fic: What a Pretty Foal
I've been holding onto this for like, a week, because I wanted to go over it with the sanity of a few days off tucked under the old belt, but I feel like such a slacker when it comes to my own petty version of mininanowrimo that I need to post SOMETHING. If I get nothing done tonight - which I won't, because Owen Pallett and me will be making sweet sweet gay love to each other in a beautiful old church here - I'll be 1k behind. Between that and the term paper (which is 15-20, not 10-15 as I'd originally convinced myself) and the monthly blood-rage I am once again entertaining fantasies of quitting to write full-time gaymo literature like, I dunno, Allan Hollinghurst or someone. HOWEVER. WHAT CAN ONE DO, WE ASK?
Fandom: SPN AU. Jo, Dean.
Rating: PG.
Spoilers: No.
Words: 1300ish
Notes: For vinylroad who wanted more from Twelve Strong Horses. Title potentially stolen from Basia Bulat, who doesn't enunciate well enough to claim it fully. The other two stories succeeding this are The Longe Whip and The Horsethief Fortune
She spends days at the filling station on the road out of town. A hundred men a day come through and watch her in their rearview mirrors as she stands in blue overalls in the bitter cold, feeding their vehicles. She wears dirty gloves that smell like diesel. She doesn’t wash her hair, just tucks it under her cap in the black dawn every morning. Sometimes when they come inside to pay they are polite, leave a dollar or two.
In the long stretches between she hunches on her stool, space heater set on the counter before her, and watches the television chatter until the white sky gets grey again, then black again. The land that stretches out across the road is slashed with barbed wire, and when the wind picks up the yellow of the feed sometimes shows under the snow. With shaggy coats and steaming breath, the horses nose for it. They are hunched like her, but in herds.
At night her ma drives out to pick her up, the smell of warm laundry trapped in the car. Other women’s clean clothes hang in the back, empty and flat. Their smell reminds her of evenings spent in a dim bedroom, with the Beverly Hillbillies and the soft hiss of the steam iron. The quiet of the rest of them downstairs.
Her ma always asks, “Any creeps today?”
Because she stopped going to school for this. Seventeen, she was almost done. Almost. But she was failing out anyway and the rent went up. She always shakes her head. “Nope. Can we have pizza tonight?”
“Nope,” her ma says.
They’ve been on their own for a long while now, but the trailer is still empty. They have a few things, two bedrooms at opposite ends, two bathrooms even. And lots of fabric. Clothes, towels, sheets, pillows, blankets, curtains. The old, stinky chairs that sit in the living room are swathed in blankets - enough to hide the smell of former owners, almost. But they often eat off paper plates, standing at the kitchen counter, scanning newspapers. And there’s nothing on the walls.
Jo leaves her workboots on the rubber mat, crawls out of her overalls like a thing being born. She stinks of sweat and oil, her hair is a greasy knot. But she soaps only her hands. There isn’t anyone she wants to smell nice for, there aren’t any invitations she wants to make. She lies to her ma every day. Otherwise she’d say all of them are creeps, every one of them looks at me sideways, or won’t look at all.
Somehow, she knows she’s been marked. Like a brand burned in her skin, no matter how many layers of grime and dirty canvas she paints over it. She remembers who laid it on her.
Dinner is chicken in the pan and barbeque sauce, frozen vegetables in the microwave. After, they’re sitting in the chairs and the phone rings. Over and over, they both stare at it. Her ma’s body twists like the sound of it is an arrow she could avoid. Eventually, Jo stands up and goes into her bedroom. Pulls against the doorknob even after it’s clicked, pulls it hard as she can like she could close the door any tighter against them.
Through the closed door she can hear her ma answer him. Monosyllabic, but voice rising into anger quick. He calls too much, like a guilty man. Guilty because he took it all, and left them nothing. He says it’s to let them know he’s alive. But it’s just implications that he and Mary and the boys have killed another monster. Heroes, all of them, he needs his girls to know. Once he called drunk, and cried, and said he should’ve left them the ranch, the land and the house. They would’ve used it, they needed it. Instead, he sold it, bought the boys a car. Even now he pisses away the profit on hotel rooms and diner meals. Even when he asks if there’s anything he can do, he doesn’t mean money. He doesn’t mean giving up anything of his or Mary’s. He just asks so Ellen can hiss out no, you bastard, we want nothing from you.
Jo refuses to hear any of it. She crawls into her bed, buries herself under a rucked tide of blankets, and listens to the rush of her own blood in her ears.
--
As the morning black fades the next day the devil’s own car pulls up. It is sleek as sin. She recognizes him instantly. The tap of the fingers on the wheel, the swing of him as he gets out. The slant of his man’s shoulders. Dean’s bigger and older. She still feels fourteen.
He pumps his own gas as she sits on her stool, watching him. Feeling like her blood has froze, her breath now set solid in her lungs. Thinking she should just run. Lock herself in the bathroom. Strike out across the fields like a refugee in rags, slip in amongst the herd.
He takes his sweet time. Knuckles the small of his back as his breath clouds white in the air. Stands rocking on his heels, surveying the curve of the asphalt into the distance while his car swallows gasoline like liquor. He is alone. That fact has a red fog of panic creeping around the edges of her vision.
She takes steadying breaths, splays her hand against the dirty countertop and looks at the black grease under her fingernails.
When he comes in he stops cold. His wallet’s out already. Fake credit card. But he recognizes her as quick as she saw him. They didn’t run that far after all, in their terms. Just two states over, barely half a day’s drive. Not even out of the neighborhood, really. She watches him convince himself it’s not that surprising, seeing her here like this. Still, there is a long moment where she prays in fervent streams of hope that he’ll turn around and walk out.
But he steps forward, and she thinks of her mother. She won’t be cowed. “So where’s Sammy?”
Dean smiles, the automatic charmer. “Hey, Jo. Good to see you too.” And when she doesn’t respond, he answers “Down South with mom.” No hesitation over the omission.
“And my dad,” she adds for him. She tries to strike sparks with her tone. She tries to scare him off with her eyes, her dirty disguise.
“Yeah, him too.” Dean looks away, casual, perusing taco chips and candy bars.
“You’re hunting on your own, now.”
“Yeah,” he looks back at her. His smile is cold triumph, a reminder. She thinks for one second of Con Cready’s dead mare and he steps forward to pay.
“That’s no good, Dean.” She doesn’t touch the mastercard: Rubin Rhea Suvak.
He eyes her, heaving a sigh. Like she’s disappointed him, one of her dad’s tricks. He tucks the card away. “You smell like a fucking hobo.”
She mutters, “Just get out of here. Get the fuck away from us.”
Dean snorts softly to himself, shakes his head. She can’t look away from his eyes. If he came for her, she wouldn’t be able to move. Her limbs feel numb, her fingertips twitch on the countertop. Once, she clawed him across the face and ran downstairs to the protection of a family and a half. But he punished her for it. He found a hundred ways to do it, the year before her and her ma finally fled.
He leaves. But he looks at her over his shoulder as he rolls back out onto the road, and she feels her skin burning, and she knows if she looked in the mirror she’d see it, the mark he left on her printed there for him and every man to gloat over.
Fandom: SPN AU. Jo, Dean.
Rating: PG.
Spoilers: No.
Words: 1300ish
Notes: For vinylroad who wanted more from Twelve Strong Horses. Title potentially stolen from Basia Bulat, who doesn't enunciate well enough to claim it fully. The other two stories succeeding this are The Longe Whip and The Horsethief Fortune
She spends days at the filling station on the road out of town. A hundred men a day come through and watch her in their rearview mirrors as she stands in blue overalls in the bitter cold, feeding their vehicles. She wears dirty gloves that smell like diesel. She doesn’t wash her hair, just tucks it under her cap in the black dawn every morning. Sometimes when they come inside to pay they are polite, leave a dollar or two.
In the long stretches between she hunches on her stool, space heater set on the counter before her, and watches the television chatter until the white sky gets grey again, then black again. The land that stretches out across the road is slashed with barbed wire, and when the wind picks up the yellow of the feed sometimes shows under the snow. With shaggy coats and steaming breath, the horses nose for it. They are hunched like her, but in herds.
At night her ma drives out to pick her up, the smell of warm laundry trapped in the car. Other women’s clean clothes hang in the back, empty and flat. Their smell reminds her of evenings spent in a dim bedroom, with the Beverly Hillbillies and the soft hiss of the steam iron. The quiet of the rest of them downstairs.
Her ma always asks, “Any creeps today?”
Because she stopped going to school for this. Seventeen, she was almost done. Almost. But she was failing out anyway and the rent went up. She always shakes her head. “Nope. Can we have pizza tonight?”
“Nope,” her ma says.
They’ve been on their own for a long while now, but the trailer is still empty. They have a few things, two bedrooms at opposite ends, two bathrooms even. And lots of fabric. Clothes, towels, sheets, pillows, blankets, curtains. The old, stinky chairs that sit in the living room are swathed in blankets - enough to hide the smell of former owners, almost. But they often eat off paper plates, standing at the kitchen counter, scanning newspapers. And there’s nothing on the walls.
Jo leaves her workboots on the rubber mat, crawls out of her overalls like a thing being born. She stinks of sweat and oil, her hair is a greasy knot. But she soaps only her hands. There isn’t anyone she wants to smell nice for, there aren’t any invitations she wants to make. She lies to her ma every day. Otherwise she’d say all of them are creeps, every one of them looks at me sideways, or won’t look at all.
Somehow, she knows she’s been marked. Like a brand burned in her skin, no matter how many layers of grime and dirty canvas she paints over it. She remembers who laid it on her.
Dinner is chicken in the pan and barbeque sauce, frozen vegetables in the microwave. After, they’re sitting in the chairs and the phone rings. Over and over, they both stare at it. Her ma’s body twists like the sound of it is an arrow she could avoid. Eventually, Jo stands up and goes into her bedroom. Pulls against the doorknob even after it’s clicked, pulls it hard as she can like she could close the door any tighter against them.
Through the closed door she can hear her ma answer him. Monosyllabic, but voice rising into anger quick. He calls too much, like a guilty man. Guilty because he took it all, and left them nothing. He says it’s to let them know he’s alive. But it’s just implications that he and Mary and the boys have killed another monster. Heroes, all of them, he needs his girls to know. Once he called drunk, and cried, and said he should’ve left them the ranch, the land and the house. They would’ve used it, they needed it. Instead, he sold it, bought the boys a car. Even now he pisses away the profit on hotel rooms and diner meals. Even when he asks if there’s anything he can do, he doesn’t mean money. He doesn’t mean giving up anything of his or Mary’s. He just asks so Ellen can hiss out no, you bastard, we want nothing from you.
Jo refuses to hear any of it. She crawls into her bed, buries herself under a rucked tide of blankets, and listens to the rush of her own blood in her ears.
--
As the morning black fades the next day the devil’s own car pulls up. It is sleek as sin. She recognizes him instantly. The tap of the fingers on the wheel, the swing of him as he gets out. The slant of his man’s shoulders. Dean’s bigger and older. She still feels fourteen.
He pumps his own gas as she sits on her stool, watching him. Feeling like her blood has froze, her breath now set solid in her lungs. Thinking she should just run. Lock herself in the bathroom. Strike out across the fields like a refugee in rags, slip in amongst the herd.
He takes his sweet time. Knuckles the small of his back as his breath clouds white in the air. Stands rocking on his heels, surveying the curve of the asphalt into the distance while his car swallows gasoline like liquor. He is alone. That fact has a red fog of panic creeping around the edges of her vision.
She takes steadying breaths, splays her hand against the dirty countertop and looks at the black grease under her fingernails.
When he comes in he stops cold. His wallet’s out already. Fake credit card. But he recognizes her as quick as she saw him. They didn’t run that far after all, in their terms. Just two states over, barely half a day’s drive. Not even out of the neighborhood, really. She watches him convince himself it’s not that surprising, seeing her here like this. Still, there is a long moment where she prays in fervent streams of hope that he’ll turn around and walk out.
But he steps forward, and she thinks of her mother. She won’t be cowed. “So where’s Sammy?”
Dean smiles, the automatic charmer. “Hey, Jo. Good to see you too.” And when she doesn’t respond, he answers “Down South with mom.” No hesitation over the omission.
“And my dad,” she adds for him. She tries to strike sparks with her tone. She tries to scare him off with her eyes, her dirty disguise.
“Yeah, him too.” Dean looks away, casual, perusing taco chips and candy bars.
“You’re hunting on your own, now.”
“Yeah,” he looks back at her. His smile is cold triumph, a reminder. She thinks for one second of Con Cready’s dead mare and he steps forward to pay.
“That’s no good, Dean.” She doesn’t touch the mastercard: Rubin Rhea Suvak.
He eyes her, heaving a sigh. Like she’s disappointed him, one of her dad’s tricks. He tucks the card away. “You smell like a fucking hobo.”
She mutters, “Just get out of here. Get the fuck away from us.”
Dean snorts softly to himself, shakes his head. She can’t look away from his eyes. If he came for her, she wouldn’t be able to move. Her limbs feel numb, her fingertips twitch on the countertop. Once, she clawed him across the face and ran downstairs to the protection of a family and a half. But he punished her for it. He found a hundred ways to do it, the year before her and her ma finally fled.
He leaves. But he looks at her over his shoulder as he rolls back out onto the road, and she feels her skin burning, and she knows if she looked in the mirror she’d see it, the mark he left on her printed there for him and every man to gloat over.