Stars
It takes Edward a while to pull himself from his mind, to find his way out of his room and through the waves and into reality. He’s left disoriented and unsure about the world. About himself. When he’s free, he notices James’s absence. His icy skin burns where James’s hand had gripped him, where he’d held himself upright against the onslaught of alcohol he’d consumed.
How many times has James drunk himself to that extent? How often does he rely on alcohol to cope? Do wizards take longer to get drunk? Do they need more alcohol, or is James simply someone with a high tolerance? There are too many questions in Edward’s mind about wizards and their unknown anatomy. He much prefers the standard human and their easily understood bodily functions. Wizards are simply beyond his scope.
Edward touches his arm, right where the skin burns insidiously, grazing his fingers along his forearm as though testing his marble skin is still actually there. He can still feels James’s fingers, those calloused hands curled around his forearm. He latches onto the memory with the focus of an addict, curling the feeling and memory into something tangible to revise later, when he’s not frozen in a stupor.
He stands in the street for a long, long time.
Long enough for Emmett and Jasper to come and collect him, usher him into the darkness of the forest at the edge of the port, where they corral him up the mountains. They don’t return to Forks. Instead, they head off to hunt. Edward doesn’t need to feed, and neither do his brothers, but they do so anyway. They take the time to track their prey across the range, to race to their hearts content, to allow that creature inside him to break free for a brief moment and exist without the constraints Edward tries too hard to keep bound around himself tightly. He corners his prey at the base of a cliff, and laughs.
Edward enjoys the hunt. It relaxes him to chase until his prey can’t run any more, until its heart beats rapidly in its chest and sometimes the beats skip from stress. Edward loathes the sadistic side of him that enjoys it. The vampire side, who takes pleasure in his prey’s fear, in providing it glimpses of hope before snuffing them out.
Jasper understands, and struggles with those same feelings himself, disgust and elation constantly warring against each other in his mind. They both enjoy the hunt, but renounce the side of them that does so. Jasper spent many, many years hunting. Many more than Edward. Many more than even Carlisle. If anyone understands the hatred Edward holds in his heart when he finally relieves the mountain lion in front of him, when he finally ends its life by clamping his jaw onto its neck, then it would be Jasper.
Emmett whoops in joy as he tackles his own prey down. He doesn’t waste time, quickly ending its life and drinking his fill. The hunt is enjoyable to Emmett in a way Edward can’t remember feeling. There’s no doubt in Emmett about who or what he is. About actions he’s taken. The hunt is simply that—a hunt for necessity, for food, with an enjoyable round of tag beforehand. To Edward it’s more than that. It’s a reminder of what he is, who he has been, how he will continue to be.
“What happened?” Emmett asks later, as they lay in the grass staring at the stars above with their bellies full and their hunts ripped apart, scattered around the forest for other creatures to feast on.
“He read my mind.”
Emmett laughs. “How was it?”
“Horrible.”
They lay silently, listening to the forest around them, watching the stars spin in the sky. Edward has seen these constellations many times in his life. For a century, he’s looked up at the sky and seen the same constants, watched as they remained immovable, unchanged across time. They’ve seen every version of him to exist.
They’ve seen him as a human, when he was young and impressionable. When he first fell sick. When his mother died, clutching Carlisle’s hand and begging him to do anything in his power to save her son. They saw when Edward began his painful transformation, when he first hunted, when he first betrayed Carlisle. They watched silently when he abandoned his morals and began murdering humans—horrible, despicable humans, but humans nonetheless. They watched as his red eyes transformed to gold, then again as they bled back to red. And then, with time, back to gold. They watched him be surrounded by family, by lovers, and watched, still, as he became alone in a coven of those who love him. The stars know every aspect, every version of Edward. Even those he regrets and those he wishes never existed. The stars know every version of James, too. And Edward wishes he could read their minds and find the secrets they hoard.
“Was it really?” Jasper asks, mere seconds after Edward has spoken, even though he already knows the answer, can feel it rattling around within Edward, willing to be acknowledged.
Edward tries to ignore it. To ignore the feelings he can read Jasper getting high on. He wants to remain ignorant to what he feels, to the way something festers inside him now. He cannot ignore it, the same way he cannot ignore the way James calls to him, the way he wants to find himself outside of James’s house right now, watching, waiting. For something. He cannot ignore the bubbling in his chest, the same way he cannot ignore Jasper’s thoughts as he drowns in the something oozing from Edward.
“No, it wasn’t. I think it was meant to be. That he wanted it to be.”
When James first entered his mind, Edward knows it was maliciously. James wanted to show Edward—to prove—that reading someone’s mind is wrong and that to enter it willingly, at random, is a violation. Maybe it is. Edward still isn’t sure even after James’s supposed lesson. Listening to people’s minds is second nature to Edward. It’s so inherently a part of him, who he is, how he understands his world, that he’s never even considered just…not. It seems James views that lack of thought as something that proves Edward is power or information-hungry, rather than simply narrow-minded or short-sighted.
But still, even with such hatred and contempt poured into his actions, James had stopped. Edward doesn’t know what made him do so. Because James had stopped. There had been a moment where James had perused Edward’s mind, spotted all those things Edward tries so hard to bury and forget. Things he’s proclaimed lost to time, but really are lost to himself. Edward knows James saw them.
Instead of proving his point, instead of dragging those fears and worries and haunting moments to the forefront, James chose a memory that was kind. One that didn’t hurt to relive and one Edward didn’t mind sharing. Out of everything, that’s what made Edward pause. It isn’t that James had entered his mind, perused it and his memories like a public library. It isn’t even that Edward found himself physically within his own mind-scape, not that he managed to perceive a mind in a way he had never considered before—his ability doesn’t lend itself to physical renderings of someone’s mind, after all, he simply views their thoughts like notes being handwritten on a page, or an image being sketched out in abstract ways. He learns and processes their thoughts and emotions at the same speed someone thinks or feels them.
No, what made Edward pause was that James could, but he didn’t.
He had every reason and some to do so, every chance and more, too. But instead, he chose kindness and care, chose not to inflict pain and torment on Edward just to prove his point, even though Edward could tell how angry he was, and how hurt, how scared he felt deep beneath that anger.
“I wonder what else he can do,” Emmett muses, arms crossed beneath his head. “Maybe he can see the future, too, since he can read minds.”
Edward shakes his head.
“I don’t think he can read minds. It’s…different.” Jasper and Emmett wait for him to explain. It takes him minutes to form the words. “It isn’t reading minds, it’s entering them. Existing within the mind, reliving memories together. He could have seen anything he wanted, from the moment I was born, if he chose.”
“Wow,” Emmett says with a low whistle. “Remind me not to get too close to that guy.”
“But he didn’t,” Jasper states, a non-question with a question loaded within.
“He didn’t,” Edward agrees. Why?, is all he can think.
Emmett and Jasper eventually leave, dissolving around Edward as he sits unmoving in the meadow, listening to the world rustle around him, to the snuffs of grazing elk in the distance and the echo of the river rushing downhill. He doesn’t truly acknowledge that they left. It’s a small thing in a distant corner of his mind. He’s lost within. He thinks about that room in his mind, his room, with his memories lined on the shelves instead of his collection of records. He wonders how to get back there. If it’s possible to do so on his own, even. If he could sink back into the depths of that space and explore his memory in a less abstract way, in a more purposeful attempt to remember and forget.
He considers what it is between him and James—what those moments meant when Edward found himself untethered from all he believed about himself and his environment, what it was when James curled something ashy and dark around himself and narrowed those haunting eyes in Edward’s direction.
His reverie is broken by the shrill ring of his mobile, lodged in his front pocket. There’s no way his family would contact him now unless it were important, doubly so with Emmett and Jasper both having returned home and shared the outcome of his ill-informed decision to track James down in Seattle.
He digs the phone from his pocket and answers it just as the first ring cuts.
“Alice.”
“Edward, it’s about James.”
He didn’t really expect it to be about anyone else. “What happened?”
“I can’t…I can’t see, exactly. It was black for so long. But, I managed a glimpse of him, just for a second. He’s all…” she trails off. “All mangled.”
Edward’s words get caught in his throat. “Ma-mangled?”
“I don’t know,” she says softly. “He was just on the ground, covered in blood, his body was all messed up. I couldn’t tell where he was. Home, maybe. The room has dark wooden floors and red curtains.”
He remembers a room similar, knows Alice does too. The room from that cursed vision, that delightful vision, the vision that Edward hoards in secret. James’s house. The place he can’t find. The place that plays tricks on his mind and turns him inside out, confuses him into forgetting what he came for. There’s one thing that’s different now. Something Edward might be able to use to find James.
“I’ll send Carlisle to meet you,” Alice says, ending the call. Edward runs.
_____
Edward and Carlisle don’t have to wait long at the border before the wolves show up. Sam stalks out of the trees with a scowl on his face and dirt smudged on his cheek. He’s flanked by Paul and Jared, who slink forward with their muzzles low to the ground and deep growls emanating in their chest. They stop just shy of the border. There’s a good few dozen feet between the two groups, but Edward is fine with that. As long as they can hear each other.
“What do you want?” Sam grunts out, folding his arms across his chest.
“We were visited earlier tonight by James,” Carlisle says diplomatically. “We have entered a treaty with him as well.”
“Great.” Sam turns and they begin to head back.
“Sam,” Edward calls, stopping Sam’s retreat. He turns back with a glare. “We are here for information. Do you know where James lives? It’s important.”
Sam spends a minute thinking over the sentence, considering the pros and cons of sharing information. Sam doesn’t know that just by thinking about the information, just by considering sharing it, he has already given Edward everything he needs. Edward now understands that the wolves know where James lives, but that they, too, can’t enter. That they find themselves turned around and confused. He had been hoping otherwise—hoping to use the information from the wolves to find out where James lived in more detail, perhaps a way to enter.
Still, Edward learns something else from Sam’s mind, something rather interesting. James is related to Billy Black. He had a godfather who was related to Ephraim Black. This is something Edward can use to find out more about James, begin to cross-reference in his research. All online searches for a James Granger led to dead ends, but maybe with this information Edward will be able to find something. To find this godfather, and in turn find out more about James.
He hears something else in Sam’s mind. It’s short and bitter but Edward notices it all the same—a deep-seated shock of fear, thoughts of powers beyond comprehension, of energy pushing him back and throwing a wolf and freezing another mid-air. Edward takes a lot of pleasure in the fact James beat the wolves up a bit, and in a decidedly one-sided way. How he would’ve loved to be there to watch when it happened. Sam doesn’t recall the whole thing in detail. It’s abstract and choppy, scenes between adrenaline and the haze of wolf-anger. Still, Edward enjoys the memory, the thoughts, of the wolves being cornered by James.
Deep down, though, Edward thinks he might also be filled with fright, just like Sam.
“If he didn’t tell you where he lives, then we’re not going to,” Sam eventually replies. Not that knowing the location does much good for Edward—he already knew where it was, anyway. He wanted to know how to enter. If they could enter. “Talk to him at that high school of yours. Leave us out of it.”
“Thank you for your time,” Carlisle says, retreating slowly. Come, Edward. They won’t give us any more. I hope you found what you wanted.
Edward nods slightly and follows Carlisle away from the border. In just a few seconds, a harsh howl cuts through the woods and three sets of paws scatter back through the forest.
“What will you do?” Carlisle asks.
Edward considers it for a moment as they race through the trees. He knows he shouldn’t bother, shouldn’t waste his time, but he wants to go and he will.
“I’m going,” he eventually replies.
“Do you want me to come?”
Edward shakes his head.
There’s no point in Carlisle coming with him. It’s not like Edward will be able to truly find James’s house. He’ll probably find himself back at home rather quickly if his past few visits are any indicator. He will likely wind up back at their front door thinking he has to feed their pet cat again.
“Be careful, son,” Carlisle says softly, before breaking off from Edward and disappearing into the trees. His thoughts slowly drift further away as Edward continues running to the area he knows James lives. To the same spot the wolves had been multiple times when trying to find the elusive home themselves.
Edward begins to walk as he approaches, taking each step painstakingly slow to attempt to avoid whatever magic it is that sends him packing. Or, at the very least, to figure out where the magic starts—how close he can get before it attacks. He counts the steps from an identifiable tree, making it all the way to one-hundred-and-twenty-three before he feels a crackle along his skin and the niggling of an unnatural thought in the back of his brain.
He stops where he is and uses his foot to mark the line on the ground. The beginning of the magic. A spot where he can withstand. He takes another step forward, and another, and another, until the niggling voice in his head is a full blown siren of intrusive thoughts blasting through his calculating brain. He quickly scratches out another line in the dirt before he takes two more steps and the thought, the suggestion, settles in him fully and he turns and begins to head back home.
When he’s past the first line etched in the dirt, his phone rings. It breaks Edward’s stupor and shocks him back to reality, one where he doesn’t have a human girlfriend waiting for him to pick her up for a date. He fishes the phone out and answers.
“Thanks, Alice,” he says shortly, before hanging up.
Edward knows where the limit is now. He’s not sure what to do with that information. He knows where he can stand in proximity to James’s house without finding himself turned around, literally, but that’s all he can do. He can’t even see a house—he can just scent James in the air, taste him on his tongue. He can feel with every fibre of his ungodly body that James is nearby, somewhere in the dense forest blurring his view.
He can’t approach. He can’t call out to James. He can’t even check if James is actually mangled in his house like Alice saw. All he can do is stand here, at the edge of the boundary and watch, waiting and hoping for James to see him, perhaps. Edward stands and watches, for the entire night.
James never shows.