[ It isn't lost on Derek that there's a disconnect between the small smiles and whatever might be going through her mind. He can see it in her body language and he can smell it on her; he's just shy of choking on her chemosignals and they're so heavy that he can't pick them apart to identify one from another, he just knows that they don't match what she's trying to make him see.
Someone really fucked her up. Someone really, really did a number on Vanya and he feels a flare of anger that falls away as quickly as it cropped up because she clearly cares about people. She cares about whether or not she hurts them. She cares about whether or not they're afraid of her or whether or not they should be. She's made that pretty transparent to him, whether she meant to or not. There's nothing about her that suggests to him that she deserves to feel all of the negative feelings he scents in the air, tainting the smell of coffee and food.
Why do the good ones always end up feeling the most pain?
Paige flashes into his mind again, begging for him to make her pain stop. The top half of Laura's body in the woods behind their old house. Imagined expressions on his cousins' faces, chained to the wall as the house went up in flames because they were too small to control their blood lust but too large to be contained by their parents. Watching the light leave Boyd's eyes inches from Derek's.
Derek was good once. He was arrogant, but he was good. After everything he's been through, sometimes he wonders if he's still that guy or if "that guy" grew up and any semblance of him died in the fire he survived. Maybe that's why he gives so much more weight to everyone else's pain and his own just...is what it is.
But Derek can act, too. So he shugs and smiles a little. ]
Who needs normal when you can be kidnapped, thrown into a new universe where you're an involuntary celebrity, and the government wants you to register yourself as a hero but doesn't want to tell you what you're supposed to be acting as a hero against. Here's to fucked up.
[ He lifts his plastic cup a little as if in toast and rolls his eyes playfully. ]
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Someone really fucked her up. Someone really, really did a number on Vanya and he feels a flare of anger that falls away as quickly as it cropped up because she clearly cares about people. She cares about whether or not she hurts them. She cares about whether or not they're afraid of her or whether or not they should be. She's made that pretty transparent to him, whether she meant to or not. There's nothing about her that suggests to him that she deserves to feel all of the negative feelings he scents in the air, tainting the smell of coffee and food.
Why do the good ones always end up feeling the most pain?
Paige flashes into his mind again, begging for him to make her pain stop. The top half of Laura's body in the woods behind their old house. Imagined expressions on his cousins' faces, chained to the wall as the house went up in flames because they were too small to control their blood lust but too large to be contained by their parents. Watching the light leave Boyd's eyes inches from Derek's.
Derek was good once. He was arrogant, but he was good. After everything he's been through, sometimes he wonders if he's still that guy or if "that guy" grew up and any semblance of him died in the fire he survived. Maybe that's why he gives so much more weight to everyone else's pain and his own just...is what it is.
But Derek can act, too. So he shugs and smiles a little. ]
Who needs normal when you can be kidnapped, thrown into a new universe where you're an involuntary celebrity, and the government wants you to register yourself as a hero but doesn't want to tell you what you're supposed to be acting as a hero against. Here's to fucked up.
[ He lifts his plastic cup a little as if in toast and rolls his eyes playfully. ]