He's an old man now. Was. My mom is his daughter. Maybe you knew Grandma Suzie too, I don't know.

[They're short phrases, blunt facts forced out because he hates the feeling that's starting to creep over him — it's uselessness, if he has to put a name to it, a guilty sinking uselessness that this friend of the family is dead and apparently was important to someone, and he has nothing to offer.

Any second now, he might be gone, too. Back to a fight he never asked for, but that he has to win anyway.

His is a long story, too.]

...If I vanish, it's because there's a bastard back there I have to beat. He thinks I'm dead...so for a little while, I have to be, or I'll lose my last shot at him.

[He's not sure why that was something he needed to say. But it's not until he says it that the magnitude of it really hits him — like saying it somehow makes it that much more real, that he's been pushed to such a brink in this fight that he's had to resort to this extreme just for the sake of standing a chance.

He's seventeen years old and never once asked for this.

He can't help but wonder if Caesar had, either.]