Wow. This was not the conversation he'd been expecting to have with a drunken Sam. Pike idly wondered if there was more here that Sam wasn't saying, but he clamped down on that thought. Rampant speculation was pointless. Instead, he focused on what Sam was actually asking him. He turned around to face the bar, popping the cap on his Sam Addams and taking a sip. Then he dropped his forearms onto the bar and leaned heavily on it, staring at a spot somewhere in the center of the little ring they formed. It wasn't that he didn't know how to answer Sam's questions. He did have answers for them, and while he wasn't arrogant enough to believe they were the right answers, they were good enough for him. It was just the wording that could be tricky. Still, he had to give it a shot.
Taking a deep breath, he started on what was likely to be some very long explanations. "You called them little things, that's kind of different than how I see them. I mean, yeah, to you and me they're little things. Pulling a punch in a fight, walking away from an argument before it even hit the fighting level, not just taking out someone that pisses us off or hurts us, those are little things to us. For Faith, though?" Now he looked up Sam, just briefly, enough so that Sam could see genuine belief and, yes, faith in his eyes. "For Faith, those very same things are huge. Maybe not the actions themselves, but sometimes you have to look a little deeper. Faith doesn't think like that, like we do, not right now. But when she does one of these little things, she's forcing herself to stop and think about what she's doing, and when she does, she's making the right choice. Yeah, for us it comes easy, but for her it doesn't. And that's the point, Sam. It doesn't come easy, but she's doing it anyway. It would be so much easier for her to just say 'fuck it all, I don't care' but by doing these little things, she's proving that she does care. She's proving that she wants to change, and more than that, she's proving that she has what it takes to change. Because yeah, they may be little actions now, but everything, little and big, they all come back to thought. She's changing the way she thinks, little by little, and that takes a kind of strength that not everyone has. Will she ever be some saintly do-gooder in a cape, defending truth, justice, and the American way? Nope. Not now, not ever. But that doesn't mean she can't be good. It doesn't mean she can't pull herself out of the hole she's dug for herself. Every time she does one of these little things, she proves that she's strong enough to keep walking down this road to redemption." With a shrug, he added, "And let's not forget, even a bunch of pennies can be pretty heavy, when you pile a bunch of them up." Okay, so maybe it wasn't the greatest metaphor, but it worked. "And no, I don't think she's going to go nuts on everyone. Not anymore. I can't say she won't ever go nuts on herself, but I think everyone else is more or less out of danger." It was the more or less that was the key, there.
Now came the tougher part. "Does it compare? Well, honestly, it's not about that. It's not about some kind of karmic balance sheet, where you check off one bad deed for every good deed she does and then, one day, she's redeemed. This isn't like getting stars on your daily report card in kindergarten. She's done terrible things, and these things can never be undone. But just because they're there in her past, just because they can't be erased, doesn't automatically make her tainted forever. She'll bear the scars of her mistakes until she dies, the same way we all will. Sometimes the scars will still twinge, other times it'll almost be like they aren't there. Almost." Pike knew that one from painful experience. "But if she works hard and doesn't give up on herself, she can change. She can become a better person. It won't change the past, but it'll make all the difference to the present and the future, and in the end that's what really matters."