mako_lies

Most people collect things purposefully. Or that’s the impression Sam gets, anyway. But that question’s not on the list of acceptable icebreaker questions he’s given up on asking the first day at a new school. 

Hi, I’m Sam Winchester. I’ll be here for a month if I’m lucky. Hey, I was wondering… do you collect things?

Yeah, that’d go over well. 

Sam turns around one day to find he has a collection of stolen library books. 

It isn’t even that Sam goes out of his way to take books. The first time, he’s ten, and it’s The Secret Garden, because Dad ushers them out of town overnight without any explanation. When Sam finds the book in his backpack the next morning, he bursts into tears—he begs Dad to let him return it, but Dad growls at him to forget it. 

But Sam doesn’t forget.

After that, Sam tries to be careful; he really does, but Sam loves books. He loves books. In books, the good guys win, and the bad guys lose, and people live happily ever after. There’s no risk in books. They’re safe. 

And, if he wants, he can skip to the end to see how it pans out. 

Sam never checks out more than one book, and he reads them fast as he can. Sometimes, if he thinks they might be blowing out of town soon, he devours them in the school library and hopes he can find the book at the next school. 

He always checks his books out from the school library. It’s not like they’re ever in town long enough to get an actual library card, anyway. 

Despite his care, by the time he’s sixteen, Sam has a small stack of stolen stories. Enough of them now that they don’t fit easily into either his duffle bag or his backpack, and that’s the thing about collecting things when you live on the road. There isn’t room for anything. Especially when so much space goes to knives and guns and everything. 

Some of the library books just have to go. It’s not like they’re Sam’s, anyway. 

Sam spreads the books out on the bed one night while Dean’s out hunting with Dad. The Secret Garden, 1984, Attaboy Sam!, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, and too many others. 

He finally grabs Of Mice and Men and Attaboy Sam! and two other books, knowing he should part with more of them. But those are the four he can stand to leave. He walks to the public library, something sour curling in his gut as he leaves them in the book drop. 

The first time he actively steals a book, he’s seventeen. He’s partway through reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban when Dad announces they’ll be leaving the next day. Every school library has this book on hold and Sam had finally, finally managed to find a school with an unused copy. 

He takes the book. Guilt curls hot into his limbs as he watches the scenery pass, and in the front, Dean caterwauls along with Zepplin and Dad doesn’t even tell him to shut up. Probably because it’s a song on the John Winchester Approved Song List. Sam’s a hundred pages from the end, but he doesn’t even touch the stolen book until a month later when he’s laid up in the hospital from a nasty fall down two flights of stairs.

The drugs make the words blur on the page, but he cries as he reads.

Jess asks him about the library books one evening, and Sam—he tries to laugh it off, but. Instead he looks down at his hands, thinks maybe he shouldn’t have put them on the shelf. She sits next to him, something softly calculating on her face. “This one of those things you’d prefer not to talk about?”

“…Yeah,” he rasps. 

She stands and moves to them, and she fingers the worn cover of The Secret Garden. “What do you think about houseplants?” she asks. 

And Sam can only laugh, startled. “Uh…I’ve never had them before…” He grins. “Can you show me?”

Jess is kind enough to only tease him a little about his black thumb. It doesn’t surprise him, though, that he can’t make anything grow. She’s good enough for the both of them, at any rate. The plants are bright and green under her care. 

The books burn easy as the plants do.