This was a fun episode, so naturally I've gone and made it angsty.

Prompt from OhSam: The real reason why Sam hates Halloween.

There are many reasons why Sam hates Halloween. He hates it because all the other kids in his class could dress up in costumes and parade around their neighbourhoods, all the while never knowing that the things they made caricatures of were very real.

He hates it because, as he keeps telling Dean, everyday is Halloween for them. There's no novelty in monsters if monsters are your normal.

And yeah, okay, sure, he hates it because of Andrea Howell and her stupid sixth-grade party.

But that's not the main reason.

Halloween, October 31st. Two days before November 2nd. Which was right around the time Dad would start acting weird.

And, by weird, Sam means going out to bars and coming back completely pissed, barely able to find his way to his bed he was so far gone. Or he would drag him and Dean away from wherever they had kind of settled in to, all the way to the other side of the country just for another hunt. He'd usually come back from those bleeding in too many places, no matter how simple the hunt, because apparently the words 'care' and 'restraint' were not in John Winchester's vocabulary. Or he'd just sit silently in the motel, pretending to research while he glowered at Sam, who was also generally pretending to be working.

Sam was never sure which one it was going to be (which one he wanted it to be). Sometimes, if they were really lucky, it would be all three at once.

As a kid, Sam had hated his dad for that. He'd hated him for a lot of things, truth be told, but for that most of all. He gets it now, sort of, so, if he's being honest with himself, that's not the real reason either.

October 31st. Two days before November 2nd. The last time he saw her.Sam considers himself to have a decent memory. Photographic, some have called it. Even so, he's forgotten a lot of stuff from Stanford, from that life he's now only half-sure he didn't dream. He's even forgotten some things about her - the exact melody of her laugh, that indescribable blue of her eyes, her favourite brand of cereal. You know, the little things.

But that night, Halloween, he remembers that night in minute detail, even down to the shitty music that had been playing in the bar. (It had been a Classic song, something Sam's sure Dean would have loved).He remembers asking if he really had to go, hating the idea of hanging in a stuffy bar with people he barely knew when he could have been practising for his law interview. But he'd gone because she'd asked him to and he kind of enjoyed it. Not as much as he should have done, though.

Oh, if he'd known that those would be the last memories of her he'd ever make, he would have used them better. He would have dressed up in whatever ridiculous costume she'd picked out for him, he would have made sure to commit every detail of her to memory so that he'd never forget just how beautiful she was.

Although... No. If he'd known, he would have stayed with her, if only to get that little bit more time. He knows he could never have saved her, and he's made his peace with that now, but he still hates himself for leaving her alone all those Halloweens ago.

It's funny, though, the things people remember with hindsight. Because Sam also remembers seeing Brady watching him and Jess from across the bar, a grin on his face. He hadn't thought anything of it at the time, thought it was just Brady being, well, Brady.

God, if he'd have known.

In the end, Sam hates Halloween because it reminds him of his greatest failure. It reminds him of everything he'd fortified by leaving with Dean, of everything he'd lost with that single action.

In the end, there are many reasons why Sam hates Halloween. And no one can ever know the real one.

I hope you guys enjoyed that! Thanks for reading, and please leave a review if you have a moment!