Sammy is afraid of fire. John and Dean realize when it comes time for his first salt and burn. They have the body dug up, and John carefully instructs Sammy as he covers it in salt and gasoline. When he helps his boy climb out of the grave, he hands Sammy a book of matches and tells him to light and drop. Sammy looks to the bones, to his father, to his shoes, to the matches, and back to his dad and shakes his head silently.
"Sam, you've been doing great, just light the match."
"Daddy, no!"
"It's easy, just light it!"
"I can't!"
"Yes you can!"
Before they can argue further, Dean is flung away from his post as guard, and the spirit materializes and attacks him where he landed. John shoves Sammy out of the way, takes the matches back, and lights the bones up himself. At the end of it, Dean is fine apart from a bruise on his shoulder, but Sammy won't stop crying. Dean is the one with the presence of mind to find out why.
"What if I burned?" Sammy is reduced to whispering in his terror, and John smacks himself on the forehead for not noticing that his youngest didn't make it out of that burning house untraumatized. John keeps them in town for another week, and he and Dean light bonfires with Sammy until he can do it without trembling. For now, it will have to do.
Sam isn't afraid of fire. He just has a healthy respect for it, that's all. It's the end of his second year at Stanford, and someone decided to throw a party on the beach… with a giant bonfire. Everyone is clustered around it now that it's getting dark, and there's dancing and drinking and laughter and Sam is standing over to the side by where they put the drinks because it's really very crowded and he's not the most graceful person after all, and he could trip very easily.
"Too hot for you?" someone asks from behind him. It's Jess, this girl that his friend Brady insists is crazy about him (after he found out that Sam his crazy about her, himself). She's so radiant in the fire's light that he almost forgets to answer until she raises her eyebrows expectantly.
"Uhh… Yeah it's pretty warm I guess." Smooth job, bitch, a voice in his head chides, and it sounds a lot like Dean.
"Would you rather come for a swim with me?"
Sam looks back at the bonfire, then to Jess again. "Absolutely."
Jess laughs and pulls him along, and makes a mental note to never light candles as a romantic gesture.
Sam is paralyzingly terrified of fire. Jess burned, screaming, right above him, and every night when he goes to sleep he can feel the heat and hear the roaring flames and choke on smoke.
Dean notices when he's bored and playing with his Zippo and Sam keeps flinching. He doesn't say anything, but he makes sure to leave Sam with guard duty whenever there's a salt and burn, at least until he can reacquaint his brother to the tools of the trade again. It takes a few weeks, longer than when he was ten but that's because they didn't have time to concentrate on it, but eventually Sam can handle a salt and burn on his own if he has to.
And all too soon, Dean's deal comes due, and Sam has to (not his brother, Sam would never let the fire take his brother too).
Sam is afraid of fire. It's really just a slight inconvenience, but now Ruby mutters an incantation that sets a map into a roiling inferno. Sam jumps back, but Ruby is tranquil as a summer day.
"Relax, the fire is our friend," she says. Sam trusts her to protect him from the flames.
The fire shows the way to Dean, and Sam sighs with relief when Ruby puts it out.
Sammy is afraid of fire. That's kind of a liability when you're stuck in the deepest part of Hell. Lucifer finds the quirk pretty quickly, then gets creative like he does best.
Sam is laying on the floor of an old house, completely paralyzed, when a short in the wiring sets the old wood ablaze. He can't even scream as the flames consume him indiscriminately along with the floor.
Sam is walking through a forest when a fireball explodes nearby. Large chunks of burning material fall on him, and he quickly tries to brush them off but they're sticky, and they don't stop burning, and more and more of him is on fire and he can't make it stop and he can't save himself. Napalm, he thinks, when nearly the only thing left of him is bones.
Sam is tied to a chair and force-fed live coals. They burn him from the inside out. His screaming only makes Lucifer laugh.
Sam is showed Lucifer's true form. His eyes explode like Pamela's, but it happens too fast for him to process anything but pain.
Sam's feet are enclosed in red-hot iron shoes. Lucifer makes him dance.
Sam isn't afraid of fire. He's not sure why he ever was. Fire is just a tool of the trade, like salt and guns and knives. It's not going to go out of its way to hurt him, and if he does get hurt he can deal with it.
When Cas tells Dean that his soul is still burning, though, that makes him flinch just a little bit.
Sam is afraid of fire. It's kind of amazing that he's still afraid of anything at all, but he is. Dean is sleeping on the bed next to him and he wishes he were asleep too. He desperately wants to be asleep. But his bed is on fire.
"Good morning Vietnam!" Lucifer screams in his face, and pressing the scar isn't working, and Sam knows he's going to be in for a long night.
Sam is afraid of fire, but he can handle it. He's been doing it for nearly fifty years (on Earth, anyway). For example, right now he's getting ready to burn down a house that's been serving as a spirit's anchor for about ten years while Dean takes care of the bones. His method of dealing with the fear has been intense concentration on the task at hand – so intense that he doesn't notice the gas stove turns on but doesn't light. Sam makes a last check to make sure that the house burns completely, and that he's not standing in any of the puddles of gasoline, then throws down the match. The propane explodes, and Sam's last thought is a prayer that there's at least a body for Dean to find for closure.
AN: I DIDN'T MEAN TO KILL HIM I'M SORRY! Probably most of this is me projecting my own fears onto Sam, but then again most of my writing amounts to the same.
Someone give me a kick in the pants to write something about Dean so I stop feeling so biased!