Dean had always felt like he knew Jo better than he actually did.
He babysat her and Sam, he patched up her scraped knees and scolded them both when she and Sam didn’t get along, and he knew her greatest fears. It may have been years since he’d done any of that, but he certainly didn’t feel like he was a total stranger to her, even with the considerable chunk of time between those memories and the present.
Jo was an adult now, twenty-four years old to Sam’s twenty-six, and Dean had no idea if she remembered as much of him as he remembered of her; her older brother by circumstance, though not by blood.
That was, as far as he knew.
He watched her across the way in Bobby’s kitchen, moving comfortably in the tight space, seemingly indifferent to the feeling of Dean’s eyes lingering on her. She must have felt him staring.
Despite her refusing to take him up on his offer, Jo invited Dean up to the room she and Ellen were sharing. They slipped away while everyone else was preoccupied—though Cas might have noticed them sneaking up the stairs and just did the polite thing and kept quiet. For a little while, they’d have privacy, and maybe talking to her would kill Dean’s primal urges.
He found it increasingly harder to not think about sleeping with Jo when they were alone in a room together, sitting on a cot that groaned every time either of them moved. The squeaking wail might sound like her, and Dean struggled to shake that thought. He wanted her bad, and he was doing a terrible job hiding it.
“Y’know, there’s a reason I shot you down aside from ‘protecting my virtue,’” she smiled, and he saw a flash of someone familiar yet distant cross her face. “My mom doesn’t think I know, and that I don’t go through her things when she leaves.”
Dean raised an eyebrow, created a facade like he still wasn’t fixated on exactly who she resembled—not to a T, but close enough that he felt like he should be splashing his face with cold water, knocking those feelings out of himself. What would Dad think?
“And what reason would that be?”
She tipped her head side to side, carefree, like all the weight from earlier had lifted off her shoulders already. Left her bright and sunny again, the little girl he’d watched over like a hawk and the sixteen-year-old who hadn’t made her crush on him a secret. A brief view into what a normal, well-adjusted person could be like and how unattainable that would be for Dean.
“She has this stash of letters she never sent, all addressed to your dad from the months she was pregnant with me. Mostly innocuous, but there was this one, towards the end…”
She looked nervous, her eyebrows knit together and her dark eyes fixed on Dean. “I didn’t want to believe it at first, but the way she wrote about him, what she tells me about him when you two aren’t around—it makes sense.”
Dean knew where this was going. He knew, and he wanted to shut her up right now. If she didn’t say it, it’d be like it never existed at all, and he wouldn’t have to address that something was just plain wrong with his brain chemistry.
Her eyes were bottomless pits and Dean was stuck in free fall. He placed his hand on her thigh, warm and firm under his grasp, the same one he’d held while he patched up and kissed her bloody knees. There was no point trying to stop the fall, but he grabbed every tether he could, forced himself to stay still while she looked at him like there was something deeply wrong with him. Of course she’d pick up on it, perceptive as she was.
“Dean?” Her voice was small, echoing as he toppled at a million miles per hour.
He stood up fast from the cot, the safest thing he could have done when his heart was pounding in the back of his throat and every instinct told him to crawl on top of her and do her. It’d be unforgivable if he did: perverted, twisted, eight million kinds of wrong. Just once, he wanted to act on those feelings that seemed to attach themselves only to people that he wasn’t supposed to feel that way about. Jo, the younger version of Mom, Sam, they all spiraled behind his eyelids, confronting him, asking what it was that made him such a fuck-up that there would always be a part of him that wanted what he couldn’t have.
“Dad wouldn’t’ve done that.”
She shook her head, like that’d help soothe the churning inside of him. “I don’t think he meant it; I think he was just being a reckless man and my mom was being a reckless woman. It’s what hunters do, right?”
He didn’t know, he couldn’t have known if Ellen never said anything, but Dean still felt like he’d been betrayed and all he could do was curl up on himself like a dying bug. He needed to get out of there, he needed to get back to Bobby and Ellen and Cas and Sam, though in this state he didn’t feel safe being alone with Sam, either. At least he wouldn’t feel like he was corrupting the innocent if something happened with Sam, but there was no way he’d let Dean in.
Jo, on the other hand, seemed insistent on him staying, but he didn’t know if she was aware of the one-sided tension in the room. It was easier to think it was one-sided.
“How long have you known?” He still didn’t believe it, he wanted that fact to be swallowed back down her throat and kept in her belly where it couldn’t roll around in Dean’s head, seep into his blood and linger with the rest of the lust he could never act on.
“A few years. Thought you’d wanna know if we’re gonna die tomorrow,” her voice was light as air.
He looked at her now, really took in the sight of her as she stood to meet him—his sister. Dean saw Mary in her, and he wondered for a moment if she was brought from the past, the real firstborn who grew up six years behind him. Maybe she was left on Ellen’s doorstep, maybe any number of things could have happened but what Dean knew for sure was that Dad rebounded faster than he would have liked to imagine, and Jo was the result.
With that knowledge of the shared blood coursing through their veins, a part of him wanted to ask just how much they shared, really. He hoped there was no judgment in this room, but he didn’t know how he’d live with himself if they left that room with Jo seeing him differently—God forbid, unable to look at him.
Dean moved to the door, he couldn’t look at her without picturing her in a way he was never meant to see her, and Jo spoke to his back: “It doesn’t change my mind about anything, though.”
He left without another word, nausea and want making him uneasy.