Work Text:
“Dean! Get back here with those!”
“No!”
He runs circles around the dining table, dodging her when she tries to fake him out and yells with frustration.
“What are you even trying to do with those? Give them back!”
Giggling, Dean does the thing every child is not supposed to do and runs with scissors clutched in his tiny fist, running circles around Ellen until he can dart through her legs out the backdoor and hop on the back of Jo’s bike. She only just learned how to make it with one training wheel and they screwed the second one back on just in time to rip down the country road, kicking up a cloud of dirt and rocks behind them.
“Petal, petal, petal!”
“I’m going,” She shouts, her tongue getting stuck where her two front teeth were before they fell out, creating a lisp.
“Jo! Dean!” Ellen yells from the porch, but they’re going going gone, and Dean laughs as he imagines her shaking her head, unable to catch up to them.
The sky’s blue, the air is crisp, and the sun beats down on them like Ellen surely will when she catches the doing what they’re about to do, but the grass is also green and the crickets are chirping and they’re flying down the road, two kids barley stable on one rickety old bike. This is what summer’s all about. Not seedy motels and running from monsters, but root beer and running from mothers.
When the bike starts to get more unstable than usual, Dean grabs Jo around the waist and she screeches, trying to keep control of the handlebars. He can see her starting to fail and braces for impact just like in the car.
Jo’s mouth hangs open to almost hyperventilate as they turn and turn and turn to overcorrect before she shouts, “I’m gonna crash!” and Dean jumps off the bike before the training wheels come loose and tucks his arms to his side, rolling down the ditch as Jo loses control and falls, tumbling with her head straight to the ground.
Loudly, she starts to cry like a baby.
Dean looks down to see blood soaking slowly out of his own clenched fist, and when it trembles open, he sees the light puncture the scissors left in his palm and his head starts to spin.
Jo shrieks and snaps him out of whatever self-centered trance he was in. He runs over to her as fast as his little legs can carry him. He’s only ten, but on the rare occasion he makes it to school, he’s always liked P.E.- plus, his pain tolerance always seems to impress the teachers. Like they knew anything.
“It’s OK,” he tells her, looking at her snot covered face and the rocks in her knees. “You had a helmet, your skull ain’t cracked open yet. C’mon, i’nt there a water pump down the road? We gotta get it clean.” He pauses. “So get up!”
She nods, wiping her face, but the tears and snot just wipe the dirt further on her face. He stifles another small giggle as he grabs her arm and yanks her up, letting her lean on him and kicking the bike off to the side.
“We can come back for it later,” he explains. “It’s not as nice as my car.”
“It’s your dad’s car,” she hiccups.
“Do you want me to drop you?”
“You wouldn’t!”
“I would!”
Under the pump, Dean says they’ll count to three but opens the water on one and Jo shrieks, again, and he tells her to shut up like Dad tells him to all the time. “It’s better as a surprise. Otherwise you’re too tense,” he explains, as if it makes any sense to him, either. It’s just what you do.
“I’m only eight!”
“No excuse. Sammy’s just a baby, too.”
“Yeah, and he cries all the time.” She sticks out her tongue and he sticks out his and inevitably, they laugh.
Then he stops pumping and looks down at her knee. “See! It’s barely bleeding. Look at this.” He bares his palm for her and she makes a face, scooching to the side so he can rinse the already drying blood off his hand.
“How’d’ya pump with that? The handle’s metal.”
He shrugs. “It don’t hurt so bad.”
“Yeah, right. You’re faking.”
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
“You’re such a little kid,” he tells her, and she crosses her arms over her chest from where she sits on in the grass.
“Yeah, and you’re so old. You’re almost in middle school!”
“I don’t go to school,” he tells her with his nose up in the air, wiping his hand off on his jeans. “I kill monsters.”
“Your daddy kills monsters.” Her face sours. “You don’t help one bit, I’ll bet.”
“I should’a left you on the road,” he bitches.
She hrmps, but her face goes back to normal when she asks, “did you hold onto them?”
Out of his pocket he pulls, triumphantly, the scissors, and she cheers.
Today, Dean doesn’t scheme with Jo any longer.
She pulls half into the mini ditch by the water pump in the Impala, half not remembering where she left Sam and half not caring.
She hesitates while walking over, not sure where she wants to go or why she’s here at all.
She remembers so much about her summer here, even if it was so long ago. All the monsters, they just blend into one another. But those precious, normal times? She couldn’t trade those memories for anything in the world.
Today, she passes the water pump, walking up to the big elm that looks smaller now. She’s sure it’s grown in the way trees do, but she has no conception of these things. She’s never been around long enough for any of this to last before.
She doesn’t know what she’s even looking for.
She sits down, though, dropping her six pack of beer and fiddling with a dandelion next to her hip.
Should She talk? People talk to gravestones all the time. At least in movies.
This isn’t a grave.
There was nothing to bury.
“Ugh, it’s hot,” Jo complains. “Let’s go under the trees. You know the elm are, um. Oh. I forget the word. But there’s a lot of them.”
“Yeah, I knew that,” Dean lies, tearing off a bit of his shirt to wrap around his fist. It seems tougher like this, even if the wound isn’t that bad, and the pressure stops him from crying. Not that he would. He’s no crier.
She sits down under the first tree with shade and he doesn’t know if it’s actually an elm, he’s not into any of that nature shit. It’s for girls.
His heart hurts as he takes her hair in his hand.
“Why’re you so blonde?”
“Why’re you so mean?”
“I ain’t mean,” he says, snipping the scissors threateningly.
She jolts off the ground with her flinch, yelling at him “stop it, stop it!”
“I thought you wanted me to cut it! Stupid idiot.”
“I do!” She buries her head in her hands and Dean rolls his eyes.
“So man up and let me cut it.”
She sniffs once, lifting her head up, and he grabs her hair like he’s making a ponytail and cuts it off in one big chop. Since he’s standing and she’s sitting, he leans forward just a little, letting his head hang, to see the look on her face.
Jo’s staring straight down, still sniffling and holding her knees protectively, but she doesn’t look upset.
So he keeps cropping her hair closer and closer to her neck.
“I cut Sammy’s hair, you know,” he says, trying to reassure her. “I mean, he’s a little… but it’s fine. He likes how it looks.”
“I do like Sam’s hair,” she admits reluctantly, and he grins.
“See! There you go. I won’t butcher it.”
“I kinda want you to buc- butcu- butcher it,” she struggles to find the word. “Sometimes I wish I were a boy like you and Sam. All messy and gross and butchered.”
“No you don’t,” he scoffs on impulse, snipping a little close to her ear and barely missing the skin. Luckily, she’s too busy getting angry again to notice.
“Yes I do!”
“It ain’t all it’s chalked up to be.”
“Y’all get to have so much fun,” she complains.
“What, huntin’ spooks and shootin’ guns?”
“No. Well. Yeah. I wanna do that too. But I wanna be a boy about it.”
“No way. Girls have it so much better.”
“How! We get to wear dresses,” she mocks, “and have our hair all pretty.”
“I wish my hair could be pretty,” he admits, quietly, while trimming around her ears. It’s kinda like the bowl cut Dean gave his brother once, but choppier, more wild. It suits her. “Y’know. Like you.” She twists around to face him and he almost drives the scissors into her face. “Watch it!”
She turns back around and lets him keep going. Her hair falls to the ground in pretty yellow locks, but then when it blows next to a patch of dandelions, it’s so pale. Dean would cry if he could, and he doesn’t even know why.
“I don’t like dresses or nothin’. And I don’t wanna be all weird like Sam.”
“How’s Sam weird?”
“He’s waifish.”
“What does waifish mean?”
“...I don’t know. My dad said it, and it’s a bad thing. Boys aren’t supposed to be like girls.”
“Can girls be like boys?”
“No. Girls are girls and boys are boys.”
“Then why’re you cutting my hair? Cuz you wish you could think differently?”
Dean shoves her head and shuts up because his brain just can’t make it compute. He doesn’t have a good answer.
“Maybe when we’re older,” Jo says happily, “you can be a girl and I can be a boy and we can swap. Do you think my hair will get darker when I cut it?’
“Why would it?”
“I dunno,” she shrugs. “It’d be cool if I looked like my dad. And if you had my hair, you’d look like your mom!”
His first instinct is to tell her to shut up, to stop talking about his mom, but when he gets quiet and tries to think about it, he can’t help but realize how right she is. He would like his mom. But he looks like her dad more than Jo does.
He wants to hold her and cry, but instead they just sit side by side next to the tree. He leans his head on her shoulder and neither of them move.
“It’s too hot to walk back,” she complains.
“And your bike’s broken.”
“Crap, my bike!”
Dean laughs, and he can feel her start to laugh, too.
“Mom’s gonna kill me.”
“You can tell her it’s my fault.”
“It ain’t your fault.”
“Hey, you must be a boy.”
“Huh?”
“Talkin’ like me.”
“Well, you must be a girl,” she supposes. “It’s your head on my shoulder.”
“Hey!”
But he doesn’t move. And she didn’t sound judgemental.
So they stay, letting the warmth of the summer press down on them like a blanket and the dirt and grass feel soft underneath their small bodies like a mattress. Dean’s been all over the world, but this is the most in it he’s ever been.
He glances over at Jo, her pale eyelashes and stubby nose, and wonders what he would have to sell to trade with her, but his eyelids are heavy and he doesn’t really care.
It’s warm and yellow and blue and he’s not alone anymore.
Dean cracks a beer, deciding not to shed her jacket even as she sweats. It’s kind of gross, but they’re always kind of gross. Blood, demon goo, dirt, various grime. Under her nails, stuck between her teeth, in her hair, caked into her skin. Every motel shower is too shitty to savor and she remembers being a child here, running half naked through the streams and creeks Jo had a sixth sense for finding while they argued whether it was crick or creek.
She’s glad she got to be a child with him. Even if he never got to be a him, not for real. Not like Sammy saying my sister and Dean, the girl over there, even if Dean will never go on hormones and will never retire her good jeans and probably never sleep with a girl again without a crushing sense of guilt, this time inescapable.
That day under the tree with the scissors was as close as Jo ever got. It was probably the best he ever got.
But, like his father, Jo met a hunter's end. A man’s end.
She knows now. What was wrong with them and what wasn’t.
“I wish we could have been girl and boy together,” she whispers, running her hand through the grass. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t pull you out with me.”
They fell asleep under the elm tree until Ellen came searching, hands on her hips. She found the two of them slouched, entangled, little mouths open to snore, surrounded by chopped bits of hair, and when she carried them back and put Jo in her bed and Dean on the pull out couch next to his brother, she couldn’t bring herself to be mad. In the morning, all four of them had breakfast together like one proper family, and it was more than good.