[ is it any surprise, then, that heine turned out the way he did? that a violent, frightened child grew into a violent, frightened adult, holding everyone at arms' length in case they get too close and his affection becomes their death sentence? heine has always thought it safer to keep those he cares for out of the blast radius. nearly every person he had ever loved has died, and most of that blood is on his hands. this is what his childhood had taught him: that to be a monster is to be alone. ]

She sent my brother for me. Giovanni. [ there's a curious quality to the way heine says his name, both bitter and affectionate. affection for the boys they were together all those years ago; bitterness for the man he became, under einstürzen's thumb. ] Lily and I both left someone alive that day, apparently. She left Giovanni, and I left Einstürzen.

[ it had taken giovanni the better part of a decade to darken heine's doorstep after he flung himself from that underground hellhole and out into the light. ten years that heine had been searching for a way back in so he could lay his ghosts to rest. imagine his surprise when they turned out not to be ghosts at all. ]

Giovanni came to tell me that our mother was still alive and that she was still at work in the underground. That she would achieve her goals one way or another. —That's about where I was when I woke up on the train here. Trying to figure out how to get back in and put it right.

[ heine looks over at kaveh, meeting his gaze steadily. ]

And that's the grief, I guess. The pain that shaped me. Sometimes I hoped the weight of it would kill me, but I knew it wouldn't, because that was the first thing I tried when I got out. [ denied even the release of death, heine had understood that he didn't deserve to die until he had righted the wrongs that bore him. ]