Crossing her arms over her chest in a feeble attempt to keep herself warm, she watched her two boys leave. Time after time she was left behind, and though she knew the truth she knew she had no place out there with them. No, instead she patched them up and sent them on their way so they could come back to her bruised and battered.
When the Impala is out of sight she doesn't go back inside right away. She thinks about what they might be talking about, what their next hunt might be like…It's not until she starts thinking about all the different creatures that go bump in the night that she goes back inside the house and locks the door behind her. She knows the action won't really make a difference, but it helps her sleep better at night.
Turning off the porch light, she slips out of her sandals and into a pair of slippers before making her way into the kitchen to make herself a pot of tea. She knows she won't sleep tonight. She never does the first night they head out.
She'd been sheltering Winchester boys, men really, since she moved out of her mother's house when she was seventeen. She'd had enough of the abusive step-father – an abusive step-father that turned out to be possessed by a demon. That was how she'd met John Winchester and his boys. His oldest, Dean, had been two years older and his youngest, Sam, two years below her. They hadn't understood why she'd voluntarily leave a home behind, especially when she had a mother to go with it. But she had shaken her head and patched up the John's wounds as the patriarch of the broken-up family looked down at her with a sense of understanding and pain that she hadn't quite understood at the time.
That was the first time she'd watched her boys drive away, and though her place of residence changed they always seemed to find their way back to her. They arrived bruised and broken, and she sent them off; no longer bruised but permanently broken.