The Family Business

Patience, 13.03

I’ve been wanting to talk about this scene since it aired, and I finally feel emotionally detached enough to do that. These are solid and wise (albeit laced with grief) words that Dean gives Patience, and I wish Jody hadn’t dismissed them. Because the thing is: Dean’s not wrong.  He helps people, absolutely. But there has been pain, and horror and death for Dean and Sam and everyone they love–on the sum of it, it’s a pretty fucked up, rotten life and there are other ways Patience can help people without becoming a monster hunter. 

Now, maybe Jody can give her a better time of it just by virtue of being there for her like parental people were not for Dean, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this advice. Just because Dean’s grieving when he says it, doesn’t make it invalid. And in fact, we’ve seen him give similar advice to others: 

It’s why he didn’t want Ben anywhere near a gun:

(and a huge reason why he erased Lisa and Ben’s memories). Hell, Bobby knows this is good advice too. Even if he shouldn’t have made the choice for Dean, it’s why he didn’t tell Dean for a year that Sam was alive. Because Dean was safe as long as he wasn’t hunting (ostensibly, anyway)

Jensen Ackles | JIBCon 2017

I don’t think there’s ever a time where we see this talked about or shown, but it seems a pretty safe bet considering we’ve seen Dean doing pretty much everything Sam needed doing. Not only taking care of his brother (and stealing to make sure he eats) when they were kids while John was gone for days (and weeks), and checking to see that Sam has his lunch money

(from 4.13)

And talking about taking Sam to the emergency room (9.15) on his handlebars (when it was a break that couldn’t be fixed with a bit of sewing):

So clearly fix-up duty was a thing. 

But we also see Dean ironing (11.20) his adult brother’s clothes (albeit with beer): 

And it doesn’t seem to be a one-off occurrence considering Sam yells at him to quit ironing his shirts with beer. Shirts, plural. Which isn’t surprising that Dean does this, because it was probably a pattern established in childhood. Another job that needed doing so Dean took it on, and would have had to figure out how to make that happen if John wasn’t around. 

And we know Dean is good with his hands

None.

I have

absolutely

no thoughts

about

Demon Dean’s

hair

no thoughts

at all