Moss (Crossposted from AO3)

In Which the Story Concludes

When they returned to the house, the children had all been washed and bedded down. Of course, they rose from their nest of blankets on the living room floor to rush to Snufkin, demanding to know where he had gone, what had taken him so long, and would he be so kind as to tell them a story.

"Of course," Snufkin said.

"You won't be coming upstairs, then?" Moomin asked.

"Not tonight, no," Snufkin replied, distractedly petting the hair of one of the woodies, the first one to reach him and pull him into the mass of clumsy hugs. "It's a special occasion, of course."

"Of course."

It was reasonable, and it was certainly warm enough in the bed with just himself. Moomin gently tucked a lock of hair behind Snufkin's ear but did not dare to do much else. The children had never been informed of anything between the two of them, and Snufkin much preferred it that way—preferred a certain degree of secrecy in general, even knowing full well that it was sometimes a futile endeavor.

"You'll be sleeping down here, then?" Moomin asked him. "Not in one of the guest rooms?"

"Yes, with the children," Snufkin told him, though he did not initially look up. When he did, even through the fatigue in his face left by too much raspberry wine and not enough sleep, there was a calm and warmth that Moomin had not seen in quite a while. "Goodnight, dear friend."

"I'll tell you a story from when I was quite young," Snufkin said. "It's about how I came to live in the valley. Before that, I changed where I pitched my tent almost every single night when I couldn't find a place that was particularly interesting."

"What was that like?" Asked one of the older woodies. "To never have a place to call home?" For all of their lack of proper caretaking before Snufkin and the Fillyjonk Niece, what had remained steady for them was always having a place to be, even if it was simply a stretch of enclosed land, which in turn enclosed them.

"Oh, I can't say," Snufkin said, momentarily sucking at his teeth for lack of a pipe to fiddle with. The Fillyjonk Niece, ordinarily quite tame, had been quite alarmed the first time she witnessed him smoking in front of the children, and he had only ever seen Pappa smoke on the veranda, never inside. "I've been in Moominvalley for so long that I don't rightly remember. I was younger even than you all when I first came here."

The children were astonished by this, as the littlest of the woodies was soon to be twelve years old. His absence from the valley in the few years after the Moomin family's trip to the lighthouse was unknown to them. It had been, as it happened, shortly after a trip to visit the children that Snufkin finally dared to return to the valley, no longer able to tolerate being so close by without satisfying his curiosity.

He was very glad, especially in this moment, that he had made the leap.

"And why Moominvalley?" asked one of the younger children. "Why for so long?" asked another. "Is Moominvalley particularly interesting, then?"

He thought of the shelter of the cave when the comet had grazed the valley. The vast expanse of the sea as it came rushing back. The thunderous sound of its ice shattering at the beginning of the following spring. The sound of water meandering through reeds and over stones every night that he slept in his tent by the stream. The abundant supply of fresh fish, of tart berries, of warm coffee, of fresh bread. The comforting enclosure of forests, loose and green and airy like his tent. The vibrant scenes of tumbling fields lush with wild flowers. The goldenrod on the edge of Mamma's garden, sheltering and comforting him during one of the most frightening months of his life.

And he thought of the empty space in Moomin's bed that he knew was being left for him out of habit. As much as Snufkin insisted that he could find a space for himself anywhere he chose to settle, and often refused to settle specifically to prove such a point, the fact remained that it was only in Moominvalley that there existed spaces created solely for him.