veneficusvenato | Alice, Through the Looking Glass

Alice, Through the Looking Glass

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: ??? ]

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"Alive?" She asks, filling in for him, like it's a better word than scarce.

But she's walking across the room toward him. It's not like there is another direction to go now that she's crossed the whole of this bunker, again, and made it through the doorway, and back into his presence, again. She's not good at retreats. Not even tactical ones. Not even when it might be safer and smarter. She never was. She can't help wondering if the version of her here was. Was different. How she was.

"Yeah," he says, pushing off from the car so he could turn and look for anything that needed doing besides what he's already taken care of within the last half-hour. Conveniently, it also meant he couldn't see her. "You getting to wear you're ready to get some clothes of your own so Amy can have hers back?"

A moment later and he thinks he's found what needed finding the first time he was working on Baby before he was so rudely interrupted. "Hand me the socket wrench. Second from left."

"I wouldn't hate some good jeans, no." But, then, Jo snorted. "I know what a socket wrench is."

It was actually all too easy for her to name all the things he had sitting out, and even to rattle off things that weren't out, but that were probably somewhere hidden in this room. Needed for other repairs that whatever he was working on didn't require. She picked it up, and handed it over.

Deciding to say something too simple, and that might go far too far, she knew.

But. It was Dean. "I've helped worked on the Impala before."
It was almost your Baby, but no. Not yet. Not quite.

Dean takes it without comment, leaning a little further over the engine so he could slot it into place to get to work on tightening things up. "So, ready for a trip to Walmart or wherever when I'm done with the car and have gotten cleaned up then?"

It might be worth seeing if there's anything anyone needed that wouldn't require darkness and a little breaking and entering. Save people from potentially needing to go back into town tomorrow.

There are questions she hasn't asked. Ones she's not even certain how to get to asking, without just blurting them out in the most graceless display either. Especially when the silence is heavy and he says absolutely nothing and she'd give almost anything to know what he was thinking. Whether she just said the wrong thing. Whether to even tell him about all of that. How bad is it for him that she's even here. He has to put up with her being her, under foot, in the way, until she can find her way home.

How would she feel in his shoes?

How would she feel if it was him, if he was --

But no. Not even in her mind. Not even doors long closed and years apart.

Be safe, she willed. Old words like old magic, like old wounded. Sharp, but not as sharp as the idea of him gone. Like she could command it of his ghost. Her world. Even Dean here. Jo leaned against the side of the car, careful of where the open hood was, watching him. "Yes. But you don't have to rush. If this is going to take a while, I can find something else to do first."

"I think I might have found the problem I was looking for when you dropped in," he says, flashing her a grin before going back to looking at what he was doing. "I'll find out when I start the car and see what there is to hear."

He has no problem taking a little time out to be a smartass. Along with finally letting an earlier comment sink in. "With magic or did the thought of magicing his car make him twitch?"

There isn't a second there where her teeth press too hard, except there is. When he smiles that unruly, mocking, flash bright, smile he does for only a second before he's not even looking again. It's barely the space of a second or two, but it still feels winding. Like she's not prepared for him to keep going on be anything like...himself. Even though that hasn't changed in a day now.

It'd be hard to count how many times she'd seen that in a day. Impossible across years.
But there was a definite weight to its loss. A chasm where it wasn't, and wouldn't be.

And all of the sudden very much was. There. Here. Right now.

"It makes you twitch." Even the idea of it. Even if not in a visible fashion right now.

"Hell yeah it does. Given I'm pretty sure you know what the car means to me, are you really surprised?" he says as he works to get things... just... a little bit... tighter.

Satisfied it was as tight as was going to get, he disengages the socket wrench, taking it and tossing both it and the previous wrench on the cart before grabbing the rag again to get the newest grease off his hands as he surveys the engine for anything immediately obvious to take care of. "I think that did it."

"I know what it meant to him." Jo said, not sure if she was correcting a point, or making one, or leaving some room for error. Since it still felt impossible to try and reconcile her own self with an ending number of things that supposedly happened to the her in this world...that never happened to her at all.

"You have to remember, magic is just another tool for mostly us." Jo lifted a hand and spun her first two fingers, lifting an odd assortment of the tools on his workstation to spiral in the air. "We've either known about since birth, or at least learned about it and been practicing it since right before we were teenagers."

She dropped her hand and they turned a last time before laying themselves back down, far more at the command of her words than any gesture she'd so long ago stopped needing to make. "It didn't make him twitch--" There's an off, amused emphasis on the word. Because he chose it, and because magic wasn't high on that list. "--and if there was an emergency in the field, it's not like he'd hesitate to use it on her--"

But, she conceded, with a curl of a smile and a look back toward the car, that was far beyond what anyone could call simple fond affection thinking about bygone moments. "But, yes. He preferred to work on it himself. And he usually spent an extra day or two on it, like he was apologizing, after such emergencies."

It was endearing and hilarious. More than once she'd ended up with grease stains on her clothes, her skin, in her hair, from those days. They made him a simple kind of happy that didn't have to do with work, that happened to all too easily get splashed onto her while she teased him or checked on him occasionally during her own ability to be around.

"Only magic I know is what hunters typically learn in the course of work," Dean says, letting the hood of the car drop down to close. "Demon summoning, angel summoning, making hex bags, whatever."

He pauses for a moment. "Not too much of that last. Just a defensive one or two to help hide from shit. Learned it from Sam who learned it from a demon who actually seemed to like him. Couldn't trust her any further than we could throw her, but she helped us out a few times."

Right, time to open the car door to slide in behind the wheel to turn it on so he could listen and see if he fixed the problem. After a minute of nothing but the proper purr of the engine, he turns it off and climbs back out. "Problem was something that came loose."

Jo followed him around. There was only a moment's hesitation before she decides to len on the door left open. To cross her arms on the top of the door, and let her chin rest on them, leaning across the door and window, and watch him while he was turning it on, and listening to the car. Like somehow she had a choice. Like somehow the door was the wall between them it couldn't be, not when she felt like a bouy being dragged along in his wake a little.

When she took liberties with the car that felt like they might be just as much her giving in as prodding against his boundaries.

"Happens when you drop things on it." Jo said, riffing right back to his words. A smile finding her mouth, even though it was faint and cool. "You should look into not letting that happen again." Except that somehow she didn't mean it, and she knew it, even as she said it right then. She needed to go home. She needed to know if Gus was dead. Who escaped, and who didn't. But this. This was like cheating, and as she said it, she knew she didn't want to vanish this second either.

That gets a snort from Dean. "Saying I should move the car so if anyone from your world decides to try to follow, they'll just go splat on the floor? What I just fixed was what I was in the middle of looking for before you showed up."

...Although on second thought, maybe he should toss a mattress on the floor for in case it was Jo's mother showing up. She's intimidating enough when she isn't pissed off and injured.

Jo looked upward. Above Dean Winchester, and the top of the Impala, toward the ceiling. The one that if she hadn't fallen out of it herself, right on to Dean and the Impala, she might not have believed it could happen. At least not here, in this place, where magic was barely a thing.

"No one's coming." There's something all but certain in that. She can't be traced. They can't be traced. But there would be people cleaning up the mess, and she had colleagues. People who would know she'd gone black. And If Gus was alive, which was a Big If. "Eventually."

She doesn't sound perturbed even, when she glances back down.
"Maybe. But it won't be through there, I don't think. Whatever it was, it's closed now."

And as for the one way she could be tracked, the Ministry didn't know about that, between it being both a massive break in almost every one of her oaths to them and Dark Magic. Even if it could never hurt another, it was a strand of her soul, somewhere beyond herself. A choice she'd made before the road swerved and everything changed, when she was sure it never could and never would.

"Great, now I have images of someone who somehow managed to figure out how to repeat what happened dropping in on me when I'm in the shower," Dean grouses as he pries the car door away from her so he could close it before heading for the door of the garage leading into the rest of the bunker. "Give me around fifteen minutes to get cleaned up and changed."

"I meant more through another door." Beat. "Or portal. Or whatever they'd name it, if they had any clue what to call it."

A entrance way and a path between universes, when they had all the magic in the world but nothing like hard evidence anywhere about universes. Except Jo was staring straight at it. Not that she had any kind of background for any ideas on any of that. This was not magic, monsters, mayhem, and mad things that went bump in the night that needed to be kept away from wizards, witches, and muggles alike.

She stepped back from the car. "Yeah. I'll just --" There was a second of awkward pause hlding. "--wait here."

It wasn't like she had a clue what to do in this place, and it wasn't hers, and she wasn't about to take the run of his things.

"You could see if there's anything people need while we're out so you're not standing around bored," he tosses back over his shoulder on his way out to get cleaned up.

He's returned in a fresh set of clothes, hair still damp from his shower at about the twenty minute mark, ready to get in the car and get moving.

"Alright." She says, even as he's walking away. Goal in mind. Like an arrow, always going one direction and she supposes she can make good use of herself. Heads back through the bunker to find where Amy and Sam are, even if they end up not needing anything since they were shopping yesterday and even is Sam will keep looking at her like she's a ghost or a water mirage in a desert.

Or the girl who blew up in a hardware store. Yet happens to be standing in his library anyway.

About twenty minutes she heads back down from that side of the house toward the garage. Wide open spaces, a few faces, and somewhere on her way back she thinks she'd give anything to see Lee and Sokka's faces. Thinks she's an idiot for not thinking of them when Dean mentioned it. Sokka who tracked her, even when she was untrackable. When she started leaving him clues that weren't clues, that were apologies without words.

They'd look. They'd know. She never would have gone dark without some kind of message.

Not when they had been waiting back at her flat for her to be done with her job. They could think she was still in the field.
But even that could only last so long, and they managed where no one had before. Not entirely. But better than they should have.

By the time she's back, Dean's in the driver's seat of the Impala, door on the front passenger side left unlocked for her. The car's not yet on although he has a tape ready to be shoved into the tape deck once it's on.

Dean Winchester in the Impala. Again. Or is it finally? Hand in hand, those two. Even if this Impala won't be taking off the ground anytime soon, or at all. She slides a hand in one of her pockets, restlessly, even though it has to come out a second later. To open the door and get in the car.

Trying for all her might to not look like it feels as weird as it does. Like she's stepping on her own ghost. She couldn't count the number of times she's sat here, and for a moment she'd give anything for some part of it to be wrong. But it isn't. Not the shape, or size, or any of the colors. Not the way it feels under her thighs, or her fingers.

"Amy and Sam are good, but Jacob votes for cookies. Which I think means we decide whether we're being nicer to them or him."

That makes Dean laugh as he starts the car, shoving the tape in and getting Hells Bells started. "I vote we're nicer to him and let Amy deal with a sugar-filled kid. Assuming she doesn't manage to control his cookie in-take."

Then the car's moving until the pause as he waits for the garage door to open so they could leave. Then they're out and heading to town.

There's something of a smile that pulls out, unexpected, when the music starts, familiar, from somewhere far distant from where she was and what she did most of the time, and Jo leaned her head back. Before looking over at him, amused, "The more things change..."

"Isn't that from a Bon Jovi song? If you keep making Bon Jovi references, I'll have to make you walk," he teases as he drives. Not that he really intends to make her get out of the car and walk to town. It takes long enough to get there driving, much less walking.

Jo shifted in her seat, with a shake of her head.
Turning so she was more diagonal than facing forward.

"You could try. I could probably lock the doors before you raised a hand."
Beat. "And keep them locked no matter how hard you attempted to change that."

Which the whole idea of just made something squirm, making the car seem a little smaller.

"Or I could do something even worse." Jo kicked a finger toward the radio....even though it didn't change. Just like a point.

"Don't even think about it," he says in a level tone as the song switches over to the next one on the tape. No magicing the car. Nuh-uh.

Jo grinned, in spite of herself and the fuck all of all of this. It was very him. Or them. Or whatever.

She let her temple rest against the seat and let her fingers drum the beat of the music against Amy's jeans.

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