Archive of Our Own

Sam meets Jo Harvelle in a bar.

Later on, when he considers that, he thinks that it might have been the first indication that it was time to take off running in the other direction.

It’s the Friday of finals week the first semester of sophomore year and he’s out with friends at a divey bar, celebrating the fact that they’ve managed not to bomb all their classes. It’s the kind of hole-in-the-wall place that mostly exists for beer but also dabbles in really cheap burgers and cardboard-thin pizza in an effort to lure in customers. Zeppelin’s playing on the jukebox, the average age of the bar patron is about forty-eight, and the whole place smells like grease and beer and cigarettes and a little bit like home. He and his friends stick out, because unlike most of the other customers they’re here because of the two-dollar beers, not because they’ve been coming to the same bar every night for the last twenty years.

For this same reason, the tiny blonde girl leaning over the pool table is particularly conspicuous. She’s pretty ordinary-looking, all things considered – on the smaller side, long hair, t-shirt and jeans – the harmless kind of pretty that sneaks up on you and catches you by surprise.

She’s playing her forty-something businessman of an opponent fairly badly – but to anyone who knows what a good hustle looks like, it’s obvious that she’s taking the guy for a ride. Sam, who has known how to play this sort of con since he was in middle school, notes that she’s doing a pretty good job of acting the part, giggling and hiding her smiles behind a hand girlishly.

Normally he would pretend that he hadn’t noticed anything. This is as much a part of his old life as the salt and the silver bullets and the shitty motels, and he really just wants to forget how much it was all he ever knew before he came to Stanford. But when the blonde girl finishes soundly trouncing Receding Hairline and moves towards the bar with her winnings, he finds herself following her.

This is not something Sam does, picking up chicks in bars. That’s firmly his brother’s department. But the blonde girl’s sitting alone on a barstool, swinging her legs back and forth slightly and nursing a beer, and something he can’t even begin to explain makes him go over and sit down next to her.

When “so that was a nice hustle” is what spills out of his mouth instead of “hello” or even a simple “I’m Sam”, he wants to kick himself and he can feel his cheeks burning. Somewhere, somehow, he’s sure Dean is laughing.

“Oh, it was, was it?” He can’t tell if she’s amused or annoyed, and Sam can only imagine that he sounds either supremely creepy or like he’s desperately trying to sound cool. He isn’t sure which one he’d prefer. She’s still giving him a measured, assessing sort of look and he’s still trying to figure out how to extricate his foot from his mouth when someone back at his friends’ table calls out his name.

Intensely grateful for the opportunity to remove himself from the situation, Sam turns around and heads back to the table – and when he turns to look back at the bar, the girl’s already gone.

He never thinks that he’s going to see her again, but of course, he’s wrong.

It’s a couple weeks later, Christmas break, and Sam’s spent most of the time holed up alone in his dorm room. His roommate is in Virginia for the vacation, presumably having an altogether normal family Christmas and leaving Sam with the room to himself and not much at all to do. Most of his other friends are off with their respective families as well, and the ones that aren’t are either studying or drinking their way through the break.

(Sam’s family, last he heard from them, was hunting a snow beast in Michigan. Pretty par for the course, as Christmases in the Winchester family go, but it doesn’t make him grit his teeth and shake his head any less).

So it’s Christmas, and he’s bored and alone and still eating cold Chinese and it feels really fucking depressing because at least when he was eating cold take-out on all those other shitty Christmases he had someone to eat it with. He’s so bored that he even calls Dean, just to see if the snow beast has torn him and Dad to pieces or not – but nobody answers, so he leaves a short, clipped message saying hi, just wanted to say Merry Christmas that probably sounds a lot more bitchy than he really intended it to.

Fucking snow beast. Sam hopes that Dean and Dad end up cleaning guts out of their clothes for weeks.

It’s an indication of just how bored and desperate that he really is (despite what Dean might think about him, Sam really can only spend so many hours in the library before going absolutely fucking stir-crazy) that when he hears a rumor going around about sightings of a dead former intern at the top of Hoover Tower, he actually looks into it. The patterns of investigation and identification are familiar, comforting in a way he’d rather not think about for very long, and by New Year’s he’s determined that there have been four confirmed and eight unconfirmed sightings of something that sounds decidedly ghostly lurking around the Tower at night.

He feels a little (okay, a lot) like a hypocrite for checking into it at all, but the fact of the matter is that he’s bored. Plus, the part of him that’s had responsibility and moral fiber and the surety that the civilians need someone to look out for them drilled into him since second grade just can’t let the rest of him pass it by. Besides, it’s just a ghost. Just one measly ghost. It’s not like he’s an amateur.

Later on, when he goes to investigate the tower and finds not one but three different ghosts, all of which are very angry and very fast and apparently very determined to choke him to death, he really regrets that entire train of thought.

This ghost has him pinned to a pillar, one hand clenched firmly and painfully around his neck and the other headed towards his eyes when all of a sudden there’s a sound like paper tearing as a barrage of salt rips the apparition apart. Sam’s left breathing heavy and confused as he tries to figure out what the hell just happened when a voice he dimly recognizes as familiar shouts, “if you’re not too busy getting choked by a dead chick, could you maybe help me out over here?”

He rubs his sore neck with one hand as he turns and sees the blonde girl from the bar, holding a canister of salt in one hand and a knife in the other, and Sam’s first thought is why can I never meet anyone normal?

“Come on, Bigfoot. There’s three graves to dig up and we’ve still got to get out of here without getting killed.”

He manages to ask her, somewhere in between the running for their lives from the homicidal ghosts and digging up graves (in a graveyard where there are security guards) at four fucking thirty in the morning, “So, what’s your name?”

She gives him a smile that’s disgustingly happy considering she’s standing in a grave. “It’s Jo.”

Three hours later the corpses are salted and burned, the tower seems clear, and it’s a cold, clear sort of morning as the sun comes up over the edge of the quad, casting an orange hue on the brown stone. Jo’s sitting next to him on the ground, back up against a wall with her head tilted back and her eyes closed. The flagstone is cold underneath him and they both smell like lighter fluid and grave dirt but he thinks Jo looks sort of amazing in the early-morning light and he really kind of wants to kiss her.

He doesn’t, though. He leans his head back against the wall behind him and asks, “So…could we try this again – the introductions thing? Without a bar involved, and without my foot in my mouth? And not chasing a ghost, either?”

Jo considers him for a minute, and then smiles and nods. “Sure. No beer, pizza or Zeppelin required. I can’t make any promises about the ghosts, though.”

“So how do you know about all of–“ he gestures with one hand, “uh, this, exactly?”

Jo speaks without opening her eyes. “Dad was a hunter. Mom owns a bar where most of the customers are hunters. Can’t remember a time I didn’t know what was out there.” She opens an eye and smiles at him. “Never exactly done anything about it before, though.”

He kind of wants to wipe the smile right off her face, because this is not a job for amateurs, but he can’t bring himself to do it because she looks so happy, and then she’s talking again.

“I’m doing the college thing for my mom, mostly. But…I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like enough, sometimes.”

“What about you?” Jo elbows him in the side, and he actually lets out a sharp “ow” because damn, the girl’s got aim. “How’d you get into all this?”

He stares intently at the rough stone between his feet and wavers, a choice he’s never had before hanging in the air. It seems like hours before he opens his mouth and chooses to speak.

“My mom died when I was six months old.”

No matter how much he tries to fit in at Stanford, there’s always something keeping him from fitting all the way. He just can’t look at the world the way that most people do, no matter how much he tries. Every time he walks into a room he assesses all possible routes of escape, just because it’s second nature. His brain is permanently imprinted with the knowledge of how to disarm and disable any potential threat within ten seconds, knowledge he sees superimposed on the body of everyone he meets, no matter how non-threatening (in case of emergency, punch to the shoulder, elbow to the bicep, stun at the neck and knee to the gut for a fast exit). He’s got a fairly impressive and very, very against-the-rules collection of knives in his dorm room, tucked underneath several layers of ripe socks and underwear that he knows his roommate has no interest in sorting through, because he doesn’t quite feel safe without weapons around.

Jo doesn’t fit in the same way Sam doesn’t fit in – the invisible space of knowledge and experience that separates him from others is made more real by her presence, by the fact that that space encompasses her too. They can sit together or stand together in the quad or the cafeteria or the coffee shop – any nondescript, ordinary place – and Sam feels the secrets he’s been keeping so palpably that he wonders how nobody notices, how he and Jo don’t stick out.

Jo also isn’t the kind of girl Sam’s used to meeting at Stanford. She wears thrift-store tank tops under old flannel shirts and workman’s boots worn thin with real use, not bright patterned shirts or sparkling jewelry. There’s dirt under her fingernails more often than not and she’s got a vaguely Midwestern accent like his, which is strangely rare here. Stanford may have students from all over the country (and the world, for that matter), but the heartland of America isn’t always particularly well-represented. She knows how to hustle and steal and use her innocent good looks to wheedle and while what she wants out of the generally unsuspecting public for fun and profit. This, she explains to him, is what she was doing when they met at the bar. She’s pretty and smart and an anthropology major and keeps a box full of knives tucked under a false bottom in one of her desk drawers.

She’s also completely infuriating a lot of the time. She picks his pockets with a surprising amount of skill and makes a habit of stealing the keys to his dorm and his bike lock. She sets up camp in his room for hours at a time (because her roommate thinks she’s a freak with a knife collection and keeps locking her out) and does her homework on his bed, twirling her father’s knife in one hand while she reads her Anthropological Theory textbook. She steals pieces of his lunches constantly and drags him back to the smoky bars that he hates and she loves. She calls him Winchester and Bigfoot and Jolly Green Giant, usually in front of his roommate, even though she knows he hates it. It’s all very fourth grade and very annoying and reminds him a lot of Dean. She has a shit-eating grin that says look what I just got away with (and she gets away with things a lot), a tendency to bulldoze over anything and anyone that gets in her way, and a talent for bullshitting that’s pretty impressive even to Sam, who has been lying smoothly with a smile since he was eight.

She also knows about all of the things that go bump in the night. On some counts, she knows more than he does. Jo knows how to draw a devil’s trap and the words to the Rituale Romanum and wears an anti-possession charm on a chain around her neck – all things she learned not because she had to, but because she wanted to, because she knows what’s out there and wants to run towards it, not away from it. He’s not sure he’ll ever understand that.

Jo is everything he’s been running away from since he got on a bus to California and didn’t look back at Dean, and he falls in love with her anyways.

Before he’s even realized what’s happened he’s gone from scowling at her and keeping the door to his dorm room locked to kissing her in the quad, and she’s kissing back and smirking at him and saying took you long enough, dumbass. Pretty soon she’s not stealing his keys anymore because he’s leaving the door open, and not stealing his lunch because he buys one for her, when she lets him.

It’s not perfect, because nothing ever is. Jo is messy and reckless and loud where Sam is neat and careful and measured. They fight about little things like how Sam hates that Jo makes a mess everywhere she goes and big things like how Jo thinks Sam should suck it up and talk to his family, but their biggest fight is always about the hunt, because Sam wants to forget and Jo keeps telling him that he can’t. She calls him a hypocrite and never lets him forget that they met properly while hunting a ghost, and he calls her ridiculous for getting into Stanford but being more interested in hunting werewolves.

He tries to get her to understand that he doesn’t want normal, he wants safe, and she laughs at him. Laughs. He feels insulted.

“You want safe, Sam? Forgetting what’s out there isn’t safe. This, what you’re doing? Isn’t safe.”

He wants to argue with her, to get angry and yell, because this is the same argument he’s had with Dad and Dean – especially Dean – dozens and dozens of times. But when Jo says it, it’s not the same. She’s not trying to push, not trying to argue. There’s no long-storied history of guilt trips and harsh words and you owe this to your family, Sam, you can’t leave us there.

When she makes the argument, it sounds like a fact, and he hates to think that she might be right.

After Sam gets his own apartment, that summer after sophomore year’s over and done, Jo spends more time there than she ever spends in her own place. Her knife collection slowly migrates to the top drawer of his dresser and her shoes are under his bed and she’s drinking milk straight out of the carton in his kitchen. Jo lays salt lines down on his windowsills and under his floorboards and carves protective sigils into his bedposts, and he pretends not to notice. By the end of July he’s waking up next to her almost every morning, and it’s strange and different and wonderful and he realizes that they’ve gone from not-really-dating to this without ever actually talking about it.

“So I think we’re living together.” He says one morning, leaning up against the kitchen counter with a cup of coffee in his hand.

Jo makes a highly unladylike snorting noise and barely looks up from the paper she’s reading. “No shit, Winchester. By the way, where’s my nice silver knife? The six-inch one, with that mother-of-pearl handle?”

“Saw it under the coffee table yesterday.” Sam takes a drink of his lukewarm coffee. “So…what does that make us? Dating?”

Jo talks around a messy mouthful of blueberry muffin. “Sounds like one way of looking at it.” She’s sort of spewing crumbs everywhere as she circles an apparently interesting obituary in her coffee-stained copy of the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s a little disgusting. Sometimes Sam swears Jo was raised by wolves, and he tells her so.

“Don’t you go insulting my mother, Winchester. We’ll both kick your ass.” She brandishes a blueberry-stained finger and gives him her best don’t you fuck with me face.

Sam laughs, shakes his head, and loves her.

When Sam wakes up, over a year later, to the crash in the living room, Jo’s already out of bed and crouched next to the bedroom door, a knife in her hand and a finger to her lips, mouthing shhhhh at him. He points at himself and gestures to the left, and she nods and creeps silently out into the hallway, going to the right.

Two minutes later, he’s pulling Dean up off the floor, asking him what the hell are you doing here, Dean and Jo’s flipping on the lights, knife tucked handily away in the pocket of her sweatpants as she assesses their visitor. Dean takes (full, roving, obviously impressed) notice of her immediately, and Sam rolls his eyes and says “Dean, this is my girlfriend, Jo.”

Jo, of course, knows who Dean is. “Oh. Hi, Dean.” She sticks out a hand for Dean to shake, which seems to throw him off a little bit, but he shakes her hand anyways. “Could you maybe not break into the apartment in the middle of the night next time you want to visit? We have these things called phones that work great.”

If Dean looked taken aback before, he looks faintly baffled now, and he gets out an “uh, sure, I guess?” before Sam interrupts to ask him, again, what he’s doing here.

“Uh, I gotta borrow you for a minute, Sam. To talk about–“ he casts a glance at Jo that is probably supposed to look significant “–some private family business.”

It’s two in the morning, and Sam is too tired for this. “No. Whatever you want to say, you can say in front of her.”

Dean straightens up immediately, and his tone is somewhere between indignant and smart-ass. “Okay. Dad hasn’t been home for a few days.”

Sam wants desperately to just go back to bed and not have to deal with this right now. “And? How is this any different from all the other times he hasn’t been home for a few days?”

“Dad’s on a hunting trip, and he hasn’t been home for a few days. “ His brother’s pointed emphasis is fairly obvious.

Jo’s the one rolling her eyes now. “Oh, so this is that kind of conversation. Don’t bother with the cloak and dagger, sweetcheeks, I know all about the monsters in the closet.”

Dean looks properly dumbfounded and Sam kind of wants to beam with pride, in between reveling in the fact that he doesn’t have to censor this conversation and wishing that his feet weren’t so cold. “I told you, anything you want to say to me you can say in front of her.”

“You told her?” Dean sounds angry now. “You told her the big family secret? I thought you were all gung-ho about normal and safe and not hunting ever, ever, ever again, so help you God?”

“Whoa. Easy, tiger.” Jo steps in front of Dean, arms extended and tiny but confident in between him and Sam. “Sam didn’t tell me anything. I already knew. So lay off, okay?”

Dean cools down for a little, apparently pacified for the moment. “Whatever. Dad’s missing, Sam. He was working a case down in Jericho and then he just dropped off the grid. I can’t get a hold of him, and…I don’t want to do this alone, okay?”

Sam’s about to refuse – interview on Monday, done with hunting, etc, etc – but Jo beats him to it.

“Have him home by Monday, Dean,” she yawns. “I’m going back to bed.”

“Jo!” He knows his voice cracks a little. He…ignores that. “I’ve got an interview on Monday! Law school, future on a platter, remember?”

“Thus you being home by Monday. Go. Find your dad and hang out with your brother and burn some corpses in my name.”

“But–“

Jo gives him a Look and points towards the door. “Go. There will be cookies and sex when you come back. Lots of sex.”

Dean looks simultaneously horrified and proud. Despite the fact that he’s unhappy with this whole situation, Sam laughs at his brother’s face all the way out to the Impala, so amused that he forgets to be angry.

When he comes back from Jericho tired and bruised and just wanting to forget, he finds the door of their apartment open half an inch, muffled whispers audible from behind it. He quickly takes out and cocks the gun that he hasn’t given back to Dean and makes his way in, making as little sound as he can manage.

Inside, Jo is sitting on the couch twirling her father’s knife dispassionately, and Brady, who he hasn’t seen in weeks, is tied to a chair inside a devil’s trap that looks like it might have been drawn with crayons, or possibly mustard. His eyes are wide and angry and holy shit, completely black, and he grimaces at Sam through the gag in his mouth as he makes his way into the living room.

“Sam!” Jo’s got bruises on her face and on her wrists, and a bandage around her side, but seems otherwise intact, and she’s smiling – though it’s a grim version of her usual smile.

“Brady and I were just having the most interesting talk.” She stops twirling the knife, holds it steady and points to the seat next to her.

“Sit down and join us?”