I don't know what the point is of this, of democracy and freedom and patriotism. If there are no white hats. If everyone is evil. If the deck is always stacked. If everyone I love is a monster. If no one is worth saving. What's the point?
There is, incidentally, a point. If there are no more white hats, if the deck is always stacked, and if everyone you love is a monster, there is, in fact, someone worth saving.
Everyone is worth saving. Everyone. In the face of darkness, you drag everyone into the light. That is the point. At least I'd like to think that is the point of you.
And I am Command. Which means you don't tell me to do anything because I'm not your bitch. Your job is to shake hands, hold babies, pose with prime ministers, and sit down to interviews with your family. You comfort people, and you look pretty, and you talk tough. You don't do anything. I decide if there is a war. I decide if a world leader dies. I decide what to do with the Dmitris and the Ivans. I decide if America sleeps at night. I decide if America endures. This is not a game, Mr. President, and you're not getting your ball back.
What I know is that you are a terrorist, a traitor to your own country.
MMaya
Maybe. But I'd rather be a traitor than what you are, Livvie. Cleaning up those people's messes. Fixing up their lives. You think you're family. But you're nothing but the help. And you don't even know it.
Of course I resent it. But somewhere in this head of mine, behind the fog, behind the anger, is my faint recollection that what we do is important, that my husband died for a reason, that his death matters. So, instead of going home and crying about it like I'm going to do, I need you to get back in there, back in that little white building with all those miserable people inside of it and do the job for both of us. Because it's not just that family you're putting back together. It's the whole damn country.
What else am I supposed to be? I lie in bed every night and I play our relationship over and over again in my head like a movie. We meet. We fall in love. We can't stop ourselves. We're meant to be. I give up everything inside me and then it stops. The movie just stops. I don't know how it ends. It's just me waiting for a house in Vermont that I can't live in and a man who makes me promises he can't keep.
Being you? Cutting people's throats and calling it politics? Appealing to the lowest, basest part of humanity, scraping the bottom of a person's soul, carrying out these little emotional assassinations?
So choose Mellie. I wish you would. It would restore my faith in humanity. But, if there's one thing I know, it's that, given the choice between power and love, men like you will always, always choose power.
I'm helping you put down an animal, a dog that isn't mine anymore, a dog that is sick and malnourished because its new master doesn't know how to care for it. So rather than sit here and watch it starve to death, I've chosen to euthanize it, to show it mercy, not because I hate it, but because I love it.
You don't get to run. You're a gladiator. Gladiators don't run. They fight. They slay dragons. The wipe off the blood. They stitch up their wounds, and they live to fight another day. You don't get to run. How was that?
You mean the sacrifice of sleeping with me so you could hack into my phone? Crazy, right? All these years of thinking B613 is untouchable. And all it takes to kill us is a good, quick tug on a zipper.
He will reel you in with a trail of warmth and kindness. He will hold you in his arms and tell you that he loves you. And once you are comfortable, once you feel safe, he will take everything that matters from you, and he will leave you with nothing. He will break your bones and step over your body on his way out. Do you know how I know that? Because that's what he taught me to do.
I want his head in the fire and I want to see him burn. I want to hand him the one piece of news that will destroy him and I want to watch his face when it happens. I have kept this secret for 15 years. I have lost my life for 15 years. I have lived this lie for 15 years and all the while I have watched him walk away from me. I have been destroyed while I have made him President. It is my turn! He suffers. He hurts. He burns. I'm tired of carrying the cross. Let him pick it up now. Big Jerry isn't something I want to be nailed to anymore.
I do not like him, but Olivia, I do love you, and I want you to have everything, everything you deserve. So, when I say I wish I could help, I do wish I could help. I wish I could help you.
