It wasn't this way when Rhys left. He'd meant to come home one day, but never to this. He'd always been a little bit broken, but holding on. For all his sins, he'd always meant to make it right. One day.

"I'm not going to stop you from leaving, Jared, but I do think you should ask yourself what you're running from."

This. This was what he was running from. His losses. His disappointments. His failures.

Once, it had been a note on the table, an empty car at the beach with pill bottles. Death and a beautiful sunset and no trace ever found.

Once, it had been blood on the floor and police tape on the door, and a promise made and delivered with scissors and black candles.

And now it was a charred ruin, the outlines of the last place he'd called home, the last of his three loves.

Everyone leaves. At the end of the world, you will stand alone, praying to the ashes for forgiveness.

And I will be there.

He never planned to come home to tumbled-down ruin, to the chemical stink of burnt insulation and staring, broken black windows. He'd left thinking somehow he would fix things, that he would come out clean and life would go on. Blue deserved better. He would be better. No more lies. No more drugs. No more of the seething, unsettled anger that left him struggling to figure out who he was anymore. He'd be her Jared, the one she had faith in. The one that he could believe would be okay.

But the sidewalk memorials are rain-stained and scattered, long past the blaze, and everything he might have said is lost in that moment, the moment when something breaks that will never come back.

This was all you pretended for, and it is gone.

He hears the rattling of bird skulls, smells snow on the wind. His bones ache from too long in the cold and from kneeling on frozen stone. There are new tattoos on his hands, done in the old way- bone needles and soot, as though he could pay the Crow-queen's price a drop of blood at a time, month after month, year after year, leaving his hands gloved in symbols of prayer and penance.

There's gray in his hair, and it's gotten long again, long enough to cover the scars. The beard is still sad and scruffy- life isn't kind enough to make him look wise with age, more like a street-corner junkie preaching the apocalypse. He's got a few more scars, and one eye is white with blindness. Odin's price.

"Are you coming, Kendra?"
"Yeah. Sorry. My mom again. She always gets a little weird this time of year."
"Mom stuff?"
"No, it's...I had an older brother who died. She always talks about it this time of year, like, anniversary? I don't really remember him, though. I was just a kid when he left, and he was really into drugs."
"Oh. That sucks." ... "So, you want coffee?"

After the fire, they boarded everything up. It was a beautiful service, so many brightly colored flowers, like Blue would have wanted, but he wasn't there.

He wasn't there. Numb and powerless, even her spirit wouldn't talk to him, and the City of Roses became a graveyard. Marigolds for Sunny, carnations for Blue. The City could break off into the sea and drown and it wouldn't matter to him.

This is what he has. This is what he is.

Now do you understand?

Their place was in the garden. And his place was in the frozen City, waiting for his queen of thorns and crows to collect.