Taylor Hebert’s relationship with Brian Laborn is an object lesson in how two different flavours of woundedness, if pressed together too tightly, create not a bond but a kind of grinding friction. Taylor approaches Brian with this overwhelming mixture of admiration and desperation: he's older, steadier, competent in ways she thinks she will never be, and so she treats him as both a role model and a lifeline. Brian, for his part, sees Taylor as someone in need of saving, and since his entire identity is organised around the need to protect and provide for others (an identity born of a neglectful mother and abusive father and the responsibility of raising his younger sister) he embraces her as another project. The problem is that neither of them is able to relate to the other as an equal, which means the relationship is already crooked before it begins.
The cracks widen the longer they spend together. Taylor’s drive is totalising: once she decides that something must be done she will do it regardless of the cost to herself or to anyone else. Brian respects this on one level but it also terrifies him. His darkness power is about concealment, protection, the creation of boundaries. Taylor’s is about intrusion, expansion, the crossing of every possible line. They are oriented in opposite directions. Where Brian wants to limit the danger, Taylor wants to embrace it and bend it into something usable.
They were both projecting needs onto each other that conflicted with romance. Taylor had already started converting every relationship into a utilitarian exchange—friends and allies were valuable insofar as they helped her achieve things, intimacy was worth as much as it enabled her to keep moving forward—so her affection for Brian was genuine in flickers but submerged under the logic of utility. Brian, meanwhile, wanted to be in front of her, blocking danger, even if that danger was her own ambition.
The irony is that both of them genuinely wanted to protect each other. Brian tried to keep Taylor from self-destruction and Taylor, in her own way, tried to keep Brian from being crushed under his responsibilities. But protection for her meant enabling him to act, while protection for him meant limiting her action. Their forms of love contradicted one another in practice, even if they aligned in intention.
So the reason it couldn't last wasn't just that circumstances were too hard or that trauma poisoned their bond or whatever. It was that the core of who Taylor was becoming was incompatible with the core of who Brian needed to be. She was someone who defined herself by control. He was someone who defined himself by restraint. They were at cross-purposes situationally.