History has a habit of repeating itself in a nasty, pathological way. If you're philosophically inclined, you might say that history repeats itself only in ways that you might allow; in a sense, the universe returns to you what you expel into the world. Your aura has more of a butterfly effect than you might think, generally affecting everything and by doing so, you allow the universe to give back to you whatever you put out. And if you aren't philosophically inclined? Your psychological construct allows you to let past events dictate how you react to the future ones. Generally, if they weren't all that wonderful to begin with, your secondary reactions when triggers are present tend to be... catastrophic, at best. At worst? I don't know if they have words for the kind of natural, internal disaster that occurs when your triggers are present and your defenses are down. There are some people who are emotional fortresses, keeping their triggers and their pasts at bay with a tactfully placed acidic moat wrapping around their stone-cold fortress. And others? They were floating in that moat on a board that was hardly fit for one, let alone letting a person try to stay afloat. Cue a Jack and Rose type of situation, and their fucking door in the middle of a winter, bone cold Atlantic Ocean.

The were in front of me looked indignant, her expression saying everything she wasn't verbally expressing. No, she didn't know me, but what did she know of whatever liability I might hold for anyone? True, she didn't know me, which meant that she had yet to understand that her existence in the bar tonight wasn't an accident â€" something in her had assumed it would be a safe place. She sat beside me, and I could all but taste her fear and hesitation. The men had sensed it too, preying on her nearly docile, frightened nature. They had come calling, their voices like crushed red pepper when it's too close to you and you inhale accidentally. Spicy, uncomfortable, and something you couldn't get rid of. Luckily, they had stayed exactly where I had put them: against that bar's wall.

I wanted to tell her that all women who felt endangered by men deserved someone to pay attention to their wellbeing and their safety. They couldn't perpetuate strength on their own. It sounds silly, but someone had to teach every single damn woman who had been wronged by a man through some kind of emotional, physical, sexual abuse... You name it. There had to be another to clean up his mess, do a double sweep, and attempt to offer a user-friendly manual of how to get through life without attracting scumbags on a regular basis. I might have understood the need to assert yourself over another being who wasn't physically as strong as you were in an attempt to prove something. To yourself, to someone... I don't know. I might have understood it once when those things were important to me at an impressionable time when all I saw was the walls of a compound that was built over red earth and the backs of my eyelids when another, more dominant man had taught me what a needle felt like.

I shook my head, negating her statement. "Someone has to, and clearly you aren't holding it for yourself."

It was uncomfortably evident that she didn't have anyone to fufill that role. I felt my jaw grit, my teeth grinding against one another when her shoulders hunched submissively. On any other day and any other occasion, I would revel in that behavior. But now? On her? It was unbecoming, especially as her blue eyes reminded me of someone who needed a watch-hound as badly as this woman. With my little sister in mind, I looked past the woman almost absent mindedly, wondering whether or not I wanted to go any further and offer her the help of getting home. If she truly was a liability, did I want to bother? The question was stupid because either way, I had already bothered, and those men were probably half drained of blood or energy by now, pressed up against the wall in the bar. Unless someone took interest in them, and removed them from the bar to do whatever it was they pleased.

Maybe this one instance I guess I could accept that vampires might have a use, even if it was to do bidding like that.

She spoke again, still with her shoulders drooping. I found myself sighing, running out of amusement with the conversation before she finished speaking. She didn't think she'd run into trouble? Ha. Trouble lurks around every corner for a woman like her, breeding in the dark recesses of her mind and attracting more trouble.

" I have a lot of things I'm not obliged to remember, but I do any way and it has surely given my pay grade a raise," I started, feeling a little curt. "I won't let you get home alone, Alexis. Trouble speaks your language, and I don't know you well enough to let you be a damsel in distress in the middle of the night. I'll walk you home since you don't trust my metal death machine."