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[center][h2] Goodnight [/h2]

[h3] The [color=violet]Chapel[/color] with Dr. Cassar[/h3][/center]

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Dr. Cassar stared Audrey down as she spoke, a calm, stung, disappointed silence as she went further and further down the proverbial path of violence with her speech. He broke his eye contact only to look around the room and assess the reactions of the others, and his eyes widened in muted, suppressed, quiet shock when Abigail interrupted. 

As Audrey's gaze moved to him, Cassar looked right back, lips pursed - and he nodded.

"I can certainly understand the need to be decisive - and better than most, I understand the need to be able to move past the hard decisions without letting them weigh on you inappropriately. But I want to point out, the man who slipped past you and threatened Angeline and Abigail was [i]not[/i] the man Ellen shot and killed. You did not miss him because you simply were not being... [i]ruthless[/i] enough - so the solution is not to be [i]more[/i] ruthless, or to not reflect on your actions."

Cassar paused a moment, looking down to the floor, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together slowly as he thought.

"I couldn't say, you know, if you were right to go looking through that man's wallet." He looked up again at Ellen. "I couldn't tell you. And I don't think you should let what you've done drag you down into a pit forever, from which you could not emerge - but..." he looked back to Audrey, "... that is not what [i]grieving[/i] is. Grief is important, it's how our kind, [i]humankind[/i] processes loss, and emotional harm. Normally, it is for people we knew - but not always, you know?" He glanced back to Ellen.

"You shot a man, with a gun, more than once. He fell over, and he died. It was not instant. I can tell you for absolute fact, that he was in a huge amount of pain, the kind of pain you would not believe unless you've been shot before too, and that as he lay there dying he was terrified in a way that most people cannot know - in a way that I pray everyone here never knows, ever. This all happened because of your actions. That does not mean you did the wrong thing, and I am certainly not naive enough to believe that our situation," he gestured around the room, "could be resolved without force, or that self-defense does not incur such a cost... but the only people who even know he's dead are in this room. Somebody should grieve, to remember that he was a person, and that he once lived."

He looked back at Audrey, his eyes harder than they were before, his demeanour colder.

"That is how you let go. That is how you move on. And Audrey, I just want to say, you cannot compare this type of decision making to medicine. The work you do is necessary, and I value it, but you cannot pretend that it is anything like mine."

"Of course it's not," Audrey agreed immediately. "Completely different outcomes. It was the only metaphor I could think of at the time." 

Cassar kept staring her down as she replied. He took a deep breath in, held it for a moment, and then released all of his discontent with it as he exhaled. A dry, rough, frequently-sanitised hand came up and scratched his beard as he nodded, and the smile came back to his face.

“Ok. Look, I don’t want to take up any more of you guys’ time, you know? I think this has been pretty good, and of course, you all did a really good job getting the medicines back, so thank you again. I’m free to talk about stuff any time anybody wants, work permitting, and I’ll hang around here to pray for a bit as well in case anybody wants to join me - although, you don’t have to pray if you don’t want, and no pressure either way.”