Hiraeth – Home is where the heart is
Pairing: Dean x Reader (Past tense not current relationship)
Summary: Dean’s looking back on the summer he spent with you in his arms. A year has passed, summer is here again. But it’s a summer without you and, even in the sweltering heat of the bunker, he’s freezing to the bone.
Triggers: Heartbreak, Loss, broken childhood, John being a bad dad, ambiguous ending (could be implied as reader death though nothing is described), ANGST.
A/N: Written for @firefly-in-darkness’s summer challenge. My prompt was Hiraeth – a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was. Since it’s an uncommon word, it’s not used directly in the fic, but rather just the feelings it encompasses. As well as of course being a part of the title of the fic.
Y/N = Your Name | Y/L/N = Your Last Name | Y/E/C = Your Eye Colour | Y/H/C = Your Hair Colour
Home.
The word had always felt foreign and strange on Dean’s tongue. He had very few memories of the apple pie life others often referred to when they spoke of ‘home sweet home’.
He knew what it was supposed to mean. At least he had once. Back when he was still a kid, when he still held onto the hope of settling down to a new normal after his mother’s death.
There’d been more than one shaky crayon drawing of four walls with a smiling sun and happy stick figures on a green lawn painted onto scrap paper in the back seat of the Impala as his father drove them from hunt to hunt during his early childhood years. A pair of young, naïve eyes catching the picket fences that rushed past on the other side of the window and dreaming of a home to return to.
He’d only had a taste of it, for the first few years of his life, before it went up in flames around him. His young eyes watching everything he loved burn as he held baby Sammy in his arms and his father fell to pieces next to him on the carefully manicured lawn. But for the next few years of his young life he’d always held onto the hope that he’d get it back at some point. Until he grew old enough to know better.
Home had never been his father’s goal. John Winchester had been driving towards revenge, not a better future for his boys.
