Sam still doesn’t quite get how they ended up staying someplace, after they left the Roadhouse. He’s not ungrateful - far from it, actually, because if they’d kept moving he’d probably still be jumping at shadows and thinking Gordon was right behind him every time he turned his back, because that’s the sort of paranoia that comes with constant motion, the feeling like you’re running from something just adds to the anxiety until it feels like you’re seconds from breaking. Or, that’s how it is for Sam, at least, and it’s already taken long enough for him to get used to the route from school to the bar they’ve rented a room above (Sam’s glad the school is walking distance; stable or no, living above a bar is still only one step above living out of a motel, and people would probably still think he was a freak if they knew), the buildings and trees and he’s learned the shadows enough to know there’s no one hiding in them, though he hasn’t been able to bring hmiself to stop checking. Not yet.
It’s taken time to adjust to not seeing his brother as often, too. For all that Dean can be the most annoying person ever sometimes, they’ve spent their whole lives together, pretty much, and so the absence of him jsut feels wrong. Sam’s had to learn how to handle sleeping in his own room (which he thinks two months ago he’d have loved, but now it just feels like the rest of the apartment offers too many hiding places for someone who doesn’t belong there), listening to the noises in the bar below and not jumping out of his skin if a glass breaks or someone starts shouting or slamming things around.
He’s got a gun next to his bed now, but he hasn’t grabbed it in the middle of the night in five nights. He counts that as an accomplishment.
His teachers had accepted emergency medical problems as a valid excuse, probably because he still looked like crap when he came back into town and had explained it to them the best he’d been able (making up stories, as usual, but there’s really no other option, nothing he could say that wouldn’t end badly). He’s grateful that it’s winter, so his long sleeves cause no raised eyebrows, and cover the healing wounds on his wrists well enough that he doesn’t get funny looks. He doesn’t know how he’s going to explain them, if somone sees.
It’s also weird coming back home (having somewhere worth calling home even if it’s not Home, in the first place, is a whole new kind of weird, but it’s a welcome one, one he’s going to enjoy while it lasts and try his best not to fully get used to because he knows it can’t be permanent, he knows that, he won’t even let himself hope otherwise) to find his brother cooking, singing to himself and generally being all domestic in the way Dean’s always seemed to want nothing to do with. Weird, but that’s not to say it’s not sort of nice.