Ty finished his day at RiseX with a sour taste in his mouth.
'What did I do to deserve this?'
He shakes his head, waiting under the Northside bus stop shelter.
A low rumble cracks in the sky, and he tilts his head up to look through the clear shelter roof to better hear it. With the overcast looming above, it's hard to tell if it's the rumble of thunder or a plane passing unseen through the dark clouds. These clouds are fuzzy patches of every shade of grey clustered together like mold, as if Ty's apartment walls were hanging above his head.
This sight only worsens his foul mood, sour uneasiness spinning into nausea in his stomach.
He feels suffocated. Heavy silver eyes fall to his hands, and the cellular device they hold.
His fingers fumble and trace across the ridges and corners of the phone, a RiseX welcome gift from the previous Sales Executive.
'This is no good.'
He flips the phone over and unlocks it, scrolling through his contacts.
Bill Crest of Crest Supplies
Diana Price of Kingsfield Education Ltd.
Donna Martin of SC Industries
Big names of clients he secured in his three years at RiseX Solutions, big names of clients stolen from him, big names of clients he's been fired for. It fills his very hands on the phone with anger knowing that with that snake Dominique, that crude boyfriend Renzo, and that truth-deaf Hartley, there's nothing he can do.
Madame Buffant of Vivid Theatre Productions
Nothing but this.
His thumb hesitates over the screen, just for a moment, before pressing it.
A bus screeches to a halt in front of the bus shelter and he steps on, bringing the phone to his ear. The vehicle drives as he takes an empty seat, listening to the device's dialling hum.
A high-pitched voice chirps in his ear.
"Yes, hello?"
He clears his throat.
"Madame Buffant? Hi, it's Ty Walters from RiseX Solutions."
"Oh, Ty! How have you been my dear?"
"Good, good."
"You know, that lighting equipment of yours has been just as marvellous as you said it'd be! Heavens, the only thing that could make it better would be your gorgeous hair shimmering under its light!"
"W-well, actually...!"
In less than five minutes, a position was secured under Madame Marianne Buffant of Vivid Theatre Productions.
He lets out a dry laugh in his bus seat that makes a couple respectable working-class individuals scoot away from him.
'Is this... pretty privilege?'
No matter what is was, he'd take it. He dealt with the Falcon Raiders, and now he's secured an income to support Eve again.
Everything is going to be just fine.
As if in emphasis of this testament, when he makes it to St. Bernadette, Eve's precious face is full of brilliant rose-coloured joy.
Ty gives her hair a ruffle, feeling its white softness slip across his scarred palm.
"Want to hear a new story about the white rabbit, brown hare, and a fox?"
The little girl shakes tiny fistfuls of hospital sheets up and down.
"Tie, tie, tie!"
"Wh- EVE, THAT'S RIGHT!"
In one fell swoop he scoops her up and holds her giggling body over his head.
"Ty! That's me, your brother!"
Dominique and Renzo all but forgotten, the day had shaped up to be another blessing towards his life. The third gift Carnelian City had given him.
An extension of this miracle was that even his check-in with crabby Barry later that night felt rather pleasant.
Sitting on the floor in Barry's bedroom while fixing the makeshift wheelchair he built the man, Ty wipes a bead of sweat off his brow.
"Eve said her first word today."
Barry, sitting all bandaged up on his bed, scratches his salt-and-pepper hair.
"What'd she say?"
Ty can't keep the joy out of his silver eyes.
"My name."
The old man grunts with a grin.
"Not bad. An' ya got that job with the flashy show lady? Stuffs turnin' round, ain't it, kid?"
He smiles.
"Yeah."
Barry's wrinkled and freckled hand is dropped on Ty's head.
Silver eyes widen in surprise.
Barry ruffles Ty's hair the way he had to Eve.
"Hair of'a ruffian. You need a cut."
Barry grunts once more before taking his hand off Ty's head, which turns to the side to hide a smile that snuck onto his face.
Ty scratches his neck, returning his gaze to the wooden wheelchair between his legs. In a comfortable silence, he goes back to his repairs.
He fashioned this makeshift wheelchair from odd scattered parts. The wheelchair seat is the old wooden chair that used to hide behind the shop's cash. Extra wood was taken from the fish crates the Falcon Raiders broke, cut down into support beams for the thin metal hinges made from spare copper pipes of a water supply line Barry never got around to fixing. Random metal screws further bound the contraption, but being far-from-flawless in execution, many of the joints have to be held together with waterproof duct tape Barry uses to fix his fishing rods.
What gave Ty the most trouble, though, were the wheels; Barry's cluttered fish shop had many things, but wheels were not one of them. He searched the junk-cluttered alleyways around the shop and found some on an abandoned baby stroller in a dumpster, but he couldn't take them. He ran and vomited against a wall, then decided to fashion the wheels from his spare crate wood and leftover sandpaper.
As the fishing crate wood was very thin, he had to sand many wooden shards into circles, overlay them and bind them together with nails in the center, then give the collection of disks a final smooth sand-down before attaching the makeshift wheel to the makeshift wheelchair. This had to be done four times, to make each wheel, and if Barry rolled around too much, Ty noticed they would buckle against each other and splinter.
Which leads to his current repairs, hence him sitting on the ground of Barry's bedroom, with the wheelchair on its side before him, sanding down and smoothing out a wheel. Though, if this cycle continues much longer, he'll have to make new ones altogether. It certainly isn't an ideal situation.
As he rubs the rough sand paper back and forth over the wood, small wooden fibers scatter across his hands and burn in the broken skin around his knuckles, but he hardly notices.
When Ty makes it to the last wheel, gruff Barry clears his throat.
"Say, boy, what's a good person?"
Ty stops mid-rub, and wipes another small sweat off his brow.
"Where'd that come from?"
Barry's thick eyebrows frown.
"Humor a bored, bed-ridden ol' man."
Ty rolls his eyes, but gives it some thought as he continues running the sand paper back and forth.
"Well… a good person is someone that is kind and compassionate. Someone that helps others when they're in need, and protects the things they love."
"An' what's a bad person?"
Ty's muscles tense, his hand faltering over the sandpaper's exterior. Barry's words the other night flood into his mind.
'Murderers. That's what yer so scared of, ain't it? I want to ask why, boy, but I won't. That don't mean... I don't want you to tell me.'
He rubs the sandpaper again.
"Murderers."
Barry's eyes hidden behind wrinkles widen every so slightly.
Ty continues.
"Someone that hurts others, and takes what isn't theirs. Someone that kills things."
Barry's voice deepens.
"Murder, eh. The root of yer fear."
Finished smoothing out the last wheel, Ty sets the sandpaper down on the floor.
"You could…maybe…say that."
"Yer not wrong, boy. Of course yer not. But ain't yous a bit one-sided? Good folks protect things, and bad folks kill things, you say, yeah? How 'bout a soldier killing others to protect his country an' loved ones? Is he a bad person for his actions, or a good person for his reasons?"
Ty opens his mouth, but he doesn't quite know what to say.
"I was a soldier once, boy. Am I a bad person?"
Ty can't find a single word, as if a can of white paint was dumped over his brain.
"I killed hundreds of men to protect my wife, Kate."
Ty shakes his head slowly, but doesn't even understand why he does it.
"I killed so I wouldn't come home to find 'er body in a pile after a raid, or a nuke, or a full-blown attack. I killed so I could see 'er smile when I got home, instead. That's a selfish goal, ain't it, son? She died, in the end, 'fore I moved to Carnelian, but it was 'cause of old age. 'Cause I was able to preserve her smile for as long as possible. So I don't regret killing. That's wrong, o'course. Who'm I to take the life of another for my selfish goal? I'm a monster. But if there was something I could do to protect Kate for even just a little longer, I'd do it. Good and bad didn't matter 'cause I had the only thing that really did. An' with an attitude like that I could preserve my soul, so I could come home an' greet her with a smile too. Man… was I ever in love."
Barry's eyes fall heavy on Ty, and then dart away.
"Merely the mutterings of an ol' man close to death. I'm ramblin' too much."
The old man pauses.
"But at least, yer too focused on black an' white to see the world for what it is, grey in all shades, like this damn overcast today. Some folks do bad things for good reasons. Even those Falcon Raiders, they got mouths to feed. Their actions are cruel, and their reason don't justify it. But they ain't bad people, they're humans like the rest o' us. Or monsters like the rest o' us. 'Cause people are just people, and bad things can be a means, not an end."
Ty's fallen silver eyes could have bore holes into the wooden wheels.
'If murder is a means, not an end, then the universe has been carefully using it to make my life a living hell.'
This statement becomes even more true when he stands in front of Hartley, who sits behind his new vintage desk, dead.