School wasn't home—it hadn't taken Sam long to figure that out. It wasn't the answer to his long list of problems (in fact, it had added a few new ones to the list). It wasn't the perfect get-away that he had built up in his mind between fights, and nightmares, and bedside vigils for over-protective brothers. Hell, he spent more time working, trying to make ends meet than he did doing school work. It didn't free him from the terror that had plagued his life since he was a small child. And it didn't assuage the niggling feeling that he had selfishly abandoned his family. So no, school wasn't perfect.
But it gave him a chance to find out who he was. Not Dean's kid brother. Not John's son. Not the new guy. Or the poor kid. Not Sammy, or Winchester, or anything else. Just Sam. Not perfect, not Dean. Just Sam.
'Cause, here, for the first time, that was ok. To just be Sam.
It was ok to sleep in every once in awhile and miss a morning run. It wasn't necessary to hit every can sitting on the fence across the field. It wasn't necessary to spar with people who hopelessly outweighed and outmatched him. It was ok to be a total nerd; to learn new things for fun, not 'cause he had to. It was ok to sleep in the same bed for weeks and weeks and weeks in a row and to whine about things and to listen to his own music for a change.
Sam was in his element. He didn't have to worry about learning that new move or running fast enough or shooting accurately enough. Here, he could whip out a major paper in record time; he could speak and read new a language better than others who had spent years studying it. Finally, he wasn't the one dragging everyone down, he was the one picking everybody up.
Here, he could talk to more people than just his brother for days at a time. Here, he had friends, friends that he could count on. Even if he didn't trust them with his past, he was more than willing to trust them with his present and with his future. And after three years of term papers, exams, homesickness, and unexplained brooding, his friends had more than earned that trust. They ignored his oddities (the salt and the sigils and the slowly receding paranoia) and embraced Sam Winchester (the compassionate geek who had a tendency to over think just about everything). People cared about him not because he was the only one there, not because they were ordered to, but because they wanted to.
He didn't have to worry about Dean hurting himself to save Sam during a hunt. He didn't have to worry about Dean being torn between Sam and their Dad during their inevitable fights.
He didn't have to worry about the slow suffocating darkness that had pervaded his life, where the only glimpses of light had been his brother right next to him and the escape of college at the end of the tunnel. That drowning feeling that would hit late at night after moving again, or after Dean or Dad got hurt had all but disappeared when Sam left that life. The ripping feeling that sometimes struck hard and fast, hurtling through his chest, after a nasty hunt or a bad argument with his father, was finally gone.
Sam could breath. Sam could move. Sam could say what he wanted to say, talk about how he felt, and have his own opinion.
He still worried, he still missed them, he still felt guilty for abandoning the fight. For not helping people.
But most of all, he felt relieved to know that he was actually strong enough to take care of himself. He was relieved to know that he was a person that other people could and did like.
And most of all, he was somebody people could be proud of. Even if those people weren't his family.