Jo's not prepared, after that last foray of rolling bland nothingness, to suddenly get accosted with something that looks real. Real enough to send a slight shiver down her spine, all alertness and familiarity at that long road and foilage that groups like pure darkness. There's a rightness to it that shifts her whole posture.
A large part of her was deeply relieved at it all, and the other keyed to a different higher note of awareness, readiness. Something she knows, something she calls home. Everything else comes into an easier focus from there. Her brow wrinkles when she follows Dean's glance to the utterly out-of-place and out of context Singer Salvage Yard, then to —
Jo doesn't freeze.
She goes still. So very, very still.
Every part of her body. Except for her copper eyes, which can't stop moving. The coarse red-brown wood. The dot lights she can't remember how many she changed. The sometimes fritzy satellite dish that was all Ash's baby to coax. The chimney. The general run-of-the-mill country, backroad, dustiness roughness told the everyday traveler to keep rolling and find somewhere else. Somewhere nicer, cleaner, closer to the city.
She saw it as rubble. It is rubble. It's standing there. That's impossible. It's impossible. It's impossible. The refrains slams on a repeat with her too quick heartbeat. Before she can even get to the words what did you do — and god knows how they might have come out of her mouth mid-traction — Dean is talking again and trying to explain. Trying to normalize this daunting expansion impossibility explosion on fast and slow at the same time.
Jo can't hear him. His voice. The words. They happen. Fall into her, unable to be avoided. But she can't hear him. Not over the existence of the building she's staring at. The only place that was ever home. The one that made her heart and broke it just as mercilessly. The one she was denied. The one that was supposed to stay there in the rearview.
The one that didn't. Fire and screams and nightmares that aren't real. It died. It's dead. It's gone. Everyone in it, too. Harvelle's Roadhouse burned to the ground. But not a Harvelle. Like a ship without its captain. Like she couldn't tell her mother was half-rudderless without it, without the life she'd chosen. What a black irony that was.
It keeps standing there, dwarfing her vision, pin holing to only itself.
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A large part of her was deeply relieved at it all, and the other keyed to a different higher note of awareness, readiness. Something she knows, something she calls home. Everything else comes into an easier focus from there. Her brow wrinkles when she follows Dean's glance to the utterly out-of-place and out of context Singer Salvage Yard, then to —
Jo doesn't freeze.
She goes still. So very, very still.
Every part of her body. Except for her copper eyes, which can't stop moving. The coarse red-brown wood. The dot lights she can't remember how many she changed. The sometimes fritzy satellite dish that was all Ash's baby to coax. The chimney. The general run-of-the-mill country, backroad, dustiness roughness told the everyday traveler to keep rolling and find somewhere else. Somewhere nicer, cleaner, closer to the city.
She saw it as rubble. It is rubble. It's standing there. That's impossible. It's impossible. It's impossible. The refrains slams on a repeat with her too quick heartbeat. Before she can even get to the words what did you do — and god knows how they might have come out of her mouth mid-traction — Dean is talking again and trying to explain. Trying to normalize this daunting expansion impossibility explosion on fast and slow at the same time.
Jo can't hear him. His voice. The words. They happen. Fall into her, unable to be avoided. But she can't hear him. Not over the existence of the building she's staring at. The only place that was ever home. The one that made her heart and broke it just as mercilessly. The one she was denied. The one that was supposed to stay there in the rearview.
The one that didn't. Fire and screams and nightmares that aren't real. It died. It's dead. It's gone. Everyone in it, too. Harvelle's Roadhouse burned to the ground. But not a Harvelle. Like a ship without its captain. Like she couldn't tell her mother was half-rudderless without it, without the life she'd chosen. What a black irony that was.
It keeps standing there, dwarfing her vision, pin holing to only itself.
"How."
She can't even parse that it should be 'why' yet.