I saw how he’d been a boy before he was a monster, before he’d been painted as the face of evil. I saw what they all had forgotten—that he was loyal, made of flesh and blood, of crooked grins and onyx eyes. Beneath it all, a boy with dreams, with friends, who laughed. A boy who had once loved his brother. And I thought how lucky I was in that moment, to see him as nothing but a boy.
