Supernatural FIC: Sore Loser (Mockingbird, Christmas 2007)
Title: Sore Loser (Mockingbird, Christmas 2007)
Author: hiyacynth
Fandom: Supernatural
Genre: Het
Characters/Pairings: Sam/Jo with cameos by Dean, Ellen, and Bobby
Rating and Warnings: PG-13 for some bad language.
Spoilers and timeline/universe notes: Backstory to Mockingbird and therefore set in that universe. Ergo: Mentions of events through "Born Under a Bad Sign;" breaks into AU just before the Season 2 finale(s). This story will probably make sense without having read Mockingbird, but it won't have as much oomph (assuming, of course, that I've achieved any oomph at all).
Word count: ~9,000
Disclaimer: Kripke and the CW own Supernatural. I do not. I do, however, own a vintage one-bedroom condo near Chicago, and probably won't make any profit off of it, either.
Summary: "I don't want your money, Sam," Jo informed him. All humor was gone from her face. "If I win, you quit apologizing." Her voice was kind but serious. "About last spring. About our dads. Just… treat me like a person again."
Acknowledgements and notes: Massive thanks and groveling to janglyjewels for her immeasurable patience as I struggled with RL and muse issues while fulfilling her Sweet Charity request for a story that was a continuation of Mockingbird. When I first started realizing I'd gotten in over my head by saying I'd continue the story, she allowed as how a story set in the universe would suffice, and that's when baylorsr gave me the idea of writing Sam and Jo's Mockingbird backstory. Thanks to pdragon76 for her excellent, insightful, and entertaining beta(s), and for enabling my "{{omg I can haz transition sentence plz?}}" notes to myself. Last but not least, eternal love and gratitude to liptonrm, who gave me Supernatural almost three years ago and has been talking me off fic-shaped ledges ever since.
Christmas 2007
From the spot he had staked out next to the pinball machines and arcade games, Sam could see the whole bar. He was still getting used to the new décor at Harvelle's Roadhouse, and the seasonal decorations made it even less familiar.
Ellen had stopped trying to pass off her establishment as a real bar months ago, when the demon activity had surged and the hunters who frequented the place started talking about getting organized. Everyone could see that the evil looming on the horizon was turning into a much bigger picture than the random, relatively small-scale evil they usually fought. Since October, Ellen had been working to make the Roadhouse as demon proof as a place could get without rebuilding it in iron and salt: Devil's Traps were painted on the inside walls above every door and window, she'd installed converted hanging wagon-wheel light fixtures, and every visitor was treated to a shot of holy water with a whisky chaser.
Ellen Harvelle wasn't one to fuck around when it came to looming demonic conflict, but she was still a hostess at heart, and she'd still managed to dress up her place up for the Christmas Eve strategy meeting. Strings of colored lights framed the windows and winked over the bar. Tinsel hung copiously from the pentagrams that replaced the more traditional spokes in her new lighting, and red bows had been stapled along the ceiling beams. There was even one of those creepy animatronic Christmas villages set up on an antique Hoosier cabinet near the bar; Sam thought the Santa circling the town on his train looked like it should have gotten a shot of holy water with the rest of them.
The crowd that stuck around for the party after the brainstorming session was the largest he'd seen here. The bar was populated by hunters drawn through the complicated network that wove its way through the country's underground by word of mouth and concern over the Yellow-Eyed Demon's recent statement of purpose. There weren't many in the room who knew the bastard's fierce interest in Sam Winchester, but even so, Sam was keeping a low profile. He felt less than comfortable in a room full of hunters juiced up on a long day of laying battle plans followed by an evening of cheap drinks and rowdy camaraderie and competition.
"Hey." A sharp jab to Sam's lower arm broke his reverie, and he looked down and left to see Jo Harvelle assessing him. "You gonna shoot, or just lean there all night?" she asked, gesturing at the 10-Point Buck game propping him up.
Sam shifted out of her way. "Sorry. No seats left. Busy night."
Jo knocked her elbow against the fake rifle mounted at the business end of the game's screen. "Yeah. Good turnout." She leaned in over the rifle's scope, sighted on the opening display, and shot Sam a sideways glance. "You got a dollar?"
Sam dug through his pockets, which yielded a tangle of bills, detached one from the wad, and handed it over. In a practiced motion, Jo smoothed the bill over the corner of the arcade game, expertly neatening it up enough to slide into the feeder.
"Thanks. You wanna play?"
Sam looked around uneasily. No one was watching them, and the only person in the room who would have given the two of them talking a second a thought was shoulders deep in the darts tournament.
Jo's raised eyebrow carried a clear challenge, but Sam was sure it extended beyond her proposed deer-slaughter show down. In fact, what she was really demanding was he pretend, as she'd asked him last summer, that a demon hadn't taken over his body and used it to beat, bind, and torture her.
"Uh. Yeah. Okay."
She slapped the two-player button and leaned over the plastic rifle mounted on the game's front end, lining up her opening shot. "Okay. But none of that letting me win 'cause I'm a girl crap," she warned.
Jo started out strong, nailing three shots in a row before an orange-vested guy popped out on screen and distracted her enough that she went wide with her fourth, winging her leaping target. The line of her lips thinned, and she bullseyed the next one, winged the one after that, and then brained a fawn.
"Shit," she hissed, then stepped away from the rifle and gave her hands a violent series of shakes as if to clear their muscle memory. "You're up."
It took a couple of wasted shots for Sam to get used to the setup. The gun was mounted about a foot too low for him, but he found a suitable squat and scored four hundred points with his third shot. By then he'd adjusted to compensate for the shitty scope, but he took his time, firing only when he was sure of his target and trying to extrapolate how the situation's awkwardness would be affected by either his beating Jo or losing to her.
Ten minutes into the game Sam noticed the tight flex of Jo's elbow as it jerked too hard and then watched as her prime target bounded, unharmed, off the screen. He felt a flash of comprehension followed by a flare of irritation when Jo's next shot clipped the orange-cammo'd hunter who kept stumbling in and out of range. Jo huffed, put the guy out of his misery, and dropped her rifle arm, stepping back so Sam could take over.
"Well, go on," she urged, waving impatiently. She finally looked up and met Sam's glare; her eyes widened. "What?"
"Are you hustling me?"
The innocent expression fell abruptly off Jo's face, and she cocked her head in challenge. "Are you letting me win?" she retaliated.
Under her steady stare Sam struggled briefly with whether to deny it and then gave in with an exasperated laugh. "Okay, jeez!" He slapped the Reset button and fished out another dollar and handed it over. "No bullshit this time."
The stubborn expression on Jo's face eased into a satisfied, self-confident smile. "No bullshit." She dipped into her pocket and withdrew a quarter, which she laid on the thumb of her loosely fisted hand. The coin tilted, but she stopped short of flipping it and caught Sam's eye again. "But we've gotta find a way to keep things interesting. And honest."
Sam went for his pocket again. "I've got…"
"I don't want your money, Sam," Jo informed him. All humor was gone from her face. "If I win, you quit apologizing." Her voice was kind but serious. "About last spring. About our dads. Just… treat me like a person again."
Sam's throat seized as he swallowed hard. He choked back the apology that leapt reflexively to his lips. "Okay."
Jo's smile was back, as was the teasing lilt in her voice. "All right. And if you win?"
Sam didn't hesitate. "You let me apologize."
Jo tipped her head, considering the stakes, and her bright hair shimmered along with Ellen's decorations. "Fair enough," she agreed and reset the quarter. "Call it."
"Heads."
Jo caught and presented the coin; Washington's profile glinted at them, and Jo gestured to the rifle. "Bring it."
She beat him in the end, but not by much. When the final scores scrolled up the screen, Jo slid her gaze left and up and let it rest skeptically on Sam's face. He gave the plastic rifle an annoyed slap and frowned defensively at Jo's unspoken accusation.
"What? Stupid thing's completely unrealistic. The scope's a joke, and I keep overcompensating because it's got no kick at all. Not to mention it's built for midgets. I practically put my back out."
Jo smirked, the same look he remembered her aiming at Dean the first day they met-right after she'd nearly broken his nose.
Sam felt his mouth and eyebrows twist into the expression Jess called the Wet Cat. "Hey, you wanna do this for real, I'm there. You get some bottles and a real gun and I promise I'll kick your ass."
Jo's mouth eased out of its grin, and she shook her head. "No thanks. I'm good with how this ended. Tell you what, though. I'll buy you a drink to take some of the sting out of telling your brother you lost to a girl, and you can practice not apologizing."
"I'll see what I can do," Sam promised dryly. At the barward tilt of Jo's head, he followed as she broke a path through the crowd packed six deep between the darts tournament and the bar. Sam elbowed them some space at the bar and watched, eyebrows arching with bemusement, as Jo clacked shot glasses down next to the pints glasses she'd filled with beer. Rather than fighting her way back, she boosted herself onto the bar and swung her legs over, dropping neatly onto the stool Sam had nudged clear of its former occupant, who appeared drunk enough to not notice the change in scenery.
"Cheers," she said, knocking her shot glass against Sam's before tossing its contents back with the same practiced, steady motion Sam had seen her mother use.
Sam followed suit, then took a slow, appreciative drink of his beer to clear the burn of Jack from his throat. Not sure how to start the small talk, he surveyed the crowd. "It's weird," he concluded after a couple of minutes.
"What is?"
Sam took another sip of beer and used his glass to draw an arc that encompassed the whole of the Roadhouse and the motley crowd that filled it. "There's so many of them."
Jo followed his gesture with a slight frown. "Who, hunters?"
"Yeah. The way my…" He paused, gauging her reaction, forcing himself not to avoid the subject or apologize for bringing it up. "The way my dad told it, we were practically the only ones doing the job. I mean, we knew a few people. Bobby, Jim Murphy, a couple others. We thought Caleb was just one of Dad's old buddies from the war, but he was probably dealing munitions to half the hunters in this room." He took another swallow of the bitter, hoppy brew. "And Dean and I-we never knew. Even when Dad was a regular here." Sam drew deep on his beer, pulling that line of discussion short before it reached the first Winchester-Harvelle disaster. He was working on it, but bet or not, he couldn't go there directly.
Jo seemed to sense his hesitation; her tone was light. "I guess it just goes to what my dad told me. You put any five hunters in a room and you'll find twelve flavors of crazy sonofabitch when you come back."
Sam sniffed in amusement. "Your dad said that?"
Jo's smile was wry. "Yep. On my eighth birthday, when Travis Keeler welched on his promise to teach me to shoot his crossbow."
"Your dad sounds like a smart guy."
"He was."
"I'm s-" Sam saw Jo's eyes narrow and clumsily rerouted. "I'm shot. I mean, I could use another shot. You?"
Jo rewarded him with a wide display of white teeth and hooked her heels on the rung of her stool so she could stretch across the bar and retrieve the half-empty bottle of Jack.
"You know," Sam mused as she poured, "I think your dad's formula works for my-" The crowd behind them erupted in cheers, pulling Sam's attention away from his introspection. Dean was making such a show of his disappointment at his voluptuous opponent's bullseye that Sam suddenly understood the exact nature of the hustle his brother was running.
"What?" Jo shouted over the noise, which had turned into rhythmic chanting that showed no signs of decreasing in volume. Sam repeated his observation twice, but Jo just frowned and squinted at him. Finally she threw back the shot she'd just poured and nodded at Sam to do the same. "C'mon," she shouted, closing her hand around the bottle's neck. "Too damn many people in here."
She jumped lightly from her stool and made a determined line through the clutch of hunters between them and her apparent goal-the swinging doors behind the bar. Sam hesitated a moment before launching himself after her.
He'd been back here before, he realized as the doors swung shut behind him. More than a few times, but he'd never bothered to take in the details. The sudden appearance of Ellen and the revolver she'd leveled at his head had blocked them out the first time, and later he'd been too busy tracking Ash down-and occasionally purposely fogging his vision to avoid the full Doctor Badass monty. Now he noticed the transition from a working bar to a home-a few framed pictures on the wall of the hallway that passed a nonpublic bathroom with elderly flowered wallpaper, a full and heavily sagging bookcase at the foot of the stairway Jo had started to climb.
Sam stopped, right foot on the first step, and watched the amber liquid slosh in the bottle as Jo reached the second floor and turned around.
"What're you waiting for, a chaperone?" she asked impatiently. "Come on."
"I dunno…"
Jo rolled her head back and sighed heavily at the ceiling for a moment before shaking her head down at Sam. "Fine. Go back to skulking around the party, welcher."
"I'm not-" Sam stifled his protest with a quiet, frustrated noise and started up the stairs. "I wasn't welching," he said when he'd hit the second-to-last step and his face was level with hers. "I was just-"
"Sore loser?" Her eyebrows sprung into a mischievous curve that reminded Sam weirdly of his brother.
Sam took the last two stairs in one stride and spread his hands in like-toned inquiry. "Are you gonna stand around finishing my sentences wrong all night, or did you have some other master plan going?"
Jo smiled and raised the bottle, then used it to point to the second door on the left side of the hallway. Sam tipped his head in acquiescence, and she smiled sweetly and strode past him, toeing open the unlatched door and waving him in. He stood blinking in the dark for a second before the room lit with the accompanying click of a chain-pull light switch. Turning to survey the room in the dim, rosy light, Sam saw a beaded pink tassel swinging under an equally pink lampshade on the bedside table, which also housed a neatly graduated line of gleaming silver knives. He felt his mouth stretch into a smile as he laughed softly, and she followed his gaze.
"What?"
"Just…" Sam waved at the table. "Not the lighting I'd expect for a set of blades like that."
Jo shrugged and blushed slightly. "I'm still a girl, you know," she pointed out, as if that explained everything, and maybe it did.
Her room was pretty, he thought. The lamp was the most overtly girly touch, but the rest was nice without being fancy. The bed was draped in a white quilt with a pattern of pastel fans, and the simple wooden furniture had the comfortable, lived-in sheen that suggested generations of use.
"Sit," she suggested, taking the empty shot glass from his hand as she nodded toward the bed and set their bottle on the low bench in front of the dressing table.
Sam eyed the bed, but flopping down on it felt too familiar. He compromised, lowering to the floor, where he arranged himself on the rag rug and leaned back against the bed's foot. Jo didn't fuss, just handed him his refilled glass and sipped lightly at the one she'd poured for herself.
"So, what were you saying before?" Jo asked. "Downstairs."
It took a moment for Sam to trace his way back. "Oh, just that your dad's formula works for my family, too. There's only three of us, but together we make at least twelve kinds of sonofabitch." He winced, catching his error. "Two," he corrected softly and then tried to turn it into a joke. "Still, I think the total holds. Pretty sure Dean and I got second helpings when the fucked-up was going around."
"Most hunters did."
"I guess," Sam said, drawing in a tiny sip of whiskey and savoring it to keep from saying any more. Jo was watching him.
"You guys aren't so bad," she concluded. "You have your charms."
Sam gave a quiet, amused sniff. "Dean has his charms, you mean." He lifted his eyes from his glass to gauge her reaction, and was pleased to see that she didn't look annoyed or heartbroken.
"Please. I'm so over your brother." She waved her hand dismissively. "I mean, yeah, I admit it. I had it bad for a while there." She flicked her eyes down in a way that told Sam she was downplaying of the degree of 'bad' from which she'd suffered. "But…" Jo shifted on her bench, tucking one foot under her other leg as she thought. "I dunno. All my life I wanted to be just like my dad. And when he died, my mom… Well, you saw what she thought about me hunting. Anyway, in walks Dean, and he's, like, the classic hunter type, except- Well, you know..."
Sam had to work hard to keep his eyes from rolling. "Yeah," he said tightly. "I know."
"Oh, untwist, would you?"
He felt the tension across his shoulders and mentally conceded her point, looking for a way to draw focus away from his reaction. "So, what changed things?"
The instant it was out, Sam wished the question back. Of all the jackass things to ask. But Jo's gaze was steady and without accusation.
"It's not what you think." She sounded sad, and that made Sam want to apologize more than ever. "I mean, it is, a little. But mostly it's that I grew up, you know? I realized there were more important reasons for doing the job than proving to my mom that I could, or living up to this hero image I had of my dad-and your dad, too, Sam. I remember him from before. Or showing all the hunters I'd spent half my life pouring full of beer that I could do the job as well as them, even if I was just a girl." She lifted her glass but didn't drink from it. "And I guess I finally worked out how messed up it is to fall for someone who's not only exactly like what you imagine your dad was, but thinks of you as a little sister."
Jo's cheeks were splotched with color, her knuckles white around her shot glass. Sam surprised himself by chuckling, and judging by the exasperated laugh that preceded her explosive, "What?" it surprised her, too.
He shook his head, smile widening, though he didn't feel like laughing anymore. "I'm just counting the crazy sonsofbitches in the room. You hold your own."
"What can I say?" she asked ruefully. "I am a hunter, after all."
"Your dad would be proud," Sam said, and though it sounded like a joke, they both knew it wasn't.
They sipped at their drinks for a minute, and then Jo said casually, "You know everyone down there's just like you, right?"
Tilting down the last of his Jack, Sam shook his head. "Just like Dean, maybe. Not like me."
"Oh, right. Because you're so special."
He set down his glass and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "But I am."
"Maybe," Jo said. "But that doesn't make you not a hunter."
Sam was skeptical. "I bet if more of the people down there knew about me, they'd disagree."
Jo frowned. "Gordon Walker's got a philosophy all his own."
Sam's spine straightened instinctively at the name. "My brother agreed with Gordon until the freak he was hunting turned out to be me. My father was making plans to have me put down if I got out of control." His voice was hard and bitter, and he hated it. Hated how it betrayed the fear and anger he struggled to keep in the dark place where he locked it.
"So, that's why you were moping around down there instead of enjoying the party?"
"Pretty much." Sam's retort still had an edge, but it was finer, more controlled now.
"Well, cut it out," Jo suggested curtly. "We're all in this together, Sam, and like it or not, you're a big, fat key part of whatever that bastard demon has planned."
"I don't want to be a key part of it!" His cheeks heated in embarrassment at the childishness of his emphatic statement.
"Tough shit." Jo's nose crinkled with her sour, exasperated expression. The last of her whiskey went back fast, and she leaned forward, elbows on her knees and empty glass clutched in her right hand. "You think any of us want the freakin' demon army taking over the world? But you heard what Bobby said. All the signs point to that happening in the new year. So we have to use everything we've got. And if what we've got is your freaky brain's window into that demon's world, then I say we use it to figure out what the fuck he's got planned and stop it." She kicked out, jabbing her boot-tip-Jesus, were those steel caps?-into his calf for punctuation. "Drink your drink," she added almost kindly,
There was a gulp and a half of Jack in the bottom half of his glass, but Sam stretched it into five slow, shallow sips to fill the time. When he'd finished, he licked his lips and rolled his head against the side of Jo's mattress, looking up at her. Motivational speech finished, she was leaning back casually, watching him with her elbows propped on the dressing table.
"People are going to die," Sam said simply.
"I know that."
"No. You think you do, but you don't."
Jo slid off her bench, bringing the bottle with her, and sat cross-legged at Sam's knees. She reached across his lap and retrieved the abandoned glass, which she filled and handed back, eyes steadily on his. "Tell me what you think I don't know."
Sam set the shot glass down without drinking. "It's not just 'people,' it's those people-" He rapped twice on the floor to drive the words home. "-down there. People we know."
"I know."
Sam felt the skin on his chin twitch and pressed his lips together to control the tic, then opened enough to squeeze out a quieter elaboration. "People we love."
Jo's coffee-dark eyes didn't waver, but Sam couldn't hold her gaze. He looked down at the rag rug and intently studied the corner that curled out from under his right butt cheek. He picked idly at its folded seam, wondering who in this building would be the next to die, how long it would take before the Yellow-Eyed Demon cut to the chase and made a statement by taking out Dean or Bobby. How long until he figured out what Ellen and Jo were up to-recruiting every hunter anyone'd ever heard of-and started picking off friends, old and new alike. He flinched when Jo touched him-her small, rough, white hand lighting on his knee and drawing his attention upward.
"Sam," she said in a voice only a shadow louder than a whisper. "I know."
When Sam looked up, he was surprised and embarrassed by the soft, intensely sympathetic look on Jo's face. Dean was right. He really was the most gigantic girl in the whole world.
"God, I'm sorry," he muttered, shifting his legs so she'd remove her hand, and then jerked again at the stinging backhand slap she laid across his haunch. "Ow! Hey."
"Hey, yourself, welcher," she said, and he had to smile at the playful curl of her lips.
"All right. You got me. What's the penalty for breaking the terms of the bet?"
Her eyes drifted contemplatively up and to her left. "Let me think…" She leaned toward Sam in a conspiratorial manner that made him stretch his neck so he could hear.
What he got instead was her hand sliding from his shoulder onto his neck and her whiskey-flavored lips pressed firmly against his own. He felt three of his heartbeats thud against her fingertips before he pulled back.
"Don't, Jo. We can't."
She dropped back and away, eyebrows raised in a querulous arc. "Why not?"
He almost laughed in disbelief, instead making a noise that sounded like a cat sneezing. "Like, a million reasons, that's why."
"Name one."
Sam sputtered, "I can't just-"
"And if you say I'm like your kid sister, I will filet you where you sit."
"I don't-" Sam protested quickly but inarticulately. "That's not why."
"Well?"
"Well nothing. It's just…" He tried to look somewhere other than her expectant, intent face, but all his eyes found was the wide scoop of her shirt's neckline and the expanse of pale, soft-looking skin, dappled pink at the base of her throat and slightly shadowed with the curves of her breasts. That view didn't help his argument. "I'm not…" He stopped himself before he said his brother's name. "I don't just randomly sleep with people. And you're-"
She stretched an arm toward the bedside table. Amid his unease Sam caught the scent of her deodorant or perfume mixed with a slight tang of sweat and something else beneath the two that made him flush. Jo froze, hand hovering, probably waiting on his response to pick the appropriate knife.
"You're a friend," he finished. "A...comrade or something. I don't want to fuck that up."
"That's bullshit." Jo lowered her arm, but the click of relief Sam felt at the gesture ratcheted into a disorienting mix of alarm and distressing desire when she swung a leg across him and dropped onto his thighs.
"What're you…" Sam protested more weakly than he'd intended. He raised his hands to move her off but couldn't find a place to touch her that wasn't going to exacerbate things. "You're killin' me here."
She nodded as if in agreement and put her hands on his shoulders but didn't scoot any closer. "Look at where we are, Sam," Jo urged, looking earnestly into his face while she spoke. "Look at what all these people are doing here. The end is coming. For better, I hope, but probably for worse. And however it happens, odds are good that a lot of us aren't going to make it. Why shouldn't we have some fun before we go?"
"Jeez." The word was half groan, half laugh. "Nice pep talk, Pollyanna."
The statement broke through some of his confusion, and he put his hands on the outside of her shoulders and pushed, gently, up and back. Jo's weight eased off his lap, and Sam thought she was going to let him move her, but then she shrugged him off and plopped back onto his legs, tilting her head curiously.
"When was the last time you got laid?"
Sam clamped his lips shut before an indignant, embarrassed sputter could escape. He cast out for some way to respond without answering, eyes moving to the empty glass she'd left on the dressing table. His fourth shot was sitting full next to him, and she hadn't refilled hers after finishing her third. He could feel the alcohol warming his blood, but it hadn't had enough time or company to affect him much otherwise. Of course, he had about a hundred pounds on Jo, and he didn't know how much she'd had before she'd kicked his ass across the 10-Point Buck game.
"How drunk are you?" he asked.
She made an exasperated face and snorted dismissively. "Not," she said-a bit too loudly-and then amended her denial with a concessionary roll of her eyes. "Not very."
"I rest my case." Sam put his right arm on the mattress and lifted his butt a few inches.
"You rest nothing," Jo contradicted, shoving his hand off her bed. Sam's ass hit the floor again.
"I'm not gonna take advantage of a girl who's too drunk to know what she's doing," Sam insisted, but despite her earlier fumble, Sam could tell Jo wasn't as far gone as that.
"I know that, Lancelot. But if you think my momma didn't teach me how to hold my liquor well enough to not screw some hot guy after three shots and half a beer then you're dumber than you look. Because if the apocalypse is coming, I'll be damned if that two-minute wonder of a loser trucker in Minnesota is going to be my last lay. Seriously."
Sam blinked at her, trying to parse through the rush of words. Finally he gave up. "Huh?"
Jo blushed and slumped a little. "Shut up. And for the record, I'm buzzed and horny, not drunk and stupid. And my point still stands."
"What point was that?" he asked, teasing, though he knew he shouldn't. God, she was pretty. He'd always thought so-you'd have to be blind not to.
She ticked them off on her fingers. "I'm not too drunk. You're hot and I like you. If the world ends before I get properly laid again I'm gonna kill myself. And never, ever sleep with truckers."
Sam had to laugh, couldn't help himself. Encouraged, Jo scooted forward a bit-not enough to cause either of them any embarrassment. So far, he'd maintained control of his body's reaction to her proximity and attractiveness, but he wasn't sure whether that wouldn't just offend her more. She put her hands on his chest and ran the tips of her index fingers around the corners of his shirt's pockets.
"So? What about you?" she asked in a soft voice, much calmer now.
"Me? I never went through the trucker phase, so I couldn't say."
She smirked, and Sam's resolve melted another degree.
"I mean, when did you last…?"
Sam flinched. The warmth spreading through him recoiled as the memory struck him, cold and hard as the barrel of the pistol he'd used.
"I don't want to talk about it," he said sharply, and Jo's eyebrows drew together at his tone. Sam looked away as soon as he realized it was concern on her face, not irritation.
"Oh, God. Did that demon…" She didn't finish the question, but Sam knew what she was asking.
He shook his head, though he couldn't know for certain. They'd hit free STD clinics for several months after to be safe, but Sam remembered swaths of most of the days Meg rode him and had gotten to know her well enough that he was fairly confident that if she had decided to fuck her way across the country in his body, she would've made sure he knew about it.
"What was her name?" Jo asked quietly.
Sam sighed and thought about reminding Jo that he didn't want to talk about it. He didn't think she'd care. "Madison," he acquiesced. "Her name was Madison." He flicked his eyes up to Jo's and held them until he was sure she understood that he wasn't using the past tense simply because he'd known Madison last year. Jo pressed her hands gently against his chest and then dropped them to her thighs.
"She was smart and beautiful and funny," Sam said in a dull voice. "And I couldn't save her, so I shot her through the heart instead."
He could feel Jo shifting, lifting her weight as if to finally pull away from him, but she was only reaching for the full shot glass next to them. She took a shallow sip, then took his hand and pressed the drink into it.
"What couldn't you save her from?"
Sam downed the whiskey without tasting it. "It doesn't matter." He clacked the glass to the floor preemptively. "And it doesn't change what I did." But it wasn't just the things he'd done or hadn't done; it was who he was. "It doesn't change the fact that they're both dead because of me."
He hadn't meant to bring Jess into it, but she was always there, never more than a few threads away in any thoughts he wove together.
"Those things," Jo said in a soft but firm voice. "They aren't about you. You know that, right?"
Sam made the only noise he could-a harsh, half-swallowed scoffing sound. What bullshit.
"Fine. It's a little bit about you. But that's because you're a hunter. This job can't exist without collateral damage. I mean, it practically exists because of the collateral damage, right? Who do we know that just woke up one morning and went, 'Ghosts and demons are bad. I think I'll spend my life killing them'? No one. Every hunter's story's got a bloody, sad start. It's why we're all crazy sonsofbitches. "
She was trying so hard. Sam turned his hands and closed them around hers, terrified at how they simply disappeared between his palms, careful not to latch around her wrist the way Meg had.
"Look," he said in a tight, quiet voice, "I know you think you know how things work. But it's not the same with me, okay? It's just not. We're not just some family who lost someone to a random monster. The Yellow-Eyed Demon-the one who is right now plotting to wipe humanity off the planet-that particular demon has been fucking with my family since I was six months old. Maybe since before I was even born. And whatever else he did to me, it seems like he threw in a bonus treat of turning anyone I …" He stalled momentarily, trying to find a verb that wasn't crude or angry or laughably sappy. "I'm with into collateral damage."
He took a breath to try to smooth down the anger rising in his chest and throat and noticed that his knuckles were white, clutched around Jo's hands and wrists despite his earlier attempt at gentleness. With a sniff and a loosening shrug of his shoulders, Sam unclenched his fingers and tapped them lightly against Jo's before drawing away.
"I don't want that to happen to you," he finished simply.
Jo's weight shifted slightly as she slumped. "Wow," she said, and then-thank God-finally moved off Sam's lap and deftly turned to sit on the floor next to him, leaning as he was against her mattress. When she'd settled, Jo drummed her drawn-up knees with her fingers. "Okay, I get it now."
Sam cast his eyes sideways, skeptical. His "Really," came out too flat to be a question.
Jo's solemn profile tipped in confirmation. "Yep. But it's much more serious than I thought."
Hearing the irony in her voice, Sam drew his feet up and started to stand, but she caught his arm and pulled. "It's not a joke, Jo," he snapped as his butt hit the floor yet again.
"I know. I'm sorry, okay?" She kept her hand on his arm and swiveled so she was facing him again. Her voice was sincere. "Sam. I know that all of this is huge-for everyone, but especially for you. And I know that I can't understand what you've been through, what it must've been like to lose your girlfriend the way you did."
"How do you know how she-"
"Everyone knows, Sam. Well," she adjusted, "not everyone, but you can bet that while you and Dean were off running down that clown thing, we were doing some research. Your dad didn't keep how your mom died a secret, and when we saw about the fire in Palo Alto and the date, it wasn't hard to put two and two together, even without the specifics."
"Oh." It was so hard to remember that his father had a history with this family beyond having botched Bill Harvelle's last hunt.
"But listen, because that's not the point. The point is that even if I don't know how it feels to have those exact things happen to people you love, I do know what's going on here." She waited for him to refute her, but Sam just listened, tired and sad. "I get that you're afraid. And I get that you really do think you have some kind of curse on you. And maybe you do in a way because you've had this demon dogging you your whole life."
Her hands, which had been punctuating her speech, hung palm-up above her knees for a moment as if weighing the possibility of a curse. She let them rest as she continued.
"But however you want to put it, whatever you think, I promise that you and me getting our groove on before the shit hits the fan? Is not going to trigger the apocalypse. The apocalypse doesn't give a crap about who any of us sleeps with. Even you, Sam Winchester."
She stared at him, clearly waiting for a response, but he had none. Finally she elbowed him, and he rolled his eyes and made a half-hearted "go on" motion with one hand because he knew she couldn't not at this point.
"I know you, Sam. And I trust you. You just have to trust yourself. I promise-I'm not going to burn up or need shooting tomorrow if you have sex with me. Assuming I was even still in the mood, which is questionable because my God, you can kill a buzz deader than anyone I've met."
Sam felt his mouth pull up at one corner, and he snuck a look at her from under the hair that had fallen over his eyes. "How am I the buzzkill here?" he asked. "I haven't said a word in, like, five minutes."
"It's a nonverbal thing. A vibe." Her mouth curled in spite of her obvious effort to keep her face straight. "Seriously, though. Me, not me-whoever. But are you really just never gonna have sex again because you think your dick's got a death curse on it? Join the priesthood?"
Sam closed his eyes and let his head fall against the mattress. Of course he wasn't planning to be a priest. Who planned for that, except priests? He just didn't want anyone else to get hurt because of him. Sure, he got horny, checked out girls, jerked off in the shower when he stood a chance of having ten minutes without Dean pounding on the door demanding to know what was taking him so long. Sure, he missed sex. But more than that, he missed the specific kind of sex he and Jess had, the ease they'd found together that was comfortable without losing passion or slipping into routine. And since the hunter lifestyle pretty much ruled out the possibility of developing a relationship where that kind of sex happened, Sam found that he just didn't spend a lot of time worrying about when he was going to get laid next.
He studied the inside of his eyelids for several more seconds and then groaned and opened his eyes, rolling his head to look at Jo.
"If I answer the question, can we please, please stop talking about this?"
"Maybe," she teased. Jo's grin was back, slanted and playful and appealing.
"I don't want to be a priest. And I didn't mean to be a buzzkill. It's just another fun Sam Winchester perk."
He struggled against the familiar feeling of hopelessness swelling in his chest. Why bother with any of it, he wondered fatalistically. Even if the world didn't end, the fight ahead was going to be bloody and deadly. Everything they knew could be burnt away around them-more collateral damage. Sam looked around Jo's room again, appreciating its lived-in comfort, and felt another surge in his chest. Stubborn anger, pushing back against the encroaching sense of doom. Security in the knowledge that Dean would be at his side no matter what. Strength from the band of hunters that would grow into an army of their own. Comfort taken with his friends. The realization that he wasn't alone.
As if to prove the point, Jo nudged a finger against his forearm, drawing his attention back.
"Thanks, Jo," he said awkwardly into the heavy silence his brooding had rolled out into the room. "I like this. Being here, talking." Sam met her eyes briefly, then dropped his gaze back to the tassels on the rag rug. "I like you."
Jo's snicker rolled Sam's eyes right back up.
"What?" he demanded, but she kept laughing. "Shut up!"
She dipped her head and curled her hands delicately at her throat. "I like you, too, Sam," she simpered. "Wanna go to homecoming with me?"
Sam forced back the smile that threatened to spread and felt his cheeks heat up. "God, you're aggravating!" he complained. "I just…" His smile broke free as he took in the warmth and energy radiating from Jo with her laughter. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed, teeth bright behind the pink bow of her lips. The combination of scents lingering around her jostled his senses again, and the heat from his face spread downward. "I just like you," he said again, slower this time. "That's all."
He lifted a hand and rested it experimentally on her thigh, just above her knee, then waited to see whether the world would end.
It didn't, but Jo's laughter died out abruptly. Sam looked up from his hand to find her watching him with an expression that mixed amusement, surprise, and anticipation.
"Me, too," she said. Without any motion that Sam could detect, Jo was suddenly closer to him. Their legs pressed against each other.
"I want…" Sam's throat felt funny-thick and tight. It made it hard to speak, but there was one thing he had to get out. "But it can't change everything."
Jo's smile was different now, not the toothy, playful grin she'd assailed him with all evening. It was soft, and her eyes were steady and clear. "Just for tonight," she agreed. "Christmas present."
Sam slid his hand farther up, the damp stick of his palm slowing his progress along her jeans. When he felt her belt against his fingertips, his hand twitched involuntarily.
"Sure?" he asked.
"I'm sure." Jo reached across him to pick up Sam's other hand. "Nothing's going to happen, Sam," she promised.
Sam brought their hands to her waist and then pulled her whole body toward him. She moved easily, raising a leg to settle back onto his lap, where she'd started this whole proposition.
"Nothing bad," he amended, and then he let his hands move up her narrow, wiry back until his fingers twined in her hair. Kneeling astride his thighs, Jo's face was level with Sam's for once, making it easy to pull her body tight against his and kiss her experimentally.
After a minute or two, Jo pulled on Sam's wrists and urged his hands down, stopping them when they covered her breasts. She arched into his touch, which added a pleasant pressure to the weight resting against his growing erection.
"Yeah," she said in a musing voice, "I think this might just work out for both of us."
She stood up, keeping hold of Sam's hand and urging him up and around the side of her bed, where she sat, her impish grin back as she made quick work of her boot laces. Sam toed off his sneakers and socks to the sound of the heavy thunks of Jo's boots hitting the wooden floor. She stood up again and plucked open the middle button of Sam's shirt with one hand while she pulled the beaded chain of the bedside lamp with the other, dropping a curtain of dark around them.
Moving instinctively, Sam's hand snapped out and caught the chain while it was still swinging. A quick tug brought back the warm cone of light.
"Like watching?" Jo asked, voice thick with mischief.
Sam settled onto the bed, knees bent outward to keep his feet from spilling off the end. He caught Jo's hand and pulled gently until she was stretched out on top of him.
"I don't want to be in the dark," he told her, and watched as her smile drew in too close to see.
***
Sam woke with a start to a soft buzzing in his ear. He jerked away from the warm mass next to him and squinted in the dark.
"Shhh!" A small, calloused palm scraped over his mouth as Sam's eyes adjusted enough to make out Jo's face, propped in her other hand as she leaned on one elbow above him. "My mom just got into the shower. You've got about twelve minutes before she goes downstairs to start the coffee."
Sam pushed himself up, taking the sheet that had been draped modestly across Jo's chest with him. She clutched it back, and Sam averted his eyes, getting to work on the part of their arrangement where their gift exchange didn't change anything between them. He toed through the pile of clothes next to the bed until he came up with his boxers, slid them on as discreetly as possible, and then stood to put on the rest of his clothing.
After creeping down the edge of the creaky staircase, Sam slid quietly through the kitchen and into the bunkroom he and Dean had staked out when they'd arrived. Dean's bunk was as fresh and unused as Sam's. He quietly set his shoes on the floor, pulled back the top bunk's Army blanket and sheet, and lifted himself onto the mattress. Sam lay back and closed his eyes, listening to the early morning noises until he heard Ellen's progress as she tackled the breakfast preparations.
He must have drifted off because the next thing Sam heard was a ruthless pounding on the door.
"Dean! Sam!" The door flew open and Bobby leaned into the narrow room. "We gotta go."
Sam jerked upright, shrinking as he felt his hair snag on the low, unfinished ceiling. "What?"
"Where the hell's your brother?"
Sam mumbled a safely nonspecific, "I dunno."
"Well?" Bobby regarded Sam impatiently for a few seconds and then swept his hand out into the hallway. "Go find him. We gotta see a guy in Yankton." He was halfway to the kitchen before Sam had located his shoes.
Ellen waved Sam over when he emerged. "Looks like you boys're getting your Christmas breakfast to go, huh?"
"Yeah, I guess," Sam replied, self-consciously combing his fingers through his bed head. "I, uh… You seen Dean?"
Ellen tipped her head knowingly. "Check the truck lot out back," she suggested. "My bet's on the rig with the crossbow painted on the cab."
Sam nodded his thanks and went out the back door to the frozen lot, filled with trucks, vans, and RVs of various sizes. A quick scan revealed the big rig Ellen had described. He knocked on the frosted driver's-side window, tentatively at first, but with more urgency when he heard the kitchen door creak open and saw Bobby scowling in his direction from the back stoop.
"Dean! You in there?"
There was an answering thud from the inside of the cab, above Sam's head. "This'd better be good, Sammy."
"Bobby says we gotta go." Met by silence from within, Sam stretched up and pounded the wall of the cab where he suspected the rig's bunk to be. "Move your ass, man. Whatever it is, it's got Bobby in a rush. I'm gonna go pack up our stuff."
Sam crunched back across the icy dirt lot and into the kitchen, where he found a steaming mug of coffee waiting on the counter nearest the door. He took a moment to sip appreciatively and murmur thanks to Ellen, and then carried it into the bunkroom. Through the thin walls, he heard Ellen greet Jo, and the roll of their voices combined with the clanking of metal as they worked.
A savory breakfast-flavored wave of smell greeted Sam when he stepped out a few minutes later, making his stomach growl. His empty coffee mug dangled off his left index finger, and he set the bags down so he could refill it from the huge urn.
"Hey," Jo greeted him, but anything she might have added was cut off by the blast of cold air that preceded Dean from the parking lot.
The collar of Dean's leather coat was twisted under itself and his t-shirt was hanging wrong, exposing a stripe of octopus-sucker bruises winding up one side of his neck. His eyes were shadowed and heavy, and the bow in his legs was broader than usual, turning his gait into a strut. Sam hoped he wasn't wearing his own lucky streak as obviously.
"This'd better be good," Dean reiterated in a grumble just as Bobby stuck his head through the swinging doors that lead into the barroom.
"You boys ready?"
"Bobby Singer," Ellen admonished him, "you can just wait three minutes until I finish some breakfast to take with you. Jo," she directed, pointing at Dean, "coffee."
Jo was already on it. She pressed a smoking mug into Dean's hand and stepped to his left to peer curiously out the back door's window, then made a closer assessment of Dean, who was slurping gratefully at his coffee.
"You dog," she concluded with a grin that might have made Sam secretly envious the day before. "You let Dreah win, didn't you?"
"Me?" Dean looked affronted. "Sweetheart, I never let anyone win. Though once in a while I do allow them to believe I've lost."
"You're a menace," Jo told him. "And I'm going to tell Dreah that as soon as I see her."
She threw him a warning look and went back to the stove where their breakfast was sizzling impatiently. Meanwhile, Bobby waved them over.
"What's up?" Dean asked after another pull on his coffee.
"Got a call from a guy says he's got a demon locked in his storm cellar keeps runnin' his mouth 'bout how the end is neigh and he's a crucial player in the master plan."
"Whose master plan?" Sam asked, but Bobby just shrugged.
"'S why we're goin' to Yankton."
"All right," Ellen said as she and Jo joined them, bearing several foam take-out boxes. Ellen handed one to Bobby. "You got egg and bacon sandwiches in here, plus extra everything on the side. Forks, too."
Jo pushed a box at Dean with an overly sour look that made Dean smirk again, and then moved past him to Sam. Their eyes met for the first time since he'd left her laughing quietly in her bed as got ready to sneak past Ellen's room. Jo treated him to her old grin along with the foam box full of breakfast.
"Sorry. No home fries on short notice." She stretched onto her toes and put one arm around Sam's torso, tilting her head up to plant a firm kiss on his cheek. "Merry Christmas, you buzzkill."
"Thank you," Sam replied, trying to infuse his casual response with deeper meaning without raising any suspicion. "Merry Christmas, Jo." He pecked her on the cheek in return.
Ellen waved them through the doors into the bar, currently serving as a dormitory for drunken hunters. She led them onto the front porch and blew into her hands.
"Go on, get going," she ordered after a few moments of awkward lingering. "Fat lotta good we'll be against the apocalypse if we freeze to death on my front porch." She spread her arms, fingers waggling and snapping, and the three men scurried for a quick round of good-bye hugs.
"Be careful out there," Ellen said as she pulled the storm door open again. "And keep in touch. Call if you need anything."
"Likewise," Bobby replied over his shoulder.
Sam cast his eyes toward Jo one last time, and she gave him a small, private smile paired with a slight lift of her chin and eyebrows.
"Bye." He addressed it to both women but kept his eyes on Jo. "Thanks again."
"Bye, hon," Ellen said. Jo waved and followed her mother inside.
Sam jogged to catch up with Dean and Bobby in time to receive a thump on the shoulder and an admonishment against idiocy before Bobby swung into his car and gunned the engine.
"So," Dean said, conversationally. "I figured I was gonna have to dodge your cockblocking last night, but it looks like Buzzkill Winchester was busy spoiling someone else's happy ending. Who was Jo after, anyway? That guy Martin? With the teeth?" He hooked his two first fingers in front of his mouth in illustration.
"What? No." Sam frowned at his brother's presumption. "She can do better than that. Besides, that's not what she meant."
Dean raised his eyebrows as he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. "Oh no?" He rounded the Impala's hood. "It's open."
Sam cranked the back door open and tossed his duffle onto the back seat.
"What then?" Dean asked after he'd cranked the engine. He let the car idle, warming up.
"Nothing. She just…" Sam squinted through the snow-speckled windshield at the windows of the Roadhouse, watching for a blur of yellow that might be Jo's hair. "She beat me at Ten-Point Buck and got all huffy when I pointed out it's a totally unrealistic setup and I'd kick her ass in a real shooting contest."
Dean gave the Impala a little more gas, gauged the reaction, and put her in reverse. "Good to see things normal between you two," he said as he swung the car around. "Normalish, anyway." He nosed the car into the tracks Bobby'd left in the snow-dusted drive.
"Yeah," Sam agreed and cast a quick sideways glance to try to gauge whether Dean suspected anything. His brother wore a familiar, distant smirk-undoubtedly caught up in sex-nostalgia.
Dean sensed Sam's attention and shook his head, smirk spreading into a satisfied smile. "You let her win?" he asked. "Jo," he clarified.
Sam shook his head. "Nope."
"You gotta give it a try next time," Dean urged him, waggling his eyebrows. "I'm telling you. Best bet I ever lost. Cramped quarters and all."
"Nah," Sam said, "It's not like that. Besides, I'll get her next time."
end
Author: hiyacynth
Fandom: Supernatural
Genre: Het
Characters/Pairings: Sam/Jo with cameos by Dean, Ellen, and Bobby
Rating and Warnings: PG-13 for some bad language.
Spoilers and timeline/universe notes: Backstory to Mockingbird and therefore set in that universe. Ergo: Mentions of events through "Born Under a Bad Sign;" breaks into AU just before the Season 2 finale(s). This story will probably make sense without having read Mockingbird, but it won't have as much oomph (assuming, of course, that I've achieved any oomph at all).
Word count: ~9,000
Disclaimer: Kripke and the CW own Supernatural. I do not. I do, however, own a vintage one-bedroom condo near Chicago, and probably won't make any profit off of it, either.
Summary: "I don't want your money, Sam," Jo informed him. All humor was gone from her face. "If I win, you quit apologizing." Her voice was kind but serious. "About last spring. About our dads. Just… treat me like a person again."
Acknowledgements and notes: Massive thanks and groveling to janglyjewels for her immeasurable patience as I struggled with RL and muse issues while fulfilling her Sweet Charity request for a story that was a continuation of Mockingbird. When I first started realizing I'd gotten in over my head by saying I'd continue the story, she allowed as how a story set in the universe would suffice, and that's when baylorsr gave me the idea of writing Sam and Jo's Mockingbird backstory. Thanks to pdragon76 for her excellent, insightful, and entertaining beta(s), and for enabling my "{{omg I can haz transition sentence plz?}}" notes to myself. Last but not least, eternal love and gratitude to liptonrm, who gave me Supernatural almost three years ago and has been talking me off fic-shaped ledges ever since.
Christmas 2007
From the spot he had staked out next to the pinball machines and arcade games, Sam could see the whole bar. He was still getting used to the new décor at Harvelle's Roadhouse, and the seasonal decorations made it even less familiar.
Ellen had stopped trying to pass off her establishment as a real bar months ago, when the demon activity had surged and the hunters who frequented the place started talking about getting organized. Everyone could see that the evil looming on the horizon was turning into a much bigger picture than the random, relatively small-scale evil they usually fought. Since October, Ellen had been working to make the Roadhouse as demon proof as a place could get without rebuilding it in iron and salt: Devil's Traps were painted on the inside walls above every door and window, she'd installed converted hanging wagon-wheel light fixtures, and every visitor was treated to a shot of holy water with a whisky chaser.
Ellen Harvelle wasn't one to fuck around when it came to looming demonic conflict, but she was still a hostess at heart, and she'd still managed to dress up her place up for the Christmas Eve strategy meeting. Strings of colored lights framed the windows and winked over the bar. Tinsel hung copiously from the pentagrams that replaced the more traditional spokes in her new lighting, and red bows had been stapled along the ceiling beams. There was even one of those creepy animatronic Christmas villages set up on an antique Hoosier cabinet near the bar; Sam thought the Santa circling the town on his train looked like it should have gotten a shot of holy water with the rest of them.
The crowd that stuck around for the party after the brainstorming session was the largest he'd seen here. The bar was populated by hunters drawn through the complicated network that wove its way through the country's underground by word of mouth and concern over the Yellow-Eyed Demon's recent statement of purpose. There weren't many in the room who knew the bastard's fierce interest in Sam Winchester, but even so, Sam was keeping a low profile. He felt less than comfortable in a room full of hunters juiced up on a long day of laying battle plans followed by an evening of cheap drinks and rowdy camaraderie and competition.
"Hey." A sharp jab to Sam's lower arm broke his reverie, and he looked down and left to see Jo Harvelle assessing him. "You gonna shoot, or just lean there all night?" she asked, gesturing at the 10-Point Buck game propping him up.
Sam shifted out of her way. "Sorry. No seats left. Busy night."
Jo knocked her elbow against the fake rifle mounted at the business end of the game's screen. "Yeah. Good turnout." She leaned in over the rifle's scope, sighted on the opening display, and shot Sam a sideways glance. "You got a dollar?"
Sam dug through his pockets, which yielded a tangle of bills, detached one from the wad, and handed it over. In a practiced motion, Jo smoothed the bill over the corner of the arcade game, expertly neatening it up enough to slide into the feeder.
"Thanks. You wanna play?"
Sam looked around uneasily. No one was watching them, and the only person in the room who would have given the two of them talking a second a thought was shoulders deep in the darts tournament.
Jo's raised eyebrow carried a clear challenge, but Sam was sure it extended beyond her proposed deer-slaughter show down. In fact, what she was really demanding was he pretend, as she'd asked him last summer, that a demon hadn't taken over his body and used it to beat, bind, and torture her.
"Uh. Yeah. Okay."
She slapped the two-player button and leaned over the plastic rifle mounted on the game's front end, lining up her opening shot. "Okay. But none of that letting me win 'cause I'm a girl crap," she warned.
Jo started out strong, nailing three shots in a row before an orange-vested guy popped out on screen and distracted her enough that she went wide with her fourth, winging her leaping target. The line of her lips thinned, and she bullseyed the next one, winged the one after that, and then brained a fawn.
"Shit," she hissed, then stepped away from the rifle and gave her hands a violent series of shakes as if to clear their muscle memory. "You're up."
It took a couple of wasted shots for Sam to get used to the setup. The gun was mounted about a foot too low for him, but he found a suitable squat and scored four hundred points with his third shot. By then he'd adjusted to compensate for the shitty scope, but he took his time, firing only when he was sure of his target and trying to extrapolate how the situation's awkwardness would be affected by either his beating Jo or losing to her.
Ten minutes into the game Sam noticed the tight flex of Jo's elbow as it jerked too hard and then watched as her prime target bounded, unharmed, off the screen. He felt a flash of comprehension followed by a flare of irritation when Jo's next shot clipped the orange-cammo'd hunter who kept stumbling in and out of range. Jo huffed, put the guy out of his misery, and dropped her rifle arm, stepping back so Sam could take over.
"Well, go on," she urged, waving impatiently. She finally looked up and met Sam's glare; her eyes widened. "What?"
"Are you hustling me?"
The innocent expression fell abruptly off Jo's face, and she cocked her head in challenge. "Are you letting me win?" she retaliated.
Under her steady stare Sam struggled briefly with whether to deny it and then gave in with an exasperated laugh. "Okay, jeez!" He slapped the Reset button and fished out another dollar and handed it over. "No bullshit this time."
The stubborn expression on Jo's face eased into a satisfied, self-confident smile. "No bullshit." She dipped into her pocket and withdrew a quarter, which she laid on the thumb of her loosely fisted hand. The coin tilted, but she stopped short of flipping it and caught Sam's eye again. "But we've gotta find a way to keep things interesting. And honest."
Sam went for his pocket again. "I've got…"
"I don't want your money, Sam," Jo informed him. All humor was gone from her face. "If I win, you quit apologizing." Her voice was kind but serious. "About last spring. About our dads. Just… treat me like a person again."
Sam's throat seized as he swallowed hard. He choked back the apology that leapt reflexively to his lips. "Okay."
Jo's smile was back, as was the teasing lilt in her voice. "All right. And if you win?"
Sam didn't hesitate. "You let me apologize."
Jo tipped her head, considering the stakes, and her bright hair shimmered along with Ellen's decorations. "Fair enough," she agreed and reset the quarter. "Call it."
"Heads."
Jo caught and presented the coin; Washington's profile glinted at them, and Jo gestured to the rifle. "Bring it."
She beat him in the end, but not by much. When the final scores scrolled up the screen, Jo slid her gaze left and up and let it rest skeptically on Sam's face. He gave the plastic rifle an annoyed slap and frowned defensively at Jo's unspoken accusation.
"What? Stupid thing's completely unrealistic. The scope's a joke, and I keep overcompensating because it's got no kick at all. Not to mention it's built for midgets. I practically put my back out."
Jo smirked, the same look he remembered her aiming at Dean the first day they met-right after she'd nearly broken his nose.
Sam felt his mouth and eyebrows twist into the expression Jess called the Wet Cat. "Hey, you wanna do this for real, I'm there. You get some bottles and a real gun and I promise I'll kick your ass."
Jo's mouth eased out of its grin, and she shook her head. "No thanks. I'm good with how this ended. Tell you what, though. I'll buy you a drink to take some of the sting out of telling your brother you lost to a girl, and you can practice not apologizing."
"I'll see what I can do," Sam promised dryly. At the barward tilt of Jo's head, he followed as she broke a path through the crowd packed six deep between the darts tournament and the bar. Sam elbowed them some space at the bar and watched, eyebrows arching with bemusement, as Jo clacked shot glasses down next to the pints glasses she'd filled with beer. Rather than fighting her way back, she boosted herself onto the bar and swung her legs over, dropping neatly onto the stool Sam had nudged clear of its former occupant, who appeared drunk enough to not notice the change in scenery.
"Cheers," she said, knocking her shot glass against Sam's before tossing its contents back with the same practiced, steady motion Sam had seen her mother use.
Sam followed suit, then took a slow, appreciative drink of his beer to clear the burn of Jack from his throat. Not sure how to start the small talk, he surveyed the crowd. "It's weird," he concluded after a couple of minutes.
"What is?"
Sam took another sip of beer and used his glass to draw an arc that encompassed the whole of the Roadhouse and the motley crowd that filled it. "There's so many of them."
Jo followed his gesture with a slight frown. "Who, hunters?"
"Yeah. The way my…" He paused, gauging her reaction, forcing himself not to avoid the subject or apologize for bringing it up. "The way my dad told it, we were practically the only ones doing the job. I mean, we knew a few people. Bobby, Jim Murphy, a couple others. We thought Caleb was just one of Dad's old buddies from the war, but he was probably dealing munitions to half the hunters in this room." He took another swallow of the bitter, hoppy brew. "And Dean and I-we never knew. Even when Dad was a regular here." Sam drew deep on his beer, pulling that line of discussion short before it reached the first Winchester-Harvelle disaster. He was working on it, but bet or not, he couldn't go there directly.
Jo seemed to sense his hesitation; her tone was light. "I guess it just goes to what my dad told me. You put any five hunters in a room and you'll find twelve flavors of crazy sonofabitch when you come back."
Sam sniffed in amusement. "Your dad said that?"
Jo's smile was wry. "Yep. On my eighth birthday, when Travis Keeler welched on his promise to teach me to shoot his crossbow."
"Your dad sounds like a smart guy."
"He was."
"I'm s-" Sam saw Jo's eyes narrow and clumsily rerouted. "I'm shot. I mean, I could use another shot. You?"
Jo rewarded him with a wide display of white teeth and hooked her heels on the rung of her stool so she could stretch across the bar and retrieve the half-empty bottle of Jack.
"You know," Sam mused as she poured, "I think your dad's formula works for my-" The crowd behind them erupted in cheers, pulling Sam's attention away from his introspection. Dean was making such a show of his disappointment at his voluptuous opponent's bullseye that Sam suddenly understood the exact nature of the hustle his brother was running.
"What?" Jo shouted over the noise, which had turned into rhythmic chanting that showed no signs of decreasing in volume. Sam repeated his observation twice, but Jo just frowned and squinted at him. Finally she threw back the shot she'd just poured and nodded at Sam to do the same. "C'mon," she shouted, closing her hand around the bottle's neck. "Too damn many people in here."
She jumped lightly from her stool and made a determined line through the clutch of hunters between them and her apparent goal-the swinging doors behind the bar. Sam hesitated a moment before launching himself after her.
He'd been back here before, he realized as the doors swung shut behind him. More than a few times, but he'd never bothered to take in the details. The sudden appearance of Ellen and the revolver she'd leveled at his head had blocked them out the first time, and later he'd been too busy tracking Ash down-and occasionally purposely fogging his vision to avoid the full Doctor Badass monty. Now he noticed the transition from a working bar to a home-a few framed pictures on the wall of the hallway that passed a nonpublic bathroom with elderly flowered wallpaper, a full and heavily sagging bookcase at the foot of the stairway Jo had started to climb.
Sam stopped, right foot on the first step, and watched the amber liquid slosh in the bottle as Jo reached the second floor and turned around.
"What're you waiting for, a chaperone?" she asked impatiently. "Come on."
"I dunno…"
Jo rolled her head back and sighed heavily at the ceiling for a moment before shaking her head down at Sam. "Fine. Go back to skulking around the party, welcher."
"I'm not-" Sam stifled his protest with a quiet, frustrated noise and started up the stairs. "I wasn't welching," he said when he'd hit the second-to-last step and his face was level with hers. "I was just-"
"Sore loser?" Her eyebrows sprung into a mischievous curve that reminded Sam weirdly of his brother.
Sam took the last two stairs in one stride and spread his hands in like-toned inquiry. "Are you gonna stand around finishing my sentences wrong all night, or did you have some other master plan going?"
Jo smiled and raised the bottle, then used it to point to the second door on the left side of the hallway. Sam tipped his head in acquiescence, and she smiled sweetly and strode past him, toeing open the unlatched door and waving him in. He stood blinking in the dark for a second before the room lit with the accompanying click of a chain-pull light switch. Turning to survey the room in the dim, rosy light, Sam saw a beaded pink tassel swinging under an equally pink lampshade on the bedside table, which also housed a neatly graduated line of gleaming silver knives. He felt his mouth stretch into a smile as he laughed softly, and she followed his gaze.
"What?"
"Just…" Sam waved at the table. "Not the lighting I'd expect for a set of blades like that."
Jo shrugged and blushed slightly. "I'm still a girl, you know," she pointed out, as if that explained everything, and maybe it did.
Her room was pretty, he thought. The lamp was the most overtly girly touch, but the rest was nice without being fancy. The bed was draped in a white quilt with a pattern of pastel fans, and the simple wooden furniture had the comfortable, lived-in sheen that suggested generations of use.
"Sit," she suggested, taking the empty shot glass from his hand as she nodded toward the bed and set their bottle on the low bench in front of the dressing table.
Sam eyed the bed, but flopping down on it felt too familiar. He compromised, lowering to the floor, where he arranged himself on the rag rug and leaned back against the bed's foot. Jo didn't fuss, just handed him his refilled glass and sipped lightly at the one she'd poured for herself.
"So, what were you saying before?" Jo asked. "Downstairs."
It took a moment for Sam to trace his way back. "Oh, just that your dad's formula works for my family, too. There's only three of us, but together we make at least twelve kinds of sonofabitch." He winced, catching his error. "Two," he corrected softly and then tried to turn it into a joke. "Still, I think the total holds. Pretty sure Dean and I got second helpings when the fucked-up was going around."
"Most hunters did."
"I guess," Sam said, drawing in a tiny sip of whiskey and savoring it to keep from saying any more. Jo was watching him.
"You guys aren't so bad," she concluded. "You have your charms."
Sam gave a quiet, amused sniff. "Dean has his charms, you mean." He lifted his eyes from his glass to gauge her reaction, and was pleased to see that she didn't look annoyed or heartbroken.
"Please. I'm so over your brother." She waved her hand dismissively. "I mean, yeah, I admit it. I had it bad for a while there." She flicked her eyes down in a way that told Sam she was downplaying of the degree of 'bad' from which she'd suffered. "But…" Jo shifted on her bench, tucking one foot under her other leg as she thought. "I dunno. All my life I wanted to be just like my dad. And when he died, my mom… Well, you saw what she thought about me hunting. Anyway, in walks Dean, and he's, like, the classic hunter type, except- Well, you know..."
Sam had to work hard to keep his eyes from rolling. "Yeah," he said tightly. "I know."
"Oh, untwist, would you?"
He felt the tension across his shoulders and mentally conceded her point, looking for a way to draw focus away from his reaction. "So, what changed things?"
The instant it was out, Sam wished the question back. Of all the jackass things to ask. But Jo's gaze was steady and without accusation.
"It's not what you think." She sounded sad, and that made Sam want to apologize more than ever. "I mean, it is, a little. But mostly it's that I grew up, you know? I realized there were more important reasons for doing the job than proving to my mom that I could, or living up to this hero image I had of my dad-and your dad, too, Sam. I remember him from before. Or showing all the hunters I'd spent half my life pouring full of beer that I could do the job as well as them, even if I was just a girl." She lifted her glass but didn't drink from it. "And I guess I finally worked out how messed up it is to fall for someone who's not only exactly like what you imagine your dad was, but thinks of you as a little sister."
Jo's cheeks were splotched with color, her knuckles white around her shot glass. Sam surprised himself by chuckling, and judging by the exasperated laugh that preceded her explosive, "What?" it surprised her, too.
He shook his head, smile widening, though he didn't feel like laughing anymore. "I'm just counting the crazy sonsofbitches in the room. You hold your own."
"What can I say?" she asked ruefully. "I am a hunter, after all."
"Your dad would be proud," Sam said, and though it sounded like a joke, they both knew it wasn't.
They sipped at their drinks for a minute, and then Jo said casually, "You know everyone down there's just like you, right?"
Tilting down the last of his Jack, Sam shook his head. "Just like Dean, maybe. Not like me."
"Oh, right. Because you're so special."
He set down his glass and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "But I am."
"Maybe," Jo said. "But that doesn't make you not a hunter."
Sam was skeptical. "I bet if more of the people down there knew about me, they'd disagree."
Jo frowned. "Gordon Walker's got a philosophy all his own."
Sam's spine straightened instinctively at the name. "My brother agreed with Gordon until the freak he was hunting turned out to be me. My father was making plans to have me put down if I got out of control." His voice was hard and bitter, and he hated it. Hated how it betrayed the fear and anger he struggled to keep in the dark place where he locked it.
"So, that's why you were moping around down there instead of enjoying the party?"
"Pretty much." Sam's retort still had an edge, but it was finer, more controlled now.
"Well, cut it out," Jo suggested curtly. "We're all in this together, Sam, and like it or not, you're a big, fat key part of whatever that bastard demon has planned."
"I don't want to be a key part of it!" His cheeks heated in embarrassment at the childishness of his emphatic statement.
"Tough shit." Jo's nose crinkled with her sour, exasperated expression. The last of her whiskey went back fast, and she leaned forward, elbows on her knees and empty glass clutched in her right hand. "You think any of us want the freakin' demon army taking over the world? But you heard what Bobby said. All the signs point to that happening in the new year. So we have to use everything we've got. And if what we've got is your freaky brain's window into that demon's world, then I say we use it to figure out what the fuck he's got planned and stop it." She kicked out, jabbing her boot-tip-Jesus, were those steel caps?-into his calf for punctuation. "Drink your drink," she added almost kindly,
There was a gulp and a half of Jack in the bottom half of his glass, but Sam stretched it into five slow, shallow sips to fill the time. When he'd finished, he licked his lips and rolled his head against the side of Jo's mattress, looking up at her. Motivational speech finished, she was leaning back casually, watching him with her elbows propped on the dressing table.
"People are going to die," Sam said simply.
"I know that."
"No. You think you do, but you don't."
Jo slid off her bench, bringing the bottle with her, and sat cross-legged at Sam's knees. She reached across his lap and retrieved the abandoned glass, which she filled and handed back, eyes steadily on his. "Tell me what you think I don't know."
Sam set the shot glass down without drinking. "It's not just 'people,' it's those people-" He rapped twice on the floor to drive the words home. "-down there. People we know."
"I know."
Sam felt the skin on his chin twitch and pressed his lips together to control the tic, then opened enough to squeeze out a quieter elaboration. "People we love."
Jo's coffee-dark eyes didn't waver, but Sam couldn't hold her gaze. He looked down at the rag rug and intently studied the corner that curled out from under his right butt cheek. He picked idly at its folded seam, wondering who in this building would be the next to die, how long it would take before the Yellow-Eyed Demon cut to the chase and made a statement by taking out Dean or Bobby. How long until he figured out what Ellen and Jo were up to-recruiting every hunter anyone'd ever heard of-and started picking off friends, old and new alike. He flinched when Jo touched him-her small, rough, white hand lighting on his knee and drawing his attention upward.
"Sam," she said in a voice only a shadow louder than a whisper. "I know."
When Sam looked up, he was surprised and embarrassed by the soft, intensely sympathetic look on Jo's face. Dean was right. He really was the most gigantic girl in the whole world.
"God, I'm sorry," he muttered, shifting his legs so she'd remove her hand, and then jerked again at the stinging backhand slap she laid across his haunch. "Ow! Hey."
"Hey, yourself, welcher," she said, and he had to smile at the playful curl of her lips.
"All right. You got me. What's the penalty for breaking the terms of the bet?"
Her eyes drifted contemplatively up and to her left. "Let me think…" She leaned toward Sam in a conspiratorial manner that made him stretch his neck so he could hear.
What he got instead was her hand sliding from his shoulder onto his neck and her whiskey-flavored lips pressed firmly against his own. He felt three of his heartbeats thud against her fingertips before he pulled back.
"Don't, Jo. We can't."
She dropped back and away, eyebrows raised in a querulous arc. "Why not?"
He almost laughed in disbelief, instead making a noise that sounded like a cat sneezing. "Like, a million reasons, that's why."
"Name one."
Sam sputtered, "I can't just-"
"And if you say I'm like your kid sister, I will filet you where you sit."
"I don't-" Sam protested quickly but inarticulately. "That's not why."
"Well?"
"Well nothing. It's just…" He tried to look somewhere other than her expectant, intent face, but all his eyes found was the wide scoop of her shirt's neckline and the expanse of pale, soft-looking skin, dappled pink at the base of her throat and slightly shadowed with the curves of her breasts. That view didn't help his argument. "I'm not…" He stopped himself before he said his brother's name. "I don't just randomly sleep with people. And you're-"
She stretched an arm toward the bedside table. Amid his unease Sam caught the scent of her deodorant or perfume mixed with a slight tang of sweat and something else beneath the two that made him flush. Jo froze, hand hovering, probably waiting on his response to pick the appropriate knife.
"You're a friend," he finished. "A...comrade or something. I don't want to fuck that up."
"That's bullshit." Jo lowered her arm, but the click of relief Sam felt at the gesture ratcheted into a disorienting mix of alarm and distressing desire when she swung a leg across him and dropped onto his thighs.
"What're you…" Sam protested more weakly than he'd intended. He raised his hands to move her off but couldn't find a place to touch her that wasn't going to exacerbate things. "You're killin' me here."
She nodded as if in agreement and put her hands on his shoulders but didn't scoot any closer. "Look at where we are, Sam," Jo urged, looking earnestly into his face while she spoke. "Look at what all these people are doing here. The end is coming. For better, I hope, but probably for worse. And however it happens, odds are good that a lot of us aren't going to make it. Why shouldn't we have some fun before we go?"
"Jeez." The word was half groan, half laugh. "Nice pep talk, Pollyanna."
The statement broke through some of his confusion, and he put his hands on the outside of her shoulders and pushed, gently, up and back. Jo's weight eased off his lap, and Sam thought she was going to let him move her, but then she shrugged him off and plopped back onto his legs, tilting her head curiously.
"When was the last time you got laid?"
Sam clamped his lips shut before an indignant, embarrassed sputter could escape. He cast out for some way to respond without answering, eyes moving to the empty glass she'd left on the dressing table. His fourth shot was sitting full next to him, and she hadn't refilled hers after finishing her third. He could feel the alcohol warming his blood, but it hadn't had enough time or company to affect him much otherwise. Of course, he had about a hundred pounds on Jo, and he didn't know how much she'd had before she'd kicked his ass across the 10-Point Buck game.
"How drunk are you?" he asked.
She made an exasperated face and snorted dismissively. "Not," she said-a bit too loudly-and then amended her denial with a concessionary roll of her eyes. "Not very."
"I rest my case." Sam put his right arm on the mattress and lifted his butt a few inches.
"You rest nothing," Jo contradicted, shoving his hand off her bed. Sam's ass hit the floor again.
"I'm not gonna take advantage of a girl who's too drunk to know what she's doing," Sam insisted, but despite her earlier fumble, Sam could tell Jo wasn't as far gone as that.
"I know that, Lancelot. But if you think my momma didn't teach me how to hold my liquor well enough to not screw some hot guy after three shots and half a beer then you're dumber than you look. Because if the apocalypse is coming, I'll be damned if that two-minute wonder of a loser trucker in Minnesota is going to be my last lay. Seriously."
Sam blinked at her, trying to parse through the rush of words. Finally he gave up. "Huh?"
Jo blushed and slumped a little. "Shut up. And for the record, I'm buzzed and horny, not drunk and stupid. And my point still stands."
"What point was that?" he asked, teasing, though he knew he shouldn't. God, she was pretty. He'd always thought so-you'd have to be blind not to.
She ticked them off on her fingers. "I'm not too drunk. You're hot and I like you. If the world ends before I get properly laid again I'm gonna kill myself. And never, ever sleep with truckers."
Sam had to laugh, couldn't help himself. Encouraged, Jo scooted forward a bit-not enough to cause either of them any embarrassment. So far, he'd maintained control of his body's reaction to her proximity and attractiveness, but he wasn't sure whether that wouldn't just offend her more. She put her hands on his chest and ran the tips of her index fingers around the corners of his shirt's pockets.
"So? What about you?" she asked in a soft voice, much calmer now.
"Me? I never went through the trucker phase, so I couldn't say."
She smirked, and Sam's resolve melted another degree.
"I mean, when did you last…?"
Sam flinched. The warmth spreading through him recoiled as the memory struck him, cold and hard as the barrel of the pistol he'd used.
"I don't want to talk about it," he said sharply, and Jo's eyebrows drew together at his tone. Sam looked away as soon as he realized it was concern on her face, not irritation.
"Oh, God. Did that demon…" She didn't finish the question, but Sam knew what she was asking.
He shook his head, though he couldn't know for certain. They'd hit free STD clinics for several months after to be safe, but Sam remembered swaths of most of the days Meg rode him and had gotten to know her well enough that he was fairly confident that if she had decided to fuck her way across the country in his body, she would've made sure he knew about it.
"What was her name?" Jo asked quietly.
Sam sighed and thought about reminding Jo that he didn't want to talk about it. He didn't think she'd care. "Madison," he acquiesced. "Her name was Madison." He flicked his eyes up to Jo's and held them until he was sure she understood that he wasn't using the past tense simply because he'd known Madison last year. Jo pressed her hands gently against his chest and then dropped them to her thighs.
"She was smart and beautiful and funny," Sam said in a dull voice. "And I couldn't save her, so I shot her through the heart instead."
He could feel Jo shifting, lifting her weight as if to finally pull away from him, but she was only reaching for the full shot glass next to them. She took a shallow sip, then took his hand and pressed the drink into it.
"What couldn't you save her from?"
Sam downed the whiskey without tasting it. "It doesn't matter." He clacked the glass to the floor preemptively. "And it doesn't change what I did." But it wasn't just the things he'd done or hadn't done; it was who he was. "It doesn't change the fact that they're both dead because of me."
He hadn't meant to bring Jess into it, but she was always there, never more than a few threads away in any thoughts he wove together.
"Those things," Jo said in a soft but firm voice. "They aren't about you. You know that, right?"
Sam made the only noise he could-a harsh, half-swallowed scoffing sound. What bullshit.
"Fine. It's a little bit about you. But that's because you're a hunter. This job can't exist without collateral damage. I mean, it practically exists because of the collateral damage, right? Who do we know that just woke up one morning and went, 'Ghosts and demons are bad. I think I'll spend my life killing them'? No one. Every hunter's story's got a bloody, sad start. It's why we're all crazy sonsofbitches. "
She was trying so hard. Sam turned his hands and closed them around hers, terrified at how they simply disappeared between his palms, careful not to latch around her wrist the way Meg had.
"Look," he said in a tight, quiet voice, "I know you think you know how things work. But it's not the same with me, okay? It's just not. We're not just some family who lost someone to a random monster. The Yellow-Eyed Demon-the one who is right now plotting to wipe humanity off the planet-that particular demon has been fucking with my family since I was six months old. Maybe since before I was even born. And whatever else he did to me, it seems like he threw in a bonus treat of turning anyone I …" He stalled momentarily, trying to find a verb that wasn't crude or angry or laughably sappy. "I'm with into collateral damage."
He took a breath to try to smooth down the anger rising in his chest and throat and noticed that his knuckles were white, clutched around Jo's hands and wrists despite his earlier attempt at gentleness. With a sniff and a loosening shrug of his shoulders, Sam unclenched his fingers and tapped them lightly against Jo's before drawing away.
"I don't want that to happen to you," he finished simply.
Jo's weight shifted slightly as she slumped. "Wow," she said, and then-thank God-finally moved off Sam's lap and deftly turned to sit on the floor next to him, leaning as he was against her mattress. When she'd settled, Jo drummed her drawn-up knees with her fingers. "Okay, I get it now."
Sam cast his eyes sideways, skeptical. His "Really," came out too flat to be a question.
Jo's solemn profile tipped in confirmation. "Yep. But it's much more serious than I thought."
Hearing the irony in her voice, Sam drew his feet up and started to stand, but she caught his arm and pulled. "It's not a joke, Jo," he snapped as his butt hit the floor yet again.
"I know. I'm sorry, okay?" She kept her hand on his arm and swiveled so she was facing him again. Her voice was sincere. "Sam. I know that all of this is huge-for everyone, but especially for you. And I know that I can't understand what you've been through, what it must've been like to lose your girlfriend the way you did."
"How do you know how she-"
"Everyone knows, Sam. Well," she adjusted, "not everyone, but you can bet that while you and Dean were off running down that clown thing, we were doing some research. Your dad didn't keep how your mom died a secret, and when we saw about the fire in Palo Alto and the date, it wasn't hard to put two and two together, even without the specifics."
"Oh." It was so hard to remember that his father had a history with this family beyond having botched Bill Harvelle's last hunt.
"But listen, because that's not the point. The point is that even if I don't know how it feels to have those exact things happen to people you love, I do know what's going on here." She waited for him to refute her, but Sam just listened, tired and sad. "I get that you're afraid. And I get that you really do think you have some kind of curse on you. And maybe you do in a way because you've had this demon dogging you your whole life."
Her hands, which had been punctuating her speech, hung palm-up above her knees for a moment as if weighing the possibility of a curse. She let them rest as she continued.
"But however you want to put it, whatever you think, I promise that you and me getting our groove on before the shit hits the fan? Is not going to trigger the apocalypse. The apocalypse doesn't give a crap about who any of us sleeps with. Even you, Sam Winchester."
She stared at him, clearly waiting for a response, but he had none. Finally she elbowed him, and he rolled his eyes and made a half-hearted "go on" motion with one hand because he knew she couldn't not at this point.
"I know you, Sam. And I trust you. You just have to trust yourself. I promise-I'm not going to burn up or need shooting tomorrow if you have sex with me. Assuming I was even still in the mood, which is questionable because my God, you can kill a buzz deader than anyone I've met."
Sam felt his mouth pull up at one corner, and he snuck a look at her from under the hair that had fallen over his eyes. "How am I the buzzkill here?" he asked. "I haven't said a word in, like, five minutes."
"It's a nonverbal thing. A vibe." Her mouth curled in spite of her obvious effort to keep her face straight. "Seriously, though. Me, not me-whoever. But are you really just never gonna have sex again because you think your dick's got a death curse on it? Join the priesthood?"
Sam closed his eyes and let his head fall against the mattress. Of course he wasn't planning to be a priest. Who planned for that, except priests? He just didn't want anyone else to get hurt because of him. Sure, he got horny, checked out girls, jerked off in the shower when he stood a chance of having ten minutes without Dean pounding on the door demanding to know what was taking him so long. Sure, he missed sex. But more than that, he missed the specific kind of sex he and Jess had, the ease they'd found together that was comfortable without losing passion or slipping into routine. And since the hunter lifestyle pretty much ruled out the possibility of developing a relationship where that kind of sex happened, Sam found that he just didn't spend a lot of time worrying about when he was going to get laid next.
He studied the inside of his eyelids for several more seconds and then groaned and opened his eyes, rolling his head to look at Jo.
"If I answer the question, can we please, please stop talking about this?"
"Maybe," she teased. Jo's grin was back, slanted and playful and appealing.
"I don't want to be a priest. And I didn't mean to be a buzzkill. It's just another fun Sam Winchester perk."
He struggled against the familiar feeling of hopelessness swelling in his chest. Why bother with any of it, he wondered fatalistically. Even if the world didn't end, the fight ahead was going to be bloody and deadly. Everything they knew could be burnt away around them-more collateral damage. Sam looked around Jo's room again, appreciating its lived-in comfort, and felt another surge in his chest. Stubborn anger, pushing back against the encroaching sense of doom. Security in the knowledge that Dean would be at his side no matter what. Strength from the band of hunters that would grow into an army of their own. Comfort taken with his friends. The realization that he wasn't alone.
As if to prove the point, Jo nudged a finger against his forearm, drawing his attention back.
"Thanks, Jo," he said awkwardly into the heavy silence his brooding had rolled out into the room. "I like this. Being here, talking." Sam met her eyes briefly, then dropped his gaze back to the tassels on the rag rug. "I like you."
Jo's snicker rolled Sam's eyes right back up.
"What?" he demanded, but she kept laughing. "Shut up!"
She dipped her head and curled her hands delicately at her throat. "I like you, too, Sam," she simpered. "Wanna go to homecoming with me?"
Sam forced back the smile that threatened to spread and felt his cheeks heat up. "God, you're aggravating!" he complained. "I just…" His smile broke free as he took in the warmth and energy radiating from Jo with her laughter. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed, teeth bright behind the pink bow of her lips. The combination of scents lingering around her jostled his senses again, and the heat from his face spread downward. "I just like you," he said again, slower this time. "That's all."
He lifted a hand and rested it experimentally on her thigh, just above her knee, then waited to see whether the world would end.
It didn't, but Jo's laughter died out abruptly. Sam looked up from his hand to find her watching him with an expression that mixed amusement, surprise, and anticipation.
"Me, too," she said. Without any motion that Sam could detect, Jo was suddenly closer to him. Their legs pressed against each other.
"I want…" Sam's throat felt funny-thick and tight. It made it hard to speak, but there was one thing he had to get out. "But it can't change everything."
Jo's smile was different now, not the toothy, playful grin she'd assailed him with all evening. It was soft, and her eyes were steady and clear. "Just for tonight," she agreed. "Christmas present."
Sam slid his hand farther up, the damp stick of his palm slowing his progress along her jeans. When he felt her belt against his fingertips, his hand twitched involuntarily.
"Sure?" he asked.
"I'm sure." Jo reached across him to pick up Sam's other hand. "Nothing's going to happen, Sam," she promised.
Sam brought their hands to her waist and then pulled her whole body toward him. She moved easily, raising a leg to settle back onto his lap, where she'd started this whole proposition.
"Nothing bad," he amended, and then he let his hands move up her narrow, wiry back until his fingers twined in her hair. Kneeling astride his thighs, Jo's face was level with Sam's for once, making it easy to pull her body tight against his and kiss her experimentally.
After a minute or two, Jo pulled on Sam's wrists and urged his hands down, stopping them when they covered her breasts. She arched into his touch, which added a pleasant pressure to the weight resting against his growing erection.
"Yeah," she said in a musing voice, "I think this might just work out for both of us."
She stood up, keeping hold of Sam's hand and urging him up and around the side of her bed, where she sat, her impish grin back as she made quick work of her boot laces. Sam toed off his sneakers and socks to the sound of the heavy thunks of Jo's boots hitting the wooden floor. She stood up again and plucked open the middle button of Sam's shirt with one hand while she pulled the beaded chain of the bedside lamp with the other, dropping a curtain of dark around them.
Moving instinctively, Sam's hand snapped out and caught the chain while it was still swinging. A quick tug brought back the warm cone of light.
"Like watching?" Jo asked, voice thick with mischief.
Sam settled onto the bed, knees bent outward to keep his feet from spilling off the end. He caught Jo's hand and pulled gently until she was stretched out on top of him.
"I don't want to be in the dark," he told her, and watched as her smile drew in too close to see.
***
Sam woke with a start to a soft buzzing in his ear. He jerked away from the warm mass next to him and squinted in the dark.
"Shhh!" A small, calloused palm scraped over his mouth as Sam's eyes adjusted enough to make out Jo's face, propped in her other hand as she leaned on one elbow above him. "My mom just got into the shower. You've got about twelve minutes before she goes downstairs to start the coffee."
Sam pushed himself up, taking the sheet that had been draped modestly across Jo's chest with him. She clutched it back, and Sam averted his eyes, getting to work on the part of their arrangement where their gift exchange didn't change anything between them. He toed through the pile of clothes next to the bed until he came up with his boxers, slid them on as discreetly as possible, and then stood to put on the rest of his clothing.
After creeping down the edge of the creaky staircase, Sam slid quietly through the kitchen and into the bunkroom he and Dean had staked out when they'd arrived. Dean's bunk was as fresh and unused as Sam's. He quietly set his shoes on the floor, pulled back the top bunk's Army blanket and sheet, and lifted himself onto the mattress. Sam lay back and closed his eyes, listening to the early morning noises until he heard Ellen's progress as she tackled the breakfast preparations.
He must have drifted off because the next thing Sam heard was a ruthless pounding on the door.
"Dean! Sam!" The door flew open and Bobby leaned into the narrow room. "We gotta go."
Sam jerked upright, shrinking as he felt his hair snag on the low, unfinished ceiling. "What?"
"Where the hell's your brother?"
Sam mumbled a safely nonspecific, "I dunno."
"Well?" Bobby regarded Sam impatiently for a few seconds and then swept his hand out into the hallway. "Go find him. We gotta see a guy in Yankton." He was halfway to the kitchen before Sam had located his shoes.
Ellen waved Sam over when he emerged. "Looks like you boys're getting your Christmas breakfast to go, huh?"
"Yeah, I guess," Sam replied, self-consciously combing his fingers through his bed head. "I, uh… You seen Dean?"
Ellen tipped her head knowingly. "Check the truck lot out back," she suggested. "My bet's on the rig with the crossbow painted on the cab."
Sam nodded his thanks and went out the back door to the frozen lot, filled with trucks, vans, and RVs of various sizes. A quick scan revealed the big rig Ellen had described. He knocked on the frosted driver's-side window, tentatively at first, but with more urgency when he heard the kitchen door creak open and saw Bobby scowling in his direction from the back stoop.
"Dean! You in there?"
There was an answering thud from the inside of the cab, above Sam's head. "This'd better be good, Sammy."
"Bobby says we gotta go." Met by silence from within, Sam stretched up and pounded the wall of the cab where he suspected the rig's bunk to be. "Move your ass, man. Whatever it is, it's got Bobby in a rush. I'm gonna go pack up our stuff."
Sam crunched back across the icy dirt lot and into the kitchen, where he found a steaming mug of coffee waiting on the counter nearest the door. He took a moment to sip appreciatively and murmur thanks to Ellen, and then carried it into the bunkroom. Through the thin walls, he heard Ellen greet Jo, and the roll of their voices combined with the clanking of metal as they worked.
A savory breakfast-flavored wave of smell greeted Sam when he stepped out a few minutes later, making his stomach growl. His empty coffee mug dangled off his left index finger, and he set the bags down so he could refill it from the huge urn.
"Hey," Jo greeted him, but anything she might have added was cut off by the blast of cold air that preceded Dean from the parking lot.
The collar of Dean's leather coat was twisted under itself and his t-shirt was hanging wrong, exposing a stripe of octopus-sucker bruises winding up one side of his neck. His eyes were shadowed and heavy, and the bow in his legs was broader than usual, turning his gait into a strut. Sam hoped he wasn't wearing his own lucky streak as obviously.
"This'd better be good," Dean reiterated in a grumble just as Bobby stuck his head through the swinging doors that lead into the barroom.
"You boys ready?"
"Bobby Singer," Ellen admonished him, "you can just wait three minutes until I finish some breakfast to take with you. Jo," she directed, pointing at Dean, "coffee."
Jo was already on it. She pressed a smoking mug into Dean's hand and stepped to his left to peer curiously out the back door's window, then made a closer assessment of Dean, who was slurping gratefully at his coffee.
"You dog," she concluded with a grin that might have made Sam secretly envious the day before. "You let Dreah win, didn't you?"
"Me?" Dean looked affronted. "Sweetheart, I never let anyone win. Though once in a while I do allow them to believe I've lost."
"You're a menace," Jo told him. "And I'm going to tell Dreah that as soon as I see her."
She threw him a warning look and went back to the stove where their breakfast was sizzling impatiently. Meanwhile, Bobby waved them over.
"What's up?" Dean asked after another pull on his coffee.
"Got a call from a guy says he's got a demon locked in his storm cellar keeps runnin' his mouth 'bout how the end is neigh and he's a crucial player in the master plan."
"Whose master plan?" Sam asked, but Bobby just shrugged.
"'S why we're goin' to Yankton."
"All right," Ellen said as she and Jo joined them, bearing several foam take-out boxes. Ellen handed one to Bobby. "You got egg and bacon sandwiches in here, plus extra everything on the side. Forks, too."
Jo pushed a box at Dean with an overly sour look that made Dean smirk again, and then moved past him to Sam. Their eyes met for the first time since he'd left her laughing quietly in her bed as got ready to sneak past Ellen's room. Jo treated him to her old grin along with the foam box full of breakfast.
"Sorry. No home fries on short notice." She stretched onto her toes and put one arm around Sam's torso, tilting her head up to plant a firm kiss on his cheek. "Merry Christmas, you buzzkill."
"Thank you," Sam replied, trying to infuse his casual response with deeper meaning without raising any suspicion. "Merry Christmas, Jo." He pecked her on the cheek in return.
Ellen waved them through the doors into the bar, currently serving as a dormitory for drunken hunters. She led them onto the front porch and blew into her hands.
"Go on, get going," she ordered after a few moments of awkward lingering. "Fat lotta good we'll be against the apocalypse if we freeze to death on my front porch." She spread her arms, fingers waggling and snapping, and the three men scurried for a quick round of good-bye hugs.
"Be careful out there," Ellen said as she pulled the storm door open again. "And keep in touch. Call if you need anything."
"Likewise," Bobby replied over his shoulder.
Sam cast his eyes toward Jo one last time, and she gave him a small, private smile paired with a slight lift of her chin and eyebrows.
"Bye." He addressed it to both women but kept his eyes on Jo. "Thanks again."
"Bye, hon," Ellen said. Jo waved and followed her mother inside.
Sam jogged to catch up with Dean and Bobby in time to receive a thump on the shoulder and an admonishment against idiocy before Bobby swung into his car and gunned the engine.
"So," Dean said, conversationally. "I figured I was gonna have to dodge your cockblocking last night, but it looks like Buzzkill Winchester was busy spoiling someone else's happy ending. Who was Jo after, anyway? That guy Martin? With the teeth?" He hooked his two first fingers in front of his mouth in illustration.
"What? No." Sam frowned at his brother's presumption. "She can do better than that. Besides, that's not what she meant."
Dean raised his eyebrows as he pulled his keys from his coat pocket. "Oh no?" He rounded the Impala's hood. "It's open."
Sam cranked the back door open and tossed his duffle onto the back seat.
"What then?" Dean asked after he'd cranked the engine. He let the car idle, warming up.
"Nothing. She just…" Sam squinted through the snow-speckled windshield at the windows of the Roadhouse, watching for a blur of yellow that might be Jo's hair. "She beat me at Ten-Point Buck and got all huffy when I pointed out it's a totally unrealistic setup and I'd kick her ass in a real shooting contest."
Dean gave the Impala a little more gas, gauged the reaction, and put her in reverse. "Good to see things normal between you two," he said as he swung the car around. "Normalish, anyway." He nosed the car into the tracks Bobby'd left in the snow-dusted drive.
"Yeah," Sam agreed and cast a quick sideways glance to try to gauge whether Dean suspected anything. His brother wore a familiar, distant smirk-undoubtedly caught up in sex-nostalgia.
Dean sensed Sam's attention and shook his head, smirk spreading into a satisfied smile. "You let her win?" he asked. "Jo," he clarified.
Sam shook his head. "Nope."
"You gotta give it a try next time," Dean urged him, waggling his eyebrows. "I'm telling you. Best bet I ever lost. Cramped quarters and all."
"Nah," Sam said, "It's not like that. Besides, I'll get her next time."
end