"Really?" Wren blinks at him. "Mother Goose? Hans Christian Andersen? Disney?" Wren tries to imagine a childhood without the repeated warning against wandering too far into the woods or not listening to your parents, or being cruel to strangers.
The next thing the young man says, though, makes him think he has a different source telling him to be kind to "the least of these".
Wren stretches his arms out, feeling the push of the tide under the moon, washing them back out and back in to the shore, and thinks about what to say. The first time he wanted to destroy himself he was seven years old. In the interim years, he's learned to love the things that make him anathema. Other things still stir that impulse in him, sometimes, but who he is at heart isn't one. But he remembers hating himself and he has to work on not just flaring up in indignant anger when he sees someone younger doing it, like he can force them not to.
"I don't think that's how demons work," he says thoughtfully. He knows neither of them are feeling it, but they're going to start to get cold soon. "Punished for what?"
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The next thing the young man says, though, makes him think he has a different source telling him to be kind to "the least of these".
Wren stretches his arms out, feeling the push of the tide under the moon, washing them back out and back in to the shore, and thinks about what to say. The first time he wanted to destroy himself he was seven years old. In the interim years, he's learned to love the things that make him anathema. Other things still stir that impulse in him, sometimes, but who he is at heart isn't one. But he remembers hating himself and he has to work on not just flaring up in indignant anger when he sees someone younger doing it, like he can force them not to.
"I don't think that's how demons work," he says thoughtfully. He knows neither of them are feeling it, but they're going to start to get cold soon. "Punished for what?"