Just a quickie...Sam's thoughts as he looks back over the last few years...please review, then off to my LJ page (insert flagrant plea for LJ friends here) where I'll review your review! :)

Dulce bellum inexpertis

War is delightful to those who have no experience of it.

If you told me five years ago that all this was going to happen, I would have laughed in your face and then knocked your block off. My life was going to be normal, dammit. I was done with that life, with the danger and the blood and the killing. I had a new life and I knew that it didn't include hunting. It wasn't in The Plan. And sure, The Plan didn't include my family, either, but as far as I was concerned that was a good thing when it came to my dad. He and I were like oil and water. No, more like gasoline and flame. Plutonium and whatever-the-fuck-it-is that blows plutonium up. And as far as my brother, he never exactly reached out after I left and he sure as hell didn't stand up for me when my dad basically told me to fuck off and die. Dean made his choice and I made mine.

So I thought.

But then all hell broke loose. Evil came to find me, followed Dean like a cougar stalks a deer, and stole my life away. I went from law libraries and frat parties to roach motels and bloodbaths, and with every day it just seemed to get worse.

We went from job to job, kill to kill, tracking and scheming, always keeping our minds on the ultimate goal. And then finally, after 23 years of obsessing and plotting, my brother killed the sunovabitch who ruined our lives. We had won. It should have been over.

But it only got worse. We went from revenging my parents and Jessica to trying to save my brother's soul. Frying pan? Fire? Try fucking inferno.

God, I was angry with him. Intellectually, I knew why he did it. I got it. He was the Big Brother doing his Job. But how could he think I would just move on without him? How was I supposed to live with him giving up his soul to save me? My whole life he had always stood between me and my dad, me and danger, me and bullets…he was always risking his life for mine, but his soul? It was beyond the pale, and I was beyond pissed. I was pissed at him and pissed at the world that forced us to that place, that moment, that choice.

So the mission changed. It wasn't revenge, it wasn't even life and death. It was my brother's soul, his eternal existence. I had to save him.

And boy, did he fight me. That stubborn bastard was hellbent (no pun intended) that I not interfere. He was intent, as always, on protecting my ass. But then, out of the blue he changed. I don't know what it was that changed his mind. Even if he hadn't given in, though, it wouldn't have stopped me. It was time for me to take care of him for a change, and the fear that I sometimes saw in his eyes when he thought I wasn't looking made me all the more determined to save him.

But I couldn't. I couldn't save him, and once he was gone I couldn't bring him back. I was the last of my family, the last of Clan Winchester. And for the life of me I couldn't fathom why I had wanted to escape them in the first place. All I wanted was them.

I had never known a time so dark or a pain so great as that loneliness and that rage. I was so filled with hate that I could have burned the world. I was so angry that I did the one thing I never would have contemplated possible. I joined with a demon, trusted a demon, because she told me all the things I needed to hear. I plumbed depths of darkness that churn my stomach when I think of it now. So imagine my shame when my brother walked through my door, into the room that I was sharing with her, with my dirty secret.

Dean, back from hell like a dream I didn't want to wake up from. Was it over? Was it done? The worst had to be past. But of course it wasn't. That's not the Winchester Way. Evil follows us like the dust cloud follows Pigpen. The worst was yet to be, because of Dean's suffering and because of the darkness that I had delved. Our choices led us to the Biggest Bad of all. How is it that two boys from Kansas grew into two men who could end the world?

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions. That is the Winchester Way.