#if the bunker were sentient it would want to kick John Winchester too

[entropic-saudade]

Something that gets me the more I think about it is how based on 2x14 Born Under a Bad Sign and 12x21 There’s Something About Mary, along with other things we see throughout the show, is that most hunters still had homes. It doesn’t always have to be a life on the road.

As liminal as apartments can be, it’s still a stable living space. All the hunters Meg-as-Sam and brainwashed Mary (notable also, Sam and Mary both under the influence of an evil force making them kill other hunters, invading their homes and ripping what they have apart: just as what was done to them) killed had their own home or apartment.

Bobby had a home. Rufus had a home. Garth had a home. The Harvelles had a home. Jody had a home. Donna had a home. A lot of them had several living spaces if you include their cabins, or the various homes they moved to.

But Sam and Dean never had a home. John never tried to give them a base camp, he just kept moving them from place to place, motel to motel. They stay in other people’s homes instead: Bobby’s, Sonny’s.

They don’t have a stable place until they get the Bunker, because even after John died it didn’t occur to them that they could have one. And even then— like Sam says initially, the Bunker is just the place where they work. They both make it a little more lived-in over the years, but the Bunker’s status as “home” and “fortress” is one that is tragically and repeatedly broken down: despite the establishing episode claiming that no one could get in without the key and that the Bunker was impervious to any supernatural threat out there, repeatedly we see the Bunker broken into by demons, angels, monsters, reapers, Death, God and Amara, the British Men of Letters, etc. It gets haunted by Kevin (not blaming him here, just noting— everywhere they live and go becomes touched by ghosts of their past). Their home gets torn apart and almost set on fire by the Stynes, it gets searched and bugged by the British Men of Letters. In later seasons it becomes a working space and refuge for the Apocalypse World hunters, overrun to the point that Dean feels the need to retreat to his room (& again I’m not blaming anyone here, they did the right thing in homing them. But Dean also deserves a space to himself, as does Sam).

Their safe spaces are always violated— whether it be their bodies, their home, their car. Nothing they have is ever really their own.

[I’d also like to note, bc it’s kind of funny but not really, that the Bunker’s red alarms only go off a few times throughout the show despite the presence of dangers: in Chuck’s other endings, when the BMoL lock Sam and Dean and Lady Bevell in (the irony of their home becoming their grave). But the most notable example and also the quickest the Bunker ever is to set off the alarms is when after Dean used the bhaozu pearl thing in Lebanon, John shows up. I just think it’s so funny that the Bunker’s alarm system never fucking works properly but the minute John shows up the Bunker sounds off bc forget God and Lucifer and God’s sister— John Winchester is the real fuckin threat here]