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Sam Winchester got a new scrape or bruise every other day as a kid, always remembered his dreams in vivid detail when he had them, and met the Devil on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.
One might think that this isn’t a very important list of facts. Arbitrary, really. And yet they reveal rather a lot in certain contexts, because the thing is—there’s something to be said about inevitability. And there’s something to be said about Sam Winchester, and these somethings are perhaps one and the same.
When you add it all up, sure, there don’t appear to be any particularly earth-shattering revelations; no deep truths revealed, no soul-striking chords of wisdom. But things have been added nonetheless, and what you come out with is that on the sunny day after the Monday that Jessica Moore burned to death on an egg-white ceiling, her boyfriend glanced into a crappy motel room mirror, glanced a little harder after a second or two, decided he didn’t like what he saw, and ended up with a small fine owed to the motel and shards of glass dug into his knuckles.
His brother patched him up. Didn’t say a word after the initial what the hell are you doing Sammy had been gotten out of the way, just grabbed tweezers to pinch out the glass and wrapped a thin strip of gauze around the torn skin. Sammy didn’t say anything either. The gauze was already turning red.
There’s something wrong with my skin, he thought, absently and disjointed, it won’t let the gauze stop the bleeding for it. It just keeps bleeding away.
There are quite a few definitions of the word meet . “Make the acquaintance of someone,” for example. “Assemble for a particular purpose.” “Play or oppose in a contest.” Several more might still come to mind.
Perhaps there’s one that stands out, though. Perhaps it is the one that goes “Fulfill or satisfy (a need, requirement, or condition).” Perhaps there is another that catches your eye—“Touch or join.” Perhaps even a third, and this one is the one you’ll want to pay the most attention to: “Encounter or be faced with (a particular fate).”
Fate’s a bitch, she really is. Her golden thread is not so much a weave as a manipulation, the mild snip of her scissors the act of a weapon, a place for everything and everything in its place and she wields that weapon well. Stitches can come undone, though, golden thread unweaving (and if you’ve got the right juice for it, you can even ensure certain broken strands were never cut in the first place). Point is, she isn’t the kind of “particular fate” we’re talking about here. Point is, we’re back to the sort of fate that means inevitability.
Which means we’re back to Sam Winchester.
The sky was drawing itself into shades of grey outside the motel, and the mirror was having to come to terms with its new jagged-and-broken state of being, and here’s the thing: it’s not that something was being assembled for a particular purpose; it’s not that something was in the act of being fulfilled or satisfied; it’s not that something was touching or joining something else. All of that had happened already, you see. That’s what has to be understood. Sam met the Devil that Tuesday because when he looked in that mirror he was faced with a particular fate and it was the sort of fate that was inevitable.
When Sam was five and Dean was nine and they’d become accustomed to their father letting them run wild whenever they got too rowdy, they were sprinting across a field as fast as they could, which wasn’t very fast because their breathless laughter was slowing them down. He’d decided—their father, that is—that this way of getting their energy out would result in only a minimal amount of chaos, and was therefore the best option. He watched on with shadowed eyes, his obligatory smile a faint one. The sun’s smile shone much brighter than his. It shined so bright on Dean and Sammy that it turned the backs of their necks and the tips of their noses a painful red that would inspire a fair amount of complaining on their end and chastising on their father’s the next day.
Dean came crashing to a halt after almost choking on his own laughter, collapsing in the grass dramatically. He wiped the summer sweat from his forehead and tried to catch his breath despite his aching lungs. Sam had been trailing behind, having shorter legs and less muscle, but he didn’t stop when Dean did—just kept on going, actually nearly tripped over Dean when he caught up to his wheezing brother but then picked himself right back up and ran and ran.
“Whatcha runnin’ from, Sammy?” Dean hollered.
“Nothin’!” yelled Sammy, and Dean exchanged a look with his father composed of raised eyebrows and what’s with this kid and amused smiles that couldn’t help but fade into fondness. The older boy made his way over to his dad.
“Maybe he’s actually runnin’ towards something,” John suggested. “Maybe something’s caught his eye.”
“I sure as hell don’t see anything,” said Dean, and got a whack to the back of the head for his language.
Then Sam tripped again, really tripped this time, a jumble of a five-year-old’s stick-thin arms and legs, and pointy knees and elbows, and confused thoughts such as “how come that really big rock was in the way” and “why are my knees all red now.”
“Geez, Sammy, you’re bleeding,” exhaled Dean, once his little brother had stumbled over to them in despair.
“Do I gotta stop running,” Sammy complained.
“Yeah, we have to patch your knees up!”
“Oh,” Sam said, staring down at his scraped-up skin. “Will that make ’em quit bleeding?”
“You bet,” said Dean, but Sam still seemed doubtful, so he employed some patented Big Brother Logic. “If we don’t, they’ll just right bleed away.”
“I can live with that,” Sam decided, but quickly came to discover that five-year-olds didn’t get much say when it came to what they could and couldn’t live with. This realization was reached around the same time Dean stuck on the fifth Band-Aid.
“I think that’s enough, son,” said John, watching on with some amusement. “Give the kid some room to breathe.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” Sam reassured him solemnly. “It’s like Dean said, he just doesn’t want me to bleed away.”
The Trials were a sickness. There was no cause and effect, no point A to point B, no because I’m doing this I’m dying : it was all one and the same. Closing the Gates of Hell was death. That was the way things were, and so be it.
After the first trial, the power had woven up into his arms with an orange glow that radiated both light and agony, and he couldn’t stand it but he had to stand it. This was how things had to be. This was what he had to do.
At first: he didn’t think it would get worse than that glowing agony, and even when the first bit of blood was coughed up from his throat, he didn’t take it as a sign of his own coming death. But the cough turned out to be something of a long-term issue, and Cas’s observations—well, they weren’t particularly reassuring.
The Gates, though, this was how to close them. And it was such a good thing, such a right thing, that even as he could practically feel the death weaving through him right along with the power, he embraced it.
That’s not a lie. But it’s not the whole truth either.
There was a moment when he just kept coughing and coughing and the egg-white sink just got bloodier and bloodier and he felt feverish and faint. He stared down at the blood and tried not to choke on it and thought, this is it. I’m bleeding away. And he wondered what would happen when he died, but he didn’t really wonder; he just looked above the sink to the mirror, meeting in it his own red-rimmed eyes, and thought about what it would be like to return to the Cage. That’s when he embraced it: the good thing, the right thing, the closing of the Gates of Hell and the dying that came right along with it
Inevitability. Sam had learned a thing or two over the years.
The Winchesters are being taken to the Empty when they die, Billie had said.
Sam Winchester is Biblically unclean, Billie had said.
Sam held flame up to skin just weeks before he would see the Devil again (although didn’t he already see him every day, every time he looked in the—) and felt the Darkness burn away. He thought about dying, about going to the same place as the angels that liked to linger under his skin and the demons that still ran through his blood. He thought about holding the flame just a little closer.
The dark veins were fading, but he didn’t feel any less unclean, Biblically or not. Fire wouldn’t help what was fundamentally within him. Michael had tried with it, had set him alight in the Cage for what felt like centuries, but he’d never deemed him purified enough.
Sam’s hand went to his jacket pocket and hovered over it for a moment. It held a scalpel he’d snatched from one of the shelves while barricaded in the storage room, blade shimmering-sharp before he’d tucked it away. What would it take to make me clean , he thought; how much of me would have to go?
There was more within him than tendrils of Darkness that could fade to ash and fall away with ease. Sometimes Sam thought he could feel it—something burning more harshly in his veins every time he’d drank demon blood, or something staining his soul since before he’d been born, or perhaps even something placed carefully inside of him by Lucifer during one of the many times he’d been splayed open under his hands (not-body gaping like a void longing to be filled even if by cruel angelic hands or dripping poison or sharp blades that drew blood from within—).
That can’t be too awfully relevant, though, so to the hospital we return. Sure, everything feels like it comes back to the Cage, but in that moment, his was the only hand close to holding a blade.
(Maybe that comes back to it too. Maybe we don’t like to think about that.)
How deep would I have to cut , he thought; would I have to bleed away?
The Devil was left for dead in a world of hazy apocalypse and slaughtered faith, and then the Devil was killed in a church by an archangel of righteousness, and then the archangel of righteousness stole Sam’s big brother to use him to tear down the world because sometimes all you’ve got left is making things bleed, bleed away.
And the Devil was gone. Not out of the picture, not Sam’s picture, because he’d been in it so intrinsically and for so long—but it now contained his death, and that was was good enough for Sam.
It was.
Really.
This doesn’t feel right , he thought, looking down at giant black wings stained into the floor that said less about an unfathomable celestial entity and more about the sudden absence of it. The death of it, of Lucifer. The husk of a vessel which he’d left behind.
Sam wondered what it would feel like to be that hollowed-out, to have held an archangel that burned up everything inside of you including yourself. After Lucifer’s possession of him was over, Sam had never felt as hollow as Nick looked now—no absence within him, no death. Because there was always more. Closed circuit. Dreams to cages to hallucinations to cracked cage bars to dark caves to open rifts to nightmares.
The day the Devil died, Sam looked in the mirror and wondered why it took him a moment to recognize himself. The night the Devil was dead, Sam woke with a start and wondered why he didn’t dream.
God, an insubstantial concept to begin with, is apparently not so certain a thing even when He’s standing right in front of you. Sam found this out the day his son (Lucifer’s son, technically, but sometimes he wasn’t sure there was much difference) drained the power of the original God, and took on that power—and that mantle and that jurisdiction and that connection to the world, the universe .
Sam watched Jack walking away and imagined lines stretching from the child (the deity) to everything around him, strings tied tightly between him and every single aspect of the world he was now God of. Or maybe the world was now God of him. It can be hard to tell the difference between such things.
They returned to the Bunker, Dean and Sammy and the emptiness that felt as thought it’d been following them around for quite some time by then. Sam embraced his older brother tightly, watched him go into his room and close the door, and then wondered if it might have been wise to remove the guns from that room before letting Dean say good night.
Sam’s own room certainly felt more like a grave than ever when he walked inside, and Sam knew a thing or two about graves at this point. Shallow graves into which big brothers are gently placed (vivid in his mind even after so many years), graves exposed for the first time in decades only to be set alight (so many instances of this that the memories blur together), choices made that can only function as graves in the end (these are the graves that make you feel the most like you’re being buried alive).
And while we’re on the topic, things set into motion at the beginning of time that designate your whole life as a grave, and your deaths too, and everything in-between; your existence is one long act of having already been buried under the earth and from then on only occasionally being able to claw your way through to open air—that is where you breathe, air filling your lungs briefly but wonderfully—those moments where you are held bleeding out in your brother’s arms or killing the monster you have hated for so long or laughing, perhaps, in the California sun with the one that is so easy to love—those moments where you are close to being free—before yet another aspect of your existence drags you down, ensures you are fully buried once again.
That’s a bit heavy, isn’t it. But if there was a word that encapsulated all that, it would be the emotion Sam Winchester was feeling right then, lying on his back and trying to get in a breath for the first time in a couple years, and thinking about Jack and strings that connect.
Strings around Sam himself, too, which you could have guessed and as his thoughts now entailed: imagined lines in his veins and staining his soul and placed carefully inside of him. He thought about them stretching somewhere he wouldn’t see without (literally) dying and ending up there, connecting him to someone he couldn’t think about without (metaphorically) getting buried in another foot of earth, and (as slow as the tide being drawn in by the moon) pulling him closer to that other point of connection, simply because there was nothing else it would ever be doing.
The word—the one that encapsulates all that. We know that word by now. And so did he. He was both suspended by the lines connecting him to the Devil and buried deep underneath the Devil’s inevitability.
Three years after his first death and subsequent resurrection, Sam didn’t let Dean try to find another way. He knew he had to say yes, even if it would end with him in the Cage—no, because it would end with him in the Cage. That’s where they needed Lucifer to be, and Lucifer in there meant Sam in there. As seems to be the nature of many things when it comes to Sam Winchester, there was no cause and effect, no point A to point B: it was all one and the same—Sam was always going to end up a part of Lucifer, because Lucifer had always been a part of Sam; because every time Sam looked in the mirror he met the Devil.
That was the way things were, and so be it.
And after he said yes, the Devil looked in the mirror and met Sam’s eyes, and the eyes that met Sam’s were both the Devil’s and his own, and when it’s all written out it sounds awfully complicated but in truth it’s nothing complex than a closed circuit, fate being fulfilled and satisfied, touched and joined.
All those times you ran away, you weren’t running from them. You were running towards me.
It was the fall, though, that meant something. He’d been running a long time, and he’d be running a long time after this, and meanwhile this was falling, nothing more and nothing less.
Things do get repetitive, don’t they, but sometimes a certain point really must be made, and sometimes that point is this: one might think that this isn’t an important distinction—arbitrary, really—and yet it reveals rather a lot in certain contexts, because the thing is—there’s something to be said about running from that which you fear into the arms of the one who created it, and bleeding long enough that you begin to suspect you will never be cleansed without fully bleeding out, and falling like it’s the easiest thing you could ever have been designed to do. There’s something to be said about inevitability.
And there’s something to be said about Sam Winchester, and these somethings are perhaps one and the same.