A/N - I actually like this! Like. I'm really proud of this except I completely forgot Ash isn't actually Ellen's kid and I'm beating myself up over it so, for the record, I'm so sorry I made Ash blood family. It was an accident. I'm actually really sorry.
Jo is nine here and Ash is six or seven.
The whispers had started as soon as the other kids had spotted them rounding the corner together. That's when Jo had grabbed his hand, to protect him, she told herself but Ash didn't need protection from people who were outright rude to him, those people bored him.
Ash was not bright, not even brilliant - he was a radiant genius and anyone who could not open his eyes to a new perspective, another way of doing things in a way he admired, did not garner his attention in the least. Ash didn't need protection from people who were too stupid to understand him, Ash had to be protected from people who caught his fancy but did not deserve to.
So that kind of stuff, cold stares, moms herding the other kids away from them, didn't faze him. Ash was too caught up in his own little tech world of various scrap parts he could salvage from dumpsters and hunters passing through to hear the things people said about their family. The last thing Ash needed was protection. No, little Jo, older sister Jo, tough Jo had always been the one to let the things said about her family, about her 'crazy alcoholic' mother and 'dead beat' dad pierce her like knives.
And sure, mom got a little scary when she started crying after one to many drinks from the pretty crystal glasses she kept under the counter. Every once in a while, if there were no customers in to share stories from the road about their latest hunt, she would shut down the bar, flip the shades and lose herself in the dregs of one of the drinks from the top shelf. Her loud sobbing could be heard from the roof, Jo knew, probably from the neighbours yard if they cared to listen.
So whenever she started to hiccup and sob and sit down on the floor behind the bar, cradling the framed picture of a young, strong jawed man hefting a gun in her lap, Jo would sneak down the back staircase so she didn't have to see a trembling husk of her mother and out the back door, to the park down the road. And when Ash was old enough to walk and talk and experiment with electrical outlets, he started coming along, too.
Jo wouldn't let him stay to ask Ellen questions. She'd been down that road before, that raging screaming, 'he would be here today if I hadn't trusted that bastard' road.
Today was one of those days, no better or worse than any of the others, and Ash was tugging on her shirt for attention.
"Jo, we are goding do play mondster and hunder. I'm the mondster first, god id?" He sniffled loudly, letting go of her hand at the base of the slide to wipe his nose. He'd had a cold all week but she'd given him the smelling salts, a bath and a shot of whiskey for good measure to calm him down and ease the cough. The runny nose wasn't slowing him down though and it gave the other kids on the playground a good reason to steer clear of the Harvelle kids.
Ignoring the starting of a few motors from the parking lot she stepped back.
"You'd better get going, then." She said without looking at him, searching the ground for a good stick to use as a rifle. She knew he'd pick something difficult to kill, just to goad her but most things weren't immune to salt and if she shot him with it… "I'm not showing any mercy"
She heard rather than saw his feet pound the grass to run off across the playground and into the trees and bushes. Jo wasn't worried about him disappearing. No monster was stupid enough to set foot into this town or take the kid of a renown hunter, what with it being the epicentre of hunter activity, and while Jo didn't exactly like letting Ash hunt monsters (in fact, she loathed it) as pretend as they might be, it was better than leaving him at home with Ellen and cleaning up two messes the next morning - Ash who shut himself up so completely after Ellen's outbursts, nothing existed except the machinery in his hands for the next two days. And mom who would still be walking shaky and talking shaky the next day.
She was also happy to 'play' monsters with him for as long as she could keep him from understanding just how dire a life like theirs, of hunting things that aren't supposed to exist, really is. To enjoy a childhood like theirs was a rare commodity. To survive long enough to grow out of it, even rarer. For a moment Jo was caught up in just how unnatural a life like theirs was. She would never forget the night she ran crying into her moms room in the middle of the night about creatures going bump in the night and her mother rolling out of bed with a 12 gauge shotgun.
Shaken out of her slump by a low growling in the bushes, Jo hefted her staff onto her shoulder like she was unworried about her fate. The great hunter Joanna-Beth did not need weapons! Why, she could take down a monster with her bare hands if need be!
She shouted as much into the great wall of rustling foliage, backing away to the playground to get a good range. Some fast monsters could make it around her and attack from behind but they were just little kids playing, just kids not supernatural creatures on the hunt. Just kids playing.
She turned her back momentarily on the trees to set up camp at the apex of the jungle gym, making sure she was comfortable but not comfortable enough to get lazy and not tangled up in the bars to heed her escape should he attack from underneath. A dirty trick, but monsters weren't known for playing fair. Ellen would have laughed.
They played for the next few hours until the streetlights started flickering on and the last of the wary families had gone home hours before. They played until Jo had bruises in places she didn't know existed until then and Ash had died so many times, 'no crossroads demon would touch his life with a ten foot pole'. They played until they forgot the reality and cruel irony of the game being fought.
They had grass stains on their chins and knees and elbows and everywhere else the light shone. They could even pass off as normal kids on a day off if the onlooker didn't know better. They played until they were both panting and exhausted, side by side on their backs in the grass.
Jo was the one to sit up first and smear dirt across her forehead in an effort to clean herself up for the families that would watch them walk by, from inside their well-lit houses, where shouts of 'dinner's ready' would be heard from the front porch. Scuffing their dragging feet in the parking lot, she squared her shoulders for the looks heavy with a conflicted mixture of disgust and pity.
They pounded the pavement side by side, the sun setting behind casting long shadows ahead of them, stretching tall, like a drawing of a monster Jo saw in a book her mom kept in the back room once. It changed places after Ellen caught Jo reading it but she never forgot what she she read and how well what she saw there fit together with the stories she heard from the gruff men who hefted guns as tall standing up as she was.
Jo wanted to be as tall and strong as those men, strong enough to fight monsters. Monsters in the real world and the monsters that haunted her mother. That's what Ellen called them but Jo never saw them coming for her until it was too late. She wanted to be strong enough to save her mom and if she wasn't (as much as it hurt her to entertain the idea) strong enough at least to stand up to her mother, maybe to leave her. But not Ash, never Ash.
She suddenly wanted Ash to ask her a question, something, anything about their family. She wanted him to ask about why mom cries about a man who looks a little bit like Jo. Why doesn't she seem to recognize them when she cries. Who is John Winchester and why does his name kill the fire that usually burns behind her eyes? And the most challenging question she could think of, will things ever get better?
She would never answer him honestly of course, she would protect him like big sisters do. She wanted Ash to be normal, to want to know things he shouldn't, she wanted any excuse possible to think that maybe if she shouldered enough of the burden they were born into, Ash could grow up into a normal life where people don't cast sly looks out the corner of the eyes when they go out in public.
But Ash has always been different, she knew that from the beginning, maybe, because Ellen was never a hands on hunter - nor a hands on mother, but all parenting aside - and Jo was normal enough to go through life without attracting undue attention onto herself for doing more or less than average, maybe they could have avoided all the insinuating comments. But when Ash fixed his first computer - the fan in Ellens old PC was making weird clicking noises - before he hit grade school, she knew it was gone.
So, they walked home, Ash fiddling with a couple pieces of wire he found in his pocket and mumbling bits of information he'd been thinking about and found important up at Jo, and she slid inside the window around the side of the house with the routine ease that shouldn't be found in a girl until high school when she's sneaking out towards something - the glittering possibility of a boy or a party, a night you won't forget, a life grander than the one she's running away from. But Jo would never sneak out in search of a better place, she was busy surviving in the gritty one doled out.
And when she slipped open the well-oiled latch with practiced fingers the next time, it was not in anticipation of something great, it was with the temporary relief of getting away from an inescapable force of nature. Something that would always be nipping at her heels no matter how far or fast she ran. It was with a sigh of resignation, of knowing that, in a few hours she would come back, dragging her feet and she would re-salt the windows and understand exactly how that was a metaphor for the rest of her damned, dogged life