Prompt: Jail
Word Count: 300
Fandom: Eureka
Spoilers: Up to 4.08: The Ex-Files
Characters/Pairings: Jo, mentions of Jo/Zane
Summary: Jo pretends.
A/N: I've started a prompt table of drabbles in the hopes of pulling myself out of my writer's block. This is my first offering. It's also the first time I've written for Eureka, so any feedback would be very much appreciated.
Sometimes, if her day has been particularly long (wrangling idiot geniuses, controlling disasters, dodging and/or having to face Zane), Jo doesn't go straight home. She'll detour into town, park on the street, and head into the Sheriff's office. Usually, her long days end late enough that Andy and Carter will be gone already.
She prefers it that way.
She'll sit at or on her old desk and try to capture what it felt like before. Before 1947, before Grant, before her life was ruined/changed. Back when she was Carter's deputy—she'd resented being passed up for the promotion, but she hadn't hated it. She and Carter had made excellent partners.
More importantly, she'd had Zane.
She'll try to recapture the happiness, the contentment, that Zane had brought her. Even when they were apart, there was that simple joy of knowing that she was loved, knowing that he would be waiting for her at the end of the day.
She thinks the job switch makes it harder. It's a promotion, to be sure, and an incredible honor, but…
But she has to see Zane every day. The Zane of this timeline is a trouble maker. She's always being called to the site of some prank or disaster of his making, and even if he's not already there, she's the one that has to hunt him down. She has to see him and talk to him and act like it doesn't kill her to look at a man who used to love her and hates her now instead.
So at the end of a long day, she'll go to the Sheriff's Office. She'll sit and stare at the jail cell and pretend. Pretend she's still deputy, pretend she still has a house, pretend Zane still loves her…
She'll pretend she's still happy.