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Jo knows the wards are down before the frame of the Roadhouse shakes with their loss. She can feel them go, like a warm blanket torn away on a cold day.
A cold, spring day.
She shivers with the phantom pain of a blade in a hand she doesn’t have anymore.
Out, then in. Fill your lungs slowly, all the way from the bottom. Hold it, then out.
They teach her the breathing exercises before they let her leave the safe embrace of unthreatening white walls and little Dixie cups of medicine. She was numb there; numb and smiling.
The deep breathing’s supposed to stop the dry-drowning of panic taking over, blooming petals of terror through her limbs and up her spine.
Purposeful and careful, breathing to remind herself that she can.
Out, then in.
There’s so much noise. Shouting, screaming, crackingburstingbroken sounds. Blast of a shotgun. There’s begging and the start of an exorcism, laughter. The laughter is microphone feedback between her ears, hurts sharp like chewing tinfoil.
Jo focuses in on her heartbeat, loud and thick. It’s in her neck, a rhythmically squeezing fist around every breath. It says she’s alive as it pounds in her five trembling fingertips, reaching numbly down to feel out the line of the gun at her hip.
Deep breaths, ones that make your belly rise.
The wood of the stairs knows her steps need to go unnoticed, doesn’t creak under bare feet for the first time in her life. Everything is just a little hazy around her, a little disconnected in slow motion.
Reality is thin as the rainbow skin of a soap bubble around her, waiting to be popped by careless fingers.
Hold it… hold it…
It reeks of spilled liquor and gunsmoke, metallic tang of bloody suffering under that. Broken glass and bodies are scattered everywhere with about the same amount of care.
The bar is full for a Tuesday. Was full for a Tuesday.
Sam is carving apart a man who once took out half a nest of vamps on his own with just a short stake and a length of piano wire. He’s doing it with a hunting knife his hands aren’t even touching.
Dean is at the bar, actually has his slick, bloody hands on the blade he’s using. He’s got a clean, white bar towel over his shoulder, right where momma usually—
Momma is—
Screaming. Her voice breaks on sharp, animal sounds that stab at Jo’s ears.
Crying. Tear tracks and wet gasps where Jo can see her lungs rise and fall in the red, sticky, open mess that used to be her chest.
Begging. Momma’s lips won’t say please, but they tremble silently around the word ‘run’. She’s laid out on the bar top and there’s jagged, shattered bone poking out through the blood-wet fabric of her jeans; there’s no running, now.
Jo can feel the second Sam Winchester’s eyes fall on her because everything goes stormy gold, sparking with color the way nothing has in a long time. Crushing pressure inside her skull makes her eyes water. His voice—look at me—is a whispering serpent slithering through the folds of her brain, leaving poison behind.
It’s only an instant before her body obeys the command to drop the gun, just the tiny fraction of a second it takes to squeeze a trigger with a twitchy finger. So it’s a good thing daddy taught her how to shoot when she was still in pigtails, because she hits just where she’s aiming.
The crack of the gunshot echoes, will echo for years, and Dean’s furious snarl of surprise as the bullet hits its mark makes all the little hairs on her arms stand on end, but loudest sound in the room is still momma’s sigh of relief.
Jo can’t get enough air for how loudly she wants to scream watching the blood ooze from that hole in her head.
You’re not dying, Jo-Jo. I promise, you’re not dying. Just breathe for momma. Breathe, baby, please.
Dean stalks across the room to slam her into the wall with his hand crushing her throat, mouth torn open to bare teeth that have seen so much blood.
His eyes are dark like a night sky without its stars, and looking into them feels more like dying than anything she’s ever felt before.
“Now, sweetheart, that was just rude.”
She won’t go easy; she won’t fade away with a sigh. They have no use for mercy killings.