It’s like... [ Tim sighs, taking another drink from his glass, noticing the edges of the world start to blur and in no mood to fight it. ] It’s like all those history books we’ve been reading, right? No one person can force change, even the leaders. Abraham Lincoln had help. You’ll find yours and I’ll find mine. People know when things are wrong, they just need someone to give them the hope to do something about it.

[ An optimism he didn’t always have, or couldn’t apply to his own troubles. The inherent goodness of other people has always been clear to him, but his own? He tried and tried, but it took years to see the forces holding him down as something that even could be struggled against, rather than a natural consequence of his own wrongness. He accepted his lot in life of loneliness and perversion, until he met Hawk, and then accepted that as something he would always have to hide. This place has shown him otherwise. Not just in the history books where he can track the changes, but seeing so many people step up and offer help to complete strangers from other worlds when everything around them is difficult, confusing, or dangerous. How can it not give him hope?

Tim lays his free hand on Koby's head, stroking his fingers through pink hair, the shell of his ear. ]

Maybe it’s the opposite. We all sin, it doesn’t make us evil. Good people aren’t perfect and bad people weren’t always that way.