Bard was used to the feel of wet rope against cold fingers. That was not to say he was immune to the scraping chafe of it.
The lilt of boats under his feet, the smell of fish, the ache of knuckles too long exposed to the wet and the cold. This was his home. Dear as it was despised.
He stepped out onto the dock, his bag slung across his back.
Water gurgled under planks that had creaked since he was no more than a boy.
Soft wood holding up their very lives. Water that cursed even as it gave. Mouths that spoke kindness and plotted evil. A leader who sucked them dry and leached off their every shadow of happiness and only grew more pustulant and greedy. Hungry people worked to death to eke out something that could never be enough to get free. Starvation kept at bay but never by enough to drive away gnawing stomachs.
This was Laketown. This was his home.
The dark wood groaned under his feet as he climbed the steps, up into the bleak and spitting sky.
He took the knob into his hand and tugged it open.
Inside, he was met by warmth and the soft glow of a guttering lamp. Sigrid's head shot up, "Oh, Da, you're home early!," she said, too loudly, "Let me help you get your coat," and she brushed the flour from her hands on the faded apron her mother had worn, coming around the cluttered little room to meet him.
"Da! You're home!" Tilda beating her sister with a gleeful shout, crashing against him.
"Yes, yes, I am," he said.
Sigrid came up behind her, coming between him and his view into the next room. She reached to hug him and take his coat.
There was a spot of flour of her nose. Bard looked at her.
Nervous, she colored, and she glanced away.
She was hiding something. They all were, if Bain's absence was taken into account.
They shouldn't. But he loved them for it.
Before she could think he'd guessed, he stopped her. "Sigrid,"
Fearful and trying to hide it, she glanced at him and away too fast, straightening the collar of his coat as she shook it out.
"Have I told you how beautiful you've grown?"
She flushed a deeper red, "Da,"
Tilda arched her head back, her arms still tight as anything about his middle. "No so beautiful as me, though, right Da?" mischief sparkled in her eyes. "You told me nothing was as pretty as me."
"Tilda," Bard scooped her up. "Your beauty could rival that of the very sun."
Tilda giggled, and when Bard raised his head, Bain had joined them, and he caught just the end of a look shared between his elder daughter and his son. The look was gone before he'd quite caught it, and were he not their father, he might have missed it entirely. As it was, he was proud of them. His children could stand together against anything. He was sure of it.
He'd been wrong earlier, he realized. Laketown was nothing to him.
This.
This was his home.