Ooooh! 14.
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14. Describe Bobby’s Library requested by inferification
When Sam closed his eyes and thought of home, the first thought that came to his mind was smooth leather of the Impala’s cab, the wind in his hair and rock and roll music playing on the raido. It was the faint smell of tobacco that never did quite come out of the upholstery, no matter how many times Dean cleaned it.
But if you asked him for second place, he would describe Bobby’s library. More often than not, when John dumped him and his brother off at Bobby’s during the days, weeks, months that John couldn’t be bothered to raise his sons, Sam would find himself in the stuffy room working on homework or reading up on whatever lore their dad needed for a job.
On those rainy days when they couldn’t go out and explore in the salvage yard, he and Dean would lie on the musty knockoff Persian and make patterns on the faded wallpaper.
When Sam was pissed at his brother or at Bobby, or his dad, or the world, he would retreat to the comfort of the creaky armchair that had the wooden handles he had carved his initials into when he was five and was learning his letters. He’d sit there for hours, listening to the old Hank Williams records that Bobby kept around for the nights that the whiskey wasn’t enough. Sometimes he would finish an entire novel in one sitting. It was his haven.
The library always smelled like a combination of Old Spice, rot gut whiskey, incense and dust, and to Sam, it was his favorite smell in the entire world.
The bookshelves were stuffed full with lore, journals, histories, County data. A couple of the old Great Illustrated Classics that Dean had used to teach Sam how to read with were in there, hidden behind a Necronomicon older than his grandfather’s grandfather and a composition notebook filled with some of the short stories he’d written at Sioux Falls Middle School. Sometimes he’d pull out that old King Arthur tale
From time to time, Sam will catch a whiff of the flavor of Old Spice that Bobby preferred as he and Dean are walking down a street or in a supermarket, and he’d be taken back to that small room off the kitchen with the faded wallpaper and creaky floorboards.
That room was gone now, along with the rest of Bobby’s house. Sam had stopped by the old ruin during that long year that Dean was gone. He’d taken a weekend away from Amelia and drove up to South Dakota, with Riot by his side as they drove north to the only home he’d ever really known.
The house was technically his now. Dean was gone and Bobby had left the place to them. The insurance company had offered a settlement to rebuild it but Sam had declined.
He took one look at the burned down ruin that he used to spend lonely afternoons reading up on fantastical lore and left.
Sometimes it’s better for things to remain in the past.
Sam didn’t have a home here anymore. So he might as well go back and make one with Amelia.
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