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the futurist

Gator Tillman x f!reader

An interlude set between the end of the alarmist and whatever comes next. About the distance between people who were never supposed to matter to each other, and about what survives.

Disclaimer: I am not American and the only knowledge I have about prison systems is what I could come up with through a lot of googling. I’ve tried to make it as feasible as possible, but this is the Fargoverse we’re talking about. We have 500-year old sin eaters wandering the plains and no one bats an eyelid.

PART ONE: Dot

November, 2024.

The clock on the microwave says 3:17 a.m., and Dot Lyon has been sitting at the kitchen island for forty minutes with a legal pad, a cold cup of tea, and the particular kind of stillness that only comes to people who have learned, the hard way, to be very quiet inside their own heads.

She isn't making a list. She’s beyond lists at this point. The legal pad has a name at the top - Gator Tillman - and below it, two columns. One that says “What I Know” and one that says “What I Can Use”. The second column is shorter.

Outside, the Minnesota dark sits thick and heavy against the windows. Early snow had accumulated all day, overwhelming the roads and choking up the drains and leaving the town feeling claustrophobic. It won't clear until spring. The feeling will linger long after.

Upstairs, Wayne is asleep. Scottie is asleep, although she'd left music playing low - someone's voice echoing faintly through the ceiling from above. Dot had meant to turn it off when she’d woken up, but now she's glad she hadn't. The rest of the house ticks and settles peacefully around her, and Dot sits in it like a woman who has never quite trusted peace to last.

This is not the first night she’s sat here like this. It’s not the fifth, the eighth, the twelfth. The kitchen island has become, over the past several weeks, a kind of office - one that exists only between midnight and four a.m., only when the house is asleep around her and she can think without anyone noticing that she’s thinking. There’s a stack of printed documents at the far end of the island that she slides under a catalogue whenever she thinks she hears footsteps on the stairs. Guidance on the rights of visually impaired prisoners. A report from a disability advocacy organisation on the failure rate of reasonable adjustments in federal facilities. Two printed threads from a forum for families of incarcerated people, the usernames redacted in her own handwriting because it felt important, though she isn’t sure to whom. A dog-eared booklet from a transitional housing organisation in the city, its cover creased from being opened and closed so many times the spine has started to give.

She has been deciding whether she wants to do this. That’s what these nights are, she thinks - not planning, not yet. Deciding. Turning it over in the dark where no-one can watch her face while she does it.

The deciding started after the October visit. Not immediately - she’d driven home on autopilot, made dinner, sat with Wayne and Scottie through an evening she couldn’t afterwards have described, and then lain awake for three hours with the residue of it. Not a clear image. Just a quality. The way he’d felt in the room. The set of him. Something she recognised without being able to name it in the dark at two in the morning, her eyes open, Wayne breathing slow beside her.

She knew that quality. She had worn it herself. She’d spent years getting rid of it.

The deciding had also been helped along, she admits, by Indira.

She hadn’t meant it to be a conversation. She’d stopped by Lorraine’s office to drop off some paperwork - Wayne’s, something routine for the dealership, she barely remembers - and Indira Olmstead had been in the outer office, between meetings, and they’d fallen into the easy back-and-forth they’d developed over the years. Dot respects Indira in the uncomplicated way she respects people who are good at their jobs and honest about what their jobs require. Former law enforcement. No illusions. A practical intelligence that doesn’t waste time on things it can’t use.

She’d said, not quite looking at Indira, straightening the papers in her hands, “hypothetically, if someone wanted to push for an early transfer to transitional accommodation - someone who’d been a model prisoner, no infractions, medical needs not being met - what would that actually take? Hypothetically.”

Indira had been quiet for a moment. Then - “depends who’s asking, and who’s behind them.”

“Hypothetically,” Dot had said again, “someone with access to a very good lawyer. And possibly a mother-in-law with friends in high places.”

Another pause. Then Indira had looked at her directly, in that way the former police officer always had - not unkind, just precise. “Hypothetically, that’s probably enough. Hypothetically, the paperwork’s the easy part. The harder part is making sure the placement is right before you pull the trigger, because you don’t get a second attempt at this kind of thing.”

Dot had nodded. Thanked her. Taken her papers and left.

She hasn’t mentioned it since. But she thinks about that conversation more than she’d expected to.

She picks up her pen and underlines Larson Unit Transfer Request for the third time, until the ink bleeds through onto the clean page below. Then she sets the pen down, presses her fingers flat against the legal pad, and thinks about the last visit.

She’d driven the three-and-a-half hours herself. She always does. Wayne always offers, and she loves him for it, she does, but there are some things she needs to do alone. Without someone she loves watching her face to check if she’s alright. Visiting Gator is one of them.

Gator had come in slowly. That was the first thing she noticed, three visits ago - not the slowness itself, because she understood about the cane and the fact that the new prison had never once arranged proper orientation training, that he navigated those corridors by memory and by the sound of his own footsteps and the way the air changed when he was near a wall. She’d watched him learn that, visit by visit, over four years at the other facility. She knew what his version of careful looked like.

This wasn’t careful. This was waiting.

He moved like someone waiting to be hit. Like a man whose nervous system had been educated, by repetition, that the space around him was unreliable.

She recognised it. She had lived it once. A long time ago, in a different name, in a ranch in North Dakota that she’s spent the better part of fifteen years making herself forget.

The second thing she noticed was the flinch.

She’d set her hand on the table between them, nothing more, just laid it there flat once he’d sat down, and he’d recoiled. Just a fraction. Just a breath. But she’d seen it, and she’d not looked away from it, because she’d also learned a long time ago that looking away was its own kind of lie.

She’d seen the flinch before, in the early visits - the first facility, the first year - and she’d understood it then as a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation. A man adjusting. Learning new edges. She hadn’t liked it, but she’d recognised it as temporary, as the kind of damage that has a start and therefore has an end.

This was different.

She’d asked him how he was doing. She always asked. In the early years he’d deflected - a joke, a shrug, something dismissive that was still, underneath it, a form of engagement. He was still in there, still pushing back against the question, which meant he was still pushing back against something. Later, he’d started answering more directly, in the careful, considered way of someone who had been thinking about a question for two weeks and had arrived at an honest answer. She’d watched that develop in him over four years and had thought, privately, that it was the most encouraging thing she’d seen.

Now he said: fine.

Just that. Flat and uninflected, the word placed down like something he wanted to be done with.

She’d waited. He’d said nothing else.

You sleeping? she’d asked.

Enough.

Eating?

A pause. Yeah.

She’d looked at him across the table - the careful stillness of him, the way he held himself slightly contracted, shoulders drawn in, chin low, like he was trying to take up less space than his body actually required. He’d always been physical, present, someone who filled a room with sound and movement even when he wasn’t trying to. He’d chased her across two states and he’d been impossible to miss in every room he’d ever stood in. That person felt very far away from the man sitting across from her now.

“You don’t have to tell me what’s happening,” she’d said, carefully. “But I need to know you’re still - ”

She’d stopped, looking for the right word, and had settled on: “- here”.

He’d turned his face toward her at that, not quite in her direction - a degree or two off, which still happened sometimes - and she’d caught something moving behind his expression. Something that might have been the beginning of something honest. Then it had closed over, smooth and practiced, like scar tissue.

I’m here, he’d said.

But the way he’d said it made her think of a man describing a geographical fact rather than a state of being. I am in this room. I am in this building. I am here.

Not - I’m still in this. I’m still trying. I’m still somewhere you can reach me.

She’d driven home with her hands too tight on the wheel and the particular dread of someone who recognises a pattern from the inside. She’d seen what resignation looked like up close. She knew how it started - not with a decision, not with anything dramatic, but with the slow withdrawal of investment. The point where a person stops defending their own interior because the cost of doing so has exceeded whatever return they can imagine getting. Where fine and enough and yeah become the whole vocabulary because anything more specific requires caring what the answer is, and caring has started to feel like a liability.

She knows where that leads. She’d been close to it herself, once, at nineteen years old on a ranch in North Dakota with no name that was really hers and no door she believed she was allowed to open. She’d pulled back from it by luck and stubbornness and the specific grace of one unlocked window on a Tuesday night.

He doesn’t have a window.

And underneath the resignation is something that frightens her more: she’d noticed, that visit and the one before it, the faint chemical sweetness she recognised from the early days of the first facility, before he’d been in long enough that it stopped being something she tracked. She might be wrong. She hopes she’s wrong. But she has a good nose for it - she grew up around it, in a different life, and the memory of it sits in her nostrils like something that never quite washed out.

If he backslides in there - if the beatings and the boredom and the psychological slow-drip of being nobody in a place that is specifically designed to remind you of that simple fact combine into the particular equation that leads a man back to whatever makes the lights go out cleanest - she won’t be able to do anything about it from a plastic chair in a visiting room three-and-a-half hours from home.

She’d seen it. She’d not looked away from it.

And she’d started, on that drive home, doing the arithmetic in her head.

By the time she got home that night she'd already decided. It had taken her three more weeks to build what she needed to do something about it.

She reaches for her tea, finds it cold, and drinks it anyway.

What I Know:

Larson Unit: no trained vision-impaired accommodation specialist. Zero. Documented. (FOIA request, 11 weeks, 2 follow-up letters, Lorraine’s letterhead on the second one.)

“Orientation and mobility support” = one volunteer, Tuesdays, unreliable. Name: Curtis Hale. Has missed 7 of last 12 scheduled sessions. No record of any formal training or qualification on file.

Braille literacy programme: listed as active in Larson overview. Has not run since 2021. (Get this in writing. This alone is actionable.) Previous facility: partial training only, incomplete. He can read slowly. Not well enough.

Assistive technology: one screen reader licence, shared across general population. Booking system informal, first come first served. He has used it 4 times in 6 months.

Former law enforcement, general population, no separation provisions. His record - deputy, Stark County, corruption, accessory - accessible to anyone in that building who wants to look. And they look.

Physical: three documented incidents in 8 months. “Altercations.” All logged as mutual. (They are not mutual.)

Psychological: last formal assessment April 2024. No follow-up scheduled. “No acute concerns identified.” (See: April 2024. That was before the transfer.)

Medical file: requested, denied. No standing, apparently. (Name of person who said that: David Purcell, Admin, ext. 214.)

Their words: “managing adequately.”

(He is not managing adequately.)

What I Can Use:

Lorraine.

Dot caps her pen. Gets up. Rinses her cup at the sink, the water running cold over her knuckles, and stands there a moment looking at the dark glass of the window, her own reflection faint and untroubled-looking in it.

She hasn't told Wayne about this part. Not the full scope of it. He’s always known that she visits Gator, and he's never once made her explain why - which is one of the many reasons she loves him. She's told him she's worried about the facility, and he'd said “then let's fix it”, because that's Wayne. But she hasn't told him she's been building a case for early release into supervised transitional accommodation, that she's been quietly documenting for weeks, that three weeks ago she called Lorraine at seven in the morning and said “I need a favour, and I need you not to make me feel stupid for asking it”, and Lorraine had been silent for a moment and then said “tell me what you need”.

Lorraine Lyon is not a soft woman. Dot had never expected her to be and has never needed her to be. What she is, is effective - which, in Dot's experience, is more useful than soft, and considerably rarer. She has the kind of money that doesn't need to be mentioned because it makes itself apparent, and the kind of connections that don't need to be named because they pick up when she calls. She is also, Dot has come to understand, someone who believes that a debt is a debt regardless of who holds it - and that occasionally a debt gets paid forward, to someone who wasn't part of the original transaction.

Dot had expected resistance. She'd prepared arguments. She'd had documents ready to go.

Lorraine had let her get through about half of the first one before she’d set her coffee cup down.

“Roy Tillman is going to die in a cell in North Dakota,” she said, “which is where he belongs and where I intend to keep him.”

A pause, brief and precise.

“His son is a different matter. The boy was a child when that man started on him.” Her eyes moved to Dot’s, direct and unambiguous. “So were you.”

She’d picked up her phone. “Who do you need me to call?”

Lorraine knows what Roy Tillman was. What he did to the women around him. And Lorraine - who paid Roy's fellow inmates to ensure he lives inside the fear he'd beaten into everyone else - has made a clear distinction, in her own quiet way, between the man and his son. Dot had not had to argue it. She'd only had to name it.

Dot dries her hands on the dish towel and goes back to the legal pad.

The transitional placement she's identified is thirty minutes from home. A supervised house in Stillwater, four residents maximum, with a support worker three days a week. It has a relationship with a vision rehabilitation charity in the city. It has a proper orientation programme and a key worker system and a lease agreement that comes with conditions - regular check-ins, no drugs or alcohol, a curfew for the first six months. She's read the terms document twice. She's made notes in the margins.

She's not doing this because she forgives what he did. She sits with that for a moment, because it matters, and because she is not someone who lies to herself if she can help it.

She’s doing this because she sat across from him in that visiting room and watched a man who was already destroyed get destroyed a little further every time she came back. Because the system that is supposed to hold people accountable is instead doing something closer to erasure. Because she knows what it is to be at the mercy of something larger than you, and to have no-one come, and she has decided she is not going to be a person who knew and did nothing.

She’s also doing it because she knew him when he was twelve years old. Because she was fifteen when Linda Tillman brought her to Lehigh and Roy started his slow work on both of them, and she watched that boy grow up inside the same machinery that was running on her, and she got out and he didn't. She has been living with that longer than she has been living with almost anything else.

The hug, at the end of it - after his eyes, after Roy, after the arrest - had undone something she’d been keeping neatly tied for years. He’d asked her to come. Not assumed. Asked. And she’d said yes before she’d thought about it, because some things you agree to from somewhere beyond reason.

She’d come every month from the start, until the Covid made it impossible. Then she’d fought the facility for phone calls, for video visits, for anything - sitting in her car in the driveway so Wayne wouldn’t hear, her laptop propped on the steering wheel, a bad connection and a ten-minute time limit and him on the other end of it not saying much. She’d kept dialling in anyway. Some months the call didn’t happen at all, lost to bureaucracy or lockdown policy or some administrator’s decision she was never given a reason for. She’d noted those names, too.

When in-person visits resumed she’d driven the three-and-a-half hours each way and sat back down across the table like no time had passed, because for the purposes of this particular thing, it hadn’t.

Five years of it, give or take. Forty-odd visits in person, and however many calls and frozen video screens in between. Two people who were on opposite sides of the same man arriving, slowly, at something that has no name and doesn’t need one. She doesn’t have to explain Roy to him. He doesn’t have to perform remorse for her in the way he would for anyone else. They were both there. They both know the whole of it.

That flinch, at the table. She knows that flinch.

She pulls the legal pad closer and writes: Call Lorraine. 8 a.m.

Then, below it - he needs to know it isn't charity. He needs to know there are conditions. He needs to know this doesn't mean anything except that he gets to be somewhere safe.

She underlines safe. Three times. Until the page beneath bleeds with it.

Then she closes the pad and hides it under a stack of recipe books, turns off the kitchen light, and goes back to bed.

She lies there in the dark beside Wayne's slow breathing, her eyes open, Scottie's music barely audible through the wall, and she thinks about a man she has known since he was twelve years old, sitting in a cell in a building that doesn't know what to do with him, flinching at noises he can't see coming.

She thinks, I am going to get you out of there.

And then, because she is Dot Lyon and she has survived worse than an inconvenient conscience - and then you're on your own.

She closes her eyes.

By eight thirty, it's already in motion.

****************

PART TWO: Lorraine

Lorraine Lyon makes the first call at 8:13 a.m., before her second coffee, before her nine o'clock briefing, before her assistant has finished instigating the day. She makes it standing at the window of her office with the city spread out below her like a thing she owns - which, in certain meaningful ways, she does.

The man she calls has a title that takes forty seconds to say aloud. She uses none of it.

"It's Lorraine," she says. "I need a transfer request expedited. Larson Unit. Inmate name - Tillman, first name Gregor, goes by Gator. You'll find him."

A pause while she sips her coffee.

"I don't need him released. I need him relocated - transitional accommodation, pre-approved, I'll have the paperwork to you by noon. What I need from you is the bureaucratic grease. Approvals. Timelines moved. The usual."

She listens.

"I'm aware it's irregular. North Dakota to Minnesota, yes, I am aware," she says. "That is why I'm calling you."

She listens again, expression unchanged, the way a woman looks when she has already accounted for every problem or objection and is simply waiting for the other person to finish making noise.

"Good," she says. "I'll have my assistant send you the file. And I expect this to be done quickly."

She hangs up. Sets her phone down. Looks out the window.

Roy Tillman is where she put him, which is where he will stay. That account is settled and she has no further interest in it beyond the occasional maintenance.

His son is an open ledger. That’s the more interesting problem - not because she has any particular feeling about the boy, but because Dorothy does, and Dorothy’s judgement has earned a certain weight over the years. Lorraine has not survived almost forty years in business by ignoring good intelligence when it’s placed in front of her, and Dorothy Lyon, née Nadine Bump, is the best intelligence she has on what Roy Tillman’s household actually produced. If Dorothy has looked at the son and drawn a distinction between him and his father, that distinction is probably real.

There is also the not insignificant matter of the facility’s failures, which are documented, which are actionable, and which represent exactly the kind of institutional incompetence that Lorraine finds personally offensive. Not on principle. On aesthetic grounds.

Some problems are complicated. This one is simply a matter of moving the right pieces.

She picks up her phone and sends a text: Moving. Call me when you've confirmed the accommodation details. Don't thank me.

Then she picks up her briefing notes and gets on with the day.

****************

PART THREE: Release

The paperwork takes six weeks. Getting to the point where the paperwork can begin takes everything before that.

Lorraine’s first call goes out in late November, the morning after Dot sits at the kitchen island until 4am. The response is encouraging, which means it is not a refusal, which in the language of bureaucracy means there is a door and it is technically possible to open it. Dot learns to read that language quickly. She has always been good at understanding what people mean when they won’t say what they mean.

There is a review board. There is a psychological assessment, the first adequate one since April 2024, which produces a report that Dot is not permitted to see but which she is told is - she writes this down verbatim - “not inconsistent with early release consideration”. She reads that sentence four times and then calls Lorraine.

There is a victim notification process. There are forms. There are forms about the forms. There is a legal challenge from the county prosecutor’s office in North Dakota, two pages, which Lorraine’s lawyer dispatches in a single letter that Dot never sees but which she is told was, in the lawyer’s words, “fairly definitive”.

Christmas comes and stalls everything for three weeks. Dot had expected this. She uses the time to finalise the placement, read the lease terms twice, and make more notes.

There is a placement assessment of the transitional house, a home visit, a key worker interview, a lease review. There is a condition about geographic restriction that needs to be negotiated - the original draft places a boundary that would have put the transitional house outside the permitted zone by four miles, which takes three weeks to resolve. Lorraine helps.

In February there is a review meeting. Dot drives all morning to attend it and is told, upon arrival, that the meeting is not open to third parties. She is not his legal representation. She is not family. She explains that she was told by the case worker’s office that her attendance had been approved. The woman at the desk checks a system, checks a different system, makes a phone call, and tells Dot to take a seat.

She sits in the orange chair room for two hours and fourteen minutes.

A different case worker - not the one she’d spoken to, not the one whose name she has - comes to find her and explains that there has been a miscommunication, that third party attendance at review meetings requires a separate application, that the form for this application is available to download online but must be submitted in hard-copy, in person. The next review meeting is in six weeks. Today’s meeting had finished before she arrived.

Dot asks if she can submit the form today, in person, now, given that she is here, in person, now.

There is another phone call. There is a wait. The paper form is produced. She fills it in at the orange chair room’s single coffee table, bent over because there is no pen at the chairs and the pen is attached by a short chain to the table.

She is told her application will be reviewed and she will be contacted in due course.

She thanks him. She writes down his name.

She drives the three-and-a-half hours home.

By April the shape of it is clear. By early May the date is set.

She drives herself west on the morning of the 23rd, signs where she is told to sign, and waits in the sterile room with the orange plastic chairs and the vending machine that has been out of order since before she started coming here. She’d drunk her coffee in the car before going through security, the way she always does - the thermos stays in the glovebox now, a lesson learned early. She sits with her hands in her lap and watches the door.

He comes through it escorted by two officers and a civilian support worker Dot doesn’t recognise. He is thirty-three years old. He looks it, and then some - the particular hollowness around the jaw and temples of a man who has stopped sleeping properly, the cost of years that didn’t go the way years are supposed to go. He’s in civilian clothes that don’t quite fit, too loose, and he’s holding the white cane with the tight, over-controlled grip of someone who has learned to use it without ever being properly taught.

But there is something else underneath all of that. Something she has always been able to see, from the first visit, from before that even - from the ranch, from the boy she knew when she was fifteen and he was twelve and neither of them had any idea what was being done to them yet. He has never quite looked his age. Not because he looks young, but because he looks unfinished. Like something that was never given the chance to set properly.

Thirty-three years old. Roy Tillman’s eldest child. And still, underneath everything, that same boy.

He stops when the officer says “she's ahead of you, ten o'clock”, and he turns - not ten o'clock exactly, slightly wide of it, correcting - and finds her by the sound of the chair scraping as she stands.

“Dot,” he says. Not Nadine, not now. Not a greeting. Just the word, placed carefully, like he’s checking it still fits in his mouth.

“There he is,” she says, warmly, like she’s greeting someone at a potluck rather than a prison release. She doesn’t make a thing of it.

He opens his mouth. She can see him assembling something - thanks, or a question, or one of the half-apologies he still occasionally attempts even after years of her telling him they’re not required.

“So there’s a car outside,” she says, before he can start. “Real nice lady driving, she’ll take you through the house rules on the way. I’ll stop by Tuesday, we can have coffee - nothing fancy, just coffee.”

He closes his mouth.

“Now, the conditions,” she says, matter-of-fact, like she’s going over a grocery list. “You know them. You signed them.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I know.”

“Good.” A pause, brief and practical. “Okay. Let’s get you out of here, whaddya say?”

She walks him out into the late May afternoon, the sky a pale washed blue, the air still carrying a chill that the season hasn't quite shaken yet. Her hand is not quite touching his arm, yet she’s close enough that he can feel where she is. He doesn't speak. The light hits them both, and she hears him pull in a shaky breath - deep, involuntary - like his body is making its own accounting of open air, of space that doesn't end at a wall.

She gives him a moment with it. She knows what that breath is.

She had one herself, once. Different circumstances, different doorway, but the same breath. The same quality of disbelief that the outside is still there. Has always been there, despite everything telling you otherwise.

Then the car, and the long drive, and the voice of the support worker going through the terms in the careful cadence of someone who has done this many times before and still means it. Dot sits in the front and looks out the window at the spring fields going past, flat and green and ordinary.

He will be alright, or he won't. She’s done what she can.

That's all any of them ever get.

****************

PART FOUR: The House

The house is a two-storey Colonial on a quiet street in Stillwater, white vinyl siding, dark green shutters, a covered porch with two chairs that look like they’ve been there since the nineties. A town that’s mostly trees and church steeples and the kind of streets where nobody looks at anything twice. A half hour from the Vision Loss Resources office on the other side of the river. Twenty minutes from Scandia, give or take. Dot likes that. Tells him so, before she leaves.

There are two other residents, neither of whom Gator meets on the first day. The support worker - a woman named Britt, who speaks to him like he's a person, which he notices - shows him his room, the layout of the ground floor, the kitchen, the bathroom, the position of the back door in relation to the hallway.

She tells him about the orientation specialist coming Thursday. She shows him where the wifi router is, which is - she says it without inflection, as though it's entirely ordinary - near the desk, where there's also a laptop that connects to the screen reader and software he'll have been assessed for, or if he hasn't been properly assessed yet, they'll get that sorted this week.

"The laptop," he says. "It's blocked from anything?"

"It's set up for you. You can log into your own accounts if you have them. The screen reader will handle it - you'll want to spend some time with it before you rely on it, the voice speed's set to default which most people find too slow, but you can adjust." She pauses. "Are you alright?"

"Yeah," he says. "I'm alright."

When she leaves, he sits on the edge of the bed for a long time.

The room smells like fresh paint and faintly of someone else's life - a ghost of a scent, laundered out, mostly gone. The window is behind him. He knows it’s behind him because Britt told him - southwest-facing, catches the afternoon sun late into the evening this time of year.

He sits with his hands on his knees, in the quiet, and listens to the house.

It's different. Not safe - he doesn't know safe the way other people seem to mean it - but different. No count. No echo of a PA system. No particular cruelty woven into the architecture of the place.

He breathes.

Then he reaches for the cane, stands, and finds the desk.

****************

The Braille laptop takes him a while.

He's used the screen reader before, in pieces - the inadequate sessions the prison's Tuesday volunteer had managed before things slid back into nothing, and a stretch of six months at the first facility when someone had actually organised proper training before the budget got cut. He knows the basic navigation. He moves slowly, the synthesised voice reading element names and menu options in its flat generic accent, and he gets there.

He tries accessing the email out of something close to muscle memory. His old Freedom Mail address - the county one was shut down the week he was arrested, obviously, but the personal one, the one he'd had since he was thirteen, the one Roy used to call the Gatorade account with that particular curl of contempt - that one, he'd never cancelled. Hadn't thought about it in years. Probably full of junk. Probably locked him out. Probably nuked by the cops.

He types the address. He types the password he's used since he was fifteen, the one he'd never changed because changing it would have required caring, and waits.

The screen reader says: Inbox. 1,847 unread messages.

He exhales through his nose.

He navigates to the search function. He's not sure what he's looking for. Something to delete. Something to mark as read and move on from. He sits with his fingers on the keyboard for a moment.

He types a website name. Pornhub. 412 messages. Deletes them.

It’s a start.

Another. Footlocker. 181 messages. Deletes those, too.

Then starts typing sheriff.r.tillm - stops. Holds down the backspace until he’s sure the characters are gone.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there after that. Long enough that the screen reader times out and reads him a system notification he doesn’t catch. Long enough that the impulse he’d just shut down settles back into wherever it came from.

He folds his hands in his lap. Outside, a car passes. Then nothing.

He thinks about Montana.

He puts his hands back on the keyboard.

He types a name.

The screen reader says: Search results. 15 messages.

He goes very still.

His hand stays on the keyboard, not moving.

Fifteen.

He tries to do the math. He was arrested - after Ole Munch, after Roy, after all of it - in November 2019. He was sentenced in the autumn of 2021, trial delayed twice by the backlog, then by COVID, then by the sheer complexity of the corruption case and the number of people it pulled in. He has been in two facilities across five and a half years. He has not had access to this email account once in any of that time.

Fifteen emails, sent into a silence he didn't know anyone was filling.

He navigates to the oldest result.

The screen reader says: From - and reads the address. Subject: no subject. Date: November 14th, 2019.

A few days after the arrest.

He hits play on the voice.

The screen reader reads it.

****************

PART FIVE: THE EMAILS

November 14th, 2019

I don’t know why I’m writing this. You’re the last person I should be writing to and the only person who would understand why I am, which is the most Gator Tillman thing that has ever happened to me.

I made it to Montana. You clearly couldn’t give less of a shit, but I’ll tell you anyway. The apartment is fine. The job is fine. Everything pre-arranged, everything adequate, everything just good enough that I can’t even be properly angry about the specifics. Very tidy. Very cruel. Very Tillman. I hope you’re proud of yourself.

I keep thinking about the outpost. I keep thinking about the snow and the dark and everything you said in it, and then I think about that diner and I want to put my fist through something. You sat across from him and you didn’t look at me. You didn’t even flinch. I don’t know how you did that. I don’t know how you went from one to the other and just - didn’t.

I watched you walk out of that diner and I kept waiting for you to turn around.

You didn’t.

Don’t write back. I mean it. I don’t want to hear whatever version of an explanation you’ve got ready. I don’t want the justification or the excuses or whatever you tell yourself about what you did. I won’t write again.

I just needed to say it to the person who deserves to hear it.

I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.

December 2nd, 2019

I said I wasn’t going to write again.

I’m aware.

I’m not apologising for the last one. I meant every word of it and I still do. I’m in a city where I don’t know anyone, in an apartment I didn’t choose, and it’s been snowing for seven days straight and it turns out Montana in December makes North Dakota look tropical. I don’t have anyone to call. I don’t have anyone who knows what happened or why I’m here or what the last month has actually been like, because I can’t tell anyone, because what would I even say, and who’d believe me anyway?

So here I am. Writing to the one person I actually hate right now because he’s the only one who’d understand why I’m losing my mind a little.

Don’t read anything into that.

I still hate you.

December 28th, 2019

I just needed to tell someone that Christmas was the loneliest day of my life and there is exactly one person in the world I can say that to, and I hate that it’s you.

I don’t have the words for what it’s like to be somewhere new for Christmas. To not have the familiar geography of your own life around you - the smell of a place, the rhythm of a day you’ve had a hundred times before. I borrowed someone else’s life to wear and it sat wrong the whole time. Like clothes that are the right size but cut for somebody else.

I tell myself that my family thinks I moved for a job. That my friends think the same. No one can call me to check. Maybe that says something about the life I had before, I don’t know. Or maybe Roy’s people made sure of it. I can’t tell anymore what’s real and what was managed.

On Christmas Day I made something with squash. I ate it alone. The neighbour across the hall knocked and brought pie and I smiled and said thank you and closed the door and sat on the kitchen floor with it for a while.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this.

Yes I do. There’s no-one else.

February 4th, 2020

I heard something today, through someone who knows someone who has a friend who used to work in Stark County. I heard what happened to you. After.

I don't know what I feel about it. I’ve been sitting with it all day and I still can’t name it. There's something in there that might be grief, but I'm not sure I've earned that. I’m not sure you have either.

You can’t see to read this. I know that now. Somehow that makes it easier to say - which is probably the saddest thing I’ve written in these emails so far, and that’s a high bar.

What I wanted to say is - I'm sorry that happened to you. Not for any other reason than that it is terrible, and that no-one should have something like that done to them. Not even you. Not even after everything.

I hope someone is taking care of you. I hope there's someone.

I know there probably isn't. I know how you move through the world.

March 27th, 2020

Spring here doesn't look like spring at home. It looks like winter making up its mind to leave and resenting the whole process.

I joined a pottery class last month. This isn’t something I ever planned to tell anyone, it’s meant to be something just for me, and here I am typing it out to you in a void somewhere. Whatever. The teacher is a woman in her seventies who has no patience for self-consciousness, which I respect. Last week she moved the whole class to video call and taught us through a laptop screen with the energy of someone who has absolutely no intention of letting any of this interrupt her schedule. I made something that’s meant to be a bowl. It sags to the left. I’m going to put my keys in it.

I think about that desk by the window at the outpost sometimes. Where I used to sit in the mornings with my coffee. How quiet it was. How cold.

I know that was terrible. I know what that quiet meant, why I was out there. I know it was a sideways move designed to isolate me.

But I keep going back to the quiet.

June 6th, 2020

The world has gone strange in ways I don’t have the energy to describe. You probably don’t know. Maybe you do.

Something happened at work that I can't explain to anyone, and I thought of you.

That's all. I'm not going to explain it. You don't know my life here. I just wanted to write it down.

I thought of you.

October 18th, 2020

Your trial has been delayed again. I saw it in the news. I don't know how I feel about that. I think I need it to happen before I can put any of this down properly. It's all still hovering, unresolved, taking up space and I don’t know what to do with it.

I hope wherever you are, they're treating you decently. I know that's a lot to hope for, given what you were, and what you did, and who your father is.

I made another bowl. This one doesn't slump to one side. I'm giving it to my neighbour for Christmas.

I don’t think I’ll email you again.

September 19th, 2021

I read the verdict online. I read your statement.

You said you were sorry. Not just in the statement - I read the accounts from people who were there. You said you were sorry and it apparently took you a long time to say it, and when you did, it sounded like you meant it.

I believe that you meant it.

I've decided to stop being angry. This is a conscious decision and it may not hold, but I've decided. I've turned it over and looked at all the sides of it and I think I understand now, in a way I didn't before, what was happening when you went into that bathroom. What you went back to. What it costs to be a Tillman.

I'm not saying it's okay. I'm just saying I understand the mechanism of it. And understanding it is as close to peace as I can get with it.

I hope wherever they send you, you have enough. Not everything. Just enough.

October 31st, 2021

It's Halloween. A kid knocked on my door dressed as a ghost - just a white sheet with eye holes - and it was the funniest, most 1980’s thing I've ever seen, and I laughed properly for the first time in weeks and then stood in my hallway feeling strange about it.

Some days are long, and some nights are longer. That's all I'm saying.

Some nights the house is quiet and I run out of things to do with my thoughts. And on those nights, sometimes, I write to you.

It's probably a little unhinged. Maybe I am? I’m too tired to care right now.

January 14th, 2022

I have a person. That’s not the right word for it yet, but I have a person. A man. He’s kind, which I realise I’d stopped expecting as a baseline quality in people. He asks me questions and waits for the actual answer instead of the easy one. He brought me soup last week when I had Covid and didn’t make it weird. Just left it at the door, knocked, and went home.

He doesn’t lie to me. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. He just doesn’t. He says what he means and he means what he says and I keep waiting for the point where that stops being true and so far it hasn’t yet.

I think about you being kind to me in the dark and then lying to my face in broad daylight, and I think about him, and I think - that’s the difference. You knew exactly what you were doing when you hummed that song to me. You knew what it would do. And then you sat across from your father in that diner and you did what you did anyway.

He wouldn’t do that. I know that already. I just know.

I’m telling you this because you’re the only place I can put things I don’t know what to do with, which is a strange function for you to serve in my life given that you’re not in it.

I think about more than just the diner sometimes. I think about what it would have looked like if you’d been someone who brought soup to my doorstep and went home.

I think I’ll keep seeing him. I think I want to.

I still write to you. I’ve started to wonder what that means.

August 9th, 2022

I’ve been thinking about what people owe each other.

Not in a big way. Just, what it means to be careful with someone. To hold something of theirs and know that you’re holding it.

He ended it three weeks ago. He was kind about it, which almost made it worse. He said all the right things. He wasn’t wrong about any of them.

I keep thinking about what I couldn’t give him. What I’d already used up, or given away, or had taken from me. I think about the inventory of it and I think - some of that’s yours.

You held something of mine. In the dark, in a storm, I think you actually held it. And then you put it down in your bathroom in North Dakota, after we did what we did, and you walked away from it.

I don’t think you wanted to. I’ve decided to let myself believe that.

I don’t know if it matters whether it’s true, and I’m not thinking too hard about why I’ve decided to believe it. But there it is.

October 14th, 2022

Three years.

I count it from the outpost. Not from Montana.

I remember the exact temperature of the floor in the mornings. The sound of the generator. The way you moved through a room you'd decided was yours - the particular confidence of that, before I understood what confidence like that costs.

I've kept a cactus for the last few months. Same kind I had at my old desk. I've moved it twice and it’s still alive. It doesn't need much. Just a little light. A little water. Neglect, mostly. That works.

I think about that sometimes.

May 3rd, 2023

I changed jobs. Moved cities. New apartment, new commute, new coffee place where nobody knows my order yet. It’s strange to start over again but it’s a different kind of strange to the last time. I chose this one. That matters more than I expected it to.

I’m okay. I think I’m actually okay, which I’m noting here because there have been a lot of months where I couldn’t have said that.

I still write to you. I’ve stopped asking myself why.

I hope you can feel the sun sometimes. I hope someone brings you coffee. I hope the orientation training finally arrived. I thought about writing to the facility about it. I haven’t yet.

October 14th, 2023

Four years today. Or four years from the outpost, anyway. The anniversary I count.

I don't have much to say this year. I think I've said most of it, and I'm not sure how much is left.

I still have the cactus. Still alive, and now sagging slightly to the left, which I've come to find reassuring rather than concerning.

I hope you're alright. I hope someone there knows your name.

February 28th, 2025

I know I’ve said this before, but I don’t think I’m going to write again after this.

Not because of anything dramatic. Not because I’ve decided anything final about you, or about any of it. Just because I think I’ve said what I needed to say, spread out over all these years in small pieces, and I’m not sure there’s much left that isn’t repetition. I’ve been writing to you for five and a half years and you haven't read any of it. At some point that has to mean something, or it has to stop, and I think now it means that I’m done carrying this particular thing in this particular way.

I’m okay. I want you to know that, even though you won’t. I have a life that fits now. I have people in it who know my name and my favourite songs and what I look like when I’m lying about being fine. I have the cactus, still alive, still sagging, but now it flowers. I have enough.

I’ve been thinking about you more than usual lately. I don’t know why. Some instinct I can’t locate, like a frequency I’ve picked up without knowing what it’s transmitting. I hope it’s nothing. I hope wherever you are right now you’re okay, or okay enough, or something in the neighbourhood of okay.

I hope you’re somewhere that has a window. I hope it faces somewhere worth looking at, even if you can’t see it - I think there are other kinds of seeing.

I hope you’re able to stay active - mentally if nothing else. Don’t get bored. Don’t stop trying. You were always smarter than you gave yourself credit for, even if you did make sure it was well hidden.

I hope this winter isn’t too cold for you. I hope you can feel warmth.

Those are small things to wish for someone. But I’ve learned that small things are mostly all there are, and that they matter more than the big things when it comes down to it.

I’m still alive. I still have the cactus. I’m still here.

I hope you are too.

****************

PART SIX: AFTER

The screen reader finishes.

The synthesised voice says End of message.

Gator sits at the desk in the room that smells of someone else's life and new paint, and he does not move.

Outside the bedroom window - which he can't see, which is behind him, which he knows is there because Britt told him, because he can feel the warmth of the afternoon light at his back - the street is going about its early summer evening. He can hear it, or not hear it exactly, but feel the quality of the room changing as the light shifts, the sounds outside easing from day into something quieter.

He sits.

The laptop is warm under his left hand, still resting on the keyboard, and he is aware of it the way you're aware of something after a long time - with the whole of you, with the skin of your palm, with the particular weight that contact has when the rest of the world has been reduced to touch and sound and the shapes of things remembered.

He thinks about all the emails across almost six years.

He thinks about I hope this winter isn’t too cold for you. I hope you can feel warmth.

He thinks about a woman he walked into a blizzard and a car and a diner, a woman he handed over to his father like a problem to be solved, a woman he did not look back for - and he thinks about what it means that she kept writing. Not always in anger. Not building to something. Not performing for an audience that might never exist. Just the “I needed somewhere to put this” way of it all.

He had been that. For years, without knowing it, without being able to do a single thing about it, he had been the place she put the things that didn't fit anywhere else.

He doesn't know what to do with that.

He just sits.

The street outside moves through its evening, and the house ticks around him - different ticks than the prison, warmer, less institutional, the radiator doing something clunky and well-meaning in the wall - and he stays very still inside the dark that is the same dark it's always been, no worse than yesterday, no worse than the day before, just the ordinary dark that follows him everywhere.

He thinks - February 28th, 2025. Three months ago.

He thinks, slowly, the way a man thinks when he's been still for long enough that thought can form without interruption: she doesn't know I'm here.

She doesn't know about Dot. About Lorraine. About the months of paperwork and the sterile room and the drive and the late May air that he breathed outside the prison doors today like it was the first time he'd ever properly managed it.

She doesn't know he's out.

She sent the last one three months ago and didn't send another. She said she wasn't going to.

He sits with his hand on the warm laptop, in the dark that is his dark now, and he stays there a long time.

Downstairs, someone is cooking something - he can smell it through the closed door, moving up through the house, something with garlic and tomato - and through a wall one of his new housemates is watching television at a volume that is considerate of other people, which is a thing he's still adjusting to.

He doesn't think about emailing back. Doesn’t dare to.

He sits, and the house holds him in its ordinary way, and the street goes about its evening, and somewhere in the dark behind his eyelids he turns over I hope you are too and holds it carefully, the way you hold something that wasn't meant for the hands you're holding it in - something left in a place you weren't supposed to find.

He holds it.

He's still sitting there when Britt taps on his door at seven and says “dinner in twenty, if you want it,” and he says “yeah, thanks,” and she goes back down the stairs.

He stays one minute more.

Then he closes the laptop, reaches for the cane, and stands.

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