Welcome back! Sorry for the random updating 'schedule', I write these when I have time and usually post them right after. Anyways, this one may be a little more on the bittersweet side, but it still ends happily, I promise. Big thanks to bagelcat1 for the prompt about the slinky and possibly connecting it to a moment from Dean's childhood. I loved the idea and had a great time writing this little thing.

Thank you guys so much for all the prompts! It brings me so much joy to read them all :) they're all saved and will become little stories someday so long as college doesn't demolish me when it starts back up this week. Of course, please send some in if you think of any! There can never be too many happy Winchester moments.

To Kathy: wow, that's a lot of ideas, thank you so much for sharing all of them! I'll try to get to a few in the near future :)

Still don't own anything SPN related, and we're just over a month away from the new season *new just sounds better than f*nal, right*

Neither Winchester brother grew up with an arsenal of toys. They grew up with an arsenal of other things, none of them child-proof or child-safe. There was an exception though, one that lasted four years until it burned with their mother.

Dean had toys growing up, as did every toddler. He had favorites, of course. A blue race car, a bright yellow dump truck, a few 'magic' hats, some stuffed animals. But none came close to his metal slinky. Mary had told John not to get it, Dean's fingers could get caught in it, especially with it being metal. That, and she didn't want to have to unwind it every time it got twisted.

But John still handed it to Dean with a smile and said that his oldest had some good hand-eye coordination and would take care of it, right? Dean's nod and wide smile was the only yes his father needed.

Dean took the slinky everywhere. In the car, to the store, around the house. He'd toss it from hand to hand and watch, mesmerized, as it bounced back and forth. When he figured out how to make it go down the stairs without messing up once, it was a sight to behold. The pride in his four-year old body wouldn't be matched for years.

After the fire, John told him that they were staying somewhere else for a while, probably forever, and that they were only taking the car, so they didn't have much room for toys. He could pick two of his very favorite to take with him, remnants of his old life before an inferno stole it from him.

He didn't quite comprehend it all, of course, but he knew that things were bad and changing and that the decision had to be made quickly so they could leave. The slinky was in his bag without another thought.

Dean then reached up for his blue race car. It went so fast when he pulled back and let it go, like it were really racing. It was his fastest car and he loved the blue color. But his hand stopped when he spotted the stuffed bear next to it. The bear wasn't a favorite of his per se, he hadn't really loved it since he was about two. But Sammy did.

Whenever Mary would bring Sammy into Dean's room, the baby's hands would go for the stuffed teddy, and he'd refuse to let it go. He'd slept with it on more than one occasion, not that Dean minded.

All of Sammy's toys had been burned in the fire, John had told him that much. He said they'd buy more, but Dean wasn't sure when that would really happen.

The race car or the bear? Perhaps the toughest decision Dean had made in his short life so far. And yet, one of the easiest, setting down the foundation for what would be hundreds of other decisions over the years.

John drove them away from the house that afternoon, Dean watching the slinky move between his hands, Sammy happily latched onto the teddy bear even as he slept.

The Winchesters didn't have a conventional childhood, not by any means. Bits and pieces of one, sure, but nothing that amounted to a whole picture. But they had things that mattered. Sam held onto his teddy bear until he was seven and the nose was falling off, along with an ear, from how much it had been loved and clutched over the years.

Sam didn't cry when it actually fell apart three months later, but he was close to it when John said to leave it in the motel room when they left the next morning.

Dean held onto the last remnant of his childhood a bit longer, and for that Sam was happy. Dean had always been fidgety, Sam noticed that even as a child. His brother always had something moving in his hands, be it a pencil, gun, remote, pen, or his slinky. It helped him focus, he'd say, as a blow-off.

He'd be reading the newspaper, one hand on the print, the other mindlessly pulling the metal springs up and down and up and down. It was soothing, actually, to listen to, and Sam fell asleep to the sounds of it more than once.

Dean tried to show him how to make it slink off a table, but he never could quite get the hang of it like his older brother had. He was fine watching Dean with it, though, like a metallic dance between his hands, usually completely unaware that Sam was watching him in the first place.

As Dean grew older, his tendency to fidget with his hands turned more tactile, and the pens and pencils were often swapped for knives to twirl back and forth. It wasn't long after the slinky got bent and twisted beyond repair that Sam seldom saw his older brother without a knife or gun component in his hand.

The sounds of a weapon being reassembled weren't nearly as soothing to fall asleep to as the ones the cascading metal rings had made.

Sam hated Plucky Pennywhistle's. Loathed. Abhorred. He could go on. The sooner they were away from the clown-filled nightmare, the better. Sam had been scanning over the whole place over the past however many hours they'd been stuck there, looking for everything from robots to clowns to actual monsters. While he had been doing that, he'd noticed something conspicuous in the prize counter.

It was a bright rainbow slinky with a price tag of 1000 tickets. For a place like Plucky's, Sam doubted many kids ever got up that many tickets to ever win something so decent. Even though the toy wasn't small and metal, it still brought up memories, and he found himself wondering if Dean had seen it gleaming like a jewel in a safe.

Knowing his brother, Dean probably had, and would have offered cash money to take it home. How that had gone, or would eventually go, Sam had no idea. For now, though, they had a job to get back to.

That didn't mean that during the chaos of the night, he didn't have a chance to slip one out of the back where they kept the prizes stored in bulk.

The smile on Dean's face when Sam delivered the gleaming Christmas present in February, bright and neon and wrapped in clear plastic, was the widest Sam had seen in months. Maybe even years.

That by itself made the glitter and the clowns worth it.

In the motel room that night, Dean flipped channels on the television with one hand and toyed with the plastic rings with the other. He'd tried flipping it off the table a few times earlier in the night, and when it hadn't gone over quite as well, he'd declared that "they don't make 'em like they used to. Just like riding a bike, I'll get the hang of it, you just watch."

And Sam had. Watched as Dean got that crinkle in his forehead that meant he was really concentrating. His careful hands nudging it over the side and then springing up as the plastic slinky did what he wanted.

"See? Told you. Master slinker."

"Dude, no way that's a word."

"It's only a word to people who know how to slink properly." Dean looked at him, proud of his accomplishment, and Sam wished that he'd found his brother such a simple joy sooner.

Dean eventually settled on a Star Wars rerun, which neither of them were ever opposed to. With a rare rest of the night off and no end of the world happening in the next twelve hours, Sam turned in before Dean.

Of course, a night off meant that the weapons could be checked and cleaned the following day. It was a nice break, falling asleep to something other than pieces of metal clicking perfectly into place.

Just plastic rings hitting each other at a perfect rhythm, over and over and over echoing throughout Sam's mind and sending him straight to sleep.