fic: horses
post season four. sam, dean, jo. r. 8,888 words.
She always did like fire.
Thanks to vinylroad for being interested and to reddened for making me actually do something with it.
horses
The hunt took longer than it should have. It's dark, now, and she's bone-tired. Shivering with cold and exhaustion. Not at her best, maybe, when she unlocks her door, and that's why it takes her a split-second longer than it should, that's why he has time to draw his gun before she has her own aimed at his heart.
It's simultaneous, instead.
"Drop it," she says, and her voice doesn't waver. Flat and bitter, mostly because there's nothing left to give.
"You first," he says, and she blinks. Her eyes adjust to the dim and then she swallows. She wants to scream.
She does not lower her gun. Metal sweat-hot in her hand. She imagines pulling the trigger.
"Sam," she says.
"Hi, Jo." Something moves behind him, and she looks away just long enough to make out Dean, standing back.
"What do you want?" she asks. The door's at her back, a step away if she needs to run. She hasn't seen him for months. Years, really. Since Duluth. Since he wasn't himself and she wonders if he remembers that like she does. If he had nightmares, too.
"We came to see if you were okay," he says.
"And you couldn't just call?" she asks.
"Would you have answered?" he asks. Hesitates for a moment. "Are you?"
"Yeah," she says. "Peachy. You?"
"Fine," Sam says. "Good." She nods. Raises her eyebrow. Sam looks down, looks back up and then lowers his gun, sets it on the bed. Within easy reach.
She waits until he's moved his hand away before clicking the safety back on her own, sliding it into her waistband. He nods, sits down gingerly on the edge of her bed. Dean does the same, right next to him. No, not right. Careful space between them.
"You cut your hair," Sam says.
"Yeah," she says. "You didn't." She bites the inside of her cheek, shifts her weight. Manages to keep from crossing her arms. "So. Thanks for thinking of me."
Sam swallows.
"Where'd you come from?" she asks.
"Michigan," Sam says. "Before that. Um." She tilts her head, waits to see what he'll add. Because she knows, because there isn't a hunter alive who doesn't know where they were before that. What happened.
Her mom said it was all of their war, but it wasn't, really. So maybe she's bitter, yeah, but it's understandable. Because she's lost everything, now, and at least they still have each other.
"So," she says. Realizes she's staring at his shirt, faded red and white checks, and she's going to fall asleep on her feet if she doesn't move. She shakes her head. "Fine. You can sleep here, if you want."
"Thanks," Sam says.
It's not until later that she realizes Dean hasn't said anything at all.
-
She knows perfectly well what she's doing. She tells herself, staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Bright yellow light all around and in the other room, in the dim and the dark, are the sons of the man who killed her daddy, and depending on who's telling the story, they're the ones who almost ended the world.
She always did like fire, was born to it just as she was to salt and blood and broken bottles of whiskey and the last song on the jukebox while her mama wiped down the bar, but all the same, she wonders if this is a bad sign.
A knock at the door. She turns away, dries her face on the once-white towel next to the sink and opens it. Cautiously.
It's Sam. He tilts his head back towards the room. "He's asleep," he says quietly. Jo moves out of the way, lets him in.
"So," she says.
"You're okay," Sam says.
"I'm alive," she says.
"Yeah," he says. "How've you been?"
"Hunting," she says, which isn't what he asked, but it's enough. Ghosts and shifters and rock-salt, and it was what she'd always wanted, but never what it was meant to be. "You?"
"Same," he says. "Fighting. I guess you know."
"I heard," she says shortly. She has, of course, because who hasn't. It's not like they were forgettable before, but now everybody knows the story. How Lucifer himself crawled out of hell and the Winchesters went to him, to fight or to serve, depending on who's telling the story, and at the end only one of them was standing but both of them were alive, and some people said the wrong side won, but the world's still here so maybe what do they know. "Why'd you come, really?"
His brow furrows; he shakes his head. "To make sure you were okay. Because so many people, hunters -- people, aren't."
"No kidding," she says. She wonders how many people they came to see before they got to her. She can't imagine it was very many, if only because there aren't that many left.
She misses her mother.
"You don't mind us staying?" Sam asks.
"It's late," she says. "I'm tired. Long as you don't slit my throat while I'm sleeping, I don't care what you do." She thinks she should be nicer, but then, maybe not.
"Okay," Sam says. "Thank you."
She knows they don't need to. Knows they could get a room next door, maybe. Probably. But she nods, anyway. Remembers stories about a yellow-eyed man in the east, about soot and blood and ruins. Stories about soulless crawling things up north and black horses made of smoke.
The room is still and quiet when she comes out. She can see them on the couch, can see the shapes of their boots on the floor. She imagines them awake, watching her. Swallows and walks slowly to her bed.
Her daddy's knife cool in her hand, underneath her pillow. Sam and Dean Winchester in the other corner of the room, playing at tame, making nice.
She shouldn't fall asleep as easily as she does.
-
They're still there, in the bright white light of morning. She slings her bag over her shoulder and follows them out to the parking lot. Shoves her free hand in her pocket and waits for them to say goodbye.
It snowed the night before, sometime after she got back. She can still taste it in the air. Her car will be freezing; the heater doesn't work so well even on the best of days.
"Where are you headed?" Sam says. He doesn't even have the grace to look cold. In daylight, he doesn't look wild at all. Just tired. And Dean looks like he did when she first met him.
They both look older, of course. Which is how she feels, too.
She shrugs. Dean is staring at the ground like he's hoping it will open up and swallow him whole. Or maybe like it hurts to look at anything else. Close enough.
"There's a nest up in New York," Sam says. "Vampires, we think. We could use somebody to watch our backs."
She draws in a breath; it freezes in her lungs. "That an invitation?"
Sam pauses. "Sure. If you've got the time."
She doesn't find out if he'll ask nicely, if he'll beg. Because she's sure he won't.
"Yeah," she says. "Okay."
She can always steal another car if she's wrong. Maybe the next one will have a heater that works.
Sam's driving, she realizes when they're already on the road. Which shouldn't be weird, really, but it is all the same. She remembers riding in the same place before, her mother in the passenger seat, all the way home, and then she has to stop remembering that.
After a few miles Dean puts in a tape and they listen to it for one side, drifting on some ancient disintegrating feedback, but he doesn't switch it when the tape runs out, so then it's quiet again.
She doesn't mind. It's good to be with people, anyway. Even them. For there to be someone who will notice if she goes missing.
She wonders how long it will last, this time.
-
They drive through afternoon, stop when the sun starts to set. It's a little nothing town, one motel and a diner across the street, where they crowd into a booth and read faded menus coated in sticky plastic, which manage to reflect the overhead light directly into her eyes, making them water.
Across the table, Sam is looking out the window, lost in thought or maybe looking for anyone who might be looking for them, and Dean's staring at his silverware.
"What can I get you?" the waitress asks, canting one hip forward, tapping her pen on her pad.
"Cheeseburger and fries," Dean says, looking up. His voice sounds rusty, but only a little. "Coffee."
Jo starts. Sam doesn't look surprised, orders his own food and goes back to looking out the window.
"Honey?" the waitress says, and Jo blinks, almost wonders if she imagined it.
Her coffee is bitter, burns her tongue. She wraps her hands around the mug, follows their lead and stares at a place just left of Dean. She can see the rise and fall of his shoulder with every breath he takes.
When the waitress brings their plates, it smells hot and greasy and she's hungrier than she realized. It's full night, sun set and streetlights on, and half of her sandwich is gone before Dean comes abruptly to his feet, slides out of the booth and heads for the door. He's outside by the time she realizes what's going on.
"What happened?" she asks Sam, who's not going after him, who's wiping his own hands on his napkin.
Sam shakes his head. Swallows.
She looks out the window. She can see him, standing, just outside one of the streetlights. Shadows all around. Shadows like wings, for an instant, shifting headlights behind him as somebody finally heads home and she heard rumors about that, too. But all of them are still here, really, so maybe that don't matter one way or another.
He doesn't say anything when he comes back in a few minutes later, snow melting on his jacket, on his hair.
She doesn't ask, not then.
A few minutes later, Sam asks for the check.
-
She's good about it, doesn't ask until they're in the motel, until they've got a room, one room for all of them, because Sam went in to register and only came back with one key and she figures that's invitation enough. She'll be damned if she's gonna use the last of her cash on a favor for them.
She doesn't ask until Dean's not around, until Dean's in the shower, until the water's running full-blast so she can hear it through the wall.
Sam's unpacking on one of the beds, sorting clean from dirty from sharp, when she crosses her arms and says, "What happened?"
He looks up at her, just barely. "What do you mean?"
"Don't start with me," she says. She stands, pads across the carpet to push into his space. Remembering the way the thing in his body did the same to her. Watching the reflection of his back in the mirror behind him.
"At the restaurant?" Sam asks, looking up. Inches away. "He needed air."
"Yeah, I got that," she says. "I mean, why. What happened before."
"Thought you'd heard."
"Tell me."
"He went to hell," Sam says. He looks up, suddenly, angry and sharp. Defensive. Like she's insulting him. Impugning Dean's honor. Asking for something that is not hers. "He came back. And then the war started."
"But-"
"He didn't talk to me for a week, after," he says. "And then it was just 'get out of my way,' and 'hand me the salt,' nothing that mattered."
"Goddamnit, Sam," she says, and she thinks she sounds like her mother. Reaching forward like she's going to grab his arms, like she's going to shake sense into him. Wondering when she got so reckless. "Don't-"
He kisses her, then. Leaning down, leaning into it. Hard and angry. One way to respond to the challenge. Pressure across her mouth and it feels like a burn, more startling than anything.
And the door opens and she realizes the water's off. She steps back and they break apart. Sam still has his head bowed, a little. It looks like reverence.
"Don't," she says again, a little quieter, tossing her hair back and turning away.
She sleeps on the couch that night. Listening to them tossing and turning, watching the shadows on the ceiling and wondering if they all always looked so much like wings.
When she sleeps, that night, she dreams of demons.
-
New York is easy, easier than it should be. Easier than it has any right to be. It's snowing by the time they get there, big storybook flakes that look cozy and safe and beautiful, that melt like perfection but make driving hell, judging from the way Sam mutters and swears and fights with the wheel.
All the same, it's easy.
No one gets hurt, anyway, which is what matters.
No one gets hurt. They break into the nest, checking for victims, making sure everybody's well and truly dead before they torch the building. And maybe they're not as quiet as they should be, or maybe the vampires here are just especially smart, because somebody notices them, somebody shouts, raises the alarm.
And even though Sam falters when his gun clicks empty, even though he raises one hand halfway like he's warding off a blow and then stops, stops like he doesn't know what he's meant to be doing next -- even though, no one gets hurt, because then Dean's got a knife through the neck of the vampire closest to him. Another kind of dead man's blood all over him, then, all over Sam, neither of whom seem to notice. To care.
They get out after that. Lock and chain the door behind them and she's the quickest, the first one with a lighter, the one to touch flame to kerosene and watch it spread.
Inside, the vampires are screaming, and outside, in the snow, Sam and Dean are looking at her like they expect her to say something. Thanks, maybe, for the invitation, for the show.
She doesn't.
She gets it, later, that they expected her to flinch.
-
Of course they didn't need her help, not really. They don't tell her to leave, though, so she doesn't.
She'll take what she can get.
-
Two days later and Sam's out for pizza and who knows what else, because he should have been back already. She's sharpening her knives, blades spread across the bed that's hers for the evening. Her daddy's, closest to her, closest to her heart.
On the other bed, Dean's reading a newspaper from two days ago, drinking a beer that has to be warm and awful, and not watching the television. Which he turned on half an hour ago and whose stilted lines and canned laughter are grating, jagged and bright.
She snatches the remote from the bedside table and turns it off. Dean doesn't react.
The room is absolutely silent.
She licks her lips. Wonders how much of it was true. Is true.
"You never called me," she says. Tests. "That's okay. I didn't expect you to."
Dean turns a page. The paper crinkles, rustles.
She looks back down. "Yeah. Didn't think you'd have an answer for that."
The blade slips. Blood blossoms across her thumb. "Motherfucker," she says. It's not deep. Won't even scar.
"Nice girls don't swear," Dean says. He's looking at her over the newspaper.
She startles, says anyway, "Why the fuck would you think that?" Manages a perfect drawl and he grins.
It feels a little like a victory. Which is strange, because she could have sworn. Would have sworn. That she wasn't that person anymore.
Old habits, though.
-
It's somewhere in the Midwest, some flat state that makes her think of home, when she jolts awake, someone screaming in her ears until all of a sudden they're not and she's clutching at the blankets and her eyes are heavy with salt.
She thinks the nightmare was one of theirs. Belongs to one of them. It sure as hell wasn't hers.
"You awake," she says to the ceiling, quiet and still too raw, and then looks down, over.
Sam wipes his face with the back of his hand. "Yeah," he says, just as quiet. His voice sounds wrecked. Like he was screaming. Except it wasn't him, in her dream.
"Me, too," she says. Somebody's taillights smolder furious red through the window. She rolls over to face the wall and the springs creak.
Dean doesn't say anything, hasn't said anything, but she knows that he's awake on the couch, now. And that he probably wasn't, before. She can hear when he swallows. Hear when he sets the glass heavily down on the table.
She always figured him for one of the ones that went out fighting. Not the ones who lived, after. Who drank themselves to death trying to forget. Even if he did go to hell and back.
It's funny, because she's pretty sure he expected the same thing.
Sam, though. Sam was just meant to get out. Like her.
Funny, because that didn't work so well, either.
None of them sleep, really, all into morning. She surfaces, coming into dawn, when the room is the color of gin and her eyes are burning, and she doesn't have to ask, that time.
She doesn't bother trying again, after that.
-
She rides in the backseat, which she thinks is to be expected. They invited her but she's not one of them, never was, doesn't want to be. Not anymore.
Sam's standing on the other side of the car, leaning against the gas pump, waiting for it to finish. He's leaning forward, hair covering his eyes, not paying attention, when she says, "Which one was it, at the end?"
She doesn't think Dean will answer, but he drags in a breath.
"What do you think?" he says, and it's almost casual enough. Almost.
Except for how he didn't even have to ask what she meant.
"If I knew, I wouldn't be asking," she says. She keeps her eyes on the window, watching the cars speed past on the highway. She glances back, just for a second, and his lips twist into something like a smirk.
Sam opens the door, then, gets inside. Twists the key in the ignition. His knuckles are cold and red. He looks at Dean, frowns. "What?" he says. "What did I miss?"
She picks at the hole her knee is fraying through her jeans. "Nothing," she says, and she reaches for her sunglasses, keeps her head down until she's got them on so she doesn't have to meet Sam's eyes.
She wonders why they haven't told her to leave yet. Why they asked her to come in the first place. How much of it was concern and how much was needing somebody to make the silence smaller.
She wonders if they found her because she's one of the last few people alive who knew them before.
Dean, as usual, doesn't say anything.
-
A ghost in Minnesota or Michigan, somewhere cold where the snow falls deep and silent, and they're in some dusty forgotten library looking for the name of a murderer, for the words that will put him to rest. She's deep among the books, quiet all around, when something shifts and she spins. Turns on her heel, reaching already for the gun at her back but not drawing it, not bringing it out, not yet, because.
Because it's Sam, standing there at the end of the aisle and then coming towards her, so she lets her hand fall away, leaves it at her side. Waiting.
Somewhere by the entrance, by the big windows, in cloudy grey light, Dean has newspapers spread across a table. She'd thought Sam was staying with him. She'd thought.
"Jo," he says. Barely more than a whisper. Maybe he's respecting their surroundings. She bites her lip.
"You find something?" she asks.
"No," he says. "I. I need to talk to you."
"So talk," she says. Glancing down. His hands are dirty with newsprint and book-grime, and then he moves.
He is very, very close, and his voice is very, very low. Hands tight at his sides like it takes effort to keep them there, to keep from shoving or grabbing or shaking, from violence.
A long time ago, she would have been scared, but she can't bring herself to do that anymore. Mostly. Some tiny part screaming, shuddering, in memory.
"Did he tell you?" Sam asks. "Did he tell you the part about how it was only me 'cause he took the shot that was meant for me? Because he got in the way? Did he tell you how he was going to die, but then he didn't?" He takes a breath. Raises one hand and rests it on the shelf next to her face. She does not look away from him. Habit. Look away and he'll move, it'll move, it'll strike. "Did he tell you what I did?"
She can imagine it, imagine him fighting. Imagine him standing before the armies of hell. That expression on his face.
She swallows. Smiles, just barely, and it hurts. "No," she says. "He didn't tell me anything."
All of her strength, then, to turn away. Leave him standing there, hands at his sides, and walk away, slowly, measured.
Dean looks up when she gets back to the table, looks back down.
Sam follows her, a few minutes later. Pulls out a chair and reaches for one of the books and doesn't look at her, doesn't say anything at all.
"Any luck?" she asks.
"No," he says. "I got nothing."
-
There's a roadhouse a block away from their motel. She saw it on the way in and she goes there, that night, shoves her hands in her pockets and keeps her head down, avoids looking up at the lights on her way in because it's dangerous to be caught half-blind in the moment after.
She opens the door and it's not right, not at all, but it's close enough.
Creaking chairs, sticky floorboards, cigarette smoke, vinyl through the speakers, crackling and true.
Hardly anybody else is around. It's too cold for that. She sits by herself at one end of the bar, the bartender cleaning glasses at the other and ignoring her, disappearing into the back for a little while.
She doesn't look up when the door opens, sometime later, but her shoulders tense.
Sam pulls out the barstool next to hers, sits down, and she says, flatly, "Fuck off."
He blinks. "Really?"
She sighs. "No."
He looks relieved, absurdly so. "I just. I'm sorry, about before."
She shrugs. The glass is sweating in her hand. "Forget it."
He nods. Bites his lip.
"What?"
"Don't tell him I told you, okay?"
She rolls her eyes. "I wasn't planning on it."
"Okay," he says. He pauses. Straightens like he's going to leave, but then he doesn't.
"I'm sorry about your mom," he says instead, which is. Just.
"What?"
He swallows. "I just, I thought you were, here, it." Stops.
"Don't," she says. "You thought wrong."
"Okay," he says. He lets out a breath. "You want a ride back?"
She shrugs. "Yeah, sure." Grabs her jacket from the back of her stool, shrugs into it. Gonna carry the scent of this place with her for days, now.
She follows him out into the parking lot. The Impala's a dark shape at the back of the lot, away from the streetlights, away from the building.
He takes a step forward, looks back when she doesn't. There's not enough light for her to make out his eyes. Nothing but shadow-black and breath.
She shoves her hands into her pockets, comes up onto her toes and brushes her mouth against his. Warm, against the chill.
When he kisses her back, she hitches her fingers in the loops of his jeans. Slides them up, locks them around the back of his neck.
Too long to the car, stumbling all the way. It's better when he stops trying to be gentle, stops trying to be nice, when she bites at his mouth and he tightens his grip.
She thinks this is reclaiming, maybe. A declaration of truce, or maybe just because it is very cold and his skin is warm, hot, so hot.
It's not all because she used to love his brother.
She opens her eyes, looks away from the roof, looks at him. He has one hand on the back of her neck and the other around the cross that hangs from the cord around her neck. His knuckles are white, even in the dim.
The corners have to be digging into his palm, have to be drawing blood.
His own eyes are closed.
She bites her lip to keep from crying out, and even then, she's not sure that it works.
-
Another little town, another little roadhouse, and this one's closer, almost close enough to hurt. But it's all of them, this time, and maybe that's what makes the difference, because it was never home when they were there, seemed like the worst fights she had with her mama began when the Winchesters came round.
At the other end of the bar Dean's talking to some pretty brunette, all hips and lips and polish in a way she could never make true. Beside her, Sam's sighing into his beer and not looking in the other direction, keeping his eyes on the door and his back to his brother.
She doesn't hear the words, when Dean puts his hand over the girl's, leans in, and the other guy shows up. She sees the look on Dean's face, though, and she remembers. Remembers it used to be charming, a little, burn under the skin. She can see traces of that, now. Almost.
And she sees when the guy raises his fist, brings it back like he's seen in all the movies and even from here she can tell it's not gonna land, swing and a miss, and that's when the light goes on in Dean's eyes, that's when his lands goddamn fucking perfectly.
Somebody, probably the brunette, screams, and she hears a table being moved. Scraped across the floor.
She nudges Sam. "You gonna do something?"
Sam laughs, almost. "What, defend his honor?"
She looks back. "But."
Between gritted teeth, then. Forced. "Let him do it. Trust me. He doesn't want."
He stops. She swallows.
It doesn't take long. Five minutes and then Dean's walking away, walking out of the bar, and they're following, and behind them somebody's crying and somebody's bleeding and maybe somebody isn't breathing anymore, but she doesn't think Sam would let it get that bad, so.
So she keeps a careful distance. Watches Sam's hands, the line of Dean's throat.
Wishes she could believe it was nothing. That they were gonna be okay.
She goes with them, again, anyway.
-
They head south after that.
She kisses Sam outside of a bar in Tallahassee, out of the light where anyone, where Dean, might see them from the road, neon light flickering across his face. Brick presses against her spine through her jacket.
It's not an apology, or an attempt at balance. It just happens. It just is.
She is the center of their gravity, she thinks dizzily, and it's terrifying.
How used to it she could get.
"He'll be waiting," Sam says, and she nods.
She'd heard the hardest part wasn't necessarily the war, but the aftermath. She'd seen it, too, all throughout her childhood. In her mama, after her daddy died.
She just never thought it would be in them, too.
In her, now.
-
It takes a week to collect everything, to prepare, to sort and dry the herbs.
"There's a spell," she says to Sam that morning. "I called somebody I know, called in a favor."
Sam raises his eyebrows. "And you don't think I've tried that?"
She shrugs. "He wouldn't have to know."
"I've tried," he says. "It doesn't work."
She tries anyway, that night. After Sam falls asleep, stretching out on the bed and saying it'll just be for a minute, and after Dean leaves, moving shadow-quiet, closing the door behind him. At midnight.
She doesn't say anything to stop him, and Sam doesn't stir.
She locks the bathroom door behind herself, salts the doorway. In case. The lock won't do much good if something wants to get out.
Her hands don't shake when she lights the match. Drops it. She stumbles, once, over the words. Sumerian, strange vowels, unfamiliar sounds.
There in an instant of light and she thinks, for one second, that it worked.
And then the flame goes out and something slices across her hands. She chokes back a scream as the mirror cracks, closes her eyes, and then the door is splintering and Sam's standing there, staring at her.
"I'm okay," she manages. Looks down at her hands, moves her fingers. The cuts aren't deep.
The sink is covered with broken glass, and Sam doesn't say, I told you so. He takes her out to the bedroom, instead, bandages her hands, instead, quickly, distantly.
"Where is he?" he says.
"He said he would be back soon," she lies.
He works his jaw, turns away. Throws the bloodstained towel in the wastebasket, leaving her there on the bed.
"I think I mispronounced something," she says, watching the line of his back. "That's all."
His shoulders tense. "It's what she wanted," he says, doesn't turn around to look at her. Lilith, she thinks. And she has heard stories. "Burned to marrow," he says, and she thinks he's quoting, the lilt in his voice. "No way to make it better."
She swallows.
"Thanks for trying, though," Sam says, and the bitterness of his tone is cutting. On somebody else she'd call it sarcasm.
"Did you kill her?" she asks, matching it, and then he does turn around.
"She's in hell," he says, which isn't an answer.
She licks her lips. "So you're just gonna let him do this."
"You have a better idea?"
"What have you tried?" she asks, coming to her feet.
"Everything," he says, and there's an undertone to his voice, something dark and frightening. She wonders where he drew the line.
"So you gave up?"
He actually flinches at that. Takes a step closer. "I. Tried everything." Standing deadly still. No doubt, no hesitation in his voice, but.
She tilts her head back to meet his eyes. "And here I was thinking you wouldn't stop short of begging God and all his angels."
Sam's laughter is a bark, is grating. She purses her lips and he looks up at her. "Angels make mistakes," he says.
"Whatever the hell that means." She looks at him. Waits. And then.
She hisses when her hands connect with the bones of his hips, and then he is lifting her, pushing her back, pushing. Her fingers twist at the buttons of his shirt, tear, and someone accelerates on the street, engine screaming high, higher.
She thinks of the broken glass, of how close it came. Twists beneath him and thinks that she wants to make him scream, too. She wants him to stop looking at her like he doesn't think she understands, understands anything.
The war is over. It's not her fault it was never her fight.
They brought her into this, after all. Not at first, not the first time, but they pulled her back in. This tragedy. Their mother on the ceiling and their war, holy or not, ever since.
Burn of salt on her hands. Drawing noise, muffled cries, from his throat. Until she shudders, until he stops, until they still.
When he gets up, she doesn't ask where he's going. She listens to him cleaning up, listens to the water running. Silver-shiver of sweeping glass.
They're both awake when Dean comes back in. She listens to him move around, to the heaviness of his footsteps, to the give of the bed beneath him, the whine of the springs.
She wonders what Sam would have done if he hadn't come back.
What she would have done.
She's not sure they would have made it out of the room.
-
The next day, when Sam's not around, Dean nods at her hands.
"He tried it, too."
She swallows. She hadn't planned on saying anything, had hoped he wouldn't notice. "Figured maybe he was doing it wrong."
Dean ducks his head for a moment. Says, without any emotion, anything at all, "He tried it so many times he couldn't hold a gun for a week."
She can't think of anything to say to that. Licks her lips and looks down at her plate. Wills herself not to flush, not to cry.
Sam comes back a few minutes later.
-
Her hands are healed by the time Sam and Dean start to fight.
She's not sure how it starts, because it's not like Dean says anything, really. She thinks they were arguing about a case, and then it turned into, who knows, philosophy, and she hears Sam says, "But dying's the easy part."
"Not as easy as you'd think," Dean says. "But I guess you knew that."
She's startled, actually flinches though she'd never admit it, when Sam hits him. Not hard, not even enough to split his lip, but he stumbles back all the same, like it's a miracle he didn't go down. Raises a hand to his mouth and looks up like it's some kind of victory.
"Sam," she says, then, low and warning, because it's not her fight, but even he has to be able to see.
Sam slams the door of the motel room, shaking the doorframe, jarring the windows, and setting her ears to ringing.
She doesn't say anything.
Dean stares at the door for a moment, like he expects Sam to come back. When he doesn't, Dean sinks down onto the couch, rests his elbows on his knees and lets out a sigh.
When she looks back, his eyes are closed, his head against the back of the couch.
She thinks that she could leave. That he would not notice, that maybe Sam wouldn't say anything when he got back, when she was gone.
Small keening noise from the other side of the room and when she looks over, Dean's skin is drawn tight, his hands locked into fists. Breath coming fast like he can't even scream, and she's on her feet, moving.
One hand on his shoulder and stepping back, in case he wakes swinging.
"Dean," she says. "Hey."
He blinks. Looks at her, swallows. Sits up, rubs a hand across his eyes. "Don't . . . tell Sam," he says, and she wants to laugh. Maybe. Out of desperation.
"I wasn't planning on it," she says, and he nods.
He doesn't say thank you, but then, he was never very good at that.
"What happened?" she asks.
"What?" Dean says. Rubs his knuckles across his mouth and looks away.
"Come on," she says. "You owe me."
"For what?"
She rolls her eyes.
"Do you do that just to piss him off?" she asks. She means it as a joke, but. It comes out crueler than she intended.
Dean makes a noise that could almost, in some alternate world, be a laugh. "Why, you think it's working?" he says.
She wishes she hadn't said anything. She shrugs, comes to sit next to him. "Yeah, a little bit." It occurs to her that this is the first time he's actually talked to her, more than a sentence, in. Ages.
Her fingers curl against his thigh as his hand slides beneath her shirt. Palm resting on the edge of a scar she got, she doesn't even remember when. His other hand curves around the smooth bone of her jaw.
He tastes like liquor, like whiskey, and the bottle on the bedside table is half empty and she wonders if it's enough, if it will be enough for him to sleep, this time. For any of them to sleep. She presses her mouth to the side of his neck, instead.
His hands on her shoulders, almost gentle. His breath in her ear, and this, this is better than being alone, this is why she did not leave. Why she hasn't.
She thinks this is maybe what could have been. What she wanted, a long time ago. And maybe that's what he wants, now.
Her hand brushes against the smooth skin of his shoulder and she thinks there should be a scar, there. Maybe that's fitting, though, maybe it's okay, because none of them are the same people anymore, anyway.
She wonders what he would say if Sam came back now. What she would say.
It doesn't matter, because he doesn't.
-
She thinks maybe Sam knows, all the same. Though maybe that's giving him, giving herself, too much credit.
Either way. They're fighting, again, this time in a bar; she's playing pool with some talentless nobody, some unshaven college kid who keeps checking out her ass, but that's okay because he keeps losing when he does it. So maybe she's not paying attention when it starts, but it's not like she has a choice, after.
She keeps catching key words. And she's mostly surprised that Dean's talking this much.
She watches them out of the corner of her eye. Dean leaves first, shakes Sam's hand off of his arm and looks like he wants to run. Which is when he looks over, sees her, and heads for the door.
She'd hate him for making her be responsible for this, for the aftermath, if he hadn't. If she hadn't seen his face. Apology and honest to god fear, laid open to bone.
She grits her teeth and sets the cue down. Forfeits the game, leaves the kid standing there, actually slack-jawed, and says, "Come on," to Sam, because she does not want to know what will happen if she doesn't.
Remembering the last time he woke up and Dean was gone.
She drives them back to the motel. She's not sure if Dean was considerate enough to leave the car or if he just didn't think about taking the keys, though come to think of it she hasn't seen him drive since. Since. Since she's been with them.
She feels small, exposed. Bare. Even the car's too small beneath this crackling grey sky.
Sam sits down on the edge of his bed while she locks the door. When she turns around, he's fumbling with the laces of his boots and she wonders how he made it on his own for four months. What he had to change to survive.
"He'll be back," she says, and winces at the harshness of her voice.
"Yeah," Sam says, and she did not want to see him like this. Not broken, like this. The aftermath of destruction, all pity and pain. When she moves past him, he catches her hand, and even though he doesn't actually say please, she gets it.
She sits next to him, legs crossed, watching the rise and fall of his chest.
"What happened?" she asks after a few minutes, when he doesn't say anything, when the quiet starts to feel reverent, like mourning.
He sighs, shifts a little. "There was. There was a light," he says, and she swallows. That's not what she was asking, not really.
She doesn't stop him, though. Doesn't correct him. Even though she doesn't think she should hear this, is fairly goddamn certain she doesn't want to.
She deserves to know.
"And I knew it would be okay if it happened. I saw. What would happen. And all I had to do was stand there, was not move. Was let it. Except Dean, he didn't, he." Sam's breath is ragged. "He got in the way, he moved, like he thought . . . and it . . . threw him. The way he turned. He landed wrong and I could see blood and he didn't get back up."
When she looks down, her hands are white. Tendons standing out.
"He got back up," she says. "What did you-"
"Nothing!" Sam says. "Nothing. I didn't, I told him. I opened my eyes and I was on my knees and everybody was dead, the demons and everybody else and Dean, he."
She doesn't dare speak.
"He opened his eyes and he looked at me like he didn't even. Like he couldn't." Sam takes a breath. "And Lucifer was gone."
She reaches out, then. Touches his hand. It's not nearly enough, but Sam lifts his head. Looks at her.
"He told me. After. He said, Dad raised us better than that. Like I was just giving up."
He looks away, then. And she doesn't move.
Her mouth is dry.
She doesn't think Dean gets back until dawn, but she falls asleep before that, listening to the beat of Sam's heart, curled up next to him on top of the blankets.
-
In the morning, they all wear shades. They don't talk. Sam drives.
The silence feels brittle, tentative, too-thin ice all around, And she swears to god she's not going to be the one to fix it, this time.
She almost wishes she didn't know. Almost.
-
The next hunt, they leave her in the car as lookout and she doesn't argue. She's had enough of heroics.
When they don't come back, though, she goes in after them.
She destroys the ghost easily, because it's not paying attention, because it has one hand pressed against each of them, steady over their hearts. Because they are on the ground, ghost-white, and that's not funny at all.
She burns the talisman and the spirit goes up in a flash. A noise like wings.
And they are both alive, their hands cold in hers. Freezing. And she is not choking, is not crying, is not.
It should have been easy. Both of them, both of them shouldn't even have had to be there. Both of them shouldn't have gone down.
"Stupid motherfucking idiots," she says, hating them a little, because they let this happen. Because they didn't have to and they did it anyway, because they should have known better, moved faster. Because.
Shotguns on the floor, hardly any scuff marks, any marks at all, in the dust.
Sam coughs. "We had it," he says.
"Yeah, I could tell," she says, like she hadn't for a moment thought that she'd been too late and they were dead and she'd lost everything again.
She drives back to the motel. Neither of them argue, which is terrifying.
Because maybe it goes both ways, and she can't believe that it took this long for her to realize. That maybe they wanted somebody to notice, too.
Because it's hard to be a war hero if there's nobody around to remember what you did, if there's nobody around who even remembers the war.
-
The heater's not enough, when they get back to their room. She strips the blankets from one bed while they just stand there, too quiet, too pale, too weary, and she has to keep moving, has to keep doing, because if she doesn't, she'll. Have to think about what they're going to do next.
Fitting together on one bed and she fits easily in the careful space between them. Wonders what she'll do if she wakes up and they're gone. In any sense of the word.
She wakes with Dean's face against her neck and Sam's hand on her hip, and they are all alive. And it doesn't last, but for a little while, she is warm, and they are safe, and it's like none of it even happened.
-
Then it is Christmas Eve, and things are better. Good. It feels like a reprieve, it feels like, in some small, strange way, salvation.
They're standing in a graveyard, burning bones, and it's snowing, and she's thinking of the last Christmas she remembers with her daddy, when her mama told him no way in hell was he going out again until the snow stopped, so what if it wasn't until next year, and the expression in her mama's eyes when he saluted.
She hadn't thought anything of it, then. Just meant her daddy was there for a week, making her mama smile, except then the week was over and he said, be brave, Joanna my girl, and that summer.
That summer.
In the distance, way far off, somebody's carolling, off-key and terrible. She laughs, more hysterical than anything. Presses a gloved hand across her mouth.
"This is twisted," Sam says after a few minutes, and Dean grins. "Pyromaniac," Sam adds.
She shakes her head. "You're both crazy," she says.
"You're out here, too," Dean says.
She shrugs. "Yeah, well. Never said I was smart."
They stand over the grave and watch the firelight flicker until the flames go out, and then they drive slowly back to the motel room.
They drink eggnog while watching something cheesy and garish on the television, which goes out after half an hour. At which point she kisses each of them on the cheek and goes to bed.
They're still awake when she falls asleep. She can hear them talking. Sam, mostly, but Dean, a little.
She wonders what changed.
On the edge of sleep, she thinks this might be happiness.
-
In January, they go by their dad's grave, which it turns out is right next to their mom's. They stand like soldiers before it, backs rigid, hands at their sides.
Dean takes a step forward, places something on the headstone, but she can't tell what it is, because she's waiting in the car.
Bloody red sky, all around, and it feels like an end.
It isn't hers to feel anything about, though, so she toes off her boots, pulls her feet up underneath her on the seat, and closes her eyes.
-
They go by where the roadhouse used to be, next.
She gets the sentiment, and yeah, it's not like anybody really knows where her mom's buried, but their dead parents tour is pissing her off. She went along for the ride, didn't ask to be one of the goddamned attractions.
She stands in the middle of the road, next to the car where they are pointedly not watching her, and crosses her arms. Looks out at where she used to live, the place from which she ran away, soon as she could.
Never coming home, she thinks. She won't say it aloud. She came back, once, after the fire. With her mama. It was summer, all weeds and blue sky, broken glass sparkling, and it was okay.
She hadn't planned on coming back, not ever.
The ground's all ash-grey, now, dirty snow and ravens squawking in the trees, breaking the silence. Nothing in its place.
Her hands are cold, and she doesn't have anything to leave.
The last time she saw her mom, her mama gave her the cross she's wearing, blessed and charmed and protected, and kissed her forehead, told her to keep safe, baby girl, keep safe.
She's not going to give that up.
She goes back to the car. Slams the door, hard enough to rattle the frame.
-
They go to the coast after that, cold black water and cruel rocks. She imagines her boots slipping, imagines sinking deep, deep, deeper.
She doesn't ask what they're thinking about. If it's the same.
-
Two days later and Dean is coughing up the Atlantic, cold black water from his lungs, and the rocks are digging into her knees.
Later, in the shower, trying to get warm, Sam's hands curl over her own and his mouth drags across her belly, sweet and slow.
Because she's the one who brought Dean back, after. She had to be, because Sam was terrifying, wasn't helping, was panicking. Earthquakes behind his eyes, and he wasn't making sense. Not that she was, either, really, up to her knees in water so cold it burned more than anything, and screaming for him to hurry up, get out of the sea, come on.
It was an accident, this time, nobody saw it coming, rising up out of the waves, tangible for one terrible instant. And Sam went in, dragged him out of the ocean, dragged him back. She had to push him away, had to pull Dean from him, press Dean's mouth to hers, as Sam's voice cracked, as he said I'm not gonna do this again and it was prayer and vow and threat, the wrath of god in his eyes.
Sam's hands trace the curve of her hips and she watches the curve of his neck. His face against her skin.
When he kisses her, she tastes salt, and she remembers tasting the ocean on Dean's lips.
She wonders if this is love.
She can hear the surf, still, and she shivers.
-
They take on a family of demons in middle America, the first she's seen in a long time. Black-eyed mother and father and two blond children who knock her shotgun aside and go for her throat.
Tiny fingernails drawing blood, and their bones should snap, should break and splinter, but they don't, they don't, they don't. The room is going grey, sparking, when Sam rips the demons out of them, easy as breathing.
She drops to her knees beside their bodies, and when she can look up again, Sam is pale, his hands shaking.
"I'm sorry," he says, rasping, to Dean. "I didn't." He stops when Dean reaches out. Reaches up like he's going to wipe the blood from Sam's face, but he doesn't. Takes him by the arm instead.
She thinks this, this might be an end, and her throat burns, a little.
She remembers the burn of the first time, the kerosene flicker of Sam's mouth against hers. Gets to her feet, doesn't look either of them.
-
In February, a ghoul slices her back open in a graveyard. She's on her knees again, trying to catch her breath, and then she's in the motel room and the floor is very white, the lights bright, haloed.
One of them is stitching her up while the other holds her steady, his hand moving with the rise and fall of her stomach.
She can't tell which is which, anymore, and maybe it doesn't matter.
The world going dark and faraway, slipping out of view. She tries to mouth goodbye, feels her eyes close.
Wonders if she'll wake up, this time.
-
Three towns over, Dean drives.
He takes the keys from Sam, who's standing next to the driver's side, and grins. And she thinks it's a little heartbreaking, because it's defiance, through and through, weary and wrenching, no wicked mustang joy.
Like he knows. There will be no happy endings for them, not that there ever are, not in this kind of life, the one they were born to, the one they chose. Small fights, instead, maybe. Battles. Lucifer was gone.
Sam looks like he's going to argue, but he doesn't. Shrugs, says something about saying I told you so, if Dean gets them all killed, and doesn't sound like he means it.
Dean drives too fast, and Sam doesn't say anything, then.
She stays quiet, too. Watches.
-
It rains in Georgia, hot and desperate and angry. She has laundry duty, walks two blocks to the laundromat. She's dripping, soaked to the skin, when she gets back. Water pooling out of the gutters, rain dripping from the roof's overhang down the back of her shirt, and she shudders.
She opens the door, drops the bags on the floor and pushes her hair out of her face. It's almost long enough for her to braid again. She'll have to cut it soon.
She looks up.
Sam and Dean on one of the beds, Sam's hand fisted in Dean's shirt, his hand against the front of Dean's jeans, and she can't think of a goddamn thing to say.
Except maybe that it was inevitable. Gravity crushing in on itself.
She was never promised anything, she remembers. She just. She just.
The door slams shut behind her and they look up. The rain on the windows sounds like distant gunfire.
"Jo," Sam says, and she shakes her head.
"Sorry, I," she begins, and then Dean's on his feet, catches her by the hand, pulls her towards them. Sam tugs her jacket off of her shoulders and they press together, all sweat and skin and salt, sheets that tear like banners, like flags.
And then. One beneath and one below, until there aren't any empty places anymore. And she thinks the world might be ending, but maybe it's been ending all along, anyway, and maybe salvation's nothing more than a myth, a story people tell their kids, tell themselves in the dark.
It's not for them, not anymore.
So maybe all they have is this war they survived, this war that was never her fight, this war that's maybe always been hers by right. So maybe all they have is this war and what got them through. And it doesn't feel like glory, or like faith. Doesn't feel like anything at all.
So this is what the survivors do. And they have. And they are. And they will, for now.
-end-
She always did like fire.
Thanks to vinylroad for being interested and to reddened for making me actually do something with it.
horses
The hunt took longer than it should have. It's dark, now, and she's bone-tired. Shivering with cold and exhaustion. Not at her best, maybe, when she unlocks her door, and that's why it takes her a split-second longer than it should, that's why he has time to draw his gun before she has her own aimed at his heart.
It's simultaneous, instead.
"Drop it," she says, and her voice doesn't waver. Flat and bitter, mostly because there's nothing left to give.
"You first," he says, and she blinks. Her eyes adjust to the dim and then she swallows. She wants to scream.
She does not lower her gun. Metal sweat-hot in her hand. She imagines pulling the trigger.
"Sam," she says.
"Hi, Jo." Something moves behind him, and she looks away just long enough to make out Dean, standing back.
"What do you want?" she asks. The door's at her back, a step away if she needs to run. She hasn't seen him for months. Years, really. Since Duluth. Since he wasn't himself and she wonders if he remembers that like she does. If he had nightmares, too.
"We came to see if you were okay," he says.
"And you couldn't just call?" she asks.
"Would you have answered?" he asks. Hesitates for a moment. "Are you?"
"Yeah," she says. "Peachy. You?"
"Fine," Sam says. "Good." She nods. Raises her eyebrow. Sam looks down, looks back up and then lowers his gun, sets it on the bed. Within easy reach.
She waits until he's moved his hand away before clicking the safety back on her own, sliding it into her waistband. He nods, sits down gingerly on the edge of her bed. Dean does the same, right next to him. No, not right. Careful space between them.
"You cut your hair," Sam says.
"Yeah," she says. "You didn't." She bites the inside of her cheek, shifts her weight. Manages to keep from crossing her arms. "So. Thanks for thinking of me."
Sam swallows.
"Where'd you come from?" she asks.
"Michigan," Sam says. "Before that. Um." She tilts her head, waits to see what he'll add. Because she knows, because there isn't a hunter alive who doesn't know where they were before that. What happened.
Her mom said it was all of their war, but it wasn't, really. So maybe she's bitter, yeah, but it's understandable. Because she's lost everything, now, and at least they still have each other.
"So," she says. Realizes she's staring at his shirt, faded red and white checks, and she's going to fall asleep on her feet if she doesn't move. She shakes her head. "Fine. You can sleep here, if you want."
"Thanks," Sam says.
It's not until later that she realizes Dean hasn't said anything at all.
-
She knows perfectly well what she's doing. She tells herself, staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Bright yellow light all around and in the other room, in the dim and the dark, are the sons of the man who killed her daddy, and depending on who's telling the story, they're the ones who almost ended the world.
She always did like fire, was born to it just as she was to salt and blood and broken bottles of whiskey and the last song on the jukebox while her mama wiped down the bar, but all the same, she wonders if this is a bad sign.
A knock at the door. She turns away, dries her face on the once-white towel next to the sink and opens it. Cautiously.
It's Sam. He tilts his head back towards the room. "He's asleep," he says quietly. Jo moves out of the way, lets him in.
"So," she says.
"You're okay," Sam says.
"I'm alive," she says.
"Yeah," he says. "How've you been?"
"Hunting," she says, which isn't what he asked, but it's enough. Ghosts and shifters and rock-salt, and it was what she'd always wanted, but never what it was meant to be. "You?"
"Same," he says. "Fighting. I guess you know."
"I heard," she says shortly. She has, of course, because who hasn't. It's not like they were forgettable before, but now everybody knows the story. How Lucifer himself crawled out of hell and the Winchesters went to him, to fight or to serve, depending on who's telling the story, and at the end only one of them was standing but both of them were alive, and some people said the wrong side won, but the world's still here so maybe what do they know. "Why'd you come, really?"
His brow furrows; he shakes his head. "To make sure you were okay. Because so many people, hunters -- people, aren't."
"No kidding," she says. She wonders how many people they came to see before they got to her. She can't imagine it was very many, if only because there aren't that many left.
She misses her mother.
"You don't mind us staying?" Sam asks.
"It's late," she says. "I'm tired. Long as you don't slit my throat while I'm sleeping, I don't care what you do." She thinks she should be nicer, but then, maybe not.
"Okay," Sam says. "Thank you."
She knows they don't need to. Knows they could get a room next door, maybe. Probably. But she nods, anyway. Remembers stories about a yellow-eyed man in the east, about soot and blood and ruins. Stories about soulless crawling things up north and black horses made of smoke.
The room is still and quiet when she comes out. She can see them on the couch, can see the shapes of their boots on the floor. She imagines them awake, watching her. Swallows and walks slowly to her bed.
Her daddy's knife cool in her hand, underneath her pillow. Sam and Dean Winchester in the other corner of the room, playing at tame, making nice.
She shouldn't fall asleep as easily as she does.
-
They're still there, in the bright white light of morning. She slings her bag over her shoulder and follows them out to the parking lot. Shoves her free hand in her pocket and waits for them to say goodbye.
It snowed the night before, sometime after she got back. She can still taste it in the air. Her car will be freezing; the heater doesn't work so well even on the best of days.
"Where are you headed?" Sam says. He doesn't even have the grace to look cold. In daylight, he doesn't look wild at all. Just tired. And Dean looks like he did when she first met him.
They both look older, of course. Which is how she feels, too.
She shrugs. Dean is staring at the ground like he's hoping it will open up and swallow him whole. Or maybe like it hurts to look at anything else. Close enough.
"There's a nest up in New York," Sam says. "Vampires, we think. We could use somebody to watch our backs."
She draws in a breath; it freezes in her lungs. "That an invitation?"
Sam pauses. "Sure. If you've got the time."
She doesn't find out if he'll ask nicely, if he'll beg. Because she's sure he won't.
"Yeah," she says. "Okay."
She can always steal another car if she's wrong. Maybe the next one will have a heater that works.
Sam's driving, she realizes when they're already on the road. Which shouldn't be weird, really, but it is all the same. She remembers riding in the same place before, her mother in the passenger seat, all the way home, and then she has to stop remembering that.
After a few miles Dean puts in a tape and they listen to it for one side, drifting on some ancient disintegrating feedback, but he doesn't switch it when the tape runs out, so then it's quiet again.
She doesn't mind. It's good to be with people, anyway. Even them. For there to be someone who will notice if she goes missing.
She wonders how long it will last, this time.
-
They drive through afternoon, stop when the sun starts to set. It's a little nothing town, one motel and a diner across the street, where they crowd into a booth and read faded menus coated in sticky plastic, which manage to reflect the overhead light directly into her eyes, making them water.
Across the table, Sam is looking out the window, lost in thought or maybe looking for anyone who might be looking for them, and Dean's staring at his silverware.
"What can I get you?" the waitress asks, canting one hip forward, tapping her pen on her pad.
"Cheeseburger and fries," Dean says, looking up. His voice sounds rusty, but only a little. "Coffee."
Jo starts. Sam doesn't look surprised, orders his own food and goes back to looking out the window.
"Honey?" the waitress says, and Jo blinks, almost wonders if she imagined it.
Her coffee is bitter, burns her tongue. She wraps her hands around the mug, follows their lead and stares at a place just left of Dean. She can see the rise and fall of his shoulder with every breath he takes.
When the waitress brings their plates, it smells hot and greasy and she's hungrier than she realized. It's full night, sun set and streetlights on, and half of her sandwich is gone before Dean comes abruptly to his feet, slides out of the booth and heads for the door. He's outside by the time she realizes what's going on.
"What happened?" she asks Sam, who's not going after him, who's wiping his own hands on his napkin.
Sam shakes his head. Swallows.
She looks out the window. She can see him, standing, just outside one of the streetlights. Shadows all around. Shadows like wings, for an instant, shifting headlights behind him as somebody finally heads home and she heard rumors about that, too. But all of them are still here, really, so maybe that don't matter one way or another.
He doesn't say anything when he comes back in a few minutes later, snow melting on his jacket, on his hair.
She doesn't ask, not then.
A few minutes later, Sam asks for the check.
-
She's good about it, doesn't ask until they're in the motel, until they've got a room, one room for all of them, because Sam went in to register and only came back with one key and she figures that's invitation enough. She'll be damned if she's gonna use the last of her cash on a favor for them.
She doesn't ask until Dean's not around, until Dean's in the shower, until the water's running full-blast so she can hear it through the wall.
Sam's unpacking on one of the beds, sorting clean from dirty from sharp, when she crosses her arms and says, "What happened?"
He looks up at her, just barely. "What do you mean?"
"Don't start with me," she says. She stands, pads across the carpet to push into his space. Remembering the way the thing in his body did the same to her. Watching the reflection of his back in the mirror behind him.
"At the restaurant?" Sam asks, looking up. Inches away. "He needed air."
"Yeah, I got that," she says. "I mean, why. What happened before."
"Thought you'd heard."
"Tell me."
"He went to hell," Sam says. He looks up, suddenly, angry and sharp. Defensive. Like she's insulting him. Impugning Dean's honor. Asking for something that is not hers. "He came back. And then the war started."
"But-"
"He didn't talk to me for a week, after," he says. "And then it was just 'get out of my way,' and 'hand me the salt,' nothing that mattered."
"Goddamnit, Sam," she says, and she thinks she sounds like her mother. Reaching forward like she's going to grab his arms, like she's going to shake sense into him. Wondering when she got so reckless. "Don't-"
He kisses her, then. Leaning down, leaning into it. Hard and angry. One way to respond to the challenge. Pressure across her mouth and it feels like a burn, more startling than anything.
And the door opens and she realizes the water's off. She steps back and they break apart. Sam still has his head bowed, a little. It looks like reverence.
"Don't," she says again, a little quieter, tossing her hair back and turning away.
She sleeps on the couch that night. Listening to them tossing and turning, watching the shadows on the ceiling and wondering if they all always looked so much like wings.
When she sleeps, that night, she dreams of demons.
-
New York is easy, easier than it should be. Easier than it has any right to be. It's snowing by the time they get there, big storybook flakes that look cozy and safe and beautiful, that melt like perfection but make driving hell, judging from the way Sam mutters and swears and fights with the wheel.
All the same, it's easy.
No one gets hurt, anyway, which is what matters.
No one gets hurt. They break into the nest, checking for victims, making sure everybody's well and truly dead before they torch the building. And maybe they're not as quiet as they should be, or maybe the vampires here are just especially smart, because somebody notices them, somebody shouts, raises the alarm.
And even though Sam falters when his gun clicks empty, even though he raises one hand halfway like he's warding off a blow and then stops, stops like he doesn't know what he's meant to be doing next -- even though, no one gets hurt, because then Dean's got a knife through the neck of the vampire closest to him. Another kind of dead man's blood all over him, then, all over Sam, neither of whom seem to notice. To care.
They get out after that. Lock and chain the door behind them and she's the quickest, the first one with a lighter, the one to touch flame to kerosene and watch it spread.
Inside, the vampires are screaming, and outside, in the snow, Sam and Dean are looking at her like they expect her to say something. Thanks, maybe, for the invitation, for the show.
She doesn't.
She gets it, later, that they expected her to flinch.
-
Of course they didn't need her help, not really. They don't tell her to leave, though, so she doesn't.
She'll take what she can get.
-
Two days later and Sam's out for pizza and who knows what else, because he should have been back already. She's sharpening her knives, blades spread across the bed that's hers for the evening. Her daddy's, closest to her, closest to her heart.
On the other bed, Dean's reading a newspaper from two days ago, drinking a beer that has to be warm and awful, and not watching the television. Which he turned on half an hour ago and whose stilted lines and canned laughter are grating, jagged and bright.
She snatches the remote from the bedside table and turns it off. Dean doesn't react.
The room is absolutely silent.
She licks her lips. Wonders how much of it was true. Is true.
"You never called me," she says. Tests. "That's okay. I didn't expect you to."
Dean turns a page. The paper crinkles, rustles.
She looks back down. "Yeah. Didn't think you'd have an answer for that."
The blade slips. Blood blossoms across her thumb. "Motherfucker," she says. It's not deep. Won't even scar.
"Nice girls don't swear," Dean says. He's looking at her over the newspaper.
She startles, says anyway, "Why the fuck would you think that?" Manages a perfect drawl and he grins.
It feels a little like a victory. Which is strange, because she could have sworn. Would have sworn. That she wasn't that person anymore.
Old habits, though.
-
It's somewhere in the Midwest, some flat state that makes her think of home, when she jolts awake, someone screaming in her ears until all of a sudden they're not and she's clutching at the blankets and her eyes are heavy with salt.
She thinks the nightmare was one of theirs. Belongs to one of them. It sure as hell wasn't hers.
"You awake," she says to the ceiling, quiet and still too raw, and then looks down, over.
Sam wipes his face with the back of his hand. "Yeah," he says, just as quiet. His voice sounds wrecked. Like he was screaming. Except it wasn't him, in her dream.
"Me, too," she says. Somebody's taillights smolder furious red through the window. She rolls over to face the wall and the springs creak.
Dean doesn't say anything, hasn't said anything, but she knows that he's awake on the couch, now. And that he probably wasn't, before. She can hear when he swallows. Hear when he sets the glass heavily down on the table.
She always figured him for one of the ones that went out fighting. Not the ones who lived, after. Who drank themselves to death trying to forget. Even if he did go to hell and back.
It's funny, because she's pretty sure he expected the same thing.
Sam, though. Sam was just meant to get out. Like her.
Funny, because that didn't work so well, either.
None of them sleep, really, all into morning. She surfaces, coming into dawn, when the room is the color of gin and her eyes are burning, and she doesn't have to ask, that time.
She doesn't bother trying again, after that.
-
She rides in the backseat, which she thinks is to be expected. They invited her but she's not one of them, never was, doesn't want to be. Not anymore.
Sam's standing on the other side of the car, leaning against the gas pump, waiting for it to finish. He's leaning forward, hair covering his eyes, not paying attention, when she says, "Which one was it, at the end?"
She doesn't think Dean will answer, but he drags in a breath.
"What do you think?" he says, and it's almost casual enough. Almost.
Except for how he didn't even have to ask what she meant.
"If I knew, I wouldn't be asking," she says. She keeps her eyes on the window, watching the cars speed past on the highway. She glances back, just for a second, and his lips twist into something like a smirk.
Sam opens the door, then, gets inside. Twists the key in the ignition. His knuckles are cold and red. He looks at Dean, frowns. "What?" he says. "What did I miss?"
She picks at the hole her knee is fraying through her jeans. "Nothing," she says, and she reaches for her sunglasses, keeps her head down until she's got them on so she doesn't have to meet Sam's eyes.
She wonders why they haven't told her to leave yet. Why they asked her to come in the first place. How much of it was concern and how much was needing somebody to make the silence smaller.
She wonders if they found her because she's one of the last few people alive who knew them before.
Dean, as usual, doesn't say anything.
-
A ghost in Minnesota or Michigan, somewhere cold where the snow falls deep and silent, and they're in some dusty forgotten library looking for the name of a murderer, for the words that will put him to rest. She's deep among the books, quiet all around, when something shifts and she spins. Turns on her heel, reaching already for the gun at her back but not drawing it, not bringing it out, not yet, because.
Because it's Sam, standing there at the end of the aisle and then coming towards her, so she lets her hand fall away, leaves it at her side. Waiting.
Somewhere by the entrance, by the big windows, in cloudy grey light, Dean has newspapers spread across a table. She'd thought Sam was staying with him. She'd thought.
"Jo," he says. Barely more than a whisper. Maybe he's respecting their surroundings. She bites her lip.
"You find something?" she asks.
"No," he says. "I. I need to talk to you."
"So talk," she says. Glancing down. His hands are dirty with newsprint and book-grime, and then he moves.
He is very, very close, and his voice is very, very low. Hands tight at his sides like it takes effort to keep them there, to keep from shoving or grabbing or shaking, from violence.
A long time ago, she would have been scared, but she can't bring herself to do that anymore. Mostly. Some tiny part screaming, shuddering, in memory.
"Did he tell you?" Sam asks. "Did he tell you the part about how it was only me 'cause he took the shot that was meant for me? Because he got in the way? Did he tell you how he was going to die, but then he didn't?" He takes a breath. Raises one hand and rests it on the shelf next to her face. She does not look away from him. Habit. Look away and he'll move, it'll move, it'll strike. "Did he tell you what I did?"
She can imagine it, imagine him fighting. Imagine him standing before the armies of hell. That expression on his face.
She swallows. Smiles, just barely, and it hurts. "No," she says. "He didn't tell me anything."
All of her strength, then, to turn away. Leave him standing there, hands at his sides, and walk away, slowly, measured.
Dean looks up when she gets back to the table, looks back down.
Sam follows her, a few minutes later. Pulls out a chair and reaches for one of the books and doesn't look at her, doesn't say anything at all.
"Any luck?" she asks.
"No," he says. "I got nothing."
-
There's a roadhouse a block away from their motel. She saw it on the way in and she goes there, that night, shoves her hands in her pockets and keeps her head down, avoids looking up at the lights on her way in because it's dangerous to be caught half-blind in the moment after.
She opens the door and it's not right, not at all, but it's close enough.
Creaking chairs, sticky floorboards, cigarette smoke, vinyl through the speakers, crackling and true.
Hardly anybody else is around. It's too cold for that. She sits by herself at one end of the bar, the bartender cleaning glasses at the other and ignoring her, disappearing into the back for a little while.
She doesn't look up when the door opens, sometime later, but her shoulders tense.
Sam pulls out the barstool next to hers, sits down, and she says, flatly, "Fuck off."
He blinks. "Really?"
She sighs. "No."
He looks relieved, absurdly so. "I just. I'm sorry, about before."
She shrugs. The glass is sweating in her hand. "Forget it."
He nods. Bites his lip.
"What?"
"Don't tell him I told you, okay?"
She rolls her eyes. "I wasn't planning on it."
"Okay," he says. He pauses. Straightens like he's going to leave, but then he doesn't.
"I'm sorry about your mom," he says instead, which is. Just.
"What?"
He swallows. "I just, I thought you were, here, it." Stops.
"Don't," she says. "You thought wrong."
"Okay," he says. He lets out a breath. "You want a ride back?"
She shrugs. "Yeah, sure." Grabs her jacket from the back of her stool, shrugs into it. Gonna carry the scent of this place with her for days, now.
She follows him out into the parking lot. The Impala's a dark shape at the back of the lot, away from the streetlights, away from the building.
He takes a step forward, looks back when she doesn't. There's not enough light for her to make out his eyes. Nothing but shadow-black and breath.
She shoves her hands into her pockets, comes up onto her toes and brushes her mouth against his. Warm, against the chill.
When he kisses her back, she hitches her fingers in the loops of his jeans. Slides them up, locks them around the back of his neck.
Too long to the car, stumbling all the way. It's better when he stops trying to be gentle, stops trying to be nice, when she bites at his mouth and he tightens his grip.
She thinks this is reclaiming, maybe. A declaration of truce, or maybe just because it is very cold and his skin is warm, hot, so hot.
It's not all because she used to love his brother.
She opens her eyes, looks away from the roof, looks at him. He has one hand on the back of her neck and the other around the cross that hangs from the cord around her neck. His knuckles are white, even in the dim.
The corners have to be digging into his palm, have to be drawing blood.
His own eyes are closed.
She bites her lip to keep from crying out, and even then, she's not sure that it works.
-
Another little town, another little roadhouse, and this one's closer, almost close enough to hurt. But it's all of them, this time, and maybe that's what makes the difference, because it was never home when they were there, seemed like the worst fights she had with her mama began when the Winchesters came round.
At the other end of the bar Dean's talking to some pretty brunette, all hips and lips and polish in a way she could never make true. Beside her, Sam's sighing into his beer and not looking in the other direction, keeping his eyes on the door and his back to his brother.
She doesn't hear the words, when Dean puts his hand over the girl's, leans in, and the other guy shows up. She sees the look on Dean's face, though, and she remembers. Remembers it used to be charming, a little, burn under the skin. She can see traces of that, now. Almost.
And she sees when the guy raises his fist, brings it back like he's seen in all the movies and even from here she can tell it's not gonna land, swing and a miss, and that's when the light goes on in Dean's eyes, that's when his lands goddamn fucking perfectly.
Somebody, probably the brunette, screams, and she hears a table being moved. Scraped across the floor.
She nudges Sam. "You gonna do something?"
Sam laughs, almost. "What, defend his honor?"
She looks back. "But."
Between gritted teeth, then. Forced. "Let him do it. Trust me. He doesn't want."
He stops. She swallows.
It doesn't take long. Five minutes and then Dean's walking away, walking out of the bar, and they're following, and behind them somebody's crying and somebody's bleeding and maybe somebody isn't breathing anymore, but she doesn't think Sam would let it get that bad, so.
So she keeps a careful distance. Watches Sam's hands, the line of Dean's throat.
Wishes she could believe it was nothing. That they were gonna be okay.
She goes with them, again, anyway.
-
They head south after that.
She kisses Sam outside of a bar in Tallahassee, out of the light where anyone, where Dean, might see them from the road, neon light flickering across his face. Brick presses against her spine through her jacket.
It's not an apology, or an attempt at balance. It just happens. It just is.
She is the center of their gravity, she thinks dizzily, and it's terrifying.
How used to it she could get.
"He'll be waiting," Sam says, and she nods.
She'd heard the hardest part wasn't necessarily the war, but the aftermath. She'd seen it, too, all throughout her childhood. In her mama, after her daddy died.
She just never thought it would be in them, too.
In her, now.
-
It takes a week to collect everything, to prepare, to sort and dry the herbs.
"There's a spell," she says to Sam that morning. "I called somebody I know, called in a favor."
Sam raises his eyebrows. "And you don't think I've tried that?"
She shrugs. "He wouldn't have to know."
"I've tried," he says. "It doesn't work."
She tries anyway, that night. After Sam falls asleep, stretching out on the bed and saying it'll just be for a minute, and after Dean leaves, moving shadow-quiet, closing the door behind him. At midnight.
She doesn't say anything to stop him, and Sam doesn't stir.
She locks the bathroom door behind herself, salts the doorway. In case. The lock won't do much good if something wants to get out.
Her hands don't shake when she lights the match. Drops it. She stumbles, once, over the words. Sumerian, strange vowels, unfamiliar sounds.
There in an instant of light and she thinks, for one second, that it worked.
And then the flame goes out and something slices across her hands. She chokes back a scream as the mirror cracks, closes her eyes, and then the door is splintering and Sam's standing there, staring at her.
"I'm okay," she manages. Looks down at her hands, moves her fingers. The cuts aren't deep.
The sink is covered with broken glass, and Sam doesn't say, I told you so. He takes her out to the bedroom, instead, bandages her hands, instead, quickly, distantly.
"Where is he?" he says.
"He said he would be back soon," she lies.
He works his jaw, turns away. Throws the bloodstained towel in the wastebasket, leaving her there on the bed.
"I think I mispronounced something," she says, watching the line of his back. "That's all."
His shoulders tense. "It's what she wanted," he says, doesn't turn around to look at her. Lilith, she thinks. And she has heard stories. "Burned to marrow," he says, and she thinks he's quoting, the lilt in his voice. "No way to make it better."
She swallows.
"Thanks for trying, though," Sam says, and the bitterness of his tone is cutting. On somebody else she'd call it sarcasm.
"Did you kill her?" she asks, matching it, and then he does turn around.
"She's in hell," he says, which isn't an answer.
She licks her lips. "So you're just gonna let him do this."
"You have a better idea?"
"What have you tried?" she asks, coming to her feet.
"Everything," he says, and there's an undertone to his voice, something dark and frightening. She wonders where he drew the line.
"So you gave up?"
He actually flinches at that. Takes a step closer. "I. Tried everything." Standing deadly still. No doubt, no hesitation in his voice, but.
She tilts her head back to meet his eyes. "And here I was thinking you wouldn't stop short of begging God and all his angels."
Sam's laughter is a bark, is grating. She purses her lips and he looks up at her. "Angels make mistakes," he says.
"Whatever the hell that means." She looks at him. Waits. And then.
She hisses when her hands connect with the bones of his hips, and then he is lifting her, pushing her back, pushing. Her fingers twist at the buttons of his shirt, tear, and someone accelerates on the street, engine screaming high, higher.
She thinks of the broken glass, of how close it came. Twists beneath him and thinks that she wants to make him scream, too. She wants him to stop looking at her like he doesn't think she understands, understands anything.
The war is over. It's not her fault it was never her fight.
They brought her into this, after all. Not at first, not the first time, but they pulled her back in. This tragedy. Their mother on the ceiling and their war, holy or not, ever since.
Burn of salt on her hands. Drawing noise, muffled cries, from his throat. Until she shudders, until he stops, until they still.
When he gets up, she doesn't ask where he's going. She listens to him cleaning up, listens to the water running. Silver-shiver of sweeping glass.
They're both awake when Dean comes back in. She listens to him move around, to the heaviness of his footsteps, to the give of the bed beneath him, the whine of the springs.
She wonders what Sam would have done if he hadn't come back.
What she would have done.
She's not sure they would have made it out of the room.
-
The next day, when Sam's not around, Dean nods at her hands.
"He tried it, too."
She swallows. She hadn't planned on saying anything, had hoped he wouldn't notice. "Figured maybe he was doing it wrong."
Dean ducks his head for a moment. Says, without any emotion, anything at all, "He tried it so many times he couldn't hold a gun for a week."
She can't think of anything to say to that. Licks her lips and looks down at her plate. Wills herself not to flush, not to cry.
Sam comes back a few minutes later.
-
Her hands are healed by the time Sam and Dean start to fight.
She's not sure how it starts, because it's not like Dean says anything, really. She thinks they were arguing about a case, and then it turned into, who knows, philosophy, and she hears Sam says, "But dying's the easy part."
"Not as easy as you'd think," Dean says. "But I guess you knew that."
She's startled, actually flinches though she'd never admit it, when Sam hits him. Not hard, not even enough to split his lip, but he stumbles back all the same, like it's a miracle he didn't go down. Raises a hand to his mouth and looks up like it's some kind of victory.
"Sam," she says, then, low and warning, because it's not her fight, but even he has to be able to see.
Sam slams the door of the motel room, shaking the doorframe, jarring the windows, and setting her ears to ringing.
She doesn't say anything.
Dean stares at the door for a moment, like he expects Sam to come back. When he doesn't, Dean sinks down onto the couch, rests his elbows on his knees and lets out a sigh.
When she looks back, his eyes are closed, his head against the back of the couch.
She thinks that she could leave. That he would not notice, that maybe Sam wouldn't say anything when he got back, when she was gone.
Small keening noise from the other side of the room and when she looks over, Dean's skin is drawn tight, his hands locked into fists. Breath coming fast like he can't even scream, and she's on her feet, moving.
One hand on his shoulder and stepping back, in case he wakes swinging.
"Dean," she says. "Hey."
He blinks. Looks at her, swallows. Sits up, rubs a hand across his eyes. "Don't . . . tell Sam," he says, and she wants to laugh. Maybe. Out of desperation.
"I wasn't planning on it," she says, and he nods.
He doesn't say thank you, but then, he was never very good at that.
"What happened?" she asks.
"What?" Dean says. Rubs his knuckles across his mouth and looks away.
"Come on," she says. "You owe me."
"For what?"
She rolls her eyes.
"Do you do that just to piss him off?" she asks. She means it as a joke, but. It comes out crueler than she intended.
Dean makes a noise that could almost, in some alternate world, be a laugh. "Why, you think it's working?" he says.
She wishes she hadn't said anything. She shrugs, comes to sit next to him. "Yeah, a little bit." It occurs to her that this is the first time he's actually talked to her, more than a sentence, in. Ages.
Her fingers curl against his thigh as his hand slides beneath her shirt. Palm resting on the edge of a scar she got, she doesn't even remember when. His other hand curves around the smooth bone of her jaw.
He tastes like liquor, like whiskey, and the bottle on the bedside table is half empty and she wonders if it's enough, if it will be enough for him to sleep, this time. For any of them to sleep. She presses her mouth to the side of his neck, instead.
His hands on her shoulders, almost gentle. His breath in her ear, and this, this is better than being alone, this is why she did not leave. Why she hasn't.
She thinks this is maybe what could have been. What she wanted, a long time ago. And maybe that's what he wants, now.
Her hand brushes against the smooth skin of his shoulder and she thinks there should be a scar, there. Maybe that's fitting, though, maybe it's okay, because none of them are the same people anymore, anyway.
She wonders what he would say if Sam came back now. What she would say.
It doesn't matter, because he doesn't.
-
She thinks maybe Sam knows, all the same. Though maybe that's giving him, giving herself, too much credit.
Either way. They're fighting, again, this time in a bar; she's playing pool with some talentless nobody, some unshaven college kid who keeps checking out her ass, but that's okay because he keeps losing when he does it. So maybe she's not paying attention when it starts, but it's not like she has a choice, after.
She keeps catching key words. And she's mostly surprised that Dean's talking this much.
She watches them out of the corner of her eye. Dean leaves first, shakes Sam's hand off of his arm and looks like he wants to run. Which is when he looks over, sees her, and heads for the door.
She'd hate him for making her be responsible for this, for the aftermath, if he hadn't. If she hadn't seen his face. Apology and honest to god fear, laid open to bone.
She grits her teeth and sets the cue down. Forfeits the game, leaves the kid standing there, actually slack-jawed, and says, "Come on," to Sam, because she does not want to know what will happen if she doesn't.
Remembering the last time he woke up and Dean was gone.
She drives them back to the motel. She's not sure if Dean was considerate enough to leave the car or if he just didn't think about taking the keys, though come to think of it she hasn't seen him drive since. Since. Since she's been with them.
She feels small, exposed. Bare. Even the car's too small beneath this crackling grey sky.
Sam sits down on the edge of his bed while she locks the door. When she turns around, he's fumbling with the laces of his boots and she wonders how he made it on his own for four months. What he had to change to survive.
"He'll be back," she says, and winces at the harshness of her voice.
"Yeah," Sam says, and she did not want to see him like this. Not broken, like this. The aftermath of destruction, all pity and pain. When she moves past him, he catches her hand, and even though he doesn't actually say please, she gets it.
She sits next to him, legs crossed, watching the rise and fall of his chest.
"What happened?" she asks after a few minutes, when he doesn't say anything, when the quiet starts to feel reverent, like mourning.
He sighs, shifts a little. "There was. There was a light," he says, and she swallows. That's not what she was asking, not really.
She doesn't stop him, though. Doesn't correct him. Even though she doesn't think she should hear this, is fairly goddamn certain she doesn't want to.
She deserves to know.
"And I knew it would be okay if it happened. I saw. What would happen. And all I had to do was stand there, was not move. Was let it. Except Dean, he didn't, he." Sam's breath is ragged. "He got in the way, he moved, like he thought . . . and it . . . threw him. The way he turned. He landed wrong and I could see blood and he didn't get back up."
When she looks down, her hands are white. Tendons standing out.
"He got back up," she says. "What did you-"
"Nothing!" Sam says. "Nothing. I didn't, I told him. I opened my eyes and I was on my knees and everybody was dead, the demons and everybody else and Dean, he."
She doesn't dare speak.
"He opened his eyes and he looked at me like he didn't even. Like he couldn't." Sam takes a breath. "And Lucifer was gone."
She reaches out, then. Touches his hand. It's not nearly enough, but Sam lifts his head. Looks at her.
"He told me. After. He said, Dad raised us better than that. Like I was just giving up."
He looks away, then. And she doesn't move.
Her mouth is dry.
She doesn't think Dean gets back until dawn, but she falls asleep before that, listening to the beat of Sam's heart, curled up next to him on top of the blankets.
-
In the morning, they all wear shades. They don't talk. Sam drives.
The silence feels brittle, tentative, too-thin ice all around, And she swears to god she's not going to be the one to fix it, this time.
She almost wishes she didn't know. Almost.
-
The next hunt, they leave her in the car as lookout and she doesn't argue. She's had enough of heroics.
When they don't come back, though, she goes in after them.
She destroys the ghost easily, because it's not paying attention, because it has one hand pressed against each of them, steady over their hearts. Because they are on the ground, ghost-white, and that's not funny at all.
She burns the talisman and the spirit goes up in a flash. A noise like wings.
And they are both alive, their hands cold in hers. Freezing. And she is not choking, is not crying, is not.
It should have been easy. Both of them, both of them shouldn't even have had to be there. Both of them shouldn't have gone down.
"Stupid motherfucking idiots," she says, hating them a little, because they let this happen. Because they didn't have to and they did it anyway, because they should have known better, moved faster. Because.
Shotguns on the floor, hardly any scuff marks, any marks at all, in the dust.
Sam coughs. "We had it," he says.
"Yeah, I could tell," she says, like she hadn't for a moment thought that she'd been too late and they were dead and she'd lost everything again.
She drives back to the motel. Neither of them argue, which is terrifying.
Because maybe it goes both ways, and she can't believe that it took this long for her to realize. That maybe they wanted somebody to notice, too.
Because it's hard to be a war hero if there's nobody around to remember what you did, if there's nobody around who even remembers the war.
-
The heater's not enough, when they get back to their room. She strips the blankets from one bed while they just stand there, too quiet, too pale, too weary, and she has to keep moving, has to keep doing, because if she doesn't, she'll. Have to think about what they're going to do next.
Fitting together on one bed and she fits easily in the careful space between them. Wonders what she'll do if she wakes up and they're gone. In any sense of the word.
She wakes with Dean's face against her neck and Sam's hand on her hip, and they are all alive. And it doesn't last, but for a little while, she is warm, and they are safe, and it's like none of it even happened.
-
Then it is Christmas Eve, and things are better. Good. It feels like a reprieve, it feels like, in some small, strange way, salvation.
They're standing in a graveyard, burning bones, and it's snowing, and she's thinking of the last Christmas she remembers with her daddy, when her mama told him no way in hell was he going out again until the snow stopped, so what if it wasn't until next year, and the expression in her mama's eyes when he saluted.
She hadn't thought anything of it, then. Just meant her daddy was there for a week, making her mama smile, except then the week was over and he said, be brave, Joanna my girl, and that summer.
That summer.
In the distance, way far off, somebody's carolling, off-key and terrible. She laughs, more hysterical than anything. Presses a gloved hand across her mouth.
"This is twisted," Sam says after a few minutes, and Dean grins. "Pyromaniac," Sam adds.
She shakes her head. "You're both crazy," she says.
"You're out here, too," Dean says.
She shrugs. "Yeah, well. Never said I was smart."
They stand over the grave and watch the firelight flicker until the flames go out, and then they drive slowly back to the motel room.
They drink eggnog while watching something cheesy and garish on the television, which goes out after half an hour. At which point she kisses each of them on the cheek and goes to bed.
They're still awake when she falls asleep. She can hear them talking. Sam, mostly, but Dean, a little.
She wonders what changed.
On the edge of sleep, she thinks this might be happiness.
-
In January, they go by their dad's grave, which it turns out is right next to their mom's. They stand like soldiers before it, backs rigid, hands at their sides.
Dean takes a step forward, places something on the headstone, but she can't tell what it is, because she's waiting in the car.
Bloody red sky, all around, and it feels like an end.
It isn't hers to feel anything about, though, so she toes off her boots, pulls her feet up underneath her on the seat, and closes her eyes.
-
They go by where the roadhouse used to be, next.
She gets the sentiment, and yeah, it's not like anybody really knows where her mom's buried, but their dead parents tour is pissing her off. She went along for the ride, didn't ask to be one of the goddamned attractions.
She stands in the middle of the road, next to the car where they are pointedly not watching her, and crosses her arms. Looks out at where she used to live, the place from which she ran away, soon as she could.
Never coming home, she thinks. She won't say it aloud. She came back, once, after the fire. With her mama. It was summer, all weeds and blue sky, broken glass sparkling, and it was okay.
She hadn't planned on coming back, not ever.
The ground's all ash-grey, now, dirty snow and ravens squawking in the trees, breaking the silence. Nothing in its place.
Her hands are cold, and she doesn't have anything to leave.
The last time she saw her mom, her mama gave her the cross she's wearing, blessed and charmed and protected, and kissed her forehead, told her to keep safe, baby girl, keep safe.
She's not going to give that up.
She goes back to the car. Slams the door, hard enough to rattle the frame.
-
They go to the coast after that, cold black water and cruel rocks. She imagines her boots slipping, imagines sinking deep, deep, deeper.
She doesn't ask what they're thinking about. If it's the same.
-
Two days later and Dean is coughing up the Atlantic, cold black water from his lungs, and the rocks are digging into her knees.
Later, in the shower, trying to get warm, Sam's hands curl over her own and his mouth drags across her belly, sweet and slow.
Because she's the one who brought Dean back, after. She had to be, because Sam was terrifying, wasn't helping, was panicking. Earthquakes behind his eyes, and he wasn't making sense. Not that she was, either, really, up to her knees in water so cold it burned more than anything, and screaming for him to hurry up, get out of the sea, come on.
It was an accident, this time, nobody saw it coming, rising up out of the waves, tangible for one terrible instant. And Sam went in, dragged him out of the ocean, dragged him back. She had to push him away, had to pull Dean from him, press Dean's mouth to hers, as Sam's voice cracked, as he said I'm not gonna do this again and it was prayer and vow and threat, the wrath of god in his eyes.
Sam's hands trace the curve of her hips and she watches the curve of his neck. His face against her skin.
When he kisses her, she tastes salt, and she remembers tasting the ocean on Dean's lips.
She wonders if this is love.
She can hear the surf, still, and she shivers.
-
They take on a family of demons in middle America, the first she's seen in a long time. Black-eyed mother and father and two blond children who knock her shotgun aside and go for her throat.
Tiny fingernails drawing blood, and their bones should snap, should break and splinter, but they don't, they don't, they don't. The room is going grey, sparking, when Sam rips the demons out of them, easy as breathing.
She drops to her knees beside their bodies, and when she can look up again, Sam is pale, his hands shaking.
"I'm sorry," he says, rasping, to Dean. "I didn't." He stops when Dean reaches out. Reaches up like he's going to wipe the blood from Sam's face, but he doesn't. Takes him by the arm instead.
She thinks this, this might be an end, and her throat burns, a little.
She remembers the burn of the first time, the kerosene flicker of Sam's mouth against hers. Gets to her feet, doesn't look either of them.
-
In February, a ghoul slices her back open in a graveyard. She's on her knees again, trying to catch her breath, and then she's in the motel room and the floor is very white, the lights bright, haloed.
One of them is stitching her up while the other holds her steady, his hand moving with the rise and fall of her stomach.
She can't tell which is which, anymore, and maybe it doesn't matter.
The world going dark and faraway, slipping out of view. She tries to mouth goodbye, feels her eyes close.
Wonders if she'll wake up, this time.
-
Three towns over, Dean drives.
He takes the keys from Sam, who's standing next to the driver's side, and grins. And she thinks it's a little heartbreaking, because it's defiance, through and through, weary and wrenching, no wicked mustang joy.
Like he knows. There will be no happy endings for them, not that there ever are, not in this kind of life, the one they were born to, the one they chose. Small fights, instead, maybe. Battles. Lucifer was gone.
Sam looks like he's going to argue, but he doesn't. Shrugs, says something about saying I told you so, if Dean gets them all killed, and doesn't sound like he means it.
Dean drives too fast, and Sam doesn't say anything, then.
She stays quiet, too. Watches.
-
It rains in Georgia, hot and desperate and angry. She has laundry duty, walks two blocks to the laundromat. She's dripping, soaked to the skin, when she gets back. Water pooling out of the gutters, rain dripping from the roof's overhang down the back of her shirt, and she shudders.
She opens the door, drops the bags on the floor and pushes her hair out of her face. It's almost long enough for her to braid again. She'll have to cut it soon.
She looks up.
Sam and Dean on one of the beds, Sam's hand fisted in Dean's shirt, his hand against the front of Dean's jeans, and she can't think of a goddamn thing to say.
Except maybe that it was inevitable. Gravity crushing in on itself.
She was never promised anything, she remembers. She just. She just.
The door slams shut behind her and they look up. The rain on the windows sounds like distant gunfire.
"Jo," Sam says, and she shakes her head.
"Sorry, I," she begins, and then Dean's on his feet, catches her by the hand, pulls her towards them. Sam tugs her jacket off of her shoulders and they press together, all sweat and skin and salt, sheets that tear like banners, like flags.
And then. One beneath and one below, until there aren't any empty places anymore. And she thinks the world might be ending, but maybe it's been ending all along, anyway, and maybe salvation's nothing more than a myth, a story people tell their kids, tell themselves in the dark.
It's not for them, not anymore.
So maybe all they have is this war they survived, this war that was never her fight, this war that's maybe always been hers by right. So maybe all they have is this war and what got them through. And it doesn't feel like glory, or like faith. Doesn't feel like anything at all.
So this is what the survivors do. And they have. And they are. And they will, for now.
-end-