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[abrightboy]

This is Bright. Leave a message.

Comments

Re: private;

[abrightboy]

Other people?

Re: private;

[hippie_ninja]

It's not just you she's pushing away. It's not personal at all.

Re: private;

[abrightboy]

Oh. Well, that's weird, because it usually is. Not sure I know what to do with general misanthropy.

Re: private;

[hippie_ninja]

Think of her as someone who's been hurt so badly, so recently, that everything reads as pain to her right now. She needs time to grieve and sort it out so she can tell the difference between friend and foe again.

Re: private;

[abrightboy]

That describes a lot of inmates on arrival.

Re: private;

[hippie_ninja]

I know. But she's the only one whose trauma I had a hand in.

Re: private;

[abrightboy]

She can't blame you that much. She still talks to you.

Re: private;

[hippie_ninja]

Yeah. She does. We have rules back home...you don't blame anyone for someone else's actions. So she doesn't blame me for the war because it was the Saviors who killed our people.

But since coming here, lately, I've just been rethinking all that. It's probably not healthy.

Re: private;

[abrightboy]

So why do you think the war was your fault?

Re: private;

[hippie_ninja]

I found out they had an arsenal. Then I brought them back to show them we had food. That's why they killed the Saviors; so my people would give them food.

Re: private;

[abrightboy]

I hate to bring logic and reason into feelings I know little about, but when you didn’t die in the next five to seven days, they probably would have worked out that you had food without any help.

Re: private;

[hippie_ninja]

No, I mean my people had food. We had a farm. Alexandria was dangerously low on rations when I found them. They could have fought us for it, but instead they were willing to trade: they'd kill the Saviors who were extorting us, and we'd let them have half of what we'd saved up for winter.

They were keeping me as a prisoner when I made the deal.

Re: private;

[abrightboy]

They coerced you?

Re: private;

[hippie_ninja]

Well...to start from the top I tried to rob them. I did rob them. And they caught me when I was knocked unconscious in the escape.

Re: private;

[abrightboy]

What were you stealing from them if you guys had the food?

Re: private;

[hippie_ninja]

Medicine. More food. Even with the farm people have starved to death over the winter.

Re: private;

[abrightboy]

…You offered them half your food when you didn’t have enough food?

Re: private;

[hippie_ninja]

We were desperate.

What's the worst thing you've ever seen?

Re: private;

[abrightboy]

I… have mostly worked serial murders for, like, twenty years. I try not to… rank them. Gruesome things, though. Why?

Re: private;

[hippie_ninja]

It's different when you see those things actively being done in front of you. When someone takes a kid and makes his parents watch as they torture him to death. As they laugh while they do it.

That's what we were facing. I had to stop the Saviors and that meant gambling with food and lives.

Re: private;

[abrightboy]

I’ve… seen some things, Jesus. I get needing to stop them. That’s all you had to say. Did it work?

Re: private;

[hippie_ninja]

I had to say it because it-

I keep thinking it was my fault even though I know it wasn't.

But yeah. We lost a lot of good people but we won. Every community I knew came together to fight them.

Re: private;

[abrightboy]

Some victories are necessary but don’t really feel like victories. But no. That wasn’t your fault.

Re: private;

[hippie_ninja]

Has this place changed you at all?

Re: private;

[abrightboy]

In some ways? Lots. But things changed me at home all the time, too. And... in some ways I don't change. In some ways I'm the same and can't be something else. I used to try.