Lone Star Mountain Talk to me, just one last time

Oh, how terrible, to have to deal with you, he quipped, though he internally thought about what it would be like to have her beside him for the winter. To be honest, it didn't seem like the worst idea, although he didn't want anything to do with Macaria and had no interest in being part of that. Lunaria and he were similar in that they didn't have much of a direction. They wandered largely where they pleased. It seemed reasonable that they might sync up somehow as a pair of loners.
When Luna mentioned the word 'slaving,' it triggered some extremely unpleasant memories in him. He tried to ignore her language, feigning a smile. But he couldn't help but recall Cella and her family. Enslaved under the rule of his mother, they had suffered immensely. Luna laughed in the joking, warm way she always did. They had joked about a lot of things, like murder, that should probably have bothered him just as much.
But he remembered. The prince of nothing remembered the subjugation of dozens of people who had been persecuted and forced into labour.
He laughed weakly, but didn't respond to her the way he might normally have.
Thankfully, she followed by asking him about something else. Aphrodite was mentioned briefly, but the tears had brought him past his sorrow for her, and he merely nodded sombrely. Not very many, to be honest, he said. Most of the people he ran into were people he never saw again. He had had lots of positive experiences with people he'd really liked, but they had vanished from his life. Kiyoshi was one such example. Tai feared that the boy might have died or been displaced after the flooding. There was a woman; she lives near here on one of the mountains. Her name's Takiyok. There was another from there too called Gracious, he said, thinking back to both of them.
They had each been very pleasant people to be around, but Takiyok had struck a chord. There was something about the way she interacted with him, something that had let his guard come down almost immediately. He wondered how she was doing. Actually, I'm curious how they're both doing, he thought aloud.