"I could've talked to you. You would've told me something like that, and I would've carried on as angry as I was when I started," Crow started, a sneer building up in his tone before he was able to calm it down and shake his head, "and you would've continued spiraling away from a family you loved, falling into all of the violence that was indefinitely down the road.

"How could I do that to you?"

He wasn't asking Rean. It remained a rhetorical question, one he was always asking himself: how could he have brought Rean, so innocent and blindingly pure, in to something so twisted and complicated? Crow was in the dark and he needed to find a way out without dragging Rean through the mud. Sometimes he still thought he was there, that he was already dead, that none of what happened between he and Rean, he and anyone, actually mattered.

Closing his eyes, Crow raised a hand to pass it over his face, before he asked, "What does it matter now, anyway? I'm back, aren't I? That's what you all wanted so bad." So bad that you would blindly allow these people to use you against me.

He was back, only in physical form. His heart was with Rean, his body with the Imperial Liberation Front, and his thoughts were split between those two things and just about every damn thing else that Crow was juggling in his mind.