A/N: Instead of posting each of my general drabbles seperately, I figured I'm anthologize them. Look for more in the future, because I never know what I'll come out with.

Not mine. I just like to play.

Salt

There are thin white lines hidden everywhere; under the welcome mat that Jess insisted they buy, along the windowframes, just out of sight enough so she can't see them. Every entrance in or out of their apartment is barriered off to anything evil.

It's part paranoia and part common sense, another margin of some feeling he can't shake, and he wishes he could forget. As much as he doesn't want to be part of that life, the life he was conditioned to conform to, he still finds himself inactively participating.

When he's procrastinating on a paper, he clicks through the online databases for demonology, folklore, mythology... anything he'd normally have looked for. He finds himself making notes about things he's never heard of and never encountered, carefully tucked away in a hidden compartment of the bag he totes to and from classes. He still reads local papers and scan obituaries, and finds every excuse he can to take long bus-rides around town.

What it will teach him, in the long run, is that you can't go back to being innocent after you've encountered the secret things no one knows about. He'll use his father as a scapegoat, blame him for not giving them the chance to grow up any other way, but it's not really his fault. The man is stubborn, but he isn't heartless.

And as much as he tries, tries to train himself out of checking the closet and dark spaces under the bed, he can't. That's the immediate reason he's glad to see his brother - for the first time in forever, it seems like. Dean is, if anything, more fanatical about these things than Sam is. It isn't strange to be cautious here, and once he's back on the road, he feels normal. Sane, again.

That's the immediate reason that Jess's death doesn't affect him more than it does - though, on a deeper level, it probably will. It's like being jerked out of a dream, back to being eighteen again; he's amazed at how well he can sink back into the mold of who he was before when he thought that person was long dead.