Story: one to omega

Summary: Jo Harvelle's life is a) The Dean Network: All Winchester, All the Time, b) a comedy of errors, minus the actual comedy, c) complicated, d) all about choices.

Notes: Er. Because I liked Jo, I really did. And because this was easier to write than the goddamn Ruby epic I cannot handle. I'm starting to think that I should just write back stories for all of the women of Supernatural, because I find them all infinitely more interesting than the guys. In a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure kind of way.

Disclaimer: Nope. Not even gonna try.

The day Jo Harvelle is born, her daddy decimates a pack of vampires and limps into the hospital room in time for her mom to glare knowingly and promise him a week on the couch (which feels like it's stuffed with rocks, but he knows better than to complain) before handing over her limp, curled-up little new-baby body.

She isn't born under a bad sign, but she isn't born under a particularly auspicious one either.

1. Hunters are:

a) Crazy

b) Divine

c) Possessed

d) Sick

"Honey," her daddy says in July (June? August? It's hot, dusty, but then again the Roadhouse is always hot and dusty in her memories, like she's swiped a brush leaking red paint across her life), "don't you ever fall in love with a Hunter."

She's got this feeling—even at seven, she knows better than to ignore them—that he isn't the only daddy to tell his little princess this bit of advice, but she rolls with it because her daddy is almost always right, and when he isn't she's still got her mom.

"Sure thing, Daddy," she says, and gives him a considering glance from underneath the hair that's fallen out of her pigtails. "If I promise not to—will you teach me how to throw knives?"

He says yes, even though her mom refuses to talk to him for a week.

2. Jo Harvelle and Dean Winchester:

a) are destined to be, like PB&J and Fred & Ginger and decapitations & vampires

b) first meet a Sunday in June, hot enough to lick salt off of asphalt and it wouldn't hurt until you had a shot down your throat, while she is cleaning her daddy's favorite shotgun and he's a compact little almost-teenager with a chip on his shoulder

c) will never meet again, after (this) moment

d) aren't destiny but they're a nicer fit than some of the other sick shit that hunters make do with

The day her Daddy dies, Jo cleans every gun in his collection. She breaks up a potential bar fight using a bit of little-girl charm. She gets her hair cut, because it's the third Tuesday of an odd-numbered month. She irons her only black dress.

She also chops down the four cherry trees he planted three summers before using a hatchet and eventually an old machete. When a beat-up Impala brings back his body, she's already soaked the wood in salt and built a pyre.

Jo is nothing if not thorough.

3. "I'll call you," is the _____ lie Dean tells Jo.

a) first

b) last

c) hardest

d) most transparent

Her mom's idea of a sex talk goes something like this:

"Anybody but a Hunter, sweetheart, and you damn well use condoms and birth control, you hear?"

Jo is noticing a theme.

4. On a crossroads in the middle of Iowa, Jo has a busted engine and gets propositioned in a same afternoon by a quick-talking, AC/DC-blaring teenager half her age by the name of Ben Braedon, who has a grin like sex on a stick and fixes her carborator before slipping her his phone number.

a) True

b) False

Fitting in doesn't come easily to Jo. She isn't really that surprised by it, except her parents had always told her that blue eyes and blonde hair would get her places that her (extensive, but who's counting?) knife collection wouldn't, and she's always assumed that charm would help her at college, just like it helped her at the Roadhouse.

It turns out that being able to hold her liquor doesn't endear her to the rugby team; her breasts make an enemy out of most of the sorority sisters; and the geeks think that she's a slut. She makes it with the other weird, lonely people, but Jo always used to think that the point of college was to get out of the Roadhouse and meet people who aren't psychotic.

The weird, lonely people are nice and lovely, but Jo hates being a fucking cliché and she's not going to be a biker bitch's concubine just to make a point about her parents not loving her enough.

So she says good-bye to college. Imagine that.

5. Jo's favorite song is:

a) Carry on Wayward Son, Kansas

b) Devil Went Down to Georgia, Charlie Daniels

c) I Love Rock 'n Roll, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

d) Dream On, Aerosmith

You get to be the best at something by being cocky is the last thing Jo ever learns about hunting. For a while she plays at hunting the way she plays at her life; she's good but not flashy, and she may be better than she shows, but she's saving it for something.

Two years on the road, and Jo gets a swagger. Hunters don't trust women, generally, and it's a crappy, sexist field but it's Jo's home and her goddamn life, and if she has to get into bar fights to prove her point—well, she learned how to win them from the best.

When a man who should know better gets grabby, she shows him the heel of her boot before she considers showing him what's in her pants, and she always tips the waitresses generously afterwards (she's been the one on her hands and knees scrapping at broken glass, and it fucking sucks).

She gets a reputation. Hunters stop getting grabby. She runs into Bobby Singer once in Wisconsin, and he buys her a beer and a shot as they talk shop (werewolf in Portland). That goes down in the books as a major victory.

6. Dean is:

a) the cure to Jo's Daddy Issues

b) the alpha and the omega

c) a dick; but a hot dick who's got more emotional problems than Charles Manson and the potential for something like—well, something, certainly

d) a guy who comes in and out of Jo's life with depressing regularity

She sends her mom semi-regular emails from the road; sometimes they're light and carefree like Hey mom, just nailed a chupacabra in the Everglades. I'm thinking about catching a boat to Bermuda or something, soak up some sun and see if you really can cook meat on the asphalt down there and sometimes they get rabidly introspective to the point where she never presses send like Why did you hide for so long the truth about Daddy and hunting and why did you never let me out and grow and why am I such a problem child and sometimes they're quick words between jobs like Stop worrying, mom, I was in the hospital for, like, two seconds and only seven stitches. Honestly. I'm fine.

7. The way Jo figures it:

a) Dean leaving was the best thing that ever happened to her

b) without her mom, she'd probably be dead by now

c) Hunters are dicks, but she's kind of a cunt, so there's always that

d) she'll never be good enough but she'll get damn close

Being a Hunter isn't a life choice or lifestyle, at this point. It's everything. Call her romantic, but Jo thinks that you're born a Hunter, and the danger comes from finding that out. Sometimes she wishes that she just never found out; that she spent her whole life living bored in suburbia or in an apartment managing her mom's bar; that she was unhappy and incomplete but she was safe.

Because being a Hunter means being unhappy and incomplete and unsafe. (And a bitch. But that's kind of the least of her worries. More the point: she's run out of trunk space for her knives.)

8. Jo wants to go out:

a) in a blaze of glory

b) in bed at ninety with twelve kids and fourteen grandkids arrayed around her and none of them are Hunters

c) in Dean Winchester's arms after decimating an entire coven of witches (by herself), as he rues the day he ever left her

d) _________________