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Dean didn’t catch him the first time.
He’s surprised by that, but he probably shouldn’t have been. He was careful, and his excuse was innocuous enough that Dean had no reason to suspect anything or try to join him or follow him or anything like that. But he just expected Dean to know anyway, to see through him.
The meeting was in a church basement. He liked that he’s sneaking off to consecrated ground to deal with this problem. He knows that it’s only the mildest of protections, not nearly as potent as holy water, but it’s still something. Auspicious.
He was awkward and quiet at first. He ducked his head and hunched his shoulders and tried to make himself look small. That…never really worked. There’s nowhere he can tuck his legs away to hide how tall he is, and they’re all just sitting around in metal folding chairs under fluorescent lights.
His plan was to just be quiet and listen and observe, to figure out how these things work, but he realized quickly that it defeats the point if he doesn’t own up to why he’s there. Not that anyone in this room *really* knew why he’s there, but…
“Hi. Uh, I’m Sam, and I, uh, guess you know why I’m here. It’s been a couple of years since I stopped drinking, but, well, you know, that never really goes away, does it? So, yeah, that’s why I’m here now.”
Even saying that much was a relief. He walked out of the meeting feeling a bit lighter. Just admitting that there was something wrong with him seemed to lighten the burden a bit. After finding out that he’d been walking around without a soul doing who knew what, he'd had plenty to feel guilty about. Every little bit helped.
He didn’t make a regular habit of it or anything, but if they weren’t busy with a case or saving the world from imminent destruction, he would look up the local options online (always being careful to clear that from his browser history). He would go if he could find an excuse to get away. Sometimes, that excuse was that Dean was spending the night in a bar. He appreciated the irony.
“I guess it got started because I wanted some control over my life, you know? Things had gotten bad, and there was a…well, I had to bury my brother. I was just, at a loss, I guess. But of course that didn’t really help, and just made things worse, so I was even more desperate to get some control back, and…and then I couldn’t stop. So, yeah, it’s an addiction. Something I think about all the time, even though I’ve been sober for years.”
Sam didn't really know how to count his time of sobriety. The last time he drank demon blood willingly was the day he'd said yes to Lucifer in Detroit. The last time he remembered drinking was the day he'd jumped into the Cage with Lucifer. But time in the Cage was...difficult to measure. Dean's experience of hell suggested that time worked differently there. And should he count his soul or his body? He didn't remember being soulless, so he wasn't even sure if he'd actually remained sober or perhaps broken and given in to temptation without his conscience to scream 'No!' at him. But he felt like he'd been sober for awhile...so he went with that.
***
Getting back his memories from the cage and from being soulless for over a year did nothing to help with his guilt. Luckily, there were bigger problems to worry about, so he could focus on world-ending disasters and his own shaky grip on reality.
Lucifer was amusing at AA meetings, he supposed. Sam ignored him, of course, but he couldn’t help but hear what he said about everyone else’s issues. It sounded almost…insightful…sometimes. Sam knew it was really just his own brain, that he wasn’t really haunted or possessed or anything like that. Maybe Sam would have made a good shrink in another life? He could have become a counselor, helped people get their lives back on track. But it made it a lot harder for him to share out loud himself with Lucifer looking at him expectantly. He supposed that, this way, there really was one person in the room who knew what he was talking about, but it wasn’t really helpful and it wasn’t real. He still tried, though.
“It’s just, I don’t really do well with being angry. Sometimes I’m just so mad, and I have to do something about it. Drinking helped me feel like I had some control over that, but it really just made it worse. Now, I don’t drink any more, but I try really hard not to be angry, either. For a while there, I didn’t feel anything at all, and that was worse. So now I’m just trying to figure out what’s okay, you know?”
“Awww, Sam, your anger is fine with me. Why don’t you try to use it to cover up your fear, that always works out well for you,” Lucifer told him. He ignored him again, looking away and putting pressure on his palm. Finally, some peace.
***
New faces, new names, every place he went. None of them knew what he’d told people at the last meeting. It was very freeing, in a way, to not even bother keeping the story straight. But it also was a bit…well, not depressing. But maybe the story of his life? That he was just passing through, no use in finding friends or keeping in touch. So, he was a bit surprised when they asked him if he had a sponsor. He begged off, saying how much he travelled for work, but they insisted that it was important to have someone just a phone call away to be accountable to. To talk him down if he needed it, but also to help him make progress. He was wary of the idea, but figured it couldn’t hurt. And he could just not call the guy if it were a problem. After the first couple of times Sam stepped out to make the call, Dean teased him about taking a smoke break. He'd been careful to always come back with something (snacks, a drink from the vending machine), but after that, he made sure he called while Dean was out.
But of course the sponsor wanted to know about his relationships. The people in his life. And how do you explain…?
“I haven’t really been good with relationships, actually. I mean, I’ve dated some great women, but, it tends to end…badly. And I have to assume that I’m the problem. I mean, they never would have….”
The sponsor wanted to know if any of these women drank with him. And Sam choked out some sort of strangled laugh. “There was…well, when this all started. I mean, I’m not saying there wasn’t any inclination before, that I had never wanted control of my life until…. But really, she started it. It was after a death in the family, and I was pretty bad off, spiraling out of control. And I thought…well, I thought she was looking out for me, trying to help me. And in a way, she did save me, give me something to focus on.” Ruby had stopped him from spending his life in a drunken stupor, actually. “It was sex first,” he admitted, “but then we were , uh, drinking together, and she encouraged that, drank with me, told me it wasn’t a problem and I could always fix it later.”
He told the sponsor that he hadn’t spoken to her since he got sober. Technically true. He did not tell the sponsor that he’d held her down so his brother could stab her to death or that the lying bitch was a demon.
The sponsor, however, wouldn’t leave it alone. He pressed Sam on whether or not it had really started with Ruby. Was he really saying he’d never had a drink before then?
“Well, yeah, sure, you know, after I left college, but that was innocent, really. And I’m not blaming her, not really. I know this is something that’s wrong with me, something that’s been wrong with me my whole life. And yeah, I…I did things, trying to get control, before. But I’m telling you, before Ruby, I wasn’t an addict.”
He debated telling the sponsor he’d had his first drink as a six month old baby, but he knew that would just raise questions about how his parents had raised him and he didn’t really want to make it sound like their fault, and talking about how he was raised was really not something he needed to get into. And he knew what it would sound like if he tried to say, ‘The demons made me do it.’
“I…I did have one good relationship. Before Ruby. I was going to marry this girl, and she was really great, great for me, and we never drank, you know, that’s just how she was raised, and…and there was this accident. And I lost her. And I just, you know, always wondered if I could have maybe saved her, if I’d been with her? And then maybe she could have saved me, too,“ he added quietly.
At this point, the sponsor seemed to catch on that ‘loss’ was a big deal in Sam’s life, and he went into ways people cope with grief that don’t involve drinking, and Sam wanted to laugh or cry or scream or put the phone on speaker and make Dean listen to this. But of course he did none of these things and just thanked the sponsor for the advice and told him it really helped. Really.
The sponsor also wanted to know if Sam had friends who didn’t drink, friends he could spend time with. Any recent girlfriends? And Sam went very quiet and didn’t answer him for awhile. Because Sam did have people, yeah. He had a brother who couldn’t function without a flask with him at all times. He had an angel who had betrayed him, broken him, and then saved him, but was now languishing in a mental hospital. He had Bobby’s ghost. And his last relationship? Well that was when Becky had magically roofied him and then tied him to a bed, and that ended when he forced her to sign the annulment papers. So, yeah.
“I…uh…haven’t dated much, lately,” he said, feeling that out. “I spent some time in a mental institute recently, and just don’t really feel up to it.” He pictured all of the ridiculous comments Dean would make if he ever heard Sam say that, and remembered that that was why he was talking to his sponsor. “But I do have my brother. The one who's alive, I mean.” The sponsor was maybe under the impression that Sam had had two brothers. How else do you explain having to bury and grieve a brother who is still in your life? He’d called his dead brother Adam, and it wasn’t even a lie. What is his life?
The sponsor encouraged him to spend time with family and friends, and said he thought that not dating for a spell was a wise move on Sam’s part. “It’s human nature, we fall back on what we know. You’ve come really far and made a lot of changes, but it’s the people around you who keep you accountable and show you there is another way. We all lie to ourselves, if we think we can get away with it.”
***
Sam liked checking in with his sponsor, but if he went too long without doing so, the sponsor would check in on him. And he resented that, because maybe he was too busy saving the world to stop and chat about how screwed up he was, thanks.
So when his sponsor started calling him after Dick Roman was killed, Sam decided it was time to lose that phone. He didn’t go to any AA meetings any more, either. He was a screw up, had always been a screw up, but now it didn’t matter. What was the point in doing anything about that, anyway? And why bother going to a meeting with a bunch of other people who couldn’t understand what he was going through, anyway? Sure, they knew what it meant to be hooked on something. They knew what it meant to reach for a bottle rather than deal with life. But they had no clue what it felt like to drink and then feel that surge of power, like he could take on anything, to watch the fear on a powerful demon’s face as they had that ‘oh shit’ moment of realizing they were trapped, out of their league, what he could do to them. Before Lucifer, the last opponent he had used his powers on had been a goddamned Horseman of the Apocalypse, Death’s little brother, and now… And now look at him. Useless. He’d given up all of that.
It had seemed a fair trade – if he wanted Dean, he had to give up the demon blood. He couldn’t have both. He knew that. Dean was so…so, so very opposed to that. And Dean was right and Sam knew that. He knew how difficult it had been for Dean to watch him hand himself over to Lucifer like that. But Dean was there for him, was always there for him, and….
And now Sam didn’t have powers and didn’t have Dean and didn’t have anything except for the Impala. There didn’t seem to be any point any more. No revenge – the Leviathans were gone. No way to get Dean back from wherever he went after the monster exploded. There hadn’t even been any human remains to bury or burn this time. Dean was just…gone. Sam hoped he was in heaven, he guessed, but even that didn’t really seem worth it. He’d tried praying to Cas, but got no answer. Not really surprising, but still.
Sam just…drifted. He felt useless. And he was a little scared how restless he was for something that would give him some control over his life. Because he knew where that led. Sure, he was clean and sober. But…not really. It was still there. He’d been tainted his whole life and it would be so simple to just reach a little and…see if he couldn’t wake up some of those powers. So he stopped hunting. He stayed as far away from the supernatural as he could.
***
And then he met Amelia. He hadn’t been looking for anyone, not really. And he wouldn’t even have noticed her at first, so focused on the innocent creature he’d nearly killed with Dean’s car. It was obvious she didn’t like him, but she saw him, noticed him, startled him into interacting with her, and, before he knew it, he was drinking with her (just alcohol) and then spending the night.
Slowly, between her and the dog, Sam realized that yes, sure, he might have lost everyone he ever knew, but that didn’t mean life was over. He could…meet new people. Start over. New life. Cautiously, he tried to let himself be optimistic. He told Amelia stories about Dean, about his Dad….but innocent stories, never anything about hunting, just human stories. If he mentioned Bobby, he never let on how close of a family friend he was – he was just ‘a friend of my dad’s.’ He never told her about Jess. He didn’t want her to feel like he was competing with her, trying to one up her by having more people he’d lost. He wanted it to be even – she’d lost her husband Don, he’d lost his brother Dean, look at us we’re just the same.
And he felt like she was good for him, that this really was healing, a new start…until it all came crashing down and he realized he’d just been hiding and pretending. Again. He was disgusted with himself. Once her husband came back…that was a married woman he was sleeping with. And that didn’t stop him. He’d never done that before except when he was soulless. He didn’t even know if Dean had ever hooked up with a married woman. He’d never asked. Knowing his brother, Dean probably didn’t bother asking if they were married or checking for rings. Dean’s main criteria had always seemed to be ‘willing’.
And so Sam left, fled again. He had no idea where he was going or what he was doing, but eventually he decided to make it back to the hunting cabin. He still thought of it as Rufus’, but of course it was the last place he had stayed with Dean. On the long drive there, he finally started thinking about AA again. Staying clean and sober wasn’t just about overcoming temptation. And sure, there was nobody there who knew what demon blood was. But…they knew ways to get clean, ways to heal the crap left in the wake of the addiction. Ways to move on with your life. And Sam was realizing that maybe he needed some help with that.
***
Then he met Dean. After he got over his shock that his brother was alive, he had to figure out how to deal with what Dean came back as this time. He wasn’t going to get the ‘Haha, everything’s fine!’ followed by a tearful confession this time. Dean wasn’t even pretending that he was the same, and he was mincing no words in expressing his utter disgust with how Sam had used his time away. Dean had listened when he’d told him about Ruby. He didn’t listen when he tried to tell him about Amelia, so…he stopped trying. Dean never even knew that Amelia was married.
One thing that Sam would say about the year in Purgatory was that it had dried Dean out. He seemed just as inclined to go back to his previous drinking habits, but it was like he was starting from scratch. And at least this time there was no haunted flask to contribute to the problem. Dean was angry at Sam, but he wasn’t really angry about Amelia. He was angry that Sam had run away and stuck his head in the sand. And…Sam was kinda angry at himself for that, too, so he couldn’t argue. He and Amelia had been alike, it turned out – both mistaking MIA for dead. But it was just massively unfair how Dean insisted on using that against him. He needed someone to talk to who wasn’t his brother, who wasn’t as caught up in all of this….
And that is how he found himself sitting in another AA meeting in another church basement. “Hi, I’m Sam. I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober for three years now. But I still… have a lot of work to do.”
New town, new room, new faces. “I’m kinda around it a lot with work. And the people I work with don’t really know, don’t see it, so I have to just deal with it on my own, you know?”
Sam started paying attention to the Twelve Steps, not just listening to people tell their stories, share their struggles. He realized that while he couldn’t change Dean, he could change himself, and that seemed a better way to deal with his anger. Belief in a higher power wasn’t really a problem – he had more evidence than most people that God was indeed real. But trusting in God was another matter. It was kinda hard to believe that God cared about him or anyone else. He’d been told by an angel in heaven that God’s only message for him was, ‘Back. Off.’ Then again…he’d been cured of his addiction in the first place by an act of God. The forced drying out that Dean had been putting him through didn’t seem to work, but as soon as he miraculously landed on that plane, the hunger was gone. Abated. Just…not there anymore. So, he supposed he could entrust this one aspect of his life to God safely enough. Privately, he reserved his ultimate trust for those who had earned it.
“I know that God can take away addiction. But, well, I don’t think I really expect him to? Like, this is my problem, and I got myself into it, and why should He bother fixing the mess now? I pray, I do, but I don’t wait around for miracles, either, because you can’t live like that.”
Dean was more suspicious of any time Sam wanted to himself now, but he still found time to talk to his sponsor without Dean finding out. He wasn’t sure what he would tell his brother if he did: ‘Yeah, Dean, I’m in a twelve step program for demon blood addiction, because it’s harder to stay dry than I thought in our line of work.’ He didn’t think that would go over well.
A ‘searching and fearless moral inventory’ would take some doing. He debated for a while whether the soulless stuff counted. After all, the whole point of AA was that the stuff you did while you were drunk damn well counted. But…being soulless wasn’t his fault or choice, and he literally didn’t have a conscience at the time. So, he was willing to put it on the list, but only as ‘all that crap I did while my soul was in the cage.’ He knew what this was getting at, anyway. If he was so cured, then he wouldn’t want the demon blood any more. And he didn’t actively want it. He wasn’t, like, jonesing for a hit every time they fought a demon. But he did crave that power, and that had never gone away. He was careful with himself around demon blood. Part of him would never forget one of the last things Ruby had said to him, about Dumbo not needing the feather to fly. Could he…? And that scared the shit out of him, that maybe one day he would reach for those old psychic abilities and they would be there and then he’d never be able to turn them off again.
His new sponsor was willing to help him out with this, but he again ran into the problem of how much to say. One difference he noticed was that he spent less effort defending himself to this new guy. He felt like everything he’d said to the old sponsor was about how it was Ruby’s fault, how it was only because he was grieving, that he never would have done this if only…. And now all of that talk was gone. He’d known what he was doing and he gave into the temptation because he wanted the power and he thought that would be worth it. He thought he was making the brave and heroic choice, that it would allow him to defeat the most powerful demon he knew of at the time.
And in the end, he’d defeated Lucifer himself, but it was not because of his powers or his demon blood. That was the truth he had to hold on to. That he was a good hunter, he was, and he did save people – and he didn’t need any special abilities to do that.
***
He didn’t think he was going to get much further along the twelve step program, because, well, he just didn’t trust God enough to hand anything over, and he’d been possessed enough times to say ‘No thanks’ to anyone wanting free access to his will. But then the Trials started. Kevin translated the demon tablet, and despite Dean’s insistence that he’d take on the quest himself, it fell to Sam. Part of him was terrified, that he’d fail somehow, but part of him was relieved, because he couldn’t watch Dean seek out death like that. And here was a cause that was worth it – slamming the gates of hell shut would save more people than he ever had in his whole life, and the best part was that it wasn’t him doing it at all – this was all God. He was just helping to pull the lever.
Asking God to take away the part of him that made him powerful was one of the hardest things Sam had ever done. Which, given his life, was saying something. But this wasn't a sacrifice to save the world or save a life - it was just a sacrifice. Even if he didn’t have these powers now, even if he knew he would probably never have them again, giving them up permanently wasn’t something he wanted to do. But he did. That’s what he prayed for after the second Trial, and…and it seemed to be working. He felt like crap, sure, but he also felt like it was…purifying him, somehow. As if all that demonic taint were washed away, for the first time in his life. He wondered if his blood was finally his, just the blood his parents gave him, with nothing of Azazel in it any more. Strange that a trip to hell would be the catalyst for removing whatever vestiges of the demonic remained in him.
When Crowley killed Sarah, an innocent whom Sam had never more than kissed, Sam wanted to be furious. To hunt down Crowley and tear him to shreds. But he recognized that anger now, that desire for revenge, and he set it aside. He still felt it, boiling under his skin, but he wasn’t going to act on it. They had a better fate for Crowley. He’d make amends to Sarah, alright. He’d cure Crowley, show him what it meant to be human and have regrets. He’d make Crowley feel sorry he’d ever killed anyone.
When the Trials and the twelve steps both demanded a confession of him, Sam couldn’t really be surprised. He had already admitted his faults and shortcomings to himself. He could confess his wrongdoings to God, as well. Admitting them to Dean was harder, but he was glad he did. Dean needed to know he was sorry for those things.
When the Trials were over, and they were back to saving the world from fallen angels, Sam took stock of himself. He might not have finished the twelve steps, but he did feel different. More at peace. He wasn’t restless any more. He realized that whatever the Trials had done to him, one side effect seemed to be that the hunger for power was…gone. He was sure that at some point in the future, he would be in some desperate situation and it would come back. But for now, he was…he was okay.
And that would have to be enough. One day at a time.