FIC: FALLING FREE
Title: Falling Free
Characters: Jo
Rating: Mature
Notes: Title from Meds by Placebo (Song here: www.youtube.com/watch) Fic bridging the time from Born Under a Bad Sign till present with some flashback stuff.
Disclaimer: Sadly they're not mine, all characters belong to Erick Kripke and co; the quote at the end is from Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
Her mom phones exactly three days after Dean walks out of the bar in Duluth.
Jo, preoccupied with shoving her worldly possessions into a duffel bag and trying to not think about the week's events, forgets to check the caller id and answers with a snapped hello.
"Joanna Beth what's this I hear about you having a run in with the Winchesters?"
Fuck.
Jo sits on the edge of her bed, shifting the phone to her other ear and preparing herself for battle. "It was nothing, Mom, I'm fine." "
Fine my ass," Ellen replies, a little bit more than anger in her voice.
My Daddy shot your Daddy in the head, Sam's (no, not Sam's, some son a bitch demon's) words taunt her, weaving a pattern through her thoughts.
She's not fine.
"I think it's time you came home, Jo."
Typical.
She rolls her eyes and tugs on the zipper of her bag. "I'll think about it, look, I have to go." She hangs up without waiting for an answer, sometimes it was just easier that way, she doesn't have it in her to fight today, doesn't have it in her to pretend like she doesn't want to run home and forget the past four months.
The phone lights up again and she's smarter this time, she checks it and lets it ring, stuffing the damn thing into her pocket. Money for the last of the week she owes on the room left on the dresser and she leaves Duluth without looking back.
The first hunt after Duluth she gets sloppy.
Distracted.
My Daddy shot your Daddy in the head...
The werewolf manages to sink its claws into the back of her left shoulder before she fires off the silver bullet. She patches herself up in the bathroom of a sketchy motel room, her blood running down the drain as she pulls the needle and thread through the worst of the slash (at least it hadn't been the teeth, then she'd really be screwed). The room spins and she isn't sure if it's the pain, the loss of blood, the bottle of vodka that sits near empty beside her or a combination of all three.
God, you're a butcher...
She barely sleeps. She's too far gone for that. Instead she listens to the rain pitter patter on the roof of whatever crappy motel in whatever crappy nowhere town she happened to be in that week, or the sounds of people fighting the next room over, or even just the silence of a night turning into morning.
"Don't tell your Mom," her Daddy says handing her the shotgun. She's barely ten and it's bigger than she is (or maybe that's just the way it feels to her). He keeps a hand on her back, protects her from the recoil as she presses the trigger letting off a round. She misses the target by miles but that doesn't stop the grin on her face. John calls him over and her Daddy presses the gun back into her hands as she goes to hand it back. "You keep it safe for me, till I get home darling," he says and kisses the top of her head.
Days turn to weeks, weeks become months. She sticks stamps on bad tourist postcards and jots the barest of notes on the back, she stops talking to anyone who cares. And then her phone rings.
"Jo honey, I think you need to come home." There's a heaviness in her Mom's voice that she hasn't heard since her Dad died, a choked back sob that tries to escape and this time she listens.
Though there isn't much a home to come to. Just charred ruins and the smell of burnt flesh. Ellen and Bobby speak about demons and a war, Bobby seems worried about something that they don't mention. She asks about Sam and Dean and her Mom quickly changes the subject, Bobby's eyes darken in a way she hasn't seen in years. She manages to find in the rubble a small fire proof lock box in the area that was once Ash's room. She stuffs it into her bag. They salt and burn bits and pieces in a field out back and she bites her lip to keep from crying, glad when the tinny taste of her own blood pools in her mouth.
John holds his hat between his hands as he walks into the Roadhouse, she's sitting on the counter filling salt shakers and she doesn't notice at first. It's the shatter of a case of beer falling to the floor that gets her attention. The broken wail of her Mom and then the sudden flurry of action as the woman races to John, slaps him and pounds her fists into his chest. She's wide eyed as she watches John take it, an emptiness she doesn't quite yet understand settling into the pit of her stomach. She bites her lip to keep from crying and runs up to her room.
"I'm not hungry," she mumbles as the food is set down in front of her. They're staying at Bobby's. Just few a few days until I can figure this all out, her Mom says.
"I don't care Joanna Beth, you look like a good wind could blow you over, now eat," Ellen commands and sits down at the seat across from her.
Jo pushes the food around with her fork. "I'm not twelve, you can't force me to eat." There's a glare given from the older Harvelle and Jo shuts up, stuffing a large forkful into her mouth.
The fight when she leaves has even Bobby running scared. Hours later when the blinding rage lifts from her eyes as she drives as far away from South Dakota as she can she can't even remember what was said. She just knows she had to go. She couldn't sit there, talk about rebuilding or getting out or whatever plan her Mom had. It's war. And right now they were losing. And more than that someone had to pay for what happened.
She's not even sure why she's angry anymore, she has the freedom she fought so hard for, she's not stuck in Nebraska cleaning up empties and wiping down tables. But yet she just is. It's a rage that fills her up from the inside and only seems to be pacified when she kills something. She's scared that she actually enjoys it, and not just the saving people part.
You don't think I'm a little twisted too...
She starts to think there's something wrong with her. It's not even being stubborn anymore, it's not even proving herself. She just has to do it, a compulsion that drives her, it's like nothing is right until her knife is gut deep in some damned creature of the night, till her skin and hair smell like a burnt corpse, till there's nothing to think about but the thrill of a kill.
She opens the box in New Mexico. There's three thousand dollars in cash, held together with an elastic and a slip of paper with her name on it, and a flash drive. The first she puts in her savings account and the latter she puts back in the box. She's not sure what's on it and she's not sure if she wants to know just yet (when she finally does over a year later it's exactly what she expected; a life time's collection of mullet rock mp3s and half baked ramblings about the government).
"Oh Jo Beth, I'm gonna send you back to your Mama in pieces," the demon wearing her old boyfriend taunts, her Daddy's knife pressing into the pale skin of her cheek. She knows it's not him but it fucks with her more than she could ever admit. She's pinned against the wall and he runs a hand down the side of her neck, he tells her how much the boy whose body he's riding is screaming for her.
"I haven't heard him this loud in years..."
She spits in his face and tells him to go fuck himself and hours later when she's holding the first person she ever loved in that way in her arms as he dies she can't find it in herself to cry.
She learns new tricks, buys new weapons, finds new challenges. Her body slowly shifts from scrawny to lean muscle and her eyes start to shift until they carry with them the same haunted look that clouded her father's. She endlessly writes notes into a worn journal, cataloging and saving everything she takes out. She wraps her anger around her like a blanket and uses it to keep the world at bay. She barely speaks, she barely looks anyone in the eye. She clings to the worst of herself and tries to justify that she's doing the right thing. She curls up with her arms hugging her knees tight to her chest at night. She tries to make herself a ball and pretend she's not as lonely as she really is. It gnaws at her insides, taunting her as much as the demon she ran into in Colorado.
You should have heard them scream when the place went up, they begged for their miserable little lives...
Sometimes she dreams of empty fields and warm summer days and in the end it burns, sometimes she dreams of the smell of soaked in alcohol and the lingering scent of cigarette smoke, the feel of worn bartop below her hands and she wakes up to the feel of her skin burning and choking for breath. All her dreams end in fire.
She stops jotting notes on the back of postcards and starts just scrawling her name, tossing them into mailboxes, a lame attempt at letting her Mom know she's still alive. She doesn't know what to say anymore, she never learned how to ask for help. She doesn't know how to say she's lost.
It doesn't matter that she doesn't talk to anyone, after all they're a small circle and everyone knows what Bill Harvelle's little girl has been up to. Well, almost everyone.
She sees Sam and Dean once from the cab of her pick up. Dean's ducking out of some truck stop on the highway and into the Impala, Sam riding shotgun and starting intently into a book. They look different, but then she looks different (there are days she doesn't even recognize the face staring back at her in the mirror; hollow haunted eyes, sunken cheekbones and collar bones that poke out, her body scarred and bruised).
Wrong place, wrong time...
She doesn't even think to go say anything. What could she say? She's not that girl right now. She's not nights listening to REO Speedwagon and hoping for her phone to ring, she's not quick witted, sarcastic to the bone and with an easy grin. Right now she's anger and burning rage, utterly lost and completely not herself. She can't stomach facing awkward small talk, she can't handle an apology, or worse, pity.
"Your Daddy would have wanted you to have this," John says and hands her the knife with her Daddy's initials carved into it. Her Mom is crying upstairs, everyone in the place seems lost and uncertain and she can't help but feel there's something she's not being told, something she's missing. She's ten and knows dead means not coming back but it's her Daddy and there has to be something they can do, right?
She gets tattooed in Boston, Harvelle in black script across the base of her neck. "It means warrior," she tells the guy whose doing it. He's two years older than her, cute with shaggy black hair and blue eyes, and doesn't ask about the three thin white lines on her shoulder poking out of the top of her tank top. He takes her to dinner and she is almost herself for a night; quick witted, sarcastic to the bone and with an easy grin that almost reaches her eyes.
"Careful Jo Beth, you're going to break your neck," Rick whispers and she's fumbling over boxes in the cellar, his lips tracing patters against her neck that have her unable to even breath let alone think. She's eighteen and everything just feels so good, she finally realizes maybe she missed out at those parties she wasn't invited to, the nights she didn't play seven minutes in heaven in some classmate's closet in the basement at their sweet sixteen. He slurs her names together, trying to force them out in the span of a single syllable and she's completely gone.
Days turn to weeks, weeks become months. She keeps fighting though she's long since forgotten what she's fighting for, it stopped being about being close to her Dad a lifetime ago. She dreams of the world ending in fire and she honestly starts think maybe it wouldn't be that bad. She spends Christmas alone with a cheap bottle of red wine in an even cheaper motel room and a free dinner from an all night diner (guys with bruised faces look badass she quickly learned, but girls just looked like the sucker in a bad relationship, even more so on Christmas eve). She can't remember the last time someone touched her. Months become a year and change.
And then her phone rings. "Jo, sweetheart, it's Dean." The story tumbles out of her Mom, a deal to save Sam, he had a year. Most of it falls on deaf ears.
She cries herself dry in the empty bathtub of her motel room. She cries for Dean burning in hell, she cries for Sam and she can't imagine what he must be feeling, she cries for her Mom and the distance between them. She finally cries for Ash and the other hunters lost in the Roadhouse. She cries for the only home she had, burned to the ground. She cries for the three long scars running down the back of her shoulder. She cries for her Dad and she even finds a few for John (he had been family once -still- forgiveness comes hard but she knows it's there). She cries for Rick and those months that had meant the world to her. She cries because she wants to go home but she doesn't know how.
She starts going home with boys from the bar, because it's easier than being alone. But it doesn't help and she quickly learns that a few hours with a warm body does nothing to chase away the darkness that is rapidly taking over her life. Everything is dark. Everything is death, it's all she sees everywhere she goes.
She sees both oceans and crisscrosses the land in between. She starts getting stupid. She chases fights bigger than she is. She knows she should be dead a hundred times over. She knows she should feel lucky, but she doesn't. She knows she needs to stop.
"You're going to send me back to Hell blondie? Doesn't matter, he's free... one of you own set him free and your world is over, Princess..."
She douses the demon with another splash of Holy Water from her jug. "You say that like it matters to me," she drawls back, the bitterness more than evident in her voice, and starts in on the exorcism.
The world is going to burn and the worst parts of her can't even find the desire to care. They were all doomed from the start anyways. They were all a bunch of sinners and liars and maybe the world would be better off without them. But she still wants to go down with one hell of a fight.
"Hey Jo girl, I don't hear any reading over there," her Dad says from underneath the hood of his truck.
Jo hitches up the strap of her sundress, the summer's coming, she can feel it on her skin. It's early May and the air smells of grass and dirt and she can hear her Daddy humming impatiently, waiting for her to start. Her fingers press into the page of her book, her birthday present.
She takes a moment to just let it flow over her, the moment, because like her Mom says, you never know.
"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand," she starts.
"It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do...."
Characters: Jo
Rating: Mature
Notes: Title from Meds by Placebo (Song here: www.youtube.com/watch) Fic bridging the time from Born Under a Bad Sign till present with some flashback stuff.
Disclaimer: Sadly they're not mine, all characters belong to Erick Kripke and co; the quote at the end is from Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
Her mom phones exactly three days after Dean walks out of the bar in Duluth.
Jo, preoccupied with shoving her worldly possessions into a duffel bag and trying to not think about the week's events, forgets to check the caller id and answers with a snapped hello.
"Joanna Beth what's this I hear about you having a run in with the Winchesters?"
Fuck.
Jo sits on the edge of her bed, shifting the phone to her other ear and preparing herself for battle. "It was nothing, Mom, I'm fine." "
Fine my ass," Ellen replies, a little bit more than anger in her voice.
My Daddy shot your Daddy in the head, Sam's (no, not Sam's, some son a bitch demon's) words taunt her, weaving a pattern through her thoughts.
She's not fine.
"I think it's time you came home, Jo."
Typical.
She rolls her eyes and tugs on the zipper of her bag. "I'll think about it, look, I have to go." She hangs up without waiting for an answer, sometimes it was just easier that way, she doesn't have it in her to fight today, doesn't have it in her to pretend like she doesn't want to run home and forget the past four months.
The phone lights up again and she's smarter this time, she checks it and lets it ring, stuffing the damn thing into her pocket. Money for the last of the week she owes on the room left on the dresser and she leaves Duluth without looking back.
The first hunt after Duluth she gets sloppy.
Distracted.
My Daddy shot your Daddy in the head...
The werewolf manages to sink its claws into the back of her left shoulder before she fires off the silver bullet. She patches herself up in the bathroom of a sketchy motel room, her blood running down the drain as she pulls the needle and thread through the worst of the slash (at least it hadn't been the teeth, then she'd really be screwed). The room spins and she isn't sure if it's the pain, the loss of blood, the bottle of vodka that sits near empty beside her or a combination of all three.
God, you're a butcher...
She barely sleeps. She's too far gone for that. Instead she listens to the rain pitter patter on the roof of whatever crappy motel in whatever crappy nowhere town she happened to be in that week, or the sounds of people fighting the next room over, or even just the silence of a night turning into morning.
"Don't tell your Mom," her Daddy says handing her the shotgun. She's barely ten and it's bigger than she is (or maybe that's just the way it feels to her). He keeps a hand on her back, protects her from the recoil as she presses the trigger letting off a round. She misses the target by miles but that doesn't stop the grin on her face. John calls him over and her Daddy presses the gun back into her hands as she goes to hand it back. "You keep it safe for me, till I get home darling," he says and kisses the top of her head.
Days turn to weeks, weeks become months. She sticks stamps on bad tourist postcards and jots the barest of notes on the back, she stops talking to anyone who cares. And then her phone rings.
"Jo honey, I think you need to come home." There's a heaviness in her Mom's voice that she hasn't heard since her Dad died, a choked back sob that tries to escape and this time she listens.
Though there isn't much a home to come to. Just charred ruins and the smell of burnt flesh. Ellen and Bobby speak about demons and a war, Bobby seems worried about something that they don't mention. She asks about Sam and Dean and her Mom quickly changes the subject, Bobby's eyes darken in a way she hasn't seen in years. She manages to find in the rubble a small fire proof lock box in the area that was once Ash's room. She stuffs it into her bag. They salt and burn bits and pieces in a field out back and she bites her lip to keep from crying, glad when the tinny taste of her own blood pools in her mouth.
John holds his hat between his hands as he walks into the Roadhouse, she's sitting on the counter filling salt shakers and she doesn't notice at first. It's the shatter of a case of beer falling to the floor that gets her attention. The broken wail of her Mom and then the sudden flurry of action as the woman races to John, slaps him and pounds her fists into his chest. She's wide eyed as she watches John take it, an emptiness she doesn't quite yet understand settling into the pit of her stomach. She bites her lip to keep from crying and runs up to her room.
"I'm not hungry," she mumbles as the food is set down in front of her. They're staying at Bobby's. Just few a few days until I can figure this all out, her Mom says.
"I don't care Joanna Beth, you look like a good wind could blow you over, now eat," Ellen commands and sits down at the seat across from her.
Jo pushes the food around with her fork. "I'm not twelve, you can't force me to eat." There's a glare given from the older Harvelle and Jo shuts up, stuffing a large forkful into her mouth.
The fight when she leaves has even Bobby running scared. Hours later when the blinding rage lifts from her eyes as she drives as far away from South Dakota as she can she can't even remember what was said. She just knows she had to go. She couldn't sit there, talk about rebuilding or getting out or whatever plan her Mom had. It's war. And right now they were losing. And more than that someone had to pay for what happened.
She's not even sure why she's angry anymore, she has the freedom she fought so hard for, she's not stuck in Nebraska cleaning up empties and wiping down tables. But yet she just is. It's a rage that fills her up from the inside and only seems to be pacified when she kills something. She's scared that she actually enjoys it, and not just the saving people part.
You don't think I'm a little twisted too...
She starts to think there's something wrong with her. It's not even being stubborn anymore, it's not even proving herself. She just has to do it, a compulsion that drives her, it's like nothing is right until her knife is gut deep in some damned creature of the night, till her skin and hair smell like a burnt corpse, till there's nothing to think about but the thrill of a kill.
She opens the box in New Mexico. There's three thousand dollars in cash, held together with an elastic and a slip of paper with her name on it, and a flash drive. The first she puts in her savings account and the latter she puts back in the box. She's not sure what's on it and she's not sure if she wants to know just yet (when she finally does over a year later it's exactly what she expected; a life time's collection of mullet rock mp3s and half baked ramblings about the government).
"Oh Jo Beth, I'm gonna send you back to your Mama in pieces," the demon wearing her old boyfriend taunts, her Daddy's knife pressing into the pale skin of her cheek. She knows it's not him but it fucks with her more than she could ever admit. She's pinned against the wall and he runs a hand down the side of her neck, he tells her how much the boy whose body he's riding is screaming for her.
"I haven't heard him this loud in years..."
She spits in his face and tells him to go fuck himself and hours later when she's holding the first person she ever loved in that way in her arms as he dies she can't find it in herself to cry.
She learns new tricks, buys new weapons, finds new challenges. Her body slowly shifts from scrawny to lean muscle and her eyes start to shift until they carry with them the same haunted look that clouded her father's. She endlessly writes notes into a worn journal, cataloging and saving everything she takes out. She wraps her anger around her like a blanket and uses it to keep the world at bay. She barely speaks, she barely looks anyone in the eye. She clings to the worst of herself and tries to justify that she's doing the right thing. She curls up with her arms hugging her knees tight to her chest at night. She tries to make herself a ball and pretend she's not as lonely as she really is. It gnaws at her insides, taunting her as much as the demon she ran into in Colorado.
You should have heard them scream when the place went up, they begged for their miserable little lives...
Sometimes she dreams of empty fields and warm summer days and in the end it burns, sometimes she dreams of the smell of soaked in alcohol and the lingering scent of cigarette smoke, the feel of worn bartop below her hands and she wakes up to the feel of her skin burning and choking for breath. All her dreams end in fire.
She stops jotting notes on the back of postcards and starts just scrawling her name, tossing them into mailboxes, a lame attempt at letting her Mom know she's still alive. She doesn't know what to say anymore, she never learned how to ask for help. She doesn't know how to say she's lost.
It doesn't matter that she doesn't talk to anyone, after all they're a small circle and everyone knows what Bill Harvelle's little girl has been up to. Well, almost everyone.
She sees Sam and Dean once from the cab of her pick up. Dean's ducking out of some truck stop on the highway and into the Impala, Sam riding shotgun and starting intently into a book. They look different, but then she looks different (there are days she doesn't even recognize the face staring back at her in the mirror; hollow haunted eyes, sunken cheekbones and collar bones that poke out, her body scarred and bruised).
Wrong place, wrong time...
She doesn't even think to go say anything. What could she say? She's not that girl right now. She's not nights listening to REO Speedwagon and hoping for her phone to ring, she's not quick witted, sarcastic to the bone and with an easy grin. Right now she's anger and burning rage, utterly lost and completely not herself. She can't stomach facing awkward small talk, she can't handle an apology, or worse, pity.
"Your Daddy would have wanted you to have this," John says and hands her the knife with her Daddy's initials carved into it. Her Mom is crying upstairs, everyone in the place seems lost and uncertain and she can't help but feel there's something she's not being told, something she's missing. She's ten and knows dead means not coming back but it's her Daddy and there has to be something they can do, right?
She gets tattooed in Boston, Harvelle in black script across the base of her neck. "It means warrior," she tells the guy whose doing it. He's two years older than her, cute with shaggy black hair and blue eyes, and doesn't ask about the three thin white lines on her shoulder poking out of the top of her tank top. He takes her to dinner and she is almost herself for a night; quick witted, sarcastic to the bone and with an easy grin that almost reaches her eyes.
"Careful Jo Beth, you're going to break your neck," Rick whispers and she's fumbling over boxes in the cellar, his lips tracing patters against her neck that have her unable to even breath let alone think. She's eighteen and everything just feels so good, she finally realizes maybe she missed out at those parties she wasn't invited to, the nights she didn't play seven minutes in heaven in some classmate's closet in the basement at their sweet sixteen. He slurs her names together, trying to force them out in the span of a single syllable and she's completely gone.
Days turn to weeks, weeks become months. She keeps fighting though she's long since forgotten what she's fighting for, it stopped being about being close to her Dad a lifetime ago. She dreams of the world ending in fire and she honestly starts think maybe it wouldn't be that bad. She spends Christmas alone with a cheap bottle of red wine in an even cheaper motel room and a free dinner from an all night diner (guys with bruised faces look badass she quickly learned, but girls just looked like the sucker in a bad relationship, even more so on Christmas eve). She can't remember the last time someone touched her. Months become a year and change.
And then her phone rings. "Jo, sweetheart, it's Dean." The story tumbles out of her Mom, a deal to save Sam, he had a year. Most of it falls on deaf ears.
She cries herself dry in the empty bathtub of her motel room. She cries for Dean burning in hell, she cries for Sam and she can't imagine what he must be feeling, she cries for her Mom and the distance between them. She finally cries for Ash and the other hunters lost in the Roadhouse. She cries for the only home she had, burned to the ground. She cries for the three long scars running down the back of her shoulder. She cries for her Dad and she even finds a few for John (he had been family once -still- forgiveness comes hard but she knows it's there). She cries for Rick and those months that had meant the world to her. She cries because she wants to go home but she doesn't know how.
She starts going home with boys from the bar, because it's easier than being alone. But it doesn't help and she quickly learns that a few hours with a warm body does nothing to chase away the darkness that is rapidly taking over her life. Everything is dark. Everything is death, it's all she sees everywhere she goes.
She sees both oceans and crisscrosses the land in between. She starts getting stupid. She chases fights bigger than she is. She knows she should be dead a hundred times over. She knows she should feel lucky, but she doesn't. She knows she needs to stop.
"You're going to send me back to Hell blondie? Doesn't matter, he's free... one of you own set him free and your world is over, Princess..."
She douses the demon with another splash of Holy Water from her jug. "You say that like it matters to me," she drawls back, the bitterness more than evident in her voice, and starts in on the exorcism.
The world is going to burn and the worst parts of her can't even find the desire to care. They were all doomed from the start anyways. They were all a bunch of sinners and liars and maybe the world would be better off without them. But she still wants to go down with one hell of a fight.
"Hey Jo girl, I don't hear any reading over there," her Dad says from underneath the hood of his truck.
Jo hitches up the strap of her sundress, the summer's coming, she can feel it on her skin. It's early May and the air smells of grass and dirt and she can hear her Daddy humming impatiently, waiting for her to start. Her fingers press into the page of her book, her birthday present.
She takes a moment to just let it flow over her, the moment, because like her Mom says, you never know.
"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand," she starts.
"It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do...."