The wind had a bite now. Not the sharp, warning kind of winter, but the steady, gnawing type that sneaks into the seams of your clothes and settles there like an unwanted thought. Tyler stepped back onto the pavement with no particular destination in mind except home—yet even that word felt distant, as if he were repeating something he'd once believed in.
He didn't look angry.He didn't look sad.He didn't look anything.
His face had settled into a calm that wasn't calm at all—the stillness of a lake moments before something breaks the surface.
Darsen City carried on around him.
A bus rumbled past, its exhaust coughing gray smoke that drifted low enough to sting the eyes. A vendor argued with a customer about the price of onions. A schoolboy ran across the street without looking, earning a shouted curse from a driver. Posters of the Ignaros Youth League hung from lamp posts—half ripped, half replaced by the blue-and-silver flyers of the Veyra Reform Club.
He walked through it all as if watching a memory he had seen too many times.
People brushed past him, muttering into phones or to themselves. Nobody noticed the young man moving quietly through the street with his satchel pulled close. Nobody cared enough to. The city was full of invisible people; today he simply blended in with them.
Tyler didn't replay the interview in his mind. He didn't replay the bribe. He didn't replay the tiny humiliation of that attendant's expectant smile. It was all already folded neatly and tucked somewhere he couldn't feel it anymore.
The truth was simpler:He didn't have the energy to carry anything else.
A wind gust blew a loose Ignaros poster across the sidewalk. It skidded near his foot. The slogan printed in bold red letters read:
"STRENGTH THROUGH STRUGGLE."
He stared at it for a moment.
He had been told that line since he was a child.Told it in school assemblies.Told it in youth group meetings.Told it at temple gatherings.Told it by neighbors.Told it by teachers.
His whole life, someone had been reminding him:
If you suffer, you are strong.If you fail, you are being tested.If you break, you deserve to.
Tyler stepped over the poster without slowing.
Ahead of him, a group of teenagers stood near a convenience store. One of them wore a blue-and-silver bracelet—the subtle mark of a Veyra supporter. Another had a red Ignaros scarf tied around his arm. They were arguing, animated, hands waving.
Tyler didn't need to hear the exact words to understand the script.
Ignaros kid's posture: rigid, defensive.Veyra kid's posture: condescending, sharp.The rest: pretending neutrality but watching with hungry eyes.
All of them thinking they were part of something important.
All of them being used.
The argument escalated; one boy shoved another. A bystander tried halfheartedly to intervene before giving up. Someone else pulled out a phone to record. Phones always came out before help.
Tyler kept walking.Not because he didn't care—but because caring didn't change anything here.
He reached a crosswalk where the pedestrian light blinked in slow, dying pulses. The button had been smashed months ago; pressing it did nothing. People crossed whenever the traffic looked tired.
Tyler followed them.
The wind picked up again, carrying the faint smell of burning plastic from a distant trash heap. Someone was shouting about price hikes near a grocery store. Someone else sat slumped against a wall, flipping through bills with the hopelessness of a man counting reasons to give up.
Tyler felt none of it.Or maybe he felt all of it too deeply to separate.
His legs moved on instinct.His hands tightened on the satchel strap.His breath clouded and faded with every exhale.
By the time he reached his neighborhood, the streetlamps had flickered on. Their yellow glow made everything look tired—not old, not damaged, just exhausted.
Like him.
His house sat quietly between two others, its walls clean, its windows intact. A normal middle-class home. A safe place, in theory. A place that had held birthdays and dinners and soft laughter in better years.
Tonight it looked smaller.
He stood at the gate for a moment, the cold settling deeper into his bones. Light spilled softly from the living-room window. Inside, he could see the faint silhouette of his mother setting something on the table.
Tyler inhaled slowly.
He wasn't sure what expression he was wearing.He wasn't sure what expression he should wear.
All he knew was that something in him felt stretched thin—as if the day had quietly peeled away a layer he needed, and he was now stepping forward without it.
He opened the gate.Walked up the short path.Placed his hand on the door.And stepped inside.
The warmth of home met him instantly—familiar, soft, and undeserved.
He wished he could feel it.
The door closed behind him with the sound of something final. It was a small noise, easily missed by anyone else in the house, but in that brief clicking of latch and frame the room reorganized itself: Tyler's weight met the floorboards; Melissa turned from the sink; the kettle's low whine cut against their faces.
Silas looked up from the table—the newspaper folded back, a pen held between his fingers like a thin spear. He didn't need Tyler to speak. He had the habit of seeing his son as though he'd been learning a language in his face for years. The look Tyler wore now—flat, taut, not broken so much as emptied—was a line Silas had mapped long ago. He stood at once, the old reserve softened by something that might be called fear.
"You okay?" he asked. The question was simple; the tone was a net. He set the pen down carelessly and came around the table.
Tyler's hands were in his pockets. He took off his jacket slowly, as if the motion alone could remove the day. He met his father's eyes and saw, reflected back at him, a man who was more tired than most, someone who had learned to hide things in the creases of bread and in extra shifts at the bank.
"No," Tyler said finally. The word was small, a single leaf falling. "Not really."
Silas didn't ask for more. He sat, spread his hands on his knees like a man preparing to speak a truth. "You don't have to do it alone," he said, and the sentence came out more like an apology than a comfort. "Not ever. If they ask for money and they—" He swallowed. Tyler watched the movement, the salt of a lifetime of restraint catching on his father's tongue.
Melissa came to stand behind Silas and put both hands on his shoulders. Her mouth trembled like a small animal breathing in a storm. "We'll manage," she said in a voice that tried to be brave and only succeeded in being human.
Tyler could have lied. He could have said something light and empty that made the kitchen feel like it had not been a battlefield that morning. But the words had no place to land. He only said, "They asked for money."
Silas closed his eyes a fraction. He nodded as if he had been expecting this for years and had been saving the answer in the folds of his shirt. "Of course they did," he said quietly. "They always do."
For a moment neither of them moved. The house hummed its normal small noises—the kettle, a muffled radio from a neighbor, the refrigerator's breath. In that thin pause, Silas reached across the table and put his hand over Tyler's in a gesture that was simple and absolute.
"Listen," he said. "I am proud of you. You have done… more than I could have. Whoever they are, whatever they want, you have something they can't buy. Don't give that away." His voice was steady, deliberate, not a show but the truth.
Tyler felt something struggle under the ribs—like a trapped word that wanted out. He managed a small smile that did not quite meet his eyes. "Thanks," he said. "That… means a lot."
Silas let his hand rest there for another moment before retracting, folding his fingers together in a way that tried to conjure normal tasks: bills, schedules, chores. He rose from his chair and moved to the window. Outside, a small dog barked at a passing cart and the world continued on, ignorant of how quietly this family was reshaping itself.
"Maybe I should take a few days off," Silas said, as if deciding aloud might make it less terrible. "I'll go to the clinic tomorrow, get checked out properly." The sentence sounded practical, responsible—the kind of thing his bank job demanded during good weeks. Tyler watched him. He had never known his father to ask for rest.
Silas's face changed in that tiny way a person's face changes when history hangs in the air. He put his hand to his chest—not the dramatic clutch of someone crying out, but a small, habitual motion, as if testing a pocket he had feared empty for a long time. Then his expression locked in place.
"Don't—" Melissa began, but there was no time to finish.
Silas's hand tightened, then his knees gave in the way that furniture gives when you lean on it too hard. He reached for the table and his other hand went out, finding nothing but air. His mouth made a sound that HURT. Tyler's brain moved like an animal startled into abrupt focus: this is wrong, do something.
"Father!" Tyler's voice was raw, the first thing in the house that burst with unpracticed volume. He lunged, steadying Silas as the older man sagged against him. Melissa was at his side in an instant, her face white and fingers fumbling with a phone.
"Call the clinic!" she said. Her voice shook in a way that made it honest. She jabbed at the screen with clumsy fingers. No answer. She tried again. The line was busy; the clinic was dealing with a ward of something the city could not find staff for that day.
Someone at the next-door neighbor's house had opened their window and called out to see if they could help. The street hummed with the small noises of life, unaware that something inside this house had decided to rupture.
Tyler slid to the floor with his father, supporting his head against his shoulder. He could feel the damp of panic under Silas's collar. The older man's breath came in short, frightened bursts, like someone trying to speak through a narrow hallway.
"Stay with me," Tyler said, because it seemed the only thing to say. The words were brittle; repetition made them stronger.
Melissa returned with a small bottle of aspirin but knew, with that immediate clarity that terror grants, that this was not a simple thing. She looked at the phone, at Silas, then at Tyler. "We need to take him to the hospital," she said.
The hospital in Darsen City was a place Tyler knew by its failures: long corridors that smelled of bleach and fatigue, waiting rooms that taught you how to measure time in the rhythm of others' suffering. They had visited doctors there before, had shuffled through the bureaucracy and left with prescriptions that were gestures rather than cures. Tonight, they would go with the thin hope that someone could stitch a man together in a system that often preferred paper to people.
They moved quickly—Melissa's hands were more efficient than her face suggested. Tyler hailed a cab though his hands shook; the driver muttered something about traffic and cost and the weather and then eased them into the backseat. Silas's grip on Tyler was surprisingly strong; for a moment Tyler felt the frail, stubborn warmth of a man who had learned to hold on when the world asked him to release it.
At the hospital doors a nurse at the intake desk looked at them over the rim of her glasses, her expression a practiced mixture of efficiency and fatigue. "Emergency?" she asked.
"Heart," Melissa said, and her voice was a single chord.
The intake process blurred into an endless procession of paper, the sound of rubber soles in corridors, the low hum of fluorescent lighting. Tyler carried his father to a triage room where the bed looked too narrow, a measurement of the kind of care the city could afford tonight. A doctor appeared in a white coat that seemed too clean for the corridor's tiredness, but even he moved with the exhaustion of someone who had seen too many days with too few staff.
"We are short-staffed," the doctor said without irony. "There's been an incident downtown—multiple cases. We're trying to triage." His eyes flicked to Silas and to Tyler as if weighing them on scales that only sometimes balanced.
"Please," Tyler said, and the word felt small in the sterile air. "He needs help."
The doctor's hands moved with the efficient motions of training. He took Silas's blood pressure, his pulse, and his face hardened as the numbers came in. The machine beeped a tone that sounded sterile and final.
"We need to stabilize him," the doctor murmured. "Get an ECG, oxygen—"
But there were delays. The ECG machine was occupied elsewhere. The oxygen supply needed a regulator that had been checked out for another patient. Every necessary thing seemed to be elsewhere, or late, or slightly out of reach. Tyler watched the doctor's jaw clench as if it were trying to push through to resources that weren't there.
Time thinned and stretched in the clinical light. Nurses darted in and out, their faces taut. The corridor's hum seemed to grow louder, swallowing Tyler's breath in a way that made each intake feel like a small theft.
"It's the system," Melissa whispered between tears, half to herself and half to heaven. "They told us—" She didn't finish. There was no finishing that sentence.
Silas's eyes opened and found Tyler's. For a terrible, bright instant Tyler felt the old love: small, fierce, unapologetic. "Ty," Silas breathed. The name was a small sound that held everything unsaid.
"Here," Tyler said. "I'm here."
Silas's hand found Tyler's and closed, weak but real. Then the room went white with bright light and the beeping sped and slowed, fragments of sound jagged like shards.
The doctor's face was suddenly everything the hospital could offer: professional, trained, terrified by the constraints. He barked orders. Machines hummed. The nurse returned with an oxygen regulator only to find, impossibly, another patient had priority—they were in the middle of an emergency elsewhere. The small hospital was stretched thin, and that thinness created gaps large enough to swallow a beating heart.
Tyler watched as professionals improvised. They did what they could with what they had, but sometimes what they had was not enough. He felt the weight of every delayed step as a small stone dropped into a quiet pond; the ripples reached out and touched everything.
Silas's face slackened. His hand, which had been gripping Tyler's, loosened. For a fraction of a breath Tyler tried to hold the loosening like a mistake, something reversible, but the room's air thickened with a sadness that was too patient to be avoided.
"He's gone," the doctor said softly, and the words cut the air into quiet pieces.