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“I know what it’s like to come back and not feel like you really fit”, Sam tells his mother.
I woke up at Bobby’s and they told me I’d been gone for 18 months, he wants to add. That wasn’t exactly the truth, but it didn’t matter at the time, because I was back with Dean and Bobby and something was wrong, there was this itch in the back of my head and Bobby was even grumpier than usual and I was just waiting for the second shoe to drop. And it did.
I understand, he wants to say, because I’ve been there when your father came back from the dead. I might have been soulless at the time, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t see how hard it was for him. He was broken up to hear you were dead. Looking back, I think he tried to fill that emptiness in his heart with me and the cousins, but that’s not how loss works. Everyone he knew was dead, and he was drifting in an endless sea without a boat or someone to teach him how to swim.
I was playing my part, and that meant watching and analyzing every action and reaction, every emotion and nervous tick of the people around me, and molding my own words and actions according to them. It was exhausting. There were days when I just wanted to get away from them all, to drop the pretense, but the part of me that remembered what it was like before, to feel love and - occasionally - happiness and, overall, the drive to save people, it kept me close to my family, to the ones who would stop me if (when) I went too far.
So, we stayed close, I helped him navigate this brave new world, and he was my compass when I strayed off the path. But neither of us really fit.
He wants to say that and so much more, but he doesn’t, because then he’d have to explain.
She’ll find out about the Apocalypse and Lucifer soon enough. Dad’s journal only allures to him, his powers, Yellow-Eyes and the other children, but she’ll read between the lines and have questions for him, ones he’ll not be able to answer without bringing up the Apocalypse. Besides, sooner or later, she’ll run into another hunter and hunters talk. Better she hears it from him and Dean.
What he doesn’t want to explain is his soulless time. He thinks (hopes) that it isn’t common knowledge among the hunting community, and since Dean, Cas and him choose to deal with it the Winchester way – i.e. not talking about it and drowning any hard feelings in enough alcohol to preserve them for years to come – he’s fairly certain that he can avoid that particular topic, and with it, the clusterfuck that was Samuel Campbell’s temporary stint on Earth.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise that Samuel would do everything in his power to get his daughter back, even a deal with the King of Hell. He wasn’t a Winchester, but apparently stubbornness and the willingness to sacrifice anything and anyone to get your loved ones back ran in both sides of the family.
He did it for you, and I can’t exactly fault him for that, he wants to say. Not when I released the Darkness to save my brother. But he doesn’t know how Mary would react if she found out her father betrayed her own sons in the hopes of getting her back, and how Sam was the one who killed him again.
He doesn’t know how she’ll react to anything, really, so he just smiles and tries not to look at her like she’s going to explode (going to disappear, the Cage-plagued part of his mind corrects).
She talks about filling in the blanks, so he hands her Dad’s journal, tries to explain around all the things he can’t bring himself to tell her.
“For me, just, um, having you here, fills in the biggest blank.”
She hugs him, hesitant at first, but growing more confident when he hangs onto her and fills another one of his blanks – the one that’s labelled ‘feeling safe in your mother’s arms’.
I want you to feel safe, too, he wants her to know (he doesn’t say). And I hope there are certain blanks that you never have to fill.