Northern Lights

Since Ava was merely a child, she had learned to live on her own. Once she became a teenager she had become more mature than most adults were, and when she finally went to college and moved out of her house, it wasn't as big of a shock as it was to most kids.

She never went back to her house when she finally left and only spoke to her parents on very rare occasions. Her life had been difficult for as long as she could remember and when she was old enough, she just wanted to sever the ties she could to her old life. Ava learned that blood didn't mean as much as most people thought; her friends meant more to her than her family ever had and she was okay with that.

She was at a game when she got the call, she had left her phone in her office and didn't check it until the game was over. She had a stressful game; Patrick Kane had taken two high sticks to the face and nearly lost his teeth in doing so. Ben Eager had also taken a hard hit and left the ice in the middle of second period. The only downfall of Ava's job was the fact she had to constantly deal with her friends getting injured. She liked helping them get better, but in the very moment they were hurt she absolutely hated it.

Sighing, she fell back into her chair and grabbed her phone from her desk. When she noticed she had a missed call she furrowed her eyebrows just because she had one, but more so when she realized it was from her Mother.

Because there wasn't a voicemail Ava was forced to call back the woman she only called her Mother because of blood. She pressed the phone to her ear and licked her lips as she waited for her to pick up. Jonathan waltzed into her room and smiled upon seeing her and took a seat across from where she sat.

"Who're you-" Jonathan began, but Ava held her finger up in the air indicating Jonathan to wait a second and he stopped talking.

"Hello?" Her Mother's tired voice came from over the airwaves.

"Hi," Ava said tonelessly.

"Ava?" She asked hopefully.

"Yeah, it's me," Ava confirmed.

"Av, I have some horrible news."

"Oh?"

"You're Father-" she began, sniffling slightly. "He's dying," she whispered.

Ava certainly did not expect that to come from her Mother's lips, and it made her jaw literally drop. "What?" She asked, just to make sure she had heard her correctly.

"He has cancer," she explained. "He has for a while. He's doesn't have much time left though, and we thought you should know what was going on. We think it'd be best if you came home for a while."

Home? Home?. Chicago and UND were the only two places she felt at home. The house she grew up in was just that- a house. A home is somewhere you felt welcome and loved and that place certainly didn't have those characteristics. She didn't want to go back, she didn't want to re-live painful memories of her childhood while she watched cancer eat away at her Father. She just couldn't. At least not alone.

"I don't know," she mumbled, her face in her hands.

"Ava, please," her Mother pleaded.

"I have work," she said flatly.

"It'd mean a lot to your Father Ava," she tried.

This made Ava irate. How could her mother say a thing like that? Her Father beat them both for most of her life, how could she even still be with him let alone try and guilt trip Ava into visiting them? She just couldn't understand her Mother's reasoning. At the same time, Ava felt like a horrible person for not wanting to go see her dying Father. She just didn't think she could get over how much he hurt her to ever forgive him. Even if he was on his death bed.

"I'll see what I can do," she responded, not even waiting for a response before hanging up. Jonathan looked at Ava curiously, looking for an answer without asking a question. "That was my Mother," she said tonelessly. "My Dad's dying."

It wasn't what Jonathan expected, and he wondered why she was so calm about it. It was almost like she didn't care. Jonathan knew Ava wasn't close with her parents, but he never knew exactly why. "I'm sorry Av," he apologized.

"Yeah," she nodded, staring off into space.

When Ava got home that night, she treated it like any other work night. She took a short shower and then fixed herself a quick meal of re-heated leftovers from the night before when her and a few of the Blackhawks had gone out to dinner. She took a seat on her couch and curled her legs underneath her, turning the TV on and flipping until she got to a re-run of some horrible dating show on VH1. She ate quietly, laughing at the appropriate times but mostly just about how pathetic the show was and not about what they were saying. A commercial came onto the screen and she sighed deeply, grabbing her phone and calling the person she had been thinking about ever since she heard the news about her Father.

"Ava?" TJ answered, not hiding his surprise.

"Hey Teej," Ava said dully, though she hadn't intended to sound that way.

"What's the matter?" He asked, obviously worried by the tone of her voice.

"My Dad's dying," she said bluntly.

TJ was silent for a few moments, thinking of what exactly to say to her. He might have used her a lot in college, but TJ and Ava also divulged some of their deepest secrets to each other. They were incredibly close and Ava considered him to be one of her closest friends, and perhaps the one who knew the most about her past. TJ understood she was never close with her family, and even grew to hate her father whom he had never even met himself. He figured anyone who would lay a hand on a girl as sweet and wonderful as Ava was undoubtedly not a good person at all.

"Oh," was all he could come up with. The fact that Ava's Dad was dying proved to be a tricky subject to deal with. Yes, Mr. Lawler may have been a horrible father, but he still was her father. "What's the matter with him?" He asked finally after a few brutal moments of silence.

"Cancer," Ava exhaled noisily, leaning back on her couch and pressing the mute button on her TV. "She wants me to go up there and see him before he dies."

"Are you going to?" He asked curiously.

"I don't know," she admitted. "I probably should. I mean, he's my Dad after all. But I haven't been there since I left for college, you know that. But I don't want to seem like a horrible person and not go."

"Ava- you're the farthest thing from a horrible person I know. Don't ever think you are," TJ said sternly. Ava was quite for a few seconds, wondering how she was going to word what she was about to say next.

"TJ?" She asked uneasily.

"Yeah?" He breathed.

"Will you come home with me?"