fic: The Horsethief Fortune
No one is more surprised than me that I am posting fic. SPN fic. Het fic. Obscure AU universe SPN het fic. I DON'T KNOW, AFTER A YEAR I FINALLY FINISHED IT. WHAT.
Fandom: SPN AU. Jo, Sam, Dean.
Rating: sex. het sex, at that.
Spoilers: No.
Words: 5285.
Notes: for vinylroad, who has literally been on me about this since last November. I think I've promised her something at least three different times, including her birthday in July. I am just that much of an asshole. Twelve Strong Horses, What a Pretty Foal and The Longe Whip are are all parts of this universe, which originated with: John died, and Mary lived to raise her boys. Bill and Ellen Harvelle invited her in when she had nowhere to go, and their kids all ran wild through scrub brush and dustbowl cattle land.
Summary: Jo shot him, and she's surprised that he's not dead.
She spends days tending to him, to the frayed muscle of his thigh where the buckshot tore everything up.
His fever, the infection that takes to it in the first few days, the way the shot has dug in too deep to pull out: all the signs are bad.
It was her single gunshot in the black night, so she waits with him. She thinks he might die.
That first night she put him in the bed of her truck, dragged him a quarter of a mile down the mountainside on a plastic tarp. But now she’s found the empty shell of a river pumphouse, just a cement box with a tin roof and a rusted-down barbed wire fence all around. It stands twenty yards back from the waterline, just above the gravel shelf, guts all torn out so that there are round holes in the walls where the pipes used to spit water back into the river.
She peers out of them in the morning; feels peered-in-at in the night.
Whatever Dean was hunting, she found him before he found it. And he hasn’t been lucid enough to answer questions for days. There could be anything out there in the woods.
It’s getting colder in the mornings, and on the third day she watches fog rise off the surface of the river like so many ghosts before getting in her truck and following the weeded-over gravel road a dozen miles into town. She’s been running low on supplies, and he has fifty bucks in his wallet that she uses to buy luxuries like oatmeal, powdered milk, a tin of coffee, water purification tablets. Two grapefruit that have a sweet weight to them when she eats them one after the other in the driver seat.
At the drugstore, she pays for bandages, and then lifts what she hopes are antibiotics from behind the counter when the pharmacist goes to help an old lady select a daily vitamin.
She jolts back down the old road, bouncing over ruts in the mud and fallen branches, leaves scraping at her windows.
She’s spent six years imagining his death, waiting for it, feeling its inevitability, but she never once thought she’d be the one to do it.
When she gets back he’s awake. He has her rifle in his lap.
She stands in the doorway, bag of oats cradled in one arm, bandages in hand, and he’s sitting up on her sleeping bag with the rifle propped like a teddybear in his arms. There is the fresh smell of blood, a slash of it dripping from the bag to the dirty floor. Like maybe he tried to crawl to the door before falling back to the nest she made him.
She holds the oats against her breast. He says, “Didn’t think you’d come back.”
The rifle doesn’t twitch, and she sees how loose his grip on it is. His bloodless hands are slack as dead things.
She wonders if he remembers how he got here, that she shot him with one hand, and then saved him with the other.
She gives him the barest smile, like she shares in his relief, and goes back to the truck.
He watches her, silent, when she comes back with the medicine. Close-mouthed as a cat.
She doesn’t know where to inject him. Lets the needle hover for a few scared seconds before she decides on the vein in the injured thigh. Maybe it’ll all pump right out of him with the blood. She cradles his wrist and he doesn’t argue with her choice. He doesn’t say anything again until after the oatmeal is cooked, a baggie of honeyed peanuts from her glovebox stirred in.
“Where’d you bring us?”
“Outside of town,” there’s no point in lying. He’s not going anywhere, he has nothing to say to anyone. But still, she sees him calculating.
She feeds him from the pot herself, offering the spoon while he struggles to stay conscious.
Ultimately, he falls asleep again, and she changes the bandages - like slapping a sheet over a corpse, there’s no art to it, no science - and leaves him be.
-
It was never a matter of teaching or learning, once she started. It was more just doing: selling her stolen horses in New Mexico and running into a nasty little ground sprite killing calves around the local ranches. Buying a used pickup from a man who smelled like something familiar and potent as garlic, a man who kept a bedraggled boy in an iron cage in his basement. Catching a mug of coffee from the waitress who eyed the map of Virginia she spread out on the table, and mentioned the pair of boys who came through just yesterday asking about that very same county.
Weeks would go by, with her just driving, gathering necessities but aiming for nothing. The weather had turned decent when she hit Arkansas, and she spent a chunk of her cash from the horses she stole at an outdoor supply store that wasn’t too picky about government ID for hunting rifles, and was happy to throw in a pup tent seeing as she was buying out the place anyway. That night, as soon as she’d settled in with her sleeping bag and her fresh-poured cartridges of rock salt, a young man in a worn coat called to her from the trees beyond the firelight. A young man with a smiling voice, and something metal gleaming at his side.
So she spent a few days tracking down his corpse and burning that up into ashes.
Luck just kept spinning bait her way, no better than if the road buckled up under her feet to force her along some twisted, narrow path, the end of which she could not see.
But it wasn’t until the waitresses stopped saying pair of boys and just said that young fellow that Jo caught up to them. Well, the one of them, anyway.
She even looked for him.
She found Sam at a bus stop in Oklahoma City, standing in a line of a hundred other people headed west. She would’ve gone right past him and his clean shirt and new shoes, but he recognized her. Called out across the concourse and left his spot in line to come stand so close that she let him hug her. The duffel slung over his shoulder lay half-empty like he was only carrying a quarter of his life in it.
Even with his hair in his red eyes he looked how he should: a kid, a student, a person with a future in front of him.
She drove him to Palo Alto herself.
-
When Dean wakes up again it’s dark out, and he groans straight through from his chest and grapples at his leg with his hands.
She comes across the floor - three feet - to catch his prying fingers and peek under the bandage herself: how to tell if it’s better? Worse? Maybe the swelling, the heat off the flap-edged skin. “It’s goddamn hot,” he tells her when she looks at his eyes to see if he’s lucid.
She feeds him a handful of headache pills and then offers him a cup of coffee, still warm on her little hotplate.
“Is it morning?” he asks.
She shrugs. He’s been sleeping for fourteen hours, so. “It’s midnight.”
Dean puts a hand to his face, rubs. “Yeah,” he says.
She turns away from him, shifts on her feet to turn and squat over the hot plate again. She should feed him something. More oatmeal, then.
“What were you hunting out there?” she asks.
There is a silence behind her that she doesn’t turn around to inspect. “A golem,” he says.
“Whose?” she asks.
A too-clear answer for his hoarse throat. “Hedge witch, I guess.”
He’s a liar. He’s lying because there was no sign of anything out there in the trees. And no squawking in town, no trail. A raised drudge made out of clay or riverrock is not so light-footed as that.
Jo doesn’t hide her expression as she turns back to him and hands him the bowl. He meets her eyes and the lie sparks between them, a reminder.
His transgressions. And hers: his shattered leg.
She turns off the hot plate and goes to sleep in her truck, as she has every night that she’s spent with him.
-
Sam sat in her truck, hunched against the passenger door, his elbow jammed out the window. He was happy to talk at her, at the trees flashing by, at the dashboard. Just to talk and not watch himself for words like exorcism and poltergeist, probably. Who else had he spoken to besides Dean in the past year? She slit her eyes against the sunlight, boot heavy against the gas, and felt twelve again, listening to her father tell war stories in the next room.
They drove until even the coffee and sugary mess of late night diner pie couldn’t keep her eyelids up. And then Sam offered to pay for the motel room, but she just pulled into a municipal park west of Flagstaff and put up her pup tent without bothering with a fire.
“Buy breakfast in the morning, instead” she told him as he crawled in after her. His shoulders took up most of the narrow gap under the yellow nylon, and in the morning she found her sleeping bag rucked to the bottom of the tent by their shifting feet. Their breath condensed above and dripped down onto them. She lay still, with her mouth pressed firm and closed, and watched him wake up.
First above everything, once the haze got blinked away, was doubt.
The part of her that still loved her father’s rockslide voice, his guns and his stories, was glad to have taken up her orphaned brother. Carried him to his future, maybe. Away from Dean, at least.
The rest of her itched to leave him.
When Sam noticed her watching him, he reached across and took her hand and twisted it to his chest like a child’s doll. She watched his eyes close again, his breathing deepen in the yellow light. She watched him choose not to wake up.
-
On the seventh day Dean doesn’t wake up in the morning and she inches across the room to him to check his breath, the warmth on her palm. His eyebrows are knotted in his sleep, but he doesn’t twitch or mutter.
She leaves him like that and goes into town. This time she makes sure to bring her rifle with her.
At the local café she sits down on a barstool beside the pastry display and orders a bowl of strawberry ice cream. She smiles at the girl who brings it to her, asks for a copy of the newspaper.
The girl says, “It’s half a week old,” when she slides it onto the counter.
“Did I miss anything?” Jo asks, giving a smile around her spoon. Implying she’s been out of it a while. Her dirty jeans, her sweat-crusted flannel shirt. She wears her hair knotted in a braid, but it flies out around her head in a cloud whenever she takes off her cap. She lets it all imply raccoon hunting, or camp life down at the Oxco mine. There are plausible excuses, anyway, all of which get less plausible the more she tries to voice them.
The girl just shrugs with the same nameless disgust Jo had at that age. She interprets the grimace: no. What’s to miss?
Still, she combs through the local news, or the news that’s local in the next largest town over. No missing persons, no assaults, not so much as a coyote bite. Whatever Dean was here for, it’s not printable.
Jo finishes her ice cream and leaves her change on the counter. She has another lead.
She parks at a trailhead halfway up the mountain. It was dark when she was here last. Clouded over, the lodgepole pines so tall they would have blocked out the light anyway. There’s no exact point of departure from the main trail, but she remembers a fallen log, and the steepness of the slope where she followed him into the bush.
Another couple hundred yards up, she finds the swatch of broken twigs and displaced dirt where she dragged Dean onto the tarp, and then another trail - straight down the fucking mountainside - where she dragged the tarp down to the truck.
She finds the place where she shot him, and it’s been a dry autumn because after a week the blood is still dark on the leaves in the underbrush. He bled a lot.
She looks, and she doesn’t see anything at odds with her memory. The pine trees are close together and dark, and they creak as if to fall over in the wind off the rock face.
She came across him in the dark, and she didn’t know what he was, moving through the brush, and she shot him as he came at her. From a hundred yards, uphill through the brush. A veil of foliage and the darkness deflected her shot to his thigh.
She came across him in the dark, and he ran, and she aimed for his back.
Or she came across him in the dark, and she shot him point blank.
She remembers it was dark. For the most part, she doesn’t remember shooting him.
All she sees, really, when she looks at the ground, are two strands of long blonde hair. Somehow, they draw her eye. Stuck in a footprint that lies overtop the mess.
Like she’s come back here already, to stand in this spot and review her intentions, her transgressions.
-
Sam got restless on the freeway into San Francisco. She didn’t take the scenic route in, and as small towns turned into fringe sprawl, he shifted in his seat. “Maybe you could drop me off soon.”
She knew they probably had another forty-five minutes of freeway, a bridge at least. He’d have to take a handful of buses, ask directions. Figure it all out himself for once. She couldn’t argue with that. But still, she kind of wanted to see it. The institution, the hallowed halls. What a future looks like.
“No,” she said, “You get door to door service today, Sammy.”
He looked sideways at her, swallowed. Her cracked hands on the steering wheel, her dirty hair in the mirror. She noticed him looking sideways at her. She noticed him swallowing.
She pulled into a strip mall, and while he went to buy sandwiches, she picked out a white shirt with a collar, and brushed her hair into something neat and up. She still smelled like stove oil and the ancient dust embedded in her truck’s upholstery, but from a distance, maybe, she’d pass.
His dorm wasn’t a brick building with white lintels and ivy growing up its northern face, and she was a little disappointed. It looked new, with windows and cement stairs overlooking grass, clean sidewalks.
She walked in with him, smiling polite and pretty at the greeters who demanded his name and told him his room number and where he could print off a copy of his class schedule and, most importantly, where to meet for the start-of-term pub crawl that night.
She said to him, in the stairwell, “Is there anything you need?”
And he said, “No,” even though when they came into his room and he put his duffel down on the bare mattress, she could count the shelves and drawers that would stay empty.
His roommate, the one with the grey-striped comforter smoothed by a motherly hand and a half dozen cardboard boxes on his half of the floor, came in and introduced himself as Rob. Asked what classes Sam was taking. Sam couldn’t remember, stuttered and mumbled like he’d been asked what day he’d die.
Jo turned her back, and counted out her horsethief cash, left a thousand in crumpled twenties and fifties in the top drawer of his desk. He’d need sheets. Textbooks. Booze. Who knew what else.
In the hall, she kissed him and smiled without making any promises. She left him standing in a herd of excited, braying teenagers. A head above the rest, looking as desolate as a single horse on the plain.
-
Before she shot him, she sat in the bed of her truck with her boots dangling, holding her rifle. She dropped the salt shells into a box, and reloaded with double-ought cartridges straight off the shelf.
She can remember telling herself that on a mountain in the black autumn night, she would be better concerned with bears than apparitions.
-
She gets back to her truck, following the scramble straight down the slope and wondering how it is Dean didn’t tumble right under her and take out her legs, or how he didn’t break his neck as she bumped him down over rocks and deadfall. She should have killed him three times over.
In the cab, she stretches down between her legs to touch her shotgun, the cold barrel, damp as a breathing thing. The other cars that had sat waiting for their drivers are gone now, and the sun is behind the trees, although it won’t set properly for hours.
The drive back into town is gravel, and a block of asphalt before she finds her other decrepit road, and follows its hitches back to the pumphouse.
She checks the gun again before she goes inside. Climbs out of the cab and looks at it properly. It’s loaded, untouched. But when she checks her ammo, the salt cartridges are gone from their box.
It’s empty.
She shakes Dean to wake him and he looks at her with foggy eyes.
“So you can walk,” she says to him.
He laughs at her, his eyes closing and opening very slowly. “Did I? I must’ve missed it.”
She stares at him, settles back to the other side of the room. She can’t talk to him if all he has to say are lies. She can’t trust him, even crippled like this, a snared rabbit already gnawed on by foxes.
His smile fades slowly as he looks at her, head tilted but not raised. His fever looks worse, despite the antibiotics, which she’s been regular about. It’s probably all a show.
He says, “If I could walk, you don’t think I would’ve walked my ass over to a hospital by now?”
“You don’t need a hospital.” She covers, because she considered it. And she knew what would happen. And she chose against it, and now it’s too late to go back.
He laughs, rough and shallow, and turns his face back to the ceiling. “Maybe not. You’ll take care of me, I bet.”
“I am taking care of you,” she says, because she could’ve just left him. She could’ve just let him bleed to death, but instead she’s spent a week and a half squatting here and staring at his face as he sleeps because there isn’t anything else human or familiar for miles. His face is familiar now, like it was years ago.
He just shakes his head, and his smile is still there. Like he’ll die smiling, just to spite her.
“Tell me what you were hunting.” Jo inches closer, fingertips braced on the ground as she leans in. “Tell me, and I’ll bring you to the hospital right now.”
Dean blinks at the ceiling, closes his eyes, and smiles.
--
After she left Sam, Jo called her ma. She wasn’t even back to the truck before she found a pay phone and punched the number, desperate for that voice, the smell of clean laundry.
But there was no answer. Not on a Wednesday morning, eleven o’clock, with the sun out and bright there on the edge of the ocean. Her ma would be working, not hanging over the phone in case her vagrant of a kid got sentimental, sick for a home that she couldn’t even name.
Jo let the phone ring over and over.
--
He doesn’t tell her what he was hunting but he tells her where his car is, and she goes and gets it - a long walk, a hitched ride, a shorter walk - because he’s eaten all their oatmeal and his leg seems to be done with bleeding, anyway.
She sells a heavy old buck knife from his trunk and spends the ten bucks on over-the-counter painkillers. He’s spooning those in himself, now, along with the porridge. He hasn’t woken up feverish in a while.
He looks at the leg under its bandages and he says, “The last time I saw you and I wasn’t bleeding you were sixteen.”
Jo doesn’t respond. She’s cutting grapefruit. She stole five of them. Walked out of the grocery store with the bag of them. What else could she do. But this town is starting to recognize her ballcap, her dirty hair, her thieving habits.
She misses her fortune. The simplicity of being flush with cash, it was like carrying the smell of those old stallions around with her. Haydust in her nose, horsehair on her jacket.
She hands Dean six slices of grapefruit, rinds cut off so he can slip them into his mouth. He grimaces at the sting. She grimaces back.
--
Jo saw Mary Winchester in Phoenix. A few days after she’d dropped Sam off. Sitting in a bar attached to a restaurant attached to a motel. She was holding a beer but she didn’t look relaxed. She was talking to a man. Jo didn’t even look at him, although later she wondered: hunter or witness, suspect or partner. But she couldn’t remember anything about him. Because Jo didn’t look at anything but Mary Winchester and her sharp blue eyes.
It took Jo ten seconds, less than that, to come through the door, see that woman, and turn back into the parking lot. In less than a minute she was back in her truck, turning over the engine, pulling away to find a different bar, a different motel.
But Mary Winchester saw her, nailed her hard with a glance. No twist of surprise, after so many years. It was like she’d been waiting for Jo. Or like there was nothing that could surprise her.
--
She asks Dean again, “What were you hunting?”
Dean says, “Hedge witch.”
She asks, “What did you do with the salt cartridges you stole out of my truck?”
Dean says, “I didn’t.”
She asks, “What were you doing up on that mountain?”
Dean says, “What were you doing up there?”
She can’t answer. It’s like they’re in middle school. Like they’re arguing over when their folks are gonna get back and whose gonna get smacked for the coyotes getting into the trash, or for her ma’s welcome-back cherry pie getting ate in solid thirds. She makes a sound in her throat and glares at him. He laughs at her.
He laughs at her and he takes a slow sip of the very old, cold coffee, and she gets up and goes outside, suddenly breathless with how much she knows him. And the other way. How much they’ve known each other.
--
She followed him up that mountain, is the answer. Even if she doesn’t say it, it’s true.
She spent a few nights with his brother, and she saw his mother, and those two things heated something up inside her. A teakettle shrieking from the kitchen while all three of them chucked stones at cans in the yard. The steam off her mother’s laundrette, collecting in the curtains, curling the corners of her drawing paper. It all started something boiling in her belly.
She followed him up that mountain. She’d been following him for a while.
--
She comes back inside, finds she’s got snowflakes in her hair. She shakes them loose and puts on her coat. Takes it off again.
She paces to the hotplate to boil some coffee, but instead knocks over Dean’s cup of cold grounds. She says, “Shit.”
Dean opens his eyes and says, “Hey,” like he wasn’t done with them.
The coffee grounds sludge over the concrete like a fortuneteller might read them, and Jo kicks the tin mug over to the other side of the bunker with the side of her boot. “I’m done with this place,” she says.
When she glances at Dean to see his expression she realizes it was a threat. A weak one.
But his eyes are closed again.
She snaps, “I’m not staying here anymore.”
He doesn’t open them to look at her. She feels even more childish than before, now. She feels pushy, pushed.
She nudges his sleeping bag with her boot. “Dean.”
He cracks an eye.
She’s standing over him: he’s flat on his back, and she’s just standing there. Looking straight down at him like from a mountaintop. Like from a satellite, thousands of miles of distance between them, and she wants more.
“Just wait,” he says.
She says, “What?”
He says, with his eyes closed, “I need a few more days.”
He says, “Don’t leave me yet.”
She crouches down then, onto her haunches, staring hard at his closed eyes. But his brow is furrowed, his mouth turned down at the corners, all of his whole body tense. She can see how carefully he is breathing. The sweat on his temples, either from the pain or the close air of the pumphouse or the last remnants of his light fevers.
She says, “Look at me.”
He does. He opens his eyes. This close, they remember each other perfectly.
She kisses him crossways, her hair falling into their faces. Then she straddles him - over the sleeping bag, still wearing her boots - and when he makes a little moan she finds the part of him that hurts and makes it worse.
She shows him how well she remembers him.
She shucks her boots, she rucks down the sleeping bag till she can set herself against him, his underwear and his bloody bandaged leg. She presses his face between her hands and moans into his mouth when he reaches up under her shirts to find the skin there at her waist, her ribcage, under the band of her bra.
She sucks his lip and presses down on him in ways that she knows aren’t gentle enough. He moans, too. She works at him, she knows she’s a little vicious. Tugging hard at him, pushing him down even though no part of him resists.
She digs her fingers into his shoulders. She soaks her underwear rubbing against him, her spine hooked so that her arms are stiff holding him there and her thighs grip his hips.
She puts her fingers in the bandages, against the bruised and swollen flesh and he doesn’t writhe, but he says, “Please.”
She says, “No.” And she keeps saying it, under her breath, a muttering, as she gets rid of the last remaining layers of cotton and slides onto him. She’s so wet that it’s just a second, just a slick fucking second of surprise on both their faces. She says it again, an inhalation as she stills her body to a heartbeat of recovery: no.
He doesn’t argue with her. He tries to rock with her and she digs a thumb into his inner thigh until he stops. She curses him, says it again. No.
She slides up and down him with her face tilted to the ceiling, her eyes closed, her fingers trailing against him, a weak threat. And she does the same thing, but looking at him.
They look at each other, and she stays on him while she jerks herself off. Quick circles with her fingertips while she floats over him, knees aching, hips straining. When she comes, she falls forward: her palms on the ground with his face between them. She lets him buck up against her, and fuck her until he’s coming, too. It’s the one thing she gives him, but she watches his face the whole time he does it.
It’s just that he looks different now, different than she remembers.
After, his come is all over her thighs and she can feel it dripping like from a faucet deep inside her and she lays down on her side beside him. She puts a hand on his hip bone, over the thigh that she shot, and he winces away a bit.
She says, “Do you need some more pills?” and it’s a challenge, so he shakes his head, settles down.
They’re both naked, and wet, and dirty. Soon they’ll be cold, too. Maybe they’ll die of pneumonia. Jo realizes that she meant it: she is done with this place. She’s not going to stay here anymore.
Dean says, tilting his chin down, “I was looking for my mother.”
On the mountain, Jo thinks. He means on the mountain. But she snorts a laugh at him. She moves her hand away from his groin, to her own stomach. She’s shaking, she’s laughing at him so hard.
He makes a sound, “Not that. On the mountain, I meant. I’ve been tracking her since. For a while.”
“Yeah,” Jo says. “Okay.” She gets up to her hands and knees, finds a shirt to wipe herself down with, dresses them both. When she tries to hand him his green flannel overshirt she meets his eyes and snorts, and he says, “Aw c’mon.”
--
Dean walks himself to his car. The snow is falling heavier, now, so much that it still seems dark out at ten in the morning. Everything gray, even the pine trees, even the river.
Jo drives the truck out first, because there’s a foot of this shit down the access road and Dean’s ride is low-built like your standard cock car and might not make it as a snowplow. They reach town and Dean buys them both fuel at the place on the highway.
He leans against the flank of her truck as she nurses the nozzle, and he says, “So where you headed now?”
Jo shrugs. Pulls some hair out of her face where the wind has pushed it. “Find some cash, find a shower.”
He nods. She knows he’s got the same plan. But same doesn’t mean together, not in this family. He smiles at her, or at least past her shoulder. He says, “You see my mom, or my brother, you tell them I said hi, alright? Tell them I’m looking for them.”
The nozzle in Jo’s hand jerks to a stop. She uses the distraction to turn her face away. “Sure,” she says. The lie burns too high in her throat, and then floats there, between them. She glances at him sideways.
Dean nods. Like he’s resolved to all of them running from him. Taking it as his due, for whatever mistakes, whatever small crimes he’s committed.
He smacks her shoulder and limps back to his car. She watches him lever himself into it, she can see his lips move as he swears against the pain of muscles flexing and releasing. The leg she shot, healing now. She’s still surprised she didn’t kill him.
She climbs into her truck and watches him roll to the intersection and gun it west.
She goes east, knowing about a few hard-up-looking ranches that way that might need an extra hand. Even if it’s not permanent. Even if it’s just cash and a shower and horsehair on her jacket. It’ll do until the road twists up under her feet again and she’s looking another Winchester in the eye.
Fandom: SPN AU. Jo, Sam, Dean.
Rating: sex. het sex, at that.
Spoilers: No.
Words: 5285.
Notes: for vinylroad, who has literally been on me about this since last November. I think I've promised her something at least three different times, including her birthday in July. I am just that much of an asshole. Twelve Strong Horses, What a Pretty Foal and The Longe Whip are are all parts of this universe, which originated with: John died, and Mary lived to raise her boys. Bill and Ellen Harvelle invited her in when she had nowhere to go, and their kids all ran wild through scrub brush and dustbowl cattle land.
Summary: Jo shot him, and she's surprised that he's not dead.
She spends days tending to him, to the frayed muscle of his thigh where the buckshot tore everything up.
His fever, the infection that takes to it in the first few days, the way the shot has dug in too deep to pull out: all the signs are bad.
It was her single gunshot in the black night, so she waits with him. She thinks he might die.
That first night she put him in the bed of her truck, dragged him a quarter of a mile down the mountainside on a plastic tarp. But now she’s found the empty shell of a river pumphouse, just a cement box with a tin roof and a rusted-down barbed wire fence all around. It stands twenty yards back from the waterline, just above the gravel shelf, guts all torn out so that there are round holes in the walls where the pipes used to spit water back into the river.
She peers out of them in the morning; feels peered-in-at in the night.
Whatever Dean was hunting, she found him before he found it. And he hasn’t been lucid enough to answer questions for days. There could be anything out there in the woods.
It’s getting colder in the mornings, and on the third day she watches fog rise off the surface of the river like so many ghosts before getting in her truck and following the weeded-over gravel road a dozen miles into town. She’s been running low on supplies, and he has fifty bucks in his wallet that she uses to buy luxuries like oatmeal, powdered milk, a tin of coffee, water purification tablets. Two grapefruit that have a sweet weight to them when she eats them one after the other in the driver seat.
At the drugstore, she pays for bandages, and then lifts what she hopes are antibiotics from behind the counter when the pharmacist goes to help an old lady select a daily vitamin.
She jolts back down the old road, bouncing over ruts in the mud and fallen branches, leaves scraping at her windows.
She’s spent six years imagining his death, waiting for it, feeling its inevitability, but she never once thought she’d be the one to do it.
When she gets back he’s awake. He has her rifle in his lap.
She stands in the doorway, bag of oats cradled in one arm, bandages in hand, and he’s sitting up on her sleeping bag with the rifle propped like a teddybear in his arms. There is the fresh smell of blood, a slash of it dripping from the bag to the dirty floor. Like maybe he tried to crawl to the door before falling back to the nest she made him.
She holds the oats against her breast. He says, “Didn’t think you’d come back.”
The rifle doesn’t twitch, and she sees how loose his grip on it is. His bloodless hands are slack as dead things.
She wonders if he remembers how he got here, that she shot him with one hand, and then saved him with the other.
She gives him the barest smile, like she shares in his relief, and goes back to the truck.
He watches her, silent, when she comes back with the medicine. Close-mouthed as a cat.
She doesn’t know where to inject him. Lets the needle hover for a few scared seconds before she decides on the vein in the injured thigh. Maybe it’ll all pump right out of him with the blood. She cradles his wrist and he doesn’t argue with her choice. He doesn’t say anything again until after the oatmeal is cooked, a baggie of honeyed peanuts from her glovebox stirred in.
“Where’d you bring us?”
“Outside of town,” there’s no point in lying. He’s not going anywhere, he has nothing to say to anyone. But still, she sees him calculating.
She feeds him from the pot herself, offering the spoon while he struggles to stay conscious.
Ultimately, he falls asleep again, and she changes the bandages - like slapping a sheet over a corpse, there’s no art to it, no science - and leaves him be.
-
It was never a matter of teaching or learning, once she started. It was more just doing: selling her stolen horses in New Mexico and running into a nasty little ground sprite killing calves around the local ranches. Buying a used pickup from a man who smelled like something familiar and potent as garlic, a man who kept a bedraggled boy in an iron cage in his basement. Catching a mug of coffee from the waitress who eyed the map of Virginia she spread out on the table, and mentioned the pair of boys who came through just yesterday asking about that very same county.
Weeks would go by, with her just driving, gathering necessities but aiming for nothing. The weather had turned decent when she hit Arkansas, and she spent a chunk of her cash from the horses she stole at an outdoor supply store that wasn’t too picky about government ID for hunting rifles, and was happy to throw in a pup tent seeing as she was buying out the place anyway. That night, as soon as she’d settled in with her sleeping bag and her fresh-poured cartridges of rock salt, a young man in a worn coat called to her from the trees beyond the firelight. A young man with a smiling voice, and something metal gleaming at his side.
So she spent a few days tracking down his corpse and burning that up into ashes.
Luck just kept spinning bait her way, no better than if the road buckled up under her feet to force her along some twisted, narrow path, the end of which she could not see.
But it wasn’t until the waitresses stopped saying pair of boys and just said that young fellow that Jo caught up to them. Well, the one of them, anyway.
She even looked for him.
She found Sam at a bus stop in Oklahoma City, standing in a line of a hundred other people headed west. She would’ve gone right past him and his clean shirt and new shoes, but he recognized her. Called out across the concourse and left his spot in line to come stand so close that she let him hug her. The duffel slung over his shoulder lay half-empty like he was only carrying a quarter of his life in it.
Even with his hair in his red eyes he looked how he should: a kid, a student, a person with a future in front of him.
She drove him to Palo Alto herself.
-
When Dean wakes up again it’s dark out, and he groans straight through from his chest and grapples at his leg with his hands.
She comes across the floor - three feet - to catch his prying fingers and peek under the bandage herself: how to tell if it’s better? Worse? Maybe the swelling, the heat off the flap-edged skin. “It’s goddamn hot,” he tells her when she looks at his eyes to see if he’s lucid.
She feeds him a handful of headache pills and then offers him a cup of coffee, still warm on her little hotplate.
“Is it morning?” he asks.
She shrugs. He’s been sleeping for fourteen hours, so. “It’s midnight.”
Dean puts a hand to his face, rubs. “Yeah,” he says.
She turns away from him, shifts on her feet to turn and squat over the hot plate again. She should feed him something. More oatmeal, then.
“What were you hunting out there?” she asks.
There is a silence behind her that she doesn’t turn around to inspect. “A golem,” he says.
“Whose?” she asks.
A too-clear answer for his hoarse throat. “Hedge witch, I guess.”
He’s a liar. He’s lying because there was no sign of anything out there in the trees. And no squawking in town, no trail. A raised drudge made out of clay or riverrock is not so light-footed as that.
Jo doesn’t hide her expression as she turns back to him and hands him the bowl. He meets her eyes and the lie sparks between them, a reminder.
His transgressions. And hers: his shattered leg.
She turns off the hot plate and goes to sleep in her truck, as she has every night that she’s spent with him.
-
Sam sat in her truck, hunched against the passenger door, his elbow jammed out the window. He was happy to talk at her, at the trees flashing by, at the dashboard. Just to talk and not watch himself for words like exorcism and poltergeist, probably. Who else had he spoken to besides Dean in the past year? She slit her eyes against the sunlight, boot heavy against the gas, and felt twelve again, listening to her father tell war stories in the next room.
They drove until even the coffee and sugary mess of late night diner pie couldn’t keep her eyelids up. And then Sam offered to pay for the motel room, but she just pulled into a municipal park west of Flagstaff and put up her pup tent without bothering with a fire.
“Buy breakfast in the morning, instead” she told him as he crawled in after her. His shoulders took up most of the narrow gap under the yellow nylon, and in the morning she found her sleeping bag rucked to the bottom of the tent by their shifting feet. Their breath condensed above and dripped down onto them. She lay still, with her mouth pressed firm and closed, and watched him wake up.
First above everything, once the haze got blinked away, was doubt.
The part of her that still loved her father’s rockslide voice, his guns and his stories, was glad to have taken up her orphaned brother. Carried him to his future, maybe. Away from Dean, at least.
The rest of her itched to leave him.
When Sam noticed her watching him, he reached across and took her hand and twisted it to his chest like a child’s doll. She watched his eyes close again, his breathing deepen in the yellow light. She watched him choose not to wake up.
-
On the seventh day Dean doesn’t wake up in the morning and she inches across the room to him to check his breath, the warmth on her palm. His eyebrows are knotted in his sleep, but he doesn’t twitch or mutter.
She leaves him like that and goes into town. This time she makes sure to bring her rifle with her.
At the local café she sits down on a barstool beside the pastry display and orders a bowl of strawberry ice cream. She smiles at the girl who brings it to her, asks for a copy of the newspaper.
The girl says, “It’s half a week old,” when she slides it onto the counter.
“Did I miss anything?” Jo asks, giving a smile around her spoon. Implying she’s been out of it a while. Her dirty jeans, her sweat-crusted flannel shirt. She wears her hair knotted in a braid, but it flies out around her head in a cloud whenever she takes off her cap. She lets it all imply raccoon hunting, or camp life down at the Oxco mine. There are plausible excuses, anyway, all of which get less plausible the more she tries to voice them.
The girl just shrugs with the same nameless disgust Jo had at that age. She interprets the grimace: no. What’s to miss?
Still, she combs through the local news, or the news that’s local in the next largest town over. No missing persons, no assaults, not so much as a coyote bite. Whatever Dean was here for, it’s not printable.
Jo finishes her ice cream and leaves her change on the counter. She has another lead.
She parks at a trailhead halfway up the mountain. It was dark when she was here last. Clouded over, the lodgepole pines so tall they would have blocked out the light anyway. There’s no exact point of departure from the main trail, but she remembers a fallen log, and the steepness of the slope where she followed him into the bush.
Another couple hundred yards up, she finds the swatch of broken twigs and displaced dirt where she dragged Dean onto the tarp, and then another trail - straight down the fucking mountainside - where she dragged the tarp down to the truck.
She finds the place where she shot him, and it’s been a dry autumn because after a week the blood is still dark on the leaves in the underbrush. He bled a lot.
She looks, and she doesn’t see anything at odds with her memory. The pine trees are close together and dark, and they creak as if to fall over in the wind off the rock face.
She came across him in the dark, and she didn’t know what he was, moving through the brush, and she shot him as he came at her. From a hundred yards, uphill through the brush. A veil of foliage and the darkness deflected her shot to his thigh.
She came across him in the dark, and he ran, and she aimed for his back.
Or she came across him in the dark, and she shot him point blank.
She remembers it was dark. For the most part, she doesn’t remember shooting him.
All she sees, really, when she looks at the ground, are two strands of long blonde hair. Somehow, they draw her eye. Stuck in a footprint that lies overtop the mess.
Like she’s come back here already, to stand in this spot and review her intentions, her transgressions.
-
Sam got restless on the freeway into San Francisco. She didn’t take the scenic route in, and as small towns turned into fringe sprawl, he shifted in his seat. “Maybe you could drop me off soon.”
She knew they probably had another forty-five minutes of freeway, a bridge at least. He’d have to take a handful of buses, ask directions. Figure it all out himself for once. She couldn’t argue with that. But still, she kind of wanted to see it. The institution, the hallowed halls. What a future looks like.
“No,” she said, “You get door to door service today, Sammy.”
He looked sideways at her, swallowed. Her cracked hands on the steering wheel, her dirty hair in the mirror. She noticed him looking sideways at her. She noticed him swallowing.
She pulled into a strip mall, and while he went to buy sandwiches, she picked out a white shirt with a collar, and brushed her hair into something neat and up. She still smelled like stove oil and the ancient dust embedded in her truck’s upholstery, but from a distance, maybe, she’d pass.
His dorm wasn’t a brick building with white lintels and ivy growing up its northern face, and she was a little disappointed. It looked new, with windows and cement stairs overlooking grass, clean sidewalks.
She walked in with him, smiling polite and pretty at the greeters who demanded his name and told him his room number and where he could print off a copy of his class schedule and, most importantly, where to meet for the start-of-term pub crawl that night.
She said to him, in the stairwell, “Is there anything you need?”
And he said, “No,” even though when they came into his room and he put his duffel down on the bare mattress, she could count the shelves and drawers that would stay empty.
His roommate, the one with the grey-striped comforter smoothed by a motherly hand and a half dozen cardboard boxes on his half of the floor, came in and introduced himself as Rob. Asked what classes Sam was taking. Sam couldn’t remember, stuttered and mumbled like he’d been asked what day he’d die.
Jo turned her back, and counted out her horsethief cash, left a thousand in crumpled twenties and fifties in the top drawer of his desk. He’d need sheets. Textbooks. Booze. Who knew what else.
In the hall, she kissed him and smiled without making any promises. She left him standing in a herd of excited, braying teenagers. A head above the rest, looking as desolate as a single horse on the plain.
-
Before she shot him, she sat in the bed of her truck with her boots dangling, holding her rifle. She dropped the salt shells into a box, and reloaded with double-ought cartridges straight off the shelf.
She can remember telling herself that on a mountain in the black autumn night, she would be better concerned with bears than apparitions.
-
She gets back to her truck, following the scramble straight down the slope and wondering how it is Dean didn’t tumble right under her and take out her legs, or how he didn’t break his neck as she bumped him down over rocks and deadfall. She should have killed him three times over.
In the cab, she stretches down between her legs to touch her shotgun, the cold barrel, damp as a breathing thing. The other cars that had sat waiting for their drivers are gone now, and the sun is behind the trees, although it won’t set properly for hours.
The drive back into town is gravel, and a block of asphalt before she finds her other decrepit road, and follows its hitches back to the pumphouse.
She checks the gun again before she goes inside. Climbs out of the cab and looks at it properly. It’s loaded, untouched. But when she checks her ammo, the salt cartridges are gone from their box.
It’s empty.
She shakes Dean to wake him and he looks at her with foggy eyes.
“So you can walk,” she says to him.
He laughs at her, his eyes closing and opening very slowly. “Did I? I must’ve missed it.”
She stares at him, settles back to the other side of the room. She can’t talk to him if all he has to say are lies. She can’t trust him, even crippled like this, a snared rabbit already gnawed on by foxes.
His smile fades slowly as he looks at her, head tilted but not raised. His fever looks worse, despite the antibiotics, which she’s been regular about. It’s probably all a show.
He says, “If I could walk, you don’t think I would’ve walked my ass over to a hospital by now?”
“You don’t need a hospital.” She covers, because she considered it. And she knew what would happen. And she chose against it, and now it’s too late to go back.
He laughs, rough and shallow, and turns his face back to the ceiling. “Maybe not. You’ll take care of me, I bet.”
“I am taking care of you,” she says, because she could’ve just left him. She could’ve just let him bleed to death, but instead she’s spent a week and a half squatting here and staring at his face as he sleeps because there isn’t anything else human or familiar for miles. His face is familiar now, like it was years ago.
He just shakes his head, and his smile is still there. Like he’ll die smiling, just to spite her.
“Tell me what you were hunting.” Jo inches closer, fingertips braced on the ground as she leans in. “Tell me, and I’ll bring you to the hospital right now.”
Dean blinks at the ceiling, closes his eyes, and smiles.
--
After she left Sam, Jo called her ma. She wasn’t even back to the truck before she found a pay phone and punched the number, desperate for that voice, the smell of clean laundry.
But there was no answer. Not on a Wednesday morning, eleven o’clock, with the sun out and bright there on the edge of the ocean. Her ma would be working, not hanging over the phone in case her vagrant of a kid got sentimental, sick for a home that she couldn’t even name.
Jo let the phone ring over and over.
--
He doesn’t tell her what he was hunting but he tells her where his car is, and she goes and gets it - a long walk, a hitched ride, a shorter walk - because he’s eaten all their oatmeal and his leg seems to be done with bleeding, anyway.
She sells a heavy old buck knife from his trunk and spends the ten bucks on over-the-counter painkillers. He’s spooning those in himself, now, along with the porridge. He hasn’t woken up feverish in a while.
He looks at the leg under its bandages and he says, “The last time I saw you and I wasn’t bleeding you were sixteen.”
Jo doesn’t respond. She’s cutting grapefruit. She stole five of them. Walked out of the grocery store with the bag of them. What else could she do. But this town is starting to recognize her ballcap, her dirty hair, her thieving habits.
She misses her fortune. The simplicity of being flush with cash, it was like carrying the smell of those old stallions around with her. Haydust in her nose, horsehair on her jacket.
She hands Dean six slices of grapefruit, rinds cut off so he can slip them into his mouth. He grimaces at the sting. She grimaces back.
--
Jo saw Mary Winchester in Phoenix. A few days after she’d dropped Sam off. Sitting in a bar attached to a restaurant attached to a motel. She was holding a beer but she didn’t look relaxed. She was talking to a man. Jo didn’t even look at him, although later she wondered: hunter or witness, suspect or partner. But she couldn’t remember anything about him. Because Jo didn’t look at anything but Mary Winchester and her sharp blue eyes.
It took Jo ten seconds, less than that, to come through the door, see that woman, and turn back into the parking lot. In less than a minute she was back in her truck, turning over the engine, pulling away to find a different bar, a different motel.
But Mary Winchester saw her, nailed her hard with a glance. No twist of surprise, after so many years. It was like she’d been waiting for Jo. Or like there was nothing that could surprise her.
--
She asks Dean again, “What were you hunting?”
Dean says, “Hedge witch.”
She asks, “What did you do with the salt cartridges you stole out of my truck?”
Dean says, “I didn’t.”
She asks, “What were you doing up on that mountain?”
Dean says, “What were you doing up there?”
She can’t answer. It’s like they’re in middle school. Like they’re arguing over when their folks are gonna get back and whose gonna get smacked for the coyotes getting into the trash, or for her ma’s welcome-back cherry pie getting ate in solid thirds. She makes a sound in her throat and glares at him. He laughs at her.
He laughs at her and he takes a slow sip of the very old, cold coffee, and she gets up and goes outside, suddenly breathless with how much she knows him. And the other way. How much they’ve known each other.
--
She followed him up that mountain, is the answer. Even if she doesn’t say it, it’s true.
She spent a few nights with his brother, and she saw his mother, and those two things heated something up inside her. A teakettle shrieking from the kitchen while all three of them chucked stones at cans in the yard. The steam off her mother’s laundrette, collecting in the curtains, curling the corners of her drawing paper. It all started something boiling in her belly.
She followed him up that mountain. She’d been following him for a while.
--
She comes back inside, finds she’s got snowflakes in her hair. She shakes them loose and puts on her coat. Takes it off again.
She paces to the hotplate to boil some coffee, but instead knocks over Dean’s cup of cold grounds. She says, “Shit.”
Dean opens his eyes and says, “Hey,” like he wasn’t done with them.
The coffee grounds sludge over the concrete like a fortuneteller might read them, and Jo kicks the tin mug over to the other side of the bunker with the side of her boot. “I’m done with this place,” she says.
When she glances at Dean to see his expression she realizes it was a threat. A weak one.
But his eyes are closed again.
She snaps, “I’m not staying here anymore.”
He doesn’t open them to look at her. She feels even more childish than before, now. She feels pushy, pushed.
She nudges his sleeping bag with her boot. “Dean.”
He cracks an eye.
She’s standing over him: he’s flat on his back, and she’s just standing there. Looking straight down at him like from a mountaintop. Like from a satellite, thousands of miles of distance between them, and she wants more.
“Just wait,” he says.
She says, “What?”
He says, with his eyes closed, “I need a few more days.”
He says, “Don’t leave me yet.”
She crouches down then, onto her haunches, staring hard at his closed eyes. But his brow is furrowed, his mouth turned down at the corners, all of his whole body tense. She can see how carefully he is breathing. The sweat on his temples, either from the pain or the close air of the pumphouse or the last remnants of his light fevers.
She says, “Look at me.”
He does. He opens his eyes. This close, they remember each other perfectly.
She kisses him crossways, her hair falling into their faces. Then she straddles him - over the sleeping bag, still wearing her boots - and when he makes a little moan she finds the part of him that hurts and makes it worse.
She shows him how well she remembers him.
She shucks her boots, she rucks down the sleeping bag till she can set herself against him, his underwear and his bloody bandaged leg. She presses his face between her hands and moans into his mouth when he reaches up under her shirts to find the skin there at her waist, her ribcage, under the band of her bra.
She sucks his lip and presses down on him in ways that she knows aren’t gentle enough. He moans, too. She works at him, she knows she’s a little vicious. Tugging hard at him, pushing him down even though no part of him resists.
She digs her fingers into his shoulders. She soaks her underwear rubbing against him, her spine hooked so that her arms are stiff holding him there and her thighs grip his hips.
She puts her fingers in the bandages, against the bruised and swollen flesh and he doesn’t writhe, but he says, “Please.”
She says, “No.” And she keeps saying it, under her breath, a muttering, as she gets rid of the last remaining layers of cotton and slides onto him. She’s so wet that it’s just a second, just a slick fucking second of surprise on both their faces. She says it again, an inhalation as she stills her body to a heartbeat of recovery: no.
He doesn’t argue with her. He tries to rock with her and she digs a thumb into his inner thigh until he stops. She curses him, says it again. No.
She slides up and down him with her face tilted to the ceiling, her eyes closed, her fingers trailing against him, a weak threat. And she does the same thing, but looking at him.
They look at each other, and she stays on him while she jerks herself off. Quick circles with her fingertips while she floats over him, knees aching, hips straining. When she comes, she falls forward: her palms on the ground with his face between them. She lets him buck up against her, and fuck her until he’s coming, too. It’s the one thing she gives him, but she watches his face the whole time he does it.
It’s just that he looks different now, different than she remembers.
After, his come is all over her thighs and she can feel it dripping like from a faucet deep inside her and she lays down on her side beside him. She puts a hand on his hip bone, over the thigh that she shot, and he winces away a bit.
She says, “Do you need some more pills?” and it’s a challenge, so he shakes his head, settles down.
They’re both naked, and wet, and dirty. Soon they’ll be cold, too. Maybe they’ll die of pneumonia. Jo realizes that she meant it: she is done with this place. She’s not going to stay here anymore.
Dean says, tilting his chin down, “I was looking for my mother.”
On the mountain, Jo thinks. He means on the mountain. But she snorts a laugh at him. She moves her hand away from his groin, to her own stomach. She’s shaking, she’s laughing at him so hard.
He makes a sound, “Not that. On the mountain, I meant. I’ve been tracking her since. For a while.”
“Yeah,” Jo says. “Okay.” She gets up to her hands and knees, finds a shirt to wipe herself down with, dresses them both. When she tries to hand him his green flannel overshirt she meets his eyes and snorts, and he says, “Aw c’mon.”
--
Dean walks himself to his car. The snow is falling heavier, now, so much that it still seems dark out at ten in the morning. Everything gray, even the pine trees, even the river.
Jo drives the truck out first, because there’s a foot of this shit down the access road and Dean’s ride is low-built like your standard cock car and might not make it as a snowplow. They reach town and Dean buys them both fuel at the place on the highway.
He leans against the flank of her truck as she nurses the nozzle, and he says, “So where you headed now?”
Jo shrugs. Pulls some hair out of her face where the wind has pushed it. “Find some cash, find a shower.”
He nods. She knows he’s got the same plan. But same doesn’t mean together, not in this family. He smiles at her, or at least past her shoulder. He says, “You see my mom, or my brother, you tell them I said hi, alright? Tell them I’m looking for them.”
The nozzle in Jo’s hand jerks to a stop. She uses the distraction to turn her face away. “Sure,” she says. The lie burns too high in her throat, and then floats there, between them. She glances at him sideways.
Dean nods. Like he’s resolved to all of them running from him. Taking it as his due, for whatever mistakes, whatever small crimes he’s committed.
He smacks her shoulder and limps back to his car. She watches him lever himself into it, she can see his lips move as he swears against the pain of muscles flexing and releasing. The leg she shot, healing now. She’s still surprised she didn’t kill him.
She climbs into her truck and watches him roll to the intersection and gun it west.
She goes east, knowing about a few hard-up-looking ranches that way that might need an extra hand. Even if it’s not permanent. Even if it’s just cash and a shower and horsehair on her jacket. It’ll do until the road twists up under her feet again and she’s looking another Winchester in the eye.