AN: It always seemed a bit of a plot hole that they never cleared out the John Winchester's storage unit from Bad Day at Black Rock. Come on, a professional thief knows the location and the defenses. It seems like a bad idea to leave it like that. So here that is, and the consequences thereof. The Winchesters find out about Adam Milligan.
Joan sat at the battered metal desk, sorting through each drawer in turn. There was a slowly growing collection of personal papers and photos on one corner. Books and notes on supernatural themes were sitting on the opposite corner, and the center was divided into personal memorabilia such as Sam's soccer trophy from middle school and reasonably inert hunting paraphernalia like rosaries and neatly labeled baggies of spell components. Now that they were taking the time to go through the storage unit after all the unpleasantness with the thief and the rabbit's foot, it looked like this was John Winchester's solution to where to keep things that he didn't want to carry around but didn't want lost. Billy was sleeping in his car seat at her feet, far away from the other side of the unit and its much more dangerous items.
Dean was carefully packing up the arsenal on the other side of the storage unit, making sure that every bit of it was unloaded and disarmed as he put it away swaddled in packing material. They would probably be renting a U-Haul to transport this to Bobby's. None of them wanted any of this in the Impala. Also, so far no one had gathered up the nerve to see what was in the metal casket pressed up against the wall. That would likely end up Dean's task as well.
Meanwhile, Sam was doing his best to catalog every curse box without opening them, sending pictures to Bobby since he was the one who built the curse boxes in the first place. God forbid John label any of them so that they might know what they were dealing with and possibly permanently neutralize the things. Given that a professional supernatural thief now knew where all of this was, it wasn't a secure place to hold any of it. It was lucky that Bobby had so much space at his place.
It was interesting for Joan, getting a good look at Sam and Dean's life through this crow's nest of things that John had saved over the years. So far she'd found a slightly scorched marriage certificate along with a wedding picture of John and Mary, both of the Winchester brother's original birth certificates, a stack of report cards, way more pictures of the two of them growing up than either one had known existed, and the title to the Impala.
There was another loose stack of papers at the bottom of the desk and then she would probably start looking through the file cabinet. Bobby swore that there was probably a masterlist that went along with the curse boxes, but so far none of them had found it.
She stopped sorting and stared at the piece of paper that she'd uncovered. "Sam?"
"Just a minute," he said, scribbling something down on the legal pad he was using. "What have you got?"
"A birth certificate dated 1990." Given a look at the originals on the corner of the desk and the one she had tucked away for Billy, this looked like a certified copy.
Absolute silence for a second on the other side of the room before Dean set down the most recent object with a deliberately loud thump. "Son of a bitch."
"It's marked Father Unknown."
"But there's not really a good reason for it to be here with all the other papers unless . . ."
"Unless Dad slipped one past the goalie?" Sam suggested.
Dean made a face of extreme disgust at the concept. "Joanie, name and state?"
"Adam Milligan, born in Minnesota in August of 1990." She looked at the date and did some math on the calendar of her phone. "Conceived the last week of October or the first week of November 1989."
"Somehow that makes it worse," Dean muttered. Joan knew the significance of the date in general, but neither one of them talked much about their childhood so she wasn't sure if the year meant anything. "Leave it on top for now, we've got to get this finished up first. You all done with the desk?"
"I think I've sorted everything so far. I'll pack it into boxes and label them before I get started on the filing cabinet."
"All right, if you keep looking for the master list while you pack away the case files I'll get Dad's private ordnance settled." Dean turned back to his work, grumbling just audibly enough that both Joan and Sam could hear him. "Paranoid bastard. As cool as it is that we have a half-dozen claymores and a case of grenades, there's no way we'd ever need them for hunting. I'm surprised he wasn't on every government watchlist known to man."
"Who says he wasn't?" Sam asked as he scribbled down notes for the next curse box. None of them wanted to chance opening them, so they were relying on the general size of the box and the symbols on the outside and Bobby's memory for figuring out what they were. Once Sam knew he labeled each one with a permanent marker and masking tape and placed each one in a makeshift padded box. "I'm terrified of the idea of running a background check on the man."
Joan found a list for the curseboxes at the bottom of the second drawer in the cabinet, under the hanging files. It moved things along for Sam, allowing him to quickly pack and label them all. They would research ways to neutralize the items around hunts with the boxes safely at Bobby's. Dean was still carefully packing up the various weapons that John had left behind, so Sam very cautiously opened up the casket.
It was thankfully empty, to Sam's relief. They hadn't found any notes about why it was there, so Sam felt carefully around the edges and in the lining for anything that might indicate why he had it. There was a chance John had taken it as part of a con on a hunt, but if so why had he held on to it? Was it cursed in some fashion? Bobby had no idea and was starting to get exasperated about the constant calling when he was attempting to work both his hunter phone bank and his salvage business. Dean made the decision to pack it up along with everything else.
The three of them worked steadily until dinnertime. Dean slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of the unit for a second night and they finished packing up and loading it all into the rented U-Haul the next day. Bobby had started drawing up plans for a storage bunker on his property, camouflaged by a storage shed aboveground, but in the meantime he simply fortified his basement for the whole mess, grumbling about John the entire time. With everything safely secured at Singer Salvage the Winchesters turned their attention to the issue of Adam Milligan.
With the yellow-eyed demon dead and its plans supposedly foiled, Adam and Kate Milligan were probably just as safe as any other uneducated civilian. Casual investigation had revealed that the kid was just finished with his second year of high school while his mother worked as a nurse. The relevant section in John's journal was missing, but a few calls in the guise of a reporter turned up stories of grave desecration and mausoleum robbing, which probably explained something about John being there.
In the end, the only way they would get their questions answered would be to ask them. Joan excused herself from any decision making, as this situation had nothing to do with her, and spent the time they were debating keeping Bobby company with Billy. Sam wanted to know, one way or another, whether Adam was a Winchester. Part of it was curiosity and another part was a desire to add more family to his growing collection.
Dean didn't want to contact the Milligans. It was a can of worms about John Winchester that he absolutely did not want to answer. As far as he was concerned, Sam and Joan and Billy and Bobby were his family. He wasn't in the market for a new bratty teenaged brother. There was nothing that the Milligans had or knew that he wanted.
Eventually Sam persisted enough for Dean to capitulate and make the trip to Windom, Minnesota. Joan and Billy stayed behind with Bobby, Joan insisting that this was something that the two of them needed to handle without the distraction of her presence. Dean just had a feeling that his future sister-in-law (they weren't there yet, but Dean was hopeful) had the good sense to stay away from the fallout. Both of the Winchesters also had an inkling that it might be a bad idea to bring the two of them to meet virtual strangers.
Sam made the phone call to the number he'd found for Kate Milligan once they were on the road, the car feeling oddly empty without Joan and Billy in the backseat. He'd introduced himself as Sam Winchester, John Winchester's son, and said they wanted to meet in a public place to exchange information.
The woman seemed reluctant, but eventually agreed to meet them in a diner in town. She was working a day shift, so it would be in the evening, and Adam would absolutely not be attending. Sam was a little disappointed at that, but given that he had left his own child tucked safely away with his mother and hadn't brought him along he also couldn't blame her. He hadn't decided if he was going to bring out the pictures or not. It would depend on how things went at the diner.
They were there a few minutes early, snagging a booth in the corner that offered good sight lines of the entire place. The waitress eyed them with suspicion when they asked for just coffee for the moment, as they were waiting for someone, before pouring out the coffee and walking off in a bit of a huff. She greeted a woman that came in as Kate a couple of minutes later and was watching with a bit of interest as the scrub-clad woman sat down across from the two of them. She looked so much like Mary Winchester that it was startling, and a little discomfiting. Sam was not happy to deduce that John Winchester had a type.
"You two have got to be John's boys," she said, sounding tired. "What's he gotten himself into now?"
Sam glanced at Dean, but his brother was doing the implacable wall impression and was clearly leaving it all to him. "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but Dad passed last summer."
"And you're just getting around to telling me now?"
"We didn't know about you or Adam," Dean interjected. "We just finished cleaning out his storage unit and found this." He passed over the copy of Adam's birth certificate. "He never said anything, didn't leave any kind of message or anything, but it wasn't hard to put some of the pieces together."
Sam glanced at his brother out of the corner of his eye. He was sure that Dean was doing his best not to take out his anger on Kate. It was hardly the woman's fault that John Winchester's secrets had secrets, and that he had a fundamental distrust of just about everyone. "Once we found that and crunched the numbers, we felt that you and your son deserved to know what had happened with our dad."
Kate laughed a little, but it was a tired thing. "Such a John thing to do. He used to blow into town once I told him three years ago, take Adam to a baseball game and play happy family for a few days before heading back out again. He told me about you two once, but just to say that Sam was in college and Dean had taken up the family business."
"He liked to hold onto personal things," Sam offered. He didn't feel like apologizing for John Winchester just now. "We found all sorts of stuff we never knew existed in that storage unit, and stuff we would have sworn got tossed years ago."
"I'll let Adam know about John," Kate offered. "And that he has you two for brothers. He's almost seventeen. He can make choices about reaching out to you."
Sam almost pulled out his phone to show pictures of Billy and Joan, but decided to hold off for now. Maybe if Adam decided he wanted more family Sam would share that particular piece of his own personal family.
They paid for Kate's coffee and for pie to go, though Dean had started to become a bit of a pie snob when he had some access to homemade versus restaurant pie. Kate watched them get into the Impala and waved before heading toward her own car.
It could have gone worse, Sam thought. The door was open there. They'd have to wait to see if Adam would decide to take up his end.