Chapter Text
It’s been eleven years now, and Jo is seventeen.
She turned seventeen relatively recently, actually, about half a month ago. Sam had mailed her a birthday present that arrived the day of the occasion, which was awfully considerate of him, she thought. He’d given her a good present too: a thick, clean sketchpad and giant cardboard box of art supplies that she’d been begging months for – pencils, markers, pastels, paints – the full nine yards. Her uncle was good at giving presents, Jo thought while laying on her bed, absent-mindedly drumming her fingers against an open, blank page of the sketchpad at her side. Grandpa Bobby gave her a present too, but it was almost always the same gift every year: a check for $30 and a goofy birthday card from the drug store with a googly-eyed dog or something on the front and “Happy Birthday Jo, don’t waste this” scrawled on the inside in blue pen. Not that she minded the extra thirty bucks. Bobby was thinking of her and it was the thought that counted, right?
That’s what Daddy used to say, anyways. He wasn’t the best at wrapping presents, Jo recalled, staring up at the ceiling. Whenever he had to wrap one and give it to someone, he’d give a free apology too. She grinned, remembering that that was the reason why Papa always wrapped presents at their house.
Jo rolled over onto her stomach and fumbled with the handle of the nightstand drawer, cringing at the obnoxious, squeaky way it opened. What she was looking for sat beneath a pile of papers and books she’d finished reading; it was a scrapbook that blended in quite well with the disarray.
It was full of her favorite and most precious pictures, or the ones that she still had anyways. Most of them had gotten lost when the movers were dragging everything out of their house that she, Bobby or Sam didn’t grab and keep for themselves. The three of them had been relentless in salvaging the pictures before the entire house was gutted though, and Jo had fond memories of what the old home actually looked like in addition to the photograph of each and every room in the house they’d taken before leaving for the last time.
Those pictures were first in the lineup, displaying her colorful bedroom with toys in all areas, the cute little kitchen with its too short appliances, Daddy and Papa’s room with its gigantic bed, Alfie’s crib with his teddy bear and baby blanket, the empty garage and the coziest living room anyone could ever live in. Looking at the pictures made her homesick in ways Jo didn’t want to deal with, and she reminded herself at least fifteen times that Bobby’s home was a good a place as any and that she’d left the old place a very long time ago. The feeling wouldn’t be shaken though, and Jo sighed, knowing that the reason for this was because she never truly got to say goodbye to the house. She hadn’t gotten to say goodbye to Daddy, Papa and Alfie either, she denounced with a sigh, dropping her head for a few moments and letting the tears stream down her cheeks.
The memory of the last time she saw Alfie started: sitting on Papa’s hip, in footie pajamas, before Jo went to bed. The baby’s dark hair was ruffled and curly, sticking up in some places that Daddy liked at the time. He said it looked like Papa’s hair in the morning. Papa had responded quickly that the baby’s sleepy green eyes were identical to Dean’s in the morning too. Alfie had learned how to say her name by then and whenever he could see her, he would shout it for the whole world to hear – it was Jo’s favorite thing in the whole world. Daddy and Papa liked it too, but they just seemed to like it when Alfie would talk to them and shout out the words he knew for different things, like his bottle, blanket, teddy bear, and occasionally the one-syllable names “da” and “pa” that had so clearly meant Daddy and Papa.
But just as soon as that memory provided itself, it was engulfed and drowned in a different one that was much less soothing, to say the absolute least: how Papa’s eyes turned jet-black and he wasn’t Papa anymore, followed by one of the demons trying to hold Jo next, except she was kicking and screaming and crying for her parents, the real ones. One horrible thing led to another, and her childish eyes couldn’t be drawn away from the blood that poured out of Daddy’s chest and Papa’s stomach and the already dead look that had passed over Daddy’s green eyes when the thing inside Papa had grabbed him by the neck. Daddy looked like he had given up, and that still terrified Jo in ways she couldn’t explain to anyone. Then Papa’s head snapped upwards and he let go of Daddy, and stuff that looked like a lot of black smoke shot out of him and drove up through the vents in the ceiling. Papa had nearly collapsed on top of Daddy, catching himself and clutching his stomach, even while the blood gushed out around his fingers and he winced in pain. His eyes were blue again and he was holding Daddy’s face in one trembling hand and mumbling something to him, staring into those dead, dead green eyes as his own blue ones were already losing their lively sparkle.
Jo gasped for air, choking on her own tears and half-wondered how looking through the entire scrapbook of happy pictures before the incident had brought her down so low. It was crushing, in so many more ways than one, and even when the tears stopped, Jo shook, her own arms hugged around her as if trying to keep the limbs together, so she wouldn’t fall apart.
Standing up from the bed, Jo rubbed her eyes and blinked away the lightheaded feeling, heading for the bathroom on the other end of the hall. She could hear Bobby and Sam working away at something downstairs, though she wasn’t sure what, just glad that they hadn’t heard her breakdown. Letting them see it either wouldn’t be a good thing, so Jo stood in the bathroom, drying her cheeks, splashing her face with water, willing it to return to at least something that resembled its normal color.
Forever tangled curls of blonde hair and too sharp blue-grey eyes stared back over puffy red eyelids and a flushed face, even after twenty minutes of trying to soothe it. Sometimes the water helped, sometimes it didn’t. It didn’t this time, and now she could only cross her fingers and hope Bobby and Sam wouldn’t notice. They never knew how to comfort her, not the way she wanted, but then again, no one could ever do it. She was always best to do that alone, in the solidarity of her own thoughts and mind, where she could pretend that Daddy and Papa would’ve been the best at this. And of course she knew that that may or may not have been true, but regardless of its truth, it was a comforting thought.
When Jo finally lifted her head, she was standing in her bedroom with the door still wide open; a boy stood in the middle of the room, with a black jacket, jeans and folded arms. He didn’t look very old, probably ten or eleven, tops, with fluffy dark hair and striking green eyes – so why did he seem so familiar?
“Jo Winchester?” The boy asked, his voice softer than Jo had expected; she nodded, eyeing him warily, unsure of whether to sprint out of the room and get help or to interrogate this kid.
The boy grinned and unfolded his arms, letting one drop to his side while the other went straight forward out to Jo, a gun clenched tightly in his hand. “It’s been a while.”
“No,” Jo murmured after an immeasurable amount of silence, but found herself saying the word over and over and over again in disbelief, the shock that she should’ve felt moments ago ramming into her with tremendous power and force, the vivid memory of a happy, smiling baby with dark hair and green eyes providing itself and sending her stumbling backwards a few steps.
The boy just nodded, or what was supposed to be him anyways, that same sweet smile twisting itself into a wide, horrid, blindingly white grin. “I believe you called me Alfie.”
And that was when everything slowed down.
The trigger was pulled and a too familiar, too loud bang of the gun filled the air before the silence did.
It was too quiet all at once; Jo’s gasps for breath weren’t loud enough, sounding just as muted as the smack of her palms against her chest where the bullet had lodged itself, the click of her knees buckling and the slam of her body against the ground.
She was only vaguely aware of the thudding footsteps on the floor while the blood rushed in her ears and heart thumped wildly against her chest; new footsteps followed from another direction but they were getting softer and softer.
Someone was turning down the volume on Jo’s life and turning the darkness down too, so that the longer she had to stare at the white ceiling of her room, the more it blurred and faded.
The pain wasn’t even palpable anymore. It was everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing at all.
But just as quickly as it lodged itself within the shaking body of Jo Winchester, it ended everything.
Everything was hazy and blurry and fading like nothing she’d ever known, but the relief that flooded her brain in the final moments was overwhelming. Finally, she thought with a tone of thought that was more triumphant than she’d ever believed she could sound – finally.
Finally she’d get to see her parents again.