#amaranthmeta

Obviously, she thinks it’s hot as hell that Sam can do magic, too, but there’s more to this. She has been expelled from the Coven. Earlier in this season, in 10x07 Girls, Girls, Girls, Rowena was shown trying to recruit those girls as students, with... very limited success.

It’s painfully obvious this is so not going to work, neither for the girls, nor for Rowena.

But hilariously, this scene is not the first time Latin is mentioned in this same episode. No, the first time was this little gem here:

It was even made clear that while the translation for the spell’s name was on the website, Sam looked up thoughtfully and just casually translated it on his own in his head.

I must have been blind never to notice the purposeful contrast between Sam and the girls before, but I seriously never paid attention to this detail until today. And that even though I’m a linguist. Pff.

(And yes, I do believe this contrast is completely intentional. Both 10x07 Girls, Girls, Girls and 10x19 The Werther Project are Berens episodes, and he does give loving attention to detail and parallels.)

Even though she probably wouldn’t admit it, Rowena craves the companionship of joint spellcasting. She’s been lonely ever since she has been expelled from the Grand Coven. She craves a kindred spirit she can nerd out with.

Enter the dude who calls her just to chat about a spell, and who can match her own intelligence and thirst for knowledge.

Sam’s initial reaction to this proposal kind of gets me, lol.

He’s a very intuitive guy with finely tuned senses. He absolutely heard how sultry her voice had become.

He declines (much to his own disadvantage, as the episode later shows. Things would have gone so much better for Sam had he taken Rowena’s offer!)

But, er... what is his face doing? This weird little smile that flares up for just a second, half tormented and half... something else, before he goes back to a far more neutral expression again.

Know what this reminds me of? This moment from 4x09 I Know What You Did Last Summer where Ruby is trying to seduce Sam while he’s desperately trying (and failing) to resist.

And here’s a casual reminder that Ruby, too, was a witch.

Even these profile shots are mirrored (and I can’t for the life of me tell if this mirror was done on purpose, or if it was a coincidence. If this was done intentionally... man.)

The positions of Sam with Ruby and Sam with Rowena are inverted, though, and I love that considering the fact that Sam’s involvement with Ruby and the demon blood and freeing Lucifer are some of his biggest regrets, and even his deepest hurt because it’s what makes him feel tainted and unworthy.

(That heavy swallow Sam does as Rowena says “dark magic” never fails to get me.)

So of course he’s trying absolutely everything and anything to keep himself from going dark side ever again. Little does he know at the time that this connection doesn’t end with him going dark side. It ends with Rowena joining the good guys! She’s his big success. She’s the deeply needed validation for his willingness to see the world in more than black and white. She’s the cure to that deepest hurt and his feeling of unworthiness.

But, erm, back to 10x19 The Werther Project and a timeline where none of that has happened so far:

Suddenly those sexually charged Rowena hallucinations he has later in this episode are making even more sense to me than they ever have before... as does the fact that he declined Rowena’s help when having a seasoned witch around who offered her help freely sure would have seemed like the more sensible choice here.

That he hallucinated her calling him “Sammy” when that’s something he always got mad about when it was done by anyone other than Dean is... certainly something.

I very much read the “It’s opening” not only in reference to the Werther’s Box, but also as Sam’s desire that’s woken up in full here.

And I don’t even mean that in an exclusively physical way, it’s also his desire for magic and knowledge and a kindred spirit and connection and being seen and appreciated for who he is and what he can offer, much like what Rowena herself craves after a life filled with rejection and never fitting in.

Yep. He is so gone on her.

And yes, I also see “it” very much as a placeholder for both of them.

Not even to mention the fact that he 100% trusted whatever this hallucination was telling him, no matter what.

Even if it was to make a blood sacrifice of himself.

To bring this full circle, let’s not forget that he also hallucinated Rowena being impressed by and appreciative of his knowledge of Latin, which... is so painfully ironic with regard to the beginning of this post, I want to bang my head against the desk.

Sam, buddy... you realize you didn’t have to make this shit up, right? You could have had the real one. She wanted exactly the same things you did. She actually appreciated your knowledge of Latin. You both could have been your sapiophile selves around each other all day long to your hearts’ delight.

No? Okay then.

To silence the box, slake its thirst... I mean, seriously. Come on.

And yes, I absolutely see the box as a metaphor for Sam’s deepest wishes. Which takes Rowena’s fondling of the inscription to a whole new level.

Then there’s also the little fact that this is what Benny said to Dean in Dean’s hallucination of Purgatory that was happening at the same time:

And guess what?

Dean woke up on his own.

Guess who didn’t?

Sam didn’t.

Dean actually slapped him, and Sam attacked Dean with a knife for trying to break him out of the illusion.

And even through all of this, even after Dean bandaged Sam’s bleeding wound and began to sacrifice his own blood instead, the Rowena illusion still persisted until the box was opened.

Oh well, indeed. And when Sam next met the real Rowena at the end of the episode, he put her in shackles in a desperate attempt to keep control this time around. Because he had already gotten dangerously close to losing all restraint, just like with Ruby.

I... rest my case.

(Who am I kidding? I’ll never rest my case.)

(Can’t believe they went so far as to even have a similar background in both 10x19 and 15x03 when Sam and Rowena were holding hands like this. Both scenes feature dark gray stone walls with rays of light falling in through a curved window. And Rowena is wearing an iron chain around her wrist in 15x03 to ward off the ghosts when everyone else was wearing the iron chain around their neck. Was this sheer coincidence or done on purpose up to the smallest detail? I feel like I’m losing my mind here. Again all of these are Berens episodes.)

On a side note, when I used the Werther’s Box inscription repeatedly in my Samwena video, I also very much had that metaphor in mind and saw it as them growing closer and closer. In case you haven’t seen the video yet:

Then Sam tries to handcuff her, and she falls back into her pattern of trying to mask her hurt with humor. She thinks she managed it by proving her superiority with that astral projection stunt. She's fleeing in a wild run because of course she wants to avoid getting captured. But I think she's partly also trying to run away from this hurt by physically distancing herself from the place it happened, and especially from the person who caused it.

Note how at this point it doesn't seem to be her plan at all to abduct Sam in any way. She's just trying to run.

Then Sam catches up to her, and she doesn’t even try to flee or fight or use magic. She’s just standing there, frozen on the spot, like she has to know the truth. She has to know if he’d actually do it, but she can’t even face him while he makes his decision.

Sam struggles, he does. There are actual tears in his eyes.

And he realizes he can’t do it. Everything inside himself screams at him not to. He lets the weapon sink.

Thinking Sam has made up his mind, Rowena finally dares to turn around to look at him in a moment of connection because she thinks it’s safe.

That’s when the promise Sam has given Dean takes over that he’d put a bullet in Rowena if she breaks bad.

After the car talk with Rowena in 13x12, Sam finally admitted how helpless he’s feeling to Dean. Sam has failed over and over again this season, and nothing would work out the way he’d intended. He got knocked out like 6 times during the last few weeks and Dean had to come save him multiple times. Sam thinks he’s the one who got Kaia killed, and that he’s the one to blame for Jack being stuck in Apocalypse World. And just one episode ago, he let Gabriel go after using the archangel’s grace to heal him. When Dean found out, he reacted with an extremely volatile outburst of frustration targeted at Sam specifically, for giving away their last hope of saving their mom and Jack. That outburst was loud enough to actually make Sam wince. All of Sam’s choices this season leading up to this point have turned out so terribly wrong that it cost people’s lives.

So Sam allows Dean’s choice to overrule his own because he has lost every shred of trust in himself and his own decisions. Sam can’t let Dean down again, he can’t.

He raises the weapon back up and pulls the trigger.

Sam can’t believe what he just did. He doesn’t want to see Rowena’s corpse slump to the ground. But the outcome he was dreading did, in fact, not happen because she stopped that bullet. Sam can’t bear to see the expression on her face and hear the slight tremble in her voice.

For Rowena, the hurt cuts even deeper than before, burning more fiercely than anything she has experienced in a long time.

Nobody was supposed to be able to hurt her like this ever again. She thought she had fortified herself against it ever since that trauma all the way back with Crowley's father who broke her heart by leaving her. She'd had no idea that Sam possessed the ability to hurt her like this, that they'd somehow grown close enough for this to be possible at all. And now the hurt just won't stop, so she short-circuits and tries to make it stop in the way her old self has done over all these centuries... by lashing out at whoever is hurting her, and making sure they can never do it again.

Naturally, the way she chooses to do this is by... putting him to sleep and transporting him into her room (How even? Levitation?) where she busies herself with lighting all the candles until Sam comes back to his senses. Then she cuts into her own palm, tears his shirt open, and presses her blood onto Sam's bare chest right over his heart. You know, as you do. Completely normal way of attacking someone. Absolutely nothing to see here.

(Also note that while the whole thing did seem to hurt Sam because he groaned in pain, no mark whatsoever is left on his skin. Not a burn. Not a scratch. She made herself bleed, but not him.) Death appears, and while Rowena is claiming that what she's doing here is killing Sam Winchester, her body language is telling the exact opposite. Throughout the entire exchange, she's threatening Billie, not Sam, with the knife. The whole thing hilariously looks like she's defending Sam against Billie! Her body is in a very clear defensive pose and she's positioned exactly in front of Sam.

Even when she finally turns her attention from Billie to Sam, supposedly to make true on her threat to kill him, it's only her head that moves to look back over her shoulder, but her arm with the knife stays aimed at Billie.

That damn knife never even gets anywhere near Sam. Then it's entirely gone in the next shot, so she must have dropped it as soon as she realized there was no way in hell she would cut into Sam's skin with it.

She’s talking softly with Sam about Crowley, but she is so confused. At this point, her emotions are boiling so high she can't handle them at all any longer, so they burst out into the open in exactly the same way they did earlier when she targeted Sam's heart, but this far more violent outburst is aimed at the target that won’t take any harm.

She doesn't understand what's happening, why she can't kill Sam to make sure she's the one in control, why she can't make the hurt stop in the way she has always done in self-preservation over all these long centuries.

Billie is the one who has to put into words what has been so glaringly obvious through the whole scene to anyone other than Rowena herself. "You were never going to kill him. There was a time you would've, but not now."

That's when Rowena caves and finally admits to everyone including herself that she has no idea what to do with all these feelings, because the only way she knows how to handle them is no longer working. She doesn't even get back to her feet to defend herself when Dean bursts into the room, instead just cowering there with quiet sobs.

Sam is the one who stops Dean with a panicked-sounding warning call. Dean was in no danger whatsoever, not from Rowena and not from Billie who clearly just stated that the Winchesters were needed. So the only possible meaning I can read into Sam's call is that he's begging Dean not to shoot Rowena.

After a scene cut, Rowena is still sitting on the floor in a position very similar to the one she's been in ever since her breakdown, with Sam and Dean sitting opposite her. She has something to drink in front of her now, though. And hilariously, we see Sam reach into the fridge like he lives there to take a bottle for himself and Dean each, so I assume he's the one who handed out the drink to Rowena as well, trying to make everyone feel better.

He goes even further than that, asking both Dean and Rowena how they are feeling and getting them to talk openly. In addition to genuinely wanting to know how these people he cares about are feeling, I think what he's doing here is ensuring the waves are smoothed over enough that this will not be a repeat of the Amy Pond situation where Dean went back to kill the "monster".

Rowena asks, "Sam, what've I done?", sounding stifled and horrified like she thinks she has ruined their relationship forever, and she still hasn’t even fully stopped crying.

This is her way of both saying sorry and carefully testing out the waters of where they're standing after all of this. He gives her a look that I can seriously only describe as soft, telling her "You had a chance to kill me and you didn't. I'd call that progress."

The wording makes even more sense considering that Dean is sitting right next to them, so Sam is making a point of putting emphasis on the fact that she isn't a lost cause, that she isn’t something they have to hunt.

Then Sam goes so far as to tell her that it wasn't her fault what happened with Crowley, even though he must realize that's blatantly false and that her way of (not) parenting clearly had a strong influence on Crowley's fate. The way Sam says it with that frowny headshake and soft voice almost gives me the impression they're talking in code, and this is his veiled "I forgive you" in reply to her veiled apology from before.

This whole exchange is insanely gentle given the fact that they both just tried to kill each other. Yes, clearly neither of them wanted to kill the other, what with those tormented expressions on their faces when it happened and Sam firing only a single bullet (which was probably his loophole way of justifying to himself that he kept his word to Dean without actually getting Rowena killed.) But still, it's remarkable how soft this conversation is after the insanity of this episode.

When Dean begins one of his motivational speeches for Rowena, Sam listens quietly, knowing he has won. He has accomplished his goal of making sure Rowena is no longer on Dean's kill list. And only after that, Sam proceeds to say the most outrageous thing possible in this situation, complimenting Rowena on her deadliness and luring the first real smile out of her still tear-streaked face. And with that one seemingly crazy comment, he cements towards her that things between them are fine and that he accepts her despite her past.

(I'm in awe of Sam's emotional intelligence.)

When Rowena asks if they think she can still be redeemed, Sam waits and lets Dean go first, even though one can basically see Sam itch to get his own reassurance out. His mouth even opens! But he has to know for sure first that Dean really has no ill will towards Rowena any longer.

And because he actually trusts her and wants to show both her and Dean that he does, he nips a potential future conflict in the bud by openly telling her the truth that Lucifer is back instead of somehow hiding that fact from her. Dean comments in a way that shows clearly he thought she was going to freak out at this piece of information, but Sam just sits there with a calm face because he trusted that she would not.

Even with everything that's at stake for Sam (they need Rowena to find Gabriel to save Mary and Jack), even after the way Gabriel let him down just one episode prior and Sam's willingness to trust in the good in people has buried them in a whole pile of problems, Sam still wants the relationship between Rowena and him to be based on open trust from here on out. So he gives her the truth about Lucifer, knowing fully well how traumatic it is for both of them.

And Rowena in turn takes that offered trust and returns it to Sam in the most outrageous way possible, finding solace in the fact that he, not Lucifer, is the one prophesied to kill her. Because Rowena is the living proof that his blind faith in the good in people was never wrong, Sam is suddenly shown to have hope and self-esteem again “You changed other people’s fates, maybe we can change yours,” after he had all but abandoned any kind of it following his interactions with Gabriel and Dean in the episode before this one. (He couldn’t even get out anything but stutters when they called Rowena at the beginning of this episode and Dean had to steal the call from him, that’s how low Sam was!)

And Rowena is so touched by still being trusted and accepted despite everything that of course she agrees to help them save their family, when at the start of the episode she had still refused because she was busy trying to save hers.

Parallels: Cursed - Rowena's and Castiel's Deaths Samwena, Destiel, and Faith Third Wheel? Rowena was the missing link, I’m so blind Mary Knows (Samwena Edition) They Learned from the Best Sam Smiling at Rowena vs. Dean Smiling at Castiel Dean’s Reaction to Castiel’s Death vs. Sam’s Reaction to Rowena’s Death Castiel & Rowena Parallels Rowena and Mary The Mentalists & Funeralia