wickerpark | 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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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."

A Dead Man Called [Ty & Elisha]

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