no one claimed we would all go down in a blaze of glory (ensemble) r
title: no one claimed we would all go down in a blaze of glory
fandom: twilight
character(s)/pairing(s): ensemble (the cullens, bella, tanya, the volturri) || cannon pairings
rating: r
word count: 3815
spoilers: up to eclipse
author's note: violence and major character is abundant in this fic; it is apocalyptic after all. just saying. you've been warned.
summary: post-apocalyptic fic. heaven has rolled up its white runner and collapsed its attic stairs; all that’s left is purgatory, yawning and gaping with the effort to swallow them all. sometimes the dead are the lucky ones.
The sky burns with soot as the flat edge of the world teeters closer on the horizon. Everything is fading.
The mushroom clouds disperse and the earth cracks and they don’t need to hide indoors any longer. Sunlight chokes, suffocating on darkness.
Besides. It isn’t as if there are any more humans alive to see them sparkle.
-
Their warning had been satin slipping to the floor.
Alice giggled as she returned another evening gown to the rack, thinking longingly how beautiful Bella would look wearing it if she would only-
The hanger clattered to the floor, the dress billowing stubbornly against the thick air before slowly floating down, down, down towards the linoleum.
“Alice? What’s wrong?”
Alice’s eyes were wide, filled like submarine portholes with shock and fear and horror, the floor-length mirror in the dressing room reflecting back a grotesquely distorted reality.
“The end.”
Bella placed her hand over Alice’s.
“The end? The end of what?”
She rounded on Bella and there was no mistaking the terror there.
“The end of everything.”
-
They watched in abject dread as the humans play their morbid chess game, thundering about broken treaties and bombs and negations as if they were moves made on black and white checkers and not the final strokes that would end it all. The world hovers at the edge of desolation and all they can think about is winning a petty bickering match over territory.
Rosalie leaves the room in disgust but for once Emmett doesn’t follow her. This time he has a perverse fascination for how it will all come to a close.
-
“What will we do?”
It was Esme’s shaking voice that whispered the question with no answer, like an earth with no sunset or a fire with no smoke. The ends of things twisted around to the beginning, unrecognizable loops of time.
They glanced at each other with fear and uncertainty yet, despite it all, empty. No one knew where to go from here.
Alice jerked her head no, stubborn in her hopelessness.
“Every means of intervention is blocked; I’ve looked. Diversion, assassination, mediation… there’s nothing. Nothing we can do.”
Then what will become of us?
Edward pressed his palm flat to his forehead, gripping Bella’s hand tight in his other, as the tremor of their thoughts shook his sanity.
“We’re stronger together; we’ll figure out something.” Carlisle assured, fixing a confident smile on his face, but Edward picked the thoughts out of his head like rotting, unsown seeds. His eyes locked briefly with Edward’s as the rest of the family wandered away from the living room.
Once the wildlife is gone, we’ll eventually become so hungry that we’ll go mad with it. We’ll be better off than the rest that haven’t tried to go without regular feedings, but the result will be the same. Nothing beyond that point has been documented, to my knowledge, so I don’t know if it will eventually starve us out of existence. But does it matter? Any sense of ourselves will be lost in the bloodlust.
Edward swallowed and drifted upstairs with Bella. Her eyes harbored fear like an unclean chicken coop, edges sharp and padded against her mind with straw, her irises darting around to read his face as would a flighty bird that knew somewhere instinctual that death was coming. But he only rolled her beneath him and whispered I love you’s. There was no room for any more truth that night.
-
The chemicals and smoke don’t kill them, not like they prayed it would. The world goes silent after the great shaking tremors of the bombs fade and they turn their faces away.
-
The Volturri try to reign in order, but the vampire world shakes in pandemonium, like rats when they finally realize there is no cheese, twitching and pacing the maze looking for an exit that isn’t there. Nomads descend on the few survivors of the holocaust, despite the call from Aro to let them breed and repopulate so they can have their feast again. But eventually all their throats run dry and the entire population are united in eyes of coal black. The others roam like packs of feral dogs.
But the Cullens remain locked tight inside, watching the world as if from a snow globe and hoping the plastic dome of it will be enough to protect them.
After all, the animals perished with the rest.
-
Metal rusts and the blood-soaked streams evaporate; the clouds slurp up the crimson residue until they rip at the seams.
“Look!” Alice cries, but her voice is more like a child waking up to the first snow of winter.
Rivets of red streak down window panes.
“God’s eyes are bleeding.”
-
Cabin fever sets in like something contagious, and they scream at each other in hoarse, gruff voices more to alleviate the suffocating silence than to resolve any dispute. Carlisle practically grabs them by the scruff of their necks and forces them outside, as if they’re blind kittens being carried away from danger by their mother. They don’t need to breathe but the fresh air does them good, flitting between the trees and barely allowing their feet to touch the ground as they run.
But it’s then that they catch the scent.
Death. Everywhere death. Blood dried and spoiled with poison but it still draws them in, unwillingly, desperately, meaninglessly. They reach the edge of town.
They walk down streets littered with rotting corpses, cars crunched together (bumper cars gone wrong), bodies of the lucky ones slumped over in their chairs and the others in a collapsed motion of escape. Ajar store fronts act like pews in a pious church, but they know when they reach the end there’ll be no salvation there.
Heaven has rolled up its white runner and collapsed its attic stairs; all that’s left is purgatory, yawning and gaping with the effort to swallow them all.
-
You know there’s no coming back from this, don’t you? We will die.
Edward sets his jaw, eyes searching out anything but blonde hair and violent eyes, because her thoughts crowd his head and he can’t take anymore of it. Of her. Of this.
“Yes, thank you. I’m aware.”
-
Her hand ripples through the water, meeting no hesitation, and she sighs in a flock of bubbles. Breaking the surface, her short hair flattens to cower around her head and her gaze meets his on the riverbank.
“We can’t drown. You know that.”
Alice laughs like he’d said something witty and rises to meet him, taking his arm.
“Never hurts to check.”
-
“I don’t think I can bear to watch my children die all over again.”
Carlisle folds the book, his heart, his hope, in half and takes her hand in his, stroking his thumb over the creases in her palm.
He doesn’t tell her she won’t have to.
-
The Volturri are pillars; black, smooth stones holding up the weight of a thousand moons without drawing a breath. They shake.
“How far now?”
“About a minute. The guards can only hold them back for so long. The last of them are fighting now.”
Aro is perturbed but not scared; Caius wild; Marcus oddly pleased.
“So we wait.”
With fingertips pressed to fingertips in a circle befitting of a fallen crown, they bear witness to their own demise.
-
“I don’t understand.”
It isn’t sadness that crystallizes Edward’s face; the Volturri were never really friends, more often foes. It’s the crazed expression of a man drowning under the tides of a world that’s stopped making sense. A world that’s twisted until the sordid worm of it has stopped being his reality, but a warped alternate.
“Who would want to rule over an empty nest? Surely they know royalty means nothing now.”
He can’t picture the faces of vampire conquistadors who’ve captured their loot and their castle, knowing that money has no value and power has been rendered ineffectual. Would they seem victorious? Or destroyed? Surely the three former kings had the easiest way out of them all.
Carlisle’s eyes are vacant, tired for the first time after centuries without sleep.
“We all cling to the constructs of the world we’ve lost. Perhaps you could consider it a grieving process.”
-
“Jasper dear?”
Alice’s toe digs a spindly line into the dirt, retracing it with her heel to make it bold.
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you a favor?”
He’s on his knees before her in an instant, hands pressed together by her thigh like cavemen over gods they couldn’t name.
“Anything.”
Her smile gives him chills.
-
The door knocks open and they flock to the sudden sound.
“Jasper? Where’s-“
His hands shake, sticky with invisible blood. All their sins are metaphorical now.
Jasper’s memories shoot through Edward’s head like bullets.
“It should be you to do it.”
A goodbye kiss, like high school sweethearts parting ways on the dock of a warship.
The screeching, metallic ripping; a fire crackling into too-quite air.
“Oh God. What have you done?”
One step forward, two steps back into the wall. He’s slipping in more ways than one.
“I- I promised. I promised her.”
Jasper wraps his arms around his knees, rocking against the rotation of earth.
“I take it back, I take it back, I take it back, I take it back…”
Esme gasps, a hand flying to her mouth in a fit of feminine horror; Edward collapses into a chair; Bella shakes, aching for someone to hold her; Rosalie’s eyes burn.
The meaningful look Rosalie shoots toward Emmett is missed by all but him, and he turns his face away from her in defiance, pretending he doesn’t see.
“I take it back. Please, Lord, I take it back.”
-
Bella’s eyes are fixated on the scarred bark of dead trees, listening as their roots creak deep in the ground. She doesn’t whisper a word.
Edward half-expects some vacant mention of Romeo and Juliet, of tragic romances and how poetic this all is. But her lips remain motionless until he turns to leave her to her thoughts.
“Stay,” is her appeal, her prayer, and he can’t help but acquiesce.
-
It’s silent sobs when Emmett takes pity on Jasper.
A sharp yelp; smoke waving a grey flag of surrender because nothing has managed to stay white here.
-
Esme watches him carefully, a hand placed gingerly on his arm. If she could hide him under her wing, she would.
“What if…” Emmett gulps. “What if I didn’t do it because I felt sorry for him? What if I did it because I’m starting to lose my mind?”
Mother coos, brings him to her chest.
“Don’t think about it.”
-
The television snows in perfectly parallel lines. Bella watches it absently, her legs curled up under her like flower petals in frost.
“Alice always loved the spring.”
-
“Do you think… would they want us to have some kind of ceremony?” Esme sniffs, finger hooked under her nose. She’s heard tell that mothers should never live to bury their children. But she must be remembering it wrong because these will be babies numbered two and three.
“You mean like a funeral?” Bella wonders.
Emmett buries a chuckle.
“Are you kidding? Alice would have this place stocked with bleeding hearts and every other depressing flower on this earth if she ever had the chance to preside over a funeral. It would be downright disrespectful if we didn’t.”
Both women stare at him open-mouthed.
“You made a joke.” Her voice is shocked, but not exactly outraged.
“Sort of.” He pauses. “Is that… wrong?”
He’s met with a faraway expression.
“I’m not sure.”
-
“I can’t. I won’t.”
Rosalie’s expression is determined, eyes wide as she calculates angles and degrees, of ways she can have this change of being on her own terms. Lord knows the others weren’t. Birth then death then birth again. Never her choice.
“Yes you can. You can do this for me.”
Emmett finally meets her gaze, and he curses his dry eyes.
“I’m not as strong as Jasper.”
Her fingertips trace the arch of his bicep, his tensed jaw line.
“What do you mean? You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.”
His hand grabs her fingers and pushes her lightly away.
“That’s not what I meant. I can’t-“ he swallows. “I can’t lose you. I’m not strong enough.”
He remembers the utter desolation in Jasper’s eyes, the way they’d softened in relief when it was almost over, and that won’t be him. He can’t. Maybe they’re both selfish, maybe he’s shriveled into a coward under all this muscle, but he can’t be the one to tear her to pieces.
-
Edward and Rosalie’s typical back-and-forth nearly comes to blows under twitching muscle and eyes black like graves dug deep.
Bella appears in the doorway of Carlisle’s study.
“How long?”
The verbs and nouns are implicit in the foreboding dip of her tone.
Madness. Hunger. Edward. Morte.
He stares ahead blankly, odd considering he’s always been gifted at delivering death sentences.
“Weeks. Maybe a month.”
A resigned nod; death stopped scaring her long before her heart stopped beating. It’s the loss of memories, of self, that she fears now, since in the end it’s all she really has left.
-
Rosalie has a list; she’s ticking them off one by one. Someone will say yes eventually.
“You made us. You gave us this life.” If she were any good at this, this asking for favors, a mere step above begging, she’d be crouched or on her knees or at the very least eye level.
But she places her hands high on her hips instead, her gaze serrated and cool.
“You should be the one to take it back.”
She finds no answers in his eyes; he finds no forgiveness in hers.
-
The patchy telephone lines finally come through and a shrill ring pierces the house.
“Hello?” It’s a question, really, because who could this be? Anyone who cares is gone.
“It’s- it’s Tanya. From Denali?” As if they could ever forget.
“You’re alive.” There isn’t joy or relief because the ones that went first are the luckiest. Carlisle doesn’t wish this upon anyone. This non-life, half-death.
The phone crackles like cellophane and he fears for a moment that he’s lost her.
“The others… they took care of each other. Kate and Irina, Carmen and Eleazar. I… I offered to stay behind.” Her voice hitches, drops. “Always the odd one out.”
Alice and Jasper flash for a pained second through his mind and his head is cradled in his hands.
“You should come here. If the journey wouldn’t be too dangerous.”
Her laugh is brief and humorless - danger is a relative term these days.
“I’m leaving now.”
A click; he doesn’t hang up until she’s swinging open the unlocked front door.
-
Esme’s grateful that vampires don’t sleep. Because the hostess in her, the part that still wants to set places at the table with knives and forks and soup spoons in the proper order, would have to offer Tanya a bed. And the only one available has ghosts clinging between the sheets.
Instead she wraps the woman, widowed by friends and sisters if not by a husband, into her arms, murmurs placid nothingness into her ear.
The mother in her is still alive and well.
-
“No.”
Rosalie pauses in the doorway, her mouth hanging half-open in a state of frozen speech. She snaps it shut.
“I’m sorry?”
Tanya turns to face her on the couch, her eyes ever tired but persistently sneering.
“I’m not going to end you, Rosalie.”
“But the others-“
“You’re not my responsibility.”
-
Carlisle’s moment of epiphany is quietly crazed.
“All wrong,” he mutters angrily to himself, his fingers giving paper cuts to the pages instead of the other way around. “We’ve been going about this all wrong.”
He isn’t sure whether to rock back on his chair legs or stand violently or collapse, but the expression on his face is terrifying. Esme stares at him, disturbed.
“What is it?”
A breath.
“I know how to end it.”
His shoulders slacken, his face melting into dreamy apprehension.
“I know how to die.”
-
Downstairs, Rosalie grins.
-
“It could work.”
Edward’s nostrils flare. The idea, the very notion, that hope’s definition has twisted to mean little more than successful failure, is unacceptable. It’s ludicrous. It’s-
Bella hooks a finger under his chin, and for the first time in months there’s the resurrected ghost of a smile at the creases of her lips.
It’s truth.
-
“I guess you found what you were looking for.”
Emmett’s voice is hard, bitter. It stings like venom shot through her heart.
He’s busying himself feverishly looking for something under the bed that isn’t there, and Rosalie places a hand on his shoulder.
“Hey.” His eyes meet hers. “I was never going anywhere without you.”
She figures it doesn’t matter now whether it’s honest.
-
“Here,” Carlisle points to the yellowed map, the faint drippings of someone’s spilled coffee marking a spot somewhere near his finger. It aches to think about the humanity behind the stain.
The factory will have a large broiler room, large enough to hold a vampire. Flames high enough to consume them quickly, burn them to incense in a gust.
Good enough for their purposes.
The group around him nods with varying degrees of hollowness.
-
“Are you scared?” Edward whispers, his voice a gravel road that leads into a darkened forest, and he prays she doesn’t ask him the same. He’s terrified, and he isn’t sure he could bring himself to lie to her.
“Not really.” Her voice is shockingly light and truthful as she glances up at him slyly. Her hand molds to his cheek. “How can I be afraid when I’m with you?”
His pathetic attempt at an optimistic expression is choked under the weight of a strangled sob, and she smiles sadly. For once she’s the one with the reassurances. She ducks her head when his eyes slip.
“We’ll be okay.” Bella wraps her tiny arms around his shoulders. “We’ll be okay.”
He sobs into her neck, and he’s never felt more like a little boy in the arms of his mother.
-
The abandoned factory squats on the horizon, an antique from an era before electrical wiring and heated coils. The sky is gray, and for a moment Edward disregards the fact that it’s an apocalypse and tells himself that it’s just twilight. He allows himself to forget.
They linger. Bella digs her knees into Edward’s sides, her arms clutching tighter around his neck, and she lets her forehead fall to his shoulder. He’d carried her, for old time’s sake, and now it’s time to let her down.
(He’d always hated double meanings.)
“I’m sorry that I brought you into this life, only to have it end like this. I’m sorry I couldn’t-“
Save you, is lost in the flesh of her palm as she muffles his unwanted apologies.
“I’m not. If this is the trade-off for hundreds of years longer with you than a human love could ever last, I’ll take it gladly. I was born to be with you. We’ve already had our happy ending.” She smirks. “No one reads the epilogue anyway.”
He’ll try to tell her how grateful he is, how much he loves her, in the press of her lips against his, desperate passion the carefully crafted ozone around them.
He doesn’t know for sure, but he likes to think that he got the message across.
-
If anyone were paying attention, they’d see the poetry to this. As it stands, you’d have to file it under dramatic irony.
Emmett is first.
“No,” he places both hands on Rosalie’s shoulders, halting her motion to follow him into the factory. “You shouldn’t have to watch this, baby girl.”
Rosalie smiles wryly.
“This is because I asked you to kill me, right? Your way of getting me back?”
Emmett chuckles, nods because it’s easier.
“Sure thing.”
He kisses her forehead, envelops her body with his.
Rosalie is quick to follow him.
Esme stretches her arms wide, Edward and Bella fitting snugly in her embrace. Bella sobs tearlessly into her shoulder; Edward resting his chin on top of her honey curls. They’re grieving the imminent loss of the woman who’s been their mother long since they’ve forgotten their own, and part of Edward is glad they won’t have to survive long without her. She gives them one last squeeze.
Her final exchange with Carlisle is silent: hands intertwined over her cheek, a secret smile on her lips, his body trembling more than hers. She curtsies like they used to at parties when she was a girl, blowing a kiss wet with venomous tears over her shoulder.
Edward carries Bella in his arms. Though she’s strong. Though she could probably still crush him, because he’d no doubt let her. Because they’re in this thing together; they haven’t done anything of importance without each other in centuries and there’s no reason to start now. She remembers thinking once that she couldn’t live in a world where Edward didn’t exist, and vice versa. She smiles, looking into his eyes, knowing now that she won’t ever have to. His eyes flicker green just before the flames consume them.
-
Tanya flicks the match at the factory’s wood paneling, watching with stoic delight as they lick the bones of the building clean.
“You’re not going to follow us, are you?”
Carlisle had asked, his face void and fearless since his destiny was on its last legs. It was the face of acceptance.
Tanya shook her head.
“Figure I’ll stick around. See what other trouble I can get into. Nothing to lose right?”
A nod; in that moment he knew precisely what she meant.
He talked. Talked about life and God and souls and morality. About finding meaning in an endless life, the value of a kind word, about the distinction between humanity and martyrdom. The fruits of a millennium living among the reeds.
She wasn’t listening. But she knew talking to a brick wall with arms and legs and eyes was better than talking to yourself, so she let him continue.
Until he ran out of words to say.
If anyone were paying attention, they’d see the poetry to this. They die in mortal chronology, the order that they joined the Cullen family. Fates sealed, it was then that they had begun their deceptively-immortal life in more ways than one.
Alice and Jasper.
Emmett.
Rosalie.
Esme.
Edward, Bella in his arms (he hadn’t really lived until he’d met her anyway).
Carlisle.
Sync. Blood. Time. As if they’re returning to the womb.
-
Eternity doesn’t stretch out into infinitum.
It ends when there’s no one left to say that it shouldn’t have.
-
fandom: twilight
character(s)/pairing(s): ensemble (the cullens, bella, tanya, the volturri) || cannon pairings
rating: r
word count: 3815
spoilers: up to eclipse
author's note: violence and major character is abundant in this fic; it is apocalyptic after all. just saying. you've been warned.
summary: post-apocalyptic fic. heaven has rolled up its white runner and collapsed its attic stairs; all that’s left is purgatory, yawning and gaping with the effort to swallow them all. sometimes the dead are the lucky ones.
The sky burns with soot as the flat edge of the world teeters closer on the horizon. Everything is fading.
The mushroom clouds disperse and the earth cracks and they don’t need to hide indoors any longer. Sunlight chokes, suffocating on darkness.
Besides. It isn’t as if there are any more humans alive to see them sparkle.
-
Their warning had been satin slipping to the floor.
Alice giggled as she returned another evening gown to the rack, thinking longingly how beautiful Bella would look wearing it if she would only-
The hanger clattered to the floor, the dress billowing stubbornly against the thick air before slowly floating down, down, down towards the linoleum.
“Alice? What’s wrong?”
Alice’s eyes were wide, filled like submarine portholes with shock and fear and horror, the floor-length mirror in the dressing room reflecting back a grotesquely distorted reality.
“The end.”
Bella placed her hand over Alice’s.
“The end? The end of what?”
She rounded on Bella and there was no mistaking the terror there.
“The end of everything.”
-
They watched in abject dread as the humans play their morbid chess game, thundering about broken treaties and bombs and negations as if they were moves made on black and white checkers and not the final strokes that would end it all. The world hovers at the edge of desolation and all they can think about is winning a petty bickering match over territory.
Rosalie leaves the room in disgust but for once Emmett doesn’t follow her. This time he has a perverse fascination for how it will all come to a close.
-
“What will we do?”
It was Esme’s shaking voice that whispered the question with no answer, like an earth with no sunset or a fire with no smoke. The ends of things twisted around to the beginning, unrecognizable loops of time.
They glanced at each other with fear and uncertainty yet, despite it all, empty. No one knew where to go from here.
Alice jerked her head no, stubborn in her hopelessness.
“Every means of intervention is blocked; I’ve looked. Diversion, assassination, mediation… there’s nothing. Nothing we can do.”
Then what will become of us?
Edward pressed his palm flat to his forehead, gripping Bella’s hand tight in his other, as the tremor of their thoughts shook his sanity.
“We’re stronger together; we’ll figure out something.” Carlisle assured, fixing a confident smile on his face, but Edward picked the thoughts out of his head like rotting, unsown seeds. His eyes locked briefly with Edward’s as the rest of the family wandered away from the living room.
Once the wildlife is gone, we’ll eventually become so hungry that we’ll go mad with it. We’ll be better off than the rest that haven’t tried to go without regular feedings, but the result will be the same. Nothing beyond that point has been documented, to my knowledge, so I don’t know if it will eventually starve us out of existence. But does it matter? Any sense of ourselves will be lost in the bloodlust.
Edward swallowed and drifted upstairs with Bella. Her eyes harbored fear like an unclean chicken coop, edges sharp and padded against her mind with straw, her irises darting around to read his face as would a flighty bird that knew somewhere instinctual that death was coming. But he only rolled her beneath him and whispered I love you’s. There was no room for any more truth that night.
-
The chemicals and smoke don’t kill them, not like they prayed it would. The world goes silent after the great shaking tremors of the bombs fade and they turn their faces away.
-
The Volturri try to reign in order, but the vampire world shakes in pandemonium, like rats when they finally realize there is no cheese, twitching and pacing the maze looking for an exit that isn’t there. Nomads descend on the few survivors of the holocaust, despite the call from Aro to let them breed and repopulate so they can have their feast again. But eventually all their throats run dry and the entire population are united in eyes of coal black. The others roam like packs of feral dogs.
But the Cullens remain locked tight inside, watching the world as if from a snow globe and hoping the plastic dome of it will be enough to protect them.
After all, the animals perished with the rest.
-
Metal rusts and the blood-soaked streams evaporate; the clouds slurp up the crimson residue until they rip at the seams.
“Look!” Alice cries, but her voice is more like a child waking up to the first snow of winter.
Rivets of red streak down window panes.
“God’s eyes are bleeding.”
-
Cabin fever sets in like something contagious, and they scream at each other in hoarse, gruff voices more to alleviate the suffocating silence than to resolve any dispute. Carlisle practically grabs them by the scruff of their necks and forces them outside, as if they’re blind kittens being carried away from danger by their mother. They don’t need to breathe but the fresh air does them good, flitting between the trees and barely allowing their feet to touch the ground as they run.
But it’s then that they catch the scent.
Death. Everywhere death. Blood dried and spoiled with poison but it still draws them in, unwillingly, desperately, meaninglessly. They reach the edge of town.
They walk down streets littered with rotting corpses, cars crunched together (bumper cars gone wrong), bodies of the lucky ones slumped over in their chairs and the others in a collapsed motion of escape. Ajar store fronts act like pews in a pious church, but they know when they reach the end there’ll be no salvation there.
Heaven has rolled up its white runner and collapsed its attic stairs; all that’s left is purgatory, yawning and gaping with the effort to swallow them all.
-
You know there’s no coming back from this, don’t you? We will die.
Edward sets his jaw, eyes searching out anything but blonde hair and violent eyes, because her thoughts crowd his head and he can’t take anymore of it. Of her. Of this.
“Yes, thank you. I’m aware.”
-
Her hand ripples through the water, meeting no hesitation, and she sighs in a flock of bubbles. Breaking the surface, her short hair flattens to cower around her head and her gaze meets his on the riverbank.
“We can’t drown. You know that.”
Alice laughs like he’d said something witty and rises to meet him, taking his arm.
“Never hurts to check.”
-
“I don’t think I can bear to watch my children die all over again.”
Carlisle folds the book, his heart, his hope, in half and takes her hand in his, stroking his thumb over the creases in her palm.
He doesn’t tell her she won’t have to.
-
The Volturri are pillars; black, smooth stones holding up the weight of a thousand moons without drawing a breath. They shake.
“How far now?”
“About a minute. The guards can only hold them back for so long. The last of them are fighting now.”
Aro is perturbed but not scared; Caius wild; Marcus oddly pleased.
“So we wait.”
With fingertips pressed to fingertips in a circle befitting of a fallen crown, they bear witness to their own demise.
-
“I don’t understand.”
It isn’t sadness that crystallizes Edward’s face; the Volturri were never really friends, more often foes. It’s the crazed expression of a man drowning under the tides of a world that’s stopped making sense. A world that’s twisted until the sordid worm of it has stopped being his reality, but a warped alternate.
“Who would want to rule over an empty nest? Surely they know royalty means nothing now.”
He can’t picture the faces of vampire conquistadors who’ve captured their loot and their castle, knowing that money has no value and power has been rendered ineffectual. Would they seem victorious? Or destroyed? Surely the three former kings had the easiest way out of them all.
Carlisle’s eyes are vacant, tired for the first time after centuries without sleep.
“We all cling to the constructs of the world we’ve lost. Perhaps you could consider it a grieving process.”
-
“Jasper dear?”
Alice’s toe digs a spindly line into the dirt, retracing it with her heel to make it bold.
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you a favor?”
He’s on his knees before her in an instant, hands pressed together by her thigh like cavemen over gods they couldn’t name.
“Anything.”
Her smile gives him chills.
-
The door knocks open and they flock to the sudden sound.
“Jasper? Where’s-“
His hands shake, sticky with invisible blood. All their sins are metaphorical now.
Jasper’s memories shoot through Edward’s head like bullets.
“It should be you to do it.”
A goodbye kiss, like high school sweethearts parting ways on the dock of a warship.
The screeching, metallic ripping; a fire crackling into too-quite air.
“Oh God. What have you done?”
One step forward, two steps back into the wall. He’s slipping in more ways than one.
“I- I promised. I promised her.”
Jasper wraps his arms around his knees, rocking against the rotation of earth.
“I take it back, I take it back, I take it back, I take it back…”
Esme gasps, a hand flying to her mouth in a fit of feminine horror; Edward collapses into a chair; Bella shakes, aching for someone to hold her; Rosalie’s eyes burn.
The meaningful look Rosalie shoots toward Emmett is missed by all but him, and he turns his face away from her in defiance, pretending he doesn’t see.
“I take it back. Please, Lord, I take it back.”
-
Bella’s eyes are fixated on the scarred bark of dead trees, listening as their roots creak deep in the ground. She doesn’t whisper a word.
Edward half-expects some vacant mention of Romeo and Juliet, of tragic romances and how poetic this all is. But her lips remain motionless until he turns to leave her to her thoughts.
“Stay,” is her appeal, her prayer, and he can’t help but acquiesce.
-
It’s silent sobs when Emmett takes pity on Jasper.
A sharp yelp; smoke waving a grey flag of surrender because nothing has managed to stay white here.
-
Esme watches him carefully, a hand placed gingerly on his arm. If she could hide him under her wing, she would.
“What if…” Emmett gulps. “What if I didn’t do it because I felt sorry for him? What if I did it because I’m starting to lose my mind?”
Mother coos, brings him to her chest.
“Don’t think about it.”
-
The television snows in perfectly parallel lines. Bella watches it absently, her legs curled up under her like flower petals in frost.
“Alice always loved the spring.”
-
“Do you think… would they want us to have some kind of ceremony?” Esme sniffs, finger hooked under her nose. She’s heard tell that mothers should never live to bury their children. But she must be remembering it wrong because these will be babies numbered two and three.
“You mean like a funeral?” Bella wonders.
Emmett buries a chuckle.
“Are you kidding? Alice would have this place stocked with bleeding hearts and every other depressing flower on this earth if she ever had the chance to preside over a funeral. It would be downright disrespectful if we didn’t.”
Both women stare at him open-mouthed.
“You made a joke.” Her voice is shocked, but not exactly outraged.
“Sort of.” He pauses. “Is that… wrong?”
He’s met with a faraway expression.
“I’m not sure.”
-
“I can’t. I won’t.”
Rosalie’s expression is determined, eyes wide as she calculates angles and degrees, of ways she can have this change of being on her own terms. Lord knows the others weren’t. Birth then death then birth again. Never her choice.
“Yes you can. You can do this for me.”
Emmett finally meets her gaze, and he curses his dry eyes.
“I’m not as strong as Jasper.”
Her fingertips trace the arch of his bicep, his tensed jaw line.
“What do you mean? You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.”
His hand grabs her fingers and pushes her lightly away.
“That’s not what I meant. I can’t-“ he swallows. “I can’t lose you. I’m not strong enough.”
He remembers the utter desolation in Jasper’s eyes, the way they’d softened in relief when it was almost over, and that won’t be him. He can’t. Maybe they’re both selfish, maybe he’s shriveled into a coward under all this muscle, but he can’t be the one to tear her to pieces.
-
Edward and Rosalie’s typical back-and-forth nearly comes to blows under twitching muscle and eyes black like graves dug deep.
Bella appears in the doorway of Carlisle’s study.
“How long?”
The verbs and nouns are implicit in the foreboding dip of her tone.
Madness. Hunger. Edward. Morte.
He stares ahead blankly, odd considering he’s always been gifted at delivering death sentences.
“Weeks. Maybe a month.”
A resigned nod; death stopped scaring her long before her heart stopped beating. It’s the loss of memories, of self, that she fears now, since in the end it’s all she really has left.
-
Rosalie has a list; she’s ticking them off one by one. Someone will say yes eventually.
“You made us. You gave us this life.” If she were any good at this, this asking for favors, a mere step above begging, she’d be crouched or on her knees or at the very least eye level.
But she places her hands high on her hips instead, her gaze serrated and cool.
“You should be the one to take it back.”
She finds no answers in his eyes; he finds no forgiveness in hers.
-
The patchy telephone lines finally come through and a shrill ring pierces the house.
“Hello?” It’s a question, really, because who could this be? Anyone who cares is gone.
“It’s- it’s Tanya. From Denali?” As if they could ever forget.
“You’re alive.” There isn’t joy or relief because the ones that went first are the luckiest. Carlisle doesn’t wish this upon anyone. This non-life, half-death.
The phone crackles like cellophane and he fears for a moment that he’s lost her.
“The others… they took care of each other. Kate and Irina, Carmen and Eleazar. I… I offered to stay behind.” Her voice hitches, drops. “Always the odd one out.”
Alice and Jasper flash for a pained second through his mind and his head is cradled in his hands.
“You should come here. If the journey wouldn’t be too dangerous.”
Her laugh is brief and humorless - danger is a relative term these days.
“I’m leaving now.”
A click; he doesn’t hang up until she’s swinging open the unlocked front door.
-
Esme’s grateful that vampires don’t sleep. Because the hostess in her, the part that still wants to set places at the table with knives and forks and soup spoons in the proper order, would have to offer Tanya a bed. And the only one available has ghosts clinging between the sheets.
Instead she wraps the woman, widowed by friends and sisters if not by a husband, into her arms, murmurs placid nothingness into her ear.
The mother in her is still alive and well.
-
“No.”
Rosalie pauses in the doorway, her mouth hanging half-open in a state of frozen speech. She snaps it shut.
“I’m sorry?”
Tanya turns to face her on the couch, her eyes ever tired but persistently sneering.
“I’m not going to end you, Rosalie.”
“But the others-“
“You’re not my responsibility.”
-
Carlisle’s moment of epiphany is quietly crazed.
“All wrong,” he mutters angrily to himself, his fingers giving paper cuts to the pages instead of the other way around. “We’ve been going about this all wrong.”
He isn’t sure whether to rock back on his chair legs or stand violently or collapse, but the expression on his face is terrifying. Esme stares at him, disturbed.
“What is it?”
A breath.
“I know how to end it.”
His shoulders slacken, his face melting into dreamy apprehension.
“I know how to die.”
-
Downstairs, Rosalie grins.
-
“It could work.”
Edward’s nostrils flare. The idea, the very notion, that hope’s definition has twisted to mean little more than successful failure, is unacceptable. It’s ludicrous. It’s-
Bella hooks a finger under his chin, and for the first time in months there’s the resurrected ghost of a smile at the creases of her lips.
It’s truth.
-
“I guess you found what you were looking for.”
Emmett’s voice is hard, bitter. It stings like venom shot through her heart.
He’s busying himself feverishly looking for something under the bed that isn’t there, and Rosalie places a hand on his shoulder.
“Hey.” His eyes meet hers. “I was never going anywhere without you.”
She figures it doesn’t matter now whether it’s honest.
-
“Here,” Carlisle points to the yellowed map, the faint drippings of someone’s spilled coffee marking a spot somewhere near his finger. It aches to think about the humanity behind the stain.
The factory will have a large broiler room, large enough to hold a vampire. Flames high enough to consume them quickly, burn them to incense in a gust.
Good enough for their purposes.
The group around him nods with varying degrees of hollowness.
-
“Are you scared?” Edward whispers, his voice a gravel road that leads into a darkened forest, and he prays she doesn’t ask him the same. He’s terrified, and he isn’t sure he could bring himself to lie to her.
“Not really.” Her voice is shockingly light and truthful as she glances up at him slyly. Her hand molds to his cheek. “How can I be afraid when I’m with you?”
His pathetic attempt at an optimistic expression is choked under the weight of a strangled sob, and she smiles sadly. For once she’s the one with the reassurances. She ducks her head when his eyes slip.
“We’ll be okay.” Bella wraps her tiny arms around his shoulders. “We’ll be okay.”
He sobs into her neck, and he’s never felt more like a little boy in the arms of his mother.
-
The abandoned factory squats on the horizon, an antique from an era before electrical wiring and heated coils. The sky is gray, and for a moment Edward disregards the fact that it’s an apocalypse and tells himself that it’s just twilight. He allows himself to forget.
They linger. Bella digs her knees into Edward’s sides, her arms clutching tighter around his neck, and she lets her forehead fall to his shoulder. He’d carried her, for old time’s sake, and now it’s time to let her down.
(He’d always hated double meanings.)
“I’m sorry that I brought you into this life, only to have it end like this. I’m sorry I couldn’t-“
Save you, is lost in the flesh of her palm as she muffles his unwanted apologies.
“I’m not. If this is the trade-off for hundreds of years longer with you than a human love could ever last, I’ll take it gladly. I was born to be with you. We’ve already had our happy ending.” She smirks. “No one reads the epilogue anyway.”
He’ll try to tell her how grateful he is, how much he loves her, in the press of her lips against his, desperate passion the carefully crafted ozone around them.
He doesn’t know for sure, but he likes to think that he got the message across.
-
If anyone were paying attention, they’d see the poetry to this. As it stands, you’d have to file it under dramatic irony.
Emmett is first.
“No,” he places both hands on Rosalie’s shoulders, halting her motion to follow him into the factory. “You shouldn’t have to watch this, baby girl.”
Rosalie smiles wryly.
“This is because I asked you to kill me, right? Your way of getting me back?”
Emmett chuckles, nods because it’s easier.
“Sure thing.”
He kisses her forehead, envelops her body with his.
Rosalie is quick to follow him.
Esme stretches her arms wide, Edward and Bella fitting snugly in her embrace. Bella sobs tearlessly into her shoulder; Edward resting his chin on top of her honey curls. They’re grieving the imminent loss of the woman who’s been their mother long since they’ve forgotten their own, and part of Edward is glad they won’t have to survive long without her. She gives them one last squeeze.
Her final exchange with Carlisle is silent: hands intertwined over her cheek, a secret smile on her lips, his body trembling more than hers. She curtsies like they used to at parties when she was a girl, blowing a kiss wet with venomous tears over her shoulder.
Edward carries Bella in his arms. Though she’s strong. Though she could probably still crush him, because he’d no doubt let her. Because they’re in this thing together; they haven’t done anything of importance without each other in centuries and there’s no reason to start now. She remembers thinking once that she couldn’t live in a world where Edward didn’t exist, and vice versa. She smiles, looking into his eyes, knowing now that she won’t ever have to. His eyes flicker green just before the flames consume them.
-
Tanya flicks the match at the factory’s wood paneling, watching with stoic delight as they lick the bones of the building clean.
“You’re not going to follow us, are you?”
Carlisle had asked, his face void and fearless since his destiny was on its last legs. It was the face of acceptance.
Tanya shook her head.
“Figure I’ll stick around. See what other trouble I can get into. Nothing to lose right?”
A nod; in that moment he knew precisely what she meant.
He talked. Talked about life and God and souls and morality. About finding meaning in an endless life, the value of a kind word, about the distinction between humanity and martyrdom. The fruits of a millennium living among the reeds.
She wasn’t listening. But she knew talking to a brick wall with arms and legs and eyes was better than talking to yourself, so she let him continue.
Until he ran out of words to say.
If anyone were paying attention, they’d see the poetry to this. They die in mortal chronology, the order that they joined the Cullen family. Fates sealed, it was then that they had begun their deceptively-immortal life in more ways than one.
Alice and Jasper.
Emmett.
Rosalie.
Esme.
Edward, Bella in his arms (he hadn’t really lived until he’d met her anyway).
Carlisle.
Sync. Blood. Time. As if they’re returning to the womb.
-
Eternity doesn’t stretch out into infinitum.
It ends when there’s no one left to say that it shouldn’t have.
-