(no subject)

[alexseanchai]

And the Epic Supernatural Bechdel Fixit Project begins!

Title: Take Me For What I Am: Crash
Rating: PG
Summary: Jess is good at homework help. Missing scene from 1x01 "Pilot".
Pairings: Implied Jess/Sam.
Warnings: None.
Word Count: 450

Amy's phone rang. She glanced over: Jess N Sam. She flipped the phone open and hit speaker. "Hi, you have reached Amy Yamamoto, the game theory homework is killing me, so unless you can help, leave a message at the beep!"

The sound of Jess's laughter. "Never change, sweetheart."

Amy frowned at her textbook and shoved it aside. "So what's up?"

"I'm lonely. Talk to me."

"It's after midnight. Since when are you ever alone after midnight?"

Jess sighed. "Since last night, apparently. So. Game theory. What's the problem here?"

"We've got these two guys. Or girls. Gender-neutral names."

"I want cookies," Jess said.

"Wow, random," Amy said, then continued, "Pat wants to go to a movie and Alex wants to go to a concert and wherever they go they both want to go together. But they forgot to coordinate."

"And they don't have cell phones?" Jess asked. The sound of the refrigerator opening and closing.

"They don't have cell phones," Amy confirmed. "Or friends with phones, or email, or anything. Real-world examples my ass."

Jess laughed.

"And Pat going to the movie and Alex going to the concert is the wrong answer, according to the helpful answer key on Facebook, and I cannot figure out why."

"There's more to the question, though," Jess prompted.

"Best outcome for Pat is they're both at the movie." Over the phone, the sound of the microwave humming. "Second best is just Pat at the movie, third best is they're both at the concert. Best outcome for Alex is they're both at the concert, second best is they're both at the movie, third best is just Alex at the concert."

"So for Pat, movie beating concert is more important than together beating alone," Jess interpreted. "And for Alex, together beating alone is more important than concert beating movie."

Amy blinked. "Yeah, I guess." Then a thought: "You took this course already, didn't you."

"Nope. Never. Where'd I put the chocolate chips?"

"Please tell me you weren't using them for kinky sex games."

Jess made a gagging sound. "Food and sex do not belong in the same sentence."

"So Pat goes to the movie because she'd rather the movie alone than the concert with Alex, and Alex goes to the movie because she'd rather the movie with Pat than the concert alone?" Amy thought out loud.

"Sounds good to—" The sound of glass breaking. "Fuck!"

"What'd you break?" Amy asked.

"The olive oil. So now there are glass bits everywhere that I can't even sweep up because the floor's greasy. And I'm barefoot. Call you back, okay?"

"Sure," Amy said. "Thanks. Don't hurt yourself, okay?"

"I'll try." Jess hung up.


"We were on the phone, I guess it was right before the fire started," Amy told Sam at the funeral. "She was baking cookies. I guess the oven caught fire?"

Sam wouldn't look at her. "I guess."

Comments

[pixel]

Awww Sam.

I wish we'd known Jess better.

[alexseanchai]

Yeah. Didn't get nearly enough of Jess.

Glad you enjoyed!

[be_themoon]

oh, Jess! how lovely, and :( I love how fine she is, even with Sam temporarily off.

[alexseanchai]

Sam has a pattern of falling for strong independent women. Why would Jess be any different?

Glad you enjoyed!

[fannishliss.livejournal.com]

great work! I love how this takes place in the background during the pilot. I especially love her random desire for cookies!!

did you mean to say, second best is they're both at the game? I fail at logic problems. :P

[alexseanchai]

...I have no idea, I cribbed from the stuff posted online to a game theory course at a university somewhere.

Glad you enjoyed!

[alexseanchai]

...crap, that was a mistake, that's what I get for trying to change things. *fixes* Thanks!

[ernest]

This breaks my heart because it's just so normal, and then that part at the end is just put as two little paragraphs because that's all that's needed to get the entire feeling of the episode. Jess is so cool!

[alexseanchai]

Yeah, that's exactly what I was going for. And I cannot imagine Sam falling for anyone who isn't intelligent and competent in her own right, so I really wish we'd seen more of Jess.

Glad you enjoyed!

[yourlibrarian]

I love how Jess instantly figured out the correct responses in terms of motivations. I'd like that to be true, that she understood Sam even if there was so much of him she didn't know.

[alexseanchai]

I like to think Jess could have understood and accepted everything about Sam if he'd only given her the chance.

Glad you enjoyed!

Fun fact: the actual game-theory-course homework assignment I'm cribbing from named the people Pat and Sam.

[anaraine]

Oh, this was absolutely lovely. Heartbreaking, but lovely. I think I'm going to go watch the pilot and insert this scene now.

(Also, you could totally post at samjess.)

[alexseanchai]

I think anything involving Jess circa Pilot is heartbreaking by definition. And I shall do that; thanks for the tip!

Glad you enjoyed!

[animus_wyrmis]

(hi, I don't know you really but I do like your icon!)

I just saw the pilot episode, like, two hours ago, and this is what I really wanted to see--female characters doing things, yes please!

[alexseanchai]

I've seen you talking Narnia and I saw your SPN post on Latest Things so I subscribed.

We do learn lots more about Mary, and if we look at her character arc chronologically instead of in the order in which we find it out, it's a lot harder to say she got fridged. Jess, on the other hand, lived and died in the damn fridge, and while we do learn more about her, none of it's about her. Supernatural has spectacular success on feminism a lot of the time, but it has even more spectacular fail on sexism all the time.

I need to get a move on on the rest of this ficlet series.

Glad you enjoyed!

[animus_wyrmis]

Lol, I'm glad you did--I think I've seen you around on friends of friends, and that sort of thing.

Oh good! I really want to know more about her, like how much did she know and what did she think about it? I'm super excited. Do we ever find out more about Jess, or she just kind of always the dead girl we sort of knew?

[alexseanchai]

I've extrapolated, from the presence of a crucifix and an Our Lady of Guadalupe candle at Jess's gravestone in 1x02 and from her possibly-Irish-derived surname, that Jess is Irish Catholic. I've extrapolated, from the nurse costume in 1x01, that she's a premed. And there's an awful lot of clutter in that apartment and Stanford is the only time in Sam's life when he had the possibility of having more possessions than could fit in the Impala, so I'm thinking just about all of that clutter is Jess's. I haven't taken time to stare at those screencaps, but there's definitely a National Geographic, plants in the windows, and a fuckton of books.

I had extrapolated, from Sam saying in 1x19 that art history is a good place to meet girls, that that's where Sam met Jess, but we find out in 5x20 that another friend of Sam's introduced them. Which is just about the only hard fact about Jess that we don't learn in those three scenes in the pilot, the others being her full name's Jessica Lee Moore and her birthday's five years to the day after Dean's, which we see on her gravestone in 1x02, and that Sam meant to marry her, which we hear in 1x22.

She's a blank slate and her sole purpose was to be a driving factor of one of the character plots in the pilot and, by dying, to kickstart the mytharc. It's frustrating.

[prettybones]

Congrats! ☆ Your fic is recced here at sawedoff_recs.

[alexseanchai]

hoshit wow

[prettybones]

<3

[potted_music]

This is heart-breaking :( Extra Jess characterization FTW, though!

[alexseanchai]

Glad you enjoyed! I love Jess. She never gets enough screentime.