Sayid ran his hands through the thick, dark hair that would only hinder him. Methodically, emotionlessly, he pulled it away from his neck and tied it back.
The man who called himself Henry Gale wished to know who Sayid was. Well, he would tell the man who he was, and then he would show him.
Sayid spoke. He spoke of the things he wished he could purge from his spirit, the things of which he had once naively believed himself incapable. His words were as calm as his eyes, but those eyes hardened as he concluded, "But I did come to learn this: there is a part of me which was always capable. You want to know who I am? My name is Sayid Jarrah, and I am a torturer."
There were two kinds of people in this world, Sayid thought. There were the Nadia's, who believed men were inherently good, who thought that if they did any works of evil, they did so because they were misguided, lost, and that all they needed to find their way again was love and direction.
And then there were the Iman's. The Iman's who chuckled with protruding tongue when you told them you would never torture again. The Iman's who knew that the beast lived within the man, that it had to be caged by conscience and shackled by society and bludgeoned back by the mallet of morality, but that, sooner or later, the watchman would grow weary of his work, the guardian of the soul would fall asleep…and the thing would get out.
Nadia had believed that in order to work in those torturer chambers, in order to live among the blood and the cracking and the screams and the pleas, Sayid had been forced to fight himself, to strike down his conscience day in and day out, to make it a prisoner to his duty. But she had been wrong. He had not needed to fight his essential self in order to take up the pliers, in order to clench the fists, in order to inflict the pain. He had only needed to stop fighting.
Sayid inhaled deeply. The stale air of the vault was saturated with the stench of fear, and that scent was invigorating. He could almost taste the blood.