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Ford Brownbarrow was very aware of his own preference for routine. For stability and familiarity and all those good, good things.
His wife, bless her soul, was much the same these days, although he had stories of a young halfling menace who’d broken fences and torn skirts that he’d bet his son would struggle to believe.
It’s funny the things you did for your kids.
They were both set in their ways, is what he means to say.
He’d gotten up out of bed to more dawns than the cock could crow, and he’d taken his barrow, loaded with barrels that had been mended more times than he could count, down to the river.
He’d fill his barrels to the brim, and then he’d sit to have a smoke. No matter the weather, even if he’d had to break ice to get the water, always a smoke – before he’d start hauling the barrow back up the hill to the farm.
Then there’d be breakfast, fresh eggs normally, so long as the ladies were laying, and then the real work started.
Sometimes, looking back, all he could see was the echoes of the thousands of times there’d been a grinning menace ‘helping’ with the barrow, first a son and then a granddaughter just like him; groaning about the early morning, spilling more than they helped, splashing around in the river while he smoked, getting distracted by fish and neighbourhood kids and how many times they could skip a stone, and was he watching?
He'd moved water without those disturbances far more often than with, but somehow those echoes still haunted his favourite task.
But all that was before.
Those days live crystalline in his memory, but seem so very, very far away now.
Sometimes, more now than in the Fortress where there was still water to be fetched of a morning, sometimes Ford thinks about packing up and going to see what’s left of their home.
The zombies will be gone now, his Quinny made sure of that, and as much as he’s sure seeing that place all torn up and overgrown will hurt, so long as he’s got a barrow and some barrels, he can make it work.
This place… Assguard is anathema to him.
It’s hot and dry and the water comes from caves not rivers and tastes of minerals instead of mud.
There’s tasks for him here, things he’s been asked to do as favours to Quinny’s friends, but they’re far from any kind of stability, and the people here… sometimes the people here make him want to cry for how they see the world.
He wants to take them down to a river, make them wait while he smokes, watch them skip stones, show them how different the world can be away from this place.
There’s no rivers here, and some days there aren’t even enough eggs for breakfast.
He thinks of his few surviving old hens back at the Fortress and wonders if they’re still laying well.
Penny raises an eyebrow at him over the new eyeglasses she’s taken to wearing as she marks the kids' sporadic homework submissions.
“You sigh any deeper and you’ll have the castle down around our ears,” she said.
“You ever think about…” he started, and then caught himself, realising the thought he was about to express couldn’t be easily taken back. “You ever think about going home?”
“Once all this is done?” she asked, gesturing at the marking and then out towards the city beyond their castle walls.
“Something like that.”
“You think our Quinny’ll let us out of his sight?”
“He was eager enough to be out of our sight, that boy,” Ford said with a wry grin. “Maybe it’s our turn to run?”
“Hmm…” said Penny, and Ford wondered if he’d been too blunt with his thoughts as she gave him a sharp look. “Perhaps you’re ready.”
Leaving her marking, Penny went to her bedside table and pulled out her favourite journal.
She set it on the table between then, flicking past sketches of a riverbank, a barn, a flock of chickens, and turning to a list. A plan, he read from the title, to run away home.
“Not yet, though,” she said as Ford took in the plan, with crazy harebrained steps far more reminiscent of a younger, wilder thing he had until recently imagined long gone. “Our young’uns need a little more time, and I’m sure with a few more classes we can get the ABCs down with the local rascals.”
Ford flicked back to the sketch of the river – there were a few, he realised. He hadn’t been the only one dreaming of home.
“It’ll be there, waiting for us,” Penny said, reaching out to clasp his hand.
“You know I love you dearly.”
“Of course you do, dear. Let’s run away together.”