The Winchester family are not mine, and I am not making any profit on them. I am enjoying their romps through my head though.

I know why the caged bird beats its wing

Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;

For he must fly back to his perch and cling

When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;

And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars

And they pulse again with a keener sting--

I know why he beats his wing!

- Sympathy, 2nd Stanza, Paul Laurence Dunbar

-Sam's Journal-

I get it now. I think I was happier when I didn't understand.

Most of my life has been spent on other people's fights, on other people's vengeance. I wanted to live a quiet life, away from fighting, from running. When I got the full ride to Stanford, I thought I was out. I thought I had my freedom. It'd come at the highest cost possible, that of my family, but hell, wasn't freedom something you were supposed to sacrifice everything for?

I knew that there was trouble when Dean showed up at my door nearly 4 years after I'd been permanently uninvited from any more Winchester Family Reunions. I thought that we'd all gone our own ways: Me to my life without running scared, and Dean and Dad to their life of hunting down my mother's killer.

I didn't know my mother except from Dean's and Dad's stories of her. I can tell you that she had blonde hair and eyes that would change color depending on her mood. She liked sunflowers, and cats, and loved my brother and me. She smelled like a flower, but which one depended on who you asked. Dean thought she smelled of roses, and Dad though she smelled like violets. Dean loved to hear her sing, and Dad said that she could dance as lightly as a leaf on the wind. Both agreed that you didn't want to make her mad at you, or you'd suffer for it in new and inventive ways. I loved the idea of her, but can you really love someone that you have no memory of? I accept that Dean and Dad loved her, and for that matter, Dean still does, but can you constantly and chronically fight for someone you've never really known?

My memory of my mother? A flaming brand walking out of a closet that briefly shifted to a woman looking vaguely like Jess, who apologized to me and then set off to do battle with a poltergeist and was presumably destroyed. Not the best of mother son bonding experiences.

All I ever really had of her was their words, and that one, brief meeting before she destroyed herself. Not a lot to go on. Words don't do justice to a living person. You can describe their height, weight, favorite color and food, but it won't matter. You still won't know them. You still won't know the echo of their voice, or their understand their soul. They'll never be a part of you, not the way the people that you know first hand do. I never understood my family's quest for vengeance in her name because I never really knew her. Without knowing her, understanding who she was as a person, not as an idea, I couldn't understand what drove Dean and Dad on this suicide quest.

That's the thing they never got. They never understood. Hell, I never understood it until now. When I think about what I said to Dean on that bridge, well, I understand why he slammed me up against that girder.

Took me a long time to figure this out: You can't fight someone else's battles for them. And that's what I spent the first 17 years of my life doing, it seems. I hunted for Dean, and I hunted for Dad, and for the memory of a woman that I can't remember. It made me the odd one out in our little family. I didn't, couldn't, understand what drove Dean and Dad so hard to find the demon that had killed my mother. I didn't have their passion, their obsession to bring my mother's killer to justice. But then, I was only fighting for a silhouette cast by a long gone actress, a pale imitation of reality, and they were fighting for someone that lived, breathed, lived, and loved them. Maybe that's why I wanted to leave so badly, to live a normal life. Adopt someone else's living, breathing mother as my own. To understand what they felt was worth destroying their lives over.

Until Jess, I never lost anyone that I'd loved before. When Jess died, I understood, a little bit anyway, the emotions that drove the rest of my family. I wanted to kill the demon that had destroyed my happy little normal life. I figured, hey, we'll find Dad and we'll kill the SOB that killed my mother and Jess. Then I can be normal. Then I can be free.

Now I'm sitting in a motel room, trying not to break under the pressure, venting into MS Word, because I can't say any of this to my brother. I can't put this on him, he won't understand, because he's lived with this since he was a child. And because he's barely keeping himself together.

I'll never be normal, and I'll never be free. Dad's dead, the gun's gone, Dean's not coping, not talking, and seems to be trying to drive me away. I don't know how to keep going on. I don't know how I can go back to having, or even wanting, a normal life. I want my brother not to hurt so much. I want Dad and Jess to be alive. I want to have never, ever have understood the cold rage that courses through me when I think about the demon and my father. Dean's barbs about my sudden zeal for hunting, for living life as Dad wanted me to just add to the icy hatred in my heart. I want to flay him alive with my understanding, the things that I've learned since Dad died, but I can't. If he knew what I felt… I didn't know that ignorance is bliss.

Used to be that the demon was something Dad and Dean were obsessed with. It killed my mother. I only cared about it to the extent that it was something Dean and Dad cared about. It was their weird obsession, like some people have obsessions with collecting stamps. An obsession I ran away from.

Now it's my obsession. That son of a bitch stole my father from me, and that's taking my brother away from me too. The bastard won't be allowed to destroy any more of my family. I'm not running from it anymore, I'm chasing after it. I'm going to find it and kill it even though it's the last thing I'll ever do.