"Isn't it?" Chuck says by way of agreement, glancing around at a bar that seems to be full of the aforementioned normal people. For him, it isn't even going back to it, either, not really. The last time he experienced anything close to normal, he was a child, too young to remember now what it felt like, only that he knows, for a little while, they'd been happy. Now, the very idea of that seems like a fucking joke. Kate probably isn't wrong and he knows it, but he also can't imagine himself ever reaching that point.

He'll always have the weight of being alive because his mother died. He'll always have the years that followed, knowing that his father didn't give a damn about him. He still thinks sometimes that it was a hell of a joke, the two of them being drift compatible.

"Especially when you know they'll never get it. Where you came from. What you went through." It's how and why he's formed what relationships he has in Darrow. All of them left behind something awful, in their own ways.