Stone Circle Please do not push me away

He listened quietly, and withheld his judgments, because beyond the anger, beyond the pain, was simply a broken boy who wanted to understand. To understand why their father had left them, how their mother had moved on so fast. As much as Merrit reserved himself and his innermost thoughts to the ear of his own mind, he felt things, and he felt things very deeply. Unlike Arlette, he simply didn't show them, or know what to do with them, so he tucked them away where they couldn't interfere, and where he didn't have to deal with them.

Merrit didn't think his father was dead, but then again, he didn't think Stark would stay away from them if he was still alive out there, either. At least he didn't want to think he would, or that he would have a reason to - but his mother mentioned the anger, the bitterness, he knew what she meant, and a frown quivered his otherwise stoic facade. He knew the danger of letting these things slip.

And yet, he didn't want to let them go. Not yet.

Merrit didn't know his mother's story, and to hear of her struggles felt like a slap against his heart - yet, a strike he somehow expected. So this was the pattern of life, to build and to destroy? Mother herself had said he could not have the good without the bad, the light without the dark, and he could see this reflected in her own life too clearly to refute. To have a family and to lose them all, to find a friend, only to lose him as well.

To repeat the process again, and now with Greyback, to still keep on trying.

His brows creased, and he didn't understand - an expression characteristic to the boy since he was a pup. He had always been a thinker, but these thoughts... these thoughts twisted in a messy heap of emotion and intellect he didn't know what to do with.

"Why would I seek love and friendship, if I'll only lose them again?"

No malice, no anger. He just wanted to understand.