Samuel Campbell knows hunters. He's lived his entire life among them. He can slip into their society like nobody's business, despite being dead for three decades. He can still patiently listen to their gossip and pick out the truth behind the stories.
He should have asked about the Winchesters – not Sam and Dean, not Campbells because blood or not they're not his grandsons – a long time ago. But he hadn't thought to. Sam was his reanimated corpse in crime, in the same baffling circumstances as Samuel himself; Dean was nothing but a worn-down hunter who was probably never as good as Sam claimed him to be.
After three months, Samuel should have known that Sam is always right – especially about Dean. But now that Samuel's seen Dean for the threat he truly is, and finally acknowledged that soul or not Sam will always, always follow Dean over him, intel on the Winchesters becomes priority number one. Better late than never, Samuel figures. Maybe he can reconstruct the story of the Winchesters retroactively, understand his lately expired self-proclaimed enemy.
And it's not because of the shiver down his spine, the itch of the hunted between his shoulder blades, not because of Dean's last promise. It's not, Dean is dead.
The first thing he realizes is that almost nobody truly knows the Winchesters. After experiencing first-hand their suicidal, against-all-odds plans, it does not come as a surprise. Even hunters think they're too dangerous to be around; the Winchesters have been relegated to the outskirts of Hunter society. Which, in a way, makes Samuel's job easier. Stories of the Winchesters come just as easy as stories about the monsters they hunt. Nobody knows them personally, nobody withholds information in the interests of keeping them safe.
There is a group, however, that finger their guns with weary eyes and murmur about Roy and Walt.
Roy and Walt? Samuel asks.
Yeah. Those two dumb fucks that went after Winchester for starting the apocalypse. The hunters shake their heads, not even bothering to distinguish which Winchester. They killed 'em both, but the fuckers got recognized. So when the Winchesters came back – and nobody questions that, because as one man mutters, they're less than hunters now, embroiled in the wars and politics of the things they're supposed to be hunting, treating them like equals instead of a plague to be exterminated – Roy and Walt ended up dead.
Samuel buys the men drinks, claps them on the back and makes a weak excuse to slip out of the bar. He ignores the way they seem to stare as his quivering hand knowingly, forcefully bites his lip to avoid itching at that place between his shoulder blades that feels like it's on fire.
He staggers to his car, starts the ignition, and starts driving to lose himself.