Becoming Human – Aftershocks
Hello loves! I bring you a brand spanking new chapter of Becoming Human while I complete my preparation for finals week!
Please enjoy, and of course, don't forget to review!
~InK
…
Life for Sam settled into one of two categories: before, and after. As time went on, it became increasingly easy to forget the before, and live in the after. He had to accept the fact that he was on his own, and that would never change.
Sam began the process of reorienting his thinking. How hard could it be, striking out on his own? It wasn't like he was planning on being a hunter anymore. He wasn't facing off against supernatural creatures or demons or anything… just the challenges of staying alive and trying to figure out how to get into school without having a shred of paperwork, or being picked up by Child Protection Services.
He knew what the scars on his body looked like. He knew that CPS and whatever government agency handled runaway kids would think he was abused or whatever. And yeah, they might be right.
But he wasn't an abused kid. He was some kind of monster. What if they put him with some family, and then, years from now, Sam snapped and killed them all? That must have been what John was afraid of happening, which is why he tried to kill him.
What Sam needed was to be as far away from he supernatural as possible without putting others at risk.
That turned out to be more difficult than Sam had imagined. He wasn't looking for a hunt, but five days and two hours after his escape, the supernatural caught up with him in Green River Wyoming.
"Did you hear about those campers gone missing?" a waitress was asking another at a diner where Sam had stopped to spend his last few bucks on a warm meal. He didn't know what he would do for cash after this, and he was trying not to think about that. He didn't want to steal or scam anyone out of their money, but he'd have to find some way to eat, or he'd starve.
"Yeah, heard they were all torn up by some bear... but they didn't find any of the bodies…"
The other waitress' response perked Sam's interest involuntarily. Bear tracks and missing campers… that sounded like a hunt.
Oh no, don't you dare. We're not doing this. Samuel Winchester, you are not going anywhere near this hunt! Leave this to an expert and walk in the other direction. This is absolutely, one hundred percent not your business.
Yeah, and if nobody comes by to take care of it? Should I just let people die?
There probably isn't anything here anyway. It's the demon in you, that's what wants there to be a hunt, wants to reach out to whatever dark things it can find.
He was flagging down the waitress before his brain had caught up with what his body was doing.
"Sorry, you said campers were going missing?"
Sam looked down at his hands, playing with the hem of his shirt. His mind was screaming that this was a bad – no, a horrible idea – and he told himself that he was only doing this to be sure that there was nothing supernatural in the area. It was just a precaution.
"Yeah hun, why do you ask?"
"Well, my brother's up camping in the woods," Sam fabricated. "Big nature geek, and he… he didn't come back. My dad thinks he's just-"
Easy Sammy, dial it back a bit. Sam bit his lip as if he were reluctant to continue.
"I'm sure its nothing," the waitress said with a reassuring smile. "The news said it was some kind of bear – they found the tracks at the scene of one of the campsites. They're looking all over to try and follow it. I'm sure a seasoned camper like your dad will know how to avoid attracting bears, and he'll be just fine."
Sam nodded and grabbed the food. He was mentally swearing at himself.
That sounded like there wendigo in the area, and it was hunting.
I can't go after this thing.
Why not?
Because I'm not a hunter.
Wasn't he?
No. I want a normal life and a normal job! I am not a hunter. Even if I weren't evil, I'm still not cut out for this. Like Dean said, I'm mostly useless, right? It's not like I could do anything anyway.
It was the utter helplessness that overtook him that finally drove Sam forward. It made him angry, desperate to prove that he was useful, that he could do this, because if he was going to live, then his life had better be worth something. And if he couldn't do this, couldn't help the people going missing, the Sam wasn't sure he wanted to live anyway. He wanted a normal life… but he wanted to make a difference.
I can't have the former, Sam acknowledged. But I sure as hell can still have the latter.
There was a library in Green River, and Sam grabbed a few hours of research on the computer there.
It was definitely a wendigo that he was after, and he'd need fire to kill it.
After talking to a local ranger about where the last campers had been found, Sam mused over what he would need to kill the thing.
A flare gun would be ideal, because it would let him kill the wendigo at a distance. Some of the campers probably had a flare gun with them when they were taken, but there was no guarantee of that, or that a flare gun would still be at their campsite.
Which meant Sam would need to buy supplies. He was down to his last five dollars, so he was going to have to make some money somehow. He was a bit young to carry out the credit card scams John and Dean relied on. He might be let into a bar, but Sam wasn't loving the idea of hustling pool when he was already injured. The risk of getting his ass kicked was enough to dissuade him from that option, at least for now.
In the end, he just picked the pockets of a few of the tourists at the local store. He used the cash to pick up two flare guns and some salt, as well as a warm blanket for the night.
He packed his new purchases into his duffle bag, and settled into his makeshift home for the night – a building that was under construction, and halfway built. It looked like it might one day be some kind of motel, because there were a ton of rooms that were already mostly built, and he could sleep with a roof over his head.
Settling in, Sam decided that he'd head out at dawn for the campers last known location.
…
Sam woke with the sun, cursing his still healing injuries as he picked up the trail the last campers had taken. It was half a days' hike from the trailhead.
The sun had only just cleared the horizon as Sam was on his way over there, determined to find the wendigo's lair and kill it as soon as possible. On his way Sam noticed a handful of posters on the wall of the local market that he hadn't seen before; the faces of the missing campers, all staring down at him. There was a girl putting up another set of posters – a girl and a boy, their arms wrapped around each other.
"Joan and Ben," Sam read aloud from the poster. The girl putting it up jumped and turned around, smiling grimly.
"Yeah, my boyfriend and his sister," the girl said, biting her lip. "They went out on some sibling bonding weekend camping trip or whatever. They were supposed to be back a few days ago…"
Sam didn't hear the rest of what the girl said, too busy staring at the poster for the missing siblings.
If he hadn't already decided that this sucker was going to die, this would have clinched it.
Sam didn't want any more families to be torn apart by supernatural evil. He wouldn't let it happen.
A new determination fuelled his drive as he made his way down the trail, keeping an eye out for any signs of something unusual or supernatural.
The campsite that the rangers had found and reported did look like a bear had attacked. None of the campers were there, but their tents were torn up, supplies scattered across the forest floor. They did in fact have a flare gun, which Sam pocketed, as well as some non-perishable supplies, which he packed away into his duffle. He felt kind of guilty about it, but his rumbling stomach overruled his morality. It was midday, and Sam began circling outwards from the campsite, looking for any sign of tracks that the creature might have left. It was slow going.
Dean would probably have killed the monster by now, and would be macking with that girl from town, Sam thought mutinously. He'd paid attention when his father had talked about tracking, he had, but he'd also had a chemistry test the next day, and all Sam had wanted to do was get home and study so that he wouldn't completely fail.
He stumbled on it almost by accident, a hole in the rock face only a bit larger than Sam himself was. Either the wendigo he was hunting was really small, or there was another entrance. Sam decided it was probably the latter. A quick survey of the area told him that there was another cave opening about half a mile east that probably connected to the smaller hole Sam had found.
"Dear god," Sam muttered, staring into the cave entrance. "If you're there, please, please don't let me die or get lost down here."
Sam was fifteen years old. He was terrified, and he really didn't want to die.
But he couldn't say that he wanted Joan or her brother Ben to die either, and so he pulled out his flare gun, kept his ears open for any sound other than his own labored breathing, and moved forwards.
You don't even know either of them. You should walk away.
Shut up.
You could die here, and nobody would ever find your body.
Seriously, shut the fucking hell up!
What do you owe these people anyway?
I know, okay? I know. And that means that I don't get to look the other way. All that is needed for evil to succeed in the world is that good men do nothing.
You aren't a good man.
No, but that doesn't mean I'm evil, and since most of the good men in this world don't seem to know about the supernatural, I'm what the world has got. Maybe if I save enough lives, I could become good.
You? You'll never be good. You're some incompetent demonic freak. These people are better off if you leave them alone.
Better off dead? Not buying it. Shut the hell up, I hear something.
It was the sound of someone crying. Sam followed the echo through the tunnels, using a rock to mark the walls with an arrow pointing to whichever direction he'd turned.
He turned another corner, and was assaulted by the foul smell of death.
Sam had only ever come up against a wendigo once before, though John had taken down at least four of them, but no amount of preparation could steel a man for the sight of mangled bodies, rotting and stacked on each other like so much trash.
There were still some victims strung up in the cave. One of them looked up at him.
"Help us, please!"
Sam advanced, tucking the gun into the back of his jeans.
The wendigo chose that moment to attack, throwing Sam off his feet and sending him careening into a wall. He hid the ground with a painful thud, groaning. The wendigo was advancing quickly, and managed to slash Sam on the arm with its claws before he jumped out of range.
Heart racing, breath caught in his lungs, Sam backed up, tripping over a corpse in the process (Oh my fucking god!) and then he was back on his feet, reaching for the flare gun, which was –
On the other side of the cavern, where he'd fallen.
In the dark, he heard the wendigo moving, saw it's barely defined shape as it came towards him again, ready to attack.
Sam wasn't going to make it. He knew it, but he ran for it anyway, clearing the distance between himself and the flare gun. The wendigo caught him on his back as he turned (hot, searing pain) and Sam bit back a gasp (Just a few more steps, right there) –
He bent down, grabbed the gun and turned, finding the wendigo right in his face, claws raised, eyes blazing with predatory instinct-
Sam fired.
The wendigo screamed violently as it went up in flames.
Adrenaline still pulsing through the teenager's system, he cut the victims free. Most of them were incoherent from dehydration and hunger. Some of them were already dead.
As it turned out, Joan was alive; Sam recognized her from the wanted poster. He was happy that her family would get at least one child back. Discretely, he examined the four remaining survivors that had lived.
Joan's brother, Ben... he hadn't made it. Maybe Dean or John could have made it in time to save him, could have kept Joan from having her heart torn out like this, but Sam had failed.
Cut up, bruised, and malnourished, the girl ran to one of the bodies lying cut up on the floor, and Sam understood that it was Ben, it was the boy that had smiled down from that wanted poster, an arm slung around his sister as though she was just the best person ever.
Sarah was sobbing. Sam's heart broke at the sight. At one time, he could have easily replaced those faces with those of Dean and himself, and the scene would still be the same. Her grief was the same grief he carried inside him at the thought of losing his brother, even now. It was raw and all too fucking human.
It took every last bit of his strength to gently pry Joan away from her brother's body. She insisted on carrying it with her, her red-rimmed eyes brooking no refusal. Sam reminded her patiently that they could come back once the medical professionals could see to the wounded, but the look in Joan's eyes bordered on crazy, and Sam backed off quickly.
She'd lost her brother. For her, this was the end of the world, except that when the world ends, you don't have to wake up the next and go about your life as though nothing had changed.
Sam led the exhausted and injured to the mouth of the cave, and then took off. He planned to be as far from Green River as he could manage by the time the police showed up.
With no real planned destination or direction, Sam went south. He wanted to be somewhere warm when winter came, and south seemed as good a direction as any to head in.
Because what did it matter anyway? Dean hated him. John hated him. Neither did so without reason; whatever the demon had done to Sam the night Mary Winchester had died, she would still be breathing if Sam hadn't been born. Fact. Sam could get over that, but he wasn't going to forgive John and Dean – who had actually known her – for not being able to.
So with the mental image of Joan sobbing over her brother's corpse, he scrapped his undefined plans of having some kind of normal life, and made his decision: he would become a hunter, and go after the bastards that were tearing apart so many families. Maybe, just maybe, he could one day kill enough evil supernatural creatures to wash away the stain that the demon had left inside of him.
…
Sam liked Wyoming. It was big and open and wild. He could walk for miles and not get tired of the scenery. Sometimes he hitchhiked, but mostly he walked or ran alongside the road. He slept in the beds of pickup trucks and in construction sites and if he was really lucky, a motel, if it was empty and late enough that he could be sure no other customers would arrive in the room, and he wouldn't be found.
Best of all was the silence. He could walk and just listen to the animals and birds and the sound of wind rushing through the trees above him. The forest was alive around him, free of demons and monsters and humans. The open fields were quiet and rural, the towns he passed quiet and agricultural.
It was a good stretch of road.
…
Sam hustled his first game of pool solo in Montpellier. He'd fooled the bartender into thinking that he was waiting for his absentee father to come back to their motel from a job, and the lady pouring drinks had taken pity on the "poor darling" and let him stay. She even gave him a free soda, with a wink and a finger held to her lips assuring that it would be their little secret. He made two hundred dollars and lost every cent when he got his ass kicked by an angry drunk while leaving the bar.
Sam cried in the alleyway for ten minutes before he managed to convince himself to get up. He couldn't help it – it was just so unfair, and his hand fucking hurt and all he wanted was his brother –
But Dean would never comfort him again, and so he sucked it up like his – like John had taught him to do, because feeling sorry for himself wouldn't splint his fingers.
Sam managed the job on his own, wincing as he splinted his two broken fingers with tape and popsicle sticks. It hurt. It really fucking hurt, almost as much as the fading wounds where the Wendigo had slashed at him, but eventually, he got up and kept going.
It wasn't like he had any other alternative.
…
In Soda Springs, Idaho, Sam dreamed that he was back with his family. He woke up feeling confused and lost, wondering where his dad and his brother had gone. He didn't see their bags in his motel room, and he experience almost three full minutes of panic before he remembered.
The motel room was empty because he was the only one staying here, and John and Dean would never be coming back.
If he ever did run across them again, they would kill him.
Sam's heart ached. He wanted his brother and his dad back, because as gruff as John had always been, he hugged Sammy when he was scared, and held him when he hurt, and told him everything was going to be okay, and taught him that every scratch, every wound, everything was worth it because they could save people and hunt the evil bastards that preyed on them. He missed his brother's wiseass comments, and his shit eating grin, and the way he'd shove burgers and pie into his mouth like the world was ending.
It might almost be worth it to die at their hands, if it meant he could see them one last time.
It was almost by accident that he stumbled onto his next hunt, when he went outside to clear his head.
Somebody was hunting down young blondes. Dean would have liked that, interviewing hot coeds. Sam straightened his back and played an intern for a local paper when he went to go interview the girls.
It turned out that the culprit was the spirit of a man named Elijah Cunningham, who had murdered a string of younger girlfriends before shooting himself back in 1958. Sam had salted and burned his bones, only to find himself thrown all the way across the graveyard by the violent spirit.
Two more girls died before Sam figured out the spirit was hanging around the murder weapon – an old knife that was on exhibit in the local museum.
Yeah, of course.
With some thought, Sam decided on a plan that had to be the stupidest, dumbest, most ridiculous plan a hunter had ever come up with.
He went shopping at a thrift store in the next town, picking up a long white dress, hat, and veil. He also used the last of his funds to buy a package of dry ice.
Oh god I really hope Dean never hears about this. Ever.
Sam used the dry ice and the stupid getup to break into the museum that night, pretending to be the spirit of one of the murdered girls. The guards ran like hell, and Sam smashed the case, grabbing the knife and escaping before the guards could come back. He wondered how they would explain this incident to their superiors as he pulled off the ridiculous costume and made for a secluded area where he could burn the knife and have done with it.
He salted and burned the dress and veil alongside the blade.
Sam really hoped this never got back to him.
…
In Jerome, Idaho, Sam caught wind of hunters on the trail of a werewolf. He was across the state border within an hour – he didn't want anything to do with werewolves, or the hunters that were after them. That was way too far out of his league.
…
Logan, Utah. Ghouls.
Sam hated ghouls.
…
The ghosts of three rail workers were haunting a station in Payson, Utah.
He slept in an abandoned rail car, which turned out to not be the brightest idea ever.
After pretending to be a local student interested in working at the cyber crimes division, he managed to convince one of the local officers to show him their system server. When he was left alone for a minute, Sam pulled up the files on their deaths, memorizing the details and minimizing the page before the officer came back with his coffee.
Later that afternoon, when Sam was gathering the supplies from his hideout, one of the spirits caused the train to start moving along the unfinished tracks, nearly making it collide with another rotted out hunk that had been thrown to the side.
Sam broke two ribs, and was found by a well-meaning Good Samaritan (with capital letters) who also happened to be the local preacher, who insisted on calling 911 while the ghosts snuck off to go kill another victim.
Sam managed to evade the EMTs, and get over to the graveyard where the three men had been buried. He used up the last of his salt and kerosene, and ended up using a flare to set the whole mess on fire.
Stitching up the gashes on his side was a bitch.
Sam sucked it up and reminded himself that if the gash had been more than an inch to the left, he wouldn't have been able to reach far enough around the trunk of his body to sew it up at all.
What soothed the hurt was the fact that the son of the preacher that had helped Sam out originally came and found him in the train yard, and snuck him back home.
His name was Justin, and he had blue eyes, bluer than the sky, and he was the kindest person Sam had ever met. Justin patiently cleaned Sam's hasty stitches, telling him stores and keeping him calm through the burning pain of antiseptic. Sam found himself wishing that he could wake up every morning with Justin's smile nearby. Justin was Sam's first kiss, and when Sam left Payson, there was a part of Sam that really, really wanted to stay.
He wasn't done though. He could feel it in the back of his mind, the taint left by the demon that had killed Mary Winchester, the woman who would have been his mother if she hadn't died because of him.
He couldn't bear to infect Justin's life with the same curse that had destroyed his own, and so he said goodbye.
Sam wondered what Dean – a self-proclaimed textbook example of a 'ladies man' – would have to say about the fact that Sam liked kissing boys. Before, Sam might have said that he would just rib Sam constantly, never letting him live it down. But now, in the after, Sam wondered if it might just be another reason for his former family to try and kill him.
Well, with any luck, he would never have to find out. Dean wasn't his brother anyway, so the guy had no business caring who Sam liked to kiss. Sam didn't need the man's approval to do whatever the fuck he wanted.
That's what Sam told himself, at least.
…
On the way into Nevada, a trucker tried to pay Sam to suck him off. Sam panicked, and pulled his knife on the man, cutting off two of the fingers on the hand that had reached towards his inner thigh. The man screamed, releasing the wheel with his left hand while he held the injured right hand to his chest.
The eighteen-wheeler lurched terrifyingly, and Sam screamed as it twisted off the roadside and crashed into tree after tree. He desperately tugged at the seatbelt, wanting to get out - but as the truck twisted and fell onto it's side, he was thrown forwards, out of the front window. He soared through the air until he hit a tree, falling painfully into the ground.
Sam vomited when he came to.
The trucker was still unconscious, and Sam ran for it, stopping only to vomit until there was nothing left in his stomach. When he finally stopped running, Sam collapsed against a tree, holding his arms around himself as though by doing so he could hold himself together.
Sometimes, it was easy to hate Dean for what he'd done, but all Sam wanted right now was his brother. God, he just wanted his big brother back, but that was the one thing he could never have.
Even the warm weather and sunshine that washed over Sam as the sun began to rise couldn't make him like Nevada.
…
Elko, Nevada.
Katherine Adler had thrown her children in an oven and then hung herself.
Before, Dean would have made a tasteless Sylvia Plath joke, assuming he could actually read well enough to know who Sylvia Plath was. Sam grit his teeth at the thought (which even now, weeks after, made his heart hurt) and pretended to be an intern at the New York Times doing a special story on local hauntings. He had printed his own fake ID using the library printers and the Kinko's two towns over, and was feeling inordinately pleased with its success. Not that there was much risk in forging an intern badge really, but it was still progress.
The Lady in White was pulling young men off the road and killing them. Sam managed to see far more of her latest victim than he really wanted to while he fired at the ghost.
The victim – Evan – ended up helping him find her bones to salt and burn them. Aside from Sam getting thrown up against a burning stove, and his shoes finally given out, the hunt was a pretty rousing success, as far as hunts went.
Sam was more grateful for the fact that Evan let him crash on the couch for three days while his burns healed (Sam had been about three seconds from being grilled by the Lady in White). He caught his first eight hours of uninterrupted sleep in over a month.
When he left, Sam realized that he was four months and one day into the after.
He had been trying so hard to leave his past behind him, to let go of it all, but at least once a day, he would see something that would call up an old memory from before, and it would be like that first day on his own all over again, like being stabbed right in the heart. It would be like a physical ache in his body as he recalled all the pain and fear and anger from The Incident.
Sam was starting to doubt that those wounds would ever stop hurting.
…
It would happen at the most inconvenient times.
Sam would be interviewing a police officer or a victim or a doctor in the guise of an intern collecting survey data on local crimes, or a journalist in training, or a student doing a school project. There would be something – some sound (the sound of a whetstone being used to sharpen a knife, John's eyebrows furrowed in determination as he lectured about how important weapons care was), or smell (a hundred diners and fast food places full of the smell of triple cheese burgers and bad jokes, courtesy of Dean), something. Sam would freeze, and then all he could think about, all he could see was the sight of his father and brother standing in front of him, Dean's bowie knife glinting in the light of the moon, the amulet Sam had given him swinging freely around his neck.
It happened in Lovelock, Nevada, while Sam was getting some information from the Police Department. He was waiting patiently for the officer to pull up what he needed, and then the guy looked over at him with this shit-eating grin that belonged on the face of Dean fucking Winchester.
Dean, patiently explaining to Sam how their father was some kind of superhero.
"So, Mr. Dalton, you're doing a report for your Justice class?"
Dean, about to devour a three pound steak at a local diner for one of those stupid contests while John just rolled his eyes and chuckled.
"Yes sir," Sam smiled hesitantly, forcing himself to look somewhere else.
Dean, cleaning his weapon, practically bouncing up and down with excitement as John explained that they were going after zombies.
"Our professor's really big on original research, getting us to go out into the field and do some practical work," he groused for added effect, even though his hands were shaking like fall leaves.
Dean standing over him, eye lit with glee and murderous intent as his hands wrapped tightly around Sam's throat and squeezed –
Sam ran out of there as fast as he could as soon as he had the data he needed.
It took Sam roughly an hour to confirm that a Raw Head was hunting here. It took him about two and a half weeks of painstaking research in the local library (both on and offline) to figure out how to kill a Raw Head. In the end, he fried it with a modified car battery. The hunt itself hadn't been so bad - Sam hadn't even been injured, really. He'd gotten off with only a few minor burns and scratches on his fingers while he rewired the battery to fry the Raw Head. The real bitch was the food poisoning he picked up from the burger he'd snagged from a dumpster behind the local Denny's. Sam spent three days puking in an alley.
Some of the local boys who were living rough found him and took him in while he was still shaking and weak with a fever. When Sam asked them why, they just shrugged, as if it were mere human nature to pull a sick kid off the streets even when you had nothing yourself.
They slept together in an abandoned church. The Church of Saint Gabriel. Sam bit back the bitter laugh that filled him when he found out. If demons existed, then perhaps it wasn't too far a stretch of the imagination that angels might exist too.
Indeed, once upon a time, Sam had prayed every day. He'd looked to God and all His angels for comfort, for guidance, and the knowledge that there was some semblance of justice in the world.
But Sam could find no comfort from his pain after The Incident, and the only guidance he needed was the guidance to find and kill as many supernatural bastards as he possibly could.
Besides, if there were such a thing as divine justice, then Sam would never have been born. Dean and John wouldn't be hunters – they would live their apple-pie life with Mary, just like they had always wanted. That's what they had said.
And yet Sam couldn't help but think that maybe there really was some kind of justice, at least for freaks like him. He was free, wasn't he? He was alive. And maybe he had to make his own justice, prove his own worth. So he bowed his head in respect, because this was a house of God, and set himself to wondering why it was that these kids could be homeless, and still take in some random stranger off the streets.
The thing was, Sam understood. When you're on the streets, you watch out for yourself first, but you keep an eye on the people like you. They're allies and friends when you're down on your own luck too. He shared the last of his canned food with them in thanks.
It wasn't much, but it was quite literally all he had.
…
Sam understood desperation. Hunger, cold… it bites at you worse than anything else in the world. It hurts.
Being sick, hungry, tired, and sans shoes was the worst. Sam's bout with food poisoning was almost over, but he still felt weak and shaky all over, like a newborn kitten.
His hands were shaking so bad he couldn't even break into a motel to snag a few hours of sleep on an unused bed (always his last resort, because the cost of getting caught was so high).
He was so hungry, and his mind seemed blurred from the sheer exhaustion. Sam just wanted to sit down right there in the middle of the road and give up. He was done, he just wanted to quit, and let someone else take all the shit that the universe had been tossing his way instead.
He was near the end of his rope. Maybe this was really how he was always meant to die, lost and alone, his only family hating him and hunting him. Maybe he had been meant to die in that godforsaken motel room at the hands of his flesh and blood, and he had just been living on borrowed time since then.
But Sam was Sam, and if Sam were anything, he was as stubborn as all hell and then some. He wasn't going to give John or Dean the satisfaction of his death. He would make it. Every breath, every step forward, every second he remained on his feet instead of on the ground, that was one step further he could walk. Every hurt, every shooting pain and discomfort was proof that he was alive, and that was enough. It was more than demon infected scum like him deserved.
Sam wasn't near done earning his redemption. And so he forced himself to carry on.
…
In Fallon Station, another trucker propositioned Sam. This time, he took the cash and sucked the guy off, because he hadn't eaten in four days and didn't have a cent to his name. The act left him feeling dirty.
On the upside, he had money to pay for food for the next three days. It was better than going hungry.
Besides, it meant that he could finally replace his shoes.
With food in his belly and shoes on his feet, Sam snagged a full night's sleep in an unused motel room, taking advantage of the bathroom to wash all the grime he'd collected since the Lady in White in Elko. He couldn't even remember how long ago that had been.
He left Fallon Station feeling more human than he had in a long time.
…
Sam celebrated his sixteenth birthday in Hawthorne by killing his first werewolf. He'd wanted to keep going once he realized what he was hunting, but there was a full moon tonight and there wasn't time to hope another hunter caught wind of the case.
The werewolf was twelve years old and a spelling bee champion. Despite everything Sam had done to try and get to her before it happened, she had killed her six best friends at a slumber party when the full moon came. Her blood ran sticky and warm over Sam's fingers when he killed her, and it was weeks before he stopped feeling like he needed to wash his hands every few seconds.
…
Doubling back towards Reno, Sam decided that the state of Nevada might actually be hell on earth.
Oh sure, he managed to salt and burn the bones of one Marc Johnson, former tax accountant that was haunting his office computer and killing everyone that his company replaced him with (and seriously, that guy had needed to get a life – even his ghost was obsessed with his job!).
On the other hand, in Reno, Sam was arrested for solicitation and prostitution, carrying concealed weapons, grand theft auto, grave desecration, and identity fraud.
Yeah. It had been that kind of a hunt. The identity fraud was fun to explain (almost as fun as dodging the officer's questions about his parents). Sam ended up picking one of his ID's at random as the name under which they should book him, knowing full well that he'd never been fingerprinted, and wasn't in any government files.
From now on though, he'd have to be careful, because they had his fingerprints. He was in a federal database. This was not good.
His bail was set at two thousand dollars. Sam had a hundred and twenty to his name, and even that was in a ziplock bag hidden in a sewn up compartment at the bottom of his duffle, which was now being held as evidence.
Wonderful.
Examining his dilemma from every possible angle, Sam came to the conclusion that he wasn't going to get out of this, not on his own. He needed the help of a hunter though, and so he called the only hunter he knew that John would go out of his way to avoid.
"Hey Bobby," Sam said into the phone, the memory of Bobby Singer's shotgun being cocked and aimed in John'sdirection echoing in his ears.
"What did you do this time?"
"Hey Sam, nice you see you, been a while, how you been?" Sam muttered. "What makes you assume I'm not calling just to say hi?"
"That threat of a shotgun up the ass I gave your daddy, I can gladly expand to you as well," Bobby said gruffly, but Sam read the genuine affection there, hidden behind the rough words that were the language with which hunters shared any kind of emotion.
"Listen, I got arrested-"
"You got what?"
"Arrested," Sam answered. "I need to post bail-"
"So ask your daddy, it's that's idjits job to deal with this kind of thing, isn't it?"
"Uh, have you heard anything about John or Dean in the last few months?"
"Last I heard they were in New York, on the trail of some Shifter they been on for the last month" Bobby said, his tone immediately changing from amused and annoyed to concerned. "Where are you, boy?"
"I'm in Reno," Sam said into the phone. "And I'm not hunting with them Bobby."
"What on earth are you-"
"Listen Bobby, it's a long story, and I need a hand, okay?" Sam interrupted, because if he had to answer the questions Bobby would have for him, then he thought he might just break down. "I was hunting a ghost of some psycho accountant, and I took care of it. But the police have got my weapons, and I need to spring bail so I can break back in and steal my shit back. If you can't give me a hand…"
As it turned out, a hunter named Andre was on the track of an Incubus in Vegas. Sam got a promise from Bobby to send the other hunter down to Reno, and an oath not to tell anyone else where Sam was. Andre was nice enough about helping a teenager get out of jail for prostitution and was a great help getting his stuff out of the evidence lockup. Sam got the impression that Andre had been in a similar situation before, but didn't ask.
David Lester (Sam's chosen identity) was now officially a fugitive of the Reno police. Sam slid away into the night before Andre could tag him as a Winchester, just in case the man had heard anything from John. He seemed like a good guy, but Sam knew hunters, and he knew that they would shoot first and ask questions later if they knew he had demon blood in him.
Then again, when Sam stopped for the night, he found an unstrung crossbow with some silver bolts packed away snugly in his worn duffel. He wished he had some way to thank the hunter for the silent help, but contact with any kind of hunter would just be a death sentence, of that Sam was sure.
…
Reports of cattle mutilations and electrical storms reached Sam as he crossed into California. He didn't know what to make of them – maybe John would have known what was causing them, but Sam decided to place those particular signs under the heading of 'someone else's business,' at least until he had more, better information.
…
In the Tahoe National Forest, Sam was nearly turned into a skinwalker. He thanked god for the invention of the crossbow, and Andre for passing it along to him. He had done some training with it in the woods, out of the sight of park rangers and campers, and it saved his life when the entire pack came at him while he was asleep. He'd taken down five of the eight of them before they were on him, and his silver knife did for the last two with little fanfare.
Which made that hunt a win, even though the last skinwalker standing pushed Sam off a ridge, where he rolled twenty yards into a muddy creek, ruining the last of his supplies and snapping his wrist painfully. On the other hand, he left the dog on top of the ridge with a silver knife it it's ribs and a dead pack, so he guessed turnabout was fair play.
He also lost his two favorite fake IDs (a badge for a congressional intern, and a student ID for Stanford University). But those could be replaced, and Sam was glad he was alive.
His leather jacket, the one he'd taken from the motel that night, the one that had once been Deans, that loss stung a bit.
But maybe that was healthy. The only thing Sam had left of his brother was the picture from Dean's fake ID, with Dean smiling goofily up at the camera.
It was hard to accept that the same kid had tortured him.
Later, he used the crossbow (miraculously still intact) to hunt down a rabbit, rather than try and find a nearby town to eat. He was running low on money anyway, and his injuries made it impossible for him to hustle pool with any kind of success.
…
Vampires in Auburn, California. Sam staked one of them fifteen times before he finally got the idea to try and cut off the things head when it came for him. When it stayed down for good, Sam took the hint and used the same trick on the rest of them.
Because seriously? Vampires? Sam had seen a ton of weird shit as a hunter and as the son of a hunter, but vampires? That was just too weird.
He wondered if garlic or a cross would have any effect on them. By the time he'd purged the nest, he was too exhausted to even think about trying to set up an experiment like that.
Besides, decapitation was easier. And way more satisfying.
Sam had to pause the instant that thought when through his head, because it was the moment that he first realized that he was almost unquestionably going to hell.
There was a married couple (a pair of hunters) looking into some ghost hauntings in town. Sam ran into them by accident at the local diner, and noticed them before they saw him.
He put on a hat he'd stolen from a donation bin outside of Goodwill, and made a run for it without even picking up the food.
…
Sacramento. Sam spent a week running after a dead end before admitting to himself that there wasn't a hunt there. Turns out the chain of murders he'd picked up on was being caused by a local gang. Sam left an anonymous tip with the police, and skipped town.
Sam didn't know when it had happened, but sometime between Green River and Sacramento, he'd stopped waking up feeling disoriented, wondering where his brother was. He was on his own, and he'd accepted that. If he succeeded on a hunt, he would only ever come home to his own silent and cold hideaway of choice, and if he was hurt, there would be nobody to hold his hand and help him through it.
…
Passing through Davis, California, Sam remembered his promise to himself that he would find out what was going on with his supposed demonic infection. After months had gone by, and nothing came of his research in college library's and on the internet, Sam decided to take a more hands on investigative approach.
That was how Sam found himself breaking in to one of the biology labs there. Sam knew how to use a microscope; he had learned in one of his first practical school experiments. He didn't remember where he had been at the time. It had been in the 8th grade, and their teacher had been giving a lesson on blood types – how antigens affected blood transfusions or something – and let them use the microscopes to test what blood type they had (Sam's was O-, making him a universal donor).
So Sam knew what blood looked like under a microscope. He had a bio textbook open in front of him that he had checked out from the campus library, just to be sure.
Back in the 8th grade, they had switched slides, and Sam was pretty sure that if there had been anything fundamentally funky with his blood, someone would have noticed.
Nobody had seen anything wrong with his blood then. Then again, that didn't necessarily mean much, because for one thing, 8th graders could hardly be expected to pick up on some unique and freaky mutation created by a demon, and for another, a demonic mutation could have progressed over time, only manifesting itself on a visual level in it's later stages.
Still, Sam felt like it was important to note for the mental records he was keeping of this disease that whatever John thought the demon had done to Sam's blood, it hadn't had any kind of observable physical affect back then.
These microscopes were more complicated and more powerful than the ones at the middle school where Sam had learned to look at blood, but Sam could figure them out easily enough. He had one set up and focused in almost no time at all.
Without so much as a wince, he cut his finger open and let a drop of blood fall onto a glass slide. With precise movements, Sam capped the slide and put it under the light. He twisted the lens just a little, noticing that he hadn't perfectly fixed it to focus on the blood sample. That done, he scanned the slide. He checked the image in the textbook. Then he looked back at the slide.
Nothing.
There wasn't a single damn anomaly in his blood to suggest that he was infected with anything. He already knew that salt and holy water had no effect on his blood, having cut himself with iron and rubbed his wounds with salt, just to check.
As far as science was concerned, Sam's blood was completely ordinary.
Which left three viable options. Either he had demon blood, but it hadn't physically manifested yet. That, or there was no demon blood, and either John been wrong in believing whatever source had told him that Sam was infected, or he'd just been lying.
Given absolutely no evidence aside from his father's angry words to support the claim that he'd been infected with demon blood, Sam couldn't in all good faith accept that option as a given. He would keep an eye on his blood, periodically checking to make sure nothing freaky was going on inside of him, but the odds were that there was nothing wrong with him at all.
John Winchester was a son of a bitch and one huge asshole, but he wasn't often wrong about hunts. By the time Sam was old enough to join in on the world his father and brother shared, John Winchester had been hunting for more than a decade, and was more than prepared to deal with anything that came his way.
Sam reiterated to himself that he didn't have one fucking shred of proof to support John's claims. He had been scared and terrified when he had first learned that he was infected… but now he was just pissed. He couldn't believe that his goddamned father would turn on him without any evidence, without real proof. He couldn't believe that Dean would just agree to kill Sam on John's word.
Because if it had been Dean, Sam wouldn't have done shit until he had proof. Solid, irrefutable proof, and even then, he probably wouldn't have done anything, because it was Dean.
For the first time in his life, Sam realized that he didn't resent his family. He didn't sympathize with their pain of losing Mary, and he didn't forgive them.
Sam didn't even hate John, or Dean. He despised John, and he sure as hell loathed Dean, who had probably just jumped onto whatever his father had said, and done exactly as the man had ordered. It burned in Sam like fire, like a knife ripping at his insides.
Sam's life was ruined. It was torn to shreds, with no hope of recovery, no hope of a real life outside of hunting because of the way he had been raised. But he would still have a family, if it weren't for John Winchesters pigheaded stubbornness, and his brother's blind obedience.
"To hell with both of you," he snarled. "I'm not your family, huh? Well screw you, because I don't want to be! I'd be fucking ashamed to be related to you!"
Without even thinking about the consequences, he picked up the microscope and slammed it onto the floor, where it made a terrible, satisfying crash.
"I hate you, and you know what? I'm glad your wife is dead, John Winchester, because it hurts you more than I ever could."
It was the first time he'd lost his temper in months. Sam hadn't realized just how deeply the scars Dean and John had carved into him went – some so deep that they were still bleeding.
"I hate you!"
His body wracked with sobs, because life was so fucking unfair.
He could take the fact that he would never have a normal life. He could live on the road, hunting the things that deserved it. He could live with having to whore out his body to pay for food, could live with having to steal and fight just for the right to sleep on the warmest patch of ground in an abandoned church. He could take everything his life had thrown at him, no matter how unfair it was, because that was life.
But how in the name of god and all His angels, was Sam supposed to accept losing his father and brother because his father was a judgmental ass? That was the final blow that caused the levy to break.
Sam sat there, hidden in the darkness as anger and self pity and hated burned in the pit of his stomach.
Weak, pathetic, not enough, never good enough, evil, twisted… The words are like accusations, spat by the memories of John and Dean, leaning over him like phantoms.
Sam found that he couldn't even remember what either looked like when they were happy, when they had been a family.
Had those days even been real? Had any of it ever been real? Or had Sam only ever imagined the love his father and brother had held for him?
"I know you've never been on my side god, but this is just too much," Sam whispered into the silence.
Something warm and comforting pressed against the edge of Sam's consciousness, and he unconsciously leaned towards it. It felt like a familiar hand on his shoulder, like Dean had once felt. With it came the realization that Sam had done nothing wrong, that he had nothing to feel sorry for, no reason to hate himself. Sam was a hunter; he saves lives. And if someday, down the line, some demon came looking for him, he had no plans on doing anything other than waste it just like he'd wasted every other evil creature he'd come across.
The tension in Sam's body seemed to fade just a little bit at that; he was not a victim. He never would be. He could acknowledge his anger and pain, and move past it.
Sam stood, feeling much more calm and put together.
"Thanks, for listening" he whispered. "I just – I miss him. Dean. I can't believe he chose his dad over me. John… not so much. I always knew he'd pick Dean if he had to. And I was okay with that, but…"
But what? Sam couldn't pretend he didn't hate his father, even though he had known what might be coming. He could barely even contain the fact that he hated Dean all the more for his betrayal.
"Nevermind," he said into the darkness. "I don't know if you're here, or I'm just talking to myself, but thank you. Just – if it is – if he wasn't – if I'm going to become something evil, please help me? Please don't let me, because it hurts so much, the idea that I might lose control, and I don't know how I can make it stop enough to save myself if a demon comes after me. Please."
But there was only silence and an empty room to greet his pleas.
…
In Oakland, Sam replaced his lost fake ID cards, and made five hundred dollars hustling pool. The scars from The Incident were only visible as thin marks on his arms, crossed by other, more recent hurts.
Life carried on. There would be whole days, weeks even, where he could go without thinking about The Incident, or his life before. He wasn't happy, exactly, but he wasn't hurting anymore, and that was okay, for now.
Eight months, two weeks, and three days after The Incident, Sam found himself in San Francisco, California.