Riding and Driving
When Hermione woke up for the first time, all she smelled was smoke and she heard the shuddering gasps of someone crying next to her. She tried to turn her head to see who was crying but she fell unconscious again before she would make out the person next to her
Hermione’s second awakening was far harsher. She woke up to someone shaking her by the shoulders. She was lying next to Dean’s car as Sam held her shoulders and Dean watched on from behind him. Bolting up she reached for her wand to fall in a defensive pattern but before she could grab her wand. Sam pushed her up against Deans car, her shoulder blades colliding sharply with the wall.
“What happened to Jessica?” Sam’s eyes were reddened and swollen as if he’d been crying for hours. He looked like a shell of a human being, like his entire world had collapsed around his feet.
Suddenly, the last few days resurfaced in her brain. While Jess and Hermione had been waiting for Sam and Dean to come back, they’d gone sightseeing and enjoyed spending time together. The night Sam was supposed to come back she and Jess had been baking when someone Jess knew from school had come in and started chatting. That's when he pulled out the knife. Everything after that had been a blur, Hermione and Jess had run to the bedroom to get Sam’s gun but before she could get the gun or her wand, she’d been slammed into a wall by unseen hands. The last thing Hermione heard before passing out was Jess screaming.
Retelling this to Sam, Hermione watched as he slowly started to sag before he left her go completely. Hermione fell to her knees as Dean held Sam around the shoulders to support the distraught man. It didn’t take much to figure out that Jess was dead.
Hermione rubbed her chest in a vain attempt to get the aching sensation to subside. The feeling wasn’t unfamiliar, it reminded her of the early days after the war when the grief of all they’d lost had nearly paralyzed her. Throwing herself into her work has dulled the pain but it has never truly gone away. Now it was back in full force, and it hurt like hell.
Dean looked at her with analytical eyes. Hermione realized with mounting horror that Sam and Dean had been distraught about what had happened to Jess but weren’t surprised with what she had told them. The unnatural force that had thrown her against the wall and the unexpected savagery of Jess’s murder. Her brothers, her dysfunctional but normal brothers had seen this before.
“What killed Jess? That thing wasn’t normal and there’s something you’re not telling me.” Hermione lifted her chin defiantly meeting Dean’s eyes.
“A demon killed Jess”
Hermione blinked, not really believing what Dean said, “I’m sorry, WHAT killed Jess?”
“A demon. A demon killed our mom, werewolves, vampires and witches all exist. Our family hunts and kills them”
Hermione searches Sam and Deans face for any trace of humour. In that moment Hermione knew three things, her biological family wasn’t devout Catholics, Sam and Dean's childhood had been far more dysfunctional than she had anticipated and there was absolutely no way she could tell her brothers that she was a witch.
The broken look in Sam’s eyes also told her what her place in all this would be, there would be no moving back to England to hide from this. Whether she liked it or not, this was her fight as well. She might not know them well or even have the closeness to love them properly but she couldn’t leave them to figure this out on their own.
Taking a deep breath, Hermione looked into Sam’s eyes “I want to help you find what killed Jess” she said, more confident than she felt.
At Hermione’s declaration, Sam finally strode off and started rooting about in the trunk of Dean's car. He returned back with a small sheathed hunting knife and pistol. He tossed them to Hermione, she caught them dumbly.
“Welcome to the family business” Sam said bitterly “We’ve got work to do”
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The next couple days were a blur, they salvaged anything they could get from the ruins of what had been Sam and Jess’s house. It wasn’t much, a picture in a cracked frame here and a couple blankets and shirts there. They helped with the funeral, Hermione and Dean sitting quietly towards the back as Sam sobbed his way through the service, the burial and eulogy.
Dean and Sam threw themselves into searching for Jess’s killer, sitting around Dean’s motel with piles of newspapers and an old leather journal opened to even older newspaper clippings and notes. Hermione opted to get the logistics of everything sorted, she applied for a temporary working visa with the MACUSA and started organizing Sam’s paperwork so that he could take a leave of absence from school with his academic record intact.
The afternoon before they were supposed to leave to start looking for John, Hermione snuck out to her rental car. She’d kept most of her things in there to avoid Dean undoubtedly going through them. Grabbing her beaded bag, she pulling out the items she’d need in order to keep travelling with the boys without them asking any undue questions. A couple pairs of denim jeans, a jumper, toiletries and a camping pack. The beaded bag went to the bottom of the pack, Hermione hoped inwardly that it’d keep her brothers from discovering it casting a small notice me not charm on the bag, she stuck the rest of the clothing on top. Tucking her wand into the holster and the gun Sam had given her into the waistband of her jeans.
After returning the rental car, Hermione walked back to Dean’s motel. Entering into the room, she threw her bag near the door. Dean looked up from the book he was reading.
“Rental car returned? ” Dean asked. Sam didn’t even bother to look up from his laptop.deeply engrossed in what appeared to be increasingly graphic crime scene pictures.
Hermione nodded, there was nothing to say
“We leave at 6:00 tomorrow morning, get some rest” Dean announces and goes back to the book he was reading. Sensing her dismissal, Hermione climbed onto the ratty couch she had been sleeping on and brought her knees to her chest. She had a feeling that no one would really be sleeping that night.
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Following an early morning wake up, rushed bitter coffee and a stale donut for breakfast. Hermione slid into the backseat of the car while Sam climbed into the passenger seat. Dean with an annoyed expression on his face looked back at her, “Look princess, are you sure you want to do this? You need to pull your eight here because Sammy and I aren’t going to be slowing down because you broke a nail or something”.
Hermione tried to ignore the rising irritation at Dean’s clear dismissal of her. If he had known what she had done during the war and what she was capable of, Hermione would have told him to shove his misogynistic attitude back where it had come from. Instead she swallowed her words, “ Dean, I’m sure this is what I want to do. Please let me help”.
Dean simply nodded, pulled the car into gear and drove away.
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The next day or so was spent driving to Blackwater Ridge Colorado, where John Winchester, Dad, had left coordinates. Sam and Dean were in a rush so they didn’t stop at any motels, opting to occasionally pull to the side of the road to sleep but mostly rotating who was driving. Hermione had offered to take a shift at night so that the boys could get a little sleep but Dean had venomously declared that she wouldn’t be touching “his baby”. Hermione had left it alone after that.
It was pretty clear to Hermione that Sam was struggling. He didn’t sleep well in the car, often waking up with a start like he was having incredibly vivid nightmares. He was also a lot more snappy, any sort of brotherly affection he might have had for Hermione seemed temporarily extinguished while he dealt with his grief. Sam was content to ignore Hermione as much as possible and she let him.
Hermione spent much of the drive to Colorado making herself as small as possible and trying to avoid bringing any attention to herself. Hermione could tell by the irritated tension in Dean's shoulders and Sam's bickering with Dean that she wasn’t as successful as she had hoped.
The coordinates led to a national park, it was remote with rocky terrain and filled with pines that seemed to dominate the landscape for miles. Hermione privately thought to herself that if John was hiding there she didn’t like their odds of actually finding them, coordinates be damned.
Dean pulled up to the first ranger station they found. Turning to Hermione, and speaking to her for the first time that day, he gruffly ordered her to stay close to Sam and keep her mouth shut. And with that, Hermione climbed out of the car and followed her irritable brothers into the station.
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The station had been absolutely useless in regards to locating John but had brought up a couple new leads in terms of something else happening in the area. Some college students working on a scientific study had gone missing up along the ridge.
The ranger, an older man with a cropped haircut named Ranger Wilkenson had mistaken the group for some of the students' friends and had told them off about it. He had seemed pretty disinterested in it all but something about it had clearly set off alarm bells for Dean. Before they had set off, Dean had managed to charm the ranger into giving him a record of the park permit and the address of one of the students' sisters promising to use it to reassure the sister that her brother would be fine.
Piling back into the car they started off to the sister’s house. Sam turned to glare at Dean, “Why are you going to this person's house Dean? We should be concentrating on finding Dad” Sam snapped.
Dean looked a little irritated but pushed back his shoulders, he gave off the energy of a man that was used to giving out orders and having people obey them unquestioningly. In some ways it reminded Hermione of Professor McGonagall, she did not share this with Dean.
“Sammy, this is our job. Stop bitching about it and let’s just check it out.”
This was the wrong thing to say. Sam went off like a loaded gun.
“The thing that killed Jess is out there and we are wasting time looking for a bunch of campers who are probably fine” Sam shouted.
Hermione made what was probably the wisest choice she had made since she’d arrived in America and tried to make herself smaller in her seat. Sam was a loose cannon at the moment for the smallest of things and she didn’t want to risk ending up in a shooting range.
Dean switched tactics trying to appease Sam
“Look, lets just check it out quick and if it’s nothing then we start looking for Dad again”
“Besides” Dean added “He sent us those coordinates to begin with and he wouldn’t do that without a good reason”
Sam huffed a little but went back to staring outside of the window, sensing that he hadn’t won this argument.
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Pulling in front of the house that belonged to Haley Collins, the sister of one of the missing campers, Dean opened the glove compartment and started rifling around before pulling out some ID cards. Throwing an ID to Sam he turned to face Hermione.
“Okay, here’s the plan. Sam and I are going to be going in as fish and wildlife officers. You don’t know what the hell you’re doing and we don’t have an ID for you so you’re going to stay in the car.”
Dean rustled around a little more and pulled out a map and an old book. “If you want to make yourself useful, get started on researching the area. What kind of monsters are out here in these woods, do we have any other cases in the area?”
“You’ve got to be joking, we have some missing campers and no other data. What am I supposed to find with just one book and a rubbish map?” Hermione spits out, she’s irritated at how easily Dean dismisses her despite not being willing to learn a single thing about her.
Dean rolled his eyes at her, “There’s a library a five minute walk up the street, go there then, we’ll meet you there after we’re done.”
Hermione accepted the book and the map. She laughed a little inwardly at the title of the book “Monsters of the Western United States”, it looked like a kitschy thing that you’d purchase at a gift shop, she missed her old class textbooks. Those would have undoubtedly been more useful here than this old book.
Climbing out of the car, she shouldered her camping pack and watched as Dean and Sam walked towards the small house before turning to start walking to the library.