Chapter Text
Dean Winchester Singer is a sentimental guy. He’d never admit it out loud and will always deny it when called out on it. But he totally is. And he’s a nester and a hoarder. Having grown up with next to nothing, it doesn’t take a Master’s in psychology to realize that is the source of his nesting and hoarding instincts. He needs a place and things he can call his own. He still lives in the first apartment he was ever able to rent, once he landed a steady position as a mechanic at his adoptive father’s auto shop. He could have moved any time in the years between then and now, but he’s never wanted to. The apartment is his. And he has populated it with every kind of shit over time. Knick knacks without any kind of function, or stuff he scarcely ever uses or even looks at. But if things have even a lick of sentimental value for him, he keeps them.
Lately, he’s been feeling like he needs to finally let go of the past though. He even happened to scan through – he absolutely does not usually read stuff like that – one of the hippie/for positive thinkers and yoga lovers/new age magazines lying around his brother and sister-in-law’s place and was slapped in the face by one of the articles. A piece about how clinging to material things, even though we never use them, is actually damaging for our psyche. Because it strengthens the idea that we might need them in the future and, implicitly, that our future will be lacking and we’ll want for something. The article suggested to get rid of what we don’t need or use, make room for new things and let go of the past and, in so doing, give the future the benefit of the doubt rather than believing we “might need something.”
Dean wouldn’t say that was him. Except it totally was.
So when the stream of Christmas presents was finally over and he realized most of the new presents could substitute old things he barely ever used, he made a revolutionary decision. He decided to donate to charity some of the things he wouldn’t use anymore, or that he had stored away with the tags still on.
He decided that, for the first time in his life, he was in a position in which he could – should – finally have faith in the future and could really hope that he wouldn’t want for anything.
Plus, he reasoned, winter was coming, and it was wrong that stuff got put aside in his house for emotional reasons, or on a ‘what if’ basis, when there were people out there who could use those things, starting with his blankets. Those blankets could literally mean the difference between life and death for some of the people living in the streets.
Leaving the building after dropping off the boxes with his donations, he kinda expected to feel regret and loss. What he felt was a sense of liberation. So Dean did what he always does when realizing a right decision was made. He smiled to himself, basked in the feeling of ‘right’ for a moment, and then went back to living his life without fanfare.
He’s all but forgotten about it a few days later when, walking back home from work, he sees a cocoon lying on the sidewalk wrapped up in one of his blankets, a shock of black hair the only visible thing.
That stops him dead in his tracks alright.
Dean has a moment to think that he’s being crazy and seeing things that aren’t really there, but no, that is definitely his blanket. Quite unlikely there could be another one in the world, considering he had made that one from scratch. A blue fleece blanket, with an embroidered ugly dog face – the poor canine has one eye higher than the other and its whiskers are weird looking too. That ugly, ugly face is even complemented by a sewed pair of flapping ears Dean had knitted himself. He had made that blanket the one time Charlie convinced him taking a knitting course together would strengthen their friendship, so they could get “even more tight-knitted” than before – a pun Dean will never let her live down. He had actually debated donating that particular blanket because he was really sentimentally attached to it, in spite of how awful it had turned out to be. It was linked to one of the most important people in his life and he couldn’t help smiling whenever he thought about that damn pun. Places and things aren’t his most valuable possessions. People are. When he gets close to someone and ends up loving them and they love him back and they stick around, anything related to those people starts meaning the world to him. Those people mean the world to him. They are his world. That is true for his friend Charlie, for his brother Sammy and his sis-in-law Jess, for his adoptive dad Bobby and his adoptive mom Ellen, and their daughter turned little sister Jo.
In the end, he had reasoned, his relationship with Charlie was as tight-knitted as ever, and keeping the blanket wouldn’t make it any tighter, just like donating it wouldn’t make it any less tight. So, either he started using the blanket around the house, which he had no intention of doing because it truly was a thing of nightmares – Dean, being a mechanic, was generally good with his hands, but, alas, a fine knitter he was not – or he gave it away in the hope that it would keep warm someone who might need it.
Apparently, he’s made the right decision, considering what he’s seeing now. Dean knows that he should do what he always does when he realizes a right decision was made. He should smile to himself, take a moment to appreciate that at least one of the things he donated seems to be helping someone, wish them all the best and keep walking, going back to living his life without fanfare.
But when he hears a chesty cough that seems to go on forever, the choice is made for him.
“Hey man, how about some dinner?”