#felix volturi

[lunastwilightblog]

“The human did interrupt” - Aro, ordering Demetri to execute new secretary Valentina

[vanilla-and-cherries]

Vampire Lemon Jam

FELIX VOLTURI X DEMETRI VOLTURI X HUMAN MATE (shared)

The room held the grey hush of morning before it had fully committed to arriving — thin light slipping through the high slit of a window, catching dust motes Mara hadn't the heart to disturb. She'd been awake since before dawn, curled at the edge of a bed too large for one person, in sheets that still smelled, faintly, of two men who were not supposed to want her at all.

Three hours. That was how long it had taken — three hours from the moment she'd stumbled off a plane and into the wrong corridor of the wrong ancient city, and two of the most dangerous creatures alive had looked at her like she was the only steady thing in a spinning world. She'd been terrified then. She was still terrified now, if she was honest, in the way you're terrified of a drop even after you've already survived the fall.

Felix and Demetri had left an hour ago. Aro's orders — some retrieval job in Southeast Asia that apparently could not wait for hearts to finish rearranging themselves — and she had watched them go with a hollow feeling she refused to name. Felix had pressed his forehead to hers like she might shatter. Demetri had fastened something cool and heavy around her throat: a small silver crest, ancient-looking, three interlocking shapes she didn't have a word for yet.

"So no one mistakes you for unclaimed," he'd murmured, and hadn't explained further, and she hadn't asked, because his eyes had gone soft in a way that made questions feel unnecessary.

What neither of them told her — what she wouldn't learn until much later — was that they hadn't actually left her alone at all. Afton Volturi stood in the far corner of the room at that very moment, three feet from the wardrobe, utterly unseen. He'd been there since the door closed. He would be there until it opened again. That was simply what he did.

The knock, when it came, wasn't really a knock. It was two knuckles dragged once across the wood, lazy, the kind of sound a person makes when they want you to know they didn't think you were worth a proper courtesy.

The guard who let himself in wore the plain grey of the lower ranks, and he carried a wooden tray like it personally offended him to do so. On it sat a cup of water gone cloudy and faintly green at the rim, and a heel of bread furred with mold along one edge.

"Breakfast," he said, and smiled the way people smile when they've already decided you can't do anything about what they're about to say. "Compliments of the house."

Mara looked at the tray. Then at him.

"There a joke I'm missing?"

"No joke." He set it down on the small table with exaggerated care, as if presenting something fine. "Just didn't see the point in wasting good food on a pet that'll be gone in a month. Felix gets bored. Demetri gets bored faster. You're new. You'll learn." He straightened, folding his arms, clearly pleased with himself. "Drink up, human."

In the corner, Afton went very still — the particular stillness of someone deciding whether this was worth intervening in yet.

He needn't have worried.

Mara stood up so fast the chair scraped the stone floor, picked up the tray in both hands, and threw it — water, bread, cup and all — directly into the guard's smug face. He caught most of it out of vampire reflex more than dignity, sputtering, moldy bread sliding down the front of his tunic.

"I am human," she said, and her voice shook, but it didn't stop, "but do you know who my mates are?" She yanked the crest at her throat up where he could see it catch the light. "I swear — on whatever god there is, and whatever gods there aren't — that when Felix and Demetri come back, I am going to ask Felix, personally, to crush you into ash. And then I am going to take that ash, and I am going to put it in that putrid water you brought me, with sugar and lemon zest, and I am going to make jam out of you. I will can it. I will label the jar. I will keep it on a shelf where I can see it."

The guard stared at her. Water dripped off his chin.

"You're going to—" he started.

"Jam," she said again, in case he'd missed it, and sat back down, arms crossed, chin up, shaking so hard the necklace trembled against her collarbone. "Get out of my sight."

He got out.

The door had not fully swung shut behind him before Afton lost the fight with himself.

It came out as a single sharp exhale through the nose — the closest thing to a laugh he allowed himself when he still needed to stay unseen — followed by a long, disbelieving silence in which he simply stood there, invisible, replaying the word jam in a mind that had catalogued four centuries of threats, oaths, and last words, and had never once filed anything under preserves.

He did not reveal himself. But he did leave, briefly, silently, at a speed no human eye could have tracked — and by the time he slipped back into his corner, unseen once more, word had already reached exactly the people it needed to.

Minutes later, the door opened again, this time with the courtesy of an actual knock first. Heidi swept in balancing a tray that put the last one to shame — fruit, warm bread, something that smelled like real coffee — and behind the composed, gorgeous calm she wore like armor, her mouth was fighting a losing battle against a smile.

"I hear," she said, setting the tray down with far more reverence than the last one had received, "that you've invented a new threat."

Mara flushed. "I don't know where that came from. I've never— I don't even make jam."

"No one has ever made jam out of anyone, cara, that's rather the point." Heidi's dark eyes glittered with open delight. "Four hundred years in this coven. I have heard men threaten to skin each other, drink each other, burn each other's kingdoms to the ground. Chelsea nearly choked when Afton told her. She wants the recipe, for the record. Says it's the most original thing she's heard out of a human in decades."

"Afton told her?" Mara's stomach dropped. "Afton wasn't even—"

"Afton has been standing in that corner since the moment the boys walked out the door," Heidi said gently, gesturing at the empty air near the wardrobe with the easy familiarity of someone greeting a friend. "Say hello, tesoro. You've frightened her enough for one morning."

A ripple, and then Afton simply was, leaning against the wardrobe with his arms crossed and an expression of profound, helpless amusement. "In my defense," he said, "I was going to step in if he'd actually hurt you. He was never going to get the chance. You had it handled."

Mara looked between the two of them — the vampire who'd been guarding her without her knowledge for the past hour, and the one now plating fruit for her like this was the most ordinary morning in the world — and felt something in her chest loosen, just slightly, for the first time since a plane door had opened onto a city she hadn't chosen.

"Felix and Demetri asked you to watch me," she said slowly. It wasn't quite a question.

"Felix and Demetri didn't have to ask," Heidi said, pressing a cup of actual, drinkable coffee into her hands. "You're theirs. Which makes you ours to look after while they're gone — Chelsea's, Afton's, mine. We promised them that before they'd even finished packing." She glanced toward the corner, toward the ruined tray still dripping faintly on the floor, and her smile turned sharp at the edges. "Though I don't think any of us expected we'd have so little to actually do."

Afton huffed. "Speak for yourself. I'm writing a full report. Aro is going to want to hear about the jam."

"He absolutely will not hear about the jam," Mara said, horrified.

"Cara," Heidi said, patting her hand with real fondness, "in this castle, everyone is going to hear about the jam."

Word travels fast in a castle full of people with nothing but time.

By midmorning, the jam had reached every corner of the tower — the training rooms below, the archive where Renata sometimes hid to read undisturbed, even Aro's own chambers, if Afton's smug little smile was any indication. And with the story came a second, quieter piece of gossip, one that spread even faster than the first: have you seen her yet?

Mara had not been told this was happening. She only noticed, over the course of the morning, that people kept finding reasons to pass by an open door.

Santiago came first, or at least first among the ones who didn't pretend they had a reason to be there. He simply appeared in the doorway, arms crossed, dark and solid as the stone around him, and looked at her the way a man looks at something he's been told about and doesn't quite believe.

He didn't say anything for a long moment. Mara, halfway through Heidi's coffee, stared back, unsure if she was supposed to curtsy or run.

"Felix said you were pretty," he said finally, in the tone of someone filing a formal complaint. "He did not say you looked like you walked out of a painting."

"I—what?"

"Rossetti," he said, like that explained anything, and when her blank look didn't change, he made a short, frustrated gesture at her hair, her face, like he was gesturing at a masterpiece he lacked the vocabulary for. "The English painter. Red hair, red mouth, eyes like they know something you don't. My first mistress had one hanging in her parlor in Firenze, three centuries ago. I used to think it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever see in this life." He tilted his head, unreadable. "I was wrong."

He left before she could figure out whether that was a compliment or a threat assessment. Vampires, she was learning, did not always draw a clean line between the two.

Chelsea didn't bother with the door. She simply was in the room, curled into the window seat like she'd always been there, examining Mara with the frank, professional interest of a woman inspecting a lock she couldn't quite pick.

"So you're the one," she said, without preamble. "Two of them. At once. Do you have any idea how rare that is?" She didn't wait for an answer. "I've spent four hundred years learning how to build bonds like the one those idiots fell into by accident. Do you know what that's like? To watch something happen naturally that I have to work for?" She said it without bitterness — more like delight, a craftswoman admiring a knot she hadn't tied. Then her mouth curved. "And then I hear you threatened to make preserves out of Dario."

"His name is Dario?"

"Was, briefly, someone people bothered to remember. Now he's the jam guard, and I don't think that's going to wear off." Chelsea laughed — a real laugh, bright and startled out of her, like Mara had handed her something she hadn't known she wanted. "Sugar and lemon zest. He's been sulking in the barracks for an hour because nobody will stop asking him about pectin."

Mara felt her face heat. "I panicked. It just came out."

"Cara, nothing 'just comes out' of a person that specific. You'd clearly been saving that one." Chelsea's gold eyes glittered, sharp and pleased. "I like you. I like you quite a lot, actually, which is inconvenient, because I was fully prepared to be annoyed that Felix and Demetri finally settled and it wasn't going to be interesting."

It was Jane who did it, though — Jane who turned the morning from a story into a legend.

She arrived the way she always did, small and precise and radiating the particular stillness of something that had long since stopped needing to prove it was dangerous. Alec trailed a step behind her, silent as ever. The room's temperature seemed to drop a few degrees on principle.

"So," Jane said, looking Mara over with red eyes that gave away nothing at all. "You're the one who thinks she's clever."

Mara's pulse spiked, old fear surfacing fast — she'd heard enough, in three days, to know exactly what Jane was capable of, and exactly how little it took to earn it. "I wasn't trying to be clever. I was trying not to eat mold."

"Mm." Jane circled her once, slow, the way a cat circles something it hasn't decided about yet. "Ash. Sugar. Lemon zest." She said each word like she was turning it over, testing its weight. "You do know that's not remotely how preserving works. The pH would be all wrong."

Of all the responses Mara had braced for, a correction on canning technique was not among them. "I— I wasn't going for accuracy."

"Clearly." Jane stopped in front of her. For one horrible second nothing happened at all, and Mara had time to wonder if this was it, if she'd finally said the wrong thing to the wrong sister —

And then Jane laughed.

It came out of her almost violently, like something breaking loose after being wedged shut for a very long time — sharp and delighted and entirely unguarded, nothing like the cold amusement she was known for when she was hurting someone. Alec's head snapped toward his twin so fast it would have been comical in any other room. Behind them both, Chelsea actually gasped.

"Ash into jam," Jane repeated, and laughed again, harder, one hand pressed briefly to her mouth like she could take it back and didn't actually want to. "Oh, I am telling Aro word for word."

"Sister," Alec said carefully, "I don't believe I've heard you laugh since—"

"Don't," Jane said, still grinning, wiping absolutely nothing from her dry eyes out of pure human habit. "Don't you dare finish that sentence." She looked back at Mara, and for the first time since she'd walked in, something in her expression had shifted — not warmth, not yet, but the sharp-edged beginning of respect. "Felix is going to be unbearable when he hears he found someone with a spine. Try to keep it. It suits you."

She swept out with Alec trailing behind, already murmuring something Mara couldn't catch, and Chelsea slid off the window seat with the giddy energy of someone who'd just witnessed a natural disaster in reverse.

"Do you understand," she said, "what you just did? I have watched that girl dismantle grown men without blinking. I have never watched her laugh." She shook her head, marveling, already halfway to the door. "Sugar and lemon zest. Cara, when the boys get back, remind me to thank you personally. This castle hasn't been this entertained in a century."

Mara sat alone again a moment later, coffee gone cold in her hands, the echo of Jane's laugh still ringing strangely in a room built for centuries of silence — and thought, for the first time since the plane had landed, that maybe terrified wasn't the only thing she was allowed to feel here anymore.

They smelled the change before they understood it.

Felix noticed it first — the way the guards in the lower corridor went quiet when he and Demetri passed, quiet in the specific, badly-suppressed way that meant something was being not said very loudly. A young guard near the archive doorway actually pressed a fist to his mouth to keep from laughing outright.

"What," Felix said, stopping dead, "is that about."

"No idea," the guard managed, and fled.

Demetri's eyes had already narrowed, tracking — not literally, not yet, he didn't need his gift for something this close — toward the source of the disturbance in the air of the whole castle. "Something happened."

"Something happened to her?" Felix was moving before he finished the sentence, mission dust still on his coat, forty-one hours of travel forgotten in half a heartbeat. Demetri was already ahead of him.

They found her in the library, of all places, curled into a window seat with a book she wasn't really reading, and the relief that hit both of them at the sight of her — whole, unhurt, there — was so absolute that neither one spoke for a moment. Just looked. Recalibrated. Twelve hours apart and it had felt like a limb missing.

Mara looked up, saw them, and her whole face changed — that same helpless unguarded relief mirrored back at them — and she was on her feet and across the room before either of them could cross to her.

Felix caught her first, lifting her clean off the floor in an embrace that would have cracked human ribs if he hadn't known, with terrifying precision, exactly how much give a human body needed. "There she is," he said into her hair, voice rough with something he wasn't bothering to hide. "There's my girl."

Demetri's hand found the back of her neck the moment Felix set her down, tilting her face up, searching it the way he searched everything — thoroughly, like he was memorizing a scent he intended never to lose again. "You're all right," he said. Not quite a question.

"I'm fine. I'm—" She stopped, and something in her expression went sheepish in a way that made both men go very still with sudden, focused suspicion. "You should probably know that some things happened."

"What things," Felix said.

It was Chelsea, lounging in the doorway with the timing of someone who'd been waiting all day for this exact moment, who answered instead. "Oh, things." She grinned, wide and delighted. "Boys. Welcome home. Has anyone told you about the jam yet?"

By the time the whole story had made its way to them — Chelsea narrating with theatrical relish, Heidi adding details from the doorway, a mortified Dario dragged in briefly by Santiago purely so Felix could get "the visual," and Jane herself appearing just long enough to confirm, with an expression of pure smug satisfaction, that yes, she had in fact laughed, and no, she would not be discussing it further — Felix had gone through several distinct stages of reaction.

First: a low, dangerous stillness at the words putrid water and mold, directed at Dario with enough weight that the younger guard actually took a step back.

Then, as the story reached the necklace, the plate, the vow — a slow-dawning grin that spread across his whole face like sunrise.

By the time Chelsea got to sugar and lemon zest, Felix was laughing. Not politely. Not for show. A great, booming, delighted roar of a laugh that echoed off the stone and made two guards down the corridor actually flinch, that had him gripping the back of a chair for support, that didn't stop even when he tried twice to get words out and failed.

"Ash," he finally managed, wiping at his eyes though nothing was there to wipe. "She threatened to can him in ash." He looked at Mara like she'd personally rearranged the stars. "Twelve hours. I have known you twelve hours and you already threatened a member of the Volturi guard with preserves."

"I panicked," Mara said, for what felt like the hundredth time that day.

"You did not panic," Felix said, catching her face in both massive hands with a gentleness that never failed to surprise people who only knew him by reputation. "Panic is running. Panic is crying. You stood in that room, alone, terrified, and you made a member of my guard cry — don't argue, Dario, Santiago told me you cried — with a threat so specific it required ingredients." His voice dropped, rough and fierce and unbearably fond. "Cara mia. I don't think you understand what you are."

Demetri, who had been quiet through most of it, arms crossed, watching her with an intensity that hadn't let up since they'd walked in, finally spoke.

"I track things for a living," he said. "I find what people try to hide — what they hide even from themselves, sometimes. I thought I knew what I was looking at with you. Frightened. Brave, trying to be brave, but frightened underneath it." He shook his head slowly, something unreadable moving behind his eyes. "I didn't track this. I didn't see it coming at all. And I have not been surprised by anything in almost three thousand years."

"Is that good or bad?" Mara asked, half-laughing, half something more uncertain, still adjusting to being looked at like that.

"It's the best thing that's happened to me since I was turned," Demetri said, simply, and the quiet certainty in it did something to the room that Felix's laughter hadn't — made Chelsea go still by the door, made even Heidi's teasing smile soften into something gentler.

Felix pulled her back against his chest, chin resting on top of her head, arms wrapped around her like he intended to make up for twelve hours of absence in the next thirty seconds. "Aro is going to want to hear this from you directly, you know. Personally. He collects stories like this the way other men collect art."

"Please tell me you're joking."

"I am extremely not joking. You may also want to prepare an actual jam, for the record — Chelsea will not let this go, and I suspect half the guard now expects a demonstration."

"I don't even have a recipe—"

"Cara," Demetri said, dry and warm all at once, pressing a kiss to her temple, "in this castle, by tomorrow, you will have four hundred people who claim to have one for you."

Behind them, in the doorway, Jane's voice drifted back one last time before she vanished down the corridor, light with something that might have almost been affection. "Tell Aro I want credit for discovering her first."

Felix, still holding on like he had no intention of ever quite letting go, just laughed again — quieter this time, closer to her ear — and murmured, "Twelve hours. What are you going to do to this castle in twelve years."

[vanilla-and-cherries]

What She Won't Let Them Take

FELIX VOLTURI x DEMETRI VOLTURI X HUMAN MATE (shared)

Demetri heard her before the elevator doors had even opened — not her footsteps, not her heartbeat, but the small broken sound she made trying to breathe evenly and failing. He was across the penthouse before Felix had fully looked up from the match on the television, and by the time the doors slid apart, both of them were standing in the hall, still in the particular way that meant they were forcing themselves to be still.

Elena stood there with her keys still in her hand, mascara tracked halfway down her cheeks, her coat buttoned wrong by one hole. She looked at them and her face did the thing neither of them could stand — that flicker of I'm fine, don't worry, I shouldn't have come home like this — before it crumpled entirely.

"Tesoro." Felix reached her first, which surprised no one; for a man his size he had a way of covering distance like it cost him nothing, and he folded her against his chest with a gentleness that always looked faintly absurd on him, like watching a mountain be careful. "Hey. Hey, look at me. What happened?"

"It's stupid," Elena said into his shirt, which was already a lie, because her hands were shaking.

"It's not stupid if you're crying in the hallway," Demetri said quietly. He hadn't touched her yet. He rarely did, in the first moments — he watched instead, reading her the way he read everything, cataloguing the details he'd need later, whether he wanted to admit that about himself or not. Right now what he was cataloguing was this: no injury, no threat in the building, no one had followed her home. Which meant whatever this was, it had already happened, hours ago, and she'd been carrying it alone since. That thought alone put a thin, cold edge under his voice that he had to work to smooth out. "Come sit down. Please."

They got her to the sofa between them, Felix's arm still around her, Demetri crouched in front of her with her hands in his, thumbs moving over her knuckles like he could rub the tremor out of them. It took her a few tries to get the story out in order.

"It's Leo's mother," she finally said. "Leo — you know, my student, non-verbal, he's tetraplegic, he's — " her breath hitched " — he's the sweetest kid, he doesn't even have a way to tell me when something's wrong, I have to watch for it in his face, and I do, I always do — "

"We know," Felix said, low. "We know who Leo is."

"Today he came home and his diaper hadn't been changed since lunch. And she — " Elena pressed the heel of her hand against her eye. "She was waiting for me outside, in front of the other parents, in front of Julie, in front of everyone, and she just — she started screaming. That I don't care about him. That I'm negligent. That I — " her voice cracked on the word, quieter now, ashamed of it even though it wasn't hers to be ashamed of — "she called me a fu— a pain in the ass. In front of the kids who were still in the yard. In front of the parents picking up."

Felix's arm didn't move, but Elena felt something change in him — a stillness that went past careful and into something else, something coiled. Demetri's hands had gone very slightly tighter around hers, and when she glanced at him his eyes had darkened, that particular shift they both tried to hide from her and never quite managed.

"I told her family in September," Elena went on, and now that the dam had broken it came out faster, messier. "I told them, in writing, that changing Leo has to be a two-person job, that it's not that I don't want to, it's that I physically cannot do it safely alone, and that only Julie is trained and cleared to help me with him because of his positioning needs. Julie had a family emergency today. She left at eleven. I told the front office. I followed protocol." She was crying harder now, angry-crying, the kind that comes when a person has done everything right and it still wasn't enough. "And she didn't ask me what happened. She didn't ask if something had gone wrong. She just — decided. In front of everyone. Like the whole year didn't — "

She stopped herself, but Felix finished it, gently. "Like the whole year didn't happen."

Elena nodded, miserable. "We worked so hard this year. All of us — me, Julie, the other aides. Leo's class won that film festival prize, the short film, he was in it, he did his part with his eye-gaze board and he was so proud of himself, he laughed for like ten minutes when they announced it. That's — that's the year. That's what this year was. And now it's the last week of school and all she's going to remember, all he's going to remember her being furious about, is one afternoon where I couldn't do something I never could do alone in the first place." She looked up at them, eyes red. "She didn't even give me her name today. She never has, actually, in almost a year — I only know her as 'Leo's mom.' Isn't that strange?"

There was a beat of silence just slightly too long.

"Marisol Andreotti," Demetri said.

Elena blinked at him. "What?"

"Her name." He said it without any particular weight, the way he might report the weather, but his jaw was tight. "I looked into it the moment I understood a parent had spoken to you that way. Before you'd told me a single detail. I didn't need her to introduce herself."

"Demetri." Elena stared at him, something between alarm and a helpless, exhausted almost-laugh. "You can't just — you tracked her before I even said what happened."

"I tracked her the moment you walked in that door looking like this," he said, unbothered, and there was nothing apologetic in it. "It's what I am, tesoro. I don't turn it off because it's inconvenient for you to hear about it."

Felix, meanwhile, had gone very quiet, which anyone who knew him understood was worse than shouting. His arm was still around her, still careful, but his other hand had curled into a fist against his knee, and when he finally spoke his voice had dropped into something flat and controlled that didn't belong to the easy, joking register he usually kept for her.

"She yelled that at you. In front of children." He wasn't asking. "In front of disabled children, some of whom don't have a way to tell anyone what they just watched happen to the person who takes care of them every day."

"Felix — "

"I'm not going to break anything," he said, though the muscle in his jaw said it was costing him something to promise it. "I'm just telling you what I heard, because I want to make sure I heard it right. A woman screamed obscenities at you, in public, for something you told her in writing months ago you couldn't do alone — and she didn't even bother learning your name in return."

"She's under a lot of stress," Elena said quietly, and it sounded less like an excuse and more like a habit, the reflex of someone who spent her whole professional life extending patience to exhausted parents. "Leo is hard to care for. I know that better than almost anyone."

"That's not an excuse to humiliate you," Demetri said. "It's an explanation, maybe. It isn't a justification."

Elena was quiet for a moment, and when she looked up, it wasn't Felix's face she searched first, or even Demetri's — it was the space between them, the thing she could feel building there, banked and dangerous, the kind of quiet the two of them got when they'd already started deciding something without saying it out loud.

"I need you to promise me something," she said.

Demetri's eyes came up to hers immediately. "Anything."

"Leo doesn't get hurt by this. Not — not physically, obviously I know you'd never — " she stumbled, because some part of her genuinely wasn't sure what she was ruling out and it frightened her a little to say it plainly, but she made herself. "I mean it. Not his placement. Not his services. Not his mother's ability to take care of him, even if she was horrible to me today, because he needs her, he doesn't have anyone else. Whatever you're already thinking about doing — and I can see that you're thinking about it, Demetri, don't look at me like that — Leo cannot become collateral damage in it. I would never forgive that. Not from either of you."

For a long moment neither of them answered.

Felix was the one who broke it, and when he did, his voice had lost the flat edge, gone back to something rougher but warmer, the sound of a man choosing, deliberately, to set something down. "Okay."

"Felix — "

"I said okay." He pulled her back into him, pressed his mouth briefly to the top of her head. "The boy doesn't lose anything. Not because of what his mother did. That's — " he exhaled, and it came out almost like a laugh, disbelieving at himself. "That's a fair line, tesoro. Even furious, I can see it's a fair line."

Demetri hadn't answered yet. Elena turned to him, and something in her expression must have told him she wasn't going to let it go until he said it out loud too, because after a moment the ice in his eyes banked, just slightly.

"He will lose nothing," Demetri said finally. "You have my word. Whatever conversation happens with that woman — and one will — it will happen in a way that never touches him. I promise you that specifically, because I understand it's not a throwaway condition for you. It's the whole point of who you are."

Elena let out a breath she felt like she'd been holding since the school parking lot. "Thank you."

"You don't have to thank us for that," Felix said, quiet again. "You should never have had to ask."

She sat between them a while longer, letting the shaking finally ease out of her hands, letting herself be held by two men who — she was starting, despite everything, despite the year of careful distance and unspoken tests, to actually believe — would tear the world apart for her without a second thought, and had just, for her, agreed not to.

It wasn't nothing, that they'd listened. She was starting to understand it might be the opposite of nothing.

"I still have to go back tomorrow," she said eventually, half into Felix's shoulder. "Last day. I have to help pack up Leo's classroom. He made me a card, before all this happened. I haven't even opened it yet, it's still in my bag."

"Then you'll go back," Demetri said, "and you'll open the card, and you'll say goodbye to him properly, the way he deserves. And nothing that happens after that is going to be your problem to carry."

Elena closed her eyes, and for the first time since she'd walked in the door, some of the weight in her chest loosened.

...................................................

Elena fell asleep before ten, worn through in the particular way grief and adrenaline leave a person once both have finally passed. Felix pulled the blanket up over her shoulder, and Demetri stood in the doorway a moment longer than necessary, watching her breathing even out, before the two of them stepped out into the hall and closed the door with a care that made no sound at all.

Neither of them said anything until they were in the elevator.

"She made us promise about the boy," Felix said. "Not about the mother."

"I noticed the same thing." Demetri was already pulling up the address on his phone, though he'd had it memorized since the previous afternoon and hadn't needed the screen for anything but form. "She was careful. Precise, even upset. She drew exactly the line she needed drawn and not one inch further."

"She trusts us that much." Felix said it slowly, turning the thought over like it surprised him.

"She's starting to." Demetri's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile. "Let's not waste it."

Marisol Andreotti lived in a narrow townhouse eleven minutes from the school, the kind of place with a strip of dead lawn and a car parked half on the curb because the driveway was too short for it. The lights were on downstairs. A television flickered blue against the front window. It was 10:40 at night, and by the rustle of movement inside, she was still awake — alone, from the sound of it. No second heartbeat in the house besides hers.

They didn't knock.

Felix simply opened the unlocked side gate and crossed the small backyard, and Demetri went around to the front, and between one breath and the next Marisol Andreotti looked up from her phone to find a man standing in her living room doorway who had not used the door.

She didn't scream. Later, if she'd tried to explain it to anyone, she wouldn't have been able to say why — only that something about the stillness of him made the sound die in her throat before it started, the way an animal goes quiet when it understands, all at once, that it is no longer the largest thing in the room.

"Who — " she managed. "How did you — "

"You don't know me," Demetri said from behind her, and she spun, and there he was too, by the front door, arms loose at his sides, entirely unhurried. "But you met someone I love yesterday afternoon, in a school parking lot. In front of children."

Understanding came into her face slowly, then all at once, and with it something closer to real fear than the intrusion alone had produced. "Elena's — you're — "

"We're not here to discuss who we are," Felix said. He hadn't moved from the doorway. He didn't need to; the room was small enough that his stillness filled it anyway, the specific, wrong stillness of something built along entirely different lines than the furniture around it. "We're here because of what you said to her. And where you said it."

"I was upset." Her voice had gone thin. "My son came home — you don't understand what that's like, watching him — "

"We understand exactly what that's like," Demetri said, and something in the flatness of it made her stop. "We understand that Leo is difficult to care for, that his needs are exhausting, that you are frightened for him every day in ways most parents never have to be. We are not without sympathy for that, and we are choosing, right now, to extend you more patience than you extended her yesterday. You should notice that. You should be grateful for it."

"I didn't — I wasn't trying to — "

"You called her a name in front of a schoolyard full of children who cannot advocate for themselves, for something she had told you in writing, months in advance, she was not able to do alone." Felix's voice hadn't risen. If anything it had gone quieter, which was worse. "You didn't ask her what happened. You didn't ask where her coworker was, or why. You decided she was careless, and you made that decision as loud and as public as you could make it, and you did it to someone who has spent an entire school year making sure your son felt safe, and capable, and proud of himself. He won an award this year. Because of her, in no small part. Does that mean anything to you, or did yesterday erase it?"

Marisol had backed against the arm of her sofa. Her hands were shaking now, visibly. "I didn't even — I don't even know her last name," she said, and it came out sounding like she was only now hearing how strange that was.

"No," Demetri agreed. "You didn't. You never asked. Nearly a full year, and you never once asked her name."

"How do you know all this? How do you know I—" She stopped herself, because some deeper, animal part of her had already worked out that this was not a line of questioning that would get her anywhere she wanted to go, and that she did not, in fact, want to know the answer.

"That isn't the part that should concern you tonight," Felix said.

The silence that followed had weight to it. Marisol didn't try to fill it.

"We're not going to hurt you," Demetri said eventually, and something in his tone made clear this was not a comfort so much as a fact being stated for the record. "We're not going to touch your son, or his services, or your standing at that school, or anything that would make his life smaller than it already is. He didn't do anything wrong yesterday. Neither did she. You did. And this — " he gestured, faintly, at the room, at the two of them standing in it, at the whole unnatural fact of their presence — "is the only consequence that's going to reach you for it. Consider it generous."

"I want you to think about tomorrow," Felix said. "It's the last day. You're going to see her when you pick him up. And you're going to think, very carefully, about every single thing you're about to say to her — because we will know. Not eventually. Immediately. Do you understand me?"

Marisol nodded, fast and small, the nod of someone agreeing to anything at all if it meant the room went back to being an ordinary room.

"Good," Demetri said. He was already at the door, Felix falling in beside him, the whole visit already collapsing behind them into something that would feel, by morning, almost like she'd dreamed it — except that she would remember every word.

Felix paused with his hand on the frame and looked back at her.

"For what it's worth," he said, and his voice had gone almost gentle, which somehow landed harder than anything before it, "she defended you today. Told us not to let this touch your son, no matter what. So whatever you say to her tomorrow — start with that."

Then they were gone, out into the dark, and Marisol Andreotti sat alone in her living room for a long time before she finally, quietly, began to cry.

The next afternoon, Elena was crouched by Leo's wheelchair, tracing over the crayon looping across the card he'd made her — a lopsided sun, her name spelled with his aide's hand steadying his — when she heard footsteps behind her and straightened to find Marisol standing there, pale, red-eyed, hands twisted together in front of her.

"I owe you an apology," Marisol said, before Elena could say anything at all. "A real one. Not — not what I did yesterday. I was wrong. About all of it. You've taken better care of my son this year than I have any right to expect from anyone, and I repaid you by humiliating you in front of a parking lot full of people, and I am so sorry. I don't — I don't have an excuse that's good enough to give you."

Elena, caught entirely off guard, could only nod, throat tight. "Thank you," she said. "That — means a lot, actually."

Marisol's eyes went, briefly, unreadable — something moving behind them that Elena couldn't place, gone before she could try. "Leo's lucky to have had you," she said, quiet. "I hope you know that."

She didn't explain any further. She didn't need to.

That evening, when Elena told them about it — bewildered, grateful, a little emotional all over again — Felix just shrugged, easy and unbothered, and reached for the remote.

"People surprise you," he said.

Demetri didn't look up from his book. "Sometimes."

[sunnybex]

I just seen a twilight post on TikTok saying “your birth month is your twilight life” and I’m very disappointed to tell you guys that they were hating on September since it said the volturis your family, Felix is your boyfriend etc.

I’m just saying I was in enemy territory and I did not like it 👀 also lucky me because my birthdays in September 🤭🥰

[vanilla-and-cherries]

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.

[vanilla-and-cherries]

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

[vanilla-and-cherries]

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."

[maevevolturi]

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.

Your hair, your skin, the color of your eyes, the way you fed the swans who swam up to you. They clearly knew you. You didn't really do anything else, no book or phone or nothing. You just sat there on the bench, with a pretty bordeaux coat on that matched the season, and... enjoyed the present.

Alec was 1200 years old. He had seen and lived through heaven and hell alike. But in this moment, he actually felt like screaming and crying, throwing a temper tantrum, but he held himself.

Why him? After all this time alone, after all this time waiting, why a human? What is the correct response in a situation so unique anyway? He can't leave you now, his body won't let him! He felt the protective instinct kick in the moment he thought about turning his back to you and never look back.

But then the image of a long broken man's face came to his mind, suffering eternally, his soul long withered away, and couldn't bring himself to act on the impulse.

He just stared at you getting a gigantic, juicy cinnamon roll out of a box, and devouring it on the spot. The wind carried the pastry's sweet scent...and yours too.

A piece of the pastry fell on your coat, the thick icing making a mess. You frantically searched for a tissue in your bag, but clearly couldn't find any. Before Alec could think this decision through, before he could chicken out and save himself the trouble, Demetri pushed a handkerchief in his hand (why the fuck did he have a handkerchief) and pushed him in your direction.

Alec just walked up to you, and held out the handkerchief. The swans let out a loud screech and swam away as fast as they could, splashing with their wings, startling you. You whipped your head up, to find what scared them away, and Alec saw the confusion and slight blush appear on your face as you locked eyes with him.

"Hey" he said, and offered you a practiced, charming smile, but your body wasn't fooled. Alec heard the sudden spike in your heart rate—not just the slow fluttering of a girl blushing. Your eyes dilated, trying to take in every detail of him, your brain desperately trying to categorize the threat. Was there even a threat? The eye contact with his mate made Alec feel like a tank ran over his head.

"Hey" you said after a moment of silence, shaking your head slightly as if shaking the uneasiness off, and shyly took what the stranger offered you. "Thank you. You're a lifesaver" you smiled at him and tried to get the icing off your coat.

"Looked tasty" he lied. Well, it wasn't fully a lie. While his body rejected human food, and didn't react to them in any way, there were some objectively tasty smelling or looking dishes humans ate. He was sure if he were able to eat, that cinnamon roll would taste heavenly. But he couldn't, and therefore, it just looked good and nothing else. You, however, looked like a fine dessert he couldn't touch, and it frustrated him to no end. He couldn't lure you away, charm you to follow him, to feel his fangs break through the delicate skin on your neck. The feeling as your sweet blood flowing down his throat...The mental image made venom pool his mouth.

No.

He cannot do that. The bond already surpressed this urge, chaining the cold predator inside him down, to be able to experience what it feels like to get to know you.

He could hear your heart flutter as he spoke, his voice was like the smoothest velvet on your skin.

"That sounded like a lie" you joked, looking back at him. "You don't look like a cinnamon roll type of guy."

"Oh, I don't, huh?" Alec chuckled, his eyes glinting mischievously. "And what do I look like then?"

"Hm..." you tilted your head as you studied his face.

He let you study him, perfectly still. No blinking, no breathing, not a single micro-movement. He saw the flicker of confusion in your eyes as your mind registered the unnatural stillness.

He watched the way your eyes roamed his face, noting every detail. But he didn't miss the subtle hesitation in your breath, the way you leaned back just an inch too far. You were looking at him the way someone looks at a gorgeous, velvet-petaled rose—fascinated, yet fully aware that a venomous snake was coiled tightly beneath the leaves, ready to lunge for your throat.

"You look like someone who would be on a very niche diet. Like Hannibal Lecter. A quiet and reserved cannibal. You look like the kind of beautiful where if I follow you into an alley, I'm definitely not coming back out," you admitted, offering a half-smile that didn't quite reach your eyes. "It's a bit unsettling, to be honest."

For a moment his eyes widened slightly, but to your surprise, he burst out laughing. His nose scrunched a little as the sound of his laughter filled the air around you. The expression looked adorable on his face, it made your stomach do a little flip.

Oh, you got that spot on, and it caught Alec off-guard. You definitely wouldn't come out of that alley. You have no idea how close you came to that ending, and that fate itself intervened.

"I do one good deed and suddenly I seem like a cannibal. You wound me!" He didn't look wounded at all. If anything, he looked like he just got praised or something, smiling ear to ear, teeth looking somehow razor sharp.

"I'm sorry. I have another one, if I was mistaken." You opened the tupperware, and scooted over, an invitation to sit with you. He did. He eyed the cinnamon roll. The thing was massive, why did you have two? He wanted to ask, but Demetri behind him growled, as if he could see his thoughs.

"Dont you dare ask her why she has two. She'll think you're calling her fat."

Alec shook his head slightly, and blinked twice.

"So I didn't misjudge you, then?" you tilted your head with a kind smile, and you seemed just as confused as Alec felt about why were you ignoring the blazing signals your body sent to you to run? Could you feel the bond too?

"No, it's not that, I just already ate lunch."

"What did you have?" You asked him as you snuck the tupperware back into your bag.

"Rabbit" first thing that came to his mind.

"Oh. He should have hopped faster then" You giggled, facing him again.

The mental image of the misfortunate tourist, on all fours trying to crawl away for him in the deep forest flashed in his mind, as he laughed with you. "Yes, he should have! But how rude of me, I haven't introduced myself. I'm Alec. And your name?"

"________"

Even your name was perfect. It resonated with the pitch black in his soul, ripples of eternal devotion stirring the dead-calm, unmoving surface.

“And what are you doing here, ______?” Now that he had finally met you, Alec found himself almost desperate to know more about you. He had to make an effort not to let the intensity show.

You had probably already noticed that he was strange. Perhaps he hadn't put quite enough effort into the whole “normal” act. In his defense, this encounter had hit him like a lightning strike, and you were still alive. That counted for something.

“I come here pretty often. I feed the swans and the ducks, try to stay off my phone for a while. Just sit here, think, enjoy the present. And get some inspiration for my paintings, I guess.”

“You paint?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of things?”

“You'd probably find them silly...” That lovely blush appeared again, and Alec nearly groaned. Nearly.

“Why would I?”

“Well, because of what I paint. It's not exactly the kind of art you'd expect to see in the Louvre...”

“They have more than enough stolen artifacts in there anyway.” Alec rolled his eyes at the thought.

Your head snapped towards him.

“You've been to the Louvre?!”

Your excited little squeal caught him off guard, and he let out a quiet laugh.

Why did he feel so at ease?

“Yes. I have.”

“Have you seen the Mona Lisa?”

“Yes."

"Was it worth the hype?"

Alec considered it. "Not particularly."

Your shoulders slumped slightly, and your expression fell. Alec stared at you for a moment.

“I'm sorry. Was that important?”

“Kind of.” You sighed. “I've never been there. It's one of those places I've always wanted to see.”

“Well, there's always time.” His mouth curved into a small smile. “Who knows? Maybe they'll want your paintings there someday.”

It was only a small nudge, barely more than a tease, but it worked. Your expression brightened again.

“They're inspired by Brambly Hedge, so I doubt it.”

“Brambly Hedge?”

“It's a children's book. About little mice and their everyday lives. They're ridiculously cute.”

Alec's eyebrows lifted slightly.

“And you paint that?”

“Mostly little scenes from their lives. Houses, gardens, food, things like that.” You gave him a slightly embarrassed smile. “It's silly.”

“It doesn't sound silly.”

You looked at him for a second, as if trying to decide whether he meant it.

“And what about you?” you asked. “What are you doing here? Are you alone?”

“No. I'm with two... friends of mine. We're just passing through.”

Alec gestured towards the two men standing a short distance away. You hadn't even noticed them before. They appeared to be deep in conversation and didn't look in your direction.

You glanced between them and Alec.

“Wow. All of you guys look so... aristocratic.”

Your nervous little laugh made something warm and utterly unfamiliar bloom in Alec's chest. He nearly startled at the sensation.

Never, in his twelve hundred years, had he felt anything remotely like this.

He felt out of control.

He disliked it immensely.

Still, he collected himself and gave you a faintly amused smile.

“We're not, really.”

He paused.

“We're just here for a meeting with a relative.”

We're going to torture and murder a man who got too close to finding out what we are and has already caused enough trouble.

“Ah.” You nodded solemnly. “Well, you've certainly nailed the look.”

Suddenly, your hand slightly brushed his by accident, and you jerked back. Fuck. He heard Demetri's footsteps closing in, in case he needed to save the day.

"Oh my god! You're freezing!" Alec expected you to jump or something, but he felt two warm hands cradling his own, brushing it in an attempt to warm it up. You were adorable. "Are you okay? Your coat seems warm enough though..."

"No, it's fine. My hands are always cold, don't worry." Alec didn't know what to say, but also let you hold his hand a little longer. He didn't want you to let go of it.

Out of the blue, Demetri appeared and you squealed, dropping Alec's hand. Demetri smiled politely, and said hello.

"I don't want to interrupt, but we need to go. It's time." He looked pointedly at Alec, who nodded and stood up reluctantly. To his great relief and joy, you looked defeated. Aw, you poor thing.

"I'm glad we've met, ____" he shook your hand carefully not to crack your bones. That would cast a dark shadow on this lovely afternoon.

" My pleasure. But I ruined your handkerchief... Will i have the opportunity to give it back to you?"

Oh, definitely, you will. And more.