"You miserable, irresponsible, SON OF A BITCH."
"Jo-"
"You never needed a partner, you wanted some convenient bait." She accused, silently cursing herself for not seeing through another Winchester plot.
"Jo, you know I would have never unwillingly put you in danger-"
And that was when she hit him. Not a slap and not particularly hard, but because he wasn't expecting it, he was sent reeling backwards one or two steps. Sam raised a hand to his cheek. "You hit me."
Jo looked down at he balled fists and back up to his face. A ghost of a grin flitted over he face. "I did, didn't I?" Her expression turned serious. "Tell me why. Just tell me why."
Why bring her here? Why chose her? What is he hunting? Why is he hunting it? Why did he call another hunter? How did he know that thing would be here? How can Dean be here? Why is he a demon?
All in all, what the hell was going on?!
Jo's knife was sitting on the hood of the Impala, where she had carefully placed it before tearing strips off Sam. The blood of Demon-Dean still glinted on the blade.
Sam was silent.
"I might be more of a joy to be around if I actually knew what we're going up against, since you're stuck with me now."
Ragnarok. The battle at the end of the world.
"Get in the car."
"Sam-"
"Get in the car. Please."
Both of them sat silently in the Impala, which suddenly seemed too large and cold.
"Three months." Sam said. "Three months into the Fletcher Gable case and I was going nowhere. No matter what I did, I couldn't track the missing hunters. There was always that one word and nothing else, and whatever partial coordinates had been left could have been from several dozen areas across America. And there's only one of me."
Jo looked out the window. Sam turned the key in the ignition before stomping the clutch and manhandling the gearstick. His brother would have flayed him alive. As the Roadhouse faded slowly into the distance, he continued to speak.
"My last bust… went wrong. The demon jumped from host to host like a flea. By the time I finished one devil's trap, the demon was in somebody else."
"Where were you?"
"Casualty. In South Boston."
"Lots of bodies."
"Lots of bodies." Sam agreed. "Whatever, it was being controlled within the psychiatric unit. Whenever I got close it attacked." He sighed.
The Impala flashed past a welcome sign for Plesantvale. Welcome to hell was scrawled across the billboard in thick black marker.
"He was in maximum security for the criminally insane." Sam carefully siphoned all emotion from his voice. "Sitting in a corner muttering to himself. He looked so haunted. I thought…well, it doesn't matter what I thought."
"A miracle." Jo said softly.
"At first I thought I could bring him back, you know? But I didn't want to see that he was the one controlling the demon. All along, he was playing me, and he knew exactly how. Jo, I let him out. Let IT out."
"Sam-"
"I gotta keep going forward. Gotta find the hunters. Gotta solve this Ragnarok thing. If I start thinking that there's a demon in Dean's body, I'll start thinking that there might be a chance to bring him back. And if I do I'll just collapse. I'm not kidding, I'll just fold up and-"
"I know."
"I'm sorry. But you knew each other, and because of that it knew you were a threat. And while you were taking it on I could come around and take a clear shot at it."
"That's one hell of a gamble, Sam."
He sniffed. "It's a demon, Jo."
"I know." She said again. "But just for a moment it felt so real. He was there, alive, and I couldn't do anything. Like my instincts had been squashed. Part of me knew it was too good to be true, but it was like I'd believe anything. Almost like-"
"Some sort of spell?"
"Yeah, some sort of spell."
He stared resolutely forward. "Not good."
"You think the demon's wrapped up in this?"
"A hundred percent certain. Well, ninety-eight percent. Ninety percent of the hunters vanished without any signs of a struggle. Showing that they might have been sort of charmed away. The last ten percent turned out to be old school slayers with basic psychic training to resist mental torture."
"Cool." Jo said without thinking.
Sam glanced at her. "You know, you're a lot like him."
"What, the demon?"
"No, Dean."
"Ah, you mean I'm brave and loyal and true?"
"More like semi-suicidal, stubborn and cocky to the point of insolence."
Jo crossed her arms and lent back into the passenger's seat. "Jerk." She waved a threatening finger at him. "You reply to that and you're so going down."
Sam grinned.
It was the same the world over. Littered campus, students almost half your age trying to pick you up, sleazy head teachers and state-of-the-art faculties that always seemed sub-standard.
"We hope you will enjoy your tenure here, Miss Devlin." Charlotte Stewart, assistant to the accommodation manager smiled as Grace Devlin dropped her bags by the door. Finally, someone had come to fill the vacancy left by Mister Lawson's sudden departure.
"I'm sure I will." Grace said.
"Your office is right next to mine, so if you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me."
"Sure."
The key turned in the lock and the door opened. The girl stepped into the room, slammed the door and armed the alarm before flopping on the lounge and grabbing the remote.
CSI: Miami was on. She watched it until the plot became too convoluted before switching it over to the Sunday Night Movie.
"But I love you!"
"No. You were only ever using me."
"But-"
Something crashed to the floor in the kitchen.
'Probably Louise's cat', she dismissed. It took her a moment to remember that Louise didn't have a cat.
She crept to the door. Her boyfriend's baseball bat was still propped up against the phone table and she hefted it in her hands before jumping into the kitchen.
He was standing with his back to her.
"Who the hell are you?" She demanded. "Get out of my home!"
He turned.
She screamed.
"Grace."
By the next day everybody on campus knew that Belinda Evans had been murdered in her dorm, the door still locked and the alarm still active. Her roommate Louise Tucker had found her the following morning, and although most of her had been situated in the kitchen, poor Louise was still discovering pieces a week after. It had her on the verge of a nervous collapse.
The Stanford staff bravely soldiered on in the face of disaster. Grace admired their endurance in their refusal to admit that anything was wrong, but pitied them for the same reason.
And so classes continued.
Grace Devlin packed her briefcase and watched as her students slowly fanned out of the lecture hall. Half of them were still being interviewed in relation to Belinda's death. She was about to leave herself when she noticed that one of the chairs was still filled.
Louise Tucker was a quiet, dark haired girl that never skipped a lecture by a rule. She had her heart set on becoming an archaeologist and would often challenge the opinions of the staff, leading many of them to think that she was too clever for her own good.
Grace sat next to her. "Louise?"
"She was pulled apart." Louise finally squawked. She looked like she hadn't had a night's sleep since her gruesome discovery. "Who could ever do that? Who could ever want to do that?"
"Some people seem to be born only able to hurt others." Grace said gently. "Have you seen a counsellor?"
"It made me feel worse."
"They tend to do that, yes. But sometimes talking to a person helps with the grieving process."
"But I am talking to someone. I'm talking to you." Grace raised an eyebrow in surprise. When she was a student at home in Brisbane, she wouldn't have trusted her teachers as far as she could comfortably spit a rat. "It was like an animal… You must think I'm crazy."
"No. But a do think you should get away for a while. Stay with friends until all this has blown over."
"I'll think you'll be lucky if you ever see me again." Louise said gravely. "Linda was my best friend."
Sam was sitting alone, staring out the window. Jo noticed that he'd been doing that a lot lately since the run-in with the demon. He'd withdrawn into himself a little more, shut a bit more of himself off from the world.
He doesn't want to hurt anymore. She pondered him as she stood by the bar waiting for their drinks. The gangly and slightly awkward kid she knew when she was younger had morphed into this brooding, haunted hunter. And once again it made her wonder how long before she began to change, from Jo Harvelle of Nebraska into someone else. Someone darker…
"Hey baby. What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?"
Jo looked him up and down through her lashes. Get a few into some guys… "Just standing here waiting for you to walk into my life." She chirped cheerfully. The barkeep slid a couple of cold ones down the bar. "And now you can walk back out again."
She breezed past him and slapped the beer down in front of Sam, breaking him from his trance. He glanced up at her and wrinkled his nose in a kinda cute way. "Got food?"
"Ordered some steak. Red meat."
"Carnivore."
"Thank you." She pulled out her chair and noticed that there was a folded newspaper underneath his large hand that she'd somehow missed when he pulled out the computer. "Hey, what you got there?"
Sam took a mouthful of drink and pushed it toward her. Jo smoothed the paper and scanned the surface. "Oh, the obituaries. Aren't you a hoot and a half," she murmured. Judging by the pen strokes, he had already searched the majority of deaths for any strange connections. "I thought we were looking for Rag-"
Belinda Catherine Evans, 1990 to 2014. Tragically passed away on the Stanford University campus without warning on the 13 July.
"Stanford University? Wasn't that where-?"
"Where all this mess really started for me, yeah."
"I was going to say that that one was the university that started as a memorial for the dead headmaster's son, but your answer works too. What all started?"
He stared up at her, surprised. "I thought you would have known by now."
"Sorry for not invading your privacy in all the time we have known one another."
A ghost of a grin flitted across his face. "Yeah, I guess I'm just used to having someone around that knows everything about me even if I don't say anything. Sorry."
"Well, I'll try to be more nosy in the future." Jo glanced back down at the paper, her brow wrinkled. It looked to Sam as if she was waiting for some divine intervention and he grinned. "What started?"
"Where my hunting really began. Hunting and visions and chasing fuglys with my crazy brother. The whole Yellow-eyed Demon thing. It killed my girlfriend." And although it was a long time ago, pain still shone in his eyes.
Jo looked away. Her first real steady, a guy called Rick, had turned up again out of thin air two years before, and was killed on a hunt because she refused to blow off a gig with Deacon to back him up. Though you couldn't have really done anything to prevent it, the guilt still eats away. "So. Back to Stanford?"
"Back to 'could have been'." Sam agreed.
"Don't get it mixed up with 'is' and 'now'."
"Two steak and fries?" The busty waitress chirped, her eyes lingering on Sam. Jo grinned.
"Yes, ma'am. This boy's a little too scrawny for my liking."
He kicked her under the table.