Broken Families, Broken Ties
Summary: Jo, Jo, Jo.
Disclaimer: Kripke
Genre: General (Angst, drama, comedy, romance, etc.)
Characters/Pairings: Bill Harvelle, Ellen Harvelle, Jo Harvelle, Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester, John Winchester, Ash, a number of OMC's, and Bobby Singer is mentioned. Also: wee!chesters
Rating: PG-13 for adult language, adult situations, sex, drugs & rock 'n' roll.
Word Count: 2,723
Author's Note: I firmly believe that the Harvelles have known the Winchesters the whole time. *lalala* In other words, AU. Thank you very very much to my betas:
velvet_midnight and
opheliahydeWritten for the
1sentence, theme Alpha
1. Comfort
Her momma tells her on days when her daddy is away that, he’ll come back, and, they’ll be safe, but Jo knows that she and her momma will only find true comfort and relief when he’s back in the Roadhouse with them, his huge arms wrapped around them, the soft feel and smell of the old leather brushes over them.
2. Kiss
Her daddy’s familiar warm breath goes over her cheek, his harsh beard and stubble rubs over her soft baby skin as his firmly kisses her forehead; she thinks it’s the best kiss she’ll ever receive.
3. Soft
She clutches at her momma’s waist, resting her head against her breast, and she breathes the scent of her mother in. (the soft, womanly smell she knows so very well, and the gun smoke, the cigarettes, the hard alcohol) It’s the best smell, sweet with a soft touch of danger, that she’ll ever know.
4. Pain
She stands inside the doorway of her momma’s bedroom and watches as her mother dabs at the blood that runs down her thighs, crying dry tears of grief as she clutches her other hand around her daddy’s jacket, empty and ghostly looking on the dirty wooden floorboards.
5. Potatoes
Jo picks at the creamy mush that takes over most of her plate and sighs inwardly. (she never liked the gooey substance, but for the time being it’s all her mother is making) It is, it was her daddy’s favourite.
6. Rain
There’s a man who comes in from the rain; a great big hulking man with kind, hard eyes and a dark, gravely voice. Her momma is cold to him. Jo doesn’t know why, but she likes his leather jacket a lot.
7. Chocolate
He sits at the bar, the only customer they have that night, drinking Jack and eating a bar of chocolate. He sees her watching, smiles familiarly, as if he’s used to small children staring at him hungrily, and he offers her a piece of the chocolate.
8. Happiness
He boards with them for two weeks; making her momma and her happier than they’ve been in months. He leaves one day and appears two days later with two of the unhappiest looking kids she had ever seen (not that she had seen many kids, she is only eight).
9. Telephone
She sees them clutching at the phone in the main room ever so often, talking to their father half a country away. (she wishes she could do that.)
10. Ears
There are many flaws in the Winchester boy’s faces; Sam’s eyes are too big and emotional, Dean’s too small and cold, the random splattering of freckles over his cheeks and nose, more annoying than adorable. The ears that boys share are small and dainty, are the only things that make them look related, only things that seem normal about them.
11. Name
The boys seem so small and delicate as they lay in the beds with lumpy mattresses dispersed randomly through her room; John looks like the only one who can live up to the family name.
12. Sensual
Jo spends a lot of time behind the bar while her momma serves drinks to the hunters; she hears them tell tales about women they had met on the road they’ve been on, women who would do anything. Jo gets confused when her momma comes into her room at night and tells her to ignore what the men said. Those women who weren’t real women at all.
13. Death
A hunter her momma knew well, an old friend of her father, dies out in Washington. She leaves the Roadhouse and Jo grudgingly under the care of the Winchesters (there’s only enough money for one plane ticket, less then enough money for gas); they close the bar and go out. He teaches the three kids how to shoot a crossbow; Jo and Sam accidentally take down a deer.
14. Sex
She wanders through the house sometimes late at night, stops outside her momma’s room and listens to the noises inside; half silenced moans, the old springs in the mattress squeaking roughly, the deep rumble of a man in there coaxing and swearing. Jo doesn’t understand.
15. Touch
She sees John touch Ellen sometimes and doesn’t know how to react; she sees Sam’s confusion, sees Dean’s hate. She doesn’t know why Dean could hate her momma so much, doesn’t see why he hates Jo herself so very much.
16. Weakness
Jo goes to her momma meekly, slouched down, “Momma,” she says when her mother finally looks at her, “I want to go to school- Sam and Dean do, too,” she says hastily when her mother gives her a strange look. Ellen lets out a shaky breath, nodding and looking away, “I’ll get you enrolled, then.”
17. Tears
Sam and Dean stand stoically at the bus stop, and Jo clutches at her momma’s jacket, scared with tears slowly coming down her eyes. The bus comes and opens its doors; Sam climbs up the steps, Dean tears her away from her momma and drags her up the stairs, forcefully telling her that if she wanted this she should be able to take it.
18. Speed
Sam and Jo sit quietly on the bus; Jo staring out the window, worried and oblivious, Sam only half paying attention to his book as Dean lectures him, not even relenting to the way the bus speeds down the highway, pushing at everyone to move. He goes on and on about safety, talking quickly and quietly because his stop his speeding up closer, strange people are with them on the bus, Sam and Jo will be all alone, “and most of all,” Dean finishes, moving in closer to Sam, “take her care of her because if anything happens to her Ellen will kick us out and we’ll be leaving again, okay, so just take care of her.”
19. Wind
The harsh wind buffets at the two small children as they stand outside the elementary school shivering; they’re both in fourth grade, Sam just shy of the fifth grade birthday limit, Jo just above the third. Sam tugs on her sleeve, giving her a reassuring smile because he’s done this before, he knows how tough it is, and he stretches his hand out to her. She takes it, and they walk up the stairs, Dean’s words of, “take care of her, take care of each other above all else,” echoing through Sam's minds.
20. Freedom
John Winchester teaches Sam and Jo how to drive when they turn twelve; Jo loves to drive, to feel the power under her, to feel the freedom it gives to drive and drive and never have to stop.
21. Life
Even though thirteen is far too young to have the proper freedom of a driver’s license and to notice deep, philosophical meanings in everything, she thinks that the song “Life is a Highway” suits her perfectly.
22. Jealously
It’s taken Jo six years to realize that whenever John gets home and hugs Jo first, Dean bristles with jealously and hate; he won’t speak to her for days because if he did he knows he would curse and shake her, and try to make her leave them.
23. Hands
At fifteen, Jo finally begins to notice boys a bit differently; the way a hunter clutches as a beer bottle, the way Dean grips at the steering wheel, the way Sam’s hands, fingers long and lean, look wrapped around a novel, and the way they feel spreading out across almost the entire width of her back when he pushes her gently ahead of him in the crowded halls of their high school.
24. Taste
The first time she has Sam’s taste in her mouth and on her skin, it’s an accident; he and Dean had been brawling and Sam, in disgust, turned to leave. Jo had run up behind the two of them to stop the fight and when Sam turned they made impact, Sam completely knocking her over, heads colliding, mouths brushing and Sam’s hot hand placed somewhere between bottom of ribcage and collarbone.
25. Devotion
Her first real boyfriend scares her more than she lets on; he’s overly devoted and is something akin to a stalker. Dean takes him down before he tries to do anything stupid. (His head sure made a huge indent on the porch railing out in front of the Roadhouse).
26. Forever
She stands on the porch, hands on her hips, glaring blackly at the boy who slouches away from her, “You’re a bastard, Tom Evans, leave this place and don’t you ever fucking come back!”
27. Blood
It’s a weird feeling of déjà vu she thinks about later when she lays in her boyfriend’s bed, the sticky, hot feeling of blood and cum slowly travel down her thighs; she tries not to think about it, tries not to think about her mother’s disapproval and disappointment when Jo will tell her she’s one of “those women”, the women her mother had warned her never to become.
28. Sickness
When Jo pukes one morning a few weeks later she prays that it was just the bad egg salad sandwiches that Dean made the night before that caused her to heave up the contents of her stomach, and not what she had been doing with Sean.
29. Melody
A hunter in the empty parking lot plucks out a sad tune on his guitar, the lonesome melody wafting through the open window; an intense feeling of loneliness overwhelms her. Sam is doing his math homework diligently beside her, and she lays her head on his shoulder, praying that she'll never be lonely again.
30. Star
They lean against the hood of the Impala; her head pillowed on her arms, his on her stomach. A bright light flares in the sky as soon as she blinks at the unexpectedness of it; Sam chuckles low in his throat, murmuring the words “make a wish.” against her hot skin, fevered in the unusual fall heat. She wishes she isn’t pregnant- her wish comes true.
31. Home
“This is the best home I’ve ever known,” Dean says in all honesty as he hugs Jo tightly against him, “The best the three of us knew.” It doesn’t stop them from leaving.
32. Confusion
Jo mopes for a week, moving listlessly through the house and main bar; seeing them here, smelling them there, remembering. They never explained why they left.
33. Fear
She gets a message on her answering machine late in her senior year; it’s full of static, rustles, screams - her name is said, hushed, hurried, and a random assortment of numbers she can’t figure out. “Hurry,” it says. She packs and leaves that night without even knowing where she’s going.
34. Lightning/thunder
When she figures out the numbers and gets to West Indian, Texas, it’s in the middle of a huge thunderstorm so strong she can’t even see straight. She sees the Winchester men chained to the trees, unconscious, by a flash of lightning, hears the Wendigo first before thunder. She whips around, loading shells into her sawed off, her flare gun lighting in her other hand, and shoots before the Wendigo even leaps upon her.
35. Bonds
The iron bonds that are wrapped around her boys’ wrists are thick; she has to melt them off so they can come free. They’re glaring sourly at the Wendigo carcass. She asks them if she can come with them; one gruff, unhappy look from John coupled with Dean’s disappointed and resigned expressions, shared with Sam’s worried eyes and nervously biting lip, she backs off, clearly knowing she isn’t wanted in their strange little family. She should go back to her mother before the hurt becomes too much.
36. Market
Her pain becomes unbearable rage; Sam’s 1985 DeLorean (flux capacitor not included, she thinks grimly) is out front with a ‘For Sale’ sign plastered in it’s front window before she even thinks twice.
37. Technology
She’s back home at the Roadhouse two weeks later, having taken the long way home, did a couple salt & burn’s along the way. There’s a man behind the register when she walks in the door, his plaid shirt with cut off sleeves hanging open on his bare chest, his long hair pulled up sloppily in his beat up ball cap, the letters MIT stitched obviously across the front; he’s fixing the register for her momma, making everything run smoothly.
38. Gift
“He has a gift,” her momma tells her proudly, watching him as he snores softly on the pool table, “He’ll be a great help for when you go to do…,” she sighs and turns away from her daughter, walking away, her words coming back to Jo faintly, whatever it is you do.
39. Smile
Her momma calls her when she’s in California at school, says Sam and Dean burst in the door the hour before, intensely excited; she said their smiles faded when they noticed that Jo wasn’t there to meet them. Jo smiles to herself, suddenly missing them.
40. Innocence
Sam and Dean show up at her apartment days later. They sleep together; Sam curled against her back, breath snuffling in her hair, and she spoons against Dean’s back, breathing him in, breathing them in. The three of them, she thinks, feels right.
41. Completion
They help her pack up her things and move back into the Roadhouse; she’s home again, she thinks when she breaths in the familiar smell of the place she knows so well. She feels complete.
42. Clouds
Jo lies down on the ground as the sun begins to set, watches as the sky turns pink, purple, and orange; she’s in love with the sunset, fascinated by the beauty of it, wonders only vaguely in the back of her mind why the rest of the world isn’t as beautiful as that.
43. Sky
She stands outside, the rumble of thunder and heat lightning echo through her ears; she runs out to dance as the skies open, and then the rain comes pouring down. Ash joins her.
44. Heaven
His arms are wrapped around her waist, long limbs moving with unexpected grace, and she looks up at him, breath hitching with desire and want, “Sam,” she whimpers, listening to him groan under her touch as she fingers rove up his spine and neck, “will you show me heaven?”
45. Hell
She wasn’t there when John Winchester died for his eldest son, wasn’t there when the Roadhouse burned, when Sam lost, when Dean gives his soul away; she’s in her own personal Hell, trying to deal with all the shit that happens to heart at once. Ash is dead, her mother might be, Dean is with a hunter their fathers had known, trying to find his - her- their Sammy; she tries to find him too.
46. Sun
She stands in the sunrise in Mississippi, feels it brush over her skin; no one writes, no one calls, no one tries to contact her at all. She doesn’t cry, but her heart slowly dies.
47. Moon
It’s a full moon outside when she’s in Okalahoma City, she doesn’t notice, she’s slaughtering a clan of werewolves.
48. Waves
He finds her in Washington state, looking over cliffs and into the Atlantic Ocean, “I died,” he tells her, watching her watch the waves. “Sam,” she says dully, “I am dead.”
49. Hair
He brushes his hands through her hair, smells it, and holds her close; her heart beats (beats) painfully.
50. Supernova
They lay in the after shock, breathing in time, limbs entwined; there’s a supernova outside that they miss. There’s a supernova inside, her heart beats again.
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