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Sam starts school late.
He walks into his first classroom holding his teacher’s hand -- large like his father’s, but with skin soft like Dean’s.
When she lets go, he doesn’t know what to do.
His classmates are sitting in a circle, rolling a ball to one another across the floor, playing a game he doesn’t understand. He stands where he is, watching,
I’m Outside, he thinks. He can hear the capital letter in his head, but he doesn't know what it means.
--
Sam studies vocabulary while they’re on the road, learning synonyms beyond his grade level, different words that mean the same things.
Sam cries at school, sometimes, loud and ugly, tears streaming down his face, nose running, eyes swollen. He could call it sobbing or bawling or weeping, but it wouldn’t change the fact he can’t describe the why behind it, can’t articulate the reasons it’s different from the way the other kids cry because they scraped their knees or dropped their lunch.
Sometimes Sam cries other places, too. In motels, in the car. That’s worse, somehow. His father tells him, Be more like Dean, boy. Dad thinks Dean doesn’t cry, but that’s only because Dean’s better at it.
Sam’s better with words, but he still doesn’t know how to explain that everything is wrong, including himself. His blubberingkeeningsnivelling isn’t cutting it. He doesn’t know what to say.
--
In fifth grade, Sam has to do a report on a non-human animal.
He thinks of his father’s journal, of the worn pages filled with crude drawings of the twisted forms of wendigo, of rougarou, of chupacabra.
He picks koalas. He researches where they’re found, what they eat, how they communicate, how they live. He makes a diorama. He gets an A.
He researches people, too. He watches movies and reads books and silently absorbs information about what people do when they’re not at school, what it’s like to work a nine to five job and come home to the same place every day for years, how normal people celebrate birthdays and holidays. He watches his classmates come to school in clean clothes, eat homemade lunches, run into their parents’ open arms when they come to pick them up.
Sam studies people like he’s going to be tested on it, on all these habits that are so foreign to him that he may as well be a member of a different species.
It’s not terribly inaccurate, he realizes. He’s about as close to being normal as he is to being a koala.
--
Sam learns about variables, about how you can use the information you have to figure out the pieces that you don’t.
The first time an adult asks him what’s wrong based solely on the look on his face, Sam says, “Everything.” They roll their eyes. They say, “You’re not even old enough to have real problems.”
Sam isn’t sure what constitutes “real problems,” but he’s pretty sure he has them. But even if he wanted to describe them, where would he begin?
He starts leaving things out. He doesn’t say he lives in a car and a series of motels. He doesn’t say his mom is dead and his dad is an asshole. He doesn’t tell people about the family business.
On the nights Sam is unable to sleep because Dean and his dad are gone on a hunt and he hasn’t heard from them, the nights where he can’t stop thinking about the fact that they could be dead and he wouldn’t even know, he plans out everything he isn’t going to say. He gets himself ready for school the next day and sits through class obediently and when people ask what’s wrong, he says, “Just tired.”
Sam is becoming one big variable.
No one ever puts two and two together.
--
There is a set of all the things Sam has.
It’s an open set, Sam learns: you can do things to its contents that will result in them becoming something else. Burn his house to the ground, for instance, and home moves firmly into a different set: everything Sam doesn’t have, can’t have, will never have.
Small towns are the worst reminders, those places where everyone knows each other, where his classmates have grown up together from the time they were babies.
He has the ability to connect with people that he supposes comes from moving around so much, from always having to readjust. He’s learned to find common ground as quickly as possible so he can treasure his time with people for the few weeks or months he’s going to know them.
But that’s different from forging bonds that last a lifetime. Sam doesn’t have any friends he’s known since childhood. He never will. That’s something that can’t be undone. There is no way to change it, no matter how badly he wants it. The emptiness in his life is a closed set.
In other words, the boundary of Sam’s life is defined by the things he’ll never have.
--
There’s a normal distribution for everything, even if no one has published a paper on it.
Sam is getting good at pretending he falls in the middle. It’s easy, usually. His classmates say, “Hey Sam, how’s it going?” and he offers them nothing more than the expected response, polite but terse: “Fine, you?”
Other things are harder. He tries, at first, not to lie. People ask what he’s doing over the holidays and he says he’s staying at school. There’s the awkward pause, the interval where they don’t know what to say before they try their best to crack a joke, saying, “What, avoiding your parents or something?” Sam forces a laugh and says, “Something like that.” Something that will at least keep him within one or two standard deviations of the expected value.
But there’s only so much he can do. When people ask about his childhood, about his family, about what schools he went to, about the scariest or most embarrassing or most traumatic thing that ever happened to him, he has nothing to say.
It’s only so long before it catches up with him, before he starts wondering that if his formative experiences are things he can never share with his friends and things his friends will never share with him, can he ever really be known? Can they really be his friends at all?
He knows this isn’t the way he’s supposed to feel, that he’s not even within three standard deviations, not part of the 99%, not even close.
Try as he might, Sam is acutely aware that on the bell curve of social dynamics, he is definitely an outlier.
--
Sam thinks of his friendships as Venn diagrams, a constant quest for common ground to increase the size of the overlap between him and other people.
He fights tooth and nail for every inch. He goes to parties and study sessions and end of year celebrations and tries not to feel like he’s always on the edge of every conversation, tries not to notice that he’s never quite all the way in on the jokes.
He clings as tight as he can to the edge of that social circle, and just when he starts to feel it slipping from his grasp, he meets Jess.
Things are different with her, he thinks; there are parts of both of them that extend so easily to one another. He starts to feel like things are changing, like he’s finally making connections, becoming part of their group of friends, coloring in the center of that diagram with a bright new shade and labeling it safe, normal, happy.
When everything he’s built is torn from him like he should have known it would be, he realizes how thoroughly he had managed to delude himself.
There was no new shade, no common ground. Everyone else was part of the same circle, perfectly overlapping, and he was a single, solitary point that didn’t come into contact with it at all.
He has never been anything else.
--
Hypothesis: There’s no point in Sam trying to keep in touch with anyone from Stanford.
Why bother? Everyone has always gotten tired of him eventually.
It was easier to shrug off when he was younger, when he didn’t have a permanent address and no one had cell phones, when kids didn’t have their own computers and email addresses. He couldn’t have expected people to try and keep track of him. He knows it would have been unreasonable.
When he disappears into the night after Jess’ death, though, he leaves with dozens of names and numbers in his phone, message histories full of texts from people he considered his friends. To be fair, they do try for a while. He responds as best he can to the questions about where he is and how he’s doing and did he hear about what happened to Jess? He says: Family emergency. I’ll live. I did and I’m going to find the bastard that did it and make him pay.
Eventually, though, they stop trying. They lose interest. They always do. He can’t tell if he’s disappointed or if that’s what he wanted all along.
Either way, it’s all the proof he needs.
--
If Sam’s life were a lawsuit, he would be the underdog plaintiff.
To the Honorable Judge of said Court, now comes Samuel Winchester, complaining of the universe, and for cause or causes of action would respectfully show as follows:
This is all so fucking unfair. See Exhibit A: His entire life.
The discovery process is the worst. He sends out request after request for information, searching for answers, for meaning, for something to connect the pieces of this puzzle, and all he gets in response are objections: Irrelevant, burdensome, harassing; you can’t ask that, you can’t have it, you’re not allowed.
His case never even gets to trial. The universe gets out on summary judgment, a procedural shortcut Sam doesn’t have the energy to fight. All it has to do is file a motion that says: Plaintiff has the burden to prove he deserves something else.
And in that regard, he has no evidence.
--
Sam has faith in god, but he believes in Ruby. They’re not the same thing.
The latter, he feels, is academic, something rooted in empirical evidence, in the way she’s proven herself to him time and time again. She takes all of him in, his kindness and compassion, yes, but also his ambition and desperation, his passion and isolation, everything that makes him Other, and still looks at him like he’s worth seeing. He’s no white knight, he knows, but she tells him he’s going to save the world, anyway. She repeats it like it’s the only truth worth knowing.
He trusts in her with a confidence interval so close to 100% that the possibility of failing to reject his own null hypothesis isn’t even worth considering.
When he lies about her to Dean, he tells himself it’s because his brother wouldn’t understand, but maybe it’s just because he wants something to call his own.
When she finally betrays him, he doesn’t know why it comes as a surprise.
It isn’t his first Type I error.
--
Humans are outrageously good at adapting, and Sam is no exception.
Take olfactory fatigue, for instance. Spend enough time being exposed to particular odor and eventually you won’t be able to distinguish it at all. It’s the reason he can no longer smell the Impala or Dean’s jacket or his own deodorant.
Sam wonders if a similar principle applies to a person’s sense of self. If someone can feel wrong long enough that they stop noticing it entirely.
When he comes back from hell, he doesn’t feel much different. He does his job. He doesn’t make friends. When he leaves town, no one tries to stop him.
It takes an absurdly long time for him to realize Cas brought him back without his soul.
He’s pretty sure that’s something he should have noticed.
--
Sam is good at recognizing patterns.
He has to be, if he wants to be a good hunter. He works hard at it until he can take what other people see as random chance and recognize it as a case, until he can take disparate scraps of information and piece them together to figure out precisely what kind of monster they’re facing.
It takes so little effort at all to apply the same process to his own life.
There are names Sam keeps close to his heart, a mental list that he tucks away for future reference: Mary, Jessica, John, Madison, Ash, Ruby, Jo, Ellen, Amy, Bobby, Sarah, Kevin.
They are all people he loved, and besides the fact that he couldn’t keep any of them around long enough to find out if they really loved him back, there’s one other thing they all shared.
He’s the common denominator, here. He sees the pattern.
--
Sam is sitting around the same table as Dean and Charlie and Cas and he should be happy.
He should be happy, but all he can see is the way they’re a closed loop, Dean’s eyes on Cas, Cas’ eyes on Charlie, Charlie’s eyes on Dean. Sam is in a room with three of the people he loves most in the world and all he can think is that he is nobody’s favorite.
Sam thinks, I’m always Outside.
He knows what it means.