Archive of Our Own

The first thing Jo does, when she steps out of the pristine white hallway and onto solid ground, is drop to her knees and kiss the dirt.

It’s dramatic, sure, but whatever. She’s allowed to be dramatic.

The grit feels amazing under her fingernails and, as she pushes herself back to her feet and gazes around, she realizes with a start that she’s just gotten a mouthful of crossroads dirt.

But she doesn’t have to worry about demons and deals here.

“You’ll be safe here,” the kid had told her as he took her by the hand and led her to the door. “Happy, even.”

Jo lifts a hand to shade her eyes from the big egg-yolk of a sun that hangs in the sky like a yellow disco globe.

“You’ve truly outdone yourself, kid,” she says, wishing she’d gotten the boy’s name at least.

“I’m God,” he says, materializing by her side like something out of Star Trek. He lifts a hand, palm out, benevolence written in every line of his body. “But you can call me Jack.”

“Well, nice to met you, Jack,” says Jo. “You seen my mom around here?” She wonders, for a moment, if Mom would have ended up in this place too. Maybe she’d been sectioned off in her own corner of heaven?

“Of course,” says Jack. “The Roadhouse is just down this—” He pauses and points at their feet, and Jo watches in amazement as a brick road springs up like flowers out of the dirt. “—road here. You can go. She’s been waiting for you.”

Jo gives the kid a grateful smile before breaking into a run, tearing down the brick road—feeling like frigging Dorothy Gale, only without the yippy little dog in a basket hanging from her arm—eager to see her mom. Maybe Dad is with her too, and Ash. Maybe even—

But Jo cuts that thought short. She doesn’t want to see Dean Winchester.

The Roadhouse blooms out of the hard-packed dirt like a weed, its familiar neon sign flickering against a rapidly darkening twilight sky.

Jo bounds up the wooden steps, heart clamoring in her chest, and throws the doors open.

“Took ya long enough, girl,” her mom rasps, pulling a shot glass and a fifth of whiskey out from behind the counter.

“Mom!” Jo vaults the countertop and throws her arms around her mom, enclosing her in a chokehold of a hug. She feels one of her mom’s hands clasping the back of her neck, pulling her tight into her shoulder, the other one resting on her back.

“I missed you, honey.” Ellen squeezes her daughter tight.

“I missed you too, Mom,” Jo murmurs against her mom’s shoulder. “You don’t even know.”

“Oh,” her mom says, “I think I have an idea.”

Jo and her mom catch up over top-shelf whiskey they never had in real life—“You just snap your fingers and the kid’s right there with the thing you didn’t even know you needed,” her mom tells her—and marveling over their new (after)lives.

“It’s so much better than the way things used to be,” Ellen says, tipping her shot glass to Jo. “You can’t even get drunk on this stuff. Not unless you want to.”

Jo tosses back her third—fourth? fifth? fifteenth?—shot and grabs the bottle. It had been half empty when they started but it’s already full again, sloshing against the tinted glass. “Sounds perfect,” she says, pausing for a moment as she tips the bottle toward her glass.

Jo had never really liked perfect. To her, growing up, perfection had always meant restriction, pretending. Trying to be someone else because the world wasn’t ready for who she really was.

“It is,” Ellen sighs, rapturously, as she sips her drink.

“Is Dad around?” Jo doles out another shot and downs it just a quickly.

“Nah,” her mom says.

Jo frowns, glancing over at her. How can this place be perfect if her parents aren’t together, if her family hasn’t been stitched back together. “Why not? Don’t you think that’s a little…sus?”

“Oh, hon, he split a while before you got here,” Ellen says, clasping a thin, dry hand over Jo’s. “You can do that here too, you know. Split up. Get back together. Start something new, even.”

“But how’s that even work,” Jo says, holding onto her mother’s hand. “Things might not’ve been perfect, but I’m pretty sure you and Dad loved each other.”

“The kid gave us all a choice,” she says, rubbing her thumb across Jo’s scarred knuckles. “We could stick together or see what else heaven had to offer. Your dad decided to set out on his own.”

Jo sits there next to her mother, holding onto her hand, feeling cheated. Heaven couldn’t be heaven without her family, reunited. Could it?

“You can make something for yourself here, too, Joanna Beth,” Ellen says, her tone gentle and yet firm.

“I guess I wasn’t expecting to have so many options?” Jo says quietly.

“It’s a little scary, I know,” her mom says. “I was scared too.”

“Did you ask him why?” Jo asks.

The corners of Ellen’s mouth curve up just slightly. She shakes her head. “I couldn’t. I was too afraid to,” she admits. “Imagine that, your tough-as-nails mama being scared of anything. But I was. Couldn’t bear hear him say he didn’t love me anymore. Or didn’t love me enough to stick around.”

Jo thinks she understands. “It’s a new beginning, in so many different ways.”

“It is,” her mom says, pushing away from the counter. She grabs a rag from behind the counter and tosses it to Jo, who catches it against her chest. “Now help me clean up. Grand reopening’s tomorrow.”

Jo wanders around aimlessly, bouncing from person to person, from one unfamiliar face to the next. There are so many people here, so many people she never had a chance to meet. And yet, there are still some familiar faces in the crowd too. She spots Ash holding court with a redheaded girl and an Asian kid. When their eyes meet over his companions’ heads, he gives her a thumbs up and a big, gummy grin.

Jo is tending bar, wiping down the counter and refilling bowls of lemon wedges and toothpicks, when someone settles in front of her and places his hands on the gleaming countertop.

“Well, ain’t you a sight for sore eyes.”

Jo goes still, goes cold all over. That voice—those hands—has haunted her for years, chasing after her in her dreams like a shadow or a ghost. Something opens in her chest then. An old wound that had long ago scarred over, she thinks.

Jo lifts her head and pushes her hair behind her ears. She wills her eyes not to fill with tears.

“Dean,” she says, managing a smile.

“I see your mom put you right to work,” he says, mirroring her own tentative smile back at her.

“Well, you know Mom,” Jo says, huffing out a breathless little laugh that makes her want to cringe away in embarrassment. She sounds like a teenage girl fawning over a crush.

They’re both dead, clearly. It’s not like any of that should still matter to her, and yet it does. She still so desperately wants to be liked by Dean Winchester.

Dean smiles, eyes crinkling at the corners, and she realizes he got old since the last time she saw him. He’s got crow’s feet and laugh lines she’s not familiar with, and the planes of his face are more angular, severe, than before.

Jo knows she still looks like the same twenty-four, twenty-five year old—but probably younger, because Jo had never quite managed to look her age.

“You wanna get out of here?” Dean asks.

Jo tugs off her apron and tosses it aside, along with the towel she’d been using to wipe the counter. “You have no idea.”

They end up taking a stroll along that brick road that had sprouted up from the dirt, arms swaying, shoulders bumping occasionally. She feels like a teenager again, finally getting some alone time with her too-cool-for-school crush. There are butterflies in her stomach, which feels ridiculous and also like it should be impossible, given that they’re both dead now.

“So,” Dean says, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, “that’s how it happened. More or less.”

“Rebar,” says Jo, looping her arm through Dean’s elbow. “Why didn’t Sam call 9-1-1? They definitely could have made it in time.”

“I dunno,” Dean allows, leaning into her shoulder a little bit. “I kind of—kind of wouldn’t let him, I guess.”

“You…” Jo pauses, turning to stare at him, taking in his profile in the moonlight. He looks gray now, smothered in shadows. “Was it on purpose?”

“Are you asking if I killed myself?” Dean asks, frowning at her. Jo nods. “No. I… I don’t know, time was moving kind of fuckily. Kind of like it moves in this place.”

Jo’s not sure how to respond to that, so she doesn’t. “Castiel sacrificed himself for you,” she says, “and then you died a few months later. And came here. And since time moves ‘fuckily,’ Sam showed up the very next day.”

“Yep, for the most part,” says Dean.

Jo falls silent.

They continue their walk along the brick road, with no particular endpoint in mind. They could probably walk forever, Jo thinks, if they wanted to. And given how time moves in this place, it could take them a million years or the blink of an eye. It’s overwhelming to think about, really.

“I missed you,” he says, breaking the comfortable silence that had fallen over them.

“I missed you too, Dean,” she says.

“I was thinkin’,” he says, then stops himself short.

Dean draws up short and Jo falls back by his side, content to wait him out while he searches for the right words for what he wants to tell her.

Finally, he finds them.

“I’m no good at this.” He waves a hand between them. Moonlight glints off the silver rings on his fingers. “But—but I think I wanna try. With you.”

“What are you saying, Dean?” Jo asks.

“I think I wanna try at ‘normal,’” Dean says. “White picket fence, big back yard, golden retriever, the whole nine. With you.”

“Really?” Jo’s too stunned to say anything else. She’s aware of how dumbstruck she sounds.

“Yeah,” he says. “I think it could be good this time.”

“Are you sure you’re not just…reacting?” Jo asks. “Like, to everything that’s happened. You lost your mom, you lost Cas, you died… That’s a lot.”

“I am surer than I’ve ever been,” Dean says, reaching out, catching her hand in his. “I never had a chance to really get it right, on earth. But now, I think I could. Now, I wanna try.”

Jo tightens her hand around Dean’s. Her eyes sting and her heart throbs in her chest. “I think we can get it right,” she says, before correcting herself. She tugs Dean closer and vaults up on the tips of her toes. “No, I know we can get it right this time.”

Jo hooks her arms around his neck and pulls him down into a kiss. Dean’s hands come to rest low on her hips, and it takes every fiber of her being not to just climb him like a tree right then and there.

When they separate, Dean rests his forehead against Jo’s.

“Better than our last one,” he says, giving her waist a squeeze.

Jo remembers their last kiss. She can almost taste copper at the back of her throat, but the unpleasant memory drifts away, as if whisked off by a cosmic hand. “Much better, but it could use a little work,” she teases. “But lucky us, we’ve got forever to get it right.”

“Here’s to forever,” Dean says, dipping down to kiss the corner of her mouth.