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Tyler’s mother was dying.
He was only five, but he knew the truth. As much as adults liked to lie to his face, he could see how his mom would forget where she was, how she couldn’t get out of bed as much as she should. Then she’d disappear for weeks at a time. Then those weeks turned into months.
She missed his sixth birthday. She never missed his birthday.
“Not now, Tyler,” his dad snapped. He’d only gotten angrier the longer his mom was away. He’d stopped talking to Tyler unless he was forced to a long time ago.
Tyler felt the anger bubble up inside him and leak through his ears as his father tried to walk away.
“Where is she!” he shouted, his fists clenched at his sides. His foot itched to stomp, but he knew it would only make him look childish and this was too important.
“I don’t have time for this—”
“No!” Tyler ran up to him and pulled at his arm, trying and failing to stop his dad from walking down the hall to disappear into his room again.
“Tyler!”
“I want her!”
“She’s busy!”
“No, she’s not! You’re lying!”
“Enough!”
His dad threw Tyler off of him, knocking him into the wall and crashing multiple photos onto the ground. Tyler cried out in pain. Glass broke underneath him as he fell to his knees.
“Fuck,” he heard distantly, but his head hurt too much to fully understand it.
A hand pulled him up, but it only made Tyler whine as his vision spun and blood poured into his eye. He tried to shove his dad off him, but he was too strong, and they were moving.
Tyler bit him, only to fall as his dad cursed loudly enough to hurt his ears, tossing him off again.
Tyler didn’t really know what happened next. He had blurry memories of pain and something wrong with his body before the world got smaller and his dad got quiet. His senses grew sharper, his anger multiplied like it was all coming out at once.
Tyler would have thought it was a nightmare if the house wasn’t destroyed the next day and his father wasn’t taken in for questioning.
Deemed incompetent for outcast guardianship. That’s what the official lady told him a few days later. Tyler was too busy trying to wrap his mind around his mother being locked up and his life being a lie to really think about his dad as he was put onto a list and made to sleep at a stranger’s house for a week.
He hated everything while he waited for somebody to tell him anything, or to see his mom. He didn’t care that she wouldn’t be able to talk to him or understand that he was even there. He missed her, and he didn’t know what else to do.
The other children left him alone. The adults avoided him whenever possible. They were afraid of him, he knew, but he didn’t care. They were all stupid and mean anyways. They weren’t his family and they weren’t his friends.
His mother died three weeks after he became a hyde.
It was the first time he’d seen his father since the accident. Tyler didn’t know what to say to him, but it didn’t matter. His dad couldn’t even glance in his direction the entire time.
Tyler stared at the freshly buried grave, lost in his thoughts as his foster parent waited just out of sight.
“Tyler Galpin?” a girl asked timidly, startling him completely. He could feel his eyes bulge momentarily as his heart jumped and then settled.
“Sorry,” she winced. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s fine,” he said hollowly.
The girl was his age, he thought. He wasn’t very good at guessing those kinds of things, but she was his height and she had bright blond hair with sparkly barrettes tying her bangs back. Black, for the funeral, but undoubtedly cute.
“Are you though?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
The next thing he knew, he had his arms full of her as she pounced on him, squeezing her arms around his middle with a shocking amount of strength.
“I’m Enid,” she said without letting go, “and I’m going to be your sister.”
Tyler had stiffened at the initial assault, but the longer she held him in her vice grip, the warmer she felt and for the first time in weeks, he felt something other than apathy or anger. Tyler awkwardly lifted his arms, wrapping them around her and squeezed back. He knew he was holding her too tightly. He didn’t know how to control his strength.
He soon realized that he had buried his nose in her hair and had been sniffing her intently for a while. Mortified, he tried to pull away.
Enid just hummed like he gave good hugs and didn’t let him escape. Instead, she mirrored him like this was normal until he relaxed into it. They stayed like that until her mother pried them apart five minutes later.
Tyler was later told that he wasn’t going back to his foster home. He’d been given to an old classmate of his mother’s. Esther Sinclair was the alpha of a pack in California, and she was supposed to be able to handle something like him.
Now that his mother was dead, Tyler wasn’t really interested in sticking around Jericho anyways.