Harvelle's Roadhouse was meant to stand forever.
It felt eternal, the building. The glowing neon sign that always flickered. A dirt parking lot with a couple of abandoned motorcycles and, sometimes, when they were lucky, a 1967 Chevy Impala. Inside, beer bottles lined the counter. Someone always picked them up. Someone was always picking something up, really.
Ellen looked after Bill. Bill looked after Jo. Jo looked after Ash. Ash looked after them. He wasn't Jo's true brother, not really, but he'd been there constantly. He'd been there within months of the roadhouse opening.
"Need a job," he said, flipping back his messy hair. At the time, his hair had still been long, but it hung over his forehead and fell into his eyes.
"You need a haircut," Bill said back.
So Ellen and Jo sat Ash down at the counter and held him down. He squirmed on his stool. He was itching to move, to go around and not stop. But Ellen kept him still and Jo smiled up at him and Bill held the scissors like he was going to kill the kid, and Ash kind of liked it.
He liked everything about the Roadhouse, he told Jo. "It's neat here," he said, gesturing around the room. The lighting was dim; it was snowing outside and the power was barely on. He could've fixed it. Ash could fix anything, and he usually did. But Jo had recently gotten a new jacket and she hadn't gotten the chance to wear it yet, so Ash pretended he didn't know how to get the heat to work.
Jo burrowed deeper into her jacket, her blond hair tucked in her collar. "So you're staying?"
"Eh, I might. Got nowhere else to go." He took a swig of his beer. Once, his hair would've fallen into the bottle. In its newly styled mullet, it hung almost regally over his back. He felt like a king.
"Where'd you come from, anyways?" Jo asked. She risked sliding her hands out of her sleeves; they were too long for her, but in the freezing room, the fleece was welcome. Still, though, her hands were pale and numb.
Ash took her hands and rubbed them together. "Everywhere."
She smiled, liking the way their fingers easily fit together, the way her hands turned warm and soft in her brother's grip. "I wish I could go everywhere." She frowned. "Mom and Dad go lots of places. But they don't take me. They never do."
"It's probably because they don't trust you," Ash teased, dropping his friend's hands. "I don't know, Jo. It's good having you here. Everyone likes you. You're only eight and you can already shoot better than anyone here."
"Shh," Jo hissed, shooting the boy a glare. "Mom and Dad don't know about that. And I don't want them to know. They're not supposed to. It's supposed to be a surprise."
Whenever her parents went out on hunts, Jo ventured into the woods surrounding the Roadhouse. There was a lone trail out there, carved by the soles of her own boots. She'd always wanted her father to teach her how to handle a gun. She'd wanted to feel his hands wrap around hers, guiding them to the proper place on the rifle. She'd wanted him to stand behind her, telling her he was sure she'd do well, that she'd hit the target on the first try.
But Jo learned by watching from a distance. She learned from the gunshots in the parking lot, the drunken hunters who leaned on the hoods of their cars and shot at their empty beer bottles. She took a rifle that some drunkard had forgotten under his table, and she'd disappeared into the forest with a gun that seemed far bigger than she was.
Jo loved that feeling. She loved knowing that she could control fate, just like that. She held death in her hands, in her stupid small hands that were always drowning in the hands of someone stronger than her. With a knife, a gun, Jo was powerful, and she was needed.
She moved back from Ash, hoping he wouldn't reach for her hands again.
Years later, her father was dead and Jo no longer wore the fleece jacket that he bought for her birthday. Even though it was a shared present, one from both him and her mother. One that her mother had pointed out in the first place, on one of the rare occasions when she took Jo shopping. Jo used to remember that day a lot. For that one day, she liked having her hands held. She felt like it was a sign. She was her mother's. They would always be there for each other. Not even a warm jacket in a blizzard could replace that.
After her father's death, though, Jo couldn't even let her mother hug her. Nothing made her warm. Not a damn thing. It could've been the hottest day recorded in history, sweat clinging to her skin, and she'd feel like someone had dipped her in a pool full of ice cubes.
She was in her twenties and still kind of cold when she meet Dean Winchester. She was surprised to find her skin heating up at the very sight of him, his eyes on hers, a cute smile that would've fooled anyone else. But Jo knew what it felt like to need to fool someone, and although she never mentioned it, she made sure that Dean realized she was there for him.
"Candle in a window on a cold dark winter's night," she muttered to herself when he left her that one night, him and his brother, Sam. Her mother had been the one to introduce her to REO Speedwagon. Her mother had been the one to introduce her to boys, show her how they worked.
"Don't trust your father," Ellen had warned. "He's a guy. Guys don't realize how stupid they can be."
Jo had never quite understood that statement. Her father, she believed, was the smartest man in the world. And Ash was a genius. He'd practically hacked his way into their hearts, knowing exactly what buttons to press, what a well running machine sounded like.
Hearing the Impala drive away into the cold dark winter night, Jo laughed, shaking her head. Dean was an idiot, really. Didn't he realize he was her candle, and she could be his?
As she continued cleaning, listen to the song play quietly in the background, she imagined hunting with the Winchester brothers. She imagined herself pressed up against Dean as they wandered through a dark hallway. He'd be her light, her flame, in those hard-to-see rooms, and she'd be his. If a ghost came around a corner – although that wasn't how it really worked, every hunter knew that – they'd only have to look to each other and find home.
But she'd seen the way Dean looked to Sam and the way Sam looked to Dean. They never looked at each other. It was as if they felt lost until they were together again. Jo was no idiot. She knew Dean would not be himself without Sam.
She glanced at the window, wishing the road didn't look so empty. There was no one out there looking for her.
Her first hunt had gone well in her eyes. She knew that really, an ideal hunt did not involve getting kidnapped by ghosts and getting locked up in a trunk. She knew that, usually, mothers did not call angrily about how dangerous and stupid their daughters had been, nor did they drive to an entirely different city to pick them up. And personally, Jo wouldn't have minded more than just, "You okay?" from Dean when he got her out of there. A kiss would have been nice.
She did like the look on the ghost's face when it realized it was trapped, though. Trapped by one of its own victims, its favorite kind. She couldn't stop smiling as she and the Winchesters found their way outside. Her clothes stunk, just the way her father's did when he came home from his own hunts. Just the way other hunters did when they stopped at the bar.
"Where's it from?" she used to ask them as she poured their drinks, gesturing to their stench heavy clothes.
Sometimes it was shapeshifters. Vampires in abandoned alleys. Werewolves in the rain. Jo almost wanted to go on that kind of hunt. The smell of wet werewolf made the hunters seem so much stronger. To get one out there in a storm, lightning striking down all around, it had to be a powerful feeling.
There was no rain in the sewers, no werewolf with streaks of lightning reflected in its wide eyes. But she had the same stink as Dean Winchester, and that was good enough for her.
Her mother did not appreciate the stench. When Ellen had met the group at their rented apartment, she'd punched Dean, shot Sam a narrow eyed look, and she'd hugged Jo. She'd hugged Jo for a very long time and then she'd completely ignored her for the rest of the day. Jo pretended this was because of her dirty clothes. She didn't like the idea of her mother feeling so hurt and betrayed. She didn't want to be the wet dog that her mother didn't let into the bar, even though the dog was starving and cold and needy.
The Impala had heat flowing through the vents but Jo could still see her mother's icy glare, peering out the window at this dangerous world her daughter had escaped into.
Later, back at the Roadhouse, Sam and Dean lingered outside, wondering what the hell they were supposed to do. Ellen had welcomed them in the past. She liked the boys. She liked it when they mocked Ash behind his back, or when Sam offered to play a game of pool against Jo after the bar had closed. Dean always watched them, smiling when Sam won a round, laughing when Jo beat him.
They were good boys, the Winchesters, but Ellen did not like that they'd brought her daughter back like the mess she was. They didn't dare follow the Harvelles, only sharing worried glances as the door slammed behind them.
Jo learned the truth there, alone against her mother's wrath. It was mostly fear, she realized. Her mother's eyes were wide in that way they were when Bill had died. "John Winchester got your father killed," was flung in Jo's face, and the girl stood frozen in the middle of the room.
"But he was a good guy," she begged, not wanting it to be true, just for Dean's sake. And for Sam's, because if Dean was a mess, God knows how Sam would be; she knew that the younger Winchester had never really reconciled with his father.
Ellen scoffed. "He was decent, alright. But he was careless." She gestured to the door. "You should know that, just from those kids out there."
Kids. Kids. They weren't even men in her mother's eyes. They were young and thoughtless and only doing what their just as thoughtless father had taught them.
"He probably saved someone else," Jo said, even lying to herself in that moment, because as much as she wanted to save people, losing her father hurt and she wanted him back. She wanted to feel warm again; she didn't want that cold feeling when Dean Winchester left the bar, closing the door behind him. Not even slamming it, so she always thought there was a chance of him coming back.
Her mother stood, still and solemn, but she could see her eyes watering. The way her hands shook. As if she wanted to rush forward, grab at her. Ellen Harvelle never wanted her family to save anyone again; she wanted them to be saved.
Jo found that she couldn't do it.
She could not stay in the Roadhouse, where the voices of rescuers begged to be rescued. Where the wind howled and the people howled with it. Where she had to sneak into the woods so that her boots were tough and hardened.
"Someone else could have saved them," Ellen began, as her daughter grabbed her jacket and headed for the door.
"Well, I guess I'm that someone."
And though her legs were shaking, they were planted firmly in those rough boots, and she felt as if she could go anywhere or do anything. Jo Harvelle pushed open the door and headed out into the cool air. She knew that it would grow warm, eventually, when she had set alight the bones of a dead man, and had given life to another person.