Sam Winchester’s Journal – Entry #12

H-minus five.

The handcuffs are done. There’s nothing else we can do now, just take a break before hitting the road again in a few hours. Dean has been too nervous to sleep; he pretended to go to bed earlier but he snuck outside to knock back a beer and think.

I’m trying to close my eyes and rest, shutting out everything the best I can, but all I see is a never ending swirl of colors, emotions, and memories that keep coming and going in circles. Everything ricochets around me, bumping loudly against the walls of my room. None of this mess is making any sense now except…except this noise, clear and familiar, echoing above the rest.

Ting, ting, ting.

It’s Dad’s dog tags clinking against each other. The chime of metal on metal from my childhood is something I can recognize from a million sounds. It was irremediably linked to my father like the friction of his hands against the leather wheel of the impala, the slow, deep rhythm of his breathing as he lay passed out drunk on a motel bed or the low mumble of his voice humming Paint it Black while shaving.

I don’t know why I am thinking about Dad now, why I’m reliving this day I got sick in the car because we spent eight hours straight on the road, till I couldn’t bear anymore the confining air of the Impala nor the same Led Zeppelin album played over and over again at full volume, until my head felt like it might explode. Dad stopped the car and took me outside to breathe some fresh air. He curled me up in his big arms and let me play with the dog tags against his neck to calm me down. I can see his drawn features, the blue circles around his eyes, his faint smile and the scar above his eyebrow. I can see how much we look like each other and that in spite of all my efforts, I am closer to what he used to be and to his ideals than Dean ever will be. It took me years to accept it and to follow his steps, to understand what kind of man my father was and what kind of man I have become.

I know that what we’re dealing with at the moment isn’t the future he had in store for us. He couldn’t imagine for even one minute that Azazel was only the tip of this iceberg of crap we would have to take care of. I’m sure he pictured for us a normal life after we took out the monster responsible for mom’s death: Dean finally settling down and becoming a mechanic, me going to Law school again and living in a house with a beautiful backyard, bringing my kids to the soccer game on Sundays, encouraging them to run faster than their cousins while Dean would do the same with his own children on the other side of the field.

But none of this happened and exactly like him, I’m gonna do what I have to do without an ounce of hesitation because I know that, even if what I have in front of me isn’t the best option, it’s the only one I have.

Like father, like son.