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The Secret Life of Sam Winchester, or: Five Possible Reasons He Won’t Tell Me Anything About His Family
by Jessica L. Moore
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What I Know. Sam’s parents are named John and Mary. He has an older brother named Dean. They lived in Lawrence, Kansas until Mary died suddenly. Sam was just a baby when it happened, and Dean was four. John took his boys on the road and eighteen years later, Sam got a full ride to Stanford. He hasn’t seen or spoken to his father or brother for four years.
What I Don’t Know. Everything else.
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One. Sam is in witness protection.
(April 23, 2004)
I laugh when Brady tells me about the guy he’s set me up with. There’s no way Sam Winchester is actually a real name. It’s too sexy, rolls too easily off the tongue. Sam — nice, short, memorable. Sweet. Pleasant to say and pleasant to hear. Winchester — regal like English nobility, but also rugged like the rifle. Not common, but not uncommon, either. A name fit for a superhero.
His real name is probably something boring, like George McDaniels or Richard Miller. He was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time — saw the wrong thing but did the right thing, got help from the right people. Now George or Richard or whoever is, for all intents and purposes, dead. And Sam Winchester’s taken his place.
Sucks that he had to go through all this at the ripe old age of — nineteen? Twenty? But still. Not a bad cover-up. A real American action hero.
Dean, John, and Mary? They don’t exist, either. They’re just stories, repeated in George-Richard-Sam’s head until they’ve become true, figments of his and the Feds’ collective imaginations. That photo on his bedside that he hastily stuffed away as we tumbled onto his creaky dorm mattress? That could be anyone.
“Stay the night?” he whispers as I get up to find my clothes. Sweet and sleepy with big puppy dog eyes. Not even witness protection could change that. I give in and curl up next to him. He’s warm.
A bright, handsome aspiring law student with a full ride to one of the top schools in the country, no family, and a name like a superhero… It’s just a little too convenient.
Still, though. Sam Winchester. It’s a nice name. He’s a nice boy.
We’ll see how this goes.
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Two. His father and brother are also dead.
(December 31, 2004 — January 1, 2005)
Sam is a serial killer. He witnessed his mother’s brutal murder as a baby and it screwed him up psychologically, and eventually he snapped and killed his dad and brother too. Now he’s coming after me.
I’m… kind of turned on by this.
I’m so screwed.
Note to self. Stop trying to go shot-for-shot with your six-foot-plus boyfriend. He will drink you under the table, he won’t tell you any of his deep dark secrets, you’ll make up something dumb that he’ll tease you about forever, and you will feel like a half-dead pile of shit the next morning. Happy fucking New Year.
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Three. The Winchesters are mutants, like the X-Men, and have to keep their abilities/powers hidden.
(July 20, 2005)
Mary and John met in a top-secret government program meant to breed and train mutants for the American military. They had a reasonable amount of contact with the outside world — diplomatic visits to the White House, holidays with the family, workshops and missions abroad, even church on Sundays if they wanted — but were always closely supervised. It wasn’t a bad life, per se. Heavily regulated, but they were valuable assets to the military (not to mention dangerously volatile), so they were always treated with the utmost respect.*
The escape was Mary’s idea. She was sick of being someone’s tool; she just wanted to live a normal life, and raise her kids in the real world without having to worry if she or they would be shipped off far away to fight some faceless politicians’ wars. John went along with it, because — well, because he was sweet on Mary and would have brought her the moon if she’d asked for it. So they hatched their plan. They’d give their bodyguards the slip at the monthly potluck at First Calvary down the street — pretending to help out and run errands with the churchgoers, going to the bathroom, actually physically running — whatever it took. Rendezvous was at the Greyhound station downtown at 4:00pm sharp, and then they’d catch the 4:10 to… anywhere.
It was on the bus that Mary kissed John for the first time. As soon as they arrived in Lawrence, Kansas, they went straight to the courthouse to apply for a marriage license. They were married within the week.
For a while, everything was perfect. They hid their powers, found steady jobs, and paid off the mortgage on their little house in the suburbs. Mary had one son, then another. They were just like any other middle-class American family. Perfectly, wonderfully average. Until they weren’t anymore.
It wasn’t Dean’s fault. You can’t teach a three-year-old to hide his true nature without irreparably traumatizing that kid for the rest of his life. He just wanted to show his friends a cool trick that he and baby Sammy could do. He’d scoop up some water in the palm of his hands and it’d freeze instantly into a small ball of ice. When he went to drop it on Sam’s head, it just bobbed up and down in the air as Sam made it float with his mind. It was just fun. It wasn’t their fault.
Dean’s classmates were delighted; their parents were terrified. Two weeks later, government agents came to take Sam and Dean away. John and Mary put up a fight. Only John and the boys made it out alive. They fled, and John raised his sons in secret. Always on the move, always hiding their powers.
Which means that my ignorance is protecting myself as much as it is protecting Sam and his family. Because if he ever slipped up, and if I knew about it, there would be ways to track him down, ways to use me to force his hand.
… Right.
I mean, mutants don’t exist, right? It’s all comic book fantasy. But who knows? Sometimes when Sam’s stressed to all hell with midterms and taking extra shifts at the mailroom and cramming for LSATs, I swear I hear things move that shouldn’t be moving. The old apartment walls creak louder as their aged foundations settle, the lights flicker from time to time, the blinds will flap when there’s no wind.
It’s as good a guess as any.
*NB: What I know about the X-Men I know from babysitting my little brother and his friends back in grade school while they played with their action figures. In other words, next to nothing. But I will still stand by this theory because damn it, it’s a good one. You’re a goddamn riot, Moore.
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Four. The Winchesters were (are?) part of a religious cult, and somehow Sam escaped.
(October 5, 2005)
The first time I remember him going to church was just after his twenty-second birthday. When he came back, he had a brand-new Bible and sat at the kitchen table all day, skimming back and forth through different passages like he already knew the entire thing cover-to-cover, but was reading it in a new light.
He has Psalm 51 bookmarked. I know this because he let me borrow his Bible for my summer class on Psalms in classic literature.
He just sort of mumbled when I asked him where this newfound faith came from. But it’s okay, I guess. Religion is a deeply personal thing, and I absolutely believe him when he says he prefers the weekday services because there are less people in attendance.
Sometimes I’ll go with him because even though I’m not particularly religious it really is soothing to just sit there for an hour or so, shoulders pressed together and focused on things that aren’t studying for exams or preparing for the rest of our lives. Also, it’s nice to have someone to sit with when all the people who have actually been baptized go up to receive Communion.
But have you ever peeked during the Lord’s Prayer? Of course you have; we’ve all done it. It’s not like God is going to smite you into Hell for it. I peeked all the time in Sunday School, back when my parents used to make me go. Lord knows (literally) how many times I’ve been admonished for it. But it’s fascinating to watch people deep in prayer, like you’re seeing into a part of them that no one else is allowed to see. I find a certain thrill to it. Does that make me a bad person?
Sam doesn’t peek, but he doesn’t close his eyes, either. He’s all hunched over like he wants to fold in on himself and disappear, and just stares at his hands. They’re shaking, hard, and his leg is shaking too and he’s chewing on his bottom lip like he’s about ready to bolt. He jumps about a foot when he notices me peeking at him and the priest finishes the prayer — deliver us from evil, amen — and the look in his eyes is pure terror and despair. Like a wounded animal.
It’s gone again in a second, though, and yeah, I know I shouldn’t have been peeking, and I probably am a bad person for doing so anyway, and later I hold him and tell him I’m sorry and he says it’s okay. But that doesn’t erase the fact that his hands were still shaking as he dipped his fingers in the holy water to cross himself after the service, like he thought the water was going to burn him or something.
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Five. Sam comes from an abusive household.
(November 1, 2005)
I don’t know why I never put this on the list before now. I guess the possibility’s always been there, nagging at the back of my mind, but — I suppose I just didn’t want to think about it. It’s not really my place. But if it’s true —
This list was just meant to be in good fun. Just me coloring in the lines of the top-secret life of Sam Winchester. Daydreams while I swim laps in the mornings or bike through campus to go to class. I don’t share these theories with anyone. They’re not supposed to mean anything. But these past few weeks have felt… ominous. He looks at me strangely when he thinks I don’t notice. But I do. And now? I just don’t know anymore.
It does kind of make sense though, doesn’t it? He’s always been a little paranoid, checking the locks three times every night and insisting that I sleep on the side of the bed that’s further from the door. Makes the bed perfectly, all crisp military corners like he’s been made to do it over and over for a very long time. Winces ever so slightly when you mention his family, or ask about anything in his life from before freshman year of college. Sometimes he yells in his sleep like someone is trying to hurt him.
He tries to hide it. Lord knows, he’s trying so hard. But it’s impossible to hide these things from your loved ones, when you’ve known each other for this long. When you actually live together, eat in the same kitchen and shower in the same bathroom and sleep in the same bed. When you share a life.
I guess I understand. The shifty eyes, the walls he’s built around himself. All the secrets. I wouldn’t know how to tell people, either, if I’d been hurt badly by the people I loved most.
But it hurts me now to see them standing in the same room, Sam and Dean Winchester after four years apart, a lifetime of secrets hanging thick between them. Hurts to see Dean just let himself into our home like he’s allowed to do that, and order Sam to put his life on hold and pack his things for the weekend so they can go fetch their stupid drunk of a dad from whatever hole he’s crawled into. Hurts to see Sam barely put up a fight, just quietly drop everything and slip away with his brother into the night.
For all that he doesn’t tell me much about himself, he’s never broken a promise to me, so when he says that he’ll be back on Monday, I believe it. But when he says everything is going to be okay, I know now that that’s not so much a promise as it is the blind, desperate hope of someone who’s been running from... something… for four years, only to round a corner and find it staring him in the face.
After they leave I lay on his side of the bed and hug his pillow tight and breathe in his scent. I try to fall back asleep but my eyes are drawn to the photo of John and Mary Winchester that’s propped up on his bedside. Something inside me aches for the easy smiles of these strangers looking back at me, for the vague darkness eating away at the lives they’ve brought into this world. I think about secrets, and superheroes, and holy water and Psalms about forgiveness, and eventually the sun rises and I’m still hurting.
But am I hurting because Sam is hurting? Because he’s a good man who deserves so much more than what little he’s been given?
Or does it hurt this badly because now I realize that there will always be a darker side to Sam Winchester that I will never know?