I want to take a moment to thank each one of you. Thank you for reading. Thank you for commenting. I believe comments are the exchange between readers and fanfic writers and I totally appreciate every one of you who've taken the time to comment on this fic. It means more than you can know!

I hope this ending finishes this fic in a way that satisfies!

Also, the title of this fic was taken from the song "Paper House" by the amazing Over The Ocean!

I love this rare pairing. In my mind it works beautifully and I do intend to continue to write more fic in this 'ship. I have many supplemental chapters that were supposed to fit into this fic but now that's impossible. I may post them as stand alone parts of the 'verse.

I don't think I can make peace with Sutter's decision regarding Tara. I loved the character. I identified with her. And her loss is huge.

"Do not look back. And do not dream about the future, either. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward—your destiny—are here and now."

~ Dag Hammarskjold

6 months later –

It was a splinter in his mind. He could not yank it out and something about the itch got him hard. He wanted to simultaneously fuck someone and kill someone. Maybe the same someone. Maybe not. It was infecting his life. He would wake from dreams where his only job was to scoop an ocean of blood into buckets and carry the buckets around until his hands bled. Into the buckets. In his more lucid moments he tried to slow down and think it through, line up his emotions and the facts he knew, stand back and study the mess and have it all make sense. It never did, though.

He had tried to tell Jax. After Jax calmed the hell down, after Jax exhausted himself for two weeks trying to sort it in his own mind. Tara and the boys gone. Chibs gone. He could see the absolute confusion on the young King's face as he pondered the coincidence of it. And that confusion enraged him.

They spoke of it one last time. After a ragged church. Bobby trying to hold it all together but there was nothing left to hold. The DA had made it clear that Jax was going to jail. That the MC would voluntarily stop flying colors. It was all over but the shouting. And there was so much shouting that Tig's ears were hurting.

Everything was hurting.

The three of them left sitting at the table. He flat-palmed the worn wood. Looked down and breathed out hard. "He's with her. They're together. You get that, right?"

"You keep saying it. And I'm getting tired of hearing it, Tig. Can you stop already."

"Man, why are you so blind?"

"Tiggy, enough," Bobby pleaded.

"You know I'm right, don't you?"

Bobby said nothing. Jax turned towards, him brows furrowed. "If he's with her. And that's a huge fucken if, then he's protecting her, watching over her."

Bobby and Tig locked gazes across the table.

"That's enough," Bobby said. "I'm going down the block to the bar."

Tig shook his head but followed. He finally figured it out. He was jealous.

1 year later -

Karma was a fanged bitch and she had him around the throat. He'd been down on his back with her on his chest for a year now. But it was almost over. He had heard the rumour mill grinding out its dark promise and he knew it wasn't long. The Chinese, the Irish, black and brown. Everyone was moving towards him with knife and club, gun and shiv. They would use their bare hands if they had to. He was truly the walking dead.

He lay back on the cell bunk. Fingers locked behind his head, staring at the stained ceiling, the cinderblock wall, and a future he could have had. A past he no longer cared to remember. And a present that ticked each minute out with the foretelling of an executioner's tight schedule.

The reaper was on his way.

He spun out the only comfort tale he had left. Tara and the boys, safe and smiling somewhere in the world. He had let go of the rage, the betrayal, the need for revenge months before. Who was he to behead his Queen, lock the Princes in an impenetrable tower. His reign had been brief and bloody. And ultimately without point.

He had seen the fear and horror etched into the face of the woman he had loved above all women. He knew he was the one who carved those lines into her flesh. He screwed his eyes shut and wished all the happiness in life for each of them.

And with a wide open heart, he wished the same for Chibs.

2 years later –

His torso was a written testament to all his judgment visited upon others. All the lives he felt he had a right to end. Vengeance was a sweet addiction, and he smiled through his ruined teeth, the bleeding lips. They thought they would break him slow, but they didn't know how hard he could ride revenge. With a roar, he wrestled free, and his last thought was a good one. He had avenged his King and now he could rest. Happy.

3 years later -

He had lost and saved one family from an insane King. He had saved this one from another but there had been losses, too. He chose to not remember the past, to think in agony of wives and daughters, brothers, fathers, sons, mothers. And it wasn't that he had forgotten, how could he have, but rather that he simply did not hold them anymore.

It was too heavy a weight and he had put it down. He had to put it down in order to carry these souls, protect these lives. This woman. These children. His family.

The straight path had not proven as restrictive as he would have guessed. They had managed to stay stateside.

She had anchored him in her sea.

His hard-won sense of calm and efficiency had been recognized quickly. He had enjoyed the hell out of driving an ambulance, and of letting others drive while he saved lives in the back of the car. But when he was offered the flight medic position on the trauma bird, he had ducked into a Catholic church on the way home, offered his confessions as though opening a vein, and kneeled in the back pew for hours with his penance.

Somewhere he had done something or somebody right.

And now, in their bedroom, candle-lit, the two boys wide-eyed at the foot of the bed, he caught his newborn child, handed her to her mother, and crawled up beside the two of them. He opened one arm and beckoned to his sons who came, awed, into his embrace. With the other he cradled his wife, their babe.

He cried until he'd cried enough and then he began to laugh softly in joy.

4 years later -

He saw her before she saw him. She was sitting with another wrecked woman, in the alley behind the liquor store. Shopping carts circled to protect them from the biting wind whipping between the dumpsters. He shook his head, and in the store he spent more than he had. Back outside, he shrugged his heavy shoulders beneath the cut, took a deep breath, and began the long walk towards her.

She looked up, they both did, as his booted step stopped in front of them. He hunkered down in front of her. A sad smile on his face. How did they come to this. She didn't recognize him, or chose not to. He handed her the bag, two packs of her brand, a bottle of something cheap, and some energy bars. She pushed it back at him, her nails ragged and torn, her hand shaking.

"Take it, darling," he said in his low gruff voice. "I want you to have it."

She pushed the bag again. He set it down, between her knees and straightened, his own knees protesting the effort.

"Merry Christmas, Gemma."

He still wanted to make it out to the cemetery, so he turned and walked away.

"Bobby?" she called to him. But he didn't look back.

5 years later –

She did not look backwards and she no longer had to look over her shoulder. Each morning she thanked her god for the man who had saved her, her boys, gifted her with more children, this good life.

She had not forgotten the past but instead allowed it to tremble into wisps of a half-remembered dream. Some mornings it haunted her for hours, other evenings she closed her eyes not wanting to dream but accepting that dreams and nightmares had shaped her. She slept in the arms of the man who had saved her, the embrace that protected her. And she woke each new day to full-mouthed kisses.

Within the safety he wrapped them so tightly in, she had become whole. In the fire that burned between them, the seed of their flower had germinated.

She had not realized, before him, that love could be vast and freeing. He was her eternity.

20 years later -

He stood in the Charming Cemetery. It was winter but this town didn't know the seasons in the same way the home he'd grown up in did. He thought of his mother and father, his brothers and sisters. He smiled thinking of his mother's kitchen, hot cocoa, fresh bread. His father stomping snow off his boots. His siblings. Dogs. The smell of pine trees. He was on his way home for the holidays, on leave. Still in his fatigues, having caught a hop to the Sacramento airbase, he'd taken a taxi out of the sprawling metropolis and into the unremarkable hamlet with the strangely endearing name.

He knew that this graveyard was full of sleeping ghosts and he didn't want to wake them. But he wanted to pay his respects. He'd bought a bouquet of blood-red roses from the florist on his walk over. And he'd already laid single stem buds on so many of the monuments, engraved names familiar in a small haunting way. Grandmother, grandfathers, uncles.

Now he was standing in front of the headstone he'd been both dreading and anticipating. He remembered this man. He was quiet with his memories, his recollections of small moments. His memories were physical things that he held in his muscles, the long bones of his legs, his fingers.

He squatted down, then turned and sat, knees up, back against the marble. He laid the three flowers beside him on the sparse grass. He rested his forehead on his knees, emptying his mind but not allowing anything to enter and settle. He just wanted to be still for a while.

This grave held the body of of a king. He hoped he slept in peace.