Mikael sat on the floor of his room. If it could even be called a room. He didn’t know what the strange table was for, but the stains on the wood were unpleasant and he didn’t want to touch them. The stone was grubby and awful but at least it was cool, a lot of the island was clammy and warm. He’d cried a lot since he’d gotten there, out on his own he felt vulnerable and hopeless, more than he ever had before.

But at the same time in an awful creeping sort of way, it was neither of those things which really got to him. He found himself upset most of all that even despite the fact he was in emotional chaos, none of those emotions really felt significant enough. He felt obligated to be sad, to be upset and scared rather than actually feeling it. It was how he’d always been, when he was happy it never seemed happy enough for the people around him, sad, angry, everything was judged inadequate. It had taught him to exaggerate to compensate, to estimate how he should really be feeling. But right now, with everything wrong and no idea what a given value of normal even was, he didn’t know what he should be feeling. He'd lost his grounding, his perspective and was floundering in his attempt to be normal and probably coming across as seriously whiny.

His mother was gone and he would never see her again (at least if what the others said was true), he should be heartbroken.

But he wasn’t. He felt nothing. He didn’t miss her, only the day to day conveniences she’d given him. And he had enough presence of mind to know that that was heinous, that it was awful and made him a terrible person. So he wept. He wept for all the sadness he couldn’t give his mother, all the things he didn’t know how to do, and the loss of the control he’d had over his life.

And even then he didn’t think he could mourn those correctly.

He should also be afraid he had found himself thinking, if he couldn’t be sad he should fear for his life. His father was here. Almost without a doubt. There were too many coincidences for it to be anything but the case, even the name Lawrence rung bells. It had come up after his mother had gone into hiding, finding out that the man she’d loved and cared about once upon a time had never even existed. And he would kill him, he didn't doubt it even for a moment, the intention in his eyes had been clear and he'd prepared too. If he hadn't been stopped it would have been over.

And yet he wasn’t afraid. He was almost pleased. It meant one day he could ask him to his face why, one day he could make the man answer for what he did. And that in itself was a thrill, or close to one, but still not enough.

He was lost without a compass, upset and alone. He had no idea what people expected of him and had no idea how to fix it.

And he could not understand what was going on, if it was this island which had changed him, changed something important in him, or if it the ledge had always been there and he’d been too satisfied and safe to question it until he found himself dangling off it.