Summary: Ellen Harvelle didn't want to have room for a third hunter in the family, but she raised one.
Notes: Spoilers up through 2x22
"Where are you calling from this time?"
"Jo?"
"Lubbock."
"You in Texas, or that the first name you could think up, little lady?"
"Does it matter?"
"Call to talk to your mama?"
"Sent her a post card. Got a list of names I need you to look up."
"Didn't think you were that scared of her."
"Samantha Langston, Robert William, and Barbara Gray."
"Your mother's a great lady."
"Course she is, Tom."
"No, I'm serious. She's amazing."
"You start hittin' on my mother, I'm not gonna care how many sheets to the wind you are."
She said it to diffuse the growing tide of how-cool-Ellen-Harvelle-was once more. To Jo she wasn't Ellen Harvelle, she never had been. Ellen Harvelle was talked about in the bar. She had a mean right hook and a glare that could make a man's balls or a woman's ovaries shrivel up and die simply because they said one wrong word.
"Didn't mean it like that."
"Sure you didn't. Drink the rest of your beer and I'll help you to your truck."
She had inherited both of those. Her mother had been pleased to know it-she'd laughed the first time she'd seen the glare directed at her-but disappointed to see it was coming across as the first symptom of a world of things she didn't want Jo to inherit.
"Any a us, we're damn proud to know her, to be here, half of us wouldn't a managed this long if-"
She listens about as much as she doesn't. The list is endless. Ellen Harvelle's intel is fabulous. If she doesn't have it in stock she can get it ordered for you. Minor and major surgeries have been done on a pool table. She'll offer a room and food if it's necessary. Not a one of them would dare to take her on in her own bar or outside of it. Only a fool would shut down her advice and they still ask her to accompany them.
They tell her all about it, when they aren't silent or brooding or planning or crowing or screwing.
There's a discernible line between 'Ellen Harvelle' and her mother.
Ellen Harvelle will whistle at a good punch, before throwing both men out on their asses.
Her mother will glare, with this despondent angry fire, like she might burn all holy hell, each time she has to come pick up Jo for fighting, or getting kicked out of yet another middle or high school.
Ellen Harvelle can spot a case three out of five times just staring at an obits page.
Her mother leaves college applications for her to find (on the bar top, next to her sink, on her pillow), already filled out with all the information, left with a big yellow highlighted and red circled box where she should sign.
Ellen Harvelle owns more weapons and demon paraphernalia than anyone else she's met.
Her mother fights her on every related tool she wants to take with her to her dorm, removing from her bags and boxes charms, tomes, herbs, an EMF reader, weapons, and files related to the area.
Jo's seen Ellen Harvelle in front of her, but she knows Ellen Harvelle has never seen her.
"I'm home."
"You have a holiday this week I didn't know about?"
"Nope."
"Care to explain?"
"I already did."
"Dammit, Joanna Beth-"
"I don't belong there. I tried to tell you, hundreds of times."
"You were doing so well."
"I wasn't doing badly. I wasn't failing. That's what you mean."
"You didn't-"
"You don't give a damn about the fact I was miserable! I'm not like any of them. To them, I'm just a freak with a knife collection, who isn't afraid to get inna fight with a dumb jock!"
"Your bedroom's where you left it."
"Tha-"
"You're unloading in the back room in twenty, and behind the bar right after. I expect everything unpacked right tonight. And every night until you go back."
The Winchester boys come and the Winchester boys go.
The Winchester boys come and the Winchester boys go, again.
They aren't the first people to have their parents killed by demons. Case and point obvious, but also unnecessary because other hunters became hunters for the same reason, same as others did for siblings and children and friends. It's part of the predictable side of the job.
They come and the go. The door swings. Life at the Roadhouse goes on.
She's surprised to find herself wondering where in the black they end up and hoping they've beat the hell out of whatever new bastard they're chasing. She wonders when they'll swing back next, if only so she can tell Dean there is no right time in their lifestyle and beat Sam's ass at pool.
"Why are you sulking now? Is it that ass who'll fuck anything left without even giving you pity, again?"
"Not interested, Ash-hole."
She'd been the one to tell Dean to get out this time.
"Maybe it's that you actually still want the son of your Dad's mistake?"
The punch he got broke a chair, but he laughed through the blood dripping out the corner of his mouth, as he pushed up from the ground. It didn't help that she could see the pain in his eyes, and that it wasn't from getting punched but from watching her watch paint peel for hours.
"That's better."
He laughed, sharp and dry, again and she just glared at him. Annoyed at knowing he'd won by baiting her into doing something-anything-normal, even if it was punching him.
Bitter that he knew, had to have known, the details about her father's last hunt long before her, that her mother would tell him-but not her own daughter. Bitter that he knew even now the punch he'd gotten was one aimed at his face but meant for the person she couldn't punch: her mother.
"Now get your skinny white ass off that bar stool, grab me a PBR, and go hustle the table that just started playin' poker."
Ash only wanted her to go back to being her-brash, sarcastic, even volatile-self.
Jo couldn't see how that wasn't the bigger insult.
The days that followed were worse.
Her outrage mounted by the day.
Her mother sent her off to school prepared, trained her up right before her first hunts, and the Winchesters boys got to waltz in like they were nobody. They got to slide under her skin, bone weary and emotionally desolate over their father's death, making them so like her. They got to work with her and save. They got to be anything but what they deserved for being the echo of the man who didn't watch her father's back close enough on his last hunt.
She hated her mother for not telling her until it was too late.
That she couldn't tear out caring, or remembering, or being grateful.
For the Winchester boys, or Uncle John, or her mother.
It's not even two weeks later, on a Greyhound a few hours west of Des Moines on I-90, the first time it punches her in the gut-what she's done to get her freedom, how many doors she had to close to do it-and the air is so thin suddenly she feels like she's suffocating on the urge to scream and beat her fists until she cries.
She doesn't.
Jo kept her gaze on the window as the woman in the seat next her prattled on about the flavor of Doritos and her children's pre-kinder accomplishments and her husbands' new promotion. She asked coldly why the woman was on a run down Greyhound then, and the woman crumples with a squeak. She regretted the question, not because it was cruel but, because the drowning silence was worse than the pointless chatter.
Her mother would have known what to do next.
Wasn't that another example of what her mother had been unwilling to teach, another reason for why she'd had to leave?
For the end of January she'd bounced every which way: hunting, hustling poker, pool, and shooting when she needed extra pocket money, not staying anywhere longer than a week. After those first four weeks her back up stash had dwindled.
She stopped in at a bar for a beer after realizing she didn't have the money for another bus ticket. Put in an application using the name of a hunter who died in her teens, while playing on the assumptions of the owner-young, female, secretive, quiet, sharp, needy, possibly a runaway from a bad home life.
The irony of it wasn't lost on her.
Nor that the one thing her mother never had a problem with teaching her, and letting her do, was the thing to tide her over while pursuing the life she wanted.
She got a cheap motel and worked four days a week, laying down beers for shmucks avoiding wives and children and work. She smiled and smirked and flirted and corrected and found herself almost liking it, almost comforted by it, but never content.
The first postcard takes four days to write, and goes through three different phases of being bought, written and trashed.
She writes too little. She writes too much. She crosses it out. She starts again. She hates using a pen or a pencil, and picking the town she'll mail it from.
In the end, fed up by the time she gets to the eighth one, a weird looking multicolored bird in a tree, she writes three words only:
I'm okay.
-Jo
In February she hit Fort Payne and Cleveland; for respectively a simple salt n' burn case and then a werewolf. Not having the super computer had made it harder to find things, but the need to find them produced the strange forth.
The second time took days longer than she expected; earned her a firing and a lecture like she was the second bar owners' daughter, chalked with implications of being a junkie or emotionally unstable. She let him think whatever he wanted to (not about to say she was tumbled down stairs by a werewolf and earned a dislocated shoulder as her prize for killing it); only asking for her last pay check and walking out like it didn't matter, because it doesn't.
It's easier to leave this time, because she's leaving nothing behind.
"Harvelle's Roadhouse, you got the bucks, we got the booze."
"Hey, genius."
"Jo? Oh, man. Long time no hear."
"Right, because you aren't tracing my cell phone for my mother?"
"Uh…"
"I'm blonde, Ash, not dumb. I'd think you wouldn't've forgotten that in the last few weeks."
"Months."
"Whatever."
"Heh. You can't punch me from there."
"I can hang up on you, dumbshit."
"Ah. Yeah-minute." She heard the voice in the back ground talking to him, hand become a vice on the plastic against her ear. "No, I got-"
"Don't tell her it's me. I'll hang up."
"-family talking."
"Think she's dumb too? You don't talk to your family."
"Crazy, loopy, niece from the red necked side."
There was a further mumble, and some response he made with his hand over the receiver.
"Better be good, skinny, you're mother'll have my balls nailed to the wall when she finds out."
"Not if."
"Gettin' sentimental out there?"
"Ash, I got a job for you."
"Pretty sure I got one of those already, Princess."
"Helping me with cases."
"You want my balls served to me, well done, on a platter."
"You could threaten to hang up or call my mommy on me."
"What'd you need?"
She'd only been working in the bar in Duluth three days before it all happened. She watched Dean leave through the door, pissed that she couldn't go after her own attacker, to punch out or help Sam, and strung out on the night.
He said he'd call and, against the screaming silence of his absence, she said he wouldn't.
She meant it as much on his side as on hers.
She cleaned up the bar, put the chairs on the tables, and turned out the lights, even if it was four hours later than usual. She took the trash out back, and stood next to the dumpster. She opened the back plate on her phone, tossed it and the battery in the dumpster, then stomped on the solid part until her data card broke free. She snapped the card in three pieces and threw all those in, too. She wasn't sure how Sam had found her, but it was the simplest way she knew she could have been tracked. He was the geek brother.
She wrote 'Sorry' on a napkin and took three days pay from the till.
Between it, her tips, and half of her savings she bought a bus ticket leaving for Ironwood, and sat clutching her bag the whole night, waiting for her bus to arrive. She didn't sleep-she didn't even think about it.
She didn't talk much and remembered less. She hated having a period of black out, of uncertainty.
Taking precautions against the known and the unknown, she got an examination and a morning after pill at a small local clinic, but refused to comment when they asked if her boyfriend often beat her up like this after examining her forehead and wrists. She took the bottle of water they offered and the coupon to a diner up the road, but didn't answer when they asked her to come back.
Ironwood was a good place to get lost, and the best part about trying to get lost was that it worked. Floating absently in a world where no one knew her, she saw all of them, and hated that no one was there when she woke tangled up, fighting her sheet or her jacket, screaming, in tears.
She didn't hate John Winchester.
Even on the nights she wished she did.
What Sam had whispered-my daddy shot your daddy in the head-it might be true. It might not.
The best lies always were curved around the truth. She knew that intimately. And nothing in their life was black or white. Those categories were too rigid and a hunter could break themselves just trying to hold on to one or the other.
Maybe John had caused her father's death.
Maybe John had given her Dad the last peace he could get that night, too.
She wasn't sure about Sam though. Demonic possession aside, what had been done with his hand, his body, stuck with her.
Just like the first guy who tried to take her hard against a wall, had gotten head-butted before she could stop herself when a wave of panic slid through her like ice and her instincts had taken over.
She wished more and more that she could call her mother; she wanted to explain everything that had happened; to go back to the Roadhouse. (She understood now why they were so grateful: for a place that understood them and that would be waiting at the end of the job, not exactly a home, not exactly a family, but the closest they could have, worth all the secret and lies.) But there wasn't a place there for what she knew and what she'd seen and who she had become.
It was the dream of something safe and sane.
She didn't want either.
(But she wanted her mother.)
The rest of March and the beginning of April passed in a haze.
There was another bar and three relatively small hunts all in the same small state-the last of which, in the end, Jo couldn't make heads or tails of.
She liked it when the monsters were monsters and the people were people, but then the world liked to play with things, and people were just as good at being monsters as monsters liked to think they were at being people.
By not moving for those weeks, she'd saved enough to get her own wheels. The used car salesman had given her a strange look when she said she didn't care what it was as long as it had four wheel drive, durability and a huge trunk, but he was only too happy to take her money.
Jo didn't approve of the credit card scam most hunters ran-convenient fraudulent accounts under fake names, making their crime untraceable and a day job a joke-but she got on board with it after the car.
Mobility between where she was and where her next hunt was becoming more important than monetary morals, about the same time her patience with shmucks, who didn't know the first things about real monsters or family ghosts, ran out.
She'd made it back into Scottsbluff, from dealing with an Indian curse out in Sheridan, and stopped for a late night bite. It was the closest to home she'd been. It felt like it had been years, not months.
She thought about Ash's nearly constant yammering about talking to her mother, more than a postcard every two or three weeks. She sat in the booth drinking cups of black coffee, thinking about her and him and the Roadhouse. It'd been about two weeks; no maybe it was four, since she'd called him for help last.
She loved her mom, there's no denying that, and she stills respects the Harvelle name, even if no one's called her by it in months. Ellen Harvelle didn't want to have room for a third hunter in the family, but she raised one, even in the denial, even trying to make sure she couldn't be the shadow of her father, couldn't die the same way he had.
Jo had turned out to be damn good hunter, like both her parents were. She had no unnecessary sympathy like mother. She was respectful and loyal to her job like her father. She had learned these, but Jo watched the moon through the window uncertainly.
The bitterness was there, but the heat under it was gone, like scorch marks after a blaze. She had taken what she had to and she didn't regret it, even the fact she had waited so long to leave didn't sting anymore.
If she did, stop by, they'd fight like cats and dogs, even if it was a one hour stop over. They'd pretend things were fine for the first five minutes. Then her mom would tell her that her hair needed a trim and Jo'd remind her right back the door still hasn't been oiled.
Trying to defuse them Ash would say everyone needed a round to celebrate, and someone would hit the jukebox which hadn't had the music switched up in years, and for an hour they might forget and just swap update stories about hunters who'd come, the stories they told, and, if her mother was willing to hear, the hunts she'd had.
It's as she pays at the counter, torn between thirsting to search for her next case and being the good, every day, daughter that she wasn't (but that her mother wanted) that Jo spotted the newspaper rack at her feet and the headline at the top: FIRE TOTALS COUNTRY SALOON.