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The road home always seemed longer on days like this: when Yuri found himself at the other end of a sleepless night in the woods. It was a necessity, he reminded himself. Peace was not so instantaneous that all of his former responsibilities could be cleared away so easily. The underground still needed his support. His mother still begged for his visits. He still had things worth protecting even if those things had shifted.
Protecting those things involved traveling. It involved checking in on people and places that were scattered halfway across the damn continent. It involved checking in on other people who he paid to travel the rest of the continent so he could spend more time at home.
Home, he thought. Who would have thought the Savage Mockingbird would find himself somewhere to roost?
The fact that he had settled down (as debatable as that ‘settling’ may have been) was a miracle in itself. Yuri had an address, a place that friends and family could write to without jumping through hoops. It was a house with a garden, with flowers, with smoke rising from the chimney and bread cooling on the windowsill. He knew every petal and vine and brick by heart because he stood outside and stared at it for an embarrassingly long time whenever he made it back.
Today was no different.
The little cottage in southern Faerghus had never looked lovelier. Spring bloomed in bursts of purple and pink against the trellis of the garden gate. Ashe had done some more planting, he guessed, judging by the fresh box of violets nestled in the corner by the vegetable garden. Yuri had told him to wait - that he would help him with the planting when he got home - but Ashe had always been resourceful and productive and a little impatient. He’d insisted that Yuri “had enough to worry about”, not realizing that the little moments where he could just exist in his garden with him was one of those things that helped him to forget all of that other stuff.
Because it was true, Yuri had far too much to worry about. Even now, after the war was just a memory and the world was stitching itself back together, “retirement” was just a dream. Everyone wanted something from him: his people, his King, even his mother (though he’d never hold that against her).
Ashe, though…Ashe was different.
Pushing open the door, Yuri winced at the squealing hinges. They helped him sleep better at night knowing no one would be able to get the drop on him, but they didn’t offer much of a surprise homecoming. Ashe turned from his place by the fire when he heard the door, and he grinned when his eyes met Yuri’s. Ashe’s smile had always lit up the darkest corners of every room - the darkest corners of Yuri himself.
“Welcome home,” he said simply. He placed the book he had been reading on the end table and reached for him.
Yuri let out a breath, maybe a laugh, and climbed up onto the couch and into Ashe’s waiting arms. “I missed you,” he said, because it was true, it always was. He pressed his ear against Ashe’s chest, listened to the steady sound of his heartbeat.
In a world where everybody wanted something from him, Ashe never wanted a goddamn thing.