#bornbetter

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

North To The Future [Chapter 15: Drive] [Series Finale]

The year is now 2000. You are just beginning your veterinary practice in Juneau, Alaska. Aegon is a mysterious, troubled newcomer to town. You kind of hate him. You are also kind of obsessed with him. Falling for him might legitimately ruin your life…but can you help it? Oh, and there’s a serial killer on the loose known only as the Ice Fisher.

Chapter warnings: Language, alcoholism, addiction, murder, violence, character deaths.

Word count: 7.3k.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

Taglist: @elsolario​ @ladylannisterxo​ @doingfondue​ @tclegane​ @quartzs-posts​ @liathelioness​ @aemcndtargaryen​ @thelittleswanao3​ @burningcoffeetimetravel​ @poohxlove​ @borikenlove​ @myspotofcraziness​ @travelingmypassion​ @graykageyama​ @skythighs​ @lauraneedstochill​ @darlingimafangirl​ @charenlie​ @thewew​ @eddies-bat-tattoos​ @minttea07​ @joliettes​ @trifoliumviridi​ @bornbetter​ @flowerpotmage​ @thewitch-lives​ @tempt-ress​ @padfooteyes​ @teenagecriminalmastermind​ @chelsey01​ @anditsmywholeheart​ @heliosscribbles​ @killerqueen-ofwillowgreen​ @narwhal-swimmingintheocean​ @tillyt04​ @cicaspair418​ @fan-goddess​ 

A/N: This is the fic I almost never wrote because I didn’t think anyone would be interested in some random, angsty, 1990s, Alaskan, crime-thriller AU. Thank you for proving me wrong. I hope you enjoy the ending. 💜

Almost everything about your existence is pure chance; it’s the most freeing and horrifying truth imaginable. There’s the genetic lottery and corporate downsizing, revolutions and hurricanes, plagues, asteroids, famines, faulty airplanes and malignant blooms of cells and drunk drivers. There are 100 billion planets in this galaxy and your atoms ended up on the one called Earth. After all that, do you really think what you want matters? So make all the choices you like, all the nail-biting deliberations and promises and vows, weigh costs and benefits, do research, roll dice, ask astrologers and palm readers, start over every New Year because that’s something we tell ourselves is possible. The fact that you exist at all is one big cosmic coin flip. If you think you’re the one driving, you’re dead fucking wrong. You’re the speck of dust on a windshield, the spin of a roulette wheel. You’re a flash of silver in the universe’s pinball machine.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about chance, okay? My family is one of the wealthiest in the Western Hemisphere, and I didn’t do anything to earn that. I was born first, and I definitely didn’t do anything to earn that, Jesus Christ, what a chromosomal fuckup. I inherited an affliction that others get to live without. I can’t imagine what it feels like to wake up and not be horrified by myself, my shortcomings, my failures: too small, too stupid, too wild, too weak. And the first time someone says something like that to you, you want to apologize, you want to drop to your knees and cling to them and beg for absolution, maybe even the first hundred times, the first thousand. And then it just starts to piss you off. Yeah, I know, I’ve heard it all before, why would you expect anything different? Isn’t this getting old, Mom? Maybe you’re the stupid one, Dad, if you think you could cut me and anything but disappointments would fall out. I’m not horrified by the fact that I’m an addict. The horror came first. The horror is what led to all the rest of it.

One day when I was in 10th Grade—I was slumped way down in my chair and drinking vodka out of an Evian water bottle—my American History teacher, purely by chance, assigned me to make a poster about Juneau, Alaska. Some other kid got Los Angeles (Hollywood! The Whisky a Go Go!) and another got Chicago (the Mob!) and another got Nashville (Johnny Cash!) and some jock moron I hated got Baltimore (um, crabs? the War of 1812…?), but I got fucking Juneau, Alaska. I thought this was so unjust that I never forgot it, the fact that I had to get up in front of the class with my pathetic Crayolas-and-magazine-cutouts poster and pretend that Juneau was a place that mattered, that microscopic cloud-covered relic of a late-1800s gold mining settlement on the shores of the Gastineau Channel. Juneau was never on my list of cities to run to. It just wasn’t. It didn’t have anything I wanted. But when I started thinking about places where I could really disappear, where no one would ever bother looking, where days are short and dark and incurious and irrelevant…well, that sounds like Juneau, right?

Let me tell you something about the night I left. I’ve been more messed up, yeah, and I’ve hurt people worse, and I’ve been closer to death, I’ve been one more powder-white gram on the scale away from oblivion; but I’ve never felt that fucking low. I can’t decide if I wish I’d never gone to Juneau at all. I can’t decide if it was a blessing or a curse.

My flight is a red-eye with a layover in Ketchikan, American Airlines, bound for Seattle. Sunfyre has the window seat. He’s wearing the bright red Service Dog vest that I once stole for him specifically for such occasions. My dog fly with the cargo? My dog?! Bill Clinton will be elected pope first. Sunfyre is chewing contently on Milk-Bones and watching the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean. He knows the drill. We’ll touchdown and deplane, and then…and then…

And then we’ll start over again somewhere new. I’ll find a flight board and pick a destination; Seattle is a hub, with spokes leading everywhere. I could go south, to Galveston, Lafayette, Biloxi, someplace where it gets hot, someplace where I can sweat her out of me, purge every cell that still remembers what she felt like. I could go west, fading into mountains or cornfields, vapid infinitesimal towns in Montana, Iowa, Idaho, Nebraska. I could go to New England or the Great Lakes or freaking Hawaii, sleep in hammocks, swim with sea turtles, drink my rum and Cokes out of coconut shells. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that nowhere really sounds good to me. My legs are suddenly tired of running. There’s an ache that rattles down to the bone.

I don’t have to tell you that I love her, right? It’s not so easy for me to say. But it’s true, and it’s beautiful, and it’s torture, and it’s a dream. It’s pain that flays you alive and then builds you back again, layers of fresh muscle and tendons and veins growing over ribs and vertebrae like a trellis thick with ivy. It’s not a high. It’s just the best life can get down here on earth. It’s the ocean, it’s the Northern Lights.

I’m swimming in a black hoodie that is three sizes too big; I haven’t slept and I’m pale and raccoon-eyed, looking like death, feeling worse. When the stewardess rolls by with her clattering cart just slim enough to fit through the aisle, I order a cup of water for Sunfyre and a double rum and Coke for myself. It arrives with two blood-red cherries bobbing in a caramel-dark carbonated sea. The guy in the next seat over gives me a judgmental little eyebrow raise.

“That doesn’t look like breakfast,” he says.

I bite off both cherries—juice dribbling down my chin, wiped away with a sleeve—and throw the stems over my shoulder. The lady sitting behind me yelps in disgust. “Because it’s dessert.”

The man smiles and shakes his head, one of those I shouldn’t find it funny but I do sort of looks. I inspire a lot of those. He’s maybe mid-thirties, long hair and ripped jeans, very punk rock, cool as hell. There is a constellation of pins on his denim jacket. One of them has a roman numeral 10 on it, a stark X nestled inside a triangle. Unity, Service, Recovery, the gold letters say. To Thine Own Self Be True. It’s an Alcoholics Anonymous pin. What are the chances?

He catches me staring, and I ask: “Does it really make you a better man?”

“It doesn’t make you better. It just makes you real.” He smiles again, patient and kind. “It makes your emotions and experiences real, your relationships real. And so you become whatever version of yourself you were always supposed to be. But you have to want it. Not your wife, not your parents or your kids, not your pastor, not your friends, not your parole officer. You.”

I speak without knowing what I’m going to say. “I want it.”

“Yes, I think you do.”

He sees a lot, I think, as the plane descends into the grey fogbank of Seattle. 20/20.

When we land, the man squeezes into a cab with me and Sunfyre—he sniffles into a Kleenex for a while before reluctantly admitting that he’s allergic to dogs—and pays the fare. The cab’s worn brakes squeal to a stop outside a residential treatment center on the banks of the Puget Sound. When we step out onto the sidewalk, I ask the man if he’s going to take me to get one last drink first. He laughs in my face. Fucking jerk.

He pulls out a black Sharpie and rummages through his pockets, his wallet. He can’t find a scrap of paper. He writes his phone number on the underside of my arm instead. “You call me, okay?” he says. “Call me when you get out. Call me before you get out, if you need to. I don’t care if it’s in five minutes, I don’t care if it’s at 2 a.m. You just make sure you call.”

“Why would you do this? I mean, you don’t even know me. You have no idea who I am.”

“Because once, years ago, someone did the same thing for me, and someone did it for her too. Maybe one day you’ll be able to pay it forward. I don’t care who you are or where you’ve been. It doesn’t matter to me. I’d like to think that we’re all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

And then he waits for me to go inside. He doesn’t leave until he watches me check in at reception on the other side of the rain-flecked glass. Outside, a brand new day is beginning. A misty sun rises as pieces of the sky fall.

Sunfyre trots into the lobby alongside me, panting cheerfully, shaking the perpetual Seattle drizzle from his fur. There’s a girl at the front desk, just a girl, and that’s the other thing that’s different now. She’s not a maybe-future-one-of-my-girls. She’s just like anyone else. I already have a girl. I mean, I don’t anymore, not really. But I still do.

I throw my things onto the counter: my single suitcase, my tattered wallet, my bundle of cash held together with rubber bands, my scraped-up electric guitar.

“Checking in?” the girl asks.

“Yeah.”

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes, I guess.”

She opens my wallet, reads my license, blinks in bewilderment. “Aegon…?”

I sigh dramatically. “It’s Greek.”

~~~~~~~~~~

You dream of him; and when you do, he’s always smiling. He’s reading your palm in an empty Taco Bell, he’s kissing you under the Northern Lights, he’s regaling your parents with stories—of lobster fishing in Portland, of cattle ranching in Denver—all through Thanksgiving dinner, he’s undressing you in his moonlit apartment, he’s climbing into your bed. He’s not angry, he’s not ruined, he’s not running away. He’s exactly as you remember him in his best moments. He’s all chaotic white-blond hair and weightless light, sharp laughter and bright eyes. And each morning there’s a splinter-thin moment before you remember that he’s gone. That’s the worst part, really. You always knew it would be. You can’t even begin to forget him.

Your friends want to help you, but they don’t know how. Neither do your parents. Your dad gets an atlas from the study, throws it down on the dining room table, and opens it to a map of the world. “Pick anyplace and we’ll go there,” he says. “We’ll close the vet clinic for two weeks and we’ll all go.” But you can’t give him a single name: not Athens, or Paris, or Buenos Ares, or Cairo, or New York City, or Rome, or Tokyo, or anywhere else for that matter. It’s the strangest thing. All your life you’ve been waiting to get out of Juneau, but now nowhere sounds good to you. And maybe that’s a lesson you wish you’d never learned: sometimes freedom is less about places than it is about people.

The blood on the equipment recovered from Trent’s apartment matches DNA from the first three victims. He is charged with eight counts of first-degree murder and held awaiting trial in the Lemon Creek Correctional Center. His family visits him faithfully each week. His lawyer is exasperated that he won’t plead guilty and spare his parents the humiliation and expense of a protracted court battle. But Trent’s story never changes: he’s innocent, he’s never killed anybody, he doesn’t understand how the blood could have been found on his belongings. He wants to know exactly what items the police tested; he and his lawyer are still waiting for the prosecutor to turn over all the details during discovery. In the midst of the scandal, the upheaval, you fade into the backdrop like the stars behind fog. People talk around you and through you. They offer gaps that you don’t care enough to fill in. Drinks clink, whispers fly, conspiracies are exchanged between pool shots. You watch the days grow longer and wait for the future to arrive. You don’t know what it will look like, you can’t even begin to fathom it. But surely there must be a future. Life goes on. It did for your mom after Jesse. It will for you too.

A week after Aegon leaves, there is a knock at your parents’ front door. You open it to find Aemond standing there in the muted amber-pink afternoon light. His hair is long and loose, his Armani suit immaculately tailored, his BlackBerry nestled in his right hand. He glances up from it at you and his jaw falls open. And only then do you realize how awful you must look.

You tell Aemond, your voice hushed and heavy, ankles in quick-drying cement: “I don’t know where he is.”

“No, I can see that,” Aemond replies, dull horror in his blue eye. Then he turns around and strides halfway down the driveway towards the street, where a cab idles as it waits for him, engine exhaust pouring into the air like smoke from a firepit.

“How’s your dad?” you call after him when you get your bearings.

He pauses under the dwindling light. “Alive. For now.” And then Aemond considers you for a while. “I suppose if I ever want to find you again, I know where to look.”

You nod. “I’ll be here.”

I’ll always be here.

A month crawls by like a wounded animal, dead leaves snared in the fur of its belly. The flesh on your thigh knits back together. The things that Aegon ordered show up in Juneau, packages left on the front porch and stuffed into the moose-shaped mailbox like Christmas gifts in a stocking. You pack these remnants of him—Zoobooks and cooking accessories, knives and Chia Pets—into a cardboard box and tuck it away in a dusty, cobwebbed corner of the attic, and you’re aware the entire time that this has happened before, almost exactly twenty years ago. When your dad puts a Third Eye Blind or Red Hot Chili Peppers or Oasis album on his record player, you find some excuse to leave the room. When you tack magazine cutouts of beaches and cityscapes to your bedroom walls, all you can think about is where Aegon might be now. You wonder where he works during the day, a surf shop or a construction site or a farm or a fishing boat; you wonder who he spends his nights with.

I’ll always be here. Even if I leave, I’ll always be here.

~~~~~~~~~~

Twenty years ago to the day, almost to the hour, a man fell into the Gastineau Channel and drowned. They found water in his lungs, though the autopsy was only a formality, an afterthought; Jesse had a reputation in Juneau, and no one was particularly surprised to see how his story ended. There were abrasions on his back and shoulders, contusions on his wrists, but so what? He probably tripped half a dozen times before he tumbled over some guardrail and into the frigid black water. There was a bloody mess of an impact wound on the side of his face, but who cares? The blood alcohol concentration doesn’t lie. The man was wasted, and more than that he was a waste. If his premature demise hadn’t been then, it would have been later, in a week or a month or a year. And when someone like that goes, there’s a sigh of relief that accompanies the misery, isn’t there? There’s the sense of a weight being lifted from a scale.

You’re sitting in Ursa Minor at the usual booth, but the bar is practically empty. It’s Valentine’s Day. Joyce is with Rob, Kimmie is with Brad; Heather’s parents have spirited her away on a short vacation to Sitka to try to take their minds off Trent’s imminent lifelong incarceration. Your mom and dad’s February 14th tradition is cooking a homemade Italian dinner together—pasta, bread with herbs and olive oil, caprese salad, tiramisu—and then settling in for a romantic Blockbuster rental. This year, it’s Runaway Bride. Your mom loves Julia Roberts. They didn’t ask for privacy, but you gave it to them anyway. Kimmie offered to drop you off at Ursa Minor and then drive you home after her date with Brad so you could drink away your sorrows without having to worry about calling a ride. So now Kimmie is getting wined, dined, and plied with boxed chocolates at the Red Dog Saloon while you drain appletinis and flip through one of Jesse’s journals, not knowing what you’re looking for.

Dale is washing pint glasses in the sink behind the bar and humming cheerfully along to a Cake CD. It’s just you and him tonight; evidently, Dale doesn’t have a hot date either. It was nice of him to eschew the usual Shania Twain or Sheryl Crow soundtrack. He’s trying to spare you from any crooning love songs. He must have forgotten that Cake has its own little slice of relevance in your memories of Aegon, those memories that refuse to fade, ink in your skin as dark as night.

Your fingerprints trace Jesse’s scrawling, handwritten letters. It’s his very last journal, the last words he ever wrote. His final entry is unremarkable, a lucid recollection of his latest woodcarving project: it’s a family of tiny bears, three of them. He says he wants the cub to have the same slope of your cheeks, the shape of your eyes. And it’s just like your mom said. It really did seem like he was getting better.

You flip to the next page, blank. The heading reads: Thursday, February 14th, 1980.

You go back a few days. And your gaze catches on words that you’ve read before, months ago, back when the journals were a new discovery like striking oil. The entry is from Saturday the 9th. It ends with an unceremonious bullet point of a reminder: dinner w/ Dale on Thursday.

You leaf forward to Thursday, to the blank page that tells you nothing. Back to the 9th, forward to the 14th, again, again. Valentine’s Day 1980, before Dale had married his wife, after your mom had stopped trying to make plans with Jesse, maybe even rebelled against them; just two unromantic, discarded men with a vacant slot in their calendars and troubles to drink into submission. Except that Jesse never came home.

Dinner with Dale, you think dizzily. Dinner with Dale on the night he died.

The opening notes of The Distance shout from the stereo. Everything suddenly feels very loud.

Reluctantly crouched at the starting line,

Engines pumping and thumping in time…

What had Aegon said about that song before you sang it together, stomping and staggering across the hardwood floor? It’s not about NASCAR, it’s about a journey!

Outside, it’s a rare clear night in Juneau. The Northern Lights are a kaleidoscopic ribbon against indigo night, the sky a mausoleum of stars. And you remember when Aegon sang Everlong, when he grabbed your hand, led you upstairs to the roof, kissed you for the first time under the ethereal, shimmering curtain of green and purple and blue…before Heather had interrupted to tell you that Dale was closing the bar. He was irritable, he was tired; he wanted to go home.

The arena is empty except for one man,

Still driving and striving as fast as he can…

And then they found a body, didn’t they? Yes, you can remember being in Aegon’s apartment and hearing the police cars zoom by. You remember the red-and-blue flashes on his face. You remember thinking they looked like sapphires and rubies, the ocean and blood.

The sun has gone down and the moon has come up

And long ago somebody left with the cup,

But he’s driving and striving and hugging the turns

And thinking of someone for whom he still burns…

Icy claws glide down the length of your spine. Memories play back with a focused clarity that you didn’t have before: Dale groggy and yawning just before they found the fifth victim at Christmas, and again before they found the eighth the same night Trent dragged you—shrieking, bleeding, virtually naked—out of your Jeep. You remember Dale at your parents’ New Year’s Eve party talking about how maybe the killer was an athlete with brain damage from CTE. You remember him offering to give Trent a box of his old equipment from when he was a park ranger. You remember him watching as Trent towered over you here in Ursa Minor with a cue stick clenched in his fist, demanding to know where you had been the night before, Dale’s eyes gleaming with disapproval and fascination and…and…oh god, opportunity.

He’s going the distance,

He’s going for speed,

She’s all alone (all alone)

All alone in her time of need…

And now Aegon’s long gone, but you’re still here. And so is the Ice Fisher.

You’re staring at Dale, eyes huge and glossy with terror. He glances up, gives you a brief casual smile, looks down at the pint glasses again. And then his eyes come back to you. He sees you and you see him, really see him, and it’s the first time in your life that you can recall him being a centerpiece instead of an ornament for gazes to skate over like ice, wallpaper or taxidermy deer heads or a mirror. And you watch as the thing that lives inside Dale stirs awake. It is a shadow with fangs, talons, barbs down its spine, a weblike scribble of a brain loud with the echoes of screams; and it unfurls and fills him completely, all the way to his fingerprints. It possesses him, it eclipses him.

It’s Dale, you realize like a bullet slicing through an aorta, spilling an ocean of hot blood. It was him twenty years ago and it’s him now.

You gasp and fumble for the cannister of bear mace still clipped to your purse. Dale crosses the room with staggering swiftness, like a wolf, like a storm, one pint glass still gripped in his hand. He reaches you just as your thumb presses down on the cannister’s release tab. The rust-colored mist spews not directly into his face but into the room; Dale is hacking and rasping, you both are, but he isn’t in too much pain to haul you out of the booth and onto the floor. You’re screaming, you’re clawing at him, your eyes feel like they’re on fire, tiny pinpoint infernos that drill down to the bone. You can feel the ice-cold juice and schnapps and vodka of your appletini, knocked off the table when you fell, soaking through the back of your sweater. You can feel pebbles of glass as they burrow into your flesh. You are dimly aware of a barstool tumbling over as you struggle with Dale.

“No!” you cry into the monstrous hand that he clamps over your mouth. “No—!”

Dale brings the bottom of the pint glass down on your head. The Distance lyrics—she’s hoping in time that her memories will fade—swirl around inside your fractured skull.

Silence descends like a curtain, shadows in, lights out.

~~~~~~~~~~

I knock, and he opens the door. The house smells like fresh bread and alfredo sauce, rosemary and crushed garlic. My rental—a Toyota 4Runner, I remember what she said about the Nova being a bad idea in Alaska—is parked in the driveway behind her Jeep. Sunfyre is standing beside me, eyes sparkling, smiling with that unburdened-by-intellect innocence that dogs have. There’s a bouquet of blue-dyed roses in my left hand, cool melancholy blooms of life like seawater, like bruises.

“Hi,” I say to her dad as he stands in the doorway. “It’s good to see you again.”

“It’s good to see you too, Aegon.” He’s not just staring at me in the artificial front porch light; he’s gawking, he’s damn near speechless. “Wow. Wow. It’s really good to see you.”

Yeah, I know I look different. The dark rings around my eyes have vanished, my face is less puffy, my hair is trimmed and healthy and mostly out of my face, I stand taller. I’m wearing a white turtleneck sweater and a leather jacket, black skinny jeans, my combat boots. I have a red chip in my pocket that I can’t fucking wait to show her: 1 month sober. On the first day, you think you’re going to die, and on the second day you wish you would. But you don’t. You live, and that starts out as a grisly inconvenience, and then you get a taste for it. “You can probably guess who I’m looking for.”

“Yeah, I reckon I can,” her dad says. “But she’s not here right now. She went to Ursa Minor.”

I grin, a crooked little curl of the lips. “I think I remember how to get there.”

I hop back into the 4Runner with Sunfyre and pull out into the street, snow and ice chomping under the tires. I had missed driving, I realize now. I got so used to almost never being able to do it that I forgot how good it feels to turn the wheel yourself, to watch the speedometer ramp up when you decide you want to fly. Ten minutes later, I swerve into Ursa Minor’s deserted parking lot and screech to a stop across three separate spaces.

“Oh, what the fuck!” I choke out as I step into the bar, coughing into my sleeve. The blue roses tumble out of my hand. Ursa Minor is empty, but there’s something in the air, something invisible that drives scorching, stinging needles into my eyes and my sinuses. Tears stream down my face; my exposed skin prickles and burns. Sunfyre sneezes over and over again and lingers in the doorway, gulping in fresh night wind from outside. There’s shattered glass and green liquid on the hardwood floor. There’s an upturned barstool. The stereo is playing Cake’s cover of Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps.

What the hell happened here—?

And then I see it: the cannister of bear mace that had rolled under the booth, the same one she and her friends always sat in.

She used the bear mace. She finally used it. But why?

There’s blood on the floor. There’s blood on the table too. There’s a tattered, olive-green journal opened to a blank page. The pieces slide closer and closer and then link together, an explosion in my mind like fireworks.

I bolt outside and study the snow-covered parking lot. There are fresh tire tracks there under the murky luminescence of the streetlights; they lead out to the main road and then north towards the lakes.

“No,” I whisper to no one but the fierce wind, the sky threaded with the opalescent Northern Lights. “No, no, no…”

I sprint back inside Ursa Minor, get the phone Dale keeps behind the bar, and call the cops. “Stay where you are,” the 911 dispatcher instructs me sternly. “Wait for the police, do not attempt to investigate yourself, do not attempt to intervene—”

“Yeah, fuck that,” I say, and slam the receiver into the cradle. Then I swipe the black 8 ball off the pool table.

I load Sunfyre into the 4Runner and spin out of the parking lot, following the parallel lines of tire tracks like the etching of veins beneath skin.

~~~~~~~~~~

There’s a sound, rough and grating; and then you realize that it’s you being dragged across the ice. When your eyes flutter open, you see the uninterrupted sky: indigo night, distant stars, the Northern Lights. Your clothes are wet with snow; it’s so cold that the fabric is freezing, stiff and crackling when you try to move. Dale is lugging you over the frozen lake by the collar of your sweater. It’s choking you, but of course that doesn’t matter much. He’s about to kill you anyway.

“It’s not right,” Dale mutters, and you’re aware through the disorientation and the fog-like cloud of pain that he’s not really talking to you. “Your mom’s a nice lady. It’s not right that she had to lose two people this way, she doesn’t deserve that. Oh well. It can’t be helped now, can it?”

You whimper something, disjointed helpless words. Please, hurts, don’t, please.

“It’s not me,” Dale says, as if it’s perfectly logical. “I mean, not really. It’s this part of me that I can’t cut out. I can only feed it so it goes away for a while. It quiets down sometimes, it hibernates like a bear in the winter…but it always comes back. And my god, is it hungry.”

You smack clumsily, futilely at his hands as he hauls you over the ice. Dale doesn’t seem to notice.

“You have to make it look like an accident. That’s the ticket, if you don’t want anybody to know. You shove a hiker from a ledge, a drunk into the ocean. I did that for a long time, never raised suspicion. Never pinged on anyone’s radar. Jesse was the hardest, though. Good lord, did he fight. Had to pour a bottle of Everclear down his throat. Had to make it look like he was drinking that night. He wasn’t, which was unusual. Kept saying he wanted to turn things around. I think you had something to do with that. Now this? You were never supposed to be here, ladybug. What a shame. What a goddamn shame.”

Consciousness is a river that you dip in and out of; blackness crumbles around the edges of your vision, collapses in, recedes, swells again like a wave. You moan, you beg, you struggle as much as you can. It’s not much. It might as well be nothing.

“Things were easier after I got married,” Dale continues. He has a large hiking backpack slung over his broad shoulders, you see now. It jostles from side to side as he drags you. You know what’s in there: a chisel to break the ice, fishing line to strangle you. “Having someone else there all the time, it was a distraction. And it kept that thing inside me…not tame, no, I wouldn’t say that. But chained up down in the basement, maybe. Now I’m alone again. And when the chains start rattling, there’s nothing to stop me from hearing them.”

You get your feet under you, twist around, and slam your fists into Dale’s chest as hard as you can. He laughs in a baritone rumble and shoves you back down onto the ice; your head hits the ground, and you can feel yourself fading again, the last wisps of sunlight at dusk.

“Sometimes you want to hide,” Dale says. “And sometimes you don’t. I was ready to stop hiding. I can’t tell you what a high it was every time they found a body. The news, the ceaseless chattering around town, the name they gave me…incredible. Exhilarating. I couldn’t sleep for days after each kill. I’d toss and turn all night imagining what the headlines would be. Let me tell you, ladybug. I’ve never tried heroin, and I never need to. It can’t possibly be better than this.”

What will happen to my parents? you think, heartbreak gutting you, dull knifes rearranging your organs. What will happen to Heather and Kimmie and Joyce? What will happen when Aegon finds out he left too soon?

“I knew I needed someone to pin it on,” Dale informs you calmly. “Didn’t take anyone who went to the bar, didn’t take anyone who could be traced back to me. And still, I knew they’d figure it out eventually if I didn’t give them another suspect. At first, I was thinking I might use Aegon. He was a little small, sure, but he showed up around the right time and he was an outsider. Then I saw the way Trent was with you…aggressive, menacing…and I knew it had to be him. It was almost too easy. I planted the seeds, and good lord did they grow.”

“They’ll know,” you croak. “If you kill me, the police will find my body and they’ll know Trent’s not the Ice Fisher.”

Hideously, horribly, Dale smiles down at you. “Oh, ladybug, I don’t think they’ll ever find you. They found the others because I wanted them to. And no one is looking for victims anymore. Once you sink, I’ll cover up the hole with ice and snow. No blood, no signs. People will assume you’re a runaway. It was just too much, wasn’t it? Trent getting arrested, Aegon leaving town. Maybe you ran off after him. Maybe you threw yourself in the channel. Who could say? No, your bones will become silt, your name will slowly disappear from Juneau. And in ten or twenty years, your parents will have you declared dead in absentia. That’s my best guess. That’s how it will go.”

“No,” you sob, battling against the hands knotted into the collar of your sweater. “No—!”

His knuckles bash the side of your head, and a black silence rolls in like high tide, engulfs you, drowns you. When you swim back up into consciousness again, Dale is a few yards from you and drilling a hole in the ice with his chisel. You try to crawl away and promptly collapse, frail and boneless. He glances over at you, chuckles pleasantly, and then begins using a hatchet to widen the opening.

No, you think, hooking your fingers into the snow and dragging yourself towards the forest. No, no, no…

Dale’s ready for you. He walks over, grabs both of your ankles, tugs you with terrifying ease to the hole in the ice. Then he has a length of fishing line in his hands, and he’s looping it around your throat again and again, and he’s tightening it until the needle-thin nylon wire bites into your flesh, spilling tendrils of blood. You know you don’t have a chance, but you try; you owe it to your parents to try. You claw at the fishing line and you struggle and you cry out in hoarse, useless screams—

And then you hear something that doesn’t make any sense. Through the darkness, through the wind, there are the barks of a dog. Sunfyre rockets into your dimming field of vision and jumps on Dale, snarling and growling and snapping at his hands, his face. Dale flings the dog away, and as he’s distracted, Aegon arrives. He’s holding—ludicrously—a black 8 ball from a pool table, and he smashes it into Dale’s head. A sick, wet, crushing sound ricochets, cracked bone cushioned by flesh, and Dale howls as he rolls onto his side and covers his head with his hands.

He peers up at Aegon, furious and pained and stunned. “You?!”

“Me.” Aegon’s voice is dark and low like thunder, like the iron gale of storms over the ocean. “And I’m a killer.”

He lunges at Dale, still wielding the 8 ball. Dale’s massive hand juts out and closes around Aegon’s wrist, and then he yanks him to the ground. They’re grappling on the snow and ice, they’re striking out with knuckles and elbows, they’re ripping at each other with their bare hands. You’re trying to unravel the fishing line still coiled around your throat, panting in deep, frantic breaths so you can see and think clearly, so you can scramble to your feet, so you can help Aegon. And then Dale gets away from him just long enough to grab you again, to wrap the ends of the fishing line around his fingers. He delivers one last macerating blow to your skull, pulls you by your throat to the gaping hole in the ice, and shoves you through.

The water is so cold it’s paralyzing. There is a thought that seizes you—so overwhelming, so strangely rational—that says all you have to do is stay where you are, to wait a little longer, and then you’ll never hurt again, you’ll never be disappointed or caged, you’ll never be anything. And you think of all the lives you could have lived, all the places you could have gone: cities and beaches and deserts and valleys, gardens and rivers, ruins and glass. You were always so afraid of really going after them. What the hell were you so afraid of? Everything worth fearing is right here in Juneau.

I can still do those things. I can still live. And I can still help Aegon.

You jolt out of your inertia and clamber madly for the surface. But you don’t hit frigid open air; you hit ice, ice too thick to break through, ice too thick for more than a murmur of light to penetrate. Your palms press against the semitransparent wall; bubbles of carbon dioxide spurt from your nose and mouth. You feel for the opening that Dale made, but you don’t know where it is. You are lost beneath the ice, running out of air, fading rapidly. Then you hear Jesse—and you aren’t sure how you know what his voice sounds like, but you do—speaking softly and kindly to you, comforting you, telling you which way to go.

I’m sorry that no one knows the truth, you say without speaking. I’m sorry we thought you destroyed yourself. I’m sorry you never got the chance to truly live.

You were all better off without me anyway, he answers, without any bitterness at all. And that’s true, isn’t it?

There is a great disruption that rocks through the water. New currents stir into existence, fresh waves spring out of the darkness. And then someone takes your hand and draws you towards a noise, muffled through the ice and water: a dog barking, you realize. Then your palms find the opening and you inhale brutally cold air into your aching lungs, the best you’ve ever tasted. Aegon helps pull you through the hole and out of the lake, out of the jaws of oblivion.

You lie together on the ice, breathing in gasps that turn to mist in the night wind. Dale’s body is sprawled several yards away. The hatchet he’d used to break up the ice is buried in his neck, spine severed, eyes slick and vacant. You can see reflections of the Northern Lights flickering in them.

“You came back,” you whisper to Aegon as whirling police sirens approach, the lights dancing on his face: blue like the ocean, red like fire and blood.

“Of course I came back, Appletini,” he says, laughing with frenzied relief, kissing your cheeks and forehead over and over again, lake water dripping from his hair. Sunfyre jumps around you both, yapping ecstatically, his tail wagging. “I couldn’t leave without my Juneau girl.”

~~~~~~~~~~

There’s wind, but it isn’t sharp like a blade. There’s a sky, but it isn’t cloaked in cloud cover or fog. The boats that bob in the surf are sailboats and cruisers, not fishing vessels. Dolphins crest out of the sun-speckled waves like someone coming up from a dream.

It’s June 9th, and you’re soaring down the Pacific Coast Highway in the red Ford Mustang convertible you rented after the plane touched down in Seattle. Aegon is in the driver’s seat, black sunglasses and white T-shirt, his hair whipping in the breeze. He has one hand on the wheel and the other behind your headrest. Sunfyre is in the backseat, grinning like only dogs can. You turn up the song on the radio: Drive by Incubus.

You and Aegon had stayed in Juneau long enough for your skull to heal, and for your parents to find someone else to take over the vet clinic. They settled on a 32-year-old from Detroit: Justin McNair, a former Marine like your dad, and he either has no family or a bad one because he never wants to talk about them. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter which it is; perhaps sometimes they’re just about the same thing. Your parents have already basically adopted him. He eats dinner with them three times a week and calls your dad when he needs help with house maintenance or scaring a moose away from his truck. And just before you went south, Aegon showed him how to make the world’s best hot chocolate.

You send postcards back to Juneau from each town you stop in. Heather’s bon voyage gift to you had been an indecently revealing swimsuit. Joyce appeared with—what else?—a stack of books fit for leisurely beach reading. And Kimmie gave you, however bizarrely, a compass. So you don’t get lost, she had said with an innocuous little smile. You honestly couldn’t tell if she was joking.

During his one month in jail, Trent learned how to meditate and do yoga. He’s still kind of a dumbass, but he’s also a supposedly devout vegan Buddhist, and he had the decency to leave you alone aside from an apology letter that he slid into the moose-shaped mailbox: handwritten, six pages, lots of spelling and grammatical errors. Oh, and he finally got that job with the Forest Service, probably mostly due to his high-profile wrongful detainment. Now hikers get to swoon over his muscles and hair flips.

You’ll go back to Juneau, of course. Maybe just for visits, maybe for more than that someday. But it will never feel like a cage again.

Aegon calls Aemond every two or three days, a habit he started when he was in rehab. At first it was by necessity—he needed someone to pay the $30,000 bill—but now you think he secretly looks forward to it. He updates Aemond about how the road trip is going and reassures him that the plan hasn’t changed: south to San Diego, and then cutting east across the country to Miami. You don’t know what exactly life will look like there, and neither does Aegon. That’s not the important thing about going. Part of AA is making amends, and Aegon has a lot of work to do in that respect. He wants to go back to Miami, he says. He’s ready to go back.

San Diego is exactly like Aegon once told you it would be. You weave through the rust-colored peaks of the Laguna Mountains and there’s the Pacific Ocean, glittering and sapphire-blue, peppered with surfers and sea lions. It’s hot and it’s beautiful beyond words and everything grows there: ivy, cactuses, palm trees, calla lilies, roses. And for the first time that you can remember, the world feels breathtakingly, impossibly big. You get carryout from an unassuming restaurant called The Taco Stand, and then Aegon parks the convertible in La Jolla. You walk down the steps carved into the cliffside, paper bags in your hands full of tacos and churros, Aegon carrying Sunfyre so the dog won’t slip.

You sit together on the golden sand and watch the 8:00 p.m. sun sink into the waves, Aegon’s arm around your waist, your fingers tucking his lock of silvery hair behind his ear. And then he takes your hand, kneads it until it’s sinuous and relaxed, and reads the lines of your palm in the amber dusk like firelight.

“It says you’re happy,” he tells you. “And that you’re free.”

“I am,” you reply, smiling as the ocean stretches out like the arm of a galaxy: the ancient past, the infinite future.

[sempersirens]

(a late) @swiftiscruff gift exchange 🫧

i know i’m late - but i want to share some love for the people i have met in this community. i joined this fandom during a really difficult period in my life. i had moved home to live with my parents, heartbroken, and was failing my masters degree thanks to an abundance of external and psychological intrusions.

being welcomed into this community from pretty much the get go reminded me of all the good things around me at a time that i seemed to be overwhelmed with the bad. every interaction, from likes to reblogs to messages or shared horniness at 3am has given me a sense of belonging and friendship i didn’t even realise i so needed.

isn’t it so wonderful that creativity in its entirety is enough to bring people together? forget time zones or age groups or upbringing or occupation, we all share a need and desire to create and share and bond and lift one another as high as we possibly can.

so here’s to you all, the ones who have affected my life - big or small - in any way whatsoever during the past year. whether we’re friends, mutuals, ships passing in the night or have never even had a real conversation, i love you all and will never take any of this for granted.

@chaotic-iguana @nostalxgic @ilovepedro @mrsmando @dustydaddyyy @chaotic-mystery @ramblers-lets-get-ramblin @joelsgreys @sapphic-gardn @party-hearses @planet-marz1 @joelscurls @swiftispunk @amanitacowboy @wannab-urs @atinylittlepain @hier--soir @softlyspector @bastardmandennis @beskarandblasters @limerence4u @persephone-girl @daydreamingmiller @sunspearesque @5oh5 @bornbetter @chiogarza @bageldaddy @janaispunk @pascalpvnk @shellshocklove @beardedjoel @joels-darlin @morallyinept @girlinterrupted1999

[writervaul-t]

recommendations

***note: stories linked usually don't have smut or smut is written in later parts***

page two

[ osferth ]

witchling series by @targaryen-realness

"what's going on in that head of yours?" by @bookofbonbon

"i've never heard of such a stupid plan" + "give me your hand" by ↑

i will not fight by @fan-fantasies

you promise by @lazypeachsoul

"you make me question my faith" by @lazypeachsoul

babysitting by @osferth

baby fever by ↑

the river by ↑

all's fair by @mischiefmanaged71

late night idea by @lauwrite1225

tinderbox of a heart by @aphroditesmoon

losing my religion by @kitkatscabinet

your hurts are my hurts by ↑

what good neighbors do by @polkadotsocks1993

because of you by @ultraintrovertedgryffindor

[ sihtric ]

unattainable by @mystic-shadows42

sleepless nights by @lauwrite1225

entertaining royalty by @lady-writes20

[ aemond targaryen ]

i know yours by @bookofbonbon

through the ages by ↑

"just the two of us" by @spideymatcha

to make them love me (and make it seem effortless) by @dango-milk

see no evil, hear no evil by @dilemmaontwolegs

the center of my own existence by @awearywritersworld

little women by @aemonds-war-crime

this fic by ↑

bane of my existence, object of my desire by @jasonsmirrorball

i would die for you in secret by @aemondsbeloved

with him, at all times by @theold-ultraviolence

in a week by @womprat00

she was lovin' me, she was wantin' me by @astrumark

her voice by @targaryenrealnessdarling

dragonstone hollow by @oneeyedvisenya

[ jacaerys velaryon ]

under the weirwood by @targaryen-jpg

unexpected visit by @jacesbeloved

firstborn iii by @archiveofthe-dragon

replaceable by @aphroditesmoon

the day the sun met the sea by @dearsnow

[ aegon ii targaryen ]

early riser by @solacestyles

as you are by @sunnysidelucida

earn it by @piecksbitch16

good grief by @bambimunson

devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes by @syzrina

[ multi ]

living with the greens by @syzrina

playing with fire by @sapphire-writes

[ tom bennett ]

literally everything written from @mischiefmanaged71

this fic by @osferth

[ gaius ]

labyrinth by @bornbetter

border credit: @urdadsfavegirlblogger @firefly-graphics

[vermithorn]

→ VERMITHORN'S 500 MILESTONE EVENT !

hello! <3 thank you so much for reading and supporting my work! y’all don’t know how happy it makes me when you reblog and comment hehe. i’m very proud of this epic milestone so i wanted to celebrate ≧^◡^≦ english isn’t my first language so having a little platform to show my writing means the world to me !

,,what are we doing?

i don't want to do full-length fics or long one-shots because god help me i cannot, so i'm going to do little drabbles of a character + a kink/fetish of your choice !

,,what characters can i request?

hotd. aemond targaryen, aegon ii targaryen, daemon targaryen, cregan stark, jacaerys velaryon, harwin strong. got. robin arryn, ramsay bolton. others. osferth.

,,what kink/fetish can i request?

→ i'll leave that to you, but here's a list if you need help choosing (it's a website with 200+ kinks/fetishes explaining them).

but a few i like to write: breath play, spitting, pegging, mommy kink, + to be added.

,,what i cannot request?

→ scat/vomit, feet, age play. and some other kinks/fetishes i cannot remember at the moment but i’ll let y’all know !

i do not write male!reader, please refer to my guidelines.

,,a little message !

i invite all of you to participate in my little event, i’m so happy to be part of this community and i would love to give some,, little gifts hehe !

* FINISHED REQUESTS:

aemond + mommy kink

osferth + anal

aemond + pegging

aegon ii + degradation

WIPS !

tagging a few mutuals to spread the word (and if you want to participate, even better hehe. also i hope i don’t bother y’all with this! besos <3)

@vhagarlovebot @aemondryvers @taranthese @jacaerysthinker @sapphire-writes @valeskafics @targaryenbrainrot @aemondsversion @aemondsmoon @aemonds-princeregent @ichorai @ilikeitbetterangsty @fairysluna @inthedayswhenlandswerefew @helaenistic @starkskeep @aegon-fanfics @bornbetter @chrispumpkin @lovelykhaleesiii @arcielee @f4ll-for-you @aemvnd @oneeyedvisenya @marthawrites @theold-ultraviolence @jasonsmirrorball @gothtargaryen @babygirlyofthevale @xfancyuu ≧'◡'≦

[feyhunter78]

Fic authors self-rec! ✨ When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you’ve written, then pass on to a few other writers ❤️

Thank you @thesolarangel for tagging me love!!!!

This was a hard one to figure out but I think my five favorites are:

The Scar on Your Palm (and the One on Mine) -> Aemond x reader

The Despair of a Dragon’s Wife -> Aemond x wife!reader

Spilled Ink and Married Bliss -> Elrond x wife!reader smut

All Dolled Up -> Billy Taylor x reader smut

Dearer than I? -> Namor x reader

And I’m gonna tag @dilf-superiority, @ragnarachael, @bornbetter, @dreamlandcreations

[ichorai]

tag games ! tagging for any of the following tag games : @taylorsvrs, @jiya-jale, @horrorwild, @bowieandqueen11, @richeeduvie, @curryaboo, @klahaist, @shirehobbit, @targaryeirene, @babygirlyofthevale, @aimlesslywanderingthings, @aegonmixup, @bornbetter, @fairysluna, @parkerflix, @a-asterias, @runningmunson, @sofietargaryen, @kiwicider, @oneeyedvisenya, @xfancyuu, @sanccharine, @dearsnow, @beaconofthehightower, @captainkilly, any of the lovely folks who tagged me in the following games, and any of my followers who wanna join in (pls tag me) !! <3

tagged by : @bluebirdsboi <3

song stuck in my head: succession (main title theme) by nicholas britell

last song i listened to: teardrop by massive attack (sooo good)

top three foods: cheesecake, seafood, chicken w/ sambal <3

last thing googled: 'antz cast' HAHA

dream trip: new zealand :( or croatia!

anything i want right now: to finish my milestone series sigh

tagged by : @typingfool and @peachjaem00 !! rules : shuffle your playlist and post the top ten tracks !

headlines - rupert gregson-williams & lorne balfe

edge of seventeen - stevie nicks

paradise found - michael giacchino

angel - theory of a deadman

the crown of jaehaerys - ramin djawadi

ezio's family - jesper kyd

trip switch - nothing but thieves

andante agitato - nicholas britell

link up - metro boomin

taro - alt-j

hotd tag game ! tagged by : @randomdragonfires <3 and tagging @jotterjots for the wonderful questions, too !!

who's your favorite character? what draws you to them? i'm gonna say rhaenyra is my favorite character :( particularly nyra when she's older. that's literally my queen fr

what's your favorite episode of the season? defo ep 8 :) the infamous dinner episode

what is your favorite line from the season? gosh there's just so many but when nyra says, "exhausting, wasn't it? hiding beneath the cloak of your own righteousness." UGH it's utter perfection

which actor's portrayal is your favorite? they're all so good :( paddy considine plays a brilliant viserys throughout all his stages and emma d'arcy is amazing as rhaenyra too <3

which character would you most want to be stuck on a deserted island with? i Want to say aemond bcs i love that man to pieces but i have a feeling he wouldn't like me very much so imma go with jace :)

name a minor character you want to know more about! the cargyll twins !!! would love to see more of their relationship and how the war splits them apart

who's character arc are you most interested to see continued, for better or worse? definitely aemond, i would love to see how they develop his character next season esp after luke's death

who's your most anticipated new character of season two? CREGAN STARK !!!!!!! MY MAN <3 also daeron targaryen bcs i Need to see that mfer rn

which is your favorite dragons of the ones we saw? i think we only saw her for like half a second but dreamfyre my love <3

what's your favorite relationship from this season? rhaenyra and her sons :(

link one or more of your favorite pieces of fanart! this brilliant piece by @mothdoly !! and this one by @4yvle1, the colors are gorgeous !!!

link one or more of your favorite fics! oh god i have way too many but i've reblogged all of them onto my ficrecs blog, @ichorkurt !! over 45 of my hotd ficrecs are linked here.

link one or more of your favorite gifsets! this gorgeous nyra set by @margoterobbies, and this amazing aemond set by @nina-zcnik :)

tagged by : @itsapapisongo <3

currently reading: elektra vol.2 (1996) comics favorite color: mm beige and sage green :) last movie: dead presidents (1995) sweet/spicy/sour: spicy but the sweet kind of spicy yk? currently working on: a roman fanfic for my milestone series :) we're almost at 40k words fr !!!

[insabecs]

tag game!

rules: tag 9 people you want to get to know better. I have a very small group of mutuals, but thank you for the tag lovely! @jasonsmirrorball

tagged by: @jasonsmirrorball

last song: dog days are over by Florence + The Machine

last show: Shadow and Bone - as I needed a refresh for season 2

last movie: Aftersun (2022) - please go watch it, it's a master piece

currently watching: Schitts Creek (another rewatch, but this one just makes me happy)

currently reading: The witches of Vardo - Anya Bergman

current obsession: uhuh i've actually been hyper-fixating in Modern Aegon Targaryen for a good, long bit now. - i have have this whole slow, nice narrative for him in my head. BUT, I sense a new one coming, as I just saw the new trailer for s2 of Shadow and Bone and Nikolai Lantsov is looking way too interesting for his own good. ahah.

no pressure tags: @bornbetter @inthedayswhenlandswerefew

[sapphire-writes]

HOTD taglist 2:

@bornbetter, @beyond-the-ashes, @clairacassidy, @loglady00, @gettheetoanunneryimmediatly, @minami97, @serving-targaryen-realness, @chaotic-fangirl-blog, @possiblyafangirl, @shmexie, @winter-soldier-101, @kaelatargaryen, @urmomsgirlfriend1, @floswife, @mizfortuna, @girlwith-thepearlearring, @arryn-nyx, @namelesslosers, @hopelesswritergall@coldcomputerkoala, @louislouve, @shinypoetryface, @klara-lily, @bubblyabs, @hufflepuff1700, @asumofwords, @angelheavensblog, @natashaobo, @tssf-imagines,  @shit-posts420, @evattude, @heyykarolina, @brie-annwyl, @wondergal2001, @herondale-girl7, @teteminne, @euphoriahoesss, @mercedesdecorazon, @koreofkore, @boofy1998, @targbarbie, @beiigegalx, @lovelyy-moonlight, , @elissanatok, @fan-goddess, @rwdkarla, , @randomdragonfires, @aemondsmoon, @targaryenbrainrot, @oneeyedvisenya, , , @shit-posts420, @hey-hey-heybitch

My Dragon ~ Aemond x wife!Reader

warnings: mentions of Aemond's eye injury, some angst & fluff

word count: 1.0k

note: pure fluffy dad!Aemond goodness! was stuck on this idea for a while, hope you enjoy this little piece!

masterlist

You returned to your chambers after a long day, desperate for nothing more than a long, hot bath and the soft furs of the bed you shared with your husband. You had spent the day with your good sister Helaena. Though once only sisters through friendship, you were truly sisters now after the marriage to her younger brother. 

As you opened the doors to your chambers, it was unusually quiet. You closed the door behind you, listening to the crackling of the hearth. You spot the back of Aemond’s head, seated on the settee facing the dancing flames. His head is angled downwards; no doubt he has stayed up late with his nose in a book as you often find him. 

Though he never admits it after the fact, you’d caught him on more than one occasion fast asleep on the settee or in his chair, a book open-faced in his lap. 

You smile softly as you approach, careful not to startle him. 

“My love…” you call softly, to which Aemond turns his head. 

He purses his lips slightly, bringing a hand to his mouth shushing you. Your eyebrows concave together in confusion, which ebbs as you walk closer. Aemond has forgotten his usual book this evening; instead, your sleeping daughter rests her head on his lap, fast asleep, her small chest rising and falling with each breath. 

Her silver curls are splayed every which way, her nose whistling with every breath she exhales. 

“It is late my love,” you playfully tease, keeping your voice a low whisper so as not to wake her.

“I know,” Aemond says, his voice just as soft, “We lost track of time.”

You smile, walking behind him to place your hands on his shoulders. Though only in her fourth year of life, your little dragon has the Targaryen prince wrapped around her little finger. Aemond brings a hand to rest on top of yours, pulling it from his shoulder and pressing a gentle kiss on the back of your hand. 

“Did you have a nice time?” he murmurs against the back of your hand, his breath causing gooseflesh to appear. 

You hum in response. “I did. You know how I enjoy spending time with Helaena. Though I must admit, my legs do ache.”

You had spent most of the day walking through the gardens with the princess, helping her add to her collection of curious creatures and oddities. You loved Helaena’s hobbies and were more than happy to indulge her. But the day was long under the hot summer sun, and it left you eager for bed. 

“Shall I call for someone to draw you a bath?” Aemond asks as you lean to rest your chin on his shoulder.

“It tis alright,” you assure him, “Do not trouble yourself.”

“It is no trouble, you know this,” he insists, glancing at you sideways. You made sure to rest upon the shoulder where he can see you with his functioning eye. 

You remove your hand from him, caressing the leather eyepatch he wears. 

“You must be uncomfortable,” you tell him softly, stroking the worn leather. It begins to irritate him on days such as this one when the heat causes the leather to chafe the skin of his cheek. 

The weather is strange these days, getting so hot during the day and then dropping significantly during the night. Aemond’s violet eye flickers down at your sleeping child. How perfect she looks, the perfect combination of both of you. A miracle made of your love. You sense his hesitation.

“She shall not be afraid, my love,” you assure him.

“How can you know?” he says, looking down away from your comforting gaze. 

Aemond had always been fearful of how others reacted to his injury. You remembered in your youth before he had begun courting you, how you’d learned of why he wore the patch. It was Helaena who informed you that Aemond wished to not frighten the ladies of the court.

“Prince Aemond should not wish for a weak stomached woman anyhow,” you had snapped, as other ladies had snickered at his injury. “Women say they wish to marry a warrior, then faint at the scars from battle. How distasteful.” 

Helaena had told Aemond how you’d come to his defense. You’d been the apple of the Prince’s eye ever since. Well, until the birth of your little one. Two women now completely owned the dragon prince’s heart. 

“A mother’s intuition,” you assure him, moving to remove the patch. Aemond freezes for a moment but relaxes into your touch as you place the eyepatch on the table, revealing his magnificent sapphire. 

You stroke your finger along the scar, admiring how the sapphire reflects the light from the hearth. 

“My dragon,” you murmur, cupping his sharp chin in your hand, and pressing a gentle kiss to the scarred tissue. 

Aemond sighs, his chest rumbling. You can see a flicker of desire in his violet eye at your praise. Your daughter stirs then, perfect face scrunching as her pale lashes flutter open. She looks up at you with wide violet eyes before throwing her small arms around your neck.

“Muña!” she says sleepily, arms heavy around your neck. 

“Hello my love,” you softly croon, pulling her completely into your arms, “How was your day?”

She buries her face into the crook of your neck and you inhale the lilac scent of her hair. How you enjoy the moments with your companions, but oh how you miss your daughter by the end.

“We went exploring all day! And we went flying on Vhagar,” she chatters away, “Sunfyre even joined us! Kepus flew right next to us!”

“Did he now?” you ask with a chuckle. Aegon was a surprisingly delightful uncle. 

Aemond stands then, still facing slightly away. You reach for his hand, pulling him closer. Your daughter looks at him, the smile never leaving her face. Aemond turns his head slowly, revealing the scarred tissue and brilliant sapphire. You hold your breath, waiting for your little girl’s reaction. 

She stares, unblinking, before reaching out to touch his face. 

“Blue is my favorite color,” she informs, turning back to you, “Did you know Sunfyre likes to sing? I don’t think Vhagar enjoys singing, her songs are rather deep. It shakes the windows of the Keep! Muñāzma was quite cross with her!”

You glance at your husband, watching his cheeks turn red. You smile so brightly that your cheeks begin to ache. There was never anything for him to fear. She adores him all the same.

As do you.

[tskottiv20]

(DiceBlakeIVXX) FOLLW DI FREQUENCY

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

North To The Future [Chapter 11: I Will Buy You A New Life]

The year is now 2000. You are just beginning your veterinary practice in Juneau, Alaska. Aegon is a mysterious, troubled newcomer to town. You kind of hate him. You are also kind of obsessed with him. Falling for him might legitimately ruin your life…but can you help it? Oh, and there’s a serial killer on the loose known only as the Ice Fisher.

Chapter warnings: Language, alcoholism, addiction, murder, discussions of sex, sexual content, violence, this chapter has something you’ve been waiting for. 😏💚 (And some things you have definitely not been waiting for.)

Word count: 5.5k.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

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No one knows what to say to you: not Heather when you return to the Jeep with Sunfyre in tow, not your parents when you walk into the hushed house littered with glass bottles and wayward appetizer crumbs. Sunfyre immediately begins assisting with the cleanup effort, sniffing around the couch and under the dining room table, licking up the delicacies he finds there. Your parents look at the golden retriever, look at you, look at each other.

“Um…I’ll drive Heather home,” your mom offers. She finishes the Earl Grey tea she’d been sipping, sets the cup in the kitchen sink, and grabs her keys. They depart into the night together, Heather giving you one last long, sympathetic glance. But still, she doesn’t know what to say. You haven’t told her what you found in Aegon’s apartment, but all the same she can read the horror of it on your face. And perhaps that is more truthful than mere words anyway, unbound by the restrictions of jagged consonants and the curves of vowels, lexicons, syntax, ink.

In the silence, in the sunless dawn of the new millennium, your dad studies you, red dress and mascara-stained face and shoulders limp. He asks tentatively, like stepping through a minefield: “How long will Sunfyre be staying with us?”

“Forever.”

“Okay.” He nods, understanding. He doesn’t need to know the details. Addiction wears many faces—masks it peels off and discards until it finds the flavor you like best, the one that can knot itself around your throat—but its soul is always the same, grave-cold and grasping. “I’m sorry about Aegon. I’m sorry that you had to find out what this feels like.”

“He’s leaving. It’s over.”

Your dad smiles, profoundly sad, dreadfully patient. “I’ve heard that before.”

You’re so heartbroken and ashamed that you can’t meet his eyes. Jessie died twenty years ago, and now it’s all come back around again. He must feel like he’s seeing ghosts.

Your dad sits down at the dining room table, sighing deeply, rubbing his forehead with his thumbs. And he’s not talking about Aegon anymore. “I’ll never stop living in that man’s shadow. I know it. Your mother knows it. It’s not something we’ve ever discussed, but it’s there. And I can’t even resent her for it, because she would forget him if she could. I fully believe that. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t love me and the life we’ve built together. But it does mean there’s a part of her that will always be somewhere else. In another room, in another time. And I wonder sometimes…if there is an afterlife, if there is a cosmic Round Two where we all meet up someplace with harps and angels and cities made of clouds…who she will be standing with.”

The terror is overwhelming. Does it never end? This pain, this longing, this irrational hope? You wonder if there’s any cure for what you’re feeling. You wonder if your dad was ever some tedious, try-hard jock that your mom avoided at bars and parties.

“I know it hurts,” your dad says. “I know it hurts like hell. But I think it’s better if you can end things sooner rather than later. Because I imagine that once you start loving someone like that”—someone brilliant, someone broken—“it’s very difficult to stop.”

It’s too late, you know. You smooth the bloodlike satin of your dress, trying not to start sobbing again. It’s too fucking late.

“Jesse used to do things like that.” Remarkably, there is still anger in your dad’s voice: rusty, treacherous, decades-old anger. “He would make plans and make promises, and then your mother would be sitting there waiting with a suitcase and he’d act like it never happened. I don’t know if he really forgot or if he had to pretend he did because he’d blown all the money. And then of course he’d apologize and promise to make it up to her, buy her flowers, pour her tea. He was always saying they’d go to London together. They never did. They never got out of Alaska.”

The tea, you think, dismayed. The Earl Grey tea. Just like Aegon’s hot chocolate. It’s like looking at yourself in a mirror. It’s enough to drive someone insane. “I need to go to bed now,” you say, your words weak and splintering.

“Okay. Okay, ladybug.” He looks sorry, like he knows he’s said too much. He gets up to hug you goodnight. He’s immense and warm and strong, yet careful, yet benign, yet so palpably ordinary.

Why can’t I fall in love with someone like you, Dad? Why can’t I be happy here?

He helps you put out food and water for Sunfyre, and when you volunteer to gather up some of the trash in the living room he adamantly refuses. You climb the staircase in the high heels you hardly ever wear, your skull flooded with unwelcome reminders. Aegon was supposed to be here with me. In my house, in my room, in my bed. Now he’s nowhere. And he’ll never touch me again.

In your bedroom mirror, you stare at your reflection. You can’t explain it, but you don’t look like yourself. The red woman in the silvery glass is not self-possessed or pragmatic or wise. She is a frayed thread, and she is desperately, irrevocably sad. You step out of your heels. You unzip the back of your dress. And before you take it all the way off—Aegon was supposed to do that part—you tear the magazine cutout of the Mustang convertible flying down the Pacific Coast Highway off the mirror. You rip it in half over and over again until it is a flurry of unidentifiable scraps on the floor. You think of how you have never acted selfishly, never acted irresponsibly. You think of how far that dedication has gotten you. Not far enough. Nowhere near far enough.

You are trembling with exhaustion and fury. Your eyes hurt, your ankles hurt, you hurt in places so deep you can’t name them. You think of all the things about Aegon you were willing to overlook and how vanishingly little he could give you in return. You want him here, and because he’s made that impossible you want revenge; you want him to feel as viciously, nauseatingly betrayed as you do. You want to do something he could never forgive. You want to knock his memory out of you like the asteroid killed the dinosaurs.

She’s hoping in time that her memories will fade.

You see it in a sudden, scarlet vision: how enraged Aegon was when he thought you had slept with Trent, how he tensed up every time Trent touched you, how he didn’t want you to be alone with him. You see how Trent has been throwing himself at you—like a skydiver out of an airplane—in a way that is somehow both frightening and shamelessly pitiful. You had once told Aegon that Trent didn’t want you dead. I know, Aegon had replied. He wants you to be his wife.

You pick up the phone on your nightstand, and then you pause. Can I do this? Can I really?

You couldn’t yesterday, and you probably won’t be able to tomorrow. But right now…

You dial the number for Trent’s apartment across town. He answers on the second ring. “Sup?”

“Hi, it’s me. Are you busy?”

“Hey!” There’s a boisterous grin in his voice. “Nah, not at all. You need something? Are your parents rearranging the living room furniture again?”

“I don’t need anything, but I’d like something.”

“Oh yeah? What?”

“What you’ve been waiting for.”

Stilted, silent seconds tick by as he puzzles it out. “For real?” He’s ecstatic, yet circumspect.

“For real.”

“Why? I mean, I’m not complaining, maybe I shouldn’t be asking questions, maybe I should just be sprinting for my truck, but I’m…uh…you changed your mind?”

“It’s not a marriage proposal, Trent,” you tell him. “It’s not a date. I just want to start out 2000 the right way.” Without Aegon. Without any threads still connecting me to him.

“Hell, I’ll take that,” he says, chuckling.

“You have to come here though. It has to be at my house.” Where your parents are just a few rooms away. Where Trent will have to be the best possible version of himself.

If he was really the Ice Fisher, why would he have saved Aegon from the channel? Why would he have been so unabashed about his anger, his strength, his size 12 boots? This killer is quiet, strategic, invisible. That’s the only way he’s managed to murder five people without getting caught. Perhaps Trent really does lack the requisite subtlety…the requisite intellect, to be perfectly blunt about it. But then who else could it be? Who the fuck could it be?

“Totally. On my way now.” Trent hangs up.

When he arrives, your parents are still downstairs cleaning up after the New Year’s Eve party. They greet him warmly and (seemingly) without much surprise. He flips his hair and offers to lift the couch so they can get the bottles that have rolled underneath. They gratefully accept. Small talk and festive merriment are exchanged, and you marvel at how seamlessly Trent blends into this family, into this house, into Juneau; he was made for Alaska. It’s in his strapping muscles and lumbering bones. It’s in his claustrophobically small mind. And then you lead him upstairs.

You don’t waste any time talking. Already you’re losing your nerve, already you have a voice surfacing in the choppy waves of your mind like a drowning man: You don’t want to do this, you don’t want to do this, you know you don’t want to do this. You tug off Trent’s blazer, button-up shirt, and khakis and shoo him onto the bed. Then you take off everything that you’d put on for Aegon, back when the Alaska Standard Time Zone was still living in the dark dwindling hours of 1999.

You’re in control the whole time because you don’t trust Trent to be. You don’t want him to be. You don’t even want to think about him. It feels like nothing. There’s no moment to get lost in, because it’s not a moment at all. It’s just logistical adjustments and premeditated reactions and flesh, heavy, crushing, bumping, artless flesh. Your thoughts are far from this room, drastically far. You hope Aegon drives by in the morning and spots Trent’s truck in the driveway, or he hears about it, or he reads it in the straightforward, chiseled lines of Trent’s face next time he sees him. You hope it digs its razored claws into him and never lets go. You hope it fucking destroys him.

As soon as it’s over you get into the shower and scrub off every remnant of what you’ve done. You regret it immediately. Aegon shattered any chance the two of you had and you ended it, so you don’t know why this feels so much like infidelity; perhaps because the reality of it is less like betraying Aegon and more like betraying yourself. In the foggy bathroom mirror, you notice that Trent left a darkening violet bruise on the side of your neck. You don’t even remember him doing it. You were so far away from him: miles away, years away, in the ambiguous future, in the lurking past. You can’t stand the thought of sleeping next to Trent. You suggest he claims the living room couch instead, complete with fresh sheets and several spare pillows. He gamely agrees.

You are optimistic that Trent will be long gone by the time you wake up. But when you venture downstairs at just before noon on New Year’s Day, you find him in the kitchen making breakfast with your parents, flipping pancakes and turning bacon and whistling along to the Red Hot Chili Peppers song that spills from your dad’s record player: not Scar Tissue this time, but Otherside.

~~~~~~~~~~

It’s Monday, January 10th when the green Nova skates into the vet clinic parking lot and slides to a slippery rest across three different spaces. As the engine dies, the song that was blaring is cut short: I Will Buy You A New Life by Everclear. Aegon steps out under the fading midday sun, almost falls on the ice, traverses slowly and cautiously towards the entrance.

“Oh no, not him!” Jennifer laments. You rush back into the exam room and slam the door.

You haven’t seen Aegon since New Year’s Eve, but you knew he hadn’t left Juneau. You’ve spied the Nova parked outside his apartment building, and Heather has run into him around town: the Foodland, the Gas ‘N Go, Ursa Minor. And then there are the phone calls. He left fifteen messages before your dad picked up and politely asked him to stop calling. Then he started putting notes in the moose-shaped mailbox.

You can hear Jennifer telling Aegon to leave. She must not be very persuasive. He bursts through the exam room door and closes it behind him. He’s wearing all black—parka, turtleneck sweater, jeans, combat boots—and his white-blond hair slicked back from his face. It gives the impression that he has no distractions, no secrets. You are suddenly acutely aware of your own, your skin crawling everywhere Trent touched you. The bruise on your neck has vanished, but the memory of it is still trapped there, heavy and scorching like shame.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” you say coldly.

“Then you should have picked up the phone.” Aegon throws it down on the metal exam table: not a thick, neatly-sealed envelope but a lump of mismatched crumpled cash—ones, fives, tens, twenties—knotted together with several rubber bands.

“What is that?”

“It’s your half of the money for the San Diego trip.”

“How—?”

“I picked up every shift I could and I sold the necklace.”

“You sold it? Permanently? It’s gone?”

“It’s gone,” he agrees. He looks good. He looks more than good: the shadows under his eyes are almost nonexistent, his skin is bright and healthy, he’s even standing taller. He moves so he’s not blocking the door, so you have an escape if you want it. You don’t leave. You wish you wanted to, but you don’t. You just don’t. “It doesn’t matter. It was the last thing I had from home, it was time for me to let go of it anyway. That was my insurance policy for anytime I needed quick cash…I’ve probably pawned it fifty times in the past six years. But this was important.”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” you say. “I told you I wanted you to leave Juneau and I meant it.”

He searches your face, his eyes blue and clear and wide. “You didn’t mean it.”

“I did,” you insist, lying.

“Look, I’m…” He presses a palm to his chest. He glances down at your right arm, then comes back to your face. “I am so, so sorry that you had to see me that way. I’m sorry for what happened. But it’s not going to happen again.”

“I don’t believe you. And I’m not interested in making plans and sacrificing so they can be a reality and then waiting around to see if you ever show up.”

“I’ll show up,” he swears. His gaze flicks down to your arm again.

“What are you looking at?”

He doesn’t reach for your forearm. Instead, he points to his own. “I remember grabbing your arm, but I don’t know how rough I was.”

“Oh. No, it’s fine. You didn’t hurt me. I don’t think it even left a mark.”

He exhales, relieved. “Good.”

There is a lull that is quiet and still but not awkward. You can hear the clock ticking on the wall, miserably prophetic. The way I feel about him hasn’t changed, you realize with disbelief. I still want him in a way that is helpless, all-consuming. I still love him.

“What happened was a mistake,” Aegon says, slowly and with great effort. “But it wasn’t random.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“This isn’t going to make any sense to you, it’s going to sound insane. But I don’t like New Year’s Eve.”

“Well I don’t like having a heroin addict boyfriend.”

“I’m not a heroin addict.” His voice is sharp and forceful, but not cruel. “It was a momentary relapse, I detoxed on my couch, I’m fine now.”

“Why don’t you like New Year’s Eve?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

You scoff bitterly. “More lies?”

“Not lies,” Aegon says. “Secrets. I haven’t lied to you.”

“Yes, you have. You said you’d be there.”

He shows you the palms of his hands, empty. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“I want this,” Aegon says determinedly. “I’m not ready to give up on this. I want you back.”

“Why can’t you leave me alone? Why can’t you just jet off to some new city and resume sleeping your way through the eligible bachelorettes of the world and then maybe I could try to move on, maybe I could—”

“Because you ruined me!” he shouts. “Because I used to be that guy who didn’t care, I used to be able to be content with meaningless replaceable flings and now I’m this idiot who doesn’t even see other women. I tried to replace you. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even invite a girl to come home with me, it was all too goddamn sad. I’ve been with one other person since I met you, and that’s Kimmie, and it’s been over for weeks, and you knew about it the entire time, and that was nothing like it is with you. I don’t want anyone else. I’ve forgotten how to want anyone else. I don’t know how you managed that. I don’t understand what kind of black magic you have swimming around in your blood, but whatever it is worked on me. I’m hooked, baby. I’m fucking hooked. I’ll do whatever you want to make this work, just name it. Please just name it. I’m giving you the money back to show you that I’m sorry and that I know I messed up. But I still want to go to San Diego with you. Hell, I’d go anywhere with you. I’d go to Omaha fucking Nebraska if that was the place you’d dreamed of, the place you hung pictures of on your bedroom mirror. I want you back.”

You don’t have to say that you want him too. Aegon can read it on your face, can see the fight bleeding out of you like the sea at low tide. He’s going to find out about Trent, you think with ice-cold dread. Sooner or later, he’s going to find out and he’s going to lose his goddamn mind. Since he left your house on New Year’s Day, you’ve avoided Trent. What Heather said must have made quite the impression, because he hasn’t tried to pressure you into inviting him over again; he has given you a wide berth of space, passing waves and smiles but no demands. Still, he has this glow. He thinks that night was a stepping stone to something more. He thinks he’s got a real shot now, and he’s basking in the gilded potential of it. I made such a mistake. It feels like everything I do now is a mistake.

“And besides, even if I was willing to go, I can’t leave yet,” Aegon says. In explanation, he looks to the flier on the wall, the one with the shadowy red-eyed specter in a trench coat. Report suspicious activity immediately! Beware of strangers! Help keep Juneau safe! The sixth and seventh victims were pulled out of Crystal Lake three days ago: a couple this time, newly engaged, mid-thirties, snatched while they were hiking in the Tongass National Forest. No one died while Aegon was in the hospital, you think randomly, vaguely. Is that a coincidence? Or is that a clue?

“Aegon, how could you possibly protect me from the Ice Fisher when you’re passed out drunk at night? Or when you’re working on a boat out in the channel, or when you’re singing rock songs at Ursa Minor? You can’t follow me around all the time. And honestly, I think if the killer really wanted me, he could probably get rid of you too.”

“If I leave and I find out later that something happened to you…that maybe, somehow, things might not have gone that way if I’d stayed, that the dominoes could have fallen in a different pattern…I’ll feel responsible. And I’d never recover from that.”

His tattoo flashes in your mind like high-beams: I’m a killer. It’s a strange thing to get inked just above your heart, even if it is a Johnny Cash lyric. It’s a little too dark. It’s a little too real. “Okay,” you hear yourself tell Aegon. “You can stay, I guess.”

“Great. Also, I need my dog back.”

“He’s happy where he is.”

“I don’t doubt that. But he’s mine, and I need him.” And when you hesitate, he adds: “If you’re so worried about Sunfyre, I would encourage you to stop by any time you’d like to check on him. And me too, obviously.” He takes his keyring out of his pocket and slips off the spare key for his apartment. Then he holds it out to you, a sliver of gold in his palm. You consider the key for a long time before you take it.

“Fine. I’ll bring him over in a few days if you’re still sober. Well…your version of sober.”

“Deal,” Aegon says. “You haven’t been at Ursa Minor recently.”

“Yes. Because I didn’t want to see you.”

Aegon shrugs, his hands in the pockets of the black parka you gave him. “Maybe you’ve changed your mind about that. Maybe you’ll show up tonight. I hope you will.”

You can’t decide how to reply. Aegon leaves while you’re still mulling it over, a vast silence stretching out between you like the void between stars.

~~~~~~~~~~

Your parents don’t want you driving alone at night. They convince you to carpool with Heather, a prospect which elates her. “You’re finally leaving the house?!” she exclaims when you call, the vibrations of her voice shrill in the phone receiver. “You’re finally going to be kind of fun again?! Hold on, hold on. I’m just sending a quick mental thank you to sweet baby Jesus. And Buddha, and Allah, and Brahma, and Thor.”

“Odin’s the king of the Norse gods.”

“Bitch,” Heather says gleefully, and hangs up.

When her Chevy Suburban rolls into Ursa Minor’s parking lot—the night indigo and starless, the ochre streetlights dim—Heather kills the engine and opens the driver-side door. Frigid wind gusts into the cabin. She glances back, realizes you haven’t even unbuckled your seatbelt, and pulls her door shut again.

“What?” she asks.

You look at her, miserable and mortified. “I made a mistake.”

“Yeah, you wore that ugly fucking grandma sweater instead of something hot.”

“No, Heather,” you whisper, tears brimming in your eyes. “I really made a mistake.”

She is concerned, mystified. “What did you do?”

“I slept with Trent.”

“You what?” She blinks. “You what?!”

“I called him after the New Year’s Eve party.” You speak quickly, like tearing a bandage from a weeping, still-inflamed wound. “I was upset and I wasn’t thinking clearly and I asked him to come over. It was horrible. He doesn’t seem to know it was horrible, but it was for me. I mean, he wasn’t aggressive or anything, he didn’t do anything wrong, he just…he wasn’t who I really wanted.”

“He wasn’t Aegon,” Heather says quietly.

“Right.” You swipe away the tears that escape down your cheeks. “And now Aegon’s going to find out. I know he is. At first I wanted him to because I wanted to hurt him, I wanted to hurt him as badly as possible. But I don’t feel that way anymore. And I can’t take it back. Trent thinks I like him and Aegon is going to hate me and I’m…I’m just…” You break down sobbing, covering your face with your hands. “I’m just so fucking stupid. My entire life I had meticulous plans and I checked every box and now I’m this fragile, illogical, aimless, stupid loser who can’t manage to hold on to anything she wants. I can’t fix myself and I can’t fix anyone else either.”

“So you fucked up,” Heather says casually. She’s not really casual, but she’s doing a good job of making it seem like she is. “So you slept with the wrong person or said the wrong thing or made a wrong choice, or two wrong choices, or ten, or a hundred, or a thousand. Who hasn’t fucked up? I have, Joyce has, Kimmie definitely has. So what? It’s not like you killed somebody. You learned from it. You’ll be a better person in the future. Regret is a useless, poisonous emotion. It’s something evolution should have bred out of us eons ago. You don’t have to carry this weight around forever. You can let yourself bury it.”

Under the dim, yellowish streetlight luminescence like a sepia photograph, you give her a weak smile. “Really?”

“Really.”

“I love you.” And then you add, so she knows you’re okay: “Bitch.”

Heather laughs. “Let’s go get you drunk. Bitch.”

You hurry together to the front door, braced in hats and parkas against the wind. Inside, it is odd to see Ursa Minor stripped of all its Christmas decorations. The multicolored lights have been taken down, the ornaments removed from the taxidermy deer heads. From Dale’s stereo soars Shania Twain’s You’re Still The One. You hear Heather’s boots squeal on the hardwood floor as she stops dead, and then you see him too: jet black suit, spidery limbs, long silvery hair that is not unruly or tangled but pin-straight. He’s sitting at the bar with his back to you. The fingers of his right hand—elegant, willowy, uncalloused—are closed around a frosty Caipirinha.

“Oh my god,” Heather breathes. “There’s two of them. The Greek boys.”

If Aegon knows he’s been found, he’ll leave. And only now can you feel the true, unmitigated devastation of it. Had you really told him to leave Juneau just ten days ago? Had that really been you? No no no no no no. He can’t leave. He can’t leave.

“Don’t talk to him,” you order Heather in a whisper, then bolt to the usual booth. Kimmie, Brad, Joyce, and Rob are already there, eyes startled and darting from you to the stranger at the bar. “Kimmie, do you still remember Aegon’s phone number?”

“Huh? Yeah, um, I think so.”

“Here.” You root around in your purse for loose change and press several quarters into her palm. “Take this. Find a payphone outside. Call him and tell him not to come to Ursa Minor tonight.”

“Okay.” She doesn’t understand, but she’s obedient. Brad goes with her. When they open the front door, the stranger at the bar glances over to make sure no one new has arrived. That Aegon hasn’t. Because this is exactly where he’d be.

Another wave of horror crashes through you. He knows Aegon so well. We’re in such fucking trouble here.

As Dale finishes serving locals at the other end of the bar and returns to his section, the stranger begins asking him something. You have to shut it down; you have to stop Dale from telling the stranger that Aegon lives in an apartment building just down the street. You can see it from Ursa Minor’s parking lot. It’s a distance that could be closed in ten minutes.

You go to the bar and sit immediately beside the stranger. Dale—seemingly relieved—excuses himself, but not before raising his eyebrows at you. Crazy world, right ladybug? that look says. He sets an apple Bacardi Breezer on the counter and is gone. The stranger turns to you, and your jaw falls open before you can stop yourself; the gasp hisses free.

The stranger smiles, like he’s caught you in a lie. The right side of his face is pristine: angular, regal, beautiful in a way that is gem-rare. The left is bisected by a scar, gnarled and old. His left eye is gone. The scraps of his lids are ragged. In the useless, gutted socket is a gleaming sapphire stone, like what the ocean looks like in the pictures you’ve seen of California. “You must know my brother.”

I have to distract him. I have to get rid of him. “Oh yeah. Totally. He talked about you and Helaena all the time.”

The stranger’s lips curl into a sly smile. “Even he forgets about Daeron.”

Aegon, Helaena, Daeron…and at least one more sibling. This one. The determined one, the capable one. You don’t know what to say; you give him a vague smirk in return. The bells on the door jingle as Kimmie and Brad scurry back inside, cold wind chasing them and clawing at their hair. Kimmie shakes her head at you. No luck, she means. Aegon didn’t answer. Probably because he’s already on his way here. The stranger notices this exchange. He notices just about everything. And there’s no way for you to tell Kimmie or Heather what you need from them without him knowing. To stop Aegon from coming here. To stop him from being caught.

The stranger offers you his hand. “Aemond Targaryen,” he introduces himself. “Targaryen Enterprises.” His voice is unlike anything you’ve ever heard: low but soft, effortlessly dignified, beckoning you to lean in closer. Aside from the shade of his hair, he is very little like Aegon. He is tall and precise, every movement purposeful. Aegon slouches and flops and makes dramatic, unrestrained gestures; this man is a sculpture of marble and blue. This man is a work of art.

You shake his hand—cool and smooth—and tell him your name. “But Aegon always called me Appletini.”

“Appletini? Like the drink?”

“Exactly.”

“Yes, that sounds like him.” His eye sweeps over you. What he asks next doesn’t sound like a question at all. It sounds like a command. “Where is he.”

“Gone,” you say, perhaps too quickly. “He left last week. He’s in Chicago now. You’re a little too late.”

Again, Aemond smiles. He sips his Caipirinha. “Hm.”

The front door opens. You and Aemond both whirl towards the clanging metal bells. Aegon shuffles inside; he’s beaming, he’s humming brightly. He drags his boots on the doormat, kicking off most of the snow. And then he looks up. His face goes entirely blank; his eyes are mindless and panicked like a trapped animal’s, iron jaws snapping shut with such force they crack bone. A second passes, two, three. Then Aegon spins around and sprints out of the bar.

“Aegon!” you shout. 

Aemond knocks his Caipirinha off the counter as he leaps to his feet and races after him; glass and lime slices spew across the floor. You follow Aemond as closely as you can, running out into the frigid darkness, your boots slipping on ice and crunching through mounds of snow. Aegon makes it a hundred yards up the street before his brother catches him. Aemond grabs the hood of Aegon’s parka, yanks him backwards, slams him face-first into a green Dodge Ram that is parked on the shoulder. Blood gushes from Aegon’s nose and splatters against the truck’s icy window. His lower lip is split; his eyes will blacken. He struggles futilely.

“Let me go—!”

“Six years!” Aemond seethes, pinning Aegon to the truck by his throat. “Six Christmases, six birthdays, six Januarys since you left and not a single phone call, no letters, no postcards, no emails, nothing, and who had to be there to comfort our mother? Who had to be there trying to convince her that you weren’t an unclaimed body on a slab in a morgue somewhere?!”

“You’re all better off without me,” Aegon moans, his skin stained red. Aemond smashes his face against the truck again.

“Stop it!” you shriek.

“You don’t get to leave,” Aemond growls at his brother. “You don’t get to abandon your responsibilities.”

“I won’t go back,” Aegon wheezes. “You can break every bone I’ve got, but I won’t go back. If you kill me, you can take me home in a box, I guess. But that’s the only way I’m going.”

Aemond shoves him away, disgusted. His brother sinks down into the snow, groaning, feeling his face with trembling hands to assess the damage. “I saved you,” Aemond says with cold, black fury. “I saved your life and you’re just throwing it away.”

“She doesn’t know,” Aegon rasps, his voice choked with blood. “Let me tell her. It should be me. Please don’t say anything. Please let me be the one to tell her.”

Now Aemond turns to you, as if suddenly remembering you’re there. His remaining eye narrows. He is deeply, genuinely perplexed; you’re a brand new species, you’re a comet that hasn’t clipped by Earth in a millennium. He says to Aegon, still looking at you: “Your type must have changed.”

“No, my type is still groupies and strippers,” Aegon replies, and spits a mouthful of blood into the snow. “I just fell in love with this girl.”

[eddiemadmunson]

Thank you for this fun tag @osferthsbussy 😏😁

Sounds interesting 😏😏😏 Reminds me of Jo's @sapphire-writes fic Down in Flames 😏😏😁

I tag: @sapphire-writes @valeskafics @aemondx @arcielee @aemondsversion @hamatoanne @its-actually-minicika @st-eve-barnes @schniiipsel @bornbetter

rules: no cheating! you’re starring in a movie with the last celebrity you saved in your camera roll. the last song you've listened to is the title. who/what is it?

ty for the tag bby 🥺🖤 @bimbobaggins69

oh man! 🥺 lmao if the movie is anything like the song ima be so heartbroken 🤣

no pressure tags: @prettyboyeddiemunson @wroteclassicaly @andvys @corrodedcorpses @eddiemunsons-missingnipple @likedovesinthewnd @eiightysixbaby @munsonsbaby @taintedcigs @silverwinged & whoever else :)

[vermithorn]

URL CHANGE !

⋆ tvrgvryen → vermithorn ⋆

hi! so i decided it was time for a little change here <3 it was very hard for me but here we go ≧◡≦

tagging a few mutuals to spread the word (i love y'all):

@vhagarlovebot @aemondryvers @taranthese @jacaerysthinker @sapphire-writes @valeskafics @targaryenbrainrot @targbarbie @aemondsmoon @aemonds-princeregent @ichorai @ilikeitbetterangsty @fairysluna @inthedayswhenlandswerefew @helaenistic @starkskeep @aegon-fanfics @bornbetter @chrispumpkin @lovelykhaleesiii @arcielee @f4ll-for-you @aemvnd @oneeyedvisenya @luvrbrat @marthawrites @nyrasbloodyclover ≧^◡^≦

[exk33]

You have my permission to worship is.....NOW! #Yardhouse #Brea #WeAreBetterThanYou #YouHaveMyPermissionToWorshipUsNOW #BornBetter #LimitedHashtags #GoodTimes #OldFriends #WelcomeHomeTwinky 👈🏼 #YouGetYourOwn

[newyorkgrnd]

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@ivxx_tribelife - Everything K. Official video is out now. Watch the full video on FizzyTheKid YouTube channel. Video shot by @fizzythekid #bornbetter #everythingk #nygrind #NewYorkGrind #fizzythekid #ivxxtribe

[kbiment]

I love my life and it's only getting better #IMENT #LACOnekta #HungerGames #kblizzlegram #futuremogul #futurestar #dreammaker #dreamsintoreality #dreamscometrue #FlyLife #Jetlife #igfamous #instafamous #ontherise #OnTheWayUp #livinglife #lovinglife #BornFly #BornBetter #Hot97

[tskottiv20]

(DiceBlakeIVXX) T S U N A M I  S K O T T