[ CATCH-ALL ] We'll have the days we break

[tobeclosetohim]

Who: Jo Harvelle + OPEN/CLOSED
When: May
Where: Cadens, Libertas, Nocwich, Horizon
What: A Catch-All
Warnings: Swearing, Temper, Drinking, Killing Things

And we'll have the scars to prove it
We'll have the bombs that we save
But we'll have the heart not to lose it


[ starters below. wanderlustlover, plotting plurk,
or at ɑรรɑรรiɳcɑptɑiɳ#6353 to plot. ]

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[tobeclosetohim]

"Excuse you?"

Jo has no eyes—or similarly lied-promises—for the trepidacious storekeeper person if Jo even notices her as more than a slight movement at the corner of her vision. The one that's all but fuzzing slight r e d all around those edges while this fucking asshole talks at her from the other the fucking wall of his too-tall stupid not-even-his body, designing to look at whoever else it is but not at her.

"You did not quote locations at me like I'm some goddamn child."

She not even touching the part about her home, their house, her people, the people she fucking thought it was fine to talk about, even on the glancing edge with him, which was probably part of his whole fucking plan to start with. It's a brand laced in heat and smoking, and she's not going to touch it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't burn to the bone.

[familysucks]

"You don't get to complain about being treated like you're young until you're at least a thousand."

Treating her like a child wasn't specifically what he was going for, but it's an attitude he can't quite ditch, one that works its way into every held sigh and suppressed roll of his eyes. Michael is used to being the oldest thing in a radius of a few billion light years—the only adult in the room. Being ripped from his home reality has changed a few things but it hasn't changed that.

Michael gives her a steady look for a moment. He notes the anger on her face, her features angled like well-sharpened knives, the soul ablaze like a holy oil molotov cocktail. Whether or not it's wise, he isn't intimidated.

"What do you want, Jo? What are you hoping to get from this encounter?"

Since she's apparently not leaving, and neither is he, he goes back to what he was doing: shopping. Michael picks another bottle off a shelf and turns it around to read the label.

[tobeclosetohim]

"Fuck that. I didn't say young. I said a child."

She doesn't care if he is older than dirt and dinosaurs now.
He did better than that as a wallflower milksop.

Which is absolutely beside the point, since that guy?

Didn't fucking ever exist.
Just a douchebag angel lying it.
No wonder he was grade-A shit at it.

"You know exactly what I meant." What she'd said wasn't esoteric or hard to follow, especially not now. If he wants to talk about people being fucking childish about their responses. Labeling off goddamn portals and their home away from home mini-cages, where they're supposed to feel freer as though it's not just one more offshoot in the maze. Like him.

Just one more stupid step in shit from their world hitting here.
And she fell for it. Which burns, and she'd be glad to set him on fire for it.

"You do not get to act like that's cute. Or ask me about my home, like you have some right to know. You have absolutely fucking no access to it. Nor do you get any information about it, or anyone in it, you piece of shit."

[familysucks]

If she wants to stop being perceived as a child, Jo needs to stop throwing tantrums in public.

There's something familiar in her attitude, in the anger that's one step shy of exploding out of her skin into violence—but Michael doesn't recognize himself from the outside, so he can't place it. He continues to be a brick wall in response, though a light frown does finally crease his brow. Language, young lady.

"Half right. I act as I see fit."

She's got a point about him having no access to the Free Cities, at least not in any practical, physical sense. It's frankly the way he prefers it. No little siblings underfoot, no hunters on his back. Solvunn is a retreat. It's not freedom, but it isn't about freedom for Michael. He's never truly known it before, has never yearned to be free of duty and responsibility the way some of his brothers and sisters did. Abraxas is simply the difference between existence and oblivion.

Jo should ask Castiel about setting him on fire, see how that experience worked out for him. Satisfying for a moment, maybe, but it doesn't stick.

"You didn't answer the question. What do you want?"

If Jo is after the why of it all, she'll have to be more specific.

The Return

[tobeclosetohim]

The flicker of disgust or annoyance or judgment or whatever the fuck it is that creases his brow when she keeps spitting words at him is only accelerant. Good. She wants to all but shove her anger and whatever the hell else it is in this wash under his goddamn skin. It's hate. Obviously, it's hate. She hates that she touched him—even in some small, normal, stupid, average way she'd trusted him.

Even if it was just being whoever he'd been presenting himself as.

It's too tense a frisson to let herself slide where that wants to keep tracking.

She doesn't want that, as he stands rigid and unremorseful and unapologetic and unashamed, just like she expected. Because he's a goddamn fucking angel who put her boys through unspeakable shit that she's all too aware of. And somehow, even knowing it, she got had, too. Even if nowhere nearly on any kind of scale of the same sort. Because she found out first. Before he could do whatever the hell he was going to—which, of course, comes spilling out, bitter bile even with a two-edged weapon, biting both ways, but she never has backed down from dealing herself damage to throw it out.

"What was your plan? Huh?" That second part gets a sharp note and gesture. "See how long this could go? How much I might trust, or tell you, eventually? Give you a fucking in?"

[familysucks]

Whom he presents himself as is as much Michael as the being that had once wanted to borrow Dean Winchester's body. Nobody gets the full picture from a handful of meetings. How can billions of years of existence fit into a few hours, a few conversations? Even the man who'd spent an effective millennia and change in the Cage with him couldn't grasp him from the tip of one wing to the other.

Hell, sometimes it feels like even his own brothers don't know him.

Unaffected he is and unaffected he largely remains, but Michael's impassive expression is tinted by confusion. Plan, what plan? God had had a grand plan—or so they'd thought—Heaven planned, Lucifer and even some of the lower angels schemed. Abraxas had featured in no one's plans, so it's puzzling to him to see their meeting as anything but an accident.

"An 'in' to what? There is nothing I want from you and yours, and there is nothing you could tell me about them that I don't already know." At least from their homeworld timeline. Michael is further ahead than any of them. There's surely been events in Abraxas that he knows nothing of, but he's long past caring what his supposed true vessel is up to. "My only intention was to put off this."

He gestures at her, like someone trying to wave off an irritating fly. Your buzzing is loud and it's annoying him.

You love me & them

[tobeclosetohim]

She hates that those words land hard and hot, and h u r t.

Faster and truer than she can even prepare for them. Tell herself all she wanted that he was a goddamn dickwad sandwiched between two wings, who repeatedly fucked over Sam and Dean, and still it lands too far inside her chest. Too close to a voice she'll never tear out. You never mattered. You're no good. I never wanted anything from you. Makes her chest pull in. That same pain lands for a skitteringly brief but utterly unchecked stab in her copper eyes, too.

All too real, all too blisteringly screaming w r o n g in every cell of her body.
It shouldn't fucking matter. What he thinks about her or anything else. Ever.

And then it flips, like a knife thrown up in her hand, caught to be thrown—Flint in every bone.

"I don't believe you and your smokestack of shit word. If that were even half true, you would have fucking nutted up months ago and done it then. Never shown your face again. Not drug this charade out for fuck all no reason, and stayed away in your stupid little cult hole and never come out again."