[What takes him longer is figuring out why it's horrible. He's afraid, he knows he is, but after the first burst of adrenaline it's far off and abstract, a thing he should be feeling and is used to feeling, nothing more. On some level he does know, he does understand, that Elena is no threat to him, that she doesn't follow the rules he knows, that if she was going to hurt him - hurt anyone - she would have done it already.]
[He knows that. He does. Which makes it easier, much easier, to calm down. But it doesn't make it any easier to find the answer for himself.]
[It takes him the whole journey of her story, the abridged version of her life as a self-described monster, past the death of her brother and the deaths that she caused and the way that she hates what she's done, for him to figure it out. The reason that this is awful isn't because she's saying awful things - awful things she's done, awful things that have been done to her.]
[What makes this awful is that she is defending her right to exist to him, as though it's his choice whether she lives or dies, as though it's his job to pass some kind of judgment on her.]
[Maybe before, he would have thought it was. Maybe. Now . . .]
[He isn't capable of passing judgment on anyone or anything. He's barely capable of keeping control of himself. He's less powerful than she is, but other than that, they're not so different - or if they are, they're different because she knows how to control her monster.]
[I don't want to hurt anyone here. That's the difference. Because some days, he does.]
[It's a struggle to figure out what to say to all this. So he doesn't bother. He does something that's maybe selfish and maybe cruel and maybe unfair instead, and sweeps her up in his arms, not tight but secure, because he is his father's son but sometimes, maybe, he can stop and think for two seconds at a time.]
I know you are. [It's very quiet, solemn, about as unemotional as he gets - a statement of fact rather than one of opinion. He doesn't think she is, he knows she is.] Anybody who can't see that isn't looking.
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[What takes him longer is figuring out why it's horrible. He's afraid, he knows he is, but after the first burst of adrenaline it's far off and abstract, a thing he should be feeling and is used to feeling, nothing more. On some level he does know, he does understand, that Elena is no threat to him, that she doesn't follow the rules he knows, that if she was going to hurt him - hurt anyone - she would have done it already.]
[He knows that. He does. Which makes it easier, much easier, to calm down. But it doesn't make it any easier to find the answer for himself.]
[It takes him the whole journey of her story, the abridged version of her life as a self-described monster, past the death of her brother and the deaths that she caused and the way that she hates what she's done, for him to figure it out. The reason that this is awful isn't because she's saying awful things - awful things she's done, awful things that have been done to her.]
[What makes this awful is that she is defending her right to exist to him, as though it's his choice whether she lives or dies, as though it's his job to pass some kind of judgment on her.]
[Maybe before, he would have thought it was. Maybe. Now . . .]
[He isn't capable of passing judgment on anyone or anything. He's barely capable of keeping control of himself. He's less powerful than she is, but other than that, they're not so different - or if they are, they're different because she knows how to control her monster.]
[I don't want to hurt anyone here. That's the difference. Because some days, he does.]
[It's a struggle to figure out what to say to all this. So he doesn't bother. He does something that's maybe selfish and maybe cruel and maybe unfair instead, and sweeps her up in his arms, not tight but secure, because he is his father's son but sometimes, maybe, he can stop and think for two seconds at a time.]
I know you are. [It's very quiet, solemn, about as unemotional as he gets - a statement of fact rather than one of opinion. He doesn't think she is, he knows she is.] Anybody who can't see that isn't looking.
[I'm looking.]