Chapter 2—Christian POV

Hi everyone, I'm back with a new chapter in Christian's point of view this time. Thank you all so much for the reviews and it means so much to me. :) Hopefully I will be able to update two more times this upcoming week (?) but if not I will definitely make it up the week after. Next chapter will be either Eddie or Lissa's POV, and then after that I will just continue events that occur at the Academy while Rose is away, and these events will be non canon events. Thank you so much, and enjoy!

"I can't believe you didn't tell me!" I yelled, fists clenching. Normally, I never would have yelled at Lissa, but as her boyfriend, I felt that she seriously done one of the worst things of almost any relationship—secret keeping.

"Why do you care so much anyways?" She countered. "It's my life. I can control what I tell you and what I don't, and besides, it's Rose's secret to tell! Not mine. Don't you get that? Plus, you never even liked her. You only dealt with her because she was part of my life. And this is just proving it. You're taking Rose's leaving as a justification that I was keeping secrets! And you don't even care about her! You ask first why I didn't tell you, not first if she was okay? What type of a boyfriend does that?"

"You can't tell me what I feel, Lissa. Do you really think so lowly of me? That I wouldn't even care about the girl who saved my butt from Strigoi so many times? I can't believe you! I even planned a goddamn birthday party for her! Do you know how much I would do to have her back, safe? She wasn't just your friend, Liss. Maybe you don't know this, but friends are people who keep the ones they love safe, not let them run off to some fucking suicide mission!"

"Friends are ones who respect their friends' decisions and choices," she said, tears in her eyes. Her voice had dropped down to a hoarse whisper, and mascara was running down her face in a black stream.

"I do respect it! But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't have let her go without a fight! Without trying to convince her! All you did was sit back and let her go do whatever she wanted; even if you claim you're respecting her. It's a suicide mission, Liss. Why didn't you tell her it wasn't worth it just to try and save some mentor guy that taught her, when she was risking her own life? If she really knew what loss is like, why didn't she think of us? Why didn't she think of how we'd feel if she died, or turned?"

"Wouldn't you do it for me?" Lissa asked simply.

"That's not the same th—"

"I know Rose would let me do it for you, and God knows how much I'd be willing to do that for you."

My eyes teared up and I looked at the ceiling, praying they wouldn't fall. There went my masculinity.

"I know Rose would let you go because she would have gone with you. I know her. I know she would have gone with you, and that would be okay, because she's meant to protect you. That's who she is. But you let her go by herself on a suicide mission and that's what's not okay!"

Lissa looked shocked. A sense of doom, or realization, passed across her face and I immediately regretted my words.

"Gone…with her?" Lissa whispered. I wasn't sure if she meant that she hadn't thought of it, or that she was horrified that I'd suggested such a thing, but either way, the anger sparked in me again.

"So what are you telling me now, Liss? You couldn't care to think of that? You wouldn't have gone with her? That's the least you could have done. The best option that you should have done was still to not let her go off on the suicide mission, but the least you could have done was go with her to save her stupid celebrity crush. I can only imagine how she feels. She'd do anything for you, Lissa, anything, yet you couldn't even help her in the tiniest of ways. I know I'd be betrayed if I were her."

"But wouldn't you let her go? If you were in my position? She probably didn't want anyone to go with her," she said the last part with some hesitation, but continued, "because that's the only way she could move on with her life. To kill Dimitri the Strigoi, because that's what Dimitri the dhampir, the one she loved, wanted her to do. He would've done it for her. And doing it with someone else would've only been wrong, because, you know, sometimes things you do out of love have to be things you do alone."

If it hadn't been for the situation, I would have laughed out loud. Rose had intruded on our "things you have to do out of love" plenty of times.

Instead, I said, "But that's because I love you as my girlfriend. Dimitri and Rose—that's something different. Philia, not agape."

Lissa's eyes widened.

"You don't know?" she asked. "They were in so much love! How could you not have seen that? They probably never had stupid fights like the one we're having right now. They probably had love stronger than ours. I saw Rose, Christian, before she left. I saw her heart in her eyes, and I saw each and every piece of her broken heart in them. It broke me, Christian, you don't know. I know philia better than anyone else, and what they had was definitely more than that. Her broken heart broke my own, and it crippled me to think that I couldn't have stopped it. That I couldn't have helped her, couldn't have realized it earlier, that I was the one who kept them apart." Her voice was agony. "And it was the least I could do to let her do what she wanted. It was the only thing I could do to make up for all that I'd done to hurt her. She told me herself that she was tired of protecting me and doing things for me when she wanted to put herself first, and this was the only thing I could do to let her put herself first. Asking her to stay would only be selfish, and imagine her hatred for me if I made her stay. That's something I'd never be able to bear."

"Oh, Liss," I sighed. Her knees were trembling, far worse than I'd ever seen, even in her spirit-mad states.

And seeing her agony, realizing the strong bond between the two of them—and not just mentally—made me understand. Not that I'd ever be able to understand, or experience that much philia, but I understood why Lissa let her go. Why Alberta did. And most importantly, why Rose did what she did.

Out of agape.

And then now, the least I could do for Rose, was to protect Lissa as much as Rose had while she was gone.

For you, Rose, I thought.