The Silence In Between

Kate’s night drags on for another three hours before she’s finally allowed to go home. Between a debrief with Hill (where they were all only slightly yelled at) and having her ribs patched up (badly bruised, but no breaks and a cut that required twelve stitches), Kate drags herself into her apartment.

“Hey, sorry I’m so late buddy,” Kate winces as she kneels down to give Lucky some love. She hates leaving him here alone for so long when missions run on like that. She’s wondered more than a few times if he’d be happier on Clint’s farm - but she doesn’t have it in her to not have this when she comes home.

After receiving her fair share of kisses and sniffs, Kate pushes up to her feet with a groan that makes her sound sixty and decides she should probably eat something before setting in.

She settles on some leftover tomato-y chicken thing Yelena left over and tries her damnedest not to think about Yelena as she eats it.

Kate’s brain has spent most of the night trying its best to paint Yelena as the worst person she’s ever known. Dragging up old memories of feeling dismissed or disappointed even from way back during Christmas years ago when they first met.

She knows it’s bullshit, she knows tonight was not something Yelena enjoyed but god it made her feel cornered and inadequate and just…frustrated.

She fucked up and she knows it, she should have incapacitated Walker and taken the part herself. She could have had an entirely different conversation with Hill tonight, one that didn't include her sheepishly apologizing for being bullied out of a resource.

It was made even worse by the fact that Hill didn’t even reprimand her. Instead she told Kate this is how it goes sometimes and that she was “smart” for not engaging and not lowering herself to “their style”.

Kate had to bite her tongue not to lash out a defense for Yelena, something she finds herself doing a lot when the Thunderbolts come up in conversation.

What she needs right now is to eat (the medical team told her to because of the painkillers), change clothes and lie down. She’s exhausted and her side hurts and when she starts giggling about the way her food looks on the fork, Kate thinks the painkillers she was given have started to make her a little loopy.

Once she starts eating, Kate finds herself smiling, if only because the pain has gone away. Kate begins to sway back and a little on her feet, dancing to a song in her head, or maybe just trying not to fall over.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

The three knocks on her door are so soft and so careful that Kate knows exactly who it is. She looks back towards the sound, just staring at her apartment door and debating on whether she’s mentally capable of having this conversation right now.

She probably isn’t, because before she really registers any of it, she’s at the door and opening it. Yelena is there, looking like she washed herself with a firehose or something. Her face and chest are red, as they get when she showers because Yelena uses scalding hot water. She’s wearing a baby blue t-shirt with a sweater tied around her waist and her blonde hair hangs in stringy, wet strands all around her head.

She’s beautiful, and the moment she sees her Kate has this instant wave of joy at the sight, but then she remembers, and her frown sets in again. “Hey,” she grumbles and turns away, leaving the door open for Yelena to follow.

In life you're going to encounter ethical questions that you've never considered before or you'll find reasons to question ethical questions that you always thought that you knew the answer to. And when that happens, you have to be comfortable thinking the whole things thru from all angles, even though your gut instinct tells you to settle for the easy answer that makes you comfortable.

You have to be able to ask questions like 'but is anyone harmed by the thing that disgusts me?', 'is this about improving the world or just about punishment'?, 'what if my assumptions about why people do this thing are wrong'?

You have to be comfortable not being sure yet what your conclusion will be. You have to be comfortable exploring opinions that differ from what your friends think. Thought experiments teach you this.

I work the door at a feminist club sometimes. We've got a big sign at the door in bold letters reading "No touch of any kind without consent, you will be kicked out". When new guests show up, we point out the rule and ask them to confirm that they'll follow this rule.

Every night, there will be a few guys whose response to this is to immediately put a finger somewhere on my body, like my shoulder or my arm, and ask "not even this?". If those guys are allowed to enter the club, they ALWAYS end up groping people. Their response to a boundary that was put in place to prevent harm, is to immediately push it, test it, see if they can do a little bit of harm, see how much harm we will tolerate. That's what that finger and "not even this?" shows.

In this club, little innocent touches without prior consent definitely happen. It's loud and it can get crowded on the dance floor and around the bar. Shoulders touch, people tap each other on their arm to signal that they want to get through the crowd. No harm is done. But "No touch of any kind without consent" stays up at the door because its an effective filter to keep out the predatory guys.

Social conventions around the n-word are a lot like that. While it is technically true that the sound of the n-word does no harm on its own and it's the intent that makes a slur into a slur, to point that out is to misunderstand why the "don't say the n-word ever" social rule is there. It's a test, like our "No touch of any kind without consent" rule. People who see that rule and respond by pushing its boundaries are telling on themselves. They're showing that they want to explore how much harm we will tolerate.

Clever, insightful thought experiments have no clear answer and challenge us to examine all sides of an issue, to dig deeper until we get to a more complex nuanced understanding of moral issues.