Work Text:
She is twenty when she asks:
“Why did you tell me to not kill my mother?”
It has been a year since Sam rescued Magda from the house, since her mother killed her father, since her brother went to live with their aunt in California. Magda ran to the center of the country when a man came after her with a gun and hasn’t left Kansas since. She still has never slept well, and on bad days her fingers itch for something to hurt herself with, craving the momentary distraction pain always brought her.
She has not hurt herself, though. Sometimes she scratches her arms in her sleep, and sometimes she cannot keep food down, but she has not hurt herself deliberately.
Sam sighs, that short but deep sound of his, and sits down on the couch next to her. Magda can hear him, knows he’s looking at the question, its layers, its meanings. Why did you save me? Why did you think she deserved to live? What were you scared of?
Magda did not sleep last night, because her mother still haunts her. She wants an answer. She knows Sam will provide it.
“One of the first times my powers showed up, they showed me this kid named Max. Well–they showed me the people he was killing.” His eyes don’t go distant, like Dean’s do when he tells stories, but Magda can still sense the depth of the memories he’s going through. “I was 22, and I still didn’t know what was happening, just that people were dying and I couldn’t stop it.
“Max was… he was kind of like you. His dad, uh, his dad blamed him for the death of his mother, and he beat him all the time. His uncle did the same, and his stepmom - she never did anything. Eventually Max just snapped, and he killed his father and his uncle, and he was gonna kill his stepmom, too…”
For a second, Magda feels something from Sam. Just a flicker, like she’s felt before - like she felt when she saved her brother, like she has felt when Sam’s in life-threatening danger. It’s accompanied by a memory of a hall closet, a display cabinet, a dreadful thrilling rush of power. Her own abilities have never felt like that, but then again, she was taught to hate them. Herself.
“What happened?” she prompts.
“He didn’t.” Sam smiles for a moment, then looks down. “I, uh, I stopped him. I convinced him it wouldn’t help, and he didn’t kill his mother.” Magda knows what’s coming before he says it. “Instead he killed himself, with his own powers, because he was too scared and angry to live.”
She stays silent. Sam will make his point. She trusts him to, and she wants to know how the story ends.
After a long moment - twenty seconds, Magda’s internal clock tells her, she’d gotten good at counting time down in the basement - Sam lets out another sigh and continues. “I beat myself up about it for months after. Wondered why I couldn’t save him, what I could have done differently. And eventually I realized… the guilt would have gotten him, if the fear and anger didn’t. He wasn’t just scared of his father and uncle, he was scared of himself, too. And you–he tried to kill his stepmom with a kitchen knife, just like you and your mother. And all I could think right then was that I didn’t want you to have any more guilt.”
Olivia Sanchez.
Ricky Copeland.
In some ways, her father.
But she feels no guilt for her mother. The remorse she felt once for the car accident was whipped and flayed out of her skin long ago.
“Oh,” she says, to fill the silence and acknowledge Sam. “Even though she was so horrible?”
“Even so.” Sam sits up slightly, still hunched over but looking up. “If she’d attacked you again–or me, or Dean, or Elijah–well, I still wouldn’t have wanted you to kill her. I would have done that myself, or Dean could have. But not you.”
“But it would be self-defense.”
“Funny thing about the mind: sometimes it doesn’t care about that distinction. Trust me.”
Emma. She doesn’t know the significance of the name, only that Sam, on purpose, rarely thinks about her. Satisfied, she leans back against the couch, reveling in the pressure on her back that doesn’t ache or aggravate whipped-on wounds that no longer exist. Sam, next to her, picks up the TV remote.
“I was thinking of watching some Attenborough,” he offers. She murmurs her agreement.
Behind her, Sam’s arm shifts to rest across the back of the couch. She leans over to him, resting her head on his shoulder; just like the ambulance, the day she was freed.
She wakes up to a different documentary, Dean smiling at the two of them from the doorway. His phone is out, clearly just used to take a picture of them, and she thinks he sent it to Mary, most likely. At some point, Sam dragged a blanket over them both, still holding Magda. His head is tilted back against the top of the couch, He’s gently snoring. He looks peaceful.
Forgive yourself, she thinks at him - not hard enough to damage his brain, but hopefully enough for him to hear. Sam, you’re forgiven.
He saved her from true sin, from a lifetime of guilt and terror. She hopes someday he’ll know that peace too–that he’ll forgive himself the way Max couldn’t, the way he helped Magda to, the way she knows Elijah is learning to, out on their aunt’s ranch.
And then she settles back in to watch the documentary and learn about the world she was kept from for so long.