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"I don't know," he replied carefully, slowly. "I don't... know if I can talk." Obviously he could talk, at least piece by piece, but the idea of taking the maelstrom of thoughts racing through his head, wrestling them into his vocabulary, and selecting the words he would need to describe them was exhausting only as a concept.

He had become somewhat accustomed to the memory of feelings - to thinking back on an event and recalling specific emotions despite having no awareness of the details the event entailed. This was different, more complete, but it was also strange. Somehow he had come to think of remembering as regressing, as if he would simply return to the person he had been before. Instead, he found that he still had a level of distance: He understood that the reason he couldn't feel grateful for his brother's sacrifice was because he had felt responsible for it, but he disagreed now with those feelings of responsibility. He understood that he had blamed himself for nearly everything that had ever hurt anyone, and he understood how he had arrived at the conclusion, but couldn't agree. He felt that he had been almost laughably foolish for much of his life to have singlehandedly shouldered the blame for every incident that he had confronted, to think that he was necessarily at fault for deciding to leave his overbearing home three years ago.

He supposed that sense of unyielding responsibility and guilt was what caused this in the first place. The pokemon that had been by his side since he was a child, slain by his hand... However, his actions had been a mercy. He knew Mieu, and he knew the Flareon would never have wanted to attack him or Rosie. The injustice was not the end result but rather the fact that it had happened in the first place. He felt confident that he had acted in the way Mieu would have wanted.

Of course, that didn't erase the conclusion. Regardless of fault or circumstances, the final truth of the matter was that pokemon's life had disappeared. His only solace was that it had no longer disappeared from his memories as well.

He spent a while longer in silence, tense and still, until he eventually breathed one long, shuddering breath and tentatively removed his arm from across his face. "I think it's okay," he said quietly. "Mostly."

He leaned nearer to her, tired and sullen. "It's weird," he said. "I thought that I would change somehow - like, stop being who I've been and return to who I was. But it's not really like that. I think I wasn't a different person after all, but I became different over the last few months."

"I disagree with the way I thought about a lot of things," he explained. "Things that I thought of as my own fault... Now it just seems stupid. What was I blaming myself for in the first place? Getting away from a home that I hated?" Gingerly he reached a hand to take hold of one of hers. "I think I probably caused you a lot of trouble thinking that way all the time... I'm sorry."

He leaned towards and against her, taking solace in her vicinity. "I guess I got my own outside point of view," he said. "I always could see the bright side for everyone but myself."

He hummed softly in consideration of his words. "It's almost like hearing a long story. I know it's my own story - I could tell it myself, every detail of it - but I can also look at it like a reader, like I can see myself as someone else." He frowned mildly. "It's sort of weird to try to explain..."

"It's a little bittersweet," he admitted. "I mean, it's not like I didn't want to remember, but I do kind of wish that there weren't so many awful memories." Not wanting to remember was wrong; it was more like he never wanted the bad memories to be created in the first place. He would have preferred if he could have just had a pleasant life. But-- "But it's not like I can change the past anyway," he said with a small shake of his head. "Looking back with regret isn't going to help anything. I'd rather spend my energy trying to make the future something that will be happy to remember."