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“I can't believe in the guns
I can't believe in the view
I can't believe in those hunters and kings
I got a new plan to bring
I got a new song to sing
And you know it's the easiest way”
- Wolf Parade, Dear Sons And Daughters Of Hungry Ghosts
*
Sam is reckless (lonely) and Allison’s (too) young and they fall into the same trap without backup. Back-to-back with her, Sam thinks when did I start feeling old because even at her age he was better with a knife, steadier on his feet. She’s brave and tactical, but she doesn’t move right.
It makes sense when she introduces herself as an Argent. He remembers Kate, how she spat out that she could fight, made Dean teach her. How she’d been raised to be smarter than that, and Sam envied her so much he picked college classes by what she should’ve taken.
“Sam,” he replies, and almost doesn’t add the Winchester, but it’s worth it just to see if it sparks something. He didn’t last long in college anyway.
*
He has his brother, she has Kate. It all circles back to them, and she makes Sam tell her about Hell, because that’s where Kate is. There are more things in heaven and—but one of them is her aunt’s soul, and one of them is Dean. It’s different for a hunter, crossing over.
With her chin on her knees on a motel chair, hair braided and pinned up and out of the way, Allison watches Sam Winchester crumbling. It looks like a steady process. They avoid each other’s eyes. This is the only life they’re allowed. This is a stolen moment.
She says, “Your brother—“ and he smiles sadly, cruelly. Says, He taught Kate everything he knew.
She says, “I’m here so I don’t turn into her. So they can’t turn me into that, my dad and her dad.”
She meets his eyes, keeps her voice as steady as she isn’t. Knows it’s no coincidence that Kate’s in Hell, Dean’s in Purgatory, and the people the two of them kept tethered to this sort of life can hardly stand to look at each other.
*
Just before she finally leaves, driven away by her desperate need not to turn into him either (Sam guesses), Allison gets absolutely and spectacularly drunk on the good whiskey in the trunk of her car. Sam tries to steer her to the bathroom so she can throw it up, but she digs in her heels and keeps talking about a werewolf. Something about Kate sleeping with an alpha instead of killing him.
“You’re drunk,” Sam says. “Go to sleep. Lay on your side.”
Sammy Winchester. Saaaammy. Grandpa told me about you. You’re really a Campbell, right? A soldier ‘cause you’re a boy? Grandpa, he said—Sam hates her a little—he said your dad went crazy when your mom died. Mary? Deanna? Campbell girl raised like my mom. And Kate.
“For fuck’s sake, go to sleep, Argent.”
and later,
You’re only a Campbell like I’m an Argent. We don’t have to be them. We don’t even—and what does she have to laugh about, when she ran away from home?—have to beat ‘em. We just live, see?
“Do you know how many times I saved the world?” Sam asks, exasperated.
She doesn’t get to talk about roles when hers gives her so much freedom. He just does, and does, and does. At the end of the day, he digs shallow graves and salts them. He knows the afterlife intimately. She can’t touch that, all of seventeen and an Argent to boot.
I left so my boyfriend would join his pack, Allison says, and Sam freezes. We live, Campbell. Get it?
And just then, he’s scared. This is someone who picked their losses. This is not a silent night, she’s not a storm in a teacup, she’s the whole damn hurricane. Sam remembers being in love like that. He remembers being her age, hating Kate, hating monsters and trying so hard to hate his dad. He doesn’t remember having a real chance.
Allison falls asleep holding her bow. Sam watches her, and thinks about a world where Mary Winchester lived to introduce him to his cousin Allison before their losses trumped the blood they share.