Chapter Text
Birthdays were odd things, for vampires—and like most everything else in their world, there was no general consensus on them. Some vampires celebrated them, some ignored them, some discarded them in favour of the day of their rebirth—but even then, there were a dozen different views; was one’s rebirthday the day one was given the bite? Or was it the day they emerged from the alchemical agony of the venom, phoenixes of diamond and adamantine rising from the ashes of burnt-away humanity?
For vampires like the Cullens, was it the day their eyes turned gold?
There was no such confusion, no room for debate, when it came to a human paramour, and perhaps that was why Esme was all but incandescent with excitement.
“Of course we’ll throw her a birthday party! Really, Edward. She won’t have many more—” Edward suppressed a flinch, the reminder of that tangle of thorns and guilt and dark selfish want burning like a hot coal in his breast. “—and we should make every one of them special.”
She beamed. “And it will be a wonderful chance for her to spend time with the family.”
If not for his…ability, Edward might have thought his mother meant that to be gently chiding, a soft admonition that he should bring Bella to visit more often, and not keep her to his room—a princess safely ensconced in a tower, out of reach of every monster but himself—on those occasions that he did.
But there was none of that in her mind, only anticipation and sincerity and the pleasure of arranging another person’s joy as ideas for those arrangements began flashing through her thoughts. Esme’s mind rarely pricked him with thorns, and when it did they were swiftly pruned almost before he could detect them; she was conscious of the unique sensitivities of her telepathic son, yes, but she did it for her own sake too. She didn’t like having what she called unpleasantness in her head. Her mind had always made Edward think of a summer meadow; natural, healthy amounts of shade and shadow, but dominated by brightly-coloured flowers and sunshine—sunshine as it was for humans, welcome warmth and brightness gilding everything it touched.
Not a threat, a danger, a Midas whose touch would reveal them as jewelled monsters.
“Alice, dear, perhaps you and I could work on decorations together? And Rosalie, would you and Emmett do some research for us? I don’t know what human teenagers consider appropriate these days…”
Edward hated himself pre-emptively for dashing Esme’s happiness, but he felt obliged to object on his paramour’s behalf. “Bella was quite firm in her desire not to celebrate, mother…”
Alice’s breath hissed through her teeth, and instantly all their eyes were on her: they were shining dead things that did not need to breathe except to speak, and they all knew that sound, that particular indrawn gasp; it might as well have been an ambulance siren, a fire alarm, a bullhorn’s shriek. Jasper was standing with her before her lungs had finished expanding, his scarred hands cupping her face as if she were Venetian glass, Ming porcelain, pure soft gold.
No one spoke. She wouldn’t hear them if they tried, but Edward heard all the curiosity and concern and confusion his family didn’t give voice to. Not yet, while it would only distract Alice, distress her, if any of it got through at all.
He wasn’t listening to it, any of it.
Alice’s mind was always a kaleidoscope of shapes and colours and sounds; that was normal, her perception of the future changing moment to moment with every decision every one of her family made. But sometimes the shapes and colours and sounds were shaken free of the kaleidoscope and whipped up into a whirlwind, mixing and morphing and merging into something as hard and immutable as vampire flesh, as sharp as their teeth.
What crystallised now burned through Edward’s veins like venom.
Alice doesn’t know the name of the boy whose visage coalesces in her mind, but Edward does, vampiric memory preserving it perfect and undying in crystal so that he could not forget it if he tried: Jacob Black, the Quileute youth with the long hair and a history with the Swan family. But Alice doesn’t see the pup who approached Bella at the prom half a year ago; the Jacob she sees etched into the future is to that boy as the bronze Adonis is to the clay from which its mould was cast. He stands straight and tall with the imperturbable self-assurance of someone who will not be moved against his will, and the sense of elixirated, illimitable power writ into every line of his body comes from something more than the height and muscle he’s gained; it is not as simple as an effect of his physicality. This future Jacob has passed through some unknowable crucible and emerged distilled, been made compelling and regnant, and the strength and salience of that inner transformation emanates from within him like the searing light and heat of a flame, a bonfire, a sun.
And none of it matters, because he is kissing Edward—and Edward is kissing him back.
Bella would not have been able to tell, if she’d been present, but by vampire standards Edward froze for a small eternity—of incomprehension, disbelief, a complete and total inability to process what he was seeing—before he recoiled, flinging himself back across the room as if that would do anything, anything, to stop what he was seeing. He would have had to run from the house, and keep running, to get far enough way from his sister not to see what she saw.
She sees them outside and it is green and bright, familiar flora making it clear they are not so many miles from the Cullen house, and the other Edward, the not-real Edward, has blood on his chin and his fists in Jacob’s hair as though he plans on never letting go. He has his back against a tree and Jacob pressed against his front and doesn’t seem to care, seems unafraid and unashamed of the jeweled, opulent fire the sunlight enkindles on his bare arms, his face, out in the open where anyone could see—
Heads shift, mouths move, the angle changing and just for a second Alice sees—which means Edward sees—the smooth, nacreous scar tissue at the base of Jacob’s throat, where his neck curves into his shoulder: two neat and perfect crescents, and only vampire venom leaves that kind of lustrous scarring, only a mating bite would be so clean and precise, with no sign that either party struggled when teeth and venom sank into flesh—
“Edward?”
His family were all looking at him instead of Alice, now, a spectrum of confusion and concern at his reaction. But he had attention only for his sister, as the vision in her mind dissolved and awareness came back into her eyes.
The look she gave him was pure, baffled amazement.
Edward hissed, fast and feral reflex—and immediately despised himself for it. That was a monster’s reaction, not a man’s.
“What did you see?” Rosalie asked. Her gaze darted between Edward and Alice and back again, elegant eyebrows arched high.
Alice shook her head. *I won’t tell them if you don’t want me to,* she thought. Jasper wrapped his arms around her from behind, and she tucked herself under his chin, the two of them halves of a locket.
“You’ll tell Jasper,” Edward said bitterly; wishing, not for the first time, that he could send thoughts as well as hear them.
Wishing, not for the first time, that he had what Alice and Jasper had.
Alice shrugged, unrepentant. *I tell Jasper everything.*
*I keep secrets as well as you do,* Jasper thought in the same moment.
As if Edward didn’t know that Alice and Jasper shared everything they were with each other—or that an empath was almost as much an involuntary voyeur as a telepath was.
“You’ll tell Jasper what?” Rosalie asked, and her voice was sharp but Edward could hear her genuine concern for him, her shock and confusion over his reaction to their sister’s vision.
It didn’t make any of it easier to bear. “She saw me kissing someone else,” he said, carving each word like a diamond to be sure he didn’t snarl them. “But it’s nothing. It will never happen.”
*Visions that clear always come true,* Alice thought; not meaning to, not talking to him, just the kind of reflexive, uncontrollable papercut-thought that a telepath wasn’t allowed to react to, had to pretend not to have heard, and this time Edward did snarl, felt it tear its razor-wire way out of his throat—
—and Jasper snarled back, and in his face, twisted by protective rage and marked with the scars left by all who had failed to kill him, Edward saw his own mirror, and flinched.
“Enough!” Carlisle abruptly stood equidistant between Alice-and-Jasper and Edward, his palms upraised. “We have too many enemies outside this house to fight within it. Edward, you know Alice can’t control what she sees. Jasper, you know better than I that you have no need to protect Alice from her brother.”
Alice tipped her head backwards to look up at her husband. “And I can take care of myself,” she added—but her voice was fond.
The look Jasper gave her was adoring, and Edward flicked his gaze away as if that could give them privacy.
“My apologies, Alice,” he said, stiffly. He didn’t wait to hear Jasper apologise aloud; he could already hear the man’s I’m sorry in his mind. “And Esme.” It always upset their mother when any of them fought. “I should go.”
He left before any of them could call him back. Ran far and fast until he couldn’t hear the conversation they were no doubt having; until he couldn’t hear their thoughts about it. About him.
Him, kissing someone else. Mated to someone else. Someone who made him unafraid of sunlight.
By the time Edward returned to the house, Esme had managed to successfully turn his family’s minds to the planning of Bella’s birthday party, and he did not try to object again.
He would have, if he’d known. If any of them could have seen that the birthday party was the first link in a long, long chain.
The gifts. The wrapping paper. The papercut, and Jasper’s thirst, and Bella falling through the glass table and Edward’s dreams of playing human alike, table and dream both shattering into a thousand shards, both tearing her to pieces.
He would have objected, if he’d known it would mean his family leaving Forks, the gifts he couldn’t take back hidden beneath Bella’s floorboards with the photograph she’d taken of him.
But not even Alice could see all the links in that chain.
It was only a birthday party.