[There is a girl crying on the floor not too far away, and so while Jonathan does rise, and turn away, he does so with a bit more restraint than would be normally present at that level of barbed sarcasm aimed at his wife. Only a bit, though, just enough that he's keeping the fists his hands have curled into at his sides.]
I am going to say this once, because I feel like shit, and I'm going to try to stay polite because you seem like you've normally got a good head on your shoulders.
There are things here that none of us understand. None of us. Maybe you're too much of a fucking egghead to realize it, but comparing the present to past experiences is just a thing humans do outside of fucking books. It's how we work. I know there's a... there's some single-word phrase for it, but I can't remember that because the person who usually remembers that shit for me is apparently being held prisoner by the same lunatic who's got us all here!
[He pauses, forces his shoulders down, forces himself to unclench his hands. He forces himself to breathe, deeply, a few times, holding one hand up to indicate he's not done talking yet.]
I don't want to believe that, but if that thud was a body falling out of nowhere, then I don't know what the fuck we're dealing with. What I do know is this: all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to ignore it and turn on each other. Maybe you're lucky, and you live in a peaceful world where there's "no such thing as evil". Maybe your world doesn't have things like atom bombs or vampires or the Klan or Franco and Hitler. Maybe you're that fucking lucky, hell, maybe there wasn't even one Great War. But where I'm from? Men like that son of a bitch who's jerking all our chains fucking thrive on people turning on each other. It's how Spain turned into the kind of country where one side of a war was killing people for going to church, and the other was doing it if you loved the wrong people too openly. It's how Germany turned into the fucking charnel house it is right now, and it's how three years ago my home started rounding up people and putting them in goddamn prison camps just because they looked like you!
I... God. I'm sorry, but you can believe what you want about what Vita can do when we're not in some kind of... when we're somewhere normal. The last thing we need to do is start targeting each other. That was Akira's mistake, and... not just his. That bastard is expecting us to fight each other. If we sit down and lay out what we all have figured out... there's one of him and a whole fucking load of snakes, and fifteen of us. Maybe eleven who can actually fight something like that, but I can tell you right now, that's better than doing exactly what that bastard wants us to.
CW: Spanish Civil War atrocities, Japanese-American Internment, World War II
I am going to say this once, because I feel like shit, and I'm going to try to stay polite because you seem like you've normally got a good head on your shoulders.
There are things here that none of us understand. None of us. Maybe you're too much of a fucking egghead to realize it, but comparing the present to past experiences is just a thing humans do outside of fucking books. It's how we work. I know there's a... there's some single-word phrase for it, but I can't remember that because the person who usually remembers that shit for me is apparently being held prisoner by the same lunatic who's got us all here!
[He pauses, forces his shoulders down, forces himself to unclench his hands. He forces himself to breathe, deeply, a few times, holding one hand up to indicate he's not done talking yet.]
I don't want to believe that, but if that thud was a body falling out of nowhere, then I don't know what the fuck we're dealing with. What I do know is this: all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to ignore it and turn on each other. Maybe you're lucky, and you live in a peaceful world where there's "no such thing as evil". Maybe your world doesn't have things like atom bombs or vampires or the Klan or Franco and Hitler. Maybe you're that fucking lucky, hell, maybe there wasn't even one Great War. But where I'm from? Men like that son of a bitch who's jerking all our chains fucking thrive on people turning on each other. It's how Spain turned into the kind of country where one side of a war was killing people for going to church, and the other was doing it if you loved the wrong people too openly. It's how Germany turned into the fucking charnel house it is right now, and it's how three years ago my home started rounding up people and putting them in goddamn prison camps just because they looked like you!
I... God. I'm sorry, but you can believe what you want about what Vita can do when we're not in some kind of... when we're somewhere normal. The last thing we need to do is start targeting each other. That was Akira's mistake, and... not just his. That bastard is expecting us to fight each other. If we sit down and lay out what we all have figured out... there's one of him and a whole fucking load of snakes, and fifteen of us. Maybe eleven who can actually fight something like that, but I can tell you right now, that's better than doing exactly what that bastard wants us to.