Robin Hood Fic: Place Called Home
Author: corrielle
Title: Place Called Home
Rating: G
Word Count: 514
Summary: Allan ponders the meaning of home.
Author's notes: Just some garden variety Allan angst... written for the final challenge over at hoodland.
When the nights grew long and cold and the voice of the wind moaned low and hollow outside the caves, talk around the fire in the outlaw camp had often turned to home.
Home, for Robin, was Locksley Manor, the hearth Dan Scarlett had built, the village on feast days, the churchyard where his parents had been wed and buried, the fields and gardens and woods when they bloomed in spring. Much spoke of the manor house as home as well when Robin reminded him that he'd only been to Bonchurch twice.
Home, for Will, was his father's house in Locksley. Every beam perfectly fitted, every bed, every chair made with a craftsman's care. It was the table where they ate, the workshop where his father helped him learn to find the beauty in a rough block of wood.
Home, for Little John, was the house he'd shared with Alice. When he spoke of it, he often complained about the roof that always wanted fixing, the walls that always seemed to let the wind in no matter what he did, and the door that didn't hang quite straight, but when Allan asked him why he didn't just tear it down and start again, John glared at him and said, "It was our HOME, Allan…" as if that explained everything.
When Djaq spoke of home, she spoke of places most of them had never seen, though there was recognition in Much and Robin's eyes as she spoke of palms by a river and a city of white houses amidst the desert sands. And the rest of them, if they could not quite see as she saw, could at least understand what it was to miss a place, a piece of ground that was theirs and no one else's.
Allan rarely spoke of home. He'd said once that his father had been a blacksmith, and that was true enough. He remembered a house built up against a smithy, but that hadn't been home for long. He remembered sleeping wherever the servants of the latest man to need his father's skills could find room for him and Tom, and when his father died, he remembered barn lofts and alleys and common room floors. But none of these were home. None of these had been his, and he remembered none of them with the fondness he heard in the others' voices.
But tonight, with the comforts of Nottingham castle all around him, a good bed beneath him and warm food in his belly, Allan yearned for home. And home, he was realizing, was in the middle of Sherwood Forest. But… that wasn't quite right either. His longing was not for the drafty caves or the secret camp Will had built. Not for trees or streams or meadows. Instead, it was for Much's awful stew and Robin's glib optimism, for John's grumpiness at the antics of his younger friends, for the rare smiles that broke through Will's seriousness and for Djaq's sharp tongue.
And for the first time in his life, more than anything, Allan wanted to go home.