Word Count: 1036
Music: here


It takes several months for Tristan to muster up his courage and return to his wonder.

He doesn’t mean to let so much time eclipse before he manages to power up and return, but his time away had taken a toll on him and his loved ones and that meant there was much work to do on Earth. All and all, his time ‘home’ is good for him. He’s gained some weight, he’s journalling, focusing on his photography and the people in his life.

There aren’t too many, but the people that have stuck around are still so terribly important and he treasures them dearly.

Tristan isn’t very good at showing how important they are to him, but he’s learning and he’s trying and it’s not the biggest victory, but it’s a victory nonetheless and it counts, it still matters.

So, this time, he lets people know what he’s doing because he’s trying to be better about his communication. A few people would get a text message saying, Taking a trip back home, should be back tonight, might stay overnight. They’d know what he meant, hopefully, and it was something he hadn’t done before.

Small steps in the right direction.

When he goes, he takes a backpack full of things, and his camera.

.

Amelia is waiting to greet him at the doors of the wonder.

“How do you always know when I’m coming?” He can’t help but ask and Amelia’s smile is kind, but strained.

“Call it instinct,” she tells him and he doesn’t feel like that’s really the truth, but Amelia looks weary so he doesn’t push it.

(And then he wonders if ghosts can be weary, but she must be. How long has she been the ghost haunting the place she once called hers?)

“I didn’t think you’d return,” she admits, her chest heaving with what he thinks is a sigh. It’s a strange thing, now that he’s thinking too much about it, to see all of her movements and the way she acts as if she is living and breathing when she’s not.

“Why?”

“Because I wasn’t sure that Midgard could give you what you needed any longer.”

Tristan’s mouth opens, then closes and he wrings his hands before him, uncertain of how to answer.

So, they stand there for a moment with silence stretching between them in a taut line that he thinks he could pluck if he tried hard enough, until he breaks it with the clearing of his throat. “I still have a lot to learn,” he tells her.

When his ancestor smiles this time, it’s a little brighter and more genuine. “Then I have much to teach you.”

.

The first rule of this visit is that he does not go out back.

That is where the remains of his garden sit and it stirs up a mix of unease and unpleasantness that swirls in his chest and makes a home in his stomach among the acid and threatens to bring bile up his throat. Working on being able to face the garden had been the lesson of his last visits, his overextended stay, and dealing it is a lesson for another time.

When he is stronger.

When he has healed more.

As always, like she knows what he is thinking but won’t say, Amelia reassures him in her gentle but firm way that it is not a failure. He still has victories he can count, choosing to tackle that later is a victory in itself, she’ll tell him and he isn’t sure he believes her but he tries.

Instead he puts his time and attention to the room that he slept in, to the library full of books in languages he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to learn and stories that Amelia feels like recounting about all of the time she spent collecting them.

Some of them were gifts, some were obtained by Midgard’s that came before her, and some were bartered or stolen.

Amelia’s smile is always a bit mischievous when she tells those kinds of tales, but he likes seeing it. It makes her seem more...real.

It’s nice, no-- it’s comforting, seeing her like this as she stands peering over his shoulder when he flips through worn pages.

It keeps him from feeling lonely and he wonders if she feels the same way.

.

The day stretches into the night and Tristan must light candles with the book of matches he brought with him. It creates a startling medieval feel to the library, but something in that is comforting and he thinks that perhaps he can relate more to his ever insightful ancestor when he reads what few books are in languages from Earth that he can find among the collection.

“Would you like some tea?” Amelia asks, as if she can provide it for him instead of him having to prepare it himself because she’s not as tangible as she wishes she were.

Carefully he shuts the book and sets it neck to the candle-lit lantern. “Not today, I should probably get going.”

It’s late, the darkness of their surroundings tell him as much and he thinks that the stars are out in the sky back in the city and he promised not to stay away long.

“Ah, right.” Amelia sounds disappointed and once again, Tristan wonders if she is lonely.

“Next time, I’ll visit with a list of things I’d like you to tell me about, if that’s alright?”

Seeing the way she seems to light up makes asking the question worth it, even if doing so makes his chest tight and breathing hard.

“I would like that, Tristan.”

.

When he gathers up his things to leave, Amelia sees him to the doors of the wonder, hand lifted in a wave and fondness written in her expression.

“Don’t stay away for so long,” she teases and Tristan grins at her.

“I’ll do my best,” he tells her, “one step at a time.”

He feels lighter after, because he didn’t do what he’d meant to when he’d gone back to Midgard, but he is still trying and learning and working to be better.

He can do this. One step at a time.