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Somewhere in Northern Wisconsin, Wisconsin - 2002
Sam leaves the cabin with the clothes on his back, a duffel bag, and a packet of information that contains his whole future.
It takes him all night to reach the bus stop, and by the time he gets there he’s dead on his feet. The stop isn’t much, just an extra-wide shoulder off the highway for the bus to pull over. He’s lucky it was this close. Last month they were in west Texas, holed up in the middle of nowhere with not even a gas station within a two hour drive.
He’d hoped to be closer to a city when his family found out. But Sam and John ended up at each other’s throats over something petty and stupid and the truth spilled from Sam’s lips. It was the only weapon he had in the fight. It was meant to hurt.
College. A full ride to Stanford. Everything Sam wanted; everything his family couldn’t abide.
Even after walking through the night, Sam holds that close to his chest. He’s out, he’s free. It’s a giddy feeling, bordering on hysterical.
Two years back Sam grew nearly a foot over summer break. His legs throbbed from June to August, waking him at night. But afterwards he’d been the tallest in the family, better able to keep up on runs and even beat Dean on occasion.
He tries to tell himself that the ache he feels in his chest right now is like that—a good kind of pain. The healing kind that portends new opportunities.
When he’d lashed out with the truth, it was aimed at John. Somehow Sam forgot one of his first lessons in hunting: when aiming a gun, keep an eye out for potential collateral damage.
John Winchester had never admitted to being hurt in his life. But try as he might, Dean had never managed to achieve their father’s level of stoicism. At least not when it came to Sam.
After the fight Sam had packed hurriedly, throwing whatever was at hand in his duffel. Dean had watched him from the doorway. Sam waited for Dean to say something, anything. Sam couldn’t blame him for his silence, he didn’t say anything, either. After he zipped his bag up, he turned and met his brother’s gaze across the room.
He didn’t know what he expected. He thought, maybe. Maybe….
But when Sam walked out the door, he did so alone.
Dean’s silence had weight. It sat in Sam’s chest and pressed the air from his lungs. Better to dwell on John, whose last words still ricocheted through Sam’s skull, trapped there, buzzing like the mosquitoes that have been snacking on him all night.
“Don’t you ever come back.”
He sits on the side of the road, duffel beside him. The money in his wallet is more than enough to cover the ticket. He’s saved up for years, just for this moment.
Somehow, he still feels unprepared.
He’s got no idea what he’ll do when he reaches California two weeks before he’s scheduled to move into the dorms. Probably sleep rough. The weather in Palo Alto has to be better than the swampy morass of the mid-August Midwest.
The bus pulls up late morning. Sam doesn’t have a ticket, so even though he’s exhausted after being up all night, he can’t let himself sleep until the bus pulls into the next station.
Outside the window the pine trees march past in neat rows.
At the next station Sam buys his ticket and a few bags of chips and packs them into his bag for later. He’s too tired to be hungry right now.
The bus driver offers to stow his duffel under the bus, but everything Sam has in the world now is contained in the ratty, military green canvas. He can’t bear to part with it. It’s lucky that the bus is nearly empty, so no one minds when collapses across both seats of an empty row.
The bus hisses as it starts moving. Outside the road skirts the edges of another collapsing small town. Sam rests a hand on his bag and his head on the window and is asleep a moment later.
Sam wakes to the bus’s squeaky brakes as it makes another stop. According to his watch he’s a few hours down the road and it’s nearing lunch. He digs around in the bag for the food. He knows he has a book in there, a ragged copy of Fahrenheit 451 from an English class long ago. It’s probably buried beneath his clothes. He rummages around and his hand closes around something rectangular and hard. Plastic. Not a book.
When he pulls it out it’s a cassette. The Norelco case around it is clear, and the label is handwritten, not printed.
Sam’s College Mixtape
It’s scrawled in all-caps that Sam instantly recognizes.
Dean.
So many questions immediately spring to mind. The first and most obvious is: how had Dean known?
Sam kept the information on his looming college admission under lock and key. Even now, his information for registration and move-in are carefully folded into a corner of his duffle. There isn’t much privacy in the Winchester world, so what little they have is sacred. Duffle bags were off limits, even during their sporadic prank wars. Despite the evidence in his hand, Sam finds it hard to believe that Dean would break that rule.
The other option is Pastor Jim. He’d helped Sam apply to colleges, even fronted him some money for the application fee so Sam could try a few more schools. Sam had convinced John to let him spend his last fall semester living with Jim, so he could go to school in Blue Earth. That it was also the time of year when college applications were due wasn’t something he mentioned. It wasn’t something John would pay enough attention to realize, but maybe Dean did.
He opens the case. The tape itself is inscribed with the same name, with sides labeled A and B in Dean’s block caps. There’s no track listing.
Sam has an absolutely antique Sony Walkman. It’s also a gift from Dean, who got it secondhand, broken, and fixed it up Sam’s birthday a few years back. It was old even then, and it has an appetite for tapes that’s seen Sam spending countless hours rewinding them with a pencil, but he’s resisted replacing it with a CD player.
Another quick rummage through the duffel bag produces that Walkman.
It was a lifesaver on the road. With the headphones on and a book in his hands Sam could pretend he was somewhere else. For the first time in his life, he got to pick the music he listened to. All his tapes were found secondhand at flea markets and thrift shops, and trying to stretch his meager spending money meant he had an… eclectic collection of tapes.
Sam left almost all of those tapes in the Impala last night. All he has left is a well-worn copy of Nevermind that he pops out of the Walkman now, replacing it with Sam’s College Mixtape.
Sam hits play. There’s a few seconds of silence, then a saxophone wails through his flimsy headphones.
The song is instantly recognizable; Sam’s heard it a hundred times, at least.
The first verse starts:
On a long and lonesome highway
East of Omaha....
Osceola, Iowa - 1995
Sam can’t even call it moving anymore. Dad comes back and orders them to pack everything into the car. When Sam was little that process took a while, but over the years they’ve molted possessions until all that’s left is what fits in their bags. Sam has two: a hand-me-down army green canvas duffel and a tattered backpack with re-stitched seams.
‘Moving’ is something normal people do. It usually implies that there’s somewhere to go. Sam has classmates in his middle school who have lived in the same house their entire lives.
Sam doesn’t move, he just leaves. He’s always leaving and he hates it. It’s not like he had friends, having only been here a month, but there were a few kids he could talk to. School here was done in just another few weeks and his classes weren’t bad. Things could be better, but if there’s one thing life has taught Sam it’s that things could always be worse. Who even knew where they’d end up this time.
But Dad doesn’t care about Sam finishing the school year with classes he understood or kids he knew. He didn’t even let Sam make his case. He just told Sam to zip it and start packing. ‘He doesn’t want to hear it.’ He never wants to hear it.
“C’mon, Sam,” Dean yells from outside.
Dean took Dad’s side. He doesn’t like this town, anyway.
Sam finishes shoving his clothes into his duffel and yanks the zipper closed. Dad and Dean are already in the car. Dean has shotgun, because Dean always gets shotgun, even though Sam’s thirteen and Dean started sitting up front way younger.
Sam gets in the car and shuts the door.
“Sam!” Dad barks. “I’ve told you not to slam the door.”
As if there’s any other way to close the heavy doors of their car. Sam crosses his arms and slumps into the leather seats.
Dad starts the car and Dean tunes the radio in to the local oldies station. A power chord fades away as they pull out from the motel and onto the road.
A saxophone screeches into the next song.
“We could listen to something from this decade,” Sam grumbles.
“What, the Spice Girls?” Dean taunts.
Sam kicks his seat.
“Sam!” Dad snaps, because of course he cares more about his precious car.
Dean shoots a smug smile at Sam over the back of his seat and Sam clenches his fists to keep from kicking the seat a second time, Dad be damned.
“Besides,” Dad says, ignoring them both. “This is Bob Seger, one of the greatest rock writers of all time.”
Dean mouths along to the end of Dad’s oft-repeated sentence with him, and Sam scrunches his face into a grimace to keep from grinning. He’s still pissed. He wants to be.
Dean smirks anyway, because he can tell. Asshole.
The car quiets as they turn onto a state highway, the engine rumbling under Dad’s foot.
On the radio, Seger croons:
When you’re riding sixteen hours
And there’s nothing much to do.
And you don’t much like ridin’
You just wish the trip was through…
The chorus hits and Dad sings along. Low, almost under his breath. Dad doesn’t sing along to the radio a lot, and when he does it’s to someone like Seger or Springsteen or Tom Petty. Dean leans more towards Zeppelin and the Stones, but Dad likes stuff that not only plays in auto shops and factories, but sounds like it was written there, too.
Here I am
On the road again
There I am
Up on the stage
Here I go
Playin' star again
There I go
Turn the page
Back on the bus to California the saxophone cries out again as the song ends, and Sam pauses the tape.
He doesn’t get it.
Dean isn’t one for ‘chick flick moments’ or professing his feelings. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have them, it just shows in his actions. Maybe he didn’t say “I love you,” but he made Sam’s favorite meals or sewed up his backpack when it broke or broke into nice houses and stole their Christmas presents.
Or he fixed up an antique Walkman so Sam could listen to his own music for once.
This tape feels the same way. Like he’s trying to say something.
He’s never heard of Dean giving a mixtape to any of his many girlfriends or flings. Of the many things the Winchesters had squirreled away in the Impala’s trunk, none of it was the technology to create a mixtape. To make things even more confusing the song was clearly not recorded off of a radio station. That means Dean recorded it from his cassettes.
How? When?
Sam pops the tape out and reverses it, hitting fast forward until it runs out, and then puts it in again. The saxophone again cries out as the first song begins.
Sam could probably sing most of the lyrics, but he’d never paid much attention to the words. It always seemed like a song John and Dean liked because it was about their kind of lifestyle, always on the move. But… it’s not happy. It’s not a celebration of the open road, like Sam assumed.
It’s about constant traveling, always feeling alone and out of place. Being lonely.
That’s the song that Dean put on a mixtape meant for Sam, when he knew Sam was going to leave.
Sam thinks back to Dean’s silence as he’d packed up and left last night. He thought that Dean’s silence had been condemning. That he’d agreed with John—Sam was selfish for wanting out.
It cut deep. He thought, once, that Dean could drive him to Palo Alto. Might help him move in, go out to some college bars with Sam’s fake ID. This was never supposed to be good-bye, not like it ended up being.
Dean’s been there for every one of Sam’s milestones, even the ones that Sam was too young to remember. He walked him to school on Sam’s first day of kindergarten, he taught Sam to drive, he helped Sam get ready for his junior prom.
He hadn’t really thought about how it would feel to take such a momentous step alone.
He starts the next song.
Nevada - 2005
It takes Sam two weeks to tear down a life that took three years to build. That’s it—two weeks.
He lets his professors know he’s taking some time off. He talks to the police about the fire.
He attends Jessica’s funeral.
The last time he moved—from a dorm to his and Jess’ off-campus apartment—they used Brady’s pickup truck to move all of their stuff. The bulky TV, the futon and dresser that Sam rescued from a curb, all of Jessica’s books. All gone.
Once again his life fits in a tattered duffel bag. It was all he’d managed to save from the fire.
They don’t make it very far that first day. Dean calls for a stop when they’re barely into Nevada. His efforts at convincing Sam to come out to the bar are met with no success. Sam stays back at the motel, piecing through his father’s journal.
It’s not very helpful. For all that Sam’s entire life trajectory was set in motion by his mother’s death, she’s absent from these pages. It’s frustrating that after over twenty years his father still has so few leads. Sam wants to find whoever—whatever—killed Jessica. But just as badly, he wants to escape the roadmap laid out before him. The uprooted life, a futile quest for revenge. Sam had been sure that he’d avoided that fate, and now he’s back, more thoroughly enmeshed than ever.
The words begin to blur and Sam reluctantly closes the book.
He changes, brushes his teeth, shuts off the lights, and then stands at the foot of his bed and stares.
He hasn’t told Dean about the nightmares, but he knows Dean’s noticed.
Of course, Dean also thinks that the nightmares started after the fire.
A change of plans.
The Walkman that Dean gave him met its final fate in the fire. But Sam retired it long before then, anyway. He has his music saved on his computer, downloaded over Napster and Limewire, replacing the tapes he’d lost when he left.
Those few tapes are gone, too. Sam had considered looking for them, picking through the charred remnants of his and Jessica’s belongings. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. The heat probably wrecked the tapes, anyway. They’re not much of a loss.
One tape remains, tucked away in the bottom of his duffel bag. Sam can’t play it without his Walkman, but fortunately he doesn’t need to.
Sam spent a lot of time searching for the songs from Dean’s mixtape. More than once he’d waited a whole night only to find the file was corrupted or completely wrong. But now he has it all, safe (if illegal). He can recite the track listing by heart at this point.
So instead of going to sleep he pulls out his Palm Pilot. He worked three jobs last summer to afford this thing and his friends thought he was lame for not getting an iPod. They’re not wrong, but he needed something that did more than just play music. Fortunately, this does that as well.
He wedges his earbuds in and lies down.
A nice thing about mp3s instead of cassette tapes is the ability to select a song without playing guessing games with the fast forward button.
The guitar starts out low.
Welcome to where time stands still
No one leaves and no one will
Metallica was where Dean and John really diverged, music-wise. Dean didn’t get the chance to listen to them much until John gave him the Impala on his 18th birthday.
The song is dark, moody. It’s slower, almost a ballad, and a perfect complement to his mood. Dean would probably call him emo. Sam’s always liked this track, back when Dean would stick Master of Puppets in the tape deck. It echoed Sam’s teenage frustration.
That’s probably why Dean picked it for his mixtape. Listening to it all those years ago, Sam thought that maybe Dean understood. Maybe he got why Sam needed out of the life, out of the prison of his father’s quest.
Sanitarium, leave me be
Sanitarium, just leave me alone
The feelings rush in with the chorus, same as they felt on a Greyhound bus three years ago, same as they felt riding shotgun with Dean, trailing their father’s truck across the country. It’s a bittersweet memory, now. The old freedom of being on the road with Dean, an escape from his father for a few hours.
The new despair at being there, once again. Riding shotgun again.
Hunting again.
This wasn’t supposed to be his life, not anymore.
Fear of living on
Natives getting restless now
Mutiny in the air
Got some death to do
Maybe Dean understood, back when he compiled this mixtape, or maybe he just added a song he knew Sam liked. Sam built up an image of his brother during his time away. He thought Dean understood. But there’s a tension between them now, one that Sam doesn’t know how to fix… doesn’t really know if he wants to. Why should he apologize just for going to college?
Mirror stares back hard
kill is such a friendly word
seems the only way
for reaching out again
Nebraska - 2008
If a hundred Tuesdays broke Sam, then it’s the endless days after Wednesday that twist him into something unfixable.
Sam spent over three years at college with no contact from his family and never feared forgetting them. For all that he lived with the background noise of terror that they might die on a hunt and he would never know, he could always bring them to mind. He imagined what John would say about his classes. He could hear Dean’s comments on the few parties he attended.
But three months after that Wednesday and it feels like every day Dean slips farther away.
He wakes up sprawled out across the Impala’s bench seat, parked off a nowhere road in the Great Plains. The field outside lies fallow, and storm clouds gather on the horizon.
Sam digs his toothbrush out of his bag and stands staring at the looming clouds. Thirty seconds on each side, rinse with a water bottle, spit.
When he goes to replace the toothbrush his hands brush something hard, wedged into the bottom. He knows what it is, of course, but his hands remove the old cassette from the bag on their own accord.
He’s been driving with the radio off all this time. Music is a landmine—so much reminds him of Dean. The oldies stations play Dean’s music; the Top 40 stations evoke Dean complaining about pop music. This mixtape is so much worse, nuclear in its potency.
Sam slides into the driver’s side and puts the tape in, side B.
If side A had spoken to Dean understanding why Sam had to leave, it always seemed like side B might explain why Dean stayed behind.
He pulls onto the highway and points the Impala into the distant thunderstorm as the keyboard starts to play.
Give me a job, give me security
Give me a chance to survive
Dean had a love/hate thing with Styx. He never forgave them for “Mr. Roboto.” Or, that’s what he’d say whenever Sam found it playing on an oldies station and turned it up to annoy his brother.
Sam would always point out that Dean was, what, four when the single was released?
“It’s the principle of the thing, Sam.”
But he liked their earlier works. Renegade, Borrowed Time, even Come Sail Away when he was in certain moods.
This one was probably his favorite. No surprise it made it onto Dean’s mixtape. The chorus rises up and it’s easy to hear Dean belting out the lyrics.
I'll take those long nights, impossible odds
Keeping my eye to the keyhole
If it takes all that to be just what I am
Well, I'm gonna be a blue collar man
“Impossible odds, that’s us, Sam.”
Dean was the gambler in the family. Sam could hustle with the best of them, but he didn’t enjoy it. Dean was an adrenaline junkie. He liked the close call, the big fight.
Sam used to wonder why Dean hadn’t come with him to college. Used to wish for it, his brother showing up and reconstituting a part of their family. It took him a long time to realize that Dean would’ve been just as lost in that life as Sam had been hunting.
Dean lived for this life. A normal life was never going to suit him. Dean was a hero in the classical sense; there was never a time when he refused the call. He saved people, and he was never tainted by the life.
It doesn’t matter what self-sacrificing bullshit their father put on Dean. It doesn’t matter that John clearly never trusted Sam. There’s a truth that Sam has been working his way towards ever since Dean told him he had a year left.
Dean should be alive. If it had to be one of them, it should be Dean.
Sam knew it from the moment he woke up in Cold Oak. That’s when everything went wrong. Or maybe it was when he was six months old.
It’s Sam’s birthday today.
Dean would’ve died today. Ripped apart by hellhounds, given what they’ve seen of other unfortunate victims of crossroads deals. Instead he’s been dead for three months. In hell, Sam assumes, for three extra months.
Sam promised Dean he’d save him from his deal. All he succeeded in was shortening his life even further.
Keeping my mind on a better life
Where happiness is only a heartbeat away
Paradise, can it be all I heard it was
I close my eyes and maybe I'm already there
He won’t let that be it. The Trickster is out there. He had the power to make Sam relieve a hundred Tuesdays, rewound the clock for a whole county and maybe more. He’s powerful, when he wants to be.
Which is why Sam’s going to find him and make him bring his brother back.
Atlanta, Georgia - June 2008
Sam is tired.
There’s a spot behind his right eye that throbs in time with his heartbeat. Drugs won’t touch it. Jamming a finger into the ridge of his eye socket provides some temporary relief, so he sits on the torn up couch of this week’s abandoned home and pinches at the bridge of his nose.
He could use a drink.
From the other room he can hear Ruby disposing of the body. If he’d been better, if he could make these powers work, he could’ve saved him. Sucked the demon right out. The man in there could be walking free, back to his family, back to his friends.
It hurts to think about, but not as much as it used to.
Sam failed at saving Dean from hell. All other failures pale in comparison.
Ruby can’t get Sam what he wants, she’s admitted that much. Dean’s gone and none of the demons of hell are going to release their grip on him.
So, instead, revenge. Revenge she can do.
Lilith isn’t going to be an easy target. It took the Colt, a team of hunters, and a whole lot of luck to kill Azazel, and Sam still died in the process. Lilith is more powerful than Yellow-Eyes ever was and there are so many more demons topside to oppose him.
Ruby’s training is working, but slowly. He still hasn’t managed to exorcise even one demon and it’s been weeks. Sam knows he’s holding back. Ruby knows it too, even if she doesn’t understand why.
He sits there for a long time as the sun sets somewhere beyond the filmed-over windows. Eventually the door opens again and he hears Ruby’s distinctive tread. Light on her feet, but quick and purposeful.
“Sam.”
“I know, Ruby,” he says, forcing the words out from behind a cloud of pain. “Leave it.”
“Lilith isn’t going to sit around and wait.”
“I said, ‘leave it,’” Sam snaps, digging the heels of his hands further into his eyes.
“You think Dean would be proud of you now?”
His head whips up and his glare is something physical, something that pushes out of him. Ruby stumbles back, startled. Far from being offended, though, when she realizes what’s happened she smirks.
But the tingle of power running through Sam’s body fades just as quickly as it surged, leaving a hollow void in its place.
“That’s what I’m talking about….” Ruby begins.
Sam doesn’t want to hear it. She lets him walk past her, out the door into the warm summer night. Of course the first thing he sees is the Impala, parked in the carport.
Despite having been in the shade all day, the interior of the car is sweltering when he slides into the driver’s seat. The leather seats stutter as he slides across and shuts the door behind him. Sweat accumulates at his hairline, slides down the back of his neck, soaks the collar of his t-shirt.
Ruby’s words are still playing in his ears.
She’s right, of course. Dean wouldn’t be proud of him, but not because Sam’s struggling to make headway with his powers.
There’s a legal metaphor that keeps coming to mind, from a political science class he took a lifetime ago. “Fruit of the poisonous tree.” It’s about how police obtain evidence. The logic is that if the source of the evidence is tainted, then anything gained from that source is tainted as well.
His powers could do good things, great things. He can kill Lilith, save the people she would’ve killed. He can exorcise demons and save the people they’re possessing.
The last time he’d used the telekinesis, it had been to save Dean’s life.
But it’s all fruit of a tree poisoned with blood and brimstone.
Dean knew that. Even if Sam never told him about what Azazel did to him in his crib, Dean understood that nothing good could come of these abilities.
He sits up, pulls the iPod from where it’s docked in the converter. Another way Sam’s tarnishing Dean’s legacy, but what’s one more sin? He hasn’t listened to this playlist since he bought the music player, hasn’t so much as turned on the radio, for fear of stumbling across a song written before 1990. But it was foolish to think he could run from memories of his brother. How, when he drives his pride and joy in the service of betraying his last wish?
The rumble of the Impala is as familiar as Sam’s own heartbeat when he starts it up. It has air conditioning, but he can’t bring himself to turn it on. How can he complain about the heat?
A guitar riffs, the click of the high hat.
Get up in the morning and it's just another day
Pack up my belongings I got to get away
Jump into a taxi and the time is getting tight
I got to keep a moving I got a show tonight
And I'm moving on, moving on from town to town
Moving on baby never see the dirt in the ground
It’s another track from Side B, another song chosen to remind Sam of his brother. When Side A talks about being on the road, it’s painful and lonely. This is about the freedom of not being chained to one place, the joys of the open road.
That was Dean.
Fuck, it’s hard to think about him. Dean’s last moments are seared into Sam’s brain, the screaming and the blood and the fear as the hellhounds tore at him. No amount of bottom-shelf whisky could erase it.
Remembering Dean as he actually was, sharp and soft, hurts just as much. The good memories might hurt more. Because somewhere Dean is still screaming in pain, and Sam can imagine that with horrifying detail, but there won’t be any more good memories. There won’t be any more long drives or stupid pranks or quiet nights bent over a table full of case notes.
But he can’t keep running from any memory of Dean.
It’s sweltering hot and humid and easy to pass off any water on his face as excess sweat, even as his eyes burn.
Moving on moving on from town to town
Movin' on I can't seem to stop now
Movin' on I never seem to slow down
Boulder, Colorado - 2012
The flimsy, clapboard wall of the motel rattles as the door slams behind Dean. Moments later, the Impala growls as she starts up and pulls away.
Sam probably should’ve gone along with him, if only to drive him back home. It might not have been so bad. They finished the case, “got the win” as Dean put it. Victory drinks seem fundamentally different than the normal Winchester alcoholism.
Of course, Sam had to go and ruin that by saying he wanted out.
The room is too quiet. Dean’s absence leaves a hole, one that Sam’s now all-too well-acquainted with. He’d plastered over it, but cracks are already leaking through.
He opens the music app on his phone, sets it to shuffle, anything to fill the air.
There’s no way he’ll be falling asleep before Dean makes it back safely, so he doesn’t even bother to try. There’s always work to be done. If nothing else, he still has to find Kevin and the demon tablet.
He hasn’t had a chance to check his email since Dean found the reply to his admissions inquiry, so he opens his laptop now.
Dean was wrong about it being from a university. Sam doesn’t think he has it in him to go back that, sit in a lecture hall among a bunch of kids. He can’t use his credits from Stanford—that Sam Winchester is a dead serial killer according to the system. But a high school transcript is easy enough to fake and most community colleges aren’t vetting their students that closely.
The email is welcoming, suggesting that Sam would be eligible for grants and loans. Sam’s a skilled enough conman to know a sales pitch when he sees one. But it’s an option. It’s a path that he’d thought was closed to him, a glimpse at a life he might enjoy.
Is it better than this, though?
It’s one thing to be on the road with Dean when they’re clicking, Sam couldn’t walk away from that anymore. But how long has it been since hunting was like that? How much more loss and suffering can they handle? Eons of hell weigh on Sam’s soul. Their dead friends haunt him.
The song switches over, from something instrumental to a driving, instantly recognizable tune. Steve Perry breaks in.
Winter is here again, oh lord
Haven't been home in a year or more
Of course this song would pop up. Sam has lots of Journey songs in his collection of music—he’s always liked them a little more than Dean does—but this one, specifically, was on the mixtape Dean made. Back when he might not have wanted Sam to go to college, but at least he understood a little.
Or, Sam thought he had.
Ooh, the wheel in the sky keeps on turning
I don't know where I'll be tomorrow
Wheel in the sky keeps on turning
Fuck, he’d missed Dean so much this past year. There was no warning when Dean disappeared this time, no year-long countdown to let the anticipation and horror build. Dean was there one moment and then he wasn’t, and Sam was alone. Still reeling from the trauma of hell, with no Bobby, no Cas, no friends or family left in the world.
Finding a way to go on had been excruciating, but he’d done it. He’d built a life, even if he still thought about Dean every day.
The Dean that came back isn’t the same Dean, though. Or maybe he is, and Sam’s memory is faulty. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Sam had imagined that Dean might be proud of him for returning to school in some way. Might have approved of Sam getting his life together, considering what had happened the last time Dean died. It feels weirdly enough like mourning again, except this time he’s mourning a brother that only existed in his mind.
I've been trying to make it home
Got to make it before too long
Ooh, I can't take this very much longer, no
I'm standing in the sleet and rain
Don't think I'm ever gonna make it home again
The admissions email is still open in his browser.
He’d told Dean just hours ago that when they were done finding Kevin and the tablet, he would be done.
But every minute that life seems farther and farther away.
Sam moves the cursor over the little trashcan icon.
Click.
Lebanon, Kansas - 2021
Sam gets up early out of habit. It’s hard with no natural light down in the bunker. He’s considering buying one of those lamps that simulates the sun’s wavelengths. Dean’s going to tease him endlessly for it.
Coffee helps. Sam nurses his mug as he shuffles towards the main room. His project is still there from where he left off last night. Currently he’s digitizing the bunker’s archives, using a script Charlie wrote for him to turn the text and figures into something searchable. It’s a massive undertaking, and Sam often finds himself distracted by an interesting passage or diagram.
He pops in his AirPods. Another stupid purchase that Dean mocked him for—until he ended up buying his own set. They’re handy when he has to run down to the archive to switch out the books, he doesn’t worry about cords getting tangled up.
No podcasts until after coffee, so he puts music on shuffle and gets started.
It’s not thrilling work, but Sam likes it. After everything that went down with Chuck, after years of close calls and near-misses, Sam doesn’t mind spending his time doing mundane work. And the things he learns as he skims through the texts… the Men of Letters knew so much, and so much of it died with them.
Having the texts accessible has already paid of dividends. Sam’s making it available to some of their fellow hunters, which has the added benefit of keeping them out of the bunker itself when they need to research.
An hour or so later his coffee sits lukewarm as he pokes around on his computer, trying to detangle a classification problem he’s having with some of the more obscure texts.
“Emporia State?” Dean asks, reading over Sam’s shoulder. “Is there a case there?”
“No, I’ve just got a contact at the University.”
“Anything interesting?”
Sam smiles to himself. “Getting their help with some cataloguing issues.”
As expected, Dean’s face scrunches up like he’s just drank one of Sam’s superfood smoothies. “I can’t believe you have a contact to talk about filing stuff.”
“You realize it’s a whole area of study, right?” Sam says, unable to help himself from stepping onto that soapbox. “The Men of Letters could’ve used some it, too, their system is impossible to decipher. And it’s actually really interesting, Dr. Jeong even said…”
“Said what?”
He’s done it now. But Dean isn’t going to let it go, so the only way out is through. “Said I could audit some of her classes.” He forces a laugh. “It’s probably just so I stop bugging her.”
Sam’s a world class liar, but Dean knows every one of his tells.
But Dean doesn’t say anything, changes the subject, and Sam only barely contains his sigh of relief. He hadn’t meant to bring up Dr. Jeong’s offer. Sam wasn’t seriously considering it. Emporia State University is four hours away, it’d be an impossible commute even for just one class. He doesn’t really need it, either. Dr. Jeong admits that Sam knows more than her grad students, even if he has some peculiar blind spots.
It doesn’t stop him from thinking about it, though.
Sam lets the slip go, figuring that they’re choosing to ignore it. Dean doesn’t mention it, and they get back to their lives. Sam continues digitizing, Dean works on some of the old cars in the garage, and in between it all they hunt a vampire or two. There are no looming threats on the horizon, no apocalyptic omens, no ticking clocks. It’s as comfortable as they’ve ever been.
They’re sitting down to dinner when Dean clears his throat awkwardly and slides something across the table.
“Uh. Here.”
“What’s this?” Sam picks it up. It’s a cassette tape. When he flips it over, Dean’s block caps stare back at him: Sam’s College Mixtape.
His handwriting hasn’t changed in decades, but this can’t be what Sam thinks it is. His mind reels. This tape is gone, lost sometime after Sam jumped into the Cage, there’s no way he can be holding it now.
He’s in such shock that he almost misses what Dean’s saying. With great effort, he forces himself to catch up to Dean’s words.
“…not fair, I get it. But things are good now, and I know your dorky ass would love doing homework.”
“Dean, what are you saying?”
“If you wanted to, you know, go take that class, I think you should. Maybe even take a couple. If you want.”
“You want me to go to college?”
The words touch a raw nerve between them and Dean reflexively grimaces, but pushes through. “Yeah.” He steels himself, and his next words are strong and sure. “Yeah, Sammy. I’m not going to pretend I get the appeal of taking exams or writing term papers or whatever, but I know you’d kill it.”
Sam has no response, and not just because the tape he’s holding, the exact same tape that he’d once carried with him to Stanford, is an impossibility. “Where’d you get this?”
“Made it,” Dean answers, probably happy to be talking about something other than college. “The Bunker’s got some good tech, as long as you don’t need to do anything with a computer.” He chews on the inside of his cheek for a moment. Sam waits. “Should’ve done something like this when you left. The first time, you know?”
“Yeah, I know,” Sam echoes.
Made it. Meaning Dean wasn’t just re-gifting something he’d saved after Sam died, which was one possibility Sam briefly entertained. It wouldn’t have made much sense, but more than what’s happening right now.
Dean’s still talking, the kind of rambling he only does when he’s trying to avoid getting too serious, skipping across the moment like he’s running across hot coals. “Yeah. Probably not your favorite songs—”
“They’re good songs,” Sam says, reflexively defensive. Of course, it’s also suspicious, since Sam’s not supposed to know what songs are on this tape. There’s no track listing, after all. “You know. Your taste in music isn’t that bad.”
It’s a weak save, and Dean is still looking at him with suspicion. “Okay. Weirdo.”
“Thanks,” Sam says, because if there’s one way to push Dean off the trail, it’s with unabashed sincerity. “Dean, thank you. This means a lot.”
As predicted, Dean immediately looks away. “Okay, okay. It’s not that big a’ deal, you girl.”
They finish dinner and Sam retreats to his room. He sits at his desk, the tape set before him. It’s been a long time since Sam saw it, but he knows it’s identical, knows it down to his bones.
He sticks it into a player and hits play. A saxophone wails into the headphones. On the Road, by Bob Seger. He hits fast forward, waits, hits play. Metallica, Welcome Home (Sanitarium). Fast forwards again. Wheel in the Sky.
He checks the other side and they’re all there, too, all the songs that reminded him so much of Dean. Styx’s Blue Collar Man and Bad Company’s Movin’ On. Some Zeppelin, some Skynard.
The worst thing is that it makes perfect sense that it’s here. For one, they have the machines to copy over songs and make a tape here in the bunker. That had always bugged Sam, the question of how Dean made the tape.
And though he’s loathe to admit it, the message of the songs makes more sense now as well. Sam struggled when he’d reconnected with Dean and realized that the acceptance he’d heard in the choice of songs had been, seemingly, a projection of his. Dean spent Sam’s time at college upset and betrayed, and Sam didn’t know how to parse that.
The real question is: how did Sam get a copy back in 2002?
The answer is all around him, of course. Time travel isn’t simple, but it certainly wouldn’t be their first time.
Sam thinks about how it felt, finding this tape in his bag and playing it as he sat on a bus that was taking him ever farther away from the only life he’d known. Thought about how he’d nearly worn the tape out that first year as he sanded off the parts of himself that didn’t fit in the normal world.
Would he have been able to do it if he hadn’t had Dean’s acceptance?
Probably, but the process would’ve changed him. He would’ve had to fully reject his family, in a way he never actually could.
And what if Dean had shown up on Halloween to that Sam?
He might’ve left alone.
It takes a few weeks to gather the spell supplies, a week or two more to ensure he’s got the incantation down correctly.
Dean’s out at the townie bar, too stir crazy to stay cooped up. Sam would’ve normally gone with, but he’d begged off.
He pops the tape in, one last time. Side A plays itself out as he measures and mixes and starts to chalk the sigils onto the floor. The songs can’t help but bring up feelings, decades of associations. And now there’s a new one, because Sam was right when he heard acceptance in them, so long ago. He’d just had the timeline wrong.
When it finishes he pops it out and flips it around, and Side B starts. This side was always Sam’s favorite when he was at Stanford. It’s Dean, through and through. His brother never felt as far away when Sam played it.
He’s finishing up the final intricate lines when the last song starts in a flurry of acoustic guitar. It is, of course, Zeppelin. Plant starts in softly with the introduction, before the band joins and his voice kicks up for the verse.
Many have I loved, and many times been bitten
Many times I've gazed along the open road
Sam listens through until the tape stops. He takes it out, places it carefully into the plastic case, and puts the whole thing in an inside pocket of his jacket.
Sam says the words of the spell as he adds the final ingredient to a brass bowl and then drops in a match. The flames shoot up, bright green, flaring so bright that Sam has to close his eyes.
When he opens them, he’s somewhere and some-when else.
Many times I've lied, and many times I've listened
Many times I've wondered how much there is to know
There are loud, angry words from just outside the bedroom. Sam knows them by heart. He’d steeled himself for this, but hadn’t been able to prepare himself for the sound of John Winchester’s voice.
Every part of him aches to go out there, to step into the middle of this fight. He could fix things, explain things.
But Sam already got his miracle when he talked to his dad last year. If there’s one thing he knows, it’s when to count your blessings and when to cut your losses.
Many dreams come true, and some have silver linings
I live for my dream, and a pocket full of gold
The bedroom he’s in is just as dingy as he remembers it being, 1970s wood paneled walls and patchy shag carpeting. Sam’s duffel bag sits under the end of his bed.
Mellow is the man who knows what he's been missing
Many, many men can't see the open road
He gets down on hands and knees, his joints creaking where his age is catching up with him. He’ll never know if those joint aches are from a life of hunting, or just getting old, but he’s not even 40.
He pulls the mostly empty bag out. Later tonight a different Sam will throw the rest of his clothing into this bag before he leaves. But now there are only a few t-shirts, left behind to camouflage the packet of papers lying on the bottom. His whole future.
Sam plucks the tape from his pocket, slips it under those papers, puts the whole thing back.
When he stands back up, the shouting continues from only a few feet away. There are things Sam would change, if he could. But if he did, how would that affect where he is now?
No way to know. There’s a world of hurt—several of them—ahead for the three men in the other room.
Maybe Sam could try to fix it, and save them from some of it. But doing so would risk losing what he’s got.
With a whispered counter-spell, Sam’s gone. The dust in the room is briefly stirred as the air rushes to fill the vacuum the disappearance of his body leaves behind. And then the room is still, hanging in anticipation for the moment when the door will slam open.
Somewhere else entirely, Sam cleans up the remnants of a spell, hops into one of their spare cars, and heads to the bar.
Many is a word that only leaves you guessing
Guessing 'bout a thing you really ought to know, oh, oh, oh, oh
Really ought to know
I really ought to know
Oh
You know I should, you know I should, you know I should, you know I should