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[ a life without choices ] It´s not like he didn´t understand it. It´s not like he didn´t get it. It´s just that he´d never wanted it. He´d never gotten a choice in it. He thinks sometimes that even if he had been given a choice, it never would have been a choice. Not really. * “You´re in or you´re out. You´re with us or you´re not. You loved her or you didn´t.’ * He was a baby though, and it´s not like he remembers. His mother was beautiful, that he knows. His mother was kind, that he knows. His mother was loving, and giving, and the sunshine when there was darkness. He knows all that, but he doesn´t know what she smelled like. He doesn´t know what her voice sounded like when she was mad. He didn´t know her at all. * “This thing, this thing that killed your mother, Sammy. He— she— it has to pay.’ * He wonders what it might have been like. What it was like. Before. When she was still alive, did Dean trip over himself to get to Sam´s side when he cried? Did Dad have that haunted look in his eyes whenever the sun went down? Did his Dad used to laugh? Because he doesn´t know. He´ll never know. They can tell him about it, nostalgic little smiles on their faces, but he´ll never get to have that. He´ll never get to be normal. * “You hold it like this, Sammy. When your hands are bigger it´ll fit better, but until then, hold it like this.’ * Other kids, they went camping too, and they sat around the bonfire too, but did they hold shotguns when they did it? Did they shoot when they heard a twig snap too close? Because when he went to friends´ houses, their Dad´s talked about the monster fish they caught, not the first apparition they'd walked through. They talked about going to the big football game, not the house that was haunted down on Beaker street. * "He´s not doing it to be mean, we have other obligations. The weekends are for hunting. You can be normal on the weekdays.’ * The rules of society didn´t apply to them, they couldn´t. They couldn´t just live like regular people, they knew too much. He read once, in some interminably long book that bored him mostly to tears, that most geniuses were at least a little insane. Because they knew too much. They knew what was out there, they were too smart. And he´s never broken the bank when it comes to brains, but he´s pretty damn smart. He´s smart enough to know that if the other kids knew what he knew, they wouldn´t sleep much at night either. * “Put this under your pillow. I´ve been sleeping with mine since I was 15. I promise, you´ll be sleeping like a baby again.’ * He used to wonder why Dean would treat women so badly. Not to their face, sure, but badly just the same. One night stands, empty meaningless fucks. Not calling them back. When he turned 16 he understood, because the look in Tina´s eyes when he´d told her had been enough to scare him away from dates for nearly six months. He learned to not tell them the truth very quickly, and he´d never liked lying all that much, but it was necessary. They found out sometimes anyway, but they were gone before he could explain. * “What do you expect, kiddo? They don´t know what we know, Sammy. And thank God for that. They wouldn´t know what to do with it.’ * And he just got so sick of it. So God damned sick of it. Because he didn´t ask for this. He didn´t get the choice. It was easy to ignore the fact that neither had Dean, because Dean was so good at it. Dean actually liked it. He´s not sure when he started to hate his own brother, and he´s not sure if he´ll ever be able to forgive him for never telling him it was okay to want out of this. * "Look, bro, I get it. Seriously, I do. But this is what we do, what we have to do. You can´t just bail out on me.’ * So when he´d gotten a scholarship to Stanford, he´d taken it without telling anyone, not even his friends. When the time came for him to fill out forms he´d forged his father´s signature. They didn´t know he was gone until he was halfway there, calling them from a pay phone to tell them he was doing this for himself, for once. His Dad had told him to never come back, and Dean hadn´t spoken to him for two months. When he finally did he told him to go fuck himself. * “She´s not worth it to you? She was our Mom, Sammy. This is how you want to repay her for all she gave up for you?!’ * And for once he was normal. For once he got to get drunk, and fuck up, and not have to think about the hangover he´d have when Dean fired the gun too close to his ear. For once he got to laugh at stupid bullshit, got to go to keggers and come home at a reasonable hour, and have sex with one woman for an extended period of time. Because they couldn´t touch him here. They couldn´t ruin it for him here. He´d finally escaped it, he´d finally gotten out, and life was good. Life was as close to normal as it ever could be for him. * “You think you´ll ever be normal, Sammy? You know what´s out there. You´ll never be normal. Why the fuck would you want to be?’ * And now this happens. His girl, just like his mother, on top of his ceiling, gutted, burning flesh, silent screams. Nothing he could do but watch as it happened. As it threatened to engulf him too. And for one second, he hated Dean for saving him. Hated him with every fiber of his being, for coming in there and getting him out. Because he could have been out, for good, forever. He could have gotten out of this world, out of this life, that he´d been forced into. That will never happen now. * “I´m sorry, Sammy. I´m so… fuck, man. But see? Don´t you get it n ow? Do you see why we couldn´t just let it rest?’ * And yeah. He did. He saw now. And he still hated them.
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