Oh. That's all her brain seems to have once she's inside Dean's arms. Oh. The least profound, yet overwhelming, yet relieved, feeling. Solid. Warm. Safe. In one piece. Her fingers ball into his shirt without caring if it is in any better, worse, or similar state. Like maybe she could ball the entirety of herself into the space of Dean Winchester's arms.

When he pulls back, she has a second long enough to feel an odd stroke of déjà vu—about his face being this close?—before his fingers cup her cheek. She has only half a millisecond to feel the battering ram that pushes through the edge of her, about to drag her with it. Even as the last ditch understanding sirens behind it, and Jo tried to make her hand let go of him, it was already too late.

Her eyes go wide, and then her back contorts with a shudder. And then another.

( It's a weird overlap this time.
Jo's not utterly obliterated by the unknown.

She knows it now; even still bleed-burned from the first time, it's not foreign. Her weight doesn't free fall, and her legs don't plummet out from under her right after Dean yells for her to get back like that was a skill Jo was ever going to learn. Retreat. She doesn't lose the texture of that shirt knotted under one set of her fingers when Dean sweeps her off the ground and goes running off with her down that street.

She can still feel the weight of her body on her feet, even when she's unable to do more than half-situp. Everything is the same, and it's not. Or it is, but it's like Dean's in starker relief. The fear in his eyes inside the store. The inability to argue that her plan was a good one. When everything is fuzzy, except her refusal to be made useless, worthless, capable of at least this much more before the darkness swallows everything.

Except it is coming, and the memory catches up with the déjà vu.

With Dean this close. With the joke, that isn't funny. That she won't have, even as she tries to push through it for a smile. The detonator. The gun. The cup of his hand against her face and her hair, and the press of his lips against her forehead, just the strike of too long, decimating that last few inches of will that have kept her eyes mostly dry and her chin up for hours. More exhausting than bleeding out and almost more necessary than that blood.

Dean kissing her until he wasn't, until it was just his forehead resting against hers, the pressure of both of them leaning into each other, tears in her eyes, and the feeling of something so much bigger than her dying between them, too. )