fic: Twelve Strong Horses
Fandom: SPN AU, het. Jo/Dean, Jo/OMC.
Rating: PG-13: for underage, post-pubescent kissin'.
Spoilers: No.
Notes: Just cleaning out the WIP folder here, don't mind me. 3400 hundred words. AND HET. I KNOW. DON'T DISOWN ME. I don't know how old Jo's supposed to be, relatively, in canon, so call this an alternate alternate universe. Mistakes are my own, but the prompt was delighter's. Sorry, baby, no back-alley abortions this time around. The three succeeding parts to this story are: What a Pretty Foal, The Longe Whip and The Horsethief Fortune.
Summary: John died, and Mary lived to raise her boys. Bill and Ellen Harvelle invited her in when she had nowhere to go, and now their kids all run wild through scrub brush and dustbowl cattle land.
i.
They spend days in the hills of the Big Belt, training. Hunting, and stalking, mostly. Lying in wait alongside the twine-and-wire gopher nooses. Shooting rattlesnakes off rocks with the pair of pellet guns Jo's dad gave the boys last Christmas.
“Now yer twelve,” he said from the breakfast table, watching Dean turn the weighted metal over in his hands, “And you teach Sam how to shoot after you learn.”
Mary doesn't frown over her coffee, but raises her eyebrows at Sammy's twisted mouth. “What do you say, Sam?”
“Thanks, Uncle Bill,” says Sammy, already turning to the next present.
“We can go and set up some targets after pancakes,” Bill says, as Ellen sets down a plate of them.
“You learn me, too,” says Jo, near as old as Dean and taller, at least. She stands up from her perch by the woodstove, clenching her plastic horse by the barrel, careful of its duct-taped leg. She picks her way through the torn up paper to stand by her daddy's knee.
“You can learn, too,” says Bill. “Sure, sweet thing.”
But there isn't a pellet gun tagged with Jo's name under the tree, just a how-to-draw horses book.
Which means that scrabbling down the dry white clay and scratching their legs on the gulch weed, she has to shoot the snakes with Sammy's.
ii.
Jo's dad is the smell of tobacco and the cold outside mountains, even in summer. He's the leaning huge shadow over her bed rubbing her raw with his whiskers and wiping his mouth - phoo! phooey! - after their goodnight kiss. The horses he brings her are always stunt-legged, garish-painted, with wobbly mis-placed eyes that catch nothing of the powerful nobility she yearns after. But she treasures them. Herds them together on the shelf beside her bed. Names them each.
Jo knows her dad is a big man, a man with a dozen rifles and a rockslide of a voice. He straps her with his belt when she mouths off to her mother and she screams and screams and knows that his is the incontestable power of the universe.
So when Dean gets slack-shouldered and sneery, and starts tellin crank tales bout their dad and how their dad was a hunderd times tougher, a hunderd times smarter than Uncle Bill, then - then - Jo socks him one right in his snotty mouth.
iii.
There's one thing her and Sam do together, and that only when Dean's gone out on one of his sulks. They catch grasshoppers. Kneeling and hopping themselves in the dirt. Powdering their brown skin pale with white silt dust. Caging the purring yellow motors in their hands, and shrieking when the jabbing sparks get too much for the flesh of their palms. Releasing them like little airships into the blue desert.
iv.
But at night not either of them will have anything to do with her. All of Sam gets curled up in Aunt Mary in the good recliner, and they spell out their murmured conversations to each other while Dean pretends he isn't jealous, reading his comic book on the floor.
If Jo ever condescends off the sofa to join him in collecting stray hairs and lint from the carpet with her drawing pad, he ignores her, too.
And if Jo ever tries to spell anything out to her dad, sitting with his eyes half closed and sometimes a little bit of dinner in his beard, she gets nothing but a grunt from him, and a glare like February frost from Sam for her thievery.
At night, her favourite thing is to creep upstairs and find her ma with the ironing board. Watch the Beverly Hillbillies together, on the old little tv in the bedroom closet.
v.
In June it's finally hot enough for the river, says Dean. And though Jo's been wearing her pink swimming shorts on and off since the start of May, roaming the banks for crawdads on her own time and cursing his embargo as nothing but cold-feet cowardice, she is also the first to forget his selfishness and win the race across the rapids to the rocky archipelago where each of them claims a boulder to defend from Sammy. Sammy who is the smallest and weakest, and therefore always the enemy.
When he gets repelled one too many times - Jo's foot on his fingers, Dean's fist in his chest - he falls back on his palms into the sharp digs of the water and starts choking out his frustration in tears. Jo can full on see the flash of pity that strikes Dean where he stands, splay-toed and triumphant on his rock. He declares an amnesty and alliance, and a now-laughing Sammy is turned traitor.
Jo is stranded at the top of her pyramid river fortress, assailed on both flanks by the scrabbling claws and shining wet skin of the united Winchesters.
She perches like a gargoyle and bares her teeth, snapping at them. Dean snarls back and swipes at her with a claw. He is a mountain lion, she sees that. And Sammy wails like a scenting hound, eager for her blood from below. Dean swipes again and she slips on the moss to avoid the blow, flaring her bat wings, but losing her balance anyway. Slow as a felled tree she scrapes off the rock into the carve of the current's main cut. Full five feet deep, brown with silt and cold as the glacier it sloughed off.
She splutters, coughing and stretching her toes for a pebbled stretch of solid. She finds it, loses it. She can't see much but the glare of green trees along the bank, the blind blur of water-and-sky. She touches bottom again. Drags herself by her toes inwards, inwards to the shallows and suck of clay.
Dean reaches a hand. It's in her hair, and she grabs his wrist. She gets one good lungful, and then the world is upright again, with the strong cold horizontal of the stubborn Missouri dragging by. They stagger in through the cattails, dumb as cattle, winded. He's soaked, too. Dove right in after her.
Sammy's standing on the bank, all goose-pimpled and dripping, looking in worse shape than either of them. His mouth is cut open and red. His face is a wet rag. He doesn't make a sound, and neither Jo nor Dean reach out a hand to ruffle his hair.
vi.
On the mornings when Dad and Aunt Mary are out hunting she goes out with her stub pencil to the barbed wire fence along the east ridge and watches cows. She's just there to count a bit, make sure the brands are what they're supposed to be, eating her dad's grass. But almost, she doesn't even need to, 'cause Lull Cready's boy Con is always there to say Mornin, Miss Harvelle from where he's set up on that big buckskin mare of his, arms crossed over the pommel. White teeth, black eyes. Jo never says anything back. She just does her count and turns to walk the mile back to the house for her breakfast.
She doesn't remember anything before they came here, and doesn't care to. Her dad has probably the most scrub range in three counties, an inheritance from Uncle Lewkis who died 'cause his horse stepped on a rattler and then fell on him. It came with about a dozen ranchers haggling prices for grazing rights along the eastern plateau - Lull Cready being the least poor - and no horses. Only animal they keep is chickens, and old Lewkis' ugly dog, also named Lewkis.
Jo would shoot a hundred rattlesnakes with Sammy's pellet gun, snare a thousand rabbits, for a horse. Even as she thinks this she knows it is a stupid want, selfish. Standing with her notepad, she eyes Cready's mare. Dull golden hide with oiled second-hand leathers, no foam on her bit or cuts on her flanks. She flicks her ears patient and attentive, and she doesn't tug at the reins or strain down for grass. She stands with her head set like a pointer's, watching where Cready watches, and right now, that is straight back at Jo.
When she turns homeward, Con Cready and the mare lag after her for probably a good quarter mile. Always staying just to the left, ten yards back, so she can see him out the sides of her eyes, face painted pale yellow in the morning light. His mare twitches her tail against the blowflies, and just as Jo's blood has boiled high enough to have her turn around and chase him off her dad's property, he turns himself around.
She squats down in the dust and scrub brush and watches them go.
vii.
That winter, Dad and Aunt Mary are gone for a full two months. Jo knows how long it's been because they've been scratching a calendar in the wood frame under Dean's mattress. Every time her Ma turns out the lights, she slips across the planks to the boys' bunks, and Sammy scrabbles down from the top, and in the darkness by moonlight they scratch in another day, and Dean says, solemn, “Now that's sixty-eight.” And then mostly Sammy cries and if one or the other of them doesn't do something, he'll get loud enough to get Jo's ma back up. So most often, they all fall asleep together in a tangle on Dean's narrow mattress. When they're older, they'll never remember the reunions, only the absences.
viii.
Jo's always known there isn't a lot of money, and what little there is comes in as it will, not because anyone goes out looking for it. Aunt Mary puts in her widow's pension and Dad takes what he can from the cattlemen, but it's Jo's mom who goes out and takes jobs in town when it gets lean. Waitressing, spilling black coffee into white mugs.
Sometimes she comes home with half a cherry pie. Sometimes she comes home, and Dad and Mary are laughing in the kitchen together, telling old stories to the kids, maybe a bit drunk if some old hunting buddy has stopped by for a brief visit.
Jo sees how her ma can just swallow all her hurt like liquor. Put down the groceries, ask Sammy if he's had dinner yet, because if he hasn't, no one has. She just twitches away the laughter like all the days and months alone, like so many blowflies.
Jo always feels guilty, laughing with Dad and Mary, and when her ma comes home she always helps with dinner, like to make up.
ix.
One cold spring Dean gets an after-school job, at the feed and supply store in town. They give him three dollars an hour and Jo knows that four days a week he skips afternoon classes to go work. He's fifteen now, and as soon as summer comes he won't have to go back to school ever. Her and Sammy spend their afternoons on the bench outside Cartwright Drug if it's warm, or inside the library when it's snowing through April, waiting for Dean to get off at six and drive them all home in the truck by merit of his hardship license.
Mostly it's an alright system. Sammy helps her with her homework, because he's always been better at all the reading and figuring, and after - to make up for her sulking and whining when she can't follow what he's explaining - she steals him a sucker from Mr. Cartwright.
She doesn't know what Dean's saving all that money for - some of it goes to the chicken feed and he puts a lot of it in the coffee tin Jo's ma buys the groceries out of. But not all of it. He's been getting mean and solitary, and he never says anything to either of them on the long rides home, wind whipping up through the rust holes in the truck's belly.
Jo always finds that Sam's crawled up tight against her, cold fingers finding warmth under her jacket as he sleeps.
x.
Come the eve of the first hunting trip in July, after school's out, Dean tells everyone at dinner that he's going along from now on. He announces it quiet, looking hard at the adults. And when Aunt Mary says no without even a pause, Dean mouths off, and before long Dean's getting his hide whipped by Jo's Dad. No sound but the smack of the leather belt on Dean's jeans comes down the stairs, and Ellen starts cleaning up the dishes quiet and quick.
After, Jo creeps to the bedroom to get her draw pad and finds Dean lying on his belly in her bed. He cracks swollen eyes and watches her as she pretends not to notice him. When she starts backing out he says, “Wait.”
He sits up as she pauses, straight-backed in the close-curtain dimness. They haven't spoken more than two words ever since he got that job, and she's got a feeling about what he's been doing, even as she tells herself she doesn't care what pissy Dean Winchester does or does not do.
He slithers out of her bed, and goes to the closet where they keep all their clothes and what toys they got left from babyhood. There's a high-chair in there, folded at the back, and the one doll she got from her gran, that she stuffed away because its eyes gave her nightmares and its hands reached for her in the dark.
Dean pulls out a rifle.
“I bought this,” he says, not looking at it, just at her. “I'll use it when I find the thing that killed my dad.”
Jo just takes a breath and says, “You oughta put it away right now.” None of her business, and she's a close-mouthed little filly, but she doesn't want a whipping.
Dean doesn't listen. He holds the gun by the barrel in his right hand and takes two steps to her. He looks mean, and his breath is hot. There are salt tracks spread from the corners of his eyes like hoarfrost. His left hand takes a handful of her flannel shirt and his kiss is hard, like a smack in the mouth. It's not even a kiss, it's a declaration. She can feel him pushing her back, toward the bed or the wall or the floor, and she's afraid he won't stop, he'll go as far as he can just to show her.
She scratches him hard, clawing straight into his cheek and throat, and pulls out of his grip, and runs.
xi.
It's hot in the morning when she goes out for her count. The house is quiet, Sammy and Dean still sleeping, her ma circling want ads in the kitchen. She walks the mile to the eastern property line, sweating under one of Dean's old shirts because she has to save her girl clothes for school, kicking up red dirt with her boots.
Last night she made up an excuse to get her dad to come up and tuck her in like she was six again. When he left, she was afraid Dean would come and punish her, but maybe Sammy being up in the top bunk stopped him. Or maybe he was just done with her. She didn't know, but she kept dreaming he was crawling across the floor all night, and she must've woke up a hundred times, hot, with her hair plastered to her face.
Con Cready is a distant figure on his buckskin mare when she gets to the bluff. He's moving the herd slow south this time, and she counts 'em, thinking she couldn't stop him if he were to slip a few more head in, or maybe meet up with the rest of his pa's herd out of her line of sight, later on in the day.
Her dad must trust old Lull. That, or not care so long as he was paid in the first place. Jo can't imagine being satisfied with either, if it were her land.
“Mornin, Miss Harvelle,” Cready says, leaning over his pommel, teeth bared as he squints down at her.
She is all of fourteen, and she tosses her plait back over her shoulder as she looks up at him and says, “Mornin, Con.”
Maybe it's curiosity, but Jo thinks it's best not to question as Con swings off his mare and leaves her standing with her nose in the brush, reins trailing. He steps closer, and Jo keeps her chin high, her gaze resolute and distant. She watches him in the edge of her vision, and his first touch is light on her shoulder: he undoes her braid, and with an irritating hesitance smooths out the long yellow hair, running his hand down her spine. She feels a roll of heat follow his stroke, like a rush of warm water.
He puts rough fingers on the join of her neck and left shoulder, still standing behind her, and then he leans down over her. She watches his shadow and hers, rather than turning to face him. His kiss is soft and painless, on the side of her sweaty throat. He moves up to her jaw, her ear, and she can feel him begging her to turn around, but she is stiff-backed, saw-boned. She wishes he would stop, but still feels a terrible yearning to know what he'll do next, in the face of her truculence.
He yields, circles around and bends at the knees to kiss her mouth. She moves her lips uncertainly, and his hands are back on her: at hip, waist, breast. He handles her like his reluctant mare, gentle, no spurs. He is compassionate, while he does this to her.
When the mare nickers, she jerks away, her whole body made out of hard lines and cast iron. His dark, skinny frame still hunkers at her height, and his face is apologetic, pathetic.
xii.
She never finds out how Dean knew. No one ever does, really, because the sheriff's office never comes calling. There's an outraged article in the newspaper, all the more vehement for its ignorance and ultimate uselessness. Lull Cready cries foul and Jo knows there's tension, because she doesn't have to go count cattle any more.
Because somehow, their parents know. Jo's dad doesn't strap Dean - though they know, they also know they can't acknowledge it. They can't acknowledge any of it, without bringing everything down around their own ears. So Jo is practically a ghost in the house. No one but Sammy really looks at her. He takes care to sit beside her on the porch after dinner, strokes her hand when she cries in bed at night.
And now Dean is allowed to go hunting.
The morning they leave for his first trip, Dean pulls his rifle out from its spot in the closet. Jo never brought herself to touch it, and now, no one asks questions.
They all stand together in the gravel in front of the house, and as the good truck, Aunt Mary's truck, gets packed up with supplies and weapons, Jo stares, hating. Dean catches her eye once, and he looks miserable, for all his victories. Dull and exhausted as the day he pulled her out of the Missouri, pushed and saved her all at once. Now she thinks she'd rather have drowned than taken help from that hand.
Everyone hugs, even Jo's ma and dad. It's a ritual, a charm of safekeeping, necessary. But when Dean hugs her he doesn't touch her, doesn't say anything, doesn't even meet her eyes.
All she can see when she looks at him is the buckskin mare he shot dead in her stall. Once in the neck, and once in the head. Done in the dark witching hour because she should have let him kiss her.
The truck pulls aways and the three of them linger in front of the house, watching the dust rise all down the road. This is how the family is split, finally - one line down the centre between them. Sammy is snivelling into his shirtsleeve and Jo doesn't cuff him, though she yearns to.
Instead, she is the first one to step away.
Rating: PG-13: for underage, post-pubescent kissin'.
Spoilers: No.
Notes: Just cleaning out the WIP folder here, don't mind me. 3400 hundred words. AND HET. I KNOW. DON'T DISOWN ME. I don't know how old Jo's supposed to be, relatively, in canon, so call this an alternate alternate universe. Mistakes are my own, but the prompt was delighter's. Sorry, baby, no back-alley abortions this time around. The three succeeding parts to this story are: What a Pretty Foal, The Longe Whip and The Horsethief Fortune.
Summary: John died, and Mary lived to raise her boys. Bill and Ellen Harvelle invited her in when she had nowhere to go, and now their kids all run wild through scrub brush and dustbowl cattle land.
i.
They spend days in the hills of the Big Belt, training. Hunting, and stalking, mostly. Lying in wait alongside the twine-and-wire gopher nooses. Shooting rattlesnakes off rocks with the pair of pellet guns Jo's dad gave the boys last Christmas.
“Now yer twelve,” he said from the breakfast table, watching Dean turn the weighted metal over in his hands, “And you teach Sam how to shoot after you learn.”
Mary doesn't frown over her coffee, but raises her eyebrows at Sammy's twisted mouth. “What do you say, Sam?”
“Thanks, Uncle Bill,” says Sammy, already turning to the next present.
“We can go and set up some targets after pancakes,” Bill says, as Ellen sets down a plate of them.
“You learn me, too,” says Jo, near as old as Dean and taller, at least. She stands up from her perch by the woodstove, clenching her plastic horse by the barrel, careful of its duct-taped leg. She picks her way through the torn up paper to stand by her daddy's knee.
“You can learn, too,” says Bill. “Sure, sweet thing.”
But there isn't a pellet gun tagged with Jo's name under the tree, just a how-to-draw horses book.
Which means that scrabbling down the dry white clay and scratching their legs on the gulch weed, she has to shoot the snakes with Sammy's.
ii.
Jo's dad is the smell of tobacco and the cold outside mountains, even in summer. He's the leaning huge shadow over her bed rubbing her raw with his whiskers and wiping his mouth - phoo! phooey! - after their goodnight kiss. The horses he brings her are always stunt-legged, garish-painted, with wobbly mis-placed eyes that catch nothing of the powerful nobility she yearns after. But she treasures them. Herds them together on the shelf beside her bed. Names them each.
Jo knows her dad is a big man, a man with a dozen rifles and a rockslide of a voice. He straps her with his belt when she mouths off to her mother and she screams and screams and knows that his is the incontestable power of the universe.
So when Dean gets slack-shouldered and sneery, and starts tellin crank tales bout their dad and how their dad was a hunderd times tougher, a hunderd times smarter than Uncle Bill, then - then - Jo socks him one right in his snotty mouth.
iii.
There's one thing her and Sam do together, and that only when Dean's gone out on one of his sulks. They catch grasshoppers. Kneeling and hopping themselves in the dirt. Powdering their brown skin pale with white silt dust. Caging the purring yellow motors in their hands, and shrieking when the jabbing sparks get too much for the flesh of their palms. Releasing them like little airships into the blue desert.
iv.
But at night not either of them will have anything to do with her. All of Sam gets curled up in Aunt Mary in the good recliner, and they spell out their murmured conversations to each other while Dean pretends he isn't jealous, reading his comic book on the floor.
If Jo ever condescends off the sofa to join him in collecting stray hairs and lint from the carpet with her drawing pad, he ignores her, too.
And if Jo ever tries to spell anything out to her dad, sitting with his eyes half closed and sometimes a little bit of dinner in his beard, she gets nothing but a grunt from him, and a glare like February frost from Sam for her thievery.
At night, her favourite thing is to creep upstairs and find her ma with the ironing board. Watch the Beverly Hillbillies together, on the old little tv in the bedroom closet.
v.
In June it's finally hot enough for the river, says Dean. And though Jo's been wearing her pink swimming shorts on and off since the start of May, roaming the banks for crawdads on her own time and cursing his embargo as nothing but cold-feet cowardice, she is also the first to forget his selfishness and win the race across the rapids to the rocky archipelago where each of them claims a boulder to defend from Sammy. Sammy who is the smallest and weakest, and therefore always the enemy.
When he gets repelled one too many times - Jo's foot on his fingers, Dean's fist in his chest - he falls back on his palms into the sharp digs of the water and starts choking out his frustration in tears. Jo can full on see the flash of pity that strikes Dean where he stands, splay-toed and triumphant on his rock. He declares an amnesty and alliance, and a now-laughing Sammy is turned traitor.
Jo is stranded at the top of her pyramid river fortress, assailed on both flanks by the scrabbling claws and shining wet skin of the united Winchesters.
She perches like a gargoyle and bares her teeth, snapping at them. Dean snarls back and swipes at her with a claw. He is a mountain lion, she sees that. And Sammy wails like a scenting hound, eager for her blood from below. Dean swipes again and she slips on the moss to avoid the blow, flaring her bat wings, but losing her balance anyway. Slow as a felled tree she scrapes off the rock into the carve of the current's main cut. Full five feet deep, brown with silt and cold as the glacier it sloughed off.
She splutters, coughing and stretching her toes for a pebbled stretch of solid. She finds it, loses it. She can't see much but the glare of green trees along the bank, the blind blur of water-and-sky. She touches bottom again. Drags herself by her toes inwards, inwards to the shallows and suck of clay.
Dean reaches a hand. It's in her hair, and she grabs his wrist. She gets one good lungful, and then the world is upright again, with the strong cold horizontal of the stubborn Missouri dragging by. They stagger in through the cattails, dumb as cattle, winded. He's soaked, too. Dove right in after her.
Sammy's standing on the bank, all goose-pimpled and dripping, looking in worse shape than either of them. His mouth is cut open and red. His face is a wet rag. He doesn't make a sound, and neither Jo nor Dean reach out a hand to ruffle his hair.
vi.
On the mornings when Dad and Aunt Mary are out hunting she goes out with her stub pencil to the barbed wire fence along the east ridge and watches cows. She's just there to count a bit, make sure the brands are what they're supposed to be, eating her dad's grass. But almost, she doesn't even need to, 'cause Lull Cready's boy Con is always there to say Mornin, Miss Harvelle from where he's set up on that big buckskin mare of his, arms crossed over the pommel. White teeth, black eyes. Jo never says anything back. She just does her count and turns to walk the mile back to the house for her breakfast.
She doesn't remember anything before they came here, and doesn't care to. Her dad has probably the most scrub range in three counties, an inheritance from Uncle Lewkis who died 'cause his horse stepped on a rattler and then fell on him. It came with about a dozen ranchers haggling prices for grazing rights along the eastern plateau - Lull Cready being the least poor - and no horses. Only animal they keep is chickens, and old Lewkis' ugly dog, also named Lewkis.
Jo would shoot a hundred rattlesnakes with Sammy's pellet gun, snare a thousand rabbits, for a horse. Even as she thinks this she knows it is a stupid want, selfish. Standing with her notepad, she eyes Cready's mare. Dull golden hide with oiled second-hand leathers, no foam on her bit or cuts on her flanks. She flicks her ears patient and attentive, and she doesn't tug at the reins or strain down for grass. She stands with her head set like a pointer's, watching where Cready watches, and right now, that is straight back at Jo.
When she turns homeward, Con Cready and the mare lag after her for probably a good quarter mile. Always staying just to the left, ten yards back, so she can see him out the sides of her eyes, face painted pale yellow in the morning light. His mare twitches her tail against the blowflies, and just as Jo's blood has boiled high enough to have her turn around and chase him off her dad's property, he turns himself around.
She squats down in the dust and scrub brush and watches them go.
vii.
That winter, Dad and Aunt Mary are gone for a full two months. Jo knows how long it's been because they've been scratching a calendar in the wood frame under Dean's mattress. Every time her Ma turns out the lights, she slips across the planks to the boys' bunks, and Sammy scrabbles down from the top, and in the darkness by moonlight they scratch in another day, and Dean says, solemn, “Now that's sixty-eight.” And then mostly Sammy cries and if one or the other of them doesn't do something, he'll get loud enough to get Jo's ma back up. So most often, they all fall asleep together in a tangle on Dean's narrow mattress. When they're older, they'll never remember the reunions, only the absences.
viii.
Jo's always known there isn't a lot of money, and what little there is comes in as it will, not because anyone goes out looking for it. Aunt Mary puts in her widow's pension and Dad takes what he can from the cattlemen, but it's Jo's mom who goes out and takes jobs in town when it gets lean. Waitressing, spilling black coffee into white mugs.
Sometimes she comes home with half a cherry pie. Sometimes she comes home, and Dad and Mary are laughing in the kitchen together, telling old stories to the kids, maybe a bit drunk if some old hunting buddy has stopped by for a brief visit.
Jo sees how her ma can just swallow all her hurt like liquor. Put down the groceries, ask Sammy if he's had dinner yet, because if he hasn't, no one has. She just twitches away the laughter like all the days and months alone, like so many blowflies.
Jo always feels guilty, laughing with Dad and Mary, and when her ma comes home she always helps with dinner, like to make up.
ix.
One cold spring Dean gets an after-school job, at the feed and supply store in town. They give him three dollars an hour and Jo knows that four days a week he skips afternoon classes to go work. He's fifteen now, and as soon as summer comes he won't have to go back to school ever. Her and Sammy spend their afternoons on the bench outside Cartwright Drug if it's warm, or inside the library when it's snowing through April, waiting for Dean to get off at six and drive them all home in the truck by merit of his hardship license.
Mostly it's an alright system. Sammy helps her with her homework, because he's always been better at all the reading and figuring, and after - to make up for her sulking and whining when she can't follow what he's explaining - she steals him a sucker from Mr. Cartwright.
She doesn't know what Dean's saving all that money for - some of it goes to the chicken feed and he puts a lot of it in the coffee tin Jo's ma buys the groceries out of. But not all of it. He's been getting mean and solitary, and he never says anything to either of them on the long rides home, wind whipping up through the rust holes in the truck's belly.
Jo always finds that Sam's crawled up tight against her, cold fingers finding warmth under her jacket as he sleeps.
x.
Come the eve of the first hunting trip in July, after school's out, Dean tells everyone at dinner that he's going along from now on. He announces it quiet, looking hard at the adults. And when Aunt Mary says no without even a pause, Dean mouths off, and before long Dean's getting his hide whipped by Jo's Dad. No sound but the smack of the leather belt on Dean's jeans comes down the stairs, and Ellen starts cleaning up the dishes quiet and quick.
After, Jo creeps to the bedroom to get her draw pad and finds Dean lying on his belly in her bed. He cracks swollen eyes and watches her as she pretends not to notice him. When she starts backing out he says, “Wait.”
He sits up as she pauses, straight-backed in the close-curtain dimness. They haven't spoken more than two words ever since he got that job, and she's got a feeling about what he's been doing, even as she tells herself she doesn't care what pissy Dean Winchester does or does not do.
He slithers out of her bed, and goes to the closet where they keep all their clothes and what toys they got left from babyhood. There's a high-chair in there, folded at the back, and the one doll she got from her gran, that she stuffed away because its eyes gave her nightmares and its hands reached for her in the dark.
Dean pulls out a rifle.
“I bought this,” he says, not looking at it, just at her. “I'll use it when I find the thing that killed my dad.”
Jo just takes a breath and says, “You oughta put it away right now.” None of her business, and she's a close-mouthed little filly, but she doesn't want a whipping.
Dean doesn't listen. He holds the gun by the barrel in his right hand and takes two steps to her. He looks mean, and his breath is hot. There are salt tracks spread from the corners of his eyes like hoarfrost. His left hand takes a handful of her flannel shirt and his kiss is hard, like a smack in the mouth. It's not even a kiss, it's a declaration. She can feel him pushing her back, toward the bed or the wall or the floor, and she's afraid he won't stop, he'll go as far as he can just to show her.
She scratches him hard, clawing straight into his cheek and throat, and pulls out of his grip, and runs.
xi.
It's hot in the morning when she goes out for her count. The house is quiet, Sammy and Dean still sleeping, her ma circling want ads in the kitchen. She walks the mile to the eastern property line, sweating under one of Dean's old shirts because she has to save her girl clothes for school, kicking up red dirt with her boots.
Last night she made up an excuse to get her dad to come up and tuck her in like she was six again. When he left, she was afraid Dean would come and punish her, but maybe Sammy being up in the top bunk stopped him. Or maybe he was just done with her. She didn't know, but she kept dreaming he was crawling across the floor all night, and she must've woke up a hundred times, hot, with her hair plastered to her face.
Con Cready is a distant figure on his buckskin mare when she gets to the bluff. He's moving the herd slow south this time, and she counts 'em, thinking she couldn't stop him if he were to slip a few more head in, or maybe meet up with the rest of his pa's herd out of her line of sight, later on in the day.
Her dad must trust old Lull. That, or not care so long as he was paid in the first place. Jo can't imagine being satisfied with either, if it were her land.
“Mornin, Miss Harvelle,” Cready says, leaning over his pommel, teeth bared as he squints down at her.
She is all of fourteen, and she tosses her plait back over her shoulder as she looks up at him and says, “Mornin, Con.”
Maybe it's curiosity, but Jo thinks it's best not to question as Con swings off his mare and leaves her standing with her nose in the brush, reins trailing. He steps closer, and Jo keeps her chin high, her gaze resolute and distant. She watches him in the edge of her vision, and his first touch is light on her shoulder: he undoes her braid, and with an irritating hesitance smooths out the long yellow hair, running his hand down her spine. She feels a roll of heat follow his stroke, like a rush of warm water.
He puts rough fingers on the join of her neck and left shoulder, still standing behind her, and then he leans down over her. She watches his shadow and hers, rather than turning to face him. His kiss is soft and painless, on the side of her sweaty throat. He moves up to her jaw, her ear, and she can feel him begging her to turn around, but she is stiff-backed, saw-boned. She wishes he would stop, but still feels a terrible yearning to know what he'll do next, in the face of her truculence.
He yields, circles around and bends at the knees to kiss her mouth. She moves her lips uncertainly, and his hands are back on her: at hip, waist, breast. He handles her like his reluctant mare, gentle, no spurs. He is compassionate, while he does this to her.
When the mare nickers, she jerks away, her whole body made out of hard lines and cast iron. His dark, skinny frame still hunkers at her height, and his face is apologetic, pathetic.
xii.
She never finds out how Dean knew. No one ever does, really, because the sheriff's office never comes calling. There's an outraged article in the newspaper, all the more vehement for its ignorance and ultimate uselessness. Lull Cready cries foul and Jo knows there's tension, because she doesn't have to go count cattle any more.
Because somehow, their parents know. Jo's dad doesn't strap Dean - though they know, they also know they can't acknowledge it. They can't acknowledge any of it, without bringing everything down around their own ears. So Jo is practically a ghost in the house. No one but Sammy really looks at her. He takes care to sit beside her on the porch after dinner, strokes her hand when she cries in bed at night.
And now Dean is allowed to go hunting.
The morning they leave for his first trip, Dean pulls his rifle out from its spot in the closet. Jo never brought herself to touch it, and now, no one asks questions.
They all stand together in the gravel in front of the house, and as the good truck, Aunt Mary's truck, gets packed up with supplies and weapons, Jo stares, hating. Dean catches her eye once, and he looks miserable, for all his victories. Dull and exhausted as the day he pulled her out of the Missouri, pushed and saved her all at once. Now she thinks she'd rather have drowned than taken help from that hand.
Everyone hugs, even Jo's ma and dad. It's a ritual, a charm of safekeeping, necessary. But when Dean hugs her he doesn't touch her, doesn't say anything, doesn't even meet her eyes.
All she can see when she looks at him is the buckskin mare he shot dead in her stall. Once in the neck, and once in the head. Done in the dark witching hour because she should have let him kiss her.
The truck pulls aways and the three of them linger in front of the house, watching the dust rise all down the road. This is how the family is split, finally - one line down the centre between them. Sammy is snivelling into his shirtsleeve and Jo doesn't cuff him, though she yearns to.
Instead, she is the first one to step away.