Jaded Youth. The Still Here Chronicles

Jimmy and Kyle didn't serve. They didn't have to - the war came home to them. Raised in households shaped by deployment, trauma, and the particular silence of parents who couldn't talk about what they'd seen, these two young men are navigating adulthood with maps drawn from someone else's damage. They're angry in ways they can't name. They're loyal to people who hurt them. And they're trying to figure out who they are when the only models they had were men held together with suppression and willpower. Jaded Youth is a story about inheritance - not the kind in wills, but the kind passed down in patterns, in wounds, in the way a father's flinch becomes a son's worldview.
It's about breaking cycles that were never yours to carry, and finding your own footing when the ground was always shifting. For the children of veterans, the next generation carrying weight they didn't ask for - and for anyone trying to become something different than what they came from.