'Who is Valentin Laurent?'
Such a corny existential question to ask himself, but it was a necessary one.
As for the answer…
Simple. Complicated.
His dad's disappearance ruined his childhood, and his innocence was robbed before it could even be defined. He'd grown up in a brothel surrounded by sex inside, violence outside. He learned what the words "victim" and "perpetrator" meant without needing to learn the words victim and perpetrator. It was this situation and the environment around him that made him mature much faster than others.
But proportionally to the rapid speed at which he matured, he grew distant from the world.
He saw those his own age or younger as unwitting to the true suffering the world had to offer, and those older as the cause of the suffering. Trusting no one and allowing none to enter his space except those he considered his 'mothers', who'd been there before his demented worldview had taken shape.
