He shrugged, wondering at it a little himself. Not really at how people had never liked him -- more at how completely he'd grown into himself since then.

"I know, I'm pretty fabulous -- they just had the worst taste, I guess?" He smiled, thinner and more wry than usual. "That, and I guess I freak a lot of people out at first. I mean, I'm kinda out there, right? I say what I think all the time, and I don't really take people's crap, plus people somehow figured out I was gonna grow up gay years before I was even old enough to get a crush on anybody, and that didn't go over so hot in a Catholic school. And I used to talk kinda more like this, like veeth the accent and vhatever, and I've always been small, so I got beat up a lot even before my mutation turned up."

Even talking about this, he sounds... somehow untouched by it. There's always been something in him that none of that and nothing since could break, and as an adult, he's completely secure in it.