He likes to remember how easy it seemed Before. (Capital "B" Before, of course. How else do you mark an epoch of time having passed?) It's not an epoch, not really, but, God it feels like that sometimes, looking back. So many years, so much pain, and so much beauty too. Grey eyes and dark hair, before betrayal. (Another before. Before everything.)
And how he'd loved him Before – loved waking up beside him, falling asleep curled around him. The transformations were easier, a distraction and playmate provided in the form of a dog. (The wolf would never harm the deer or the rat, but the dog was special, and the wolf knew that.) And now that easiness was lost, locked away in prison for the rest of his life. (And rightly so.)
The guilt consumes him now – as the closest he should have seen, should have recognised that he was a traitor. He's guilty too for loving him still, for wanting to protect him and keep him safe in spite of everything that he's done, all of the havoc and pain which he's wreaked. That intoxicating, reckless maniac more potent than the Firewhiskey which he occasionally indulged in, usually after a difficult mission, a juxtaposition to his sleeping vulnerability, the soft breathing and barely parted lips. (He shouldn't feel this way, but the knowledge of that isn't enough to quash the sentiment, isn't enough to make any of this any easier.)
And yet, his thoughts on Before don't matter now, no matter how many of them manage to possess his mind so that he feels it in his chest as if the very ache itself is physical. (Frankly, they haven't mattered since that Hallowe'en night when everything ended up turned on its head.) There is nothing for anyone to do except carry on. (And, fuck, but doesn't that hurt most of all?)