I keep going over the situation again and again, in my head. The damnedest part of it is… I don’t see what I could have done differently.
Couldn’t let the Tenebrae think that he could threaten me with the lives of innocent people. It’s the ransom example, but so much more raw and immediate. If I will give in to those kind of tactics, then he’s won – completely and irrevocably, he’s won. He could ask anything of me and have it granted.
And he doesn’t intend to only ask things I can agree with. He wants my Almshouse. The whole bloody point of my Almshouse is to provide a springboard for those who want to escape Southside without being caught up in the cycle of crime that exacerbates their poverty. You start seeing the Brotherhood as the only ones who care, the only way out, when in reality they just use you as foot soldiers and get you caught in deeper. If I gave him my Almshouse… it would mean quashing that dream. I know there are people who have already benefited from it to save up enough to get away, move Northside, find a job with our placement services.
I can’t give that up.
He wasn’t going to kill her. I knew that as soon as I stepped one step closer, just as he threatened, and he didn’t. And I suspected it as soon as I came in. I’ve known a lot of villains in my time, and one eventually begins to recognize which sort you’re dealing with. This Tenebrae is the sort who believes himself to be a hero. The mage murders, the distribution of the silver to Southside… many of them pretend to be a savior for the poor, but this one actually believes it. So she was safe. Saviors don’t murder innocents.
Those are the facts that I – and I alone, in that bar – had to work with. Knowing them, I had to convince him that I didn’t care, so completely and thoroughly that he wouldn’t try again. I had to minimize the importance of her life to a trifle, while getting close enough to disarm him safely at the right moment.
I had to.
Or is that what I tell myself?
I tried to apologize to her. She accepted the words, but the sentiments slid off her like water on stone. I don’t think she understands that I did what I had to do, or if she does, she doesn’t care; it’s not sufficient and I should have done anything else. I’m not forgiven. But it’s utterly misunderstanding the point of an apology to say that I -should- be, that I ought to be. Being sorry gives you no right to demand forgiveness; especially when you’re sorry, but you’d do the same thing all over again. So why should I expect that she’d forgive me? I earned the ill regard fair and square.
This is the price you pay, Ari. Don’t let yourself forget that. This is the price you pay for being the one who’s willing to do anything for the greater good. You pay in rumors, and you pay in hatred. You pay in eyes that smoulder with resentment and bows that you coerce with the threat of the whip. You pay in being the cold bastard who does arithmetic with lives.
I threw away honor long ago as the self-satisfied luxury of men who quail at doing what needs to be done. So I shouldn’t falter at the cost.
…at least I can comfort myself by saying I’m not Uvarov. He wouldn’t even have been bluffing, and she’d be dead. The Tenebrae probably would have escaped all the same, and he would have called it a ‘victory’ because he blooded the man, whatever the cost. I shudder to think of what he said he’d do, in a pitying way as if it were a shame I was not hard enough to do it myself.
I may be willing to do what’s required for the greater good, but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost all perspective about what the greater good is. It’s not sacrificing the people I do all these things to protect.
