Author's note:
This drabble is for my best friend WaywardSigh. She's the Jo to my Dean, the jock to my strap...She's my freakin' SOULMATE, okay? And without her, I'd be nothing. So this is for you, Corinne. xx
Jo staggered out of the bar. Vertigo. Nausea. Anything that could be wrong with her, she felt as though it all was wrong with her. She wasn't drunk; she wasn't that foolish. She was used to the migraines by now, but ever so often there was that blaze of mind numbing torture she just couldn't handle.
A creak of a metal spring. A warm hand and a leather jacket being rolled over her cool shoulder. The vague memory of someone toting her away into a leather-bound seat.
She never knew her mother had had it so bad. Feeling so bloated. So miserable. So unneeded. Jo had been told by countless people to blame it on the hormones, everything in her body changing and senses heightening.
But she always felt like a neusense even when Dean reassured her it was fine, everything was fine...She didn't feel fine.
Days, weeks, months, she felt bloated, miserable, unneeded. Her stomach kept getting larger and larger, even to the point where she had to borrow Sam's old sweets when they had "misplaced" her bag in the old trunk of the Impala and she couldn't fit into a pair of Dean's jeans. Too tired to look for the bag, too big to fight them for it.
Months turned into weeks, weeks into days, days into hours...
In backseat of the car Dean loved so much, with the women he loved just as much, everything changed. He felt like everything had been leading up to this moment. He had been stealing everyone else's time to make it feel like it hadn't been so long ago he had dug the golden ring from the ammo box and stolen her away, taken her up the road, away from Sam, and tossed it into a bag of Reese's Pieces.
Minutes, seconds, milliseconds...That's all that it took to tell Jo she wasn't worthless, meaningless, and unneeded. That was all it took to tell Dean if he was stealing time, he might as well steal it for his family. Because that was what they were, the slight blonde, the towering guy across the room, the man in the trucker hat outside sitting with a darker blonde, and the man in awe beside the hospital bed….
They were a family.