Thomas tried his best to evade the attack, but he still found the right side of his abdomen bleeding after the successful hit. Thomas put his left hand across the wound and fired his weapon at the Saint again with his right hand. Thomas needed to kill this thing fast, so he decided he would not stop firing until the thing fell off the catwalk or simply died where it stood. He knew he had a very limited amount of bullets, but he was sure that the few he had left in his current clip would be enough to finish the job.<br/><br/><br/>Jack pulled his bandanna out of his back pocket and began using it to try and polish his weapon. His mind wandered as he rubbed it back and forth across the barrel of his shotgun, the almost hypnotic motion stirring up the memories of the past that roiled in his head like a storm over a murky ocean. Jack remembered everyone he'd let down in the past, but he couldn't understand why he'd let them down. There were always chances for him to do the right thing, but he felt like he never wanted to do it. Maybe he was afraid to be the better man, perhaps it was because he honestly believed in his heart that he didn't need anybody and all they were were hindrances. Jack contemplated the good people he'd met and the bad people, thinking about which of the good could have helped him if he'd let them and which of the bad might have caused him to become this way. He thought harder, wondering why he was a bad person, not understanding why he couldn't just have been the better man. After a few seconds of thought the realization hit Jack like a train. It wasn't that he didn't let the people change him, it was his indifference towards every situation and almost every person he'd ever met that stopped him from being better. The situation where he could have helped Draco, letting his friends die so he could survive, even taking that shot yesterday when he had no right to take it. Every one of those acts displayed a near sociopathic level of indifference towards the lives of the people around him, he'd never cared, nobody had ever made a big enough impact to make him care. He thought he loved Leela, but when he went over their relationship in his head the best part of being around her was that he forgot about his own problems, not to mention he got to fuck somebody in the process. Jack realized that he didn't care, not about her, not about his past friends, not about anything in the past fifteen years he'd been through. Jack understood now what his new power meant, he wasn't angry at the enemy, he was angry at himself because he was completely incapable of giving two shits about anything. Jack wanted to care, but he couldn't, that was what the power stood for.<br/><br/>Jack thought about Dradel, thinking of the two people it used to make it's form. Draco and Zaida, those were the two. Draco probably hated him for leaving him for dead when there was almost no effort involved in helping him and possibly saving his life. Jack remembered his thought process at that moment, he was thinking about how he turned his sprite against him and how much he was undeserving of any help from him. That was why Jack walked away, he chose indifference towards somebody he knew nothing about. Zaida was another matter entirely, there were so many reasons for her to hate him. Jack kept the amulet away from her for quite a while, but he never destroyed it because he felt it made no impact on his life once he left the planet. Jack could have tried to help the people of Exalein, it might have cost him his life, but he might have been able to do something. Jack was indifferent towards the lives of billions of people he knew nothing about simply because he felt they didn't matter in the course of his own being. He would get to go home, they would get to die at theirs, and he didn't do a damn thing to try and stop that. Whether it was what Dradel was meant to represent or not, that was what it was to Jack. Dradel was a monument to Jack's indifference towards life as a whole, a monument to how little value he put on everyone but himself.<br/><br/>Jack snapped back to reality, raising his head as he stopped polishing his weapon. He set down the shotgun and tied the bandanna around his head, wishing he'd never thought about what he just realized. After Jack picked his gun up he gazed out the door to see if there was any hostiles approaching. After all, it was his job to keep watch.