The Road So Far || Self Para
"Who are you? What's your story?"
When Sam Winchester was born, it was to the happy second-time parents, Mary and John Winchester, citizens of the relatively small town of Lawrence, Kansas, and to his older brother, Dean, he was the coolest thing that had ever happened. With such good beginnings, you might think that Sam would have a pleasant childhood, with plenty of time to be a kid having his parents and older brother doting on him, but, alas, this isn't quite what happened. In an electrical fire six months after Sam was born, Mary Winchester was taken from her family, as well as most of their house and quite a few personal belongings of the Winchesters. John was broken in the process and was never really the same, moving their small and dispirited remaining family around all over the United States, and letting his eldest son take care of his youngest, even though there was only four years to hold between them. Dean Winchester was only four at his mother's time of death, but he let the responsibility of his younger brother fall on his shoulders with the grace of someone worth many years more than himself, and Sam would be grateful for it for the rest of his life.
Sam was approximately three when John started drinking abhorrent amounts of alcohol every time they stopped for a night, hitting up bars that he didn't need and leaving seven year old Dean for a too young Sam. Dean could barely reach the stove at this point, but he had taught Sam how to talk, and he could make dinner every night too. They didn't even really know what their dad did every time he left them alone, which was so often that once upon a time, Sam had called Dean "Daddy," on accident. He was so young, but Dean still remembers it and tells the story to embarrass Sam every chance he gets. It wasn't until Sam was five that John raised a hand to Dean that Sam had seen, but he had a sneaking suspicion that it had started before that, with a silent agreement between a grown man and a nine year old that it should never happen in front of Sam. And then it did. Sam was never hit as much as he thought Dean was, and Dean always caught the brunt of everything for Sam's benefit. Even when they were just kids (when Sam was just a kid, because let's face it, Dean never really was), it was obvious that Dean favored Sam more than he favored himself, that he'd protect his little brother with his own life. Sam doesn't know how to repay him for that. It made Sam quiet, if not selectively complacent, and he is stranger now, with looming height and silent stares.
In a stroke of both irony and the boys' luck, John was killed in an automobile accident in which he was hit by a drunk driver, when Dean was nineteen and Sam was fifteen. While Dean was old enough to take on the responsibility of Sam himself legally (and emotionally, he' had been doing as such for most of his life), they decided to relocate to Sioux Falls, where their Uncle Bobby lived. When John had not wanted to deal with his own children when he was on a bender or such, he dropped them at Bobby's, their entire lives, and he had been a refuge for them. Bobby had tried to take them permanently from John a few times, but he would never allow it, keeping his pride above the lives and livelihoods of his children every single goddamn time. Even while Sam knows Dean caught the greater bits of John's drinking habits, Sam had always hated John more, hated him more deeply, and Sam was a little sure that it was because Dean remembered, however vaguely, what John was like before Mary died. Sam did not have those memories dragging him away from hating their father, remembering cleaning Dean's wounds from their father's hands, remembering the few scars he retained from John's beatings himself, nothing held Sam back in the ferocity of his paternal hatred.
Bobby enrolled Sam in a real school, where he'd be able to stay for more than a few weeks at a time, make some friends, maybe even make a fucking life here, and Sam had never been so grateful to anyone but Dean in his life before. Sam was smart, he knew it, had known it since he was enrolled in grade school and they asked John to stay in town so they could put him in the Academically Gifted program, but John had blown town and Sam never really had anything to do with what was in his head. He wanted to be a lawyer, a doctor, a physicist, anything that would make Dean proud, that would make Bobby proud, and that would challenge a mind that has never been in one place long enough to be challenged before. He was told growing up to never stand out, so he dulled himself down and basically lied through his teeth, but Bobby had books, and Bobby was enrolling him in high school, and Sam wanted to cry for how much Bobby was not only expecting of him, but what Bobby and Dean honestly expected him to exceed, knowing his intelligence. This was all he had ever wanted, the apple pie lifestyle, the proverbial picket fence, to be normal. And he was getting that now.
