(Untitled)

[tobeclosetohim]

Later. After Happy Hour ended.

Jo brings a bottle and a set of shot glasses.
They get placed on the edge of the table first.

Dead pan, but wanting.

"She's gone back home now."

Comments

[hopeitsworthit]

"Yup," Dean says.

He's trying like hell not to sound tired.

It almost works.

[hopeitsworthit]

Any other day Dean'd laugh and say 'luck'.

Any other day.

"Maybe he was workin' on something. I dunno."

[tobeclosetohim]

It catches up her sort of like a bang.
And the need for a shot.

Which she doesn't do. Yet.

Doctor Badass. And his computer --

Oddly enough she does kind of laugh suddenly.
It's not the kind of sound one considers a laugh.

She shook her head and looked back,
"My mom can't kill him for helping me now."

[hopeitsworthit]

Dean pours another shot.

"To silver linings."

There ain't nothing funny about it, but sometimes you just gotta laugh.

[tobeclosetohim]

"Yeah." Jo shook her head. Took her next shot "He was."
Been a few weeks, but he's been doing it for months now."
Huh. She -- she was going to have to get to past tense.

"She tell you of any of the others that were there?"

She knew some of the cars. Breaking and entering.
The kinder version of asking for records.
Since a lot of registration wasn't.
And most of them were scrap at that point, anyway.
Explosions were not kind on close-range parking lots.

[hopeitsworthit]

"Nope."

Dean swipes a hand across his mouth, pouring another shot but not drinking.

"And I wasn't exactly lookin' for any more shitty news."

He still isn't.

[tobeclosetohim]

It's a complicated half glare, that he gets.

He hadn't known. Her world, that world.
He knew the monsters, but not those people.

And it makes her angry to hear.
Almost as angry as she is relieved.
At not wanting to think about it more.

(Not wanting to remember. Names, faces, memories.
As incapable, as unwilling to let herself forget.)

"Thanks. Anyway." There's a vague gesture with the cup, pushing it all off. "How're you and Sam?"

[hopeitsworthit]

"You know us," Dean says.

She doesn't.

"We're getting by."

This time he does down his drink.

But at least he's not pouring out another one.

Yet.

[tobeclosetohim]

That rarely means all that much.
But it fits every time she's seen him.
Except the last. Everything but that one.

Jo turned the glass on it's bottom edge against the table.
Everything in her voice stayed flat, holding his news.

"Anything exciting on the other side of the Door?"

[hopeitsworthit]

Dean pastes on a fucking huge smile.

"Besides all the tail I'm getting? Nah."

Apparently there's a lot of shit he ain't planning to talk about, too.

Go figure.

[tobeclosetohim]

Jo blanched in surprise, expelling, "Pig."

But, oddly, enough it made her smile.
Even as she shook her head at him.

Disturbing...but at least a more normal kind.

[hopeitsworthit]

Dean's answering grin is a little sloppy.

Hey, he's had a lot to drink.

"You know it, sweetheart."

Mission accomplished.