She's still so young, so much younger than he is, and he watches her profile for a moment as she speaks, brought to silence by the things she's saying. The familiarity of the words. His life before the boy's home seems like an impossible dream, even with how unhappy it had been, because even seeing his father beat his mother regularly, even feeling the icy lack of love between all three of them, it had been better than the home. Better than the violence and the loneliness. Better than the demons, both literal and metaphorical, that had followed.

"I understand," he says softly, pressing a kiss to her shoulder. "After my parents died... after he killed her and I killed him, everything was different. The life I had before, when it sometimes felt like maybe they loved me, it's like a dream. That's why I draw it so often."