A/N: And Supernatural gets me right in the feels. AGAIN.
He is eleven, and he wants so badly, so painfully, to grow up.
Not for all the reasons that Dean thinks. Not for the girls or the cars, money, guns, beer, any of the basic hallmarks of adulthood that John Winchester sprinkles along the bitter trail of hunting like scraps of bread.
Sam just wants to be free.
He is sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. The hands of the clock fight round and round, boxers in a ring. Sam thinks he is grown up and hopes that he is free. He crosses the country and doesn't look back, feels textbooks heavy in his hands and falls so deeply in love with Jess that he doesn't really understand it until she burns.
He is twenty-two, and his world is in ashes around him. The only one left is Dean. Dean has never tried to be free, and Sam could hate him for that, if he didn't know that Dean has never tried to be free from Sam.
Sam is twenty-six when the cage closes around him the first time. It is the farthest thing from freedom, but he gathers the shreds of his tortured soul together, decade after decade, and tells himself that he chose this. He chose this, and he saved the world.
(Even if he didn't save it for himself).
He makes it out of the cage, and is never the same again.
He is eleven, he is twenty, thirty, broken, scarred, lost, and lonely. He is tired, he is so tired—
He is thirty-two and turning over the thousandth new (old) leaf, trying to remember that saving people matters more than hunting things. Dean taught him that, even though Dean has forgotten it himself.
He longs for freedom but he knows that sometimes it leads behind bars. Sometimes there's a choice, a series of choices, each crueler than the last, but Sam has to believe in something (he's always believed in something, seven-year-old knees sore from praying at his bedside) and he thinks if it be Your will is enough to lead him down into the dark.
The cage is all around him once more. Yet Sam thinks he can bear it, if only he believes—
Then Lucifer's knowing smile burns like a brand.
And Sam thinks of the bitter trails he's wandered, how they led him here and here again. He saved the world only to break it, and the choices he made were not his own.
Amid the anguish and dread, he thinks that he only ever asked for a little. But now he knows that it was too much to ask for anything.
Because all Sam has ever wanted is to be free.