The Stormcrow & The Saint, Redux

[themidnightson]

She hasn't been paying attention for minutes now, and he's listening to the way it's ratcheting in her brain. He wasn't trying to. He's left this alone. For the most part. As much as he could. He's done enough damage. To all of them. But he knows this part of Alice.

It's hyperbolic, to say he'd known this even if he were dead.
He is dead, and he recognize it. The spiral.
Getting tighter, faster, drowning out her class.



He manages to resist for about thirteen minutes, but then he just can't.

Because she might be sitting still, facing forward, but if she were human, he'd worry about the chance of hyperventilation. It's not. That. But it's. Important. Something she isn't even talking about, but she never stops thinking of it.

That term, and Edward's refusal to play nice with her futures.
Both of them in an endless whirlwind, buffeting her between one and the other.

From: 360-339-2730 (Edward)
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Breathe, Alice.
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11.23 am Tues, Apr 10

The irony is not lost on him.

It isn't even that not breathing will do anything to her. But she can't freeze up entirely, like home, here, either. And part of that is breathing but in an entirely different way. Even though she won't need telling it's not so much meant that way, even if both apply.

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[betagainstme]

"I couldn't let them kill you--"

It bursts out of her, terrified and sad. She hates she gave away the secrets, she hates that it will cause more issues.

She hates it's put them on their radar, more so than just being 'Carlisle Cullen's children' ever did.

Her lip trembles and she shakes her head at him. You're too important.



No one would recover if he were lost. "You're here. You, me, Bella. The others. We can...we'll be okay." She's telling herself this, more than him, pressing already for every possible thread of future with the Volturi in it. A quiet repeat: "Okay."

[themidnightson]

Edward doesn't know what to do with that thought. More than every word that pours out of Alice's mouth suddenly, explanations turned almost apologetic in fear, and sadness, instead of the earlier screaming rage. None of it hits as hard, repeats as loud as;

Being too important. Not just to her.
Being so important no one would recover.

(No one.)

As if somehow they are 'recovered' now.

(No one.)

(And he thinks of Rose. Apologizing. Rose and Emmett leaving. And he thinks of Carlisle. Swearing at him. Barely cohesive behind it. Again. Of Star, and Esme, and his marriage, and Alice at the burning edges of it. Of Emmett, and Esme's easy acceptance that he's back. The same as last time. Of Alice. Of everything, she's done. Of even Alice & Jasper leaving. Of Jasper's guilt for starting the whole domino line. Of Jasper, at the end, waiting on Alice waiting on him.)

He doesn't know what to do with that.
Doesn't know if he can even hold it.

He can't look at her.

It makes the least sense.
He doesn't deserve any of that.

And if it's true, he deserves it even less.



He tried to push all of that away.
He has to give her a choice.
It's Alice, after all.



"Do you want me to stop now?"

He won't hold it against her.
He still doesn't know how.
(Even with Bella.)

[betagainstme]

“Don’t—“ she tugs on his hand, knowing he’s uncomprehending as too important and fighting against it. “You are.”

Watching him, watching the war just beneath the surface of words versus thoughts and parsing out what needs to be said and what doesn’t.

For all of Edward’s beautiful ability at language, she so rarely hears the actual words fall from his lips. It’s always snippets of conversations they’ll have and then not need to once she’s seen them. Sometimes she hates it, wishing she were half as eloquent as her brother.

He’s waiting for an answer.

“Don’t stop,” Alice shakes her head. “I need to know. I can’t be in the dark now.”

[themidnightson]

Alice has always said these things. Said everything that jumbled into her heart. It just falls out of her mouth like it's easy, and it is easier for her. He knows she's not wrong, but he wants her to be, which is stupid. But it's true.

He'd be still as stone likely, if he weren't driving the car.

He's not sure he can. Not yet. If he can. It's still so close.
It's still in ruin all around his feet every time he steps in the house.
Every time Carlisle looks at him. Alice does, and Jasper, too. Rose, even.

Every time Bella reminds him Alice and Carlisle chose her.
Every time Bella says 'no' whenever he asks again.
Disgusted. Like it's worse than all imaginable.


It's easier to just not look at it. Not try to find those words.
Sort out all the feelings that get everywhere. Blend. Blur.
Can't be made better. Can't be promised wouldn't again.


He did the part he could. The part she needed to know. So much.

"You know about Marcus's gift to be able to see the strength of bonds between people, and Aro's ability to take all the memories and thoughts of your life with a single touch, and Jane's affinity for causing pain." Edward is slowing. He should probably pull over. He's not sure he can do this without getting angry. He knows better than that.

"Caius doesn't have a definable gift, nor Anthenodora or Sulpicia, Ciaus and Aro's mates."

"Demetri--" Edward presses his lips. "--is the head of the Gaurd. You saw him, but not what he can do. Demetri is the best tracker in the world. He makes James' work look infantile. He's the one Aro will go to, when he decides. He's the one who will look for us, and find us. He's the one you'll need to watch closest, after Aro."

"He doesn't track people, physically, like James, following the clues left behind."

"He can sense people mentally. Where they are. Follow the .. tenor of their minds."

He's not sure Demetri could find Bella after her display of being untouchable by Aro and Jane's gifts, too. But he could, and he will, find all of them instead, and with Edward's aversion to even leaving her side, inability to think he could survive that again, and Carlisle's agreement to change her after graduation: they'll find her with finding them.

[betagainstme]

Demetri, Aro. Her two main points. Easier that she’s met them. Aro is easiest, he’s touched her, he’s been in her mind.

She feels him like an oily film in her memories.

Her eyes close, listening to Edward, focusing back to Italy. No choices stand out. Just black cloaks and red eyes and the deafening possibility of it being them.

Her and Edward.

No.

Quietly, unnecessarily because he can see the future as she says it: “Pull over. You’re going to crash the car if you don’t.”

[themidnightson]

"We'd survive it," is quipped too fast, too sharp.

He likes this car, and he knows she's not wrong. He knew that before she said it even, and so he keeps decreasing the speed. He's never been able to be perfectly rational about the Volturi. Not even when he was standing there begging for his own death from their hands. The blackest sin he could ever visit on Carlisle.

Who didn't entirely understand, what he couldn't forget now.

He's quiet until the Volvo is coasting on to a shoulder. Not worried about their being stopped by and inquired of. Again. He'd see someone coming long before they spotted the Volvo.

"Jane's brother, Alec," Edward says it still looking at his one hand on the steering wheel. "He can produce this mist that cuts off all your physical senses. He can extend it over several hundred meters. He can even choose selectively who is affected by it and who isn't, so The Gaurd can enter it and slaughter those caught in it without being effected themselves."

"Chelsea is the one who can affect the bonds between people." The one he'd referenced earlier. The one who made even Alice suddenly more afraid than ever Aro had, and he can't fault her. "She makes a bond stronger, or weaker, or non-existent."

"She can make it so it feels like you never were attached to someone you'd been were for centuries, and like whoever it is has always had the deepest affinity and loyalty to them instead. Enough to follow them anywhere. Do anything for them. Leave anyone else without a second thought."

"She's Aro's lynchpin." Edward pulled a breath in his nose, thinking over Aro thinking over options. "He only needs to touch Marcus' hand to be able to view whether it's worked, whether he wants more. Less. What to command her to do next.'

But Aro was arrogant enough to want Edward's fall, his defection, to be fully his own choice, his own will. To be able to gloat, forever and ever amen, Carlisle's first and favorite, his golden boy-child, fell, of his own accord, incapable of keeping up Carlise's insane little life rouse, and everyone else following him would eventually, too.

Manipulating his misery, like he did with Marcus, would have come later.

[betagainstme]

He’s right.

Chelsea is much more terrifying than Aro ever could be. The idea—the mere idea—that Chelsea could dissolve her bond with Edward.

Her love with Jasper.

The fragile, repairing threads of her and Carlisle.

stormcrow stormcrow stormcrow

Her fingers tighten on Edward’s, her gaze straight ahead of them, out the Volvo’s windshield and to the asphalt stretching out in front of them from their spot in the shoulder.

“Fuck,” she whispers.

[themidnightson]

Edward didn't move, didn't clench his fingers or stop hers. Thinking briefly of his first words to Carlisle on it --

It was everything you said, and wrote. And more.


You knew that before you went.

Yes.

-- and thinking about how Alice didn't, Alice is only even this second getting the outline of a shape with no details, no definition, no color. She ran into the belly of a best she couldn't even define. (For him. He owes her so much more than a Porsche for Christmas.)

He's still not even sure how to explain it to Carlisle, who wouldn't need the details. What 'more' means. What it's like. The jumble in his head. The fact it might take him years, or decades, to even attempt to deconstruct everything in Aro's head, everything thrown into his head everytime Aro touched someone.

Hundreds and thousands and millennia of years of someone's memories shoving themselves down his throat, into his head in less time than it took a human to blink, so much more than even the number of people he could hear in every direction in a crowded city. The very second Aro's fingers touched a hand. A shoulder.

The thousands of them shoved into Aro, all of them taking up space.
Every single touch during his stay, pushed into Edward, too.

His jaw tightened, but he pushes through that, too.
That's his fault. His burden. No one else's.


"Renata is Aro's personal bodyguard. She can shield physical attacks, repelling them and confusing the attacker. Making them forget what the purpose of the attack was. Afton, Chelsea's mate, is a little like that, too. But he can't extend past himself, and he can't affect the minds of those attacking him."

"Corin can sooth people into complacent. Contentment. Even something that mimics happiness." But it isn't. It never is. Not really. But the subject can't tell anymore. It's so like it. "But she's had the same job for millennia, and she's almost never pulled from it."

"Felix isn't a concern that way." At least not a concern on the same level with any of the others. He's a foot soldier, and insanely loyal, bent on destruction, but not a powerhouse. "And Heidi basically has what Rose does."

[betagainstme]

It’s disturbing, to find out just how in danger they were, after the fact.

Giving Aro her hand may have been the worst idea possible, his oil-slick picking through her brain, learning every secret possible—but it was the only idea that stopped them from being killed.

Even if somehow she got Bella out of there, she’d never have been able to look Carlisle in the eye again.

Felix’s name brings up the image of Edward, laying prone on the ground, cheek cracked, choking under Felix’s grasp.

Alice stepping over them to offer her hand to Aro as quickly as possible.



She leans her head against the window again, silent. Have they come for Carlisle before?

She wants to know avenues, their plots, how they’ll come at them this time, and if there’s anything specific she needs to look for.

[themidnightson]

Edward doesn't so much freeze and he's staring very hard at the steering wheel. Considering promises made in light of promises broken. Considering promises he didn't realize mattered as much that also broke the world. Their family.

It was so long ago;

and that had been his fault, too, hadn't it?

[betagainstme]

“...Edward,” Alice hisses, her eyes wide. He’s not answering her.

It’s a yes as if he’d screamed it.

whenwherehow—

She trembles, taking her hand from his to push her hands into her hair and tug.

“What happened?”

[themidnightson]

"It wasn't like that."

There's a cringe for even that much, and he looks up at the ceiling of the car, and all he can think is that he hopes Carlisle forgives him. Even though Carlisle is in the middle of trying to forgive him already. Even if Alice never tells him; like she never tells Carlisle so many of the things she's managed to figure out over the years that stay between him and Carlisle and no one else (except her, too; because).

"You have to understand--" There's a sigh, and his eyes close. Then, he opens them right up again, and he shakes his head. "They weren't even married yet, Alice." He didn't even call her family at first with the messenger. Just him. (Just him.

He is my chosen family.)

Forcing himself to say it. Hating them still.
"And they didn't so much come for him."

"It was only a messenger." New and unknown from Carlisle's years among them. "He came to tell Carlisle never to come back. To implicitly threaten taking me, because of this--" There's a hand that flicks at his head. For the obvious. Before it returns again. "And Esme, too. If she ended up being similarly gifted."

Because it's too much to pretend innocence,

"Carlisle's always been pretty sure they came because I stole his father's cross for him." The one in the hallway outside Carlisle's office. The one no one ever needed an origin story for how it got into their possession. It was so easy to assume Carlisle had it all along. That it was something he'd acquired himself, like Edward had his parent's house continually willed to later generations of himself.

"But they'd been watching through other vampires we'd met back then, too. Before he was sent. Like our life--" All, what, four years of it? Edward's hands are tightening dangerously on the wheel and the plastic and metal is starting to make a sound he can't hear, when all he can see is the wings on the ground. The ruined pieces of it, shattered under his foot. "--was a penny peice novel production designed for their amused serial updating."

[betagainstme]

They didn't come for Carlisle.

They told him to stay away. Or they'd take Edward, and Esme.

The cross. She hated it suddenly, without reason. What a stupid thing to come after them for. She squeezes her eyes shut again, breathing in through her nose and out of her mouth to calm herself. It's dumb, getting mad over an inanimate object.

It's dumb, getting mad over the past she can't change. But she's never been good at listening to that rule of thumb.




Esme is safe from them, Alice knows. At least, from being taken. That in itself offers her a little bit of calm. It's just her and Edward then. The freaks, among the freaks. Less futures to watch. Hers, Edward's, Bella's, the Volturi and Victoria. She's going to be busy.

Without looking, Alice reaches over to the steering wheel to pry Edward's fingers off of it, to stop the crunching screech of metal and plastic he's not hearing, he's not listening to. "Shh, let go."

Let go

[themidnightson]

"Not or, Alice."

There's something almost too sharp in his tone.

But it not at her, it's at all of it. When he lets her pull his hands away, but he can't let her keep it. He can't touch anything. He's mad, at them, at himself. And maybe even at the fact she's giving them credit still for caring about anything. Caring about being fair. This for that. This or that. "And. Both. Separate and just as important for him to hear. To terrorize him with. That they could just do both."

"You don't understand. He's--" Fuck. But he doesn't want to say this.
Ever. To anyone. To him. To Alice. "--just a game to them."

Carlisle. Carlisle who was the best of all of them. Who always would be. Who was their moral focal point. Who was all the goodness Edward could even see in the world. Who Aro looked into what black void of him this life made, into all he felt about Carlisle and still chose to do, still chose Them, and cackled to see Carlisle brought low in one swoop.

"They were so--" It draws, he's not pausing, he's looking for the right word. Something dark enough. Sharp enough. Hatred is too light a word for this feeling, for its age, its truer understanding. "--proud of themselves." His jaw feels like it might snap. "I couldn't even care about it enough at the time. The abject elation Aro felt, through all his fake civility, when I--"

But this one is a break. His teeth all but snap.
When he asked to die. When they would never.
But, god in hell, Aro loved his asking.

"Or Caius." Words break from a growl somewhere in his chest.
Where Aro had civility as his shield, Caius' sword was not caring at all.

[betagainstme]

It's the most emotion she's heard from Edward in a while.

It's the most she's heard him talk in a while. This whole conversation. Not even when she was yelling at him in his room, he barely spoke then. Now, he's like an angry, fiery fountain spewing forth.

Her fingers slip to her jeans, picking at them again in the silence that stretches as she tries to think of something to say. But where Edward's words finally come forth, her's are frozen in her throat--

Demetri's hand around her throat, pinning her to him when she tried to go for Edward, when she tried to help him, his face cracking with the force of Felix's slam into the marble, "Stop!"--

--Alice opens her eyes like it's hard, like her eyelids are heavy, forcing herself to focus on the forest beyond the window.

Not or.




They were always going to come. They should have told her it was something to worry about. Carlisle's half-answers to her questions in 1950, her promise to herself to watch for them. She'd lied. She'd forgotten. Lulled into false security. She wants someone to blame. So she blames herself.

Edward, Bella, the Volturi, Victoria, her list growing shorter by one. Alice is very still.

[themidnightson]

He can't stop himself. He can't even tell if it's the two weeks or the eighty years. A hatred so deep and so pure and perfectly silently still inside of him, like a light never gone out. And Aro had loved even seeing that considered made inconsequential by his descent to madness, too.

(And it would have been once he erased it.
He'd erased so much than that.
Marcus still existed.)

Edward let his head fall back on the seat.

"They consider it all ... hubris. A temper tantrum. A phase." They didn't really see them until Edward showed up. They were just details in Carlisle's game. Not all that important, or worth interest. Until Edward showed up, and put his hand in Aro. Gave Aro the knowledge of the best prize in the game yet.

But Caius didn't think like that. All rage and impatience.
How clearly he'd rather Carlisle and all of them were just put down.

He'd been gloating, and Edward hadn't even been aware he had it left in him to feel as much until the moment he realized the message. And he already started, so he's not sure he can stop. Not until she says it. Says stop. Tells him to put all of this back in that dark, still, silent place that never learned not to boil.

"He sent a child to me. Pale, and blonde, and blue-eyed." He didn't need to have anyone tell him why. Alice doesn't need him to either. "Like all the strings of people they sent to Carlisle, before he could escape. Except he had this toy. He didn't even know what it was."

He was so young, so small, powdered and perfumed, served up like Edward gave a single damn about starvation since he was thirty, no less in the last six or seven months, or now that he was dying inch by inch, waiting for the last stroke.

Especially once he'd finally seen what the boy was holding.

"The broken wings of Icarus."

Icarus.

Icarus, who flew to close to the sun, and died for it.

Except people have forgotten the story.
That the myth isn't about Icarus at all.

Icarus is just a detail, and not the main character. It's about his father, Daedalus, the once creator of the Minotaur's Labyrinth, and his captor, the great King of Crete, who he managed to outwit, outmaneuver. How he made two pairs of wings so he, and his son, could escape that land of blood and chaos. Fly away to freedom.

Icarus was always just an ending footnote.

Icarus was just the price of his father's arrogance;

Caught up in his freedom, the dizzying grandeur of the world,
flying too close to the sun and hurtling to his death for it.

[betagainstme]

Her anger blooms.

Icarus. Broken wings. A price for his father's arrogance.

There's a spot in Alice that always burns brightly--angry and scared and tamped down deep inside. Born of a past she can't remember. Her vampire years have been easy, good, she's luckier than most. She's had it easy. There's no reason for hatred and vitriol and anger to boil inside of her like that.

Yet it does. She keeps it buried, deep inside of her, where no one sees. Except Edward, and Jasper when he touches on it with his own anger.

It's blooming inside of her now, raging in her mind, all fire and heat and the desire to run into the woods and scream as long and as loud as she can. But she taught herself how to keep a lid on it a long time ago, to keep it out of other's mouths. She imagines a grease fire, imagines the lid of a pot smothering it.

It's easier to be sad, to be happy, to be stressed, than it is to give into the anger that could fuel her, could make her burn brighter than ever before. She's not sure who she is in that emotion and she's never wanted to find out. She thinks, though, that if Aro or Caius were in front of her now, they'd see the full brunt of it.




She'll do what needs to be done. Whatever it is, Alice will make sure it happens. Whether it's death (hers or theirs? no--) or fighting or words. Aro is civility and Caius is war. But Caius will listen to his master. She thinks.

All of this is in her and gone in seconds, flipped through like a magazine. Edward can see it, if he wants to, if he's able to pull away from his memories for a moment--but she doesn't care. It's set. It's done.

Edward, Bella, the Volturi, Victoria.


stormcrow.

She'll earn that title.

She looks at Edward, still listening, if he is still wanting to talk. She will not say stop. She will not ask questions until he is done.

[themidnightson]

It's not her anger, but her stillness, her silence, that catches up with Edward as he tries not to touch the steering wheel. The window. The seat. Anything he'll touch will break. It's holding his breath, holding that in, that the silence caves in. Silence is almost, no is, worse than any amount of her screaming or her crying earlier.

He's hurting her.

No.

That wasn't. He shouldn't. That all, what happened to him, was his fault. He knew. He knew and he went there anyway. He didn't care what they did to him, if they just granted his last request. This isn't about him. (And it is; and everything feels painfully, suffocatingly about him.) He didn't care about himself then, he doesn't get to care about getting what he asked for, and deserved, now.


He should have done this better. For her.



Edward pulled a breath in,

reaching up to rub his face with his fingers.


"Sorry." She has to know.
But. Not. Not like that.


And suddenly, from nowhere,
he thinks he understands a little how Carlisle felt.
A century ago. Watching him as he pushed and pushed.
Trying to pick certain things to say, as Edward saw every thought.

[betagainstme]

"--no," she whispers, her head turning sharply, cocked to the side. Bird-like. Uccello.

Stormcrow.

"No." She repeats, her fingers smoothing over her jeans. "You don't get to--this is not your fault. I am not upset with you.

"I want you to tell me. I can't afford to not know. I have to keep them in my sights, and your information is invaluable. I'm sorry, Edward. To make you relive it. You know I won't say anything."

To anyone, ever. He knows that.

"We don't have to continue today though. I have enough, for now, to get started, if you'd rather." Softly. Gently. A hand reaching out, then curling back in, knowing he doesn't want her touch now.

[themidnightson]

The problem is she's wrong.

She's already yelled at him about it, too. Just because she loves him more than she's angry, more than she's afraid, now that they have to come together to work on it -- it doesn't make it not his fault. He went there. He put them all on this path. Reawoke their interest now. There was so much he just hadn't known. But ignorance is not a defense for innocence either.

He doesn't say that he doesn't want Carlisle to ever hear about that part. He doesn't have to say it; she says it for him before he can even think it. A promise to keep the last-minute locked away between them, with all the other truths.

(He isn't certain he wouldn't give it up, if Carlisle asked. He never is.)

Everything is awash though, and his focus has unmoored, on the rock of his rage, so far out to sea from where he was when he agreed to start. One of his hands drops back in his lap, the other pushes up into his hair. "Give me a subject."

It's not a question. He just needs a landmark. Something to stand on. Something she needs. Something concrete that isn't the boiling in between his ears. He needs to stop it being so personal he can't think. If he can't think, they can't plan, and they'll all need to be ready, especially him and Alice.

So they can see it coming.

So they can protect them before it arrives.

[betagainstme]

What she needs to know: how to stop them.

But the answer is there, in Aro's guard. A shield. Something they don't have. Something out of reach, intangible. They must work around it.

Also needed to know: why? Why Carlisle? Why is this one man so strange to them? They are not the only vegetarians out there--the Denali sisters found it on their own too. And Carlisle isn't the only vampire to have left the Volturi--not that Carlisle was ever a member like Eleazar.

"What's their reasoning? For being so interested in Carlisle's life?" She says it out loud, knowing he's already heard her ruminations. "There are territorial wars still happening in the South and they spend their time and energy here instead?"

[themidnightson]

Edward let his other hand finally fall back in his lap. "Obsession."

"The Southern Wars are a rabble to be put down for them, who have been put down time and time again. Faceless, mostly, whether newborns or old bitter rivals forever squabbling over the same plots of weeds. They've never even been a challenge. Only a problem." The same as any number of other places in the world.

"Carlisle was-" Edward tries to search through a hundred words. Too many of them Carlilse's own. What they called him. How they saw him. Edward needs a whole new vocabulary for seeing Aro's own reactions, recollections, opinions about Carlisle. He has to find a way to weave them into one time, one truth. Even as he can't help hating the feel of Aro's thoughts in his memories. That they are twisting into Carlisle's, like opposing mirrors.

He has to settle for: "--personal."

"He liked being admired by Carlisle." Edward would like to burn those words. "Grooming him to understand the actual world at Volterra's feet. What his birth had gotten wrong, without someone there to guide him. The insanity of the mouse-trap game of both of them trying to succeed in changing the other to how they thought. Even though he never would, concede or play fair." Like everything he did was just ante in a raising card game.

Not the actually fraying edges of Carlisle's sanity.
Two decades of torture that nearly broke him several times.

"In a messed up way, he thinks they're still playing it. Different rules, different board, different time span. Long game. Because neither of them has won yet. Because he hasn't."

"Sometimes--" No. No, he doesn't want to say that one. Edward's face scrunched up. Instead. "His head is chaotic. I've never been in anyone's head like--" There aren't words yet. There's so much he saw in it, so much he needs to sort through. So much in his head now. He shakes his head again.

"He's gotten his way, won at every war, every game, every person, fast or slow, free or rewritten will, for so long, no matter the price, that there aren't other options to him. The games are his. The rules are his. The world is his."




"Except for Carlisle."

That's why.



Even if he still expects Carlisle will eventually come to heel eventually.
He just doesn't mind if it involves a blood bath, or stealing his children, too.

[betagainstme]

Her fingers reach for her choker again, fiddling with the crest set in the middle. Carlisle's crest, which she wears because of him.

This family that Carlisle brought together. Created, welcomed in. He'd welcomed her and Jasper in immediately and for more than just the powers she brought with her. In fact, she's pretty sure they weren't even the main reason.

But to Aro, she would only ever be a power.

Two men, so different, yet so intertwined with one another. Their lives twisting and curling like black smoke in her mind. When she looks for Carlisle's future, Aro is there, at the edge, hovering, always. But never in it. Not yet, at least. No decisions made.

Her fingers still on the choker as she watches her brother. The torment he's putting himself through to tell her these things, and he was worried about hurting her. She's doing far worse to him, making him relive these moments, making him share them.

The obsession of Aro. The oily slick of his mind on Edward's--the feedback of all the people Aro has held in his mind while in Volterra--weighing them both down, both still feeling dirty from his touch.

She remembers Carlisle's anger, when he realized it was his children, beaten and worn down, who saved him from Volterra that night. She didn't understand it then.

It makes more sense now, having met them.

"We should stop," she whispers, still staring at him. "I...you need a break. I have enough, for now."

she will earn the name stormcrow.

[themidnightson]

There's a strange curl to the edge of his mouth, the shift of his shoulders that forgets to become a true shrug. Like somehow there's any way to stop any of this. Like stopping talking will stop it circling. Except then she follows it up with that. One of the things she keeps cycling back to on refrain in her head.

He knows what she's doing, what she means, but --

"Don't tell him that." He wouldn't understand.
And would. But he'd take it to heart, too.

For the same reasons he never told Carlisle that his earlier self hit him, or called him that boy the whole time, or told him Aro would enjoy burning him. There are things Carlisle doesn't need to carry, even if Edward knows he'd be pissed to have the choice made for him. Especially right now.

He thinks of Uccello. Cara. He thinks of Carlisle swearing Stormcrow at Alice, naming her a harbinger, on the last night he saw her. He thinks of Carlisle, his first night back, calling him my Edward and swearing, blackly, in his name, and his head on Carlisle's shoulder.

He thinks of Aro saying he was so like Carlisle; about the inverted compliment-insult about how he'd somehow bested even Carlisle's self-control, being able to stand so near to Bella. And he thinks of the thing he tries to think least of, honey-sweet and too understanding,

He loves you more than anyone, Edward. And I say that as his wife.
That you came back will always matter more

And almost all of that is in Aro's mind, too.
When he decides to look for it.

Everything sacred and holy left in him. Alice. Bella. Carlisle. Their whole family. Every way they've ever protected themselves. Aro has all of it, from his birth to that day. And Alice hasn't made the blackest, worst connection yet. Hasn't put it together entirely. They touched Aro's hand and he does want them. Alice. Bella. Him. For the magnitude of their abilities. For Bella's potential.

But it's not just that. That isn't the only reason why Aro will want him eventually. She hasn't pieced it together yet. She will in time. She's so smart, his sister. Just not yet. It's not just his powers. It's not just that he knows Bella is Edward's greatest weakness. It's that he knows, thanks to all of Edward's memories before leaving them, and all of Alice's memories after Edward left:

that Edward is Carlisle's greatest weakness.

[betagainstme]

Her sharp glance over at Edward speaks in volumes of don’t say a word, unnecessary but there.

To Carlisle. To Jasper. About this, any subsequent plans or visions that come from this.

A harbinger. But not for them, she hopes.

Righteous fury, that will only grow, the more she parses out. When she realizes the full extent of what Edward is saying. Soon.

She draws her knees to her chest and pushes her forehead against them. “Fuck.”