II: Five By Five.

It wasn't a dark and stormy night. Well, it was dark, which only made sense with it being night and all, but it wasn't stormy. It was surprisingly clear, actually, considering that this was England. There was a warm breeze curling in through the open window, and a fat half-moon giving her a jackal grin every time she looked out.

She was looking out a lot. Her big squishy armchair was right next to the window, and the night sky was a lot more interesting than her Sumerian textbook. Then again, anything was more interesting than her Sumerian textbook.

"Don't think I can't see you daydreaming." Sam's voice came from the kitchen, where he was washing up the dishes from dinner. "If you can't conquer those verbs by tomorrow, Sister Rain's just going to send you home."

"Gee, thanks, Dad," Jess grumbled, mostly under her breath.

"What was that?"

Jesus, he had the ears of a freaking bat. "I said, I'm working on it. This is freaking hard, Sam. It makes med school look like a walk in the park."

Sam stuck his tousled head out of the kitchen, his eyes twinkling in that way that meant he was really laughing at her. "You're lucky Sumerian is all you have to learn," he said. "Basic Watcher training has Sumerian, Latin, Greek, and Arabic. And that's just the human languages."

"Yeah, yeah, we all know you're language-genius boy," she sighed. "The Anthro department must have cried a thousand emo tears when you transferred to Oxford."

"No, they're much too dignified," Sam said. "Mostly they just tried bribery. You know, grants, special projects, sexual favors, that sort of-"

A thunderous pounding on the door broke into the half-second pause between one word and the next. Both of them froze, Jess' hand going to the stake sitting on the coffee table, Sam's to the pistol holstered in the back of his jeans.

("It's only the really big bads that can't a bullet like it's nothing," Sam told her, correcting her stance and sighting down the barrel. "Sure, you can't kill a vamp with a gun, but if you can plug them in the head or the spine it'll certainly slow them down enough to put a stake in them. And it's a lot safer to shoot from a distance than it is to fight up close." He stepped back to allow her to take the shot, grinning and brushing his hair futilely out of his eyes. "Especially with your roundhouse kicks.")

"Jessica," Sam said quietly. "Get away from the window."

She practically catapulted across the room, stake clutched firmly in her hand, and was ashamed to realize that she was all but hiding behind Sam. She was a Slayer, for Chrissake, she could bench-press Sam without breaking a sweat, but she was pretty new to fighting the forces of darkness.

Also, she was from L.A., and Sam was the one with a gun. Some instincts died hard.

"Who is it?" she whispered.

"Don't know," he replied shortly, equally low-voiced.

The pounding continued, this time with vocal accompaniment. "Sam! Open up, you son of a bitch!"

She couldn't see his face, but she felt the sudden and absolute stillness that took Sam's muscles, like a puppet in the split second after its strings had been cut. "Dean," he whispered.

"I can hear you in there, Sammy! Open the goddamned door!"

"Coming!" Sam yelled. To Jess, he added, "It's okay. You can stand down. It's just my brother."

His brother? Jess stayed where she was as Sam went to answer the door, her world reeling. Sam had a brother? Why, God, why hadn't he ever said anything? How did she not know this incredibly important fact about him?

She bet Buffy never had to deal with this kind of thing with her Watcher.

"Dean, what the hell?" Sam demanded. She couldn't quite see around the half-open door to catch a glimpse of who was standing on the other side, but she didn't want to move any further away from the safety of the kitchen, and its wealth of choices for makeshift weapons. Just in case. "What the hell were you thinking, bringing her here like this?"

"I was thinking that she's fucking dying and my baby brother might be willing to help," the disembodied voice growled. "But if you're too busy playing house with your pretty blonde Slayer, I can go save her life somewhere else."

"Oh, shut the hell up, you're such an asshole," Sam said wearily. "Of course I'll help. Get her into the guest room, I'll get the kit."

The door swung wide, propelled by a kick from the mystery brother, and then the man himself was rushing past her, following Sam's pointing finger to the room in question. She got a glimpse of his face- short brown hair, hazel eyes, a nose that had been broken a few too many times, three scars on his cheek, and freckles- and a confused impression of leather and denim, long dark hair spilling over his arm from the slack female body he was carrying, and a smell of blood that sent a primitive spike of fightorflight into her belly.

"Jess." Sam's voice was very, very calm. "Go get the kit out of the bathroom. The full one, please. I think we've got some stitching to do."

("If you freeze up in a fight, it can get you killed. You always have to react on instinct, because anything else is dangerous. Your opponent could get in the killing blow while you're stopping to think."

"What if my instincts aren't telling me anything? Or, or, what if there's mind control involved or something? What if I can't trust my instincts?"

"Then trust mine. That's what your Watcher is for.")

Shaking, Jess put down the stake and followed Sam's instructions.

The guest bedroom was filled with that hair-raising blood scent when Jess went in, most of it coming from the girl on the bed. Now that she was lying still, Jess could see that she was about twenty-two, wearing the shreds of a black tank-top and jeans, and gorgeous despite being a little underfed. Jess could probably count every rib, if the gaping hole in her abdomen wasn't so distracting.

"How did this happen?" Her voice seemed to come from a long distance away. "How could this happen?"

"Barbed spike," Dean said shortly. "Ripped her up on the way back out."

"There doesn't seem to be any organ damage," Sam said, studying the mess clinically. "Alright. Jess, do you remember how to do a generalized focus?" Sam's voice was still strangely calm, and she realized that he'd gone into his headspace, the place he went while studying or training or fighting for his life, where nothing surprised him and every decision was well-thought-out and made in a split second. He'd been trying to teach it to her from the beginning, but it had never made sense before now.

It did now. It was just that she'd never seen him in a real crisis before, no matter how desperate a fight might have seemed to her at the time. Sam had always had it under control. God, how hadn't she realized that before?

"Yeah," she whispered. Sam threw her a sharp look ("Again.") so she cleared her throat and repeated, "Yeah, I remember," in a louder voice.

He nodded. "Focus on her while I stitch. She can use all the extra energy she can get."

Dean made some small movement in the back corner of the room, like violence aborted at the last minute. "The hell is she doing?"

"She's training under Sister Rain to be a battle medic, Dean," Sam snapped. "That's why HQ placed her with me. Now will you shut the hell up and let us save your Slayer's life?"

"Babydoll here better not fuck up," Dean muttered, but he subsided. Jess looked at the girl on the bed from a new angle. A Slayer. That would make things a lot easier.

Jess concentrated on the focus spell, lipping the words of the spell to herself, almost soundless. The power inside of her swelled, black and red, and flowed down the line into the Slayer's body. It was easier than any other time she'd done this during practice. Normally she had to struggle to get the subject to accept her energy, the human body rejecting her help as foreign, but that wasn't happening here. Slayer magic called like to like. The edges of the girl's wounds, raw and peeling away from her body, firmed and pinked as she watched.

Sam let out a slow, controlled breath. "That's very good, Jess," he said, and started to sew.

After the worst was over, Dean went to wash off the blood and Sam went to work on the more minor injuries and Jess curled up in her squishy armchair by the window under the moon and just shook. She'd never- she'd never- Well, she'd been training with Sister Rain for over a year now, but she'd never seen anything like that. She'd seen plenty of pictures, back when she was still in med school, cases that were probably worse than that, but she'd had to stand there and kept that girl alive while Sam patched up the hole in her stomach. Jess had been able to see ribs underneath the meat and blood, and she'd had to-

Christ, she needed a cigarette. Since smoking was banned in this household, no exceptions, no extenuating circumstances, forever and ever amen, she'd make do with a hug from Sam. Unfortunately for her, Dean came into the living room first, and she kind of doubted he'd give her a hug.

Not that she wanted one from him, anyway.

He was down to a wrinkled black t-shirt and jeans that had seen better days- twin to the outfit the girl had been wearing before Sam had cut it off her to better get at her injuries- and a pair of what might have once been motorcycle boots, before they'd been ripped apart and stitched back together about a million times. The confused impression of leather she'd gotten earlier had come from coat he was currently holding in his right hand, which was black and shone strangely and upon more leisurely inspection, didn't look like any kind of leather she'd ever seen in her life.

"If I didn't know better, I'd say that was dragon hide," someone said, and after a strange moment she realized it was her. Dean let out a crack of laughter and tossed the coat over the corner of the kitchen door, where it hung, reflecting the lamp-light strangely as it swayed.

"Can't complain about Sam's teaching, I guess," he said. "That's exactly what it is. She and I took it down three years ago, during the dimensional flux. It was a real bitch to hunt down, let me tell you, but it was worth it for the hide."

"It's supposed to be indestructible, right?" Jess asked, wondering at herself even as the question left her mouth. Sam was in the other room stitching a stranger back together and she was in the living room chatting with his brother she'd never heard of like she'd met him at a cocktail party. An hour ago she'd been struggling with Sumerian. How had her life come to this?

"It pretty much is," Dean said. "That thing's saved my life more times than I can count." His face darkened, the three parallel claw marks on his left cheek standing out in stark relief. "Too bad she wasn't wearing hers."

Jess swallowed. "Is she…" She couldn't finish the sentence.

"She'll be fine," Dean said on a sigh. "This isn't a first for either of us. The way she fights… She always throws everything in head-first. It's always been my job to wade in and get her back out." His eyes refocused on her. "Sorry for coming at you back there. You did a great job. I didn't even know Slayers could be healers."

She picked at the fraying spot on the knee of her jeans. "Yeah, well, that's what a lot of people said. Sam said he could do it, found a Wiccan settlement that was willing to teach me, argued his case with Mr. Giles, the whole nine yards. I guess they had enough new Slayers that actually wanted to be on the front lines, so they let me go."

"Ah, Sammy." Dean shook his head. "Always gotta break that mold."

Her ears perked up at that, but she took care not to seem too interested. "He's, ah, not exactly like the other Watchers. I mean, he's more… modern? With guns and all, not just swords and crossbows. It's weird. Cool, but weird."

"That's because we're not a Watcher family," Dean said.

She blinked. "You're not?" All the other Watchers she'd met, their dads had been Watchers, and their dads before that, and so on and so forth. But most of them were dead now, so. "What were you?"

"Dad was a wetworks guy, same for me," Dean said. "Sammy was raised thinking that if you had to get within twenty feet of your target, you weren't doing your job right."

Jeez, she'd learned more about Sam in the last five minutes than she had in the entire year and a half she'd been living with him. "So you work with their black ops guys? I thought they were disbanded after they lost Faith six years ago."

Dean's face went to stone. "They were."

Oh. Oh, oh, oh, she couldn't believe this. She couldn't believe this. "Your Slayer. The one in the other room. She's been with you longer than a year, hasn't she?"

Dean gave her a cautious, assessing look. She held as still as possible, trying to look like the kind of person you confessed in. Dean must have liked what he saw, because he said, slowly, "Yeah. We've been together longer than a year."

Oh, boy. "How much longer?"

Another long pause. "Going on six, now."

"Then she's-" Her throat caught on the name, some half-formed superstition keeping her from saying it out loud, as if giving voice to it would make it not true.

Dean finished for her. "Yeah. That's Faith."

"But- but the Council's been looking for her for six years! She vanished when the wetwork team came for her, there was this big thing where one of the agents vanished and nobody ever heard from her again!" She stopped. "That was you! You were the one who got her away."

He regarded her for along moment. "You sure know a lot about it."

She blushed and looked back down at her knees. "I spent some time at HQ before they assigned me to Sam," she said. "I heard Mr. Giles talking about it a lot. They wanted to find her."

"To bring her in," Dean growled. "That's why I took her underground in the first place."

"No, no, it's not like that anymore! It's a new organization, not like the old Council. They just want to find her- maybe hire her, if she wants. Not lock her up."

Dean was very still, in the kind of stillness that could become violence, very quickly. "Is that true, Sammy?"

Sam appeared from behind him, so unexpectedly Jess had to control her instinctive flinch. She didn't know how Dean had heard him coming. "It's the truth, Dean," Sam said, laying one hand on his shoulder. "I could have told you that a while ago, if you'd shown up any time sooner."

"Fuck you, I always come back eventually," Dean said tiredly. "It's been… a long two years."

"And you're going to tell me all of it, starting with why Faith looks like dog chow and you're untouched, because that's not your style. But it can wait, along with any decisions about the Council. You're dead on your feet."

"Yeah, okay," Dean said, and only then did Jess realize how exhausted he looked. How far had he had to go to get to Sam's door tonight, after a fight that almost killed his Slayer? Dean started to turn towards the guest bedroom, saying, "I'll just crawl in next to-"

"I don't think so," Sam said, wrapping one hand around the back of his neck and hauling him back in. "Leave Faith to rest. She's not going to vanish in the middle of the night, dude. She's safe."

"She better be," Dean grumbled. "So where am I sleeping?"

"You can take my room."

"But-" Dean protested, his eyes going to Jess.

"I'll take the couch," Sam cut him off. "Stop arguing and go to bed."

Dean closed his eyes for a second, the fight going out of him, and leaned back into Sam's hand. Sam still hadn't let go. "Fine."

"Good." Sam gave him a good-natured shove towards the hall. "Go the hell to sleep."

Dean was weaving a little on his feet now, as if his surrender had brought down all the built-up exhaustion that had been hovering around him, waiting for an opening. "Aye aye, sir." His smile to Jess was tired, warm, and just on this side of flirtatious. "By the way, I love the Smurfs."

She was still fiddling with the end of her t-shirt ten minutes later, sitting in bed and waiting for Sam to finish his rounds and wish her goodnight. He loomed in her doorway, the light from the lamp on her nightstand casting strange shadows on his face. "You all set?"

Stupid for a Slayer to be afraid of the dark- or maybe not so stupid. She knew so much more about what was out there. She didn't have the comfort of assuming it was just her imagination.

Still, Sam was pretty patient about it, all things considered. It had to be frustrating, being stuck with someone who had all the natural talent and instincts of a killer, but always flinched at the thought of real danger. Especially for someone who was raised around black ops training.

"I'm probably the worst Slayer you've ever met, aren't I?" she mumbled. "Sorry I'm so- useless. All the time."

"Hey." Sam came in and sat on the end of her bed. "You want to be a Healer, Jess. There's nothing wrong with that."

"Yeah, but I'm supposed to be, you know, all Slaying, all the time." She couldn't look at him. "I hate training."

"If I wanted to train a Slayer for battle, I'd be back at HQ, dealing with hordes of hormonal teenagers high on battle lust, but I don't and I'm not." He reached out and grabbed her knee. "Look. You wanted something different, and I happen to think that's amazing. The world got flooded with a whole bunch of untrained killers, how's that a good thing? If you can become a Healer instead, prove that it doesn't have to be all about death, maybe someone else will come forward to do the same. Maybe there'll be a better balance. Did you know we're headed towards war with the demon community? If I could avert that- if you could avert that- how could that be anything but a good thing?"

She risked a look at his face. Not calm now, but lit with passion and belief. She'd never seen him like this. "I didn't know any of that."

He eased back, his hand coming away from his death grip at her knee. "Yeah, well. I didn't want to put too much pressure on you."

She considered that for a moment, then grinned at him. "I can handle it."

"Yeah, you can." He grinned back. "Now, how's about we both get some damn sleep, okay? Tomorrow's probably going to be pretty fucking long."

That's how she knew Sam was tired. He never cursed. "Just one more thing."

He cocked his head in question, paused halfway to climbing off the bed. "Yeah?"

"Dean. You and he-" She couldn't finish that question. "It's a good thing he's back, right?"

He seemed to know what she really meant to ask. A peculiar smile crept over his mouth. "Yeah. I think it's a great thing he's back."

"I think so, too." She watched as he turned to go. He was almost out the door when she said, "Hey, Sam?"

He turned in the doorway, patient as always. "Yeah?"

"The couch is terrible for your back. It's been a pretty tiring night. You should probably have a mattress to sleep on."

He tossed a grin over his shoulder, carelessly beautiful in the half-light. Jess held onto the image for a long moment, cherishing it, and then let it go. The death of that dream was relatively painless. It could never have happened, anyway.

"Yeah, I probably should," he said. "Night, Jess."

She turned off the lamp and listened as he went into the room next to hers. The walls were pretty thick, but she could still hear the creak of bedsprings and the sleepy protest from Dean. "Jess-"

"Shut up and go to sleep, you moron," Sam whispered, and the affection in his voice made her ache. "It's been two fucking years. If you think I'm sleeping on the couch, you're delusional."

"'s your funeral, dude," Dean mumbled, and she heard the beautiful sound of Sam's laugh, followed by a slightly wet noise that could only be kissing. It went on for a while, before she heard the light click off on the other side of the room, and the little squeaks and rumblings of two people settling down for the night.

She smiled to herself, a little, then rolled over and went to sleep.

Lights out.