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Some time, twenty years on, Sam will take a case in Palo Alto. Dean will be dead, five years past, and Sam will still be hunting at this point, but not for long. She'll drive right past the welcome sign, which proudly declares it the home of Stanford University (population: 68,572) and try not to think about how that number's changed. She'll stand there at the front desk of the hotel that replaced the one he stayed in back around 2005 and try not to feel maudlin, knowing that's all this really is—a chance to feel sad about things past. The clerk will see a tall, sad, middle-aged man with hair too long for how much of it thats gone and hand him the keys to a (single, please, pet friendly... yes, smoking is alright, whatever is cheapest) and not think about him again until he's bruised up while checking out (no, don't call anyone—just got roughed up by a fall.)
She'll set her stuff down on the bed and let Miracle do her business on the sad strip of grass that has survived with a single-minded determination ongoing efforts to regulate and remove water-wasting greenery (the almond farms remain untouched,) making sure to remember a grocery bag for cleaning up before the shit heats up something foul in the late-fall, semi-desert sun. Miracle trots back in as fast as her old legs'll let her, and Sam will be glad for the schedule her aging bladder keeps for them both when she starts whining again a few hours later, once the sun has set.
By then, Sam will have laid out all the details of the case on the small, plastic and particle board desk, and be just about ready to start interviews tomorrow at 8am, sharp. After feeding the dog and taking it out, she will do the same for herself, opting for the pub she used to celebrate at in college, miraculously still open twenty years later, and proud of it, if the coasters declaring it their 25th anniversary are anything to go by. There won't have even been any redecorating attempts, really—still the same low lights and honey oak paneling, with various framed posters and pictures of half-drunk patrons making merry post-exams. She will try not to look for the one she's in and find it anyway.
It will strike her as odd that they didn't take down a photo featuring a twice-dead, twice-wanted serial killer drunk to the gills for his birthday, ruddy face half-buried in his girlfriend's shoulder as she smiles at the camera. A subtle brag, probably, that they caught evil when it was too young to know what it was, defenseless against the attack of a well-meaning camera whilst a few too many beers deep. Sam will muse upon the danger the photo might pose, but figure she's old enough and long enough on estrogen to be unrecognizable as it's subject.
Halfway through her drink, she will be propositioned by a hopeful looking thirty-something and she will gently turn her down, citing gender rather than buried wounds to avoid that look of pity people love to don when she says as much. As she walks away, Sam will imagine how a night with her might have gone down.
In this imagining, the woman will have been kind but not too careful, speeding up at the sight of scars rather than slowing down. She will have allowed Sam to buy her a couple rounds of something mild and done Sam the grace of doing the same in return so that they're both pleasantly tipsy as they leave, hands all over each other but not to the point of spectacle, just clarity of purpose—a promise: we will fuck. She will even allow herself to imagine the woman conveniently missing the creepy clippings and gorey photos as she leaves in the morning after they makeout a little in the golden light of something respectable like 9am, not really bothering to leave a number out of mutual and unspoken knowledge that this is temporary; one night only. She will even go so far as to imagine her ignoring the ring on the nightstand, only a little singed and beaten up from being salvaged from a fire and kept through hell and back. It will be a nice thought to round out her night on, and it will keep her warm through the chilly walk back to the hotel.
Miracle will greet her enthusiastically as she walks through the door, and Sam will grab yet another bag on the way back out. Miracle was not present in her imaginings, and she'll try not to feel guilty about that. While Miracle is doing her business, Sam will stare blankly out at the road that runs perpendicular to this stretch of grass. She's going to think about how many times she walked, drove, and biked it in those four years at Stanford because they resurfaced it and that old greasespot from a dead armadillo is gone. She used to use that to mark the halfway point between home and work, a small and shitty apartment to a high-dollar restaurant that paid well for pretty smiling waitstaff. The dog will bark before she can wonder whether that place survived '08 and they'll go inside, taking a little more time now that it's cooled off.
Miracle will settle into her well-researched dog bed for the night and Sam will do a quick evening rinse, to get the day's funk off. She'll piss, too, and throw out a quick prayer for her intestines, given the pub food from earlier. Time and sickness has already robbed her of her iron stomach, and it will only be that much worse after five years without Dean to shove her into diners and consistent, square meals. She eats, but not the same way. She doesn't do a lot of things the same way without her brother.
She'll get up and wash her hands before that thought can take root, though. She's going to brush her teeth (don't think about it) and put on a face mask (don't think about it) and change into the fantastically overlarge shirt and tiny shorts she uses as pajamas (don't think about it) and climb into the single, too-short bed (don't think about it) and turn off the lamp but keep the TV on real low, still not letting that familiar grief grow. When she wakes in the morning around 6am, it will have still blossomed in the night, and she will still go on her morning jog.
The place that replaces that old motel is a middling hotel, out of her usual price range but housing a gym, which she will make use of, and a continental breakfast, which she will not (except to fill a small styrofoam cup with coffee.) No one will stare at her the way she always expects them to, and it will bolster her mood past the melancholy that will trail her much the trip. Miracle will pick up on her mood, wagging her tail and barking happily for breakfast which they will share; Sam eating her granola bar and protein shake (mixed into the coffee, to cut its sickly sweet flavor,) Miracle her kibble.
Sam will put on a pale blue button down, something slightly silkier than a couple years before, without a tie to finish it off, and a pair of fitted, navy blue slacks. She'll style her hair and makeup for the myriad of roles she plans to play today (insurance auditor, true crime buff, local historian, gormless tourist, no FBI, she'd stand out) and bring a snappy jacket for some, a cardigan for others. She won't realize that this, dressing up for something, could be fun until she realizes she's just been doing it wrong. It will feel good, after that, and she won't untangle the mess of ancient guilt from slight euphoria for fear of tumbling the whole delicate balance down.
It'll be a haunting, that's for sure, and she won't want to accept the target until it's staring her in the eyes, so she won't. Each interview will go exactly as she feared it might—bumps in the night, smells of caramel turning to smoke, ooky spooky incidents where they say an apartment burned twenty years ago tonight—except the one she's most scared of. It's going to strike her as oddly fitting that of everyone in their old group, Luis Menendez was the only one who stuck around to become a star professor rather than float off to crash and burn. This feeling is going to strike her first when she finds his address in the faculty address book, next when she arrives at it, and a final time as she takes a seat in his living room. Luiz will look her right in the eyes and know something familiar is looking back through a changed face, so being a direct man, will ask if he knows her from anything. She'll say she just has one of those faces, and they'll both know she's lying, but he won't know how until later that night as he's in bed. He'll remember one of the photos hanging towards the back of his dresser, one with Sam Winchester (that crazy bastard (fond, somehow)) and figure, as a flipping of the universal coin, that Sam would be the one to get caught and killed doing wildly illegal shit and resurface years later as a woman. She would be the one to waltz right in with a smile and a lie to drink his tea and pry into events she knows better than anyone alive. He won't even really be all that upset, his wounds long healed.
He will, however, wake up to a release of pressure like a storm front or crashing plane some time around 4am, and realize the next morning he'd slept better than he had in years. This will be because Sam will go back to her hotel room in a daze and tear up and down every meticulously pinned piece of evidence, knowing exactly where it's been pointing the whole time, and taking an ill-advised face plant to deal with it. A few hours later, around 10pm, Miracle will lick her hand where it hangs off the bed and yip, urgently, and Sam will remember she's alive. She will take the dog out on that stupid strip of grass in record time and not bother to clean the shit up. She will change back into something halfway comfortable for ghost-fighting and gently fold and stack everything necessary for an exorcism (or salt-n-burn, if it comes to that) into her duffle bag. Privately, to herself, she will deny that she's procrastinating, but she is.
Around 3:45am on November 2nd, 2024, Sam will start chanting as she stalks between cardinal directions of the house as it's current occupants cower somewhere in a central closet. Around 3:50, the ghost of Jessica Lee Moore will appear. She won't fight, just follow Sam around like a dog on a leash, and Sam will refuse to look at her in the eyes. At 3:58, their eyes will finally meet and Sam will feel the electricity fire pulse of green, blue, brown piercing through six feet of sacred dirt to find something long buried and it will burn. Jessica will put her flaming, melting hand on Sam's face, and Sam will put her shaking, calloused hands on hers, and they will kiss I love you, goodbye.
The shockwave will take some time to travel across the intricately woven fabric of interpersonal connection, such that Luis will feel it before Josephine and Marcus Moore, but travel it will. No one will want to quite admit it, but it will feel good; their souls will be lighter for it.
Later that morning, when Sam has showered and stared catatonically at a plate of pancakes long enough for the diner staff to request she leave, she will pull a ring from her pocket and place it on the grassy earth of a worn grave. She will lovingly, gently, carefully clean the slightly dulled stone face, and bury the ring, unaltered, right where her hand would be. She will say a quick prayer for her soul, though Jess was never religious and this whole thing has been a sort of prayerful ritual, and kiss the stone saying finally, aloud;
"I love you. Goodbye."
And Sam will leave the graveyard, the hotel, the whole world of hunting with her dog in tow feeling finally that some worn, invisible tether has been burned to ash.
That night, for reasons she will not quite be able to place, Sam will return to the pub and find the same hopeful thirty-something there. They'll hit it off, though not as well as she had fantasized, better than she could have hoped for. The woman, Macey, will invite Sam back to her place and Sam will be glad of it. The encounter will continue to fall short of fantasy, but land somewhere solidly within the lovely parts of reality, so they'll agree to do this again.
There's more than one way to exorcise a ghost.