1/2
Moving wasn’t exactly new. Dean had been moving from motel to apartment to rented house to abandoned cabin to... wherever, pretty much since he was four. They did it all the time - it was actually more common for the Winchesters to be on the move than it was for them to be settling in somewhere for longer than a night. Hell, sometimes they didn’t even live anywhere - sometimes it was just sleeping in the car, parked on the side of some back road heading to the middle of nowhere, all three of them crashed in the car.
Packing up to move wasn’t new, either - at least, not in theory. Back then, though, everything he’d owned had fit in a duffel bag - two, if his weapons counted - and so had Sam’s things, and Dad’s. Now it was just him and Ben, but the amount of things they had between them was staggering. It wasn’t like he’d noticed the accumulation of stuff - it just sort of happened, somewhere along the way. Sure, it had happened before - the six months during a school year when Sam was thirteen, where he’d ended up with a whole box of stuff when he was packing, in addition to his duffels - but it had never been stuff he took with him when they actually left. It was always left at a thrift store somewhere, for someone else, because they had to travel light.
Now, though, he was only moving to a different place in the same building, and he was staying there for the foreseeable future, and... he had things to take with him. It was weird, and it probably shouldn’t have been. He knew most people did have things, that it was normal, but the idea of getting boxes of stuff and moving them - to a new place, not to a thrift store or the dumpster outside - was just bizarre.
It wasn’t just stuff, either - there was the furniture. He’d gone out and gotten Ben a bed once he’d arranged for the two-bedroom place, since he only had his and a couch and the whole point of having a bigger place was that Ben would have a real bedroom, and not just a couch (yeah, a couch would be okay - Dean had slept on his fair share of couches or even less comfortable places - but it wasn’t what Ben was used to, and he deserved better than that, and Dean was pretty sure Lisa would be pissed if she knew her son - their son, his son - was sleeping on the couch forever). So the new place had a bed in it, and now Dean was trying to figure out... what else he was supposed to bring over. And this whole thing where he actually had furniture that was his to move with him? It was even weirder than the boxes.
This was the new normal now, though. He was a normal guy - one who happened to be a hunter and an angel vessel and stuck in the middle of the apocalypse - and he was a parent, and a boyfriend. It wasn’t like all of this was new, he’d been dating Juliet for a while, now, and, okay, the parent thing was new, but other than that, he’d been pulling all of this off for a while, now; most of this wasn’t new at all. It was just weird, realizing just how domesticated he’d become - realizing how much he hadn’t even noticed it happening. He just sort of fell into the routines of staying in one place, did it a lot more easily than he ever would have expected to, years ago. Before Hell, before Sam died... this sort of life would have seemed stifling at best, long protracted torturous suicide at worst. He’d have felt like he was living in a cage, a box - he needed his freedom, back then. The car and the road and his brother were enough to keep him happy.