ice age coming
one. and run
When Jacob sees the leaked video that spreads like wildfire through the world, he knows. He knows. The reddish-brown whirl of hair, the paler than pale skin - even then, it could’ve been anyone, could’ve been any vampire caught feeding on tape for millions to see.
But this is how he knows for sure : the gleam on her wrist. It’s only visible for a split second, the action choppy, the picture quality terrible. There - free floating through the air. A crystal heart. A carved wooden wolf.
The decision is never a conscious one. It’s on the day that that the bombs start dropping that he phases. Years and miles and marriages and lifetimes between them, and he still knows, knows in his bones, that her greatest fear is being left behind.
So he makes sure that will never happen. That there will always be at least one person waiting for her. Staying alive for her.
Logic dictates that eventually Jacob must phase back. Eventually the pain must fade. Eventually he must stop loving her.
Jacob has always defied logic.
two. who’s in bunker, who’s in bunker?
Hey, remember that time when we were young and alive and in love and nothing could hurt us?
… Yeah. I can’t remember it, either.
~
She’s familiar with the sound of thunder. Thunder is the Cullens playing baseball, thunder is the sky breaking open, thunder was her heartbeat, once upon a time.
Her heart is silent now, but the thunder goes on.
Thump.
Thunder is the SWAT team outside of the crumbling church they’re holed up in, First Presbyterian something or other; the words run together, like ink in rain. The church lives more clearly in her memory as smell, incense and wine and aging wood and the glowing sweat of useless prayers.
The myths are just that, myths, but they use them however best they can. Seeking sanctuary in holy places is just one method.
… They should’ve just gone with the cliché and hidden in a crypt. The end’s coming for them, anyway.
Thump.
The Cullens are loosely fanned out, waiting. Simply waiting. They - we, Bella corrects herself - are capable of becoming still as stone statues. With every sick, hammering thud from whatever makeshift battering ram the SWAT team has dug up, the wooden pews jump, and dust is shaken from the ceiling and the floors.
Thump.
But Alice’s eyelashes do not even flicker; not a single golden hair on Rosalie’s head is disturbed. Emmett is the only one who breaks the stillness with a slight rolling of his shoulders.
Thump.
This is the second raid. None of them realise that it is the second of what will be many. Not everyone will live long enough to find out just how many.
During Jasper’s tactical meeting, Carlisle had closed his eyes, and they were all held breath (not that they breathed), watching every minute shift in his almost smooth face.
His hand drifted up to shade his eyes and he said, his voice only breaking slightly, “… It is such a terrible waste. They are only human.”
No one needed to say it, not even Jasper :
It’s us, or them.
Thump.
And Carlisle says, now, what he said then :
“May God forgive us all.”
Thump.
“I don’t think, Carlisle,” Edward says, his voice falling like snow, “that God is listening.”
The doors open.
three. this is really happening
When Alice goes, Jasper goes hunting.
He works solo. His planning is careful and meticulous, almost obsessively so. He makes a clean sweep of it, effectively getting rid of every single person who was involved in the operation that took Alice down, from the researchers who discovered Mary Alice Brandon’s records in a mental institute in Tennessee to the man who signs the paper with TERMINATION APPROVED written across the top.
Afterwards, he makes his way to the Volturi who open him with welcome arms and put him to use at once. Similar job, without the paperwork.
He never comes back to the Cullens, never witnesses the deaths of Edward and Esme, of Carlisle.
He doesn’t have to. He carries a million small deaths inside of his skin, and every corpse wears Alice’s smile.
four. women and children first
Liam is seven and being seven means that you are small enough to slip through cracks and air vents and in the narrow alleyways between buildings and that you are light enough to walk on the rotting floorboards of abandoned attics without them breaking beneath your weight and that you are clever enough to know, instantly and intuitively, where someone has hidden their food store in what appears to be an ordinary, water stained, flame blackened, empty, and otherwise ruined apartment.
Izzy is nine and being nine means taking care of Liam because he is stupid sometimes, because he is only seven. This means giving him boosts when he needs to crawl up fire escapes and keeping a lookout for adults or older kids and sometimes distracting people by “pretending” to be caught stealing (which is a tricky business) while Liam actually gets away with goods, and sometimes that means taking a few knocks here and there.
Like that time that the old fat man in the yellow shirt with the stained armpits and all that stubble caught her trying to slip away with a withered apple from his stall and he slapped her so hard across the face that she heard a blinding crack and almost couldn’t breathe.
Then Liam leaped on him and crawled on his back and tried to bite him in the neck but that meant he dropped the fruit and Izzy had to take a broken steel table leg that was lying in a nearby junk pile and smash the old fat man in the shins, until he dropped cursing and she cracked him a good one across the face just in case he thought of giving chase, and the few hot drops of blood that flecke across her face moved her to grab Liam’s hand and run like hell.
She chewed Liam out later, for making them lose all the food - but not very much, since they are still alive, after all.
They bunk down in the Paramount Theatre, where an uneasy truce exists between all the children there and everybody mostly minds their own business in exchange for having a roof over their heads. Izzy has to go through a fistfight and some snarling in order to secure them their usual corner, their furniture a few shipping crates covered with a grimy old blue and white rug. Compared to where they could be bunking down, it’s a downright palace.
If they were children in another age, Liam might’ve said, Hey, Izzy, tell me a bedtime story and Izzy might huff and puff and say, Again? but launch right into a few good fairy or folk tales. Then there might be tucking in and pestering for last glasses of water and maybe even a goodnight kiss.
However, they are children in this age. As soon as possible, Liam passes into merciful blackness, where he can forget, for a moment, that with every breath, he is fighting for his life.
Izzy only half-dozes, one of her eyes always partly open. She is always tensed and waiting for the wolves at the door.
~
Then one night, they come.
Or rather, She comes.
Izzy wakes up at four in the morning and Liam is gone.
She prowls through the darkened theatre, refusing to let the panic rear up and swallow her whole; she spies a half open door, where the moonlight spills in, and an on impulse, she steals out.
And there is Liam and she is so mad that she’s ready to smack him upside the head and drag him back to bed and give him a huge lecture on how bloody worried she was but then her eyes slide past Liam and she forgets how to speak.
For Liam is sitting at the feet of the most beautiful Lady that Izzy has ever seen.
Her skin is flawless, pure and cool, smoother even than the moonlight. Her hair waves gently and drifts around her shoulders, like a cloak. And her eyes are scarlet, edged with shadows, a brighter red than the apple Izzy tried to steal but a darker red than the old fat man’s blood. Somehow bright and dark at the same time, a scarlet that’s whirling but at the same time completely still. Without realizing it, Izzy drifts closer.
“Hello,” the woman murmurs, in a way that says, I have been watching over you, very gently, from the moment you were born, and you are bright and beautiful and I have always, always loved you.
“Izzy!” Liam says, his voice dripping with adoration, with wonder, so rough against the white and silver tones of the Lady’s voice. “This is Bella! She’s really nice, and she’s been telling me stories - about the Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood and the Boy Who Cried Wolf.”
“Liam’s told me a lot about you,” Bella says, and there is such an overwhelming tenderness in her voice. The simple words are such a shock, like someone suddenly cradling your face in their palm, the dizzying warmth of that contact, the intimacy of it.
Izzy comes closer, puts her hand on Liam’s shoulder, and tips her face up to look the Lady straight in the eye.
And Izzy says - she doesn’t know what possesses her, looking into the luminescence of the Lady’s face - she says, “You are the loneliest person I have ever met.”
The Lady’s face folds and softens into perfectly carved lines of grief, which shakes Izzy’s heart more thoroughly than the most powerful joy that she has ever seen on another’s face. Not that she has seen much of it.
“Yes,” the Lady breathes, and a strange sort of hunger seems to shiver over her, her beauty becoming colder and purer and even more terrifying to behold and even more impossible to look away from. “Yes.”
Izzy wonders what the Lady sees in them, in her and her brother. They are just two, small black-haired children who should be running away from her, back into the forest of makeshift shelters in the theatre.
But they stay, Liam and Izzy. Just as the Lady stays.
Then the Lady bends, willow graceful, her face descending towards Izzy’s, and Izzy closes her eyes, feeling very peaceful, very ready, as if she’s been waiting for it, for this, her whole life.
A goodnight kiss.
end.