He recognises the fabric draped over his father's shoulders the moment he see it, finds his fingers stretching for it on impulse after the waitress has left them alone with their drinks.
Of course he's snapping them back the moment he realises what he's doing, feeling headache brewing for the mix of emmotions for the regection on his father's face as he does as such.
They talk almost in tandem but a moment later, he offering hollow appology and his father profering the blanket like tallismen as he states,
"Here, it's yours anyway."
It smells, still, impossibly like hay, wool and the spices his mother wore always against her skin.
Like home.
For a moment he doesn't care how crazy he knows he looks from the outside, all but burries his head in the soft fabric in the foolish hope that, somehow, he might find himself swallowed back to those happier times.
Then there's a sharp sound as someone drops something back of house and he's again Neal Cassady a man the Darkness inside of the one across from him would be proud to name allie, a man worlds away from the boy he knows that other has given likely far too much to find.
"Not anymore," he responds as he hands the thing back, the new hurt the action causes slicing that little shallower as reality settles in.
As, at last, he fully lets go his boyhood fantasies and accepts that this is what his life is to be.
That he is the price of his father's magic.