Supernatural: Next Generation

( Cut from 1x10, when Ben, Claire, and Jesse recover from the hunt )

- THEN -

NOW

Having not found anything behind the main building, Ben had already been making his way back to the front. At hearing Jesse’s words, he looked around frantically. Which one was the leader’s? It wasn’t like they were labeled or anything. There was one that was closer to the main building, and he immediately sprinted toward it at a tilt, racing around the back.

Their shouts were muffled by the roar of her own pulse in her ears, but Claire could still catch them, thanks to the adrenaline and endorphins that shock finally started to release in her blood. It took just enough of the edge off to find the strength to let go of her arm and reach down for the gun she’d dropped.

“Go on. Stay with’im,” she gritted at Jesse when she noticed he’d turned back toward her. The pistol scraped the wood as she worked back up to her feet; she used the door frame as a latch to reset the flange. ( “I’m right behind you...” )

****

When Jesse opened his eyes again, he was facing a graveyard. A large monument rested in front of him, its door intricately designed with one sole lock in the elaborate shape of a pentagram. The demon stood just off to his left, his hands settled low in his pockets as he studied Jesse’s face. Jesse didn’t return the gaze, folding his arms against the chill.

“Graveyard, huh? Way to be original,” he said, his jaw tight.

“Oh, not just any graveyard,” the demon answered, smiling evenly. “This is an entry point. One of many. I found it... suiting.”

Jesse’s eyes snapped to him, overly wide. He didn’t have to ask where the entry led. “I’m not going. You’ll have to kill me first.”

“Oh no, don’t misunderstand me,” the demon drawled. “I want you here. I’ve always wanted you here. Others will be coming through the door, though, once you’ve retrieved the key and taken your rightful place. Foot soldiers, in addition to the army I’m making you.”

The laughter that bubbled out of Jesse verged on hysterics. “Yeah, I saw all that when you sent me that fucking dream. You’re mental if you think I’d ever do that, lead some crazy demon army. Even if I was in this fight, I wouldn’t be on your side.”

The demon’s brows arched slightly and his head tilted as he took a step forward, angling his body toward him. “All this time you’ve been alone, Jesse,” he said in a near-hypnotic voice. “Always drifting, never able to settle. I can feel the uncertainty and fear in you. You cringe away from your gifts. Why live a life like that, when you are so much more? You were meant for more than this life, son.”

Jesse’s insides tightened. “You aren’t my father, and you know shit about my life,” he said, glaring. “And if not wanting to get fucking stabbed means I’m cringing away from my ‘gifts,’ then yeah, I’m cringing and I’m not going to stop.”

The demon gave him a measured look. “That family you spent your early years with? Was a mistake. A wonderful one for you, I’m sure, but they held you back. Your mother told you as much, but those...” his lip curled back slightly, “...hunters... corrupted your mind. I am not so unreasonable. I would have kept them safe, had you simply come to me freely. And as for your temporary captivity,” his face relaxed again. “That was a test of your endurance. I apologize that you experienced physical pain, but once you let yourself go and come to your full potential, you will learn. All these mortal needs will fade away.”

“So now you’re some wise and caring guru?” Jesse practically spat. “You kidnapped a child, you nearly killed Ben’s mom, you hurt my friends, and what about those mutilated zombies you use like cannon fodder? All that seems pretty fucking unreasonable to me.”

The demon sighed and shook his head gently. “That’s the trouble with the help these days: they go to extremes. All I asked was that they bring you to me, nothing more. I could only do so much from the office.” He smiled slightly again. “The people at Canavilla were vessels for our enemy. They had to be neutralized. Such is the way of war. You’ll understand in time.” His brows once again arched in subtle question. ( “Feel free to punish Abbey, if you can pin her down. I encourage it, in fact.” )

***

Claire was currently in a bed nearby Krysta, asleep under the influence of heavy painkillers. Krysta had stabilized once they pumped her stomach, but was also asleep. Ben had called his mother, who was currently on a non-stop flight to Saint-Fabien-de-Panet, Québec to meet them and take her daughter home.

Ben was trying not to have a nervous breakdown.

By all accounts, he should have passed out from sheer mental collapse and exhaustion, but he couldn’t. Not until Krysta woke up or his mother arrived. He would not leave either of them scared and confused.

Jesse stopped in the doorway, two paper cups in hand. After the race to the hospital, with a quick stop so he could sweet-talk their way across the Canadian border, he was feeling rather at peace. Things were as good as they could be. Except for Ben. He almost wished they’d put Ben in a bed right next to Claire and given him his own round of sleep meds.

“Here,” he said quietly, waiting until Ben looked up to hold out the coffee.

“Thanks,” Ben replied, his voice low and barely above a whisper. Wordlessly he emptied the cup, his hands shaking when he clenched it in his fist and ducked his head over his knees again.

His heart giving a wrench, Jesse set his own cup aside before sitting at Ben’s feet, resting a hand on his knee. He gave it a squeeze. Ben shuddered in response.

His sister was alive and safe, and his mother had recovered by a sheer act of desperation through Claire and Kadiel, but he still couldn’t handle everything that had happened. It was all too much, hitting him too close to home. Worse still: there would never be an escape from it. Never. Even if he had entertained the idea of returning to a normal life, he couldn’t now.

“Hey, c’mon, wuss,” Jesse said, his voice soft despite the words. “Everyone’s fine. It’s gonna be fine.”

Ben made a choked noise, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes and shuddering again. All it took was two short breaths and he crumbled, his whole body shaking with dry sobs.

Pushing to his knees, Jesse hugged Ben hard, his cheek resting against his shoulder. He’d been there just the other night and knew that words were useless at this point. Just the press of his body seemed enough to ease Ben’s shaking, but it was a long time before the other man calmed.

( “I have to tell them goodbye.” )

***

Two more Vicodin later Claire could actually lift her arm over her head without thinking she was going to pass out, a luxury she found especially freeing when it was finally her turn to shower. Rock-Paper-Scissors was never one of her favorites, but losing twice in a row at least gave the oxicontin a little more time to work itself into her blood stream.

By the time she stepped out of the warm, jasmine smelling bathroom, Claire’s endocrine system was wrapped in a warm blanket of endorphins and affection. She found the boys settled on the bed already, Ben in the middle of the bed, a little toasted from the liquor he’d convinced Jesse to let him have. Things were okay again, but the residual stress from the past four days were finally taking their toll on him, leaving him exhausted him.

Half sitting up on his elbows, Jesse quirked his head to the side. “Feeling alright, darling?” he said with a slight smile, trying not to stare at her long, bare legs too much. Claire shot him a sleepy looking smile, tossing her towel back toward the bathroom before slinking onto the foot of the bed.

“Can’t complain,” she sighed easily. So much weighed on all their minds, like looming thunder clouds, that Claire received their short sliver of peace brought on by Krysta’s rescue, pharmaceuticals, and a hot shower in the same light as an early retirement.

Ben tracked her with his eyes but remained mostly quiet as the two of them talked to each other in soft tones. While Claire had been showering, he and Jesse had simply lied there. He’d started off on his side, but then Jesse had spooned up behind him just like he himself had when Jesse had returned to them from their separation in Erie. Only things were a little different this time: Ben had felt Jesse’s arms circle around him and pull them closer, then felt the ghost of his lips along the curved back of his neck. With Claire’s reappearance from the bathroom, still glistening from the shower and looking so relaxed and happy, the only thing keeping her decent an all-too-thin ribbed tank and shorts that curved up with the shape of her creamy legs, it took all Ben’s effort not to visibly adjust the ache in his groin. They were all tired, ( but perhaps assuming they would want to sleep was wrong. )

****

The sun was peeking through the cheap window treatments, but eventually it found Jesse with all the insistence of a nagging old woman. He squinched his eyes, trying to turn away but a hand clamped down on his elbow, holding him in place.

“What the...?” he tried to turn the other way, but another hand pinned him in place. With a slight laugh, he smiled as he opened his eyes. “Alright, what are you two--”

But when he finally saw Ben and Claire leaning over him, they weren’t smiling. Their faces were drawn and serious, their eyes shining with an inhuman gleam. A wind roared up through the room, the window curtains blown aside and the sun streaming in, revealing the spread shadows of wings arching from Ben and Claire’s backs.

“No. No, Ben, Claire, please,” he begged, looking between them.

Their expressions impassive, Claire looked over at Ben, who lifted a short, silver sword in his free hand. Jesse bucked in desperation but their grips were like iron. He couldn’t move, couldn’t escape. He could only watch as Ben tilted his head and then brought the sword down, right through Jesse’s heart.

Jesse’s body spasmed and his eyes snapped open. It was dark. Oh God, it was dark. He sat up sharply.

‘Ow! Goddammit--!” Ben bleated, his hand coming up over the right side of his face. Jesse had hit him -- hard -- in the process of jolting awake. “The hell was that for!?” Claire half-rolled back, peering up at Jesse with the same confusion.

His body shaking, Jesse looked down at them, then up at the room. The dark, angel-free room. “It wasn’t real,” he breathed, not sure if he wanted to laugh or cry. Claire’s nose wrinkled when she tried to shift up to her hip. The Vicodin had worn off, and now that she was awake, she was fully aware of the twisted, recovering muscles in her shoulder.

( “S’just a dream, Jess.” )

Claire awoke slowly, her eyes opening and being met by the cheap textured ceiling of their Ithaca hotel room. A crack of daylight cut through the privacy curtain at the window, caught in a mussed spike of Jesse’s hair, his arm across her stomach and using her shoulder as a pillow. Another larger hand, Ben’s, dangled from over Jesse’s arm. A craned-neck glance found Ben’s face buried into the back of Jesse’s shoulder, his face scrunched up a little as though he was trying not to wake up.

With a breath of a sigh, Jesse shifted on Claire’s shoulder, trying to open his eyes, though his lashes stuck together some. The hand that had been under him came up to rub away the sleep, and that’s when he noticed Claire looking down at him. His expression turned sheepish, a light blush crossing his cheeks, but he didn’t look away.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” Claire’s sleepy expression warmed with a tired smile. She hugged him a little closer, closing her eyes again as she sighed against his temple. In more than a few ways, this cramped hotel bed with it’s scratchy sheets and flat pillows was more warm and comforting than the dream she’d just drifted back from.

“Don’t be too loud,” she whispered, her lips tickled by Jesse’s hair. “Ben might hit you with a pillow.”

He smiled, his thumb running unconscious circles against her stomach. “Think he’s currently using me for a pillow,” Jesse whispered back. His expression smoothed some before he said, even quieter, “Thanks."

( “Will you two just make out already so I can go back to sleep?” )

****

Ben had the first leg of the driving, but fortunately they didn’t have much farther to go. If they didn’t stop except for bathroom breaks, they could get up to Maine that night. It was a very, very small window.

It was driving him crazy. The only thing keeping him from losing his cool was driving.

Claire was locked in a staring contest with the open laptop on her knees, studying the spiderweb of trails and dirt roads that apparently surrounded this massive Maine lake. The cherry sucker she bought at the gas station twenty miles back clicked against the back of her teeth, once, when she rolled the stick from one side to the other.

This isn’t gonna be easy, the thought parroted in her head for the third time in an hour. She’d looked at seventeen different maps taken over the last fifty years, and each one was different.

“The topography keeps changing,” Claire spoke around the lollipop, shaking her head. “Everything from the roads to the size of the damn lake...”

Leaning up from the back, his arms folded over the top of the front benchseat, Jesse frowned slightly. “We could drive around it. I’m getting a good feel for when demons are near. Don’t know how close I have to be though.”

“Claire, how do you feel about off-road driving?” Ben asked, not looking away from the road.

“In this thing?” She looked up at him and popped the sucker out of her mouth. “We wouldn’t make it over the first ditch.”

“Okay, next chance we get, we get bigger tires,” he muttered, then sighed, running a hand through the back of his hair and up through it.

“We could take another car?” Jesse said, looking back and forth between them. “I could just ask to borrow one of those bigass kinds from someone.” Claire looked at both of them like they’d briefly lost their minds.

“Have either of you ever been to the woods in New England? You can barely walk through the trees, let alone drive something through them.”

“I don’t normally go this far north,” Ben admitted. “Not a big fan of the cold. I mean hell, it’s May and it’s 60 out right now. That’s devilry.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Jesse said with a smirk. “So what do we do? Run around the lake until we find something?”

Ben took a deep breath and let it out. It was a lot of ground to cover, and a very large lake. He knew that the quickest way to look fast would be to split up, but he didn’t dare suggest it. Not after what had happened the last time they’d been split up. He took a breath to speak, but suddenly the phone buzzed out on its generic ringtone.

“Shit--” he blurted, struggling to pull his phone out of his pocket. The car swerved slightly in the process before he finally pulled it out and flipped it open.

“Braeden.”

“...is--is this Ben?”

Ben’s brows furrowed. “Who’s this?” There was a slight pause on the other end.

( “Um... This is Rosie Holt?” )

****

Rarely had Claire ever experienced darkness like this. Like a living thing, the northern Maine midnight swallowed the beams ahead of the GTO as it wound slowly around an endlessly winding road. The blue arrow on the dash mounted GPS followed their progress: a single line on a field of nothing. Even technology had no idea where they were.

Which to her meant they were close.

“Next time we get a chance, let’s get some night-vision goggles,” Ben murmured. The radio had gone quiet hours ago, not that he’d been that interested in listening to music by that point anyway. His thoughts had narrowed; nothing else in the world mattered anymore but getting his sister back. They’d hit the 24-hours mark.

Despite the urgency of the situation, Jesse was exhausted and fading fast. His eyes kept drifting from the road, so it was a while before he noticed it. Even then, at first he thought he was imagining it, or at most it was just a reflection. But the light was steady, even from this distance.

“Is that a car coming our way?” he asked.

Ben turned to look over his shoulder at him. “Dude, we’re in the middle of the wilderness. Unless moose suddenly come equipped with headlights, I doubt it.”

“Yeah, then what’s that?” he said, leaning forward to point out the window. The closer they got, though, the less he thought it was headlights.

“I don’t see anything,” Claire said, squinting into the dark. Still, on instinct, she let off the gas.

“The light right in front of you,” Jesse huffed. “It’s not on the road, though, it’s off to the left some, coming up in thirty feet or so.”

“You’re going delirious, get some sleep,” Ben replied, his voice a little strained.

“You need sleep if you can’t see what’s right in front of you,” Jesse said, getting testier. “Look, there’s two of them now! Stop the car and just look, would you? They’re glowing like--” He froze a moment before his head snapped to Claire. “Like the thing on your chest did.”

Though pulling over in this blinding darkness wasn’t Claire’s first idea of a smart move, Jesse’s correlation to the Enochian seal on her chest hit more brakes than just the left pedal on the floor. Her heart jumped and her stomach bottomed out all at once.

( He’s seeing sigils )

****

The advice turned out to be harder for Jesse to follow. With only Claire’s sigil as guidance, they walked through the dark woods for hours. Jesse never would have described walking as exhausting before, but he was barely keeping one foot going in front of the other now, stumbling over branches and dead leaves and gopher holes.

It was only a matter of time before one got him. He hit the ground with hard grunt, unable to even summon the breath to swear. Part of him just wanted to stay down, let them go on without him, but he pushed up to his knees.

Ben was at his side in an instant, looking equally worn out but also running on fear and adrenaline. He almost dragged the other man up, but he knew they were getting tired. They couldn’t fight on fumes.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Fine, fine,” Jesse said, waving him off as soon as his feet were under him. He started forward again, knowing if he stayed still too long he might not be able to get going again. Ben frowned, catching him by the elbow.

“No you’re not, you’re dead on your feet,” he murmured. “Claire, hang on.”

“We’re not stopping because of me,” Jesse said heatedly. He wasn’t going to be the reason they didn’t make it in time.

“We have to rest,” Claire barely chimed in. She’d stopped a few paces ahead and could barely imagine lifting her foot for another step. Nearing twenty-seven hours without any actual sleep, they were all dead on their feet.

“You two can go down for four hours,” Ben said firmly. “I’ll keep watch.”

“You need sleep, too,” Jesse said, his irritation making it sound more like an accusation.

“We’ll take shifts,” Claire injected calmly, from fatigue and her own sense of order. She was already spending the last of her energy coiling a salt circle around them and a large, sprawling oak.

“Shifts for a four-hour rest? No,” Ben countered. “I’m fine. I’ve had enough coffee and Monsters to fuel the Israeli army. You guys need it more than me.”

“Fine; we’ll see how you feel about that after an hour of sitting.” She looked directly at Ben, able to be knocked over by a stiff breeze, but completely unwavering on her compromise.

Jesse’s eyes looked between Claire and the circle she was making. “Do we have to use salt?” She didn’t glance up as she answered.

“Not much of a choice,” the line on the grass connected. Claire tucked it away and leaned heavily against the tree, making her way down to sit. Then the thought hit, delayed a lot more than she was comfortable with. Claire looked at Ben, then Jesse, concern in her eyes.

“...can you cross salt?”

Jesse ran a hand over his face. This wasn’t exactly a time he wanted to talk about it. “Yeah, it just fucks with me a bit. As long as you break it before we leave, though, I should be fine.”

Ben smirked slightly. ( “Guess I know how to protect my computer now.” )

****

The gray wash of dawn coming through the trees was a mixed blessing; at least the blackness wasn’t so complete, that they could actually see the dim stretch of an old road they’d stumbled on an hour before first light. Dawn also meant, however, that time was still moving. The last of the sand was running through the hour-glass; they were down to the wire.

The forest was tomb-still when the road opened up beneath a wooden sign that arched over it from two stripped trees, too old and weathered for Claire to make out clearly, save for the word ‘Camp’ at the end. The vine-choked buildings and crumbling tent platforms that surrounded the overgrown clearing were a further testimony to what this place had been at one time. Claire kept quiet, but as she stepped gingerly over dead and tangled grass, her pistol poised and aimed low, she notched this place as one of the creepiest sights she’d ever seen.

Gritting his teeth to keep himself focused, Jesse spread to the side as the campground widened around them. The place looked like it hadn’t been touched in ages. If it weren’t for the strange people who’d attacked them, he would have been sure it was empty. At this rate, though, he had no clue what to do. He looked to Ben.

Small cabins lined the narrow road leading in, all facing outward toward the lake. There were even a few overturned canoes on the shoreline. This is it. This is where Rosie said she’d be, he thought. But where?

“Let’s check the main building,” Ben proposed. Even using a voice very near a whisper, it sounded like a shout in such an empty, quiet place. “Stay alert.”

The old door looked like it would collapse to splinters if she touched it the wrong way. Claire eyed it cautiously, trying to see through the spiderweb of broken glass that served as a window. Everything inside was dark and still as the woods, but naturally, none of them trusted it. Her gun extended just beyond her hand as she grabbed gently for the handle, twisted, and nudged it open.

Nothing moved, not even the air. She tipped her head to get a better look, and slowly crossed the threshold. Before her extended gun had hardly crossed into shadow, a hand lashed out and grabbed her wrist, twisting her arm up behind her back with unnatural strength and speed. Before Claire got the chance to even look at her attacker, her arm was jerked up hard. There was a sickening pop, and Claire’s short, animal-like scream.

Ben brought his gun up sharply, his pulse off at a gallop at the sound. “Claire!”

Gasping hard and blind to anything but the tearing pain in her shoulder, Claire was marched forward, her attacker holding her firmly from behind and peering just a little bit around the side of her head. She flashed a pearly smile in Jesse and Ben’s direction.

( “You made it! I was beginning to think you wouldn’t show.” )

TO BE CONTINUED...