All Together as a Family

Samuel

Hope for the best
Prepare for the worst

Well, there goes the awkward tension, replaced with all out gut-wrenching anger and upset. Deimos, characteristically, didn't say much, only one question: Sam turned to answer it, happy to at least talk to someone willing to temper his voice, but then Amalia, who was very much not willing, began to speak.

Yell, really.

He took it all silently. The words, the anger, the partial shifting; Amalia had done all this to him before and he'd been scared once, but now he found that he was mostly angry himself. Tired of being misunderstood, of being stuck in this endless argument about Ascended that he'd never wanted to be a part of, yet always seemed to be in the middle of.

Putting down his cup with a gentle clink, he turned to her, quiet and cool for the moment. "...Amalia, do you really think the Ascended could fight all the monsters and win? There's hardly any of us strong enough to take on one monster." He'd explained this to the Ascended too and they hadn't seemed to understand, but Sam refused to give up on this point: it was arrogance from the Ascended and assumptions from everyone else that they were somehow strong enough to take on the whole threat.

"I have two families. This one, and the Ascended one. What would you have me do, Amalia? Leave them and die? We went to Safrin. She didn't have a way to help."  It was basically out of the bag now that he'd gone back to the Voice now, so he supposed he may as well justify it.

"So you'd want all the Ascended to die in an attempt to end the monsters? We have choices now that we have the portals, and those people chose to stay in the Grounds. I took people here with me to stay over Longnight and they were safe. You just...you just want us to redeem ourselves in your eyes. Face it, Amalia. You'd rather have a dead brother, than an alive Ascended one." He had been managing to keep a calm composure up until this last part, but now his voice was unsteady and emotional, his eyes boring into her with an intense precision.

Wait all your life to see what you see