nekare

Well, better late than never, I guess. *looks shifty* Okay people, you gotta know, I feel like somewhat of a downright bitch for writing happy schmoopy fic after last week's ep. Granted, I'm known to write soul-wrenching angsty fics after funny, comical eps, so it really shouldn't come as a surprise, LOL.

Anyway, in honor of SPN's renewal, yay!

Title: Photographic Proof
Word Count: 2000
Summary: Sam Winchester has sixteen photographs buried at the bottom of his duffle bag: This is what each one of them means.
Author Notes: Written for my awesome, wonderful internet little sister, javajunkie13, who really deserved to get this fic on her birthday but my muse decided to slack off. So sorry. Betaed by terraneanblues and logovo.



Sam has sixteen photographs buried at the bottom of his duffle bag, hidden carefully between his underwear and a chemistry textbook with singed pages that he rescued from the fire.

He buys the aging Polaroid camera in a bout of sentimentalism while in Nebraska, right after Dad’s death and just before meeting Ellen and Jo for the first time.

It’s right there, on the convenience store’s counter, as he pays for Dean’s Doritos and when he asks about it, the man just shrugs, bored, and says that it’s been sitting there for eight years already, collecting dust, that no one’s wanted to buy it. Sam feels oddly sad for the camera, abandoned there.

He doesn’t tell Dean about that when he returns to the car with the camera, though. He still has his pride, after all.

He tells him it came free with the batteries they needed for their flashlights anyway, and Dean’s distracted enough to buy it.


1.

Picture number one shows Dean and himself, arms thrown around each other’s shoulders, smiling at the camera. They both look relaxed and normal, like they’re really just two guys on a road trip looking for nothing in particular.

They’re standing in front of the largest ball of twine in the continental U.S.

(It is a day to remember, too; they get matching t-shirts and have a ‘who can eat more’ competition next to a hot dog stand and Sam chokes on his cotton candy when Dean wonders aloud if the twine ball could fit in the Impala’s trunk.)

In Sam’s defense, it was all Dean’s idea.


2.

Picture number two shows a three inch deep wound on Dean’s calf. It ends up infected because they are both too tired to do a proper job of tending to it after the hunt, and they kind of forget all about it until two days later, when it starts suppurating pus all over the place and smells like something has died inside of Dean.

Sam snaps the picture right before going to the hospital because once the panic goes away and they’re pretty sure that Dean’s leg isn’t going to fall off, they have to agree that it is a wicked cool sight.

Boys will be boys, after all, and the basic instinct of grossing people out never goes away.


3.

Picture number three shows Dean eating a banana. It’s not nearly as funny as it sounds; it’s not even that interesting or amusing. It just shows Dean sitting cross-legged on his motel bed, watching TV as if it held the answers to the universe. His socked feet are moving in tune to some internal song Dean has beating inside his brain, and he’s holding the banana with his right hand while he rests his head on the left one.

It’s such a normal, peaceful scene that it almost looks boring. Dean turns sharply to look at him once he hears the click of the camera.

“Really, dude, what’s with you and your shitty camera?” he says, and Sam shrugs; mumbles something about being bored. “Well, you could at least ask me to pose, that’d be much more interesting, although the camera might break from the sheer hotness,” he says, and then he pouts at Sam, hand on the back of his neck like a lame model.


4.

Picture number four shows Dean making a kissy face at the camera, banana forgotten beside him on the dusty coverlet.


5.

Picture number five shows Dean, looking horrified that Sam actually took the kissy face picture.


6.

Picture number six is lopsided, and it shows half of Dean’s hand as he tries to get the camera away from Sam.


7.

Picture number seven shows Sam’s left shoe.

Dean says he just couldn’t allow him to take a picture of such a girly thing as a squirrel, and that he just had to move him; that it was his duty as a big brother.


8.

Picture number eight shows the world in shades of green for some strange reason, and it has Dean hugging a pig-tailed seven-year-old girl. It’s a ‘thank you for saving me’ hug, all huge smiles and chubby fingers digging into his worn leather jacket and the smell of cookies in the air, made by little Billie's mom.

Dean is elated, smiling softly and looking a bit embarrassed because he’s not used to so much attention or, at least, not the innocent kind. Sam did his fair share of the saving, but little kids take to Dean, always have, and Billie had decided Dean was her Prince Charming and knight in shining armor all at once, the moment she set eyes on him. So he’s the one who gets kissed by the girl and Sam’s the one who gets the handshake from the girl’s mother.

He likes teasing Dean about the photo, laughs at the way Dean says, flustered and uncomfortable, that no, he doesn’t look like a fucking teddy bear, for the last time, okay?

Sam actually loves the photo. It shows a part of Dean that he usually tries to hide, the one he thinks Sam doesn’t know about, the one that wants a lawn to mow and a kid of his own to spoil rotten and a different life for Sam.

The moment passes, as it always does, and then Dean’s singing along to AC/DC as they chase another ghost, adrenaline flowing through their veins and Sam knows Dean is exactly where he wants to be.


9.

Picture number nine shows a unicorn.

Seriously.

Sam can’t quite believe it yet, either.


10.

Picture number ten shows a red-headed girl looking up into the camera in a seductive way, a finger between her blood-red lips. Her bra is black, and it doesn’t leave that much to the imagination.

Sam doesn’t notice when Dean steals the camera, and is, frankly, confused when Dean wakes him by pulling his right foot (which is hanging out of the bed, as it has since he was sixteen) and throwing the Polaroid at his head. Sam squints at it, eyes bleary, and vaguely recognizes the girl Dean left the bar with last night just before Sam returned to the hotel.

“So you’ll have something pretty to look at in that weird photo collection of yours, you freak,” Dean says, and goes inside the bathroom to take a shower.

He knows Dean took more pictures, because the film ran out far sooner that it was supposed to, but knowing Dean, he’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to see them, and anyway, Dean is probably storing them somewhere for future jerking off material, the dirty pervert.

He’s not quite sure why he keeps this one, but he does anyway.


11.

Picture number eleven shows Sam, asleep, drooling on his pillow. Dean takes it on an early July morning, and Sam wakes up at the sound of Dean searching for something inside his duffle bag, muttering every few seconds. When he asks Dean about it, he says he was going to write ‘Princess’ with black marker on Sam’s forehead and have a before and after picture, but Sam woke up before Dean could find the marker.

He says it with such sadness in his voice, too, like he genuinely regrets the lost opportunity.


12.

Picture number twelve shows the Impala, muddy and dirty and with empty Big Mac Styrofoam boxes thrown all over the backseat. Her tires are wet from the melting snow. The sky above her is so blue it almost looks unreal.

The picture’s taken near Chicago, after a long and exhaustive hunt that turned out to be an honest to God Sasquatch.

The Impala’s the first thing Sam sees once they’re out of the woods, bruised and tired and hungry and, in Dean’s case, bloody. She’s shining a bit in the sun, in the places where she’s not covered in mud, and Sam is surprised by the sharp tug of belonging that grips him when he looks at the car.

He takes the picture two days later, after they’ve slept for what feels like a bazillion years and eaten enough to leave them feeling like they’re about to burst, and Dean bitches for miles on end that he should have at least given him the chance to doll her up a bit.

Sam knows that he loves the photo anyway, though, because it looks like it’s been through years of constant handling, even when it is actually only a few months old.

(Sam writes home in the little white space beneath the picture, just to remind himself, because the picture is self-explanatory already.)


13.

Picture number thirteen shows a ghost, a little blonde girl with a pale pink dress and ribbons in her hair, looking sad and quiet. She’s standing by the corner, arms hanging by her sides. She’s wearing white socks that reach her knees and little black patent leather shoes that have seen better days. The wall behind her and the old rug look perfectly in focus, but her figure looks shaky, blurry.

The funny thing is, Sam isn’t trying to snap her picture. He’s just goofing around with the camera while he’s waiting for Dean to come back to the motel room with their lunch. He’s sitting on his bed, humming to himself, snapping random pictures of the TV and his toes and the wall.

He’s still humming as he shakes the picture, urging it silently to develop faster, and then he jumps in surprise when the girl appears in the photo. He looks around the room, but there’s nothing but the God-awful décor and stale pizza smell.

“Um, hi?” he says, but thankfully, nothing talks back.

It’s a simple job with the picture, just a regular salt and burn, but Sam insists on moving on right away. God knows he’s slept in worse places, but a haunted motel room feels too close to home for comfort.

Afterwards, Dean says that they should sell it to some crappy ghost site online and make a crapload of money. Sam refuses at first, but he really, really needs new clothes, and those idiots over at hellhoundslair.com deserve to be ripped off anyway.


14.

Picture number fourteen shows Dean singing Death Cab for Cutie.

Sam takes it while he pretends to be asleep on the passenger seat of the Impala. His iPod earphones have slipped from his ears, and the music is barely audible coming from between them.

Dean doesn’t know the photo exists, and he never will, unless Sam needs some emergency blackmail material.


15.

Picture number fifteen shows Ash and Dean, huge grins on their faces, both of them winking theatrically at the camera. The room behind them is dark and dingy, torn posters decorating the walls. It’s filled almost to the top with grayish smoke.

The photo’s a bit lopsided because Sam’s every bit as high as they are.


16.

Picture number sixteen shows Dean leaning against the Impala. He’s looking up at the sky, eyes half-closed. The sun is right behind him, and the ends of his hair light up to a golden shade. He looks pale, after a week hunting in the north, and his freckles look dark against his skin.

Sam takes it while sitting on the ground in the middle of an interstate, cars blurring past. It’s seven thirty in the morning, and it still smells like morning dew. Dean turns to look at him when he hears the click and steals the camera, points it randomly at the sky and takes a picture.

It ends up being upside down, because Dean can’t be bothered to figure out the camera when he’s practically falling asleep on his feet. So the sky is on the bottom of the photo, looking almost white with all the clouds, and the road on top of it seems to go on forever.

And this, this is Sam’s life now, going from hunt to hunt, from motel room to motel room, finding a purpose in the people they leave behind (scared and confused of what they saw, but alive nonetheless) and the ones they haven’t met yet.

There are only a few pictures from their childhood, worn and yellowed with the years, and a third of them were destroyed by fire.

They’re building new memories, though, and Sam wants to have proof of it, because life is so fickle at times and he’s afraid that one day he’ll turn around and find that it all has vanished into smoke.