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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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?"

Edited 2016-10-16 05:31 (UTC)

Dean gets out his own side, smacking down the lock on his side without even needing to think about it before following her. "Ellen didn't want her hunting. She'd already lost your Dad to it, she didn't want to lose you too."

He's not even going to bother trying to keep pronouns straight. It's not worth the headache.

"Hmmh." There was a press of lips, and her arms crossed loose over her stomach as she walked at his side. "She wasn't in love with it when I got my letter either, but my Dad talked her down. More than once that summer right before First Year. But I was two years in before--" She thinks about saying, you know. "--he was killed."

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.

"My Jo, as she put it, was still in pigtails when her Dad died. I think it happened when the three of us were still in the single digit age range." So there's another difference. Although he's going to shut up on this subject for the moment. Time to order their food.

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.

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.

He hands over the money once their orders were in, shifting to the side, once he's gotten his change and the receipt with their order number to wait for the food.

"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.

"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.

Dean takes a moment to decide what he wants to ask about, aware of the injunction not to talk about the wizarding world to people not part of it making choosing questions tricky. "Okay, I know you guys have this whole thing about not talking to people not already in the know about certain things, which makes me wonder how marriages between magic folk and non even happen."

Right. Focus, Dean. Tangent later. "What sort of things do you hunt? Since you apparently don't go after the usual."

"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."

"It's a harder job without magic to fall back on, that's for sure," Dean agrees quietly, eyes tracking over to the tray being filled with their food and drink cups, stepping forwards once their number was called. He's picking up the tray a moment later to carry over to where the soda fountain is to get his drink and let her get her own.

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.

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.

"Blame J.K. Rowling. She's the one who decided to go in for kids' books that don't need as much world-building as ones for adults," Dean says with a shrug, settling in with his food.

"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."

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.

Dean eats a few bites of his burger, giving himself time to think of something to ask. It's hard to know what questions to choose.

"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.

Jo can't help it. There's a fry half in her mouth, lips pressed against it, teeth biting down, and she's already smiling before she even thinks to smile. It's so dumb. So bloody dumb, and she's never stopped being proud. Straight up arrogant and unapologetic. Never stopped finding it funny, especially in retrospect.

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.

Dean can't help laughing. "The gun sounds about right. Sam managed to get into Dad's phone and found a message from your Mom in it. We traced the number to found out where to go, showed up at the Roadhouse. No one answered our knock, so we, uh, let ourselves in. First I knew of Jo's presence was her rifle in my back.

"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."

"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.

Dean just snorts. "My nose wasn't broken. Sore, yes, broken, no. Sammy and I weren't out of the hospital for that long at that point, so I didn't really need that."

He had enough problems. "Anyway. Sam and I handed off Dad's research into the demon that killed Mom. Ash gave us a weirdly specific about of time he needed, and Sam got a case from Ellen that she was actually intending to hand off to someone else. It kept us busy and not sitting around the Roadhouse for the entire fifty-one hours."

"Pity. It makes a wicked cracking sound when reset."

What? No, that's totally not a devious expression. Magic did a lot of things that were rather fun in the worst ways. Even if manual triage was something most of them knew, as well as silent healing spells, including how to assuage the flow of blow and how to fix broken bones. It could be done, but it was easy and it was nowhere near painless.

Dean winces slightly. "I'll pass. You can break and reset someone else's nose."

His own has abused quite enough for one lifetime, thank you. Even if it's bound to get broken several more times before his clock runs out for good.

"Oh, I never said I broke it. I assumed she might have. I didn't punch him the first time." Which, yes, means, there may have been another time. But that was hearsay, and unprovable, and really such old, old news. Water under the table. Physical violence was almost like foreplay compared to waging war with magic against creatures, and certain compatriots, who were made of it.

"Both of us came home with a number of nasty things from time to time, skipping out on the rules about heading to being healed first. Sometimes it's just a pain in arse really to get lectured by your handler, about what you chose to do, and how many rules it broke, and possibly, but I am not saying this is on the record, but the number of wands you might have broken in the process--" Yeah, there's something smug there.

A rules she's broke a million times. Enough times there's a stigma attached to her alias.

That the Ministry coughs and looks the other way on. With no viable proof against accusation.

"--even if it totally managed to make you win." Beat. "Especially when it's something you really can take care of yourself."

Edited 2016-10-24 01:46 (UTC)

"She didn't, but I had a few minutes where I couldn't see." Because damn, that hurt. He's been in worse pain since then, but there's just something about a punch to the nose...

He shakes his head slightly as he realizes he started woolgathering, picking up and eating one of his fries a moment later. He should probably eat them before they get cold. "So. Your turn for a question, I think."

Jo has to think about that, and she does, taking a bite of her burger and considering his face. This face that is so alarmingly the same and yet different. Different shadows. Different memories. Different life. All around American Boy and hunter. Still the car, and still Sammy, and in some part, still her. Until she'd, apparently, decided to give it up for a hellhound.

Since he'd so kindly yelled that are her in their first minutes. A messy death.

The kind magic could have fixed. But there were close calls and deaths even with magic.

Hell and war was the same, even when it was played on different fields. She still couldn't imagine being dead.

She couldn't imagine dying on him, and she didn't want to think about him dying again. It lurked around her ankles, and in the spaces between her bones up her spine, gnawing gently into a necessity of trying to figure out what that changed, how that happened, why and whether she'd. What all she'd been, and when, and where.

It was like having her hand on top of a book of endless pages and being asked to choose one at random.

She took a drink of her soda, trying to stay on the same line. At least for now. "How long did you know me? Her?"

Castiel probably could have saved her if his dickbag brother didn't get the jump on him almost immediately, taking him out of play entirely too soon.

"Besides the obvious 'not long enough'?" Dean asks wryly before popping a fry in his mouth to chew on it as he counts up the years. "'Bout four years. We didn't actually see each other often since, y'know. The job with our own cases to keep us busy. And not being able to pop about to be in one part of the country and then an entirely different part in about five seconds."

"Wait." Is that even--

"Were you two--" There's a motion with her drink that she'd raised to take a drink, before it forgot to get anywhere near her mouth. Because she hadn't even thought. She'd assumed. You know. With the wrench to her face, and the rage, and hell, even the fact he wrapped himself around her in the parking lot.

That it.

It was a given.

"--not -- ?"

She's not even sure she wants to put that into a clearer set of questioning.
Bloody hell. They'd fucked theirs right up. But she wouldn't take back those years.

Edited 2016-10-31 03:00 (UTC)

Alice, Through the Looking Glass

Shhh, you. At least you are getting some. It could be so much worse. :P

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