@trueseeking ( continued )
‘ hurting others is a choice ’
❛ It’s unfortunate how many people would disagree. ❜ Yet for all his deceptively light tone, the glimmers of wry humor, someone who knew him better would pick up the sadness that lurked therein, the perpetual exhaustion with the world as it was. As if his very being warred at every moment with the external universe, unreconcilable. He restrained a sigh, shook his head instead. Now is not the time or place for grim mockery or flippancy.
More seriously, more focus, he added, ❛ But it’s not a choice I intend to make. We’ll find another way. ❜ Yet he didn’t add the words that followed in his mind: we always do. They seemed too prophetic, too dangerous in the way they must tempt fate and bring worse down upon their heads. Orders were only orders, after all, and now would not be the first, nor the last, time he bent them to his own purposes or shattered them upon the rocky shore of morality. He wondered, sometimes, how many more times he could afford to do so.
Reg couldn’t really get his head around the vastness of all this. Entire civilizations at war with each other, at serious risk of being wiped out forever. Every ship Reg was called to fix in worse shape than the next. Though worst of all was being asked to salvage the ones whose pilots hadn’t survived the trip. Just patch it up and move on, like it wasn’t a death trap now...
“I r-really hope you do, Commander,” he finally replied. “Because... I d-don’t know how much longer we all can keep doing this.”