No one really knew what to do with themselves, after he died. He'd been keeping so many disparate circles together with nothing more than his charisma and his ability to make people feel like they owed him, like they needed him. Then someone put a bullet through his head and it all started to fall apart.
We thought maybe running away would make the chaos go away, but you can't really run from chaos, not when you're part of it. Not even if you thought you'd finally gotten away from all that. The chaos follows, and it's so, so tempting to give in, to let the chaos rule, to ignore everything you know and understand and let it all drift away on a whim. We almost did. Neither of us were trying to be leaders when we finally decided to stand up. We just wanted to calm things down, to let people know they didn't need to keep suffering now he was gone. But they rallied behind us anyway, a rock to shelter behind in a tempest, because what other choice did they have? Keep on drifting aimlessly?
So we helped where we could, we tried to give people some solid ground to stand on, and I tried my level best not to cringe every time someone said "we owe you one" or something like it. Maybe that's how he got started, forever ago: standing steady in a storm and people just flocked to him. Maybe he really did want to help at first, and then it was just so easy, once he'd built something, to just keep collecting people who owed him, who needed him. Maybe at some point he forgot that this all started because he had the chance to help people.
We disappeared again as soon as the chaos settled down, went back to laying low, trying to stay out of sight. Some part of me worried that we'd just leave more chaos in our wake once we were gone, but people aren't so bad at dealing with chaos if they have a rock to stand on. They'd be fine. I had to believe that.
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