Pendour's smile was thin and tired as Faustite spoke of how he saw Order. A small line formed in between her brows, and she spun her ring around on her finger. "Even with, um, everything I don't agree with, I don't think their intentions are quite like that. If you're doing all this for smiles and thanks, you'll be disappointed a lot of the time."
Not just when you found the cold corpses, or the old friends wearing black, with empty eyes, and that was what the result was, so much of the time, until the hopelessness crawled into your bones. "A lot of people still think we're terrorists or gangsters. I've had people scared of me, even when I'm getting them away from a youma. Sometimes people don't see you at all, and even if they're grateful, it's not like they know who you are under the magic."
She was silent for a longer moment, and when she spoke again, it was a little louder than her scared whisper, a little more rhythmic. "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less."
She looked over to Faustite. "It's a poem."
She looked skyward, and then around herself at the damage that she knew Order had wrought. "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
It was a thought that was important enough to her own philosophy that she'd memorized it. Maybe it wasn't like that for everyone else, who probably didn't see it as deeply as she did, to the point where she didn't even wish for the death of someone like Faustite, but they understood the basics of it.
"It's like what we were talking about, how things would limp along for a while if something happened to us, about how hearts would break. It's the same for anyone else, who gets hurt or killed. Maybe they're someone's favorite teacher, or the life of the party."
She knew that the easiest counterargument here would be that maybe some people weren't as important as that, which could quickly nosedive into the argument that some people deserved to die, which made her skin crawl, and she did what she could to cut that off by adding, "Or even someone who's down on their luck who still shares whatever food they find with the others. People are probably fighting for their friends and neighbors more than you see as someone on the other side of things, but even if they're not, those violent losses have awful ripple effects on the whole community."
How many candle vigils had she seen on Instagram? How many bodies had she seen on the pavement? How many missing people came up, every year, with people begging on the Internet or even sometimes on TV, with their tear-streaked faces, for any news about someone who Pendour knew was probably corrupted, or else lying soulless in an alleyway?
"And yes, some people probably get sucked up in the power." She thought of Cybele as she took a few steps over to a charred brick, and ran a finger over it. "Some people have more, um, specific reasons? That I can't go into without breaking confidence."
Encke's story came to mind, but she knew Faustite was the last person he'd want knowing that he'd once been a youma.
"But that's the baseline I mostly hear. That's why I come out, wanting to stop that pain and to keep things as whole as they can be, keep people from living in fear. A lot of people in Order have those kinds of intentions, even if their methods make me want to rip my skin off."
A little blunt, but the words had already come out of your mouth.
"And maybe if you squint you could still argue that we're using people for the happiness they give us through society, but," she shrugged. "That's how it goes, isn't it? Giving, receiving. You're, um, going to want energy before you let me leave, I'm guessing."
