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You write Alec in a way that makes me feel he’s canon. And that’s the truth❤️
Oh my gosh anon, thank you! This means everything! 🩷
I like to write him based on the very short description of what SM told us about Alec, because to me, that's the most fitting. (I like to read about him however he's written) I'm glad you like it 💝
Home
Alec’s bedroom was bigger than you had imagined. Standing in front of the heavy, intricately carved door, you expected to see a black-and-burgundy gothic horror room, but the exact opposite turned out to be true—it had more of a dark academia vibe, or something like that.
The room gave off a warm, cozy feel. The dark, carved furniture was balanced by light-colored murals—definitely painted by master artists—along with beautiful, visibly expensive curtains, and the softest carpet you’ve ever stood on. A pleasant warmth filled the room; Alec must have turned the heat on for you, since he didn't really need it himself.
On the small table next to the door, a huge bouquet of lilacs sat in a vase, like a silent 'I'm glad you're here.' How on earth he got his hands on lilacs remained a mystery to you, but you rewarded the sweet gesture with a grateful kiss.
Everything
Woodstock, Vermont. It was in this picturesque little town that Alec first found you, sitting in a park. From the very first glance, you felt that this encounter was almost destined. The way that strange boy looked at you had nothing ambiguous or ordinary about it.
Since then, he had invited you on countless walks and extended his stay just to be with you. During one of your incredible conversations, he told you that he was actually a vampire. Alec was more surprised than you were—specifically by how calmly you took the news.
"Well, you really aren't a cinnamon roll type of guy, huh?"
Somehow, it was a completely believable explanation for his behavior and his aura. However, he cheekily laughed at you when he mentioned he was over 1,200 years old, making you nearly choke on your tea.
You had since come to terms with the situation, and the first anniversary of your meeting had already passed. You were surprised to realize that you didn’t care—about Alec being a vampire, that is. He was surprisingly attentive, by the way. He warned you that the secret he was letting you in on came with consequences. And that those consequences would sweep you away from your ordinary life. But at that point, it was already clear to you that you were hopelessly in love with him, so you were ready to face whatever came. He also told you that he was your soulmate, and you were his. That once vampires find this particular mate, they commit to them for a lifetime. No falling out of love, no moving on, no straying. As a human, you experienced a somewhat muted version of this, which was why you accepted what he was so easily—because your soul felt he was the one.
not so busy
Alec Volturi x Vampire/Hybrid Reader (Gifted with Pyrokinesis)
You constantly push past the icy walls of the Volturi’s most dangerous enforcer, slowly turning his quiet tolerance into a deep, unwavering devotion.
The library in the Volterra castle was built to be silent, but tonight, the silence felt heavy.
Alec stood near the tall arched windows, reviewing a series of scrolls that detailed recent movements along the northern border. His focus was sharp, disciplined, and entirely undisturbed.
Until the heavy oak doors clicked open.
You didn't sneak in. You never did. Your footsteps echoed softly off the marble floor as you wandered through the towering rows of ancient texts, trailing a hand along the dark wood of the shelves.
Alec didn't turn around, but he shifted slightly, tracking your movement by sound alone.
"You are supposed to be resting," he noted, his tone smooth and even.
"I tried," you said, coming to a stop a few feet behind him. "It was boring."
The snow flake
PART 2
Felix Volturi x Demetri Volturi x human mate
They brought her into Volterra the way the Volturi brought in everything they didn't want the daylight world to notice — through a service gate off a narrow street, down a stair no tourist map had ever marked, into corridors of old stone that swallowed sound and light in equal measure. Rin was awake for this part, upright in Felix's arms with a blanket still wrapped close around her and her splinted arm cradled against her chest, and Felix felt every flinch of her go through him like current every time the passage narrowed, every time a torch-shadow moved wrong across the walls.
"Almost there," Demetri murmured, close at her other side, one hand resting light against her uninjured shoulder, more anchor than support. "It looks worse than it is. I promise you."
"It looks like a dungeon," she said, the first full sentence she'd managed since Utashinai, thin and hoarse but unmistakably, wonderfully alert, and something in Felix's chest that had been clenched tight since the balcony eased a fraction at the sound of her having enough spirit left in her to sound unimpressed.
"It's older than a dungeon," Felix said. "Try not to hold that against us."
They came up at last into a corridor with proper light, proper carpet, the low, expensive hush of a place built to intimidate people who had never once questioned whether they had the right to be intimidating, and it was there, at the base of a wide stair, that Felix felt the whole castle's attention arrive at once — not a sound, not anything so crude, just the particular pressure of many old, patient eyes finding something new to look at.
Word had gotten ahead of them. Of course it had. Jane was the first Felix registered, arms crossed in a doorway, dark eyes moving over Rin with an expression that gave away exactly nothing; Heidi paused halfway down the far stair, unashamedly curious in the open way Jane never allowed herself; even Chelsea, drifting past with an armful of ledgers, slowed enough to look twice. None of them said anything. None of them needed to. The whole guard had clearly heard some version of the story by now, and every one of them wanted to see the human who'd apparently undone two of the Volturi's most formidable enforcers with nothing more than existing.
"Ignore them," Demetri said, low, before she could ask.
"Hard to," Rin murmured, "when they're all staring like I grew a second head."
"You grew something considerably more interesting than that, as far as this castle's concerned," Felix said, and was rewarded with the faintest huff of breath from her that might, on a better day, have been a laugh.
Aro was waiting for them at the top of the stair, and he did not wait for them to reach him. He came down to meet them instead, robes moving like water, hands already lifting with an eagerness he made no attempt to disguise, and stopped only when Demetri's whole body went subtly, immediately rigid at the proximity — a warning as clear as a growl would have been from anyone else.
"Forgive me." Aro's hands folded back against his chest, graceful, unoffended, his pale eyes moving over Rin with a hunger that had nothing predatory in it and everything of pure fascination. "I forget myself. It has been a very long time since something walked into this castle that made me forget myself." He inclined his head to her, an old-world courtesy that looked strange and formal aimed at a woman in a hospital blanket with a broken arm. "You must be Rin. I am Aro. I understand you've had a very long day, and I promise I have no intention of making it longer than it needs to be. I only wished to see you safely arrived, and to tell you, myself, that nothing under this roof will harm you."
"That's a big promise," Rin said, quiet, wary, the words costing her visibly, "from someone I've known for about four seconds."
Something delighted moved across Aro's face. "It is. I intend to keep it regardless." His gaze shifted, finally, to the third figure descending the stair behind him, unhurried, silent in the particular way that made a room quieter just for his presence in it. "Ah. Marcus has come to see for himself. He so rarely bothers to come and see anything at all these days — you should feel flattered."
Marcus stopped a few respectful feet away, his ancient, weary eyes moving not to Rin's face but to the space between her and Felix, and then between her and Demetri, in a way that made the skin along Felix's arms prickle with the sense of being read by something that had nothing to do with words. For a long moment nobody spoke. Marcus simply looked, his expression unreadable, and then, very softly, something in his face shifted — not quite surprise, Felix suspected Marcus hadn't felt surprise in centuries, but something adjacent to it, some flicker of long-buried interest resurfacing after a very long sleep.
"Two threads," Marcus said, and his voice was rough with disuse, quiet as dust settling. "Equal. Unbroken. I have not seen its like in three thousand years." His gaze moved to Aro. "It is real. Whatever you were told, it is not exaggeration."
"I never doubted it," Aro said, though the satisfaction in his voice suggested he'd wanted precisely this confirmation, wanted it witnessed and made official in front of the small, silent audience that had gathered along the edges of the hall. "But I thank you for it regardless, brother. It isn't every day—"
"It is not every day anything happens in this castle worth commenting on," said a new voice, cold and precise, cutting cleanly through Aro's warmth like a blade through cloth, "and yet I find, once again, that I am the last to be told of it."
Caius came down the stair the way he did everything — deliberately, unhurried, every step calculated to arrive exactly when his presence would land hardest. His pale eyes found Rin immediately, swept over her with none of Aro's delight and none of Marcus's distant fascination, only a flat, assessing coldness that made Felix's arms tighten fractionally around her before he'd consciously decided to do it.
"So this is the human." Caius said the word human the way other men said something distasteful they'd stepped in. "The one who's had half my guard gossiping in corridors instead of working. Tell me, Aro, has anyone yet mentioned to her what happens to humans who learn what she now plainly knows?"
"Caius." Aro's voice hadn't lost its warmth, but something underneath it had gone very still, very careful. "Not now."
"When, then? After she's told a doctor, a friend, a stranger on a plane what she watched two of our own do to four men in the space of a minute?" Caius's gaze didn't leave her, and Felix felt the low growl building in his own chest before he'd given himself permission to make it. "The law exists because sentiment like this — " a thin, contemptuous glance at Demetri, at Felix, "—is precisely how it gets broken. She dies, or she's changed, tonight, before this becomes one more loose thread this family has to spend the next century chasing down."
"She is not dying tonight," Demetri said, and his voice had dropped into something Felix had heard perhaps twice before in three hundred years — the voice that came before violence, controlled by nothing but the sheer act of will it took to keep it controlled at all. "And she is not being changed against her will either, not tonight, not by you, not by anyone. Lay one hand on her, Caius, and I promise you the law will be the least of what you have to answer for."
"Is that a threat, guard dog?"
"It's a fact." Felix's own voice came out low and flat and entirely without heat, which was somehow worse, and he felt Rin go very still in his arms, felt her turn her face slightly against his chest as though she could make herself smaller inside the argument happening over her head. "You'll want to think very carefully about what happens to this castle's precious order if both of us decide we don't have anything left to lose."
For a moment nobody moved. The hall had gone silent enough that Felix could hear Rin's pulse, too fast, and hated that this was what she was waking properly into — a stone hall full of ancient things arguing about her life like she wasn't breathing right there in the middle of it.
"Enough." Aro didn't raise his voice. He never needed to. But something in the single word landed with enough weight that even Caius's jaw tightened and stilled. "Caius. Walk with me."
"Aro—"
"Walk with me." This time there was steel under the silk, unmistakable, the tone of a man who had run this family for three thousand years and intended to remind everyone in the hall, gently, exactly how. Caius held his gaze a moment longer than was wise, and then, with visible effort, inclined his head and followed him a short distance off, close enough that Felix's hearing caught every word, which Felix suspected was entirely the point.
"She will be changed," Aro said, low, brisk, none of the performance left in it now. "You know this. I know this. It was never in question — a human who knows what she knows cannot stay human forever, and I have no more intention of pretending otherwise than you do. But you will not be the one to force it, and you will not be the one to harm her getting there, and I would like you to consider why, rather than simply obey me on the matter, because I think the reasoning matters rather more than the obedience."
"Enlighten me."
"She will remember." Aro's voice had gone very soft, very precise, the voice of a man laying out a ledger. "Whatever happens to her tonight, whoever's hand does it and however it's done — she will remember it perfectly, forever, the way we all remember everything forever. If you force this, if you frighten her or hurt her getting her there, you will not simply be changing a human into a vampire, Caius. You will be creating an immortal enemy with perfect recall of exactly what you did to her, bonded for eternity to two of the most dangerous fighters in this guard, both of whom already hate you a little more than is convenient for any of us. That is not a loose thread. That is a grudge with three thousand years to mature in, kept alive under our own roof, fed daily by two guards I am not remotely prepared to lose." He paused, and Felix, listening, could hear the small, satisfied shift in his tone as he arrived at the point he'd clearly been building toward all along. "Whereas a newborn who wakes to find that we were patient with her — that we gave her the courtesy of time, of choice, of not being murdered or forced the moment she became inconvenient — that is a vampire who might, one day, choose to be loyal to this family instead of merely bound to it. I find I much prefer collecting gratitude to collecting grudges, brother. It keeps so much better, over the centuries."
Caius said nothing for a long moment, his cold eyes flicking back across the hall to where Rin still sat wrapped in Felix's arms, watching the two brothers with the particular wariness of someone who understood, even exhausted and half-healed, that her life was currently being negotiated somewhere just out of easy hearing.
"Fine," Caius said at last, clipped, unwilling, but final. "Let her heal. Let her have her time. But mark me, Aro — when the time comes, it will come, promptly, or I will see to it myself."
"It will come," Aro agreed, pleasant again, the warmth sliding back over the steel like water closing over stone. "When she is ready, and not a moment orchestrated by anyone's impatience but her own." He turned back toward the small, tense group waiting at the base of the stair, and whatever expression he wore for Caius fell away entirely, replaced by something gentler as his gaze found Rin's face. "You'll forgive my brother. He mistakes urgency for wisdom rather more often than is good for any of us." He inclined his head to her again, courteous, careful. "Rest now. Heal. No one under this roof will touch you before you are ready, and no one will ask that of you before then either. You have my word, and I do not give it lightly."
Rin looked at him for a long moment, too tired and too wary to trust it fully, but something in her shoulders eased fractionally regardless — the small, involuntary relief of a threat postponed, if not yet resolved.
Felix felt Demetri's eyes find his over the top of her head, and read there the same unspoken thing he was thinking himself: that a promise from Aro was worth exactly what Aro decided it was worth, that Caius's patience had a clock on it now whether anyone had said so aloud or not, and that whatever peace this bought them, it was borrowed time, not safety.
But it was time. And for tonight, with her breathing steady against his chest and her pulse finally slowing toward something like calm, Felix found he could hold onto that much and let the rest of it wait until morning.
The snow flake
Felix Volturi × Demetri Volturi x human mate
PART 1
Utashinai was dying the slow way a town dies when the thing that built it disappears. The coal mines had closed decades ago, and what was left was a scatter of low roofs under snow, streetlamps spaced too far apart, and a silence so complete that Felix could hear the individual flakes ticking against his coat.
He liked it here, in the perverse way he liked anywhere the humans had already half-abandoned. Fewer witnesses. Fewer complications. Just the job, and then the long quiet after.
The job was finished. Three newborns and the fool who'd made them without permission, discovered by the Volturi's watchers after a string of clumsy kills left bodies for the local police to puzzle over — the kind of sloppiness Aro found personally offensive. It hadn't taken long. It never did, not with the two of them. Demetri found what needed finding, and Felix ended what needed ending, and between them the matter was closed inside of an hour, the snow already beginning to erase the evidence by the time they walked away from it.
"Aro will want the full account," Demetri said, shaking a fine dust of snow from his sleeve as they cut through an alley between two shuttered shopfronts. "Every tedious detail. You know how he gets about newborns who slip the leash — he'll want to know whose leash it was."
"Let him have the tedious details. I'm not writing the report." Felix rolled a shoulder that didn't need rolling; a very human, very useless habit he'd never managed to shed in three centuries. "I vote we're back in Volterra before he thinks to ask which of us is holding the pen."
"Coward."
"Strategist."
Demetri's mouth curved, the closest thing to a real smile he allowed himself on a job. It didn't last.
Felix felt it before he understood it — the change in Demetri beside him, a stillness that had nothing to do with vampire stillness, which was simply the absence of unnecessary motion. This was different. This was a man who had walked face-first into a wall he hadn't known was there.
"Demetri."
Nothing. Demetri had stopped in the middle of the alley, snow catching in his hair, his dark eyes gone distant and fixed on some point that wasn't in front of him at all.
Felix had seen him track a thousand times. He knew what it looked like when Demetri's gift unspooled itself across a city, a country, an ocean, searching for the particular signature of a mind he'd once brushed against. This wasn't that. This was involuntary. This was a hook sinking into him from somewhere close, and Felix watched his oldest friend's face do something Felix had genuinely never seen it do.
It went soft.
"Demetri, you're scaring me. Talk."
"I don't—" Demetri's voice had lost its customary polish. "I've never felt anything like this. It isn't a search. I'm not looking for it. It's just there, pulling, like it's always been pulling and I only just noticed—" He turned, slow, following something Felix couldn't perceive, his whole body angling like a compass needle finding north. "Felix. I think—"
He didn't finish. He didn't need to. Felix had heard enough stories in three hundred years of service to the Volturi to recognize the particular, terrible wonder in his friend's voice. He'd watched it happen to others. He'd never once imagined watching it happen to Demetri, of all the ancient, controlled, unshakeable people in that stone fortress.
"Your mate," Felix said, and something in his own chest reacted to the word in a way he didn't have time to examine.
"I have to go." Demetri was already moving, unhurried in the way of a man trying very hard not to run and failing more with every step. "I have to see. Felix—"
"I'm coming." It wasn't a question. Felix fell into step beside him without breaking stride, some old instinct insisting he not let Demetri walk into the unknown alone, mate or no mate, especially not with his guard this far down.
They went north, through the sleeping town, past the last of the shuttered mining-company houses to where the streets gave out into scattered, isolated properties half-buried in snowdrift. Demetri didn't slow. If anything he sped, the pull dragging him faster than reason, until a house rose up out of the dark — old, poorly kept, a single light burning somewhere on the ground floor and the shapes of men moving behind drawn curtains.
And above it, jutting from the second floor, a narrow balcony.
Felix saw her at the exact moment Demetri did.
He would spend the rest of eternity trying to describe that instant and failing every time, because there were no words built for it. One breath he was a man standing in the snow beside his friend. The next breath the entire architecture of his existence had quietly rearranged itself around a stranger he had never seen before in his life, and he understood, with a certainty that needed no explanation, exactly what Demetri had just felt in the alley.
Mine.
It should have been impossible. A mate was rare enough. A shared mate — the same soul answering two calls at once — was the kind of thing spoken of only in the oldest stories, half-myth even among vampires who had lived a thousand years. Felix had no space in him to marvel at it. Not yet. Not with what he was looking at.
She was on the balcony. Outside, in a Hokkaido winter, in temperatures that had human blood sluggish and dangerous inside an hour of exposure. She had nothing on her — no coat, no blanket, nothing at all — and her skin had gone the terrible white-blue of someone whose body had stopped fighting the cold and started shutting down instead. She was curled against the balcony rail as if she'd tried to make herself small enough to disappear, one arm wrapped uselessly around her knees, the other held at an angle that told Felix, even from the street, that something in it was broken. Dark bruising mottled her jaw and one cheekbone. Her wrists bore the raw, cross-hatched marks of rope or wire, cinched too tight and left too long.
She was shaking — not the ordinary shiver of cold but a deep, involuntary convulsion her body couldn't stop, the kind that meant she was well past the point where shivering did any good. Her lips had gone the same blue-grey as her fingertips. When her head lifted, slow and disoriented, toward some sound only she could hear from inside the house, Felix saw her eyes — glassy, unfocused, but still, impossibly, still frightened. Still present enough to be afraid.
She wasn't screaming. She didn't have the strength left to scream. What came out of her when she saw the two shapes standing in the snow below the balcony was barely more than breath, a single fractured sound that might have been a word, might have been nothing at all, and it broke something in Felix that he hadn't known could still break.
"She's mine," Demetri said, low and raw, and then, before Felix could answer, "Ours. She's — Felix, she's ours."
"I know." Felix was already moving, already stripping his coat from his shoulders as he went, the cold that meant nothing to him mattering violently now, mattering more than anything had mattered in three hundred years. "I know. Go up. Go to her, I'll take the wall—"
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. Demetri was already airborne, catching the balcony rail and vaulting it in a single motion too fast for the men inside the house to have registered as anything but wind, and Felix was a half-second behind him, boots silent on old wood, coat already open in his hands.
Up close it was worse. Up close Felix could hear how faint her pulse had gone, could smell old blood beneath new bruising, could see that whatever had been done to her had been done deliberately — she had not simply been left out here. She had been put here, stripped and abandoned on this balcony as something less than an afterthought, and the men still moving behind the lit window on the floor below hadn't so much as glanced up to check on her in — how long? Felix didn't know. Long enough that her body had nearly given up making its own warmth. Long enough that a few more minutes might have finished what the cold had started.
"Hey. Hey, look at me." Demetri had gone to his knees in front of her, and his voice — Felix had heard that voice give orders that ended lives without a flicker of feeling in it, and now it was breaking over every syllable, gentled down to something almost unrecognizable. "You're safe. Do you understand me? You're safe now, I promise you, I promise you, just look at me—"
Her eyes found his. Something in her face changed — not relief, not yet, she was too far gone in shock and cold and fear to process anything so complicated as relief, but recognition of a kind, some animal understanding that these two strangers dropping out of the dark were not a continuation of whatever had put her out here.
"C-cold," she managed, the single syllable costing her visibly, her jaw shuddering too hard to hold a longer word.
"I know. I know, sweetheart, we're going to fix that right now." Felix was already crouched beside Demetri, coat spread wide, and between the two of them they wrapped her in it with a care that felt almost absurd given what they were — two of the most lethal creatures either of them had ever stood beside, handling a half-frozen human woman like she was made of glass that had already cracked once. Felix's hands, when they brushed her skin settling the coat around her shoulders, found her colder than he had known a living person could be and still be alive. "There. There you go. We've got you."
She flinched at the contact — of course she did, after whatever she'd survived to end up out here — but she didn't pull away, too depleted to do more than tremble against him, her broken arm cradled instinctively to her chest.
Demetri's attention had already split. Half of him was here, murmuring to her, coaxing small responses that Felix understood were less about the words and more about keeping her present, keeping her from slipping under. The other half of him — Felix could feel it radiating off his friend like heat off a struck match — was on the men downstairs.
"How many," Felix said, quiet, not looking away from her face.
"Four." Demetri's voice hadn't changed pitch, but something underneath it had gone to iron. "They know she's out here. They put her out here. I can hear them talking about it like it's — like it's nothing."
Felix felt the low, cold thing move through him that always preceded violence, except this was nothing like the professional detachment he brought to Volturi work. This was personal in a way he had no prior experience of being personal, a wrongness done to something that had become, in the space of ten minutes, the single most important thing in his existence.
"Stay with her," he said.
Demetri's jaw tightened. Every instinct in him would have wanted to be the one to go, Felix knew that, could feel the same instinct clawing in his own chest — but she was shaking apart in front of them, and someone had to stay, and it could not be both of them, and it could not, would not, be no one.
"Felix—"
"Stay with her," Felix said again, softer. "She needs one of us right now more than they need both of us. I won't take long."
He was gone before Demetri could argue further, over the rail and down, moving with a silence that had made men three times his size disappear without a sound in far less forgiving places than this. The lit window came apart under his hand without ceremony. What happened after that was quick — quick enough that it barely deserved the word fight — four men who had spent the evening congratulating themselves on cruelty finding out, in the last handful of seconds any of them would ever have, exactly what kind of thing had come through the wall after them. Felix did not linger over it. He had no interest in lingering. He wanted only to be finished, and clean, and back on that balcony, and within a few minutes he was exactly that — the house behind him gone still in the particular way of a place that would never again hold anyone in it.
When he came back up over the rail, Demetri had gathered her fully against him, coat and all, one hand cradling the back of her head where it had fallen against his shoulder, her eyes drifting, fighting to stay open and losing.
"She's fading," Demetri said, and for the first time in longer than Felix could remember, he heard real fear in his friend's voice. "Felix, she needs a hospital, she needs — I don't know what she needs, I've never had to know what a human needs to live—"
"Then we learn fast." Felix was already shrugging out of his second layer, tucking it around her legs, her bare feet, doing the useless human-instinct math of surface area and warmth because it was something to do with his hands. "I call the private jet. Talk to her. Keep her awake if you can, don't let her close her eyes."
Demetri bent his head close to hers, and whatever he said next he said too low for even Felix to make out, some low unbroken murmur that had nothing of the Volturi's most efficient tracker left in it at all — just a man talking his mate through the dark, over and over, stay with me, stay with me, you're not alone anymore, I've got you, we've got you — and she, barely conscious, barely warm, somehow turned her face a fraction toward the sound of it, as if some part of her already knew.
Felix looked down at her one more time — at the bruises, the rope-burn, the blue fading slow and stubborn from her lips as his coat and Demetri's warmth began, finally, to do their work — and felt the last of his old certainties about what his existence was for quietly rearrange themselves into something new.
Three hundred years he had served the Volturi without once imagining there was anything in the world that could matter more than the law, the order, the endless careful architecture of Aro's court.
He looked at her, and understood, with the same total certainty Demetri had felt in the alley, that all of that had just become secondary.
"Let's move," he said, and gathered them both up, and ran.
They made it three streets before Felix said what he'd been turning over since the balcony. "Sapporo has real hospitals. Trauma units. People who know what to do with a broken arm and a core temperature that low."
"And police reports." Demetri didn't slow, didn't look at him, his whole attention narrowed to the weight in his arms and the shallow, uneven rise and fall of her breathing. "And a kidnapping investigation. And four bodies in a house not half a mile from where she turns up half-dead, found by two foreign men who won't be able to explain how they got to her before anyone else did, or how they got her out, or why neither of them will let her out of their sight for even a moment while she's questioned. Felix, think it through. Best case, they take her from us for processing. Worst case, someone starts asking exactly the kind of questions Aro pays very good money to keep unasked."
Felix's jaw tightened, because Demetri wasn't wrong, and he hated that he wasn't wrong, hated that there was a calculation to be made at all when what he wanted, with an intensity that frightened him a little, was simply to put her somewhere warm and never let anything touch her again. "So what, then. We're not doctors."
"No." Demetri finally glanced at him, and there was something steadier in his face now, some old, competent part of him reasserting itself over the raw thing that had cracked open on that balcony. "But Volterra has doctors. And Volterra has planes that don't ask questions and don't file flight plans anyone in this town will ever see. There's an airstrip four kilometers north — I saw it on the drive in, the old mining company's, abandoned with everything else. Long enough, flat enough. I can have a jet on the ground inside the hour if I make the call now."
He didn't wait for agreement. He already had the phone to his ear, walking fast, cradling her against his chest with a care that looked almost nothing like the man Felix had watched dismantle four kidnappers' worth of consequence-free cruelty an hour from now, minus one hour, minus everything that had happened since.
"Gianna." Demetri's voice dropped into something clipped and efficient, all the raggedness folded away where it wouldn't slow him down. "I need a plane. Yes, now. Utashinai, Hokkaido — there's a disused airstrip four kilometers north of the town center, coordinates coming to your phone. I need it on the ground within the hour, and I need Dr. Renn on it, or wherever he can be routed from fastest. No, this isn't a Volturi matter. It's mine." A pause. Felix watched something flicker across his friend's face — the particular vulnerability of saying a true thing out loud to someone who would understand exactly what it meant. "Mine and Felix's. Yes. Both of us. I need blankets, warming packs, whatever they use for hypothermia, and Renn needs to be ready to set a fracture the second the wheels stop. Human female, mid-twenties, severe hypothermia, likely broken forearm, ligature injuries to both wrists, bruising to the face and torso. I don't have vitals I trust, her pulse is too faint for me to read against my own. Gianna — tell him to hurry."
He ended the call before whatever she said back could slow him down further, and picked up his pace, and Felix matched him without needing to be asked, the two of them cutting fast and silent across the last white fields toward the dark seam of the old airstrip.
"Renn," Felix said, mostly to have something to say that wasn't the fear sitting cold in his own chest. "The one who patched up that witness after the Cairo business."
"The one who doesn't ask what he's patching up or why, and doesn't remember any of it clearly enough to matter even if he wanted to talk." Demetri's arms had tightened fractionally around her, an unconscious adjustment, as though proximity alone could keep the cold from reaching her. "He's good. He's fast. He'll be enough until we can get her somewhere with more than a jet's worth of equipment."
"And after that?"
Demetri didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice had gone quiet in a way Felix understood completely, because he was thinking the exact same unanswerable thing. "After that, I don't know. I don't know what any of this looks like, Felix. I've spent three hundred years being very good at finding things and I have never once had to think about what comes after I find them."
"We'll think about it on the plane," Felix said, because it was the only useful thing he had, and because she made a small, thin sound against Demetri's shoulder just then — not quite a word, not quite consciousness, but something — and both of them went instantly, entirely still, listening, before easing back into motion at a fraction of their former speed, as though speed itself might be the thing that broke her.
The airstrip was exactly as abandoned as Demetri had promised — a long grey scar of cracked tarmac between two rows of skeletal floodlight poles that hadn't held a bulb in twenty years, snow drifted knee-deep along its edges and swept thin and hard-packed down the center where wind had scoured it clean. They'd been standing at its edge for six minutes, Felix counting every one of them, when the jet's lights finally broke the treeline to the south, low and fast, no running lights blinking the way commercial craft were required to blink, nothing about its approach announcing itself to anyone who might have been watching. It set down with a competence that spoke of a pilot who had done exactly this kind of quiet, unlogged landing more than once before, and it wasn't fully stopped before the cabin door was cracking open and a man was coming down the steps at a dead run despite the snow, a case in each hand.
Renn was younger than Felix expected, though he supposed that meant nothing after three hundred years of everyone looking young to him. Dark-haired, sharp-eyed, already assessing before he'd covered half the distance between the plane and where Demetri stood with her cradled against him.
"Talk to me," Renn said, dropping to his knees in the snow without any apparent concern for his own trousers, hands already moving — pulse at her throat, a light across her eyes, quick and sure. "Time exposed?"
"We don't know. She was already like this when we found her." Demetri's voice had gone tight again, watching Renn's hands on her like he was fighting some deep instinct to knock them away. "Forty minutes, maybe less, since we found her. Longer before that."
"Core temp's low, but she's got a pulse and she's tracking light, so we caught her before it got critical." Renn was already unfolding a thermal blanket, working with the brisk, impersonal efficiency of a man who had learned a long time ago not to let his hands shake at a scene like this one. "Arm's definitely fractured, radius, clean break by the feel of it, that's good news relatively speaking. I want her on the plane and warming before I set it — moving a hypothermic patient too fast can do more damage than the cold does. Help me get her up the steps, gently, and then I need everyone but me out of my direct light for about ten minutes."
Neither of them moved to obey the last part. Renn, to his credit, didn't waste breath arguing with two vampires who had clearly reached the limit of what they intended to be told to do; he simply worked around them, and Felix and Demetri crowded close on the narrow jet as the engines spun back up beneath them, close enough to see, unwilling to be anywhere else.
It was in the warm, humming quiet of the cabin, blankets layered heavy over her and a warming pack tucked beneath her jaw, that her eyes opened again — properly this time, clearer than they'd been on the balcony, fixed with dawning, terrified confusion on the unfamiliar ceiling of a private jet and then, worse, on the two large, unfamiliar men crowded close on either side of her.
"It's all right." Demetri got there first, dropping his voice to the same low, steady register he'd used in the snow, crouching so he wasn't looming over her. "You're safe. We're not going to hurt you. Do you understand?"
Her mouth worked, cracked lips and a throat gone raw from cold, and it took her three tries before anything came out that had shape to it. "Where—"
"Away from that house. Away from them." Felix kept his voice low too, though it came out rougher than he meant it to, thickened by everything still sitting unresolved in his chest. "You're on a plane. There's a doctor with you. He's going to take care of your arm."
"Who—" Her eyes moved between them, wide, glassy, cataloguing two strangers who had appeared out of the snow and, apparently, taken her somewhere by air, which should by any reasonable measure have terrified her more than it seemed to. Maybe she was too spent for a new fear to register over the old one. Maybe some buried, unreasoning part of her recognized them the same helpless way they'd recognized her. "Who are you."
"Demetri." He said it gently, the way you'd offer something fragile into careful hands. "This is Felix. What's your name?"
It took her a long moment. Renn's hands had gone still around her arm, waiting, giving her the space to answer before he moved.
"Rin," she managed finally, barely more than breath. "Rin Aoki."
"Rin." Demetri said it like he was testing the shape of something he intended to know for the rest of forever. Beside him, Felix felt the name land in his own chest the same way, settling into a space that had been empty an hour ago and now felt like it had never held anything else. "You're safe now, Rin. I promise you. Whatever happens next, you're not going back to that house, and you're not going to be alone."
Her eyes drifted, exhaustion and cold pulling her under again despite everything in her fighting it, but before they closed she looked at the two of them — really looked, in the unguarded way people did on the edge of unconsciousness, when there was no strength left to perform anything for anyone — and something in her face eased. Just slightly. Just enough for both of them to see it.
"Set the arm now, while she's under," Renn said quietly, already moving. "She'll thank us for it later."
Neither Felix nor Demetri answered. They stayed exactly where they were, on either side of her, through the whole of it, and through the long dark hours after, as the jet turned south and west and the lights of Utashinai fell away behind them into the snow, carrying the three of them toward Volterra, and toward a conversation with Aro that neither of them had the first idea how to begin.
The flight to Volterra would eat the better part of a day even with the pilot pushing the plane's range to its limit and a fuel stop scheduled somewhere over the Gulf that neither Felix nor Demetri paid the slightest attention to arranging — Gianna handled it from the ground, quiet and competent as always, the way she handled everything that wasn't hers to ask questions about.
Rin slept most of the first hours, deep and drugged-heavy under whatever Renn had given her once the arm was set and splinted, her color coming back by degrees under the layered blankets until she looked less like something the cold had nearly finished and more like a woman merely, ordinarily exhausted. Renn checked her every twenty minutes without being asked, murmuring numbers to himself that meant nothing to Felix and everything, apparently, to Demetri, who tracked every one of them like they were oxygen.
"Her temperature's normal," Demetri said, some three hours in, to no one in particular, the words coming out on something close to relief. He was sitting in the seat nearest her, had been sitting in it since they'd leveled out, his posture the specific, coiled stillness of a man forcing himself not to hover. "Pulse is steady. Renn says the arm will heal clean if it's kept immobilized. He says—" He stopped.
"He says she's lucky," Felix finished, from the seat across the narrow aisle, watching his friend with the particular attention he reserved for people he loved and rarely admitted to loving out loud. "That's what's stuck in your throat. Lucky. Like luck is what did this and not two of us walking into that alley at exactly the wrong hour to notice her, or exactly the right one."
Demetri exhaled, a long, unnecessary breath, three hundred years of never needing air and every one of them apparently useless against the human habit of sighing when a thing was too large to hold still inside your chest. "I keep thinking about how close it was. Another twenty minutes. Another ten. I've hunted men for Aro across four continents, Felix, I've found people who spent decades trying not to be found, and I have never once in three hundred years cared this much about being ten minutes too late for anything."
"You weren't." Felix said it simply, because it was the only thing that mattered, the only fact worth holding onto out of the whole terrible night. "You weren't too late. Neither of us were. Hold onto that part instead."
Demetri looked at him for a long moment — really looked, the way brothers-in-arms looked at each other after the kind of night that rearranged what either of them thought they understood about themselves — and something passed between them that didn't need words. Three hundred years of fighting at each other's backs had built the kind of understanding that outlasted speech.
"We have to call him," Demetri said eventually, low, and didn't need to specify who him was. There was only ever one him, in a sentence like that.
"I know."
"Gianna will already have told him something's happened. She's not going to sit on a call like the one I made her." Demetri's jaw worked. "Better it comes from us. Better he hears it right, before Chelsea or Corin or anyone else decides to have an opinion about it before we've even landed."
Felix didn't argue. There was no version of this where they avoided the conversation, and putting it off only handed the shape of the story to someone else's mouth. He watched Demetri pull out his phone, watched his thumb hover a moment longer than strictly necessary over Aro's name, and understood, in a way he rarely let himself feel about his oldest friend, exactly how much that small hesitation cost him.
The call connected on the second ring. It always did, with Aro. Felix had never once known him to let a call from either of them run to a third.
"Demetri." Aro's voice came warm and immediate down the line, pleasure evident in it even before he'd learned a single detail of what had happened, the particular delight of a man who loved little in this world so much as being told a new thing. "And Felix too, I hear you breathing at him from wherever you're sitting — don't think I can't tell. Gianna tells me you required a plane, and a physician, and that you were, and I quote her rather precisely, 'not in a state to explain why.' You've worried her terribly. You've worried me rather more, if I'm honest, though I confess I'm equally delighted, because it has been a very long time since either of you called me sounding like something extraordinary had happened to you and not to somebody else."
Demetri closed his eyes briefly. "Something extraordinary has happened."
"Go on."
"We finished the Hokkaido matter — clean, no complications, I'll have the full account for you when we land. It was after, on our way out of the town, that I felt something I've never felt before. Not a search. Not a target. It came without my asking for it and it wouldn't let go of me until I followed it." A pause, and when he continued his voice had dropped into something rawer, something he didn't bother to hide from the one person alive who'd have understood it instantly for what it was. "I found my mate, Aro."
The silence on the line lasted the length of perhaps two human heartbeats — an eternity, for Aro, who filled silences the way other men filled rooms.
"Oh," he said at last, and the single syllable was so full of genuine feeling that even Felix, three hundred years cynical about every performance that man had ever given, believed it entirely. "Oh, my dear boy. After everything — after three hundred years of watching you find every lost thing in this world for me and never once, not once, hearing you speak of finding anything for yourself—" His voice caught, actually caught, something Felix had heard perhaps twice in his existence. "I am so pleased for you I hardly know where to put it. Tell me everything. Tell me her name. Tell me what she looks like, what she sounded like when you—"
"There's more," Demetri said, and something in the way he said it made even Aro stop.
"More."
"Felix felt it too. The moment he saw her. The same pull, the same certainty — she's not only mine, Aro. She's ours. Both of ours." Demetri's eyes flicked to Felix, and Felix held his gaze steady, offering what support a look alone could offer across a phone call that was about to remake both their lives twice over. "I didn't think it was possible. I still don't fully believe it, and I've felt it happening to me."
This time the silence stretched considerably longer, and when Aro spoke again his voice had changed entirely — the warmth still there, but threaded now with something sharper, hungrier, the sound of a three-thousand-year-old man who had just been handed the single rarest thing he'd encountered in longer than he could easily calculate. "A shared mate." He said it slowly, tasting each word. "I have read of it. Twice, in all our records, in all our years — twice, and both accounts so old and so uncertain that I'd long since filed them alongside the other pretty myths we tell young ones to keep them believing in something larger than themselves. And now you tell me you've found the third instance of it, walking, breathing, in Hokkaido of all the unlikely places, and that it has happened to two of my own guard.*" A soft sound, almost a laugh, disbelieving and delighted at once. "Marcus will want to see this the moment you land. He will want to see it before you've even finished crossing the courtyard, I expect — you understand what your bond will look like to him. He has never in three thousand years seen a single thread run to two people from one."
"There's a complication," Felix said, cutting in for the first time, because someone had to say the part neither of them wanted to. "She's human."
"Yes." Something in Aro's tone sobered, settled, the delight not vanishing but making room for the weightier thing underneath it. "I had assumed as much, from the physician, from the urgency in Demetri's voice. Tell me the rest of it, then. All of it. I take it she did not come to you gently."
Demetri told him — the balcony, the cold, the injuries, the men in the house below who would not trouble anyone again — and Aro listened the way he always listened, without interruption, absorbing every detail like a man storing coin against some future need.
"Then she has already seen what you are," Aro said, when Demetri finished, and there it was, the thing they'd both known was coming since the first mile of that flight south. "She has seen you move as vampires move. She may not have the words for it yet, in whatever state you found her, but she will have the words soon enough, and once she does, she is no longer merely a frightened human woman who was fortunate enough to be found. She is a human who knows." A pause, delicate, deliberate. "You understand what that means, under our law."
"She's our mate, Aro." Demetri's voice had gone very quiet and very certain, the tone of a man who had already decided, somewhere over the Sea of Japan, exactly how far he intended to let this go before it went any further. "There is no version of this where she isn't eventually one of us. You know that as well as I do."
"I do. And I have no objection whatsoever to that outcome — quite the opposite, I confess I find myself rather eager to meet a young woman remarkable enough to have caught not one but two of my finest at once." Something in Aro's voice sharpened again, gently, unmistakably. "But she is not one of us yet, Demetri, and 'eventually' has a way of running longer than we intend it to, and Caius does not share my sentimentality about rare and beautiful exceptions to the law. He will ask how long she has known, and how many humans she has spoken to since, and whether her memory of tonight is the kind that stays quiet on its own or the kind that needs help staying quiet. I would very much like to have good answers ready for him before he thinks to ask the questions himself. Do you understand me?"
"We understand," Felix said, before Demetri could answer with something sharper than was wise, even now, even to Aro.
"Good." And just like that the warmth was back, folded neatly overtop the steel the way it always was with Aro, so that a person forgot the steel had ever been there at all until the next time they needed reminding. "Bring her home, both of you. Keep her warm, keep her quiet, keep her safe — I trust you for that far better than I'd trust anyone else in this castle with something so precious. I will see to Caius. I will see to everything. You need only finish the flight, and rest, and let me be the first to meet her properly when the wheels touch down."
The call ended. Demetri sat with the phone still loose in his hand for a long moment, staring at nothing, and Felix reached across the narrow aisle and set a hand briefly on his shoulder — not a word, because there wasn't a good one for this yet, just the plain fact of being there, the same as he'd been there for three hundred years.
Across from them, beneath her blankets, Rin stirred in her sleep, turned her face toward the sound of their voices without waking, and settled again, and neither of them looked away from her for the rest of the flight.
PART 2
https://www.tumblr.com/vanilla-and-cherries/823275817519939584/the-snow-flake-part-2-felix-volturi-x-demetri?source=share
A cancelled wedding
FELIX VOLTURI X DEMETRI VOLTURI X HUMAN MATE
Felix and Demetri's shared room was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the faint creak of Demetri's chair as he shifted his weight, flipping through a book he wasn't really reading. Felix was sprawled across the other end of the couch their mate currently occupied, her legs draped over his lap, her eyes fixed on the ceiling like it owed her money.
She'd been quiet for almost ten minutes. Too quiet.
"When I was four," she said, apropos of absolutely nothing, "I accidentally got an entire wedding cancelled."
Felix's head turned so fast Demetri heard his neck crack. "Excuse me?"
"Mm-hm." She didn't move, didn't even blink, just kept staring at the ceiling like she was reading the story off of it. "Nobody in my family would tell me exactly what happened. Not for years. I finally asked my grandma last week."
Demetri set his book down without marking the page — a cardinal sin for him — and turned fully in his chair. "You're telling me you have been sitting on this information for how long, and only decided to share it now, lying on a sofa, staring at nothing?"
"I was bored."
"You were bored," Felix repeated flatly, as if testing whether the word had betrayed him. "Continue."
She smirked faintly at the ceiling — she knew exactly what she was doing — and continued.
"So for years I just assumed I did something normal. Knocked over the cake. Ruined the photos. Cried too loud during vows, whatever. Kids do that." She paused, savoring it. "But it wasn't embarrassment on their faces when the wedding came up. It was fear. Like actual, genuine fear that I might remember."
"Fear," Demetri echoed slowly, leaning forward, elbows on his knees now. "Of a four-year-old's memory."
"Exactly. So last week I asked my grandma why everyone goes silent whenever the wedding gets mentioned. She just stared at me for like twenty seconds. Sighed. Looked around the room to make sure nobody else was listening." She finally turned her head to look at them, deadpan. "Then she said, 'You really don't remember, do you?'"
Felix's mouth had gone slightly open. "I don't like where this is going."
"You're going to like it less in a second," she said, and rolled back to face the ceiling, clearly enjoying the dramatic pacing far too much. "Apparently, halfway through the ceremony, I stood up. In front of two hundred people. And asked the groom why he was marrying my aunt when he'd kissed another woman in the hotel lobby twenty minutes earlier."
There was a full beat of silence.
"No," Demetri breathed, half-laughing, half-horrified, sitting bolt upright now like the news itself had physically struck him. "No, absolutely not, a four-year-old did not just—"
"Say the man's business out loud in front of God and two hundred witnesses," Felix finished, sitting up so fast their mate's legs slid off his lap. He didn't seem to notice. "You brought down a wedding before you could reliably use a fork."
"I was very advanced for my age."
"Keep going," Demetri said, and there was real hunger in it now, the kind reserved for centuries-old gossip, not four-year-old party crashers. "You said it didn't go quiet right away."
"Right, because at first everyone just kind of froze — like maybe five seconds — because they thought I was making it up. Except." She held up a finger without even looking at them. "Several guests had seen the exact same thing happen. In the lobby. Twenty minutes prior."
"Corroborating witnesses," Demetri said, sounding almost proud. "You had corroborating witnesses at four years old."
"The bride turned around and looked right at him," she went on. "Nobody said a word. The pianist just — stopped. Mid-song."
Felix pressed both hands over his face. "I can hear the silence. I wasn't there and I can hear it."
"And then the groom, absolute genius that he was, laughed it off. Said, 'kids have amazing imaginations.'"
"Oh, he did not," Felix said, dragging his hands down his face to stare at her, aghast. "He tried to gaslight a toddler in front of two hundred people?"
"He did. And I did not accept that answer."
"Of course you didn't," Demetri murmured, awed.
"I pointed directly at the woman. Third row. Still sitting there like she hadn't just been named and shamed by a preschooler."
"She was still there?" Felix's voice cracked slightly with disbelief. "She didn't even have the sense to leave the venue beforehand?"
"Nope. But she left the second I pointed. Stood straight up, grabbed her handbag, and walked out without saying one single word."
"The confidence," Demetri said, shaking his head slowly. "The absolute confidence of that exit. No denial, no scene, just — gone. She knew the jig was up."
"Meanwhile the groom's finally realizing that maybe, just maybe, denying he even knew her would've been the smarter move than accusing a child of lying."
"A day late and two hundred guests short," Felix muttered.
"After that it was chaos. People started arguing. Somebody's uncle fainted—"
"An uncle fainted—" Demetri repeated, clutching at the arm of his chair like he needed something to hold onto.
"—the groom's mother burst into tears, and one of the bridesmaids tried to physically pick me up and carry me out of the room because I would not stop answering people's questions."
"You kept going," Felix said, half-laughing now, disbelief melting into something like pride. "You had already ended a wedding and you were doing press."
"I was four, Felix, I didn't know when to stop talking, I still don't, ask literally anyone."
"We're aware," Demetri said dryly, and she kicked at him without looking.
"My mum spent the whole time apologizing to everyone in a five-mile radius. My dad, on the other hand, just stood there going, 'She simply told the truth,' like that was going to calm anybody down."
"A brave man," Felix said solemnly. "Wrong. But brave."
"That started a whole separate fight between my parents. In the middle of the reception hall. While the actual bride and groom situation was still completely unresolved behind them."
"So there were, at minimum, three simultaneous public collapses happening at once," Demetri said, ticking them off on his fingers. "The marriage. The affair. And your parents' united front."
"At minimum."
Felix flopped back against the couch, staring at the ceiling now too, as if trying to physically absorb what he'd just heard. "I have fought armies. I have stood in rooms with kings. I have never once wanted to personally witness an event as badly as I want to have witnessed that wedding."
"I would have paid," Demetri said, dead serious, "actual money, to see the pianist's face in that moment."
"He apparently just sat there," she said. "Hands still on the keys. Didn't move for like a full minute."
"A professional," Demetri said. "Traumatized, but a professional."
Felix turned his head just enough to look at her, something warm and disbelieving and deeply fond crossing his face. "You have been sitting on this story your entire life."
"I told you, nobody would tell me anything until last week."
"No," he said, "I mean you've been sitting on this couch, next to us, for the last ten minutes, staring at the ceiling, before deciding, out of pure boredom, to reveal that you personally ended a wedding as a toddler."
She finally smiled properly, tipping her head back to look at both of them upside down. "I told you I was bored."
Alec meets his mate for the first time, and he's so cute! Well, to me at least. Im longing for autumn, cinnamon rolls, and him. I got two lines from Hannibal, I know, but it fit him so well! Mistakes may have been made but I'm sleep deprived and ovulating, bear with me pls. Idk what do you guys think about the way I portray him, but feel free to share your opinion!
Warnings: none, i think? Implied murders.
It was a chilly, grey autumn day when Alec first spotted you. He had come to your city to deal with some business with Demetri and Felix.
One minute he was standing in a neat park, looking at leaves falling like flaking rust and copper dancing in the air. Next minute, you were there. Just walked into the frame, sat on a bench not too far from him. His entire world went upside down.
Demetri and Felix felt the shift in his mood, slightly adjusting their stance, because this was unlike Alec. He was always confident, even tempered, and a bit sarcastic. But now Alec went completely still like a statue, and his bewildered expression froze on his angelic face.
He knew by instinct that this is the mate bond he's feeling. It's frozen inside him forever, no running away. But just because he knew what this was, didn't mean he knew what to do about it. So he just stood there, frozen to the ground, and studied you.
