A combination coda for The End/I Believe the Children Are Our Future. I wanted to write about what happened to Jesse in the future Dean saw.
In 2011, in Alliance, Nebraska, Sam finds a child. He's terrified, throwing up in the grass next to his mother's body, and Zachariah's hovering over him with Ruby's knife; Sam doesn't think twice.
There are lines of right and wrong that he hasn't ever been willing to cross, and whatever the angel wants, whatever this kid's done, Sam's not going to sit by and let him die. He's just a kid.
Dean's not here and Dean hasn't been here in a year, so Sam doesn't even feel bad about reaching in for that seething mess of power. Zachariah goes slamming into the side of the house and the kid comes flying towards Sam, so he can tuck him behind him and away from the corpses in the dirt.
"I've got you," Sam says without taking his eyes off of the angel. "You're safe now, alright? Just close your eyes. It'll be over in a minute."
"Samuel," Zachariah says, "You know not what you do. The child must be--"
There really isn't that much of a difference between the angels and the demons. Not when it comes to possession. The angels laugh at exorcisms, but they scream at invocations, and Sam's used to drawing on the power of Lucifer to get them out of his fucking way.
The kid kind of wails when the world goes white; Sam feels an affectionate hand on the back of his neck right before Zachariah and his vessel are incinerated by light.
It takes a minute for the power to drop down again. Sam shakes his way through it, because humans were never meant to have the power of a fallen angel course through them, and then turns around to drop to his knees next to the kid. "Are you alright?" he asks.
"They said they were angels," the kid cries. "They said..." The kid hiccups and throws up again, a little dribble of bile down his shirt. "Mom said she wanted to meet an angel and I, I don't know what I..."
Sam pulls the kid forward to lean against his shoulder. "It's okay," he says. "You're alright."
"They killed Mom!" the kid wails, "Angels are supposed to, supposed to be good and they killed. They." He stutters off and just kind of breathes into Sam's shirt, hot and opened mouth, and, yeah, Sam finds it's not that hard to let the lie slip out, small and white.
"There's no such thing as angels," he says quietly.
He takes the kid and Ruby's knife with him when he leaves Alliance. He heads for Chicago.
The knife's got Dean's fingerprints all over, tactic big brother blessing given to an angel to go kill a little boy, and Sam. Sam is sick of trying not to be a monster when the rest of the world is going down the toilet and his brother sent an angel to kill a child.
If Dean's allowed to be a monster, than so's he and he's sick of saying no to the one person that still has his back.
"My name's Jesse," the kid says when he wakes up. He slides over cautiously to lean against Sam's side while he drives; he still smells like vomit and cold sweat, but he also feels a little like family, like Lucifer purring in happy anticipation in the back of his mind.
Sam watches the sun crest over the trees. "Sam," he says. "Sam Winchester."
The possession with Lucifer doesn't work like Sam's pretty sure most possessions do. Lucifer lets him have the body pretty much whenever he wants, he feeds Sam his favorite foods, and takes him around the world to show him the wonders.
He always makes sure Sam's asleep for the blood, guts, death, mayhem, and betrayals. Sam really appreciates it.
At night, Sam crawls into bed across from Jesse, who always rolls over and asks, "Are you Sam or the Devil?" and then giggles, high and amused.
Sam swats him with one pillow and buries his face under his other to get some sleep. "Can you stop time for a while?" he mumbles into clean linen. "I need nine hours tonight and Lucifer wants to be somewhere in three."
"Yeah," Jesse says, "Sure."
Sam wakes up in eight hours and wanders outside to stretch, poke a man over where he's caught mid-piss in the alley. Jesse shows up next to him. "Ready?" he asks, smiling, and Sam nods his head and watches the world restart.
Jesse gets more powerful the older he gets. Around the time that Lucifer snaps his brother's neck, Jesse decides that this shit is for the birds and Sam wakes up in the middle of tall grass.
"What did you do now?" he asks, long suffering.
"The Devil said he wanted to start over," Jesse says. "I just... gave him a hand. He wasn't doing a very good job."
Sam sits up, then has to stand because the grass is tall, and even then he can only barely see over the tops of it. It reminds him of the descriptions of the American prairie, before humanity swept it all away. "All the people?" he asks.
"Gone," the boy mutters. He's coming up on seventeen now, willow thin still, but the power that looks back at Sam is enough to almost make his hair stand on end. Almost. "I figure we can bring back the people we like, you know? Make a real paradise."
The inside of his skull is empty. Sam scratches at the back of it and smiles. "Sure," he says. "Who do you want?"
"I always wanted to meet the X-Men," Jesse says thoughtfully.