Chapter Text
‘Home: a shelter that is the usual residence of a person or family.’
For three hundred years, Jack had no place to call home. His lake, and the small cave nearby where he stored a few personal effects, was hardly befitting of the title. It was more his informal property than anything else, and certainly not a ‘home.’
‘Home: the place in which one’s domestic affections are centered.’
In some ways, the sky was his ‘home’; it certainly held a great deal of his affection. He immensely enjoyed the time he spent spiraling through the air, spreading snow and frost as he flew hither, thither, and yon.
So too was winter, in part, a ‘home’. His power was strongest there, and he delighted in what he could do with the weather, and the fun he could have.
‘Home: the dwelling place or retreat of an animal.’
Jack had visited many human dwellings in his time, and quite possibly more animal dens than that. He’d found that each bore the unmistakable signs of being a ‘home’.
Where humans collected knickknacks, furniture, and pictures, animals collected bones, shiny trinkets, bedding, and food. Different lives, to be sure, and yet each saw fit to bring in only the things that they felt would improve their homes, and make them fitting places for their families.
Families gathered in these places, and shared of themselves and were happy.
Jack wondered sometimes what that would be like.
For three hundred years, Jack had no memories of what ‘home’ was. He knew it in the abstract, and understood the value placed on it by humans and animals alike, but he could never remember a time when he’d felt at home.
Then he regained his memories, and he ached for his past life, where he had a warm bed to crawl into every night, and parents and siblings to spend his days with. A home where he felt welcome and loved, where he felt like he belonged.
The other Guardians, his new friends, helped assuage this sense of emptiness, in their own ways, but they lived so far apart, and were all terminally busy, that he couldn’t spend much time with them, together as a group, outside of the semi-regular meetings.
Tooth and Sandy were the busiest, with work that demanded their attention on a near-constant basis, and he could not begrudge them this. North... while he was fatherly, in his own way, and not quite as busy as Tooth and Sandy - except near Christmas, of course - it just didn’t feel quite the same as his memories told him it should. He visited at least once a month, if not more - and even had a bed! - but something had been missing.
It was only, over the course of the next few years, that he came to truly understand what had been missing: someone to share with. His life and his dreams, his worries and his failures, his successes and his triumphs.
Someone who could share his hope, and his joy.
It came as quite the shock, the day Bunny showed Jack the room he’d made for him in his own home. Jack had been overwhelmed by his happiness, and he couldn’t quite understand why; North had given him a room, after all, but it had not garnered even half the emotional response as Bunny’s gift had.
Jack promised himself that he wouldn’t be a nuisance, and would stick to visiting only as often as he visited the North Pole, but that resolution quickly died in the face of Bunny’s hospitality, and the mere prospect of his company.
Once a month became once a week. One day became two, then four. By the time six months had passed, hardly a day went by that Jack didn’t find himself, when he tired, tapping out the rhythm Bunny had taught him. He’d fly through the tunnels, a leaf on the wind, and alight on the windowsill in the kitchen with barely a sound.
Bunny - now Aster (and Jack cherished the trust placed in him to have earned the right to call Aster by his proper name) - would grump about the chill breeze that followed in Jack’s wake for but a moment, and then turn to offer him dinner and company the next. Jack always accepted graciously, and never questioned the warmth that spread through him each night he stayed.
The day Aster confessed his love, Jack discovered what ‘home’ really was.
Home was where the heart lived, and his heart lived with Aster.