"You either learn through whatever the world throws at you, or you die. Sounds like you've both been learning."

He smiles, and there's a resigned, self-aware aspect to it, like he remembers what the confidence of youth and the arrogance of the unburned had been like for him; like it happened so far long ago that it couldn't be summarised as "a year and six months before, when I woke up from sixteen years of being in an unknown dark space, after I tried to be nowhere at all."

We all have different massively traumatic turning points.

"Who is he to you?" Curious only, not a pointed or particularly poignant question. Rude? Yes, but he did just 'sneak' into the house with Wrathion. They're both incorrigible.