Jo moves closer to Sam when he shivers without even realizing she's done it. It's automatic after the past couple days because you strain a body enough and it starts forgetting that there are heaters and quilts and thermostats within reach. Leave someone that way long enough and they start feeling like they're the only thing they can rely on, that they'll take care of things, of other people, or no one will.
>>“I’d finish school, go to college. Find a place to live, you know, something permanent... safe.”
Jo laughs, a startled but not altogether unamused sound and raises her eyebrows, “All the things my mom wants for me,” she says wryly, “but...” she trails off because even with Sam who bypasses a lot of her pride she can't bring herself to articulate that a normal life is the opposite of safe to her. The last time she'd felt safe, really safe, was when her dad was alive. Back then when she'd heard a noise in the dark it had never scared her because there was no unknown, there was no “other.” She'd had a father who knew the names of everything that lived in the dark and how to kill what would hurt her there. The thought of being a “normal” girl who would sit up in her bed and clutch her covers to her chin and not know a house settling from a wraith coming to feed had terrified her even then, the helplessness of it. Normalcy seemed like living your whole life in that moment in a horror movie when the murderer is right behind you but all you know is the hairs on the back of your neck are standing on end and the whole audience is screaming and you're just a worm on a hook. Knowledge, skill, that was how you stopped being scared, how you stopped other people being scared or hurt.
Still, that's too personal and she changes tactics, keeping the conversation focused on running away. “Well you'll be eighteen not much anyone can do to stop you,” she grins then, fierce and reckless and obviously thinking of her own escape as well, “I mean, I don't know about you but I'm tired of people making choices for me. I'll go where I want and do what I want and if I screw up I'll deal with it. It sucks just letting things happen to you y'know? It'd be good to be the one actually doing something.” That's skirting back uncomfortably close to the warehouse though and she bites her lip for a moment, worrying it between her teeth. “But I guess in the meantime we have to deal with our parents,” she concludes, huffing out a sigh, all her earlier bravado submerged in pure teenage frustration again.