Locked Away
Title: Locked Away
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine, not real.
Characters/Pairings: Sam, Dean. No pairing.
Word Count: 3,020
Summary: After finding some old photos at their father's storage room, Dean finally opens up about their childhood to Sam. Sam, however, finds the revelations bring more questions than answers. Set Season Three, after BDaBR.
“Where you going?” Sam asks, digging his elbows into the hotel mattress to pull himself into a more attentive position, mentally kicking himself for the protest his shoulder barks in response. His eyes shift seamlessly from the random Discovery Channel documentary he had been viewing, something on a dog whisper, of all things, to his brother, standing near the foot of Sam’s bed with keys in hand.
“Out,” Dean answers vaguely, shooting a glance towards his brother. Dark circles interrupt the flow of his complexion, falling below bloodshot eyes that illustrate the toll the last two days have taken on him.
Sam told him, numerous times, that the gunshot wound isn’t really that serious, that it really doesn’t hurt him that much. Dean knows his brother better, however, and though the wound isn’t the worst either have dealt with, the past two days have sent the elder into full-out nurse mode. Dean’s days (and nights) have been spent fussing over it, changing the dressing every couple of hours and more than a few violating shoves of a thermometer in Sam’s mouth, grumbled protests getting lost behind Dean’s insistence of, “You feel warm.” Dean is past his normal overly protective capacity, into the realm of obsessive and Sam can’t help but notice the toll it’s taking on him.
“Oh,” Sam grunts, pulling himself upright towards the edge of the bed, legs dangling over. “Specific.”
“Yeah,” Dean mumbles, pulling his jacket on. “You going to be okay here by yourself?”
“Depends,” Sam begins, a stubborn smile tugging up the corners of his lips slightly. “Where are you going?”
Dean sighs, disappearing into the hotel bathroom for a moment in what Sam figures is probably a routine mirror check. The response comes through a mouth of toothpaste, garbled and nearly indistinguishable, had Sam not spent his entire life trying to decipher Dean through mouthfuls of cheeseburger and less than sufficient manners. “Storage room.”
This peaks Sam’s interest, causing his eyebrows to furrow slightly.
“Dad’s storage room? What for?”
“Well, legally everything in there is ours now, right?” Dean prompts, shuffling out of the bathroom. “Figured we might as well take our pick. And there might be stuff we can use, you know, like research or something.”
“Yeah,” Sam nods, stomach flopping as his mind automatically flies to the possibility of any information that could help with Dean’s deal, though he knows full and well the possibilities are slim to none. He has been searching for almost two months and still has yet to find anything outside of weak lore and a demon with a supposed heart of gold. Neither seems particularly promising to Sam, considering he’s placed Ruby under the category of “Last Ditch Effort.” He isn’t, however, above resorting.
“I’ll be gone a couple hours, probably.”
“I’m going,” Sam declares, his attempt to get to the feet haltered by a sudden headrush that sends him harshly back to the mattress, vision blurring.
“Hey,” Dean warns, his hand finding its way to Sam’s shoulder, opposite of the one covered in a taped gauze pad and half a tube of Neosporin. “No you aren’t. You need to rest and heal. I’ll bring you back something to eat, okay? You’ll be fine until then?”
“Yeah,” Sam grumbles, knowing even the best crafted protest will fail after that wonderful display of strength and sturdiness. He collapses back against the mattress, turning to face the television.
“Good,” Dean nods, quickly patting the younger on the leg before making his way to the door. “Just… stay there. And call me if, you know, you pass out or something.”
“Yeah, I’ll just phone you from my unconscious state and let you know,” Sam rolls his eyes, wincing as he inadvertently moves his shoulder in reaching for the remote.
“Whatever,” Dean mutters under his breath. “Later.” Sam gives a nod in response, a sigh escaping his lips as the door closes, leaving him alone with his aching shoulder and a television show about some crazy lady talking to dogs. Something about this pales in comparison to, oh… just about everything.
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Dean’s perception of a couple of hours, Sam knows, is much different from his. To Dean, a couple hours usually translates to the time it takes to go to the bar, pick up a girl and eventually meander back to their hotel room. A couple hours usually turns to several, and though lately Sam hasn’t minded the time that affords him the opportunity for Dean-forbidden research, he can’t help but wish that, for once, a couple hours would actually mean a couple of hours.
Instead, four hours pass before Dean finally surfaces, sauntering into the hotel room with a cardboard box tucked under one arm and fast food in the other.
“I didn’t know what you could eat,” he admits, evaluating Sam under a protective stare as sets a paper cup and bag on the table beside his brother’s bed. “Chocolate milkshake and chicken nuggets if you can manage.”
“Sounds good,” Sam admits, reaching for the milkshake. “How’d it go?”
“Eh,” Dean dismisses. “The man had to have been the biggest packrat ever to live out of motels.” Sam nods, a small knowing smile tugging up at the corners of his lips.
“I didn’t know he kept half of this stuff,” he continues, plopping down in front of Sam on the mattress. Sam straightens his back against the stack of pillows, craning his neck in an attempt to see into the box Dean had brought with him.
“What stuff?” he asks, frowning in impatience as he waits for Dean to either move or respond.
“Stuff,” Dean repeats, shrugging his shoulders back slightly. He emerges from the box with a few photos. “Stuff from when we were kids.” At the sight of the pictures, Sam furrows his eyebrows and reaches out to snatch them away from his brother. In response, Dean swats his hand away and tosses him a look.
“Hey,” he warns. “You want me to tell you what I already know you don’t remember or what?”
“I might remember,” Sam protests weakly.
“Right,” Dean scoffs. “Because I’m sure you know all about everything that happened before you were born.” The line shuts Sam up immediately, part way because he recognizes this as one of those rare moments Dean is actually going to open up about the past and part way because Dean has no idea what Sam knows. Hell, after what the demon told him, he has to wonder if he actually knows more than his brother.
“Okay, well,” Dean begins, revealing the first photo to Sam, whose eyes in turn eagerly graze the faded paper. The smiling faces of his parents, young and happy, grace the photo, their arms wrapped lovingly around each other. A palm tree sits idly behind the couple, the ocean mid-churn behind them. “This is from their honeymoon, I guess.”
“Honeymoon,” Sam repeats, eyes glued on the smiling faces in the photo, especially his mother’s. He takes in every detail: the way her eyes wrinkle when she smiles, much like Dean’s, and he finds himself desperately trying to memorize every detail, every change in color, as if it’s the last chance he has to memorize her face.
“Yeah. They went to California, after the wedding,” Dean clarifies, own eyes idly placed on the picture in his hands. His fingertips sit lightly on the edges, almost cradling it in his grasp as if it’s so delicate it may disintegrate if he uses any less caution. “Spent a week there, I guess. Dad… I mean, I think he kind of equated it with her, you know? The beach, I mean. He always went out of his way to avoid it.”
“Why?” Sam crinkles his nose, not following.
“Well, I guess he thought it would be too hard,” Dean shrugs his shoulders back. “Never went back to San Diego, either.”
“Was that where they went? On their honeymoon, I mean?” Sam asks, the impact of all of his brother’s words turning into a big jumble in his head. He wants so badly to understand, to engrain every detail, yet he can’t seem to follow. He equates it to the gap in their knowledge, the memories that Dean is so familiar with versus the fragments of ones that Sam has borrowed from him during the course of their lives. Dean is such an encyclopedia about this, such a useful source, but all the answers Sam has needed his entire life have been kept under lock and key. These were the things his brother withheld from him. Refused to talk about. And, though Sam tries to see Dean’s side of things, he can’t help but feel the elder is being selfish.
“No, they went to San Francisco. San Diego was where Mom was born.” At this revelation, Sam’s eyes double in size.
“What?” His whole life, he had been under the impression his mother was from Kansas. Everything with the demon, everything with her- he had always traced it back to Lawrence. Sam’s surges with possibilities. What the demon had said- has he been searching in the wrong places?
“Yeah, grew up there and everything. It’s where they met, when Dad was stationed there,” Dean says, as if it’s the most casual knowledge in the world, and the younger can do nothing but stare at him, incredulity etched on his features.
“You never told me this,” he notes, speech soft and considered under focused eyes.
Dean shrugs. “That was all before I was born. They moved to Kansas and I was born a couple years later.”
“Lawrence,” Sam murmurs passively, earning an odd look from Dean.
“Well, yeah.” The younger watches as he carefully sets the picture a safe distance beside them on the mattress, still treating it like it’s made of glass. “Speaking of which,” he laughs slightly under his breath. “Family photo number one.”
Sam leans forward slightly to get a better look, the image of three people focusing beneath scouring eyes. It’s parents again, grins glued across their faces. A Christmas tree stands beside them, elaborately decorated with tinsel and garland, as well as an assortment of perfectly coordinated ornaments. His eyes, however, shift nearly instantly to the tiny life in his mother’s arms. The baby, all big eyes and toothless wonder, is entranced by the presence of the tree, tiny hand grasping fruitlessly towards the tiny lights on the tree. The colors dance off his fingertips and the loving stares he is oblivious of tell the rest of the story. Dean’s first Christmas.
“She loved Christmas,” Dean’s voice, unusually soft, intrudes on Sam’s concentration. “Dad always said it was her favorite holiday.” Sam’s eyes drift up to his brother’s, briefly locking in a surge of an emotion Sam can only identify as I’m sorry. And, God, that isn’t an emotion, it’s Dean’s look of sympathy and empathy and I’m sorry and I failed you. None of the emotions blend, never intermingling enough to become one, or even lose the “ands” in its description. Instead, the emotion is I’m sorry and, as always, it breaks Sam’s heart into realization.
“I never got to have a Christmas with her,” he says, the words escaping him as such an awed reaction that it’s like he doesn’t say them at all. His eyes drift questioningly back up to Dean’s to see if the words had actually made themselves tangible, heard. The shift in his brother’s expression is all the confirmation he needs.
“I remember her talking about it,” Dean says, eyes distant and avoidant. “Vaguely. Maybe. I don’t remember what she said, but I guess… guess I just remember dad trying to make her plans a reality. Without her there, you know. He tried to make it what she would have wanted.”
Tears ghost over Sam’s eyes, at first without his knowledge, and when he looks to Dean to see his reaction he sees his brother is already on the next photo. It’s of the three of them once more, an older, toddler-like Dean sitting on the couch, arms crossed and cheeks streaked with tears. Mom seems patient, amused, even, while Dad seems slightly exasperated. A disbelieving snort escapes grown-Dean.
“What?” Sam asks, not having the slightest idea why someone would take a picture of a kid throwing a temper tantrum.
“It’s, um… I think this is when they told me Mom was pregnant.” Sam’s eyebrows instantly furrow further, forming a harsh crease between his eyes.
“I don’t remember it, really,” Dean continues, a hint of amusement in his tone. “But Dad… I guess I wasn’t very happy.”
“That she was pregnant?” Sam asks, confused once more.
“Yeah. Dad mentioned it a couple times when I was older. I guess they kind of expected me to be happy about it and I threw a fit.” Two things about this statement perplex Sam. First, the notion that Dean has ever thrown a fit about anything is a shock to his system. Dean has always been the perfect little soldier, all subordination and Yes, sir. Sam was the fit-thrower. Secondly…
“So you…” Sam prompts, still confused about that second half.
“They were not selling me on the idea of not being an only child,” Dean smiles lightly. “I guess I was just not buying it at all; I didn’t want a little brother or sister and I was not happy I was getting one.” There it is. There’s that secondly, there’s the part that Sam was having so much trouble wrapping his mind around. With all they have been through, that’s the part he has trouble digesting. He knows Dean, and he knows that being a big brother is a big part of what defines him. He guesses he has just always assumed Dean accepted the role willingly.
“Really,” Sam says after a short time, being all he can really manage without sounding like a total idiot. By this time, however, he notices Dean already moving to the next picture.
“And enter Baby Sammy.” A hospital room. His mother in the bed, holding a tightly wrapped, newborn baby in her arms. And, in the corner of the frame, a little Dean peering curiously at the even littler life in question, slightly pudgy arms crossed at his chest.
Sam studies the picture, nearly protesting when it is returned to the growing pile, revealing a similar picture. Only in this frame Dean sits on the bed beside his mother, the baby in the blanket cradled carefully in his arms. Mary watching her boys proudly. Dean watching little Sammy peer up at him, a sense of amazement on his features as he stares at the new addition to the family.
If Sam were still at Stanford, in some analytical art class, he would be studying the subcontextual foreshadowing of the photo, because, God, it’s glaring. The new life, Sam, triggering a new beginning. His mother, time clicking down in the next six months, handing Sam off to someone else to take care of him. And Dean… he doesn’t know exactly what would be derived from Dean’s expression, but he knows the contrast is important. The rebellion in the first, the distaste, from the acceptance in this one. The love.
“Didn’t take me long to decide you weren’t so bad,” Dean’s quips, though the edge gets lost in the softness of his face. “I think I was just happy I wasn’t getting a sister. Plus Mom and Dad sort of talked me into not hating the idea.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, though I did feel kind jipped. Dad said I’d have someone to play catch with- kind of neglected to mention that’d be a few more years down the road.”
“Yeah,” Sam says with a forced smile, the word apparently wiping out all other vocabulary as Dean’s questioning stare settles on his brother.
“You feeling alright? Shoulder good?”
Sam almost laughs. “Yeah, it’s fine.”
“Good,” Dean responds skeptically, placing the photo in the pile. “That’s it.”
“Really?” Sam asks, slightly surprised.
“Yeah,” Dean nods. “I mean, we have the ones from that poltergeist hunt in Lawrence, but that was all I could find at the storage place.”
“We never were much of a picture-taking family,” Sam nods. Dean’s eyes immediately snap to his.
“Mom was,” he mumbles. “Just happens that most of them…” he trails off, not needing to remind Sam what happened to most of the photos. Their entire lives had focused on just what happened to those photos.
“What else did you find?” Sam asks, artfully changing the topic.
“Not much,” Dean admits. “That was about all that was ours. I brought back some stuff from the file cabinet. Just some old research of Dad’s. I think most of it is common knowledge, but I figured with the war and all we can’t really take that chance.” Right. The war. Sam nods, eyes settling hard on Dean.
“Thanks for telling me that stuff. About the pictures, I mean.”
“It’s not a big deal, Sam.” It is. “You deserve to know.” Because in ten months, I won’t be around to tell you.
Sam nods, smiles, even, pretending to ignore the submeaning of the words that neither can miss. A part of Sam shifts back into that frame of mind, that panicked, Oh my God, I’m going to lose him frame of mind that tears him apart once it starts to take hold. His eyes begin to study his brother’s face, much as they had his mother’s in the photos, desperate to commit every last detail into memory because the undeniable fact is he is living on his brother’s time and ten months from now Dean is going to die.
Shaking his head, however, Sam regains his ground. Dean isn’t dying. He won’t let him. After all, he still has options. He has research to do, Ruby to resort to, and maybe, just maybe, help on the pages of the papers Dean exhumed from their father’s storage place. Either way, he still has hope and, most importantly, he still has Dean. And he’ll be damned if he lets himself have anything less a year from now.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine, not real.
Characters/Pairings: Sam, Dean. No pairing.
Word Count: 3,020
Summary: After finding some old photos at their father's storage room, Dean finally opens up about their childhood to Sam. Sam, however, finds the revelations bring more questions than answers. Set Season Three, after BDaBR.
“Where you going?” Sam asks, digging his elbows into the hotel mattress to pull himself into a more attentive position, mentally kicking himself for the protest his shoulder barks in response. His eyes shift seamlessly from the random Discovery Channel documentary he had been viewing, something on a dog whisper, of all things, to his brother, standing near the foot of Sam’s bed with keys in hand.
“Out,” Dean answers vaguely, shooting a glance towards his brother. Dark circles interrupt the flow of his complexion, falling below bloodshot eyes that illustrate the toll the last two days have taken on him.
Sam told him, numerous times, that the gunshot wound isn’t really that serious, that it really doesn’t hurt him that much. Dean knows his brother better, however, and though the wound isn’t the worst either have dealt with, the past two days have sent the elder into full-out nurse mode. Dean’s days (and nights) have been spent fussing over it, changing the dressing every couple of hours and more than a few violating shoves of a thermometer in Sam’s mouth, grumbled protests getting lost behind Dean’s insistence of, “You feel warm.” Dean is past his normal overly protective capacity, into the realm of obsessive and Sam can’t help but notice the toll it’s taking on him.
“Oh,” Sam grunts, pulling himself upright towards the edge of the bed, legs dangling over. “Specific.”
“Yeah,” Dean mumbles, pulling his jacket on. “You going to be okay here by yourself?”
“Depends,” Sam begins, a stubborn smile tugging up the corners of his lips slightly. “Where are you going?”
Dean sighs, disappearing into the hotel bathroom for a moment in what Sam figures is probably a routine mirror check. The response comes through a mouth of toothpaste, garbled and nearly indistinguishable, had Sam not spent his entire life trying to decipher Dean through mouthfuls of cheeseburger and less than sufficient manners. “Storage room.”
This peaks Sam’s interest, causing his eyebrows to furrow slightly.
“Dad’s storage room? What for?”
“Well, legally everything in there is ours now, right?” Dean prompts, shuffling out of the bathroom. “Figured we might as well take our pick. And there might be stuff we can use, you know, like research or something.”
“Yeah,” Sam nods, stomach flopping as his mind automatically flies to the possibility of any information that could help with Dean’s deal, though he knows full and well the possibilities are slim to none. He has been searching for almost two months and still has yet to find anything outside of weak lore and a demon with a supposed heart of gold. Neither seems particularly promising to Sam, considering he’s placed Ruby under the category of “Last Ditch Effort.” He isn’t, however, above resorting.
“I’ll be gone a couple hours, probably.”
“I’m going,” Sam declares, his attempt to get to the feet haltered by a sudden headrush that sends him harshly back to the mattress, vision blurring.
“Hey,” Dean warns, his hand finding its way to Sam’s shoulder, opposite of the one covered in a taped gauze pad and half a tube of Neosporin. “No you aren’t. You need to rest and heal. I’ll bring you back something to eat, okay? You’ll be fine until then?”
“Yeah,” Sam grumbles, knowing even the best crafted protest will fail after that wonderful display of strength and sturdiness. He collapses back against the mattress, turning to face the television.
“Good,” Dean nods, quickly patting the younger on the leg before making his way to the door. “Just… stay there. And call me if, you know, you pass out or something.”
“Yeah, I’ll just phone you from my unconscious state and let you know,” Sam rolls his eyes, wincing as he inadvertently moves his shoulder in reaching for the remote.
“Whatever,” Dean mutters under his breath. “Later.” Sam gives a nod in response, a sigh escaping his lips as the door closes, leaving him alone with his aching shoulder and a television show about some crazy lady talking to dogs. Something about this pales in comparison to, oh… just about everything.
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Dean’s perception of a couple of hours, Sam knows, is much different from his. To Dean, a couple hours usually translates to the time it takes to go to the bar, pick up a girl and eventually meander back to their hotel room. A couple hours usually turns to several, and though lately Sam hasn’t minded the time that affords him the opportunity for Dean-forbidden research, he can’t help but wish that, for once, a couple hours would actually mean a couple of hours.
Instead, four hours pass before Dean finally surfaces, sauntering into the hotel room with a cardboard box tucked under one arm and fast food in the other.
“I didn’t know what you could eat,” he admits, evaluating Sam under a protective stare as sets a paper cup and bag on the table beside his brother’s bed. “Chocolate milkshake and chicken nuggets if you can manage.”
“Sounds good,” Sam admits, reaching for the milkshake. “How’d it go?”
“Eh,” Dean dismisses. “The man had to have been the biggest packrat ever to live out of motels.” Sam nods, a small knowing smile tugging up at the corners of his lips.
“I didn’t know he kept half of this stuff,” he continues, plopping down in front of Sam on the mattress. Sam straightens his back against the stack of pillows, craning his neck in an attempt to see into the box Dean had brought with him.
“What stuff?” he asks, frowning in impatience as he waits for Dean to either move or respond.
“Stuff,” Dean repeats, shrugging his shoulders back slightly. He emerges from the box with a few photos. “Stuff from when we were kids.” At the sight of the pictures, Sam furrows his eyebrows and reaches out to snatch them away from his brother. In response, Dean swats his hand away and tosses him a look.
“Hey,” he warns. “You want me to tell you what I already know you don’t remember or what?”
“I might remember,” Sam protests weakly.
“Right,” Dean scoffs. “Because I’m sure you know all about everything that happened before you were born.” The line shuts Sam up immediately, part way because he recognizes this as one of those rare moments Dean is actually going to open up about the past and part way because Dean has no idea what Sam knows. Hell, after what the demon told him, he has to wonder if he actually knows more than his brother.
“Okay, well,” Dean begins, revealing the first photo to Sam, whose eyes in turn eagerly graze the faded paper. The smiling faces of his parents, young and happy, grace the photo, their arms wrapped lovingly around each other. A palm tree sits idly behind the couple, the ocean mid-churn behind them. “This is from their honeymoon, I guess.”
“Honeymoon,” Sam repeats, eyes glued on the smiling faces in the photo, especially his mother’s. He takes in every detail: the way her eyes wrinkle when she smiles, much like Dean’s, and he finds himself desperately trying to memorize every detail, every change in color, as if it’s the last chance he has to memorize her face.
“Yeah. They went to California, after the wedding,” Dean clarifies, own eyes idly placed on the picture in his hands. His fingertips sit lightly on the edges, almost cradling it in his grasp as if it’s so delicate it may disintegrate if he uses any less caution. “Spent a week there, I guess. Dad… I mean, I think he kind of equated it with her, you know? The beach, I mean. He always went out of his way to avoid it.”
“Why?” Sam crinkles his nose, not following.
“Well, I guess he thought it would be too hard,” Dean shrugs his shoulders back. “Never went back to San Diego, either.”
“Was that where they went? On their honeymoon, I mean?” Sam asks, the impact of all of his brother’s words turning into a big jumble in his head. He wants so badly to understand, to engrain every detail, yet he can’t seem to follow. He equates it to the gap in their knowledge, the memories that Dean is so familiar with versus the fragments of ones that Sam has borrowed from him during the course of their lives. Dean is such an encyclopedia about this, such a useful source, but all the answers Sam has needed his entire life have been kept under lock and key. These were the things his brother withheld from him. Refused to talk about. And, though Sam tries to see Dean’s side of things, he can’t help but feel the elder is being selfish.
“No, they went to San Francisco. San Diego was where Mom was born.” At this revelation, Sam’s eyes double in size.
“What?” His whole life, he had been under the impression his mother was from Kansas. Everything with the demon, everything with her- he had always traced it back to Lawrence. Sam’s surges with possibilities. What the demon had said- has he been searching in the wrong places?
“Yeah, grew up there and everything. It’s where they met, when Dad was stationed there,” Dean says, as if it’s the most casual knowledge in the world, and the younger can do nothing but stare at him, incredulity etched on his features.
“You never told me this,” he notes, speech soft and considered under focused eyes.
Dean shrugs. “That was all before I was born. They moved to Kansas and I was born a couple years later.”
“Lawrence,” Sam murmurs passively, earning an odd look from Dean.
“Well, yeah.” The younger watches as he carefully sets the picture a safe distance beside them on the mattress, still treating it like it’s made of glass. “Speaking of which,” he laughs slightly under his breath. “Family photo number one.”
Sam leans forward slightly to get a better look, the image of three people focusing beneath scouring eyes. It’s parents again, grins glued across their faces. A Christmas tree stands beside them, elaborately decorated with tinsel and garland, as well as an assortment of perfectly coordinated ornaments. His eyes, however, shift nearly instantly to the tiny life in his mother’s arms. The baby, all big eyes and toothless wonder, is entranced by the presence of the tree, tiny hand grasping fruitlessly towards the tiny lights on the tree. The colors dance off his fingertips and the loving stares he is oblivious of tell the rest of the story. Dean’s first Christmas.
“She loved Christmas,” Dean’s voice, unusually soft, intrudes on Sam’s concentration. “Dad always said it was her favorite holiday.” Sam’s eyes drift up to his brother’s, briefly locking in a surge of an emotion Sam can only identify as I’m sorry. And, God, that isn’t an emotion, it’s Dean’s look of sympathy and empathy and I’m sorry and I failed you. None of the emotions blend, never intermingling enough to become one, or even lose the “ands” in its description. Instead, the emotion is I’m sorry and, as always, it breaks Sam’s heart into realization.
“I never got to have a Christmas with her,” he says, the words escaping him as such an awed reaction that it’s like he doesn’t say them at all. His eyes drift questioningly back up to Dean’s to see if the words had actually made themselves tangible, heard. The shift in his brother’s expression is all the confirmation he needs.
“I remember her talking about it,” Dean says, eyes distant and avoidant. “Vaguely. Maybe. I don’t remember what she said, but I guess… guess I just remember dad trying to make her plans a reality. Without her there, you know. He tried to make it what she would have wanted.”
Tears ghost over Sam’s eyes, at first without his knowledge, and when he looks to Dean to see his reaction he sees his brother is already on the next photo. It’s of the three of them once more, an older, toddler-like Dean sitting on the couch, arms crossed and cheeks streaked with tears. Mom seems patient, amused, even, while Dad seems slightly exasperated. A disbelieving snort escapes grown-Dean.
“What?” Sam asks, not having the slightest idea why someone would take a picture of a kid throwing a temper tantrum.
“It’s, um… I think this is when they told me Mom was pregnant.” Sam’s eyebrows instantly furrow further, forming a harsh crease between his eyes.
“I don’t remember it, really,” Dean continues, a hint of amusement in his tone. “But Dad… I guess I wasn’t very happy.”
“That she was pregnant?” Sam asks, confused once more.
“Yeah. Dad mentioned it a couple times when I was older. I guess they kind of expected me to be happy about it and I threw a fit.” Two things about this statement perplex Sam. First, the notion that Dean has ever thrown a fit about anything is a shock to his system. Dean has always been the perfect little soldier, all subordination and Yes, sir. Sam was the fit-thrower. Secondly…
“So you…” Sam prompts, still confused about that second half.
“They were not selling me on the idea of not being an only child,” Dean smiles lightly. “I guess I was just not buying it at all; I didn’t want a little brother or sister and I was not happy I was getting one.” There it is. There’s that secondly, there’s the part that Sam was having so much trouble wrapping his mind around. With all they have been through, that’s the part he has trouble digesting. He knows Dean, and he knows that being a big brother is a big part of what defines him. He guesses he has just always assumed Dean accepted the role willingly.
“Really,” Sam says after a short time, being all he can really manage without sounding like a total idiot. By this time, however, he notices Dean already moving to the next picture.
“And enter Baby Sammy.” A hospital room. His mother in the bed, holding a tightly wrapped, newborn baby in her arms. And, in the corner of the frame, a little Dean peering curiously at the even littler life in question, slightly pudgy arms crossed at his chest.
Sam studies the picture, nearly protesting when it is returned to the growing pile, revealing a similar picture. Only in this frame Dean sits on the bed beside his mother, the baby in the blanket cradled carefully in his arms. Mary watching her boys proudly. Dean watching little Sammy peer up at him, a sense of amazement on his features as he stares at the new addition to the family.
If Sam were still at Stanford, in some analytical art class, he would be studying the subcontextual foreshadowing of the photo, because, God, it’s glaring. The new life, Sam, triggering a new beginning. His mother, time clicking down in the next six months, handing Sam off to someone else to take care of him. And Dean… he doesn’t know exactly what would be derived from Dean’s expression, but he knows the contrast is important. The rebellion in the first, the distaste, from the acceptance in this one. The love.
“Didn’t take me long to decide you weren’t so bad,” Dean’s quips, though the edge gets lost in the softness of his face. “I think I was just happy I wasn’t getting a sister. Plus Mom and Dad sort of talked me into not hating the idea.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, though I did feel kind jipped. Dad said I’d have someone to play catch with- kind of neglected to mention that’d be a few more years down the road.”
“Yeah,” Sam says with a forced smile, the word apparently wiping out all other vocabulary as Dean’s questioning stare settles on his brother.
“You feeling alright? Shoulder good?”
Sam almost laughs. “Yeah, it’s fine.”
“Good,” Dean responds skeptically, placing the photo in the pile. “That’s it.”
“Really?” Sam asks, slightly surprised.
“Yeah,” Dean nods. “I mean, we have the ones from that poltergeist hunt in Lawrence, but that was all I could find at the storage place.”
“We never were much of a picture-taking family,” Sam nods. Dean’s eyes immediately snap to his.
“Mom was,” he mumbles. “Just happens that most of them…” he trails off, not needing to remind Sam what happened to most of the photos. Their entire lives had focused on just what happened to those photos.
“What else did you find?” Sam asks, artfully changing the topic.
“Not much,” Dean admits. “That was about all that was ours. I brought back some stuff from the file cabinet. Just some old research of Dad’s. I think most of it is common knowledge, but I figured with the war and all we can’t really take that chance.” Right. The war. Sam nods, eyes settling hard on Dean.
“Thanks for telling me that stuff. About the pictures, I mean.”
“It’s not a big deal, Sam.” It is. “You deserve to know.” Because in ten months, I won’t be around to tell you.
Sam nods, smiles, even, pretending to ignore the submeaning of the words that neither can miss. A part of Sam shifts back into that frame of mind, that panicked, Oh my God, I’m going to lose him frame of mind that tears him apart once it starts to take hold. His eyes begin to study his brother’s face, much as they had his mother’s in the photos, desperate to commit every last detail into memory because the undeniable fact is he is living on his brother’s time and ten months from now Dean is going to die.
Shaking his head, however, Sam regains his ground. Dean isn’t dying. He won’t let him. After all, he still has options. He has research to do, Ruby to resort to, and maybe, just maybe, help on the pages of the papers Dean exhumed from their father’s storage place. Either way, he still has hope and, most importantly, he still has Dean. And he’ll be damned if he lets himself have anything less a year from now.