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There were a few things about Sam’s life that Dean might never understand.
Dean tried, he gave so much of himself, but he was sometimes just a little too much like their father. He had ideas about strength and weakness that were like holding Sam’s head under the water. They didn’t talk. They didn’t communicate. They didn’t even really support each other. They were just a mash-up of emotional constipation and toxic masculinity and codependence.
And Sam didn’t blame Dean anymore, not like when he was a kid. Then, he was bitter. He hated the world and his circumstance and himself. Dean was one of the people that kept him within those circumstances, even if Dean’s goal was simply to keep him alive, so his resentment of his brother was an extension of that.
It was that, and the abandonment and betrayal he felt every time Dean took their father’s side. There was only one person that Dean never protected him from.
It was a cruel thing to blame Dean for that. Sam wished he had understood then that he and his father were both cruel. But Sam was a child, their father was not.
Sam had simply felt betrayed that the person who raised him took the side of the person that abandoned them.
But Sam no longer blamed Dean. Sam no longer blamed himself either; not for blaming Dean or for being the kid who wanted to get out. Those weren’t his fault. They weren’t Dean’s fault. The most fault lay with his father, but even he was manipulated by grief and his own traumas. Sam just wished it was different.
At eighteen, when Sam left for college, he remembered reflecting on everything that happened over the years. He wasn’t going to stay, he couldn’t stay, but he remembered the guilt of not forcing Dean to leave with him. He wasn’t sure it would have mattered. Sam just wanted Dean to see the world out from under the lens of their dad.
Perspective is one thing Sam believed he had that Dean didn’t.
Dean was so desperate for their father’s validation, even as it was killing him, that he never looked past it. He never found other external or internal validations. He never found another option, never accepted that there could be another option.
Their father was Dean’s god. Sam thinks that the only person who didn’t notice that was Dean himself.
Dean echoed their father because their father would want that. It was really that simple sometimes.
It doesn’t matter that the man he idolizes is dead. It doesn’t matter that Dean has nothing to prove anymore. Dean is the rough, tough, manly man because that is what he was supposed to be, what it is good and correct to be. It was drilled into him as a child like it is driven into soldiers in the military. The act was cruel and abusive, but Sam knew Dean would never see it like that.
And maybe that was short-sighted. Maybe it was cruel to compare the two parental figures in his life. Dean was not their father. Sam didn’t think he ever could be. Dean was still kind, even without his perspective. A good man, as the angels had said. A flawed man, yes, but aren’t they all?
The closest Dean ever got to being himself was with Lisa, but even that was a different variation of what he should want. It was a cookie-cutter lifestyle. Dean admitted that himself. Sam didn’t think that Dean knew that if hunting didn’t fit, that didn’t mean the nuclear family would.
You don’t have to either die softly or in a blaze of glory. Life is messy, full of turns and loops. It’s gory but is allowed to be enjoyed.
And no one fits perfectly into a mold without breaking bones.
But even as Sam knows all of that, he still feels like a drowning kid again. He feels the hesitation of saying anything that he shouldn’t say or feeling anything he shouldn’t feel. When he is struggling, he doesn’t always have the patience to walk Dean through a different perspective.
Maybe that is selfish when Dean spent so much of his own childhood guiding Sam. Maybe Sam should extend the same grace, and he tries, but he can’t.
Because Dean won’t change. Sam is not here to place moral judgment on that it just is how it is. Or maybe Sam should lock him in a poor therapist’s office and see if they can get through to him, but that is nowhere near realistic. Sam would be hard-pressed to find a therapist that’s more stubborn the Dean.
Sometimes Sam just wishes this wasn’t how it was.
Sometimes Sam needs softness and chick-flick moments. Sometimes he just needs someone to talk to that wouldn’t judge.
Sam only tried to talk about his addiction once with Dean.
Dean forcing Sam through detox was rough enough. Sam remembered the look in Dean’s eyes the entire time. It was one of worry, yes, but the worry was overshadowed by anger and fear and judgment. Sam knew that some of those looks were justified. He fucked everything to hell and back. He knows that. He hates that. He regrets it every day. He also somehow accepted that it was inevitable.
After the detox, he wasn’t magically cured. It didn’t fix anything, he just wasn’t actively high.
He still wanted it. He still craved it. Every time something horrible happened he felt the idea of demon blood pop into his head because couldn’t he have saved them? If he wasn’t so weak, would they still be alive? Didn’t he want to feel good again? Strong? Powerful? Euphoric?
He craved it with his whole abomination of a soul.
And one night, a few months after the second detox, when Dean asked if he was okay Sam actually answered.
He told him that he felt like his insides were clawing at him, begging for it. He told him that if Ruby magically walked through the door, he wasn’t sure he could say no. He told Dean how good it felt, how good he felt, right up until he came down. He told him how fun it was, how awful he felt after, how shitty of a person he was, how gross he was, how much he wished he never met Ruby, and how much he wished Ruby never left.
He wanted to rip out his hair and claw at his arms. He wanted to destroy himself. He wanted to cry himself to sleep because he knew he couldn’t have it.
Sam told Dean how weak he felt. Sam broke down to his brother in a way he hadn’t since he was nine years old.
And Dean was there for him physically. He pulled him into a tight hug and let him cry it out. It helped some. Dean always tried so hard to help. Dean wanted so much to help.
But Dean saw his weakness and saw him as weak. Sam knew his brother like he knew his own mind. He could read the expressions on his face. He could read Dean’s posture. There was still judgment there, and this couldn’t be blamed on the apocalypse.
Addiction to Dean was very much a weakness. It was a step outside the status quo set by their father. Even as Dean cared for him, and Sam never doubted that he did, the conditioning ran deep.
Dean never said anything to Sam about it. They never talked about it like that again.
But he was careful when Sam was around demons. He watched Sam more. Sam lost some kind of trust he didn’t know he had ever earned back.
And more than that, Dean took on Sam’s weakness as his own. He added Sam’s addiction to the list of things to fix or hide or suffer through.
That was worse for Sam than his brother thinking he was weak. He didn’t need him to carry Sam’s burden as well. Maybe it was unfair of Sam to ever have brought his addiction up at all, knowing that this was how Dean would react.
Maybe he should never have brought it up because somewhere in his mind, Sam wanted his big brother to fix it. He wanted anyone to fix it. He knew that it would never be fixed.
They fought about it a few weeks later. Sam yelled at Dean for taking on Sam’s baggage. Dean yelled at Sam saying that Dean was supposed to take care of him.
They got nowhere.
Dean backed off a bit.
It frustrated Sam that their most productive conversations were fights.
But Sam never talked to Dean about demon blood or his cravings again. He just clenched his jaw and white-knuckled it around him, then privately raged and sobbed.
He told himself he would never touch demon blood again, but he looked for it. He knew how to get it. He knew how easy it would be.
He could follow demons down alleyways when they passed through cities. He would inevitably be noticed and start a fight.
He would pin the demon in some way and think about it. He swore he could smell it. The demon would squirm underneath him, pleading about something or someone. Eventually, Sam would gut them. Eventually, Sam would leave without taking a drop.
Usually.
Usually wasn’t good enough.
He doesn’t know how he has kept his relapses from Dean. It’s entirely possible that he didn’t, Dean knows Sam better than Dean knows himself, but Dean has never given any indication. After Sam got out of hell, away from Lucifer, he was on demon blood for over a month. He eventually detoxed by himself at Bobby’s while Dean was off on a minor solo hunt.
Bobby swore he wouldn’t say anything and to the best of Sam’s knowledge, he never did.
Sam just knew that if Dean knew, everything would fall apart. Or maybe he wasn’t giving Dean enough credit. Maybe Dean knew and said nothing because he knew he couldn’t help. Maybe if Sam told Dean he would take it in stride.
But Sam had only talked about his addiction with Dean once and he wasn’t sure if he could ever do it again.
So he continued his pattern. He kept his shit together more often than not. When he slipped up he made sure no one knew. He felt like shit, but he felt amazing.
It was too close too many times. Eventually, he knew something needed to change.
No, that’s a lie.
He always knew that things needed to change. He had known in every waking memory that he needed to change. But knowing and doing are very different things.
Sam just had an epiphany one day. It is so stupid to look back on, but it was what he needed: this was going to get him killed.
One day he didn’t win his fight against a demon. He remembers the pressure on his neck and the black spots in his vision.
He thought he was going to die. At that moment, that was all he thought.
He was barely saved when a cop came by and the demon ran off.
Sam didn’t want to die. Dean was always the concerningly suicidal one, not Sam. Sam loved life in the same breath that he hated it.
Sam didn’t want to die.
So he started going to meetings.
At first, it was almost an accident. He was looking for a fight and found a sign instead. Deciding to go that night probably saved him.
After that, they weren’t hard to find. Nearly every city had hundreds, and rural towns might have a couple. He thinks that part of their method of keeping people sober is the sheer saturation of them in some areas.
It was harder to sneak away from Dean, but once again, Sam knew Dean like his own mind. Sam knew how to make good excuses and when to leave when Dean wouldn’t notice.
More often than not, Sam went when Dean was off getting into some girl’s pants.
It wasn’t perfect. Sam knew he would have to tell Dean eventually. For now, though, it worked.
Or maybe Dean noticed already and just didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure what Dean would do if he found Sam. He would like to think that it would be okay.
But he is afraid of his father’s voice coming from Dean’s mouth.
Even with the lies that built up, Sam felt more like a human. He gained support. He had people to talk to who could understand, even if they could never know about the demon blood. Whenever he spoke at the meetings he tried to avoid bringing up a vice at all. When he did he oscillated from heroin to steroids to anything in between. He wasn’t sure there was an apt equivalent and he rarely saw any of those people again.
He even met some hunters that he swapped stories with. He was far from the only hunter with an addiction, or even a supernatural one. It came with the career.
Everyone needed some way to cope. You can’t go raving about vampires and demons to a therapist without being locked away for good. It limits your options to drugs, alcohol, denial, or a bullet in the head. He has yet to meet a hunter that didn’t fit into one or multiple of those categories.
The more Sam goes to meetings, the more he sees that Dean also shared his vices with their father.
Sam finds it morbidly funny that drinking yourself half to death is more manly than a needle in your arm or a powder in your nose.
Maybe that was the other reason Dean hasn’t noticed Sam going to meetings. When a hunt goes south and Sam starts craving, maybe Dean is already halfway through a bottle of Jameson. Maybe if Sam started drinking with him, Dean wouldn’t notice that anything is wrong.
But Sam never drank much because it reminded him of their father.
And if spite keeps him healthy, from picking up another vice, then so be it. He has decided to hone that spite and keep himself clean.
But today was another bad hunt, one involving children and blood and torture. They found the monster, but a lot of bodies had already dropped. Sam recognized the signs. He had been so frustrated at his own inability to act.
So Dean went to a bar, Sam waited for the text to say he wouldn’t be back, and Sam bolted out of the hotel room like he was on fire.
He barely read the sign on the door of the center before entering.
He just needed to be somewhere where people could help him, or someone could hold him accountable. Or just not alone in a hotel room or on the streets of the city. He clung to his six-month chip like a lifeline.
Sam made his way in as quietly as he could and took a seat in the very back row. No one seemed to notice he came in.
He breathed in deeply.
His whole body shook but he kept breathing.
In and out. In and out.
In through your nose and out through gritted teeth.
Spread out your hands and place them on your legs so your fingernails don’t dig into your palms.
Sam reached a state of almost calm.
And so another night passed.