@lawatsakil asked: how does seth cope with killing riley and helping kill victoria?
i see this question, and i raise you the whole damn scene + the aftermath.
you better hold on tight, spider-monkeys.
Alright, so. I’m gonna start from before the fight even happens. Earlier in the movie, Jacob talks about Seth changing along with Leah, and the fact that the pack keeps him home studying instead of out with the rest of the group. At that point, he’s the youngest member of the pack ( Collin and Brady join in BD I think? ), and they’re trying to keep him focused on his studies to preserve his future. They don’t want to put him in danger, and that extends into his assignment in the fight.
He’s used as a messenger, running all the way up the mountainside to tell Edward and Bella that the fight’s starting. Seth is still eager to help out, feeling like that’s the chance to prove to Sam and the others that he can handle his own, and really be a part of the pack instead of someone to just sit on the bench. But yeah, they put him all the way up there, not expecting him to get into any danger.
Also, important note for later: he’s too far away to really hear the rest of the pack’s thoughts, or broadcast his own to them.
Victoria and Riley weren’t supposed to catch onto Edward’s scent and figure out the plan, but they do. Seth stays with them, just out of sight, hidden right behind the tree line. He stays there and waits, listening to the conversation between Edward, Riley, and Victoria. He feels the instinctual urge to attack Riley, but he’s also listening to Edward try to reason with him. Riley’s a local kid, from Forks. He’s young, and was clearly manipulated in some way by Victoria. He gets flashbacks to the training scene, where he’d decided so quickly that the Cullens weren’t bad ( there’s also the fact that they drink animal blood and not human blood, which renders them as less of a threat, which doesn’t make him as uneasy around them than vampires like Riley / Victoria but that’s a thing for another time! ), and he can feel that pull about Riley, too. That hope-filled side of him, thinking perhaps there’s more to this than he thought.
All of that ends when Riley actually lunges towards them. It’s instantaneous, he doesn’t even move a foot before Seth jumps out from behind the hill, grabbing and attacking him in a way that nobody’s ever seen before. There’s a mix of the instinctual need to protect and the fact that, at that point, he’d already considered Bella and Edward close friends. There’s double the motivation, and so he starts trying to rip him to shreds.
He only gets distracted once Edward starts struggling with Victoria, which gives Riley the chance to get the upper hand and kick his head into the rock. Seth lets out a cry and lies there, moving every once in a while. He’s not completely passed out, but really disoriented. He moves again once Bella dashes for the rock, remembering the story they’d both heard. He doesn’t have to read her mind to know exactly what she was planning. She makes the cut against her arm, and just like the story of the third wife, all three vampires get distracted. He goes in for the kill, dragging him behind the hill as he continues to scream for Victoria. He’s still wrapped up on adrenaline, so he’s able to finish the job and kill him. He comes back as soon as Edward kills Victoria, and that snarl that comes out of his mouth is his way of telling both of them that he did it.
Edward then reads Alice’s mind, and they figure out that something’s wrong. They go back down the mountain, and Seth isn’t on screen anymore. For the sake of me needing to know, he’s doing one last perimeter run, making sure that no newborns were sneaking off towards Forks. He comes back right as the pack starts carrying the injured Jacob back to Billy’s, and before he can shift back and ask what happened, Sam tells him to run ahead and warn Billy and Sue. He sprints over there, and he’s the one that has to break the news about what happened. He struggles shifting back for a couple minutes, just because of all the emotions flooding through him. It feels familiar, the same panic that he’d felt during the night of his first shift, when he’d watched his father die after Leah shifted for the first time. He doesn’t even want to think about the possibility of losing his brother, too. He’s eventually able to calm himself down enough to shift, and he tells Billy who immediately calls Seth’s mom, knowing they’re going to need all of the help they can get.
He’s standing outside of Jacob’s house as Carlisle’s re-breaking his bones, standing next to Embry and Quil. Seth can’t even look at anybody, staring at the gravel on the ground and wincing every time Jacob screams. His head whips up as soon as Carlisle walks outside, and he stays out there with the others for the rest of the night.
Also, it’s outside the house that he figures out that it was Leah that Jacob was protecting. The fact that his sister could have died if Jacob hadn’t stepped in only adds more unease to the whole thing. And if she had died, he wouldn’t have been able to do anything as he didn’t arrive until after Jacob stepped in and saved her.
He doesn’t talk about what he did on the mountaintop, and the killing doesn’t really hit him until after Jacob’s in a stable condition. Because they remain in their human form for the rest of the night, nobody can read his thoughts. If they bring it up or ask about it, he deflects it. Nobody really pries because they’re all worried about Jacob, so he doesn’t have to try that hard. Since they were too far for the pack telepathy to kick in, the only people that know that Seth killed Riley are himself, Bella, and Edward.
As for how he copes? For the first part of it, it’s mainly denial. The rest of the pack finds out as soon as they all shift again, because he’s still thinking about it. He says that he didn’t tell them because he didn’t think it was that important, that Jacob’s incident was much more urgent than Seth’s first kill, especially since the rest of them had killed multiple people. He thinks he’s supposed to be used to it, that it’s a normal occurrence.
It keeps him up for a while, which is a concern in itself because he’s always been known as the kid that could sleep through anything. He sleeps through thunderstorms and has no idea they happened the next morning - it’s a running joke in the pack and in his family. After the incident, he struggles with nightmares for a while. He hears Riley screaming out for Victoria, and then Jacob screaming right after. They sound almost the same - full of pain - and he finds himself questioning Riley’s humanity because of it. Wondering why he didn’t hesitate, and if he should have like he did with the Cullens.
Eventually, he talks to Jacob and Leah about it, fully allowing himself to open up and share how everything made him feel. He knows that it was the right thing to do - if he hadn’t steeped in, Edward and Bella could have died. He doesn’t regret stopping him, and would do it again in a heartbeat if he had to, but it’s still hard for him to wrap his head around.
He’d been asking to prove himself to the pack for months; to get out and get a real taste of the danger that came with protecting his people, but he hadn’t meant for his chance to appear the way it did.
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