Arlen Halibert had always been the lonely sort.

Even when he was younger, just a pudgy-faced, snotty little brat with too much time on his hands and his head in the stars, he had been lonely.

Lonely even in a house full of siblings, because even when he had been surrounded by what were supposed to be his closest friends, none of them had ever taken him seriously, none of them had ever really listened to him.

He hadn’t minded, at first. He had been too young to really understand, y'know? That his opinion simply didn’t matter to his own family, that he was just another voice in a sea of them that were already too loud as it was.

As time passed, he learned to be heard in other ways—if people didn’t pay attention to him when he did his part, he’d simply act up until they noticed him, until they listened to his opinions, until they—

When he was about seventeen, he made some dumb mistakes. Not the sort that bore repeating, but the sort that made him sick to his stomach when he thought too much on them in the late nights under the star canopy that hung so precariously above his bed.

He wasn’t a perfect person. Far from it. Which was why it annoyed him so much, why it made him so angry when Jack had—

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

He turned the sentence over and over in his head, days after the interaction, because on one hand, he could understand the truth of it. Even if he meant to do well, even if he was trying his damned best and fighting for what he thought was the right reason, he could still end up being wrong at the end.

He could close his eyes on that final day and realize that all along, the cause he had fought so hard for had been the incorrect one.

He just… hoped to gods that wasn’t the case, most days. He’d pray, but he’d never been very religious.

Between his hoping, he also did a lot of… well, “compensating” was the best word for it, in all regards.

If he really had done too much wrong to be considered forgivable, Arlen figured the only way forward from that was trying to do as many good things as he could to balance it out.

Part of him grappled, some days, wondering passingly if doing things for reasons like that made him less altruistic, or if it made him a bad person.

But at the end of the day, he was still doing them, right? Still trying to be a good person, even if it was hard, or it hurt, or it made him want to hide away again, like he used to.

And it paid off a lot, too. Sometimes the universe gave back, like it had with Jack.

(Even if Jack was the unfortunate origin of his current panic attack.)

He took a deep breath, and let it out as a little sigh.

Ah, well. Even if he wasn’t the best person in the world, and even if he was irredeemably bad—

He’d be able to burn knowing he had done the best he could. And that was good enough for him.