Fic: Count Me In
Title: Count Me In
Author: lucklessforhim
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: About 2500
Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural or any of it's characters and I am making no money writing this. It's just for fun.
Note: First posted fic in a very long time. This is the beginning of a long Dean/Jo story that I have recently determined will work better as snapshots and such. (Or maybe I got tired of working on it.) Anyways, I do hope you enjoy and please leave a comment. Title taken from Unknown Soldier by Breaking Benjamin. AU ending to BUABS.
"That's just how it's gonna be"? Was he serious? Of course he was serious…Well…Fuck that.
Jo looked at the clock on the wall. He'd left about ten minutes ago. She ran behind the bar and grabbed her bag and keys. She picked up the first aid kit on her way to the door. At the door she stopped and turned, taking one last look at the broken bar. She hadn't been working here for long, but she still felt bad for leaving it in the shape it was. Oh well…
She stopped at her apartment on her way out of town and grabbed her essentials: her clothes, books, hunting supplies and the weapons she had stashed in various places. She was on a month-to-month lease so, leaving was no problem. She didn't plan on being back. Someone else could deal with the crap she left; she had more important things to do.
She was on her way out of Duluth 40 minutes after leaving the bar. About an hour behind Dean, and she knew exactly where he was headed.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
When she pulled into Bobby's driveway Jo could just barely make out the shadows of frantic movements in the window of the front room. When she heard the crash, she was out of her Jeep and up the steps as fast as her feet could go.
She got to the door and tried the knob. It was locked. "Damn it," she swore, kicking at the door in frustration.
She heard another crash and a groan of pain that sounded a hell of a lot like Dean. Taking a deep breath, she took a step back. A silent prayer ran through her head as she raised her leg and brought it down on the door as hard as she could.
When the jamb splintered and the door flew open, she saw Sam leaning over Dean, his hand clearly digging into the bullet wound on Dean's left shoulder. After that, things seemed to happen very quickly.
A flash of anger ran white-hot straight through her. Her eyes frantically started scanning the room for a weapon; all the while she internally cursed herself for running in unprepared. Jo spotted a bucket of what she could only hope was holy water near the living room doorway and tried to divert Sam's attention away from Dean. "Hey! Asshole!"
Once he faced her, she splashed half the bucket on his face and then poured the rest over his back while he was hunched over. When Sam arched away in pain she took the opportunity to move in front of him to guard Dean. Over Sam's shoulder she saw Bobby removing a red-hot poker from the fireplace as he yelled, "Joanna! His arm!"
A well-aimed kick to Sam's chest sent him flying back towards Bobby. As she felt her foot connect, Jo felt a surge of satisfaction. She knew it wasn't really Sam that had been hurting people, but damn did it ever feel good to have something to hit. Besides, what she did wouldn't kill him.
Sam landed a few feet from Bobby, starting to try and fight back. She went after him, crossing the room in two quick steps. Then she crouched down and put her knee to his neck with just enough force to restrain him while Bobby broke the binding lock. When it was done, Sam looked confused to say the least. But he wasn't the Winchester Jo was worried about.
Dean felt a soft, warm, distinctly feminine hand on his face. He opened his eyes while clutching his shoulder, and saw Jo's very worried face. With her help, he sat up to see a dispossessed Sam.
Around a groan Dean scolded Jo saying, "I thought I told you to stay put?"
"Uh-huh, and I took it under advisement before I decided to come anyway," Jo said with false cheeriness, ever the smartass.
All Dean could do was roll his eyes at her before addressing Sam. "Sammy? Is that you in there?" Sam nodded. "Good." With that Dean delivered a punch to Sam's jaw and fell back, groaning in pain, onto Jo's lap.
Jo pointedly looked down at Dean, then at Sam and sighed. "Man, are you two a sight." Looking down at Dean again, she rested her hand on his cheek. "Let's get you cleaned up and fixed up, huh?"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Bobby Singer had the most extensive first aid kit Jo had ever seen. 'Kit' was actually a kind of misleading term. In fact, it was a large plastic bin filled with anything a person could ever need. Sterile gloves and suture kits, high quality surgical steel instruments, IV and oral antibiotics and painkillers, even some IV tubing and a bag of saline. Of course, the standard goodies were there too. There were ACE bandages, gauze and band-aids of every shape and size, all sorts of creams and ointments, along with five different kinds of antiseptic. Jo smiled and let out a low whistle. Gotta love Bobby. He must've robbed a hospital. She could work with this.
"Alright, Dean," she said while taking a seat in the chair in front of him. "Let me get at that shoulder."
Dean winced as Jo pulled away the now-mangled bandage she had placed earlier and scrutinized the mess that was his shoulder. "Man…Sam really did a number on you…"
"Yeah, well…whatever. I'll be fine." Dean did his best to sound unperturbed by the gaping hole in his body, while he held an ice pack up to his bloody nose. Jo gave him a look that told him what she thought of the 'Walk it Off Philosophy' before she rolled her eyes.
She narrowed her eyes, looking a little closer at the wound. When she stood and leaned across the table to bring the light closer for a better examination, Dean attempted to take his mind off the pain by running his eyes over the smooth curves of her hips and ass which were accentuated by the movement. No such luck. He turned to swig the whiskey at his right hand as she settled in her chair again, sliding forward in the seat to get as close to the wound as possible while expertly pulling on a pair of the gloves Bobby had in his first aid kit. Her eyes never left the deep hole in Dean's shoulder.
She, gently at first then harder, pressed on either side of the wound. "You know, you shouldn't be so cavalier about your health," she reprimanded him.
Dean watched her not look at him when she said it, and heard her sincere tone. "I'll be fine. I've been worse off before and made it out." Even as he said it, he couldn't figure out why he was reassuring her.
She sighed and sat up straight, finally looking away from the wound and to his face. "Still. This is bad."
Dean looked down at his shoulder, searching, like maybe he could see something she couldn't. "D'you think you can fix it?"
Jo shook her head and shrugged. "Probably. It's gonna take some time, though."
"Good. Go as fast as you can." What the hell? You don't talk like that to someone who's about to do you a favor! Jo leaned back in her chair and raised an eyebrow at Dean, not even needing to say the words, and waited for him to realize his error. "I mean, thank you…Sorry."
Jo mumbled, "Damn straight you better thank me," as she started pulling things off the table beside her and opening packages. Dean recognized the medical grade sutures and sterilized instruments in their packages spread out in front of Jo, and marveled just a little at how at ease she seemed with them.
When he saw her pick up a bottle of antiseptic, he dropped the ice in favor of his bottle of Jack and took what could only be described as a chug. He cried out when his entire shoulder exploded with white hot burning pain. He was still blinking away the spots in his vision when Jo picked up a stack of gauze and pressed it hard and deep into the wound. Around a grunt of discomfort Dean asked, "So how do you know so much about this stuff?"
Jo bit the corner of her mouth and actually looked uncomfortable for the first time since she plowed through the front door. "I, uh…was in nursing school for a while."
"Nursing school?" He didn't mean to make it sound like he was belittling her choice of major, but it just sounded so utterly ridiculous to him. Badass, armed to the nines, Jo walking up and down the halls of a hospital smiling cheerfully at people in aqua scrubs. The look in her eyes at his tone made him realize that her skin wasn't quite as tough around this subject. "Sorry. So…how long were you there?"
"Three years."
"Wow. That sounds like quite the commitment," Dean commented. Jo just shrugged. It seemed like maybe she didn't want to talk about this. She was concentrating on injecting some anesthetic around the bullet wound, and Dean couldn't help but probe further. "So, what made you choose nursing?"
Jo huffed and looked up at him. "What's with you? You want to know about my touching college experience?"
He shrugged his good shoulder in response. "Geez, sorry. Just trying to have a nice conversation, maybe take my mind off things. Guess I'll just sit here and drink my whiskey…"
Jo finished prepping the area and picked up the needle holder. While she focused on attaching the needle and suture, she started tell the story. "When I graduated from high school, my mother really pushed me to go to college." No surprise there. "She always said she didn't want me to end up like her, when she and I both know that she has no problems with who she is. She meant she didn't want me to end up like my Daddy, dead in the middle of nowhere with nothing but ashes left."
Jo set about her work of closing up the messy hole while she told Dean one of the longer versions of her story about college. "She pushed me to go to school and I made a deal with her that I would go for a year and if I decided to quit, she'd leave it alone and let me make my own decisions."
"But you stayed for three years…?"
Jo looked up for just a second with a twinkle in her eye that he'd never seen before. "I picked a random school, University of Illinois at Chicago. My grades were good enough that most of the schools I applied to were offering really good scholarships. UIC offered me one and financial aid covered most of the rest," she said while continuing to work carefully and quickly. "I wanted to go to a big city, you know, really have some fun before I left and spent my life hunting. I told them I was undecided as far as a major went, and it was true…at the time."
"So how'd you pick nursing?" Dean knew this was something important to her, and he was careful that his tone showed her that he understood that.
Jo cleared her throat nervously while she continued to work on Dean's shoulder. "Maybe six weeks before I was supposed to leave, one of my best friends was in an accident. He'd been on a downward spiral for a while, and one night he lost control of his motorcycle and was pinned under it while it skidded down the road and slammed into a retaining wall. It was bad, real touch and go for a while. He was in a coma for three days and needed skin and muscle grafts over most of his left leg." Jo snipped the extra ends of the stitches and paused to reach for the antiseptic again.
"Wow."
"Yeah. He was really lucky to have even made it out of the ICU. Thing is, he could barely name his doctors. And when he left the hospital more than a month after the accident, he was on a first name basis with his nurses. Hell, he could even tell you what sports most of their kids played, which soaps they preferred, you name it. The doctors - they fixed him, but the nurses - they were the ones that healed him."
"So you decided to become a nurse."
Jo nodded, smiling and placed a large, thick, pad of gauze over his shoulder. "I decided that if I couldn't help people doing what I was born to do, and I do believe I was born to hunt," she emphasized. "I'd try to help them other ways."
Dean decided right then and there, with her hand smoothing over a bandage on his shoulder for the second time in a day, that she deserved a chance. Maybe she didn't have a ton of experience, but that wasn't exactly her fault. Everyone has to learn sometime and better she do it alongside people who know what they're doing than off on her own somewhere. Plus, she had a genuine desire to do good. That was rare, even in his line of work. "That's admirable. But it doesn't make you ready to do this."
"I know." Jo gave one last look over the bandage, making sure it would hold and pulled off her gloves with a flick of each wrist. "You and Sam do your own patch work?" she asked, watching his face closely for his reaction.
Dean shrugged his good shoulder, knowing where she was going with this. "Yeah. Why?"
"Got a proposal for you. I need experience and you could use someone along who knows a little something about the medical stuff, might keep you guys from dying of infection or internal bleeding."
"I don't know, Sam's pretty good with a needle and thread…"
Jo looked hard, straight into Dean's eyes. "No kidding, I'm better. Faster too, which is probably my biggest asset. Now, I'm not asking to be your understudy or anything like that, just let me come with you and work the hunts." Dean seemed to mull this over as Jo leaned back in her chair and started to examine her nails. "There's plenty of other hunters out there that would just love a pretty young blonde like me along for the ride…"
Dean visibly and audibly shuddered at the thought of some of the hunters he knew running their greasy hands through Jo's spun gold locks. He looked into her eyes and when she didn't so much as blink, he knew he was about to make the right decision. "Fine. But, uh, there's a situation going on. We gotta leave here ASAP."
"What happened?"
"Let's just say you weren't Sam's first stop."
Jo just nodded. She'd gotten a call about Steve Wandell from one of his closer friends on her way to Bobby's. "No worries. I flee and hide with the best of 'em."
"All right. Take a look at Sam's arm and then we'll get out of here."
"'Kay. Hey, go eat something, will ya? And drink some water?"
Dean started toward Bobby who was in the kitchen and called over his shoulder, "Sure thing, MOM."
Jo didn't even look up from the kit where she had started digging for burn supplies. "I'm serious!"
Author: lucklessforhim
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: About 2500
Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural or any of it's characters and I am making no money writing this. It's just for fun.
Note: First posted fic in a very long time. This is the beginning of a long Dean/Jo story that I have recently determined will work better as snapshots and such. (Or maybe I got tired of working on it.) Anyways, I do hope you enjoy and please leave a comment. Title taken from Unknown Soldier by Breaking Benjamin. AU ending to BUABS.
"That's just how it's gonna be"? Was he serious? Of course he was serious…Well…Fuck that.
Jo looked at the clock on the wall. He'd left about ten minutes ago. She ran behind the bar and grabbed her bag and keys. She picked up the first aid kit on her way to the door. At the door she stopped and turned, taking one last look at the broken bar. She hadn't been working here for long, but she still felt bad for leaving it in the shape it was. Oh well…
She stopped at her apartment on her way out of town and grabbed her essentials: her clothes, books, hunting supplies and the weapons she had stashed in various places. She was on a month-to-month lease so, leaving was no problem. She didn't plan on being back. Someone else could deal with the crap she left; she had more important things to do.
She was on her way out of Duluth 40 minutes after leaving the bar. About an hour behind Dean, and she knew exactly where he was headed.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
When she pulled into Bobby's driveway Jo could just barely make out the shadows of frantic movements in the window of the front room. When she heard the crash, she was out of her Jeep and up the steps as fast as her feet could go.
She got to the door and tried the knob. It was locked. "Damn it," she swore, kicking at the door in frustration.
She heard another crash and a groan of pain that sounded a hell of a lot like Dean. Taking a deep breath, she took a step back. A silent prayer ran through her head as she raised her leg and brought it down on the door as hard as she could.
When the jamb splintered and the door flew open, she saw Sam leaning over Dean, his hand clearly digging into the bullet wound on Dean's left shoulder. After that, things seemed to happen very quickly.
A flash of anger ran white-hot straight through her. Her eyes frantically started scanning the room for a weapon; all the while she internally cursed herself for running in unprepared. Jo spotted a bucket of what she could only hope was holy water near the living room doorway and tried to divert Sam's attention away from Dean. "Hey! Asshole!"
Once he faced her, she splashed half the bucket on his face and then poured the rest over his back while he was hunched over. When Sam arched away in pain she took the opportunity to move in front of him to guard Dean. Over Sam's shoulder she saw Bobby removing a red-hot poker from the fireplace as he yelled, "Joanna! His arm!"
A well-aimed kick to Sam's chest sent him flying back towards Bobby. As she felt her foot connect, Jo felt a surge of satisfaction. She knew it wasn't really Sam that had been hurting people, but damn did it ever feel good to have something to hit. Besides, what she did wouldn't kill him.
Sam landed a few feet from Bobby, starting to try and fight back. She went after him, crossing the room in two quick steps. Then she crouched down and put her knee to his neck with just enough force to restrain him while Bobby broke the binding lock. When it was done, Sam looked confused to say the least. But he wasn't the Winchester Jo was worried about.
Dean felt a soft, warm, distinctly feminine hand on his face. He opened his eyes while clutching his shoulder, and saw Jo's very worried face. With her help, he sat up to see a dispossessed Sam.
Around a groan Dean scolded Jo saying, "I thought I told you to stay put?"
"Uh-huh, and I took it under advisement before I decided to come anyway," Jo said with false cheeriness, ever the smartass.
All Dean could do was roll his eyes at her before addressing Sam. "Sammy? Is that you in there?" Sam nodded. "Good." With that Dean delivered a punch to Sam's jaw and fell back, groaning in pain, onto Jo's lap.
Jo pointedly looked down at Dean, then at Sam and sighed. "Man, are you two a sight." Looking down at Dean again, she rested her hand on his cheek. "Let's get you cleaned up and fixed up, huh?"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Bobby Singer had the most extensive first aid kit Jo had ever seen. 'Kit' was actually a kind of misleading term. In fact, it was a large plastic bin filled with anything a person could ever need. Sterile gloves and suture kits, high quality surgical steel instruments, IV and oral antibiotics and painkillers, even some IV tubing and a bag of saline. Of course, the standard goodies were there too. There were ACE bandages, gauze and band-aids of every shape and size, all sorts of creams and ointments, along with five different kinds of antiseptic. Jo smiled and let out a low whistle. Gotta love Bobby. He must've robbed a hospital. She could work with this.
"Alright, Dean," she said while taking a seat in the chair in front of him. "Let me get at that shoulder."
Dean winced as Jo pulled away the now-mangled bandage she had placed earlier and scrutinized the mess that was his shoulder. "Man…Sam really did a number on you…"
"Yeah, well…whatever. I'll be fine." Dean did his best to sound unperturbed by the gaping hole in his body, while he held an ice pack up to his bloody nose. Jo gave him a look that told him what she thought of the 'Walk it Off Philosophy' before she rolled her eyes.
She narrowed her eyes, looking a little closer at the wound. When she stood and leaned across the table to bring the light closer for a better examination, Dean attempted to take his mind off the pain by running his eyes over the smooth curves of her hips and ass which were accentuated by the movement. No such luck. He turned to swig the whiskey at his right hand as she settled in her chair again, sliding forward in the seat to get as close to the wound as possible while expertly pulling on a pair of the gloves Bobby had in his first aid kit. Her eyes never left the deep hole in Dean's shoulder.
She, gently at first then harder, pressed on either side of the wound. "You know, you shouldn't be so cavalier about your health," she reprimanded him.
Dean watched her not look at him when she said it, and heard her sincere tone. "I'll be fine. I've been worse off before and made it out." Even as he said it, he couldn't figure out why he was reassuring her.
She sighed and sat up straight, finally looking away from the wound and to his face. "Still. This is bad."
Dean looked down at his shoulder, searching, like maybe he could see something she couldn't. "D'you think you can fix it?"
Jo shook her head and shrugged. "Probably. It's gonna take some time, though."
"Good. Go as fast as you can." What the hell? You don't talk like that to someone who's about to do you a favor! Jo leaned back in her chair and raised an eyebrow at Dean, not even needing to say the words, and waited for him to realize his error. "I mean, thank you…Sorry."
Jo mumbled, "Damn straight you better thank me," as she started pulling things off the table beside her and opening packages. Dean recognized the medical grade sutures and sterilized instruments in their packages spread out in front of Jo, and marveled just a little at how at ease she seemed with them.
When he saw her pick up a bottle of antiseptic, he dropped the ice in favor of his bottle of Jack and took what could only be described as a chug. He cried out when his entire shoulder exploded with white hot burning pain. He was still blinking away the spots in his vision when Jo picked up a stack of gauze and pressed it hard and deep into the wound. Around a grunt of discomfort Dean asked, "So how do you know so much about this stuff?"
Jo bit the corner of her mouth and actually looked uncomfortable for the first time since she plowed through the front door. "I, uh…was in nursing school for a while."
"Nursing school?" He didn't mean to make it sound like he was belittling her choice of major, but it just sounded so utterly ridiculous to him. Badass, armed to the nines, Jo walking up and down the halls of a hospital smiling cheerfully at people in aqua scrubs. The look in her eyes at his tone made him realize that her skin wasn't quite as tough around this subject. "Sorry. So…how long were you there?"
"Three years."
"Wow. That sounds like quite the commitment," Dean commented. Jo just shrugged. It seemed like maybe she didn't want to talk about this. She was concentrating on injecting some anesthetic around the bullet wound, and Dean couldn't help but probe further. "So, what made you choose nursing?"
Jo huffed and looked up at him. "What's with you? You want to know about my touching college experience?"
He shrugged his good shoulder in response. "Geez, sorry. Just trying to have a nice conversation, maybe take my mind off things. Guess I'll just sit here and drink my whiskey…"
Jo finished prepping the area and picked up the needle holder. While she focused on attaching the needle and suture, she started tell the story. "When I graduated from high school, my mother really pushed me to go to college." No surprise there. "She always said she didn't want me to end up like her, when she and I both know that she has no problems with who she is. She meant she didn't want me to end up like my Daddy, dead in the middle of nowhere with nothing but ashes left."
Jo set about her work of closing up the messy hole while she told Dean one of the longer versions of her story about college. "She pushed me to go to school and I made a deal with her that I would go for a year and if I decided to quit, she'd leave it alone and let me make my own decisions."
"But you stayed for three years…?"
Jo looked up for just a second with a twinkle in her eye that he'd never seen before. "I picked a random school, University of Illinois at Chicago. My grades were good enough that most of the schools I applied to were offering really good scholarships. UIC offered me one and financial aid covered most of the rest," she said while continuing to work carefully and quickly. "I wanted to go to a big city, you know, really have some fun before I left and spent my life hunting. I told them I was undecided as far as a major went, and it was true…at the time."
"So how'd you pick nursing?" Dean knew this was something important to her, and he was careful that his tone showed her that he understood that.
Jo cleared her throat nervously while she continued to work on Dean's shoulder. "Maybe six weeks before I was supposed to leave, one of my best friends was in an accident. He'd been on a downward spiral for a while, and one night he lost control of his motorcycle and was pinned under it while it skidded down the road and slammed into a retaining wall. It was bad, real touch and go for a while. He was in a coma for three days and needed skin and muscle grafts over most of his left leg." Jo snipped the extra ends of the stitches and paused to reach for the antiseptic again.
"Wow."
"Yeah. He was really lucky to have even made it out of the ICU. Thing is, he could barely name his doctors. And when he left the hospital more than a month after the accident, he was on a first name basis with his nurses. Hell, he could even tell you what sports most of their kids played, which soaps they preferred, you name it. The doctors - they fixed him, but the nurses - they were the ones that healed him."
"So you decided to become a nurse."
Jo nodded, smiling and placed a large, thick, pad of gauze over his shoulder. "I decided that if I couldn't help people doing what I was born to do, and I do believe I was born to hunt," she emphasized. "I'd try to help them other ways."
Dean decided right then and there, with her hand smoothing over a bandage on his shoulder for the second time in a day, that she deserved a chance. Maybe she didn't have a ton of experience, but that wasn't exactly her fault. Everyone has to learn sometime and better she do it alongside people who know what they're doing than off on her own somewhere. Plus, she had a genuine desire to do good. That was rare, even in his line of work. "That's admirable. But it doesn't make you ready to do this."
"I know." Jo gave one last look over the bandage, making sure it would hold and pulled off her gloves with a flick of each wrist. "You and Sam do your own patch work?" she asked, watching his face closely for his reaction.
Dean shrugged his good shoulder, knowing where she was going with this. "Yeah. Why?"
"Got a proposal for you. I need experience and you could use someone along who knows a little something about the medical stuff, might keep you guys from dying of infection or internal bleeding."
"I don't know, Sam's pretty good with a needle and thread…"
Jo looked hard, straight into Dean's eyes. "No kidding, I'm better. Faster too, which is probably my biggest asset. Now, I'm not asking to be your understudy or anything like that, just let me come with you and work the hunts." Dean seemed to mull this over as Jo leaned back in her chair and started to examine her nails. "There's plenty of other hunters out there that would just love a pretty young blonde like me along for the ride…"
Dean visibly and audibly shuddered at the thought of some of the hunters he knew running their greasy hands through Jo's spun gold locks. He looked into her eyes and when she didn't so much as blink, he knew he was about to make the right decision. "Fine. But, uh, there's a situation going on. We gotta leave here ASAP."
"What happened?"
"Let's just say you weren't Sam's first stop."
Jo just nodded. She'd gotten a call about Steve Wandell from one of his closer friends on her way to Bobby's. "No worries. I flee and hide with the best of 'em."
"All right. Take a look at Sam's arm and then we'll get out of here."
"'Kay. Hey, go eat something, will ya? And drink some water?"
Dean started toward Bobby who was in the kitchen and called over his shoulder, "Sure thing, MOM."
Jo didn't even look up from the kit where she had started digging for burn supplies. "I'm serious!"