Winter Sunshine

---

Jo is young when her father dies. Young-er, anyway. Like any other child who can't imagine their parents as anything other than invincible. Can't imagine them not coming home, not walking through the door.

An hour after the news comes, she isn't young anymore.

---

For weeks after they get news of his death, long after the shell-shocked grief fades from Ellen's face replaced by a hardened knowledge, Jo will jump and turn when the door swings open, at a certain timbre of voice, at a familiar footstep. It drives her crazy; the the irrational subconscious leap of hope, and the inevitable crash and fall.

She cries a little out of sheer frustration at night.

Eventually it goes away.

---

Hunters got a death wish or a mission, someone tells her once. Be it vengeance or righteous bullshit or a desire for oblivion, they've got something in their heads that is missing in more healthy people.

Jo wants to kill them-wants to cut them up and strike them down and riddle them with salt-and she knows for damn sure there's that something in her head. Sometimes she feels like she's doing it for vengeance or justice or to stop some other girl from having her daddy never come home, but mostly she thinks there's just something in her head, like something she inherited from her father, which meant that if the boogey man crawled out from under the bed she'd go for its throat.

---

A hunter comes in possessed by a ghost one time when she's wiping down the bar, Ellen out doing some thing or another. He's got a weird look in his eyes and doesn't order his regular; she puts her hand on the shotgun under the bar and keeps her stare on him.

He mutters to himself, then looks up at her-not at her face. He focuses on the little cross necklace she's wearing, then her blonde hair.

"Whore!" He shrieks, and swarms over the counter, way too fast-adrenaline jump starts in her veins and she swing the gun up, he slaps it aside and her spine hits the ground, his hands trying to fasten around her throat. She's flung up an arm, pressing it to her throat, and he can't get a good grip, and she presses the muzzle against his breastbone and pulls the trigger. At that distance, rock salt does enough damage.

Blood tastes like copper and adrenaline is jump-started in her veins, fizzling and popping like sweet champagne. She drags the corpse into the back room and turns on the jukebox to dance, wild and crazy in time to the pounding of her blood.

Ellen comes rushing in a little later and catches her-she stares at her with the strangest expression, the mixture of wounded and amused that means Jo's just reminded her of Jo's dad.

But all she says is, "thank god you haven't hit puberty."

And then she makes Jo mop the floor while they bury the corpse.

---

Jo eventually does hit puberty and she finds a cute boy from the local high school, with floppy brown hair and dark eyes. She kisses him in his car and finds herself monumentally bored; the touch of human skin is distant and disinteresting compared to the deep flare of fight-or-flight and the hot rush of triumph.

She doesn't see him again: Ellen pretends she isn't relieved and suspicious in equal measures.

---

She doesn't try it with hunters; the crazy or dead-eyed strangers that mostly wander in are a risk she's not interested in taking. Instead she pulls together files, works out clues in the dead of night with her lip caught in her teeth.

Anger almost gives her that rush, arguing with her mother. "I want to hunt!" She shouts, and means, I want to feel alive. But Jo is smart enough to know if her mother heard that, she'd never leave the bar.

---

John Winchester has different eyes; predatory ones.

She went to a zoo once, on a road trip when her dad was still alive, and there had been a tiger there, pacing close to the miniature ravine they used to separate it from the bars and goggling spectators. His eyes call up misty memories; the measuring in them, the lazy knowledge of their own power.

Her mother talked about him before; she thought another hunter. She didn't expect to like him, or respect him.

Sometimes when she's talking to him her veins get that familiar fizz; the prickle at the back of her neck that says careful, beware. The man is just as dangerous as the things he hunts.

---

She's a teenage girl; of course she gets restless and lonely. She inevitably has to push friends away; clothes she has to toss because of blood an injured hunter spilled, bruises from persisting in learning to fight, secrets and close-mouthed smiles and looks.

She likes to run. When her lungs burn and her legs ache and she's stung in tiny scratches from branches, she likes it. Feels clean and free.

The track coach is impressed-he talks to her after school, she declines with a little curious ache. Family, she explains. Job. She wonders if she'd even like it, but it feels like a missed chance anyway.

Normal life, she dismisses, I don't need that.

Still, on odd moments she wonders.

---

There's some kind of prom, or homecoming, or dance. A couple girls in class ask her about it; she stares at them, uncomprehending. Three boys ask her, shyly, and she tells them she doesn't plan to go.

One night, she casually asks her mom about a dress.

Ellen is pretty happy about anything that distracts her from hunting, so she pulls out something from her own closet; white satiny fall, and Jo puts it on, models it in the mirror. It fits okay, a little loose in the bust. A smile touches Ellen's lips and she says she might know enough to fix that. Jo wonders when her mother had to do something as ordinary and domestic as sewing. She wonders, as an afterthought, if her mother minds how long it's probably been.

One of the boys writes her a poem. It is insipid, drippily sentimental and poorly versed. She's flattered in an absurd way anyway.

Three stanzas down, it compares her to a winter sunshine. Bright but untouchable, it says, and she frowns, loses interest and drops it in a drawer, walks away.

She accepts an offer from one of the boys to pick her up, puts on the dress and a little makeup and even a little perfume and waits.

Then ten minutes before the guy is supposed to arrive John Winchester staggers in, bleeding profusely from his shoulder and stomach. She runs in her little white heels from the jukebox, catches him as he crashes to his knees, blood spilling across her hands and skirt. He shudders, grits something incomprehensible between his teeth and she screams for her mother, applying pressure as well as she can.

The boy is early-opens the door to bandages and blood and poppy-red stains on her white dress. They're frozen for a minute, staring at him, and Jo gets to her feet and tells him he needs to go.

He says her name, and babbles something about blood, and are you all right, and she just tells him to go.

He turns and stumbles out and Jo knows then what it will take her mother a much longer time to realize; Jo Harvelle has no place in their ordinary, cotton-candy lives.

She looks after him for a moment with the same queer little ache, and then shrugs, turns, and runs to get stitches and antiseptic.