"Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home."
-Matsuo Basho, Narrow Road (tr. Sam Hamill)


The M1 stretched out before them, and Alex peered out the rear view mirror before casting a sideways glance at her daughter in the passenger's seat.

“Chin up, Molls,” she chirped. “We're driving towards your new home. You could be a bit more excited.”

Molly huffed a sigh, her slender form curled up in the seat as she peered out the window. “Easy for you to say, Mum. You've lived in London your whole life.”

“Which is precisely why Cambridge is such a great opportunity for you,” Alex replied. “You can always come back to London after university. It's not as if you're moving to another planet.”

“Might as well be,” Molly answered, glumly. Alex wasn't sure what had happened to the intense excitement that had surrounded her daughter the day she had received her acceptance letter in the post. For the last two years, Molly had talked about leaving London as if it were the only thing she'd wanted in the whole world. Alex didn't remember being as confused and disgruntled at eighteen as her daughter seemed now.

“You can come back every other weekend, if you'd like.”

Molly readjusted herself in her seat, looking down at her hands and looking back up at her mother. “What are you going to do with me gone?”

“Hm, I don't know. Maybe I'll try dating again.”

“Mum.”

“Really. I think your poor, old mum could use a bit of companionship...”

“Mum.”

Alex looked over again, and Molly's eyes were welling up with tears.

“Oh, Molly, don't cry,” Alex soothed, hoping this wouldn't come to her having to pull the car over. “You're going to have fun, I promise. After a few days you won't even think about me anymore.”

“It's not that,” Molly replied, swiping away a tear with the sleeve of her jumper. “I just don't think I could ever call anywhere else home.”

Alex offered her daughter the smallest of smiles. “Sometimes, Molly, home isn't a specific place. It's just wherever you happen to be.”

Molly turned her head to look out the window again. She spoke so quietly Alex almost couldn't hear her. “Is this about your coma-world again?”

She hadn't meant it as a blow, but it struck Alex to the very core of her being. She had, eventually, told Molly about the 1980s – about Gene, and Chris, and Ray and Shaz, and the adventures she'd had the things she had learned. And Molly had taken it all in, with a maturity and understanding that Alex hadn't quite expected. And she had accepted it all in stride, except for the one time, when Alex wasn't thinking her words through carefully enough, and she had referred to her tiny flat over Luigi's as “home.”

That slip up had made Molly's tiny world fall to pieces, because she finally really understood her mother. She finally understood the sobbing that came through the walls in the dark of the night, and the silences that would fall between them at times. The way her mother would shush her unexpectedly when they watched television or listened to the radio, and the way Alex would peer at the device as if she was seeing or hearing something that wasn't actually there.

Alex had been homesick for a world she never thought she'd wanted, and Molly had finally realized the bullet in her head had driven her mother mad.

“Maybe it is,” Alex replied, her hands tightening on the steering wheel. “But I made a choice, Molly, and that choice was to come back to you. But that doesn't mean it wasn't home, at least, for a little while.”

Molly still didn't look at her. “Are you sure you'll be okay by yourself?”

“If you're asking if I plan on jumping off a roof any time soon, the answer is no.”

“But, I was only a kid when that all happened. Now I'm grown up and starting my own life and... Maybe one day you'll want all that back. You know, like Sam did.”

Alex cringed, because saying she would like to go back one day and see all of them again wasn't entirely a lie. But saying she was willing to leave this world behind to do it wasn't entirely the truth, either. Her memories of Gene and her time in his world had long ago faded into cherished memories, funny stories that sounded like something out of a book rather than anything anyone could have lived. She often wondered if it all had been real, and she had, somehow, just been living another person's life. In a way, she supposed she had.

“Life is full of unexpected events,” she whispered, when the silence between her and her daughter became too much to bear. “Things you wish hadn't happened or things you wished had never ended. But the most important thing you'll ever learn is that every moment you feel alive, that means your home. That's why Sam did what he did. And that's why I'm still here.”

“Whatever, Mum,” Molly replied, but when she turned her head to look at her mother again, she was smiling.

After a moment, Molly rolled down the window and stuck her hand out, letting the wind rush by her splayed fingers. The sun shone warmly through the car, and the brush of the crosswind tickled Alex's hair against her cheeks.

For that cherished, fleeting moment of clarity, Alex was happy to be completely home.


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Cut for length
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Muse: Alex Drake, Ashes to Ashes
Prompt: #327 - "Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home."
Verse: Open Verse, speculative post-series
Word Count: 936