"Not all timelines are the same. There was a girl here who was from my world but not, a version of someone but not the same. She knew me, but I had never met her. So the weird way worlds work here, it could be different."

So Sylvain could be fine in his timeline and not in Claude's, but they don't exactly know, so there's still good reason to be uncertain and have feelings about this. Meeting Alina was something of a mind fuck because she definitely knew him, Inej, and Kaz, but she looked nothing like the Alina of legend and she was very alive, whereas she was very dead in his world (or so he thought). A very strange situation.

Jesper rubs a hand along Sylvain's back as he talks. Some of this he heard from Claude, but not all of it exactly.

"Grisha who are found for the Ravka army get to live with relative safety and training there ... but they're obviously not free. They can't leave the army and everyone wants them dead, even the people they protect."

That was Jesper's fate if his father had let him go be trained. It's a double-edged sword, the situation they were in. Holding him back and hiding his gifts led to some messed up issues, but even finding belonging and power with them would make him a caged bird. There was no good answer back there. It seems like no matter what world, the 'special' are actually miserable in their own unique ways.

"I keep waiting for the army here to try and do the same to me, to us."