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He looked about the small cupboard uncertainly after she spoke, hesitant in his movements as he ran his hand along the frame of the door.

Drystan had always been quiet. He didn't know why that was, but that's how it had always been. When something, when life, got to be too much, he used that quiet as his weapon. Memories of Sorcha came easily to him then, how she would get so furious during their fights when he'd grow deliberate more silent as she raged louder and louder. She accused him of using logic like a sucker punch and quiet like a left jab, which was an accurate statement on his preferred method of arguing. His temper was explosive, but Drystan was not.

That tendency, he thought, was another fundamental difference between him and Bess, that she opened herself up in such a way, and he closed in. He marvelled that they could be so unlike in so many ways yet still be together, still need each other in all the ways that they did.

Family never ceased to amaze, mystify, or terrify him.

He simply didn't know how to be loud, but the gesture touched him more than words could say anyway. The cramped space brought another kind of comfort, the tightly safe spaces he sought out as a child and the ones he resisted hiding in as a grown man faced with more sadness than he reasonably knew how to handle. The ones the pale, fragile looking girl asleep on the cot in the room down the hall could so often be found in.

Though his throat closed, Drystan managed the few simple, necessary words. ""Thank you," he said, laying his hand on her shoulder.