Start the song. It's Maple Hill by Rosie Diamond. This song does mention using heroin, so don't listen if you'll be triggered!

Tyler was relieved to see that Zack's car was still at his house when he got there. He'd had to drive around town a few times to get his head on straight after meeting Josh. Josh. No part of Josh seemed capable of hurting another person. He was sweet and shy and guarded and clearly so desperate for someone to just tell him he deserved to be happy and mean it. Tyler had meant it. He still meant it.

He hurried up the front steps to his house before disappearing inside, kicking his shoes off and hanging up his coat as he peeked into the living room. The couch Zack had been on was empty. Tyler frowned, walking through the living room and into the kitchen. He stopped in the doorway, his chest instantly feeling heavy for a multitude of reasons.

First, Zack, Tatum, P, Maddy, and Maddy's little daughter were all sitting on the floor in the kitchen. Tatum was entertaining P and Mia with toys, making the little girls giggle as she made a stuffed rhinoceros give them kisses on their chubby little cheeks. Zack and Maddy, however, were hard at work examining and discussing a pile of documents sitting between them beside a mostly empty pizza box.

Second, right beside Maddy's thigh was a stack of framed photos that had once hung on his living room wall and sat on the dresser in his bedroom. They'd gotten the photos back. He had them back.

Third, as soon as P noticed him in the doorway, she smiled widely at him with her tiny new teeth and reached her arms up for him to pick her up. No one noticed he was there until he complied, lifting his little niece up and kissing her chubby cheek as she babbled excitedly at him.

Mia reached for him too, smiling just as brightly with a few more teeth as she exclaimed, "Ty Ty!"

Tyler scooped her up too, making the babies giggle when he hugged them both tightly. His siblings looked relieved to see him, and Tatum smiled warmly at him.

"You got the pictures back," Tyler observed quietly.

"Maddy did," Zack corrected. "I called her and told her they'd been taken, so she drove to Jenna's mom's house and got them back."

"I brought Mia so I wouldn't be tempted to beat the shit out of her," Maddy added, reaching a hand out to Tyler. "Come sit. Let me hug you, and then you need to eat some pizza. You're too skinny."

"You sound like Mom," Tyler told her as he set the babies back down beside Tatum before sitting down beside his sister.

Since a lack of emotional awareness ran in the gene pool, Maddy's hug was an awkward one-armed squeeze that lasted for half a second and ended with an uncomfortable pat on the back. Then a piece of pizza was being shoved into his hand, and his sister was back to marking up a form with a yellow highlighter.

Zack offered Tyler a brief and somewhat uncertain smile before he was back to work too. It was more than he'd gotten from them in a while, but it still made his chest feel hollow. Tatum laughed.

"You're both robots," she told Zack and Maddy before reaching over to hug Tyler properly. He hugged her back tightly, relief washing over him instantly. "I'm glad you're home safe. Do you think you'll be able to handle staying here tonight? You always have a place to stay at our house if you need it."

"I think I'll be okay," Tyler told her, not quite sure how much he believed those words but saying them anyway. "How exactly did you convince her to give the pictures back?" Tyler asked his sister as he handed a pepperoni to Mia, who had opened her mouth expectantly as soon as she realized he was holding food.

Maddy chuckled. "I'm not sure if you want to know that, dude. I didn't break any laws or anything, if that's what you're worried about. Plus, Mia was there, so I couldn't have done anything crazy even if I wanted to. That's partially why I brought her."

"The other reason being...?" Tyler asked curiously.

His sister smiled as she looked up from the paperwork to meet his gaze. "Because as soon as I said I was coming over here, she went over to the door and pulled her shoes on. She had no intention of letting me come see you without her."

Tyler smiled, looking over at his niece gratefully. She grinned right back, maintaining her smile for about two seconds before reaching for his pizza again and whining. He laughed, pulling off another pepperoni and popping it into her little mouth. She smiled contentedly as she chewed it up.

"In case you're wondering how significant that is," Zack said as he turned the page of the document he was reading, "she had no fucking clue who I was when I got here, and she sees me pretty much every day. If I wasn't P's dad, P would probably do the same thing. These girls love you, dude. You're their favourite."

"I love them too," Tyler replied easily before finally taking a bite of his slice of pizza. He didn't feel even remotely hungry, but he ate it anyway. "Did you yell at Jenna?" He asked his sister curiously.

Maddy hummed, smiling slightly. "Nope. No yelling. I did call her a spineless bitch and tell her that I would force you to sue the shit out of her if she tried to steal anything else from your house in front of her mom though. I don't think she'd told her mom why you guys split up, so her mom looked really fucking shocked. I don't regret it though. She had to find out at some point that her daughter is a monster."

Tyler's eyebrows raised in surprise as he listened to Maddy's brief summary of the night. "Wow. Okay. So does her mom know what really happened, or does she just think my family is full of crazy people?"

"Both," Maddy replied easily.

Zack smirked. "Tell him how you told her mom what happened."

Maddy was grinning deviously now, but she still kept her eyes on the papers spread out in front of her. "Oh. I should probably apologize in advance before I even tell you, and I should probably...." Maddy leaned over and covered Mia's ears while Tatum covered P's as well. "I told her I'm relieved that my brother knows he deserves more than some loser who can't hold down a job, tell the truth, or survive without a dick inside of her at all times. When her mom tried to interrupt me, I told her that I'm looking forward to finding out which of the five hundred men Jenna's slept with will be the father of her next grandchild. I could hear her mom yelling at her while we brought all these pictures back out to my car. Her mom is definitely siding with you."

Tyler sighed instead of laughing along, making Maddy's eyes shoot up with instant worry. As much as Tyler appreciated his sister standing up for him, he didn't want to cause a divide of any kind in Jenna's family. They'd always been really kind and supportive of him and of each other, and he didn't want to rob Jenna of that safety net.

"I can apologize to her mom," Maddy offered quietly, rapidly trying to resolve the situation before they had to go into much emotional detail about it.

Tyler shook his head tiredly, watching P crawl across Zack's paperwork and into her father's lap. The usually stoic and unemotional man smiled cheerfully, wrapping his daughter up in his arms and kissing the top of her head. She smiled widely up at Zack, babbling to him cheerfully.

"It's okay. Thanks for looking out for me," Tyler replied after a beat, offering his sister a half-hearted smile.

His sister hesitated before nodding and smiling back uncertainly. "Yeah. Sure. Anytime."

Tyler didn't contribute much to the conversation after that. He let Zack and Maddy troubleshoot their current cases together, too naturally closed off for anything truly confidential to slip past their lips as they spoke. P fell asleep in Zack's lap as he worked, only leaving Tyler and Tatum to care for Mia. Tatum didn't ask any personal questions or try to make him feel pressured to speak. She just allowed him to be distracted from everything weighing him down for a while as he busied himself with keeping his little niece entertained.

After a few moments, Tatum asked Tyler to watch Mia alone for a minute while she went out to get some things from her car. He agreed easily, already having a lapful of Mia as she started to doze off in his arms. It was getting to be too late for babies to be awake, but Tyler was grateful that they were at least here. They were a welcome distraction. He heard Tatum leave the house and come back in a couple times, but he couldn't leave the kitchen to see what she was doing without waking up Mia, so he stayed where he was.

When Tatum finally came back into the kitchen, she had P's little white blanket with tiny images of strawberries scattered across it. She handed it to her husband, who carefully wrapped it around their sleeping daughter before returning to his work. She didn't explain her prolonged absence to Tyler, simply sitting beside him once again and watching her husband work.

Tyler's family stayed at his house until about ten o'clock, when they really and truly couldn't justify keeping their little ones away from their beds any longer. Maddy and Zack both gave Tyler half hugs and mumbled "call me if you need me" before departing. Tatum hugged Tyler tightly before looking him in the eye and telling him, "We love you so much. The key is always under the mat if you decide you want to stay with us for one more night, and we're always happy to see you."

"Thanks," Tyler told them all quietly before watching them leave the kitchen and hearing the front door close behind them.

He stared at the pile of framed photos for a moment, trying to remind himself that he wouldn't last the night here if he looked at them right now. Seeing the empty spaces on the wall might be painful, but seeing himself smiling beside Jenna after everything she'd done would absolutely destroy him. He forced himself to take a deep breath and walk past the photos on his way to the living room. He stopped when he reached it, tears flooding his eyes immediately as he looked at the spaces where the photos used to hang.

In their place were pieces of printer paper containing tiny handprints. His nieces' names were written beside the little paintings. Above them were framed photos of his nieces, him and his siblings as children, and even one of a preschool-aged Tatum dressed as Jessie from Toy Story. There was another piece of printer paper in the center of it all that said in his sister's handwriting, "Don't settle for anyone who loves you less than we do."

Tyler closed his eyes and drew in a shaky breath to steady himself. He wrapped his arms around himself tightly, wishing desperately for someone else to hug him instead. He knew his family loved him. He did. He just needed someone to physically be here to remind him of that, and his family was bad at that even when they were around. This was the one way they felt comfortable showing him how much they loved him though, and that meant more to him than he could ever express.

The hallway to Tyler's bedroom was lined with more pictures of him and his family from the time Zack was born until Maddy's graduation. Not a single photograph contained Jenna, but he was smiling in all of them. He tried to keep that in mind as he walked past the foreign new bed his parents had bought him and into his bathroom. He took a shower so hot that the water turned his skin bright red before changing into sweats, brushing his teeth, and returning to his empty bedroom.

He stared at the bed for a moment before slowly approaching it. No matter how hard he tried to will himself to just climb into it and go to sleep, he couldn't. He couldn't even touch the mattress. Despite his mother's attempts to keep him from doing so, Tyler grabbed his pillow and dropped it on the floor. He took the comforter off as well before spreading it out on the carpet.

He climbed into his makeshift bed, accepting without hesitation that he wasn't going to sleep comfortably tonight. He wasn't ready to sleep on a new bed. He wasn't ready to accept that his was his life now. It was easier to slip back into the post-Kennedy routine of sleeping on the floor, forcing himself to eat despite not being hungry, and telling his family that he could handle this when he couldn't. Tyler had survived this once before. He'd only barely scraped by, but at least he had a road map now. He was going to survive this in the same way he'd survived that. There was no alternative.

After hours of struggling to fall asleep, Tyler slipped into a strange dream. The dream felt too soothing for him to register how strange it should have been though. It was the kind of dream that didn't feel like a dream at all, and it provided Tyler with a sense of peace. He was lying atop his new bed with his feet in Josh's lap as Josh read him the first chapter of Catcher in the Rye aloud. Instead of the orange prison uniform Josh had been wearing that afternoon, he was wearing a pair of Tyler's pajama pants and a light blue sweater. He smiled slightly as he spoke, making the words sound better somehow. Tyler listened carefully to Josh's voice as he read, finding warmth and comfort in doing so.

When Tyler woke up to a dark room and a hard floor beneath his back, he glanced up at the bed that had seemed so intimidating just a couple hours before. Somehow, it seemed less scary now that Josh had shared it with him, even if he'd only done so in a dream. Tyler silently picked up his pillow and blanket, situating them properly on the new bed before climbing beneath the covers and getting comfortable. This time wasn't like last time. This time was different. This time, he had Josh.