Title: Blood and Anesthetic

Chapter: 20

~~~~~~~~~~

While Jo knew Cas still loved her, their relationship had been changing again for weeks. Gone was the sense of calm he’d had, of being centered. In the place of that was a growing desperation and despair that he tried to mask from her, going through the motions of each day.

As though she didn’t know him well enough by now to see the difference. He thought she couldn’t see that he was hanging on by the barest thread and that the thread was fraying.

His depression grew, finally reaching a point inside him that Jo couldn’t soothe. She was no longer the anesthetic that got him through the night. He never admitted it, still insisting she stay in his cabin, but she noticed he never said a word when she accidentally fell asleep in her cabin, not waking until morning. He’d slept alone for the first time in nearly two years.

Either he no longer felt panic for sleep or he no longer cared if he did, so high he didn’t notice she wasn’t there.

Cas’s group of women undertook a change as well. With Alexis and Maggie’s withdrawal -- the last of that group she’d mothered --, he no longer made those deeper emotional connections with the women.

Like Dean.

Jo would sit in her cabin and cry for the two of them, so alike in their emotional reactions, and yet so different at the same time. Dean embraced emptiness, all of the compassion and mercy he’d previously shown gone. He’d put a lid on it and locked it away for good. He might as well be dead inside.

As for Cas, he was the same as he’d been on the outside, very good now at putting on a show, but was just as gone as Dean on the inside, screaming, barely holding it together, and attempting anything to try to stop the pain that only kept growing.

It tore her up to see them like that and there was not a thing she could do about it. Neither really wanted her help anymore.

So she did the best she could, trying to make sense and order for the camp out of Dean’s cold, increasingly harsh policies, and trying to keep Castiel together.

Maybe if they’d had depression meds for Cas, it’d help, but those were gone and had been unavailable for months. All he had were those pills he’d stashed, and the liquor and pot, his daily doses increasing as his body adjusted.

Sometimes Jo wondered what Jimmy thought of all of it, or was he in the same place as Cas? Had despair taken Jimmy into it’s cold embrace as well?

On top of that, Jo suddenly became ill.

~~~~~~~~~~

Cas woke to the sound of someone throwing up. It wasn’t a quiet retching, but one of agonizing force, of someone unable to hold it back, moaning a little with each loud heave. Sweeping an arm out, he patted the bed beside him. Jo wasn’t there, the sheets cool where she usually slept. Tossing aside the covers, he got up to investigate, expecting to see Jo helping someone in the bathroom.

It was Jo on the floor by the toilet. She was the one throwing up.

He went to her, kneeling behind her and wrapping an arm about her waist. She wiped her mouth with a cloth, her hand shaking, and leaned back against him, sobbing.

“Nothing comes up,” she gasped, “not even bile, but it won’t stop!”

He held her, and as she heaved, he pretended it was anyone but her because Jo didn’t get sick and if she was? Something was really wrong. During a lull in the spasms he asked, “Is today the first day you’ve thrown up?”

Jo drew her legs up, shaking her head and leaning against him. “No.”

“How long?”

Her body quivered. “Nearly a week now.”

She had a few body aches, though those could be from how hard she was throwing up, a fever, not high, but raised enough to be called a fever, and she slept. Hours and hours during the days, she slept.

A cold, hard knot of dread grew inside him the longer she was sick.

~~~~~~~~~~

The part Jo hated the most about being sick was the puking. She hated to throw up. It made her feel weak and helpless to do so, not to mention the force of it each time left her body hurting. Her abs felt like she’d been doing hundreds of crunches without pause -- which she guessed was the case. She was unable to keep anything down save the blandest of foods, her stomach rolling at even a whiff of strong food orders. For the first couple weeks, she tried to hide the nausea, but it soon grew too much for her to keep a secret. Morning, noon, and night she was nauseated.

She got worse during the third week, feeling feverish at all hours. Exhaustion tugged at her and it wasn’t unusual for her to sleep in the afternoons -- and the mornings and evenings. She joked to Alexis and Maggie that she’d developed narcolepsy.

The truth was, Jo just felt weird and with no real doctor anymore, she had no one to go to for her symptoms.

In an attempt to help, Chuck tried to diagnose her one day. He sat on the couch while Jo laid on the bed, a large medical book open on his lap, flipping back and forth through the pages. “So…any seizures?” He glanced up. “How about sleep paralysis? Hallucinations? Have you talked to people and don’t remember it?”

Jo smiled, unable to resist the obvious joke. “Hey, what’re you doing here, Chuck? When did you get here?”

He stared at her, uncertainty in his eyes. “Are you…are you joking?”

She lifted her head up a little off the pillow to see him better, “yup,” then laid back down.

“Oh, not funny, Jo. So not funny. Don’t do that to me. Dean thinks things like that are funny too and they’re just not.” He shook his head and returned his stare to the book. “How about this one? Are you having headaches?”

“No.” She curled up tighter on her side, swallowing hard and trying not to look at the bucket on the floor by her side of the bed. “No headaches. Not unless you count the pounding in my temples after heaving.”

“Hmmm.” He frowned. “Nausea, really sleepy, no headaches…yeah, it’s not that, let me look under….” He flipped pages again, pausing on one entry, his glance flicking to her and back to the page, indecision all over his face. “Have you…um…I don’t think I can ask you this. It’s kind of personal.”

“What?”

“I’m not trying to be overly personal, Jo --”

“Chuck, spit it out. I’ll answer whatever you want.”

“Have you missed a, um, a you know?”

“I don’t know. A what? Have I missed a…” She slowly pushed herself to a sitting position. “Oh, you mean my period. Have I missed a period?”

Chuck cringed, eyes squeezing shut. “Don’t say it, Jo. It’s icky woman stuff. It’s just…do you think you could possibly maybe be…I don’t know…um,” He raised a hand, rubbing his head with his hand. “…pregnant? I mean, you and Cas have been together for a long time now and I know we’ve had to go to alternate methods since we quit finding the pill….”

Jo thought about it. “No, no. I haven’t skipped a period. It’s been business as usual, light, but there. I’ve got it right now as a matter of --”

“Oh, geez, I don’t need to know that! Come on, Jo!”

“You asked, I answered.”

“I didn’t ask if you’ve got it now! That’s way more information than I needed to know.”

She shook her head. “It’s got to be something else. Besides, we always use protection.” She changed position, drawing her legs up and wrapping her arms around them. “Never mind, it’s the flu. It has to be. It’s lingering, that’s all. I’ll be fine in a few days.”

“It’s not the flu, Jo. No one else is sick. No one else has been sick.”

She considered a few other things they could check and asked, “Well, what are the symptoms for an ulcer? Let’s look at that. Cas keeps suggesting it.”

They got nowhere, Chuck turning redder and redder as they tried to pinpoint what could possibly be wrong with her, finally giving up altogether.

Cas was concerned for her, suggesting and insisting that maybe she was reacting to the increasing tension in the camp. It was a nice, logical suggestion if she’d ever had such a reaction before, but she hadn’t. Jo wasn’t the type, but she understood his need to suggest it. He refused to consider it might be something serious because serious meant he could lose her too. Castiel ignored it, treating her like she was delicate.

He treated her the way he’d once treated Melanie.

~~~~~~~~~~

After leaving Jo, Chuck continued to try to diagnose her, spending the following week with the medical book in front of him wherever he was. He was in supplies, going through the systemic symptoms of cancer -- weight loss, fatigue -- when Dean snatched the book away and hefted it up to look at it.

“Finally going to get that medical degree, Chuck?”

“I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with Jo.”

“What are all her symptoms?” He raised a brow. “I only looked in on her. Didn’t stay to hear the whole list.”

Chuck moved a few papers around on the desk. “She throws up a lot, says she’s nauseated most of the time, is losing weight, sleeps constantly….”

Dean pursed his lips, eyes narrowing. “She skip her monthly?”

He shuddered. It was bad enough hearing Jo talk about it matter-of-factly, but for Dean to? Ugh. Chuck would rather remain ignorant of those things. “She says no, that it’s, um, light but there. I can’t believe she told me that.”

“How light? Light as in a tiny sprinkle or as in normal.”

He frowned, looking up at Dean, thoroughly grossed out by the conversation. “I didn’t ask. That’s just too personal. The whole topic is too personal.”

“What kind of doctor are you?”

“I’m not one, Dean.”

His lips twitched and Dean flipped a few pages, apparently finding what he was looking for, for he ran a finger down the page. “Light, but there. Probably means next to nothing knowing Jo.” He closed the book with a firm thump. “She’s pregnant.” Dean said the word in a disgusted tone.

“No, no, she says no, that she can’t be.”

“She’s been boffing Cas for months, Chuck. That means she can be. She is. Like it’s not the obvious diagnosis that comes to mind.”

“But….”

Dean sighed, impatience in his eyes. “Is she having pains aside from those caused by tossing her cookies all the time?”

“No.”

“Then I wouldn’t be too concerned. Watch her and if she starts having pains, her bleeding is constant or at least heavier than barely visible to the human eye, then we start to worry. She’s fine. She’s only pregnant and I have other things to worry about than that, like a camp full of people who need supplies.”

It was an obvious attempt to steer Chuck towards the supply lists, but he wasn’t sure Dean should be dismissing Jo’s health so quickly. “Barely visible? How do you know that? She never said --”

Dean dropped the book onto the table and leaned down. “Let me explain something. Bear with me through the ickiness factor you seem to have for this. Most women would want to shoot Jo for how easy she has it every month. Four days, tops, with nothing more severe than the occasional bit of moodiness. She has no headaches, backaches, or other symptoms that usually turn women into demons from hell for a week. When she says it’s light, but there, it means it’s barely visible. Trust me. When you spend nearly a year with a woman, you get to know the way her body works on those matters.”

“Oh.” He glanced away. “I didn’t need to know any of that.”

“For future reference.”

“When would I need to reference that?”

“Just in case.” He tapped the desk with one fist. “You got those lists ready for me or has Jo’s reproductive system taken precedence today?”

Chuck reached for a sheaf of papers and handed them over. He thought about what Dean had said and decided to ask Maggie her opinion. She seemed to have a pretty good grasp of medical matters.

Somehow, he was unsurprised when she agreed with Dean.

“She’s been too miserable to really think about it, Chuck. Trust me. When you’re that sick in the beginning, the flu sure sounds like a great diagnosis because that means it’ll be over soon. Anything sounds good except the possibility that it could go on until labor.” Maggie stretched out on his bed, hands under her head and ankles crossed. “Give her a week or so and she’ll connect it all.”

But a week passed and Jo didn’t. Neither did Castiel. They were both unaware that Jo was probably pregnant and Chuck didn’t know how to break it to Jo. Should he even be the one to? He could understand Cas not realizing she was pregnant because there were still things Cas sometimes didn’t understand about humans, but surely Jo was in touch with her body -- or however it was Maggie had put it. Surely she knew it was a possibility?

As the days went by, Chuck decided Jo was in denial, willfully ignoring the truth. He kept expecting her to suddenly understand what her symptoms meant. If it went on, someone was going to have to tell her.

He really didn’t want it to have to be him.

~~~~~~~~~

By the fourth week, Jo made the decision to move into her cabin full-time so Cas wouldn’t catch whatever it was trying to get a foothold in her. It had to be the flu, she kept telling herself. It couldn’t be anything else. All the other ideas were ridiculous.

Cas ignored her illness and told her she was beautiful when she knew she looked like hell: hair limp and damp with sweat, dark circles under her eyes, and hollows in her cheeks from the weight she was losing. He was being sweet, bringing her crackers if they had any and making sure she had water and anything she could need when he wasn’t there.

She had visitors most days. Alexis and Maggie would come with board games and decks of cards to distract her. Chuck would look in at her and ask if anything had changed. Emily brought foods she thought Jo might be able to keep down. Risa popped in every couple days and Jim brought her books to read.

The one person who didn’t visit was Dean. He’d looked in on her once, staying only a few minutes before excusing himself. She wondered if he cared even a little that she was sick. They didn’t appear to even be friends anymore. Friends checked to see how you were and he didn’t. She supposed he could be asking the others, like she knew he’d done those first weeks after she’d arrived in the camp. Was he that busy that he couldn’t come by for a minute? His absence hurt.

Jo laid on her bed, enjoying a brief respite from the nausea. She knew it’d be brief. Call it intuition. She couldn’t wait to feel better and kept hoping it’d be soon. She wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take.

There was a knock on the door. It opened before she could call out, Castiel stepping inside. “Hey, you’re awake.”

“For the moment. I’ve been alternating sleeping and puking hourly today. It’s a nice change of schedule.”

“I was planning on sneaking in and being here when you woke.” He came to her, sauntering slowly, weaving just a little.

Jo eased up so he could join her on the bed. “Look at me?” Taking his face in her hands, she noted he was a bit more stoned than usual. “What’d you take today, sweetheart?”

“A little of this, a little of that, and something extra to grow on.” He caught her to him, maneuvering them so that they lay together on the bed, facing each other.

She almost ignored it, but changed her mind. She’d already ignored a lot regarding his drug use. “Wanna tone down the this, that, and the extra, Cas? For me? Please? It worries me when you take combos like this.”

“Jo.” He grinned. “I’m fine.”

“But you might not be if you keep taking combinations of pills and booze --”

“I’m fine.” He drew his hand along her side. “Look at me. I walked in here under my own steam, I’m coherent…. I’m just a little stoned. It’s no big deal.”

“Please, Cas.”

He sighed, rolling onto his back. “I’ll think about it.”

Jo could hear a hint of pain in his voice and dropped the subject. There would be time another day to talk to him about it.

~~~~~~~~~~

She was going to die.

That thought was an ever-present fear in Castiel’s mind. It consumed his waking hours. To see her so sick when she was the healthiest woman he knew sent him running to any escape he could find when he wasn’t with her.

Pills. Booze. More pills. One woman. A little more booze. Two women. And so on.

When he was with her, he tried not to show his fear. He held her hair from her face when she threw up what little she’d managed to eat, bathed her face with a cool cloth, and curved his body about hers when she napped. The heat pouring from her body scared him. The weight she lost terrified him. The amount of sleep she needed alarmed him.

And yet, despite it all, she still managed to be beautiful and serene. She just didn’t look sick to him, but what else could it be?

He would lie there with her and simply stare at her, committing her to memory for that inevitable day when he lost her, too. Castiel didn’t think he could bear it. While they’d had their rocky patches, she’d stayed by him, persevering through everything, putting up with what he’d become.

She got steadily worse, one month turning into two, and then…she got better. Miraculously, wonderfully better. He breathed a sigh of relief. Things would go back to normal now.

~~~~~~~~~~

Thankfully, after two months of it, Jo began to feel better. The nausea eased, her stomach settling so that her appetite returned with a vengeance. She was still a little tired and now both hot and hungry all the time, but she felt better overall. She thought she was on the mend, that she’d licked whatever it was. It was about time. Two months was a long time to be sick.

When Jo finally emerged from her cabin for more than a couple hours at a time, strangely energetic after being so alarmingly sick, she found a camp she no longer recognized. While she’d known they’d had more deaths, she hadn’t realized how many. She knew only a handful of people apart from Dean, Cas, and Chuck: Alexis, Maggie, Jim, Emily, Jane, Risa, and Yeager. The rest were strangers she’d never seen before, people who didn’t know her or her prior relationship to Dean.

The young women she saw seemed to assume she was just another of Cas’s women. There was no distinction to them between themselves and her.

She found Dean pursuing Risa with his sorry old ‘connection’ line, and saw his eye already straying from Risa to Jane -- who didn’t seem to mind the possibility of being the other woman. He was doing the same thing Castiel did -- trying anything to have some sort of good feeling.

Jo watched Risa’s features soften when Dean was around and hated that she knew that softness would soon be gone, because she really did like Risa. She thought Risa could have made Dean happy once. And Risa herself deserved a bit of happiness. She’d been through a lot on the outside and come through it stronger.

Maggie actively pursued Chuck, finally acting on those flirtatious comments and gestures she’d been tossing out since she’d left Cas’s group of women. Jo wondered if that interest in him was why she’d left. It was amusing to watch Chuck blush and stammer, as though he couldn’t believe Maggie liked him.

It wasn’t only people changed, it was policies as well, undergoing yet another hard shift. Dean’s well-ordered, civilized camp was a thing of the past. People simply existed in the sphere of the guidelines Dean put forth, or they left for the outside. The camp focus was no longer survival, but rather the Colt. While he’d been looking for it for years, Dean’s passion for finding the Colt had turned obsessive sometime during the two months Jo was sick and was consuming them all.

There was even an order to capture demons and take them to Dean for questioning.

How did he question them and know they weren’t lying?

She soon got her answer when a hot-shot demon of some sort was captured.

Jo waited to talk to Cas until he was mellow and more than willing to talk as long as she sat on his lap while he did. Still, it took awhile to extract the information she wanted and once he’d explained, Jo sat stunned by what he’d told her.

“He’s torturing them.”

“He sure is,” Cas replied absently, as though it didn’t matter, his amorous impulses taking over. His lips nibbled a path along her neck, his hands slipping beneath her shirt. He undid her bra, cupped her breasts. “You’ve gotten bigger,” he murmured. “I like it.”

“It’s where I put the weight back on.” There and along her hips. It was a struggle to fasten her jeans these days. Jo drew away, endeavoring to refasten her bra. He had a great fascination with that redistribution of weight on her body, spending long minutes just kissing and caressing her breasts, over and over, then running his hands along her hips. He’d talk forever about how beautiful she was. Like now. If she didn’t stop him now, she’d get distracted herself. “Cas, stop. Is he torturing it now?”

“Probably. Why?”

“Torture is wrong. I don’t care if it is a demon.”

He shrugged. “Hey, I tried to talk him out of it, but as he quickly reminded me, he’s our leader and if I don’t like his methods at this point in the game, I should stage a coup and do it myself. I declined, so it’s not really my concern anymore, is it?”

“No, sweetie, it’s not. As second, supposedly, it’s mine.” Jo moved away, put her clothes back in order and gave him a kiss. “I’m going to have a talk with him about this. Torture is unacceptable. I can’t let him keep doing that.”

“Good luck with that. You won’t change his mind.” He sounded so certain.

“Thanks, Cas, for that ringing encouragement.”

“No problem. I’ll wait here.”

Jo headed for the area she knew Dean was keeping the demon. It was back from the rest of the camp, isolated. A perfect place to torture because few people would hear the screams unless they were listening for them. The building was quiet.

Torture. Oh, geez.

She hadn’t actually minded being Dean’s second-in-command, mostly because he never had much for her to do. But torture? When had it become acceptable? When had he made that decision and why hadn’t he said anything to her?

Did she really want to go in there? Did she want to see just how far Dean had gone?

No. But she had to.

Steeling herself, Jo opened the door and stepped inside.