Don't make the mistake of feeling sorry for lucas or thinking there is any good in him. Lucas is a manipulative predator. Trying to make people sympathize with them is what people like lucas do. If you start to feel sorry for him its only because the manipulation is working. Don't forget that this is a person who without exception, nobody who has any significant interaction with him has wanted anything to do with him. Even his family. Being shunned by his family isn't about his mental problems, if it were they never would have supported him for as long as they did. its about his attitude and his behavior, and finally recognizing him for what he is. As the saying goes, when everyone else is the problem the problem is you
As for cyril considering him a friend, i'm not so sure about that. He and his then girlfriend knew him in high school, so they both must have been aware of the same stuff everybody else was, including why said high school women wanted nothing to do with him, no differently than his elementary school female classmates went out of their way to shun him. a reputation like that gets around, especially in a high school. My point being, I don't think cyril or his girlfriend ever considered lucas a good friend. I've long suspected they knew he was someone best avoided but also thought that being clearly not right in the head that he was someone they could have as a roommate and keep control over him to do shit around the apartment and get an easy rent payment out of, and figured if push came to shove he'd know he had nowhere else to go and could be intimidated into keeping in line. In short, I think they were using him but underestimated the kind of insane sped he really is and bit off alot more than they could chew, which led to the shitshow that was their time as roommates. I also think that on some level lucas realized this, at least belatedly, he just drew the wrong conclusions as to exactly what was going on and why, and twisted it around in his head to convince himself it was all about not hooking him up and such. The fact that both cyril and his girlfriend knew lucas in high school is pretty strong evidence that this was the case. They knew what he was like and what his reputation was long before they were roommates. They knew women especially gave lucas a wide berth and for good reason. Yet they both thought it a wise move to not only have lucas move in with cyril but with a woman as well? Something about that doesn't pass the sniff test, or the common sense test. There had to be ulterior motives behind it. As much as lucas's reflections should be taken with a grain of salt, they do show an underlying theme that lucas himself seems to recognize, if draw an incorrect conclusion from. There are any number of people they could have been roommates with at the time, yet they chose the guy they knew wasn't right in the head and had a reputation bad enough for every woman in the school to avoid like the plague. What they did they did for a reason