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Dean dies in the late hours of November 1, 2023; the irony of this does not escape Sam, even as the shock of it numbs his limbs and brain and he pulls Dean’s body down from the rebar and drives the kids to the police station, and drives to the doggy daycare where he and Dean left Miracle, and then makes the endless drive back to the Bunker.
How many times must he suffer this? The burying of his brother, the knowledge that he is alone. Once was enough, with dire consequences to prove the point that Sam’s no good alone. Maybe, he thinks bitterly, wrapping Dean in his burial shroud, if Dean had ever had to do this for him, had to clean him and close his eyes, build a pyre or dig a grave, live for months without Sam by his side in the aftermath, then maybe Dean wouldn’t have asked this of him.
That’s not fair, says a little voice in his head. He did live without you. For almost eighteen months. He watched you jump into Hell, Sam.
A different version of Sam, the one who was fourteen and keeping score, is clawing, biting against the more reasonable voice. But it takes energy to maintain that kind of anger, the anger of his adolescence. And anger at Dean, like his anger at his dad, is unproductive. It isn’t fair to be angry with Dean for wanting Sam to keep going. This, he thinks, was Dean’s happy ending. Taken out fighting and dying before he couldn’t do the things he enjoyed anymore, and Sam, still here, trying to build a life.
Sam swallows, finishes tying Dean tight. Lashes the pyre together out behind the bunker where they burned the hunters Michael killed, where they burned Mom, and Charlie, and Kevin. There’s no one left, Sam realizes, who will be able to take care of his body when he finally goes, unless he crawls next to Dean and lights it from atop the pyre. Not that it matters. There’s nothing for him to stick around here for anyway.
Miracle sits at his feet while Sam stares into the fire, watches Dean’s body burn down to ash. It takes hours and Sam’s exhausted, empty, on the verge of collapse, when the fire finally burns down to embers and there’s nothing left of Dean except the lingering smokey smell of a campfire. Sam goes back inside and crawls into bed. Miracle, at least, is warm and soft beside him, within grasp, for Sam to run his fingers through his hair. He thinks, momentarily, of how badly he wanted a dog growing up, of the countless fights he had with his dad about it (eight, to be exact, and Sam remembers every one, but he pretends he doesn’t), and how much Dean hated dogs, especially after he got dragged into Hell. He feels an unexpected twinge of anger at Dean for denying him even that, and Sam starts sobbing again, loud and wet and gross, because Miracle was an exception and now Dean isn’t even here. And it isn’t fair to be angry with Dean, but he is.
Miracle turns around to face Sam, to lick his tears from his face, but he tires of this eventually and settles back down next to him, close, his heart beat fast but his breathing even, and eventually Sam falls asleep.
When he wakes up, November 3 has almost passed. Sam stares at the ceiling, listening to Miracle’s claws on the linoleum and concrete of the hallway, trying to ignore the pressure in his bladder so he can just fall back to sleep. He thinks about his dad, bundling him and Dean into the car to figure out a life that was suddenly so much darker, so much scarier than he thought when he went to bed the night before. That was forty years ago, exactly. His dad would be almost seventy. Mom too. Miracle finds his way back into Sam’s room, licks Sam’s hand from where it dangles off his bed and whines. How did he do it, Sam wonders. How did he take care of us at all?
He pulls his hand away from Miracle and buries it under his pillow. He thought he understood his dad when Jess died, almost twenty years ago now. He doesn’t think about the life he could have had with her — that particular torture lost its teeth while he was in Hell — but he’s never stopped thinking about her as she was. A lit major with not a care in the world, grad school acceptance letters hanging on their fridge, her hair pulled back into a messy pony tale while she read through Sam’s papers, helped him study for the LSATs. He thought he was dying when she died. The last time Dean died. This is different, somehow. Worse. Maybe because it’s Dean. Maybe because it’s forever.
Miracle barks at him, and Sam stares, looks at his alarm clock and realizes the time. He wants to go back to sleep, wants to lay here forever, but Miracle needs to be looked after, and he can do that. He can walk miracle and he can feed him. He can do it.
So he does. And he makes himself scrambled eggs, which he throws away after two bites because he can’t stomach them, since he’s already up.
He takes care of Miracle, but is paranoid to leave his side, like Miracle will just disappear, like he did after they first found him. He doesn’t know what he would do, if he didn’t have this dog. He eats what he can. He loses weight he can't afford. He walks Miracle and then sits motionless in the library the rest of the day, thinking about Dean, trying to remember his voice. His internal monologue sounds like Dean some days. Others it sounds like Lucifer. It’s unsurprising that on those days he can’t eat at all, with the Devil whispering in his ear that they’re all alone. They’re all alone.
“I’m not alone,” Sam tells the empty Bunker, just to prove to himself his voice still works. More often than not, Lucifer would take his voice. Lucifer liked talking to Sam, but he didn’t often like what Sam had to say back. He’s alone though, and that, at least, is some relief. Miracle looks up at him from where he’s sleeping, and Sam sighs, scrubs a hand down his face. Goes to bed.
After weeks of this, weeks, worried calls from anyone who’s left ignored (it’s just Jody and Donna and the girls), Dean’s cell rings. It’s a case, and Sam takes it.
Werewolves in Texas, the kind of thing Dean would be excited about. Local PD got Dean’s name from Donna, months ago maybe, though Sam guesses she believes Dean is still alive. He hasn’t had the heart to say it out loud, to tell anyone that Dean is dead. Jody’s guessed. In the last call Sam let go to voicemail, she addressed only him and said: Sam, you call me back. I hope you’re okay. Please come see me and the girls soon. We miss you.
No message for Dean, no mention of him at all. He packs his bags, anything of Dean’s he can, his gray hoodie that no longer smells like him, the few childhood pictures Dean kept in his room, his watch, and all the little things they picked up for Miracle over the last few years. The door slams shut behind them — him and Dean’s dog, the lights flickering off, and Sam’s glad to leave it behind. It was Dean’s home, more than it was ever his. Home’s always been some place he’s had to leave. All the little places dotted across the contiguous U.S. (and Alaska, once; Mexico for three weeks when he was eighteen and a two-month stop on the border between New York and Canada that made Dean late for his first few weeks of middle school), his first apartment he and Jessica shared for two years in college, only because her parents knew he didn’t have any place to go home to over the summer. The house he shared with Amelia but couldn’t pay for during those horrible, fuzzy months he thought Dean had died and he was trying to make it work. They were all places that Sam knew he couldn’t stay. Even with Jess. Every morning he woke up and stared at the ceiling, believing that it was only a matter of time before something happened; that this day would be the day that the rug was pulled out from under him and he would be forced to move on. He’s always supposed he was right about that. Eventually, his life did catch up with him, and he left all his dreams of safety and comfort behind while they were still smoldering. The Bunker was always going to be temporary. It was meant to be temporary. A hub for transient hunters and Men of Letters on their way in and out of cases and back to their families in their nice American homes, protecting the lives of people who were happier in the dark. And it was good for them — him and Dean, but even in the last three years, Sam never had any doubts that one day he would leave Kansas forever. He’d hoped Dean would be with him when he did. Maybe they would move into Lebanon, buy a house and get jobs. Maybe Sam would go back to school, finally finish his degree. Sam thinks he saw Dean looking at little homes in Lawrence even, a sign that this was all truly over, since the only times they’d been back to Lawrence since their house burned down was a million years ago with the thing with Sam’s visions and the Poltergeist, and on the Honest to God Apocalypse. Not that Sam would have moved there. He was a different person when he jumped into Hell, a different person twice over than the guy who had those visions, forcing Dean to go home. He tried to keep it together for Dean, but Sam doesn’t think he could stomach going home to Lawrence after all this time, although maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, to live out the rest of their lives peacefully in the state that they were born. And if Sam’s being honest, he’s running out of real estate if he’s trying to avoid places where bad shit has happened to him. Miracle takes Sam’s spot in the Impala, and Sam takes Dean’s, wrapping his hands around the steering wheel, trying to feel the places it’s worn down from almost fifty years of constant use, his dad’s fingerprints, Dean’s. The heat rattles when he turns it on and Miracle lays his head on Sam’s lap. It’s probably not safe, but Sam doesn’t care. He’s got to drive, and he feels a sick sort of relief at the prospect of driving away from Kansas, away from all of the horror and blood. He can kill some werewolves in Texas and then maybe he can leave it all behind him.It’s still warm in Texas when he gets there. The local sheriff meets him at the nearest crime scene, a dusty back road where the werewolf attacked again, leaving the body with the heart chewed out. Sheriff called early in the morning, to tell him there was another one, and Sam, almost there, pulled over to the side of the road to change into his suit. It was okay, in the low light on empty roads, but he imagined Dean was with him, shielding him from view, and then him doing the same, backs turned like they were school girls embarrassed by their changing bodies, and not brothers who had grown up in each other’s pockets, who knew more about the others’ anatomy than he even knew about his own, who shared motel rooms and this car. Still, Sam misses their little rituals of normalcy built up between them more than he misses the other stuff, the all encompassing-ness of his and Dean’s relationship. Sheriff is grimacing at Sam as Sam approaches, but whistles when he sees Dean’s car. Sam’s car now. Miracle is waiting in the passengers’ seat. Sam shrugs. He doesn’t have to explain himself to a local badge who doesn’t know where to start and who thinks that Sam’s name is literally Bon Jovi. Sheriff, who’s name Sam can’t keep track of and so Sam just thinks of him as Sheriff is tall, almost as tall as Sam, and salt-and-pepper, but he’s got one of those soft faces that would make him instantly likable in the right circumstances. Dawn looking at the dead body of a nineteen year old girl isn’t one of them, and Sam can already feel his will to work this case draining out of him. “Third body this month,” Sheriff says, holding up the crime scene tape for Sam to duck underneath of. “All of them missing hearts.” Sam grimaces right back at him. “Nasty stuff, huh?” And it is — holes in these bodies of these poor young girls right where the hearts should be. Instead of hearts, there’s just nothing and bite marks. Animal. Human. Lunar cycle’s right. Werewolves, feeding and nasty. “And the victims?” Sam asks, turning away from the body. “Anything in common?” Sheriff nods, chews on his fingernails. “Freshman at the local college. Parents are panicking. Students are panicking. Different majors, different everything. We’re not even sure this is…what is this?” Sam shrugs. He clears his throat. He doesn’t lift his hand to his mouth to chew on his fingernails in case the sheriff thinks he’s mocking him. “Can you just send me the case files for the victims?” His breakfast — such as it was, black coffee and a protein bar he found in the glove compartment — isn’t sitting well with him, and he’s pretty sure by the hastiness of Sheriff’s nodding that Sam’s turning green. Back at the car, Sam slides in next to Miracle who licks his face, and Sam buries his face in his hair, breathing in his doggy scent, and he stays there until his phone dings and he looks up to see Sheriff smiling and giving him a thumbs up. Case files. An email that seems genuinely sympathetic. Sheriff is maybe fifteen years older than Sam, and probably still thinks of Sam like he’s a kid, even though Sam is forty and seen more shit than this goofy looking, nail biting cop could even imagine. This kind of thing is rough. It doesn’t get easier. Case files as requested - Rich. Rich. Sam might be able to remember, at least, that this affable Sheriff’s name is Rich.
With no one to watch his back and his grief addled mind the werewolves nearly take him out. He’s lying in the sand in the dugout of the college baseball field, the moon glinting overhead of him, staring at the stars. His ears are ringing and he thinks that this is finally the end. The wolf — the kind that’s all wolf on the full moon, nothing human about him, some poor junior with his future torn from him — lunges before Sam has time to react and he’s relieved, relieved that in a matter of seconds he’ll be reunited with Dean. He closes his eyes — someone will take care of Miracle, someone will take care of his body, but it doesn’t have to be him anymore. He can let all of this go, and when he sees Dean — soon, so soon — can say that he tried, he really did try, and he went out fighting. Bang. Bang. Two shots ring out loud and clear in the night, the werewolf whimpers and falls with a thud, and Sam is not dead. He lives to fight another day. He opens his eyes and pushes himself to a sitting position to see Jody Mills staring down at him. “Oh, Sam,” she says, reading the heartbreak on his face.
The silence in Jody’s car swallows him whole. They drive for forty minutes back to the motel Sam’s staying at without saying a word, so Sam can go get Miracle. Sam climbs in the back seat of Jody’s car with Miracle, who lays his head in Sam’s lap. Like this it’s easier to breathe, and easier to say: “I’m sorry. I should have called you.” “I thought it — ” Jody clears her throat and meets Sam’s eyes in the rear view mirror. “I thought it was either you or Dean. I’m sorry.” Sam laces his fingers through Miracle’s hair. Miracle looks up at him. “It happened in November,” he manages. It’s the first time he’s said it to anyone. “Dean died in November. We were on a hunt.” His eyes sting and he sniffs. “You can stay with me,” Jody says, which is the first she’s said it, even though that’s clearly the direction they’re headed. “For as long as you need to.” Sam sighs. He’ll stay. A night or a week or two. And then…And then he doesn’t know. The only times he’s ever lived without Dean he’s been a wreck, except when he was twenty, living away at school. Then it was less about Dean and more about his dad and he had school to focus on. School and trying to be normal. Now, he knows there’s no chance of that. He knows that when he walks around, people can see him for what he truly is. Not just a freak but broken, like they can see his flayed soul on the outside of him. People avert their eyes, take long circuitous routes to get around him. With Dean, people were always comfortable, because Dean was comfortable in his own skin. Sam never has been, but it was easier to pretend with Dean. Or maybe he wasn’t pretending. Maybe Dean shielded him from the world and the world from him in a way that Sam is only beginning to understand. He stays. A night. A week. Two. And then — It’s weird — being here with Jody, her life with the girls coming in and out. No one cares that he’s there, taking up space, trying but mostly failing to be helpful. The life Jody leads is foreign to him, with the girls grown — Claire just turned twenty-seven, they hardly need a home base anymore — and settled; it’s a quiet life, an easy life. Jody looks at him over dinner, a night when it’s just the two of them, and she says, “You know, my son would have been twenty-five today.” It’s March. When Sam goes out to walk Miracle, there are buds forming on flowers, and the air smells green and vibrant. It makes Sam’s heart ache. Soon he’ll turn another year older and he has nothing to show for it, and no one to share it with. Even though he’s been here with Jody for months, he is an outsider in her life. Who is she to him, but one of Dean’s friend, one of Bobby’s? She had a whole life before Sam ruined hers, and he’s sticking around ruining her second one too. “That kind of pain, it never goes away,”she says. “I miss him and my husband, and the people they never became.” Sam doesn’t really know what to say. He knows pain and grief. He knows it more intimately than joy. His Dad, Jess, Dean countless times. Himself. He grieves for himself most of all, the man he thought he’d be twenty years ago. He drops his fork and grabs his plate. He takes Jody’s, but she grabs his hand and pulls herself up and pulls him down so she can kiss him. He blushes. They’re together. Jody introduces him as her boyfriend when they go out, but it catches him by surprise. A pity kiss, a pity house. He’s always liked Jody, but Jody was always Dean’s friend, the way, at some point, everyone in his life became Dean’s friend. He doesn’t know when it happened, but it was easier. Dean’s friends lived, Sam’s died. Dean’s friends were good. Sam’s were morally dubious at best and actively deceitful at worst. He was able to live in a world where Dean had friends, as long as Sam had Dean. The next morning, Sam packs the car, his dufflebag of clothes and Miracle’s things. He leaves Jody a note and leaves while she’s at work. Easier without the heartbreak. Easier to be alone. The last time he left a woman like this, Dean showed up, and so Sam drives to Montana, half mad with hope that Dean will already be there when he arrives, but knowing that things are different now than they were a decade ago, that the natural order is in place, governed by a God who does not want Sam and Dean to kill each other with hammers, so he will go to Rufus’ old cabin, and he will be alone. Alone he rebuilds his life.
It’s not like he hasn’t rebuilt his life before, although, in fairness, what he did during that year he thought Dean was dead wasn’t so much rebuilding a life from scratch as it was survival and keeping the most dramatic symptoms of his Hell-Induced PTSD at bay, which he did with varying degrees of success until Amelia, and for reasons Sam can’t really comprehend, he never told Dean the truth about what that year was like, really. Why didn’t he ever tell Dean? Because of Dean being fucked up over Purgatory, and then the Trials and then Sam had an angel stuffed inside of him and he hated Dean for a little while, but then Dean was dead and a demon, and the world kept ending. But after that, after everything, why hadn’t Sam told him the truth, the whole truth, about Hell and about Amelia, and about wanting to finish his degree? “Mr. Wesson?” Sam looks up. He chose this name because there’s a tiny part of him that longs for whatever angel-induced normality was granted to them for those three weeks a million years ago, and he found Dean in that world, found Dean there, found Dean and hunted with him and found a rhythm with him, and maybe, thinks the part of Sam that’s stupid and sick with grief, if Sam Wesson exists in this version of reality then Dean Smith will too. The Dean of Adult Admissions is looking at him, curiously. “No records at all?” “Uh…” Sam stutters. Sam Winchester is a criminal. Sam Winchester’s GPA and vaccinations and loans and grants burned in 2005, and Sam Winchester is a dead and wanted man, so Sam Winchester was only sticking around for Dean, and all the things only Sam and Dean Winchester had, but well, Dean Winchester is dead, for real, for good. So, no transcripts from Stanford, not that they’d be any good. He doesn’t know, didn’t even check, if any college in the country would accept 20 year old academic transcripts. “No…I mean — I almost finished undergrad, but that was 20 years ago. I just want to start over.” It’s a little too earnest, and he’s a little too old to get away with it still, but the Dean of Adult Admissions smiles. “We do still typically require a high school transcript,” she says. Sam huffs. He did this all over again ten years ago, but he used his own name, his old name, thought they were so officially dead, and not political assassins that it would be okay, and he wasn’t exactly thinking straight back then, and he isn’t exactly thinking straight now. “Ah, sure, I do…I know that…” He fishes in his bag, pulls out his actual high school transcript with his name replaced. “We moved around a lot, and I — it was a long time ago.” She takes it, smiles again. She must see all sorts come through here, people older than Sam, with lives more fractured than Sam’s, trying to pull it together for the back nine. A golf metaphor, because Dean had started golfing, like he did when he lived in suburban bliss with Lisa when Dean had thought Sam was dead. Dean is dead. The Dean of Adult Admissions, who has decided to help Sam with his application because Sam is still charming, even at forty-two, which is so much older than he ever thought he’d be, slides him papers, which Sam fills out blankly, still thinking about the job applications he found in Dean’s desk before he left the bunker forever. “Mailing address?” she asks, tapping a pen at the blank line. Sam doesn’t laugh. He’s staying at a motel because he doesn’t know what else to do, with Miracle, because he doesn’t know what else to do, doing repairs for the family that owns it, because he doesn’t know what else to do. He scratches the address into the paper, doesn’t blush, just tries to keep himself in this moment in time and not think about doing this at eighteen or twenty-nine. Starting over, starting his life over, again and again. The Dean of Adult Admissions smiles again. Sam realizes that she’s his age, a little younger, and she’s flirting with him. Oh. Sam tries to smile back, tries to thank her in the well-trained way of getting what he wants that feels hollow, because he wants this, maybe. He wants Dean back, mostly, so he’s got to rebuild himself. This is where he’s going to start. It’s where he started when he was eighteen. When he was twenty-nine. Forty-two.
The week after Sam receives his acceptance letter, the Dean of Adult Admissions calls him. People don’t call him, because there’s no one left. (Neither of these things are strictly true, but he doesn’t know how to talk to Not Bobby or Not Charlie or Eileen or Jody or Donna. He talks to Claire sometimes. He doesn’t really know why he picks up when Claire calls.) He realizes, half way through the conversation with the Dean of Adult Admissions that he doesn’t know her name, and he’s probably been calling her the Dean of Adult Admissions because he’s sick. He probably thinks that this is pathological because he’s sick. He probably — “Hey, sorry, I know this is…it’s rude, but I don’t…what’s your name?” Just so he can stop the spiral. A laugh. A name. It’s Diana, which is funny in that it’s close but not the same. She says she’d like to take him out for a drink. To celebrate Sam’s achievement, which is, to be clear, getting into college for the third time. He says, “You know, I got a 174 on my LSAT.” And she laughs again, like she thinks it’s funny, which it isn’t even though Sam is trying to joke around, so he tries something else, something a little ridiculous — “You don’t know me. I could be a serial killer or something. Wanted in all fifty states for all kinds of crimes.” “Criminals can get a college education.” She pauses. “And — a date.” Well, Sam literally has nothing else to lose, and it’s easier to pretend he’s normal when he’s talking to people who don’t know anything about him. Normal and functional and turning his life around in his forties.
She says, “So Wesson? Like the gun?” Which is a funny thing to say, and it turns out her name is Diana Smith, which is almost too much to be a coincidence, so Sam says, “Yeah, I think so,” which shouldn’t be an answer that makes sense to anyone but Dean who knows that yes, probably exactly like the gun, as a funny cosmic joke that Sam Wesson and Dean Smith couldn’t get because they didn’t know each other until they did and then they were sprung back into the reality and were Winchester again and the world was ending and they were on the outs so they didn’t have time to laugh about or even think about it long enough to find it funny. She laughs again. She laughs a lot and Sam likes that. “Smith and Wesson, huh? It’s a funny thing.” Sam agrees, especially since it’s probably just a coincidence, a real one, this time. They’re having dinner. It’s their third date, and Sam’s too old to be college student poor, but she’s the Dean of Adult Admissions, and so she is graciously paying and graciously asking Sam only surface level questions about his past, and Sam is lying through his teeth, and trying to remember how to get to know someone again after living so long in Dean’s pocket. She supplies answers to questions he forgets to ask, and ignores him when Sam zones out, which he’s doing a lot of because he can’t stop thinking about Dean and getting him back or stumbling upon him in the men’s room, or, in the moments of stifling unreality, that this is Dean, reincarnated as a red head with a crooked smile because her name matches his made up one. At the end of their date Diana kisses him on the cheek and Sam has to stoop almost a foot to let her, even on her tip toes, and he says, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” and he means it and he will, and then he goes home to walk Miracle and he lays awake digging his thumb into the old scar to try and convince himself he’s alive.
On his forty-third birthday, Sam takes finals again and Diana takes him out for a birthday dinner and asks him to move in with her. He says, “You still don’t really know me.” And she answers that he’s a weirdo drifter living at a motel still and she is simply taking pity on him, and he knows he has had this exact conversation before, when he was twenty-nine with a different woman he might have loved and it’s hard to believe that it’s happening again. (If he thinks really hard, back to his twenty-first birthday, he can remember Jessica too, saying: My lease starts in June, Sam, I think we should move in together, and how excited he was to do that, how he kissed her and said Yes, absolutely, yes. And she pulled back and smiled at him and said, Is it just because you’d be homeless other wise? And Sam laughed, full-bellied back when he used to be able to do that, and said, Yes, actually. You know the only reason I’m dating you is so that I can live in your parent-subsidized apartment.) Diana is looking at him strange, so Sam tries to laugh like he once was able to, and says instead “I have a dog, FYI.” “Yes, his name is Miracle because your brother found him when he thought there was nothing,” Diana supplies. “He’s invited too. In fact — well, it’s more like, you’re invited too.” “Good to know,” Sam says. He’s trying to remember telling her about finding the dog, but it’s been six months and he’s done his paranoid hunter thing on her, so he figures he must have forgotten, which is something he does a lot of. Forgets he’s not Sam Winchester, forgets Dean’s dead, forgets he tells the woman he’s dating things about his past life, forgets homework assignments and due dates, and where he’s driving to. He cups her face in his hands and kisses her like he loves her. He doesn’t know if he does, but he certainly likes to spend time with her and she likes Miracle apparently and doesn’t mind waiting for him, so it’s good enough.
They don’t make it, long-term, but they get a couple of good years out of it. Sam finishes his degree. Because Diana is the Dean of Adult Admissions and says that bean counters are always needed and Sam seems like a practical guy (they’ve been dating for a year and a half, Sam is finishing his gen-eds, they’ve been living together for an entire year, and yet still, she says seems, because he’s the kind of guy who keeps a classic car because his brother drove it and his brother is dead), Sam majors in accounting and he gets a job that pays okay, and they buy a house, get married, have a son when Sam is forty-five. Diana lets him name him Dean after the brother he won’t talk about. She thinks it’s a nice gesture. He loves Dean, which is as true in this life as it was in the last. He rekindles some of the adolescent resentment he had for his father in the first six months of Dean’s life. He thinks — how could he have done this to us? This life is so precious he doesn’t know how to breathe, and he is startlingly aware of his own size when he holds Dean for the first time. He fits in the palm of his hand, and his father dragged them across the country and put them in danger and ruined them in ways Sam will never know. Dean grows into DJ, and Diana has dreams of bigger and better things; more children and a husband who doesn’t flinch away from her touch. But it’s all fine. Sam Wesson lives a life Sam Winchester would have been proud of, relieved even when he was nineteen. He has a house that’s warded in only the most subtle ways, and people who wave to him in the grocery store and his son’s friends feel safe in his house, and DJ and him fight, but they fight about normal things. Sam Wesson keeps Sam Winchester and his life of monsters and paranoia at bay enough. Enough so that DJ is safe, and that he understands that inside the four walls of their home why Sam is the way he is. But he doesn’t talk about the Devil or Hell, and he doesn’t talk about the lonely unreal years he had before DJ was born, or the aching years he had with Dean. It’s over. All of it is over, and Sam knows that when it’s all, finally, over for real, he’ll see his brother again and this time they won’t be separated ever again.