Author: Minervacat
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Winchester gen
Rating: R for language
Spoilers: Through "Crossroad Blues".
Summary: Things Dean Winchester keeps in the glove compartment of the Impala. 4000 words.

A pack of playing cards from the Jack Daniels distillery, missing the Jack of Hearts.

Somewhere in the United States, a sociology major from Vanderbilt University has the Jack of Hearts that goes to this deck.

The cards were old -- Dad had been on a job a couple of miles from the Jack Daniels distillery the spring that Dean was 11 and Sammy was 7. They were living in El Paso, a three-bedroom rental house that they'd been in for 9 months, and it had felt almost like a home, like a normal home. Sam had been happy, and he hadn't been happy about being hauled to Nashville. He'd whined the whole way out, and he'd whined the entire way back.

Dean couldn't remember why Dad hadn't left them with Pastor Jim but the drive from Nashville to El Paso was a long one. Dad had gotten hit by the wood sprites that he was flushing out of the Tennessee hills, and he'd had burns up the side of his face plus two restless kids in the backseat, and somewhere outside of Little Rock, he'd flipped the deck of cards over the seats. Sammy didn't have much of a poker face at age 7, but Dad wouldn't ever let Dean keep the nickels he won off Sammy, anyway, so it didn't matter.

Dean learned to bluff on those cards, the edges crumbling and the corners wrinkled by the time he was winning real money at bars where nobody bothered to check his fake ID. By the time he was old enough to drink for real, he knew every crease and every fold on every card -- it wasn't cheating, he told Sam, to play with those cards for money, it was just leveling the playing field.

Sam had snorted, said to Dean, "You could take their money without those cards, the field's already tilted."

Dean shrugged. "You always thought the field was just fine when you played me."

He was in Nashville again, just stopping over on his way from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Palo Alto, when he gave the card away. The bar had looked like the kind of place where he might have found a couple of college boys to take for a semester's worth of cash, so the pack was in his pocket when he walked through the door.

But it was Ladies Night, and the bar was wall-to-wall women, and Dean had better things to do in a bar full of women than play cards.

He can't remember the girl's name, but she'd been smart -- crazy smart -- and pretty in a freckled Southern sort of way. When she asked for his phone number, the place was so crowded and covered in spilled drinks, sweet-smelling rum and flavored vodka, that Dean couldn't be bothered to find something other than the deck of cards to write his number on. She'd uncapped the Sharpie with her teeth before she offered it to him, and the Jack of Hearts had been the first card he'd pulled from the pack, no tricks.

It wasn't a real phone number, and she was just another girl, but sometimes he missed the Jack of Hearts.

Sam flipped through the cards when they were going from Stanford to Colorado -- somewhere in Wyoming, he'd opened the glove compartment and rifled it. He said, "Hey, these", and it was the first time since they'd seen Sam's apartment burn to the ground that Sam had sounded even halfway to normal.

"Yeah", Dean said, and Sam had pulled the cards out and shuffled them on the dashboard. He'd thumbed them out into a fan, and nobody had ever said that Sammy wasn't sharp -- he missed the Jack right away.

"What happened to it?" he asked Dean.

Dean said, "Lots of poker games, lots of places to lose a card. Doesn't matter."

But the way Sam had looked at Dean, like Dean had gone out and run over Sammy's dog, he guessed it did matter.

Half a pack of Marlboro Reds and a blue plastic Bic lighter, drained of fluid.

The cigarettes were in the glove compartment when he inherited the car. (The lighter was his.) Dean hardly remembered Dad smoking, just the faint smell of stale tobacco on Dad's clothes when they were little, but Dean was sure that Dad had quit before Sammy got old enough to notice.

Dean called him on that once, when Dad was riding in the passenger seat of the Impala, fishing through the glove box to find the IDs that they wanted. Dad had a busted ankle, which was the only reason Dean got to drive -- they were on their way up from Alabama to Western Kentucky, on the trail of a werewolf, and Dad had been cranky since the minute he'd limped through the door of the hotel room on his crutches.

It was the first summer Sam was gone, and Dean had resigned himself to the fact that he was doomed to spend the rest of his life trapped in moving vehicles with pissed-off relatives. Dad complained about Dean's driving, and the way Dean was keeping the car up, and the radio stations Dean listened to.

When Dad had found the pack of cigarettes, he'd crumbled the paper and cellophane under his fist, and glared at Dean.

Dean said, "Hey, they were here when I moved in."

Dad grunted.

"You quit when Sammy got old enough to notice what you were doing," Dean said, because he was cranky, because Dad was cranky, because there were sore spots he knew he could push. It was what Sam had always done. "But I could have picked up the habit any time."

"You were stealing my beer when you were 10," Dad muttered. "Wouldn't have put it past you."

"Well, I didn't," Dean snapped.

"You were always going to do what you wanted," Dad said, and Dean flinches, because it's Sam who left. Dean drank and chased girls but he stayed put. "Nothing I could have done as a parent to change that. Sammy, he was impressionable. He got ideas."

"They're stale as hell," Dean said, because Dad had uncurled his fist and was shaking the pack idly. Dean knew that motion as well as he knew how to load a shotgun in the dark -- Dad, sitting at whatever kitchen table they had, trying to puzzle out a hunt, shaking another cigarette from an imaginary pack without thinking about what he was doing.

"Thought you didn't smoke," Dad said, and he shoved the pack back in the glove box and slammed the lid shut.

"They've been there six years," Dean said. "Doesn't take a genius to figure out they're stale."

Dad grunted again and turned away, stared out the window at the Tennessee mountains. Dean hummed and turned the radio up, and fought the urge to light a stale cigarette, just to smell the smoke that always made him think of being a kid, not knowing anything -- not knowing to be scared, or to be brave, or how to fight with Sammy beyond arguments over Lucky Charms and cartoons.

The lighter he'd bought in a gas station in South Florida, somewhere on I-95 between Miami and the rest of civilization, the summer he turned 18, the first time he'd been on the road by himself for more than a day or two. He'd also bought two pounds of night crawlers, because the only stuff the place sold besides lighters was bait and beer, and Dean needed the lighter and he needed to pay with a credit card and drive up to Albany, Georgia in the next 24 hours, so he couldn't make the $10 minimum with beer.

At one point the lighter advertised #24, Jeff Gordon, but Dean picked the wrapper off it while he was sitting around waiting for the full moon to rise completely and midnight to roll around, so he could shoot the damn hellcat that was terrorizing the outskirts of Albany and light the thing on fire so it wouldn't do it again.

It rained, the one hellcat turned out to be four hellcats, and somehow Dean ended up standing in a forest in Western Georgia drilling a hole in the bottom of a plastic lighter that used to have Jeff Gordon's face plastered on the side of it, just so he could get enough lighter fluid to set the corpses on fire, once the hellcats were dead.

He limped out of the forest with a serious gash in his left thigh and what would turn out to be three broken ribs, back to the spot on the two-lane highway where he'd left the Impala. The shotgun was slung over his shoulder and the lighter clutched in his right hand. All Dean had wanted to do when he'd finished that job was get in the car and drive until he was too tired to drive anymore, and then sleep in a cheap motel before he headed back to Dad in San Antonio.

He managed to get the shotgun put away in its slot in the trunk, but he was still clutching the lighter when he tried to turn the keys in the ignition -- it slid down onto the floor with a clatter, and Dean had to lean over, horrible fucking shooting pain in his chest, and fish it off the floor because Dad had told them, had always told them never to drive with anything on the floor of the driver's side, because it could get stuck under the brakes.

Last thing Dean needed was to wreck the car because a fucking Jeff Gordon lighter was stuck underneath the brakes.

He didn't even remember throwing it in the glove compartment until way later -- he spent two weeks after he got back to San Antonio sleeping on the couch and popping Vicodin like they were M&Ms. His ribs had hurt so bad by the time he hit the Texas state line, he figures that he was lucky to have not crashed the car at all, lighter or no lighter under the brakes.

Dean was groping for a screwdriver, almost three years after that time in Georgia, because the tuning knob on the radio had broken off in his hand the week before, driving through Southern Missouri, and he hadn't gotten around to fixing it yet.

It was January, and cold as fuck in upstate New York, and his fingers closed on something smooth and metallic while he tried hard to stay on the road. He thought it was the screwdriver -- it was the lighter from Florida instead, and he chucked it back into the glove box without thinking about it. Sammy had bought Dean a Zippo for his birthday, a couple of weeks late, and Dean always kept it in his pocket now, heavy and cool against his thigh.

He wouldn't have bought the damn plastic lighter if Sammy had given him the Zippo earlier, but Sam had shoved it into Dean's hands almost a month after Dean's birthday, embarrassed and a little pleased with himself. Sam said, "I had to -- I didn't have the money earlier, I had to save it, I'm sorry it's late."

Dean threw the lighter back into the glove box and slammed it shut without finding the screwdriver. He closed his fingers over the square press of the Zippo in his pocket, and the metal is cold underneath his fingers, cold even through his jeans, even colder than the air outside.

The radio turned to static, and Dean kept driving.

A tin box that used to have Band-Aids in it, and now holds an assortment of stray buttons and safety pins and one flattened bullet.

It was a job hazard -- losing buttons. It wasn't why Dean favored shirts than just pulled over his head (that was because it was easier to cut something off than button something on, when you had a broken collarbone) and it wasn't the only job hazard, not by a long shot. There were shirts that were shredded in fights, shirts that had to be cut off so that venom could be sucked out of huge welts across your back, shirts that got too soaked through with blood or gore or mud to be worth saving.

Hazard of the job, along with frequent near-death experiences, questionable run-ins with law enforcement professionals, and the fact that silver bullets were expensive: clothing got sacrificed, and there was nothing you could do about it.

Dean didn't need Band-Aids. He wasn't stupid, and he kept the same heavy-duty first aid box in the trunk, wedged between the flame-thrower and the two crossbows, that Dad always had. But the fact was, they never needed those tiny round Band-Aids that always ended up last in the box -- they needed rolls of gauze and full bottles of hydrogen peroxide and holy water, but tiny round hardly sticky bandages were low on the list.

The box used to hold all the round Band-Aids that had been left in boxes when they'd used up the useful ones, because Dean couldn't bring himself to throw any of them away. Not even when they were 10 years old, white wrappers turned brown and cracked. The box had been stuffed to the top with stupid round Band-Aids, and somewhere along the way, it had gotten dumped into the backseat of the Impala and somewhere after that it had gotten shoved underneath a seat and forgotten about.

Dad had stopped buying Band-Aids when Sam got old enough to hunt -- if Sam was old enough to hunt, he was too old to come home with injuries that just needed a Band-Aid. Anything that happened to any of them after Sam stopped scraping his knees and elbow, either it was minor enough that it didn't need to get covered, or it was major enough that a Band Aid wasn't going to do shit.

Nothing in between with their family -- Dean had known, as soon as he was old enough to understand, that it was all or nothing with them. Band-Aids were just something in-between that they were never going to need again.

Dean cleaned out the backseat of the Impala on Thanksgiving, the year that Sam left for Stanford.

Dad had banged out of the rental place in Tuscaloosa that was home base for most of that fall, three days before, headed for God knew where. He'd just grunted when Dean, watching some stupid preseason college basketball game on the TV, asked if Dad wanted him to come along. It was a rough couple of months -- neither Dean or Dad was really angry at Sam anymore, but they still didn't know how to fill the skinny, awkward hole he'd left in their lives.

Three's balanced, Dad had always said. Like a tripod, like the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost. Two turns over too easy.

That Thanksgiving, they were still trying to figure out how to be two instead of three, and it took longer than Dean expected it to. All the cuts and bumps and bruises he brought home from working healed over, scabbed up fast and disappeared, but losing a person -- it was harder than Dean thought it would be.

Dad disappeared in a screech of tires on gravel. Dean finished watching somebody like West Buttfuck State get creamed by Kansucky or Illibraska, and then he got up off the couch and went out and got drunk, just because he could.

Dean never let the Impala get dirty -- when they'd been kids, there had always been crumpled fast food wrappers on the floor, plastic soldiers crammed down into the seats. Dad had his hands full enough without having to worry about keeping the car spotless, too. Dad kept the car purring like a kitten, and so the inside was always a little grimy -- it wasn't that big a deal.

Dean kept it spotless, though, because it was his and he could and after a while, the smell of the stale grease on the burger wrappers started to make him queasy. He was shoulder deep under the front seats on Thanksgiving, grabbing for an edge of metal that he thought was a soda can, when his cell phone rang. The street was quiet on Thanksgiving, everybody else inside with families, eating turkey and watching football, and the noise of his cell phone startled Dean, and he knocked the can further out of his reach.

He stretched a little further towards the annoying spot in the middle of the seat, closing his fingers on the can at the same time he shoved a hand in his pocket for the phone. Dean answered it without looking at the display -- only person who called him was Dad, he didn't need to bother checking -- and yanked the can out from under the seat.

It wasn't a soda can -- it was the box of Band-Aids.

Dean said, "Yeah, Dad."

It wasn't Dad -- it was Sammy.

"I wanted to," Sam said, and stopped. Dean stuttered, dropped the box of Band Aids back under the seat, and fell out the door of the Impala backwards.

"Uh, Happy Thanksgiving," Dean said. He scrambled back into the car and grabbed the Band-Aids, scrambled back out and slammed the door behind him, loud enough that it broke Sam's heavy-breathing silence on the other end of the phone.

"Are you," Sam said. "I didn't mean to interrupt -- if you're working."

Dean said, "I'm not doing shit, Dad went out without me."

"No turkey," Sam said.

"Turkey sucks," Dean said. He didn't know what Sam wanted -- he hadn't called since he'd gotten on the bus, not for money or a shipment of holy water or any of the shit he'd left in the apartment or the Impala when he'd gone. Dean stomped into the apartment and elbowed the fridge open, fishing out a beer and chucking the Band-Aid box at the table. "Thanksgiving sucks."

"We never had a normal one, did we?" Sammy said. "Do you remember the year you got hacked up by that water pixie? That was --"

"Shut the hell up, Sammy", Dean said. He missed the trashcan with the twist-off lid, and snapped the lid off the Band-Aid box, spreading the yellowed bandages out on the table in front of them. "I remember everything."

"I just called to say -- Happy Thanksgiving," Sam said. His voice sounded tight, the way it had sounded all Sam's life, whenever he was fighting with anyone -- Dad, Dean, the kids at school, Pastor Jim, himself. "And I'm sorry."

Dean snapped, "Don't apologize", and Sam heaved a deep breath on the other end of the phone, like Dean had said the magic words, only Dean had meant, you can't just say you're sorry for walking out, and Sam had heard, you're forgiven for doing that.

He listened to Sam breathing on the other end of the phone, drained the beer in three gulps, and crushed Band-Aids under his fingers -- tiny bits of flaky paper clinging to the hand that isn't holding the phone.

"We never celebrated Thanksgiving," Dean said. "Fuck off, Sammy."

He clicked "End" on the phone and dropped it on the table, scattering tiny round bandages onto the floor. It didn't ring again. Dean got drunker and stayed drunk until Dad got back late Sunday night -- early Monday morning -- and left the Band-Aids on the table. They were gone when he staggered out of bed mid-afternoon, hangover pounding at the back of his skull, and the box was sitting upright on the table, empty.

Dad was gone again, two cryptic sentences on a note under an empty bottle on the table. Dean clutched his head with one hand and the box with the other, which didn't leave him a hand to shovel in a bowl full of cereal, as if food would make him feel better.

He didn't know why he dropped the first safety pin into the box. Or the second, or the fiftieth. When Sam shook the box, it sounded like the inside of Dean's head the Monday after that Thanksgiving, though, and it was good enough reason to keep the thing.

A photo of himself and Sam, taken by their father, sometime in the summer of 2000.

They didn't have a lot of family photos -- the Winchesters have never been that kind of family. Plenty of reasons why not, plenty of if onlys that never happened. If they had led a different kind of life -- and the demon had never marked their family as hunted -- but they hadn't.

If, and, but -- and not a lot of photos.

In a trunk full of crossbows and rock salt, there wasn't much space for the family photos albums, after all.

Dad always kept a couple tucked into his journal -- some of them together, all three, and one photo of their mother, looking younger than Dean remembers her being. Dean knows this because Sam found them, the first time he flipped through Dad's journal. He'd held them out to Dean even though Dean was driving, asked Dean if he remembered where they were taken, when they were taken, who had taken them.

The photo Dean kept wasn't in Dad's journal, but Sam held it out just the same as he'd held out all the others from Dad's journal months ago. He was rifling through Dean's glove compartment like it was Sam's own damn property. "What are you doing," Dean asked, when Sam had popped the latch and flipped the front down to paw through Dean's stuff. Dad had been dead four months, and it was the first time that Sam had opened the glove compartment in months and months -- they kept the box of IDs under the front seat now, and the maps tossed behind the driver's seat, within easy reach of Sam's long arms when he was sprawled out next to Dean.

Sam didn't need the Impala's owner's manual, which was where Dean kept the photo, tucked between a diagram of the original engine (long gone) and the original transmission (still intact in name, but too souped up to bear much resemblance to what it started out as).

"Looking," Sam said, and Dean had heard something -- something nosy, something weirdly un-Sam -- in Sam's voice..

"I keep the porn in the trunk, under the rock salt," he said, to break the mood. "And you know it."

Sam snorted and Dean could hear the smirk in his voice, familiar and as comforting to Dean as the Impala on a long stretch of highway, when Sam said, "The porn's not what I'm looking for."

Dean didn't take the bait, because he knew that Sam wanted Dean to ask what Sam was looking for, and Dean hadn't lived almost 28 years to give Sam anything Sam wanted.

When they were kids, Dean had sat in the front of the Impala and fiddled with all the stuff that Dad had kept in the glove compartment. Bottles of holy water, a couple of spare rosaries -- you can never have one too close, Dad always said -- a box of bullets, Dad's journal. A handful of Dean's baseball cards that Dad had taken away during one particularly awful hunting trip up to the Upper Peninsula when Dean was 12 and Sammy was only seven or eight.

Half of Dean's memories from growing up are of Dad leaving them with Pastor Jim, and the other half are of all the times that Dad couldn't find somebody to park them with. Miles and miles and miles in the Impala with Sam squirming in the backseat.

They didn't have a lot of family photos, and they didn't play the normal road trip games that Dean eventually figured out that most people's families played -- no hunting for license plates from other states, no road sign bingo.

Sam spent fifteen minutes silently rummaging through the glove box, shaking the tin Band-Aid box full of safety pins and stray buttons. Dean gritted his teeth at the noise and inched the volume on the radio up as slowly as he could without Sam noticing and complaining about busted eardrums. Sam twisted the rosary around his hand and counted out a Hail Mary under his breath, and he flipped through the Impala's manual when he was done, the first time Sam had probably ever picked that particular book up in his entire life.

Dean knew that the one he has was taken sometime in the summer, because he and Sam are both tanned deeply brown and there are freckles standing out against Dean's cheeks. He knew that it was 2000, because Sam is taller than he is in the photo, crouching down to lean against Dean's shoulder -- Dean is cleaning a gun in the photo, cloth spread out across his crossed legs. HeÕs leaning against a heavy log, and Sam is bending down over his shoulder. Sam looks awkward, the way he did that whole year while he grew into his height, and Dean is scowling at having been interrupted.

When the picture fell out into Sam's lap, Sam stared at it weirdly for a minute before he shoved it at Dean. "Dad kept this one in the Impala's manual, I guess", Sam said. Dean had been driving the Impala in 2000. "Do you remember?"

"That's not Dad's," Dean said. He ignored Sam's question and fought the itch in his fingers to turn the radio up even further, cover Sam's questions and the way Dean's voice sounded strange to his own ears. He'd put the picture there, stolen it from where it had been propped on the dashboard of the truck. Dean took it the week Sam had left for Stanford, before Dad had a chance to see it and throw it out.

Sam didn't say anything in response, but out of the corner of his eye, Dean saw Sam tuck the photo back into the pages of the manual, fingers smoothing carefully over the edges before Sam stashed the manual away and slammed the glove compartment shut.

"Turn this shitty music down," Sam said.

Dean stared out at the road, trying to keep his mouth from twisting into a smile for no reason at all, and tapped his fingers against the steering wheel.

author's notes: for my darling cee, on her much-belated birthday. so much love, ceecakes, the written word cannot contain it. title courtesy of thea gilmore, "exit route". beta by my heterosexual life partner, as always with these things.