Chapter Text
Sam should be happy and fine.
OK, maybe not happy. But content, at least. That's the conclusion he came to when everything first started happening.
It wasn't Dean being gone, really.
When that happened it was just like he said, it was like his world was ripped in two. It was horrible. He’d lived it before and it didn’t feel like it had been any help. He wasn't just saying that. He sat on the edge of his bed for hours every night, unwilling to lie down and unwilling to get up and do anything, just staring at the floor.
He couldn't move, he was so wracked with guilt.
Hitting that damn dog didn't help, either. Even when he took Dog in and let him live with Sam, drive in the car and sleep at the foot of his bed, even when he started spending a lot of his money on treats and food and a cute, flowery collar that Dog picked out in the store.
Not that he needed it, of course. Dog trailed around behind him and responded to everything Sam said like a goddamn person, and every glimpse at him made that guilt resurface.
In his mind he could hear Dean's snarky comments, his irritating dudes, the shaking of his head every time Dog did anything. And by god, did it hurt.
The guilt was eating him alive, but he knew there was nothing he could do about it.
The God that's out there- not Castiel's absent father, the tangible god, the one who was a person, but the capital G God who exists but only in an unconscious hand guiding humanity- doesn't seem to let them die. So he has faith that Dean'll be back someday, somehow, and if he isn't... well, maybe Sam will meet up with him one day, but he's tired of running himself to the ground.
But the guilt never stopped chewing at him, and it was the worst.
That's what he thought it was for the longest time. Guilt. Because what else could it be?
It's always something with him, he likes to joke, always something that's not going well. Something's always breaking down and maybe he doesn't want it to be like that anymore! Maybe if he works hard enough, settles into a life a little less on the road, and gets used to living by himself, things will get better. Maybe he'll learn to be OK with it all.
“To our new house, right?”
“To our house.”
Their glasses clink together and she has this just... radiant look on her face. And Sam can't help but smile.
At first he would say its been a while since he smiled like that, but now she has him smiling like that all the goddamn time. It’s odd in the best way possible.
They haven't gone and bought a table yet, so they spread a blanket out on what will be the living room floor and set it all out like a picnic. Only it's inside, their meal is ramen from the package, and they're drinking wine in a homemade pottery mug and a Christmas cup. It's laughable, kind of, and all Sam feels is a kind of bubbly warmth that he never felt before. Maybe he felt it with Jess, he can't remember.
It's almost... it's almost unnameable.
He can't reach out and grasp just what it is.
“It’ll be nicer when we can move into it for real,” he says, taking a bite. They don't have chopsticks, just plastic forks from last night's takeout. “You know, put some stuff on the walls, maybe repaint them first... then it’ll look like real people live here.”
She snorts. “Yeah, I know, it looks like someone's just using it as a front to deal drugs or something, you know?”
“A ‘BnB for laundering.”
“Yeah, exactly that.”
It's not even the good kind of spicy ramen, just the regular 50¢ package, but it feels more like a dinner that he and Dean ever shared. It feels… not to get too ahead of himself, but it feels kind of like a real family.
He smiles at her, soft and genuine, and Riot whines on his bed, a beanbag they thrifted so he wouldn't have to sleep in their bed every night- they have to pay for laundry with quarters still, for now at least, and he is still a dog. It's one of his 'give me attention' whines, and Amelia laughs, leaning back so she can reach him, lying on the floor looking up at him with her big eyes. She scratches behind his ears, cooing.
“Poor baby,” she whines back, “we've been so busy! Have you not been getting the attention you deserve?” He barks as if to say exactly! “Aww, puppy.”
"He just isn't spoiled enough," Sam shakes his head, dragging another laugh out of her.
He loves that she named him that. A dog named Riot, the gentlest boy anyone could ask for.
“Tomorrow well take him on a big walk.” She sits back up, wiping her hands on the paper towel on her lap and clearing her throat. “There's a big forest preserve nearby that I think hell have a good time with, right?”
“Definitely.” Sam doesn't think about all his encounters at forest preserves, because that's not relevant right now. It hasn't been relevant in a while.
This is it. This is the American dream, a suburban utopia.
For one night in a while, the thought doesn't cause a chasm to open in his stomach, fill up with guilt and spill over. He waits, expectantly, jaw clenched like it's coming to overtake him, but then it... doesn't.
It's just the two of them. A boy and a girl. In love. Sitting on the floor for dinner.
A week or so passes.
Amelia's busy working. Since she started back up with dentistry it's been a bit hectic, and Sam's alright with it. He's being supportive.
They have dishes now, more than a few, and they've started cooking. Sam's gotten good at a few dishes, right now he's trying to master casserole. Other than that, they've been eating a lot of rice. He walked Riot down to the grocery store early this morning, still in the habit of waking up at an ungodly hour, and surprised her with an omelet and whole-wheat toast.
She got home late, saying that she worked insane overtime, and she's exhausted. So she's upstairs sleeping and Sam's doing the chores.
He stands there, scrubbing their dishes, his hands starting to wrinkle with the water. He stares down at the plates, and that feeling starts to come back up.
Sam squeezes his eyes shut for just a moment, the world disappearing around him.
He thought that whatever this was, it was gone.
He's not guilty anymore. It's not guilt because it can't be, and it's not fear or anxiety or insanity.
Everything is good, everything is fine, but this feeling just doesn't go away. He can sit there as much as he want with all these good things- not suffocatingly good, just… just enough. The alternative lifestyle he always wished for.
But somehow, if he sits and rests, those feelings creep up on him, and he has to get moving again to keep them down.
Sam didn’t mean to unturn those stones. He was perfectly happy to leave them unturned, as a matter of fact.
He can't help being bored, and there's only so much time you can spend in your own head without getting bored. He walks Dog, he sits around, he tries to get back into reading. This has been his life for almost a month, and he's been done with hunting for almost a year. It shouldn't be boring to sit around and have a life like everyone else, but at a certain point he wonders how they do it.
He gets restless, and he starts drinking. And when he starts drinking, he wants to avoid places where he'd see anyone he knew.
Back in college he went to a few gay bars, because hey, it's college? What else is that experience fo other than making out with a few guys to see if you like it and realizing that no, bisexuality could not be for you.
There's not many in the middle of nowhere, and the scene's different than Sam remembers it.
He has to drive out a little bit, but when he's there, it's like a breath of fresh air.
Without cutting his hair in more than a while he has to start tying it back, but because of how he trims it some parts aren't long enough to make the ponytail, so he has little bangs like a girl. His outfit balances it out to be just as masculine as he wants, though, none of it makes him look gay. Other than his hair, he tries to wear his straightest outfit, plugs headphones into his cell, and orders a few drinks to take to the back of the room.
The only problem with gay bars is that everyone is just a little bit too friendly.
Not in a necessarily sexual way. Nobody wants to let somebody sit by themself, despite the signals that that's all they want to do.
Most of the encounters go away quickly after Sam repeats “What?” Enough times before eventually taking his headphones off, looking annoyed. He hasn't drank enough to get actually drunk, just enough to be pleasantly buzzed out of his mind.
That's the thing he regrets most of that time on the road, how high of a tolerance he has.
HA!
This is nothing like those dingy bars Dean would drag them too. There's no pool table, the music is much louder, and people are talking in excited, animated voices. It's a much more positive environment if you want to drink to forget your troubles.
The only real interaction Sam has is when two girls sit down across his table, having to drag over chairs to talk.
“You know,” the feminine one starts, “you don't have to sit all the way in the back if you don't want to. A lot of environments aren't the best for girls like us, but this one's good.” She squeezes the hand of the other one, who is either an incredibly effeminate goth man or a boxy girl. “It's alright.”
“Huh?”
She repeats herself, and Sam sighs, wondering what on earth made her think he was a girl.
“Huh?” He half removes one headphone, waiting for them to get frustrated and leave, but she just repeats herself again, and then the other one starts.
This is his third night here, and no one has ever been so... insistent on having a versation.
Goddamn gays are getting a little too friendly.
The androgynous one nods. “I mean, yeah, there are some creeps, but they're pretty easy to spot and they will be kicked out. You just have to say the word, you know? We look after each other here.”
OK, so definitely a dude.
“Look, man, I'm just here to drink.”
“Right. And we're just here to tell you... you don't have to pretend. There's a girl here who sells DIY HRT, if you're concerned about that, but not everybody here has insanely high standards, E isn't a requirement-”
“I'm serious,” he says, laughing a little. “I'm not a chick, I have- I have no idea why you would think that. I'm not very androgynous, no offense, and I have no idea what any of these words mean.”
The man laughs. “Then you really have some soul searching to do, sister.” Man? Probably a man. Or… probably not. Sam has no idea anymore.
“That, or you need to stop lying,” the other chips in.
Sam raises his eyebrows. “Wow.” That's just... “wow.” Rude. “If anyone's the one with a masculinity problem, it'd be my brother.”
“OK,” the genderless one shrugs. “Just letting you know there are people you can talk to. You don't have to be so defensive.” She, or whatever, gets up, reaching for her partners hand and twirling her as they stand. “Back to the bar?”
Sam sits quietly for another moment, finishing his drink.
He's going to go home, and then he's going to have some googling to do.
There were few things worse than explaining to Amelia why he was hanging at a gay bar. He tried to explain that his brother had a drinking problem and he did by proxy, and she almost cried a little bit. And then he didn't want to explain the things he had been googling.
He wasn't a girl, he wasn't- he wasn't trans. A lot of what he found was porn that looked weird and degrading, nothing he could see himself in. But some of the blog posts…
He pushed those thoughts out of his mind until a few weeks later, when she was doing her makeup in the morning before work.
It wasn't his fault. He couldn't help it.
They all talked about their first times... doing girl things, feeling like a girl externally, how it felt so liberating.
What he told himself was that he was just checking that he didn't really feel that way, that he was just a guy who was curious. A midlife crisis was all this was, and he'd get over it.
When he expressed curiosity in what makeup felt like, Amelia grinned and told him to shave a little closer. That evening they sat side by side on the couch, facing each other, and keeping his eyes closed so she could draw shapes and patterns on his eyelids and soften his face with her creams and powders was a kind of vulnerability, a kind of intimacy he'd never felt before. It was terrifying, but they both smiled at each other and laughed when she was done, and Sam realized how weird it was to kiss someone with lipstick on.
…
And yeah, the 'he' thing didn't really last, either.
After reassuring Amelia that she wasn't gay, she didn't like men(Saying “I tried in college, but who didn't?” got a laugh from her), they went to the doctor. They got her a prescription and went shopping for women's jeans and women's flannel.
“I've spent years in these clothes, do you think I'm suddenly gonna want to wear, what, tube tops and short shorts?”
She kissed her cheek and said “I love you so much. But we are going to have to get you some fitting bras soon.”
Then it was over. She sat by herself all day in that old house, avoiding the mirrors.
There's a word for that old, creeping feeling. Dysphoria. It's not just her body, it wasn't until she opened those doors and it flooded over her, before it was just… that creeping dissatisfaction with the world. With how she fit into
She won't look too different, unless you're looking closely. Electrolysis has made it so that she doesn't have to shave, she doesn't really wear makeup. There's not too much of a point, anyway, except on nights out when she wants to feel cool and sexy and like a woman in someone else's eyes.
Without changing much of how she dressed and her tits still small, it's not all that much. She doesn’t look too different.
Except how when she looks in the mirror she sees a mannish woman, and she's fine with that.
Oh, how things have changed, and how they haven’t one bit.
She doesn't have that common lament most other trans folks she met seem to have- what would've happened if I'd known younger? How much better could it have been? Look at all that I could’ve reversed!
It doesn’t work like that for her.
You can't be a hunter in the world like this. You can't go out and be tough and kill shit, not because the things that go bump in the night will somehow have another reason to kill you- that's normal. No, you can't because you'll never be able to impersonate FBI again, you can never work with the police, you can't go to the grocery store without being marked out as other. There's no way to go unnoticed, not really. And that's not even to mention how other hunters would treat you.
No, you'd never work again.
Would she really hate that so much, though? She's happy to be done, even if she did still wind up back in the cabin.
They never really leave. It always finds them, in the end. This is all they have to go back to.
A knock at the door startles her out of her thoughts and she goes to answer it, maybe a little carless. Dean's face at the door almost shocks her, and she stutters, “uh, come on in.”
“Thanks.”
He trudges in without a second thought, popping the fridge for a beer. Sam makes a face to herself before moving to stand in front of the couch, surprised to see him.
“So... how've you been?”
“Oh, you know, bad- hold on.” He narrows his eyes at her and Sam brings back her old teenage habit of shrinking her shoulder in, this time to hide her chest. The cut of her clothes is undeniably off, her jeans hold up on undeniably plumper hips. It's not Ignorable. “Have you been hunting looking like this for the past... how long has it been? Jesus, you look like a friggin' girl.”
Sam inhales, corners of her mouth twitching. That, he hasn’t missed. “It's been almost two years. And, uh, that's the thing.” She cringes.
God, he's not going to take this well.