and I guess it doesn't matter what I am or pretend to be;
Who: Jo, Dean, and Dean. Yeah. You heard me.
Where: Her apartment.
When: June 23, 2008
What: He comes by to sort things out, like promised... except not. I promise it's not a shapeshifter, and I promise this is the last log we'll spam you guys with. ♥ Have at it!

She hadn't questioned it. He'd passed her little tests, of holy water slipped into drinks and silver on skin. It acted like him, and there hadn't been any real supernatural evidence to suggest otherwise. And there had been a cocky persistence that was so very Dean (even though he seemed darker, and made of more twisted edges and brute force than the Dean she knew), so she hadn't doubted the man at her doorstep. It was him — sounded like him, smelled like him, tasted like him, and knew things even demons couldn't suss out. So Jo hadn't doubted him. Past the lingering bruise on her cheek. Past shoving each other up against the living room wall, past the shirt riding up over her shoulders, past the awkward fumble to tear away belts. Up until she heard the click of the lock (no one could let themselves in like that, no one had that key except for the man currently in her arms) and she looked right over Dean Winchester's shoulder and into the eyes of Dean Winchester. It took Dean several long moments to make sense of what he was seeing -- surely, he wasn't so tired as to be hallucinating -- but damned if it wasn't hard to wrap his mind around the fact that Jo -- his Jo -- was currently well on her way to being fucked silly by ... whatever the hell that thing wearing his face was.  He was reaching for his gun, even as his mind raced through the possibilities: ghost (not possible for many reasons, least of all being that Dean himself was still alive); shapeshifter (more plausible, but considering how few things had added up, wouldn't Jo have tested the thing somehow?); hallucination (unlikely, considering that they both seemed to be having it). "Jo, get down!" It wouldn't be quite that easy, though -- for all of the copy's faults, stupidity wasn't one of them, and the second he realized there was a gun trained on him, he was moving, curling an arm around tightly Jo's waist and turning, placing her right in the middle. That one was warning her. And the other one was using her as a shield. It took surprisingly short time for Jo to react on pure instinct, and make the split-second decision to side with the new Dean. She stopped trying to understand what she was seeing. Couldn't duck down, but she'd go for the next best thing — instead, she elbowed the half-dressed man behind her in the gut, and followed it up with a hard stomp to his instep. He would have yelped, were it not for the sudden lack of oxygen in his lungs.  The elbow to the gut managed to do two things -- it made him double over with a grunt, and loosen his grip on Jo.  It didn't take long for him to recover, though, and with it came a split-second decision to give Jo a shove, straight at the other Dean, before bolting towards the door. Which is what sealed the deal. When faced with something as perplexing as a duplicate of himself, she knew that the Dean she knew wouldn't run away. So even as she stumbled forward, clad only in jeans and a bra, Jo was completely unselfconscious, focused on the two identical men as she was. She needed to figure who in the hell she'd been spending the past couple days with. And that meant not letting this asshole get away. "Stop him!" Dean made a grab for the duplicate, but exhaustion slowed his reflexes, and copy managed to slip right by (there would most certainly be a bruise later, from Dean hitting the doorframe in his failed attempt), making it down the stairs and out the door before Dean had a chance to recover.  For the longest time, he could only blink, before turning back towards Jo.  "That ... was not me." He felt the need to state the obvious, so shoot him. If he hadn't said it, Jo would've, so she didn't exactly blame him. The blonde stood there in the centre of her apartment, hugging herself and staring out into the empty hallway. There was a hard look in her eyes. It wasn't pretty. "I laced his drink with holy water. I cut him with fucking silver. I tested, Dean. There's no way that... jesus christ, he was you. It wasn't a shifter, I'm not dumb enough to believe a shifter." But there was something hopeless and lost in her tone. This was just like Duluth only worse because she'd never been this close to Sam and, oh, christ. The look she wore was one that Dean didn't like, and damned if the copy wouldn't suffer, if only because of that look.  It went against his better instincts, but he holstered the gun (it wasn't like there was anything in the apartment to shoot at the moment) and took a tentative step towards her.  "Hey.  It's okay," he said, trying to be soothing, though the underlying anger -- not at Jo, of course -- kept it from being one-hundred percent such. In the interests of time, Jo didn't go for the all-out hug. Instead, she reached out and took his hand, fingers tightening white for one moment, before Jo shook her head and broke the contact, ducking over to pick up her discarded tank top. "We're wasting time. Let's go get this... I don't know, goddamn evil twin thing." A pause as she pulled the shirt on, before adding, fiercely, "He wasn't you. I thought he was, for the longest time, 'cause he was just like you when..." ... when you're broken and battered and hating everything but most of all hating yourself. For a moment, he was tempted to tell her no, that she was staying behind, but the moment passed, and he nodded, albeit reluctantly.  He had the feeling that if he refused to bring her, she'd follow anyway, and the only option to prevent that would make the situation hit even more closely to Duluth. Dean was pretty sure neither of them wanted that. "You know, I wouldn't have held it against you if you'd gone for the groin," he commented, offhandedly almost, as he led the way from the apartment, trusting her to keep up if she truly intended on coming. A couple seconds to shrug into her jacket and grab her knife and a gun, and then Jo was following closely behind Dean — the real one this time — with the apartment door slamming behind her. They'd lost a couple minutes, so there was no telling where the double had gone... but at least Dean Winchester's face was well-known enough in Nebraska's hunting parts. Hopefully it'd be possible to track him down. And it took a moment for her to mull over his words before Jo responded with a cheeky smile, though it was a bit frayed around the edges. "Guess I just didn't want to damage the goods." "Good to know for the future.  Wouldn't be my goods you'd be damaging, though, and once we find the bastard, singing soprano's the least of that sonofabitch's worries."  He'd noticed the bruise on her cheek -- though he hadn't said anything yet -- and it did little more than fuel his anger.  Whatever the creature was, he planned on ending it, and doing it slowly. That bruise on her face was the reason Jo would mentally beat herself up about this later — even after one false Winchester and one false hunter named Charles Lang, she still trusted stupidly and absolutely in anything wearing Dean's face. And either the bastards would stop using the people she trusted in order to mess with her (which was not damn likely), or Jo would have to stop trusting. Well. She wasn't looking forward to that tug-of-war. But then again, it wasn't just an imposter wearing his face, was it? It really was Dean Winchester. Ay, there's the rub. Later on, sitting in the passenger seat, Jo would rest her head against the Impala's window, gingerly touching the bruise on her cheek and berating herself. Not a shapeshifter. Not a demon. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy... She could have barked a laugh at that: high school Eng-lit classes come back to haunt her ass, and with painfully real repercussions. But Jo was a fast learner, and she'd just acquired more reasons to be cynical and distrustful. Chalk it down as one more point to the hunter's life.