Freya sat with Finn outside of a small café a few blocks from the house. She figured talking with Finn alone might be the best option at the moment.
"Is buying me coffee your way of apologizing for beating me up?" Finn asked.
Freya laughed. "You're out of your mind if you think I have any intention of apologizing. You had it coming. Who better than your big sister to beat some sense into you?"
Finn only grunted in response before taking a sip of his coffee.
"I brought you out here because I thought it would be easier for you to talk to me alone than with Elena there. Not to mention that any of our other siblings could come home at any moment, and they wouldn't take your presence very well," Freya said.
"I can handle myself against them," Finn said.
"Oh, I know you're capable of hurting our younger siblings. That's sort of the problem," Freya said.
"And what about them hurting me? I don't suppose they told you that they left me daggered for nine hundred years," Finn said in an angry huff.
Freya sighed. She did know about that. She wasn't very happy about that. It was true that Finn had a right to his issue with others. Well, most of them anyway. "They did actually. Look, I don't agree with what they did. I think it was wrong, and I've said so.
"Wrong? It goes deeper than that, don't you think? I was there, brother, and they were willing to just throw me away! They never treated me like their brother," Finn fumed.
"From what I hear, that goes both ways, little brother. Did you ever treat them like your siblings? The way I've heard it, you never wanted much to do with them, even when you were young. You pushed them away. And I'm not saying that justifies them leaving you daggered. It doesn't. They had their reasons, but they were wrong. But if you want them to see you as their older brother, you have to act like. Kol and Rebekah have both told me that you barely tolerated all of them as children. You wanted nothing to do with them. They saw Elijah as their oldest brother. You never even tried to get to know any of them," Freya said.
"How could I? How could I allow myself to get close to them? How could I set myself up for the pain it would cause if and when they got taken away too?" Finn asked with pain laced in his voice. That was all he'd thought about when she was a child. It wasn't as if he didn't want to love his siblings. He just knew what the consequences would be. He'd seen it with his own eyes when he was just barely old enough to form memories. It was one memory he wished he could forget.
Freya sighed. She knew she was not the only one traumatized when Dahlia came for her. "So, you closed yourself off. You wouldn't let yourself love our brothers and sisters because of me. Is that why you stuck so close to Esther?" Freya asked.
"Partially. I was the only one who knew the truth, and she was the only one I could discuss it with, although, she barely ever would. It was too painful for her," Finn said.
Freya decided not to even dignify that last comment with a response. It wasn't worth it. She'd made her opinion on Esther's so-called pain very clear.
"You know, despite how much I hated what I'd become, I was almost relieved when Mother made us vampires. It meant that there was no risk of Dahlia coming after us again. None of us could give her what she wanted. She would never be able to hurt another child. "Then Mother became pregnant again."
Freya could hear the resentment in Finn's voice with his last statement. "Is that why you hated Elena?"
"No, I didn't hate her. I don't even hate her now. It would be easier if I could. I was afraid for her. I was afraid that her fate would be no better than yours. I was angry at Mother. I was angry that she allowed something like this to happen again. I think it was the first time I ever really felt anger for her. Then Elena died because of me, and the only person I felt anger for was myself. I felt guilty for the anger I felt for Mother. I hated myself," Finn told her sadly.
"Finn, you're not responsible for Elena's death. Father killed her, and Mother put her at risk in the first place, the same way she did with Klaus," Freya said.
"I left her with him knowing how he must have felt about her. I told myself he wouldn't harm a baby. I was starving. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to control myself around her much longer," Finn explained.
"It wasn't your fault. You should've been able to trust that our sister wouldn't be murdered by our father. What happened a thousand years ago wasn't your fault. The way you treated Elena over a year ago in Mystic Falls, that was your fault," Freya told him. She wanted to be clear on that. It might not be his fault that Elena was killed, but his terrible treatment of her definitely was.
"Nothing I did would've changed what happened," Finn said.
"But it would've made a difference to Elena, a point she made to you very clearly. You could've helped her by being on her side. Instead, you made life incredibly difficult for her," Freya said.
Finn scoffed at his sister. "She doesn't know what a difficult life is."
Freya felt the urge to smack him, or use magic on him again, but it wouldn't do any good even if she could right now. She needed him to see how horribly he'd treated their sister, and that wasn't going to be achieved through violence. "You remember the night Dahlia came for me, right?"
"Of course I do," Finn said with a shudder. That was part of his point regarding Elena. She didn't know half of what they'd all been through. She had no idea what terror really was.
"You remember her practically ripping me out of Mother's arms? You remember me crying and screaming for her to let me go? Begging for Mother to help me?" Freya asked.
"Why are you bringing this up? I don't think either of us needs a reminder of it," Finn said. He didn't even want to think about that day, especially now that Freya was back. He wanted to forget it ever happened.
"I was terrified, Finn. Dahlia was a stranger to me. She was cruel and hateful that day and every day afterwards. I didn't know what she was going to do to me in that moment. I didn't know if she'd kill me or do something worse to me. It turns out the latter was more accurate. I'm bringing it up because that's exactly what you and Esther did to Elena," Freya said. When she'd gotten the full story out of Elena, she had been livid. She'd made the correlation almost immediately. The way Esther had taken Elena prisoner was almost exactly the same as the way Dahlia had dragged her from her home. The only saving grace that Elena had the Freya didn't was the rest of their siblings, who made sure Elena knew they had her back, and who eventually got her out of there.
Finn flinched back as though he'd been slapped across the face. He immediately shook his head. "No. That's not true."
"Yes, it is. Elena told me exactly what happened. Esther told her the truth, and she didn't want to believe it. Because who would want to believe they'd been murdered and forced into someone else's body more than a thousand years later? Who would want to believe that the man who murdered them months before was their brother?" Freya said. She knew what Klaus did to Elena. She had been livid when she found out. She made sure he felt her displeasure for harming their sister as well. However, she knew he felt a lot of guilt for it, and Elena forgave him, so she let it go quickly enough. "She needed time to deal with it. She needed to process it, but Esther wouldn't give her that."
"She was human in a town filled with vampires. It wasn't safe for her to leave," Finn said.
"Don't give me that. That's not why Esther did it, and you know it. And if it was why, there were better ways. Elena was terrified already. Then you grabbed her. She screamed, right? Just like I did when Dahlia grabbed me," Freya said.
Finn shook his head wildly. It wasn't the same. It just wasn't. "It's different. We were her family. Mother didn't want to hurt her. She just wanted her daughter back."
"Say for a second that that's true, in that moment, all Elena saw was people who wanted to hurt her. She saw a woman she didn't know, who was going to lock her up in in that house, with people who had done nothing but try to hurt her since she'd known them. The only ally she had in that house was Elijah. She was terrified."
Finn flashed back to that night. He remembered her screams. He remembered her trying to thrash in his arms as she fought to get away from him. He could feel her trembling in his arms. Then he remembered the same thing with Freya a thousand years earlier. He remembered hearing her screams as Dahlia carried her away.
"Elena told me that Esther threatened her loved ones to get her to quiet down. I imagine she still begged you to let her go though, just as I would beg Dahlia for weeks to take me home," Freya said.
Finn had enough flashback as he remembered taking Elena to an already spelled bedroom. She'd begged him to help her, and he'd ignored her pleas. He told himself that his mother knew best. In time, he'd come to resent Elena for the way she treated their mother. He couldn't understand why she couldn't see that their mother was only trying to protect her. But after listening to Freya compare their lives, he began to understand a little better. Esther may have been her mother, but to Elena, she was no more than a stranger, who had ripped her from her home, just as Dahlia was to Freya.
Freya could see the realization in her brother's eyes. She was starting to get through to him. Now, she needed to drive it home. She needed him to fully understand what he'd done to their sister. Only then could he make amends and maybe earn forgiveness. "It didn't end there though, did it? You continued to make Elena's life a living hell. He reported everything she said back to Esther. She couldn't have a single conversation with any of our siblings without possibly paying a price for it. Then you decided to start telling lies about her? Why would you do that?"
"Freya, she was manipulating Mother. She claimed to accept her life with us, but she was lying. I knew she was lying. I knew they were all plotting something," Finn said.
"So what?" Freya asked bluntly. "Frankly, Finn, I commend her for that. She found a way to protect herself. I can't blame her for doing whatever it took to make life easier for herself."
"She set me up," Finn said.
Freya shook her head. "She gave you an opportunity to do what you had already threatened to do. You said you were going to lie about her. She just made sure she was prepared for it when you did."
"She provoked me. I wasn't even really going to do it at first. I said that scare her, but then she and Kol started playing their game, and it pissed me off," Finn said.
"Do you hear yourself? You wanted to scare her. You wanted to make life even more unbearable for her. Why? Why would you want to do that to your own sister? Why do you hate her so much? It can't really be because of her reaction to our mother, can it?" Freya asked.
"It wasn't supposed to be that way!" Finn exclaimed. "I didn't know that Elena had been reincarnated until Elena came back from the dead. She never told me that part."
"No, of course not. It would interfere with her plan to make you hate yourself for her death," Freya said.
"When she told me, I felt like a weight had been lifted off of me. I still hated myself for what happened, but I had another chance. I let myself believe what Mother was saying, that we could be a real family again. But then Elena reacted so horribly. So did the others. It just made me angry."
"She reacted horribly because she was put in a horrible position," Freya said.
Finn shuddered. He was starting to see that. It was hard to ignore when Freya put it the way she had. "I just wanted to pretend that none it ever happened, but none of the others would let me."
"And you became resentful. They wouldn't let you pretend it never happened because it did happen. It can't be wished away," Freya said.
"When I looked at Elena, all I could see was how I failed to protect her. I only hated myself more when I saw her, and she could see right through me. I suppose that's why. It was easier to put my anger on her than to face what I'd done," Finn told her.
"You failed her, Finn, not a thousand years ago, but when it really mattered, when you really could've made a difference in her life," Freya said.
Finn once again remembered the night he'd dragged Elena from his mother's rooms. He remembered every interaction he had with her, only this time, he looked at it without his anger to justify it. The guilt swelled up in his chest as he finally understood what both Freya and Elena had tried to explain to him. Elena must have seen him as a monster, because that was what he was all those months. "Oh, God!"
Freya nodded before standing up. That was the moment she'd been waiting for, when it finally hit her brother all that he'd done. "It's time to start making it right now. You can still have what you wanted. We can be a family again, but you have to earn it, and you have to start right now. Let's go."
Reluctantly, Finn got up and followed his sister back towards the house.