This is Frank "Ax" Jones. WW2 Veteran with major PTSD. He considers himself a reformed bad guy, but when he drinks, reformed is a generous term... and he drinks. After his honorable discharge due to injury during his deployment, he became a firefighter- and a good one. Unfortunately, his PTSD became too much, and his crew pulled some strings to get him a position on fire watch: stationed in a fire watch tower in a national park... during the rainy season. The job consists mostly of keeping his station clean and maintained for his replacement come the dry months, and provides him the solitude to work through his demons. Or, at least, to drink them away.
After all the violence, Frank just wants a peaceful life where he can look at himself and think, "I'm a good enough person." but when Jayce comes back into his life, that gets a little harder. Jayce is a young transgender guy in the 1970s- he doesn't have the words to describe it, but to quote his mother, "People think she's a boy and she's just letting them! I don't know what to make of all this, I feel at the end of my rope with her!" Taking Jayce in was a spur-of-the-moment offer that was accepted without much fight, and Jayce was there before Frank even realized what he'd gotten himself into.
Jayce Bells, on the other hand, is just dealing with the shitty cards life has dealt him. Recently disabled, Jayce is adjusting to his new life with paraparesis and mild quadriparesis. He went from skateboarding and riding bikes with his friends, to laying in his room day after day because- even though they wouldn't say it out loud- he was an embarrassment to the family, now. Not just from the accident, although that didn't help things, but everything about him! His bad attitude, his interests, his transness, his failing grades.
Depressed and struggling to accept his new reality, Jayce became a recluse by choice, and an angry one at that. His attitude became too much for his mom, and after a tense incident during a dinner party, she complained about him to Frank. Nobody knows that Jayce and Frank have a bad history, except the two of them, but Jayce isn't willing to tell anyone either... that would mean facing his past, and that's not something he's ready for.
When pleading, begging and fighting doesn't work, Jayce accepts his fate and goes to spend the summer with Frank in the fire watch tower. Helpless, afraid, and more isolated now than ever, Jayce holds onto his anger to keep himself grounded and alert- he doesn't trust Frank, and he's determined to make it out of this unscathed.
