Title: Coming Home
Fandom: 07-Ghost
Pairing(s): Ayanami-centric
Warnings: -
Synopsis: Home is where the heart is.
The boy is five when men in jet-black coats edged with a tinge of gold burst in through the doors, bringing with them the chill of the outside wind, and he does what children do, stares at them with a fearless child-like curiosity.
He is however, intelligent enough to comprehend the raised voices, he hears his mother's accusations and his father's excuses, but being the child he is, he does not fully understand the gravity of the situation at that time. He doesn't understand why the man he calls Father has to leave in the midst of a snow-storm with those intimidating soldiers, or why his mother was furiously shouting after them as they left.
It takes him another year or two before the boy who would become the Empire's most famed strategist to realize that on that winter's night, his family had lost their nobility and the men in their long, ominous coats had come to take his disgraced father – that man had served the military, served and betrayed – away to his eventual fate.
–
He jolts awake, the remnants of that memory still too fresh on his mind. The reason for the dream still sleeps within murky depths, and distantly the silver-haired man wonders why this old, old memory from a childhood he now barely remembers would surface in the midst of a war.
He is not a sentimental person, and sees no reason to remember a man – even the affection he had once had as a child is lost in the passage of time – who had betrayed the country he now serves.
A hand comes to rest against his shoulder, and Ayanami looks up only to see the reflection of a man worn and tired from too many battles and burdens. There are no words between them, there never is, and he looks away to the blinding glare of the snowy landscape stretching out before them.
–
The letter comes after a harsh training session, and perhaps it is the exhaustion that numbs the surprise; there had been an accident and his mother is dead, consumed by the flames from which she couldn't escape in time.
A remarkably un-extraordinary way to go out, but the young man simply crumples the letter and stows it away in the chest of drawers beside his bunk. Two days later a man comes by and hands him a small trunk that smells vaguely of smoke and charred wood, and another letter dictating his now-deceased mother's desire for him to have the house they had lived in – Ayanami sees no point of retaining the empty, burnt-out husk of steel and concrete but he does nothing about it – and the few possessions they had retrieved from the wreckage.
He puts the trunk away beneath the bunk, deftly avoiding his room-mate's unending flood of questions on its origin, and easily forgets about it.
Years later, the trunk – still unopened – is amongst his belongings as the now-Colonel of the Barsburg Empire moves into newly appointed quarters. Ayanami is not a sentimental creature, or so he tells himself, but yet, when the door closes behind him, he pushes the trunk into an unobtrusive corner and allows it to remain there.
–
Ayanami looks tired, even when he's fast asleep in the back of a carriage. It isn't like the Chief of Staff to take a nap, not outside and most certainly not while he has company, but the dark-haired swordsman sitting across him is someone he can trust to keep a secret and watch his back. So he sleeps as their transport rumbles on over a well-worn dirt track, and even in slumber Ayanami knows where they're going.
–
The first time he returns to the cold, abandoned shell of the place he once used to call home is after the graduation ceremony. He is alone then, and as he stands before a once majestic house he remembers the feeling he once had as a child – that time is long past, but the memory has not died yet – of being so small before a towering structure meant to shelter from the winter cold.
He feels a small, almost sad smile curl the edge of his lip, the house had not survived the firestorm that had consumed it and its sole inhabitant.
The letter is in his breast pocket, under the warm overcoat that shields him from the cold.
It isn't like him to care about the past, so he seals those emotions away as booted feet carry him back to the vehicle which had brought him here and will bring him back to the imposing Fortress of the First District.
The second time he stands before the ruined structure he is a man hiding battle-wounds and old scars under the crisp black uniform he wears, a lethal blade fitted snugly into a matching sheath hanging at his side.
This time the memories are dead and long gone, borne away by the breeze that lingers around crumbled rock and rusted steel. He doesn't know what manner of whim has brought him back to this place, not when he's quite sure he has abandoned it a long time ago even though the trunk tucked securely away in the place he calls home seems to protest otherwise.
The letter is still in his breast pocket, under the fitting black uniform he wears in place of that old, warm overcoat.
–
Over the years he has thrown away so many emotions, locked them away – like the still-locked trunk with its rusting lock that sits in the place he calls home – and paid no heed to them. He knows they call him cold, the heartless commander of the terrifying Warsfeil, of course he has heard the rumors being whispered in long empty corridors, but he has better things to do than to bother disproving the idle daytime gossip of students and soldiers with too much time on their hands.
Instead long strides carry him down towards the war-room; their counterpart Kingdom has declared battle and it is time for them all to take up arms once more.
–
The third time he returns to the overgrown ruins of a manor is after the death, he refuses to speak of it at all, and he wonders why he has come back to this place again. It is no longer home, not for him, not when his home is the small but comfortable room in the corridors of Hohnburg Fortress, but there is something here that draws him back even though he knows he is not just Ayanami and not simply human.
It has almost become custom to carry the letter, now worn and crumpled by time and the many times he's handled it, in his breast pocket, almost as if he is still keeping it close to his heart – perhaps he is, perhaps he isn't – every time he visits the place now reduced to rubble.
He has never stepped any further past the gate on every visit, not even after the iron has crumbled under years of elemental torture.
"Why don't you go in?"
The only answer is the wind's howling, and then, silence.
–
It takes him years before he is able to make time to travel out of the office, away from the Fortress – it is still on official duties, to track down that boy who had escaped – to return without any reason to that one place his feet have always carried him back to, even though he no longer thinks of it as home.
But still he is here, standing before unrecognizable mounds of twisted metal and crushed stone overgrown with vines. Ayanami is not afraid; he now has an answer to that disembodied question, an answer someone had thrown at him once upon a eternity.
This is the last time he will come here, and he knows, the structure is already irreparably damaged and will at most last a year and a month more – and he will never come back – before it returns from whence it came, dust to dust.
So he stands there, waiting in the winter cold, but the question never comes.
It feels like eternity – and the winds have started to pick up around him – before the sound of booted feet crunching up a path that is no longer there distract him from his thoughts. A warm hand closes over his wrist and Ayanami looks up into familiar dark glasses, wonders what his subordinate is doing all the way out here in an area long forgotten by many.
Perhaps he is expecting the swordsman to ask the question he heard so long ago on the breeze, but instead Hyuuga merely smiles, grip never once relenting on his superior's wrist.
"Come home, Aya-tan."
END
A/N: What is this I don't even. I was mesmerized by the term 'coming home', but somehow it turned out rather disjointed and everything so… I don't know. I took liberties a-plenty especially with regards to his childhood, god knows how it was like anyway.