When Mary Winchester puts her son to bed, it's with a kiss to his forehead and an "Angels are watching over you".
She had never felt quite right saying it to Sam. It was heavy in her mouth, like something that was too true to be said. So her youngest she tells "You're perfect," instead.
Sam prayed for the first time when she was three years old. Her dad had dropped her and Dean off at Pastor Jim's parish for a weekend hunt somewhere else in the state, something that hunted kids.
They'd sat in the second row pew, Sam wedged between Dean and an old lady who'd smelled like mothballs and cat litter, and Pastor Jim preached about God's forgiveness. How He created man in His image and they were all His children, and how He loved them unconditionally, that no matter who you were or what you had done, there was nothing so awful that God would turn His back on you or turn you away. "Even those who do not know the Gospel," he said, "but who are moved in their hearts and their actions by grace are saved."
She thought about the dirt inside her that she'd tried to scrub off in their last next-door neighbor's garden hose, and about her dad saying "There's something not right about him, Missouri," on the phone when he thought her and Dean were asleep, and about Sir Gawain and when Pastor Jim asked the congregation to lower their heads in prayer, she closed her eyes and whisper-asked God to make her clean.
Dean elbowed her in the ribs and hissed "Shh!"
When she was six, she asked Pastor Jim if she could be baptized. He did it in the kitchen sink and the water felt like a motel shower in its five minutes of hot water, where it burns you all pink and steam hisses up from your skin. Her scalp flaked and the skin on the back of her neck and shoulders cracked and bled. The blood and water went down trails along her spine.
She breathed hard and bit her lips bloody. "I'm okay," she said, and, "Please."
Pastor Jim looked at her sad, but he finished the sacrament, water over her head twice more, and when it dripped off her hair it ws tinged pink. Pastor Jim crouched down, put his hands on her shoulders. "God gave us all free will to choose good or evil," he told her. "That means all of us. Remember that."
She nodded, holy water and blood in her lashes. "I wanna be good," she told him.
"I know you do," he said.
Anything Sam couldn't tell Dean, she told Pastor Jim. He was the one who got the call from a payphone in Flagstaff: "Please, please don't tell my dad," and he was the one who held her weeping and gangly in his arms and told her that God would still love her if she was a girl and not a boy. When she was 18, she put his address on her college applications, and when she was 20 she brought her girlfriend to Christmas. When she was 22, an obituary notification showed up in her email inbox, and she figured that was probably to be expected.
The first time she died, it was like this:
There was a sharp heat, not quite like pain, in the base of her spine, and she fell to her knees and then fell further, and she was on her hands and knees on a polished stone floor and a hand helped her to her feet. The heat in her back was gone.
The hand belonged to a woman who was taller than Sam and could only loosely be described as a person. She had spindle limbs and no clothes covering her body, smooth and clear like glass, and Sam could see through her chest to the backs of the eyes on her shoulder blades. "Your Highness," the woman said, out of the mouth that opened in her sternum, sideways, and with teeth of ribs. And, "You are not supposed to be here."
"I'm not?" she asked, breath punched out of her chest.
"Not yet," the woman said, and the eyes on her back couldn't see the crumple of Sam's shoulders. Her head was a lower jaw and a long, black tongue curling around congealed blood. Her half-mouth pulled in something that might have been a frown. "I will be having words with Azazel." An incline of her neck. "Your yellow-eyed demon. And I am Penemue, My Queen."
Sam took a breath that turned into a dozen, and then she was dizzy and on her knees again in a throne room in Hell. "I didn't-" she gasped. "I don't want your crown."
"It is not for you yet, Your Highness," Penemue said, like a comfort. "You must be forsaken first by God."
Sam assumed she already had been, and said as much. "I mean, I'm in Hell, aren't I?"
Penemue laughed with the sound of snapping bones. "You will know when He has left you. My Father has never been subtle, and He enjoys symmetry too much."
The second time she died, it was like this:
There was cold metal pressing hard into her soft palate and the taste of gun oil on her tongue. Her hands were shaking. She pulled the trigger and there was heat with no time to be pain, and she fell and then fell further, and she was warm and comfortable and there was a body pressed against her back. Lucifer stroked her hair and tucked a loose strand behind her ear.
"I said I would bring you back," he told her, not unkindly. "Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life," he said, "oh ye of little faith," and then she woke up. There was blood matted in her hair and blood pooled in the back of her throat and her skull was stitching itself back together and she tried to pray but it turned sour in her mouth.
She spent a week in the hell in the back of her head and then she tracked down the nearest church.
The confessional was dimly-lit and the screen reminded her of the Cage and her breaths came a little bit faster. "Bless me, Father, in this confession. It has been five years since my last confession," and she accused herself of all her sins. "I have doubted the Lord," Sam said, the taste of sulfur and the Devil on her tongue. "I... I stopped praying. I thought He'd given up on me. I should have trusted Him."
"We all have lapses in judgement," the pastor said carefully, and assigned her ten Aves for penance.
She took on the trials to close the Gates of Hell and while they burned the impurities out of her soul, Sam thought of Pastor Jim talking about salvation.
"I think it's God," she said.
"When the fuck," Dean said viciously, "is it ever God? And if it was, why would He be talking to you?"
Sam blinked. A few years ago, she might have flinched. "I don't know, Dean. Why would an agnostic mass murderer be the Righteous Man?" she said. Regretted it. "Sometimes God works in mysterious ways," she bit out, and then, "Look, man, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. I just... this could be a good thing," she implored. "God's helped us before. Why not now?"
Dean scoffed. "Look, I get it if you have some religious complex, or whatever, but be reasonable here, Sam."
"Faith isn't reasonable, Dean. That's why it's faith." She sighed. "Just think about it, okay? Please."
In the end God healed all ills, and soothed all pain, and righted all wrongs. And He walked among the people, whom He had created, and whom He had saved. And God said, We need to talk.
Sam didn't know if she was supposed to be holding back tears or bitter, incredulous laughter, or if it even mattered anyway. He comes when Dean calls, of course He does. "Are you breaking up with us?" she asked.
His lips quirked. And God said, You know, I thought about it, really. I had the whole speech planned and everything.
Dean was silent at her side. She wished he'd say something. "What changed your mind?" she asked.
And God said, Oh, well, you know... You've got faith in me. I figured maybe it was time to return the favor.