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Sam remembers hunger and anger as the lenses through which she saw everything, when she and Dean were kids. Hungry for more, always. Angry because more was not available, no matter how hard Dean tried, no matter how much she cried, no matter how much shit John got about the way he raised them.
Nearly until she jumped into the Pit at the age of 27, Sam saw her brother as miles ahead of her, eternally one layer closer to whatever true living was, four years more wizened and more scarred and more familiar with the way the world worked. She fought to keep pace from their first day on the road, and she never caught up.
Dean could spell and read and count and run and shoot and speak to adults and communicate with John and flirt and drive, always first, and always better than she did. He was faster, and bigger, and more coordinated for the majority of her life, and the hunger and the anger had no choice but to erupt from her psyche, like a volcano, covering everything with a sheen of pain and blinding heat. Sam could never remember feeling comfortable in her skin or settled in her life, but much as the hunger and the anger ebbed, when you feel so much of something all the time, eventually, you feel nothing at all. At age twelve, she saw Dean - the one person who was supposed to be hers forever, who never left her and never got hurt and never turned her away - come home from a hunt with seven gashes across his body that bled profusely for several days through countless bandages and restitchings and made him look white and ghastly where he lay recuperating, mostly unconscious in a motel bed. The day he opened his eyes and sat up for the first time, Sam decided that no matter what happened or what she had to do, she was going to get the hell out of dodge.
--
For all that she strove to fit in and be “normal” – whatever that meant changed from town to town – Sam grew up with a fear of people ingrained deeply in her bones. She never had close friends, and she never disclosed anything that really mattered. Every person could be a shapeshifter, every shadow could be a monster, every friend could be the last face she saw through the rear windshield as they hightailed it out of town.
She ached with loneliness when she was working through adolescence, seeing countless classmates across all state lines pair up and create something real out of all the flirting that - for Dean - never became anything else. Four or five times, she saw couples in her classes that were really in love, and she'd wonder how they managed it. The thought of laying her soul bare and placing her heart into anyone's hands made something in her chest seize up. She thought sometimes that John and Dean, if they hadn't carved their names in her soul over decades of intimacy and unifying experiences, wouldn't have a chance in hell of knowing her, either.
A few times during her junior year, she had the urge to show Dean her SAT books and ask him what he thought of it all. She wanted to talk to him about their mortality, how much shorter their life expectancies became with each new injury, how much she wanted more out of life. She wanted to hear what he wanted, what drove him to wake up at the crack of dawn every morning rather than climb under the covers and let life just pass him by, what it was that he found so satisfying about his effervescent encounters with random girls in every new town.
The only person who knew that she was applying to colleges was her guidance counselor.
--
When she was in fourth grade in eastern Utah, Sam was bullied.
The duffel bags that housed every belonging that the Winchesters owned were small and the space within them was limited. John never let her have brightly colored clothes, or anything feminine, because it would have no use in a hunt or on the road. Most of her shirts were Dean's old ones, and her pants were often tattered and stained before another shopping trip afforded her a new pair.
The girls at her school, funnily enough, didn't care. They spent most of recess braiding each other's hair, and most of class time gossiping amongst themselves, and Sam was on the periphery, nearly invisible. It was a boy who started it.
His name was Cole, and he had silky blond hair that made her breath catch when Sam first saw him. He wore crisp polo shirts and neatly ironed khakis to school every day, not a single smudge or tear on them. Sam never figured out what provoked him, but hazarded later on that he might have liked her. On her third day at the school, he pushed her to the ground and mocked her spotted, washed-out gray sweatpants to his friends. It progressed to laughing at her in class, punching her as she walked to the middle school across the road to wait for Dean, and stealing her lunch.
The first time she came home hungry after school, Dean gave her all the leftover pizza in the fridge and did not himself eat until the following day. Every day after that, he would run over during her recess hour and check that she still had her lunch - and if she didn't, he gave her his own.
--
When she was five, John found a hunt in Mississippi and left her with Dean in an abandoned house near a Gulfport suburb. After the roar of the Impala faded down the street, Sam watched Dean walk around the entire house methodically closing and locking windows, doors, and latches to the basement and attic. Once that was done, he made another circle around the house pouring crooked – but effective – salt lines with unsteady hands just bigger than her own.
Then he unpacked two boxes of macaroni and cheese, put them on the stove, and told her to get in the bathtub. It was a Sunday night in the middle of a warm March, and Dean was going to school in the morning while Sam was going to kindergarten. They'd spent the whole weekend training outside with Dad, running laps and learning to start fire with sticks and using knives to cut wood into different shapes – skills John told Sam would be necessary when she was grown up.
Sam complained briefly, but Dean threatened to keep the mac and cheese from her, and she sulkily gave in, walking to the small bathroom upstairs over creaky floorboards, hands playing with her shirt where it was stiff with dirt and sweat.
When Dean joined her, she was sitting in mostly tepid water, pouring it over her arms absently. His legs bracketed her as he sat on the edge of the tub and began to scrub her head with shampoo. Sam dozed as he worked his fingers through knots at the base of her skull, and then something occurred to her. "Why doesn't Dad wash me? Molly and Timmy told me their parents give them baths every day, and they have toys they play with."
"Because washing you’s my job, not Dad’s."
"Why?" She tugged at one toe with her left hand, watching her whole foot pop out of the water and wave in the air, covered in goose bumps.
"Because taking care of you’s my job."
"Why?" She lowered her leg and rubbed it to smooth the skin over again, shivering. From the corner of her eye she saw Dean's hand reach toward the faucet and turn the hot water on, filling the tub with another few inches of warmth. When it reached her chin, he turned it off.
"Because Dad isn't like other parents. He can't take care of you, because he isn't home a lot. So it's my job."
"Does that mean you're a grown up? Miss Anna said only grown ups have jobs."
Dean sighed behind her, putting pressure on her head so she would lean backwards into the water and let him wash out the shampoo. She gazed up at him, interested by this new angle to his face, until he snickered and sprayed her in the face with some water. "No, Sammy. Enough questions."
"But - "
"Sam," he said in a voice that had never failed to silence her. He spoke like that when she would try to talk back to John, or when she would refuse to eat what was left in the fridge.
He lathered the rest of her with soap in relative silence, just their breathing and the splatter of water echoing around them. When he was toweling her off, he said, “A job isn’t just something a grown up does. Sometimes kids have jobs. Like babysitters. And you saw that dog last week, chained up outside the butcher’s house? It had a job too, to protect the butcher’s house. Jobs are just things people have to do.”
“The dog didn’t look like it liked being outside.”
Dean was silent for a moment, pulling her pajama top over her head with jerky hands. Sam made a noise of complaint when the motion left her hair in disarray and began moving it back into place while her eyes squinted up at Dean. He rolled his eyes. “It doesn’t matter. Jobs aren’t supposed to be liked, you just do ‘em.”
“What if you don’t?”
“Really bad things happen,” Dean said, pulling the plug to drain the tub. Sam watched him, watched his shirt crinkle stiffly with dirt that he'd still not had a chance to wash out. “Jobs are very important.”
“Can I have a job?”
Dean turned around, handing her a comb from the countertop and opening the door. “Here’s two: brush your hair and then come eat.”
--
Facial symmetry, Sam learned from an issue of Cosmopolitan in the waiting room of a hospital, was really important in life. Facial symmetry made you more attractive, more approachable, and more likable.
When she walked into Dean’s room after his surgery, her eyes jumped from the big white cast on his leg to his face, which, she immediately determined, was perfectly symmetrical.
John began to murmur with the nurse as she thoroughly explained Dean’s condition, and Sam approached the bed slowly. Dean’s hand lay palm up with a large needle sticking out of his wrist. Sam squeezed her eyes shut against the image of it. Her fingers wrapped carefully around Dean’s, and she leaned closer to study the planes of his face, distorted slightly by the tube sticking out of his mouth. His broken nose, once perfectly straight, was now mangled under the little cast that was stuck on it. She listened to his raspy breathing and let her eyes roam over his freckles and eyelashes, nearly the same color in the gloomy overhead light. His cheekbones were pronounced, one eye slightly swollen and tinged with pink bruising.
Stephanie Cortez, her geology project partner, had repeatedly demanded that they work at Sam’s place after school and on weekends, finding excuses to get Dean’s attention when he was in the room and whispering, “God, Sam, how do you even function with a brother that hot,” when he was out of earshot.
To be fair, Sam had understood several years prior that Dean was born with looks that were extremely rare – and extremely inconvenient, according to their father. Dean drew attention everywhere they went simply because people wanted to look at him, and this interfered with the fundamental goal of the last thirteen years: of blending in. She wasn’t even irritated anymore by all the girls who clung to her in hopes of getting closer to Dean, and she stopped being jealous that she wasn’t enough on her own to be that interesting to them. Something numb had settled in her bones as she grew older, and Sam was frightened sometimes by how she could observe her life with complete detachment.
The cold hand of her brother underneath her own didn’t make her scared. Dean’s lifeless, mechanically regulated breathing didn’t nauseate her. All she could think about was that this put another tally under the Get the Hell Out of Dodge column in her head. The Stay With Them column had nearly dissolved.
Sam let her gaze drop to Dean’s neck, where a thick bandage covered the large tear in his skin, and a sling held his right arm loosely cradled to his chest. If she narrowed her eyes just right, she could almost imagine that Dean was dead.
The broken nose would bend and the scab on his forehead would scar, and Dean wasn’t symmetrical anymore. But Sam thought if Stephanie saw Dean right then, she’d still think he was beautiful.
--
Sam read a lot of books and essays and historical accounts about things, being as curious as she was. She was encouraged by her own understanding and enjoyed introspection, analysis. From the time she started to feel herself going numb, she began to read up on psychology and disorders and the existing theories for both.
By the time she was midway through high school, Sam was able to confidently put her finger on what was wrong with her, without aversion or shame. She’d never tell anyone, anyway. And it was not as though it would be anyone’s first guess. Sometimes she felt like she was on fire from how much she wanted to swallow Dean whole, make him a part of herself forever. Sometimes she wanted to smash his head into a concrete wall. But always, she knew she couldn’t bear to be far from him.
In November of 1999, John left her and Dean at Pastor Jim’s. When Pastor Jim was out, Sam accidentally caused a fire. She’d left her curling iron (worth $48 that they didn’t have, but which Dean created out of pocket change and saved allowances and cutting corners on food) powered on in the bathroom near a box of tissues. The whole bathroom reeked of smoke for hours, even with the window wide open. The walls near the sink were singed and unraveling, and the countertop was cracked. All of Dean’s toiletries, including an expensive electric razor that Bobby had gifted to him for his eighteenth birthday, were destroyed.
When Dean found her twenty minutes later standing in front of the wreckage with a half empty fire extinguisher dangling from her hands, he’d led her silently to a chair and gently removed the extinguisher out of her grip. “How long were you standin’ there for, Sammy?”
Sam blinked up at him, feeling for the first time the drying tears on her cheeks and the broken nail on her right hand from when she’d smashed it, trying to open the bathroom window. Dean crouched beside her, brushing her hair out of her face and watching her quietly. “I dunno.” She was seized with fear, suddenly, at the prospect of telling Pastor Jim, sweet, kind, generous Pastor Jim, that she’d nearly burned his house down, that she’d paid him back for his care and his open arms with detritus.
By the time Pastor Jim came home several hours later, Dean had bundled her up in downy blankets in the upstairs bedroom, with a curt command to lie there and try to sleep. Through the crack he’d left in the door, she heard him explain to Pastor Jim how he’d accidentally plugged her curler in instead of his razor, how he was real sorry about the damage, how he’d try to pick up a job in town to help pay for the repairs. She cried until she passed out from exhaustion several hours later. The next week, Dean was working as a bartender at Jack’s Pub on Eighth, and after three months, the bathroom was paid off.
Sam resolved never to let her shit see the light of day. Dean would take a bullet for her, he’d do it proudly, he’d do it without a second thought. Telling him about the fucked up monster that had reared its ugly head inside her would be calamity. It would be total wreckage. It would be the end of everything.
If she told him, he’d act like he was fucked up too, and somehow he’d make it his own fault, and eventually he’d let Sam smash him to bits, but he’d never let her wrestle with it on her own. If she told him, Sam knew, she would finally and completely break him.
--
The night before she caught the bus out of Philly, she and Dean sat in the front seat of his car, staring at the people lined up at the stop. Her duffel was light, emptied of all the hunting gear she wouldn’t need at Stanford, emptied of the last eighteen years of her life. Besides her clothes and shoes, the only thing Sam had thrown in was Dean’s second favorite shotgun. He wouldn’t know it was missing until after she left, and he’d still have his favorite to keep him safe.
Dean’s leather jacket creaked as he leaned forward, almost cradling the steering wheel, and closed his eyes.
“I’m sorry, Dean.”
He didn’t answer her, just thumped his forehead onto the wheel and breathed out.
“If I’d told you, you would have had a say in it. I would’ve – “ she swallowed the sob that suddenly jumped to her throat. “I think I would have let you change my mind. I would’ve let you talk me out of it, and I couldn’t – I can’t let this be anything but my – my own choice – my decision. And if I’d still left, even after you asked me not to, I would’ve – you’d have – "
“Stop acting like you were sparing me some sorta heartache,” he said gruffly, voice sharp but quiet. His chin was still tucked into his chest, and his arms were wrapped around himself. Sam blinked tears from her eyes, looked out the window. After several minutes of silence, he said, “I did everything.” He began to sit up, weary. Sam watched as he rubbed a bandaged finger, scraped raw on a recent hunt, between his eyebrows and laughed humorlessly. “I did fucking everything.” It was close to terrifying, the look he leveled at her when he finally turned his head. In the dim light coming from the street lamps, Sam could see his puffy eyes and the freckles standing in stark contract to his skin. He looked sick. “I gave you whatever you needed, I took on Dad to let you have it easier, I helped you with homework, I tucked you in, I – what the fuck was it for?”
Silence stretched as they looked at each other. Sam’s fingers clenched around the rough material of her bag, her heart hammering in her chest. She wondered if she could ever tell him that all of that was exactly why she was able to leave, able to see that there’s a life for her somewhere out there. That what he had done for her was a blessing, rather than unintentional self-inflicted betrayal, would be beyond his understanding.
“You wanna take anything else from me, Sammy?” he scoffed, mirthless. “Want the car?” he patted the leather under him. “Want to chop off my right arm and keep it? What haven’t I given you?” Underneath the cutting sarcasm, Sam heard desperation; Dean really wanted an answer, so that perhaps he could give her what would make her stay.
“Someday, you will stop seeing this as something that I did to you,” she said slowly. “And see it as something I did for me.”
Dean chuckled again, almost soundlessly, and rubbed his hands over his face. “Yeah, God knows you haven't been selfish enough over the last eighteen years.”
When she chanced a glance out the bus window later, as the bus began to pull away from the stop, both Dean and the car were long gone.
--
In the fall of 1997, Sam started her freshman year at Helena High School. It was the first big city school she’d ever attended, and she’d run to Dean’s car overwhelmed by the fifteen hundred students that had flooded out of the building at the three o’clock bell.
He was parked near the front of the lot, showy the way he always was, sitting on Baby’s hood with his legs splayed and his face turned toward the sun. Sam had knocked his sunglasses askew as she walked past him, listening to him squawk in surprise and scramble to catch them before they broke on the ground.
When she climbed into her seat, she felt a prickle on her neck and looked around, spotting a group of guys from the AP senior History class she’d had in the morning (Sam liked reading History books, and it paid off) huddled near a rundown blue truck, staring at her and Dean. Dean followed her gaze and snorted, “Got some admirers, Sammy?”
Sam flushed, startled by the very idea, and looked down at her baggy clothes, all variations of gray. She brushed her hair back and retorted, “More likely that you do.”
He did a double take, tipping his glasses down and looking over them at the jocks talking among themselves as they continued to throw glances at the car. “Nah,” he decided, “it’s Montana, after all.”
A few weeks later, Sam walked in on Dean and Chase Jones from AP senior History in the bathroom of a bar. They sprung apart, breathing heavily, and Sam slammed the door closed in front of herself, a flush spreading over her entire body.
It really wasn’t a mystery that her wires got crossed at some point, considering.
--
When they were both little and Dean was still not allowed in the front seat, he’d let Sam climb on his lap and count his freckles.
Sam was born with a darker complexion, her hair already dark brown when Dean’s still glinted golden in the sun, and it was always a source of supreme wonder for her that these little beige spots covered every inch of Dean’s skin.
She’d count anywhere from ninety-nine to four hundred each car ride, numbers swinging wildly depending on the height of the sun in the sky, whether Dean was sleeping with his cheek against the seat, and how much he helped her with her counting.
Over the years, Sam had grown to know, with the kind of certainty with which one knew the color of snow and the number of suns in the solar system, the clusters that gathered on Dean’s face. There was a particularly dark bundle under his right temple, usually hidden by his hair. A group vaguely resembling the Big Dipper was sprinkled over his left eye. One dark spot, probably a single mole, sat square under his chin.
If she had to draw her brother from memory, she couldn’t. But she’d recognize his face before her own. It was almost like she was him, more than she was herself. The shade of his hair and the color of his eyes were so much more familiar to her than what she saw in the mirror.
It took her years, far longer than normal, to comprehend that she was not Dean, and Dean was not Sam. They were separate. None of him belonged to her innately, and everything that he gave her, he could take away. It was painful to understand and to accept, because Dean had been the foundation on which she had built everything, and she had thought he was hers forever.
Eventually, it didn’t matter, because their life wasn’t the kind where Dean could leave or take himself away. Whether anyone liked it or not, Sam would get to look at his freckles every day, and his eyes would be on her more than they would be on anything else. Where before, she had feared the steady foundation of Dean crumbling, she soon realized he was also the walls, the roof, the pipes, and the furniture sitting atop the acreage of her life.
It would be only a few years before she began to find it suffocating, rather than safe.
--
John had never really been tough on Sam. He hadn’t been strict, or imposing. He liked rules, he liked it when they were followed, and he enlisted Dean as the enforcer.
Sam remembered hating that her friends all had mommies and daddies who bought them presents and gave them puppies and pampered them with vacations. Sam remembered being self conscious about how she looked and dressed, when she would attract the inevitable looks of girls her age who dressed more provocatively, more fashionably, more femininely. She even remembered, in her older years, the envy that roared within her when technology began to be stylish, and her classmates all used cell phones to plan parties after school, while she had to be found and told in person.
But that was all negligible. What Sam really hated was John’s base-level assumption that this was it. Motels at the edges of towns, scamming people out of money, lying about their past, disappearing from people’s lives and entering new ones – all of this was how it would always be. Sam would always be invisible, Dean would always be beautiful, and nothing would ever change. No more and no less existed in the world, at least for them. When Sam realized that she had the capacity to have more, the hunger and the anger became her constant companions.
The one thing Sam got to have was her hair. She kept it at just above her elbows from the age of ten, and with the help of some industrial strength rubber bands from Wal-Mart, could keep it in a tight bun on any hunt and during training. It was never an issue. Once, John even let her buy hairspray and mousse, when he felt generous. The bottles had traveled with her for the length of a few hunts, until Sam forgot them during a particularly late packing session, when they’d had to leave town at dawn. Sam wasn’t even sad about it, but a few weeks later, two new bottles showed up in her bag, and Dean looked privately pleased when she came out of the bathroom with the stench of aerosol trailing behind her.
Sam had never convinced herself that she was pretty, but they moved around so much that it never grew to be something to measure herself with. Even during her first semester at Stanford, she found it hard to be concerned with makeup and jewelry, when so much more was flooding her mind on a daily basis.
So when Jessica Moore approached her at a frat party and looked at her like she enjoyed what she saw, the notion was so new and yet so elemental that the next few months felt like a constant headlong tumble from a cliff. Jess was the first one who looked at Sam like she was a person, like she was entitled to space and admiration and adjectives and soft touches. Jess opened Sam’s eyes to a world that had never existed for her before, a world where Sam could speak about her passions and be heard – nay, responded to; a world where Jess was never using her peripheral vision on high alert, but rather focused all of her attention directly on Sam. It was a fairy tale world, Sam knew, because a world where monsters didn’t exist was a delusion, but it was the most deliriously happy world she had ever known.
--
The Sam that came back to Dean from Palo Alto was different. She cared about her looks, she cared about her things, and she cared about her life. She cared what Dean thought of her, she cared what Jess had felt before she died, she cared, she cared, she cared. Reckless as Dean had always been with his emotions, the new Sam felt the constant threat of being overtaken by hers. The numbness she had known as a teen was foreign to her, boggling that she could ever have missed the raw way in which everything chafed.
She wept for months after Jess’s death, and sometimes would find her eyes watering in the middle of a mundane conversation. Eventually, the nausea of grief passed and left an open wound in its wake: Dean.
The wound, with as much as she desperately clawed at it, never healed. Each look, each touch, each smile cut deeper into her, until she felt like she was covered in her own dripping blood. There was no reprieve; to put distance between them would be as painful as it was to sit next to Dean in the car, every day, hours at a time.
Relearning the map of their relationship was like a fresh hunt, with fewer risks. But the risks that existed were landmines. Sam spent every waking second tiptoeing through her own head. She had despised hunting with her very core, before Stanford. Now, every blessed second she spent thinking about something other than Dean was a second of peace.
“We’re trying to help you, Sam,” Bobby had said. She knew he thought she was being a shit when she’d asked him to shoot her. She wasn’t.
When she jumped into Hell, she felt the most wonderful, peculiar thing: she felt nothing.