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liesmyth:

She said to me, John, there is no second wave. There is no third. They’re escaping. The trillionaires have converted everything to material resources. Half these passenger manifests are made up, these aren’t real people. They’ve fucked everyone, even the governments. There’ll be one single ship of internationals who think they’re on Wave One to Tau Ceti, and everyone else will be corporate, or have bought a ticket, or be useful. They’re leaving us to die. I had to have her breathe into a bag for a while, because she hated it when I tried to fix her anxiety attacks with necromancy. When she could talk I was just all, Are you sure. She said, John, there they go!! And I said, Not as long as I have breath in my body.
“You have rendered yourself unlovable, Mercy,” said Augustine. “You’re the second saint. He’s sentimental over you. But don’t forget that he’s spent the last ten thousand years on a perpetual search-and-destroy mission out of, as far as I can tell, purely symbolic retribution. John is never as sentimental as you think.

“There can be no forgiveness.” John and his myriad-long revenge quest. Augustine calls it symbolic retribution; but to John it’s the only way to fulffil the promise he made to the friends he saw brutally murdered in front of his eyes. Nevermind that he removed their memories, so Mercy can’t hold him to it and—conveniently!—she can’t release him from it. Nevermind that he killed Mercy; he’s still clinging to it because revenge is all he has left. “Nothing satisfies me. Nothing.” 

Also: Augustine, telling Mercy that John isn’t sentimental. John who is driven by nothing but his sentiments, as corrupted and twisted as they are. Something something the man I want you to be rather than the man you apparently are.