wickerpark | My ashes, as the phoenix, may bring forth....

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My ashes, as the phoenix, may bring forth....

Ty's eyes fluttered slowly, and for the first moments he was lost as to what was going on. He had no recollection of where he was, though he could quickly put together that was he in some sort of hospital room. He could also feel his toes, and move his hands- so...that ruled out, well...something. There was a steady beat on a machine to his left, the loud beeping keeping time with his remarkably steady heart as he stared at it before he spotted Ollie sitting in a chair- asleep from everything he could see.

But...that still didn't explain why he was there. Or, actually, why Ollie was there. Maybe they'd gotten into some sort of bar fight. He doubted he'd drank too much, he wasn't a particularly heavy drinker even when he could afford to drink as much as he wanted. Reaching up, he ran a hand over his face, before he sat up. He seemed....alright.

Why couldn't he remember what had happened? The last thing he remembered had just been him....going to bed. So why....

"What's....what's going on?" He asked, reaching up to rub his temple as he tried to message the dull buzz out of his head. There was a persistent fog in his mind, he thought. Maybe after he just woke up more he'd manage to work out that the fucking hell was going on.

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"That...does not sound very welcoming." Ty admitted as he looked from one parent to the other. "Doctor says...I'll be fine, you know. Just, uh, a chance for seizures, really. And um, missing memories. But other than that..." He shrugged, looking back at the door with just the smallest of frowns on his face. He supposed he understood why Oliver had left, but still. It did hurt a little.

"He needs his own time," Hadyn's voice cut in through his thoughts unexpectedly, causing him to look up at his father with a bit of surprise. Carlos always swore Hadyn was the one full of sage advice, and Ty believed that for the most part. He also knew most of that advice probably came from, well, dealing with himself.

"I know," Ty said, shrugging again. "I get it...I'd feel the same in his place." He said, looking away from Hadyn and his concerned gaze. He didn't want the man to see more, he didn't want Hadyn's mind to play a game with him- make his father believe this was all his fault. And while it seemed ridiculous that he would, Tyler had seen first hand what the chaos of Hadyn's mind could do to the otherwise rational, calm, and caring man.

Elisha flicked a bit of a bland look between his son and his partner. He was fairly sure his family was convinced he had a convenient blind spot when it came to interpersonal relations, but it wasn't true. He knew the undercurrents here as well as he knew the undercurrents almost everywhere in the Deck. Ty was trying to be the parent, but sometimes he needed to be the child.

"Hadyn," he said though. "Would you mind if I had a minute with Ty?" His lips twitched. "You can go smoke and we'll pretend we don't know."

He waited until Hadyn was gone before he leaned his elbows on his knees. "I can practically sense you trying to protect us from what's going on in your head," he said. "You don't have to, you know. You can be upset and pissed off and we can take it, son."

"There isn't anything to protect you from- I literally feel like I just woke up....only I'm in a hospital room and I can't seem to walk. Oh, and I'll probably have seizures. What's to protect you- him from?" Ty said, looking at his hands for a moment as he sighed. He didn't, in truth, know what he was trying to protect Hadyn from, either. He was a grown man, capable man. All of those things.

"When I was nine, I can remember him bursting into our apartments....and moving so...bizarrely. When I called out to him, at first he just ignored me, and then....looked at me as if he had no idea who the hell I was. The whole time, just...going on and on in a babbling triad that made no sense to me." Ty said, looking up at Elisha. "You know he stabbed himself, trying to claw something out of him? He did....and never once seemed to realize I was standing there, crying....and on the phone with Uncle Jordan."

He paused then, looking back at the door. He and Hadyn had never had a strong relationship after that- one part fear of upsetting Hadyn, one part a boy being angry that his father would do something like that. Even as an adult, Ty still found himself dealing with those raw feelings as if they were something he could deal with.

"I...know he's better, before you say it. I know that, but medication on does so much. And...well..." He didn't want to be the reason something broke in Hadyn's semblance of peace of mind. "He doesn't look like he's slept any more than Oliver....or you."

"I've never really told you about your grandmother," Elisha said after listening to Ty wind down. "The one we named Sarah after. She raised me by herself, in a manner of speaking, in Tel Aviv, before she died in a car accident when I was sixteen." That was exactly how much he'd told the twins about Reina Kagan. Oh, a few more details, perhaps. She'd had curly auburn hair and the same brown eyes as Sarah. She'd been an artist who'd taught him to paint. Living with her was full of adventure. The harmless things.

"She was sick too," he said. "Sometimes she'd come in like that, and there was no understanding what was going through her head. And sometimes she'd crash, and want to end it all, too. So, I do understand, Ty. I know where you're coming from." He hadn't wanted to be what broke his mother, either. The difference between Hadyn and Reina was - Hadyn had done something about it. Reina had, at some point along the line, embraced her disorder as artistic temperment. He shook his head a bit, though; getting mired in past 50 years old wasn't worth it.

"You can only protect so much," he said. "And at some point you've got to remember that fighting against something like bipolar takes emotional strength. Your grandmother didn't have that strength, but your papa does. He has more than I do, really." And sometimes Ty needed to be the kid.

"I think you'll find most people who love you haven't been sleeping much," he said, though. "Sarah's running on rage and coffee fumes and Carlos is just powering through it. You can't expect less from Hadyn."

They had never really put a name to it, Ty thought. His grandmother, Hadyn...no one wanted to discuss what the demon in the room was, but there it was- laid out and bare. Bipolar. Of all the disorders Ty vaguely remembered learning from Eileen, that one had struck him as the scariest, perhaps because he'd seen it and in his face.

"He...." He wanted to argue that Hadyn wasn't strong, but rather tied down to it. Ty suspected that the only way Elisha and Hadyn stayed together was that Hadyn stayed on his medication; Ty had gathered that much from over heard conversations when he was supposed to be asleep. He was supposed to be the child, but he had never felt that way with Hadyn. Despite, perhaps, Hadyn's best efforts. "Would you stay, really....if he wasn't on enough medication to tranq a horse?" Ty asked, looking up at Elisha.

"I get it, he's been worried- everyone has. He is strong enough to deal. He's blah, blah...blah." He sighed a softly, a little unsure where the irritation in his voice was coming from. "But he's not like the rest of us, and you know it. There are days, you know...that I hope he dies before you do. Because I don't think I can deal with his whirlwind...."

There were days, Elisha thought, where Hadyn hoped the same. He didn't; he was fairly sure losing Hadyn Novak at this stage would break him, and for all that their children thought of him as the rock, Elisha wasn't sure they wanted to see the truth of it. He wasn't so sure he was the strong one, or even the sane one, as much as he was the one with a less showy version of fucked up.

"It would take a lot more medicine than he's on to tranq a horse, Tyler," he said. And it made him wonder if Ty had ever bothered to peek at Elisha's own medicine cabinet, which was home to its own cocktail. Probably not. "But I did leave him once, a few years before you and Sarah were born. It didn't stick. It...would have even less chance of sticking now, I think."

"I...didn't say you should leave him," Ty said, sighing as he looked down at his fingers. He just didn't know what to do about....them. There was, after all, no going back to a moody and angry teenager screaming 'I hate you, you aren't my father' at the a man's face after he'd done and sacrificed a lot help raise you to be the best person you could be. Ty felt he could still see the disappointment in Hadyn's face from time to time.

"I just, I wish...." He didn't even know what he wished, really. Maybe he never would. "I just don't think I can deal with him, Dad. I love him, he is my father....but I don't think there is repairing what has happened to us. And I don't know that there is any starting over either. So....I don't know."

There had been a certain irony, really. When Eileen had been the moody teenager - and she'd had plenty of moods that Elisha felt ill-equipped to deal with, especially around the time when Argine had finally succumbed - Hadyn had constantly been telling him not to be so hard on her. But when they'd had their own children...

Well, it was different when it was your own, he supposed. Eileen was his; Ty and Sarah and Carlos were theirs.

"There aren't any easy answers," he said. He wondered what his own relationship as an adult with Reina would have been. As it was...as it was, he'd not been able to forgive her for years after her death. And that had been when he was seventeen. "I'm not telling you that you have to be close. I wish you were, but I understand that you can't. I just want you to know that he does love you, and he will worry about you, and if you go get yourself in an explosion in an abandoned house...he's going to sit up by your bed on any nights when Oliver can't push him out and I can't force him to come to bed. That's going to happen whether you think he should or not. He's your father."

"How do you do it?" He asked, frowning as he looked up at Elisha. "How do you.....handle it all? Being with Hadyn, raising a family, being King..... Being someone's target as king." He asked, unsure of how he felt now that his life had been purposefully attacked in a way it had never been before.

"I mean...." He looked away, toward a wall as he tried to figure out what he was trying to say, trying to ask. "I thought....I could do it all, I could take your place- but now...heh. I'm scared, and I don't even know why."

Not the easiest thing to answer, Elisha thought. Not even something he thought about, strictly speaking, because it was an everpresent part of daily life for him. Maybe the kids never realized - he hoped they hadn't. And maybe, before now, few had dared, because most who might have remembered the about-face that had led to an artistic Six rising to a very sharp Ten in three months time.

"Well, for one, I'm always a little bit scared. It's what keeps me sharp." Though he could have stood for a little more fear, a little less confidence, he thought. It might have prepared him for this possibility. "The trick isn't not being scared. It's not letting the fear have command. There are things that have to be done, and they have to be done whether I'm afraid or not."

"That.....sucks," Ty breathed out, laughing just a little as he rubbed at his face. But then, they had grown up on stories of tragic events- murders of kings and queens, jacks plotting against Aces, one unhappy ending after another. He rather hoped this peace he'd grown up in was the norm and not the exception. He was, apparently, wrong.

"Don't suppose you'd let me go back to work this week...So I could find out who tried to kill me?" He asked, even through he leaned just a little closer to he father. Despite it all, Elisha was still the one that was the rock...and his guide. It didn't take someone long to piece together a reason why taking Ty out was important.

That was life, Elisha thought. Life on the Deck, at any rate, and life Outside...had it's own tragic quirks, just less likely to involve poison and blades and spies sneaking away in the night. More likely to involve explosions, honestly, and it was one of the many times he cursed this place and it's tendency to pretend that only the good parts of the Outside world could come in.

"That's adorable," he said out loud. "No. You need to take time to recover. For one, Sebastian would be so sad that he didn't get to force you to sit still for medical examinations. For another..." He smiled a bit slyly. "You have a boyfriend who'd probably drag you out of your office bodily if you tried."

"My boyfriend, as you say, has bolted and had been trying to do so since I woke up, so I don't know what I would count him in the 'drag you home' bracket at the moment." Ty said, frowning as he glanced at the chair Ollie had been in. He didn't understand why it bothered him so much, but it did. It hurt a little that the man just ran away, and didn't even give Ty a chance to do much in the way of stopping him.

"Personally, I would just prefer going back to work, you know. Solve a mystery or two. Give Carlos a break from the paperwork he so loves." He also just needed something to do, and sitting still was not one of those things he was good at. He never had been good at it, and Ty suspected he never would be.

"Not his finest moment, probably," Elisha said with a shrug. He understood the need for air, of course, and it was exactly as Hadyn had said. Ollie'd about burned himself out, and with Ty not remembering enough to even know why - Elisha couldn't blame him.

But Ty was hurt by it, so he did blame him, a little.

"I'd rather you not go after your own would be murderer," he said evenly. "I understand wanting to, but I'd rather you didn't." Still, he'd go stir-crazy himself, so he leaned back a bit. "But maybe you'd like to take some of my work off my hands."

There was something utterly suspicious about Elisha offering up some of his work in order to keep Ty out of his own office. On the one hand he could hear his father's argument for it- you need to learn, responsibility, more to ruling than knowing how to fight. On the other hand, he was enough of his father's son to see a ploy to get out of certain jobs for what it was.

"I don't suppose we get to discuss which items of interest I would be taking off your hands in advance, either. Because if we did that...." Well, Elisha did so hate some of these meetings, and Ty was starting to suspect he was going to get a first hand taste of them and why they were hated so much.

"You're thinking I'm going to drop the budget committee on you," Elisha said with a sage nod. "Hadn't crossed my mind." The entertainment committee, though. The winter party season was coming up, and with it a gaggle of eveningwear obsessed planners agitating for a ball. The only joy he got out of it was coming up with alternatives to disappoint the people wanting to get into a hundred yards of purple tulle.

"But we can, I suppose, discuss. Your father's likely to frown at me otherwise." It was fair to say Hadyn had his number even better, after all, than Ty.

"Oh, he would frown....he would most certainly frown." Ty said, smiling just a little. If nothing else, one would always trust in Hadyn's 'disapproving dad' face to help bend Elisha's opinions on some things. He and Sarah had used it enough to their advantage as kids.

"But fine....if you insist." Since he wasn't going back to his job, he might as well get to do something. Anything. Because otherwise his wall was going to make for excellent target practice.

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My ashes, as the phoenix, may bring forth....

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