Fic: Alien (Part 2 of 2)
Mar. 22nd, 2013 06:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brightly_litTitle: Alien
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
brightly_lit
Rating: PG-13 for language and one mild sex scene (they could easily show it on the series)
Pairings: None
Characters: Sam, Dean, OCs
Genre: Gen, Stanford-era, hurt/comfort, angst, teen!chester (Sam is still a teenager), first time, brotherly love
Warnings: None
Spoilers: None; takes place pre-series
Word Count: ~13,000
Disclaimer: I don't own Sam and Dean or their history
Summary: This is the story of when Sam went to Stanford and figured out, with a lot of difficulty, loneliness, and false starts, how to make his way in the normal world without the family that had defined his whole life for 18 years.
"If there was one thing he’d learned at college, it was that you could take the boy out of the hunter’s life, but you couldn’t take the hunter’s life out of the boy."
This is part 2 (of 2) of a story continued from here.
It was great to have a friend. They ate together sometimes, but Lina was mysterious and busy and always meeting new people, and sometimes he still had to eat alone. One of these times, reading for class so he didn’t see the sidelong glances he was getting, three trays landed on his table all at once. He looked up, surprised. His hand went automatically to the back of his pants, where once upon a time there would have been a weapon. Then he saw it was three tiny girls, and he smiled, flummoxed.
“Hi!” said the ringleader.
“Hi ...,” he said uncertainly.
“We’ve been watching you since the beginning of school, and we finally decided to come over and see if you sit alone because you’re too cool to talk to anyone else or if you’re really just a nerd with no social skills like us.”
Sam laughed. “Definitely the latter.”
“Sweet!” said the main one brashly, but he sensed she was getting pretty nervous underneath all her bravado. “We’ll just make ourselves at home at your table, then.”
Sam gestured encouragingly at the other chairs there, and they all took a seat, the other two seeming to have become tongue-tied shortly after arrival. Sam wondered why. Well, he was naturally shy. If he hadn’t been raised in a situation where he’d had to learn how to talk to just about anybody at any time, he might be feeling the same right now. Trying to appear as unintimidating as possible, he talked to them, drawing them out of their shells, making it clear he was happy for the chance to have a conversation with them. Partway through the meal, another girl joined them, who had been too shy to come over until she saw that he didn’t bite.
As nice as it was to be friends with Lina, it was even nicer to be friends with these girls. There was just nothing scary or incomprehensible or uncertain about them; they were open and genuine and completely unintimidating. By the end of the evening, he felt more comfortable with them than he had ever felt around even Dad and Dean. Once they saw what a geek he really was, they seemed to come to feel the same about him, although it took a little longer.
The funny thing was, none of them cleared 5’4”, so with him towering over them, and him the only guy in the group, as well as the only one who knew how to dress with a modicum of cool, he knew the whole gang must make quite a sight. He was sure of this because they got stared at a lot, especially by the people in his dorm, who really didn’t seem to know what to make of him now. Crazed gun nut? Awkward loner? Nerdy-girl pied piper? He was causing a lot of head-scratching.
Apparently nerdy girls were really horny. Whenever they were hanging out in one of their rooms together, they were all over him, pulling on his legs, fondling his torso, even occasionally grabbing his ass, giggling gleefully over the idea of all having sex with him at the same time. After getting over his initial surprise, Sam wasn’t complaining; he really couldn’t get enough of the feminine touch. It was like he was making up for eighteen years without maternal love or tenderness all at once. Besides, it was sweet and well-meaning. They told him there was another guy they tried to do this with and he had freaked out. Sam thought about that a lot. What kind of guy would turn down something like this? Then again, sometimes it did feel a little Gulliver, like they could overpower him en masse. If he didn’t know so well how kind they were at heart, and if he didn’t know he could always take control of the situation if he needed to, he guessed he could see finding it overwhelming or even scary, but for Sam, it was ideal.
It seemed like it must be ideal for them, too. Whenever he teased them that they should go find a guy to have sex with, they rejected the notion with howls of dismay. Eventually, he began to realize they seemed kind of scared of men. He did laugh a little at the notion that he of all men would seem safe to them, but it also made him incredibly happy, that he was able to make them feel safe where no one else could. He couldn’t really blame them, either; college guys were jerks. Now that he was being seen around campus surrounded by girls, other girls were starting to come up to him and befriend him, but to this day, he didn’t have a single male friend. Not like he minded--he’d had enough male company to last him a lifetime.
He fell into bed with a lot of these other girls who befriended him, although things stayed strictly platonic with his nerd-girl gang. He seriously didn’t know how he ended up having sex with so many women. It was always like it had been with Lina: he would think they were just hanging out, and then they would make a move, and his loneliness and need didn’t let him refuse. He was always as up-front with them as he had been with Lina about not being boyfriend material and not wanting that to hurt their friendship. They knew he had other paramours. Still, it almost never caused a problem. Lina just laughed and affectionately called him a whore.
As he made friends with more girls, some of those girls introduced him to their male friends, and he finally had some guys to hang out with, too. He never had to eat alone anymore. For that matter, he almost never had to walk anywhere alone, even to class. He was getting into the swing of things. Although he still kept a small knife in his backpack, he became used to a life without weapons, without danger. He began to wonder how he’d lived like that for eighteen years. He got good at dodging questions about his life, or coming up with euphemistic ways to tell the truth that didn’t reveal too much. The loss of his family was an ache that never went away, but he was able to distract himself from it with school and friends and extracurricular pursuits. He finally got the hang of how college kids interacted, and got to the point where he could sit down with a group of strangers in a class meeting or at a new club and not alienate them, even if none of his friends were around to vouch for him being an okay guy.
Nevertheless, he hung out with Lina whenever he could. There was some part of her that mirrored some part of him no one he’d ever met before did. Part of it was how much she knew about his past, but that wasn’t all of it. He generally didn’t cry during sex anymore, but when it did happen, it was with Lina, because she understood and didn’t judge. He generally didn’t even cry over the loss of his family anymore, but when he needed a shoulder to cry on about that or anything else, he used Lina’s. She cried sometimes, too, though she was more vague about why. Still, he was touched to realize he was her shoulder to cry on, too.
He found himself blurting out things he really shouldn’t, when she asked him questions about his life, but nothing bad ever came of it. She had a pretty freaky life, too. Turned out she actually was rich. Really rich. Her family owned some kind of corporate empire she was set to inherit. She was a senior, and after she graduated, she was supposed to get her MBA, which was a shame, Sam thought, because she had so many other talents and interests. Those conversations he’d wanted to have about great literature and scientific discoveries, he could have with her. She was always hanging around the theater department, and when he finally saw her in a play, he thought she was magnificent. Still, once he lifted the moratorium on talking about his family with her and they shared stories from their pasts, he discovered he wasn’t the only one keeping some things to himself, but that was yet another way in which they got along: he didn’t push it, and neither did she, and they were comfortable knowing they each had to keep some things secret. People could sense he was hiding things, and some people acted like consequently he couldn’t be trusted, but Lina understood.
“So,” she said one day, looking him up and down as he got dressed in her room in the morning. He hardly ever had to spend the night in his own room anymore. “Ya ever gonna ... buy more pants?”
Sam looked down at himself, surprised. “I’ve got three pairs.”
She was making a humorous face. “Yeah ... three dirty, holey pairs. Not like you don’t do laundry, because I know you do, but that dirt is, like, ground in. You should buy more pants.” He pulled on his shirt. “Shirts, too,” she added.
Reluctantly, he mumbled, “... I don’t have the money.”
“I do. We’ll go shopping. Girls’ day out!”
She liked to call him a girl, too, because all his friends had been girls for so long, but when she did it, it didn’t hurt like when Dean did it. He smirked, but demurred. “No, I ... you’re right, I should buy some pants. It’s okay. I’ll get the money.”
There was one of those moments, when they were both fully aware there was something that wasn’t being said. She was thinking about whether she should bring it up. She must have decided she may as well. “How are you affording school?”
“I got a full academic scholarship, but it doesn’t pay living expenses.”
“It pays for books, though, right?”
“Yeah, but I cashed that check ....”
She frowned. “It doesn’t pay room and board, does it?”
He smirked slightly. “No.”
“And ....”
“And, I kind of hacked into the system ....”
She only giggled. “Awesome. But I’ve seen that you have money. A little money. Sometimes.”
He flopped down beside her on her big bed. “Yeah. I hustle pool for it sometimes, across town. And ... sometimes I ... apply for a credit card, which ... um ... doesn’t have my name on it.” He looked down, feeling dirty. All his nice, respectable friends were beginning to make him rethink all these things he’d been raised to think of as a perfectly normal way to get by.
She loved these tales of his outlaw ways; she cackled. “Man, you have to teach me how to do that stuff.”
“No, what I should do is get a job, and maybe not even lie my way into it. You need to teach me how to do that. I seriously have no idea how, because not one person in my family has ever had a job since I was six months old. You need to help me go straight.”
“We’ll teach each other then: you teach me how to fall off the grid, and I teach you how to be on the straight and narrow.” He shook his head and let it flop onto her shoulder, smiling. “Seriously? Your dad never had a job?”
“Nope.”
“How did you live, then?”
He just quirked an eyebrow at her. “How do you think I learned all these things?”
“Your dad’s a criminal, too?” She tsked, disgusted.
“No. No, you’re getting the wrong impression. See, my dad ... he hunts ... the things that hurt people.”
“He kills people?!”
“No, he never kills humans; he’s saving humans from ... bad guys. So, really, he’s doing a public service. He thinks of the money he steals as ... a tax, I guess, on society, to pay for the service he provides.”
She fell to giggling again. She really loved all this stuff. If only she knew how not-cool it all actually was. “Whatever you say, Sam. I trust your judgment. But let’s not ‘tax’ the citizens for pants, okay? I’m buying.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“Why not?”
He was awash in shame at the idea of not being able to take care of himself in this most basic of ways. “I can’t let you buy me necessities. Seriously. I’m sorry; I’ll get myself some new pants.”
“Why are you apologizing? Sam, look: my mom and dad created this big, evil corporation that made them piles of cash. Let’s use it for something good--for a hero who saves people from bad guys ... you know, while we still can.”
He tilted his head. “What do you mean?”
He saw the mask come over her features again. Secrets. “I mean, I’ll be your sugar momma. Today, at three. Meet me here. And now I’ve got class. Lock the door on your way out.” She kissed him and left.
He hustled three hundred bucks in an epic game of pool that day. He used the old ‘I suck at pool, oh no I lost another round, let’s go double or nothing’ trick, finally winning on the last round. This was always lucrative, but an approach the Winchesters seldom used simply due to the time commitment, not to mention the danger of having to get into a fight when the mark realized he’d been played the whole time. When they did decide to go with that one, Dad always had Sam do it, because he looked so young and innocent, and because he was the best at faking mere luck during the final round and feigning surprise that he’d managed to win. Dean couldn’t resist gloating and rubbing it in the mark’s face that he’d been duped.
Sam had to ditch class so he could do this, before meeting her at three. She still found a way to pay, though she was most entertained by his tale of how he’d earned the money that day.
Nonetheless, they had a grand time. He’d almost never set foot in a department store before. He’d never gotten to eat in a mall food court before. She kind of shook her head and snickered that he could actually be excited about all this stuff, but he could tell it charmed her, too.
Suddenly, over mall food, sitting among hundreds of other people in the food court, she blurted out, “I’m not going to do it.”
“What?”
“Sam, I need your help. Will you help me?”
Sam was bewildered, and concerned. “Of course. What--?”
“I can’t live the life my family wants me to live. I just can’t. But if they had any idea where I was, they would never let me go, I would never get out. I need you to help me disappear. Will you help me do that, Sam? Please? You’re the only person I’ve ever met who knows how.” She looked right into his eyes with such agonizing vulnerability, his heart hurt. Her eyes were wet.
“Of course, Lina. But ... leaving your family is harder than it sounds.”
“I know that. Since I started college, I’ve been trying to see my way clear to making myself do what they want me to do, but it feels like I would stop existing if I tried, like ... like I would stop mattering in this world. Like I would stop mattering ... even to myself.”
Sam was kind of freaking out. It was like looking at another version of himself. He tried to calm his breathing. He grabbed her hand. She squeezed his back so tight, both their hands turned white, like she was holding on with every bit of strength she had, like she was holding on for dear life.
“You know I’ll do whatever I can to help you, Lina. Now and always. You can disappear to everyone else, but don’t ever disappear from my life, okay?”
She nodded and smiled, and the tears fell from her eyes. She rolled her eyes at herself and wiped her face quickly. Sam had killed a lot of monsters. It had been dangerous and bloody and horrifying. This was the first time he’d ever saved someone from what haunted them that left him feeling light and free. Maybe his crazy upbringing did allow him to offer something worthwhile. He could still save people, just in his own way.
Sam’s cell phone rang one day when he was with his nerd-girl gang. They were all having a ball quizzing him about some of the scifi shows they’d gotten him watching, seeing how well he remembered characters and plot, laughing hysterically when he misinterpreted something that had happened, as he so often did, lacking the same reference points other people had. Sam had been expecting a booty call from Lina, or possibly Cherie, and he figured that was who it would be. Sam was chuckling as he answered without bothering to look who it was. It was always the same people nowadays. Sitting on the floor, nonetheless, he lost his balance and had to clutch the carpet when he heard Dean’s voice, even more careful and subdued than the last time he called. “Hey, Sam.”
Sam scrambled to his feet and headed for the door as his friends looked on in surprise. “Dean?” His friends called after them; he waved and went outside into the warm spring air.
“Sounds like you’re having fun. That’s good!” Dean said quickly, to make clear he didn’t mean it critically. “That’s good. College boy should be having fun.”
Sam could only think of one reason why Dean might call when it had been pretty clear he shared Dad’s opinion that when Sam went to college, he’d walked out on his family for good. “Is everything okay?” he asked anxiously. “You and Dad--”
“We’re fine,” Dean said calmly.
There was a long, pregnant silence. “Then why--?”
“Can’t I call my brother? What, do you have so many awesome friends now, you don’t got time to talk to your family?”
Sam smiled slightly, looking toward his friends’ room, where he could still hear them carrying on about Star Wars through the open window. He chuckled softly, imagining what Dean would think of his friends. He probably wouldn’t even comprehend them or why Sam would hang out with them. Dean mostly thought about things and people in terms of how ‘cool’ they were. Somehow, Sam had never really seen that before. He was suddenly seeing lots of things from a whole new perspective. “Yeah. I am having fun.”
“That’s good.” Sam couldn’t detect a note of jealousy in Dean’s voice, even though he couldn’t possibly be having fun. Well, maybe he was, or maybe he at least thought he was, but looking back on how dark and dangerous his life had once been--how Dean’s still was--Sam felt like he was standing in a bright, sunny garden, talking to someone who was living in some hellish, seedy pit. “Uh ... sorry ... sorry about ... our last conversation ....”
“It’s okay,” Sam said quickly.
“No, it’s not. I was, um ... pretty messed up when you left, I’m not gonna lie. Dad and I both were.”
“Yeah?” Sam said noncommittally. He believed that about Dean, but he’d only believe it about Dad when he saw it.
“Yeah, and I, uh ... I guess I couldn’t see any solution besides making you come home. But you’re there, you’re where you want to be, you’re happy. That’s all that matters.”
Sam’s heart broke. These words he’d been needing to hear for so many months. Here they suddenly were. He hadn’t realized that what was on the other side of having to hear them was wanting it not to mean it was the end. He didn’t realize he still wanted his family, right there with him, always. Just as long as he could get what he needed, he wanted them by his side for the rest of his life. “You could still come!” he found himself saying desperately. “It’s great here! You could hang it up, come out here, we could get an apartment together. There’s tons of pretty girls; I’m sure you’d be happy too--”
“Nah,” Dean casually interrupted his hysterical appeals. Whether his casual tone was natural or put on, Sam could no longer tell. Dean was growing up, too. “Monsters still need killing. But, tell you the truth, I’m glad you got out. You weren’t cut out for this. You were always destined for ... greater things.”
Sam looked down, the ache through his whole body almost more than he could stand. Dean didn’t even realize that what he was saying was that Dean didn’t deserve anything better, that he wasn’t worth it. Risking one’s life every day for strangers, living on crumbs, hunted and always in danger, could do that to a guy. There had to be a way to pull Dean out of that hole--and there was, but Dean had to let him, and he never would. Sam stared at the ground, now understanding why Dad and Dean tried so hard not to let him leave: because they felt like he did now, like they couldn’t live without him, but they couldn’t go where he was going, just like he couldn’t go back to where they were now. It was an unbridgeable divide between their destinies and their need for each other. “If you ever change your mind ... and I hope you do ... I’ll always be here, and the door will always be open for you. I mean it, Dean. I’ll ... I’ll be waiting for you.”
“Well ... same goes for you, Sam.” Sam could hear how hard Dean was working to sound okay. “We’ll always be waiting for you to come home. If--you know, if you want to.”
“Dad said I couldn’t.”
“You know he didn’t mean it.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Come on, Sam! You know he could never turn you away. You’re a Winchester. You always will be.” That was true, and Sam knew it. If there was one thing he’d learned at college, it was that you could take the boy out of the hunter’s life, but you couldn’t take the hunter’s life out of the boy. “You always have a home here, if you ever want to come back.”
Sam regretted having to say it, but he had to. He made his voice as gentle as possible, though there was no way to soften the words themselves. “Thanks, Dean, but ... I never will.”
Sam heard the smile in Dean’s voice, and how hard it was for Dean to put it there. “I know.”
~ The End ~
End notes:
- I've been wanting to write a story from Sam's POV (so far I've exclusively written from Dean's POV, except for one outsider POV story), and this seemed an ideal place to start: where he very first embarks on figuring out who he is separate from his family ... because his separateness is such a defining quality for him in the series.
- It was interesting to me to write this from the perspective that Sam, and John and Dean, truly believe at this point that this is a permanent change, that Sam has walked away from a hunter's life and will never go back.
- I was surprised, writing Sam, to find that, although he's very sweet and good, he's also manipulative and calculating as hell. (As my friend said, "He's a crafty little bastard!") I learned a lot about Sam's character through writing this story.
- One thing that DIDN'T surprise me as I was writing this story was how much he got laid. (I really didn't plan it that way, though ....) It certainly seems at the beginning of the series like he has plenty of sexual experience, but he doesn't get most of it during the series (except when he's soulless), and I couldn't picture him doing much in high school, either, never getting to stay in one place for very long, so I figured he must have gotten most of that experience in college, before he met Jess.
- This was partly inspired by a prompt in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
spn_bigpretzel about Sam going to college and finding there's a lot he still doesn't know about how to get along among normal people. It was meant to prompt a humorous story, and I took it in an angstier direction, as I so often do, but I thought it was a great idea.
Author:
brightly_litRating: PG-13 for language and one mild sex scene (they could easily show it on the series)
Pairings: None
Characters: Sam, Dean, OCs
Genre: Gen, Stanford-era, hurt/comfort, angst, teen!chester (Sam is still a teenager), first time, brotherly love
Warnings: None
Spoilers: None; takes place pre-series
Word Count: ~13,000
Disclaimer: I don't own Sam and Dean or their history
Summary: This is the story of when Sam went to Stanford and figured out, with a lot of difficulty, loneliness, and false starts, how to make his way in the normal world without the family that had defined his whole life for 18 years.
"If there was one thing he’d learned at college, it was that you could take the boy out of the hunter’s life, but you couldn’t take the hunter’s life out of the boy."
This is part 2 (of 2) of a story continued from here.
It was great to have a friend. They ate together sometimes, but Lina was mysterious and busy and always meeting new people, and sometimes he still had to eat alone. One of these times, reading for class so he didn’t see the sidelong glances he was getting, three trays landed on his table all at once. He looked up, surprised. His hand went automatically to the back of his pants, where once upon a time there would have been a weapon. Then he saw it was three tiny girls, and he smiled, flummoxed.
“Hi!” said the ringleader.
“Hi ...,” he said uncertainly.
“We’ve been watching you since the beginning of school, and we finally decided to come over and see if you sit alone because you’re too cool to talk to anyone else or if you’re really just a nerd with no social skills like us.”
Sam laughed. “Definitely the latter.”
“Sweet!” said the main one brashly, but he sensed she was getting pretty nervous underneath all her bravado. “We’ll just make ourselves at home at your table, then.”
Sam gestured encouragingly at the other chairs there, and they all took a seat, the other two seeming to have become tongue-tied shortly after arrival. Sam wondered why. Well, he was naturally shy. If he hadn’t been raised in a situation where he’d had to learn how to talk to just about anybody at any time, he might be feeling the same right now. Trying to appear as unintimidating as possible, he talked to them, drawing them out of their shells, making it clear he was happy for the chance to have a conversation with them. Partway through the meal, another girl joined them, who had been too shy to come over until she saw that he didn’t bite.
As nice as it was to be friends with Lina, it was even nicer to be friends with these girls. There was just nothing scary or incomprehensible or uncertain about them; they were open and genuine and completely unintimidating. By the end of the evening, he felt more comfortable with them than he had ever felt around even Dad and Dean. Once they saw what a geek he really was, they seemed to come to feel the same about him, although it took a little longer.
The funny thing was, none of them cleared 5’4”, so with him towering over them, and him the only guy in the group, as well as the only one who knew how to dress with a modicum of cool, he knew the whole gang must make quite a sight. He was sure of this because they got stared at a lot, especially by the people in his dorm, who really didn’t seem to know what to make of him now. Crazed gun nut? Awkward loner? Nerdy-girl pied piper? He was causing a lot of head-scratching.
Apparently nerdy girls were really horny. Whenever they were hanging out in one of their rooms together, they were all over him, pulling on his legs, fondling his torso, even occasionally grabbing his ass, giggling gleefully over the idea of all having sex with him at the same time. After getting over his initial surprise, Sam wasn’t complaining; he really couldn’t get enough of the feminine touch. It was like he was making up for eighteen years without maternal love or tenderness all at once. Besides, it was sweet and well-meaning. They told him there was another guy they tried to do this with and he had freaked out. Sam thought about that a lot. What kind of guy would turn down something like this? Then again, sometimes it did feel a little Gulliver, like they could overpower him en masse. If he didn’t know so well how kind they were at heart, and if he didn’t know he could always take control of the situation if he needed to, he guessed he could see finding it overwhelming or even scary, but for Sam, it was ideal.
It seemed like it must be ideal for them, too. Whenever he teased them that they should go find a guy to have sex with, they rejected the notion with howls of dismay. Eventually, he began to realize they seemed kind of scared of men. He did laugh a little at the notion that he of all men would seem safe to them, but it also made him incredibly happy, that he was able to make them feel safe where no one else could. He couldn’t really blame them, either; college guys were jerks. Now that he was being seen around campus surrounded by girls, other girls were starting to come up to him and befriend him, but to this day, he didn’t have a single male friend. Not like he minded--he’d had enough male company to last him a lifetime.
He fell into bed with a lot of these other girls who befriended him, although things stayed strictly platonic with his nerd-girl gang. He seriously didn’t know how he ended up having sex with so many women. It was always like it had been with Lina: he would think they were just hanging out, and then they would make a move, and his loneliness and need didn’t let him refuse. He was always as up-front with them as he had been with Lina about not being boyfriend material and not wanting that to hurt their friendship. They knew he had other paramours. Still, it almost never caused a problem. Lina just laughed and affectionately called him a whore.
As he made friends with more girls, some of those girls introduced him to their male friends, and he finally had some guys to hang out with, too. He never had to eat alone anymore. For that matter, he almost never had to walk anywhere alone, even to class. He was getting into the swing of things. Although he still kept a small knife in his backpack, he became used to a life without weapons, without danger. He began to wonder how he’d lived like that for eighteen years. He got good at dodging questions about his life, or coming up with euphemistic ways to tell the truth that didn’t reveal too much. The loss of his family was an ache that never went away, but he was able to distract himself from it with school and friends and extracurricular pursuits. He finally got the hang of how college kids interacted, and got to the point where he could sit down with a group of strangers in a class meeting or at a new club and not alienate them, even if none of his friends were around to vouch for him being an okay guy.
Nevertheless, he hung out with Lina whenever he could. There was some part of her that mirrored some part of him no one he’d ever met before did. Part of it was how much she knew about his past, but that wasn’t all of it. He generally didn’t cry during sex anymore, but when it did happen, it was with Lina, because she understood and didn’t judge. He generally didn’t even cry over the loss of his family anymore, but when he needed a shoulder to cry on about that or anything else, he used Lina’s. She cried sometimes, too, though she was more vague about why. Still, he was touched to realize he was her shoulder to cry on, too.
He found himself blurting out things he really shouldn’t, when she asked him questions about his life, but nothing bad ever came of it. She had a pretty freaky life, too. Turned out she actually was rich. Really rich. Her family owned some kind of corporate empire she was set to inherit. She was a senior, and after she graduated, she was supposed to get her MBA, which was a shame, Sam thought, because she had so many other talents and interests. Those conversations he’d wanted to have about great literature and scientific discoveries, he could have with her. She was always hanging around the theater department, and when he finally saw her in a play, he thought she was magnificent. Still, once he lifted the moratorium on talking about his family with her and they shared stories from their pasts, he discovered he wasn’t the only one keeping some things to himself, but that was yet another way in which they got along: he didn’t push it, and neither did she, and they were comfortable knowing they each had to keep some things secret. People could sense he was hiding things, and some people acted like consequently he couldn’t be trusted, but Lina understood.
“So,” she said one day, looking him up and down as he got dressed in her room in the morning. He hardly ever had to spend the night in his own room anymore. “Ya ever gonna ... buy more pants?”
Sam looked down at himself, surprised. “I’ve got three pairs.”
She was making a humorous face. “Yeah ... three dirty, holey pairs. Not like you don’t do laundry, because I know you do, but that dirt is, like, ground in. You should buy more pants.” He pulled on his shirt. “Shirts, too,” she added.
Reluctantly, he mumbled, “... I don’t have the money.”
“I do. We’ll go shopping. Girls’ day out!”
She liked to call him a girl, too, because all his friends had been girls for so long, but when she did it, it didn’t hurt like when Dean did it. He smirked, but demurred. “No, I ... you’re right, I should buy some pants. It’s okay. I’ll get the money.”
There was one of those moments, when they were both fully aware there was something that wasn’t being said. She was thinking about whether she should bring it up. She must have decided she may as well. “How are you affording school?”
“I got a full academic scholarship, but it doesn’t pay living expenses.”
“It pays for books, though, right?”
“Yeah, but I cashed that check ....”
She frowned. “It doesn’t pay room and board, does it?”
He smirked slightly. “No.”
“And ....”
“And, I kind of hacked into the system ....”
She only giggled. “Awesome. But I’ve seen that you have money. A little money. Sometimes.”
He flopped down beside her on her big bed. “Yeah. I hustle pool for it sometimes, across town. And ... sometimes I ... apply for a credit card, which ... um ... doesn’t have my name on it.” He looked down, feeling dirty. All his nice, respectable friends were beginning to make him rethink all these things he’d been raised to think of as a perfectly normal way to get by.
She loved these tales of his outlaw ways; she cackled. “Man, you have to teach me how to do that stuff.”
“No, what I should do is get a job, and maybe not even lie my way into it. You need to teach me how to do that. I seriously have no idea how, because not one person in my family has ever had a job since I was six months old. You need to help me go straight.”
“We’ll teach each other then: you teach me how to fall off the grid, and I teach you how to be on the straight and narrow.” He shook his head and let it flop onto her shoulder, smiling. “Seriously? Your dad never had a job?”
“Nope.”
“How did you live, then?”
He just quirked an eyebrow at her. “How do you think I learned all these things?”
“Your dad’s a criminal, too?” She tsked, disgusted.
“No. No, you’re getting the wrong impression. See, my dad ... he hunts ... the things that hurt people.”
“He kills people?!”
“No, he never kills humans; he’s saving humans from ... bad guys. So, really, he’s doing a public service. He thinks of the money he steals as ... a tax, I guess, on society, to pay for the service he provides.”
She fell to giggling again. She really loved all this stuff. If only she knew how not-cool it all actually was. “Whatever you say, Sam. I trust your judgment. But let’s not ‘tax’ the citizens for pants, okay? I’m buying.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“Why not?”
He was awash in shame at the idea of not being able to take care of himself in this most basic of ways. “I can’t let you buy me necessities. Seriously. I’m sorry; I’ll get myself some new pants.”
“Why are you apologizing? Sam, look: my mom and dad created this big, evil corporation that made them piles of cash. Let’s use it for something good--for a hero who saves people from bad guys ... you know, while we still can.”
He tilted his head. “What do you mean?”
He saw the mask come over her features again. Secrets. “I mean, I’ll be your sugar momma. Today, at three. Meet me here. And now I’ve got class. Lock the door on your way out.” She kissed him and left.
He hustled three hundred bucks in an epic game of pool that day. He used the old ‘I suck at pool, oh no I lost another round, let’s go double or nothing’ trick, finally winning on the last round. This was always lucrative, but an approach the Winchesters seldom used simply due to the time commitment, not to mention the danger of having to get into a fight when the mark realized he’d been played the whole time. When they did decide to go with that one, Dad always had Sam do it, because he looked so young and innocent, and because he was the best at faking mere luck during the final round and feigning surprise that he’d managed to win. Dean couldn’t resist gloating and rubbing it in the mark’s face that he’d been duped.
Sam had to ditch class so he could do this, before meeting her at three. She still found a way to pay, though she was most entertained by his tale of how he’d earned the money that day.
Nonetheless, they had a grand time. He’d almost never set foot in a department store before. He’d never gotten to eat in a mall food court before. She kind of shook her head and snickered that he could actually be excited about all this stuff, but he could tell it charmed her, too.
Suddenly, over mall food, sitting among hundreds of other people in the food court, she blurted out, “I’m not going to do it.”
“What?”
“Sam, I need your help. Will you help me?”
Sam was bewildered, and concerned. “Of course. What--?”
“I can’t live the life my family wants me to live. I just can’t. But if they had any idea where I was, they would never let me go, I would never get out. I need you to help me disappear. Will you help me do that, Sam? Please? You’re the only person I’ve ever met who knows how.” She looked right into his eyes with such agonizing vulnerability, his heart hurt. Her eyes were wet.
“Of course, Lina. But ... leaving your family is harder than it sounds.”
“I know that. Since I started college, I’ve been trying to see my way clear to making myself do what they want me to do, but it feels like I would stop existing if I tried, like ... like I would stop mattering in this world. Like I would stop mattering ... even to myself.”
Sam was kind of freaking out. It was like looking at another version of himself. He tried to calm his breathing. He grabbed her hand. She squeezed his back so tight, both their hands turned white, like she was holding on with every bit of strength she had, like she was holding on for dear life.
“You know I’ll do whatever I can to help you, Lina. Now and always. You can disappear to everyone else, but don’t ever disappear from my life, okay?”
She nodded and smiled, and the tears fell from her eyes. She rolled her eyes at herself and wiped her face quickly. Sam had killed a lot of monsters. It had been dangerous and bloody and horrifying. This was the first time he’d ever saved someone from what haunted them that left him feeling light and free. Maybe his crazy upbringing did allow him to offer something worthwhile. He could still save people, just in his own way.
Sam’s cell phone rang one day when he was with his nerd-girl gang. They were all having a ball quizzing him about some of the scifi shows they’d gotten him watching, seeing how well he remembered characters and plot, laughing hysterically when he misinterpreted something that had happened, as he so often did, lacking the same reference points other people had. Sam had been expecting a booty call from Lina, or possibly Cherie, and he figured that was who it would be. Sam was chuckling as he answered without bothering to look who it was. It was always the same people nowadays. Sitting on the floor, nonetheless, he lost his balance and had to clutch the carpet when he heard Dean’s voice, even more careful and subdued than the last time he called. “Hey, Sam.”
Sam scrambled to his feet and headed for the door as his friends looked on in surprise. “Dean?” His friends called after them; he waved and went outside into the warm spring air.
“Sounds like you’re having fun. That’s good!” Dean said quickly, to make clear he didn’t mean it critically. “That’s good. College boy should be having fun.”
Sam could only think of one reason why Dean might call when it had been pretty clear he shared Dad’s opinion that when Sam went to college, he’d walked out on his family for good. “Is everything okay?” he asked anxiously. “You and Dad--”
“We’re fine,” Dean said calmly.
There was a long, pregnant silence. “Then why--?”
“Can’t I call my brother? What, do you have so many awesome friends now, you don’t got time to talk to your family?”
Sam smiled slightly, looking toward his friends’ room, where he could still hear them carrying on about Star Wars through the open window. He chuckled softly, imagining what Dean would think of his friends. He probably wouldn’t even comprehend them or why Sam would hang out with them. Dean mostly thought about things and people in terms of how ‘cool’ they were. Somehow, Sam had never really seen that before. He was suddenly seeing lots of things from a whole new perspective. “Yeah. I am having fun.”
“That’s good.” Sam couldn’t detect a note of jealousy in Dean’s voice, even though he couldn’t possibly be having fun. Well, maybe he was, or maybe he at least thought he was, but looking back on how dark and dangerous his life had once been--how Dean’s still was--Sam felt like he was standing in a bright, sunny garden, talking to someone who was living in some hellish, seedy pit. “Uh ... sorry ... sorry about ... our last conversation ....”
“It’s okay,” Sam said quickly.
“No, it’s not. I was, um ... pretty messed up when you left, I’m not gonna lie. Dad and I both were.”
“Yeah?” Sam said noncommittally. He believed that about Dean, but he’d only believe it about Dad when he saw it.
“Yeah, and I, uh ... I guess I couldn’t see any solution besides making you come home. But you’re there, you’re where you want to be, you’re happy. That’s all that matters.”
Sam’s heart broke. These words he’d been needing to hear for so many months. Here they suddenly were. He hadn’t realized that what was on the other side of having to hear them was wanting it not to mean it was the end. He didn’t realize he still wanted his family, right there with him, always. Just as long as he could get what he needed, he wanted them by his side for the rest of his life. “You could still come!” he found himself saying desperately. “It’s great here! You could hang it up, come out here, we could get an apartment together. There’s tons of pretty girls; I’m sure you’d be happy too--”
“Nah,” Dean casually interrupted his hysterical appeals. Whether his casual tone was natural or put on, Sam could no longer tell. Dean was growing up, too. “Monsters still need killing. But, tell you the truth, I’m glad you got out. You weren’t cut out for this. You were always destined for ... greater things.”
Sam looked down, the ache through his whole body almost more than he could stand. Dean didn’t even realize that what he was saying was that Dean didn’t deserve anything better, that he wasn’t worth it. Risking one’s life every day for strangers, living on crumbs, hunted and always in danger, could do that to a guy. There had to be a way to pull Dean out of that hole--and there was, but Dean had to let him, and he never would. Sam stared at the ground, now understanding why Dad and Dean tried so hard not to let him leave: because they felt like he did now, like they couldn’t live without him, but they couldn’t go where he was going, just like he couldn’t go back to where they were now. It was an unbridgeable divide between their destinies and their need for each other. “If you ever change your mind ... and I hope you do ... I’ll always be here, and the door will always be open for you. I mean it, Dean. I’ll ... I’ll be waiting for you.”
“Well ... same goes for you, Sam.” Sam could hear how hard Dean was working to sound okay. “We’ll always be waiting for you to come home. If--you know, if you want to.”
“Dad said I couldn’t.”
“You know he didn’t mean it.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Come on, Sam! You know he could never turn you away. You’re a Winchester. You always will be.” That was true, and Sam knew it. If there was one thing he’d learned at college, it was that you could take the boy out of the hunter’s life, but you couldn’t take the hunter’s life out of the boy. “You always have a home here, if you ever want to come back.”
Sam regretted having to say it, but he had to. He made his voice as gentle as possible, though there was no way to soften the words themselves. “Thanks, Dean, but ... I never will.”
Sam heard the smile in Dean’s voice, and how hard it was for Dean to put it there. “I know.”
~ The End ~
End notes:
- I've been wanting to write a story from Sam's POV (so far I've exclusively written from Dean's POV, except for one outsider POV story), and this seemed an ideal place to start: where he very first embarks on figuring out who he is separate from his family ... because his separateness is such a defining quality for him in the series.
- It was interesting to me to write this from the perspective that Sam, and John and Dean, truly believe at this point that this is a permanent change, that Sam has walked away from a hunter's life and will never go back.
- I was surprised, writing Sam, to find that, although he's very sweet and good, he's also manipulative and calculating as hell. (As my friend said, "He's a crafty little bastard!") I learned a lot about Sam's character through writing this story.
- One thing that DIDN'T surprise me as I was writing this story was how much he got laid. (I really didn't plan it that way, though ....) It certainly seems at the beginning of the series like he has plenty of sexual experience, but he doesn't get most of it during the series (except when he's soulless), and I couldn't picture him doing much in high school, either, never getting to stay in one place for very long, so I figured he must have gotten most of that experience in college, before he met Jess.
- This was partly inspired by a prompt in
spn_bigpretzel about Sam going to college and finding there's a lot he still doesn't know about how to get along among normal people. It was meant to prompt a humorous story, and I took it in an angstier direction, as I so often do, but I thought it was a great idea.