Chapter Text
Tecumseh, Michigan. That’s where it all began all over again. It had been a regular hunt - a simple salt and burn of a bitter high school teacher gone vengeful spirit. For once there had been minimal complications, not even a scratch on either of them.
Except…
Except Sam had caught a glimpse of a small, metallic green object that peeked from the Impala’s trunk when he was fetching the rock salt. His old iPod, half-broken and missing for at least a year. Given to him by a pitying stranger on his bus ride to Stanford. Still holding all of the songs he had fed his teenage pain with. Packed with memories.
Dean had headed to the local dive soon after the hunt. Sam stretched his long body on the too-short motel bed and plugged the ear buds in. As Sean Brennan began to profess his will to sacrifice for love, Sam was transported back to those first years of bleak solitude at the university.
I sacrificed too, he thought. I left. I thought it would stop if I wasn’t with him all the time.
Swallowing a lump of suppressed feelings, he realized that nothing stays buried forever.