Archive of Our Own

It’s months after Dean comes back from purgatory, after Henry’s short but illuminating appearance in their lives, after Dean had actually moved into his very own room in the bunker.

They’ve been picking up boxes of things from all over, warehouses and storage units and safety deposit boxes and some more imaginative hidey-holes that they’ve found out about. With their seemingly almost unlimited space in the bunker it seemed prudent to get the hex boxes and books under one roof. The weapons caches they leave for emergency use, it’s not like they don’t have nearly every weapon known to man in the bunker already.

Sam finishes hauling the last box in from the Impala and turns to where Dean is very nearly swaying on his feet between the tables in the room they’ve started calling the library.

“Dude, fifteen hours behind the wheel. Hit the showers and hit the hay,” Sam says, flipping a hand at Dean to shoo him towards the dorms. “I’ll get these taken care of.”

Dean doesn’t even say anything, just shuffles tiredly down the steps and out of sight.

Sam shakes his head and turns towards the stacks of boxes standing on the map table they’ve been using as a staging area. This particular load was one of Dad’s old storage units that he had used when he packed up after Dean and Cas disappeared. It’s an odd mix of hex boxes that need to be catalogued, things that Dad had stashed, and boxes of the collected paraphernalia between them.

Grabbing a box labeled SAM in Dean’s blocky handwriting, Sam walks to the library, intent on sorting through at least one box before he follows Dean’s example and crashes for a few hours.

Once he gets the box open its clear that it was mislabeled. The pile of dirty laundry laying on top is a clear enough indicator. Dean prefers to be fairly neat and clean, something that doesn’t entirely mesh with the image he’s cultivated over the years but comes from Dad’s insistence on military strict order. Despite that, Dean’s been known to hide his dirty clothes for weeks until Sam declares it’s time for a laundry run. Sam knows it’s the inherent lack of anything to do while waiting through the wash-rinse-dry cycles. While Sam can settle with a book and be glad of the break, Dean tends to get himself in trouble or wind himself up enough to be nearly jumping out of his skin. In the division of labour between them, laundry has been mainly Sam’s chore since he was old enough to be left alone to tend to it without raising too many eyebrows.

Sam pulls out handfuls of dirty clothes, throwing them into a pile to be hauled down to the laundry room later. He doesn’t expect anything other than clothes in the box so he’s surprised when his hand encounters a metal box. He lifts it out, noticing that there are books underneath. A battered copy of ‘The Outsiders’ which he remembers Dean reading in high school, a notebook with a whole series of exorcisms copied out in Dean’s blocky handwriting, and a copy of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ with half the cover missing.

Sam pauses when he sees the last book, flashing back to cleaning out the Impala years ago after Dean’s deal had been up and the hellhounds had taken him. Back then there had been a few books in the trunk as well but Sam had always assumed they were Dad’s. ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ had been one of them though, in nearly as battered a state as this one was. Suddenly Sam wonders whose books those had been. He knows this is not the same copy as the one he had lost in those interminable months that Dean had been in hell. This one is thinner, more yellowed with age, what’s left of the cover is a different colour; but the only explanation he can think of is that sometime over the last four years Dean had noticed that the book was missing and replaced it, then shoved the replacement in a box of clothes and books and-

Sam turns his attention to the metal box, aware that he is now deliberately prying and not finding it within himself to care. He and Dean have lived in each other’s pockets for so long that almost nothing is sacred any longer. Personal property has never been that, they’ve shared toys, clothes, toiletries, space their whole lives. Sam wonders briefly if that is part of the reason Dean can be so possessive sometimes.

Very few things has he ever told Sam weren’t theirs but his and his alone and Sam thinks maybe a lifetime of owning so little has made Dean cling more to what he does have.

The box is flat and rectangular, not big, and has no visible hinges or catches on it but is covered in grooved lines and inscriptions. The contents give a muffled rattle when he shakes it gently. It takes a few minutes for Sam to realise that some parts of the metal slide. It takes a few more minutes to get the right combination of panels slid around and then the box opens, hinged from the inside. Sam is reminded of wooden puzzle boxes Jess had liked and shakes his head again. He’s never seen a metal one but it looks like something Dean could make and he feels a curl of unease at opening something that Dean has so clearly tried to hide. It’s open though, and, with a younger brother’s curiosity, Sam looks inside.

He’s not sure what he was expecting to find but what’s in the box isn’t it. On top is a small clear baggie, the kind cheap jewelry comes in, with three tiny baby teeth in it. At first Sam wonders why Dean would keep his own baby teeth, then he realises they aren’t Dean’s, they’re his. He barely remembers losing teeth as a kid but Dean has clearly held on to them the way a parent would and Sam wonders if anyone ever did the same for Dean.

Next to that is a misshapen silver bullet, a spent shell casing, and a scratched up fired bullet. Sam sets each one side by side on the map table and looks at them. He doesn’t have to wonder at their significance, he knows what each is, though he’s surprised that Dean has kept them.

The first is the first silver bullet Dean ever tried to make, pouring molten silver into the mold, then dunking it in water, waiting for it to steam and cool into something deadly. This was his first attempt and Sam can see that it’s not perfect, would never have properly fired, but it’s closer than his first attempts came and he remembers Dad telling Dean not to look at it as a failure but a reminder that there is always room for improvement.

The next is the casing of the round that marked the first kill Dean ever made. A water serpent n Mississippi that had very nearly drowned him before he was ever able to shoot it through the eye and keep it from eating another fisherman.

The last Sam remembers vividly. It had been a poltergeist hunt, the incredibly pissed off spirit of a teenage girl who had been killed when her alcoholic father crashed their car one night driving home. Sam remembers the heart stopping moment when the old man had taken exception to their poking around and asking questions. He’d been waiting in the car while Dean and Dad were doing some follow up, had seen Dean back out of the house onto the porch, hands raised, the man following him with a .38 in hand. Sam shivers, remembering how helpless he had felt, seeing Dean mouth off but too far away to do anything, to even hear the words. The man had turned an ugly shade of purple and shot, just as Dad came around the corner of the house, a shotgun in hand.

Luckily years of Jim, Jack, and Jose had left the man’s aim shaky and the shot went high. After all these years, all the horror they’ve been through, Sam can still hear Dean’s cry of outrage as he fell backwards off the porch, hear the report of Dad loading the man’s chest with rocksalt. He can feel the heat of the door handle, the rocks digging into the knees of his jeans as he threw himself into the gravel next to Dean.

For one heart stopping second he looked into Dean’s wide open eyes and thought everything he knew in life was going to end on a hot July summer afternoon in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. He’ll never forget the heart attack inducing rush of adrenaline when Dean suddenly inhaled, reaching up to grab Sam’s arm. “Holy fucking shit!”

Sam remembers the rush of getting Dean in the car and hauling ass out of there before the cops showed up, his sneakers barely touching the pedals until he took the time to pull over on the way to the motel and pull the seat forward.

It took an hour for Sam to dig the bullet out, the first time he had ever had to do that, and by the end Dean was nearly incoherent with whiskey and pain.

At 16 Sam wasn’t anything like as big as he is now but he was still tall and strong enough to maneuver Dean into the shower, to get grave dirt and driveway dust and blood off Dean before toweling him mostly dry and taping a bandage over the wound.

The next day he woke to Dad snoring on the couch, Dean bitching about how much his collarbone hurt, and no other evidence of the gory clean up job he’d done. He’d always thought the bullet went in the trash with the towels but apparently Dean had kept it.

Next to the bullets and shell casing was a black matchbox version of the of the Impala. Sam remembered the birthday Bobby had given it to Dean. It was hazy but clear in that snapshot way of a memory so old, so much recalled that the edges had worn down. Dean had been delighted with tiny car, refusing to let Sam touch it for years. When Dean had finally outgrown toys the car had disappeared but apparently he kept it.

Sam shifts aside a silver rosary he knew came from Pastor Jim, the washer ring Dean stopped wearing after coming back from Hell, the cracked center pad that came from the car before that horrific crash with the 18 wheeler.

Also in the box is a wooden bead bracelet Sam has never seen before, a hanged man tarot card with a New Orleans area phone number written on the back, a single dream catcher earring, and a big gold belt buckle with a bull engraved on it Sam doesn’t know the stories behind these objects, wonders if there would ever be a way to get Dean to tell them.

Next under the objects is a postcard Sam recognises. It was the only mail he ever sent Dean, on the last day of his first semester at Stanford. Sent to Bobby rather than one of their dropboxes so Dad wouldn’t see. He’d never sent another when he got no reply but knowing that Dean has held onto it for all these years, it makes him think maybe things were not as black and white as his 18 year old self had thought they were.

Next is a stack of photographs. A lot of them he’s seen before, nearly half of them he’s in. There are copies of the pictures they got from working their case in Lawrence, snapshots taken when they were growing up by Bobby or Jim or Dad or each other. There is a single picture of Cassie wearing her OU hoodie and a handful of pictures of Lisa and Ben. Even one single picture of Bobby, Jo, Ellen, Cas, Dean, and Sam, that Sam doesn’t remember even posing for. It has a Camp name on it that he’s never heard and he wonders how Dean could have a picture that never happened. The last picture in the stack, the last item in the box, is another picture Sam has never seen. It looks like something Dean probably took on his phone and had printed at a drugstore but Sam wonders why, of all the pictures they’ve ever taken of each other, this would be the one Dean kept. Sam can tell it’s old by his hair, probably from that first awful year they hunted together after Jess-

They’re in the Impala, sunlight dappling over his face leaned against the door sleeping with a plastic spoon hanging out of his mouth. The memory is vague, he thinks it might have been the beginning of yet another prank war.

Sam looks at the kid in the photograph and part of him wonders if he was ever truly that young. He feels so much older now, even though only 8 real years have passed. He doesn’t count his time in Hell because adding those years in makes him feel beyond ancient when in reality he’s barely 30.

He smiles but it fades as he wonders where the joking went, the pranking and the wrestling matches. He remembers so many times that he yelled at Dean to stop being childish, to grow up, to act his age not his shoe size. Now he looks at Dean, the Dean that shuffled off to bed, his eyes wrinkled and heavy with sleeplessness and worry, and he misses the overgrown kid that Dean used to be.

He knows that Dean never really got to be a kid, always had to look out for himself, always had to look out for Sam. He thinks that’s why stupid jokes and sticking plastic spoons in people’s mouths had still been funny to him even after he should have grown past it. But now all that childishness has been beaten out of him and Sam wishes he could give it back.

There’s nothing else in the box, just cool smooth metal, so Sam fits everything back into it, then pushes the panels back into place, closing it up. He stacks the books on top, largest to smallest, and slides the stack down and across the table, to Dean’s customary place. It does no good to either of them for Sam to pretend he hasn’t seen these things but he doubts Dean will ever acknowledge their existence and after digging into Dean personal belongings so deeply Sam finds that now he wants to afford Dean as much privacy as he can.

Sam gathers the dirty laundry back in the box and heads down the steps towards the laundry room and then his own bunk, flipping off lights as he goes.

Maybe one day Dean will tell him about the things in the box, about the relics of childhood, maybe not. At this point, Sam is too tired to keep thinking about it so he just goes to sleep.