SPN FIC - Treasures
Have a look at Christmas 1989...
Characters: John, Dean (age 10), Sam (age 6), OFC
Pairings: none
Length: 3974 words
Rating: G
Spoilers: none
Disclaimer: Still no money happening.
janglyjewels...thanks for the concept!!
It was a good thing that Mrs. Tyler in the principal’s office had donated so many shoeboxes to his class. Dad didn’t buy him and Dean (or himself) brand-new shoes, and he didn’t know how to go about asking Dad to help him find a box with a lid. All they had at home were boxes with food in them, and Dad had told him a bunch of times not to go rooting in the trash. A trash box wouldn’t have been good anyway, because of the smell. Dean laughed at farts as much as anybody, but he wouldn’t like a present that smelled like garbage.
Treasures
By Carol Davis
“Those are great pictures, Sam! Is that for your dad?”
Sam tried not to make a face. Ms. Gilmore had interrupted him at the very worst second. “No,” he mumbled.
He thought she might go away then, but she didn’t. At least she kept quiet. Pulling in a deep, careful breath, Sam laid the picture down.
It was in the middle, right? Exactly the very middle. And it was straight.
It looked straight.
“Is it straight?” he asked worriedly.
Ms. Gilmore leaned a little closer and took a serious look. “Yes, that looks perfect. You’re doing a really nice job.”
“I am?”
“It’s beautiful.”
“It’s for my brother.”
“I think he’s going to be very pleased. You’ve worked very hard on it.”
Sam touched the tips of his thumb and forefinger together. They were a little gluey. So were the rest of his fingers, for that matter. “He might think it’s dumb.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
“You’re supposed to buy stuff for people for Christmas.”
Before she could answer, Kenny Burton came up behind Ms. Gilmore and started pulling at her sleeve. He was wiping his nose with his other hand. He was always wiping his nose with his hand. Kenny had a runny nose all the time and never remembered to have any Kleenex. It was kind of gross, the way he walked around all the time with snot on his lip. Every once in a while his tongue would come out and swipe across his lip like a windshield wiper.
“What is it, Kenny?” Ms. Gilmore asked him.
“I don’t have no more glue.”
“You had a whole bottle of glue. What did you do with it?”
“I don’t know.”
Ms. Gilmore sighed, then smiled at Sam. “Your brother will think it’s terrific, Sam. See if you can finish with the pictures. Tomorrow we’ll do the glitter.”
Sam watched her walk away with Kenny. She was shaking her head a little. She almost always shook her head at Kenny.
Kenny probably had used up his whole bottle of Elmer’s Glue. His pictures were probably all messed up and gluey.
Dork, Sam mouthed at him.
But there wasn’t much point in mocking him. Kenny was what Dean would call a natural-born dork. Like, he couldn’t help it. He wasn’t weird, exactly, except for the snot thing, and he wasn’t dumb; he could do arithmetic problems pretty well. Still, there was something about him that was… Like Dean would say, it would make you crazy. He couldn’t get his coat on by himself, even though there was nothing wrong with his arms. When he ate lunch, he always got some of it on his shirt.
He probably drove his mom batshit crazy.
That made Sam grin to himself. Okay, so bats made poop like everything else. But was bat poop crazy? And if so, how come?
He could ask Dean. But Dean would probably give him a wedgie for it.
Luckily, no one bothered him while he finished gluing down the last few pictures. There were a lot of them: he had made what Ms. Gilmore told him was called a co-lodge. He laid them out first without glue, to see how they looked, and lined them up in rows. That looked good, but Ms. Gilmore asked him to try making his design a little more “random,” and that looked even better. There were big cars and small cars, old ones and new ones, in lots of different colors. He’d gone through about forty million magazines to find them, and cut each one out perfectly. Well, maybe he’d made a couple of little mistakes, but by placing them on the outside of the shoebox in a “random” way, the mistakes didn’t show.
The best car of all, a big black one that looked almost exactly like their car, went right in the middle of the shoebox lid.
It was a good thing that Mrs. Tyler in the principal’s office had donated so many shoeboxes to his class. Dad didn’t buy him and Dean (or himself) brand-new shoes, and he didn’t know how to go about asking Dad to help him find a box with a lid. All they had at home were boxes with food in them, and Dad had told him a bunch of times not to go rooting in the trash. A trash box wouldn’t have been good anyway, because of the smell. Dean laughed at farts as much as anybody, but he wouldn’t like a present that smelled like garbage.
Tomorrow they’d do the glitter. Sam didn’t plan on adding too much glitter - that might make the box look like a girl thing. But a little bit, around the big black car in the middle of the lid, would be good.
Dean already had Dad’s present all taken care of. He’d paid for it himself and told Sam he didn’t have to chip in, but in the end he’d let Sam give him a dollar and eighty cents to cover the tax and the card. But finding something for Dean was pretty much impossible. The only time Sam ever got near a store, Dean was right there.
So this co-lodge thing was perfect. Dean didn’t know anything about it. It would be a total surprise.
It was the middle of the night when Dean woke him up. “Sammy,” he said. “Come on, Sammy, wake up. We have to go.”
Go where? he thought, and pushed Dean away.
Dean wouldn’t let go, though. “You have to get up. You can keep your PJ’s on. Just put your coat and your boots on. I already packed your stuff. Come on, hurry up. Dad says we have to be out of here in ten minutes.”
Sam pressed his hands to his eyes when Dean turned on the light. “It’s night time.”
“I know.”
“Why do we have to go?”
“Because Dad says. Put your shoes on. Go pee if you have to. No, go pee anyway. He won’t want to stop.”
Confused, Sam stumbled into the bathroom and peed. When he came back out, Dean was holding his coat and his boots, but instead of reaching for them, Sam went past him into the living room. Everything looked the same as it had when he and Dean had gone to bed: the little Christmas tree was still sitting in the corner, and the dishes were still in the rack by the sink.
“Where are we going?” he asked Dean.
“Away.”
“Why?”
Dean looked unhappy. And tired. And maybe a little scared. He didn’t say anything until he’d finished shoving Sam into his coat and boots. Then, as they listened to Dad’s heavy footsteps coming up the outside stairs, he told Sam quietly, “Don’t ask Dad a bunch of questions. We have to go. Please, Sammy.”
“Okay,” Sam said, no less confused than he’d been when Dean woke him up.
Dad went past them with just a nod to Dean. He came out of the bedroom with an armful of pillows and sheets and blankets that he whipped into a sort-of neat package, then handed it all to Dean. He went through the whole apartment in a few seconds, looking into drawers and closets and cupboards, came out with a few things that he threw into a plastic grocery bag, nodded to Dean again and stood holding the front door open.
“You did good,” he told Dean. “Let’s go.”
Dean yanked his coat on, then the three of them went down the stairs to the car.
They were a little ways outside of town when Sam realized that the car was packed full of their stuff: clothes, Dad’s books, some of the groceries from the kitchen, the pillows and blankets. He was stuck in the middle of the backseat with stuff jammed in all around him.
So they were going.
“Dad?” he said softly.
Dean, who was up front with Dad, turned around to shush him, but Dad said, “You burrow in there and get some sleep, Sammy.”
“Are we coming back?”
“No, son.”
Something bad had happened. He could tell by the look on Dad’s face.
Then he remembered.
“Dad? I have to go to school tomorrow.”
“Don’t worry about that. It’s Christmas vacation. Get some sleep, now.”
“But -“
“Sam. I said, you go to sleep now.”
Tomorrow. Friday. Glitter. One more day, and the box would be finished. Just one more day to finish up the box that was on the shelf at school.
“I have to go to school, Dad.”
“Quit it, Sam,” Dean said sharply.
“But I have to. I’ve got to go to school tomorrow. I do.”
Dad made a noise in his throat. A second later he pulled the car over to the side of the road. When he turned around he looked serious. And kind of tired. Not mad, really. But he could go from serious to mad pretty fast. “Sam,” he said. “This is not open to discussion. I want you to go to sleep. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” Sam whispered.
“Am I understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
Dean glanced at Dad, then climbed over into the backseat, yanked the pillows and blankets around and made a little nest for Sam to sleep in. “It’ll be a whole new place in the morning,” he said close to Sam’s ear. “That’ll be cool, right?”
“Yeah,” Sam said, but he didn’t believe that at all.
Dean ruffled Sam’s hair and pulled the blankets up around Sam’s shoulders. “Go to sleep before I count to a hundred, and you get the prize out of next box of cereal. Okay?”
“Yeah.”
He only needed one more day. Glitter was tomorrow, and then he could bring the box home. He’d have to hide it over the weekend, to make sure Dean didn’t see it before Christmas.
Glitter was tomorrow.
Tears started to slide down Sam’s cheeks.
“Ssshhh,” Dean whispered in his ear. “It’ll be fun.”
He didn’t go to sleep for a long time.
Dad told the lady their name was Simmons. He said they had moved because of his job and that his children were very quiet and well-behaved. She smiled at that like she didn’t believe it but she said okay and had Dad sign some papers. She said normally she wouldn’t be doing this on Christmas Eve but she couldn’t turn away a man and some kids who needed to get settled into a place to live because the Lord would probably get madder at her for turning away the needy than he would about her working on a Sunday that was Christmas Eve.
Dad made a face at that word, “needy,” but then he handed her the papers and she gave him two keys.
The apartment smelled like somebody’s cat.
It smelled like a lot of cats.
“I don’t like it here,” Sam said to Dean when Dad had gone back downstairs to get more of their stuff out of the car.
“It’ll be fine,” Dean told him.
“No it won’t. It stinks.”
“We’ll clean it.”
“I don’t want to clean it. I want to go home.”
“Sammy -“ Dean didn’t finish what he was going to say. He looked around for a minute, and everything he looked at seemed to make him unhappier. When he got done he looked every bit as unhappy as Sam. “Don’t get on Dad’s case, okay?”
“I need to go to school.”
“You’ll go to a new school.”
“But why?”
They wouldn’t answer that kind of question, either one of them. All they would ever tell him was baby stuff. “It’s okay” or “Because” or “Not now, Sam.” It didn’t matter to them that he was six years old and not a baby. It didn’t matter to them that he got four gold stars in the month of November and three in December, and that he would have gotten four in December too except it was a short month. It didn’t matter to them that Ms. Gilmore let him help pass out the glue for their project, or that he was the only one in the class who understood that Kenny Burton didn’t mean to be a dork and that Lisa Pritzkey wasn’t nice, she was a b-i-t-c-h, and Molly Anderson was a lot nicer and not stuck up at all.
Dean wouldn’t care about going to a new school. Dean didn’t like school. Every school he went to, they said he wasn’t working up to his…somethings.
He didn’t care about that, and Dad didn’t either.
They didn’t care about nothing, because they hadn’t even brought the Christmas tree.
Sam sat down on the smelly plaid couch. When snot started to run down onto his lip he let it. “You don’t never tell him no,” he said.
“Because I don’t want to get killed.”
“You shoulda told him no.”
Dean looked away, toward the window. All either of them could see through it was the wall of the building next door. “Wouldn’t do any good,” he muttered. “It’d just make him mad. It’s not like he wants to move all the time. We only do it because we have to.”
“But WHY?” Sam shrieked.
“I don’t know,” Dean said. “Stop asking me.”
“I want to go HOME.”
“This is home,” Dean said.
“No it’s not.”
Looking even more unhappy than Sam, Dean started to go through one of the bags he had brought up from the car and pulled out a package of Oreos. “Here. You want some of these? There’s no milk, but Dad said he was gonna go get some.”
He brought them over to Sam, but Sam clamped his arms over his chest and stuck his lower lip out. “I have to go to SCHOOL.”
“Sammy…”
Dad’s heavy footsteps started coming up the stairs.
Sam streaked past Dean into the apartment’s only bedroom and flung himself face down onto the cat-smelling bed.
Nobody on TV slept in the same bed with their brother. And nobody on TV’s dad slept on the couch every night because he had no bed.
Their house probably didn’t smell like a million cats, either.
Kids on TV talked about running away sometimes. Sam totally would have done that except he had no idea where to run to. He hadn’t paid much attention the other night while they were driving, so even if he could hitch, he wasn’t sure he could tell the person how to get to their old apartment. Or to his school, or Ms. Gilmore’s house.
He didn’t have any grandparents or cousins or anything. Or any friends. Even if Kenny Burton wasn’t a dork, that was no guarantee his parents weren’t. They might call the cops. Or Social Services.
Maybe that was it. Maybe somebody at school had found out about them having no mom and had called Social Services.
Sam had no real idea what Social Services was. All he knew was, they would take him and Dean away from Dad. And they might not let him and Dean stay together.
He might not see Dad or Dean again, ever.
Dad had flipped the mattress over to a side that didn’t smell so bad, and Dean had fixed it up with their sheets and blankets and pillows, so it smelled sort of like them and not like cats. Dean was asleep now, a hundred percent asleep, not faking. Dad was asleep, too - Sam could hear him snoring out on the couch.
Carefully, so he wouldn’t wake Dean, Sam turned over and looked at the clock.
6:17, it said.
If they had been in their old apartment, he would have woken Dean up.
Because it was Christmas.
When Dean woke him up, it was light out. Dean had bed hair, sticking out from his head all funny, and any other time Sam would have laughed at him.
“Hey, dog breath,” Dean said. “You gettin’ up?”
“No,” Sam told him.
“Come on. It’s Christmas.”
“I don’t care.” He did care, but in a way that meant he didn’t want to get up, because there was no special box for him to give to Dean. He had nothing to give to Dean at all. They had that dumb shirt to give to Dad, but Sam had stopped feeling like he wanted to give Dad anything.
As if Dad had heard that, right straight of Sam’s head like a mind reader, he came into the bedroom with a big smile on his face. “Hey, dude. Rise and shine.”
Dad looked like he hadn’t slept a whole lot. He kept smiling, which made him look even more tired, and a little sad. But it was all his own fault. He had messed something up with his job - it had to be him, because Sam hadn’t done anything wrong, and Dean probably hadn’t either, because he would look guilty - and it was a hundred percent his fault they had to leave their old apartment where Dad had had his own bed in his own bedroom and nothing smelled like cats.
“I don’t want to,” Sam said.
He burrowed way down under the covers, down to the foot of the bed.
Nothing happened for a minute, then he felt Dean move too. “Dude,” Dean said through the covers. “Santa found us.”
Sam thought that over. “What?”
“He found us. Don’t you want to see?”
Santa hadn’t found them last year. Dad said he tried calling, but since it was Christmas Eve, all he got was Santa’s answering machine.
Maybe Dad got through this time.
The covers got peeled back and Dad scooped Sam up into his arms. Sam didn’t fight him, just hung there kind of limp. “Come on, dude,” Dad said softly. “Don’t be mad. It’s Christmas. We’ll check out the presents, then have some breakfast. I found a place that’s open later on that serves turkey. Sounds good, huh? We’ll have a regular Christmas dinner.”
Dad looked even more sad then.
Maybe he should have told the lady their last name was Unhappy.
“Okay,” Sam muttered.
Dad didn’t carry him much any more, but he carried him into the living room, holding Sam’s face against his chest so Sam couldn’t see anything. He put Sam down, holding his hand over Sam’s eyes and turned him around to face the corner by the couch.
“Merry Christmas, dude,” Dad said, and took his hand away.
It didn’t look like what the kids on TV had. The tree was only little, and kind of brown around the edges, but it was real (not fake, like the one they had left behind) and it had tinsel garland all around it and twinkly lights.
Underneath it was all kinds of stuff. A flying-saucer sled thing. Three - no, four - different jigsaw puzzles. Transformers and a book on fish and a whole stack of comics.
And shoes.
New shoes.
In a box.
“Cool, huh?” Dean said. “Santa made up for last year. He even left you a note.”
Sam frowned. “He did?”
With a little grin at Dad, Dean picked up a piece of paper that was lying on top of the puzzles and handed it to Sam. Dear Sam, it said. I hope you forgive me. Love, Santa.
“How did he find us?” Sam asked.
Dad grinned. “Sent him a fax.”
But it was his hundred percent bullcrap grin. “No you didn’t.”
“Okay, I didn’t. Dude’s pretty smart. And he must’ve felt bad about screwing up last year. He’s got spies all over the place, you know.”
“Yeah,” Sam mused.
“You didn’t see the best thing. This one’s from me, ‘cause I can’t let Santa get one up on me all the time. The dude’s good, but -“
Dean obviously hadn’t seen the best thing either. He was frowning as Dad pulled one end of the couch away from the wall, reached down behind it, and came up with a portable TV set. It wasn’t new - it was all scuffed, and the little plastic door that was supposed to cover the knobs and dials down at the bottom was missing - but it was a TV, something they hadn’t had for almost two months, after the one at the old apartment shorted out and almost caused a fire.
“Better yet,” Dad said, wiggling a cord that was connected to the back of the TV, “sucker’s got cable.”
“You paid for cable?” Dean said.
Dad shrugged a little. “Guy that lived here before us must’ve had it, and they haven’t shut it off. It’ll probably go off at the end of the month. We’ll see. But we’ve got it for now. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, son.”
He fell asleep for a nap on the couch wearing the new shirt, which he said was the best shirt he’d ever owned. He looked a lot happier while he was sleeping: relaxed, and smiling, like he was having good dreams.
“I don’t got anything for you,” Sam said quietly, looking at the little hand-held puzzle thing Dean had given him.
“Doesn’t matter. That’s okay.”
“No it’s not.”
Santa had brought stuff for Dean: car magazines, and a picture book on how to fix cars. Boots, and a tour t-shirt for some band Sam had never heard of. A bunch of other things. Dean seemed to like all of it.
And of course, there was the TV.
“I was supposed to go to school,” Sam mumbled. “One more day. For glitter.”
“Glitter?”
“I made you something. And now it’s gone.”
That made Dean look really unhappy again. He looked away for a minute, like he thought something was interesting over in the kitchen. When he looked back at Sam he was smiling but it was pretty fake.
“I’m sorry,” Sam told him. “I got nothing for you.”
“You’re not gone.”
“Huh?”
“You. You’re not gone. We’re here, Sammy. All of us.”
That didn’t make sense, unless Dean knew Sam had been thinking about running away. Either way, Sam sure would think about Dean wearing this sad of a face the next time running away seemed like a good idea.
“I’m not gonna go nowhere,” Sam promised.
Dean reached out and knuckled Sam’s head. “You better not, jerk.” Then he got up off the floor. “I’m gonna take a bath. I smell like freakin’ cats. I don’t know what this place is that has the turkey, but I’m not going there smelling like cat piss.”
“Me neither.”
“Excellent plan.”
After Dean had shut himself inside the bathroom, Sam sat looking at what Dad called their “loot.” Games, puzzles, books, clothes. Lots of good stuff that they might have to leave behind when they moved again. Because they definitely would be moving again. Six times now that Sam could remember - the same as his age. The kids on TV didn’t do that. Some of them moved once, to a nice new house with their own bedrooms. They didn’t have Social Services looking for them, either.
But on the good side of it all, Santa had found them. Santa had tracked them down in this whole new place that Sam didn’t even know the name of.
And Santa…had left him a shoebox.
Santa was pretty smart. No, really smart. Even if he was kind of late sometimes.
Dean was right: it was good that they were all together, that Social Services hadn’t found them and made them live in all different places. And it was sort of fun, seeing new places. Maybe this one had miniature golf. Miniature golf was excellent, mostly because Dad was really crappy at it, but instead of making him mad, it always made him laugh.
That was a good thing.
A very, totally good thing.
Smiling, Sam got up off the floor and quietly went looking for Dad’s bottle of glue.