OOC: oh drop dead / i don't care / i won't worry / let it go
So, I've seen this go around a few RPGs in my day and I've always found them to be very interesting and a good way to help flesh out random pieces of your character that you might never really have the chance to touch on in logs, but that remain key to who they are and how you play them. Hope you guys enjoy, and hope you decide to give it a shot too.
1. He has more scars than his other self, at least more visible ones. They are his defining factor. Each of them has a story---a hunt, a fight, a mistake attached to it as pretty as a ribbon of memory---but they are stories that Sam has either stopped dwelling on or won’t share. They’re small scars, fine white lines and raised edges, and there are big scars. His most prominent one is the irregular burn tissue on his left forearm, the exact size and shape of Dean’s handprint.
It makes sense that reaching out for his brother would be the first thing Dean would do when the new power and the resulting panic hit---he hadn’t even realized he’d burnt Sam, that he was literally on fire, until he’d started gasping Dean’s name. Sam’s blistered skin had peeled away in layers, wet.
Sam traces over the handprint when he’s nervous, skimming lightly over the pearly-soft flesh just below his rolled-up sleeve with his thumb.
He doesn’t talk about it.
2. His favorite food is pancakes. Pancakes are, in Sam’s opinion, the perfect food: they are universal, like an unspoken synonymous landmark of the proud US of A, and he has yet to find a diner from Oregon to New York that doesn’t serve them. No matter what backwater town they’re in or what zip code they’ll be in tomorrow, there are, there have been, and there always will be pancakes. Sam won’t ever get sick of them, because sometimes having one or two things that stay stable and unchanging keeps him sane.
3. Sam has one tattoo, and he got it out of sheer necessity. יהוה, the Tetragrammaton, the name of God written in four letters, is a powerful, powerful piece of work. It’s a small tattoo, only about two inches wide and settled low on his right shoulder blade, but it was inked by a tattoo artist turned player whose thick arms had been scrolled with prayers for protection and whose instruments were all dutifully cleaned with holy water. The name of God prevents possession better than any talisman could hope to, and after the first time he’d woken up without any memory of the past week and Dean holding him, shaking and repeating Latin under his breath, the protection had become necessary.
His prayers may be watery, but he’s got God on his back. He figured that if he was meant to keep watching Dean’s six for all eternity, he might as well have someone watching his, too.
4. He takes his coffee black, two sugars. The cheaper the coffee, the more sugar he pours into it. He thinks that there’s some kind of weird property of physics that explains why that the closer you get to the west coast, the stronger the coffee gets. It was probably the Starbucks Effect, and the fact that Washington, Oregon, and California lived a highly caffeinated existence.
The only time he ever took his coffee like Dean drank it---”As black as my soul, Sammy; none of that sissy shit”---was when they settled in the northwest for two months, resting off some broken ribs from a wendigo hunt gone sour.
Sam will never forget the November rains rattling through the drains outside the window at night or the rich, dark coffee in the morning. He still dreams about it sometimes.
5. He somehow managed to miss the sex-ed part of sixth grade in all eight of the schools he attended when he was twelve. He didn’t think this was a problem, especially since he had a worldly older brother to tell him all about the birds and the bees.
Dean told him that when you like a girl, your dick gets hard because a bunch of blood rushes into it. If that girl doesn’t like you, your penis will keep filling with blood until it explodes in a wicked genital rocket.
Sam woke up screaming after his first wet dream, proving the timeless gullibility of younger brothers and that yes, Dean is an asshole. It took a lot of gentle coaxing strangled by half-helpless laughter from Dean to assure Sam that no, his dick wasn’t going to go off like a firework.
6. His first real experience with sex was listening to Dean and a redheaded cheerleader fuck on the couch when Dad was out of town on a solo hunt. He’d been eleven and Dean had been fifteen. She’d made soft, angry gasping noises that'd worried him, scared him, made him peer at them from down the hall. When he’d realized Sam had overheard it all, Dean hadn’t been able to look at him straight for two weeks.
7. It took until Jess to lose his virginity, but it wasn’t for lack of trying---at least on Dean’s behalf. Dean would bring home girls in pairs during the summer between his sophomore and junior years, and Sam would look up at him over his stack of books and half-finished glass of Kool-Aide, frowning and turning another page with sweat-sticky fingertips. Dean would waggle his eyebrows suggestively, and Sam would just shake his head, gather up his books, and move to another room.
He wasn’t a prude, really. He just wanted things to have meaning.
8. Sam was a vegetarian for all of six months when he first got into college. Jess was a vegan, and he didn’t want to look like some big, stupid male who couldn’t appreciate all the warm fuzzy creatures in the universe and who would rather gnaw on their delicious muscles than understand their plight. So, he pushed back a lifetime of diner burgers and greasy takeout and gave tofu and eggplant a chance. He liked it just fine and tried to keep to it after Dean dragged him back out of normality, but that lasted all of a week---
“Dude, you’re like the biggest friggin’ rabbit ever. BUNNYZILLA.”
“What, you like rabbits.”
“I’d rather have a tiger watchin’ my back. Steak is good for tiger.“
---but he’ll still order vegetarian gonzo food when he’s in an artsy district and Dean’s not around to give him crap.
9. If they ever wrote their story---names and monsters changed to protect the less-than-innocent---it’d be the next Great American Novel, Sam told Dean one time as the passed through the Midwest in the summer, the Impala’s windows rolled down while Robert Plant sang about stairways and salvation over the radio. Dean had arched his eyebrows---he hadn’t taken any surveys of literature classes, obviously, so he had no idea what he meant by it---and Sam had shrugged, feeling stupid.
When he thought about it later, he realized he was wrong. American novels were about going into the pastoral to find the self and become great. The Winchester men moved around like lone wolves, sure, but they were eternally caught on the hero’s journey---there was no home to go back to, no way to end the journey.
You don’t write great literary pieces on damnation.
10. His first term in college, he took an Intro to Poetry class.
Dean must never find out.
11. Not that he’s, you know, a big poetry buff? But he has this weakness for dactylic hexameter. Dactylic hexameter, the “heroic hexameter”, was the measure that the great epics were written in in Greek and Latin; if their Great American Novel didn’t work out, Sam thinks he’d write the Winchester epic in dactylic hexameter. Apparently, the meter was thought to be hypnotic---it puts the brain into a trance state, so that the words seep down to the deepest core of the audience.
If he ever tells Dean’s story, it’ll have to strike that deep. It’d have to be Greek, too: it’s that kind of tragic.
He totally got an A in the poetry class for being able to recite the first lines of the Iliad in the original Greek---(μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος: Sing, goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles)---and pretty much stickied-up the panties of every poet in the room.
How do you think he met Jess in the first place?
12. Jess had been his first and only real girlfriend. He’d met her Fall term of his freshman year, the cute girl in his poetry class with a mess of wavy blond hair and a couple chewed-up pencils she always let him borrow when he forgot his.
She took him out to coffee, decided he was badly raised and adorable because of it, and gave him her number. He gave her everything he had in him, twice over. He gave until he ached, he gave until he felt like he’d dug out a core in himself, he gave to the point of crying the first time he came in her. She’d found it---him---endearingly pathetic, and had never asked the deep prying questions.
The relationship with Jessica didn’t last long, but it was proof that he had something in him to give still, something that set him above and aside from the blind fanaticism of his brother and father.
13. It took him a couple of months and Dean’s reappearance for him to realize that he wasn’t so much different as he was obsessed with different white whales.
14. Sam used to like drinking a dark beer or two when he drank, but Dean has always been a the type to like his beer cheap and his alcohol hard and stiff. After five years of hunting by him, he sort of adopted some of those drinking habits to a lesser degree. There was one really memorable night of body shots with a pretty hunter from Seattle, and despite the first killer hangovers that resulted, Sam got into drinking hard alcohol, too. Tequila was his poison of choice, but he’s been drinking whiskey more and more since Dean’s death. A lot of things have changed since Dean’s death, really, and Sam does everything he can to hold onto whatever pieces of his brother he can still dig his fingers into.
This includes digging into Dean’s drinking habits, and maybe he kind of hopes it’ll kill him---alcoholism is just suicide on an installment plan, after all.
15. Dean Winchester left behind a car, a duffle bag full of clothes, an assortment of guns, a shoebox of personal belongings Sam hasn’t had the heart to dig through yet, and a brass amulet on a worn leather thong. Sam would have buried Dean with the necklace, but Bobby’d pulled it off before burning him.
He wears it under his shirt, the warm edges of it flush against his skin.
The really sick thing is that sometimes, it feels like he’s made what’s left of his life a shrine to a late great hero.
16. He’ll say that he’s moving on, that he’s giving up on bringing him back.
It’s bullshit.
17. Sam understands the world in syllogisms. His rhetoric professor had been a mean son of a bitch, and he’d pounded them into him until he’d breathed syllogisms.
Major premise: A demon killed his mother.
Minor premise: The demon got away with it.
Conclusion: They had to get revenge.
Major premise: The Yellow-Eyed Demon ruined everything good in their lives.
Minor premise: Their lives would be shit until they killed the Yellow-Eyed Demon.
Conclusion: It’d end with the Yellow-Eyed Demon.
(And that one was an example of the faulty logic that syllogisms sometimes presented.)
Major premise: Demons are evil.
Minor premise: Dean had demon blood in him
Conclusion: Maybe Dean’s death was supposed to happen that way, before he could go darkside.
Major premise: Family is important.
Minor premise: Mom was family, Dad was family, Dean was family.
Conclusion: His family should have been protected.
Major premise: Dean has his blood.
Minor premise: Dean has demon blood.
Conclusion: Either way, he was doomed to fail.
18. When he dreams, he lives in a small suburban house with a blond feminist-vegetarian-beautiful wife, a golden retriever whose well-groomed coat gleams coppery in the sun, two kids---a girl named Mary who likes ponies and thinks her dad’s just about the best ever, and a boy named John who has freckles and dark blond hair and a slow smirk that breaks Sam’s heart over and over---and the best neighbor ever. Dean lives next door in this dream world, and he has a job as a mechanic and a steady girlfriend he might actually settle down with one of these days---maybe a stripper with a heart of gold or something like that. Dean and Sam switch off on mowing lawns and building tree forts for the kids; Sam’s wife always makes extra for dinner because there are five place settings at the table and one will invariably be filled by her engine greasy-grinning-teasing brother-in-law.
When he dreams, he and Dean have hit middle age. They don’t hunt, they pay taxes, they go to soccer games and dance recitals, and they drink cheap beer on the back porch on summer nights. Dean is normal and alive, and Sam is still a whole person and not just chunks of human and soul stitched together with a thin thread of stubborn determination.
They’re good dreams, if impossible.
19. Sad thing is, Sam hasn’t really dreamt in a month. He has nightmares sometimes, but no real rest.
The days blend together, photocopies of endless hours spent poring over dusty old books.
20. Sam’s world has always been one almost void of women. Mom died early on, Jess was an almost-literal blip on the screen, and everything else has passed by too quickly for him to grab onto. As a little kid, he’d always ached for that soft touch, that maternal attention, without even realizing it---and, of course, John’s gun-hardened hands and JD breath were never there to give it to him.
Dean had filled that space, wholly throwing himself into his role as brother-protector-caretaker-mother. He always took care of him, and that meant rubbing his back and letting him sleep crammed in next to him on his single bed when he was six and plagued by dreams of fire and teeth.
When he wakes up from his nightmares now, sometimes he swears he can feel Dean’s hand in his hair again, smoothing it down like they’re kids again. He swears he can feel the hard edge of his silver ring, the low timbre of It’ll be okay, Sammy. I’ve got you, brushing over the side of his cheek.
And it’s enough to break him.
1. He has more scars than his other self, at least more visible ones. They are his defining factor. Each of them has a story---a hunt, a fight, a mistake attached to it as pretty as a ribbon of memory---but they are stories that Sam has either stopped dwelling on or won’t share. They’re small scars, fine white lines and raised edges, and there are big scars. His most prominent one is the irregular burn tissue on his left forearm, the exact size and shape of Dean’s handprint.
It makes sense that reaching out for his brother would be the first thing Dean would do when the new power and the resulting panic hit---he hadn’t even realized he’d burnt Sam, that he was literally on fire, until he’d started gasping Dean’s name. Sam’s blistered skin had peeled away in layers, wet.
Sam traces over the handprint when he’s nervous, skimming lightly over the pearly-soft flesh just below his rolled-up sleeve with his thumb.
He doesn’t talk about it.
2. His favorite food is pancakes. Pancakes are, in Sam’s opinion, the perfect food: they are universal, like an unspoken synonymous landmark of the proud US of A, and he has yet to find a diner from Oregon to New York that doesn’t serve them. No matter what backwater town they’re in or what zip code they’ll be in tomorrow, there are, there have been, and there always will be pancakes. Sam won’t ever get sick of them, because sometimes having one or two things that stay stable and unchanging keeps him sane.
3. Sam has one tattoo, and he got it out of sheer necessity. יהוה, the Tetragrammaton, the name of God written in four letters, is a powerful, powerful piece of work. It’s a small tattoo, only about two inches wide and settled low on his right shoulder blade, but it was inked by a tattoo artist turned player whose thick arms had been scrolled with prayers for protection and whose instruments were all dutifully cleaned with holy water. The name of God prevents possession better than any talisman could hope to, and after the first time he’d woken up without any memory of the past week and Dean holding him, shaking and repeating Latin under his breath, the protection had become necessary.
His prayers may be watery, but he’s got God on his back. He figured that if he was meant to keep watching Dean’s six for all eternity, he might as well have someone watching his, too.
4. He takes his coffee black, two sugars. The cheaper the coffee, the more sugar he pours into it. He thinks that there’s some kind of weird property of physics that explains why that the closer you get to the west coast, the stronger the coffee gets. It was probably the Starbucks Effect, and the fact that Washington, Oregon, and California lived a highly caffeinated existence.
The only time he ever took his coffee like Dean drank it---”As black as my soul, Sammy; none of that sissy shit”---was when they settled in the northwest for two months, resting off some broken ribs from a wendigo hunt gone sour.
Sam will never forget the November rains rattling through the drains outside the window at night or the rich, dark coffee in the morning. He still dreams about it sometimes.
5. He somehow managed to miss the sex-ed part of sixth grade in all eight of the schools he attended when he was twelve. He didn’t think this was a problem, especially since he had a worldly older brother to tell him all about the birds and the bees.
Dean told him that when you like a girl, your dick gets hard because a bunch of blood rushes into it. If that girl doesn’t like you, your penis will keep filling with blood until it explodes in a wicked genital rocket.
Sam woke up screaming after his first wet dream, proving the timeless gullibility of younger brothers and that yes, Dean is an asshole. It took a lot of gentle coaxing strangled by half-helpless laughter from Dean to assure Sam that no, his dick wasn’t going to go off like a firework.
6. His first real experience with sex was listening to Dean and a redheaded cheerleader fuck on the couch when Dad was out of town on a solo hunt. He’d been eleven and Dean had been fifteen. She’d made soft, angry gasping noises that'd worried him, scared him, made him peer at them from down the hall. When he’d realized Sam had overheard it all, Dean hadn’t been able to look at him straight for two weeks.
7. It took until Jess to lose his virginity, but it wasn’t for lack of trying---at least on Dean’s behalf. Dean would bring home girls in pairs during the summer between his sophomore and junior years, and Sam would look up at him over his stack of books and half-finished glass of Kool-Aide, frowning and turning another page with sweat-sticky fingertips. Dean would waggle his eyebrows suggestively, and Sam would just shake his head, gather up his books, and move to another room.
He wasn’t a prude, really. He just wanted things to have meaning.
8. Sam was a vegetarian for all of six months when he first got into college. Jess was a vegan, and he didn’t want to look like some big, stupid male who couldn’t appreciate all the warm fuzzy creatures in the universe and who would rather gnaw on their delicious muscles than understand their plight. So, he pushed back a lifetime of diner burgers and greasy takeout and gave tofu and eggplant a chance. He liked it just fine and tried to keep to it after Dean dragged him back out of normality, but that lasted all of a week---
“Dude, you’re like the biggest friggin’ rabbit ever. BUNNYZILLA.”
“What, you like rabbits.”
“I’d rather have a tiger watchin’ my back. Steak is good for tiger.“
---but he’ll still order vegetarian gonzo food when he’s in an artsy district and Dean’s not around to give him crap.
9. If they ever wrote their story---names and monsters changed to protect the less-than-innocent---it’d be the next Great American Novel, Sam told Dean one time as the passed through the Midwest in the summer, the Impala’s windows rolled down while Robert Plant sang about stairways and salvation over the radio. Dean had arched his eyebrows---he hadn’t taken any surveys of literature classes, obviously, so he had no idea what he meant by it---and Sam had shrugged, feeling stupid.
When he thought about it later, he realized he was wrong. American novels were about going into the pastoral to find the self and become great. The Winchester men moved around like lone wolves, sure, but they were eternally caught on the hero’s journey---there was no home to go back to, no way to end the journey.
You don’t write great literary pieces on damnation.
10. His first term in college, he took an Intro to Poetry class.
Dean must never find out.
11. Not that he’s, you know, a big poetry buff? But he has this weakness for dactylic hexameter. Dactylic hexameter, the “heroic hexameter”, was the measure that the great epics were written in in Greek and Latin; if their Great American Novel didn’t work out, Sam thinks he’d write the Winchester epic in dactylic hexameter. Apparently, the meter was thought to be hypnotic---it puts the brain into a trance state, so that the words seep down to the deepest core of the audience.
If he ever tells Dean’s story, it’ll have to strike that deep. It’d have to be Greek, too: it’s that kind of tragic.
He totally got an A in the poetry class for being able to recite the first lines of the Iliad in the original Greek---(μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος: Sing, goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles)---and pretty much stickied-up the panties of every poet in the room.
How do you think he met Jess in the first place?
12. Jess had been his first and only real girlfriend. He’d met her Fall term of his freshman year, the cute girl in his poetry class with a mess of wavy blond hair and a couple chewed-up pencils she always let him borrow when he forgot his.
She took him out to coffee, decided he was badly raised and adorable because of it, and gave him her number. He gave her everything he had in him, twice over. He gave until he ached, he gave until he felt like he’d dug out a core in himself, he gave to the point of crying the first time he came in her. She’d found it---him---endearingly pathetic, and had never asked the deep prying questions.
The relationship with Jessica didn’t last long, but it was proof that he had something in him to give still, something that set him above and aside from the blind fanaticism of his brother and father.
13. It took him a couple of months and Dean’s reappearance for him to realize that he wasn’t so much different as he was obsessed with different white whales.
14. Sam used to like drinking a dark beer or two when he drank, but Dean has always been a the type to like his beer cheap and his alcohol hard and stiff. After five years of hunting by him, he sort of adopted some of those drinking habits to a lesser degree. There was one really memorable night of body shots with a pretty hunter from Seattle, and despite the first killer hangovers that resulted, Sam got into drinking hard alcohol, too. Tequila was his poison of choice, but he’s been drinking whiskey more and more since Dean’s death. A lot of things have changed since Dean’s death, really, and Sam does everything he can to hold onto whatever pieces of his brother he can still dig his fingers into.
This includes digging into Dean’s drinking habits, and maybe he kind of hopes it’ll kill him---alcoholism is just suicide on an installment plan, after all.
15. Dean Winchester left behind a car, a duffle bag full of clothes, an assortment of guns, a shoebox of personal belongings Sam hasn’t had the heart to dig through yet, and a brass amulet on a worn leather thong. Sam would have buried Dean with the necklace, but Bobby’d pulled it off before burning him.
He wears it under his shirt, the warm edges of it flush against his skin.
The really sick thing is that sometimes, it feels like he’s made what’s left of his life a shrine to a late great hero.
16. He’ll say that he’s moving on, that he’s giving up on bringing him back.
It’s bullshit.
17. Sam understands the world in syllogisms. His rhetoric professor had been a mean son of a bitch, and he’d pounded them into him until he’d breathed syllogisms.
Major premise: A demon killed his mother.
Minor premise: The demon got away with it.
Conclusion: They had to get revenge.
Major premise: The Yellow-Eyed Demon ruined everything good in their lives.
Minor premise: Their lives would be shit until they killed the Yellow-Eyed Demon.
Conclusion: It’d end with the Yellow-Eyed Demon.
(And that one was an example of the faulty logic that syllogisms sometimes presented.)
Major premise: Demons are evil.
Minor premise: Dean had demon blood in him
Conclusion: Maybe Dean’s death was supposed to happen that way, before he could go darkside.
Major premise: Family is important.
Minor premise: Mom was family, Dad was family, Dean was family.
Conclusion: His family should have been protected.
Major premise: Dean has his blood.
Minor premise: Dean has demon blood.
Conclusion: Either way, he was doomed to fail.
18. When he dreams, he lives in a small suburban house with a blond feminist-vegetarian-beautiful wife, a golden retriever whose well-groomed coat gleams coppery in the sun, two kids---a girl named Mary who likes ponies and thinks her dad’s just about the best ever, and a boy named John who has freckles and dark blond hair and a slow smirk that breaks Sam’s heart over and over---and the best neighbor ever. Dean lives next door in this dream world, and he has a job as a mechanic and a steady girlfriend he might actually settle down with one of these days---maybe a stripper with a heart of gold or something like that. Dean and Sam switch off on mowing lawns and building tree forts for the kids; Sam’s wife always makes extra for dinner because there are five place settings at the table and one will invariably be filled by her engine greasy-grinning-teasing brother-in-law.
When he dreams, he and Dean have hit middle age. They don’t hunt, they pay taxes, they go to soccer games and dance recitals, and they drink cheap beer on the back porch on summer nights. Dean is normal and alive, and Sam is still a whole person and not just chunks of human and soul stitched together with a thin thread of stubborn determination.
They’re good dreams, if impossible.
19. Sad thing is, Sam hasn’t really dreamt in a month. He has nightmares sometimes, but no real rest.
The days blend together, photocopies of endless hours spent poring over dusty old books.
20. Sam’s world has always been one almost void of women. Mom died early on, Jess was an almost-literal blip on the screen, and everything else has passed by too quickly for him to grab onto. As a little kid, he’d always ached for that soft touch, that maternal attention, without even realizing it---and, of course, John’s gun-hardened hands and JD breath were never there to give it to him.
Dean had filled that space, wholly throwing himself into his role as brother-protector-caretaker-mother. He always took care of him, and that meant rubbing his back and letting him sleep crammed in next to him on his single bed when he was six and plagued by dreams of fire and teeth.
When he wakes up from his nightmares now, sometimes he swears he can feel Dean’s hand in his hair again, smoothing it down like they’re kids again. He swears he can feel the hard edge of his silver ring, the low timbre of It’ll be okay, Sammy. I’ve got you, brushing over the side of his cheek.
And it’s enough to break him.