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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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)

"The first time we'd met, my Dad had just died and that... wasn't a real good time, as you can imagine. Not to mention your mother was in the same room almost every time we were together." Talk about a mood killer. Not that he hadn't been about to flirt with Jo anyway, until he thought better of it.

Dean takes a sip of his own drink, giving himself some time before the next part. "We've only kissed once and that was when she was dying."

Before she and her mother bought them time to get to Lucifer without hellhounds on their asses.

"Fuck." It's the first word, barely breathed between her lips.

She has to put the cup down. She has to put it all down. "I'm sorry."
The words sound so damn useless, when she's not even sure she understands.
Or she does. She understands, but she doesn't even want to think about that as a thing.

She was dead, and she'd never. They'd. Never. Barely. Right before she just happened to die?

"I'm so sorry." She couldn't even get to her mouth, or the part of her head, beyond her head, something in her chest. "We--"

But. That, Godrick. She had no right to touch him and she wanted to so suddenly. To touch his hand. Or his shoulder.

The sheer number of times she'd seen this expression, and just dragged him down, until his forehead was somewhere against her shoulder, her neck, rest of him against the pillows of his couch. Things that never should have worked, with his stupid foot of taller, but did somehow. Like everything else that just worked out.

She couldn't even imagine. Even staring it down like a wand. Just. Never?

Edited 2016-10-31 03:56 (UTC)

"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.

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.

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.

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Alice, Through the Looking Glass

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