An "asylum" was what they had called it, but really, it was a prison, maybe nothing more than an elaborate laboratory with a never ending supply of test subjects. For a moment he was silent. That dark hole in which he'd lived for ten years never felt closer than at moments like this, and he could feel his palms starting to sweat. You're outside. You're okay. They will never put you in a cell again. He could still smell the antibacterial ointments and the body odors and the death and mold and dust that lived in the fabric of the walls. And the cold. And the dark. Why waste lights and air on a lab rat? He refused to lose it in front of a recruit, however. He was older--better--than that. This was not his bedroom in the middle of the night where Graham or Nate could and would come running. He had to take care of himself. He couldn't afford to lose control of himself out in the open. There were too many things that he could explode and potentially cause to go radioactive.
"Don't be," he replied gently, reaching out to gently rest his palm on the back of her hand, which he gave a squeeze. He was the one who had been practically turned inside out in literal ways, but comforting her seemed more important than dwelling on his pain and injustices. "I'm okay." Relatively echoed the phantom sense that he sometimes got from the part of his foot and the three toes that had never grown back in, a constant reminder that even he couldn't avoid destruction completely or forever. Maybe one day, he hoped. "You don't owe me an apology. You had no part in any of it."
He drew his hand away t run it back through his hair. "You do now, though. For better or worse. When I was ten, the inmates broke free. The Revolution. Brave men and women banded together to take the asylum and their lives into their own hands." His mother. His father. Many of the higher ups in the Syndicate. Even though he was technically a veteran agent now, he had not fought in The Revolution. He'd been too young with no offensive capability. "People fought. People died." His mother, whose face he'd never seen alive, flickered through his mind again. He hadn't done either of those things. The doors had been open, so he'd walked out, ignoring injuries he'd sustained, and sat in the sun until the revolutionaries had found him.
"Only we couldn't even agree what to do once we got free. So now we have Willowbrook and the Centurions and us. Fighting each other instead of the real enemy." Unable to help himself, he sneered, his disgust written all over his face. Mutants fighting mutants when it was humans who should have been dying, excluded. It was enough to make him sick. It was enough to make him angry, though it had already succeeded there. He was thankful for not the first time that his trigger wasn't rage or fear or hatred.