"She craved his twisted darkness, the same way he grasped at the light in her shattered soul."
Natalie Gilbert has spent her entire life putting everyone else's needs before her own. So much so, that it ended up costing her the one person she couldn...
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NATALIE
Kai remained good on his promise not to leave me by myself again.
We spent every day working on the Ascendant together, never pausing in our efforts to find our way out of this hell.
Nothing truly changed in a way. It was a similar routine as before. Wake up, eat, work for hours on end, eat, go to sleep. It was repetitive and exhausting, but Kai never let it stay too boring for too long.
He filled the silence with chatter about anything and everything. He practically never stopped talking. Which ended up being a good thing at the end of the day.
I still drowned out most of it, but the sound of his voice alone brought a comfort I didn't even know I needed. It kept me from spiraling back into the hole he pulled me out of.
Even then we still fought like animals.
Every day it seemed we were finding something to blow up at each other about. Who wasn't pulling their weight, who left the lights on, who's turn it was for dish duty. More often than not our days ended in heated arguments, vicious insults being flung back and forth.
Kai managed to wreck a lot of good furniture in his rage, where as I turned to more productive forms of coping which was sulking in my bedroom until morning came, which apparently was our reset button.
It was an endless cycle, and a few times I stormed off only to come back hours later remembering the words he told me about what to do when it got like this. I would just picture everyone at home waiting for me, and somehow I'd manage to find my way back to the Salvatore Mansion before dinner.
I never thought about ending my life again.
There was a newfound determination to beat the sad little voice in my head, and Kai's speech was really good at fighting it.
In equal measure, sometimes I would push him too far, enough where I would see the muscles in his arms grow taut from the effort of not strangling me with his bare hands again. That same dark look taking over his features for a minute, before he regained some control.
He never touched me, or hurt me in that period though. Even when I could tell he really wanted to, and even if I probably deserved it at some point for purposefully pushing his buttons in all the wrong ways. He never laid a hand on me, which spoke more than it should've.
In a very screwed up kind of way, we sort of became a team.
We were fighting the battle, and learning to tolerate each other all at the same time.
And it never got bad enough that he left me alone for more than a day. Could've been a precautionary measure, like suicide watch, but after a while I generally didn't mind his company.
I stopped flinching every time he got remotely close to me. My bruises faded, my cuts healed. Other than the jagged, ugly scar on my abdomen from the arrow, you couldn't even tell this place had left a mark.
