✓ Chaos Theory | Diego Hargreeves [1]

【CHAPTER TEN】

—chapter ten.

  ❛ i'm not sure how anything came to be. ❜  

ELODIE AND DIEGO WERE A STRANGE COMBINATION.

Universally, it was always the thought that two people so similar and for lack of better words, screwed up should not work. They should not even be in the same room together (save for when seven of them had to save the city from great evils or whatever Reginald claimed). Opposites attracted, but two sides of the same coin never met except in their inevitable doom.

Except that could not be further from the case with the two of them.

Whether they would admit it or not, both Elodie and Diego were very lonely people. They spent most of their time with only themselves, and even when around people, it was on the edge of a great precipice, waiting for their turn in. They longed for conversation, for the touch of another or even just a friendly smile, and yet both scorned anything good that came their way in the belief that they did not deserve it. Sure, they weren't going to admit that to anyone and certainly not each other, but that truth was true.

Diego Hargreeves was hardly functional as a member of society. He had a chance to be great; the police academy was a great path and another version of him might have excelled within that system. But he couldn't. He threw away everything good, including a woman he once thought he'd do anything for, for a bloody and selfish path of justice. It was taxing and didn't pay him a single red dime and left him anxious and bruised every single night.

He wasn't even sure why he did it, anymore.

Elodie was a different story, but not that different. Instead of being an amateur vigilante, she worked a shitty bar and at least talked to people, which was more than Diego could say, but there was never a connection. She did not care about the people that came and went, and scorned her coworkers, even the ones she wanted to be closest with. She didn't want their love, their sympathy, because she knew they would only leave her if they found out who she really was. She kept them at arms-length and subdued their troubled looks with a cheerless smile and ignored her burning desire to feel something more than loneliness for a night.

She wasn't really sure how she kept going, anymore.

But it was for the ones they loved, and both knew that they'd do anything for them. Diego never said a word about it, but he'd broken up more fights for Klaus then the man could imagine, and pulled deal after deal to keep his brother out of trouble even when he deserved the consequence. He kept guard some nights of Vanya's apartment and made sure the bastards that yelled and drank outside the building didn't try a thing, just for his own peace of mind. And Elodie played mother to a boy meant to be her brother, sending and doing everything she could to ensure he never had to live the life she did. Even if it meant she lived on the mere scraps of her paychecks, and never got to see his face save for in the pictures her Grandmother mailed her, if he was happy she'd survive.