Trinkets and Trifles
Title: Trinkets and Trifles
Author: Ameonna1
Rating: PG
Fandom/Pairing: Supernatural, Sam/Gabriel, a scooch of Dean/Castiel
Disclaimer: I write for fun
Warnings: Uh, fluff? Suggestive themes depending on how dirty your mind is?
A/N: I was perusing the LJ today when I came across kijikun's journal and well, got bit by a wild plot bunny. The idea was a Sam/Gabriel version of this prompt and since I've been slowly oozing over to the Supernatural fandom lately, most especially Sam/Gabriel, I couldn't resist playing with it.
Sam is digging through his duffle when he freezes, well, more pauses. Dean looks up at him and frowns as if he’s trying to figure out if his brother just got bit by a snake or found a dollar, either one being way better than the extended bitchfest that they had currently been engaged in.
“Dude,” Dean says after too long a moment of nothing and Sam drags his hand out of his duffle.
He’s clutching a handful of those individually wrapped mints they have at restaurants, the fluffy pillowy kind that are filled with chocolate, the one’s he always steals five or six of when they come across them. He lets them fall back into his duffle as he yanks the zipper open and Dean leans over to stare.
“Huh,” his brother says which isn’t helpful at all. Usually there’s the barest hint of smugness if Dean had done it but all that’s there is curiosity and maybe a little relief that they’d finally stopped arguing.
His duffle is full of mints.
Of course all his other stuff is in there too, cushioned by confectionary. He finally pulls out the T-shirt he was looking for, watching the little white packages slither out of the folds and plop back into the bag. The room is starting to smell strongly of mint and chocolate.
===
Sam is in the passenger seat in the Impala trying very, very hard to not look out the window at his brother, who’s yelling like a madman at Castiel. The angel had been gone for weeks and Sam had to sit through weeks of his brother turning more and more silent. He didn’t think they’d said anything but pleasantries to each other for the last three days. Then like usual Castiel popped up out of the blue, portents ablazing, but this time Dean just lost it.
He sneaks a peek out the window, at Dean wheeling his arms like a scarecrow and Castiel still in the middle of it, staring at the ground and if Sam squinted he could almost say that the angel looked sorry but Dean wasn’t giving him a chance to say anything.
With a sigh, he slid down in the seat until his head was under the window and shoved his hands into his jean pockets. This could go on forever. For-e-ver. Then Sam blinks and digs around in his pocket a little more and pulls out… a frog. He inspects, it’s blue and plastic, one of those little jumpers that you can get at an arcade for like three tickets, with a tab on its ass so you can… Sam waits a moment, slides a look out the window again, yep, still yelling.
Carefully he puts the frog on the dashboard and presses on the tab until his finger pops off it and the frog goes flying.
It pings! off the windshield and ricochets off the seat to hit the roof of the Impala before landing back in Sam’s lap. He’s snickering like an idiot, he hasn’t seen one of these things since he was six and he has no idea how this one got into his pocket. But he quickly settles it back on the dash so he can do it again.
He’s lying in the backseat with the frog clutched in his hand, smiling, when Dean comes back, frowning, and shoos him back to the front. Castiel slides in behind him so Sam thinks that must be that. He must have missed the part where they kissed and made up as Dean starts the car.
===
They’re six miles outside of Boise and Sam’s digging around the trunk looking for the cable to his laptop, waiting for Dean to finish taking a piss so he can go. There’s an unspoken rule about not leaving the car alone at rest stops ever since Black Kettle… when his hand encounters a heavy jumble of something bulging out of his jacket. He frowned a moment, his mind going back to the little plastic frog that’s still in his jeans pocket and the tumble of mints that he has left in the side compartment of his duffle.
He pulls the pocket open, cautiously with one finger and smiles. It’s a mass of those mini sharpie pens all strung together on a ball chain. He counts twenty-four of them and none of them are the same color.
After that, life becomes, well, colorful. Communication is easier with motel paper and ‘ocean blue’ and most magic circles don’t care if they’re drawn in blood or ‘berry’.
===
Dean laughs for hours when Sam finds the umbrella tucked carefully under his duffle after they’ve pulled into their motel. It’s blue and has a repeating pattern of stars and planets with a plastic rocket ship handle.
That was when the first hilarious accusations of a ‘secret admirer’ started to fly. Sam shot them down quickly because if he had a secret admirer it wasn’t going to be human. Not with the places he’d found everything. Lucifer was brought up but even Dean admitted that Lucifer was probably more of a weird or creepy gift giver. Plastic frogs and mints stolen from restaurants were strange but weren’t exactly creepy or weird.
Together they decided to ask Castiel next time they saw him and keep an eye out if anything else popped up.
Four days later when they’d gotten stranded in a downpour out in some empty stretch of Montana, Dean was no longer laughing about the umbrella.
===
Castiel is frowning, which means Dean is frowning, which means Sam is rolling his eyes and waiting for someone to say something.
The gifts are laid out on a motel table; a handful of mints, the plastic frog, six of the sharpies, the umbrella and the book that Sam found in his duffle that morning.
It’s a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the copyright in it says eighteen ninety-eight and along with the musty familiar warm scent of old book it smells like a fairground. So their motel smells like chocolate mint, and sharpie and rain and antique pages and a hint of popcorn with the barest tickle of cotton candy or it might be salt water taffy or maybe the ocean itself.
Castiel can’t make heads or tales of it, though he sniffs the mints and his frown twitches just barely at the book. He tells them that the gifts are harmless but Sam gets the feeling that the angel isn’t telling them everything.
Sam doesn’t tell anyone that he falls asleep with the book under his pillow and dreams about a carnival by the sea whirling with lights and sounds. There’s someone else there but when he wakes he can’t recall the face.
===
Sam is sitting in a mausoleum with a shotgun in his lap, shivering. He’s to the point that if ghouls don’t start bursting out of the walls right now it’s been a completely wasted night.
He shoves his hands into his pockets and swallows when he feels something there. There’s an odd sort of flippy feeling in his stomach as he pulls out a worn and creased square of cardstock. He can’t make out all the writing on it in the light of his flashlight and he’s supposed to be paying attention in case something does jump out of the wall.
It takes him a moment to pick apart the spindly writing and see ‘flour’, ‘cinnamon’, ‘sugar’… A recipe? Sam furrows his brow but doesn’t think too much about it because he hears another shotgun go off somewhere across the cemetery and he’s shoving it back in his jacket and running.
Dean calls dibs on the shower the second they get back to the hotel, which is fair because a Barghest did drag him through the mud for about a half hour until they put it to rest.
Sam waits until it’s quiet and Dean’s off before he pulls the card out again and examines it better in the light. It is a cookie recipe. Some ancient thing, in barely legible writing on yellowed card that looked like someone found it in their great grandma’s attic.
For a moment he just sits there on the edge of his bed and twirls the card carefully in his fingers, trying to imagine who it could have belonged to, who left it. How many hands have touched it?
Sam wonders if Bobby would have all the ingredients or if he’d have to stop at the store first.
===
Two angels arguing outside his motel room is not something Sam expected to see coming back with lunch but his life being what it is, he’s not surprised. Well, they aren’t exactly arguing, but Sam thinks they would have been if either of them had been more human. But it’s mostly Castiel looking terse and disappointed while Gabriel completely ignores him in favor of making a Jacob’s ladder with a length of neon colored string.
Sam clears his throat as he stops and Castiel looks caught for a moment and now Sam really wants to know what was going on. Gabriel doesn’t look up. He nods at Cas and gets one back in return.
“Here to see Dean?”
“Yes, your brother is being… reticent.”
Sam rolls his eyes, is that angel talk for ‘stupid’? He holds out one of the bags he’s carrying.
“Here, he can’t kick you out of the room if you’ve brought lunch, it’s in the rules.”
There’s a moment before Castiel grasps the bag that Sam thinks he might want that explained. That Castiel would like to know all the rules and regulations between them that make the Winchester brothers work. But the angel has picked up a few of those rules already and the first one is ‘don’t ask’. Castiel murmurs thanks and disappears into the half open motel door. He doesn’t come back out. Which Sam already knew would happen. He lets out a sigh and watches Gabriel for a moment, manipulate the string into diamonds and loops.
“What are you doing here?”
He can’t help but ask. Gabriel had been almost completely off the radar for a few months even though Castiel said he was going to ‘petition him for assistance’.
“What does it look like?”
After a moment Sam shrugged, “Nothing.”
“Exactly.”
Sam shook his head and made his way to the Impala, the day was a bit brisk but passable, and spread him and his lunch out on the hood. He was lying on his back eating French fries and reading about Alice and the caterpillar when the car dipped a fraction of an inch. Sam looked at Gabriel over his book. The archangel was on his belly on the roof of the car staring at him like a cat that was annoyed with that particular toy.
“What are you reading?”
He asked this carefully, measured, as if he’d been studying small talk 101 and Sam wondered if he was going to follow up with a quip about the weather or a sports team. Funny, Sam had always imagined Gabriel would be savvier if they had a conversation... He blinked that thought away and held the book up instead of answering. Gabriel slipped it out of his hand before he could say anything, sitting up on the hood of the car and flipping through pages, though he kept one finger in Sam’s place.
“Do you like it?”
Sam found himself blinking again. What?
“The story, you monkey, is it interesting?”
Oh.
“Uh, yeah, but it’s a classic. Those are always good.”
“War and peace.”
“What?”
Gabriel frowned down at him, “Read War and Peace and tell me that. It’s a classic sure, but not good.”
“Some people think it’s good.”
“Some people have no taste. The only reason War and Peace is a classic is because no one could get through it so they just called it good.”
“Don’t tell me you couldn’t get through War and Peace.”
“I’m practically immortal and I had better things to do than finish that.”
Sam laughs and gets a book tossed onto his chest for his trouble. He’s about to complain but the archangel’s gone and there’s a length of neon orange string tucked between the pages where Sam left off.
Sam stares at the string and swallows.
===
Three days later he’s sitting in a diner with Dean.
“You’re kidding me? Right?”
Sam shrugs and leans back, “It’s the best theory I have.”
Dean frowns, moving his pie around on his plate for a bit until he decided it was in the correct arrangement.
“You’re saying its Gabriel leaving all this stuff in your pockets and junk?”
Sam shrugs again, “They seem to fit him.”
Dean doesn’t say anything; he just stares at the storm trooper action figure that Sam is fiddling with, the one that magically appeared that morning.
“Why would Gabriel leave you Star Wars action figures? And books and…”
Dean breaks into a grin and Sam knew that it was entirely too much to ask that his brother not jump to conclusions and assume any sort of affection on anyone’s part. He hadn’t said a dozen words to the archangel and this might just be some way of passing time for the man, angel, creature, thing… Of course that didn’t make any sense as to why Sam was the only one receiving these things. Dean teases him all evening.
Until Castiel shows up with a ‘gift’ for Dean.
===
Sam isn’t sure when he fell down. But his ears are ringing and it’s far too hot. There’s blood in his eyes and he knows with a pretty shitty certainty that it’s his. He lost sight of Dean what feels like forever ago and that roaring noise is fire, fire that he would have gotten away from right away if that golem or whatever it was hadn’t thrown him across the barn and into some crossbeams.
His head is seventeen kinds of fuzzy and he scrapes then stumbles away from the orange blurs. He falls again and he knows he’s been lying there for entirely too long when there’s a terrible wrenching sound of wood splintering then the world blurs and he curls in on himself with nausea. He’s coughing, suddenly sharp and painful while the world still spins. Someone has their hand in his hair and there’s another firmly on his back, pressing between his shoulder blades. He focuses on them until the coughing stops and his body realizes that it’s cool; the air is sweet, mint. The pain ebbs until it’s only an annoyance and he blinks up at… nothing. Gulping air at stars and black sky, he can hear Dean shouting and it takes him a moment to shout back, to find Dean soot-smeared, bewildered but relieved.
They don’t bring up Sam’s miraculous escape as they limp to the car but Sam can tell that Dean knows. The burning barn is half collapsed; Dean said something blew the side of it out, knocked him on his ass as he was running back after the golem was dead.
Together they make it to the motel and collapse on the bed for a few sweet minutes before they have to make sure neither of them are still bleeding. Sam rolls over and there’s a ‘crunch’ from under his pillow. He sees Dean raise his head as Sam fishes out a box of band-aids, the little kid kind with superheroes on them. A moment passes before Dean snorts and then his composure falls apart as he laughs into his pillow while Sam follows.
===
It’s the day after and Dean has dragged Castiel off to find food and regale him of last night’s tale, entitled, ‘Why golems suck and Sam is a lucky bitch’. Sam stays inside, reading, a Spiderman band-aid over the gash on his head.
He doesn’t look up when the bed dips a fraction of an inch, he finishes his paragraph. If he wants to be mean he’d finish the chapter.
“Winchester, you masochist, don’t you listen to anything anyone tells you?”
Sam slips the card with the recipe for the best snicker doodles in the world on it, into volume two of War and Peace before he looks up at Gabriel who is perched on the end of the bed.
There’s silence between them and Sam realizes that he’s never really seen the archangel before. He never paid attention, except maybe he has been. He knows the angel likes sweets and sci-fi, children’s stories, along with silly toys, and he can guess that maybe Gabriel doesn’t like to be caught in the rain. There’s a smudge of green on his hand, a color that Sam knows as ‘lime’.
“Thanks,” Sam says and Gabriel rolls his shoulder halfway between ‘you’re welcome’ and ‘well, duh’.
The archangel’s eyes flicker over the book, to Sam’s head and then to the storm trooper that’s sitting on the side table, next to a blue plastic frog and a coil of neon string.
Sam stays still as Gabriel stands and picks up the string, settling back on the bed next to Sam, their shoulders almost touching. It’s quiet, Gabriel is warm and the room is starting to smell like chocolate mint.
Sam leans over a bit and watches the angel work patterns into the string, looping it around his fingers. After a moment Gabriel tilts his head,
“You know, the more complicated ones have to be done with two people.”
Slowly, Sam lets his book fall to the side, “Show me.”