Tylon was shy when we were small. I don't think people remember that about him now, or if they do they've filed it somewhere they don't look. But I was there. I remember him at the back of the group on missions, behind shoulders broader than his, trying to take up less space than he occupied. I recognised it. I was doing the same thing from a different angle.
Then the testing happened. And he came back from it different, and then a bit more different, and then one day I looked across the dinner table and realised I didn't know what expression he was going to make next because there wasn't going to be one.
I don't know exactly what they did. I never asked and I don't think he would have told me. What I know is that the father sent a shy, timid child into a room and got something considerably more useful back out, and whatever it cost Tylon to become that, the cost was paid without anyone asking if he could afford it.
He left first. Before any of us. No letter, no goodbye, nothing taken. I've thought about that often — the nothing taken. I took my journal and a photograph and everything I'd saved. He walked out of that house like it had never contained anything of his.
I sent letters in the first year. I told myself it was just to check in, which was true, and also that I thought he might write back, which was — optimistic. He didn't. The letters stopped eventually. I don't know if he burned them or just didn't open them.
There's a version of what the father's testing does to a person that looks like what happened to me, and a version that looks like what happened to Tylon. I think about the distance between those two outcomes more than I'd like to admit. What was different. Whether it was luck or something in the mechanism, or whether there's still something in Tylon underneath all of it that just hasn't found a way out yet.
The underground fighting. The burning letters. The manic gleam someone mentioned seeing in his eyes.
I don't know what I'm going to find when I see him. I know I'm going to look for the boy at the back of the group, and I know I probably won't find him, and I know that's going to cost me something regardless.