"Don't think anyone really has a say in who ends up finding each other, do they?" Marcus asks in return. The boys' home had been hard on him, harder than he wants to admit even to himself most of the time. He had been relentlessly bullied, tortured and beaten up, and then he'd beaten himself up, found little ways to deal with the anger and the hurt and the feeling of being utterly lost in the cut of a sharp edge on his skin.

He'd only done it a few times, never hard enough to really cut, never enough to leave scars, but he remembers even now. Just one protective friend might have changed that.

"You need to not sell yourself so short," he says. "Sam never did. Never held a grudge. He admired you, I could see it in the way he spoke of you to me."