Tyed - Chapter 52: Chapter 52

Tyler's known Kevin his entire life.
They weren't friends at first, of course, but there was a camaraderie, invisible while there, among the kids at Darkfilly Copse. It was difficult; pulled this way and that, brought up to replicate the abuse they'd endured, most of them spent at least up until puberty looking for comfort from each other, as it could rarely be found in the adults around them. Some of them had good mothers, but they were the exception.
Kevin was, honestly, very lucky. He wasn't targeted by his dad in the same way Tyler was by his, and he had a decently good mother, which Tyler did too, but couldn't be said of all the kids. That might've been the initial hurdle it took them a little time to get over. It wasn't like hell was any different for Kevin, outside of that one fact. They just didn't know it was hell at the time, and Kevin having the best seat in hell changed things.
But what made Tyler feel different about Kevin was when they tried to run away. Kevin, Tyler, Trey and Kali; they almost made it down the river, and before they got caught, Tyler and Kevin ran. They ran together, hand in hand, through the woods that Kevin had tried to burn to give them a chance. And so Tyler just remembers running through fire, feeling hope in his heart for the first time in his life, as it beat out of its chest, unclear if it was adrenalin or Kevin. It kinda turned out to be both.
And so that idea of being forged by fire together meant ever so much more for Tyler and Kevin. They kept meeting up at night, when they shouldn't go anywhere, lighting up the night with flame to keep their hearts beating like they had that day. Adding fuel to the fire. Making them beat harder.
It was stupid, the way they fell in love, really. Tyler can't think of a moment, not today; all he really remembers is loving Kevin. When Kevin kissed him for the first time, he remembers that. A bond that formed from something more than the pain around them; something that was new, and different, and not at all very abundant in Darkfilly Copse. It was felt in that moment. Tyler knew it, and he knew in that moment he'd always feel it. And he was right.
They couldn't go long without each other. Tyler used to wake up thinking of Kevin and spend his days waiting for the next time he'd see him. When Darkfilly Copse imploded, it imploded with them side by side, and one thing about the burns they got is it melted them together, and tearing them apart was painful.
It was luck that they weren't apart for long. No, not luck; Kevin's heart simply demanded as much as Tyler's did, almost more, demanded to be near Tyler, and he did anything he had to. Tyler would've done the same if it had been left a moment longer, perhaps, and it's that thought Tyler goes back to when he wonders if Kevin abandoned him.
Kevin wouldn't abandon him. If Kevin didn't love Tyler, he wouldn't have tracked him down and ran to his door; that's what Tyler tries to tell himself when he wakes up from a nightmare that's just repeating that summer evening over and over. He has those nightmares sometimes more often than he has nightmares of Darkfilly Copse. When he's slept alone for too long, his mind strays to why he's alone, and he fears those memories almost more than he fears his father. When he wakes up in the throes of a tangled horror brought on by a one-night stand he'll forget and hardly liked, at least he's not dreaming of what was left when Kevin was gone.
Tyler's experience of the new world was good, really- it was slow at first, but exponentially it grew, the way he'd notice something he'd never known before about the world and he'd want to learn it, expanding his knowledge and decrying all the old things he'd learned. Learning what he wanted, growing comfortable in who he was. Throwing himself into every new thing, every new person and experience. Tyler was never, not once, afraid of the new. That was how he'd ended up in that club that evening; it was how he slept in so many beds and tried so many hobbies and jobs he quickly threw away. Tyler was bad at not doing something new, he was bad at recognising what he had, and appreciating it while he had it.
And while he spent every moment of his spare time with Kevin when he could, he still felt often that he didn't appreciate him enough while he had him.
Kevin wasn't like Tyler; change wasn't easy. Sometimes he forgot how old they were, sometimes he mentioned his dad as if his dad was still there. Sometimes he wouldn't come when Tyler thought they were supposed to meet; when asked about it he'd say he got lost, but Tyler didn't know how true it was. Often Kevin had bruises and scabs across his knuckles, across his forehead; he said, straightforward and simple like he was answering a question about the weather, that he'd been punching a wall or bashing his head against it. After a while, he was finally able to put into words why he did it; it was to feel something that was familiar and within his control.
It didn't help that Tyler could talk to schoolmates, smooth as butter like it was second nature, and Kevin couldn't. People were alien to Kevin; he didn't get their little rituals, things Tyler could slip easily into. Add to that that Kevin wasn't book-smart, behind on the low amount of schoolwork they'd been given at Darkfilly Copse, and he had little going for him in this new life. He was unabashedly jealous of Tyler. "How do you tell if someone's making fun of you?" he'd ask, and Tyler would try his best to explain the little smile that meant it was a joke between you and them, and the sneakier smile that meant it was a joke you were excluded from; but Kevin could never conceptualise the difference, how it changed from face to face. Problem was, it was something you just knew, not something you learnt; so how could Tyler teach him?
It was a little easier, sometimes, when Kevin asked him for help with maths homework; but not a lot easier. Algebra clicked in Tyler's head in a way it didn't in Kevin's. "The X is standing in for something, and you've got to move things around to figure out what it's standing in for," he'd say, and Kevin would examine the paper and try to move the two across wholesale. "No, it's- it changes things when it goes across the equals sign, you have to make it negative," he'd say.
And Kevin stared at him, and said, "how'd you know?"
"It just... makes sense," Tyler would mutter.
And the emotions of puberty made it all worse, Tyler reckons; the rejection from peers, the loss of everything he knew- however bad- and the lack of prospects in life, not knowing where to go, feeling the need to escape again and find the glorious new life that was promised but wasn't found. Kevin slowly drew away, in ways Tyler tried to explain away. He wanted to make out in alleyways less and less; Tyler became the one to always grab his hand first; and although he always made it out, he smiled less and less, and the look on his face when he had to go home became more and more resigned.
They'd had conversations before. Kevin asking what there was, looking for some comfort, looking for an answer to the melancholy, and Tyler tried his best to promise that such a thing existed. That was the wrong move, he thinks these days. Maybe if he'd instead promised that there was no answer, but instead that living was at least more interesting than dying, that living provided a chance for anything at all to happen, that living gave one a chance of waking up one morning without that crushing weight on your chest, of perhaps eventually finding something that can make the melancholy go away for at least a little while. That no feeling is final, but death is. That you never, ever know what comes next unless you're there to see it, and even if it sucks, at least you saw it. The cruelty of the world will go on if you're dead, and all you'll stop is your own perception of it; all you'll cause is more of it.
Tyler didn't get a chance to say any of that.
In year ten, Tyler's English class watched the Shawshank Redemption as one of their texts for the year. It was a good movie, probably; Tyler didn't get as much chance to appreciate it as most of his classmates did. He had no problem with the prison, watching people mock the new kid, watching someone too smart for their own good get screwed over by circumstance. He felt it in his  bones, he saw himself there, but it wasn't hard to watch, at first.
The scenes where prisoners beat up the main character for not sucking their dick was a little hard to watch, but Tyler's two traumas on the front remained relatively unconnected; he could steel his jaw, and disconnect from the whole idea of it. That scene was harder for Nancy to watch.
But still, everyone in the classroom remembered Tyler staring at the screen, empty-faced and dull-eyed, and honestly, he doesn't remember doing it, but apparently he screamed and kicked the table and fainted all at once, and he woke up in the nurse's office with the taste of vomit in his mouth. It wasn't the sexual assault scene, wasn't fighting or the conditions or crawling through a mile of shit. It was nothing the main character did, nothing that happened to him.
It was depicted, a thing that sometimes happens in prisoners. People live there for years, and they get used to it. They may dream of getting out, may dream of a future, may even desire it; but the schedule, the routine, the familiarity, it grows to be all they know, all they can conceptualise. They know who they are in prison.
This character, he'd been in prison a long time; Tyler doesn't remember much about him, doesn't remember his name. He remembers the bird he had kept, the bird he'd raised in prison. Was that the same character? He'd come to find something he loved, while in prison, found someone to be. The routine was comforting, and even the horrible things he ate, or experienced, or saw, those things were part of home. They were part of who he was, and he'd made the best of it.
And then he got out. Suddenly, this man had had to work for a living; he was a grocer, and suddenly he had these new expectations. He was supposed to know what to do already. He was meant to have skills he didn't have, wasn't given in prison; he was meant to look after himself when he hadn't for years. Moreover, he was meant to learn how to live in a world so much bigger than the one he'd been accustomed to, so much wilder, with no support and no structure, the rules he'd learned unhelpful at best, harmful at worst. It could be so much better, but he didn't know how to get that value out of it. Nobody had taught him.
Everything he was in prison, he wasn't anymore, and he didn't know who he was.
So he hung himself.
And Tyler got an exemption from his Shawshank Redemption essay, because they all talked in class about what it must be like to leave such a specific environment and be thrust out into the world, and kids would raise their hands and say how they didn't understand that prisoner's actions like nobody who'd been imprisoned was in the room.
Like nobody in the room had seen a body swinging from a ceiling before.
Like it was nothing.
And after watching that Tyler had nightmares for weeks; which is nothing, because when it happened he had nightmares for months, still does. He'd see the scene play out, interchanging scenes and angles and experiences with Kevin, but the body was always Kevin, it always was.
The things we purport to be unexpected aren't always. Sometimes they creep up on us, and we just don't want to see them until they're right upon us. And sometimes this is true; Tyler would say, later, that he should've expected Kevin to kill himself. He got to a point where he could almost laugh at the absurdity of it, but it felt true. He probably should've expected it, and deep down he probably knew it was coming.
But there was absolutely nothing he could've done to expect it right that moment.
Usually they met out in the night together, but they'd go to each other's houses when they missed each other and they had nothing planned. Sometimes it was for sex, sometimes for a hug, sometimes for a laugh. Tyler didn't care which.
He'd climbed up the window, unlatched it from the outside as Kevin had shown him, focussing on the window. He'd climbed in, and halfway through he'd stopped, because his eyes had caught it.
Sometimes the world ends and you have to decide what to do about it.
Tyler tried to convince himself, first of all, that he wasn't too late; he jumped into denial, grabbing Kevin's legs and trying to push him up, but the very act of touching Kevin proved he was far, far too late, because Kevin was already stiff- no, his body was. Kevin wasn't there. Wherever he was- Tyler typically said nowhere, that you were gone when you were dead, but a small part of him hopes he'll meet Kevin again, so he won't commit- wherever Kevin was it wasn't in this body. Touching him proved that.
And Tyler fell back against the floor and screamed.
Every second felt like drawn out agony, and Tyler was left again with the same question he'd had when he came through the window: what do you do when the world ends?
Tyler couldn't decide what to do at all. He lay on the floor, staring and looking for proof that Kevin hadn't actually hung himself somehow, until Kevin's little sister finally burst through the door.
She screamed too. Tyler regretted screaming, regretted letting her see this.
It was his older sister who called the police, and an ambulance; she called before she'd seen what everyone was screaming about. Tyler wonders if Kevin's little sister regretted screaming, because that's what brought his older sister upstairs. Screaming. What a dumb response to this situation.
What do you do when the world ends? Scream, apparently.
Tyler has never recovered, not really.
His first instinct was to follow Kevin, to go wherever he went. To jump when he jumped. Nancy didn't leave his side for a week, and barely for weeks after that. It was that exact moment when Tyler realised how much he mattered to her, because there was genuine fear in her voice when she asked him if he was okay. She never had much to say about Kevin, before or after he killed himself, but she knew how much he cared. Tyler leaned pretty heavily on her after that.
Trey tried his best to be there for him, too, in his own way. He started doing as much of Tyler's chores as he could so Tyler didn't have to get out of bed. And Tyler's mum didn't bother him; she let him take weeks off school without asking many questions. Most support was quiet. What else was there to do?
The world had ended, after all. Everyone was trying to make it easier for him to transition to the post-apocalypse. It would never be easy.
Kevin's mum came up to him at the funeral and handed him a sealed envelope. "He wrote it to you," she said, "I haven't opened it."
He wanted to cry, but he didn't. He was so proud of himself for not bursting into tears the minute she spoke to him. He was so focused on not crying, and being proud of himself for such, that he forgot to thank her.
He was asked if he wanted to speak at the funeral. His initial response was to say no. He couldn't get up there to say anything, and anything he had to say was between him and Kevin. But he found himself writing a script, found himself repeating it to himself at night, and asked Kevin's mum if she'd change her mind.
There were supposed to be fun stories, but it was noticeable how many people couldn't come up with anything. Tyler felt like he was waiting for his turn at first, listening to people who didn't know Kevin like he did say things that were clearly grasped straws; how he'd made a joke in class one day, how he'd helped around the house or how he used to walk his sisters to school. Tyler's turn felt odd, and not quite real. For the first time he could kind of understand what Kali meant when she said she made herself smoke when life was hard. His body moved on its own; he could see from his own eyes, yet still he was not the person who moved and stood behind that podium. That was someone stronger than he was, who didn't cry when he looked out at the crowd. He was just a spectator.
And that person unfurled the speech in front of him, and as he began to read it Tyler waited for a moment, expecting this strong person to speak for him.
But in this life, especially now, Tyler was utterly alone.
Tyler remembers the script, mostly. It wasn't long, and he rehearsed it a lot in case he couldn't manage it. But he had managed his entire life.
Trey was there, and so was his mother. Kali should've been there, and so should Nancy, because even though she didn't know Kevin Tyler needed someone there. But she wasn't. So Tyler smiled at Trey, as fake as any smile could be, and began to speak.
"God, everyone's trying to say nice things," he says instead of the first things on his script. "A-and when I say that I mean everyone's trying to pretend that we didn't grow up in hell. The nice things they're saying about Kevin are true, but... this nice world they're trying to construct around him, that's not true."
He coughs. "Kevin and I, we grew up in hell. And the thing about hell, is it's... it's not hot. It's cold. It's getting kicked out of the house and left in the woods when you're six and it's winter in the mountains. It's the only hugs you get coming when you're running from a beating, or worse. You don't have many clothes that aren't worn thin and there's not many days of summer, and all the words you hear are about how you should be afraid of burning in hell and you should love the biting cold they give you because that's... because that's somehow better than burning. It's not better than burning."
Tyler closes his eyes for a moment, glad he read it so much. "Kevin was burning."
He can see him in his mind's eye, can pretend he's there. Kevin is here and Tyler is alright. "Kevin, you were... in the middle of frozen-over hell he was a flame that kept us warm. The not-so-nice stories about where we grew up reveal that. He burnt down a forest trying to get us out of there, once. I think that's the time I fell in love with him."
He doesn't look anyone in the eye except Kevin. "Kevin, I never told you that, I don't think. When I fell in love with you. Because I loved you for a lot longer than I said."
Open eyes, remembering who he's talking to. Back to his script. "And when we burnt down his father's shed- that's when he kissed me, you know. And we'd grown up surrounded by these messages that we deserved to burn in hell for that, but we were already in hell and it was so cold I wanted to burn."
"There was a lot of fire, because fire drove that cold away. Kevin drove that cold away. And he was so... he was good at it, but back at Darkfilly Copse, it was like it was his mission. He wanted to find a better life, and he wanted to take me with him. He wanted us to be happy."
Tyler can feel his eyes boiling and closes them. He remembers the rest, mostly. "He imagined how good life would be when we got out. He wanted so badly to get out, because he imagined that we'd be happy. But when we got out, he... he wasn't happy. And all he'd known to escape the sadness before was to get out."
When Tyler looks, he finds he's not the only one crying. "He was a good person," is all Tyler can get out now. "He didn't deserve to die. I love him so much."
He had more. He was going to talk about how great Kevin was, all of his good traits- but he couldn't get any more words out. He thinks his mum lead him off the podium. He's not sure how he got off.
He just remembers that Kevin's sister made eye contact with him at that last sentence, and they started sobbing at the same time.
Tyler remembers that he waited a long time to read the letter. Not weeks, or even days, but he was thinking about it from the moment it was given to him; he just didn't open it until that night, after saying he was going to go to sleep and waiting a good hour after that. He wasn't waiting for anything except the courage to open it.
He still didn't have that as he gingerly opened it up. It wasn't a long letter, but it was everything. It was misspelled in a lot of places, and the grammar was bad, things Tyler typically corrects in his memories of it- but aside from that, he has the gist of it memorised, he's read it so many times.
Dear Tyler,
You were the reason I waited so long to do this. I kept wondering if you'd be okay when I was gone, and I was so worried that if I died you'd want to die too. So don't. I'm going to never forgive you if you die, too.
I felt when we were younger like it would be all okay once we were out, and it seemed like it was for you. It wasn't for me. I feel so heavy all the time, and everything feels as bad as it felt at home, it feels worse even. Everything that's meant to bring you joy hurts me. I hang out with friends and I feel like none of them are listening to me. I watch stuff and I just feel empty. The world is still really shit in a lot of places and if all the places where it's better are still so painful to be in, I don't see the point.
But I don't think the world is so wrong. I just think I'm broken. You seem so much happier now and you've got friends you care about and a life you like living. I'm broken, I can't be happy, but you can, and I'm just dragging you down.
I don't think I'll ever be happy. I was disappointed in the world and I'm so scared that if we have the life we talk about I'll be disappointed in that too. I don't wanna be disappointed. I want it to be as beautiful as it is in my head, so it's got to stay in my head.
I love you. I'll see you again if there's an afterlife, and if there isn't you'll be happier without me. You'll say it's not true but I know it is.
I love you.
-Kevin