Tyed - Chapter 54: Chapter 54

They don't really speak that night, and the morning isn't tense per se- it's just that constant feeling between them of things unsaid, but a touch stronger than usual. Tyler kisses him and narrowly bites his tongue on words of love, before being dropped off at home and promising himself, silently, that he'd sleep in his own bed tonight. His own bed, that was starting to feel alien. It was certainly cold.
Tyler walks into the kitchen in yesterday's clothes, not even noticing that his collar is around his neck (he doesn't remember when he put it on), heading straight for the coffee pot without paying attention to who else is in the kitchen. He reaches for it, to realise it's not sitting where it usually is.
He turns and Chappie is standing in his kitchen. Tyler connects the dots a little slowly, nods, and pats Chappie on the shoulder. He's dressed, at least, in his black uniform, although he is barefoot. At least Tee got home alright. Presumably.
"Were you looking for something?" Chappie asks, as though the situation isn't odd to him. Tyler supposes he's reacting the same way.
"I'll just get coffee later," Tyler says, instead taking an apple from the fruit basket on the other side of the bench. "Have a good day."
He walks out into the hallway, passing the living room, in which he sees a stiff-backed Shouto in front of the TV, next to an equally stiff Nancy staring at her phone. He stops and leans into the room.
"Everything alright?" he asks.
Shouto looks at him, and Nancy tilts her head like she heard him, but doesn't stop reading whatever's on her phone. Shouto says, "I'm alright."
"Are you actually?" Tyler raises his eyebrows.
"Yes, legitimately. I'm just on edge with strangers in my house," he says, but when he meets Tyler's eyes properly there's a sincerity in them as he says, "but I don't have the problem you may think I do."
Tyler takes a few steps into the room, and now Nancy's looking up, but watching this before she speaks. "What problem do you think- that I think?"
Shouto sighs. "I'm fully of the opinion that people should be able to do whatever they like. I struggle to empathise, perhaps, and I don't personally enjoy strange people in my kitchen, but I don't judge your choices or think you're wrong for making them."
Tyler had kind of assumed that Shouto didn't think he was doing the right thing, but he attributed no malice to it. "Why're you saying this now?"
Nancy answers him instead. "You haven't been home much recently, that's all. But I did try to tell him..."
Tyler finishes her sentence. "It's not that I don't want to be around you. It's just that I want to be with Colby. You haven't been one of our friends as long as anyone else, so you don't... remember Kevin, and what I was like with him."
It's so much easier to say his name than it was yesterday. Like Colby carried a portion of the weight now. Tyler feels inexplicable guilt for that.
Shouto shrugs. "As long as you know I don't judge."
"Thank you," Tyler says, words hanging loosely in his mouth. Nancy looks like she wants to say something, and the knowledge of what she's about to bring up pulls him back to her. His mouth is dry, and he can taste anticipation before she says a thing.
"Sorry," Nancy says to Shouto, "but I asked Kali if she had time to meet me in real life. We haven't actually, like, met, so I didn't want to just invite her over, because you know, don't meet people on the internet at their house. But she told me the building she's starting her new job at, and she told me it's okay to meet her there when she finishes at three. So, if you want to..."
Tyler takes a deep breath and nods. "Does she know I'll be there?"
Nancy bites her lip. "I haven't mentioned you besides sending that picture, which she... didn't really react to. I'm not sure she actually saw it. So I don't know? My best guess is that she either didn't recognise you, didn't look, or..."
"She's probably just not sure it's me," Tyler mutters. Probably. Hopefully. "Do you think it would be bad to just... show up, without warning her?"
"She was your best friend," Nancy says, "you tell me."
If Tyler ran into her suddenly, he'd probably laugh, cry, he doesn't even know. He still doesn't know how to feel now. Would she even recognise him? Would he just be a reminder of the hell she grew up in, rather than a comfort?
"I don't know," Tyler tells her truthfully. "It depends on how she's changed. But I don't know how else to do it. We could warn her, but..."
Selfishly, he wanted to see her first reaction. He wanted to know exactly what crossed her face the moment she realised he was still... Alive.
"I don't know," he repeats instead. "I'd rather just show up, and I think if we warn her and she doesn't want to see me..."
Shouto is silent through this. He knows it's not his business, and he'll probably ask Nancy about it later, seeing the vulnerability on Tyler's face and hearing it in his voice. Tyler's fine with that. He doesn't feel like repeating his past again out loud, that's all. He's not sure if Shouto ever heard about Kali. He doesn't suspect he remembers.
He goes and naps instead of doing the hard work of thinking about all of this.
Nancy wakes him up with enough time to get dressed in something else, and gently points out the collar. Tyler thanks her and tries not to be too embarrassed. She's the closest thing he has to an older sister, despite the fact that she's younger than him. Well, the closest thing to an older sister, other than his mother.
And so they take the train and Tyler wants to vomit the whole time. Colby had texted him while he was asleep, and Tyler texts him the latest information; Nancy teases him on the train about not being able to take his mind off Colby, although her face falls after he looks at her with complete seriousness and she apologises with her eyes, changing the conversation very quickly to something about the movie she watched last night instead of anything involving his heart.
It's so risky, this. It should be easy, should be good, it should be a relief to know she's alive. But selfishly, all Tyler can think about is what's going to happen if it doesn't go well for him.
It's sad to think that he needed to be worried about whether or not she was even alive.
And worse, he's going to have to tell her that Kevin isn't.
————
The biggest search for Kali took place right after Kevin's death. Tyler had searched and searched before that, plugging her name into every social media and search engine he could find. Now he knows what the one thing he had to do was, but it never occurred to a teenager in grief, nor any of his friends.
The night after the funeral, Trey had helped him build a pillow fort. In the living room, where their mother didn't often let them do such things. Trey wasn't far off adulthood then, and building a pillow fort wasn't something they had been able to do as kids. But when Tyler kicked off his shoes and slumped on the floor, Trey had put a pillow under his head and started moving chairs so that he could stretch blankets over them.
It was wordless, but Nancy, who was there because she refused to leave his side (and nobody had the heart to make her), had thrown fluffy blankets over Tyler on the floor, and dragged a lamp into their little camp as it was being made. Tyler was still crying, and he kept thinking of how alone he was. He'd muttered, "never fall in love," words he hopes neither of them heard.
Sitting in that little camp with Trey and Nancy, he hadn't felt so alone. He's not sure how Trey knew this would help; he didn't think he did, but the idea had worked. It reminded Tyler of that boat, of that fire, of that day. Trey was there, and Nancy had earned her place at his side; Kevin was gone forever, but there was one place that maybe, maybe...
"I need to tell her," he muttered. "That he's gone."
"Who?" Nancy had asked, and Tyler had been struck with a sudden burst of energy. It was adrenalin, running on empty, the boost you get when you're dying and you just need this one thing to save you. Tyler felt it, death coming for him, felt this one last thing that could maybe, just maybe, bring him back from the brink.
"Kali," he said. "I need to find Kali."
"We can look again tomorrow," Nancy had offered softly, reaching out as though to touch him, but thinking better of it.
"Now," he'd said, "I can do it, we can find her. Let's look."
And Trey had begun to stutter words he didn't say, and instead, just pulled out his tablet and brought up Facebook again.
"Well," Nancy said, a sigh very well hidden in her words, "where haven't we looked?"
"Ke- I was found from school da-school data." Tyler choked unexpectedly on tears that were still there, ignored now. "I didn't know how he did it but he did so we could."
Tyler spent half an hour trying to search government websites, downloading census data, and he actually found quite a bit more than he expected. He was able to find children fostered in the past few years, locked into a deep part of a government website on baby names. He found two girls named Kali, but both were in other states. He triangulated their last names anyway and had Trey and Nancy look them up on social media; it wasn't her. He checked arrests records just in case she'd gotten into trouble, and he was able to find a patient list that had accidentally been uploaded in a corner of the Children's Hospital website; she wasn't there. He searched social media, not just for profiles with her name, but for any mention of the name Kali at all, by anyone, and for hours he scrolled through posts about nothing important and wanted to cry, quite often doing so. He was constantly on the verge of what felt like death. There could not be anything worse than that feeling. A large pit, a bowling ball in his chest that tore him down and ripped a hole in him; there is nothing now and he will never fill it. His grief did not grow smaller. He grew around it to make it seem like it had shrunk. And in that moment, that black hole beckoned him, and he scrolled looking for a hopeful face that would bring him hope he wouldn't actually be able to feel just so he wouldn't fall backwards into that hole.
He didn't find her.
And now he doesn't know what to do now that he has found her.