Chapter Text
Sam Winchester did not have a normal childhood.
His mother died in a house fire the day he turned six months old. Instead of picking up the pieces and finding a way to care for his children, as any sane father would have done, John Winchester decided to take them on the road while he searched for the yellow-eyed demon who had killed her.
He didn’t raise his boys to be good, Catholic kids like Mary Winchester would have wished. John never spoke religion to them, never brought them to a church or taught them a prayer. If they learned from anyone else, he didn’t want to hear about it.
In a world where demons killed women beside their babies’ cribs, John was sure God was either absent or vindictive. He and his boys had no time for that.
Sam was a bright, precocious child. Often left in libraries to do schoolwork as his father and brother hunted, he read voraciously. Fiction, history, law – he wanted to be a lawyer one day, he decided when he was ten – ethics and science all caught his eye. Mythology was required reading as he grew old enough to help his family research what they were hunting; the better he knew the lore, the better he could keep them safe.
Of course he would eventually make his way to the religious corners of the library. The Christian didn’t hold his interest – demons were rare monsters, but there was nothing in the real lore about angels or any single God who ruled the universe. If anything, he had direct evidence to the contrary: on occasion, he had heard of hunters going up against lesser gods of old pantheons. One had somehow led Týr away from Nebraska and claimed to have convinced him to spend his time and energy in the Middle East – though even at thirteen, Sam was rather skeptical about the second half of that tale. He suspected that the Norse war god had simply grown bored and left to wreak havoc elsewhere on his own.
These were the religious books Sam was drawn to: the ones that made sense of old gods in new times. He loved the ones which made Sam’s life seem almost normal, or at least within the bounds of a normal worldview. They offered him an ethical system which reflected the life of a hunter: energies you put into the world come back to you and affect you; your actions are your own business, as long as you strive to hurt none and help when you can.
Sam read through the books of the new pagan movement avidly, writing down notes and thoughts in a notebook he kept hidden among his school things, where Dean and his father would never bother to look. By the time he was fifteen, he was sure that this was the path he wanted to follow – that this path made sense to him, and reflected his truth, as an outsider to the world who just wanted carve out his own space, and find a way make to make the world better somehow.
By the time he was eighteen, he was ready to dedicate himself not only to the Path, but to a specific aspect to it.
In all his research, his meditation and his soul searching, he had been drawn primarily to the Trickster figures: gods of laughter, chaos and change, but also of justice, wisdom, innovation and luck. From Loki to the Coyote and Raccoon to Puck, these were the gods and demigods who most encapsulated his worldview. Even as a lawyer, he thought, he would best serve them.
And so during his first Yule at Stanford, he decided to make it official. Wide eyed and idealistic, he expected his Dedication ritual to change his life.
He didn’t realize how right he was.