#i'll link the meme later my computer is ab 2 die

[loveisaviolence3]

tasha has her own anger, of course, but it has nowhere to go. she’s glad for that sometimes, which always feels cowardly, but what can she say — she doesn’t want reasons, and people always have them. even lucas would have them if he were here to demand them from, and she still feels weary from their arguments thirteen years later. you could say she’s been living on borrowed time for quite some time now and that’s at least partially to blame, hazard a guess that a thing like that could make time sort of slow to a stop, but sometimes she doesn’t believe she’s made it past twenty seven even though she often feels so old the number of years she’s been alive seems complicit in the series of lies she’s told, and though she can’t fathom living past how old lucas had been when he died, she expects anything he could have to offer would wear her down just as much if she did. she wishes she could want the fight for them — for vinh, for sara, for dolan, for jonas, for ira. the screaming match, the denial of each and every excuse and justification, but fighting with lucas has always made her queasy, and more and more she finds herself just so tired. 

there isn’t a day where tasha doesn’t want to see justice done, but she doesn’t always want the confrontation, doesn’t always want the anger. but that doesn’t mean she can let it go — letting it go would mean their crimes don’t matter, and vinh isn’t here to be angry for himself and there’s no one left to be angry for him except her. besides christian, she’s the only person left alive to have loved him, and that makes her responsible. when she finally fought off the blinding agony of whatever they’d injected her with and she could see more than a foot in front of her, she knew she was not done being responsible yet. there was still so much for her to carry. 

god knows christian loved him as much as she did, but he doesn’t carry that hate around in his heart, and she’s never wanted him to. no one should ever have to hate family; no one should have to dig around in the back of the closet for forgotten, abandoned dead bodies to lay to proper rest. she thought she could protect him from that — carry that burden alone. dig the graves, lay the flowers every year, curse what took them away. she could condemn them in her heart when all it wanted to do was rest and he could let the ghosts go. 

she never wanted him to feel like he had to hate his parents, not for any one or any thing, but she’s more than certain now that he hates her. 

and she doesn’t want to be the explanations she imagines lucas might have come up with, the love tatiana had turned inside out and spat at her with razor sharp efficiency, doesn’t really want to be here at all. in this room, in this body, in this life. but still there is something desperate rising up in her, clawing at her throat the way it does whenever she thinks too hard on the past — scared and pleading and not at all like the punching bag she’s trying to be, prepared and equipped to take any hits christian has for her. it happens especially when bellamy’s mentioned like this, in the context of her childhood — some wildly throbbing, horribly aching young thing in her reliving it all again. there’s something particularly painful about their situation now, and she feels it with every breath she takes, but she can deal. the sixteen year old girl that stirs as christian speaks of time winding backward has no such discipline — there’s nothing for her to bite down on, no tolerance for pain to speak of, no threshold. and both of them feel the agony of this conversation like a sword sent straight through, one entangled in tasha’s fears in the present and the other in tasha’s fears in the past. 

both want, with such fatal intensity, to cry. surprisingly, it’s the girl rather than the woman that holds back. ozeras stand tall; ozeras don’t break; ozeras don’t cry. she remembers telling herself that over and over again when she ended things with bellamy — that she had to be strong, that she couldn’t be weak, remembering lucas’ voice in her head when she’d accepted his role in what tatiana had done, explaining that this was merciful: tatiana’s hand had been played early in the game, leaving her with no cards left to play; by forcing her to break up with bellamy, he could no longer be used against her. if bellamy had still been in the picture, tatiana could have used him against her for a very long time before they broke it off because it got to be too much or tatiana needed a final blow. bellamy being out of the picture meant he was forgotten, out of sight out of mind, and that made him safe. which meant she didn’t. she made him the opposite. 

because of what’s inside her that had love ripped away and is still reeling from the loss ten years later after all of this time and practice. that weakly wants to try and explain, that breaks somewhere and can’t help the strain in her voice.  “ i tried-  ” is all she can say — before the end, she tried, but of course there wasn’t time, of course he couldn’t understand. and that there were years and years before when she could have, and nothing to say for herself at all.  “ i didn’t know how to explain that to you, christian. you were eleven years old, and i — ” was devastated, and young, so young. too young to have his heart in his hand like she did, to have had no one holding hers.  “ you were a kid, and i was a kid, too. ”  it doesn’t feel like an explanation so much as a confession to something horrible — that she wasn’t ready, that she failed. 

maybe it’s a part of her accepting that he isn’t a kid anymore, or maybe she’s just too broken down to do anything different, but that part of tasha on guard against her own pain drops, and whatever barrier she had protecting her from the agony of the past wanes away.  “ and that was the first time i ever hurt you. ”  she’d promised herself it would be the only time, but of course it wasn’t. the truth may be that she’s hurt him every single day since without realizing it, and the agony of that is so severe she can hardly stand. her voice trembles around it.  “ i didn’t know how to explain it, i didn’t know what to do. i didn’t know how to make it better for you, or octavia, or bellamy — or me. and i didn’t — i didn’t have anyone i could ask. i was alone. but i never wanted you to think that — i tried so hard to make sure you didn’t. but there i was nothing i could say that could have convinced you — except the truth. and i couldn't tell you that then. ”  she didn’t have a parent, she means. and she lost bellamy. now she realizes that being alone in that decision had been a choice, but she hadn’t then — she’d just reacted. and when she’d told him they were broken up, she’d tried so hard to make him understand that it was no one’s fault, that bellamy wasn’t to blame, but of course it hadn’t mattered, of course it hadn’t made a difference. 

bellamy and octavia are just as much my family as you are, she remembers telling lucas, hating how close to tears she was and how easily he could tell. and they’re christian’s, too. and that is not just on me. you did that to him too. but tasha did this to him, and so her anger — still present, building in the back of her neck as the worst kind of tension — can do nothing for her, even if lucas, she’s realizing now, was not a kid. lucas, she can’t help but think, should have done something. should have... cared. she, she’s thought every day since she woke up in the hospital afterward, should have done something when she saw him changing. instead, he’d come to her the next day with apologies and she’d been so desperate not to lose anymore family that she’d accepted them. and in the time after, he was good to her. he made an effort, he seemed sincere. 

and then he sunk his teeth into a human girl’s — angie dawson’s, tasha had found out — neck and fed until he felt her go limp in his arms. 

she steps toward him, wanting so badly to touch him, and then — reaching out. because the part of her that’s held back for fear of overstepping has been broken down, because so many parts of her have been broken down, and she can no longer see what she’s doing until she does it.

“ i’m sorry. i’m so sorry i didn’t tell you when you got older. i’m so sorry i never figured that out. ” so sorry she still doesn’t know how to tell people things, that her gut instinct is still to hold them as close to herself as she possibly can even when they’re looping around her neck and pulling themselves taut.  “ i should have seen what it did to you — how much it still hurt you. but i was blinded to it. i didn’t.. i didn’t see it until now. i couldn't. but i should have. ”  and the idea that she was so blinded by her own pain that she couldn’t see his is more than she can stand.  

she flinches at what he says next, but it doesn’t stop her.  “ no, ” she says firmly, but her eyes are burning.  “ it’s me. it’s not you, it’s not us, it’s not the ozeras. it’s me. this is on me. i’m the one hurting them. i’m the one who keeps hurting them. ”  she swallows.  “ bellamy isn’t angry with you, he’s angry with me. i appreciate you feeling like you have to defend me, but you don’t need to. that’s not your job. and nothing you could ever say would change how he feels about you. ”  you saved o’s life, but she’s in more danger now than ever because she won’t talk to any of us now. somehow that hurts more than bellamy’s silence, and she wasn’t sure anything could hurt more than that. but of course, what kills her more than bellamy’s anger is that he’s right. that octavia is at risk right now because of her,  because she's alive, because she exists, and there’s nothing she can do. that’s its own kind of hell for her, and having been in his shoes before, terrified for christian, only adds to her guilt. she knows what she’s feeling, she knows, and octavia isn’t her daughter, but the terror she feels is the kind only a parent can feel, the kind bellamy feels doubled. 

“ i know, ” is all she can say, and it’s a horrible whisper.  “ and i don’t expect you to forgive me for that, or for bellamy or octavia to. i don’t want that. ”  how can she when she can’t forgive herself? she doesn’t deserve it; if anyone knows that, it’s her. but she wanted christian to forgive bellamy, wanted them to have each other.  “ i just needed you to know that... bellamy isn’t going to leave you. even if he leaves me, he’s never going to be leaving you. he isn’t now — octavia is just all he can think about. there's... there's no place worse than where he is right now. there's no worse hell, nothing that could break you down more. it's the worst place there is. ”  and she’s certainly doing her fair share of thinking about her, spending so much time in hell that she's put down first and last payment and every one in between. if only he could pick up on that, see just how much she's speaking from experience.