Timeline: January 2001. Adam is 13 years old and on the road with Sam, Dean, and their father.
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He was awake.
It was dark. Black. He glanced around the blackness, seeing only a slim stream of light from the window where the heavy curtains met. His ears strained, listening for what might have woken him, but the only sound in the room was the soft, even breathing of his sleeping brothers. He kept still, waiting. His muscles clenched tight in fear and anticipation. Something must have woken him.
It was then he noticed the cold. The bite in the air and the chill that was seeping through the thin motel blanket, making him shiver. His nose was cold, he noted suddenly. He tucked his face under the covers rubbing the end of his nose with his hand, surprised at how cold it felt against his warm palm.
Adam poked his head out of the blankets, looking around again for any signs of danger, consciously aware that threats were never far off, but seeing and hearing nothing he let himself relax.
There was nothing there. No strange shapes looming in the darkness, no sounds warning him of impending danger. No sounds at all.
Wait a minute.
No sounds.
The aggressive and annoying loud clank and hiss of the motel room's ancient heater was missing.
Great, Adam thought, rubbing his feet together for warmth under the blankets. Should he wake up his brothers? He wasn't sure. Maybe it would be fine until morning…
He rolled over and leaned up a little to look over Sam's head at the small red numbers on the digital clock between the motel room beds.
2:30 am.
Shit.
He was already freezing. There was no way they would make it until morning. He'd grown up in these Minnesota winters. He knew that losing a heat source in January was a big deal.
Still, he hated to wake up his brothers, especially to complain about a problem he had no solution to.
What would Dean do?
It was a question he asked himself a lot these days.
Dean wouldn't let us just sit here and freeze our asses off, Adam thought, his resolve growing. He rubbed a warm hand across his nose once more trying to take the chill off, before slipping out of bed. He moved quickly, trying not to let any cold air into the bed that would disturb Sam.
Out of the warm bed, the room really was freezing. Damn.
He shuffled over to the heater, just under the curtained window and sure enough, found it silent and still. He pulled the curtain back a little, letting more of the soft light from the parking lot security lamps flood the room. He fiddled with the knobs, clicking them to the left then again to the right. He pulled the lever for temperature high then low, hoping that the thing would kick to life.
Nothing happened.
Shit. Now what?
It's not like Adam knew how to fix stuff. His mom was a nurse, a single mother who worked all hours of the day and night. She didn't fix things. When things broke in their house she threw them out or called a repairman. That was it. Dad wasn't much better. The only thing that he'd ever shown Adam how to fix was a jam in a firearm.
Adam turned the knobs on the heater again, getting irritated with the machine and his own lack of knowledge. Turning already broken dials was a dumb attempt at fixing the damn thing.
"Kid? What the hell you doing?"
Dean's deep rumble startled Adam, making him pull off the knob he had in his hand.
"Shit." He hissed.
"What's going on?" Sam asked blearily, leaning up on his forearm, his voice thick with sleep.
"The heat's out," Adam said, crossing his arms to stick his freezing fingers under his armpits, hiding the broken knob.
"Goddamn it," Dean said, throwing back his blankets angrily, not seeming to care how cold it was in the room.
He stomped over to the heater, grumbling.
"Where's the damn dial?" he muttered.
Adam held the plastic circle out to him, earning a glare of frustration from his brother, "What? It just came off."
"Get back to bed," Dean growled, looking back down at the radiator.
Adam was all too happy to obey, skirting around his brother as he kneeled down for a closer look as Sam turned on the lights in the room. Adam slid back into bed next to Sam relishing the lingering warmth their bodies had created.
He watched as Dean pulled the plastic cover off the heater and examined the parts, looking for what Adam had no idea.
"What do you think Dean?" Sam asked, sitting up in the bed watching his brother intently.
"I don't know..." Dean said shaking his head and standing up, still staring down at the silent machine.
"What are we gonna do?" Adam asked, rubbing his hands together and tucking them under the blankets.
Dean walked across the room and grabbed both Adam and Sam's duffle bags from the floor, throwing them on the bed in front of them.
"Layer up." He said flatly, bending down to grab his own bag, digging out a long-sleeved shirt and pulling it over his head.
Adam reached for his bag, pulling Sam's up as well and they both dug around tugging out shirts and socks, layering them on top of the clothes they already had on.
"Maybe we could get another room?" Adam suggested, trying to adjust his shirts without getting too far out of the warm blankets.
Dean shook his head, "2 am. The managers gone…"
"We could pick the locks," Sam suggested and Adam could see the wheels turning in his brother's head, "but we won't know for sure if the room is occupied or not,"
"Yeah, I'm not risking getting a .45 in the face for sneak up on some coke head," Dean replied, grabbing a pair of socks from his bag and sitting on the edge of the bed to put them on.
"Maybe we just get in the car?" Sam asked watching for his older brother's reaction. "It's warm in there,"
"It'd be warm, yeah," Dean said shuffling over to the busted heater and peering out the window above it, "but the roads look like shit. There's like 2 feet of snow of there."
"Should we call Dad?" Adam asked tentatively.
They both looked at him like he'd spontaneously grown another nose on his face.
"Yeah right," Sam huffed, shaking his head.
Dean sighed, "Alright…well…I'll get the tools."
Adam watched silently as Dean pulled on his boots and coat and grabbed his keys from the table between the beds. Sam grabbed another shirt and pulled it on and then tossed back the covers, running a hand through his long hair to brush it away from his face.
"You think Dean can fix it?" Adam asked curiously. Dean was always messing around under the hood of the Impala, not that Adam ever knew what he was doing, but the car always ran perfectly so he must know something about mechanics.
"We're gonna try," Sam answered, gently correcting his brother.
We're.
A tiny word that cut Adam like a knife. Another reminder that it was always Sam and Dean, Dean and Sam, the exclusive team, the elusive bond that left Adam on the outside. Maybe Sam didn't mean it that way, but that's how it felt.
"I'll help," Adam said determinedly, refusing to be left out again.
Sam just nodded and got out of bed, going over to the heater and unplugging it from the wall. Adam threw back the blankets and followed, shaking off a shiver of cold, trying to be as tough as his brothers. Sam squatted down in front of the silent heater and Adam followed, shoving the plastic cover Dean had taken off out of his way.
Suddenly the door beside them opened, blasting them with icy winter wind and flecks of freezing wet snow.
"Ugh, " Dean grumbled, shutting the door behind him and shaking the snow out of his hair "fucking freezing out there."
Adam watched his oldest brother drop the old green toolbox beside Sam and shake the residual snow off his jacket, not bothering to take it off. Sam had only momentarily looked up when Dean walked in and was now intently studying the inside the heater.
"What's it look like Sammy?" Dean asked, peering into the machine.
"I'm not sure," Sam said, starting to poke at wires and metal pieces.
Dean squatted down beside Adam and Sam, reaching back to flip open the top of the toolbox and grab a flashlight.
"Here," he said, clicking it on and pointing the beam of light inside the heater.
The brothers were quiet as they surveyed the machine. Adam didn't know what the hell he was looking at or looking for, but he studied just as closely as Sam and Dean did, hoping the problem would announce itself.
"Ok, let's figure this out," Dean said sitting down fully and leaning in to start unscrewing parts.
-/-
An hour later Adam was ready to call it quits. He just wanted to wrap up in all his clothes and blankets and go back to bed.
But his brothers wouldn't give up. They were doggedly working at the heater, pulling out parts and examining them, moving around wires and knobs, plugging and unplugging the ancient device, cursing it and kicking it, trying to make it work.
"Ok, ok..." Sam was saying slowly, "So I think this part hooks here and maybe we just need to…"
Adam was barely listening, the flashlight he'd been relegated to holding drooping. It was almost 4 am and he was supposed to go to school in the morning. He was supposed to get up at 5 and go run. Dean better not be a hard ass and make them do PT, not after all this bullshit.
"Hey, Kid, the light! Come on!" Dean snapped.
"Yeah, yeah," Adam mumbled, pointing the flashlight back toward the inside of the machine.
If he hadn't been so tired Adam would have been pissed about them making him stand back and hold the flashlight. He was supposed to be helping them. Part of team Winchester. He'd started right there with them, trying to deduce how the machine worked and what might have caused it to stop, but he soon realized he was way out of his depth. Even if he'd known anything about repair the damn thing was built and installed 20 years before he was born.
"All right Sammy, try it now," Dean said, tightening a nut with a small wrench.
Sam leaned back and reached over to plug the heater back into the wall for what must have been the 20th time in the hour and they all waited anxiously for a result.
Silence.
"Damn it!" Dean cursed.
Sam sighed and unplugged it again.
"This sucks," Adam complained.
Sam and Dean didn't reply, both staring grimly at the heater.
"What if we can't fix it?" Adam asked, "When do we just admit it's busted?"
"We can fix it." Sam said resolutely, "We can. We've narrowed down the problem. We know its not the fan, it's not the circuit or the power."
"So it's gotta be the motor…" Dean reasoned, leaning back to grab a small screwdriver from the toolbox.
"This is stupid. Someone is gonna be in the front office soon right? Can't we just wait until they get in and change rooms? We'd be fine till then…right?" Adam groused.
"So you wanna just sit here and freeze your ass off instead of trying to do something about it?" Dean asked, irritated.
Adam rolled his eyes but kept his mouth shut knowing that any more arguing with his brother was probably only gonna get him smacked in the head.
"Adam why don't you make some coffee," Sam suggested as they watched Dean pry the ancient top from the loose from the housing of the motor.
"What am I? Your wife?" Adam asked indignantly.
"Dude," Sam admonished wearily, shaking his head in weak exasperation.
"Fine..." Adam grumbled handing the flashlight to Sam and standing up; at least if he made coffee he'd be holding something warm.
Adam shivered as he made his way over to the coffee pot on the dresser. If the room was cold when they woke up it was positively freezing now.
Adam started the coffee with expert ease, his hand automatically measuring out his families' preferred coffee strength without him having to think about it. He'd made a lot of crappy motel room coffee over the last year. Dad practically lived on the stuff. Dean too. At first, he'd hated making coffee for his Dad and brothers, irritated that they might think of him as their errand boy, the youngest kid thus the doer of all the things they didn't want to do. He'd tried to mess up Dad's coffee those first few months, adding too many grounds and not enough water or too much water and only a little bit of grounds. He did everything he could think of to get out of coffee duty. Of course, no matter how crappy he made the coffee, no matter how many ways he tried to screw it up, Dad never said a word. So he was stuck.
Adam put the pot on to brew and turned back around to Sam and Dean. Watching his brothers bent over the heater, their heads nearly touching as they peered inside the dusty machine, Adam was hit with the familiar feeling of melancholy that he'd started thinking of as the 'suck scale' of their lives. Most days were low on the 'suck' scale with 5 am runs and fast food for dinner. Some days super sucked with hunts that went bad and blood being spilled. And some days fell in the middle, 'moderately sucky' Adam thought, like waking up to a broken radiator in the middle of winter.
He tried not to dwell on it though. And Dean was pretty good at reminding him of the cool parts of their lives: the badass feeling of kicking ass, the freedom to stay up late and eat what they wanted, the confidence that came with knowing how to operate any firearm, the novelty of traveling all over the county seeing things that other people would never see. As long as Adam listened to Dean (and not Sam) their lives seemed pretty low on the 'suck scale'. But there were other times…
"Ok look there..." Dean said, pulling Adam from his thoughts.
He was pointing with one hand and the flashlight at some spot within the motor of the heater that Adam couldn't see. "Grab me some duct tape, Sammy,"
Sam reached over to the toolbox and pulled out the silver tape, tearing a small piece and handing it to his brother, watching his movements carefully, "You think that will do it, Dean?"
"Worth a try," Dean said, fiddling with the tape in the small space, "It's not like we have any extra wiring…"
The pot behind him finished brewing and Adam turned his attention to his making his brothers' cups of the warm liquid. Dean took his black (as if avoiding sugar and cream made him more macho) and Sam preferred a little sugar. Adam would have rather had hot chocolate, but that was almost never an option, so he'd learned to tolerate the bitter liquid. Given a choice, he'd add a ton of milk and sugar to make the stuff palatable, but par for the course, they had no milk or sugar in the room today so everyone was getting 4 am black coffee.
He picked up his brothers' mugs by the handles in one hand and carried his own in the other, walking back over to them and the carnage of the broken heater surrounding them.
He cleared his throat to draw their attention and they both looked up and gratefully accepted the cups of steaming liquid.
"Thanks, Kid," Dean said, grabbing the mug with one hand, the flashlight still clasped in the other.
"What do you think?" Adam said, sitting down on the floor behind them, cradling his own mug and appreciating its warmth.
Dean shrugged, "We'll see."
Adam sighed and glanced over at Sam, who was holding his coffee cup and staring thoughtfully at the open face of the dismantled heater.
"You gonna do the Vulcan mind-meld on it, Sam?" Adam teased, trying to lighten the mood.
"What? No..." Sam replied distractedly, ignoring his brother and Adam rolled his eyes and glanced at Dean to see if he appreciated the joke. Dean didn't even look at him.
Adam scowled into his coffee, today's suck scale was creeping up.
"I've got an idea..." Sam said quietly, putting his coffee mug down without ever having taken a sip.
Adam watched as his brother moved to the heater, kneeled in front of it, and began adjusting wires and tightening screws. Adam couldn't tell exactly what he was doing, but Sam seemed deeply focused and Adam figured that was a good thing.
A few moments later, Sam sat back on his heels, " I think...maybe...well... Let's try it,"
Sam leaned over and grabbed the cord from the floor, plugging the prongs into the wall outlet.
The heater gave a heavy clunk and then kicked to life.
"Hell yeah!" Dean said, clapping Sam on the back, who ducked his head in embarrassed pride, "Nicely done Sammy."
Sam gave a partial smile, "It works now, but it might not for long. We should still switch rooms with office opens."
"Yeah, we will," Dean agreed, "But now we can go back to bed!"
Adam smiled gratefully, knowing this meant no stupid 5 am run in the snow.
"Good job Sam," he said, congratulating his brother.
Sam just shrugged off the compliment, picking up tools and supplies and handing them over to Dean to put into the toolbox.
Adam had to admit he was impressed. He honestly didn't think they'd be able to get that old ass thing working again. Warm air blasted from the heater, blowing comfortably on him and his brothers as they cleaned up and Adam was actually glad for once that they ignored him and didn't give up.
"So we can skip school tomorrow right?" he asked, grabbing his brothers' coffee mugs from where they had abandoned them on the floor. "Or at least go in late?"
"You wish," Sam said, glancing up at Adam as he helped Dean replace the plastic cover of the heater.
"I do wish," Adam mumbled, but didn't push any further. Dean might not make them run, but Sam was always gonna make them go to school. They could have been up all night slashing supernatural throats and he'd still insist they show up at 8 am for Geometry.
Adam dropped the mugs on the dresser, trying not to be annoyed that they were almost completely full, that only Dean had taken more than one sip. He pulled off his outermost shirt as he walked over to the bed he and Sam were sharing, leaving on his extra socks since it was still pretty cold in the room.
Sam and Dean were doing the same and soon all the brothers were tucked back in the bed, ready to sneak in an hour or two more of sleep before the day began.
"Nice job Sam," Adam whispered as Dean turned the light out.
Sam just smirked at him and ruffled his hair, making Adam duck away and rollover.
Just another night with the Winchesters.
A/N- Just a little slice of life fluff to get back into writing! I know nothing about repair ( as evidence by this story) so I take full responsibility for the inaccuracies. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the story as well as any ideas you have for what things the brothers might get into!