Stavanger Bay and every minute gets longer

Mordecai found that like with most things, he bottled them up. Whatever response, whatever emotion wanted to well up inside of him and bubble to the surface, he quartered it off and tucked it away. In its place came a pressure of indescribable force. It too, he did not display outwardly, bar an ever-present flicker of acknowledgment in his gold eyes. If not for the deliberation behind Charon's words, he may have questioned the validity of them. But there was something in the markup of how the boy put things, something in that resentful edge of tone that told him every drop of it was true.

Decidedly, Mordecai summarized the winter as not being so good after all. Any well caring notion of how pleasant his had been was thrown directly into the nearest inferno burning into the unseen structure of some recessed area in his mind. A certain pallor found itself cast across the majority of his demeanor and of it, little doubt that it was palpable through the tension between himself and the adolescent. Mordecai offered no apology; what good would it have done? Instead he focused on the reality in front of him, probing visually and silently over the stern set countenance and frame of his nephew.

"You get into fights to protect him too?" he asked, gesturing towards the healing scatter of wounds he had spied.