Supernatural Fic: under the carpet
under the carpet
all roads out of los angeles are coy. it’s smart to keep cash in the register. just in case. supernatural. jo. sam. (jo/ofc, jo/dean, jo/sam-ish). general spoilers. 3,548 words, pg13. for vinylroad.
-
All roads out of Los Angeles are coy.
Her truck stands at the open end of a gas pump, under the gallon of a three fifty-nine sign, as she watches cars clump and clutter inside the mouth of highways. Panicked. Exhausted. Trapped to a routine.
She tells herself just a few days.
The city stands on stilts.
Shadows are open and wide, laughing over bowed heads as they chuckle to spit over each empty corner. It makes her uneasy, thin, and heavy with the reminder that she’s still purchasing experience with shaky hands. Still though, she learns quickly to sigh and sway, to mold her jeans into her hips within city limits and because a demon is just a demon and a city changes nothing. All blindness is warm to the universal.
It’s a small club that finds her instead, an open door extending an arm of invitation. Bodies are rolling. Heads are spinning. And the demon, living in between hips, is hunkered in the heaviness of human sweat. Jo watches for a moment, trying to lift the rhythm around her into some sort of understanding. But she’s never like how close she sometimes gets, how easy it is for them to play shades of gray when it shouldn’t be this simple. Jo remembers Ma warning her, time after time with message after message, but she was never the one with something bigger to prove.
Whether it sees her or not, doesn’t matter, because the climax of confrontation comes minutes after; the hum of excitement picks its hauntings. Her boots are always moving first, peeling her through pockets in the crowd to a small corner and the girl, the demon, and strong drink. Jo eyes the girl, the dark beads of eyes that don’t belong here, belong to this world.
“Easy, baby,” it still sighs, sullen with understanding. And the music seems to task harder, ripping a sync of names as the demon’s fingers strangle the width of her glass.
There are hands, heavy hands, and Jo with her shoulders always too tight. The Latin comes with tiny fumbles, parched against the roof of her mouth and nearly lost to the music as the brief girl returns to becoming nothing more than a tally mark. There are no heavy screams, just the city and the hips that’ll never understand.
No one is listening.
But the thrill is always sharp, peeling against the tips of her fingers as it scrapes hard against the throat of that pretty, pretty girl. To split in half, of course.
Jo isn’t clean. She never wanted to be.
The postcard finds her when she’s finished.
It’s one of those things that you buy out of the city limits, where the sky is still waving behind the truck and a dollar is just a dollar. Small, glossy edges start to smile.
It’s been a long time since she’s seen the beach.
The decision to stay come at random, long after she parks her truck and sends a week’s worth of odd jobs to the front desk of a motel away from the city’s maze to be careful.
She keeps the memories in the back of her truck, with the rest, under the supply of knives that tell her, “Jo, the hunt is nothing new.” she isn’t shaken and the argument submerged in the idealism of Ma’s constant rhetoric, the one that keeps the road lonelier than it should be.
She’s tired.
But she finds the beach along a small drive, the coast walking with her in a shy gesture of force that is only a few miles away if she needs to exercise a hard run away from here. The colors of the water follows to greet her, guiding her to a small spot with a tiny cluster of cars for company. She sees an umbrella, a family that lodges a brief memory into her throat, and the sand that opens more miles, the temptation rising heavily.
I don’t know, she thinks. And her toes are starting to curl in her boots, rubbing along the heat of her socks. Her hands stay around the wheel of the truck, the keys swaying over her knee as she tells herself to just think about it and maybe, something like only for a little while.
But her boots are ready to come off.
On the third day, his name is Jack.
The sand is easy against her heels, crawling against her skin and into her jeans. It’s about different sensations, from the shyness that she used to have back home and under bottles and bottles of stories, to the hand the road’s been giving her since she’s left. The water is new too; the array of colors that match the glossy edges of the postcard back in her room, the companion that she can’t quite give up.
But she sees him. The huge, red surfboard that glides between the licks and giggles of waves that play. The sun keeps shifting, here to there and here again, opening a raw sense of curiosity. It’s dangerous. He’s better as the hazy, the form and reminder of things that she can’t get too close to. It’s okay though, it’s okay - she keeps telling herself that this is just a little break.
Then he finds her first.
“Hey.” The grin is large, the boy’s eyes are wide and blue; the distant memory of another breaks in the back of her mind, the questions and answers only stemming from rumors. It’s just nice to see someone else and the unfamiliarity is almost romantic; Jo’s not that girl.
Her teeth still shy into her lip. “Hey yourself,” she murmurs. “Saw you out there - it was pretty good.”
The boy laughs and somewhere in between that sound, there’s i’m jack and i’m jo and she feels fourteen again with those kind of shy, shaky knees. A wistfulness seems to climb her throat, curl after curl, as she remembers that it was never a tradition in her sight. Still though, it feels a little funny and her stomach, knotted, warms into a steady stream of understanding. Just a little bit.
“I saw you watching, Jo.”
She blushes, shrugging. “Yeah, I -”
It feels funny talk to someone else, age or no age, without some sort of knife in her hand and the comfort of her truck a few feet away. The moment swallows the constant of her motel room a few miles away, locked and neat with the things the hover around her.
But all he has to say is “Wanna learn?”
The motel room is always cold.
Stateless, it doesn’t matter. Each room becomes the same room, written in a strange code for all hunters. Small towns carry the same faces and cities, if anything less, open the same wall of secrets. In habit, she waits for it to happen here. With Jack. With the water and the beach. With the people that seem to have a measure of attainable circumstances, something that she’s never really thought about since she was blinded back at home.
But it’s different here, different with the way the sand spreads against her skin and the water sinks into her hair. The cool bumps splay across her skin, over her shoulders and along her throat, to her jaw and the shivers of her lips are almost too much to be true.
She’s half in love with the waves when Jack kisses her on the eighth day, open mouth and something real pretty. Too warm to be for girl like her, too soft, and too sudden. But her hands have more of an idea and they’re curling in his hair before she says something honest like this isn’t for girl like me. She kisses back to taste the salt, the sun, and to remember the way the water lingers even when she’s deep into the sand.
It’s selfish, but Jo starts learning a smile.
She buys a phone card, in the moment, and dials her without blinking.
The beach is warmer today. The water fuller, the sun opening warmly across the sand and the string of cars that fills the parking lot. There’s laughter. Jo’s biting her lip, the anticipation rising with a wave from Jack in the distance as he waits. She doesn’t want to think about lasting periods and keeps writing the memory of everything deep in her head and in red.
On the fourth ring, it’s Ma and her voice opens the longing for home. There’s nothing like the comforts of your own corners, of people that keep your day-to-day memory on end; but the Roadhouse is gone and in ashes and Ma, her Ma, is working off a stop somewhere in between counties. Just alive and maybe well. It’s always depended on the day for Harvelle women.
“So you’re doin’ okay?”
There’s some song on in the back, whimpering a shaky riff over the older woman’s voice. It’s good to hear her. But the beach is brighter, almost losing that pang of memories. Ma remains too distant and comfortably so; the almost-surge of anger still hangs around, homesickness or not.
“Yeah,” she says slowly. “Really, Ma. Fine.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” she says again, trying not to laugh at the disbelief - it feels funny, you know, that kind of thrust-forward, eager grin that’s too ready to emerge. It’s been a long time. She doesn’t know if she believes it.
But there’s a suspicion of quiet on the other line, the yell of just a few more crisp as laughter swings behind her. There are a group of girls passing her spot, the phone in her hand. Friends with age.
Jo sighs. Ma sighs.
“I’ll come around soon,” she tries change.
Old habits stay hard, printed across headlines in the paper each morning.
She ignores every inclination to drop her walls, to tell Jack about love and lies, to confess what the road’s really taught her. So breakfast is a solitary adventure, the same place - a corner diner - to indulge in the possibility of new habits. She gets coffee, two eggs, and toast she never eats.
She sees a murder. And another. And another following another; girls with the same faces, eyes that peer back up at her and say things like remember your Daddy as if to mock her indefinitely. There’s a distant surge of strength though, even under the impression of temporary, and she stares back without moving.
“I’m gonna give this a try.”
It always sounds better out loud.
The water is quiet.
Her board is yellow, almost faded as a rental, and she sits with her legs dangling on either. They move with the water, back and forth, letting her anticipation rest for the moment. She watches the water too, the calm day rushing it against her legs and over the nose of her board. It’s almost too quiet for her, too much of a possible rush, and opening a door she isn’t sure she should see.
The skepticism hasn’t left and in the distance, she sees Jack at the foot of the sand with smile that is hers and something she feels a little funny saying. She waits though, practicing patience as slow cracks start from behind her to pan at the foot of the beach. It’s so different sitting here, watching the beach and even the road.
It’s coming, she thinks, the right time.
(Jack tells her, later, you’re getting there.)
It happens for breakfast.
There are things you can say when you’ve been on the road too long, how ghosts become people and people become ghosts. She’s carried this with her since she’s started, under the advice of Ma and the few, scattered memories of bar stories that people gave her for advice.
She’s picked a corner in the diner, away from the crowd that clusters next to the windows. It’s her table or one of them. Someone says something like it’s a beautiful day and Jo finds herself smiling shyly into the paper. Some things are strange and true. But her fingers are pressing over her stats and news, over the habits that seem unable to leave her for any moment or minute; it’s her indecision, she’d like to say, but it’s more of a practice of self.
“Jo.”
She hasn’t heard that voice in a real long time, blinking to make sure that she heard her name, her good name.
“Hey Jo.”
His shadow is long and curled; Sam not Dean, and the paper reads back the hunch in his shoulders to keep her clear. She feels her mouth start to dry, her eyes grow heavy, and her hands turn into fists over the table. She doesn’t say anything, half-hoping that shadow disappears and this is only one of those memories, full of surprise anniversaries.
But it doesn’t move.
Her eyes close and minutes lead her back to a bar, back to a time where her anger was more of a riot act. There are old whispers in her ear, churning as her stomach wakes her old knots.
“Sam Winchester,” she says softly.
Her voice is tired and just tired, the clarity of any reasons running far and fast away from the two of them. The memory makes her tight, but her exhaustion comes with the cluster of things that have defined her, the road and all her old habits.
“Can we talk?”
“No.”
She’s sharp, her eyes flying open. Out of habit, she looks for Dean. Sees no Dean, refusing to look at Sam all the same. Briefly, she thinks of Jack, of the beach, and then Dean again; there’s no such thing as amusement when it comes to any first curiosities, but Dean brings a different sense of self to her. She craves the dirt to her knees, the teeth against her shoulder, and the smears of fingers in hair. Countless fantasy after fantasy, birthed in the Roadhouse with the girl that had just as much fire as the blot of hunters that tried to sway her.
But Sam doesn’t press or try to look at her.
An envelope drops in front of her, cracking against her morning paper and the menu. She thinks eggs. She forgets eggs. She forgets the toast and coffee too. Her hands reach for the envelope and then stop, drawing back into her lap. She doesn’t want to know. Not yet, not now.
It’s a warm gesture, almost coy, and only, if she wants it to be. It’s almost the Sam of the bar, the Sam with black eyes and the Sam that changed and charged all her shades of gray. There’s a reassure for her and the road, but she’s been here too long to really appreciate it.
“I’m in town for a couple days,” he says lightly.
Her eyes close again.
To practice, she starts saying goodbye to Jack.
Slowly, the beach isn’t the same.
Her table is his, another morning.
She’s yet to open the envelope, has been letting it sit under the postcard she bought and the beach that slowly, slowly isn’t hers anymore. But it’s the first time that she gets a good look at the Sam Winchester that’s found her, the tired sneer written for his mouth and the small wave that he gives her just so that she can’t go and turn back.
“Why are you here, Sam?”
It’s the question that suddenly haunts her, the weight of her curiosity expanding back into her mind. She feels it under the tips of her fingers, even as she presses them along the table as he stays sitting and she keeps to standing.
He shrugs. “Case.”
The nonchalance is almost effortless and suddenly, she’s angry. It emerges out of her hands, into her mouth and her eyes as he doesn’t look away. She doesn’t care to ask questions, doesn’t want to ask questions, but almost too deliberate as he keeps watching her.
Case. Right, she thinks
“You’re full of it,” slowly, her mouth turns into a tight frown. “I’m not sayin’ that you can’t be here or anything, but it’s not like you -”
His hand lifts. She’s following his mouth even before he says it, watching how it curls and uncurls almost with a certain familiarity. She feels the rise of flush, broken across her cheeks in memory. It wasn’t him, she used to say, it wasn’t him and she was from a silly girl with a silly crush; there was always too much she wanted to do, wanted to learn and share. But then again, these things never mattered.
He’s too quiet when he says it.
“He’s dead.”
Her eyes narrow, not hearing him. “Right.”
There’s a tight wistfulness when his mouth turns again, brief as he shakes his head and looks away from her. She doesn’t know if she’s breathing or not, too tired and too surprised to attain some sort of reaction. There’s a press of something under her eyes, dulling as her lips tighten and her skin wakes to feeling parched without the water. It feels almost too palpable, almost to ready to hit her when she doesn’t completely grasp at what she might be hearing.
“He’s dead, Jo,” he says quietly.
She doesn’t know what to say.
There’s an envelope in your motel room, the tips of her finger say. They spread and shake in the replay of his words; he’s dead, Jo and dead means a rush of things that she doesn’t understand. It was the road. It was the burden of fathers. These things, those stories - this is where the romanticism follows, steady and hard.
Her eyes close too. She feels sand against her feet. Walking this morning, everything seemed too briefly. She almost called Ma, almost bought a second paper as if everything was already coming anyway.
Slowly though, she shakes her head. “I’m not going to be bait for old times’ sake. Or shits and giggles.”
Sam laughs. It sounds too hard.
“You look good, Jo.”
There are things that she knows how to do, that won’t forget her.
It comes too easily, the way her fingers seem to peel over the end of the envelope. She remembers things like late nights and wistful research, back when she was ready to make the world understand. But she pulls back the flat of the envelope, over her open suitcase on the bed.
Just papers.
It’s just papers and she’s staring down at her hands, at the way her palms seem to press the clippings and spells together as if to marry them. Her fingers drag over the paperclips that hold things together, that are so distinctly Sam that she just craves the purity of early memories. She sees the look over and sighs, feeling the rush slowly bridge back into her.
Her blades are dull. The truck needs gas. She’ll have to buy two papers in the morning.
What was she thinking?
Her senses are already stretched when she finds him at the diner again, the string of pages and papers the only safety she has of a brief connection.
He orders coffee at her table.
“I didn’t do this for you,” she says and still doesn’t sit, dropping a new envelope in front of him; there’s no expectation and she’s already measuring the next trip to the next state to the next kill that her hands are murmuring to have.
As he stares at her, the beach is finishing a disappearance. The color is gone, the sound, the sight, the taste - she loses the kiss too. It is that postcard, the one she buried in between old clothes and things that she’ll lose in the coming months. A former companion, if anything else. She wonders if Sam understand and briefly, doesn’t to hold that edge of slighted humanity with him.
She doesn’t want to share.
Still, his mouth seems to turn softly. There’s a warmth - maybe for her, maybe not for her, and there was a time, she remembers, that Sam might’ve been a stop of familiarity for her. There’s Dean in her head too and the rumors have yet to reach her. She could call Ma. She could look some old bar stories up. There are several of them, men and scars, littered on her way out. There is no such thing as a death certificate, only the mythology that the road holds. She has a craving for likeness though, for a brief understanding that she did something like this because she needed to breath.
It’s almost there.
The corners of his mouth fade and she’s Jo, the small pocket of a stop, another mark to use. Older, maybe wiser. She’s made out of her truck, out of the boards of ashes that once were the feet of the Roadhouse. She’s a casualty’s daughter and however deep, it’s never been between Sam and her. But then again, these things have never been for her to carry long.
He sighs finally, almost hard to hear.
“I know.”
It stays faint, the follow through of I understand written as she takes her step back. And then another. And then two more. She keeps no moment of a goodbye, her shoulders returning to low and practiced.
That morning, she remembers how not to look back.
all roads out of los angeles are coy. it’s smart to keep cash in the register. just in case. supernatural. jo. sam. (jo/ofc, jo/dean, jo/sam-ish). general spoilers. 3,548 words, pg13. for vinylroad.
-
All roads out of Los Angeles are coy.
Her truck stands at the open end of a gas pump, under the gallon of a three fifty-nine sign, as she watches cars clump and clutter inside the mouth of highways. Panicked. Exhausted. Trapped to a routine.
She tells herself just a few days.
The city stands on stilts.
Shadows are open and wide, laughing over bowed heads as they chuckle to spit over each empty corner. It makes her uneasy, thin, and heavy with the reminder that she’s still purchasing experience with shaky hands. Still though, she learns quickly to sigh and sway, to mold her jeans into her hips within city limits and because a demon is just a demon and a city changes nothing. All blindness is warm to the universal.
It’s a small club that finds her instead, an open door extending an arm of invitation. Bodies are rolling. Heads are spinning. And the demon, living in between hips, is hunkered in the heaviness of human sweat. Jo watches for a moment, trying to lift the rhythm around her into some sort of understanding. But she’s never like how close she sometimes gets, how easy it is for them to play shades of gray when it shouldn’t be this simple. Jo remembers Ma warning her, time after time with message after message, but she was never the one with something bigger to prove.
Whether it sees her or not, doesn’t matter, because the climax of confrontation comes minutes after; the hum of excitement picks its hauntings. Her boots are always moving first, peeling her through pockets in the crowd to a small corner and the girl, the demon, and strong drink. Jo eyes the girl, the dark beads of eyes that don’t belong here, belong to this world.
“Easy, baby,” it still sighs, sullen with understanding. And the music seems to task harder, ripping a sync of names as the demon’s fingers strangle the width of her glass.
There are hands, heavy hands, and Jo with her shoulders always too tight. The Latin comes with tiny fumbles, parched against the roof of her mouth and nearly lost to the music as the brief girl returns to becoming nothing more than a tally mark. There are no heavy screams, just the city and the hips that’ll never understand.
No one is listening.
But the thrill is always sharp, peeling against the tips of her fingers as it scrapes hard against the throat of that pretty, pretty girl. To split in half, of course.
Jo isn’t clean. She never wanted to be.
The postcard finds her when she’s finished.
It’s one of those things that you buy out of the city limits, where the sky is still waving behind the truck and a dollar is just a dollar. Small, glossy edges start to smile.
It’s been a long time since she’s seen the beach.
The decision to stay come at random, long after she parks her truck and sends a week’s worth of odd jobs to the front desk of a motel away from the city’s maze to be careful.
She keeps the memories in the back of her truck, with the rest, under the supply of knives that tell her, “Jo, the hunt is nothing new.” she isn’t shaken and the argument submerged in the idealism of Ma’s constant rhetoric, the one that keeps the road lonelier than it should be.
She’s tired.
But she finds the beach along a small drive, the coast walking with her in a shy gesture of force that is only a few miles away if she needs to exercise a hard run away from here. The colors of the water follows to greet her, guiding her to a small spot with a tiny cluster of cars for company. She sees an umbrella, a family that lodges a brief memory into her throat, and the sand that opens more miles, the temptation rising heavily.
I don’t know, she thinks. And her toes are starting to curl in her boots, rubbing along the heat of her socks. Her hands stay around the wheel of the truck, the keys swaying over her knee as she tells herself to just think about it and maybe, something like only for a little while.
But her boots are ready to come off.
On the third day, his name is Jack.
The sand is easy against her heels, crawling against her skin and into her jeans. It’s about different sensations, from the shyness that she used to have back home and under bottles and bottles of stories, to the hand the road’s been giving her since she’s left. The water is new too; the array of colors that match the glossy edges of the postcard back in her room, the companion that she can’t quite give up.
But she sees him. The huge, red surfboard that glides between the licks and giggles of waves that play. The sun keeps shifting, here to there and here again, opening a raw sense of curiosity. It’s dangerous. He’s better as the hazy, the form and reminder of things that she can’t get too close to. It’s okay though, it’s okay - she keeps telling herself that this is just a little break.
Then he finds her first.
“Hey.” The grin is large, the boy’s eyes are wide and blue; the distant memory of another breaks in the back of her mind, the questions and answers only stemming from rumors. It’s just nice to see someone else and the unfamiliarity is almost romantic; Jo’s not that girl.
Her teeth still shy into her lip. “Hey yourself,” she murmurs. “Saw you out there - it was pretty good.”
The boy laughs and somewhere in between that sound, there’s i’m jack and i’m jo and she feels fourteen again with those kind of shy, shaky knees. A wistfulness seems to climb her throat, curl after curl, as she remembers that it was never a tradition in her sight. Still though, it feels a little funny and her stomach, knotted, warms into a steady stream of understanding. Just a little bit.
“I saw you watching, Jo.”
She blushes, shrugging. “Yeah, I -”
It feels funny talk to someone else, age or no age, without some sort of knife in her hand and the comfort of her truck a few feet away. The moment swallows the constant of her motel room a few miles away, locked and neat with the things the hover around her.
But all he has to say is “Wanna learn?”
The motel room is always cold.
Stateless, it doesn’t matter. Each room becomes the same room, written in a strange code for all hunters. Small towns carry the same faces and cities, if anything less, open the same wall of secrets. In habit, she waits for it to happen here. With Jack. With the water and the beach. With the people that seem to have a measure of attainable circumstances, something that she’s never really thought about since she was blinded back at home.
But it’s different here, different with the way the sand spreads against her skin and the water sinks into her hair. The cool bumps splay across her skin, over her shoulders and along her throat, to her jaw and the shivers of her lips are almost too much to be true.
She’s half in love with the waves when Jack kisses her on the eighth day, open mouth and something real pretty. Too warm to be for girl like her, too soft, and too sudden. But her hands have more of an idea and they’re curling in his hair before she says something honest like this isn’t for girl like me. She kisses back to taste the salt, the sun, and to remember the way the water lingers even when she’s deep into the sand.
It’s selfish, but Jo starts learning a smile.
She buys a phone card, in the moment, and dials her without blinking.
The beach is warmer today. The water fuller, the sun opening warmly across the sand and the string of cars that fills the parking lot. There’s laughter. Jo’s biting her lip, the anticipation rising with a wave from Jack in the distance as he waits. She doesn’t want to think about lasting periods and keeps writing the memory of everything deep in her head and in red.
On the fourth ring, it’s Ma and her voice opens the longing for home. There’s nothing like the comforts of your own corners, of people that keep your day-to-day memory on end; but the Roadhouse is gone and in ashes and Ma, her Ma, is working off a stop somewhere in between counties. Just alive and maybe well. It’s always depended on the day for Harvelle women.
“So you’re doin’ okay?”
There’s some song on in the back, whimpering a shaky riff over the older woman’s voice. It’s good to hear her. But the beach is brighter, almost losing that pang of memories. Ma remains too distant and comfortably so; the almost-surge of anger still hangs around, homesickness or not.
“Yeah,” she says slowly. “Really, Ma. Fine.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” she says again, trying not to laugh at the disbelief - it feels funny, you know, that kind of thrust-forward, eager grin that’s too ready to emerge. It’s been a long time. She doesn’t know if she believes it.
But there’s a suspicion of quiet on the other line, the yell of just a few more crisp as laughter swings behind her. There are a group of girls passing her spot, the phone in her hand. Friends with age.
Jo sighs. Ma sighs.
“I’ll come around soon,” she tries change.
Old habits stay hard, printed across headlines in the paper each morning.
She ignores every inclination to drop her walls, to tell Jack about love and lies, to confess what the road’s really taught her. So breakfast is a solitary adventure, the same place - a corner diner - to indulge in the possibility of new habits. She gets coffee, two eggs, and toast she never eats.
She sees a murder. And another. And another following another; girls with the same faces, eyes that peer back up at her and say things like remember your Daddy as if to mock her indefinitely. There’s a distant surge of strength though, even under the impression of temporary, and she stares back without moving.
“I’m gonna give this a try.”
It always sounds better out loud.
The water is quiet.
Her board is yellow, almost faded as a rental, and she sits with her legs dangling on either. They move with the water, back and forth, letting her anticipation rest for the moment. She watches the water too, the calm day rushing it against her legs and over the nose of her board. It’s almost too quiet for her, too much of a possible rush, and opening a door she isn’t sure she should see.
The skepticism hasn’t left and in the distance, she sees Jack at the foot of the sand with smile that is hers and something she feels a little funny saying. She waits though, practicing patience as slow cracks start from behind her to pan at the foot of the beach. It’s so different sitting here, watching the beach and even the road.
It’s coming, she thinks, the right time.
(Jack tells her, later, you’re getting there.)
It happens for breakfast.
There are things you can say when you’ve been on the road too long, how ghosts become people and people become ghosts. She’s carried this with her since she’s started, under the advice of Ma and the few, scattered memories of bar stories that people gave her for advice.
She’s picked a corner in the diner, away from the crowd that clusters next to the windows. It’s her table or one of them. Someone says something like it’s a beautiful day and Jo finds herself smiling shyly into the paper. Some things are strange and true. But her fingers are pressing over her stats and news, over the habits that seem unable to leave her for any moment or minute; it’s her indecision, she’d like to say, but it’s more of a practice of self.
“Jo.”
She hasn’t heard that voice in a real long time, blinking to make sure that she heard her name, her good name.
“Hey Jo.”
His shadow is long and curled; Sam not Dean, and the paper reads back the hunch in his shoulders to keep her clear. She feels her mouth start to dry, her eyes grow heavy, and her hands turn into fists over the table. She doesn’t say anything, half-hoping that shadow disappears and this is only one of those memories, full of surprise anniversaries.
But it doesn’t move.
Her eyes close and minutes lead her back to a bar, back to a time where her anger was more of a riot act. There are old whispers in her ear, churning as her stomach wakes her old knots.
“Sam Winchester,” she says softly.
Her voice is tired and just tired, the clarity of any reasons running far and fast away from the two of them. The memory makes her tight, but her exhaustion comes with the cluster of things that have defined her, the road and all her old habits.
“Can we talk?”
“No.”
She’s sharp, her eyes flying open. Out of habit, she looks for Dean. Sees no Dean, refusing to look at Sam all the same. Briefly, she thinks of Jack, of the beach, and then Dean again; there’s no such thing as amusement when it comes to any first curiosities, but Dean brings a different sense of self to her. She craves the dirt to her knees, the teeth against her shoulder, and the smears of fingers in hair. Countless fantasy after fantasy, birthed in the Roadhouse with the girl that had just as much fire as the blot of hunters that tried to sway her.
But Sam doesn’t press or try to look at her.
An envelope drops in front of her, cracking against her morning paper and the menu. She thinks eggs. She forgets eggs. She forgets the toast and coffee too. Her hands reach for the envelope and then stop, drawing back into her lap. She doesn’t want to know. Not yet, not now.
It’s a warm gesture, almost coy, and only, if she wants it to be. It’s almost the Sam of the bar, the Sam with black eyes and the Sam that changed and charged all her shades of gray. There’s a reassure for her and the road, but she’s been here too long to really appreciate it.
“I’m in town for a couple days,” he says lightly.
Her eyes close again.
To practice, she starts saying goodbye to Jack.
Slowly, the beach isn’t the same.
Her table is his, another morning.
She’s yet to open the envelope, has been letting it sit under the postcard she bought and the beach that slowly, slowly isn’t hers anymore. But it’s the first time that she gets a good look at the Sam Winchester that’s found her, the tired sneer written for his mouth and the small wave that he gives her just so that she can’t go and turn back.
“Why are you here, Sam?”
It’s the question that suddenly haunts her, the weight of her curiosity expanding back into her mind. She feels it under the tips of her fingers, even as she presses them along the table as he stays sitting and she keeps to standing.
He shrugs. “Case.”
The nonchalance is almost effortless and suddenly, she’s angry. It emerges out of her hands, into her mouth and her eyes as he doesn’t look away. She doesn’t care to ask questions, doesn’t want to ask questions, but almost too deliberate as he keeps watching her.
Case. Right, she thinks
“You’re full of it,” slowly, her mouth turns into a tight frown. “I’m not sayin’ that you can’t be here or anything, but it’s not like you -”
His hand lifts. She’s following his mouth even before he says it, watching how it curls and uncurls almost with a certain familiarity. She feels the rise of flush, broken across her cheeks in memory. It wasn’t him, she used to say, it wasn’t him and she was from a silly girl with a silly crush; there was always too much she wanted to do, wanted to learn and share. But then again, these things never mattered.
He’s too quiet when he says it.
“He’s dead.”
Her eyes narrow, not hearing him. “Right.”
There’s a tight wistfulness when his mouth turns again, brief as he shakes his head and looks away from her. She doesn’t know if she’s breathing or not, too tired and too surprised to attain some sort of reaction. There’s a press of something under her eyes, dulling as her lips tighten and her skin wakes to feeling parched without the water. It feels almost too palpable, almost to ready to hit her when she doesn’t completely grasp at what she might be hearing.
“He’s dead, Jo,” he says quietly.
She doesn’t know what to say.
There’s an envelope in your motel room, the tips of her finger say. They spread and shake in the replay of his words; he’s dead, Jo and dead means a rush of things that she doesn’t understand. It was the road. It was the burden of fathers. These things, those stories - this is where the romanticism follows, steady and hard.
Her eyes close too. She feels sand against her feet. Walking this morning, everything seemed too briefly. She almost called Ma, almost bought a second paper as if everything was already coming anyway.
Slowly though, she shakes her head. “I’m not going to be bait for old times’ sake. Or shits and giggles.”
Sam laughs. It sounds too hard.
“You look good, Jo.”
There are things that she knows how to do, that won’t forget her.
It comes too easily, the way her fingers seem to peel over the end of the envelope. She remembers things like late nights and wistful research, back when she was ready to make the world understand. But she pulls back the flat of the envelope, over her open suitcase on the bed.
Just papers.
It’s just papers and she’s staring down at her hands, at the way her palms seem to press the clippings and spells together as if to marry them. Her fingers drag over the paperclips that hold things together, that are so distinctly Sam that she just craves the purity of early memories. She sees the look over and sighs, feeling the rush slowly bridge back into her.
Her blades are dull. The truck needs gas. She’ll have to buy two papers in the morning.
What was she thinking?
Her senses are already stretched when she finds him at the diner again, the string of pages and papers the only safety she has of a brief connection.
He orders coffee at her table.
“I didn’t do this for you,” she says and still doesn’t sit, dropping a new envelope in front of him; there’s no expectation and she’s already measuring the next trip to the next state to the next kill that her hands are murmuring to have.
As he stares at her, the beach is finishing a disappearance. The color is gone, the sound, the sight, the taste - she loses the kiss too. It is that postcard, the one she buried in between old clothes and things that she’ll lose in the coming months. A former companion, if anything else. She wonders if Sam understand and briefly, doesn’t to hold that edge of slighted humanity with him.
She doesn’t want to share.
Still, his mouth seems to turn softly. There’s a warmth - maybe for her, maybe not for her, and there was a time, she remembers, that Sam might’ve been a stop of familiarity for her. There’s Dean in her head too and the rumors have yet to reach her. She could call Ma. She could look some old bar stories up. There are several of them, men and scars, littered on her way out. There is no such thing as a death certificate, only the mythology that the road holds. She has a craving for likeness though, for a brief understanding that she did something like this because she needed to breath.
It’s almost there.
The corners of his mouth fade and she’s Jo, the small pocket of a stop, another mark to use. Older, maybe wiser. She’s made out of her truck, out of the boards of ashes that once were the feet of the Roadhouse. She’s a casualty’s daughter and however deep, it’s never been between Sam and her. But then again, these things have never been for her to carry long.
He sighs finally, almost hard to hear.
“I know.”
It stays faint, the follow through of I understand written as she takes her step back. And then another. And then two more. She keeps no moment of a goodbye, her shoulders returning to low and practiced.
That morning, she remembers how not to look back.