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Jack is quite the unusual child.
Aside from the obvious reasons, of course. But Dean isn’t interested in what’s not obvious, so Sam has no one to talk to about what he’s observed in the few months since they’ve taken him in. Dean’s made a concerted effort to not observe anything, in fact. Any Jack knowledge he does have is against his will, as he’s made clear. He’s spent the past month on an extended hunt in Nebraska just to stay as far away from Jack as he can get.
So, Sam is left to his own quiet observations as he watches his sort-of adopted son start the same I-Spy book over again in his room after being given some alone time. The kid’s grown into an avid reader since Sam taught him the basics on his first days in the bunker. He’d graduated from baby books to I-Spy to middle-grade adventures in only a few weeks. He’s recently shown an interest in non-fiction books about animals—specifically reptiles—written for adults, and although he struggles with some words, they don’t slow him down on his quest for fun facts.
But still, he goes back to I-Spy. He’s long since found all the hidden objects and learned what all the words mean, but he keeps returning nonetheless. Something else about the book must fascinate him because Sam swears he sees it in Jack’s hands at least once a day.
He asks Dean once, off-handedly, if it’s normal for a child to re-read the same book multiple times. Incredibly, Dean doesn’t pick up on the fact that’s he actually asking for Jack, so he answers honestly.
“Sure it is. You remember that weather facts book we got from a library when you were really little? Man, I couldn’t get you away from that thing,” He laughs over the phone, car honks in the background. “You knew every word inside and out, but you must have loved looking at those pictures of tornadoes or something because you kept it by your side 24/7. You even slept with it, if I remember right. And if I asked you even one question, you’d go on a long babbling rant about everything you learned, no escape. I tried to do the right thing and return it once it was time for us to skip town, but you threw the biggest tantrum of your life. You’d think I was beating you the way you screamed. But you were a weird kid, Sammy. So maybe it’s not normal.”
Sam blinks in surprise. “I don’t remember that. I mean, I remember the book kind of, but I don’t remember crying over it.”
“Oh, you bawled your eyes out, believe me,” Dean insists. “It was shocking, especially ‘cause you weren’t a big crier in general. Always real nice and quiet. That is, until you found a special something and it was about to be taken away from you. Then, you’d blow up with the force of a thousand tantrums, and there was nothing I could do but give you back whatever it was you wanted to keep.”
“Huh,” Sams says quietly.
That isn’t the last time they have a conversation like that.
Sam notices that Jack only eats nougat for breakfast, grilled cheese and nougat for lunch, and mac n’ cheese and nougat for dinner. Sam tries his best to introduce more variety, but every time he does, Jack scrunches his nose up and only takes a lick before loudly declaring that he doesn’t like it. Sam doesn’t push farther than that (mostly because he suspects that Jack’s angelic heritage protects him from developing dietary issues), but he wonders whether Jack would throw a tantrum if he did.
He asks Dean about that too.
“Yep, food was always weird for you. That I can confirm.” Rowdy bar sounds interrupt from the background. “Can’t tell you how many times you spat up spaghettios at me because you wanted cereal. I swear, your terribles twos were mostly just you versus all non-cereal food. Lucky Charms this, Lucky Charms that. One time, Dad insisted I pin you down to get some protein in you by force, and you didn’t speak for days afterwards. Total shutdown. I felt like a monster. That was the last time I did that. From then on, we just stuck to cereal and vitamin gummies, and that worked well enough until you finally grew out of it. I tell ya—weird from day one.”
Sam can hear the telltale sign of alcohol kicking in at the end with Dean’s words slurring together, so he doesn’t ask follow-up questions. He simply accepts the story from a time he was too young to remember and tries to move on.
Except he can’t.
Because Jack still begs for nougat every day and tears up at the slightest suggestion that he shouldn’t have it, and he re-reads I-Spy Treasure Hunt as excitedly as if it’s his first time. While Sam eats his own carefully structured daily meals and winds down with his nightly fiction book indulgence, he wonders if repetition is normal. Some is normal, surely. Having a favorite food is normal. Having a favorite book is normal. What’s so weird about knowing what you like and sticking to it?
And then, he considers the flapping.
Jack does it when he’s happy, when he’s anxious, when he’s thinking, even when he’s just plain bored. He sticks out his arms and starts flapping like a hummingbird. Sam considers that it might be a nephilim thing, needing to stretch his wings, but that can’t be it. Arms aren’t wings; Cas made it clear that they’re separate. One day, Sam sits Jack down and asks him why he does it.
Jack seems confused by the question. “I don’t know. It feels good? I just do it. Like how you bounce your leg when you sit down or tap your pen on the table or rock back and forth a lot. Oh, or crack your knuckles. You do that a lot too. Why do you do that?”
“Oh, um,” Sam flounders for a moment, caught off-guard by the question. “We weren’t talking about me. I just wanted to know if you were aware of the hand flapping and where it came from.” He pauses. “Do I really do all that?”
“Uh huh,” Jack answers matter-of-factly. “It’s kind of funny. I can tell whenever you’re reading something really important because your leg starts bouncing faster. It looks fun. I just like flapping better.”
“Oh,” is all Sam can manage.
Jacks nods and smiles big before walking off to his room, abruptly ending the conversation without a goodbye as he often does.
Sam lies awake that night for a long time, thinking about everything and nothing in particular.
There’s so much of his childhood that he doesn’t remember. Whether that’s due to trauma, Lucifer’s manipulations, or plain aging he doesn’t know. But watching Jack blossom into his own person with just the two of them in the bunker, it’s like Sam’s seeing a more innocent version of himself grow up before his eyes. In Jack, he is reminded of so many forgotten memories that weren’t deemed important enough to recall until now: memories of staring up at ceiling fans for long stretches of time, running in repetitive circles out of pure restlessness, or being convinced that certain foods were poison and refusing to eat them. And for what? What does it all add up to?
Sam has no idea. In another world where there’s no new prince of hell to worry about, no parallel universe trapping his mom with Lucifer, or better yet, no monster hunting at all, he might spend more time investigating. Those things might matter. But that’s not the world they live in. If it’s not something harmful or life-threatening, then he doesn’t have the bandwidth for it. That’s just the way it is.
But that doesn’t mean Sam can’t use what life experience he has to at least help Jack feel less alone.
The next morning, Sam gives Jack his requested nougat for breakfast and offers a suggestion.
“You know what I wanted to do more than anything when I was a kid?”
“What?” Jack asks excitedly. He loves learning new facts about him and Dean.
Sam smiles. “Make marshmallow nachos. Build a town out of candy. Mix pop rocks and soda. I didn’t have much of a kitchen or groceries growing up, so it was all in my imagination. Cereal was pretty much my only special treat, kind of like you and nougat. But we can do that today if you want—make a new kind of food, just for fun. Is there something you’d want to make?”
Jack’s eyes are as round and shiny as Christmas ornaments. “Nougat cabin. A cabin made out of nougat. There’s a brown cabin in I-Spy Treasure Hunt that looks just like seven nougat bars stacked on top of each other, and we could put chocolate chips in front to look like people since they’d need to be tiny to fit in the cabin, and we could crunch up nuts to make a walkway to the door and look like rocks but rocks we could eat. Can we make that?”
Sam laughs. “Sure, that’s a great idea. Maybe we could make an orange tree behind the cabin out of orange slices and eat those too.”
Jack hums in consideration. “I guess that would make sense. Oranges are the only orange food.”
Sam counts it as a nutritional win. He’s still not sure that nephilims can get scurvy, but why take the risk? In any case, this is certainly better than force-feeding vital ingredients to Jack and having him form the same strained relationship with food that Sam has. This is his chance to give him what he needs without ignoring what he wants.
Together, they make the nougat cabin, and Jack eats a whole orange slice that he grudgingly admits tastes good. Sam gets him to eat two more by showing him the “orange peel smile” and setting off a round of pure hysterical laughter from the kid. It’s one of the most fun days that Sam has had in a long, long time.
It also forces him to realize that maybe he’s been trying to make Jack grow up too fast with all the emphasis on reading and learning. Those things will always be important, of course, but isn’t it just as crucial for Jack to be happy? After all, how can he care about the world’s happiness if he never experiences it for himself?
Sam finds himself questioning the value of normalcy as well. He used to think of normal as a synonym for health and wellbeing, a sign that all was as it should be. But that seems far too simple an explanation now, if it ever was.
There was a time when Sam would have died to be normal. No one knew what was wrong with him, but they knew he was wrong. A freak. A weirdo. And with enough people in unanimous agreement, how could he deny the facts? So Sam crafted a version of himself with all those undesirable traits sanded down, hidden from view. But they were still there. Not even hundreds of years in the cage could break his habit of rocking back and forth, apparently. Still, that unconscious desire for normalcy remained, sticky as tar. Until Jack. Until he saw firsthand the joy he was meant to be protecting all along.
Whatever it is they share together, Sam hopes that Jack is able to embrace it fully. At least one of them should.