crewxgaming

[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.

[killerqueen-ofwillowgreen]

Here is a poll for the wonderful @inthedayswhenlandswerefew's fic NTTF!

Let's see who wins! 👀

[aemcndtargaryen]

its me again hi @inthedayswhenlandswerefew

so i was thinking about my mental suspect list (as one does) dale, brad, trent, …dadtini and while so far I was trying to avoid really entertaining the idea of dadtini being the real culprit... lets be honest, out of all the names dadtini WOULD BE the most devastating, ...so knowing you its probably gonna be him lmao 👀😭🤧

(cant get the repeated use of “he likes to stay busy” out of my head and the murders started up around the time he retired and appletini took over the clinic like… + all the other stuff thats been mentioned before💀)

so anyway as i was contemplating all this i just had a realization: IF dadtini really killed jesse for all the shit he had been putting momtini throuhg back then… THEN WHAT IF now hes gonna kill aegon too for all the shit that hes been putting appletini through… thus coming full circle on all those aegon - jesse parallels👀👀👀😭😭😭🤧🤧🤧

[charenlie]

it’s 2 am but i felt a desperate urge to sketch aegon n sunfyre in chapter 1 so here we are… is this a good way to ask to be added to the tag list for north to the future 👉👈 @inthedayswhenlandswerefew

[netturtechnicaltraining]

This certificate course of NTTF will equip students with the necessary skills to operate and set up machine tools within the machining industry. The curriculum focuses on developing general machining skills that align with the requirements identified by the industry.

[flowerpotmage]

I think i need a hotd detox 🥲

[townpostin]

NTTF RD Tata Technical Institute Celebrates Teachers' Day in Style

Vibrant program highlights educators’ role; students showcase talents with performances Golmuri’s NTTF RD Tata Technical Institute marked Teachers’ Day with a lively celebration, featuring speeches, performances, and a cake-cutting ceremony. JAMSHEDPUR – The NTTF RD Tata Technical Institute in Golmuri hosted a vibrant Teachers’ Day celebration, complete with student performances and speeches…

[presidenthades]

Actual tweet from NTTF Aegon @inthedayswhenlandswerefew

[arcielee]

Interview With a Writer

Here is part 3 of my Interview With a Writer series. You can go to this post to review the other amazing authors I have spoken with ♥ Just a BTS of some of the talented minds on Tumblr and ao3.

Name: inthedayswhenlandswerefew

Story: North to the Future

Paring: modern Aegon Targaryen x Reader

Rating/Warning: Sexual themes, substance abuse, acts of violence, and there is a serial killer, so murder.

So when did you start writing?  I can remember working on pieces of stories as far back as elementary school, but I never thought of myself as wanting to be a writer. Then in 2010, when I was 15, I got my first vivid, all-consuming, lightning bolt of an idea. It took over my life in the best possible way and I wrote a novel over 9 months. 

Now, to be clear, the novel was very bad. But you have to read a lot and write a lot before you start getting good at it, and that experience was absolutely transformative for me. 

I had a lot of chaotic life situations and a bit of a crisis of confidence, and I wrote only sporadically during college and for several years afterwards. Then in 2018, I saw Bohemian Rhapsody and it became my only personality trait for a while. 

As I was reblogging a million gifsets on Tumblr, I stumbled across fanfiction for the first time, and I was like…wait…other people make up self-insert stories every time they get obsessed with a movie/show too?! It was so exciting, I finally felt like I had an outlet to put my ideas and characters out into the world. I’ve been writing pretty consistently since February 2019, and I would consider that the point when I really became a writer.

I think it is safe to say every writer has that first, all-consuming novel. Does it still exist? Oh yeah, it definitely still exists! I have a Word Doc, and also a paper copy that I had printed and bound at Staples back in the day. It’s a dystopian story about a man who has to pretend to be a true believer in an oppressive regime in order to rise to the top and change it from within, but by the end of the journey he’s become sort of genuinely evil. I keep the paper copy in a box under my bed. Poor quality notwithstanding, it has a lot of sentimental value.

Okay, where did the plot for North to the Future come from? What inspired the story? Towards the end of writing my Aemond fic—Have You No Idea That You’re In Deep?—I started feeling this fascination with Aegon as a character, and I could kind of sense that there was a story about him ready to be excavated from wherever ideas wait to be discovered. 

I kept picturing him in an unassuming little bar filled with Christmas lights as snow fell outside: sad, drunk, wearing all black. But I didn’t have a story yet, just a vision. And the songs I kept hearing when I thought about this tortured modern Aegon were 90s songs: Everlong, A Long December, Drive. 

Then one day out of nowhere, the plot showed up. 

The first real idea I get for a story is always the very end, and I saw Aegon and the protagonist barreling down the Pacific Coast Highway in a red convertible. I knew that Aegon was sober and going back home to face some terrible past, and that the girl he loved was experiencing California for the first time, and that they were both finally free of demons they’d been running from their whole lives. Once I knew the ending, the rest of the details started falling into place, and within a few days I had an outline and chapter list.

Explain your interpretation of Aegon. What drives him? Why is he the way he is in NttF? Aegon is a talented and intuitive person, but he’s clearly not suited for running a venture capital empire or corporate work in general. So his earliest, most formative memories are of his parents (and grandfather) being disappointed in him. He experienced abuse, both emotional and physical, and developed extremely harmful coping mechanisms that at a certain point he no longer knew how to function without. He was suicidal in part because of his self-loathing and the futility of his situation, but also because the only time he received even vague compassion from his parents was after he had swallowed a bottle of pills or stabbed himself with four of his mother’s EpiPens. 

Of course what Aegon overlooked was that he did have people back in Miami who cared about and wanted to help him, although they were too young to effectively communicate it: Aemond, Helaena, and Daeron.

After the accident that claimed Aemond’s eye and three innocent lives, Aegon can’t cope with reminders of what he’s done because he’s fundamentally not someone who ever wants to hurt others. He directs his destructiveness inwards, not outwards, and even when striking out in self-defense he runs away as soon as the opportunity presents itself. That’s the real difference between Aegon and Jesse. When Dadtini talks about Jesse, he mentions bruises and kicked down doors. That’s not Aegon. Jesse gives bruises, Aegon gets them.

Was there anything in specific that inspired your Reader portrayal? I didn’t consciously have anyone in mind when I was writing Appletini, but most of my Readers tend to be snarky, studious, and guarded (yet reluctantly hopeful), so that’s probably my own personality bleeding into the characters! I envisioned someone who was well-intentioned and ostensibly responsible, yet under the surface struggling in a way that she felt she couldn’t share with anybody else. I think most people have felt like that at some point in their lives, so it’s just a matter of being able to take the essence of that feeling and shape it to fit with the story’s narrative. Honestly, the most difficult part of writing Appletini was her relationship with her extremely supportive and functional parents, as that’s not something I have much experience with. I was really relieved when people connected with Momtini and Dadtini as characters because I wasn’t sure if I was doing them justice. In what ways do you feel your Reader compliments Aegon? The defining characteristic of the Aegon/Appletini relationship is that she wants him to become the best version of himself, and truly believes that he has the capacity to if he’ll work for it. She knows he’s brilliant, she knows he’s a genuinely good person under all of his issues and mistakes, she knows he’s fine af, and she knows she loves him. But none of that is enough if he’s not sober.

Someone like Heather or Joyce wouldn’t see value in Aegon, and someone like Kimmie wouldn’t push him to change. The story is in the war that Appletini fights to prove that Aegon can and should conquer his demons. Similarly, Aegon wants Appletini to break free of her suffocating obligations in Juneau, and it causes him genuine pain to see her not living the life she wants. They really want the best for each other, even in their worst moments.

Was there another character (OC or canon) in your story you enjoyed portraying? (And why?) Firstly, I really enjoyed writing Kimmie because she’s a twist on the trope of the attractive, overtly-sexual, not terribly intellectual girl always getting killed in horror movies. Kimmie is the “hot friend” and she loves to party, but she’s also deeply loyal and affectionate, and she notices certain things that other people don’t. I wanted the readers to underestimate her, and then hate her, and then come back to realizing that she wasn’t a villain after all. She could use a better sense of boundaries, but she’s a good person. I feel like by the end of NTTF, it’s clear why Heather, Joyce, and Appletini are friends with Kimmie despite all her…peculiarities.

Secondly, Trent was a super fun character to write, because he’s unnerving without being completely unrealistic. He reminds me of a lot of the frat boys I went to college with…superficially pleasant yet entitled, less malicious than willfully ignorant about anything that doesn’t fit with what he wants in life. He’s a product of the “boys will be boys” era that he grew up in, especially with Alaska being more old-fashioned than the rest of the country, so the 1990s there feel like the 1960s or 70s in some ways. Also, I can’t lie, I loved all the dumb horse boi jokes.

Finally, I absolutely adored Aemond as a character and I was just as impatient as the readers were for him to finally show up in Chapter 11. He’s so stoic and fierce, but he has a tremendous amount of love for Aegon and this blind faith in his ability to change for the better. Aemond’s personality is a lot like Appletini’s, which is why they end up having this tacit respect for each other. I think they end up as close friends eventually, probably even closer than Aemond and Aegon.

Was there an OC character that reflects the author? Out of all the NTTF characters, I am definitely the most like Heather! I’m that friend who is snarky and judgmental on the surface, but also ferociously protective…which can be tough when you’re watching your friends make questionable decisions, like our poor beloved Heather was forced to throughout the series. I know she was thrilled to see that everyone ended up happy. That’s all we really want, us Heathers of the world.

You mentioned your retirement from fan fiction, so what is next? What’s next is writing a novel, which I am super excited about! I’ve had the plot figured out for a few years now and have written bits and pieces of it already, but now I’m determined to dive in without any creative detours and get it written, hopefully within a year. 

I do have some trepidation about the project—What if the idea isn’t good? What if I can’t do it justice? What if I can’t keep to a schedule now that I don’t have an amazingly wonderful audience expecting weekly updates?—but I’ve come to realize that if I never try to be a “real” writer, I’m going to regret it my whole life. I’m trying to be logical about it and tell myself that even if my first book isn’t perfect, I can always write others, so it’s not like my whole future is contingent upon this one project. I’ve had the idea for so long that the characters feel real to me, and I just want to tell their story well.

[starfalldragondreamer]

Posting this before reading the last chapter of NTTF by the amazing @inthedayswhenlandswerefew. I am prepared to have my heart shattered in millions of pieces 👍

[chaoticallywriting]

@inthedayswhenlandswerefew you suck for mentioning that Tom has a band in your last chapter of NTTF. I am currently listening to the entire discography of this band and I DID NOT EXPECT HIS VOICE TO SOUND LIKE THIS

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

North To The Future [Chapter 14: Strong Enough]

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, sexual content, violence, angsttttttttttt (but what else is new 🥰).

Word count: 5.3k.

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

Taglist: @doingfondue @tclegane @quartzs-posts @liathelioness @aemcndtargaryen @thelittleswanao3 @burningcoffeetimetravel @hinata7346 @poohxlove @borikenlove @myspotofcraziness @travelingmypassion @graykageyama @skythighs @lauraneedstochill @darlingimafangirl @charenlie @thewew @eddies-bat-tattoos @minttea07 @joliettes @trifoliumviridi @bornbetter @flowerpotmage @thewitch-lives @bearwithegg @tempt-ress @padfooteyes @teenagecriminalmastermind @chelsey01 @anditsmywholeheart @heliosscribbles @elsolario @killerqueen-ofwillowgreen @narwhal-swimmingintheocean @tillyt04 @cicaspair418 @fan-goddess​ @ladylannisterxo​

Only 1 chapter left! The series finale will be very...eventful 💜

Ice clinks in Aegon’s rum and Coke, his fourth in an hour; lemon juice and crystalline sugar is a halo around your appletini. The sky is a watercolor painting blending from lavender to violet to indigo, clouded, moonless. Downstairs inside Ursa Minor, shadows grow longer, slanting across the red-brown hardwood floor: hands turn into claws, men into beasts, skeletal and reaching. If this was a movie or a book, you would be able to see the Northern Lights, just like you did the first time Aegon brought you up here. It would be a full-circle moment that would soften a goodbye with a homecoming. Instead, the sky offers no consolation, no hint of any grander design. Sometimes things just blink out of existence like an eviscerated star. Sometimes things are just over.

You stand together on the rooftop patio in a patch of snow that is only shin-deep, exhaling white fog that evaporates into the nightfall, drinking. You don’t speak, because speaking of the end will make it real. You don’t look at each other either. You gaze out over the channel, where dark waters ripple and boats bob in easy waves. When Aegon offers you his rum and Coke, at first you don’t understand; and then you realize he wants to trade.

“I thought you hated these,” you say as you pass Aegon your appletini, Dale’s newest addition to his repertoire. You taste the rum and Coke: solid, heavy, bitter, biting.

“Figured I shouldn’t miss my shot. How often does someone get the chance to enjoy an appletini with an Appletini?” He gives you a wry, off-balance smile as he sips it, saccharine and emerald green.

You down the rest of the rum and Coke, haul up your courage like a body from the silt of a lake. And then you ask him: “What if you went with Aemond?”

Aegon stares at you in disbelief, in betrayal. “What?”

“Back to Miami. What if you actually went?”

“Whose fucking side are you on?”

“No, really, think about it,” you plead. “They can afford to get you the best treatment, take you to the best doctors. You can go to rehab and then, maybe, maybe after you’re better—”

“You want me to go crawling back to my parents after—?!”

“Then don’t do it for your parents!” you shout, your breath short-lived mist in the Arctic wind. “Do it for Aemond and Helaena and Daeron, do it for yourself, do it for me. You’re young, you’re brilliant, it’s not too late for you to start over. You could stop running, you could make amends.”

“I killed three people. How can anyone make amends for that? Aemond lost an eye, he’s maimed for life. How could anyone make amends for what I’ve done? What would me being home do for anybody except serve as a constant reminder of the fact that I got to walk away without paying for my mistakes?”

“You’ve paid,” you say. “You’ve paid for six years.”

He shakes his head, peering into the channel. “I can’t go back.”

“You really think you can run for the rest of your life? You’re never going to get married, have children, own a house, file taxes, start a business, go back to school, keep the friends you’ve made? Aegon, think about it! You can’t even play in a band good enough to book a spot at a festival or a club without there being advertisements, magazine articles, Google search results. You can’t disappear, not in the world that exists now. You can’t disappear and have any life worth living.”

“I’ve made it this long. I’ll find a way.”

“You’ll die,” you tell him, cutting like glass, like the splinters of a broken window. “You can’t keep doing this or you’ll die. And what then?” What about me, Aegon? “What was this all for?”

“I can’t go back.” It’s an echo, mindless and reflexive, a survival instinct. There’s no reasoning with it. He drains the appletini and pitches the glass off the roof, out into the darkness.

You hear footsteps on the staircase, and again you are reminded of the night Aegon kissed you for the first time, the night he sang Everlong, the night under the Northern Lights. Then it had been Heather who interrupted you. Now it’s Kimmie. She bursts through the door, panting from the effort of scaling the steps in five-inch hot pink heels.

“She’s here,” Kimmie informs you and Aegon from the doorway, her face an exaggerated, childlike pool of sympathy, all soft edges and slick eyes. And then she hurries back downstairs.

Heather, sitting in the usual booth, is inundated by well-meaning spectators who offer sympathy, support, thinly-veiled prying so they don’t look quite so much like kids gawking at a zoo animal. They hug her and pat her back reassuringly; they buy her drinks. There is a small army of Sex On The Beaches on the table. Kimmie climbs nimbly into the booth, snuggles up beside Heather, and rests her head on her shoulder. Heather, for once, does not seem to regard this as an intrusion. Aemond, attempting not to encroach, is sipping a Caipirinha at the bar in his black Armani suit. Dale has apparently at last tired of Shania Twain songs. From the stereo drifts the wistful acoustic chords of Sheryl Crow’s Strong Enough.

You slide into the seat across from Heather and take her hands. Joyce is beside you, no book to be found. Brad and Rob are standing a few yards away, both drinking heavily, both murmuring in dazed, conspiratorial voices. “Guess the Hulk jokes aren’t so funny now…can you imagine…he did get kind of aggressive sometimes…the best quarterback Juneau’s seen in decades…but the boots…who would have guessed…?”

“I can’t stay long,” Heather sniffles. Her eyes are red, her face puffy from crying. “My parents are calling around trying to get a good lawyer. They’re in shock, they’re fucking devastated, we’re all just…just…” She crumbles into loud sobs, shoving a fistful of tissues against her nose.

“Shh,” Kimmie says, stroking Heather’s hair. “Shh, shh…”

“Heather,” you begin, not knowing how to put it delicately. “Were there any…you know…any signs? That Trent could be the Ice Fisher?”

She shrugs despondently. “You know how he is. He’s a dumbass sometimes. He gets angry…he says the wrong things…but he doesn’t kill people!” She starts crying again.

“He does fit the description,” Joyce says softly. “He’s big, he’s athletic.”

Kimmie marvels: “I can’t believe we spent all that time around him. We were totally clueless. Out in the woods with him? Hanging out together at night? Trent could have gotten any of us.”

Heather wails, mopping the tears from her face with the damp mass of tissues.

“So he’ll stay in custody?” Aegon asks Heather. “Until the trial?”

“That’s what the cops said. There’s no way he’s getting bail.” She shakes her head. “Chief Baker came to the house to talk to my parents about what was happening. What they had found in Trent’s apartment, what the next steps would be. He looked so sorry to have to deliver the news. That was nice of him, wasn’t it? He didn’t have to do that.” More sniffling, more tears snaking down her cheeks.

“Heather, please,” you say helplessly.

“I hate this,” she sobs. “I hate this!”

Kimmie holds her tighter. “Shh, shh. I know.”

“It’ll kill my parents. They were always so proud of Trent, they loved him so much…they still do, I mean, but now…now…”

“Did he say anything to you?” you ask Heather. “After he was arrested? He got a phone call, right? Did he confess, did he give a reason why? Did he say anything?”

“Yes.” She gazes across the table at you, eyes murky with bewildered, immutable horror. “He said he didn’t do it.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Heather, somewhat mollified by a number of Sex On The Beaches, asks Joyce to drive her home. As Aegon bids goodbye to Rob and Kimmie—a permanent goodbye, a remorseful one—you retreat to the bar to give him space. Brad must know about the transitory Kimmie-Aegon situation; he glares at him as he knocks back glass bottles of beer misty with condensation. Aegon is working on his sixth rum and Coke. He sways, he slurs, he blinks in slow motion.

“Can you believe it?” Dale asks as you sit next to Aemond, sliding you a fresh appletini. His bushy eyebrows are raised: incredulous, inquisitive. “Trent? Our very own hometown hero?”

“It’s disturbing, for sure. But he was prone to…outbursts.”

“Yes,” Dale says, a little vaguely. “I had noticed that.” He lumbers away to take orders. Ursa Minor is full of locals clamoring for gossip, theories, commentary, self-medication.

Aemond nips at his frosty Caipirinha, his eye fixed on Aegon. “He’s stalling.”

Why lie? There’s no shade of dishonestly that he can’t see through. “Yes.”

“It won’t work.”

You watch Aegon from across the room: the way he talks with his hands, the way he smiles crookedly beneath sad eyes, the way that lock of white-blond hair falls over his face. He’s leaving. He’s really leaving. “Show me more pictures from Miami.”

Aemond smirks. “Now you’re stalling too.” Regardless, he produces his wallet and starts leafing through a small stack of photographs. He plucks out the ones you haven’t seen yet with lithe and yet curiously dangerous hands. There are more images of Vhagar, several mansions and yachts, some of a young woman who must be Helaena—slight, delicate, intensely vulnerable—and a boy in his late-teens playing golf.

“Daeron?” you guess.

Aemond nods. “He’s the most balanced, the least damaged. He would have been Dad’s choice to inherit the leadership of the company if he was older. He’s the best of us.”

“I doubt that.” You sift through the photographs until one stuns you: an olive-skinned, black-haired man, perhaps thirty, with his arm around a woman’s shoulders. He wears a modest, strangely burdened smile, but his dark eyes are warm. “Who’s this? He’s gorgeous. And he actually looks Greek. Don’t tell me you have yet another brother. If so, I fear I might have allied myself with the wrong one.”

“Well, that’s obvious,” he says with just a dusting of sarcasm like flurries. “No, he’s Criston Cole. He’s been Dad’s bodyguard since before I was born.”

You squint at the photo. “How old is he?”

“He’s in his forties now. I know he looks younger.”

“And the woman is…his wife? Girlfriend?”

“My mother, actually.”

You raise an eyebrow. Aemond smiles bashfully, averts his gaze. “They share an affinity. He’s helped her immensely through Dad’s illness, through…well.” He gestures to Aegon with his glass. “Everything.”

“I mean…yeah. I’d probably find an excuse to fuck Criston too.”

Miraculously, this works: Aemond laughs, the first time you’ve ever heard him do it. It’s a joltingly beautiful sound. It’s like the earth waking up again at the end of winter. He gathers up the photographs, places them safely back into his wallet, sips his Caipirinha contemplatively. “You’re not stupid,” Aemond says. “You have to understand that there’s no way this ends with you and Aegon together.”

We were supposed to have two more months. And maybe I even dreamed of more than that.

Aemond continues: “He has to get better before it’s too late. He has to get sober. I can’t give him a new liver. Dad’s the only one in the family with Aegon’s blood type.”

You turn to him, bemused. “You’ve already thought about that.”

Aemond is annoyed, like you haven’t been keeping up. “Of course I have.” His BlackBerry beeps, and he slides it out of his pocket. He reads the onyx pixels on the screen, his eye widening. He reads them again. And then he says: “I need a phone. Immediately.”

“Okay, um, well there’s a payphone outside, and Dale has one behind the bar—”

Aemond flags down Dale, expresses that he has an emergency, is swiftly ushered to the phone. While he’s gone, Aegon makes his way back to you. He finishes his latest rum and Coke, bangs the glass down on the counter, kisses you with unaccustomed roughness, his calloused fingers cradling the arc of your jaw.

You tuck his unruly lock of hair behind his ear. “Aegon—”

“We have to leave now,” Aemond says. He’s reappeared, and he will not be ignored.

“Go buy a newspaper and jack off to the business section,” Aegon flings at him, bringing his lips to yours again, burning with dark rum.

Aemond grabs the neckline of his brother’s royal blue sweater and drags him away from you. Bar patrons glance over. You’re beginning to attract attention. “We have to leave. Now.”

“Okay, okay,” Aegon agrees; but there’s something flighty and devious in his eyes, like an animal too sly to be caged. The three of you walk back to Aegon’s apartment together, stepping in footprints already left in the snow. Each time Aegon staggers, you catch him and haul him upright again. You can’t even resent him for it. Soon you won’t be able to touch him at all.

Sunfyre is waiting when Aemond unlocks the door. He gives the golden retriever an absentminded pat on the head as he glides past him. Aegon lurches into the kitchen, where the mugs are still waiting on the counter for the hot chocolate he never made. And then he just stands there unsteadily under the goldenrod florescent lights. He’s run out of room to run. He’s a rat at the end of a maze, not an open door but a brick wall.

“Pack your things,” Aemond orders.

“No.”

With one powerful hand, Aemond shoves him against the refrigerator. Magnets—Las Vegas, Phoenix, Baltimore, San Francisco, Portland, Denver, Chicago, Dallas, San Diego, many more—go flying in every direction. “Pack your fucking things.”

“No,” Aegon repeats.

“Dad’s in the hospital,” Aemond says. “He was admitted this morning. It’s bad, he has a pulmonary embolism. He might be dying. I need to be there to handle things.”

“So go,” Aegon replies dismissively.

“Not alone.” His only eye is an icy blue, sharp and ferocious; but it’s heartbroken too. “Not without you.”

“I’m not going.”

“Aegon,” he implores, he begs. “Mom can’t make these decisions alone, Helaena doesn’t have the spine for it, Daeron’s too young, we need to be there!”

“You need to be there. Not me.”

“Pack your things,” Aemond says again.

“No.”

“Then you can leave as you are.” And he lunges for Aegon, closing the distance between them in a heartbeat. Sunfyre barks franticly.

“Aegon, no!” you shout, because you realize what he’s going to do. He grabs the green mug off the kitchen counter, shatters it against the stovetop, and wields a thick, five-inch-long shard of it like a dagger as Aemond grapples for him. Aegon’s arm is lightning in the air, striking blindly. The jagged sliver of the mug connects with Aemond’s face.

“What’s wrong with you?!” Aemond roars, touching his palm to his forehead and seeing the blood. “What’s your plan? To cut out my other eye too?!”

“No.” Aegon brings the shard to his own throat and starts slicing: not deep enough to kill, but deep enough to show he’s serious. A trickle of blood flows down his neck like a string of rubies.

“Stop!” you and Aemond shriek together. He gets to Aegon first. Aegon careens away from him until his back hits the wall. Aemond knocks the piece of the mug out of his grasp; it clatters over the hardwood floor like a rock skipped across water. Aegon slaps at his brother’s face ineffectually, then finally slams his elbow into Aemond’s nose. Blood rockets, blood flows like a river. With an open palm, Aegon smears it upwards into Aemond’s only remaining eye. Aemond screams in anguish and frustration, fumbling blindly for the kitchen sink. Then Aegon reaches for his brother.

You shout: “Aegon, don’t hurt him—!”

“I’m not.” As Aemond twists on the faucet and splashes water into his eye, Aegon thieves his few consequential possessions from Aemond’s pockets: his keys, his wallet, his cash. And then he retreats to the other side of the room. His message is clear. He doesn’t want to fight; he wants to run. He wants to start running and never stop. Sunfyre scurries over to him, claws clicking on the floor, examining Aegon like a fretful mother.

You yank a dishtowel out of a drawer and go to Aemond. “It’s me, it’s me,” you say gently when he flinches away. You help clear the blood from his eye, assess his nose. Not broken, but bleeding like hell. Aemond doesn’t even look angry. He looks exhausted, he looks hopeless. Aegon watches from across the small apartment, holding his belongings, clutching them to his chest, a coward and hating himself for it.

“Six years,” Aemond says, his voice clotted with scalding blood, with an ocean of time. “For six years I tried to find you and this is what I have to show for it. You didn’t miss me at all. Not even sometimes. Not even for a second.”

“I never said I didn’t miss you.”

“But you won’t come home.”

“No,” Aegon says, like an apology.

Aemond readjusts his suit, smooths his hair. He doesn’t seem aware of the blood still streaming from his nose, his forehead. “I have to go. I have to be there.”

“Then go, Aemond. That’s where you belong.”

He stares at Aegon with a vacantness that you can feel in your own bones: excavated marrow, howling void. “This isn’t over,” he says. “All I’ve ever done is live in your shadow. I don’t know how to stop.” And then he gets his green Louis Vuitton suitcase and vanishes through the apartment doorway. You bolt after him, chasing him out into the darkness, a starless night with a cold wind that slits into your lungs like needles.

“Aemond!” you call, and he stops. “Where are you going?”

“Home. The jet is waiting.”

“But you can’t walk to the airport from here. And I’ve had one too many appletinis to drive you.”

“I’ll call a cab from the bar. You do have cabs here in Juneau, I assume?”

“Yes. Two, I think.”

“That’ll do.” He stands in the weak beam of the streetlight, heaving in labored breaths. He wipes the blood still pouring from his nose with the back of one hand. “Good luck with him. You’ll need it.” And then he’s gone, his suitcase bumping over thickets of snow and ice.

Upstairs, Aegon is dragging his own suitcase—black, tattered, Samsonite—out from beneath his unmade bed. He opens it and starts throwing in clothes: band T-shirts, sweaters, jeans, flannel. Sunfyre, whimpering, crawls under the bed and stays there.

“Aegon—”

“If my father stabilizes, Aemond will come back. If he dies, Aemond will come back. He might try to bring my mother up here, or Helaena, or Daeron, or Criston, or the whole fucking family, who knows? I have to be long gone by the time he returns to Juneau.”

“Aegon, please, think about this—”

“I already have a guy lined up to buy the Nova…I think I still have his phone number…I don’t have enough cash yet, but I will once I’ve sold the car…” He’s mostly talking to himself. He’s not really in Juneau anymore; he’s in the future, he’s in the past.

“You don’t have to go—”

He says suddenly, looking at you: “Come with me.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Everywhere. We’ll do this together.”

And for a second, you almost say yes. You can see it in one of those flashes, brief and inescapable like lightning: sand, surf, wild children with white-blond hair. Then reality roars back in like a storm. “What, so I can drag you off the floor, clean up your messes? So I can have a front row seat to your self-destruction? So I can burn all the bridges behind us as I follow you into exile? There’s no place for me in a future like that. That’s not a future at all. It’s a cage. It’s a different kind of cage than the one I’m in here, but it’s a cage nonetheless.” Your voice isn’t harsh. Perhaps it would hurt him less if it was. You sound patient and sad and old, like you’ve already seen it all and returned as a ghost, wearing decades of regret instead of white sheets. “And you’ll drink away the money I make, or you’ll inject it into your arm, or you’ll buy pills with it, and I’ll resent you, at first just a little bit, and then more, each time stacking up like pennies in a jar, getting heavier and heavier until I can’t feel all those reasons why I fell in love with you, I can only feel the crushing goddamn weight.”

He can’t even tell you that it’s not true. He wants to, he wants to desperately, but he can’t.

“Tell me you’ll get better,” you say in a whisper thinner than a knife’s edge. “Tell me you’ll try, at least, that you’ll go to rehab, that you’ll face your past, that you’ll make amends. Give me something, anything to hold on to. Give me a reason to leave with you. Please, Aegon, please, just give me one fucking reason.”

“I’m not capable of what you’re asking for.”

“Then I can’t leave Juneau.”

“If you walk out that door, it’s over,” he says, his eyes glassy, tiny barren oceans. “I can’t wait. And I won’t be here tomorrow.”

“Maybe that’s for the best.”

“Then get out,” he hisses. “You want to go so bad? You want to get away from me, you want to start forgetting? Just get out. You don’t need to make polite excuses. You don’t need to placate me. I understand. I understand perfectly.” And he doesn’t hit you, but it feels like he does. “Go find some painfully ordinary Juneau boy that you won’t give a fuck about. Maybe he’ll be a logger, maybe he’ll work on a fishing boat, it doesn’t really matter, does it? You’ll play pool with him and you’ll stroll through Blockbuster together and you’ll let him order you beers you don’t want and sooner or later you’ll be lying underneath him, and he’ll be fucking you, and you’ll be amazed by how it’s possible to be so close to another human being and yet so far away. And you know what? The whole time you’ll be thinking about me.”

“Yes,” you answer, dripping with cold venom. “I’ll be wondering what morgue you ended up in.”

“Then get out,” he says again, he dares.

But you don’t turn to go. You don’t even move. Aegon’s gaze sweeps over you: face, down to your boots, back up to your eyes.

His lips curl up at the edges, not in a smile but something stinging, boastful, cruel. “I know what you want.”

Don’t touch me, you wish you could say, you wish you could stab him with like a blade, all the way to the hilt. I don’t want you to touch me. I don’t want you at all. But Aegon has learned every one of your languages, and he can read lies on you like scrawls of ink.

He crosses the room, buries a hand in your hair, holds you still as he skates the other into the front of your jeans. You cry out, opening your thighs for him, surrendering, ravenous. One last time. Yes, oh god, please, one last time. He yanks your jeans down to your ankles and unbuttons his own. Then he turns you to the wall. You brace yourself against it—a palm pressed to fraying wallpaper—as he slips into your wetness, becoming a fleeting visitor rather than one with you, a lover without a name, a face.

And you want it, yes, yes, there’s no ambiguity there, but still it’s agony, because it’s nothing like it was before. Aegon doesn’t whisper to you, doesn’t kiss you, doesn’t touch you anywhere that isn’t necessary. He makes you come, yes; but quickly and mechanically, like it’s a necessary task to be checked off a list, a patched roof, gasoline into his Nova. He doesn’t leave bruises on you, yes; but that doesn’t mean anything. He never left bruises on Kimmie either. When you reach back—instinctively, without thinking—to touch his face, his hair, he catches your hand and pins it to the wall. You could be anybody, and you will be: soon enough the girl standing in your place will be from Des Moines, Modesto, Scottsdale, Buffalo, Plano, Durham, Wichita, Knoxville, Fargo, Ann Arbor, Hartford. It doesn’t matter where she lives, because he won’t be there long. It doesn’t matter who she is, because that’s not why he wants her.

Aegon finishes with a shuddering gasp, is still for a moment, and then recedes from you. The sensation of abrupt emptiness is forlorn, sickening. I feel worse than I did before. How is that possible?

“Now get out,” he says, zipping up his jeans in the sepia florescent light. He can’t even look at you. He stares down at the floor instead, pretending to be scrutinizing something, a scuff or an indentation. You both know he doesn’t care about things like that. You both know he’s done with you. You dress yourself, grab your purse, and break out into the freezing darkness.

You go to Ursa Minor and clean yourself up in the bathroom, a tear-streaked ghost under stark white lights. Then you go to the usual booth. You don’t order anything, not even when Dale swings by to check in with you, his forehead crinkled with questions and worry. You don’t talk to the few locals who are currently drinking their January evening away. You just sit there, staring at the wall, not feeling time as it breathes through you: an invisible truth, a string that ties the past to the present like an anchor. Eventually, you get up and leave, climb into your Jeep, drive back to the place you’ve always called home.

You walk into the house, into the nightscape silence. Your purse drops off your shoulder and thumps against hardwood. And you stand there, not speaking, not seeing, just feeling the ionic bonds between your atoms being snipped, your veins and ligaments unweaving, pieces of you falling away until you vanish. You can feel yourself becoming transparent. The pigment of your eyes, your hair, your skin evaporates—boiled water from a tea kettle, steam off a bathroom mirror—and is replaced by the muted grayscale of Juneau. Your eyes are puddles of melted snow on asphalt, laced with salt and stray earth. Your hair is wisps of fog. Your skin is the Gastineau Channel, a silver-cold river deep with bones. It’s not that you can’t imagine a future. It’s that you’ve forgotten how to imagine anything at all.

“You’re home already?” Your mom steps out of the kitchen, drying her hands with a dishtowel. “Dad went to the Foodland. I found this neat new cookie recipe but we’re out of baking powder—”

You look at her, and she sees you, really sees you. And the totality of the understanding on her face is like you’re under a spotlight, like you’ve never had a secret and never will. “How did it happen?”

“He’s leaving Juneau. I can’t go with him, not the way he is now. That’s all.” You show her your palms, empty.

“Well, it’s not necessarily goodbye forever, is it? I mean, you can still stay in contact with him. Make phone calls, send letters…”

“There’s no point, Mom,” you say, with more despair than you intend to. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Ladybug…” She hesitates, wringing the dishtowel. “Your dad and I…we want you to be happy. You know that, don’t you? And we like having you here. We love having you here, it’s the greatest gift we could have ever hoped for. But if you need to change things to be happy…if you need to see other places, experience different things…we would want you to do that. We would want you to do whatever it takes for you to feel that you’re truly living.”

You stare at her like she’s speaking a dead language: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Gothic, Illyrian. “Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

I could get out of Juneau. They would want me to. “But even if I did leave one day, I couldn’t go with Aegon.” Your voice breaks, your lips tremble. “He’s too damaged. He’s too much like Jesse.”

“Oh, ladybug,” your mom says, smiling with tears in her eyes. “Aegon isn’t like Jesse.”

Of course he’s like Jesse. He’s exactly like Jesse. And that’s why he’s going to end up dying the same way Jesse did. “He’s…not?”

“Well, he is, but he isn’t. Aegon is more defenseless, more gentle, more kind. Aegon would never hit you. There’s more good in him, I think. There’s more of a chance.”

You want to believe her. It shocks you how much; you’ve never wanted to believe in anything this badly. “So you think I should go with him.”

“That’s something you have to decide,” your mom says. “And only you. Because you’re the one who has to live with the choices you make. All I can tell you is that if you see potential in someone, even a glimmer of possibility, and you don’t try with every shred of yourself to make it work…you might regret it for the rest of your life.”

A question occurs to you that is so horrible you almost can’t bring yourself to ask it. “Do you regret being with Dad?”

“No, never,” she says, and the relief rolls through you. “But I think that if I had handled things differently with Jesse, he would still be alive. I had given up on him by then. I had stopped trying to help him, I had stopped believing him when he told me he wanted to change. I wasn’t there for him at the end. And I should have been. Because it really did seem like he was getting better.” She embraces you, warmth and unconditional harbor. “If you want to run after Aegon…if even the smallest part of you does…then I don’t want you to ignore that because of your love for me and Dad. We’ll be alright. Do you hear me? As long as you’re happy, we’ll be alright.”

“Okay.” You kiss her on both cheeks and hug her one last time, your arms slung around her neck, clinging to her like a child. “Okay, Mom. Thank you. Thank you so much. I love you.”

“I love you too, ladybug. Now go. Go, if that’s what you want.”

So you go. You snatch up your purse, bolt for the door, run through the frigid darkness to your Jeep. Dim gloomy streetlights flick by overhead as you drive, snow and ice and salt crunching beneath the tires. The channel is a glistening ribbon to the west, the mountains vast ancient shadows to the east. And you think about what you’ll tell Aegon, what perfect confession you’ll make; but the truth is, you won’t need to say anything at all. When he sees you, he’ll know.

You swerve to a haphazard stop under the streetlight outside Aegon’s apartment building. You dive out of your Jeep, sprint up the steps, rattle the spare key he once gave you in the door. It opens. So does the rest of your life.

Inside, Aegon’s apartment is silent and still. The refrigerator magnets have been collected from the floor like seashells from frothing surf. The battered green electric guitar is missing. His closet is bare; the blue mug has disappeared from the kitchen counter. There are pawprints in the dust on the hardwood floor. But there’s no Sunfyre, and there’s no Aegon either.

He’s gone. He’s just gone.

[sharpbharat]

jamshedpur nttf-एनटीटीएफ गोलमुरी मे तीन दिवसीय दिवाली फेस्ट आयोजित

जमशेदपुर: गोलमुरी स्थित आर डी टाटा तकनीकी संस्थान, एनटीटीएफ में प्रतिवर्ष की भांति इस वर्ष भी दीवाली मेला का आयोजन किया गया. जिसका शुभारंभ कॉलेज की प्राचार्य प्रीता जॉन एवं उप्राचार्य रमेश राय द्वारा किया गया. इस मेले में विभिन्न प्रकार के प्रतियोगिता में विद्यार्थियों ने भाग लिया. जिसमें रंगोली मेकिंग, दिया मेकिंग, स्वयं निर्मित दिवाली घर, तोरन मे��िंग आदि शामिल हैं.(नीचे भी पढ़े) तीन दिवसीय यह…

[aemcndtargaryen]

@inthedayswhenlandswerefew Maggiiiiie listen, i know you can't answer, but I was just doing some rereading and realized

I was waxing poetic about how dadtini was ready to gut trent here, but he wouldn't hurt Jesse cos it would hurt momtini and appletini

all the while conveniently looking past the line that says he sounds exactly like when he was talking about jesse👀👀👀

you know I think Dale is dirty, and well, as much as I don't wanna believe it, dadtini could very well be as well..

so there's no way Dale is innocent, but dadtini is also sus... SO WHAT IF IT'S BOTH OF THEM?! 👀👀👀

maybe dadtini killed Jesse and Dale saw that and now he's killing people in a similar fashion, orrr they teamed up and there's not one, but TWO Ice Fishers👀

[tracknews1]

NTTF SOUTH SOUTH REGION REDEDICATES COMMITMENT TO TALENT DEVELOPMENT

The Chairman of the Nigeria Table Tennis Federation (NTTF) South South Region, Mr. Ama-ebi Stow, has reaffirmed the region’s unwavering commitment to cultivating future table tennis stars. In a statement delivered at the 4th Edition of the Offiong Edem Mini Tournament held in Calabar, Cross River State, Mr. Stow emphasized that talent development is the cornerstone of ensuring the sport’s…

[netturtechnicaltraining]

NTTF, Thalassery student Amal Varun Mathew, 20, hailing from Kattangal in Kozhikode, developed an automatic sensor-triggered sanitizer dispenser that does not require touch to operate. Our world-class training helped him to bring a solution for his mother Dr Mary Joseph’s difficulties faced in Rural Health Centre as a director of the center.