fandomhigh | Ethics [Tuesday, January 5, 2nd period]

Anakin walked into his classroom precisely on time and gave the students assembled there an appraising glance--lingering a moment on a few faces--as the door clicked shut behind him. If you were late, you weren't getting in. "I'm Master Anakin Skywalker," he said in a voice that was intended to carry, "this is Ethics, and we're going to skip the introductions--I'll figure out who you are, if I don't recognize you already--and move straight to our first discussion."

He paced around the room, cloak flaring out behind him, as he handed out the syllabus. "Today's topic," he said, pointing to the top of the page. "Self sacrifice: knowing the difference between saving people and being a pretentious twit."

"Any time I ask a a group of people what they would do to save someone they love, they all blither on about how they would set the world on fire, lie, cheat, steal, kill, die, et cetera, et cetera. I've been at this school too long to believe that half of you haven't already been put into this situation and I'm in no mood to hear adolescent ramblings about how wonderful you were or might hypothetically be. Instead I want you to give me a concrete example of a time you admitted to yourself that a problem cannot be solved, and that sacrificing yourself wasn't a statement, but was merely pointless." His gaze swept the room. "How long does it take for you to realize you can't fix everything by yourself? Have you ever learned that lesson?"

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This was a difficult question. It had never occurred to Bruce that he couldn't solve any problem, he was devoting his life to train for something that could get him killed at any time if he wasn't perfect, and he absolutely intended to fix everything by himself.

In effect, he not only hadn't had the experiences Skywalker was asking for, he also disagreed with the very premise of the question. And so he worked around the question.

"I have yet to be in a situation where I've needed to sacrifice myself, and I haven't seen a problem that can't be solved. The real question is whether or not you can get to the best solution."

"But that's not the question I asked," Anakin said with a tiny smile. "And you've never run into an impossible scenario?"

"Not since I was eight years old," Bruce said. Because, really, there wasn't anything that could be done then. "Maybe I've just been lucky."

He didn't believe that for a second.

"What happened when you were eight?" Anakin asked.

"My parents were killed," Bruce said. If it wasn't clear that the bit about being lucky was sarcastic before, it probably was now.

Edited 2010-01-06 03:29 (UTC)

"There are other students here who have suffered that same loss," Anakin said, but not without sympathy.

And only a few of them had looked into zombies and reincarnation.

Edited 2010-01-06 03:35 (UTC)

"So I've heard," Bruce said. He met several of them. On Saturday. While waiting for the bus.

That's the kind of thing that might give some people notions about just what kind of school was being run here.

Ethics [Tuesday, January 5, 2nd period]

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