therushingsky | IC Contact Post

Yeah, okay.

No file for you.

Because you think the world that, what was it, gave him no opportunities to be other than what he is deserves to be preserved, or because I'm uninterested in the spirit of the original offer, or just because you want someone to manage to shoot me?

Edited 2019-01-18 00:42 (UTC)

Oh, way simpler than that.

Because I am not a soldier or a spy for either side of the messed up, millennia spanning war that spit Hux out.

And

Because yeah, okay, I think anyone who thinks they're qualified to decide which universes should be allowed to exist is a fucking psycho. I mean, I don't think either of you are going to change your minds, but I look forward to seeing Fives back here as an inmate when it's all done with.

Are you saying that just to piss me off, or are you really that small-minded?

Surprise! Even garbage worlds deserve to exist. Even people who got born because garbage things happened to mash their garbage parents together in garbage places deserve to have been born.

And I get that blah blah universe time travel, we're always making and unmaking universes, except that here, you don't get to pretend that we're flying blind. You're actually here hitting me up for the details of a bunch of the lives that you're going to fucking steamroll out of existence because you guys know better.

No. Fuck you. You pathetic, sentimental idiot.

We should do nothing, we should let a million million people be born into worlds of terricide and slavery and orthodoxy, just because we've seen some of their faces? As though the million million people who could have been born into a better world deserve less to exist, to have better lives, just because you're too selfish and limited to imagine them?

Maybe I am a fucking pyscho. But if I don't change the world, then everyone, forever lives in the world written by the psycho more sadistic than I am.

No one should do anything good because people have the right to be themselves, as shaped by the worst fucking circumstances no one can fucking be bothered to fix. That's your take on the value of life. That's obscene.

Edited 2019-01-18 01:21 (UTC)

Newsflash, dickhole: You and Fives could literally wish for a planet made of cupcakes and stars where a billion of your non-existent people get to live in peace. You could magically wish for all those people born into slavery to be the beneficiaries of an effective peace process, or to zap those million million people into a different, nicer universe with a cool policy of galactic refugees.

Instead, two fucking assholes who never even lived in the time they're erasing have decided to just salt the fucking earth, and you're going to come at me like you're making a tough choice for the good of the universe.

You think you can build a better world? Cool. Go for it. You live on a magical wishing ship, but you're still going to do it by killing an entire timeline?

Yeah. Pathetic. Major ego trip.

Leaving entirely aside whether I trust the admiral with something of that complexity, what would be the point of magically wishing for happy people to exist while deliberately allowing generations of torture to continue. And it's fine, because I can just spend my time in the happy world, never looking at the suffering I'm ignoring! Of course I'm killing the fucking timeline if I can get one fingernail into it. I'd kill mine given half a chance, and I hope I did with the one message I managed to send back.

Better egotistical than complacent.

Okay dude, so instead of pretending that I just said "bail on the universe that's the only solution", why not move on to my other two suggestions:

1. Effective peace process, instead of allowing generations of torture to continue.

2. Save everyone from the entire history of time, and put them all on planet nice using the magic powers that apparently you only believe are effective when they allow you to play sword of Damocles with other people's existences.

Y'know what, just because you've decided what level of suffering is too high to justify enduring, that doesn't mean you get to speak for anyone else who wants to keep living. What do you think Phasma would say if you ran your little plan past her? I mean, she was enslaved right? Tortured? Hell, all these people who you're going to save from their horrible fucking universe, what do you think they're all hoping for, deep down in their souls?

You really think it's to not exist?

Man--

[Pause]

You're so fucking much like him.

What do you think I'm going to do, wars that last forever mean everyone loses. What fucking kind of effective peace process are you imagining that doesn't change the possible lives two and three generations down the line? You're fucking incoherent.

It is the duty of everyone living to decide. Most people just fail. The difference between him and me is I'm not an idiot and I do my research.

If you're too pleased with your own noble abstention to help with that, then I'll find another way.

Let's just be real:

You're going to start whatever you're doing right after all the people you give a shit are already born, and whatever war and suffering and injustice that came before that gets a pass because you specifically want Fives to exist.

Which, okay, whatever. I specifically have a problem with that because we know that Hux, and Phasma, and Kylo Ben or whoever all exist, and we know that Hux has been fighting a rebel alliance who also clearly exist, and who-- actually, Ren specifically went back to try and force a peace with, but I guess going to help him would be the wrong time zone to help the people you care about.

So you trade his universe, and those rebels, and their dreams, and the things they care about, for your universe, and your dreams, and the things you care about.

And hell, maybe Kylo is right now fucking up a different happy future in that universe, but the difference between you and him is that he's returning to his own time, to his own world, with no idea how to future is going to go.

Look--

You wanna save people. Five wants to save people. We all want to save people. I get it.

I had a weird, weird conversation with Hux about this Fives stuff, months ago. Ultimately as shitty as it is, Fives is doing the same thing as Kylo, returning to his own time, trying to save people. Okay.

And maybe it's because you're a general or whatever. And you are doing your research, and somewhere in that you get away from just focusing on the people you're going to save, and it becomes like--

Weighing up what's worth burning so you get the ending you want the most.

And everyone in history who's ever done that has been able to justify it to themselves, but if you're telling yourself that you're on the side of the angels, and anyone who disagrees with you is complacent and apathetic--

I don't know what I can say to wake you up from believing that.

If I had to cut Fives' heart out with my own hands to save the baby clones from growing up to be slave soldiers, I would do it. I'm not going to his time for him, no matter how much I love him.

And there are no angels. I'm a monster. I've known that for centuries. But I am a necessary monster. I've done everything I could do for my world, and I died for it, and now that - that certain cycles and powers are broken - if I went back, I would only do more damage than the fight was worth. I wanted to be done, Rhys, I cannot. Express. How much I wanted to die. How angry I was at the Admiral for telling me I couldn't, that I had to keep going, keep fighting, do something new. But Fives told me about his little brothers, and I thought, alright. That would be worth living for, lurching along for, learning to do something besides war for. So I care first about those children, who were made to be slaves and told to be proud of dying for the people content to accept the convenience of not fighting their own battles at the behest of another soul-sucking black hole of a tyrant playing every side. And I do believe I'll make a better galaxy than he does, but I haven't lost focus. I know exactly who I'm saving first, and who I'm willing to burn.

Does that make me justified? Hardly. It's not about justice, there is no justice, the millions I've killed never agreed to die for a chance at a better world, and I had no right to decide for them. Justice would never have allowed my world to exist in the first place. I can't...achieve justice, I can't imagine what it would look like. But I care about the future, and I can affect the future. And I've chosen the clones' future to fight for now because they get me in the few raw places I am weak, and because no one else ever would.

[He drags a hand down his face.]

You think I'm dismissive of everyone who disagrees just because I'm angry at you. Complacent isn't the same as apathetic. Complacent is the natural human state. People learn to bear what they must. People can be very good and not willing to push for change. If the system is designed insidiously enough, people can be completely right, that rocking the boat will cause bloodshed and suffering and only catastrophic destruction could succeed in truly changing things. But when the ship is being steered by a colder monster into pack-ice to starve everyone for generation after generation, the better to suck the marrow from their bones - then yes. I am going to call down catastrophe. I will burn the rigging and learn to swim. As carefully as I can, but I will fucking do it.

You can't wake me up, Rhys, because I am skullfucking awake. I am aware of the costs. I have suffered more than you can imagine, more than I could have imagined before it happened, for the chance to wake other people up to the course our world was on, to the truth that it didn't have to be what it was. I don't think less of you for being wary of catastrophe. But I do think less of you for being so proud of your certainty that everyone in history in every circumstance willing to burn something rotten to the ground is equally deluded, and every horror on every world is equally balanced and - ennobled and made worthwhile by the proud struggles underneath it, and so no one should ever try.

Okay dude. I'm out.

Look, I get Fives's motivations. I get your motivations, but it is exhausting trying to convince you that I'm--

I'm not psychic, man.

When you argue, ferverntly, that the only reasons that I object to you erasing millions of people's lives is because I'm obscene, Because I can't be bothered to do anything about it, because I'm selfish and limited, because I think it's fine to deliberately allow generations of torture to continue, and because I'm too pleased with my own noble abstention to help--

How am I supposed to magically get from that, that you understand for one second that what you're doing isn't the moral absolute here?

On the other hand, you must have some mad psychic skills, because you got from "Everyone who does this shit has a justification for their actions." Straight to: "Everyone who has ever done this shit has had a delusional justification and all of them have committed crimes of exactly equal magnitude and I'm so smug that I know all about it, and what's more, every horrible world is justified because suffering is noble!"

Without me ever actually saying that.

Ultimately, you're a universe ending whatever, and I'm basically one of the nobodies who'd just end up erased if this ever happened in my world. So I can't stop myself from like-- not wanting you to do that. And I can't stop myself from thinking it's wrong, and that there are better ways of doing this than just deleting them all.

But whatever. I have my own deal. You save the kids, I'll save the rest.

And all that other stuff? Yeah, you wanna argue with someone about that, you can just build a straw man in your bedroom and put whatever words you want into it's mouth.

I'm Crowned With Eyes. I don't expect you to understand or care what that means. But it is not unlike being psychic, and it is not comfortable.

You want me to wake up because I've lost focus, and everyone in history who's been in my place - which you know so much about - is even relevant, but you're not at all implying that it's the same?

I wish my universe never existed, not as it did for a good four hundred years before my birth. I would happily be erased. And I didn't have a bad life, until I made the first real moves to unhinge the Calendar in earnest. But I cannot remember the first time I saw someone publicly tortured to death. And when I was a kid I thought it was loud, and boring. And normal. That's just what happens. They're just heretics. Everyone knew that.

No exaggerations, no inferences. You said even garbage universes deserve to exist. And I think you're just wrong. Mine didn't, and neither did I, and neither did anyone else who watched and was warped by watching, forcing themselves to accept and believe it was normal and safe and good. And the ones who couldn't do it ended up on the table themselves.

Universes deserve nothing. Only people deserve anything, and we can't always give it to them. Maybe your anarchy isn't as impossible to improve without ripping up the foundations as the Heptarchate's ubiquitous and terrible control. That seems plausible to me. But you don't get to speak for all worlds. And when you put your own single wish to live against the possible infinity of warped future lives, it strikes me as - natural, understandable, but selfish.

[And because he is something very close to psychic, "I'll save the rest" is enough for him to cock his head -]

When you make your deal, make sure to leave Palpatine out, please. Or he'll poison whatever refugee utopia you think you can make work just as well as he did the galaxy the first time around.

Yeah, well, I kinda think that, if you're looking in from the outside, at the single lives of people who are all clinging desperately to existence, and decide to take it away because you think you figure out something better-- I guess I think that's selfish too.

[He doesn't say this with any malice though, if anything he just sounds tired.]

I think that must be like-- I don't want to say a species thing, but. An us thing. Like, I get that you're not going to see it like that.

And your psychic powers are super busted, dude. I'm not going to tell you all the ways you're wrong, because I don't want you to feel bad, but you're way off.

[Pause]

Could I grab you in person for five minutes.

Edited 2019-01-18 05:40 (UTC)

Maybe it is. For all the good it ever did me.

[Sharply, wistfully wry. But he's being selfish over the clones. He wants them for him, he always wanted children, he's going to have a million and all he has to do is steal them and rewrite history.]

They aren't - exactly -

[He shakes his head.]

Nevermind. Sure. Where?

[He mostly figures Rhys is finally going to punch him after all, but whatever. Sure. Fine.]

Just, come by my cabin?

If that's what you want.

See you soon, Rhys.

[It's a few minutes before he knocks.]

[Rhys's door opens, and he's there. A little red eyed and weary looking.]

Hey.

[He gives Jedao a whole ten seconds to get used to that, before Rhys takes a step forward and just-- wraps one arm around his shoulders, pulling him into a tight hug.]

I'm sorry for shouting at you.

[Jedao looks...tired, and sad. His eyes aren't red but his shoulders sag a little under his uniform. He waits like he's bracing for something.

When the hug comes, he's still for a moment of pure surprise, then melts into it, tucks his face into the crook of Rhys's neck, arms coming up to cling back tightly. He takes slow, deep breaths as he holds on, not quite letting himself shudder.]

I'm sorry for...calling you things.

[Even if he hadn't meant Rhys specifically, or Rhys as a person, with all of them - well, all the more reason to apologize.]

[It's cool, Rhys can shudder for both of them, because they just had a roaring argument about the fate of billions of lives, and he absolutely doesn't feel qualified to be making some of the decisions he's been making here.

But whatever. Better egoism than apathy, right?]

I'm sorry your home world jacked you up so bad.

[Mumbled into Jedao's shoulder.]

You're not a monster, man.

[oh god damn it, is he crying? He's such a wuss. The only redeeming fact is that Jedao can't see.]

[Jedao manages to stop clinging with one hand long enough to stroke a slow, soothing hand down Rhys's back, even as he takes a hitching, wavering sort of breath, followed by a raggedy sigh.]

Just a fucking psycho then?

The word doesn't matter. I'm not....good. No one has to be delicate about it.

Who's delicate, dude? I'm saying-- look, yeah, so I don't think it's good, but like--

[Ugh, how to say this in a way that won't start them both fighting again?]

It's like, that lever thing, right? You're on a train, and the train's going to crash, unless you pull the lever to put it onto a different track. But if you pull the lever, it's going to run some people down. And-- there isn't a right answer. Like, that's the point. Then, the second part of the question is: What if someone you love is on the train?

[All of this is muttered into Jedao's shoulder.]

Might be Psycho, but it's a really normal kind of psycho. Especially when it's kids.

[Jedao has not really been exposed to the wonderful world of trolleyology. But he can pick up the gist.]

You have to kill the guy laying the train tracks, obviously.

[Which is easier to say than I put everyone I loved on the train just to get to the switch.]

If there's no right answer, you have to change the question.

Edited 2019-01-20 00:22 (UTC)

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