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It’s a seven-hour drive back to Lebanon from Iowa, and Sam spends the whole time in the passenger seat with the phantom taste of blood in his mouth.
When all was said and done, that’s what he allowed himself to keep. That, and the panic room in Bobby’s house, though he doesn’t particularly remember that part much. Just-- the bad things. He never let himself think about how it had felt good, too. How he’d saved people, saved everyone—losing that had been the hardest part. It had been something good, dug out from underneath all the impurity, means justifying the ends. Ends justifying the means. Maybe both apply.
Dean never understood that. Perhaps needed not to understand it, in order for everything else to be easier. It’s enough that Sam has to carry it. Dean can charge in with angel blades or the demon knife and if innocent people die, well. That’s just the job; so it goes.
Sam does what he can. Carries binding cuffs, researches exorcism chants. But at his best—or worst, depending on who you ask, depending on how he himself feels about it on any given day—he used to flick his head and get a demon out without breaking a sweat, without the host getting hurt. Now, even when he puts all his effort in, his track record of people saved is significantly shorter than people killed.
Way more people could have died, Dean would say, if Sam ever decided for some reason to bring it up to him (he won’t, for the record). We kill monsters, we save everyone they could’ve hurt down the line. Sam knows Dean doesn’t necessarily believe that either sometimes—a lot of the time—which is the main reason why he doesn’t grab him by the shoulders and ask, oh yeah? Who decided that made it okay?
The visions had been one thing, easy to let go of because he never wanted them in the first place, they so rarely helped, and the telekinesis had been a one-time occurrence—maybe with practice-- but it doesn’t matter now—it’s just harder to forget what he really used to be able to do. So, he buries it out of necessity. Reminds himself of the bad parts, practices his Latin, tries not to keep a death toll in his head. Then he met a teenage psychic locked in a basement who called herself the devil. And he thought about being 22 and dreaming of his girlfriend dying for days before it happened, 25 and grieving his brother with only Ruby by his side, and about how always, even long before any of that, he’d felt wrong and unclean—every year of his life as far back as he can recall. Remembering the kid he had been, it’s not too difficult to extend some of the kindness he’d wanted Magda to have towards himself, too.
That didn’t make me the devil, it just made me who I am.
When he told Magda he can’t use his powers anymore, it hadn’t been a lie. He thinks, maybe, on the off-chance that they’re still there, they’re inaccessible anyway. He’s put too much time and trauma between himself and the energy that used to be thrumming underneath his skin—and it might not have all been the demon blood, but he hasn’t felt it since he got that out of his system.
If Dean thinks Sam is uncharacteristically silent this car ride, he doesn’t comment on it. Maybe he’s a little shaken, maybe he’s thinking about Mom—Sam should check up on that. Later. Dean parks the Impala in her regular spot in the garage, and Sam makes sure to yawn, say: man, impossible to sleep in the car tonight, I’m beat, goodnight dude; and make his escape.
Alone in his bedroom, though, he has no idea where to even start. He used to always feel it, once he knew what it was, could just reach inside and grab it instinctively—easier the more he practiced, the more blood he drank—but it’s not there anymore. Maybe that means there’s not even any use in trying. Maybe it means he has to build something new. Right now, he’ll even allow himself to believe that could be building something better.
He sits down at the foot of his bed, feet firmly planted on the floor, trembling hands in his lap. He’s jittery in the way he’d get sometimes right at the beginning with Ruby, before the blood, when Dean was barely in the ground and Sam still mostly answered his phone whenever Bobby called. She said he just needed to focus, to drop everything else. Eventually, she used it to ease him into the idea of demon blood.
Now, clean and older and different, he instead takes some deep breaths, closes his eyes and feels only his chest rising and falling until he’s as calm as he’s going to get. When he opens his eyes again, adjusting back to the light of the ceiling lamp, he decides on a pencil on his desk.
It’s not inside of him anymore, but he imagines it where it used to be. Imagines the power he used to feel along with his heart beating, imagines the ways he wants it to be different now. He looks at the pencil, and nothing happens for the longest time.
He keeps his focus, his hands are still, he breathes.
He looks at the pencil, and it lifts a good inch off the table before it falls to the floor.