Echoes and Silence, Patience and Grace || Closed Thread
♫ People I've loved, I have no regrets
Some I remember, some I forget
Some of them living, some of them dead
And all I want is to be home ♫
Ben was going home.
October had finally given way to the creeping cold of Fall. Trees blazed in a last flash of glory against early morning frost and a cloak of darkness that came closer and earlier every night. October brought relief in the form of damp morning air, warm store fronts, and the scent of pumpkin lingering in the air.
He had left around October of last year. A year. Three hundred and sixty fives days. How did the rest of that song go? How do you measure, measure in love? You measure in salt rounds, in motels, in exorcisms and scars. You measure in the days you've managed to stay alive, to keep two other people going too. Jesse and Claire, who he had told last week that he was going to finally see his mom. "I'll be back." Ben promised, more or less easing his own anxiety than their own.
Home wasn't where he had grown up though. Home was a Bed and Breakfast called Luck of the Draw. The kind of place that his mother would fit in perfectly. Old, but well loved, inviting from the moment you saw it with overflowing flowerbeds and cute Halloween decorations already out. Home was no longer a kitchen that had a crack in tile from when he let his first Junior Varsity football MVP trophy slip. Where a window faced out to a lawn where a bouncy house castle had once stood so long ago. Home no longer had a room on the second floor in the furthest corner where bookshelves groaned with too much weight and words bound with paper and glue. Where homework was done at the kitchen table and games were hastily piled into a futon to be played on the weekends. Home wasn't home anymore.
Ben knocked on the front door, not knowing how this worked. It wasn't his home, at least not yet. He didn't want to barge in. Why hadn't he brought Claire and Jesse with him? The young hunter was paralyzed with fear- not at facing hell hounds, rogue angels, hell, even Slenderman, but of seeing his mom again.