When she laughed at how her senior staff were starting to fall in line with his own behavior and ideology, it prompted him to just smile and let out an amused exhale but the undeniable sense of melancholy prevented him from outright laughing. Still, there was something he felt like taking note of out loud. "You called me by my name." A trivial thing but still something that felt uncommon between them.
The question was complicated, because to some degree he wasn't sure what would really happen and how this would change anything, or even if it did change anything. From a cursory glance he'd made at the current attitudes of people in response to this, things seemed on the verge of zealous behavior and in his favor. And while this was definitely a good thing for him, zealotry rarely ever brought good tidings to causes predicated on independence. "It means we're down 4 pilots. That's an insignificant number relative to the thousands of others. The vast and overwhelming majority of people seem more angered by what the mutineers did rather than why they did it. So the integrity of the Alliance is still intact and there's been no petitions demanding my removal. I was surprised to hear that Command had more or less taken initiative the second they knew this had happened, they still are in cases where my direct oversight isn't possible. Not only has Command contacted the Order about this, but they've made sure to dispatch a unit of men to weed out any potential sympathizers the mutineers might have had, so even if this could pose a liability to operations - they aren't going to let it. As for the LFR, well she's always been a herculean dream at the end of a long and bloody tunnel. I'm a drop in that veritable ocean of a war and this changes nothing. With or without me, people will keep striving to create it for as long as Liberty isn't truly free." The reality of the LFR being able to manifest felt immensely distant, and that was almost discouraging. It evoked a sigh from him as his eyes moved across her face in an almost instinctively affectionate manner.
"I'm just going to keep doing my job. As harsh as this was it's given me perspective, couple that with the fact that some of our enemies probably think that I'm dead and that now's the time to make a move, something that we're both prepared for and hoping for them to do. It's about time we grew up as a movement." That last sentence of his was likely the most interesting and full of implications, but he'd provided no elaboration on what he meant by that. Still, it could be assumed that he meant the cause needed some kind of overhaul or restructuring, to eliminate petty divisions that result in the kind of perceptions that the mutineers had of the Roanoke, despite the shared commitment to the LFR.
Even with the genuine and natural confidence and charisma behind his words now, that sense of melancholy remained, like a dampness that had seeped into the walls of a home.
