Chapter Text
When Tk was 6 he begged his dad to teach him how to ride a bike. Most of his friends had known how to ride one for years, and Tk hadn’t cared -he lived in a New York apartment, bikes weren’t exactly a necessity- but he was starting to go out with his friends more now that his parents’ work took over their whole lives, and walking the streets of New York kind of sucked.
Owen never did, always insisting he was busy with work, couldn’t get the time off, ‘soon Tyler, promise.’ But soon never came, and eventually Tk just gave up waiting. He was a stubborn kid, always determined to get what he wanted, and so one afternoon, several weeks after his eleventh birthday, he grabbed the toolbox from under the sink, forced the old, barely used training wheels off and walked the now slightly beaten bike 10 minutes to the park from their apartment, pushing it the whole way.
When he got there the sun was already starting to set, but Tk continued anyways, getting on the seat and putting both his feet on the peddles. The first half hour was filled with falling off almost instantly, carelessly swerving to one side and scraping his hands raw, but eventually he managed to go more than a minute without toppling, and then further, until he was starting to pick it up. He was laughing to himself wildly as he rode across the park's paths, smiling at the thought of being able to hang out with his friends more now, not noticing the broken branch on the path. The wheel came to an immediate stop as it hit the branch, not managing to make it over as the front wheel stopped and the bike tipped forward, throwing Tk off.
He barely managed to react as he pulled his hands up to try and cushion the fall some. His hands hit the concrete first, followed by his head, and he lay there silently for a few moments taking the situation in before he immediately rolled over and pushed himself from the floor. Tk was hurting, a lot, but it was pretty dark now, and there was no way he would manage to ride the bike back to the apartment, and so he pulled it from the floor after himself and started to push as he walked home.
He dumped the bike in the doorway after having hauled it up all of the stairs -of course the stupid lift was broken- and dragged his aching body to his room, flopping in bed without even taking his shoes off as he fell asleep instantly.
He woke up several days later. He was confused at first, everything felt weird, he wasn’t wearing the clothes he had been in, and this definitely wasn’t his bed, but when his eyes opened, he saw his mother slouched in a chair by his bedside, and the painfully bright white of a hospital room and groaned lowly. Her head snapped up at the sound, and she sat forwards as she looked him over carefully. “You gave us a real scare honey.”
He hadn’t gone to sleep, but had passed out, his mom explained to him later. She arrived home late and tried to wake him for him to change and eat, but upon realising he wasn’t waking up no matter how much she shook him (and getting over her initial panic), she called 9-1-1 and he was taken to the hospital. It was a concussion, a bad one to keep him unconscious for several days, but with some rest and many watchful doctors he would be fine.
“He always has been an accident-prone kid.” He heard his father say to his mother over the phone when she told him what had happened.
He pretended it didn’t hurt that his dad never even visited him.