Maybe he needs this reminder that Max is not a child. Tristan stares with the discomfort of ill-timed enlightenment. It’s easy pretending Max is innocent, that Max is just a kid. The truth is they are more alike than they know: too grown up for their own good and survival hardened. Max is not much younger than Tristan himself, in many ways they were equal. Max possesses a young face and a kind heart and that muddles things, forgoes Tristan’s memory of the other boy’s ability to live in the harshness of this world.
The primal mechanisms in Max that will him to move forward, to live, to do whatever it takes, are the same mechanisms in Tristan that had him plunging a knife through someone’s eye months prior.
They are the same. He can see that now.