#gonna be haunted by rufus forever probably

[cajolions]

I just finished reading Another Country. If you even care

[shirtlesssammy]

3x15: Time is on My Side

Then:

Dean made a demon deal and his time is almost up

Now:

Cuthbert Sinclair A dude finishing up a late night at the gym is attacked at his car and thrown into his trunk. Cut to him stumbling into a hospital, blood dripping, and insides (WAY TOO FUCKING GORY TO SHOW THE AUDIENCE <--production drafts of the script are my jam) falling out at the behest of a not very smart hospital attendant. 

Sam and Dean torture Patience Turner’s dad a demon for more information on who holds Dean’s contract. They can’t touch him --he’s more afraid of the demon holding the contract that Sam and Dean. Sam exorcises him. 

Sam tells Dean about the hospital dude. Apparently he had fingerprints all over him, that weren’t his own. The fingerprints matched someone who died in 1981. Dean’s all for hunting zombies, but he’s confused why Sam is too. They head out to investigate. 

They ask about bite marks around where the liver was removed. The coroner has instant doubts about their credentials. Dean’s in fine sarcasm mode and gets them kicked out. 

So, they’re not dealing with a zombie. They head to interview someone who just had a kidney stolen. He was jumped from behind and remembers the worst pain of his life. He’s extra salty (as he should be) and has no other information for the brothers. 

Sam does some research while Dean tackles a burger. Sam’s long discourse on maggots is a particularly fine moment for him. He tells Dean they know this story and pulls out their father’s journal. Doc Benton, a 19th century doctor, found a way to live forever --mainly by harvesting parts from other people. 

A man takes a break while on a run at night, and gets chloroformed for his laziness. He wakes strapped to a table. Suddenly one ugly motherfucker appears and starts tearing him open. Fun.

Sam and Dean track where the doc could be hiding out. Dean gets a call from Bobby who’s got a lead on Bella. He mentions Rufus Turner, who heard from Bella recently. Bobby warns Dean to bring a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue with him when he meets with Rufus. 

Sam wants to stay on the case. Dean wants to find Bella. Dean wants to know why it’s important to work this case. Sam reveals he’s chasing immortality. Dean gets mad. If Dean doesn’t go through with the deal, Sam dies. Dean wants the Colt to kill the demon or the hell hounds. Sam tells his brother that he’s staying. The brothers part ways. 

Dean reaches Rufus Turner’s house and is greeted with a super friendly, “What?” Dean doesn’t get far with the man. He pops outside to tell Dean that a while ago Bobby had called him to let him know if Bella ever contacted him, to let Bobby know. He did. (And in retrospect, man, Bobby was doing everything he could for Dean.) Rufus isn’t budging with Dean, so Dean pulls out the Johnny Walker. Dean has a new BFF. 

They sit down for a drink (or two --half the bottle is gone!). 

Rufus asks Dean why he wants to track down Bella when he’s got three weeks to live. Dean sobers at the realization that Rufus knows this. Rufus tells Dean that the Colt isn’t going to save him. “Folks like us? There ain’t no happy ending.” Dean pushes back on those very real words but it’s clear that Rufus’s words haunt him ---even if he beats the demon deal, his life isn’t going to be easy. 

Sam continues to track the doctor. 

Rufus gives Dean the details about where to find Bela, and warns him about her. They talk about how she burned off her fingerprints. “You do her ear?” Rufus asks with a smirk. 

“I’ll try anything once but that sounds uncomfortable,” Dean returns and...DEAN. BEAN. What a word picture you just painted! 

Rufus tosses Dean a thick file of intel on Bela, obtained through his mysterious contact network. Rufus, we love you.

Sam finds his way into Doc’s creepy shed. The creepy shed is a must-have accessory for the modern sociopath! Sam discovers the latest victim dead on the table. Next to him there’s  another slab where a woman lies tied down, maggots on her arm. She shrieks when she wakes up and sees Sam. Up above, Doc hears the disturbance and heads down to check it out. Fortunately, Sam and the woman are good climbers. They’ve escaped out the window by the time the doc searches the basement. Though Doc catches up to them at the car, Sam runs him over and they peel away. 

Dean ambushes Bela, ordering her to stand down while he searches her room for the Colt. She swears that it’s gone - she sold it already. Dean reads Bela her own sob story when she pleads for her life. She had her parents killed and inherited millions. Dean is smug and self-righteous, but we flash back to Bela’s memories. She’s young and crying while sitting on a bed. Her father walks in and closes the door…

Bela smiles coolly after the horrible memory. “They were lovely people, and I killed them.” Dean aims the gun for her forehead when he notices some brambles slipping over the doorframe. He drops the gun and leaves in disgust. Bela, clever girl that she is, reveals a motel receipt that she picked from Dean’s pocket. She calls someone on the phone to relay the Winchester’s whereabouts. 

Driving back from Bela’s, Dean is in a tailspin. The Colt’s gone and pursuing Bela turned out to be a wild goose chase. He’s facing his own mortality and it is a B I T C H. Don’t worry, Dean. Sam has a plan! Sam found Doc’s lab books which explain “scientifically” how he’s managed to stay alive forever. While Sam nerds out about the Doc’s Super Life Extending Elixir, he’s attacked from behind and chloroformed. Science!

When Sam wakes up, his eyes are taped open which is UNNECESSARY.  

Doc reassures him that he will almost definitely probably survive the procedure. He prepares his surgical instruments, all the while bitching about how much maintenance he has to do to stay alive. Creepy old men, amirite? He’s after Sam’s peepers and as fandom knows, Sam has EXTREMELY POWERFUL PUPPY EYES - so these are high value items. 

Doc holds up John’s journal and lets Sam know that there’s probably a good dollop of revenge in this eye stealing. He then pulls out a MELON BALLER and I flinch and pretend I’m not watching it start to scoop around Sam’s eye. UUUUUGH. A+ body horror, show.

Fortunately, Dean arrives and shoots some ventilation holes into the ol’ doc. The gunshots don’t seem to do a thing to slow him down. Dean jabs a knife in his heart and Doc just chuckles...until Dean waggles a bottle of chloroform. He soaked the knife in it, and now Dean’s managed to drug his whole system. I love one smart boy! 

Also, look at his skull bracelet! I love one well accessorized boy! I miss Dean and jewelry.

Doc passes out. When he wakes up he’s tied to the table. Doc pleads for his life - he can give Dean immortality. Dean looks at his ugly mug and probably thinks, “Nah, I’m too pretty.” Sam proposes taking the Doc up on his offer. It’ll be years before Dean needs new organs! (All of us fans just wipe our brow and thank this universe for throwing a healing angel at this Winchester and his put-upon liver and arteries.) Dean refuses utterly. He’d rather go to Hell than sign away his humanity willingly. 

When Doc wakes up again, he’s trapped in a refrigerator. He pounds at the door, which is chained closed. His book of immortality lies on top. The Winchesters bury him, shovel-full by shovel-full. 

Bela arrives at Sam and Dean’s motel room, shooting the people-shaped mounds in the beds. She peels back the covers and discovers two GRUESOMELY DYING….blow up dolls. 

The phone rings, and it’s Dean. He realized he was pick-pocketed and they cleared out before she could take them out. Dean also tells her that the herb above her door was devil’s shoestring, and is used to ward off hell hounds. He knows she’s facing down a demon deal now.

We flash back again to young Bela. A little girl swings next to her and promises to kill Bela’s parents and she won’t need to pay a thing for ten years. Bela confesses that the original deal for the Colt was to tear up her contract, but the demons changed it so that she would need to kill Sam as well to save herself. Bela cries as the clock ticks her life away. She confesses that she knows who holds Dean’s deal - it’s the same demon who holds her own. Lilith. 

“See you in Hell,” Dean says as a parting shot...AND also as a polite appointment for hellfire tea time. Bela hangs up the phone. In the distance, hell hounds howl. She stands, and awaits her fate. 

Rufus Quoter is Our Hero:

Dr. Quinn, medicine zombie

I'm not gonna let you wander out in the woods alone to track some organ stealing freak

You are knocking at my door, so don't "Look, man" me. I'm not your man

Ears are as unique to humans as fingerprints

This whole eternal-life thing is very high-maintenance

What part of immortality do you not understand?

Wow, demons untrustworthy? Shocker

My man Dave Caruso will be stoked to hear it.

Excuse me? No, no, we’re very smart

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[elizabethrobertajones]

Do you think Sam's reluctance to call the Bunker "home" has more to do with the Bunker's function as a library and a laboratory and a Men of Letter's charter house (essentially not his and Dean's, especially now that they know about the BMoL), or because he's probably afraid that any place he calls home will be taken from him (like when Azazel killed Mary, then when he killed Jess)?

DEFINITELY the second, but I think there’s room in the pie chart to say that Sam has always traditionally defined “home” in a white picket fence aspirational way that may not even make him happy, truly, without a lot of other terms and conditions (e.g. never once has he got to experience an attempt at normal life while actually friends with Dean/knowing he was alive/also emotionally at peace) but he does still aspire to this whole wife, kids, dog, big house, garden for them to all run around in thing… He might not even THINK he wants it at times, and he might settle or throw himself into hunting or see no happy ending or whatever, but he and Dean both have a strong image of this as the sort of suburban happy ending. Dean still emotionally seems less suited for it and still needs to be talked out of the idea that he will never have it because he’ll die in the process of securing it for everyone else, ESPECIALLY Sam, but he is also extremely adaptable to the sense of home.

Actually, Bugs has the best little metaphor for it - Dean keeps on talking about how suburbia gives him hives, while Sam is still basically convinced he’s on a road trip and after they’re done he can have another go at college and the normal life… Dean might disdain the houses but he breaks into one, happily uses the power shower, and generally sinks into acting the part in suburbia to get free food and access to the case. 

I mean Dean could make anywhere home, and we see him in general making more use of the places they use as home bases as homes - we don’t see him, like, getting domestic at Bobby’s, but he constantly uses the car yard for fixing Baby and hanging out, in a way Sam isn’t associated with, so he and Sam have a shared more business related relationship with the main rooms of the house where we normally see them for cases, but Dean has an extra, personal connection to the scrapyard. And at Rufus’s cabin, he colonised the sofa in 7x03 and later it seems to lowkey play a part as being a domestic space belonging to Dean, the symbolically worst example in 8x10 when Sam and Dean dump Amelia and Benny and Sam gives up the chance at a normal life again to spend it with Dean, who would have been there anyways so he is very much the one invited to sit on the sofa with Dean. 

And then obviously once they find the Bunker, Dean immediately settles in while Sam sees it as a valuable resource. Dean might have a bleak outlook on the future but in a way that means that he makes the most out of where he is at that exact moment. They find a weird bunker, Dean moves in and makes a house a home with throw pillows and lava lamps (I wish) while Sam is busy just reading everything there, determined to get the job done and that metaphorically is the character traits behind the argument in 8x14 where the nesting scene takes place, that escalates into Sam trying to do the trials, and Dean ends up just the manager of the home, and responsible for who should have been there (Kevin, 8x21) who is there (Kevin, after that, for the rest of his life Dean comments on his whereabouts when he isn’t in episodes) and who can’t stay (ow. Cas. 9x03.) 

And in 9x04 we see Sam has barely altered his room except for the TV for downtime, but other than that only brought more boxes of files to his room, opposed to Dean who made it a personal space immediately that you could recognise as his. I don’t really think at this point he’s holding out for the white picket fence but he has an emotional disconnect to the Bunker as home - Dean tries to kill him in it as a demon, and in 11x04, 2 seasons later, he still picks Baby as home over the Bunker, as we get the strong reminder of Swan Song in that episode, and how Sam has literally known no other stable home, we get the poking at the concept of “someone in the life” and Dean is much more open to thinking of the Bunker and where Cas is currently as “home” while Sam’s emotional connection is adrift, because despite their best efforts he just didn’t bond with the Bunker that way. 

And 8x22 is where Sam jokes to Cas that Dean was going to make the Dean Cave that took 5 years to actually show up, and these days Dean is getting even more comfortably happy in the Bunker and less worried about despite all the fighting and occasional murder or attempted murder that takes place there, it is still where they live and they deserve real comforts, while Sam still hasn’t expressed a strong opinion about the Bunker as home - I think Cas has referred to it that way in significant dialogue more often than Sam. And that difference in how they rate their work/life balance is a significant part of their low-key, mostly unstated character stuff that is nonetheless pretty much constantly on screen in how they relate to or have it relate to them when the question of home or the Bunker comes up. 

I think fundamentally Sam’s relationship to the job goes WAY beyond just what he calls home and it’s a symptom of his own issues - which tie in with the stuff he discussed with Rowena about Lucifer, and his lingering presence in the story where he just will not go away, but Sam (and Rowena) don’t get catharsis until he is dead. That’s the overall big issue, but there’s also the one from 8x03 about how Sam could leave the job 100% but at the cost of ignoring everything that might have been a case and assuming other people would handle it, which the discussion from the end of 12x18 and 13x15 seemed to be about - Sam is wandering back to that doing the trials mindset that maybe they could find a switch to turn off all monsters forever… (not happening - your legacy is Wayward Sisters and they’re gonna need things to fight for as many seasons as the CW can squeeze out of them if things go our way, no matter when you retire :P)

Ideally Sam needs to strike a MoL/Bobby level retirement, PROBABLY in a white picket fence house (You know, like in 3x10 where he walks out of Bobby’s terrifying haunted house into the garish garden… you know what, he should just buy Bobby’s and refurbish it, and then marry Jody and be a frequently mentioned but invisible background character and once per season cameo  in Wayward Sisters) and find a peace with his place in the world where he doesn’t have to be actively ensuring monsters are being killed, but can be chill about it all and get out of the job he never wanted to have. Hunting is in his blood and he’s happy doing it in some ways so I don’t think he can tear himself out of it like he wants to at his worst moments, and burying his head in the sand is a terrible idea, and he NEEDS a someone-in-the-life to understand him and for him not to end up with that dreadful problem where he doesn’t want to ruin their view of the world so he lies to them about his entire identity for their sake… but he’s also messed up and even being the younger sibling, I honestly think he needs retirement far, far, far more urgently than Dean does (and 13x14 has utterly broken me about that >.> GO HOME. GET A DOG, SAM). Dean, with no threats to his loved ones, could happily keep hunting into his early 60s with his angel, bizarrely younger mother, and smol nougat stepson at his side :P All people born into the life and more willing to continue the fight without being utterly consumed by it like poor Sam >.>