Story Summary: After her husband, Sam, is brutally murdered, Jessica struggles with just getting out of bed in the morning. When a mysterious stranger knocks on her door, he makes her question everything she knew about her husband, but he also gives her hope that maybe Sam didn't leave her all alone in the world after all.

Dean was tired. So very tired.

He hadn't realized until now just how little sleep he'd gotten in the last two weeks. Two days on the road nonstop, three days sitting vigil outside Sam's house, days of anticipation of the hunt. And now, he was once again parked outside a picturesque two story in the middle of the night bleeding from the gut and so very tired.

Just a little longer, he told himself. Just a little longer and then he could rest. It felt like he hadn't truly rested for fourteen years, but now, just one more thing, just a little longer and he could finally rest.

It seemed like between one blink and the next, Dean was on Sam's porch. He didn't bother trying to hold his belly together. In a little while it wouldn't really matter. He didn't notice that he'd left a trail of blood from the Impala all the way to the welcome mat. He didn't notice the steadily growing puddle at his feet.

The doorbell sounded just at incongruously cheerful as it had last time. Jessica Winchester's footsteps across the wood floors sounded just as soft. It was almost soothing. Dean closed his eyes to just breathe, to gather enough strength to do this one last thing. He heard the deadbolt unlock and the door hinges creak. His eyes opened and just like last time Jessica stood in the doorway in a worn soft t-shirt, barefoot, sad, and still beautiful.

You sure know how to pick 'em, Sammy.

They stared at each other. Jessica stood wary of the stranger on her welcome mat and Dean stood trying to memorize the woman in front of him. His little brother's most important thing.

"It's finished," he rasped sounding like it took all his strength. "I killed the thing that killed Sammy. It's finally finished."

When Jessica opened her door to find her husband's brother standing on her doorstep in the dead of the night, she had to try hard not to show her fear. He looked like he'd been in a fight. His face was scraped on one side like road rash, blood from a gash on his scalp was smeared across his forehead, caked with dirt in his hair. His eyes were wild and bright.

He looked manic and triumphant and just a little bit crazy. Her heart was pounding, afraid of his man that she didn't know, that was part of something that Sam had run away from. Afraid of how he looked like he'd been through a battle and had reveled in the fight.

Then his words reached her ears through her whirling fears. I killed the thing that killed Sammy.

Doubts she didn't even know she had about Sam's death pinged and bounced off the things she'd found in his box, ricocheted off evidence of a hard violent life on this stranger's body to finally settle on fueling the burning questions piling up in her mind.

Jessica stared at her husband's brother standing on her welcome mat battered and bleeding and victorious shining in his bright green eyes. She stared at him and let out a sob of relief she didn't even know she needed.

The sound of her sob seemed to be what he was waiting for. He let out a heavy ragged breath and collapsed.

Jessica gasped and jumped back. He hit the floor hard and didn't move again. It was then that she noticed the puddle of blood slowly drying on her porch and the blood seeping out from his body on her floor.

"Oh fuck." Running a shaking hand over her hair, Jessica took a second to just stare in shock before her instincts kicked in.

Jessica was not a small woman. She stood inches over the majority of her coworkers and had had the worst trouble finding a boyfriend not intimidated by her height. It was like a miracle that Sam was actually almost half a head taller than her.

Dean Winchester was inches shorter than his brother, but still inches taller than her and had just as much if not more muscle mass than Sam had. Jessica wasn't a lightweight by normal standards, but Dean was a big man and he was almost too heavy for her to handle.

If that wasn't a challenge enough, Jessica didn't know just how injured he was and she was afraid moving him would make it worse, but she couldn't just leave him sprawled half in-half out of her house. Not only was it a sure way for him to actually die on her, but if the neighbors saw a man collapse on her porch the police would be called and she was pretty sure that not only did she not want to deal with that, but that Dean really wouldn't want to deal with that either.

Jessica, after everything she'd learned and hadn't learned about Sam's family and Dean in particular, felt it was a safe assumption to make that Dean would have some kind of trouble with the law in some form.

Struggling to turn him over on his back, Jessica found in a glance that all the blood was coming from a dangerously deep wound on his belly. Then she was moving to grab his arms to try and drag him further inside without dislocating his wrists. She made it into the living room sparing a second to shove the coffee table out the way before dragging him onto the area rug.

The snap judgment that it was probably easier to get rid of a rug than it would be scrub blood off a floor should surprise her with the calm practicality of it. Shoving the thoughts away, she'll be impressed with herself after she kept her brother-in-law from bleeding out.

Thank God she kept a professionally stocked first aid kit in the closet, Jessica thought after a more thorough examination of the man in front of her. She was surprised she didn't rip the closet door off the hinges to grab it. Skidding to her knees next to Dean, Jessica let herself fall into her training as a nurse. Sure, she was a pediatric nurse and the worse she saw was the odd accidental butt shot with a BB gun, but she'd been trained for worse. She dredged up that training like there was a life at stake. Which there was.

She cut Dean's shirt open and started packing the wound with gauze to stop the bleeding before she tried to do anything like stitch it up. Thankfully puddles of blood always looked worse than they were, and Dean hadn't actually lost that much blood. Pressing down hard on his belly, Jessica looked at his face and didn't really like what she saw. His eyes were sunken, his cheeks were gaunt, his skin was almost grey, his lips were chapped. Exhaustion, she thought, dehydration, malnutrition.

He collapsed more from that than from blood loss. His wounds hadn't helped, but she was sure he would have collapsed sooner rather than later anyway.

Jessica's heart gave a lurch in sympathy and continued to go about patching him up. In the back of her mind she thought of those old photos when the bleeding stopped and she examined the wound for debris to start cleaning it out. The photos had reflected so much love. Every smile Dean had cast at Sam was filled with love. He'd practically raised him if the absence of their father in the photos was any indication. He'd taken care of Sam to the detriment of himself it seemed from the visible discrepancy in their physical appearances.

She looked at him again and saw a grieving, haggard man. The last fourteen years had not been easy on him.

The job of caring for Dean's wound sped up time as she worked in a haze of focused procedure. Suddenly she went from trying to keep the blood inside his body to stitching him closed with steady practiced movements. She fumbled momentarily when she realized she hadn't stopped to put on gloves and her hands were slick and sticky with drying blood.

Her fingers resumed their task and she resolved to worry about possible blood transmitted diseases later. After she finished saving Sam's brother from bleeding out in front of her collection of Jane Austen movies.

Jessica put the finishing touches on the wound, antibacterial cream, not stick absorbent bandages, and a quick wipe down of the surrounding area of blood and dirt. Dean was breathing easy and his heart rate was normal, he was going to live regardless of his bodily neglect. She let herself take a moment to breathe and shake and let out one more sob then she got back to work on the other not so terrifying injuries he had.

After scrubbing her hands with the most astringent soap she had, Jessica packed up the first aid kit, was as gentle as possible in divesting Dean of the rest of his clothes leaving him a pair of faded boxer briefs. She shoved a towel under his back over the blood stain on the rug, put a pillow under his head and did her best to bundle him up in blankets without moving him too much.

She was jittery and exhausted and had tears drying on her cheeks, but she didn't stop. Yanking her least favorite rattiest towels from the linen closet she tried to soak up and scrub away as much blood from her floors as possible. Her welcome mat was a lost cause and it was tossed into the big black trash bag along with the stained towels. She threw the entire thing by the trashcan in the garage to deal with later and untangled the garden hose from the messy knot on the side of the house.

The sun was just starting to rise and Mrs. Havisham from down the block would be on her early morning stroll any moment now so Jessica didn't waste any time. The water was turned up as high as it would go and she used it as a makeshift power wash on the blood trailing up her front walk and the stairs on her porch.

One last scan for any more damage, she turned off the hose, stumbled up the stairs into the house, locked the door behind her, and checked on her patient. When she saw that he was in fact still breathing, she shut herself in her bedroom and collapsed exhausted on her bed. She was passed out before her head hit the pillow.

Dean woke groggy and in pain. His head, his neck, his back, his gut, fuck even his feet hurt. The pain, as prevalent as it was, was not new or worrying. He was used to it. Hunting alone wasn't a safe occupation, but after Sam left, after Dad died, there was no way he could stomach putting that much trust in another hunter.

Plus most hunters were fucking idiots.

So, he woke to pain, his head was filled with cobwebs and it took him longer than he would have liked to fight to consciousness through the lead weight of exhaustion over him. He'd felt this kind of exhaustion before. It came just when he'd finally given in and slept, before the hallucinations started, but after he couldn't feel his face anymore.

Dean held perfectly still and took silent stock of his body and his surroundings. Even agony and exhaustion couldn't make him forget his training. He was naked, mostly, he was lying on a fluffy thing on the floor, he was wrapped in a blanket and his head was resting on a pillow.

So, he wasn't lying bleeding out in the alley next to a dead werewolf and he wasn't lying in a motel room with a new hole out the back of his head. He didn't know whether to be happy about that or not. He decided to just push that to the back of his head and concentrate on now.

The memory of looking his brother's widow in the eye and telling her he'd killed the thing that killed Sam came back to him. It was hazy around the edges, presumably from his bleeding out, but he could still remember every single second of it. Up until his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he assumed he collapsed on her doorstep.

Dean figured, since he wasn't in the morgue or handcuffed to a hospital bed, that Jessica Winchester had taken it upon herself to patch him up. He didn't know why she would even bother since he was a stranger to her and she probably thought he was an insane criminal showing up bleeding on her welcome mat in the middle of the night.

He didn't know why she would patch him up and she'd done a good job of it, too. Even without examining his wound he'd been stitched up enough times to be able to tell when it was a professional job. He didn't know why, but he figured he would find out soon enough since he could smell coffee and hear her stepping lightly around her kitchen.

Awake Dean might be, but willing to risk more agony by moving he was not, so he just blinked his eyes open and took in his surroundings while he waited for her to notice.

Turning his head to the right he learned he was both in her living room and lying on her fluffy flower area rug. He figured she couldn't wrestle him up on a bed or the couch so he wasn't too annoyed to be on the floor.

The wood floor creaked quietly and Dean turned his head to watch her walk through the doorway and into the living room. She was wearing a stretched out t-shirt, flannel pajama pants printed with rainbows and clouds, and her sleep mussed blond hair was pulled up into a ponytail. She looked better since the last time Dean had seen her and it was easy to see how she caught his brother's eye in the first place. She was definitely a beautiful woman.

Stopping just inside the living room, Jessica's hand tightened around her Peru souvenir mug and just looked at Dean for a long moment. He held her gaze steadily and waited for her make the first move.

"So, you're awake." She sipped at her coffee to distract herself from the tremor in her hands.

"It looks like."

Suddenly uncomfortable lying vulnerable on the floor Dean slowly eased himself up on one elbow. His belly wound pulled, but the stiches held.

Jessica took a step forward as if to help then thought better of it. She may have patched him up, gotten his blood on her hands, and seen him mostly naked, but this didn't feel like a moment where either of them would be comfortable being touched.

Dean grimaced both from the pain and from the situation he'd put them in. He was pretty sure she had to be freaked out and that she had questions. The near future wasn't going to be pleasant. Even so, he wasn't going to hide from this.

"Thank you," he said grave and utterly honest. "For saving my life."

Jessica's cheeks pinked and she looked away. "You're welcome." It sounded like she meant it. She met Dean's gaze again. "I couldn't just leave my husband's brother to die on my porch."

An icy wave went down Dean's spine and his stomach lurched. It felt like he was going to throw up. "How did you know?"

Jessica took a step closer and fiddled with her coffee mug to have something to do with her hands. "I saw you," she said. "At the funeral and outside my house." Biting her lip, her breath stuttered in her throat. "I found a box of Sam's things and you were in the photographs."

Dean didn't think he would be able to feel any more pain for the rest of his lifetime, but he'd been wrong. The knowledge that Sam had kept something from their life, something so precious as their family photos was like a bittersweet knife to the chest.

"He kept photos? Of us?"

"Of your family." Her expression gentled and she gave him a brittle smile. "Your mother and father and your friends."

Dean covered his eyes with a shaking hand and struggled to breathe around the tightness in his throat. He didn't think he could cry anymore, but he had to wipe away one last tear before he wrestled back control.

"Thank you," he rasped.

Jessica just nodded in acceptance. They fell into a sympathetic silence, for the first time sharing in the grief for a man they both loved equally and differently.

After a steadying inhale, Dean looked back at his brother's widow. She had questions, he could see them brewing. No matter how laidback she seemed now about letting her estranged brother-in-law bleed all over her rug, there was no way she wasn't going to demand answers sooner or later. And she was due them, Dean knew. She'd loved Sam and lost him just as Dean had, and if that didn't give her enough right to know the truth, then the fact that Dean had told her he'd killed the thing that killed Sam sure would be enough reason for her to demand it.

It's been a long time since Dean had last heard, "We do what we do and we shut up about it." He'd long since given up on his fragile hope that telling people the truth wouldn't end in disaster. Fourteen years is a long time for life to beat you down, and Dean hadn't been hopefully naïve like that for at least a decade. But Jessica deserved to hear the truth from Dean and he would do right by his brother's widow in at least that.

He tried to push up with his elbows 'til his was sitting up straight. A determined mask settled over his face and he opened his mouth to begin telling her of impossible things.

"I'm sure you're hungry," Jessica interrupted him and took a nervous step back. Her heart was suddenly pounding and the tremble in her hands had returned. She didn't want to hear what Dean was going to say. At least not yet, she'd give herself until her patient had eaten and then she would listen to what he said.

Then she would listen to how many secretes the man she loved had kept from her.

"I was going to start making some eggs and bacon. I'll bring you some." She turned and disappeared down the hall without waiting for Dean's reply.

Before Dean could get any food, however, he had to get dressed. It wasn't good for him to stay on the floor and she didn't want him to get cold since he was suffering from malnutrition, dehydration, minor blood loss, and exhaustion.

She worked on autopilot and ignored the emotions stirred up by digging around in Sam's drawers. Hurrying back to her brother-in-law now perched precariously on the couch, she handed him a pair of worn soft plaid pajama pants and a stretched out t-shirt.

Jessica didn't want to hover over him while Dean got dressed so she kept an eye on him from the kitchen as she whisked up some eggs. Dean didn't seem like the kind of man that would ask for help voluntarily, much less take well to being weakened by an injury. Thankfully, he seemed to do alright on his own. Worryingly, however, it seemed like he'd had plenty of practice taking care of himself while wounded.

The pajama pants were inches too long, but the t-shirt fit alright because of his heavy musculature. When he was clothed, Jessica felt a little bit of relief. It was one thing to see your husband's brother naked while keeping his blood from spilling out everywhere; it was another thing for him to just lounge around like that.

When Dean was settled stiffly leaning back against the couch, Jessica started setting out his breakfast. A glass of orange juice –for the blood loss-, a glass of water –for the dehydration-, and a plate piled high with eggs and bacon and toast –for the malnutrition. They descended into a more comfortable silence as they both studiously ignored the awkwardness of Dean wearing his dead brother's clothes.

The comfortableness didn't last long.

"You didn't have to do this."

Jessica glanced over at Dean as he looked up from his breakfast. She was seated in the loveseat next to the sofa with a refill of her coffee clutched tightly in her hands.

"Do what?" she asked, even though she knew.

Dean gestured vaguely in the direction of the plate in his lap and the hidden wound in his gut. "This. You didn't have to patch me up. You didn't have to make me breakfast."

She snorted derisively before she could smother it. "What? You expected me to just leave you to die? To let you walk out my door while you're a stiff wind away from collapsing again from hunger and exhaustion."

He stiffened. "I don't know what you're-"

"I'm a nurse, Dean," Jessica cut him off with a stern look. The one she used on the recalcitrant teens that insisted they hadn't actually sprained their ankles attempting to skateboard on a homemade ramp. "I know the signs of physical neglect. You could black out the sun with the shadows under your eyes and you could cut a hand on your cheekbones. I know you spent three days straight sitting outside my house, it doesn't take a genius to figure it out."

He scowled and started to protest, but Jessica talked over him.

"Even if you had been taking care of yourself I wouldn't let you leave anyway. I let you bleed all over my rug so I have an obligation to make sure you recover."

She knew that wasn't really how it worked, but Jessica needed answers. She needed to know the truth about Sam, and she needed his brother, the last living link she had to him, to not die from self-destructive neglect.

Dean blew out an unhappy breath even as he resigned himself to staying. His wound pulled painfully and he resisted the urge to wrap an arm around himself. Truthfully he knew he wasn't in any shape to take care of himself much less make the drive to Bobby's so he could be laid up in safety. He had already silently pledged to give Jessica answers so he wasn't going anywhere anyway. If she was so determined to keep him here in her house as well then he couldn't muster up the energy to fight her.

"I haven't been the only one neglecting themselves," Dean pointed out looking at Jessica. "You haven't been too great yourself."

Glancing up from her coffee Jessica met his gaze. "My husband died, Agent Lugosi. It's all I can do to get up in the morning and go to work."

Dean winced under her glare. It's the first time he felt shame for lying like that.

He must have given himself away, because Jessica was curious again. "Why lie?" she asked. "Why not tell me who you were?"

He gave her a darkly wry smirk. "What would I say? 'Hi, I'm your husband's estranged brother who he hasn't talked to in fourteen years'? 'He hated our life so bad he didn't even tell you he had a brother'? Should I have said that instead?"

"No. I don't know." She shook her head frustrated. "I don't know! My husband is dead and I just found out that he kept his entire life a secret. I don't know what you should have said, but I had to find out looking through a box with a collection of insane things, full of a life I never knew about!" Jessica swallowed thickly. "I'm all by myself now and I just want to know- I want to know the truth."

Dean had to stomp down on a shameful well of anger at his brother. Sam had kept his entire life a secret from the woman he loved then he'd gone and fuckin died leaving Dean to take away her illusion of a normal apple pie life.

"I'll tell you the truth, Jessica." He looked her in the eyes. "You deserve to know. I owe you that much."

She let out a shaky breath, scared but determined. "Please. Please tell me."

Dean took a breath and started with the night the Winchester family fell apart.

Jessica was curled up in her chair with her hands clenched white-knuckled in her lap to hide their shaking. The things she was hearing coming out of Dean's mouth were too horrible to be real. They shouldn't be real.

"It's all real," she murmured a slim vain hope that Dean was lying, that he would suddenly take it all back.

He didn't.

"Yeah," he nodded. "Ghosts, demons, werewolves, ghouls. Pretty much every evil thing you can think of. It's all real."

"And you and-," her breath hitched. "You and Sam, you hunted them."

"Salt for ghosts, silver for shifters, holy water for demons. Yeah." Dean flashed her an unpleasant smirk. "We hunt them."

"Of course you do." Jessica wasn't feeling much of anything after all of that, just numb.

Sam had spent twelve years lying to her. Lying about how his mother died, about what his life was like, about a million little things that she'd just thought were cute little quirks of his that made her love him even more. Sam spent eight years of their marriage letting Jessica believe that his family never came for the holidays because they were ashamed of him not because he was ashamed of them.

Some distant part of her could understand why he would want to get away, why he would lie. Who in their right mind would believe that people actually hunted all the creatures from the horror films? Who in their right mind would believe that their mother had died burning up on the ceiling?

But then Jessica thought about all the little times that Sam would lie to her and her heart just ached that he didn't trust her enough to at least give her the benefit of the doubt with the truth of his past.

She loved him, Jessica thinks she would always love him, but that betrayal hurt almost as bad as his death.

Jessica turned her attention back to Dean, Sam's brother, her brother-in-law. He was watching her warily, studying her reaction to the truth of his and Sam's life. He was waiting for her judgment.

She could guess at what he was waiting for. The house phone was next to her on the end table, it would only take her a second to pick it up and dial the police. By the carefully neutral expression on his face, Jessica figured that's what he was waiting for. There was a small part of her that wanted to cling to the comfortable ignorance of Sam's lies and itched to reach of the handset and dial. The larger part of her that still ached with love for her husband despite of his many flaws felt relief.

Jessica had never liked to be kept in the dark and it would have always plagued her in the back of her mind that all the strange questions she had would never be answered.

Abruptly she stood up from her curled up perch and grabbed up her cold coffee mug. Dean gave a small jolt in surprise and tensed.

It was impossible and crazy and she couldn't believe that she believed it. Now that she did believe, however, the choice of what she was going to do about it was simple to make.

"It's almost lunch time. You've lost a lot of blood and need some iron," she announced non-sequitur. "I think there are some steaks in the freezer. I'll fix a couple for lunch then you need to rest some more."

Dean incredulously watched her make her way back to the door to the kitchen with sure steady steps. This turn of events confused him.

Jessica made it to the doorway then she paused and turned back to Dean with a small genuine smile on her face. "Dean," she called waiting until he met her eyes. "Thank you," she said, "for telling me the truth."

He cleared his throat, but held her gaze. "You're welcome."

She gave him another small smile then disappeared into the kitchen leaving Dean sitting on her couch in her dead husband's sweats staring after her.

Lunch consisted of large medium-cooked steaks, a large green salad, and a large platter of mixed vegetables. It was a lot of food and it was obvious that Jessica was used to cooking for a man with a large appetite. If she maybe cooked an extra steak and sat there glaring sternly at Dean until he finished it off, well nobody could blame her. She was nurse, a caretaker, and Dean was already worryingly underweight.

She'd been at loose ends since her life had crumbled down around her and if taking care of her long lost brother-in-law gave her a little bit of purpose back, well she figured she deserved a break after life had screwed her over.

After lunch Jessica made sure Dean was passed out on her guest bed before she started with the haphazard plan that had been forming in her mind since she'd accepted the reality of the supernatural and Dean's self-appointed mission to hunt the evil that hunts us.

Dean's clothes were scrapped, too torn up and soaked with blood to be salvageable so they went in the trash along with her ruined towels, welcome mat, and her living room rug. Taking into account her suspicions of Dean's avoidance of law-enforcement Jessica took the time to grab the trash bag of stuff she'd tossed the night before and drag everything with even a speck of blood on it to the backyard and soaked it all with bleach. The chances of her trash being raided and the all the evidence of him bleeding out in her living room being found was slim, but her neighbors were nosy and she didn't want to take the risk that someone had gotten suspicious of the rough looking man camped out in front of her house and called the cops.

Better safe than sorry was a good rule to start to live by she figured, if she wanted Dean to come back at some point in the future. And she did want him to come back. He was a link to her Sam, a living breathing reminder of the man she loved and the only person who could really understand the enormity of her loss.

When Jessica married Sam what was his became hers and what was hers became his. Dean was Sam's family and the moment Jessica had met him he became her family as well. Jessica had been taught that you take care of family.

From what she'd seen of him so far, Dean needed some serious taking care of.

Jessica decided that she was going to look after Dean at least until he was healed up enough that the possibility of him suddenly keeling over was gone. From what she could guess from her admittedly limited interaction with him, he was not a man that took well to depending on other people so she was going to have to make it clear that she wasn't letting him leave until she was damn good and ready.

She cleaned out the pockets of his jeans before they went into the trash bag and scooped up his keys from the pile of receipts and a wallet full of fake IDs.

The car Dean drove was a big black beast. It was a classic muscle car and it was obviously well taken care of despite the layers of dirt caked over the paint job, the large collection of fast-food wrappers, and empty liquor bottles clinking around on the floorboards. When Jessica sat in the driver's seat and turned the car on the rumble of the engine could be felt through the entire vehicle. It was such a departure from her little economy sedan it was almost comical.

The turning radius wasn't great, but it could be worse. She didn't have much of a problem backing it into her driveway. Her garage was already taken up by her and Sam's cars so it would have to be contented with taking up driveway space.

Dean needed clothes. He couldn't just keep wearing Sam's. The sight of him in them made her uncomfortable and she was sure Dean shared her sentiment. So, she dug around in the backseat looking for some sort of luggage. She didn't find any.

Moving around to the back of the car she tried out the extra key on the key chain and quickly popped the trunk open. What she found there was a little shocking and a bucket of cold reality.

She found a green surplus duffle bag that did indeed hold what appeared to be his entire wardrobe. Not a single piece of it was clean so she would have to remedy that. She also found a couple of gallon jugs of water with rosaries floating inside. Taking a wild guess she would have said they were probably holy water. Next to the holy water were what appeared to be industrial sized bags of salt.

Thinking back to the little Dean had told her about the details of their hunting job, Jessica figured they were for the ghosts and demons a hunter might come across. God, it was beyond weird that she actually used supernatural fighting lingo.

"Hunters, right." She chuckled a little hysterically.

She was about to close up the trunk and tote Dean's duffle inside when she noticed the proportions of the trunk were off. It only took a second to find the false bottom and discover the massive box of weapons.

"Holy shit."

Guns. A lot of guns. Pistols and shotguns mainly, in all their various incarnations were piled up inside right next to the innumerable boxes of ammo. Shotgun shells and bullets that were definitely not standard issue, all of them in different calibers and types.

"Oh, my God. He's got throwing stars." She poked at one attached to the lid incredulously. Then something big and black caught her eye. "Of course. Of fucking course he's got a grenade launcher."

That couldn't be legal. You know what? She knew damn well that wasn't legal.

If the guns and grenade launcher weren't enough there were also a wide range of things with pointy ends tossed haphazardly inside. Wooden stakes, metal spikes, and more knives than she'd ever seen in her life.

"Well," Jessica leaned back and surveyed it all with a pragmatic eye. "It's a good thing he's a hunter and not a serial killer, 'cause otherwise I'd be freaking the fuck out right about now."

Who was she kidding? She was definitely freaking the fuck out.

She was also talking to herself so she figured harboring a monster hunter wasn't going to weird her out for much longer since, you know, she was obviously going crazy.

Resolutely deciding not to think about the armory parked in her driveway, Jessica closed everything up, made damn sure she locked the trunk, and headed inside, Dean's duffle of dirty cloths tossed over her shoulder.

Dean was still passed out underneath her grandmother's patchwork quilt on her guest bed so she decided to get a start on his laundry. It was a little traumatizing. She wasn't sure what half the stains on his clothes were, but most of them were either permanently set or still crusty.

She was certainly not thinking about how some of them were probably monster goo.

Jessica tossed his t-shirts and underwear, all frayed and faded, elastics stretched and needing to be thrown out, in the wash with extra strength bleach based detergent and set on the most intense wash setting possible. Once the load was tossing around in the machine she paused and thought about what she could do for the next forty minutes.

If she kept busy, she didn't have to think and not having to think was what she wanted desperately. The last eighteen hours were more than any person should have to handle. Not only did she patch up a guy that had been in a fight with a werewolf, she had to learn the truth about her husband's awful childhood.

And it had been awful. Having your mother burned up on the ceiling and you father obsessed with finding the thing that killed her. Being raised to hunt the things in the dark. Moving around the country, never staying in one place longer than six months. She couldn't imagine. She didn't want to imagine.

She didn't want to think about the pain and fear and sadness in the life of someone she loved. Sam was already dead, she didn't want to have to think about anymore terrible things happening in his life.

Groceries. She needed groceries. If Dean ate nearly as much as Sam did, there was no way she'd be able to feed them both on the meager findings currently in her fridge.

Jessica shoved her feet in some running shoes, grabbed her purse and her car keys and left a note on the kitchen counter in case Dean woke up while she was gone. She locked up the house then headed into the garage and jumped in her car. The garage door rolled up noisily like it always did and she was quickly on her way to the nearest grocery store.

Groceries. Groceries. What kind of groceries should she get? Definitely a lot of meat. And some potatoes. Dean seemed like a meat and potatoes kind of guy. And sandwich meat, more eggs, some greens, ice cream…

Dean-

Went to get food. Be back soon.

-Jessica

TBC…