There is a small ranch, somewhere on the border between Kansas and Nebraska, about a twenty minute ride out from the nearest town. Its windows are shuttered now, but in the ephemeral times of cowboys and outlaws, it was a bustling little place - perhaps not full of people, but full to the brim with two quiet lives being well lived after many days of hardship. 

These quiet lives were those of Jo Harvelle and Dean Winchester.

To everyone else (namely the nosey figures in the windows of that small town a twenty minute ride away), their partnership looked formulaic: a guy and a girl shacking up together with a few horses, a ranch, saving up to make the place a little cozier. Nothing that nobody hadn’t seen before. 

But what everyone else didn’t know was how radical their love was. The way that Dean was Jo’s first kiss with a man, and Jo Dean’s first kiss with a woman, when they were both far from virginity. How they had drifted in and out of each other’s lives for years like no one could decide their fate. The scars along Jo’s torso, too, were proof that they had almost been out of time. That they were alive, to realize the could-be potential of their will-they-won’t-they relationship at all, was incredible. It was the time of outlaws, afterall, and our two protagonists had not been immune to a lawless life.

With all that stood in their way you could perhaps be justified in saying their love was out of character. But it wasn’t. It made perfect sense, in the same way that poetry might, strong and solid in meaning if only when read by the right eyes. And that was Jo and Dean: a nonsense poem with a strict rhyme scheme, predictable on the surface yet profound between the lines. Rhythmic, galloping, beating hearts as certain as hooves on the sun-hard ground. 

Still, they weren’t strictly in love. Rather, the love was all around them. Jo saw it in the green oasis of their pastures amid the desert land, in the firewood piled beside the porch, in the leather jacket quietly left for her to wear on colder days. Dean saw it in the crystal clarity of the ranch windows after a rough wind, in the oats faithfully refilled in the stables, in the gift of a new hat with a wider brim when the heatwave came. For both of them it was a love of actions, the affection solid and tangible and filling after years of starvation.

Contentment, in the gentle touches of four scarred hands. 

On one of the long sloping dusks of August, the world bathing in nectarine and plum, Jo sat on the bottom porch step with Dean a step above, his knees either side of her. It was the kind of evening which cost nothing, yet gave everything in return, where the turn of the earth could be felt in the hum of the cicadas, and the day, while fading away, seemed still to be new - the kind of evening which only ever occurred thrice in the nineteenth century, and has not occurred since. Well, it was on that incredibly rare kind of evening belonging only truly to retired outlaws, that Dean held silver scissors (copper in the light) in his scarred hands as he snipped easily away at Jo’s hair.

“Almost a decade past since we got this place, now,” Jo mused. “You were 31 then, you’re 41 now.”

“And you were 24.” 

“I’m older now than you were when we moved here.”

Dean hummed, somewhere quiet between surprise and acknowledgement, the scissors snipping a melody at the nape of Jo’s neck. 

He had been in the habit of cutting Jo’s hair for as long as they’d set up together on the ranch - a few months short of a decade, to agree with Jo - as, though she liked knives, she wasn’t to be trusted with them near a head of hair, and Dean had had the practice of cutting his younger brother’s shag for all his adolescent years. 

Tonight, though, was slightly different from the usual trim. Cursing the summer heat and finally relaxing into Dean’s encouragement, Jo had marched up to her partner and demanded anything past her chin to be very decidedly cut off. She could tuck it behind her ears as she worked, and the wave of her hair would bring it up off her neck and out of the heat. All this had been patiently explained by Dean many times before. He had this way of knowing Jo, and knew, in the same way as he liked wearing his mother’s jewelry, that cutting her hair might steady her in the skin she was prone to slipping in and out of. 

So far, Jo liked it. Liked the feeling of weight leaving her, the almost dizzying lightness that came with her hair cascading to the floor. She had followed Dean blind into battle, and while she would not do that again, she could go all in on him cutting her hair well. The many hues of their relationship, the bright bruises of their coming-of-age, had not altered, simply mellowed. 

“D’you ever miss it?” Dean said, caring yet mild. “The life we had before all this?” 

Jo waited for two hawks to sail across the apricot sky before answering, no clouds to dapple the light. The words came to her easy enough, but from somewhere moving and deep, wading through long grass. She breathed in deeply, bringing herself to meet them, allowing herself to savor their sweetness.

“All the time we were running with that gang, I were thinkin’ - this is what proper love is, to have something worth dying for. I’d never known it before, you know. An’ then that hound sinks its teeth into my side an’ my vision goes white and there’s only one thing I remember seein’ after that.”

The careful snips of the scissors ceased, and Jo smiled, tilting her head upwards to hold Dean’s gaze.

“You. I could barely think nothin’ and it’s just your face in front of me and then I had one thought, and it were just that I’d been wrong. I were wrong. Love is something worth living for. By god, right then I knew it was worth livin’ for you.”

“Joanna Beth,” Dean whispered, his lips rose and soft around her name. 

Jo had not used to like it when he called her that, mainly due to the fact it was the name her mother had flung at her from across the bar in many a desperate fit of anger, back when she was alive and both of them working at the Roadhouse. It was a name that sank low in her gut like a guilty stone, heavy with the shame of misplaced temper. Jo had wanted to get out, and her mother had wanted a daughter, and neither could give the other what they wanted.

But Dean only ever used Joanna Beth in moments of adoration. As if he felt the simple Jo could not do her justice. When he said Joanna Beth, it meant he was seeing the whole of her, afresh, anew, finding again all of her troubled histories and still wanting to write futures with her.

Her slate was never, would never be clean. There was too much blood for that. But Dean saw the blood and did not love her in spite of it, but with it. Like he wouldn’t rather have her any other way. 

“Grow older with me, Winchester,” Jo murmured, and she turned in his lap to meet him, having been inches too far from him for far too long.

His lips pressed hers tenderly, like they had done hundreds of times before. The great heartlands of America could not hold as many sensations at this, for all of the lushious, dying, sprawling, changing lands around had nothing on them. They were not in love, but they were radiant with it, each with the other firmly and irreparably in their heart.

Jo had yet to find a gray hair, and she felt her breathing alongside Dean was nothing short of a miracle. She hummed these next words against lips, passing them like a breath between them.

“Grow old.”

And, dear reader, I can see even now through the shuttered windows of the ranch they whiled away their years on the many contented memories they made. There is still love there, this century and a half later: it is not a haunting, but a remembrance.