wickerpark | A Dead Man Called [Ty & Elisha]

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A Dead Man Called [Ty & Elisha]

Ollie wasn't quite back yet. Another month and the ship was due to roll into the harbor, the flight squadron would fly in hours before the ship itself docked. Still, that was some time off and Ty had come to a rather startling realization that being alone in San Diego was possibly the worse thing for him in that moment.

So he'd told Ollie that he was going home for a while. After Carlos came back from the dead, he...couldn't handle things. And he hadn't wanted Sarah to barge in on him the way she promised to if he didn't do...something. Anything.

He hadn't told her he was going home, though. Not until she called him angrily from his front door demanding to know where the hell he was, and promising that he better not be dead or she'd bring him back and kill him herself. Though, telling her he'd just landed in Chicago did seem to steal a lot of her thunder.

And maybe he should have told his parents he was going to just show up, seeing as neither of them were home when he let himself in and looked around. Neat and orderly as ever, their home seemed still foreign some how. But he moved to his bedroom and put his bags on the bed and looked about for a while. Nothing seemed to ever change in that home, and maybe it never would.

Eventually, though, Ty found himself in the kitchen. It took a bit of searching to find the bottles of liquor, the old habit of hiding them likely to never die for his parents. Pouring himself a glass he sighed a little, before moving to the back porch and sitting heavily. At least he could still drink and smoke in private with no one knowing he was there.

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Not quite. He could almost smoke and drink with no one knowing he was there, but Ty had forgotten - maybe willfully, maybe not - that he'd been the one to put the state of the art security in place. The one that had called Elisha's office as soon as he arrived, and the one that recorded him coming inside.

Elisha decided not to call Hadyn right away, and he didn't rush home. He'd learned his lesson that way over the years with all his kids; they opened up more if you didn't look like you were in a panic over them.

So he dropped his keys in the kitchen and shrugged out of his coat before he meandered to the back porch door with a glass in his hand. He recognized which bottle was missing from the cupboard.

"Got enough there for two, kid?"

Ty turned when the door opened, looking at his father a little curiously before nodded. Stuffing his cigarette between his lips, he reached down and picked up the bottle before pouring some for Elisha and setting it back down. Plucking the cigarette from his lips, he ashed it before taking another drag.

"Sorry I didn't call," before, you know, just showing up. It wasn't like him to show up unexpectedly. Even he knew that.

"How are you?"

It was, frankly, the opposite of him. It was the opposite of all the kids, but especially Ty, who generally had to be coaxed into coming home, and only made it for the occasional major holiday. Definitely never in the middle of summer.

Elisha chose to take a drink instead of pointing any of that out, though, and he sprawled seemingly casually in a chair. "I'm fine," he said. "We're both fine here. Your father wants me to retire before my arteries shut down from too much stress." He wasn't entirely sure what he'd do with himself if he did, of course. His heyday as an artist - as much as he'd had one - was pretty much on the wane.

"You look rough, Ty."

"Retirement kind of sucks," Ty said with a snort, "gets boring pretty quick. I should know." Not having something to focus on, he figured, didn't help his cause much. Nor did being angry at the Navy for discharging him when they had. Just shy of his ten years, too. Though, he guessed they'd worked it out but using his unused leave to get him to the ten year mark- which officially let him say he'd 'retired' from the service. He got to get a special ID card and everything.

"Carlos Sanchez isn't dead," he said finally before taking a deep swallow of his drink. But then he went quite again, staring across the yard at the fence he used to scale when sneaking out of the house. "He's been a POW for the last year."

"That's what I keep telling Hadyn," Elisha said with a slight smile as he took a drink - more of a sip, really. "And he can't come up with anything to do with my free time, so that keeps him quiet for a while. At least until the next blood pressure results come in."

He sobered though, when Ty mentioned Carlos. "I'm sorry," he said. "Is he doing okay?" Ty clearly wasn't. That wasn't even a question. Ty wouldn't be here if he was.

It would have been easier to stick to talking about blood pressure and if Elisha should retire. Those were the sort of normal conversations that fathers and sons across the country would have. Except they all probably had better relationships with their parents.

"I left him to die." Ty said, laughing a bit bitterly. "Pretty sure 'okay' isn't the word I'd use to describe how he is." Betrayed, maybe. Angry, probably. They hadn't talked about those specifically, but it seemed natural. "I...get the feeling we aren't exactly going to be good for each other to be around."

"I don't have to tell you what war does," Elisha said. It hadn't left him in one piece, all those years ago. He'd had to rebuild himself, which Ty wouldn't know. Even Hadyn didn't know how he'd had to do that. It was really only Eileen who'd been there for that part of his life.

"Does he blame you?" He asked. It would be a natural reaction; he'd been bitter towards his commanding officer for a shit-ton of operations gone wrong, and he'd never been taken prisoner in Somalia. Never really been majorly at risk, and had only suffered minor injuries.

"I've got a pretty clear of the effects of war, for myself." Ty agreed, softly. He took a drink again, before turning back to his cigarette and puffing on it silently. Ty had never made it a point to talk to his parents about everything. For one reason or another- none of his men had talked much about it either.

"He doesn't have to. I blame myself. I always have." Ty said finally. "I was supposed to bring them all home, and I buried three of them. And nothing anyone says makes that change. Knowing they were doing their duty doesn't change that I ordered it. So who else could be blame?"

"I know you have," Elisha said. "You don't have to spell it out for me to be able to tell." For all it seemed that the problem with he and Ty was that they didn't understand each other, the real issue was that they understood each too well.

That was how he knew it was better to take another tack with Ty. He was going to blame himself; nothing was going to change that. "He has to be struggling," he said. "I know Gael's got to be trying, but between his recovery and probably not really getting it..." Elisha shrugged. "I doubt Carlos really knows how to deal with coming home."

"Gael's in the hospital, ICU." Ty said, looking back at Elisha. He wasn't going to be entirely surprised if Elisha hadn't known. But then again, his Chief Communications/IT/whatever his title was, Leon Shaw, was Gael's dad. He had to know something was up. "Considering he's going to be there for a while I don't know how much help he can be."

For that matter, Sarah probably told them. Right?

"I don't know what I'm doing anymore, dad."

"Leon told me," Elisha said. Leon wasn't one to say much, but Sarah had told him too, and his daughter was talkative enough to tell him that Gael might never walk again.

It was irrational - he knew it was - but a part of him wondered, a bit, if Ty would be doing better if Ollie hadn't moved him to California and then gone back to his tour. He knew Ollie hadn't had any choice, but regardless...

He wondered. "I don't think you can be expected to," he said after a moment of silence. "I didn't know what I was doing anymore either, when I came home."

"So...what did you do?" He asked, putting his empty glass down on the table, he scrubbed his hair. He needed to know there was something he could do that didn't lead him down the road he was headed.

No one was going to thank him for walking that particular road.

"I can't...keep doing what I'm doing." Which was nothing. He worked on the house with the crew from time to time, but it didn't help much. He could avoid them, and they let him.

Elisha shrugged. "I went to the art institute, but that was mostly to keep Aunt Debbie from summoning every psych she knew." Not that he hadn't gone to one or two, but he'd liked having it on his terms. "Having a place I needed to be every day helped. That's why I started at the company, really. After school I was getting itchy, not having something to do."

He finished his drink and looked over at his son. "I can't tell you what to do," he told Ty. "But you need to find something that engages you, enough that you can stand doing it every day. At first you're not going to love anything, but that'll come in time. House flipping...might not be hands on enough, right now." It could be if Ty wanted it to be, but it was also easy to just hand it over to the contractor.

Ty needed something where he had to be there.

"Art isn't really my thing, either." Ty admitted while toying with the idea of pouring himself another drink. If he were honest, he wasn't sure Elisha wasn't going to summon every psych he could find either. Ty was damned, he thought, because he could see in a rational manner how fucked up everything was, and yet he felt powerless to change course.

He had to find a way out of this...misery. One way or another.

"Heh." He started, before closing his eyes. "I've had job offers." Mostly for development companies in need of physicist. But they had all required him to move, or just didn't offer enough of a challenge for him to even try to care. And honestly, he didn't much care for the idea of doing physics the rest of his life.

"Did you....ever consider just..giving up?"

"I only managed to pass that on to one kid, unfortunately," Elisha said dryly. And Sarah's preference had always been for arts and crafts - design - instead of the traditional fine arts. Most of his life he felt surrounded by mathematicians and scientists, really.

"Just because you studied doesn't mean you have to do it," he pointed out. "We both know you only went to USNA because you weren't really offered another choice." Something Hadyn hadn't understood; when Ty had told him, Hadyn had thanked a god he didn't particularly believe in, but Elisha had wondered if Ty would stay stateside much longer than it took him to finish his education. And as it had turned out, he was right.

That was neither here nor there anymore, though. "Of course," he said after a moment. This was, he thought, something he'd never shared with any of his children; he'd never intended to, really. He hadn't even told Hadyn about it. "I thought about it off and on for a long time, even when you and Sarah were little."

He could have asked more, pried a little more. Only he figured that was just a good way to get himself a ticket to the shrink's office. Honestly, he'd probably be lucky if that was all. If the VA/Navy caught wind, they'd probably insist on putting him in a hospital.

"Sucks," Ty said, before taking a deep breath and smiling a little. "So...what's for dinner?" Maybe things would be less heavy if he just moved the conversation on to something else. Something more casual.

And he poured himself another drink, before offering more to Elisha.

It was a strategy Elisha used himself to this day, so he recognized it. He even thought about pushing it with Ty, but that would likely just end in one of their fights. They had those often enough as it was, and neither of them needed it today.

"Fatted calf, obviously, what else would we be having?" He asked with a smirk before he shook his head. "Don't know, really, I figured I'd grill steaks or something. Since you're here Hadyn might let me get away with it without mentioning my heart."

"Oh, I don't know. I seem to recall Hadyn's idea of a good mean was a salad." He loved his dad, but Hadyn was a bit of a bird when it came to food. Ty could remember watching him eat off and on all day long- and yet it was nothing big. Just little bits of salads, tomatoes, some soup, whatever was around.

"Steak sounds good." He said, nodding. "I can probably convince him not to argue with it. He's kind of a push over at times." Hadyn, honestly, spent most of Ty's childhood try not to let his temper get to the best of him. Izak said he'd back handed him once, and that was the first and last time any of them saw Hadyn loose his temper.

The man made up for it by being overly concerned with making them all happy and comfortable.

"He's secretly a rabbit. Didn't want me to tell you, but you're old enough to know about Thumper now." Thumper would be giving him a look for this conversation, but Elisha was fairly sure that that would be tempered by the sight of he and Ty not arguing. Oddly, he'd been better at handling the relationship when he'd been a moody teenager.

It was once they were all adults that things got rough.

"You can throw together a salad to keep him happy," Elisha said with a nod before he pushed himself to his feet. Then he paused, though. "Ty," he said, "it's unusual to have a friend who went through something similar to you and who's suffering the same sort of thing. Carlos going to need someone who gets it." Gael was a nice kid, Elisha thought; weirdly so considering his parents, who were different degrees of sharp, but he wasn't going to get it. Not all the time.

There were a lot of reasons for why Ty and Elisha had difficulty getting along. A good portion of it probably stemmed from their personalities being too much alike for their own goods. They shared the same expressions right down to the same bullheadedness.

It was a fatal flaw for both of them.

"I think I can manage a salad. I could even manage a steak, given the practice I've had." Cooking for himself, that was. But eh, he wasn't going to rush to it. He paused though, before pushing himself up to his feet and stuffing his hands in his pockets. "I don't know that I can help him," he said after. "But, I don't plan on just running out the door on him."

Even if, technically, he had sort of done just that.

"Don't take away one of the few joys I have left in life. If I can't play with fire, what have I got?" One way they weren't similar, really, was the way they dealt with their depressive periods. Elisha's tended to manifest in sarcastic allusions to being suicidal; Sarah'd gotten that one.

"Good," he said, though. "I think we both know it's rough to deal with alone. No matter how many therapists and support groups you have."

"Wouldn't dream of taking that away." Ty replied, putting his hands up in surrender. He figured there wasn't much use in arguing anyway. There were worse things than getting kicked out of the kitchen.

"Yeah. Well, it can be dealt with." He said after a moment. He just didn't know what else to say. "Dad..." He started as he turned to look at the older Kagan. He had more he wanted to say, but as his father looked up at him....all he could do was smile. "Uh, thanks...for listening."

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A Dead Man Called [Ty & Elisha]

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