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Jo drives for ten miles before turning off at a shoddy motel on the side of the road. It’s significantly less clean than the rebuilt Roadhouse, despite being roughly equal in size; the sort of place that’s cheap and rents by the hour, and attracts drifters with no better options.
Like herself, Jo supposes.
She and Ellen are fighting again, too much at each other’s throats—and Ellen too suffocating—for Jo to stay home, and so she’s coming here, like she always does when she wants to get away, because where the hell else are you going to go when you live in the middle of nowhere?
She stops by the office, rents a room for the night, and parks in front of Number 17 before clambering out. She’s got a backpack full of crap DvDs, two packs of beer, and a bottle of whiskey; and chips, as a solid.
Mostly, she’s here because she stormed out, and coming back before the next day would be a concession.
She goes through the hunter’s checks once she’s inside, out of habit; checks the doors and the windows and looks for hex bags under the mattress and pillows. She doesn’t find any; nor does she find any sign of bed bugs, to her great relief.
This completed, she sticks in a much-used dvd of A New Hope and flops back on the drawn covers with one of her bottles of beer pulled open using an opener on her keys.
She could be doing something useful, she thinks, as the Imperial Dreadnaught rolls slowly into view on the screen. She could be hunting—there’s probably someone dying of a rougarou somewhere right now, and she could be the one stopping it, saving a life.
If only Ellen would let her.
Which is, of course, the prime frustration of her life: she knows she’s competent, she knows she can fight and hunt and do everything other hunters do—and she knows she’s capable of handling the now-past apocalypse, for fuck’s sake. What she is not competent enough to do, evidently, is get away from under the thumb of her mother, who has claimed that she’s not above chaining Joe to the bar to make damn well sure she doesn’t go anywhere.
It’s ridiculous, and Jo doesn’t hate her mother, exactly, but she hates her mother’s tendencies, and she kind of hates herself for being unable to make the decision to either bolt and thus hurt her mother (again, and more permanently, this time) or stay and abide by her rules.
(Ash has told her, repeatedly, that he thinks she needs to give Ellen time to adjust: Jo’s told him to stuff it, just as repeatedly and insistently, because by the time Ellen’s had her time to adjust to Jo being a grown woman and not a kid, there might not be a world to save anymore, or she might die of old age.)
The Imperial Dreadnaught passes, and the scene shifts to the inside of the ship, rebel forces versus stormtroopers, and Leia and Vader. Jo pushes aside the problem of her mother and her independence—like she always does, she reflects acridly, because that’s her in a nutshell, waffling indecisive Jo that can’t get anything done—and drinks her beer.
—
Which is also how she ends up drunk-dialing Ash, to begin with; she’s trying to call Ellen but she misses the number in her phone and ends up calling him, instead, and he manages to talk her out of leaving shouting voice messages, just barely. Mostly she just whines to him while he half-listens, half-plays some game on his computer.
After, when there’s rather less whiskey in the bottle and rather more of it sloshing around inside her stomach and muddling her thoughts, she tries to call Dean, which doesn’t work out; and then, frustrated and stifled, she decides to call for Dean’s angel, for reasons she doesn’t later recall.
Of the lot, he’s the only one that shows up.
—
“Oh,” is all she can think to say, and, “fuck.”
“You prayed for me,” the angel says, and he—it, she corrects, hadn’t Sam said something about angels being genderless when they’d talked? Wavelengths of celestial intent, or something?—doesn’t seem thrilled with the concept. He—it—isn’t burning with heavenly fury, either, though, so Jo takes that as a good sign.
“Uh,” she says, intelligently, suddenly damning the whiskey, swallows, tries again. “Yeah. I just—yeah. Mom’s being awful, and Dean and Sam are who the hell knows where, and Ash is barely listening, and I’m drunk, and I thought maybe you . . .” She trails off, because she’s actually not sure what she thought. What, that this angel would make Dean appear to her, abruptly sympathetic? Bullshit. Bullshit, Harvelle, and you ought to know yourself well enough to call yourself on yours.
“How does this involve me?” Blunt, as always. Jo can appreciate that, all things considered. At least when you drunk-dial an angel they’re up-front about how awkward it is, rather than carefully beating around the bush and trying to get you off the line without hanging up.
“Look,” she says, “I don’t know. This was stupid. I wanted to talk to Dean, and you usually know where he is, and—nevermind. Nervermind, it doesn’t matter. I guess there’s nothing you can do.” Inanely, to break the tension, she adds, “Unless you want to watch Star Wars with me, anyway. I’m just getting to the good bits of this one. You know, ‘do-or-do-not, there is no try!’ “ Except he doesn’t, of course. Angels don’t watch movies, and they certainly don’t know about Yoda.
As such, she’s more than a little surprised when he blinks, rumbles, “Okay,” and sits down at the foot of the bed. (She’s given up trying to sort pronouns. She’ll ask later: maybe he has a preference.)
“Really?” She doesn’t mean for it to come out sounding so incredulous, especially since she offered, but, well, really. “You want to watch Star Wars? I thought you had important, like, sherrifing to do in Heaven.”
“There is a lull,” Castiel explains, from where he’s perched. Appropriate word. “For now I may only wait, and Dean,” a strange pause, there, “Dean has no need of me.”
“You and me both,” Jo says, and reaches over to where one of the half-empty packs of beer rests on the side of the bed. She pulls a bottle out and offers it to him by the neck, though given she remembers how he downed row upon row of shots without the slightest effect, maybe she should give him the whiskey. Without ire, as Castiel takes the bottle, she goes on, “Dean doesn’t do needing people. Except Sam, and he won’t even admit to that, probably.”
The angel takes the cap off the bottle she’s handed him bare-handed, the teeth of the lid biting into his palm. While Luke makes profound discoveries about the Force on Dagobah—or gets progressively angrier at the bullshit cryptic green alien leading him in circles, whatever—Castiel says, quietly, “I suspect he needs people very much indeed. He merely wishes he didn’t.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Jo cedes, magnanimously. “But he still doesn’t need me. No one needs me, if he and Ellen are to be believed. They’d have me stuck behind a bar for the rest of my life, like that’s where I belong, just ‘cause it’s safer and I’m useless.” Contemplatively, she makes the addition of, “Fuck that.”
The angel at the foot of her bed tilts his head and peers at her out of the corner of his eye. “You are not useless, Jo Harvelle.”
“You sure about that?” She takes a swig of her beer, shakes her head, a blond loop falling past her face.
“You assisted in averting the apocalypse,” Castiel points out, as blandly as he does anything, gravelly voice practically toneless. “You held off hellhounds. You are an accomplished soldier. You survived that which many did not.” He doesn't drink his beer.
It’s weird, having someone acknowledge what she’s been insisting to anyone that would listen for years. Actually, now that someone says it, she almost feels it’s untrue, and protests, “Yeah, but I still haven’t been out in the field as long as Sam and Dean and everyone, you know? The only time I went hunting alone I got caught by the monster and stuffed in a sewer.” She shudders at the memory.
Castiel opens a hand in a gesture of acquiescence. “There is a human saying—‘bumps along the road’? That would seem appropriate.” A barely-perceptible shrug of his slouched shoulders, because apparently angels don’t care for posture. “Regardless of your failings, you are an adept soldier.”
“Damn,” Jo intones, suddenly immensely amused by—his words, by him, by this. “I’ve got an angel’s testimony. Should put that on a bumper sticker and stick it on my car to get business.” Her elation sours. “On mom’s car. Fuck.”
He doesn’t say anything more, and she’s not sure what else she can say, beyond but I still can’t get my shit together enough to get out of here, so she broaches the question that’s been bouncing around in her head, as bluntly as he would: “Hey, so, Sam said angels were genderless.”
“Yes.” A slight head inclination. “The vessels we take are not a reflection upon ourselves.”
“But you let us call you ‘he’,” Jo points out. “Doesn’t that, like, elevate you to male status, or whatever? Or do you just not want to spend your time correcting everybody?”
Again that slight shrug. “It seemed to work for them, and the apocalypse was more pressing than the details.” Another pause. “And I find that . . . male members of your species pass far more unimpeded. A useful trait, when trying to hold attention and maintain respect.”
A bitter laugh breaks out of Jo’s chest, and she finishes off her beer. “Shit, yeah. Got it in one, the world’s full of misogynistic bastards.” Darker thoughts, ones that usually arise when she’s alone and having imbibed an even greater amount of alcohol than this, float to the surface. “Sometimes I wish I was a guy, you know? Because at least then Dean and Sam and mom wouldn’t try to stop me from doing what I wanted. Then they’d listen to me, instead of looking at me as though I need to be protected and coddled.”
A nod. “I understand.” Castiel’s form is largely motionless, aside from these small tics: he’s been wearing a body for, what, two, three years? and still it’s as though he doesn’t quite connect to it, like it’s external to what he really is. What it is. She still hasn’t asked if he’d prefer to be called something else.
He surprises her when he speaks again, without being prompted: “Sometimes I wish I had chosen a female vessel, and yet then those very societal problems would assail me.”
Jo’s eyebrows climb her forehead. “What, really? Why?” And, since the moment is as opportune as any, “Would you rather I didn’t call you ‘he’, or whatever? Like, I get that you’ve allowed them to do it because it hasn’t mattered that much to you, but, you know. If you’d prefer something else?”
“In Enochian, our pronouns differentiate only between the collective and the singular. I suppose your gender neutral pronouns would be close enough, as a translation.”
She notices that Castiel doesn’t answer her original question, but she lets it slide, for now. “So, what—zie, right? Zie, zir. Would you prefer that?”
“It would be more accurate,” Castiel allows, without stating any greater preference. She mentally adjusts, though, nodding: not ‘he’, after all.
The conversation drops into a lull after that, the two of them watching the television screen as the action builds.
Jo still kind of hates Lando.
—
The angel’s attention is rapt on the narrative playing out on the screen; Jo mouths along to the lines as a game of quote-along with herself, because she’s seen the movie so many times she knows it by heart.
She notices Castiel’s lips twitch downward as they reach the scenes with Leia in chains. Speaking up, she says, “It’s shit like this, right? That made you choose a male vessel.”
“In essence,” Castiel says. “I watched your planet long before humans were here, but once your present civilization formed, this treatment became disturbingly prevalent. It seemed prudent to take a vessel which would not be viewed in such a fashion by the very people I would be made to guide.”
“Yeah,” Jo says, bitterly. After a moment, she plunges on into the things she thinks about more often than she’d like, but doesn’t admit to anyone, because she’s sure they’d laugh, or call her stupid, or get offended. She’s pretty sure Castiel won’t do any of those things, though, and so: “I don’t want to hate what I am, but when the reality is that the world hates me for it, it’s pretty hard. I want to, you know, be able to beat my chest and proclaim I’m as woman as woman gets and people should accept me that way, but when being a woman’s just gonna hurt me in the long run, I keep ending up just . . . folding. Trying to be like all the guys, not a woman, whatever that even means, anymore.”
“A collection of stereotypes,” Castiel says. “Largely incorrect ones. Largely ones perpetuated by their own existence and reiteration by your culture.”
“Yeah. And I know that, y’know, I’m not blind to all the bullshit I’ve been fed, and I’ve gotten lots of good influence from mom—“ funny, she’s not mad at Ellen anymore, just sort of deflated, “—but it still hangs around. There’s still this weird, like, disconnect, between the gorgeous and perfect woman that's molded by misogyny, or the non-existent opposite ideal for which everyone who's anti-society sometimes seems to advocate, and whatever I am.” She waves a hand, vaguely, scowls. “God, it’s hard to explain. I don’t even know how to say it. Just, all this societal gunk. I just want to be me, without a mental split between what it means to be a girl or a guy or neither or anything, and without trying to assign myself to a category that still feels like it doesn’t fit, even when I’m trying to purge all that internalized misogyny and proclaim myself to be like 'all other girls', which is a stupid generalization in itself.”
Castiel takes this all in in silence, eyes on the movie. She gets the impression that zie listens closely, though. And then, while on the screen Boba Fett plummets into the maw of the sarlacc, Castiel says, “A self-defeating society. Putting this burden on you.” A beat. “But at least you might—might be loved. By who you wish.”
Jo watches zir swallow. She suddenly has the feeling that this is what she’s been waiting for, an answer to her earlier question, a piece of the puzzle. “Wait,” she says, trying to parse this. “You wish you’d chosen a female vessel because—because you’re in love with a guy that isn’t into other guys? Is that it?”
Castiel’s hands twist slightly in the hem of zir coat. “Yes,” zie finally says, shortly, a bit harshly. “Yes.”
“Oh,” Jo says, and it’s so simple, she wonders why she didn’t catch it before; maybe because she didn’t think an angel could fall in love with a human, or at all. With a sharp twinge of sympathy, she presses a hand to Castiel’s shoulder. “Oh, Castiel, I’m so sorry.”
“It isn’t something to be sorry about.” An aborted gesture that ends with zir hand in a fist. “It isn’t something I should be concerned with at all.”
“You are, though,” Jo points out. “And it’s sad. So you get my condolences, whether you think you need them or not. That, and . . .” She sighs, smiles at zir. “It’s Dean, right?”
The minute jolt this withdraws from the angel is sufficient to tell her she’s right, even if the half-lidded sideways stare she gets after weren’t. “I get it,” she says. “I was, too. Still am, maybe. It’s frustrating.”
“He doesn’t see you the way you want to be seen,” Castiel says, and there’s a knowing there. Jo nods.
“Not like he doesn’t see you, but—yeah. Same boat.” She laughs, and drops her head back against the headboard. “We’re a pair, huh? Discontent with the bodies we’re wearing and in love with some asshole that probably doesn’t even deserve it.”
“He deserves it.” The look Castiel gives her this time just looks exhausted. “But he can be—tiresome.”
“Yeah, okay,” Jo says. She reaches over to the remaining two bottles of beer sitting in the package by her foot. “We should drink to it. As a motion of the Pathetic-Self-Pitying-and-In-Love-With-Dean-Winchester Club.”
Castiel doesn’t respond to this, but zie does drink, so Jo can only assume that constitutes an agreement.
—
When she wakes, the angel is gone, and the title screen is playing the theme music over and over again on the screen.
She watches all the prequels and doesn’t check out until noon.