veneficusvenato (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
veneficusvenato) wrote2016-03-16 10:15 pm
veneficusvenato) wrote2016-03-16 10:15 pm
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.....
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.
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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"I haven't been in America in good while--" Clarification even while, her brows are up and she's making her way through a list. Places she would usually consider pop to. Or only appearing at and then leaving right from there back to her flat. Never staying. Not in the building, and not in the country. "--and I like a potato skin as good as the next girl, but America really does have the better handle on french fries. I always got fries while here."
Beat. "And skittles." She should have gotten those inside if she thought about it.
And rather shit faced tossed. Which might have happened in her mother's bar as much as one home.
She hadn't thought about much at all about being in America,
when all it was dwarfed by with Dean, in an Alternate Universe.
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Before. "You do actually still have McDonalds over here, right?"
She didn't need to end up with a craving for something simply because it didn't exist.
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Ack! I lined it up wrong hours ago!
"Good." That's decisive, with a small nodded-sideways bobble of her head.
"Good, good. So." There's almost a note of cheek, lightly louder. "I think tomorrow, if we manage to make it through a whole second day and night without killing each other, there should be Frosty's, too. If it's not as long of a drive as this place. What is it about Kansas?"
The last question is really more to the window and the landscape passing them by.[ ]
That explains why you were apparently taking forever to tag. >_>
Although maybe not, if Jo's been living in Britain since she was around twelve.
At least it's only a couple minutes more until they're at the McDonald's and he pulls into a parking spot, killing the engine. "Ready for some nice hot fries and a chance to get your own drink refills?"
I EVEN LEFT IT THERE! So you can see it before I delete it. It was 3 hours ago! *facepalm* Sorriest.
Jo looks over at him, at first confused, before she nods, an odd expression stealing on to her features. Half there, and half distant. Like it was uncertain where its feet belonged, in which emotion, maybe in which emotions of which decade even. It was almost easier to look at him than it was at that.
"I haven't spent a lot of time in Nebraska, or America for that matter, since I was twelve. Summer vacation, and winter mostly during school, and mostly when Sokka begged, and only until I was seventeen, too, before-" Jo has to sort of look at his hair, the roof of the car. Before she vanished. Name on the dotted line. Jo Harvelle, Gryffindor, reckless prankster with her own whole cabinet of files but perfect OWLS, perfect N.E.W.T.'s, graduated on one day, and on the next she never existed. At least not until three or four years later.
When she appeared officially on the bankroll of someone nobody as like the thirteenth nobody undersecretary to them.
Though she never once stepped foot into an office and really never even remember the names of anyone she didn't actually work for.
"I don't think I've driven more than two or three times in a year for a while." Not when apparating worked so well, when so far, required so little. Even flying was so much faster. But it does beg the question. "Did she stay in Nebraska?"
Now I'm wondering if lack of tag for Gabe's tfln turned action is related. <_<
Shhh, you. At least you are getting some. It could be so much worse. :P
Jo pulled the door handle, face wrinkled, as she pushed up and out of her seat. Trying to picture it. America.
Her whole life in America. With her mom, and the Roadhouse. The way it was supposed to be before she got her letter, even though her mother was very much American, and not a witch. It didn't seem the people who knew what her Dad could do, and she had already been doing since early childhood, cared at all either about her rough and tumble, middle of nowhere, half-American-ness.
"All of you." She stepped back by him. "In only America." It sounds ludicrous on her tongue.
She grabbed the door to the place to slip inside it, odd puzzle pieces everywhere. "Why were they fighting?"
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He's not even going to bother trying to keep pronouns straight. It's not worth the headache.
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She likes that word better than dead. It's an issue Dean wouldn't have liked. Hers.
Dead was easier, and Jo was not easy. Monsters. Memories. Mistakes.
Monsters and Uncle John, and really she wasn't any happier with both dead than she had been with one.
By the time she knew the real story she didn't have much anger left for or about either of them. Only Dean then.
And even anger was the wrong word. Anger only went so far. Anger, like fire, died at a point. What that did...wouldn't.
She shrugged. Shrugged it off, shrugged through it. She had years of experience with that. No one ever paraded through the days of her life like they knew them, but didn't. Made her do it. Only Dean once upon a time, and now again, Dean, but not, somewhere far, far away. "So, you know, she couldn't stop me by that point, and there was the bar." There was a snort. "Actually, that was the first time I took anyone home from school. His funeral."
It was where the cowboy hat started, and Josephine. It was one of the times she most appreciated what her father left her.
It changed everything. It made her who she was. The path she choose. The job. Even the nickname that became her label.
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It only takes him a moment to pick what he wanted, glancing over at her to signal it was her turn, a moment later as he digs out his wallet.
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She's going to pretend, maybe even for a second right at the very beginning badly, that those first two words, said together, don't strike an odd chord through every part of her. Just the words put together. Even when he's just differentiating. Except that it's a number. He already said it was his Dad, too. Earlier. The same kind of thing. The job. Her dad. His dad. Whatever the American, general-hunter level equivalent of what happened in his file.
She'd never needed the gory details, but it hadn't kept her from memorizing them anyway. Sleep was for the weak.
Jo tried to tune it out. Ordering herself a burger. Cheese, bacon, avocado on top.
No egg here in America. Just a normal, greasy burger. And a large fry.
She couldn't imagine the rest either. Not her Dad not being there, two days later, sweeping her up into his arms, nearly dancing her around the room, bragging that his kid got into the best school on the planet, still smelling like fire smoke and the crisp crackle of magic and faded leather. Letting her sit on the bartop while he told her, what she knew now was a very cleaned up version, of his latest mission.
Or to the first time she saw the Express with him, and it filled her eyes with so much red and shiny. Childhood dreams.
But a world with none of it? Where he was gone?
No deep laughter? No quick smile? No temper like a snake strike?
No breezing in and out on missions with the Ministry and hunts from the bar?
No gagging constantly over her parents, but knowing what she wanted one day?
No wonder her mother hadn't wanted her to leave.
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"So. That's how many things I've told you now?" Dean asks with a half-grin, keeping half an eye out for their food. Just making small talk as they wait.
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"Fair's fair," Jo concedes, moving out of the way from the very front of the area, so that other people can walk up and order while they wait. They both have, but they were her questions. Her words only related to the things she had pressed at and not even specifically. "Ask away."
Hopefully, she wouldn't regret it.
Even there's a part of her, glancing between his smile and the counter that isn't sure there isn't a part of this she won't.
In some odd, backwards, twisted way. Once she has to go home, and she no longer has him somehere hovering nearby.
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Right. Focus, Dean. Tangent later. "What sort of things do you hunt? Since you apparently don't go after the usual."
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"If you marry someone, if would be hard for them not to be know. Especially once there are children involved." Children manifested talents and magical mishaps as often as they still scrapped knees and needed people to blow their nose. At least her own childhood, and the general assumption of it, put it that way. It wasn't like she'd had much to do with children ever.
Or that there'd ever been a truly long window in her life where she'd been considering it. Children.
Though he isn't wrong. She hasn't said a lot of things she could have, both for it and for her own means. She's done far more magic in front of him than most statutes would consider under desperate necessity. But she hasn't stopped either. She hasn't entirely wanted to look at why. Why it's easier to consider treating him the way she once had. Even if he isn't.
Even if maybe she shouldn't be. For his sake. For the ministry's sake.
Definitely for her own, too, at the end of the night. And this trip through.
But she gives him an odd look. Long, but then there's the vaguest edge of a smirk. "Of course, we still go after the normal. If it's-" Her voice tilts slightly lower, and there's a momentary pause because she steps next to him. Shoulders brushing, ignoring it, to be able to drop her voice quiet enough. "It's it's magical, or supernatural, and it's killing people, anywhere in the world, it's on the list. Just a lot of stuff hunters over here cover, is considered a lot lower on the list. More general, and we know people here are handling a small portion of it."
Plus, there were the American wizards, too, but that was a longer story and a lot of politics. And not the point.
There's an odd snort of breath out her nose. Something that isn't loud enough or shaped enough to be a laugh, but it makes the corners of her mouth twitch and the corner of her eye's crinkle. "My Dad had a lot of respect for the people-" She looks at him for that word. The one that isn't people, but hunters, but she's amending for public, where she can. "-out here. He used to say they were made of sterner stuff than a good number his people because all they had was their skin and their own teeth between them and the dark. No magic, just that indomitable American spirit."
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It's only a minute until he's taking his drink and the tray over to a corner booth away from the other customers. "I even get the prohibition on talking about things too much. It'd end up like in the X-Men comics. The Muggles freaking and slapping up a ton of regulations on you guys, making your lives that much harder and more dangerous."
Please tell him he doesn't have to explain X-Men.
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Jo doesn't correct him. Even though it's on her tongue to. Anyone else she would have. Without hesitation.
He doesn't know any better. Hasn't seen any better. Didn't even know of magic in his world that wasn't witches who fell only into the monster category two days ago. She breathes in through her nose, soundless, the pause, without even a rise of her shoulders, that becomes her too-oft used tic at Ministry parties when she is pretending to the be the five hundredth under-secretary and not The WHD. Not the name everyone knows and the face almost no one does.
She does outclass his monsters. But nature abhors imbalance, and what she fights outclasses her more often than not.
Jo follows behind him, getting her drink, pausing only long enough for, "It really is kind of strange that you know about things in my world, words and names from it, but that you don't know about it all, at the same time."
It's really strange that she even has to put a sentence like that together, after making sure no one was close enough to hear.
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"Not that I've read any of them. But there was stuff about them everywhere for awhile. Made it hard not to pick up things here and there."
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Jo takes the other side of a booth from him, picking up her fries even as she stretches out her legs and puts her feet up against the near lip of his booth seat under the table. It's almost a compliment, and it's almost something she takes back the moment she gets her feet flat. But it stays, and she eats a fry instead. Hot on her tongue, salted and greasy. It tastes like home.
She'd say it feels the most like home she has in forever. But it's a lie.
She knows her own lies by their feel, and she doesn't want to look at what that most actually is.
"Next question." And another fry.
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"How did you meet your version of me?" Okay, so sue him. He's curious. And trying to wrap his brain around to possibility of that Dean spending time in Britain. Sure, he's made that little trip to Scotland for Bobby, but that's a whole different bag from living and working there.
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Even if it even further retrospect there's an echo of weighted ache, it's still beautiful.
She ate the rest of her fry, leaning back, stretching her legs straight against his seat. Smug is almost an understatement for the expression there. "A rifle against his back, before he was telling me to get lost, like the little lost kid in the wrong war zone I must have been, while singing the praises of his man crush on me."
Beat. "Before he knew I was the person he was supposed to meet."
Beat. "Which he didn't learn until he got home again, yelling at his people that his contact didn't show up, because someone blew the meet, only to be told his contact had been standing in front of him."
Beat. "We didn't meet, again, on his part knowing, until a few months later, and he was a little sore I didn't just tell him."
Until they fell into bed.
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"I got it away from her and she punched me in the nose. Cue Ellen and Sam showing up from the kitchen. Guns were put away after Ellen realized who we were and she got me some ice for my face. Ash somehow managed to sleep through all that. I don't know if you knew him back home."
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"Yeah. We had Ash back home. He showed up in the spring of my fourth year, and I met him that summer when I went home." The grin isn't checked. He was fool of the best kind. Smart, silly, had the same kind of mouth as her. Got lost in his tech, his music, his PBR's. She appreciated it all. He fit in with the bar, like his was a puzzle piece it'd always been making.
She loved her school, and she loved coming home. They fed into each other. The hunters and the magic. Driving her ever forward and forward to becoming exactly like her Dad. To do exactly what he did, how he did it, as good as she could get to how good he did it. The best grades, even if she had some of the worst reports for what she did in her free time.
"And good on her. You've never looked that bad with a black eye or a broken nose." Yes, that might be a smirk.
She'd seen him on the mend as many times as he'd seen it in her. After the department did the most they could, sent them home.
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