Thoughts back home

Streets were already empty and a light rain had begun to fall. He needed to be careful now or he would slip.

Three weeks had passed since his return to Downton; three weeks working in a public house; three weeks away from his wife. That's all he wanted. He didn't deserve anything else after how he had behaved.

Why wasn't he able to do things right ever? Shouldn't the war and his age have turned him into a wiser man?

Those unanswered questions haunted him day and night; first in London and now here. He felt he was a failure for anyone involved in his life so he had to be alone.

And yet, he was weak and in the end, had to surrender.

He turned the last corner in his way back home and by now, despite his struggle to be in the moral side of the scale, second thoughts had already faded away.

He couldn't see the darkness of feel the coldness that had enveloped the village by the time he had closed the public house. Like a blind man who was beginning to see again, John was desperate to reach the familiar lights that illuminated that last street.

Those lights were the guidance in his search for safety and warmth that sometimes he could find at home.

Looking up to one of the windows of his small flat, he smiled. Tonight he would find them.

His mistress was home.

The end


A/N - Currently working on a longer M-ish "sequel" of this