“
Peter immediately felt stupid. His parents had been told that he was rejected because he was too aggressive—dangerously so. And he had wormed that information out of them at a very young age. Ever since then, it had been a burden he carried around inside—the judgment that he was dangerous. Sometimes it had made him bold; more often, it had made him not trust his own judgment, his own moral framework. Am I doing this because it’s right? Am I doing this because it will really be to my benefit? Or only because I’m aggressive and can’t stand to sit back and wait? He had forced himself to be more patient, more subtle than his first impulse. Time after time he had held back. It was because of this that he had used Valentine and now Petra to write the more dangerous, demagogic essays—he didn’t want any kind of textual analysis to point to him as the author. It was why he had held back from any kind of serious arm-twisting with nations that kept playing with him about joining the FPE—he couldn’t afford to have anyone perceive him as coercive. And all this time, that assessment of him was a lie. “I’m not too aggressive.
”
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