against all odds, sam winchester does not die young and bloody. (or, rather, he does; over and over again, but it just never seems to stick.)
so sam celebrates his fiftieth birthday, and his sixtieth birthday, and his seventieth birthday, and really, this is getting ridiculous.
dj is home for four weeks one summer ("you should get hazard pay for that job of yours," his dad grouses every time dj regales him with tales of the modern middle school classroom) when his dad says, "think it's about time you help me clear out some'a this junk, so you don't have to do it all yourself when I'm gone."
dj feels his heart jerk in his chest. he knows the statistics; that men on average live to be about seventy-five, and that his dad's got risk factors he's never given dj a straight answer about. scars that never saw the inside of a hospital; bullet wounds, plural. hell, who knows; probably exposure to radioactive waste or crazy volatile chemicals, the sort of thing you'd see commercials for class action lawsuits about. his grandpa john died young, some kind of sudden cardiac collapse. but sam winchester is an institution. a behemoth. he'll never die, not really.
his dad's a stubborn old man down to his very bones, though, so dj spends hours sorting books in the library, and moving boxes in the garage, labeling totes and rifling through file folders, and all the other myriad things his dad wants. they load up dj's honda and take several trips to the good will, a few to the scrapyard, two to the antique dealer and furniture restoration specialist dj sorta thinks his dad might've had a thing with back in the day, and one to the household hazardous waste collection center. dj's touched goddamn near every single thing in his father's house. everything but the big old footlocker tucked away at the back of the closet.
"it's nothing you'd want," his dad says with that wry smile, the one he always wears when he's got a secret tucked in his cheek like a piece of hard candy. "and it's personal, deej. no passports or birth certs or deeds hiding in there. just... mementos. a couple lifetimes' worth of junk that somehow manged to make the trip every time I moved."
and... it is mostly junk, when dj cracks the padlock off, still wearing his sober black funeral suit (thank god his dear departed dad kept four pairs of bolt cutters in the garage and one in the trunk of his car).
an old flannel shirt, soft and worn thin in the elbows, the red faded pinkish from a million trips though the washer. a ring of keys that don't open any doors in the house. a pair of kansas license plates that expired back in '06, an unimaginably ancient year. a bunch of old school ID cards for dad and his brother, dozens of them shuffled together in an old tin box the used to hold electrical splicing tape. (dj has the laugh at the mullet his dad was rocking in the early '90s, the long over-gelled daytime tv heart-throb bangs his older brother — dean senior, dean the first— sported back then.)
receipt papers with unfamiliar designs scribbled on the backs and old brochures and brittle, yellowed newspaper clippings leaving acid stains on the folder they're tucked inside. a library copy of the collected works of vonnegut, absconded from a high school in battle creek, michigan. old leather bracelets, the knotted kind you're supposed to leave on until they rot off, wrapped around a black jelly bracelet. beer bottle caps, flattened into misshapen coins. an old winchester repeating arms belt buckle, cowboy logo dark with tarnish and age, attached to a belt whose cheap pleather strap flakes off on dj's fingers. a dark green hoodie with "HURON HIGH SCHOOL MATHLETES" on the front and "S. WINCHESTER" across the shoulders in cracked white vinyl letters. a navy blue bandana with a crusted brown stain gluing the folds together. (it smells like iron when dj tries to peel it apart.)
a box of four- and five-leaf clovers, each one carefully pressed and dried, easily a hundred of them, piled neatly in an old peanut brittle can. a pocket knife with DEAN carved into the casing in crooked, spikey letters. a red plastic whistle on a lanyard, like a lifeguard might use. a keyring with a silver bullet dangling from it. an index card labeled "LAWRENCE HOUSE" in sharpie, folded in half and taped at the edges into a makeshift envelope, filled with grass clippings that scatter all over dj's lap and the closet floor when he finally rips it open.
polaroid pictures, faded blues and oversaturated pinks distorting the faces of people dj only knows by sight. his grandparents. uncle bobby, who "wasn't really our uncle, but if you'd've told him that, he'd've kicked your ass." dean. there are others — better pictures, from cameras and phones; the dark-haired man whose commitment to being photographed repeatedly in a trench coat stems either from a strong personal sartorial philosophy or a complete lack of sense, fashionable or otherwise; the redheaded women, one tall and one tiny; the boy with the sunshine grin — but there are so many photos of dean. dean, and his dad, and dean-and-his-dad frozen in time throughout the years, moving and sitting and standing as a unit, without a sliver of space separating them.
dj had asked his dad over and over as a kid, how come he didn't have a brother or a sister, and his dad always got that little half-grin that it took dj almost two decades to realize wasn't a smile for him, but for the man he reminded his father of whenever he used that tone.
"because you're dean winchester, and you're destined for great things," he'd say every time dj asked. "and as an expert on the subject, I can assure you that one dean winchester is more than enough winchester for your generation."