Bella was ten years old and her Mom-Renee-was on a bad boy phase.

"It's perfect for my muse, darling!"

Renee, decked in leather clothes had spent the better part of three months trolling biker bars and coming home the next morning smelling like spirits and cigarette smoke. If Bella hadn't learned to pay bills years ago, they wouldn't have any electricity as Renee was too hungover in the mornings to do so.

("If my parents aren't going to act like parents, why should I call them that," Bella, all of eight, thought furiously to herself through frustrated tears.

Kids weren't meant to be acting as parents, but few things work out how they're meant to. Life is never fair. Bella learned this lesson early.)

Bella expected this to blow over soon. Renee slipped in and out of her interests the way she shopped for clothes-with excess and shallow impulsivity. She loved her… Renee, but she was notoriously flighty.

However, she was mistaken.

John Smith, was her mother's most recent conquest. He was tall, wore a leather jacket and looked perpetually mean and scruffy. He was "staying" in their guest bedroom and tended to disappear and come back at odd hours throughout the week.

But, his odd habits didn't worry her. What worried her was that he and m-Renee went into closed rooms for hours and she could sometimes hear screaming arguments through the walls. Whenever they left the room, he was angry and she was frightened.

Bella was scared and on edge and that made her impulsive.

It wasn't the first time Renee had gotten a bad boyfriend. A few years ago there was this man named Randall. He seemed alright and Renee was in love, then a few months in Renee started going around with bruises and not painting and crying at weird times. Bella eventually had to call grandma to make it stop and Randall got a restraining order.

However, Grandma was sick and there wasn't enough going on to call the police. And, like what was mentioned, when Bella was scared she got impulsive.

Thus, leading to her holding a flare gun on John and demanding for him to leave her mother alone.

John stood there, a big man with his hands halfheartedly raised, and then he did something that she's never expect. He chuckled.

"You're a good kid, Isabel." He told her, looking amused. She stood there in shock. She didn't know he could show an emotion beyond brooding anger.

Then, he rather predictably disarmed her and studied the flare gun with a rather unnerving attempt at a smile. John then looked at Bella in a serious manner, "If you ever aim a weapon at someone or something, don't talk, shoot. Or else you might not get out of there alive." He told her firmly.

Before Bella could panic at his ominous statement, the lights flickered out. John's face turned from helpfully unnerving to oh-fishsticks-I'm-gonna-die-young.

Yes, threaten the scary biker dude with a flare gun. Mortal impulsivity, thy name is Bella.

She must've zoned out for a moment because John's face was suddenly in her's. "Can you work a shotgun," He demanded of her.

"I-I… Maybe? Dad took me to a range," Bella stammered.

A sawed off shotgun was then placed in her arms. It was heavy and cold and slipped a bit in her sweaty palms, but her grip was surprisingly steady.

"What-" She began but was cut off.

"Go to the kitchen and draw salt in a circle and stay there. Shoot anything that moves, even if it looks like me or your mom. It'll try to trick you into leaving. Don't."

"Wh-"

"GO NOW!"

She went. There was a time and place to argue with her crazy, unwanted house guest, and it was not when he was armed.

"So, ghosts." Bella says politely.

The house was a mess. A legitimate, horrible mess of which she was probably going to have to do most of the cleaning up herself. However, she was was so relieved to be alive she was having trouble being annoyed by it.

She tried and failed to brush the glass out of her hair and made a valiant effort to ignore the blood clinging to her lest she pass out, or throw up, or both.

Bella was pretty sure a glass surface in the house didn't escape the being's wrath. To her horror, she realized this meant Renee would be on a new redecorating kick. Bad luck is putting things mildly.

"Yes," John said. He looked remarkably calm for a man who just narrowly avoided getting skewered by a piece of rebar and had only survived due to a lucky shot by a ten year old with a loaded weapon who was aiming in the opposite direction.

After all of this she still wondered about his sanity.

"Your mother was similar enough to his former wife for the ghost to become obsessed with her. He tried to recreate how he had killed his wife in order for them to be together forever with your mother."

"So, you weren't dating mom?"

"No. When she realized someone was stalking her she filed a report with the police. I… led her to believe I was an undercover cop working her case." He looked vaguely uncomfortable which was the closest he probably ever got to sheepish.

That probably was a bad thing but she couldn't bring herself to care. He saved her and Renee's life. In the books she liked to read, that meant he was the hero.

John then tried to soften his voice, "Your mom will wake up soon."

"It's probably a good thing she was unconscious," Bella mused, looking at the wreckage that used to be her house. She looked back at John. "It's not just ghosts, is it," She half asked and half stated. He said he was a "hunter", not a "ghost hunter" and there couldn't be that much need for all those weapons with ghosts. "Vampires, werewolves, zombies… How much of it is true?"

John did that unnerving almost-smile again, but it was less scary this time. "You're a sharp kid. I saw you, though. You stepped out of that salt circle when she had me pinned and thought nothing of the consequences to you. I know that look in your eyes. If I told you what's out there, what's going to stop you from going to seek it out?"

Bella remained silent.

"That's what I thought." John ran his hand through his hair and then shuffled off and sifted through the wreckage. He pulled out a pen and a mostly unstained scrap of paper after a few minutes and scrawled something on it.

He handed the paper to her. "It's my number. When you get in over your head, call me." He picks up his duffel bag. "I gotta get going," He says.

Bella was minorly peeved that he wasn't staying to help clean up but didn't try to stop him.

"Hey," she called out before he got out the door. He turned.

"What's your name? Your real name, not 'John Smith'." Bella asked before she could lose her nerve.

"John Winchester," He answered and strode off in a dramatic matter.

"That's even worse!" Bella yelled out after him. His resulting laugh was the most unnatural event to happen that night.

Much to her chagrin, she did need to call John several times over the years. After that night, weird stuff just seemed to gravitate towards her and she seemed unable to just walk away.

John said it was because she was missing whatever it was in her head that make people run away from scary situations. Bella thought he was being dramatic.

Then again, there was that thing with the sentient school bus-that was on fire-that she ran into with a car the stole from driver's ed. On purpose.

It was a miracle she wasn't expelled for that one.

John might have a very, very minor point.

Throughout the years, Bella changed. Mostly little things, her tastes in books went from romance novels to books that favored heroines. She took Latin. She started listening to overly loud music. Her tastes in interior design looked like they were stolen off of a heavy metal rock band album.

She had a box of...interesting items under her bed that could probably get her chucked in an asylum if she wasn't careful.

Blood still made her queasy, but it was a lot less effective on her than it it once was. Simply because there were worse things out there that blood couldn't really register anymore.

Bella had been a shy child, nervousness making her unsure of her movements and causing her to be clumsy. People, she found, were a lot less intimidating when you had stared down a murderous clown with nothing but a lighter and a half empty beer bottle.

All that being said, social anxiety was still a problem she had to deal with, but she could now bullshit with the best of them.

Her talks with John ended up mostly for advice but occasionally for help when she just couldn't handle whatever was going on next.

(They never and will never acknowledge The Thing with the demon happened. It didn't and it will forever stay in her nightmares were it belongs.)

Years passed, and she ended up going to live with her father awhile in a sleepy town named Forks, Washington. She thought she'd take a break from her weird shit and focus on her college prep for awhile.

That is, until she heard about the animal mutilations that had been going on in the town for a few years.

With human bite marks.

Only her.

"Hey, John. I need to know how to kill a… well, I'll call it a vampire but it's not like a fucking normal one."

"I don't know."

"It sparkles."

"No, I'm not drunk. Or high. Or under some other influence."

A pause and then the sound of stomping feel and a window being slammed shut.

"Actually, scratch that. I might need to kill more than one."