BORN TO DIE, stefan salvatore [1]

39 - THE SUN ALSO RISES

BORN TO DIE
THE SUN ALSO RISES

"WHERE ARE WE GOING?" Madeleine finally asked after half an hour of silence. After jumping in the car with Theo, the boy hadn't uttered a word nor broke his stare on the road.

"I don't know." He answered forcibly as his grip tightened so hard on the steering wheel that his knuckles had turned white. Madeleine pursed her lips. She needed to tread lightly around Theo. He had just betrayed his family for her. She wondered if he regretted it. Clearly not enough to turn the car around but he was evidently debating the situation in his head.

"Thank you. For what you did back there." She meant it. She was a second from death. He could've let her die and all this would've been over. Madeleine would've been terrified of it, but at least she could stop being a burden to her friends and family. 

Theo didn't utter a word. There was a storm happening inside his brain. The angel and devil arguing loudly. "We learn about you, you know." He said finally. "We're taught from a young age about your kind. How you're the children of evil, how you spend years gathering power to kill us all, that you're monsters. It's all I've ever known. And then I met you and you were so normal. You were kind and you had friends and you opened up to me. You weren't like they said."

"Have you ever actually met anyone like me?" If everyone was taught that the cursed were monsters with razor sharp teeth and a thirst for destruction, she could half understand they're want to kill her. But everyone seemed to forget the human girl that lay beneath all that. 

"A cousin." Theo said. "The deal with Elijah is that we stop killing the cursed as infants but if they turn 20 and there's still no cure, we're allowed to take them as ours. That way the cursed get a chance to live and we don't have to face the repercussions of one of Hestia's bloodbaths. But, Patrick slipped out of our grasp and we were too late. He got taken over and he massacred hundreds."

Madeleine was horrified but she wasn't going to let that change her mind. "Hestia murdered those people not him. Not me. That's the distinction that you people seem to be forgetting."

"I get that. I know that." Theo inhaled. "Maybe I always did." He wondered. "Patrick killed my brother. And it didn't just screw me up, it screwed up everyone. Any empathy that was left inside my mom died when Dean did. She taught me everything I know and maybe it was easier to believe it, to blame someone else and I'm sorry for what I did to you but you have no idea what life I've grown up in."

He was right, she didn't. She had no idea what it was like to live everyday in fear of a monster. To be told your whole life that the people you love are in jeopardy and then to witness it by losing somebody close to you. That was only a reality she had recently discovered. 

Madeleine faced the front. She wanted to understand but all she knew is that she spent the past few days in a basement. That her mother died for her, and her dad lived every day in fear of them.