[And the thing is, it took him years to move past that word. Tried. To even reach it, really. They hadn't tried to kill him, he'd told himself. It was a prank. A scare, meant to keep him in line with their cruel bullshit. If anything killed him, it was the water. The rocks. The cold.

But then, he heard the same story from Edwin's mouth, beat by beat. A joke gone wrong at the hands of bullies. Maybe they hadn't been his mates, but they hadn't gone into the night meaning to be murderers. The demon had done that job for them, taking the killing out of their hands. And still, Charles considered them murderers from the first moment he heard it.

Thirty years is a lot to sit with something, and plenty of time to be told that the same applies to him.]

Don't know if they meant to. They did, though. [He stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt somewhere back in the 1990's.] Realized I wasn't white enough for them after all, when I stopped them from beating up a Pakistani kid.

[He's heard the words "hate crime" more and more in recent years, and supposes with a sort of detached consideration that it might apply to him.]

Haven't checked up on them in awhile, but I like to pretend they grew up to be proper miserable, yeah?