fic: The Longe Whip
Apparently someone threw himself off the 17th floor of the building earlier this afternoon. My window's on the wrong side, so I didn't see the corpse. Yeah. Probably not as traumatised as I should be.
Fandom: SPN AU. Jo, Sam, Dean.
Rating: PG.
Spoilers: No.
Words: 4200ish
Notes: for delighter, who also wanted more from Twelve Strong Horses (see also What a Pretty Foal and The Horsethief Fortune). 4200ish.
She spends days and nights, then weekends and months before long, at the Joyce ranch. Mucking their stalls and walking their horseflesh through paces. All under the view of that big kitchen window she knows Mr. Joyce sits at all morning long. His paper and his phone. His wife flown back to Maine, unpredictably.
She clucks each stud round the circle, warms them up like engines against the falling autumn till their breath roils in clouds from their nostrils and their tails stream like banners. She runs them till she’s dizzy, spinning in one spot on her heel, the longe line in one hand, whip in the other. Till the ground tilts under her feet. Till the colours of the barn and the dead land past it blur.
There used to be a girl working inside the house, but she’s gone, so now Jo makes the coffee while she’s heating the oats. Leaves her mud-bottomed boots outside before she steps in with the pre-dawn chill. She is the wash of icy air that stumbles over the lintel, spreads itself out into the kitchen like a spilt bucket of ash. Nasty until it disappears, mixed in with the warm under the woodstove.
She leaves the pot for Mr. Joyce, doesn’t take any for herself, just hovers her hands over the element and shivers.
By October they’re both gone for Florida. Mr. and Mrs. They took the house keys with them, but she stays on in her cabin out back of the stable. There’s a phone for the vet and her ma. The only problem is, sometimes she wakes afraid of changelings, spirits, skinchangers. Things she’s never seen nor heard. She dreams them, though, all alone with the four aging thoroughbreds.
The one time the phone does ring she doesn’t answer it for hours. Who knows how many times he called. She’s outside a lot and when finally the horses hear it for her, it takes a long time to get to it. Mud, fences, tackle. But he doesn’t hang up. Just keeps it ringing for her.
He says, “Is this Jo?” in an unfamiliar voice. She allows for excuses: puberty, six years, a belt full of kill notches. A man grown.
“Sammy,” she says. Clears her throat. She remembers traditions rustily. “Where are you?”
“Outside Pocatello.” There is a pause. She hears a roar of wind fuzzing the connection, his voice is strained even if she doesn’t know him. “Listen. Dean’s hurt. Ellen said you’re in Wyoming?”
Talking to her ma. Dean somewhere listening. Or not, probably he can’t know, Sammy asking for help outside the family. Her heart starts convulsing, jumping against her collarbone. “What was it?”
“Spirit. a real angry one. I’d take him to the hospital, but the locals - they’ve got our faces on TV, we’re kinda low on options.” she can hear the kid in his voice. All problems, no answers. She does the math. He’s not past eighteen yet. She pictures blood on his shirt, the car still running.
Pretending Dean’s unconscious gives her strength. “I’m out of Bondurant. That’s on the 191. You got a map?”
“Yeah.” He takes down further directions and she hangs up the phone. Doesn’t know what to do with herself. She thinks of the last time she drove down there, for a date mounting a pretty little hunter-jumper. Took her four hours with the horse trailer. She’d bet dollars that Dean would do it in two and a half.
Sammy takes three. It’s that same black car from three years ago - the last time she saw Dean or any of them - sleek sides now rimed with grey-brown dust thick as a finger. The roads are drowned in it this time of year, silt sifted off the fields fine as ash. She hovers in the door of the stable as the black car navigates the ruts in the drive. She can’t see him, just Sammy behind the wheel, but her pulse is still sputtering like a worn down generator.
Sam gets out of the car and she steps forward, her arms crossed against herself, hands folded in dusty red flannel. He takes a second, lingering over the back seat with one foot in the frozen mud. She sees his mouth move, but the wind takes the sound of whatever he murmurs.
She says, “Is he awake?” as soon as he’s on his feet, looking at her with his hand on the car door.
Sam shakes his shaggy head. He’s huge, but slouches like to make up for it. Looks so skinny as to fall over, but with those shoulders he’s still growing into she can see he weighs two of her easy. His eyes are familiar, though. Hopeful, always. Needing. Just not trusting her, anymore. He remembers someone different than her.
“I got a bed, you want to carry him,” she says, and turns to go back to her shed without looking to see if he needs help. Wasted effort. She knows no Winchester would want it.
It’s a long curving gash laid open from pelvis to shoulder, and it smells bad. Like rot, like rusting metal. She stands in the corner, boiling water and ripping up an old horse blanket while Sam kneels on the floorboards, peeling Dean’s t-shirt out of his abdomen.
She likes to see his eyes closed, him groaning nonsense into her pillow: sweaty, tortured. Sammy’s expression echoes every whimper, and she feels a long, straining sense of déjà vu.
With his chest laid bare she offers the rags of clean cotton. Peroxide, like maybe he scraped his knee. She has a sewing kit somewhere, a quick-reference veterinary handbook. But the smell. She says, “How long ago?”
Sam can barely meet her eyes, “Two days. He seemed fine at first. We kept going.”
“Jesus,” she says, “He shrugged that off?” The gash looks like it was carved with a meat hook. Ripping, not slicing, upwards.
“It wasn’t that bad, then.” His voice is cornered, scared. “I don’t know how it got like this. It was just a little cut. I saw the scabs.”
Jo shakes her head, takes the pot off the hotplate. She is sweating cold with anxiety, the hair on her bare forearms standing on end. The back of her mind wishes for her dad - dead and dumb, now, no use to anyone - wishes for someone else to take this rotting body off her bed. She never had anything to do with this. She left, she tells herself. She wants to smack Sam in the face. They were the ones got the pellet guns at Christmas, and she was the one that left, goddammit.
“You can use the phone, call your mother collect,” she says, instead.
Sam’s still kneeling, head bowed, eyes hidden. One hand is curled on Dean’s bicep. He doesn’t look up as he mutters “We haven’t heard from her in months. We don’t know where she is.”
Jo’s stomach tightens. She wants to take no pleasure from that, but she sees long yellow hair, a triumphant flash of white teeth, hard hands that touched her father. She almost laughs, it almost chokes her, but she kills it. “Don’t you know anyone else?”
Sam looks up again. He doesn’t have to say anything. He wouldn’t have called her to begin with if there had been anyone else. Just her.
“Start cleaning out that wound,” she reminds him, and he does, dutiful.
Later it gets dark, and she makes them a few cans of beans, heats up some instant coffee to sip. They pull her week-old sheets over Dean, who’s stopped muttering and fallen into a darker sleep, and go out to the stable where the air smells like straw and animal warmth and living things. Jo breathes deep, trying to clear out the stink of the rot, which she feels is a creeping poison, transferring itself with spores and tendrils. It frightens her. In the few hours since he’s been here, has it got worse?
Sammy perches on the ladder to the loft, hunching over his beans and eating them fast as any soldier’s brat. Then he watches her while she goes around to the horses with their feed and curry combs. Brushing them down for the night, touching their forelocks and running her hand down their long throats as they breathe. She doesn’t touch the grey: just chucks his bale through the stall door and latches it shut again. A week ago she tried to curry him down, and that horse pressed her against the boards till she thought her ribcage would shatter. All alone, the only reason she didn’t die was because he stopped. Some unfathomable animal mercy.
Sam says, “I could sleep out here tonight,” and she can hear how he doesn’t mean it. How he’s afraid to leave his brother alone with his murdering gash in the night. Nervous to get back to him even now.
But she thinks of sleeping on the floor under Dean, and remembers there are parts of her that have never stopped having nightmares about his gleaming eyes, his hot breath in her hair, on her cheek. Always in the dark, deep at night. She says, “No, you stay with him. If he wakes up, gets confused.”
There’s frost on the ground in the morning, but she wakes up in the Joyces’ log-framed king bed, under their duvet. And she showers in their bathroom, standing on their heated tiles. In the kitchen she broke a six-inch panel of plate glass over the door handle. She tapes a garbage bag over it to stop the draft.
When she goes outside she brings a mug of the good coffee. Sam is shivering at the hotplate, trying to boil a mug of water. He looks sorry and miserable, and maybe for the first time she feels genuine pity for him. Remembers his snotty nose and small hand in hers, how he used to help her with algebra in grade school, though she was a full three years ahead. She stands at chest height when she comes up behind him to take the mug off the plate, dumps the water into a pot instead. She finds him a spoonful of whitener. He steps aside, but there isn’t much room to move.
“He sleep alright?” she asks, looking at her disheveled blankets. Dean’s sweat, his skin in them. The smell of her last bit of childhood, and the first year after.
“No.” Sam’s voice is coarse with exhaustion. The water boils again and he bends to peel back the blankets, the damp sheets. The horse blanket bandages are soaked through, lymph and pus. Jo gags at the waft of stink, and Dean’s head thrashes. Sam’s fingers stroke his throat, touch his forehead, and calm him quick.
She sees that, and looks away. Sam starts peeling away the bandages, replacing them. He has patient fingers, but they stutter in their work whenever Dean makes a sound.
Jo says, “You’re gonna have to purify him somehow.” It’s her best guess, but she doesn’t know the first thing about rituals. She thinks the Joyces have a bag of salt, but anything else is full beyond her.
Sam looks over his shoulder, mouth already open with a question. A request, probably. But she turns her face and slips out the door into the bitter wind. She wants to curse in the face of his expectations, his helplessness. She wants to tell him that she hopes - fiercely - that Dean will die in that bed.
But she finds she doesn’t have quite the voice for it.
In the stable they are restless, whickering as they hear her open the door. The grey tosses his head at her and she pours his oats first. He could start trumpeting, get the rest of them riled up. She watches him thrust his nose into the bag, eyes rolling to watch her even as he eats. He wasn’t always this white. It’s age that’s bleached him: once he was probably dark and dappled like snow under pine trees. Now she’s supposed to run him just so his hind legs don’t get too weak to hassle and mount the young mares. Sire a well-papered foal. But she hasn’t brought him out since he trapped her in the stall. He could kill her.
She likes how his dark liquid eyes follow her, jealous, as she takes the others out, one after the other to run in led circles, and he blows and stamps in his stall. She’ll have to do it sometime: otherwise, when the Joyces get back they’ll find a fat, lame pony who couldn’t stand stud for a donkey.
Sam is outside again as she pauses to click shut the lock. He says, “He’s just getting worse.”
Jo’s smile is unpleasant, she hates to feel herself making it. “I’m no hunter. I don’t have any holy water for you. Or whatever you need.”
“Just a few things.” Sam says, supplicant. “From the store in town.”
She lets him make her a list. When he hands it to her, she waits a few seconds more, but he looks at her with such distraction that she doesn’t say anything about the money. She waits till his back is turned, bent over Dean again, to pick the bills out of the bottom of her tin.
In town she buys the candles from the tourist shop, and the cloth, the baling wire, the syrupy red wine from Leo’s. Bondurant is small enough yet that they know who she is. Little girl left with the priceless showboat studs. And that there’s a wicked black car parked behind the Joyces’ stable while they’re gone. Leo Dennis looks at her through narrow eyes when she asks him for the wine, which he keeps behind the counter like every other shopkeep in the state, but he turns to the shelf, and he gives it to her. That’s the way of it: the locals recognize her rough hands, the horse smell on her red flannel shirt, and her knot-tied hair and see something familiar, something just this side of acceptable. But they don’t like the pleasure ranchers one bit. So Jo keeps the advantage.
She pauses again at the diner. Orders a coca-cola and a bowl of strawberry ice cream, refusing the girl’s suggestion of a float. “No, ma’am,” Jo says. The girl’s younger than Sam, probably. Speckle-faced with a bristling mane of hair. Jo catches her smiling, shy. Smiles back.
When she pulls up again beside the Winchesters’ black beast, Sam is nowhere to be seen. Dean is quiet in her bed, but the shed is still. The horses are planted outside in the yard with their bare faces to the wind, their black eyes squeezed closed. The grey doesn’t look at her, though his ears are angled to her footsteps.
She finds Sam inside the house, the kitchen door slightly ajar. He is standing in their living room, looking at the stilted portraits of the Joyces’ grown children. The handsome boy in the convocation gown is in corporate finance, she understands. She has been told more than once.
Her mouth opens to say something obvious, but she closes it again. Sam is so young and quiet, standing in the dimness: all the white-grey light of early winter is diluted by the cut of the curtains into a blurred, noncommittal beige. She can feel her eyes softening, relaxing without the glare.
Sam says, “I got accepted to school.” He puts down the picture frame. “I was going to tell him after that last job.”
Jo thinks school, thinks night school: medical transcriptionist, pet groomer. But she suspects Sam means something grander. Something threatening, rooted like an oak tree. “What’ll he say?”
Sam’s eyes rove like he’s never considered it. He angles a bit towards her, stares past her head then breaks into a self-conscious grimace. “I was going to ask him to come with me to California. It’s what mom wanted. We could keep looking for her, but stay put for a while. Live our lives.”
Jo doesn’t want to talk about this. She doesn’t want to hear someone else’s dreams, while burying her own dusty dry ones back into the deep of her heart. She wishes Sam were someone else, someone who hadn’t spent his twelfth year listening to his brother grunt on her in the night. Maybe then she could find her human empathy. “You don’t have to hunt anymore. Not if they’re both gone.” That last euphemism is a mercy she didn’t think she had.
Sam looks at her, a bitter smile. “Have to find the thing killed our dad, though. Don’t we.”
She shrugs , staring at him. “Maybe not,” and he hears that she doesn’t care, that she is done with dead fathers. She knows he hears it because for a second, a look of yearning so bare and bright that it hurts her to see it passes over his face.
He is eighteen. He has never made a choice for himself and she can see an idolatrous reflection of Dean mimicked in his every movement. She can see, as clear as the red flush of a palm-print from a slap in the face, the mark Dean has left on him, too. She thinks, again: wouldn’t they all just be better off if that man in her bed rotted straight through to his filthy heart.
For a moment she lingers, watching him as he turns his face away to hide whatever’s there. Then she goes back outside to run the horses.
With the supplies, he does the ritual in the cabin, and through the rising wind and the thud of hooves in sand she hears his voice falling into a cadence as insistent as the beat of a piston engine, as waves falling over each other. Harmony to an unheard melody, alien language. While Sam performs his hoodoo, the horses refuse to run: flatten their ears against their skulls and roll their white eyes.
Her own hackles prickling, Jo doesn’t doubt the magic. When it gets dark, she goes inside and makes a stew in the Joyces’ kitchen - raiding their freezer for a frozen hack of venison, pickled carrots - leaving the tv on in the sitting room. The human voices are a luxury that she dawdles over. It isn’t until it’s truly black with the clear sky sucking all the light and warmth off the world that she brings bowls of the stew out to the shed for them. The static has gone from her hair, the warmth has returned to her hands. She knows that Sam will have fixed him, in the same way a child knows that dinner will be served, beds will be made - faith in something she never understood herself. Just the pellet guns. She pictures Dean at fifteen, with that rifle he bought from town. She is ready for his cruel mouth. Ready enough.
The candles are still burning, and the stink has faded. In the fog of yellow light, the two of them are twined into each other and the sheets, strips of bare skin and slack joints. Her expelled breath - not of surprise, but regret - rather than the creak of the door, is what wakes them. Sam startles like a guilty child, sliding out of the bed and casting around. His feet are bare, and under the hem of his shirt his jeans are unbuttoned. He doesn’t look at her as he tugs them up around his hips. Dean yawns and sits up, gazing at the steam rising out of the bowls in her hands.
She hands him one, wordless.
He rubs a hand against his chest - bare, the bandages dirty in piles on the floor - and the wound there. It is a thin line of shiny pink skin, barely visible in the light. He chuckles before he puts the first spoonful in his mouth. He is mostly naked.
Sam says, “We’ll go in the morning.”
Jo hands him the other bowl, looking at him. Flushed cheeks, his eyes down. Dean’s mark blazoned on him, practically burning from within. She can feel the heat rising off the three of them. Shame.
She smirks, though her limbs tremble to take her out of there and says, “Take your time.”
“No, we’ll get out of your way,” Sam asserts, glancing sideways down at Dean. Dean ignores him. Eats his stew. Jo stands there for a long moment, listening to them swallow and chew, then she goes back to the house and lays in the light of the television, listening to the sounds of strangers’ conversations. Anything better than the silence in her own thoughts. A frightened silence, she knows. A crippled one.
In the morning she’s in the barn, cradling the chestnut’s hind hoof and picking gravel out of his horseshoe when she hears the black car’s engine rev and turn over. She looks up and Sam is standing on the other side of the stall door, watching her yank and jerk with the metal tool.
“Doesn’t that hurt them?” he asks.
She lets the horse drop his foot. “No. It’d be worse if I left it.” Straightening and brushing off dust and dried mud from her shirt, she wipes a hand across her damp temple. “You’re going?”
He nods, absently, in time to a distant measure.
Looking at him, she sees the same crumple-faced boy that she guarded and tortured through her entire childhood: sometimes an ally against Dean but more often the victim in all their campaigns and cruelties. He was the youngest, and she knows the feeling in her gut, in her ribcage, is pity again. The two of them knotted together in her bed. Sam never got to escape.
Either Jo steps out of the stall, or Sam steps into it, just briefly, and she pressures him back against the boards. Her hands are small on his chest, but his shirt is thin and she feels the warmth of him beating through his ribs, so she burrows under the fabric and finds the wide hot expanse of his skin. Touching chest, back, long curves of muscle that she presses hard with her fingers. Calming him, grooming him like one of her old, rutting stallions. He slumps to meet her mouth, both their eyes open - his glazed and frightened. She does not know what her eyes show, right now, doesn’t want to know. She closes them.
They don’t get caught, but even as Sam’s hands rove up under her shirt, over her breasts, even as she rubs herself over him, thighs between thighs, hips pressed tight as lips, she pulls back. She steps out of his grasp.
Sam hangs his head and breathes slow through his mouth. Jo straightens her bones back into place. Neither of them hunger for anything more than this smallest rebellion. She knows it when he looks at her again and says, “Thanks for taking us in.”
She nods her head, meaning to smile but not sure if she’s making it. “Sure.”
He steps away, out of the stall, looks to say something else, and stops himself. He doesn’t stop looking at her. Anxiety resurfaces in the fold of his brow, his hovering hands.
She wants to tell him to get in the car with his brother. Drive somewhere far away, then tell about school. Tell him and then leave him: she knows she’d do one but not the other. She’d just slip away in the night. But Sam is just a kid, compelled to honesty somehow: she knows he’ll probably do both.
He turns and leaves, and she doesn’t say anything.
But after the growl of the car has faded, the shudder of it over the dried mud track gone, she pulls the horse trailer around herself, the rumble of the Joyce’s pickup her own thunder. She loads three of them - black, bay, chestnut - into the trailer. Probably she left the house door open, probably she left the hot plate plugged in. She has fifty dollars in cash and one thermos full of stew, one of coffee.
She knows of a breeder down in New Mexico that might take the paper pedigrees off her hands. After she closes the gate, she goes back into the barn. The grey stamps in his stall and she stares at him. Her favourite, when she first came here. She steps forward and he bares his teeth and strains his neck over the door at her. He kicks the backboards of his stall and trumpets a hotblooded challenge. Distantly, she hears one of the others respond, rattling the metal trailer.
If she lets him out, he’ll kill her. Press her against the boards, bite her or trample her under his iron shoes. She hasn’t run him in over a week. She’s driven him half-mad, far past whatever made him trap her in his stall. His eyes roll white, always, his breath comes in heavy gusts.
When she reaches forward and clicks open the latch, he pauses. The stall door swings wide and it’s like his knees are locked already, a lame or crippled thing.
She hesitates, pulse throbbing, then leaves him like that, gets into the warm cab of the truck, starts the slow roll down the drive. She left the barn door open, too, so he could go even further afield. Wherever he wants. If he heads out onto the road someone will find him and discover what she’s done. If he goes out into the ranchlands he’ll starve before spring. Or maybe he’ll just stand in his open stall and wait. Wait for someone to come and feed him and untangle his mane and stroke his ears. She just knows it won’t be her.
Fandom: SPN AU. Jo, Sam, Dean.
Rating: PG.
Spoilers: No.
Words: 4200ish
Notes: for delighter, who also wanted more from Twelve Strong Horses (see also What a Pretty Foal and The Horsethief Fortune). 4200ish.
She spends days and nights, then weekends and months before long, at the Joyce ranch. Mucking their stalls and walking their horseflesh through paces. All under the view of that big kitchen window she knows Mr. Joyce sits at all morning long. His paper and his phone. His wife flown back to Maine, unpredictably.
She clucks each stud round the circle, warms them up like engines against the falling autumn till their breath roils in clouds from their nostrils and their tails stream like banners. She runs them till she’s dizzy, spinning in one spot on her heel, the longe line in one hand, whip in the other. Till the ground tilts under her feet. Till the colours of the barn and the dead land past it blur.
There used to be a girl working inside the house, but she’s gone, so now Jo makes the coffee while she’s heating the oats. Leaves her mud-bottomed boots outside before she steps in with the pre-dawn chill. She is the wash of icy air that stumbles over the lintel, spreads itself out into the kitchen like a spilt bucket of ash. Nasty until it disappears, mixed in with the warm under the woodstove.
She leaves the pot for Mr. Joyce, doesn’t take any for herself, just hovers her hands over the element and shivers.
By October they’re both gone for Florida. Mr. and Mrs. They took the house keys with them, but she stays on in her cabin out back of the stable. There’s a phone for the vet and her ma. The only problem is, sometimes she wakes afraid of changelings, spirits, skinchangers. Things she’s never seen nor heard. She dreams them, though, all alone with the four aging thoroughbreds.
The one time the phone does ring she doesn’t answer it for hours. Who knows how many times he called. She’s outside a lot and when finally the horses hear it for her, it takes a long time to get to it. Mud, fences, tackle. But he doesn’t hang up. Just keeps it ringing for her.
He says, “Is this Jo?” in an unfamiliar voice. She allows for excuses: puberty, six years, a belt full of kill notches. A man grown.
“Sammy,” she says. Clears her throat. She remembers traditions rustily. “Where are you?”
“Outside Pocatello.” There is a pause. She hears a roar of wind fuzzing the connection, his voice is strained even if she doesn’t know him. “Listen. Dean’s hurt. Ellen said you’re in Wyoming?”
Talking to her ma. Dean somewhere listening. Or not, probably he can’t know, Sammy asking for help outside the family. Her heart starts convulsing, jumping against her collarbone. “What was it?”
“Spirit. a real angry one. I’d take him to the hospital, but the locals - they’ve got our faces on TV, we’re kinda low on options.” she can hear the kid in his voice. All problems, no answers. She does the math. He’s not past eighteen yet. She pictures blood on his shirt, the car still running.
Pretending Dean’s unconscious gives her strength. “I’m out of Bondurant. That’s on the 191. You got a map?”
“Yeah.” He takes down further directions and she hangs up the phone. Doesn’t know what to do with herself. She thinks of the last time she drove down there, for a date mounting a pretty little hunter-jumper. Took her four hours with the horse trailer. She’d bet dollars that Dean would do it in two and a half.
Sammy takes three. It’s that same black car from three years ago - the last time she saw Dean or any of them - sleek sides now rimed with grey-brown dust thick as a finger. The roads are drowned in it this time of year, silt sifted off the fields fine as ash. She hovers in the door of the stable as the black car navigates the ruts in the drive. She can’t see him, just Sammy behind the wheel, but her pulse is still sputtering like a worn down generator.
Sam gets out of the car and she steps forward, her arms crossed against herself, hands folded in dusty red flannel. He takes a second, lingering over the back seat with one foot in the frozen mud. She sees his mouth move, but the wind takes the sound of whatever he murmurs.
She says, “Is he awake?” as soon as he’s on his feet, looking at her with his hand on the car door.
Sam shakes his shaggy head. He’s huge, but slouches like to make up for it. Looks so skinny as to fall over, but with those shoulders he’s still growing into she can see he weighs two of her easy. His eyes are familiar, though. Hopeful, always. Needing. Just not trusting her, anymore. He remembers someone different than her.
“I got a bed, you want to carry him,” she says, and turns to go back to her shed without looking to see if he needs help. Wasted effort. She knows no Winchester would want it.
It’s a long curving gash laid open from pelvis to shoulder, and it smells bad. Like rot, like rusting metal. She stands in the corner, boiling water and ripping up an old horse blanket while Sam kneels on the floorboards, peeling Dean’s t-shirt out of his abdomen.
She likes to see his eyes closed, him groaning nonsense into her pillow: sweaty, tortured. Sammy’s expression echoes every whimper, and she feels a long, straining sense of déjà vu.
With his chest laid bare she offers the rags of clean cotton. Peroxide, like maybe he scraped his knee. She has a sewing kit somewhere, a quick-reference veterinary handbook. But the smell. She says, “How long ago?”
Sam can barely meet her eyes, “Two days. He seemed fine at first. We kept going.”
“Jesus,” she says, “He shrugged that off?” The gash looks like it was carved with a meat hook. Ripping, not slicing, upwards.
“It wasn’t that bad, then.” His voice is cornered, scared. “I don’t know how it got like this. It was just a little cut. I saw the scabs.”
Jo shakes her head, takes the pot off the hotplate. She is sweating cold with anxiety, the hair on her bare forearms standing on end. The back of her mind wishes for her dad - dead and dumb, now, no use to anyone - wishes for someone else to take this rotting body off her bed. She never had anything to do with this. She left, she tells herself. She wants to smack Sam in the face. They were the ones got the pellet guns at Christmas, and she was the one that left, goddammit.
“You can use the phone, call your mother collect,” she says, instead.
Sam’s still kneeling, head bowed, eyes hidden. One hand is curled on Dean’s bicep. He doesn’t look up as he mutters “We haven’t heard from her in months. We don’t know where she is.”
Jo’s stomach tightens. She wants to take no pleasure from that, but she sees long yellow hair, a triumphant flash of white teeth, hard hands that touched her father. She almost laughs, it almost chokes her, but she kills it. “Don’t you know anyone else?”
Sam looks up again. He doesn’t have to say anything. He wouldn’t have called her to begin with if there had been anyone else. Just her.
“Start cleaning out that wound,” she reminds him, and he does, dutiful.
Later it gets dark, and she makes them a few cans of beans, heats up some instant coffee to sip. They pull her week-old sheets over Dean, who’s stopped muttering and fallen into a darker sleep, and go out to the stable where the air smells like straw and animal warmth and living things. Jo breathes deep, trying to clear out the stink of the rot, which she feels is a creeping poison, transferring itself with spores and tendrils. It frightens her. In the few hours since he’s been here, has it got worse?
Sammy perches on the ladder to the loft, hunching over his beans and eating them fast as any soldier’s brat. Then he watches her while she goes around to the horses with their feed and curry combs. Brushing them down for the night, touching their forelocks and running her hand down their long throats as they breathe. She doesn’t touch the grey: just chucks his bale through the stall door and latches it shut again. A week ago she tried to curry him down, and that horse pressed her against the boards till she thought her ribcage would shatter. All alone, the only reason she didn’t die was because he stopped. Some unfathomable animal mercy.
Sam says, “I could sleep out here tonight,” and she can hear how he doesn’t mean it. How he’s afraid to leave his brother alone with his murdering gash in the night. Nervous to get back to him even now.
But she thinks of sleeping on the floor under Dean, and remembers there are parts of her that have never stopped having nightmares about his gleaming eyes, his hot breath in her hair, on her cheek. Always in the dark, deep at night. She says, “No, you stay with him. If he wakes up, gets confused.”
There’s frost on the ground in the morning, but she wakes up in the Joyces’ log-framed king bed, under their duvet. And she showers in their bathroom, standing on their heated tiles. In the kitchen she broke a six-inch panel of plate glass over the door handle. She tapes a garbage bag over it to stop the draft.
When she goes outside she brings a mug of the good coffee. Sam is shivering at the hotplate, trying to boil a mug of water. He looks sorry and miserable, and maybe for the first time she feels genuine pity for him. Remembers his snotty nose and small hand in hers, how he used to help her with algebra in grade school, though she was a full three years ahead. She stands at chest height when she comes up behind him to take the mug off the plate, dumps the water into a pot instead. She finds him a spoonful of whitener. He steps aside, but there isn’t much room to move.
“He sleep alright?” she asks, looking at her disheveled blankets. Dean’s sweat, his skin in them. The smell of her last bit of childhood, and the first year after.
“No.” Sam’s voice is coarse with exhaustion. The water boils again and he bends to peel back the blankets, the damp sheets. The horse blanket bandages are soaked through, lymph and pus. Jo gags at the waft of stink, and Dean’s head thrashes. Sam’s fingers stroke his throat, touch his forehead, and calm him quick.
She sees that, and looks away. Sam starts peeling away the bandages, replacing them. He has patient fingers, but they stutter in their work whenever Dean makes a sound.
Jo says, “You’re gonna have to purify him somehow.” It’s her best guess, but she doesn’t know the first thing about rituals. She thinks the Joyces have a bag of salt, but anything else is full beyond her.
Sam looks over his shoulder, mouth already open with a question. A request, probably. But she turns her face and slips out the door into the bitter wind. She wants to curse in the face of his expectations, his helplessness. She wants to tell him that she hopes - fiercely - that Dean will die in that bed.
But she finds she doesn’t have quite the voice for it.
In the stable they are restless, whickering as they hear her open the door. The grey tosses his head at her and she pours his oats first. He could start trumpeting, get the rest of them riled up. She watches him thrust his nose into the bag, eyes rolling to watch her even as he eats. He wasn’t always this white. It’s age that’s bleached him: once he was probably dark and dappled like snow under pine trees. Now she’s supposed to run him just so his hind legs don’t get too weak to hassle and mount the young mares. Sire a well-papered foal. But she hasn’t brought him out since he trapped her in the stall. He could kill her.
She likes how his dark liquid eyes follow her, jealous, as she takes the others out, one after the other to run in led circles, and he blows and stamps in his stall. She’ll have to do it sometime: otherwise, when the Joyces get back they’ll find a fat, lame pony who couldn’t stand stud for a donkey.
Sam is outside again as she pauses to click shut the lock. He says, “He’s just getting worse.”
Jo’s smile is unpleasant, she hates to feel herself making it. “I’m no hunter. I don’t have any holy water for you. Or whatever you need.”
“Just a few things.” Sam says, supplicant. “From the store in town.”
She lets him make her a list. When he hands it to her, she waits a few seconds more, but he looks at her with such distraction that she doesn’t say anything about the money. She waits till his back is turned, bent over Dean again, to pick the bills out of the bottom of her tin.
In town she buys the candles from the tourist shop, and the cloth, the baling wire, the syrupy red wine from Leo’s. Bondurant is small enough yet that they know who she is. Little girl left with the priceless showboat studs. And that there’s a wicked black car parked behind the Joyces’ stable while they’re gone. Leo Dennis looks at her through narrow eyes when she asks him for the wine, which he keeps behind the counter like every other shopkeep in the state, but he turns to the shelf, and he gives it to her. That’s the way of it: the locals recognize her rough hands, the horse smell on her red flannel shirt, and her knot-tied hair and see something familiar, something just this side of acceptable. But they don’t like the pleasure ranchers one bit. So Jo keeps the advantage.
She pauses again at the diner. Orders a coca-cola and a bowl of strawberry ice cream, refusing the girl’s suggestion of a float. “No, ma’am,” Jo says. The girl’s younger than Sam, probably. Speckle-faced with a bristling mane of hair. Jo catches her smiling, shy. Smiles back.
When she pulls up again beside the Winchesters’ black beast, Sam is nowhere to be seen. Dean is quiet in her bed, but the shed is still. The horses are planted outside in the yard with their bare faces to the wind, their black eyes squeezed closed. The grey doesn’t look at her, though his ears are angled to her footsteps.
She finds Sam inside the house, the kitchen door slightly ajar. He is standing in their living room, looking at the stilted portraits of the Joyces’ grown children. The handsome boy in the convocation gown is in corporate finance, she understands. She has been told more than once.
Her mouth opens to say something obvious, but she closes it again. Sam is so young and quiet, standing in the dimness: all the white-grey light of early winter is diluted by the cut of the curtains into a blurred, noncommittal beige. She can feel her eyes softening, relaxing without the glare.
Sam says, “I got accepted to school.” He puts down the picture frame. “I was going to tell him after that last job.”
Jo thinks school, thinks night school: medical transcriptionist, pet groomer. But she suspects Sam means something grander. Something threatening, rooted like an oak tree. “What’ll he say?”
Sam’s eyes rove like he’s never considered it. He angles a bit towards her, stares past her head then breaks into a self-conscious grimace. “I was going to ask him to come with me to California. It’s what mom wanted. We could keep looking for her, but stay put for a while. Live our lives.”
Jo doesn’t want to talk about this. She doesn’t want to hear someone else’s dreams, while burying her own dusty dry ones back into the deep of her heart. She wishes Sam were someone else, someone who hadn’t spent his twelfth year listening to his brother grunt on her in the night. Maybe then she could find her human empathy. “You don’t have to hunt anymore. Not if they’re both gone.” That last euphemism is a mercy she didn’t think she had.
Sam looks at her, a bitter smile. “Have to find the thing killed our dad, though. Don’t we.”
She shrugs , staring at him. “Maybe not,” and he hears that she doesn’t care, that she is done with dead fathers. She knows he hears it because for a second, a look of yearning so bare and bright that it hurts her to see it passes over his face.
He is eighteen. He has never made a choice for himself and she can see an idolatrous reflection of Dean mimicked in his every movement. She can see, as clear as the red flush of a palm-print from a slap in the face, the mark Dean has left on him, too. She thinks, again: wouldn’t they all just be better off if that man in her bed rotted straight through to his filthy heart.
For a moment she lingers, watching him as he turns his face away to hide whatever’s there. Then she goes back outside to run the horses.
With the supplies, he does the ritual in the cabin, and through the rising wind and the thud of hooves in sand she hears his voice falling into a cadence as insistent as the beat of a piston engine, as waves falling over each other. Harmony to an unheard melody, alien language. While Sam performs his hoodoo, the horses refuse to run: flatten their ears against their skulls and roll their white eyes.
Her own hackles prickling, Jo doesn’t doubt the magic. When it gets dark, she goes inside and makes a stew in the Joyces’ kitchen - raiding their freezer for a frozen hack of venison, pickled carrots - leaving the tv on in the sitting room. The human voices are a luxury that she dawdles over. It isn’t until it’s truly black with the clear sky sucking all the light and warmth off the world that she brings bowls of the stew out to the shed for them. The static has gone from her hair, the warmth has returned to her hands. She knows that Sam will have fixed him, in the same way a child knows that dinner will be served, beds will be made - faith in something she never understood herself. Just the pellet guns. She pictures Dean at fifteen, with that rifle he bought from town. She is ready for his cruel mouth. Ready enough.
The candles are still burning, and the stink has faded. In the fog of yellow light, the two of them are twined into each other and the sheets, strips of bare skin and slack joints. Her expelled breath - not of surprise, but regret - rather than the creak of the door, is what wakes them. Sam startles like a guilty child, sliding out of the bed and casting around. His feet are bare, and under the hem of his shirt his jeans are unbuttoned. He doesn’t look at her as he tugs them up around his hips. Dean yawns and sits up, gazing at the steam rising out of the bowls in her hands.
She hands him one, wordless.
He rubs a hand against his chest - bare, the bandages dirty in piles on the floor - and the wound there. It is a thin line of shiny pink skin, barely visible in the light. He chuckles before he puts the first spoonful in his mouth. He is mostly naked.
Sam says, “We’ll go in the morning.”
Jo hands him the other bowl, looking at him. Flushed cheeks, his eyes down. Dean’s mark blazoned on him, practically burning from within. She can feel the heat rising off the three of them. Shame.
She smirks, though her limbs tremble to take her out of there and says, “Take your time.”
“No, we’ll get out of your way,” Sam asserts, glancing sideways down at Dean. Dean ignores him. Eats his stew. Jo stands there for a long moment, listening to them swallow and chew, then she goes back to the house and lays in the light of the television, listening to the sounds of strangers’ conversations. Anything better than the silence in her own thoughts. A frightened silence, she knows. A crippled one.
In the morning she’s in the barn, cradling the chestnut’s hind hoof and picking gravel out of his horseshoe when she hears the black car’s engine rev and turn over. She looks up and Sam is standing on the other side of the stall door, watching her yank and jerk with the metal tool.
“Doesn’t that hurt them?” he asks.
She lets the horse drop his foot. “No. It’d be worse if I left it.” Straightening and brushing off dust and dried mud from her shirt, she wipes a hand across her damp temple. “You’re going?”
He nods, absently, in time to a distant measure.
Looking at him, she sees the same crumple-faced boy that she guarded and tortured through her entire childhood: sometimes an ally against Dean but more often the victim in all their campaigns and cruelties. He was the youngest, and she knows the feeling in her gut, in her ribcage, is pity again. The two of them knotted together in her bed. Sam never got to escape.
Either Jo steps out of the stall, or Sam steps into it, just briefly, and she pressures him back against the boards. Her hands are small on his chest, but his shirt is thin and she feels the warmth of him beating through his ribs, so she burrows under the fabric and finds the wide hot expanse of his skin. Touching chest, back, long curves of muscle that she presses hard with her fingers. Calming him, grooming him like one of her old, rutting stallions. He slumps to meet her mouth, both their eyes open - his glazed and frightened. She does not know what her eyes show, right now, doesn’t want to know. She closes them.
They don’t get caught, but even as Sam’s hands rove up under her shirt, over her breasts, even as she rubs herself over him, thighs between thighs, hips pressed tight as lips, she pulls back. She steps out of his grasp.
Sam hangs his head and breathes slow through his mouth. Jo straightens her bones back into place. Neither of them hunger for anything more than this smallest rebellion. She knows it when he looks at her again and says, “Thanks for taking us in.”
She nods her head, meaning to smile but not sure if she’s making it. “Sure.”
He steps away, out of the stall, looks to say something else, and stops himself. He doesn’t stop looking at her. Anxiety resurfaces in the fold of his brow, his hovering hands.
She wants to tell him to get in the car with his brother. Drive somewhere far away, then tell about school. Tell him and then leave him: she knows she’d do one but not the other. She’d just slip away in the night. But Sam is just a kid, compelled to honesty somehow: she knows he’ll probably do both.
He turns and leaves, and she doesn’t say anything.
But after the growl of the car has faded, the shudder of it over the dried mud track gone, she pulls the horse trailer around herself, the rumble of the Joyce’s pickup her own thunder. She loads three of them - black, bay, chestnut - into the trailer. Probably she left the house door open, probably she left the hot plate plugged in. She has fifty dollars in cash and one thermos full of stew, one of coffee.
She knows of a breeder down in New Mexico that might take the paper pedigrees off her hands. After she closes the gate, she goes back into the barn. The grey stamps in his stall and she stares at him. Her favourite, when she first came here. She steps forward and he bares his teeth and strains his neck over the door at her. He kicks the backboards of his stall and trumpets a hotblooded challenge. Distantly, she hears one of the others respond, rattling the metal trailer.
If she lets him out, he’ll kill her. Press her against the boards, bite her or trample her under his iron shoes. She hasn’t run him in over a week. She’s driven him half-mad, far past whatever made him trap her in his stall. His eyes roll white, always, his breath comes in heavy gusts.
When she reaches forward and clicks open the latch, he pauses. The stall door swings wide and it’s like his knees are locked already, a lame or crippled thing.
She hesitates, pulse throbbing, then leaves him like that, gets into the warm cab of the truck, starts the slow roll down the drive. She left the barn door open, too, so he could go even further afield. Wherever he wants. If he heads out onto the road someone will find him and discover what she’s done. If he goes out into the ranchlands he’ll starve before spring. Or maybe he’ll just stand in his open stall and wait. Wait for someone to come and feed him and untangle his mane and stroke his ears. She just knows it won’t be her.