abraxaslogs | so many wars we fought, so many things we're not

"I should pluck you bald as a baby just for that,"
Jo rolled her eyes at the replacement name. "Stop wiggling."

There's a momentary urge to grab his something—it starts as a thought about the generic grabbing his shoulders, but there's so much more wings everywhere that shoulders would take a few to find—but it turns into nothing. God. She's never actually been this close to them. She had seen them across from her, had them thrown out over her under a collapsing building, but never from right here, from right behind.

Never considered reaching out to touch them.

"Tell me about some of those other times." Jo's hand hovers, unsure where to start or how. Top, bottom. Wings aren't like hair. She'd never wanted a bird for a pet. Jo snorted, quiet, as the thought connected in a second way right after. Then, she reached out to brush a collection of the small feathers down the right direction, one of the smallest disastrous of the helter-skelter mess of patches, sending herself back to words. "Other ways this place had messed with everyone before I got here."

He huffs, absently mutters another disgruntled comment under his breath — something along the lines of I freakin' dare you, but ultimately does as he's been told. Settles in, stops wiggling, instead sitting stiffly like he's waiting for her to jab him with a safety pin or something. Obviously no such treachery happens. Kind of the opposite, actually. Fingers go threading through the most irritated, itchy tangle of feathers, straightening and orienting in a way that feels not all too dissimilar from having fingernails run through his hair.

Two or three more seconds pass before the muscles in his back start to relax of their own accord — and eventually as they talk, he finds himself slumping. Softening. Leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees and clasp his hands together between them.

"Spent a couple days sharing dreams with each other. Nightmares, mostly. Before that, it was memories. Bumping into another summoned had like a fifty-fifty shot of throwing you both face-first into your own personal history. Few of us learned a little too much about each other that way."

It gets easier with that first patch. She has more of an idea of direction, and she's starting to work out how to move them gently from the wrong direction to the right one. She doesn't let it change the set of her mouth, but they're delicate, which alone feels unnerving. Breakable. Like a wrong move too far might snap them. Make that joke they were tossing all too real.

"Wow," is for his answer, as she's lifting carefully to turn some of the longest ones back into the apparent pattern and set they should be in rather than twisted and fluffed. "Not feeling too bad about missing any of that."

It's half a lie. Jo doesn't want to have had to deal with it—to have been forced to share her dreams, nightmares, or memories—but it doesn't go so far as being fine with the other hand of that balance, being he'd been here alone. Or not alone; him and Cas; them alone. She'd rather take that hell and help than leave them in the wind, spinning.

In spite of himself, his eyes slip to something half-lidded. Pointed at nothing, seeing nothing, all his attention devoted to the gentle relief happening just beyond his shoulder blades.

This is weird, isn't it? This is totally weird, these things aren't supposed to feel good. They're not supposed to be there at all, but here he is like a girl getting his hair braided. Hollow bones shift beneath Jo's hands as he absently, unconsciously fans them out to give her easier access.

"Yeah, no kidding. You getting to see Hell up close and personal is the last thing on my to-do list, somewhere just below sky diving."

As Dean relaxes by increments as this goes, Jo feels a strange, quiet, utterly surprising sort of pleasure at that this is more than working. Weird (incredibly so, because the wings are still a jarring newness even months in for their rare appearances), but unexpectedly nice. Unexpected bonus points. Along the same lines is the vague fascination with how soft the feathers are, and even as she moves to the second wing, she wonders how different it would feel to run her fingers down through the feathers set the right way rather than brushing their edges and ends so carefully while straightening.

"Second to last," Jo says, and she winces because she hadn't thought those two words out before they just popped out; and wasn't that always the actual problem with her mouth half the time? It's a worthless bunt, but she adds it anyway. "But nice to know you've decided I can't go skydiving. What if that's my greatest hidden wish, hmm?"

It never goes well when she's given never's, but that's not here or there. It's just words being pushed out; she's not thinking about them or skydiving now. It's Dean's face. That day. A myriad run of expressions from desperate fear to such sadness. Too late regret. And didn't that redefine entirely why wanting more time rang in on his end?

He could clarify, he could say it's his to-do list, that she can skydive any time she damn well pleases but he'll be waving at her safely from the ground — but he doesn't. Instead, there's a compulsion to lean into this version of it, to roll with it, this interpretation where they're a unit.

What if it's my greatest hidden wish?

He shakes his head slowly once and sighs, "Well, then I guess I better figure out how to use these damn things."

So he can swoop in and save her ass when the parachute doesn't deploy.

It's a joke, but it does bring to mind a more serious what if? What if there's a situation like that, what if sometime down the road something happened and knowing how to use them could make all the difference?

Maybe it really is time to learn.

"Not to bust your ass about it—" After all, that's why she's back here, straightening angel wings that went the way of an angry chicken trying to emulate a cat with its hair all on end. "—but you seem to be failing at that so far."

Not that he had much help to go on. What with Cas gone and Lucifer not even the shadow of an option except for someone to kick right back into Hell. Or Thorne. Or both. "Have you, I don't even know, attempted not falling into the ground?"

Beat. "Or, like making them work from a stable standing point?"

Which does get to being about whether they can, or if they're just a really large problem.

Not to bust your ass about it; he grunts quietly, skeptically. Yeah, okay, sure. Appreciate all that restraint.

Kind of hard to sound annoyed when he's got both eyes closed and a sleepy-serene expression on his face, though.

"I've tried once or twice from standing, it went about as well as you'd expect."

In that it felt like doing a reverse breast-stroke through the air, but with a gust of air determined to knock him backwards on his ass.

"I'll figure it out. Maybe I just need to start... jumping outta trees. Baby birding it."

"Maybe with mats below it."

"We could look for straw-stuffed ones."

Her mind is ahead of her mouth in the equation of how well a tree would need to be along to support his weight before and with the wings, which put him further up from the ground, and out here, in whatever passed for 'the real world' in this place, where falling could fuck up a whole lot more than just some feathers bothered by the Horizon.

Jo's mostly done, though she thinks somehow, and Dean is still caved forward, shoulders and the muscles of his back looser than she's seen in a good while again. There's a temptation at the edge of her fingertips, and she's paused for a moment looking at the curved walls of white feathers, dithering on whether to reach out again and run her fingers down through the feathers to feel them that way. The way they're supposed to be.

"Pf, mats are for cowards," he scoffs gently — while thinking about how much of a coward he is, and how hard it's gonna be to find some honest-to-god mats in this the year of our lord... whatever year it is, for whatever lord this world has.

In any case, should Jo decide to reach out and follow the impulse to pet, the moment her fingertips alight on one of the feathers she'll find herself touching nothing. The wings, now straightened neatly, fold themselves politely into that nowhere-space that doesn't exist between his shoulder blades. It's only think that he blinks his eyes open, chin turned to one side to finally get a peak at her over one shoulder.

"Whatever the hell you did, I guess it worked," a little surprise, a little more gratitude. Don't ask him why that did the trick, but apparently they didn't want to put themselves away out of order — a thought that's weird enough that he really doesn't wanna dwell on it for long. The concept of those things having a mind of their own is just a little too much body horror for his taste.

Her fingers barely brush the white feathers before they vanish—Jo's chest giving some weird, foreign, utterly surprising pang—and Dean is moving. This time there isn't a wall between his antic twisting, and when she looks up, he's already looking back at her. The words come out her mouth much the way a punch would. Too fast to let herself think about it because there's too much to think about, too much to consider, and too much fall out connected in each direction, and Dean's eyes are too green over his shoulder.

(And it's a muddle of too many memories that conflict the emotion even in that now, too.)

"You kissed me."

That comment is met, for a moment, with silence. With a long pause, with no flicker of expression on his face — and then the eventual narrowing of his eyes, soft and studious, until he slowly pulls them away from her to settle them on some safe middle distance three feet from nothing. A moment after that, his head drops, and he nods slowly at the ground.

At length, he concedes it with a slightly tired, faintly hoarse, "Yeah."

He did. He doesn't have to ask what she's talking about. It only happened the once, and it's not a hard conclusion to make given what he knows she's seen today.

What he's not sure about is whether he should apologize, and if so, for what aspect of it exactly? A few different things come to mind, but they don't make it to his tongue yet. Maybe he's not that sorry.

Is there really anything you can say about dying that isn't it's messy and painful, or that she knows too deep into her bones that she doesn't want to go through it again, a third time, today, but that somehow, what might be weirdest is that she doesn't regret what she did, or how she died—that first choice on the street, or all the harder ones sitting on that floor.

(It was the only time she almost lost the war against not crying.)

"Think you skipped over that in your summary of my heroic demise."

She doesn't have to question if it was a mistake, past or present tense, not after what Dean said in the Bunker that first night. It wasn't a mistake. It was more ... the end note, the last possible say, on a completely different kind of mistake. Playing fearlessly against the clock until the clock told you that you were out of time and you'd lost. How many times had she heard a story like it across their bar?

Jo shifted, unfolding her legs for sitting crossed, and scooted to the edge of the bed beside him, letting her feet hang off. She nudged his arm with her shoulder. "It's stupid, but do you know what I thought the first time you told me I was dead—going to die—whatever?"

That quip about her heroic demise earns a breathy sound. It's not a laugh, but it is the customary, appropriate facsimile of one. The token effort of acknowledging humor without actually feeling any of it in the process.

At any rate, she's right. It wasn't a mistake, he doesn't regret it. Might regret not doing it sooner, but knowing what he does now... about himself, about his life, about what he deserves, about what the people around him shouldn't have to deal with... Knowing about his failed attempt with Lisa, and the crushing realities of what he can't actually have?

Makes that a little more complicated.

The nudge to his arm earns a gentle curve to his lips, something that echoes a smile but still manages to look sad at its core. Tired, beneath the fondness. Melancholic.

"That you should've taken a long vacation on the other side of the continent?"

He supplies, a half-hearted joke of an answer to her totally rhetorical question.

Jo can't remember what she said then. It was probably bullshit and pissing on the fire despite already being on fire. She hated being decked in the face unprepared, and nothing had stopped her shorter than that since getting here. Until earlier. Until going from just first knowing t, to just first living it. Even tatter edged and unconnected as it is.

She looks over at the bullshit response he'd give—patently him. A deflection without much effort even thrown into it. That sadness like a shape she doesn't quite know how to touch. Whether she's supposed t, insteadd she leaves it at leaning in only a little at that one point where they're touching, not even designing to comment on his.

"I didn't think that it wasn't fair or it couldn't be true." She knew what she signed up her whole heart and soul, and life to before she was in double digits. She knew what the end always would be from the beginning. "I thought-"

Jo licked her lips. Because it's stupid, itis, and it feels like reaching, even at honesty, how reckless you could get with time. With hope. "We weren't supposed to be a replay of our dads. Another chapter in that same bloody history."

Her gaze had settled on the white lines and edges of her father's initials inside her right wrist.
"That we were supposed to be different. Do better."

She leans into him, and he takes her weight gladly, a sentinel of muscle gone soft to accommodate her better. He doesn't move otherwise, his back still gently sloped, fingers interlaced, neck gently bent groundward save for the faintest tip of his chin her direction — enough that he can watch her expression as she speaks.

We weren't supposed to be a replay of our dads.

Guy screwed up. Got my dad killed. It was your father, Dean.

His eyes drop away from her as that sinks in, the low weight of hanging guilt — his, and even a little extra that doesn't belong to him. Rollover guilt that John may or may not still carry, he'll never know for sure; evidently to the back of his mind decides the safe bet is to carry it for him just in case. Someone deserves to, may as well be him.

"Jo..." he starts slowly, low, quiet. Begins and ends there for now, while he searches for a new apology he hasn't already used, one that doesn't feel cheap. Looking for the right words, a combination that may not even really exist.

Edited 2022-12-01 16:10 (UTC)

There's something to that. Not the drop of his gaze shifting from her face again, but that too too low note that takes her name like somehow it knows it too well, and it's a key she doesn't need to be told the shape of. It's impressed a little too deep right now, and maybe it's too her, but she is not sure she could handle what would happen if that key ended up in the keyhole her new memories already proved it fits; what she would do if it unlocked everything behind it.

From then, or from now.

All of it feels a few breaths away if she just looked to her other side. Which is why she didn't stay in her room, and it's why she doesn't look toward it even now, sitting in the room with it. Instead, she lifted the hand between them, arm moving against his, and tapped his thigh. Not light. Not requesting. Like it was an impatient point of order, and she made her voice a little more strident than it had been a few ago.

"We don't really need to have the conversation about how, given I'm the person who just got to die twice in the last day—" Without dying, too; what a delightful feat to avoid doing again; all of it. (~~Except.~~) "—I'm pretty sure I should have the longer face of the two of us, right?"

He's thankful for it, that interruption. That deviation from the current trajectory of his thoughts, jostled with the tap tap on his thigh.

"Fair enough," he concedes in a tone that would be light, were the weight around both of them not so heavy. Humor, the faintest attempt at it. "For what it's worth, it gets easier. Think I've died, what, two dozen times at this point? Practically a cakewalk."

That's not true. Neither the number, nor the sentiment. Dying's hard, it's just that living is harder.

"Anyway, I'm sorry you had to see it, but... it's better, probably. That you know how it all went down. Felt a little weird, me being the only one of the two of us to remember. It's like- it doesn't belong to me, you know?"

The memory, the incident, her death. It's hers. If either of them should have it, it's her — grim and unpleasant as it may be.

so many wars we fought, so many things we're not

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