Characters from the original series belong rightfully to their creators. The characters not from the show are invented by me and their lives are pure fiction. Some places, parts of nature and the ways of living are from Scandinavia rather than Nevada, but I trust on the kind eye of the reader.

Introduction

Adam, Joe and Hoss were sitting by a campfire and warming their fingers and their cold leather gloves at its warmth. A pot of coffee was on its way, and the men were leaning towards the flames to keep warm in the chilly weather. They had been off the ranch for days, and they would be reaching the Ponderosa the next day.

Joe stirred the fire and picked the kettle away from the fire with folded gloves to protect his fingers. "You have that look in your eyes again, Hoss", he teased, and smiled playfully from under his brow. Hoss didn't even notice at first, so Joe had to repeat his line and throw a dead twig at him.

Hoss jolted, but very slightly. "What, Joe? Why're you throwing things at me?"

"You've only been three days away from them and already you're lost in your own world."

Hoss smiled, just to himself, so inwardly that his blue eyes seemed to glitter with snowflakes and distant candle-light when he thought of his family. "Yeah, I reckon I am", he said with a soft chuckle. "It's just that... I've been apart."

Joe looked at his brother with a curious look and shifted under his heavy coat, to make himself warmer. He wrapped his fingers around the coffee cup and blew to the surface of the steaming black drink to make it easier to taste. "You were married last summer, and still you act sometimes if you had met her just yesterday."

Hoss' smile curved a little bit more towards his own heart. "Yeah, ain't it so. It feels quite wonderful inside of me, too." He couldn't have imagined any emotion more fulfilling than what his brother had just described.

Joe sipped his coffee and heard Adam shift in his place, too, so that he could hear better what Hoss had to say. Both of them stared curiously at their middle brother, until he noticed their expectant looks and chuckled. "What. Ain't you got any other things to look at but me?"

"Tell us", Adam said, pouring a cup of coffee for himself. "How does it feel, after all these months?"

Hoss looked into the fire, which reflected from the surface of his misty blue gaze. "I don't really know, Adam." He frowned slightly, and chased his dreams in a moment of silence. "I mean, I can't really put my finger on it, exactly. Some days, especially when she's cross with me, I wonder if it was really worth it after all. Sometimes I think I know her all completely, and I look at the back of her and think, how it could last any longer?"

Adam and Joe sat in silence, looking at their brother and awaiting for what would follow.

The corner of Hoss' mouth twitched, when a smile broke through over his face and lit up the shimmering blue eyes that looked into all the memories. "And then she just turns around, and I fall in love again."

He pulled himself out from his own thoughts and fixed his look back into his brothers, grinning to them in a way to disqualify his home-spun poetry. "Don't be scared, brothers, it's still the same ol' Hoss."

Adam winked to him from behind his shadowed dimple. "Although, you've come a long way, little brother." He took a sip of his coffee and looked into the shadows of the trees, with an affectionate smile on his lips, and a look of distant memories in his hazy eyes.

Joe hugged his knees and stared at the flames with a small curl on his lips, implying to Hoss that he was thinking of the latest crush of his. Although, Hoss had to hide his smirk under the rim of his big hat as he lowered his eyes, since he knew Joe's crushes came and went away quickly as snowflakes in late winter. Better not judge this one before it had been proven to have any direction, though. He'd find his own happiness from somewhere, some day.

Hoss, on the other hand, was going home to Elin.