After the race, tensions between Dean and Johanna lessened slightly. They weren't at each other's throats quite as often, though part of that may have been due to the return of Jane, who'd finished a hunt and come back three days later. He'd soon figured out though, that Jane wasn't quite as innocent as she seemed. One night, Johanna had come home late, with her dark hair windblown and her cheeks rosy. Bobby had asked where she'd been, and she'd admitted that she went street racing.
"Of all the illegal things to do," Bobby had grumbled.
Unable to stand the tense silence between them, Jane had spoken up.
"What did Cinderella say when she got to the ball?" She'd asked quietly. She'd shared a look with Johanna, and they simultaneously made a choking noise. After choking on his beer, Sam had laughed so hard he almost cried. Bobby hadn't looked surprised, not in the slightest. Then one night at the dinner table, after non stop begging from Jane, Johanna had told everyone the exorcism story about when she sang to a demon. They had all laughed.
"You think that's funny?" Johanna had asked. "She tap danced."
Sam had choked on his food. Dean had rolled his eyes so far into the back of his head that Bobby asked if he had seen his brain.
But Jane's presence didn't fix everything. When she didn't have something to do, Johanna got restless. And when she got restless, she was a mythic bitch. Dean had told her as much one of the times that they'd had it out. For three days, she was snappy and horrible, and hardly anyone except Bobby dared even go near her, Jane included. So when she heard about a pack of werewolves in Vermillion, South Dakota, no one protested when she packed up her things and left. No one heard from her for two days, which normally would have worried them, but everyone was still getting over Johanna's temper.
~time skip brought to you by Jane listening to Being As An Ocean and La Dispute~
On the night of the second day, she pulled into the junkyard and trudged through the door without knocking, thus awakening a shirtless and disheveled Dean. Her face was almost white, and she swayed nearly imperceptibly.
"What happened?" He asked, sitting bolt upright.
"'M fine." She slurred, sitting down on the couch.
"No, you're not." Dean insisted.
She pointedly ignored him. "Whiskey."
Dean retrieved some. He offered her a glass, but she just drank straight from the bottle.
"Now," he instructed, "take off your shirt."
With some effort, Johanna raised her eyebrows, but reluctantly did so. She winced as she lifted her arms. Dean almost passed out at what he saw. There was a messily stitched gash under her left breast, as if something had been aiming for her heart. It wasn't bleeding, but it was definitely fresh.
"What the hell is this?" Dean half-yelled.
"What's it look like?" She shot back.
"It looks like you almost got yourself killed!"
"But I didn't."
"And what if you hadn't been able to stitch it up? Huh? What then?"
"Then I would have died bloody! Like a hunter! It happens to all of us, Deanna! I don't know if you'd noticed, but our life expectancies aren't exactly the best!"
"Exactly, so why go so something so stupid and reckless when we're already at a disadvantage here?"
"I'm twenty-eight, I can make my own decisions!"
"What about Jane? She's fourteen. Where would she be if you kicked it?"
"Contrary to popular belief, Jane can make her own choices!"
"You can't go off on your own like that again. I'm not having your damn blood on my conscience!"
"You didn't have anything to do with it!"
"I let you walk out!"
"So?"
"You almost died."
"And maybe I'm okay with that!"
This shocked Dean into silence. Dean took a long drink from the whiskey on the table. They sat like that for a while, simmering with anger, until they each finally cooled down and Johanna spoke.
"What gave me away?" She asked.
Dean just sang the chorus to 'A Whiter Shade of Pale.'
"Her face, at first just ghostly,
Turned a whiter shade of pale."
Dean gave her dental floss, scissors, and a needle, and she cleaned up the stitches a bit. He looked at her exposed torso.
"Why don't you have an anti-possession tattoo?" He asked, indicating his own.
Johanna stayed silent and pulled her bra strap aside. For a moment everything looked normal, but then Dean saw a mark, the same as his. The only difference was, while his was ink, Johanna's was literally carved into her skin. It must have been deep, considering how prominent the scar was. And doing it had to have hurt like a bitch.
"Where did that come from?" He questioned.
"I did it myself. I was thirteen, there was no way I'd be able to get a tattoo, so I cut it into my own skin. Hurt like hell itself, but it works."
"What about this?" She asked, pointing to a small, faint scar above his eyebrow.
"Sam. We were kids, and we got into a fight. He punched me, and it left a split." Dean took a sip from the bottle of whiskey. "That?" He pointed to two thin symmetrical lines where her neck met her shoulders.
"Captured and tortured by a demon. Son of a bitch cut me up pretty bad. They weren't big, but he doused me in salt mixed with holy water. I guess as a really freakin' ironic 'screw you.' I was fifteen." She took a drink.
Back and forth they went, one of them pointing to the other's scars, telling tales from hunts or fights where they got them. They kept going, telling stories until the bottle of whiskey was empty and they'd almost run out of visible scars. Then Dean, bearing Johanna's wounds in mind, moved onto the floor, and they slept.