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]

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.”

[themidnightson]

Her glance is fierce and accusatory, without any rage behind. That she does need to be told not to tell anyone anything. But that wasn't the point of the words.

"I didn't it mean it like that." He didn't even gainsay her turning it from a stabbing weapon into one that could strike into the hell coming from them. It would have been a completely other comment if he had.

"It's not that he couldn't handle it." Knowing. That one small part. A word, given, taken, kept. "He didn't mean it--" Even if he did, even if Carlisle means everything that comes out of his mouth. They were hurting, they were angry. "--and you've both apologized. More than once."

Those words are so easily spilling for them.

His fingers are playing against each other in his lap.

"But he'd take it to heart so much harder that it's stuck."
That for all his peaceful life intentions, his mistake is her weapon.
Not just that he's breaking his rules for Bella, that he broke them on Alice, too.

One second's rage and hurt and weakness wounding Alice so deeply, so intentionally and unintentionally at once. Because you always know how best to hurt the ones you love; the ones you've built a life protecting from that hurt that can hurt them worst. He may have wanted to hurt Edward, and even have every right to that even Edward won't entirely fight, only what he did with it. But he never wanted to hurt Alice. Edward didn't even have to ask Carlisle to know how true that was.

Edward can still hear himself. In the forest. The only answer to oh my Edward, when his lips, blood-covered and suddenly frozen still as though he'd been punched, at hearing it even then, unable even to bear those three words in his head, said in the same kind of reflexive defense, reflexive offense, you aren't innocent. But even in that truth. He can't stop himself.

Here. Even with Alice. He owes Carlisle so much still, too.



For not knowing;

and for the fact, that feels like a lie, even in his head, too.

[betagainstme]

Rain is on the horizon. There’s clouds, gathering at the edge of the town.

At the edge of Alice.

“Storm’s coming,” she whispers, her lips barely moving. “Tonight, weather-wise.”

Alice-wise...that’s yet to be seen.

It’s not the subject broached, stretched between them. It’s safer.

Carlisle would hate knowing she took the words to heart. I should not have named you stormcrow then. Murmured in the car, her wishing she could sink into the seat and never be seen again.



“I’m doing my best,” she whispers, her fingers tightening at the crest on her throat. “To make sure he doesn’t know how...bad it all is.”

She’s making a vague gesture at her head. It encompassing the future, the world around them, the state of her mind and Edward’s. It’s a lot. She’s trying.

“I’ll be...stretched thin, until I can figure out the balance. Keep them from noticing? As much as you can?”

[themidnightson]

It's the first time he thinks about reaching out and touching her. He doesn't know if he's safe yet. He thinks he is. He thinks the car is. He knows she wouldn't care, even if he wasn't. It's not gone. It's just subdued. Back in its century, and a fortnight, corner. Where he can't tell anyone, because Carlisle doesn't need the mess and Edward doesn't deserve their sympathy.

Because there are bigger things to focus on.
Protecting all of them now.

"Of course."

He hates that she's in this. He's grateful not to be alone.
That even in this, he and Alice are united, the ever-watchful front.

There's a glance at the clock, coinciding with how blase he makes his words,
"It shouldn't be hard with everyone's fixation on my situation right now."

Like if he says them easily, unclipped, with no tension, almost like it's joke, it won't be as true as it is. Worrying that he almost died, and will he do it again, and Bella's being changed with near everyone against him, and Bella's unchanged and unchanging response to his proposal.

All of it, just some fair-weather mask against the coming storm.

[betagainstme]

He thinks it, she stretches her arm out for him, her fingers ghosting the edges of his hair as she reaches to pull him into her shoulder.

He thinks of comforting her, but she comforts him first. Her turn. He’s held her while she’s raged and screamed and cried at him.

Her turn.

His blase tone doesn’t fool her, wasn’t meant to, but she snorts anyway. She thinks about offering to shake some sense into Bella, but the thought is there and gone with the breeze.

“I promise I’m not really going to shake Bella.”

[themidnightson]

Edward let himself be tugged, gaze shifting only briefly to the grip marks bruised into the steering wheel. Maybe he can tell Rose he'll take a replacement as her apology.

It might be funny to anyone else, to see. Alice so tiny, pulling him into her arm, against her shoulder, their sizes so completely different. That he lets her in a way no one else ever gets. It's stupid, in comparison. In comparison with still refusing to accept Bella's win with Carlisle, to putting the family back together, and Aro's eventual attack.

Alice knows him. Better than himself sometimes.

How dumb, and absolutely oblivious he'd been, asking for something he hadn't even let himself know he wanted until he doled it out like a checkmate chess move, and how he couldn't unsee in himself, how desperately and deeply he did want it, after he finally could see it.

"I'd appreciate that." There's a breath out his nose.

Only for Alice: "She could still change her mind. I'm not giving up."

[betagainstme]

Her fingers stroke through his hair, her gaze still straight ahead, watching the horizon beyond them.

Finally, she turns, barely, and presses a kiss into the bronze fluff of his hair. Love you.

She will never not understand how important moments like this are. How they fuel her, keep her burning bright. Her brother.

A flash of annoyance, almost anger, at his last words. At Bella. For torturing Edward like this.

“She better,” Alice grumbles. “Or I‘ll break the promise I just made.”

[themidnightson]

There's a faint snort, and a roll of his eyes.
Alice loves Bella, too. Too much to actually do that.

Knows it's not even that, with the whole of her new nickname-weapon. Somewhere, Carlisle's words are a cement around it, not angry, not a defense, like a pled confession, for him to stop pretending there was anything else he could do, over even Bella's head; you've chosen not to live without her.

Anything if the loss of her equaled an uncontrollable willingness to end his own life. Edward's rage and even if Edward decided not to forgive Carlisle, to actually hate him for it, was a hesitationlessly willing price worth his being there, still on the planet. It's not lost on him, that even if Alice's want for Bella, for her best friend, undeniable visions (white skin, red eyes, gold eyes), chose her for her own reasons.

That in there, in the things she snapped at Carlisle, too, he knows it's the same for her.
She wouldn't put him back on that path, not even for the conundrum of Bella.

But Edward knows even less how to put any of that into words. He can see each instance of Bella's pain-stricken, grimacing face and flinching pull back at each explicit and implicit use of those words. And more than actually twisting the knife in, even though it does that, too, it makes his focus go back to the clock. It makes the rubber band of how far they are apart ache more fiercely than even those memories can.

He chooses, rather like Alice's non-answer to his words about Carlisle;

"We should get back. There's about ten minutes to the bell."

[betagainstme]

She hums an affirmative, with one last stroke of his hair, then let’s him go so he can sit up to drive.

“If we must.” A sigh, drawn out for dramatic emphasis. More like her.

Still, she turns her focus to Aro, that oily feeling in her mind. He’s not made any decisions that matter to her. Demetri, then, perhaps...

[themidnightson]

He almost wants to stay there, as her fingers thread through his hair one last time, soft, possessively affectionate even as it's something like the wordless feeling of both goodbye and thanks and until next time. She's never judged him for his space, and never not been thankful he lets her break it at will.

He fails not thinking that it took Alice two weeks to coax this out of him, and Carlisle less than three hours; Carlisle not touching him, but also willing him, with every thought, every careful silence and even more careful word, not to move away and stop touching him. Of Bella, curled up in his arms, every night since the plane, forehead pressed into his neck, softly mumbling his name into his skin.

The car gets turned back on, and he's silently grateful to Alice the steering wheel is still there. This time he does pick music, and doesn't talk. Doesn't disturb Alice's focus. Follows along the decades-long familiarly tenuous line she starts touching. Plucking her mental fingertips as delicately as though time, and space, and the future, are only an instrument she, too, was a virtuoso of. He watches the dark grey, rain-impending sky, as he watches Alice watch more and more of Italy.

They're about three minutes out, when Edward's cheek twitches barely.
It's still a short number of miles, but: "Jasper is waiting for you."

And he's really not happy.

Edward really can't win for losing lately.
But she needed the space, and she needed to know.

[betagainstme]

Her head snaps to look at him, a rare flash of surprise flitting across her face, then: something akin to terror.

Her voice, tiny, as she turns back to look out the window again, her fingertips pushing lightly against the glass. ”Shit.”

She needed more time, to wrap her mind around all of the things she’s learned and is trying to juggle. To push things aside and focus on others.

Alice draws in a shaking breath, exhaling slowly, her fingers fiddling with her choker again. “Okay.”

Okay. Okay, okay, as they draw closer to the school.

[themidnightson]

"It'll be okay." It's reflex. But it's true, too.

Even as it goes from Edward being able to hear the ramping tide of his thoughts, to suddenly seeing the still frame, photo-like, pre-volcano stillness, quality of Jasper, besides Edward's old now-gifted-over Ducati bike, and the thunder that is his expression while he's waiting.

It's true, but it's probably going to be bad, too.

If she does it. He doesn't judge. But he can't say he doesn't see Jasper's point, hasn't watched her dance around Jasper, around him. It wasn't even as though they'd discussed the thing that had him drag her off the school campus for the last two weeks either, until now.

The school is too close for it to take long, and he's smarter than to do anything other than slide the Volvo into the open parking spot beside the bike. And his brother. He doesn't get to make Alice's choices for her.

[keptherwaiting]

Thunderous is an understatement.

The parking lot would be a crater if Jasper had the right tools for such expression with the emotional fallout of the past two weeks - not only Jasper's own feelings on the matter, but everyone's.

He grabs the passenger door handle as soon as the Volvo stops, waiting for the door to unlock and open it for Alice.

He's not allowing her the choice this time.

He'll tear the door off, if need be.

[betagainstme]

“Traitor,” Alice whispers, without moving her lips, throwing a glare over her shoulder at Edward.

Pressing her lips together firmly, she draws in another breath before popping the lock, letting Jasper open the door for her.

She slips out, looking up at her husband and then the bike. “I’ll uh—“

A hand gestures at the bike and she just goes ahead and climbs on the back.

[themidnightson]

Edward does not hide either. Nor does he quite look apologetic.

Just not ... like he plans to get in Jasper's way.

He gets out at the same time as Alice.
Almost a perfect reflection.

Except he stays by his car.


"Jasper."


It could be a very middle of the road, polite, familiar hello.
It could be please don't damage the car any more than Edward already just did.