don't call my name, tag jo

Jo had loved hunting with Dean, since she'd gotten back. He was family, and it had made her feel less alone, that was for sure. They still did their own things too, she was sure of that, but it was nice to know that there was someone she could call on a moment's notice who she could absolutely trust to have her back, no matter what was going on. If she'd come back, and everyone had been dead, Jo didn't know how she would have coped. It had been hard enough with the realisation that her mom was gone and finding out that Sam had literally jumped into Hell to save the world, and she was so, so glad that Dean and Bobby were still around. Maybe their number was few, now, but they were still a family, albeit a dysfunctional one, and Jo was glad to have that support. She knew that they were trying to find out what had brought her back just as much as she was, and then there were all the other things to focus on as well, evil law firms and vampires going rabid and all those other unspeakable things that were in the world and needed to be stopped before innocent people ended up getting caught in the crossfire and seriously hurt. She knew that she was never going to replace Sam for him, that it had to be hard when she was sitting in the passenger seat instead of his brother, but she wasn't trying to do that, either. She liked Sam a hell of a lot, he had been her family, it wasn't like she was trying to get rid of that. It was just that in this world that was full of vampires, it was nice to have somebody that she liked and trusted with her when she hunted, and it was always more productive to do something like that as a team, rather than solo. It could be done, of course, but there was something about being able to bounce off one another with nothing more than a few looks, and then drinking through the high of a fight afterwards in some bar or other. It was great. Jo enjoyed it a lot; nothing could seem bad in the middle of a hunt—unless things weren't going their way, at least.

But hey, they were going their way, in that neither of them were dead yet, which was absolutely a positive thing; not being dead was great, considering the fact that it was pretty damn easy to die, especially now that vamps had access to go anywhere they liked, really. That was not a good thing, and sure, it was illegal for them to kill humans, but why the hell would they listen to some law, they were monsters? It was just the same on their side; Jo had zero intention of adhering to the law that was supposed to stop her killing vampires, because where was the logic in that? They were monsters, they killed people, hunters could only find them if they'd killed people, so they deserved to die. She was not going to feel bad about doing her job, not even slightly. Why the hell would she? She was making the world a safer place, and it was hard, sometimes, when she had been dead, when half the people she knew and loved were dead, but Jo was focussing on the job at hand, on the fact that she still had Dean and Bobby around—and now Sam, kind of, but it wasn't the same. He wasn't the same, and it made it harder for her to feel as though things were back to how they had been before the apocalypse. Of course Dean was going to choose Sam over her, of that she had no doubt, and she understood it as well as an only child could, but...it had kind of seemed as though Sam was trying to force her out, trying to get her to hate Dean and not want to be around him, or something, which made no sense, because yeah, Sam and Dean were close, they always had been, but they were still her family, her friends. Did she miss the times when it had just been her and Dean? Yeah, a little, but to have Sam back was so, so wonderful that it barely registered at all. The two of them still went out without him, after all, now and again. But this Sam...he was so different. What could have happened to him?

She had to admit that she was a little relieved that she wasn't the only one who'd noticed things, because it would likely have been bad if she'd been finding all these things that made him different, and yet he was exactly the same towards Dean; that would have implied that it was personal, and she didn't know what she would have done to deserve that. Sam had always been family too. It kind of made everything harder, actually, when it was already pretty tough, being stuck in one city, torn out of Heaven with no idea why and her mom still dead. But hey, Jo always had a smile on her face. Sometimes life sucked; that was just life. There were good things too—even if it was a little hard to see them now, the jealousy still curling in her gut. She didn't know why it had hit her like a ton of bricks, this time around; she knew that Dean slept with people. He was perfectly entitled to...it had just been seeing him all over that girl that had bothered her, she decided. She wouldn't let it get to her. She didn't even want to think about why it bothered her, honestly. It meant something, if she thought about it, and it wasn't supposed to. “Sure, if it's your car. Mine's a piece of junk.” But it worked, and that was all that mattered, really. It was never going to be like the Impala, after all. She shrugged, and shook her head. “It's not your fault he's being a dick,” she said, and it wasn't; Dean didn't need to take the blame for the fact that his brother was scary, now. He couldn't have done anything to stop him being that way. She didn't trust him either, though. She didn't want to be around him, not if he was going to be hitting on her like that, not if he was going to be acting that way. “We'll figure out what's happened to him,” she promised, because they had to. Sam was family, and it was more important than working out why she was back, right now, without a doubt.

WHAT DAY IS IT? AND IN WHAT MONTH? THIS CLOCK NEVER SEEMED SO ALIVE.
i can't keep up and i can't back down, i've been losing so much time.
ALL OF THE THINGS THAT I WANT TO SAY JUST AREN'T COMING OUT RIGHT. I'M TRIPPING ON WORDS.
you've got my head spinning. i don't know where to go from here.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

If it came to choosing someone to hunt with, Jo was always at the top of the list. He liked hunting alongside of her. Before Sam came back, it had been nice having someone at his side again. No, she wasn’t Sam. And of course it would always be strange having someone else in the car instead of him. Dean had never gotten used to him not being in the passenger seat. It wasn’t as if that had been the first time that Dean had been without his brother. Back when Sam had gone off to college, Dean took plenty of hunts on his own and his brother hadn’t been right at his side. Hell, he hadn’t even been talking to him. But, he wasn’t dead and that was the different. Back then, his brother was just in college and he was upset at him and missed him, but he knew that he was okay and that if anything happened he could get a hold of him. It didn’t feel like a weight slammed into his chest when he thought about an inside joke or something that reminded him of his brother. Instead, he had only gotten an urge to give him a call, but then remembered the odds of him picking up and returned to frustration at him. This wasn’t like that. This wasn’t Sam taking off. This was Sam dead. And it had been hard for him, even after so much time passed without him there, it had been difficult. But Jo had been great and he liked how much time they had to spend together. It was great. And when they found Sam, Dean thought that things might go back to normal, especially once they found a way to get his memories back. But, they’d never managed that and when his memories suddenly resurfaced, he wasn’t the same.

Even hunting with his brother was different now. While he was almost sure that Sam would never hurt him and he trusted him at his back, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he didn’t really trust him half as much as he used to. He shouldn’t have to question his brother or his motives. He never had to be Sam’s conscience before. Frankly, it was usually the opposite. It wasn’t to say that Dean lacked one, because he never had. But, Sam had a way of looking at the grey areas and having more compassion that Dean wasn’t initially capable of. He was the one that could win people over with a god damned puppy dog look and empathy. Dean wasn’t as good at that kind of thing. But now, Dean was a hell of a lot better at it than Sam was. Just because Sam and Dean were close didn’t mean that they weren’t close to other people. Jo was family, after all and they had both considered that. So, to hear the things Sam had been doing was hard to process, except that he saw the differences so it wasn’t a huge surprise. He could never have seen him doing anything close to that before. As far as he knew, Sam had always liked Jo. She was family. He didn’t know what had changed and while he could try to blame Hell for it, it didn’t make sense to him. He had been to Hell and maybe his ride in Hell was nothing compared to Sam’s, but he didn’t think it could turn someone into what Sam was. Unless that was just the way that Hell and the job made him. He was like an amplified version of him, right? He was just turning into one of those hunters... The idea worried him, really. Because, Sam wasn’t one of those. And at the end of the day, Dean wanted his brother back.

They couldn’t have him a loose cannon forever. But, he really wasn’t in any mood to worry too extensively on Sam tonight. It had been a great night so far, after all. He was still feeling the high from the woman from before. Sex usually made everything look a hell of a lot better. Especially good sex. “At least it’s not a mini-van,” he teased. Though he guessed he would rather scrap a car if it was a piece of junk than try to push it through traffic. Yet, since he didn’t want to stick around forever, if he had a junk car, he didn’t see himself separating from it. Dean loved to drive. But, he would much rather have his own car and there was nothing in the world that was going to separate him from his car. “No, but he’s Sam.” He replied, in his own way naming him his responsibility. Because, that’s what he was. Sam was his younger brother and he was supposed to look out for him. He was his main responsibility and no matter how many times he was reminded that Sam was grown, he was still his younger brother and he wasn’t going to just stop watching out for him. He was his responsibility, period. “I know, it’s just I’m tired of worrying what he’s gonna do in the meantime. I can’t predict him.” And in the past, predicting Sam was like second nature. And he was sure it worked both ways. But, this was the first time that he felt like he barely knew him. It was his body, his memories, but not the brother he grew up with.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT YOU I CAN'T QUITE FIGURE OUT. AND I DON'T KNOW WHY
i can't keep my eyes off of you.
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tag; jo
music; you and me - lifehouse
word count;915
credit; La-La-Lia from caution
notes; <33

It took Jo a while to find someone she trusted enough to hunt beside, ordinarily. It had been different in the beginning, because she'd been so desperate to hunt, and she knew that John Winchester had been trustworthy, that skipping out with the brothers to hunt alongside them had seemed like a good idea; she might not have known them personally, at least not well, but hey, a girl had to take a risk, sometimes, didn't she? They were the hunters that had been closest to her age, she'd liked them immediately, and they were Winchesters, Jo had figured that she'd be safe with them, or as safe as anybody ever was on a hunt. But now that she was more experienced, now that the monsters they were fighting were generally more dangerous, Jo wanted someone she knew she could trust working with her; most hunters weren't going to let someone they were hunting with die, but there were some out there who were so fanatical about what they were fighting that they really didn't give a crap what happened to people beyond that, as long as the monster got killed. She couldn't imagine getting that far; of course she wanted to kill monsters, but not to the exclusion of everything else. She thought that if someone got to that point, where people's lives didn't matter, even, as long as the vampire or whatever was dead, then they were losing the whole meaning behind hunting. They did it to keep the world safe, to keep people safe. If you didn't want to protect the person hunting alongside you, how could you want to protect people that you didn't even know? Jo would always watch out for the people that she hunted with, even if she didn't know them, but she thought that it was unlikely to ever really be that way, aside from when a whole bunch of them were working together, because she was always going to choose Dean or Sam first.

Well, Dean. She didn't want Sam watching her back at the moment, because she wasn't entirely certain that he'd stop someone from killing her if it came to it. He really seemed to want to make her hate him; if he wanted her to leave, he could have just said that, not that it would have made that much of a difference. The job was here, and Jo was pretty certain that it would take Dean himself telling her to get lost before she even considered listening, instead of just being reminded that he had no interest in her and was probably off screwing some girl somewhere right now. Yeah, she'd seen the aftermath of that. She was still here, wasn't she? The fact that Jo might have had a crush didn't change the fact that Dean was her friend and she worked with him because of that, nor did it give her any right to feel jealous when he went to strip clubs or slept with other women. He was perfectly entitled to do so, and hearing that that was what he liked to do wasn't going to make her leave. She'd not slept with him the night before she'd died because she'd known that was what he liked to do; sure, maybe she liked him, but she also had enough self-respect to stick to being his friend, rather than becoming another notch on his bedpost. It was honestly that simple. That feeling she'd had coiling in her gut as she watched him kiss some woman wasn't going to do anything other than make her a little grouchy, because Jo wasn't the type to moon over some guy, even if it was a little difficult to spend so much time with him sometimes. She still trusted him more than anybody else to have her back in a fight, especially since she couldn't trust Sam anymore. He might have been a good hunter, sure, but he wasn't Sam.

She tried not to think about it, really, because it was worrying, except that she had to think about it, because if Sam wasn't Sam anymore, then that meant that the real Sam was still someplace else – and was this something different walking round in his body, pretending to be him, something that wasn't a demon, or was this him, just...so changed by Hell that he was unrecognisable? Neither of those options seemed like good ones in Jo's mind, and so she thought that there had to be some other solution, she really did. It seemed like there was always something to think about, really, didn't it? There was always something, because things just weren't able to go smoothly; that seemed to be asking too much, in their lives, for some reason. “Anything's better than looking like a soccer mom,” she agreed, and she wasn't going to get rid of her car, because she didn't know when she might need to leave the city, but for the most part, she either walked, got the subway, or rode with Dean, and it seemed to work well enough. Nobody liked sitting in traffic. She shrugged, and shook her head. “It's still not your fault.” Maybe he felt responsible for Sam, it wasn't something that Jo could really say that she understood, being an only child, but Sam's actions were his alone, and nothing was going to change that. “He seems really unpredictable. I just...don't get what it is that's wrong, 'cause there are times when he seems so much like himself, and then he goes and does something else and he's just...not.” She took a long drink of her beer, and looked down. “For the first time he was using his size against me.” She was small, sure, but she'd not felt that way since Meg, and that hadn't been Sam at all.

WHAT DAY IS IT? AND IN WHAT MONTH? THIS CLOCK NEVER SEEMED SO ALIVE.
i can't keep up and i can't back down, i've been losing so much time.
ALL OF THE THINGS THAT I WANT TO SAY JUST AREN'T COMING OUT RIGHT. I'M TRIPPING ON WORDS.
you've got my head spinning. i don't know where to go from here.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Although his first impression of Jo was with a shotgun to his back, he couldn’t help but like her initially. In fact, he caught himself getting pretty used to Ellen, Jo and Ash relatively quickly. He didn’t know what to expect at first, because his dad had never mentioned them. In hindsight, it was obvious why, given his history with the Harvelles. He wondered if things had been different between them that he would have told him about them sooner. Because, they didn’t fit the bill of the kinds of hunters that he seemed to have intentionally kept from mentioning. Perhaps if things had been different, they would have known them for a long while. There were few hunters that the man seemed to trust enough to allow them around when he was younger, but again, he understood it. Though, he figured that Ellen would have been different. When Dean first met Jo, naturally, he thought about picking up on her. She was indisputably hot and he was someone who didn’t have a lot of shame when it came to picking up on girls. Of course, Jo automatically had a certain attitude that kept it from being easy to try to get into her pants and in addition Ellen wasn’t a woman that he wanted to cross by trying to hit on her daughter. It hadn’t taken long for them to be a part of the family, really and for Dean to look at Ellen and Jo as an extended part of theirs. And that last night with Jo, he would have slept with her if she had given him the chance. But, they both knew what would have come of it. Dean wasn’t the type of guy that was ever going to settle down or take one person. He couldn’t give himself to someone like that completely. There would always be other people and he didn’t know that it would ever change—or that he wanted it to. He cared about Jo and yeah, he liked her more than he generally liked a woman he was attracted to. But, it didn’t mean that it was going to be acted on. She had her self-respect and he reserved his attempts to pick her up for nights before the world ended or they were sure to be killed. Honestly, he didn’t think that it said anything about her, but instead was more telling about him.

And frankly, Dean hadn’t even considered that jealousy might be in play here. When he noticed her after the woman left, he hadn’t thought anything of her noticing him with her. Dean’s sex life wasn’t necessarily secret. Anyone that knew him could probably guess his type in a second. He was never all that guarded when it came to women and his sex habits. If anything, his appearance generally fit a type that made it easy to tell what type of man he was. Sex usually didn’t mean anything on a romantic or emotional level. They were usually women that he picked up in a bar and wouldn’t remember the name of later. And honestly, they were probably women that weren’t going to remember his either. He was ignorant to the idea that hanging all over a woman in the lobby probably made things more than uncomfortable and the billboard that his bed was with its rumpled sheets probably added to it. He just didn’t think that way. Jo was his friend and he trusted her with his life and trusted her about the same as he would his own brother—well, more so right now because he wasn’t sure if he trusted Sam. So far, Sam proved to still have his back. Whenever something happened or when Dean was threatened, he was still right there to help him out of the mess. But, at the same time, it didn’t feel like it used to. Honestly, there were times where he wasn’t sure if helped him because he was his brother and that’s what they did for each other, or out of obligation or usefulness. Then, when he started to go on that chain of thought, he honestly thought he might sound paranoid. It wasn’t Sam though.

By now, he thought he knew him well enough to know when something really wasn’t him. As far as he was concerned, he knew him better than anyone. He had grown up with him and practically raised the kid. So, for sure he knew him enough to know that something was wrong. Everyone was picking up on it. And honestly, his worst fear was that it was Sam; that this was just what Hell did to him, because if that was the case, then how did they fix it? If it was a different influence, they could help him. They could figure it out and change it. But, if it was just how his personality was impacted by his stay in Hell, then Dean didn’t know what he would do about it. “What? You’re not a fan of the soccer mom look?” He teased; a chuckle in his voice. When she claimed it wasn’t his fault, Dean gave her a look of disbelief; not even guarding that he didn’t think for a moment that it wasn’t his fault. Sam was his responsibility and what if it was his fault? Had Dean not let him say yes, had he not allowed him to jump into Hell to beat the Devil, then none of this would have happened. A lot that Sam went through, Dean probably could have helped stop long before it happened. Hell, he was the one that brought Sam back into this life to begin with a few years before. Dean’s guilty conscience really knew no limits. “He’s my brother, Jo.” To him, that explained it. “I know. He’s still got all the same memories and sometimes, it’s almost like he’s back, then he says something. It’s as if his internal filter is gone or somethin’.” And it felt like worse than that sometimes. “He’s got no tact. Before, he had a hell of a lot more than me.” Frowning with concern, he nodded. “And he’s a friggin’ giant. I’m sorry. I don’t know if even Hell could change someone that much.”

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THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT YOU I CAN'T QUITE FIGURE OUT. AND I DON'T KNOW WHY
i can't keep my eyes off of you.
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tag; jo
music; you and me - lifehouse
word count;1049
credit; La-La-Lia from caution
notes; <33

If John Winchester hadn't been hunting with her daddy when he'd been killed, things might have been different. Jo wasn't sure that she'd ever know exactly what had happened there, because there were so many stories and they never quite fitted together (and Meg's version was the one that she found it difficult to get out of her head), but she had moved past it. Whatever had happened, her dad had ended up dead, and she trusted Sam and Dean with her life, so did it really matter, ultimately? She wasn't sure that it did, anymore, because it was so long ago, now, and it wasn't going to be able to bring her dad back, and now Uncle John was dead too. They shouldn't have been brought back; honestly, she didn't think that anybody should have been, because what was dead should stay dead, and yet here she was, as alive as ever, and she wasn't going to go ahead and kill herself just to change that. She had been very happy in Heaven, she wasn't nearly so comfortable back here on earth, but this was how it was, and Jo knew that she couldn't change it. She wasn't going to try, because it was something that was beyond her control and frankly, with the state that the world was in, Lucifer and vampires and all that everywhere, she probably wasn't going to last that long anyway. That wasn't being pessimistic or suicidal, just being realistic, and it wasn't like hunters ever lived long. She knew that, Dean knew that, and sure, if her dad hadn't died so early, maybe they'd have been friends sooner – it would have been nice to know other kids, because she was always the only one – but Jo thought that it had turned out alright ultimately. She thought that the way things were between her and Dean were good; they were friends, family even, she trusted him completely, and yeah, okay, the jealousy was still there, she was pointedly not looking at the rumpled sheets of his bed, but it wasn't like she'd sleep with him if he asked, anyway.

Oh, she wanted to, she wouldn't deny that (actually, she would deny it, but it was the truth), and she had no doubt that he'd be the best sex she ever had – not like there was a whole lot to compare it to – but Jo wouldn't sleep with him. She liked him too much to just want a one night stand, and yes, okay, they'd kind of made out when he'd not had his memories, but beyond that, she was pretty sure that the only time she'd do anything with him again was if the world was about to end and one of them was dying – and obviously that was not something that Jo wanted to happen. She didn't want the apocalypse just so that she could kiss Dean Winchester, and as much as she wished she could be that way, she didn't think she could just make out with him and not have it make everything harder than it already was, not even if all they did was kiss and they didn't actually have sex. It would be nice – no, scratch that, it would be great – but she didn't think that it was ever going to happen. They just wouldn't work that way, and it would make things more awkward to try; right now, she really needed Dean to be her friend, not some guy that she'd kissed a lot and now couldn't look in the eye. Her mom was gone, Sam was scary...she needed to know that Dean was on her side, that she could talk to him and trust him, and as much as she wanted something more, she knew that she had to put those feelings aside. She always would, and it was just a crush. If she didn't die in the meantime, she'd get over it eventually – seeing him with someone else just made it harder for her to believe that that eventually would be any time soon, in all honesty, but she wasn't going to act on it. Her crush was a secret one, undoubtedly...even if Sam had known about it. Was she that obvious? She really hoped that Dean didn't know.

It was one thing if Sam did—but while ordinarily she'd have trusted him not to say anything, right now, she had no idea what he might d. She had no idea if he'd tell Dean just to spite her, just to make things awkward enough that Jo decided to leave. She didn't know if he'd use the information to blackmail her, somehow, or at least make her feel like nothing, parading the fact that Dean slept with all these women in front of her face while he didn't choose her...Jo honestly had no idea, and yeah, it kind of scared her, actually. It kind of scared her, not having a clue what someone she used to trust might choose to do, because he was so unlike himself that Jo really couldn't predict, anymore. He wasn't Sam; she liked Sam, she trusted him, and maybe they had never been as close as she was to Dean, but did that really matter a huge amount? They were still family...but now he seemed to hate her, seemed to want to intimidate her, and he wasn't himself. If she had noticed it, then Dean had to have done too, since he was obviously closer...and she had to admit that she was glad that apparently Sam wasn't just acting this way towards her, in some attempt to make her look bad, because she wasn't making this up, Sam really wasn't Sam anymore. “Yeah, but you didn't tell him to be a jerk,” she replied; she didn't understand the whole feeling responsible for a sibling thing, she'd admit that, but Dean had had no influence over Sam being this way, it really wasn't his fault, and she wasn't going to be going around blaming him for the sudden change in personality. “It's just like...he's pretending to be himself, sometimes, but it's not quite right. And then he stops pretending, and he's downright creepy. It kinda feels like he's trying to make me hate you.” It felt wrong, to be talking about Sam like this, but it was obviously a problem, if they'd both noticed it – and clearly they had. She shrugged, slowly tearing the label off her bottle. “It's okay. I'll knee him in the groin if I have to.” She could defend herself, even against someone as big as Sam, and of course she wasn't going to do anything that would hurt him permanently, in case they could get him back to how he was meant to be, but she'd already had to slap him once. “Me either, but it's not like I'm an expert.”

WHAT DAY IS IT? AND IN WHAT MONTH? THIS CLOCK NEVER SEEMED SO ALIVE.
i can't keep up and i can't back down, i've been losing so much time.
ALL OF THE THINGS THAT I WANT TO SAY JUST AREN'T COMING OUT RIGHT. I'M TRIPPING ON WORDS.
you've got my head spinning. i don't know where to go from here.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Dean understood that once someone died, they shouldn’t have been brought back. What was dead was supposed to stay that way and he already had his share of scolding from Death himself on the natural order. Dean came back several times; he wasn’t supposed to, but he had. And of course, he wanted to bring people back that he cared about, although he never would; not anymore. He did it once with Sam and he wasn’t going to take that route again. He knew the burden of someone who was alive because of a deal; because someone decided it wasn’t his turn to die and kept him from it. And he didn’t want to die, so there was a part of him that was glad he was alive, but at the same time, it was a lot to look up to a dad that let himself die and go to hell to save his life. But, given that the last he saw him, he had managed out to help them, he hoped he wasn’t still there, and that he found his way to Heaven to be with Mom. Because, that was the best type of peace the two of them would have, wasn’t it? It was better to let his parents have their peace, then to pull them back to the world, where everything was darker and full of death. He imagined that his dad would have been completely appalled by the vampires coming out in the open and the laws that said they couldn’t kill them. Naturally, he would have still fought them, Dean was sure. But, he knew he probably would have a hell of a huge shock on what had happened in the time that he had been gone. Of course, there were also things that Dean had done that he worried his dad would be ashamed of him for.

But, he tried not to think about that. He liked to think that his parents might be proud of him and that he wasn’t going to find out anyway. They were gone and they had to stay that way. People in his life might not always stay dead (Jo, for example), but most of the time they did. Because, people didn’t just come back after dying. Once someone was gone, it was usually it without any exceptions. But, for some reason they didn’t always stick to the order. And just because he believed that what was dead should have stayed that way didn’t mean that he didn’t like it when he had someone back. Of course he did, despite being suspicious, of course. And he was glad to have Jo back. He cared a hell of a lot about her. She was a part of the family. And yeah, he would have been happy to take things further, but it wouldn’t have gone to the point that someone who had self-respect would have wanted. Giving himself to one person just wasn’t going to happen and he couldn’t find himself in any sort of relationship that didn’t revolve around sex and never calling again. Now, it didn’t mean that he would stop picking up on her when the mood set in and she would always deflect his pick-up lines and he knew it before he even opened his mouth. Dean was better when it came to women like the one he was with tonight; a woman that was probably going to forget his name and he would do the same. There was no pressure there and no connection. Dean didn’t live a life that gave him room for that. Although he knew Jo, trusted her, and gave a damn, he didn’t think that he would ever be able to give over quite what one kiss would imply.

She was supposed to be a part of the family and while Dean had been closer, he knew Sam cared about Jo too. The Sammy he knew wouldn’t have been hard on her and wouldn’t have tried to chase her away the way that Sam seemed to. There were a lot of things that he knew his brother wouldn’t do that he saw him do now, however. It was like he wasn’t the same person and of course it frightened him and caused him to worry whenever he heard that someone had ran into Sam and seemed to pick up on something weird about him. Or they would get the impression of this jackass with no internal filter, when his brother was basically the opposite of it. He was still like him sometimes. But, he didn’t know if it was pretending or if Sam was just half-Sam. “No,” Dean agreed that he didn’t tell him, but his tone of voice betrayed that he still saw it as a fault of his and if not his fault than a responsibility that he had to take care of. Looking out for Sam was what he did. “I don’t get it. He wouldn’t do this; not if he was himself.” And they both knew it, but he saw the same things. He saw the Sam that seemed to only be pretending and then when it dropped, it could be pretty frightening. “It’s like he’s completely unchecked.” As he took a drink from his bottle, he nodded. He knew that she could defend herself against Sam if she had to and he wasn’t against that in the least bit. She should, if Sam was being goddamn creepy. “I’m not either. I mean, I went and came back, but my trip wasn’t like his. And I sure as hell didn't act like that.” So, he couldn’t really know what it could do to him.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT YOU I CAN'T QUITE FIGURE OUT. AND I DON'T KNOW WHY
i can't keep my eyes off of you.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

tag; jo
music; you and me - lifehouse
word count;951
credit; La-La-Lia from caution
notes; <33

Just because Jo wasn't close to a lot of people, it didn't mean that she outright hated the majority of them. She wasn't going to randomly be trusting a stranger any time soon, that was just a given; their line of work was dangerous anyway, being close to the Winchesters made it even more so, and she wanted to trust that people would have her back. She'd found it pretty hard, to work with other people on this Eve thing, not because she was bad at working with others, but because she hadn't had a chance to get to know them first. Okay, so she hadn't known Sam and Dean before she'd gone off hunting with them, but her mom had known who they were, and for Jo, that had been good enough; she hadn't had to know everything about them, after all – honestly, she still didn't know everything about them, but they were her closest friends, and that meant a hell of a lot. She didn't know what it took for someone to become family, in all honesty; there wasn't a particular time scale that was needed, there wasn't a set of tasks that had to be completed, or anything like that, and it probably wasn't something that was the same from person to person. Jo just knew who she would trust to the end, who she would die for without even thinking twice about it, and who she wanted to spend her time with. Sure, most of the time when she was hanging out with Dean, they were talking about a hunt, or comparing good places to get weapons, but they were things that they had in common. They could chat like anybody else, too, have a few drinks and not talk about hunting for a while, it just so happened that hunting was a huge part of their lives, and it would have been weird if they'd suddenly banned it as a topic of conversation for those times when they weren't planning their next hunt. Dean was, after all, the person that she'd spent the most time with since she'd been back.

He was the person that she trusted most, at the moment, especially with Sam being the way that he was; of course she had worried that once Sam had come back, Dean was just never going to want to hunt with her again – Jo was well aware of the fact that she was a poor replacement for his brother, every time that she was sitting in the passenger seat of the Impala – but it had been an irrational worry, really, because she and Dean worked well together. A person could have more than one hunting partner, and hypothetically, the three of them should have been able to go out together...except that right now, Jo wasn't able to trust that Sam wouldn't attempt to get her killed, and she didn't want that to happen. Just because he hadn't done it so far, when they'd been working as a group, it didn't mean that he wouldn't if it came to it, if it was just the three of them. Jo knew that she was likely to die again sooner rather than later, but she was damned if it was going to be at the hand of someone she considered to be family. He wasn't himself; that was all it was. They'd figure out what was wrong with him and get him back to normal – and Jo really wanted to do that, not just because he creeped her out, not just because he was Dean's brother, because she'd always been closer to Dean, but because he was her friend too. They might not have been close, but Sam, the Sam she knew, wouldn't have been like this towards her. By being here, Jo wasn't running off to tell Dean, getting him to protect her, because they both knew that Jo could protect herself, and could quite possibly kick Dean's ass, anyway, because she'd been coming to tell him about a hunt; Sam being the topic of conversation had just come up naturally, and it seemed like the thing to talk about. Better than her focussing on the rumpled sheets, or the way that he had sex hair, or the fact that sometimes she found herself looking at him, and then quickly dropping her gaze when she realised, before he could spot her. Better than thinking about the fact that even with a beer inside her, she still felt oddly jealous.

Sometimes she thought he felt it too, that heat that could sometimes rush into the room all of a sudden, that way he'd brush past her and her breath would catch in her throat, and Jo had spotted him checking her out on more than one occasion, not to mention all of the times that he outright hit on her, with her always turning him down, but...but then she remembered that Dean hit on pretty much every woman he came across, that anyone who was reasonably pretty got checked out, and he slept with a different woman every night, practically, and she remembered that he probably didn't feel it at all. He didn't think about the fact that she still closed her eyes and thought about that time they'd made out – he might have been a teenager, but she'd not known that at the time, and to feel him on top of her...she still thought about his goodbye kiss, how it had meant so much and yet neither of them were going to mention it. But she had more important things to think about than Dean, there were bigger worries, and she couldn't stop glancing to the other bed, but Jo was doing everything she could not to feel that. She had no right to, she didn't need to. She needed to think about the next hunt, about Sam. “He's not a demon...I don't know what else he could be,” she admitted; was this him, now, was this what Hell had done to him? If he wasn't possessed – which would have been a logical explanation for his behaviour, really – then she was at a loss to explain why he was being such a creep, why he seemed to suddenly hate her. She looked down, twisting her bottle in her hand. “Could this really just be what Hell did to him?” That was a terrifying thought, the fact that there might not actually be anything wrong with him, other than the fact that he'd jumped into the Pit with Lucifer.

WHAT DAY IS IT? AND IN WHAT MONTH? THIS CLOCK NEVER SEEMED SO ALIVE.
i can't keep up and i can't back down, i've been losing so much time.
ALL OF THE THINGS THAT I WANT TO SAY JUST AREN'T COMING OUT RIGHT. I'M TRIPPING ON WORDS.
you've got my head spinning. i don't know where to go from here.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Just because Dean didn’t have one hundred close relationships didn’t mean that he was less capable of being close to someone. He could still care fiercely for someone without being in love with them or them being his blood. His family was extended beyond blood, naturally and he didn’t know when it happened that he managed to gain family outside of his immediate, related one. There wasn’t a list of tasks that they had to complete, after all. Bobby came naturally, because they had trusted him even when they were kids and they owed part of their raising to the man. Bobby was like a father to him. Ellen and Jo had known his dad, and although there was obvious strain there with whatever happened between John and Jo’s dad, he had obviously trusted Ellen and they had been able to help them when they needed it. And over time, they became closer, like family. It was just what happened, he supposed. He didn’t think about it beforehand. When he met someone, he didn’t think that they were somehow going to wind up in his extended family. He wouldn’t have guessed that Castiel would become practically a brother to him, when he made his first appearance to him, but the job did that. It brought some people closer and Dean didn’t want to be alone. He never had wanted that. Although he was okay by himself and could hunt with the best of them on a solo run, it didn’t make him enjoy it. He would much rather have a partner; knowing someone had his back and also, he simply didn’t care to be alone. Family had always meant the most to Dean. It was the most important thing and even if that family was extended, it was still the same.

Blood didn’t make you family, just like not being blood didn’t exempt you from it. He figured that family and that kind of closeness and trust was something that was earned without any conscious thought about it. Over time, you figured out how well you could trust someone and whether or not they had your back. With Jo, Dean trusted her completely. And since she came back, the two had gone on several hunts together, especially before Sam came back. And it wasn’t that he thought that she was replacing him when he was gone, because no one did that. He didn’t have to have one person that he hunted with and one only. Of course, if Sam was there, it would have been the three of them and of course, he missed him then. Dean had been working to the bone secretly to find ways to bring him back but to no avail. But, getting to spend time with Jo had always been great. And while hunting often dominated the topic of conversation amongst hunters, it wasn’t all that they could talk about. They were still people, they had interests and ideas that didn’t revolve around monsters. But, with a heavy interest in weapons and hunting, it was obviously something that could be brought up often. With the state of the city right now, it was no surprise that it was always on their mind. Maybe it should be, given how bad it had gotten. Though, at the same time, they had to have time to take breaks in between, to let their minds rest from the constant strain. He didn’t want to be burnt out and there was no doubt that it was always a possibility. It was easy to get tired doing this job and right now, that was the last thing Dean could have wanted.

If circumstances were different, if his life was different and consequently, he was, maybe his relationship to Jo would have been different. He would have acted a little more on those moments where it felt like a certain heaviness had entered the room, or would have been more aware of the smallest tinges of jealousy. Dean was no good for any woman on the long term and he knew that. Especially not someone that he actually cared about and respected. It didn’t bug him usually, because he liked how he lived. He enjoyed having a woman for every night of the week and he didn’t want to be attached that way. He was a hunter and that was just that, any tension aside. Although, he would still hit on Jo, because hey, if she ever gave him a shot, he’d take it. “I don’t know,” Dean said, glancing to the floor, then back at her again. “At first, I thought maybe Lucifer was hitching a ride again, but it’s not that.” And he didn’t know what it was. He didn’t want to think that it could be Sam. There had to be a way to fix this and he knew if his brother was in there somewhere, that’s what he would have wanted. He wouldn’t want to go around being the creeper that scared their friends or that was a little less of a moral compass. He would want to be himself. “I hope not. ‘Cause that means nothing we do’ll help.” He said, and it did scare him. He didn’t want to think Hell did it. “But, I dunno. I don’t know what happened in there, I’m not sure what it’d do to someone.” But, what he never expected was how he was.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT YOU I CAN'T QUITE FIGURE OUT. AND I DON'T KNOW WHY
i can't keep my eyes off of you.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

tag; jo
music; you and me - lifehouse
word count;908
credit; La-La-Lia from caution
notes; <33

Stumbling across Dean – or rather, him accidentally finding her – had made adjusting to life again a whole lot easier, Jo knew that for a fact. She'd have coped just fine if she hadn't gotten back in touch, but it would have been harder, because she'd have been totally alone. She'd tried to find him initially, since he was the first person she had wanted to know that she was back, because he was the one that she was closest to, but Jo guessed that he'd needed to change his number while she'd been dead, because she hadn't been able to get through—or it could have been that she'd just not remembered it correctly, because it wasn't like she had her old cellphone or anything. And yeah, she could have gone to Bobby's, Jo wouldn't have been surprised if the salvage yard was still there in fifty years' time, even if none of them were still around, but she'd been hesitant to do that. Jo didn't really know why; it had just seemed wrong to turn up on his door, somehow, and she'd wanted to try and get settled again first, to try and figure out why the hell she was here, not that there had been any success on that matter. Even now, Jo didn't have a clue why she was back, and she'd reunited with everyone she considered to be family, barring Castiel—and as much as she thought a chat with him would really help her, at the moment, since he was more likely to know about things going on than anybody else was, Jo had resigned herself to the fact that if he wasn't coming down to see Dean, there was no way in hell that he was going to come to see her, because it wasn't like he really answered anybody else's prayers. She'd have liked to know if Cas had idea about what had brought her back, but Jo could wait, she guessed. It wasn't like she really had a choice in the matter, when it came down to it. She was sure that sooner or later, whatever it was would decide it wanted to talk to her—because she didn't believe for a second that something would go to the effort of bringing her back to life and not have some ulterior motive.

People didn't just do that; resurrection was a huge thing to do, and not even angels could just go around doing it all the time, from what she'd gathered, and yeah, okay, Jo wouldn't have claimed to be an expert on the matter, it wasn't like she'd come back to life before, but even so, she kind of thought that by now, plans might have been made known—but apparently not. Apparently she was just going to go on living her life like she had never died, like she had never been in Heaven, and nothing would come to claim her as theirs, or whatever it was they wanted to do with her. Not that Jo was complaining about that, hell no, she was glad that she was able to go around hunting vampires without anything trying to use her for something else entirely, but at the same time...there was that anticipation that something was going to go horribly wrong, and not the good kind of anticipation, either. This wasn't waiting for something good to happen it was waiting for the other shoe to drop, and she was terrified of what might happen when she figured out who'd brought her back. What did they want? Would they turn her against her friends, or use her in a way that she didn't want to be used? Jo had free will, and god damnit, she was going to keep that. She'd already gotten both Dean and Bobby to say that they would do something with her, if she started acting out of whack; if she ended up being like a puppet on a string, there was no way Jo wanted to be allowed to go and hurt people. She'd rather Bobby lock her in the panic room, thanks, because if she was going to be alive, then she was damn well going to be herself while she was doing it. She didn't want to become some kind of monster...she didn't want to become Sam.

To be herself and yet not be herself at all? That sounded like hell, if you asked her, and Jo didn't want to get to the point where she was alienating the people that she cared about. She was scared that she was already some kind of sleeper agent or something, in all honesty, but she trusted that Dean would do what he had to do to make sure that she didn't really end up doing anything too awful. He had to, didn't he; if Jo went bad, she'd rather be killed than have that continue. She just had to hope that that wouldn't happen, because it was bad enough with Sam being the way that he was. Jo couldn't trust him, she doubted that Dean could, either. If they had some explanation as to why he was being this way, then maybe it would have been easier for them to deal with, but they didn't. They didn't have anything like that; all they knew was that Sam was creepy as hell, he didn't like Jo anymore, and that was about it – if something was controlling him, as she was scared would happen to her, it was doing a damn good job of keeping its identity a secret. “Is there anything that can possess a person but that isn't a demon?” she asked; throwing holy water at him had had no effect, but maybe it wouldn't, if he was possessed by some other creature entirely. Jo might not have come across anything that could do that, but it didn't mean that one didn't exist. There were a hell of a lot of things out there that she didn't know much about, after all. She sighed, because he was right; that was a terrible scenario. If this was just who Sam was now, they couldn't get him back to who he was supposed to be, and that was something she didn't want to think about. Sam was her friend, her family, of course she wanted him to be okay. “I mean, you went to Hell, you didn't come back like this...but you weren't with Lucifer.” She didn't want to remind Dean of his visit there, but it wasn't as though they had no idea what Hell was like – well, Jo didn't know, but she assumed that Dean remembered at least some of it, since she remembered some of Heaven. “I just wanna find something we can do, but I don't even like being in the same room as him.”

WHAT DAY IS IT? AND IN WHAT MONTH? THIS CLOCK NEVER SEEMED SO ALIVE.
i can't keep up and i can't back down, i've been losing so much time.
ALL OF THE THINGS THAT I WANT TO SAY JUST AREN'T COMING OUT RIGHT. I'M TRIPPING ON WORDS.
you've got my head spinning. i don't know where to go from here.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Compared to the year before, Dean had things better now; at least, what he considered to be better. Sure, the world might look like it was in worse shape than before, but he had the people he cared about back in his life. Jo and Sam were both there and that meant a hell of a lot for him to have. It took a little adjusting, but he felt like when he met Jo again, he had slipped right back into their former relationship. It was as if she had been there the whole time. He knew she hadn’t and of course there were still a lot of questions on how she came back to begin with. That worried him still, but so far, nothing had dropped. And if Castiel would come down, he would have questioned him first and foremost. But, the angel wasn’t answering him and he decided that it was probably because of the state of Heaven right now that he didn’t come down. Hopefully, it was nothing worse than that. Of course he wanted to figure out what brought Jo back, just in case there was some evil purpose in it. Monsters figured out a long time ago how to use the Winchesters and it was generally through their friends and family. It was their biggest weakness. And as many times as Dean wondered if it was wise to have those weaknesses, he always ended with wanting to have them above not having it. He didn’t want to be alone. Not once, in his entire life had he wanted to be alone, completely. There were times where he thought that decision was best and went about it anyway, but Dean liked working as a team. He liked having family near, because while he was an adept hunter on his own, he didn’t like it. He needed his family. It wasn’t something he often admitted to, but he was reliant a little on having people that gave a damn nearby.

He didn’t need a lot of people, because obviously, he didn’t have that. Nor did he really want to have a lot of people out there having his back. He had the people that he considered family and that was enough. It felt like their numbers had been constantly shrinking over the last few years; but he was happy with what he had right now. Even though he wasn’t at all happy with Sam’s state or the lack of answers in how Jo came back. By now, he expected that they would know what happened to bring her back to the world of the living again. At least she seemed like herself. Whereas Sam, on the other hand, was far from whom he was supposed to be. Half of the time, Dean wasn’t even sure he should be trusting him. In a lot of ways, he didn’t. He was there to try to be the conscience of his brother, because he seemed to be lacking that completely. He didn’t know what it was, but Sam was making decisions that he would have never made before. He was acting threatening to people that Dean knew he never would have acted that way towards before. There was no way that his brother would have treated Jo like that in the past. They might not have had the same closeness that he often had with her, but they were still friends—hell, they were family. Nothing about how he acted now was normal and if he knew Sam (and he knew him better than anyone), then he knew that he would have wanted the help. He would want them to figure out what was wrong and keep him from being a monster. Whether Robo-Sam thought so or not.

The problem was he didn’t know how to fix it. He couldn’t even figure out what was wrong, let alone what he could do to stop it. It wasn’t demonic possession, because none of the normal tests worked with him. There wasn’t a demon that could pass every single one of them. Thoughtfully, he glanced down at the floor, to try to recall if he had ever heard of anything other than demonic possession, aside from angels. “Like some kind of monster possession?” He asked, looking up again. “Never heard of anything like that.” He admitted, but just because he hadn’t heard of it didn’t mean that it couldn’t happen. He didn’t pretend to know everything that was out there. He couldn’t come anywhere close to knowing that. “I know ghosts can, but I don’t think they could hang on for this long. And there’s no sign of ectoplasm, so they’re out of the question.” Ghosts were capable, as rare as it was, but they didn’t hang on for that long and there was no reason behind it. Plus, there were signs when that happened, none of which that Sam had been vulnerable to. And no ghost had flown out of him and returned him to normal. Thinking back to his time in Hell wasn’t something he liked to do. In fact, he tried to do it as little as possible and buried it deep so he didn’t have to remember. It didn’t work like that, of course. Because, he did remember and it was always going to have an effect on him. But, it wasn’t the same as what Sam was going through. He didn’t remember Hell and become a monster. “I’m guessing whatever I went through was a cakewalk compared to what he did.” Dean admitted. And it wasn’t minimizing his experience, because it was horrific, but it wasn’t Lucifer. “It’s probably safer when you’re not,” he shook his head, “That’s something I never thought I’d be saying concerning Sam.” It wasn’t safe for her to be alone with him. “We’ll figure something out. I’m not letting him stay like that.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT YOU I CAN'T QUITE FIGURE OUT. AND I DON'T KNOW WHY
i can't keep my eyes off of you.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

tag; jo
music; you and me - lifehouse
word count;988
credit; La-La-Lia from caution
notes; <33

What qualified a person to be brought back from the dead, aside from someone else making a deal for them? She was pretty certain that nobody had done that for her, thank God, because she would never have forgiven them, and she knew how desperate Dean had been to get his brother back, but she didn't think he would have sold his soul to do that, either. He might have done, because it wasn't like he told her everything he did, but she sincerely doubted it; they'd talked about that, about how it wasn't worth it, and hadn't he sold his soul once before? Demons were choosy things, they probably wouldn't want it a second time, anyway—which was good, because of all the people that Jo knew, Dean really did not deserve to go to hell. The world would never known how many times he had tried to save it, how much he had given fighting monsters, and if anybody deserved to get into Heaven when they finally died, it was him. Most hunters did; they dealt with the worst things in existence, they saved innocent people at great personal sacrifice, and at the end of the day the job would kill them. If he hadn't sold his soul, Jo believed Dean would have been right there in Heaven, because that was where he belonged. It was where he'd go next time. He'd been brought back to life because an angel had dragged him back. Had the same thing happened to her, and why? Why her, why Sam? Sure, Jo's death had been horrific, it had been in the middle of a huge fight, and damn straight she'd gone down fighting, but that didn't mean that it was okay to just dump her back in the world and expect her to carry on like she hadn't spent two years in Heaven. It was so, so hard to be here, right now, and she didn't think that anybody appreciated that. She wasn't looking for them to, in all honesty, because the last thing that she wanted was pity, but God...why had they brought her back?

If Jo could just know who it was, that might have made things easier, she might have been able to make educated guesses as to why she was alive right now, but it was the not knowing that made things so hard. How long had it been, now, and she still had no answers, not even a word from Castiel – what the hell was he doing up there that stopped him coming down for five minutes, seriously? There might have been a war going on in Heaven, but things were pretty bad down here too, and they were his friends, his family; would it really have made things so much worse just to let them know that he was okay? But hey, that was what you got for being friends with an angel, she guessed; Jo couldn't say that she knew a lot about them, not really, but it was clear that they weren't exactly the most forthcoming of types. It was probably for the best, given everything that they knew, but Jo didn't care about that everything, she just cared that she was alive and she shouldn't have been, and she had received no word as to why that had happened, or what she was supposed to be doing now that she was here once again. She cared that her friend was also not dead anymore, but that he was some kind of creep instead of himself – was he really Sam, now, or was he just a monster pretending to be him? Was she going to slowly lose herself and become like him too, or was it just something that came from being shut in the cage? There were a hell of a lot of questions and nobody to answer them, and Jo really thought that they deserved some answers right about now. It wasn't going to stop them fighting, not knowing, but it made Jo warier, at least; she didn't know what the person who'd brought her back wanted from her, what they might have changed about her. She had to be careful, in case she hurt people that she cared a hell of a lot about.

It wouldn't happen by choice, but she wasn't even sure how much choice she had here; until she knew more about who had brought her back, and what they were, Jo couldn't make assumptions about anything, she couldn't guess the purpose, although she was willing to bet good money that it wasn't just so that there was another hunter around, just so that Dean Winchester had a friend to fight alongside him. The world didn't work that way. People died and it was heartbreaking, absolutely, but there wasn't anything that could be done about it. They weren't meant to come back again...and yet here she was, here Sam was, and they really were a family of people who should have been dead but weren't, now, weren't they? At least Jo was herself; it saddened her that she couldn't say the same for Sam, unfortunately, but whatever was going on with him, he was not the Sam Winchester she had known. That Sam was family; this one seemed to want to make her hate him, seemed to hate her enough to make her scared of him. It wasn't good. “Yeah, I don't know. I've not heard of anything either, but it's not like we know everything,” she replied; they had to consider the fact that Sam might not be himself, didn't they? She sighed, glad that ghosts could be ruled out, of course, just as she'd been glad that he wasn't a demon, but it didn't explain what was going on with him. “What about a shapeshifter, or something else that can do that?” She didn't want to be the one to voice it, and there was obvious caution in her voice, but Jo thought that it might be time for them to consider other options, if Sam was not himself. She nodded, because she was guessing that as bad as Hell was, being in Hell with two angry archangels was going to be a hell of a lot worse. That was just logic, really, wasn't it? “Sam's one of the nicest people I know, and...this isn't him.” It didn't matter that she was a lot closer to Dean than she was to him; they were still friends, he was still family and she would have trusted him with her life. Now she didn't trust him to be near her. “I can look after myself,” she assured Dean, but Sam was physically a lot stronger than she was, and she didn't really want to get to the point of needing to test that out. If it came to a full on fight, Jo knew that she'd need weapons to win, and she did not relish the thought of having to shoot him. She didn't want to do that, she wasn't sure she could do that. “Me either. We'll work out what's wrong with him.”

WHAT DAY IS IT? AND IN WHAT MONTH? THIS CLOCK NEVER SEEMED SO ALIVE.
i can't keep up and i can't back down, i've been losing so much time.
ALL OF THE THINGS THAT I WANT TO SAY JUST AREN'T COMING OUT RIGHT. I'M TRIPPING ON WORDS.
you've got my head spinning. i don't know where to go from here.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Frankly, Dean wasn’t sure what caused one person to be brought back, but not another. He didn’t know what you had to do to fit into that, except that you could be used for the bigger picture. It was why he was pulled out of Hell initially, right? The angels wanted him for a bigger plan that he had said to hell with eventually, even with the angel that had saved him at his side. There was always a reason for being brought back, unless it was a deal, but he was sure that no one had made a deal for Sam or Jo. He would have made a deal for Sam if he thought it would do any good and if he had become too desperate. But, he hadn’t and he knew that he wasn’t ready to throw his soul away again. He decided that he was done with that and he feared Hell incredibly. He already made his deal once, he’d been to Hell and he still feared that he might go back. He never wanted to go back down there again. And no one was going to make a deal with him for Sam. It wasn’t as if it would have been an easy venture to get Sam out of the cage and even if they could do it, why would they make a deal with him again? It just wasn’t going to happen. And while he had looked for a way to bring Sam back, he never discovered it. The whole time that he searched for it, he always drew blanks and then Sam was back and he had been different, but only because he had no memories. And now, he didn’t know what it was that had happened to him. He regained his memories and became someone else entirely. The memories might be the same and there were parts of him that were still Sam, but not enough. He still wasn’t his brother and he couldn’t place what it was that was so different about him.

With Jo, she seemed exactly has she had always been. Although he didn’t know how she came back either. His first instincts were that it had something to do with the angels, because aside from a demon deal that was the only thing he knew that could do it. But, he couldn’t get a hold of any angel that might have that information either. And Castiel wasn’t answering. He didn’t know what the hell was going on up there for him not to answer. Honestly, he hoped it wasn’t anything too bad, because the angel was like family to him. To think that something had happened was a worst case scenario that didn’t want to venture into. Hopefully, he would show up eventually and they would be able to talk to him about what might have happened. And who knew? Maybe he wouldn’t have a single clue either. Probably not on Jo or Sam. Both of them had mysterious ways of coming back, but at least Jo was herself. She hadn’t done anything for him to think otherwise and he hoped it stayed that way. He didn’t want to think that she might have had someone pulling the strings on her. Or that there was someone waiting to do just that when she least expected it. He hoped not, because he didn’t want to think of anyone using his friend like that. But, at the same time, there had to be a reason for her to be there and naturally, they should be suspicious. They wouldn’t have made good hunters if they weren’t.

Sam made it impossible not to be suspicious about he was though. As his brother, he knew him too well for even subtle differences to get past him. The scariest thought he had was that maybe it was Sam. The idea that he had changed that much because of Hell made his stomach churn because it wasn’t his brother anymore. If he had to compare himself to his brother, he would have said in an instant that Sam was more good than he was. Even with his history and the things that he had done, Sam always had the best of intentions and he was a hell of a lot warmer and more socially adept than Dean was when it came to dealing with people. He was empathetic in ways that Dean just hadn’t been. And now, it was like the opposite had happened. He was having to second guess Sam and the one that would intervene and have to keep him from making people uncomfortable or from saying something too brash. This wasn’t how it usually worked. Dean didn’t know what happened, but whatever he was, he wasn’t acting like his brother. “Silver didn’t have an effect on him.” He admitted and he had done the normal tests to figure out if anything was the matter with his brother and those were among them. “I don’t know, is there another monster that acts like a shifter?” If there was, maybe they could figure it out. He didn’t want to think that it was really just a creature posing as his brother, but if it was, then they could deal with it and find out what happened to Sam. If it was Sam, then it meant they had to find out how to fix him and he didn’t know how possible it was or where to start even. “I know. It’s weird, y’know? Trying to act like his moral compass. He’s usually better balanced than I am.” And it wasn’t to say that he was bad, but to emphasize how good he thought that his brother was. “I know that. But my brother’s a goddamn sasquatch and tough too.” He outsized her a lot and he was a good fighter; if it came down to it, he was sure that his brother could do some damage and he didn’t want to see that happen. “Yeah, we will.” He nodded. “Hopefully soon.”

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THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT YOU I CAN'T QUITE FIGURE OUT. AND I DON'T KNOW WHY
i can't keep my eyes off of you.
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tag; jo
music; you and me - lifehouse
word count;1011
credit; La-La-Lia from caution
notes; <33

Jo didn't think that there were many people who would have been happy to hear that somebody they loved had sold their soul so that they might live – especially not the people who knew the implications of what that meant. Hell wasn't an abstract concept, it wasn't something fake, it was a real thing, very real, and Jo was fortunate enough not to have experienced it herself, but that didn't mean that she wanted anybody she was close to to go through that. She'd rather stay dead, thanks; it sucked, but death happened, and there wasn't a thing that she could do to change that. It was life, wasn't it, after all? At the end of it there was death, and nobody was immortal. Honestly, Jo wouldn't have wanted to live forever. It would have been nice not to die when she had, of course, she wasn't going to deny that, but the idea of outliving everybody kind of sucked a whole lot, in all honesty. She didn't know how the vampires did it, aside from the fact that they spent their time with other vampires, a whole group of long-living evil things. Wonderful. She didn't want to live on and see the people she loved die, and not be able to do anything about that; the very idea of it was enough to make her pause, because she didn't know how people could do that. She'd rather live less time and really enjoy it, feel like she was loved and love people in return, than to live forever alone. Jo was okay with the concept of death. It wasn't like she was just going to go out and sacrifice herself, and she knew from experience that dying could be painful as hell, something she wanted to avoid as much as possible, but she'd already died once, and right now, she should have been dead. She'd been okay with that; she'd had a good life, nobody but Meg was to blame for her death, and she'd been in Heaven, having died saving the world. What more could she have asked for, really?

Not dying at all might have been nice, but you couldn't have everything now, could you – and it wasn't like she was the only one of her friends who'd ever been brought back to life. Jo didn't know how many people had, it wasn't like there were statistics on that kind of thing, but she was willing to bet that they were pretty highly concentrated just within the people she considered to be family, since three of them had come back when they should have been dead, and both Dean and Sam multiple times, if she remembered correctly. That kind of thing just didn't happen, it wasn't supposed to happen, and if Jo ever found out that someone had sold their soul for her but just hadn't told her, then she was going to kick their ass so hard—but she didn't think that was the case. There weren't enough people who would do that, anyway, and there was no reason why they would do that now, after a couple of years, and not as soon as Lucifer was dealt with and the world was relatively safe again, if that had been the case. It didn't make sense that she'd come back because of a crossroads deal, thank God, although that didn't bring Jo any closer to knowing what she was doing here. She wished that she could know. She wished that there were some answers for her, because of course it was highly disconcerting to just come back from the dead and not have anybody around taking credit for it. She could try and summon someone, but who would she even summon? She'd tried praying to Castiel, but gotten no answer from him. Jo guessed that her revival wasn't particularly huge news up there in Heaven, then. It sucked. It really sucked, to be so clueless, and Jo hated it. She wanted to know what was going on; being in the dark was killing her, no pun intended.

And she thought that they all wanted to know what was going on with Sam, in all honesty, except probably Sam himself, who seemed to be perfectly happy to be going around being a dick to everybody. It wasn't right, it wasn't him; if he had always been that way, then they wouldn't have batted an eyelid, but Sam was genuinely one of the nicest people Jo had ever met, and to see him like this threw her off entirely. It was more like Meg was inside him again than anything else—he'd intimidated her once before, he'd made her feel afraid, except that that hadn't been him at all, and there was no way that he was possessed right now. She'd checked, Dean had probably checked, and nothing. She sighed, shrugging. “I don't know of one, but I guess we could try and hit the books, if we knew what we were looking for,” she said, but she didn't really hold out much hope. What was wrong with Sam seemed to be just as big a mystery as why she was alive again. She nodded, and it sucked, it really did; they could have used Sam's help right now, but actual Sam, not...this. “It's just like his conscience has been turned off,” she commented, and it made no sense. Sam wasn't like him, but if they'd done all the tests and gotten nothing...was this Sam now? Jo shrugged again, and yeah, it was tough, of course it was, and she was outsized entirely, but she'd shoot him in the leg if she had to; she didn't want to kill him, but she'd hurt him to make him back off if it came to it. “I'll be okay. I don't plan to be alone with him.” It wasn't that she thought she needed Dean to protect her, because she didn't, but Jo just had no desire to be anywhere near Sam until this was sorted and he was himself again. He could take what he wanted from that. “Sure. We'll figure it out.”

WHAT DAY IS IT? AND IN WHAT MONTH? THIS CLOCK NEVER SEEMED SO ALIVE.
i can't keep up and i can't back down, i've been losing so much time.
ALL OF THE THINGS THAT I WANT TO SAY JUST AREN'T COMING OUT RIGHT. I'M TRIPPING ON WORDS.
you've got my head spinning. i don't know where to go from here.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

As far as Dean was concerned, he was finished with demon deals. He’d made one and that was it and he swore never to do it again. It didn’t matter what the stakes were, he wasn’t going to run right into that again. And he’d made good on that. He didn’t go straight for the crossroads when someone died, but had to accept it. Of course it was always different when it was Sam, but even if he had tried to make a deal, no one would have been able to bring him back. And he hadn’t done it for Jo either. He knew that she wouldn’t have wanted it and he could accept (no matter how hard or how coupled with guilt he was) that she was gone. Dean hadn’t tried to bring Jo back after she died. It didn’t mean that he didn’t want her back or that he hadn’t wished that it never happened at all. All of those things were true. He blamed Meg and he blamed himself for not being able to protect her and taking the ‘hard way’. It was their fight and they had lost two good hunters—two pieces of their family in a fight against the Devil that was unsuccessful. The only thing they gained out of it was the knowledge that the Colt wasn’t going to work. And now, even though they had fought and they had thrown Lucifer back in the box, he was on Earth again. He knew it really couldn’t be looked at as a failure, because it didn’t change what Sam had done or the safety that they gave back to the world. But, now he was back and so was Sam, but who knew what was coming next? The idea that the Devil was back was disquieting to put it mildly.

There wasn’t very much about the world right now that was easy to process. With vampires out in the open and Lucifer’s rising, it felt pretty bad. And he didn’t know what brought back Jo or even Sam. And hell, they weren’t even the only ones. Bela was back too, although he hadn’t been spending a lot of time trying to figure that out. Years, death and even Hell might have been between them, but she still irked him like no one else could. He wanted to figure out what had brought Jo back, but no one was answering that he thought might have even an inkling of an answer. And he knew that she wanted that information too. Why wouldn’t she? That would be the first thing Dean wanted to know if he ever came back. And it had been the times that he came back to life again. He would want to know why and how and make damn sure that nothing bad was going to happen because of it. He was starting to feel comfortable with the idea that Jo wasn’t being pulled by anything evil, but could he really trust that? He didn’t think that they could without complete fact, because who knew when whoever brought her back was going to kick in and reveal its plan. Dean wasn’t even sure what it could have been. Yes, Jo was a good hunter and he wanted her alive again, but that didn’t mean that she needed to be brought back. And it didn’t make sense why anyone would do it. They could probably safely assume it wasn’t a deal, but that still left other options—or well, the only option that ever made sense was an angel, but even then, who would have done it? And if they had, he thought they would have showed themselves by now.

And Sam, however Sam came back, it wasn’t right. It had been strange enough when he had no memories, but then, at least, he didn’t think that he was something else. Now, he was distinctly not Sam. He was different and he didn’t know how it happened or why. It felt like something was missing, as if his moral compass had been severely busted when he regained his memories. “I’ve been digging around; so far nothing.” Dean replied and he had been looking for answers, but they weren’t coming fast. He didn’t know what to look for, really. This wasn’t the type of situation that he really knew how to deal with. He didn’t think any of them really knew how. “I know. I don’t know what’d do that.” When she assured she wouldn’t be alone with him, he nodded. He would rather that than think about her being with him when he was that off. He might not be willing to admit that his brother couldn’t be fixed, but he didn’t want him to hurt Jo either. And he knew that Sam wouldn’t have wanted him to allow it either. They were friends, after all. “Of course. We always figure things out.” And when it came to his brother, Dean was usually more than driven to figure it out.

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THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT YOU I CAN'T QUITE FIGURE OUT. AND I DON'T KNOW WHY
i can't keep my eyes off of you.
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tag; jo
music; you and me - lifehouse
word count;840
credit; La-La-Lia from caution
notes; <33

There were always answers to be found, it seemed, it just also seemed to be completely impossible to know where to start looking. It could be overwhelming, sometimes, because there was a hell of a lot of information out there, and to not really have a clue what you were even looking for...it was definitely hard to figure out where it would be best to begin. Jo had thought that she'd seen a whole load of supernatural books at Bobby's, because he was definitely the person who had the biggest collection that she knew, and he was always a fountain of knowledge, too; you could call him up and he would know exactly where to look, which books to flick through, and most likely he'd be calling back within the hour with whatever information was necessary to kill the son of a bitch that you were fighting. It was great, and Jo didn't know how they'd survive if anything ever happened to him, because he was so integral to everything that they'd fall apart without him there to give information or back up whatever story they were spinning with their aliases. But then Jo had seen the inside of Wolfram and Hart's library, and had been completely bowled over by how many books they seemed to have—and it wasn't fair, was it, that somewhere so evil had the books that could help people like her do some good in the world. It wasn't as though she could just wander inside and ask to use their library when she had a bit of trouble figuring out what she was hunting. Hell, Jo didn't ever want to go near the building again, thank you very much, but it would have been good if they had had access to that many books. A supernatural library would have helped them a whole load, Jo was sure of that, but nobody had that many books—and nobody was really willing to pool their resources because for the most part, hunters stuck to working with the people that they already knew.

She got that, because she was the same. She'd met other hunters here, she'd worked with them on jobs where they'd needed higher numbers of people, but Jo still only really wanted to work with Dean and—well, just Dean, really, since she couldn't trust Sam farther than she could throw him, and given that she doubted she'd even be able to lift him, that wasn't very far at all. He was family, she trusted him with her life, and yeah, she'd died while hunting with him, but that hadn't been his fault, not even a little bit, and Jo sure as hell did not blame him for that, because why the hell would she? It had happened, she'd died, and yeah, it was awful and she hadn't wanted it to happen, she'd been in pain and terrified and trying to stay strong even though she could feel herself slipping away, but she didn't blame anybody for it, it wasn't going to be enough to stop her working with one of the few people that she really trusted. Sure, she could hunt solo, and sometimes she did, it wasn't like she needed Dean there all the time, she was a big girl now, but it was nice to know that there was someone she could call if she thought she needed it, or if she ended up in a tight situation and back up was necessary—or hey, even if she just wanted to go hunting with someone, because there was nothing quite like a cold beer with a friend after you'd killed some vampire sons of bitches, was there? Some of the people she'd met recently were great, and she was happy to hang out with them, even if she had no real desire to spend a lot of time in the hunters' bar, but she didn't know how they worked when they were hunting on their own, she didn't know their techniques, or whether they would really have her back. It wouldn't be as effortless. She'd stick to working with Dean, thanks, and hope that Sam could be added to that list when they figured out what the hell was going on with him.

She didn't know when that would be, though, in all honesty. She didn't know how they were going to work it out when it seemed hard to even pinpoint the thing that was wrong. He was meaner, crueller, more intimidating and less caring about what he was doing, but really, he was just...not Sam. This wasn't how he was supposed to be, and Jo got that she had never been as close to him as she was to Dean, but she'd still trusted him with her life, he was still family. And now she didn't want to be alone with him because there was a very real possibility that he might assault her in some way? That wasn't right, it wasn't how he was supposed to be, and while they might have ruled out possession, there were still about a million possibilities. They just didn't know how to go about narrowing that list down. It broke her heart, a little, because Sam was family, and this wasn't Sam. It would probably have been easier if he'd remained dead. “I guess all that means is that more digging is required,” she said with a sigh, and she didn't particularly relish the thought of spending even more time digging through books than she had done lately, but it was for Sam, so there was never any question about whether she would or not. She would. “Me either. Is it even possible?” Was that the problem? And if it was...how in the hell did they fix it? How in the hell had it happened, for that matter? Had whatever had brought him back intended for this to happen? Too many questions, yet again, and not enough answers. God dammit. “Sure, and we will with this one.” It was a promise; Jo knew how important Sam was to Dean. They'd figure it out.