pssst you should write a ficlet with sam finishing a giant important paper because i am just not even bothering pretending that i'm thinking about anything else (also hi i missed you how is everything?)
A/N: Kassie! I’m so glad you’re surviving the thesis :-D I can totally do this for you--it is a feeling I know very, very well. (Everything is under control? Is I guess the best way to answer that? I don’t know, dude. This whole dissertation thing is a giant pain in the ass.)
It makes sense, Sam thinks. Asking college students, most of them far from home for the first time, to write about the meaning of home. It’s something they’re all thinking about, and his professor knows that. What she doesn’t know, probably, is how impossible it is for Sam to do. He’s tried writing the truth about their lives before, and it's gotten him noticed--not in a bad way, but in a way he doesn’t want here. He wants to be normal, not the new kid (or at least not the only new kid), not the kid who hadn’t had a real home since he was a baby, not the kid whose family had turned their backs on him for trying, for once, to move forward with his life instead of just following. Home is complicated, and it's far away, and it doesn’t want him back.
He tries, though. Of course he tries. He writes pages and pages about home.
He writes about waking up and seeing Dean next to him, face squished into the pillow and, beyond him, their dad snoring away on top of the motel comforter. He writes about the relief of being all three together without fighting or worrying or being on their way to something terrible and dangerous.
He writes about the smell of grease and hot metal and dust at Bobby’s and the way a man who isn’t even related to him shouting “Boy” sounds more like home sometimes than his actual father saying his name in that way he does before he gives an order.
He writes about a girl he knew who killed her mother to save him and how it made him afraid that he had no idea what family was, even though it was supposed to be the most important thing in the world.
He writes about the car that keeps them safe on the road, like a big black dog sleeping outside motel rooms and the way there’s always been enough room for him there, no matter how much he grew. He writes about learning to drive without ever feeling like it mattered, because he could never choose the destination. He doesn’t write about how he never expects to sit in that car again.
He writes about learning that a monster killed his mother in their home, and he tears up the page. He tears up all the pages; he doesn’t want to write about home. But he has to write something to prove that he should be here, that he can do the work, that he isn’t too broken and abnormal to succeed here. He has to write something.
“In its ordinary use,” he finally begins, “a person’s home is the place where he lives. In a strict and legal sense, that is properly the home of a person where he has his true, fixed, permanent and principal establishment, and to which, whenever he is absent, he has the intention of returning.”
It comes more easily after that, after he takes himself out of it altogether. This, he decides, is how he’ll survive here. This world isn’t his world, but if he reads enough, studies enough, knows the laws of this world well enough, maybe he’ll fit.
Maybe he can make himself at home here.