Writer's Note: This one is definitely a drabble in name. It was a request for urania_calliope, under the prompt "Absolution". This one was a TOUGH one, so I had to make it short, but I'd say that, over all, it turned out how I wanted it to. Enjoy!
Absolution
It's hard to see beyond black and white. Hard to see beyond what you've thought is the way of things.
But when it was learned, near the end of the war, that the Beast Planet itself wasn't so much a ruthless killer, but more akin to a hungry predator, it threw everything into grey.
Could you fault a man for killing a fish to feed his starving family? Could you punish a child for stealing some lichen in order to stop the pain in its belly?
Could you be angry at a creature for wanting to stave off the hunger?
Granted, the Beast's offspring weren't exactly poster-children for benevolence, but it made everyone reconsider their approach on how to face the Beast Planet as a whole.
It had always been agreed upon that the Beast Planet was pure evil. They all agreed that they would pull out the stops to destroy it if it meant ridding the universe of a horrendous killer.
But what if it was just hungry?
What if it was cursed with insatiability?
It was a dilemma. How could they punish a predator for doing what nature intended? How could they destroy something for merely being what it was?
For a while, there was no solution. For a while, they were forced to pause in their actions, to try and figure out if they should change their plans to disabling rather than destroying.
There was no way around it, really. They had to destroy it. They had to find some way to be rid of it.
But it wasn't without a sense of guilt, a sense of loss. A sense of shame, really, that what they were doing was, while necessary to survive, somewhat hypocritical.