**HOPE**
The first thing her family did was take away the mirrors.
Hope didn't notice until the second morning. She walked into her bathroom to brush her teeth, and the mirror over the sink was gone. There was just a pale rectangle on the wallpaper where it had hung for fifteen years, and four empty screw holes. The full-length one on the back of her closet door was gone too. So was the little round one on her dresser that she'd had since she was nine, the one with the painted wolves around the frame that her dad had made her for her birthday.
She stood in the middle of her room and looked at the empty spaces for a long time.
She knew who'd done it. She knew why. Her dad had come home from that bar and stood in the hallway outside her door all night again, and she'd heard him not crying. She'd heard every breath catch and stop, catch and stop, like a machine that kept jamming. Sometime before dawn, while she lay in bed pretending to sleep, she'd heard him come into her room very quietly, take the mirrors down one by one, and carry them out.
He didn't want her to see.
He didn't want her to look at herself and see the red eyes, the veins, the thing Stiles had made her. He thought it would hurt her.
Hope went downstairs.
---
The kitchen was full of Mikaelsons trying to look normal.
Her mom was at the stove making pancakes. Hope's mother hadn't made pancakes since Hope was eleven. Aunt Freya was at the island with a grimoire, a cup of tea, and dark circles under her eyes so deep they looked painted on. Uncle Elijah stood by the window in a fresh suit, holding a newspaper he wasn't reading. Her dad sat at the head of the long wooden table.
The *table*.
Every head turned when she walked in, and every face did the same thing at the same moment. They softened. It was careful and heartbroken, as if she were something made of glass that had been dropped and glued back together and might fall apart if anyone breathed on her wrong.
"Good morning, sweetheart," her mom said, too brightly. "Pancakes?"
"I don't eat pancakes anymore, Mom."
Her mom's spatula stopped moving.
"You can still eat," Freya said quickly. "Vampires can eat. It won't *nourish* you, but you can still taste it, and it's good for you to keep..." She stopped. "...routines."
"Right." Hope sat down at the table, across from her dad. "Routines."
There was a glass in front of her place. It was a tall one, and it was full. It was dark red and still faintly warm.
She could smell it from the doorway. She'd smelled it from the *stairs*. Her gums had started aching halfway down the steps.
"It's from a blood bank," her dad said quietly. "It's clean. No one was hurt."
Hope looked at the glass. Then she looked at him.
He hadn't slept. She could tell. His eyes were red-rimmed and his jaw was dark with stubble, and his hands were flat on the table in front of him. They were very still, the way they got when he was working very hard not to break something.
She picked up the glass and drank it.
She drank the whole thing in five long swallows without stopping, while her entire family watched. When she set it down, the ache in her gums was gone and the hunger had gone quiet. Warmth spread out through her chest into her fingertips.
Nobody said anything.
Her mom had turned away toward the stove. Her shoulders were shaking.
"Hope," her dad said carefully. "How are you feeling?"
"Fine."
"You don't have to be fine."
"I know. I'm just fine."
"Darling." Uncle Elijah folded his newspaper and set it down. "Yesterday you took a life. For the first time. It's a great deal to carry. Whatever you're feeling, whatever you need to say, you can say it here. No one will judge you."
Hope looked at him.
She knew what he wanted her to say. She knew what all of them wanted. They were waiting for her to break. They wanted her to cry and shake and put her face in her hands and tell them about the boy in the Tulane hoodie. They wanted to hear that she couldn't stop seeing his face, that she wanted to die, that she'd never forgive herself. They were waiting for the wave to hit so they could all be there to catch her.
And she could feel it. It was still there, behind the door, the way it had been in the bar. The horror and the guilt and the grief were all waiting in some far-off room. When she thought about Marcus smiling at the ceiling fan, she could hear it faintly through the wall.
But it was quiet. It didn't come through.
"I killed a boy," Hope said. "His name was Marcus. He went to Tulane. I didn't stop when I should have, and he died." She looked around the table at each of them. "And I'm fine."
Nobody moved.
Her father's hands pressed flatter against the table. The wood creaked under them.
"Hope," he said, very quietly. "What did he do to you?"
It was a simple question. It was reasonable. It was exactly the question a father would ask.
But the way he said it made Hope's skin go cold. He said it slowly and carefully, with his head tilted and his eyes moving over her face, searching for something. He looked at her like a puzzle, like a case file. It was like something had crawled into his house in the night and was wearing his daughter's face.
*What are you?*
Hope's breath caught in her chest.
She was sitting at a kitchen table. Her father was sitting across from her, looking at her like he didn't know what she was.
*Oh*, she thought. *Oh. So* that's *what it feels like.*
The anger came up so fast it scared her. It was hot and sharp and sudden, like a match dropped in gasoline. The windows rattled in their frames. Freya's tea sloshed over the edge of her cup. The overhead light flickered, and her dad's eyes went wide.
"Hope..."
"Don't," Hope said. Her voice came out low and hard. "Don't look at me like that."
"Like what?"
"*Like that.*" She stood up so fast her chair went over behind her. "Like I'm something else. Like I'm not *me*. Like you're trying to figure out what I *am*."
"That's not..."
"You took down the *mirrors*, Dad." The light over the table burst in a shower of sparks. Everybody flinched except her. "You took down the mirror you *made* me. Because you couldn't stand the idea of me *looking at myself*."
Her father stood too. His face was white.
"I did it because I love you."
"I know you did." Hope's eyes were burning. She could feel them going red and couldn't stop it. She didn't want to stop it. "That's the worst part."
She turned and walked out of the kitchen.
Nobody followed her. She heard her mom start to, heard her dad say *Hayley, don't*, and heard the kitchen go silent behind her.
She went up to her room, closed the door, and sat on the edge of her bed with her face in her hands. Her heart was pounding, slow and heavy and new.
The thread under her ribs hummed.
She'd kept it shut since the bar. She'd slammed the door closed the second she'd walked out, and she'd held it closed all night and all morning with every ounce of strength she had. She didn't want to feel him. She didn't want to know where he was or what he was doing or whether he was laughing.
But she'd felt something in the bar, right before she'd closed it. For half a second, when she'd stepped over Marcus and walked across the room toward her father, the thread had flared open. Something had come through from the other side.
She'd been too angry at the time to look at it. She'd shoved it away, slammed the door, and walked out.
Now she let herself think about it.
It had been cold and tight and awful. It was like standing at the edge of a high place and finding out there was nothing under your feet. And under it, huge and hot and overwhelming, was *relief*.
It wasn't hunger, or boredom, or the empty stadium.
It was relief.
Hope lifted her head from her hands.
"You liar," she whispered.
She opened her window and went out.
---
**STILES**
He'd been sitting on the roof of the Monteleone for two days.
He hadn't eaten. It wasn't a hunger strike or anything dramatic like that. He just hadn't been hungry. Hope's blood was still sitting in his chest, warm and bright. And every time he thought about going down to the street to find someone, he'd get distracted listening to that heartbeat a mile northeast. He'd sit there for another six hours, and then the sun would come up again.
He'd watched two sunrises and two sunsets. He'd watched a pigeon build a nest in the air conditioning unit. He'd named the pigeon Greg Two. He'd composed several speeches in his head. They were all terrible. One of them included the phrase *so, funny story about your neck*, and he'd abandoned it immediately.
He'd felt the thread go dead when she shut it. That had been fine. He got it. He'd broken her neck. You're allowed to be mad about that. He'd give her a week, or a month, or a year. He had forever. He could wait.
At 9:47 on a Saturday morning, it snapped open like a window thrown wide.
It didn't creak open. It *slammed*. She came through it all at once, hot and furious, flooding into him like a wave. He felt her anger and her hurt and a hundred other things tangled together. He felt her father's face across a kitchen table, and a pale rectangle on a wall where a mirror used to hang.
And then he felt her *coming*.
She was fast. She was so fast. She was crossing the Quarter over the rooftops in a straight line, right at him.
Stiles stood up.
"Oh no," he said to Greg Two. "Oh, she's mad. She's *real* mad."
Greg Two cooed.
"You're not helping, Greg."
She landed on the roof about twenty feet away. She didn't land gracefully. Newly turned vampires never did. She hit the gravel hard and skidded, one hand going down to catch herself, and came up already moving toward him. Her auburn hair was wild from the wind. Her eyes were blazing red.
"Hi," Stiles said. "So, funny story about your..."
She hit him.
It was a much better punch than the one in the alley. She had a lot more strength behind it now. His head snapped sideways, and he went down onto the gravel, and he lay there looking up at the blue sky.
"Okay," he said. "Yeah. That's fair. That's super fair."
"You *lied* to me."
He sat up slowly, working his jaw.
"I've lied to a lot of people. You're gonna have to be more specific."
"*Don't*." She was standing over him with her fists clenched, shaking. "Don't do the jokes. Not right now. You told me you turned me because I was *breakable*. Because some hunter would get lucky and you'd go back to eating *garbage*. You told me it was about the *food*."
"It was about the food."
"*No*, it *wasn't*." Her voice cracked right down the middle. "I felt it, Stiles. In the bar. Right before I shut the thread, I felt what you were feeling when I woke up. And it wasn't hunger. It wasn't boredom. It wasn't anything you told me." Her eyes were wet. "It was *relief*. You were so relieved you could barely breathe."
Stiles didn't say anything.
For once in his entire life, he didn't have anything to say.
He sat there on the gravel in the morning sun and looked up at her. His brain, which usually ran about a hundred miles an hour and never shut up, was completely, perfectly blank.
*Oh*, he thought. *She felt that.*
*Oh no.*
"So tell me the truth," Hope said. She was crying now, openly, tears running down her face. Her jaw was set hard, and it was the most Mikaelson thing he'd ever seen. "You said you'd always tell me the truth. You said you were honest about all the murder. So be honest about *this*. Why did you do it?"
He could lie. He thought about it. He could make a joke. He could say something about Ben & Jerry's, or dessert, or not wanting to go back to eating tourists from Ohio. He could make her laugh and make her roll her eyes and make her hit him again, and it would all go back to normal.
But she'd know. She'd *know*. The thread was wide open, and she was standing right there on the other side of it, looking straight into him.
Stiles let out a long breath.
"Because you'd have grown old," he said.
The words came out quiet and rough. They didn't sound like him at all.
"You'd have grown old, Hope. You'd have gotten gray and slow and tired. Maybe you'd have had kids, and a house, and a whole life. And one day you'd have been lying in some hospital bed with machines beeping, and your heart would've gotten slower and slower and then it would've *stopped*." He swallowed. "And I'd have been sitting next to you, exactly the way I look right now. Twenty years old forever. Holding your hand. Listening to it stop. And then I'd just have to keep *going*. Forever. With nothing. Because I can't *die*, Hope. I can't follow you. I'd just be *here*."
She'd gone very still.
"My mom died like that," he said. "In a hospital. I was eight. I held her hand. She didn't know who I was by the end. She thought I was trying to kill her." He laughed, and it came out wrong. "So, yeah. I've done that one before. I didn't love it. I wasn't gonna do it again. Not with you."
The wind blew across the roof. Greg Two cooed from the air conditioning unit. Somewhere down on the street, a car horn honked.
"When I broke your neck," Stiles said, "you were dead for two hours. And I sat on that bar and made jokes and got drunk and made an old guy do the chicken dance. And the whole time, every second, I was listening to how *quiet* it was. You've been the loudest thing in this city since the night I got here. And it was just... *gone*. And I kept thinking, *What if I got it wrong? What if she doesn't come back? What if I just killed the only thing that's made me feel anything since Beacon Hills?*"
He looked down at his hands.
"It was the worst two hours of my life. And I've been possessed by a thousand-year-old fox demon. So, you know. The bar's pretty high."
Hope didn't say anything for a long time.
When she finally spoke, her voice was very small.
"You care."
"About *you*," Stiles corrected. "Not about anybody else. I want to be super clear. I still don't care about Marcus. I don't care about Dwayne, or Terrence, or the guy from Ohio. I'd kill every single one of them again tomorrow. That part's not a lie."
"Just me."
"Just you."
She sat down on the gravel across from him, slowly, like her legs had given out. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. Her eyes had faded from red back to green, and they were wet and shining and completely unreadable.
"Stiles," she said. "What is this?"
He looked at her.
*Just say it*, said the voice in the back of his head. *You're being honest. Go all the way. What's the worst that happens? She punches you again? She's already done that twice.*
"I think," Stiles said slowly, "I love you."
Hope stared at him.
"It's stupid," he went on quickly. "It's *really* stupid. I've known you for, like, a week. I put a head in a box for your dad. I drained your whole family. I broke your neck. I made you kill a kid. I'm pretty much the worst possible boyfriend in the history of the world, and I haven't even technically *asked* you out. But I sat on that bar for two hours, and I figured it out. And I don't really know what to do with it. So I'm just telling you. Because I said I'd be honest. So. Yeah." He rubbed the back of his neck. "That's the truth. Surprise."
Hope was quiet for so long he started to count Greg Two's coos.
Fourteen. Fifteen.
"I still hate you," she said finally.
"Yeah," Stiles said. "I figured."
"You *killed* me."
"I know."
"You made me kill someone."
"I know."
"You ruined my life." Her voice wobbled. "I sat at the kitchen table this morning, and my dad looked at me like I was a *stranger*. He took down all my mirrors. My mom made pancakes. She hasn't made pancakes since I was *eleven*. They looked at me like I was broken. Like I was something that crawled into their house and ate their daughter."
Stiles's jaw went tight.
"And I thought of you," Hope said. "Sitting at your kitchen table. With your dad."
"Yeah," he said quietly. "Yeah, it's not great."
"I understand now." She looked at him. "What you said. About why you left."
"That wasn't the point, Hope. I didn't want you to..."
"I know it wasn't the point. But it happened anyway." She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. "I don't know what I feel about you. I don't know if I'm always going to hate you. I think I might. I think it might be a Mikaelson thing. My dad's been mad at his brother for about a thousand years."
"That's what I said!"
"But you're the only one who doesn't look at me like I'm broken." She met his eyes. "You're the only one who looks at me like I'm *me*."
Stiles's heart did something weird. It was the new one Klaus hadn't managed to crush, and it gave a sort of lurch and stumble, like it had missed a step on a staircase.
"So I don't know," Hope said. "I don't know what this is. I don't know if I'm ever going to forgive you."
"Okay."
"Ask me in a hundred years."
Stiles blinked.
Then he grinned. It was the real one, crooked and stupid and so wide his face hurt.
"Yeah?"
"Maybe. I don't know. Don't make it weird."
"I'm not making it weird! You're the one who said a hundred years!"
"You're *grinning*."
"I'm allowed to grin! I'm happy! I've got a hundred years!" He flopped back onto the gravel and spread his arms. "I've got a hundred years to make you stop hating me. That's *so much time*. Do you know how much time that is? I can learn *guitar*. I can learn *French*. I can take you to Paris and serenade you in French *on* guitar..."
"I will throw you off this roof."
"Won't kill me!"
"It'll be fun, though."
He laughed. It came out of him huge and loud and real, echoing across the rooftops, and Greg Two flapped off in alarm. Hope was trying very hard not to smile. He could see it. Her mouth was twitching at the corners, and she pressed her lips together, and she lost.
It was the best thing he'd ever seen.
---
**HOPE**
They sat on the roof until the sun was high.
They didn't talk much. It was strange, how easy it was. She'd have thought it would be awful, sitting next to the person who'd killed her. She'd have thought she'd want to scream, or cry, or tear his throat out.
Some of her did. The part behind the door, the part that was still quietly screaming about Marcus and the boy's smile and her father's face.
But most of her just felt quiet.
The thread between them was wide open, and neither of them bothered to close it. She could feel him on the other end, and it wasn't the empty stadium anymore. Not quite. Most of the seats were still empty. But one section was lit up bright, right in the middle, like someone had turned on all the lights in one corner of the stands and left them burning.
She knew what that section was. She didn't say anything about it.
Around noon, her stomach cramped. Her gums ached. She pressed a hand to her mouth.
"Hungry?" Stiles said without opening his eyes.
"The blood bag didn't last."
"They never do. They're like diet soda. You think it's working, and then an hour later you're eating an entire pizza." He sat up and looked at her. "You want to go hunt?"
Hope looked at him for a long moment.
She should have said no. She knew she should have said no. She could hear her father's voice in the back of her head, and her mother's, and Uncle Elijah's. *This is how it starts. This is how you lose yourself. This is how you become him.*
But she'd sat at that table this morning and watched them all look at her like a stranger. And she'd sat on this roof and listened to Stiles tell her about his mother's hospital bed, and she'd felt that one bright corner of the stadium light up.
She didn't know who she was anymore. That was the truth. She didn't know if she was her father's daughter or her mother's or something new. She didn't know if the quiet was freedom, or if it was the beginning of something terrible.
But she was hungry.
And she wanted to find out.
"No killing," Hope said.
Stiles made a face. "That's such a *weird* rule."
"*No killing*, Stiles."
"Okay, okay. No killing." He held up his hands. "Today. For you. I'll be super good. I'll be so good you'll think I'm a golden retriever."
"You're not a golden retriever."
"I'm a *little* bit of a golden retriever. Wolf. Technically. It's in the family."
She rolled her eyes and stood up. He stood up too, brushing gravel off his jeans. For a second they just stood there on the roof of the Monteleone in the noon sun, looking at each other.
"Hey, Hope," he said.
"What?"
"I meant it. What I said."
"I know you did."
"Okay." He nodded. "Just making sure."
He held out his hand.
Hope looked at it for a long time. It was the same hand that had broken her neck. The same hand that had drained her mother, her aunt, and her father, and torn a man's throat out in a bar.
She took it.
The thread between them flared hot and bright. On the other side of it, the one lit-up corner of the empty stadium got a little bit brighter.
"Come on," Stiles said. "I know a place. They do great beignets."
"Is anybody going to die there?"
"*No*. God. It's a *brunch spot*." He tugged her toward the edge of the roof. "Who do you think I am?"
Hope thought about it. She thought about the head in the pink box, Marcus smiling at the ceiling fan, and the kitchen table. She thought about a hundred years.
"I don't know yet," she said.
Stiles grinned.
"Me neither," he said. "Let's find out."
They went off the edge of the roof together.