Alice, Through the Looking Glass

[veneficusvenato]

Do your job, you love it, Lee had said,

and Sokka hadn't helped adding, Be good
and we'll make it worth your while even.

For them, Jo'd stood still while two of the costumers got to make her over in a way she rarely agreed. She told herself if was for Sokka and Leah, but it was for Gillespie, too. Who might have been a Gil, but could have been a Dick, John, Harry or Bartholemuel, too. That was the job, after all. Part of which was dressing up and dragging the newest trainee to a Ministry Function, because that, too, required training this high up.

Learning that this was all part of it, too.

Blending in, using your real name, but with the longest-lived lie you were handed.

Today, which involved watching two people curl her hair and apply her makeup with wands, and even a board that looked more like an artists pallet. Then a short white dress, with just enough give to hide her wand but nothing else, and an even smaller, more ornamental, looking shoulder jacket.

It would have been lovely if that was the worst the night could offer. Dresses, makeup, small talk, and Gillespie. But things never went that easy, really, did they. She couldn't just go home and bitch to her people about the mind numbing boringness and the funny tasting food. No, of course not. Instead the night went from that to explosions, sparks raining purple and black, from two dozen people dressed in black and purple, and running.

Shoving Gillespie, while shouting and and firing behind them. Creating a diversion. A spectacle. They weren't meant to be the people who did clean-up or cattle herding of the ministry wives and children. This wasn't exactly what they were for either, but they excelled in a pinch. Just like a handful of the other groups that had been in the milling dinner crowd.

The throbbing knuckles, and the disarray of her curls, as well as a rip along one side of her skirt, had happened before the running started, but they were lost in that. The way running did. Took every thought that wasn't attacks, hexes, and counter-spells. Stumbling through the doorway that should have led to a staircase, but didn't. She felt it sizzle through her skin, but all the three wizards were following right after, and as a burst of purple exploded toward them, Jo shoved Gillespie out of the path.

But it slammed straight into her, acid burning and needle stinging, sending her stumbling backwards, with a crack that she was sure was one of those damned heels they'd insisted on, which only helped it. She reached out to catch the reddish drape hanging behind her, but her fingers went straight through it, and her shoulders followed sending her into a tumble.....


...that did not have her slamming the ground less than a second later.
Or the one after that. Everything went black around, and she swore she would
have Gil's ass for breakfast, as well as the costumers, and her best friends.....

....before the light returned in a blinding assault and Jo collided solidly,
in an all too familiar feeling, with another body beneath her.

[ Jo's Timeline: 1 Year Before Order of the Jobberknoll
SPN Timeline: ??? ]

Comments

[pielemental]

"Yeah," Dean says, lump in his throat as he stares at his fries, them suddenly becoming the most fascinating thing in the world. "We thought we'd have more time. To get past all the flirting and the puncturing of my ego and all that."

Because Jo definitely spent time on that one.

[veneficusvenato]

The words that go there, they're predictable. Dean could probably pick them in less than a second. Her Dean would have. Except she watches them roll by, no more than a confused fog of a dust cloud. Because it's not true. There is ... was? ... always will be more to Dean Winchester, the one she knew, the one she loved, than puncturing his ego. It never would have worked if they were just sarcastic insults and flash bright attraction.

She wouldn't say that to him now on her life. In fact, when he doesn't look up, it's heavily painful.
He's not him, but he is, too. Somewhere, somehow. Not like their world, but stuck in his.

Her food gets a look but she's not sure she could stomach another bite now, and she reaches up to rub two of her fingers at the side of her head, and comes away pulling at a long strand of blonde hair. Looking more at it than him, or the table, or the end. "We were." She rolls her eyes at the golden strand, at how small and stupid that sounds. How small her voice is. "Obviously." In retrospect. Surprise. Shock. Founderingly, almost apologetic.

Even when the one thing she refuses to regret of the last decade is him. Well. One of two. But he'd been first.

"Three years. The better part of four depending on where you start and stop the counting."
Jo's mostly sure he doesn't want to know. Not if. But she can't help or stop herself now.

[pielemental]

Dean drags his attention away from his fries to look back up at her. "So you guys managed to get your shit together, huh? At least some version of us did."

At least there's that. It doesn't keep him from wishing he and his own Jo had managed it, though. Or that they never tried to attack Lucifer, to give themselves time to do so.

He absently shoves a fry in his mouth and chews on it, trying to think of a question that was less rhetorical than the one he just asked. "Right. Less serious business crap, I think. What's your favorite of the critters that exist over there? I don't mean the usual, I mean like those horses pulling the carriages."

He doesn't think the name of the things have ever come up when he was being bombarded with this stuff. If it did, he's forgotten it as something not worth remembering because they're only fictional.