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Grace knew that on hard days like these, there was nothing she could do to help Xullara. They had lived the kind of life she hadn’t thought entirely real, before meeting them. Sure, many people had bad childhoods, and many a great hero of poem or song had been abandoned in some form or another. None of those poems or songs ever mentioned how uncertain it would leave their heroes.
Xullara had said once, in a joke with more than a hint of truth to it, that their true mother tongue was that of the wild. Less a language, more an understanding of exactly what move meant threat and which meant submission. The understanding of when and where to strike. Xullara could survive on their own in the wild for years, for so they had. Here, with the city surrounding them, they were far less assured. They were, Grace thought, wildly, desperately lonely, in the way where they hardly knew there was a different way to be. She tried her best to care for them, but they were skittish. Like a wild creature, they had to be acclimated to kindness.
She judged their parents, however much she knew they too had been desperate. She didn’t know them, could not weigh what choices they had or hadn’t had available to them. She did, however, know Xullara, and could see quite easily what impact had been left to them by what was less an upbringing and more a kind of unsupported growth. A thing which might do well for certain creatures, but certainly hadn’t for them. They barely knew how to hold a conversation, no matter the language. They held a blade more comfortably than they did a baby. They lived in a world she was not even on the edges of.