Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

one. ashes to ashes

It was a normal night for them. There was nothing to indicate anything was wrong. The boys had gone hunting together, deep into the Olympic Ranges for predators.

If he had to remember one thing about that hunt, it was how … pleasant it was. They’d all caught what they had hoped for (with a helpful map from Alice). There were no disagreements, no mood swings, no storming off for hours. And with brothers like his, to avoid all three of those things was a fucking miracle.

When he looks back, he tries to work out when it started. They were running back, mud-splattered and bloody; for once, they weren't out so late that Esme would get annoyed at the risk they ran, traipsing through the forest barefoot and covered in animal blood.

It’s Edward first - just ahead of him to the left. Eddie leaps over a fallen tree and he … stumbles, only just keeping his balance.

“Jasper!”

He’s laughing at Edward’s stumble - perfect balance and all that - but Jasper isn’t. In fact, both Edward and Jasper have this look of increasing horror on their faces, and it’s only when Jasper grabs Edward and Jasper’s hand goes through Edward’s shoulder because Edward is turning into dust and that is not fucking right.

“Emmett.”

He’s never heard Edward sound so much like the seventeen-year-old boy he was, and he reaches for his oldest - and his youngest - brother, but by the time his hands are grasping out for Edward’s, Edward is gone. There’s nothing left of him, no clothes or cellphone or bones or hair or anything. It’s not even proper ash, but dust that mingles with the dirt on the ground, and there’s nothing. Nothing. He might as well have never been there.

He’s not entirely sure if he’s feeling his own horror, his own terror, and grief, or if Jasper is projecting. Neither of them knows what to do, to scoop what is left of Edward into their pockets, and flee home or to get help or to… what.

But then Jasper is running again, and he follows, desperation streaming off Jasper so strongly that Emmett can almost feel his own dead heart pounding.

Is it disease? Are there vampire diseases?

It can’t be age, Jasper and Carlisle are older, the Denali girls older still…

His phone trills in his pocket but he keeps running and Jasper keeps running, and they aren’t getting there fast enough.

Jasper keeps running until he crumples into dust, his golden eyes wide, and the one word on his lips lost as he disintegrates.

Alice.

He backs away from Jasper’s resting place like the dust is contagious - and maybe it is - maybe whatever happened to Edward spread to Jasper when he touched him.

Instead, he runs. He tears through the forest, a soundless rhythm in his head Rosie-Rosie-Rosie-Rosie and the kind of swirling, twisting worry like human nausea in his stomach as he bursts through trees and underbrush.

He’s ten miles out when he hears the screaming.

It doesn’t stop as he somehow moves faster, and bursts through the property line, to the backdoor of the house, which he half rips off the frame as he charges into the house.

The screaming - the wailing - is Alice, on her hands and knees in the sitting room. There’s dust on her face and hands, and she’s not all there, her eyes wide and glassy, as she rocks back and forth.

There’s a weight in his stomach, one that gets heavier every second Rosalie doesn’t appear, that Esme isn’t trying to calm Alice. Instead, he skids to a stop and drops to his knees in front of her, tugging her into his arms, pointedly ignoring the dust that sticks to his jeans, that he sends floating up into the air.

This is an Alice he doesn’t know, just like he knows a Rose that no one else does. The one that Jasper has alluded to, once or twice, in confidence. That it might have always looked like Alice was the one piecing Jasper back together, pulling him along in her grand plans, but it was never as simple or easy as that. Jasper held her together, she put him together. A balancing act.

Just the way that people assumed that he was the one that healed Rosalie of all her demons, when in truth he was just there, letting her know that whatever ‘okay’ looked like for Rosalie was for her - and only her - to decide. And that he’s always been the luckiest son of a bitch in existence to be a part of her version of ‘okay’.

Rose would have lost it with Alice by now. There’s no way Rosalie would have tolerated this level of noise.

Rose isn’t coming.

He holds his sister tight and mutters reassurances in her hair. They stay like that for a while until Alice just lets out a sob, and looks up at him, blinking slowly.

“He said he’d never leave me,” she says in a wobbly voice. “He promised me.”

“It wasn’t by choice,” Emmett rushes to tell her. “You were his last thought; he tried so hard to get home before he…”

Alice wipes her eyes, but she still doesn’t look like Alice. She looks lost and breakable, and she sits back, noticing the pile of dust they’re both sitting amongst.

“She… she was so mad,” Alice babbles suddenly, grabbing his hand. “If anyone could have stopped it, could have reversed it by… by sheer will, it was Rosalie, Em. She didn’t go alone, I had her.”

He’s sitting amongst his wife’s… ashes-dust-remains. It’s on his hands and legs and face, and he can see it clinging to Alice’s hair and he kind of wants to match her wailing because there has never been an Emmett without a Rosalie, not in any history that counts, and without Rose, he has no plan, no direction, no purpose. The world has tilted off its axis, and he wants to go and bury his face in her clothes upstairs, clothes that smell like roses-lemons-cars until the tearing feeling in his chest just stops.

“Esme came running,” Alice continued, staring off into space. “She didn’t make it down the stairs. She didn’t even notice until she was practically gone.”

They sit in silence for a moment, or maybe longer, until the day has begun. The sky has lightened, and they are still alone in a quiet house. No radio, no conversation, no bickering, nothing.

“Did you see this?” he asks finally, and feels cruel asking.

“No.” She sniffles, and he thinks how cruel it was to take Jasper and leave Alice. “It happened so fast; I saw Edward when Rose started to…” She took a deep breath. “I felt Jasper go.” She shudders and there’s a hitch in her breath, and he really doesn’t want her to start crying again.

“We should call Carlisle,” he says, and she nods but pauses.

“Call his phone, not the hospital. No one will answer,” she whispers, but there’s a look in her eyes he doesn’t like and he doesn’t want to ask, either…

“I can’t see him answering, Em,” she whispers.

He takes a deep breath and dials the number.

It rings.

It keeps ringing.

“Hello?”

It’s a nervous-sounding woman’s voice, and for a moment, he can’t find the words.

“I don’t know whose phone this is,” the woman continues, her voice shaking.

“It’s Emmett Cullen. I need to speak to my father - Dr. Carlisle Cullen,” he manages, but Alice is already shaking her head.

“Emmett, it’s Nurse Fletcher,” and he has no idea who that is, truly. “Your father… he’s gone, Emmett.” The woman sounds traumatized, and he understands. “Half the hospital just… disappeared, there was nothing anyone could have done…”

He throws his phone against the wall, and it smashes through the drywall as it shatters, and Esme’s not even here to yell at him.

—

Somehow, Alice gets him to his feet and drags him into Forks. Something about people coming looking for them and they need to go to the school, where everyone who is still here is gathering. They’re both covered in the dust of their family (Edward and Rose, mostly, and he wonders if bringing Alice a handful of her husband’s remains would have been the right thing to do. They’d left Esme where she fell, a waterfall of dirt on the stairs.)

There aren’t many people at the school when they arrive, and people are staring. He gets it; Alice looks like she just crawled out of an empty grave (Rose’s; Rose sticking to her face and hair and hands and knees…) and he’s splattered with mud and probably blood that he didn’t think to clean up before they left but together they are a suitably haunted, stricken pair of siblings.

A couple of Bella’s friends are at the impromptu gathering; the Hispanic girl is clinging to a man who has to be her father, fresh tear tracks on her face. A blonde girl is sitting with a blanket around her, almost bisected perfectly down her body with the dust of someone - a classmate, a family member, a passerby. Just dozens of people standing around, confused and grieving.

But Alice stops when she sees one figure, stooped and already exhausted.

Charlie Swan catches her in a hug as she approaches him a little faster than she should, and he wants to pull her back because now parts of Rosalie are sticking to Charlie’s clothes and from the look on Charlie’s face and on Alice’s, the dust on Charlie belonged to Bella.

He wants to chuckle, at the picture of Rose’s face if she was told her ashes would be mixed up with Bella’s forever now, or at least until Charlie does some laundry.

“She was in bed, sleeping,” Charlie says. “I thought it was a prank, at first.” His eyes are shiny and he takes a shuddering breath and looks closer at the pair of them. “Who…”

Alice seems to shrink into herself, and just shakes her head. “It’s just me and Emmett now,” she mutters. “Jasper’s gone and Rosalie’s gone, and Esme and Carlisle and Edward and now Bella.” There’s a tinge of hysteria to her words, and Emmett pulls his sister closer because he doesn’t want what’s left of Forks to watch if he has to try and calm her down from another round of hysteria.

“It’ll be okay,” he manages. “We’ll call Denali and see how Tanya’s doing. Cousins,” he offers to Charlie, who looks relieved. “We’ll check in on a few people,” he continues, hoping to distract Alice, who keeps repeating their names under her breath. “Peter and Charlotte, Maria, Garrett, Randall…”

“Good. You kids can stay with me while you track down some family if you need to,” Charlie offers but Alice manages to pull herself together.

“No, we’ll be fine,” she assures him. “Emmett’s old enough and … we’ll be fine. We just need to know what happened.”

“We don’t know much yet, but as soon as I do, I’ll call,” Charlie promises. “I’ll put your names on the … Survivors list, you two go on home and take a shower, make sure you’ve got enough food and gas in the car. And you call if you need anything.”

“Carlisle’s phone,” he says immediately. “Nurse Fletcher at the hospital has it, but we … can’t go there.”

Charlie seems to understand by totally misunderstanding why they can’t go to the hospital and promises to see what he can do.

And then there’s nothing else for them to do but go home. Go home and wash off the dust, and scoop what’s left into Esme’s vases (urns, now). Alice folds their dirty clothes and puts them in a box without a word, and he watches her collect dust from the trim on the coffee table, from the gaps between the floorboards, with a tiny paintbrush so that every grain of his beautiful wife is collected.

Then he takes her to where Jasper fell and she doesn’t say anything. There’s no way to tell what dust and dirt is Jasper and what is the forest, and there’s nothing here for her to gather in her hands and hold tight. They sit for a while, just staring at the spot.

“If Maria survived, it’s going to be bad,” she manages as the light begins to fade. “And if the Volturi…”

They walk home at a human pace, and they both start to notice things that they missed before; the stillness of the forest, suddenly amiss half its animals. The sparseness of the trees, of the ground. As they make it home, the day sinking into night, he notices half of Esme’s gardens just gone, as if waiting for someone to plant them fresh, when they were in full bloom less than a day ago.

There’s a small figure waiting on the back porch, in dirty denim cut-offs. He looks smaller than the last time they saw him, only weeks ago.

Seth Clearwater swallows hard when he sees them, and they can tell by the look on his face that whatever, whoever is left on the Res, it certainly isn’t his family and friends, and Emmett is overwhelmingly sad for the kid that had to come to his natural enemies for safe haven.

“The pack,” Seth begins. “It’s only me, and Colin, and Brady left. And at home, it’s only me.”

Alice moves too fast, and pulls him into a tight hug, and Seth hugs her back, despite the stench.

“I figured you might know something about what’s happened,” Seth continues, and he’s trying so hard not to cry, he’s giving Emmett a headache. “I left Colin and Brady back to protect the Res, and came to find help.”

He wants so badly to promise this kid it’s going to be fine, that they’ll find a Tardis, a time-turner, a fucking goddess of time and rewind everything to stop this from happening but his wife is nothing but dirt, and his sister looks like a broken marionette, and there’s a wolf pup looking so desperate and hopeful that the words die on his tongue.

Alice smiles at him, kindly, for for a second she looks like herself. That lost, glassy look she’s worn all day has faded back inside her, and he hopes it stays there.

“Come in, Seth,” she says, and motions that they both follow her in through the door he broke that morning. “I think we’ve got food.”

Emmett takes off his boots before he goes inside (just like Esme always nagged for him to and he never remembered), and he wonders if the others are up there, laughing their asses off that the House of Cullen has crumbled and all that’s left is a broken psychic, an underage shapeshifter, and the guy with his wife in a jar.

He thinks it might even be funny to someone.

Chapter Text

two. survivors

What happens next?

It’s a good question, and one Alice used to be able to answer. Her predictions have… well, they haven’t stopped, but there are less of them. Maybe she’s not saying everything but he doesn’t press.

They stay in Forks. It’s the easiest option, really. They have resources at the Forks house - all of Jasper’s computers, Rose’s cars, Carlisle’s medication stash. And for, now, it makes sense to keep up the masquerade - the orphaned Cullen kids, in that big old house. 

And Seth Clearwater. Neither of them have made more than polite inquiries about the Quileute reservation, because what can they do, really? They weren’t allowed on the land, and nothing they offer will be accepted. Seth doesn’t want to talk about it either, so they just… don’t. Not yet. 

The first announcements and news reports are hard to listen to - half of all living creatures. Humans, animals, plants, sea life… just gone. Then there are the people who survived, but died in the aftermath; the patients in surgery with the dust of their surgeons sinking into their chest cavity, the passengers on an aeroplane, the school bus with no driver. The news plays on, listing losses and catastrophes until he loudly asks if Seth wants to play Xbox instead. 

Alice goes with them, and sits crosslegged on a recliner, watching them. 

“Carlisle would have liked that,” she says suddenly when Emmett realises the error in picking a war game - should have opted for a racing game instead. 

“Liked what?” he asks, as he gets up to change the disc. Seth doesn’t say anything, playing with the recliner buttons instead. 

“‘Half of all living creatures’,” she quotes. She’s been wearing one of Jasper’s t-shirts under her cardigan, and the scent of his brother is fading the longer she wears it. “Carlisle would have appreciated that. That the universe thought we were living creatures. Might have convinced Edward that we weren’t total monsters, either.”

Seth looks up at her, confused. “Why wouldn’t you be living creatures?” he asks, concentrating on the recliner tips him right back. 

“We don’t breathe or age or change,” Alice says, a smirk playing around her face as Seth yelps when the entire chair begins to tip, but luckily it doesn’t fall. 

“But you eat,” Seth accepts the controller Emmett passes him. “And you’ve got families. That means you still count.”

“I wish we didn’t.” Emmett doesn’t realise he’s said those words aloud until he realises Seth and Alice are both staring at him. He wants to explain that if they didn’t count, then there wouldn’t be five vases lined up on the mantel (three empty) full of dust. That he wouldn’t be sitting here playing Xbox with Seth Clearwater, and Alice wouldn’t be wearing leggings and her husband’s t-shirt, looking brittle and tired. That he wouldn’t go into their room every night and bury his face in Rose’s clothes to keep himself from going insane. 

But he doesn’t need to. They both understand - Alice sits with Seth when the boy sniffles and tries to hide it; Emmett hears Alice padding around Jasper’s office, having a conversation with thin air, questions asked to silence. If there was some loophole they could grab with both hands and exploit, he knows he and Alice and Seth would take it, humanity and life and all those upright and moral things be damned. 

“Just what everyone needs,” Alice muses, leaning back and stretching like a cat. “A world where humans and animals were cut in half but the vampires weren’t.”

And she’s right. That would be a mess. The fucking end of times. 

“That would be a cool movie,” Seth says absently, focused on the screen and forcing Emmett’s car off the road and into a ravine. 

Alice watches them play for a while before getting up. A few minutes later, there’s a knock at the door and low voices. Charlie Swan, with Carlisle’s phone.  Emmett lets Seth win a second race, focused on the conversation Alice is having - why it took Charlie so damn long to bring the phone, how they’re holding up; his irritation at the delay it took to get Carlisle’s phone is tempered when he hears the genuine concern Charlie has for Alice. He doesn’t know much about Bella’s father, but he seems like a good guy.

Not that Alice needs to act the part - she looks broken. Most of the time he feels like he’s seeing a part of her that he shouldn’t be seeing, that the loss and grief that becomes her is somehow shameful to witness; it’d be less awkward to see her naked than to see her twisting Jasper’s t-shirt in her hands with that glassy look of hopelessness she tries to hide. 

Alice feels the same about him; that Emmett without Rose is devoid of that joie de vivre, that endless good humour, the extra joke. He feels tired in his bones, deflated, and distracted with the space in his chest that Rose used to fill. He feels like an old man, when he was never finished being a young man, never made it to middle-age. 

But they are trying. Especially with Seth in the house - he’s taken over the bedroom that Esme planned to give to Bella, mostly because it didn’t stink of vampires as much as any other room; and neither of them wanted to dismantle Esme’s studio or Carlisle’s office. It wasn’t really much - a mattress and box spring, a dresser and desk. Alice had given him a laptop to use and found some new bedding for him, and occasionally even remembered that a fourteen-year-old boy shouldn’t be eating pizza six nights a week, and probably needed more boundaries than they were giving him. But Alice isn’t maternal, and her attempts at forcing vegetables and a bedtime on Seth usually get forgotten within a day or two. 

Charlie Swan leaves, and he listens as Alice puts Carlisle’s phone into his vase, and then he focuses on the game so that Seth doesn’t think he’s letting him win because of pity or anything.

—

It’s not until late summer that people start bothering them. Parents of classmates who suddenly don’t have any children of their own to worry over. Colleagues and acquaintances who feel some kind of lingering responsibility. Busybodies, usually a part of some self-aggrandising self-appointed community group butting into everyone’s grief. 

Alice ignores the early attempts to interfere, to crack open the metaphorical door for anyone who isn’t Charlie Swan. She’s taken to doing the oddest tasks, but Emmett doesn’t ask. At the moment, she’s painting every single door in the house with a swirling pattern of flowers that is tiny and detailed and fills up the day. Esme would have a conniption if she saw her lovely doors like this (he remembers when Alice and Jasper first arrived, and her art projects ran afoul of Esme - she had apologised and channelled that manic energy into embroidery instead; there’s a pair of unspeakably ugly curtains hanging in the Vermont house from one panicked week when Jasper went off with Peter and Charlotte).

Then the harassment starts - both her and him since he’s apparently considered her ‘guardian’. Alice hangs up the phone numerous times wordlessly before being so outstandingly rude to Mrs Newton that both he and Seth stare at her before Emmett remembers he’s actually supposed to be in charge - as far as the rest of the town knows, at least - and calls to deter any more visits or phone calls or casseroles because Alice isn’t well and the disruptions are upsetting her. 

If Carlisle or Esme were here, they’d think to send Mrs Newton flowers or something as an apology, but they aren’t, and no one can get Alice to apologise when she doesn’t want to, and Seth confided in him that she’s crying when he’s hiding in the garage and Seth is totally at a loss over what to do about a crying girl that isn’t Leah, so maybe they’ll just leave it at that. Give the town something new to gossip about again.

But it does spark sudden realisation in both Cullens about a topic that has been long forgotten - school. Alice and Emmett have both graduated, but Seth had not. Seth had another four glorious years in high school, even if the Res school is down to double digits of enrolments, and probably won’t even run every weekday. 

Seth whines and begs and negotiates until Alice stamps her foot and demands to know what Sue Clearwater would say and that makes Seth all small and miserable, and Alice hates herself and Emmett solves the problem by making a large donation through one of their anonymous charities to the Res school so that Seth can at least do online learning, and apparently, that’s a huge deal that is on the local news, and that makes Alice and Seth laugh because only Emmett would stop a teenage boy’s whining by revolutionising a tribe’s educational provisions with a cheque large enough to sustain a small city for a year. 

But it’s help - it means the children who suddenly have no parents and have to raise siblings can still study; it means that half-empty classrooms don’t necessarily mean half-empty classes; it also means that other tribes with larger losses and no way of schooling are invited to join them. 

That’s one good thing they’ve managed. 

He also fixed the backdoor as good as new, so it should be two, but he’s pretty sure that doesn’t count now that Alice has painted flowers blooming and dying all over it.

At some point they both bully Seth into going home again, to get his own stuff - clothes and bedding and photos and all those things you look for when you’re in a house that isn’t yours. He yells at them, they yell at him, and he storms off. But now there’s a photo of him with his parents and sister on his dresser and a bunch of books crowding his desk, and the world’s most beat-up DS under his pillow. There are more photos, somewhere - Emmett knows that because Alice knows where they are and then one day there are two framed photos joining the vases on the mantle - one of Sue and Harry Clearwater on their wedding day, and one of Leah laughing. Neither of them knows what happened to Sue or Leah precisely on that day, but Seth doesn’t bring the ashes with him, so they don’t ask. 

Summer folds into fall, and what’s left of Esme’s gardens wither up. Charlie Swan checks on them every few weeks, sounding tired. There’s a lot of work for him right now - mostly community and social issues, like scared and orphaned children hiding, people struggling with money, grief, religion. There have been some shortages of food since there’s less being grown, less people to process and package and ship it, and a little town hours outside of Seattle is not a priority to whoever is deciding where to send a milk delivery.

They order Seth’s food from high-end places online that deliver them quickly and quietly; Alice starts choosing long-life and bulk items, and no one needs to ask because it’s obvious things will get worse before they get better. Seth holds a pretty intense grudge against the powdered strawberry milk, though. 

But food shortages are the least of their worries, as Alice uses the dining room wall to start taking nonsensical notes, and Emmett’s heard enough stories to know that losing a mate can be… well, he’s not having much fun, but the very last thing he needs is to wrangle Alice if she’s lost her mind. Dead or not, he knows he could never lay a hand on her even if she did go nuts out of love for his family, out of respect for Jasper, and out of this funny bond they’ve somehow formed, being the last ones left. 

The notes turn into lists, lists of everyone they’ve ever known, in her swirling handwriting. Even people they know are gone, like Bella, goes on the list.

Then she starts striking out names, like she’s slashing with a knife - Carlisle, Esme, Jasper, Rosalie, Edward, Bella, Sue, Leah, Sam, Jacob, Paul… Slash, slash, slash. 

Then it starts getting interesting. Peter and Charlotte are gone, but so are half the goddamned Volturi (Alice smirks as she crosses out Caius, Jane, Alec, Dimitri because imagining Aro on his throne with grief-mad Marcus and only the minions is a very pretty picture indeed). Carmen and Tanya have survived, but Kate, Irina, and Eleazer are gone. Garrett is alive, but Randall and Mary aren’t. J Jenks didn’t make it either, which makes things… difficult.

Alice scowls darkly as she scratches out Maria’s name, and Emmett wonders if it’s because she didn’t get to do the honours of destroying the Mexican harpy herself. Or because wherever Jasper is now, so is Maria, and Alice is left behind. 

Finally, she is done, and the list is nearly balanced in living and dead. Alice’s left eye twitches, and whatever she’s thinking she doesn’t say as she stands up. 

“Alaska and then Mexico, then,” she says to him, and he gives her the Look that he gives her and Edward and Jasper every time one of them forgets that not everyone has a gift and some of them have to use their words. 

“We need to check on Carmen and Tanya; I think they need us,” Alice explains, still examining the list. “I saw that we need to go. And then we’re going down to Mexico.”

“Maria’s dead,” he gestures at her list, and Seth wanders in stuffing his face with Pringles and turns white at the sight of Esme’s freshly defaced walls; evidently Motherly Wrath is something universal across all of the species.

“Maria’s gone, and left behind a bunch of fresh newborns,” Alice sounds tired. “There’s no one left for clean up, Em, no one who knows. And it will be bad if we don’t step in soon.”

There might be something cathartic in that for Alice, undoing Maria’s life’s work. Maria’s lands weren’t exactly in the wealthiest or most populated lands these days - Jasper kept a secret map that wasn’t at all a secret - and if going down there and taking off a few heads saves a mother or father or child, then maybe it’s worth the hassle. 

“Fine. Alaska and Mexico,” he agrees, and Seth cheers. 

“Road-trip!” he declares around a mouthful of chips. Alice rolls her eyes. 

“I’ll make you up a passport,” she says, not even bothering to argue with the younger boy that he’ll be joining them. “We’ll take the Jeep, Em - Rose just finished it.”

The words hang in the air for a second, and he nods in agreement. There might be something in that, taking the last gift-gesture-offering Rose ever did for him on their End-of-the-World Road Trip. Alice can rip the heads off newborns, he can drive around in the SUV his wife carefully and lovingly put together just to please him, and maybe he’ll buy Seth a beer in Tijuana. 

Closest thing they’ll ever get to therapy, he supposes. 

—

Chapter Text

three. road trip

They’re almost in Arizona when Charlie calls to find out where the fuck Seth Clearwater is, because apparently he’s been tangling up his story all over town - he’s told anyone on the Res who asks that he’s staying with Charlie. He’s told Charlie that he’s staying with Colin or Brady.

Alice scowls at Seth through the rearview mirror and begins to weave a tale of being told Seth had permission to join them to go see their cousins - in between lecturing Seth about setting them up for a kidnapping charge across state lines.

By the end of the conversation, Charlie’s trying not to snigger at Alice’s increasingly indignant rant at Seth, at law-breaking in general, and at fucking son-of-a-bitch moron drivers, sweet Jesus. Emmett and Seth are howling at Alice’s cussing and even Charlie is a little bit shocked at her language (later, when the boys are picking on her about it, she rolls her eyes, looks over the top of her heart-shaped sunglasses, and reminds them both - quite primly - that she married a goddamned soldier.)

Seth’s favourite part of the whole ordeal is that Alice isn’t even the one driving.

But Charlie clears Seth accompanying them, so that’s one less problem. Of course, it means his Jeep stinks of human food, and that they have to stop, but they still make good time up to Alaska.

It’s a hard drive to make - closer to the cities and urban, abandoned cars have been moved off the road. But in the rural areas, cars are still scattered, seemingly abandoned or crashed. Most of the bodies have been removed, thankfully. But still, only most. And it’s been weeks - months - since it happened, so those bodies aren’t in good condition.

And not all of them are adults.

They start out burying the people they find (well, Emmett and Alice do - they both insist Seth stay in the damn car), but then only the children.

Then they just stop because they are both tired of handling rotting bodies who never should have died, let alone forgotten on the side of a long, empty stretch of highway. The graves they’ve already dug haven’t got markers or anything. Just a hole on the side of the road.

It doesn’t feel like enough.

The house in Denali feels wrong before they even get out of the car. The house has always had a sense of otherness, thanks to the fact that it’s the permanent residence of immortals. But right now, it feels more forgotten, lesser in a way.

Tanya’s walking out the front door the second the car pulls up, and she looks old. Tired and strained, and she walks straight into the hug Alice offers.

Seth gapes at the house - the enormous glass-and-wood lodge tucked carefully in the wilderness where it is mostly forgotten. It might be on a map somewhere, might be noted down in some database, but it is mostly overlooked, a sanctuary in the middle of nowhere.

There’s not really much for them to say or do in Alaska, Emmett realizes; Carmen and Tanya are more than capable enough to manage on their own.

Except… Carmen looks like a ghost. She looks disorientated and disinterested, and there’s a part of Emmett that is cold and dead that is perversely fascinated with all the different ways there are to fall apart after the loss of a mate. He’s walking around like a hollowed-out old man, Alice is… not quite there, a little unbalanced.

Sometimes he wonders if Rosalie should have stayed, should have taken his place instead. He would have given it to her, without question. Rose only deserved good things, easy things.

But then he wonders. If living through it all really was easy or good. It doesn’t feel like it, most days. It’s a heavy weight in his chest and a constant feeling of leaving something behind (he’s got one of her hair ties around his wrist; it’s dumb but he always had one on him just in case - at school, when they went hunting, everywhere; he’s also got one of her shirts in his bag. It won’t smell right, being crammed in with his stuff, but he brought it anyway).

Rose wouldn’t have been happy in this world. She wouldn’t have known what to do with Alice or Seth. She would have been angry at the disruption to her life. She would have been afraid and lonely and lashed out at everyone.

No, not good and easy at all.

Then he wonders how Jasper would have faired, without Alice, and that is a grim, grizzly train of thought. Thanos would have begged for death if Alice had been taken and Jasper left behind. He’s only ever seen a glimpse of the monster behind the man over the decades since Jasper and Alice joined the family, and it’s enough to think that perhaps nature intervened and tried to protect everyone from what Jasper would become without Alice.

They stay in Alaska for two days; Tanya and Carmen are ill-at-ease with Seth, even after they explain who he is.

“But,” Tanya had frowned, “why is he with you?”

He didn’t have an answer for that.

Because Seth was… he was Other, like the Cullens. He understood what it was like to be special and expect to be strong enough to survive and to save; to be beyond the reach of petty mortal shit. He was a fucking kid, who’d lost his family, his friends, and most of his community. Fuck, at this rate, he’d lost his childhood too. He was the natural leader of what remained of the pack, and he’d done something fairly smart - looked for adult guidance.

A shame that the only thing he could find in its place was him and Alice. If someone had ranked his family by ‘best choice to care for a teenage boy’ he, Alice, and Jasper would have been dead last. Edward would have ranked higher.

(It still feels weird to think or talk about Alice without adding ‘and Jasper’. Like he’s mispronouncing a word.)

But it is what it is, and Seth’s still clocking more hours doing online school than online games on the laptop Alice gave him, plus there’s a bunch of food in the back of the Jeep, so they aren’t failing too badly.

Seth turns red when Tanya smiles at him, and Alice banishes him to a guest room, loudly forbidding any imprinting for the next decade, and that just means Emmett has to explain imprinting to Carmen and Tanya, and Alice has to read the riot act to Tanya about not flirting with the fourteen-year-old boy upstairs and it almost feels like old times.

They go hunting whilst Seth is asleep, and it’s obvious that nothing is the same. So much of the forest surrounding the house is just… gone. Empty, as if there were never trees looming over them, underbrush to push through. There are fewer animals to track and hunt, no excuse to be picky.

It was probably the same around Forks, truthfully, except there was that cloud of grief and horror surrounding him and Alice when they hunted - that was where Edward stumbled and fell. That was where Jasper couldn’t run any longer.

That was where he heard Alice scream when Rosie disintegrated.

In the harsh light of day, the situation feels much bleaker, much bigger outside of the insular forests of the Olympic Peninsula. 

They don’t see a single bear.

He’s not entirely sure why they’ve come to Alaska, except he sees Carmen and Alice go off together, finds them sitting quietly together talking. On one hand, he wishes that he could sit with them; that he lost Rose just like they lost Jasper and Eleazer, but on the other hand, he doesn’t want to be a part of that particular club. Doesn’t have words left to comfort Carmen. Most of his platitudes have started sounding hollow.

Alice vanishes one morning and leaves him to help Seth with school work, and he grimly realizes they have nearly four more years of this until Seth graduates. But things will be different before then; they’ll be back in Forks and Seth can ask paid professionals to explain algebra to him.

When Alice returns, it’s time to go - she’s been off in the wilderness, trying to See around Seth, and deciding to go off on her own is, apparently, the best way.

“Call us if you need anything,” Tanya says, pulling all three of them into crushing hugs, and if Seth turns red and tries to look down Tanya’s top, Alice pretends not to notice.

“Where are you headed next?” Carmen asks as Seth climbs in the back, clutching an energy drink they’re all going to regret.

Alice smiles. But it’s the wrong kind of smile; it’s sharp and sinister and looks wrong on her face. A Cheshire Cat smile, a Joker smile, and Emmett wonders if after all these years together, Jasper’s reactive violence hasn’t bled into his wife a little.

“We’re going to Mexico.”

—

The trip to Mexico can be described as long.

If the Jeep wasn’t Rosalie’s last gift to him, then they probably could have run there faster, even with Seth in tow. But there won’t be any more perfectly modified cars ever again, so he’s staying with the Jeep.

Alice gives up the passenger seat once they make it through to Alberta, apologetic that Seth’s been crammed in the backseat. But then Alice starts muttering to herself, tapping away on her phone, and seems distracted and irritated when Emmett tries to get her attention.

He can’t make out what she’s saying at all, it’s just an irregular hum, and he wonders if she’s having more of her one-sided conversations with Jasper.

The trip takes a week, winding through landlocked states. It shouldn’t take so long except everything is in chaos; they lose an entire afternoon carefully shifting some abandoned cars off the road to get the Jeep through in the middle of backwoods Montana. They spend hours waiting for gas every time they stop. And Seth might be a mystical shapeshifter, but he needs a proper bed, and hot food, and human moments; they have varying success at finding all three, but they try, and Seth is nothing if not agreeable and grateful for even the smallest attempt at making him comfortable.

They find an abandoned farm in Wyoming and they let Seth transform and run for a few hours at dusk, sitting on the front of the Jeep in silence until it’s dark enough for them to hunt, as well.

It feels like the world has ended, some days, and they are the only ones left - to him, at least. Maybe that’s why Alice is talking to herself - it’s the only sensible answer she’ll get.

Some towns are empty; no one for miles. The information that filters through the internet mentions people heading to the cities, to the larger towns because the population is too small to keep so many different settlements functioning. There’s no money or survival if you’ve lost your entire farm, if the hospital or the school is unmanned.

And Emmett wonders if he’s been cured of human blood for good now he’s seen so much of it spilt, stale and rotting, on the backroads of the country. It feels like everything smells just a little bit like decomposition right now. He’s not sure if that’s him or if that’s everything.

And they get closer to Mexico.

—

They arrive just as the day turns to night, and he expects… he’s not sure what he expects, honestly. Maybe setting up in the motel they’ve found, that Alice has declared a safe distance from any of Maria’s plotting, and getting Seth some fresh food - he hasn’t complained, but even Emmett’s tired of the pre-packaged, long-life crap.

Instead, Alice slips from the car, clad in jeans and a leather jacket, tucking her phone in her back pocket.

“I’ll be back in a few hours,” she says, like she’s going alone.

“What?” Seth looks suspiciously at the pair of them, and it’s only later that he realizes the kid is terrified of being left behind. That he’ll cling to their belt loops with his dying breath. His mom left, his sister left, his friends and pack left, and he took a chance on leaving everything else that was left to stick with them.

That makes Emmett feel guilty for no reason he can name.

“I can’t see with you around me,” Alice says gently. “It’s a simple clean-up job, it won’t take long.”

Seth frowns and looks at Emmett.

“You aren’t doing this alone, Alice. Even if we wait in the car,” he says with finality. This isn’t going to be an argument, because there’s nothing to argue about. He’s not letting Alice roam around in a city full of uncontrolled newborns, no matter how talented she is.

Alice scowls. “I know what I’m doing, Emmett,” her voice is sharp, and she never likes reminding them of how long she was alone before she found Jasper; what the family knows about those years is quite vague and patchwork - as far as Alice is concerned, nothing important happened before she met Jasper, as if she popped into being on a diner stool just in time.

Rose always suspected Alice’s real story was very lonely, very frightening, but no one asks when she so obviously doesn’t want to talk about it. He knows what it costs for her to bring it up now.

“I know. But that doesn’t mean I’m letting my only sister go newborn hunting alone,” Emmett says, and Alice sighs and nods - her visions have gone dark, obviously this is not a battle she can win.

Emmett ends up wishing that he and Seth had stayed behind.

Alice is like a laser, zeroing on her targets with a single-minded intensity. He hears that hum faintly, of her talking to herself and he wants to ask her what she’s saying, what thoughts are so important she needs to say them almost out loud but he doesn’t get a chance.

The first one of Maria’s abandoned acolytes is a girl around seventeen with matted black hair and a dress that Emmett mistakes for some kind of lace at first, except it’s the remnants of dozens of meals dried across the front of her, ripples of dried, stale blood that have solidified into a repulsive black and red mass.

She snarls at them, her face bloody, and the pale form of a man beneath her. Alice just walks up to her and backhands her with a crack that makes Seth jump; Emmett flinches but he’d never admit it.

The newborn snaps at Alice, and in one movement, the girl is pinned to the brick wall behind them, cracks spiraling up her neck from Alice’s tight grip.

“Who the hell are you?” the girl snaps in Spanish and Alice says nothing, just rips her head off by her neck, the screech sounding deafening so close. Moments later, her body is in pieces in a dumpster, along with her victim, and Alice has set the entire thing alight, her face blank.

Emmett makes a decision then, to leave Seth in a brightly lit burger place with a promise he’ll be back in one hour because this is nothing a kid should see.

And he’s so, so glad that he made that choice. Alice’s hunt is something that will be burned into his brain for the rest of his life.

The next newborn is a middle-aged male who reminds Emmett of his English lit teacher back at Forks, right down to the salt and pepper streaks in his hair and the slightly off-center nose. He’s the worst of the night, Emmett silently decides, as he guards his hunt - a family of five that he’s only half-finished. The father is extremely, viscerally dead and there’s no putting him back together; the mother is choking and struggling for a breath that her torn throat will never give her as she bleeds out; the baby in her arms is long dead with its head taken up by a gaping wound. There are two young girls, clinging to each other in terror, and there is no way this ends well.

The newborn obviously thinks Emmett is more of a threat than petite little Alice, practically frothing at the mouth as Emmett approaches him, and grabs at one of the children. It all happens in seconds - the girls scream, there is a crunch of bone and more screaming, the rich scent of fresh blood, another crunch of bone and muscle, and then the newborn’s head is half-torn away before Alice can get better leverage and finish the job. The dead child dangles from his grip, bent the wrong way; her sister has her head half caved in, and the mother still chokes on her own blood. It all happens so fast.

He should have stayed with Seth.

He lets Alice handle the rest of them - she’s located six of Maria’s surviving nine, and after the family, she takes them down swiftly and wordlessly, just a diminutive blur and the sound of tearing metal.

The sweet smoke clings to them as they make their way back to Seth, Alice’s head down.

“I thought,” she began and just shook her head. And he reached out to squeeze her shoulder.

She thought it would be closure, would feel like an ending or an achievement. That there would be some peace in ending Maria’s life’s work. Instead, she’s just the same, but with blood on her boots and a tear in her jeans. The newborns barely got an opportunity to fight back, to give her the pound of flesh she was looking for.

Seth is waiting for them in the window of the store, a broad grin on his face when he spots them. Back to the motel for the night, now. And then tomorrow…

“So,” he says finally. “What now?”

--

Chapter Text

four. five years later

If Emmett could add up the amount of time spent driving over the last five years, it would be embarrassing.

Depressing.

And most likely illegal.

Five goddamn years.

Seventeen trips down to Mexico to deal with overzealous vampires and abandoned newborns. Just because Maria was out of the picture didn’t mean that there wasn’t another upstart lusting after herd lands, raising an army. Usually someone who wasn’t old enough to know the unspoken rules, who was careless and stupid and could expose them all.

Alice sits beside him, in the passenger seat. He can see every single day since written on his sister’s face - she says that they have to behave like they’re aging, changing, or they won’t be able to go back to Forks again. As if the changes had been gradual, and not just her striding out of the house on one of their few visits back, clad in black with the eyeliner heavy around her eyes. Seth had choked on his soda, his eyes wide, and Emmett remembered that gesture that Carlisle used to do, where he pinched his nose when one of the ‘kids’ was being particularly vexing.

He gets it now. And if he could go back and apologize to Carlisle for actively being a shit, he would. (Some of those incidents were too funny to take back, but he would sure as hell apologize for trying his hardest to give Carlisle a migraine.)

But he’d looked at Seth - who was maybe sixteen at the time, and staring at Alice’s leather-clad ass with something between horror and intrigue (and Emmett sympathized with the kid; Seth hadn’t exactly clocked much time with kids his own age since the blip beyond online classes, and that wasn’t exactly the recipe for healthy romantic relationships. But Alice? Oh hell no) - and he blurted out the dumbest thing he’d ever said.

“I didn’t realize the dress code today was for ‘Jasper Whitlock’s Wet Dream’.”

Alice had frozen, Seth had decided that he was going to get another soda immediately, and Emmett hated himself for even saying Jasper’s name in front of her. But, in for a penny, in for a pound.

“I’m just saying, that that is a look that he is very sorry he missed,” he had continued carelessly, as he finished packing the Jeep. As if he didn’t know that he was saying all the wrong things. He wanted to say that it was okay it still hurt - he felt like half his chest had been carved away every single day with Rose. That sometimes when he was scrolling through his phone and an old video autoplayed, just the sound of Edward’s voice or Esme’s laughter made him feel sick and small. That he missed his brothers and the man that had, for all intents and purposes, raised him in this life beyond anything he ever imagined.

He wanted to hear Alice say it back to him; admit that Jasper’s absence was making her crazy, was eating away at her faster than she could control it, and it was making her into a person she didn’t even recognize. But she didn’t. He didn’t. They were words they didn’t even need to say because it all boiled down into one thing - they were both in pain. They would always be in pain. Sometimes the shape of the pain changed, and that was okay.

Seth dealt with it better than the two of them, Emmett thought. It had become a tradition to be home in Forks on the Anniversary, where Emmett would supply the booze. The first couple of years, Seth drank with Colin and Brady on the Res; sleep in the Clearwater house, and come home looking older than ever.

But that had stopped. Now it was Emmett and Alice he drank with, out in the woods. He’d tell dumb stories about growing up on the Res, about growing up with Leah, about Harry and Sue and Jacob and all of the ones who had left them behind. Then Seth would cry, just let the tears run down his face because it was unfair. It was so fucking unfair that Seth had lost everyone.

At least Emmett had Alice, and even Tanya and Carmen up in Alaska. The Clearwater family had not been a large one and Seth was the last. The only, now.

Emmett still had no idea why Seth had thrown his lot in with Alice and Emmett. He figured the kid would head back home eventually. But the years passed, and Seth had stayed. Clung to them, almost.

When Seth started crying, it was up to Emmett to fill in the silences. Sometimes it was Alice who started with some fragment of a story that she drifted off in the middle of and never finished. And Emmett had good stories, silly stories, the sort of stories that made being a part of a family, of loving someone and losing them a little bit worth it for having known them.

They still marked the anniversary, and Leah and Sue’s birthdays, with alcohol for Seth. And maybe it was a fucking irresponsible thing to do, but it was something. It was better than the memorials that had slowly gone up, with names etched into stone. Charlie had escorted them to see them when they got back from one trip, and it felt like some kind of fever dream to see the names on the pillar of marble - one of ten that sat in Forks Municipal Park. Rosalie Hale. It made him want to laugh and vomit. The second time Rosalie got a headstone without a body to bury. There’s one back in Rochester, a memorial plaque at the base of her mother’s headstone, that they visited once, back in the 60s.

It makes him feel better that Jasper’s name is above Rose’s. That Jasper’s taking care of Rosalie, like he’s taking care of Alice. Or maybe Rose is bossing Jasper around, because she hated not being in control, and Jasper knew how to mope. But it would be worse, somehow, if Carlisle and Esme and Edward were all clustered together under ‘Cullen’, and Rose and Jasper had been alone. They both would have hated that. He still takes flowers down, for Rose and Esme and Bella, when they go to leave again - one of the younger people to do so. Most of them are wildflowers from the forest, because Esme’s garden has nearly gone to seed - what was left of it, anyway - and cut flowers are expensive enough to be noticed unless it’s a special occasion.

At the Res, Emmett and Alice had stayed in the cruiser, let Seth and Charlie approach their memorial - made of native wood, and hand-carved, there was only one pillar which someone seemed so much worse. There weren’t enough people on the Res to begin with, and now there are even less. The spirit wolf carved on the top was so lifelike, Alice had likened it to Sam’s wolf, the shiny black eyes following them.

They’d found Seth flowers to bring to his mother and to Leah. Alice had helped him pick out nice ones, ones that were chemically treated to last a whole year.

Flowers aren’t the only thing that are expensive. Gas, fresh food, utilities… entire towns have been abandoned because of it. The stock market is a disaster, and he still has no idea how Alice untangled their investments so well. They were never in any real financial trouble, even with their support of the Quileute reservation (he wasn’t going to watch that community falter; they needed power and water and food and medical care as much as Forks, as Port Angeles, as Seattle, but they had a hell of a lot more trouble finding help.)

Alice had wondered aloud why Carlisle had never helped them out in the past, and Emmett remembered that it was something to do with ‘respect’ and ‘dignity’ but, in hindsight, it felt petty and shallow. Jasper had spent decades pouring money into reparation charities and scholarships down south, and Rosalie had funded numerous womens’ not-for-profits. As much as Carlisle wanted to live and respect humans, he had still felt superior to them, had felt the need to turn his back on people who had more than one very justifiable reason to reject them.

One thing that he had learned over the years was that the idea a vampire couldn’t change was bullshit. They changed slowly, and they changed in the face of great upheaval, yes. But they also changed with contemplation, with discussion, with compassion, and with new choices.

Vampires were, essentially, humans - just slower.

“Can we stop?” Seth leans forward between the seats, pulling Emmett back to the present. A present where Alice pretends she wears dark eye makeup and skintight black clothing because it makes their cover story more convincing. A present where Seth is nineteen years old - a high school graduate and part-time online college student. He’s the same age now, as Leah was. The same age that Alice will always be. Older than Bella will ever be. It’s a mind-fuck on the best of days. “Preferably somewhere with pancakes?”

Sometimes, Emmett wonders how long this can last, the way they live. Traveling eight months or more out of the year, only popping back into Forks occasionally; Seth’s welcome presence in their lives; it feels temporary, like they’re waiting for something that will never, ever arrive. There’s no reset button, no grand plan. Just them treading water for five years.

It’s not that they aren’t doing good - stemming the vampire population down south is important; it wouldn’t take much for the decimated cities to be overrun. It’s a fact of life that predators require prey and that a balance must be maintained. It’s the reason that he and Alice log their hunting grounds, to make sure that no one area is targeted too often. Not until nature has a fighting chance. He’s bored to tears of deer and fox blood, but the number of bears he’s seen in the last few years can be counted on one hand. It’s why hunting - for humans, at least - is so expensive and regulated now - there just aren’t enough animals.

Sometimes he wonders if it’s time to sit Alice and Seth down and have a talk. Confess that he feels like this arrangement is reaching the end of its practicality - that Seth deserves to have a life. When he’s home, he spends time on the Res (enough that last summer, he stumbled home at dawn with lipgloss on his collar and a stupid grin), but not enough. He should be at his house, studying and working and hanging out with his old friends. Rejoining his old pack. That they can still be friends, still get drunk in the woods on the anniversary, they can still harass him about his studies and eating healthy. Good-bye doesn’t have to mean forever.

Alice looks over at him, from the tops of her sunglasses, as if she knows he’s worrying again. It’s the very same look he gives her when she’s been talking to herself again, mouthing the words and slipping into Spanish, and answering questions no one ever asked.

“Pancakes for Seth,” she orders, as he nods and taps on the GPS for the nearest reputable diner.

She’s plotting the next stage of their route; they aren’t talking about the scene they left behind in Mexico City, of gang members with gruesome blade wounds that had drawn a few newborns out to ravage the bodies. Alice had carved out the bite marks on the bodies to look like torture, but something about the scene had left her in a strange mood.

Every time he looks at Alice, he knows his brother would hit him if he saw his wife and the state she was in. She’s taken a few bites over the last few years, putting down newborns - thin, feathery scars on her arms that she never acknowledges. She doesn’t talk as much, and he’s not sure when the last time she mentioned clothes - beyond making sure that Seth is warm enough and has clean laundry. He would never, ever say it, but he sees the broken little mental patient in her more and more.

It’s overcast enough that he and Alice can join Seth in the diner; Alice stirring a lemonade absently with a straw, him staring into a cup of black coffee as Seth eats his body weight in pancakes. Things like eggs and meat are harder to get now, and Seth’s eaten enough pancakes, enough pizza and spaghetti and goddamn Pop-Tarts that Emmett’s almost entirely convinced they don’t smell vile anymore. They sure as hell don’t smell like something he plans to ingest, but like river water and grass, like car exhaust and nail polish, they aren’t bad scents anymore. He’s used to them.

Alice looks at him like he’s crazy, but he knows she agrees - he’s known that since Chicago when Alice brought Seth back a pizza without complaining. The same way that Seth doesn’t complain about ‘vamp-stink’ on his clothes anymore, or that none of them really notice that the house in Forks doesn’t smell like the family anymore. No Esme or Carlisle or Rosalie or Jasper or Edward. They’ve all faded away entirely. Even the dresses still hanging in his closet don’t smell like lemon-roses-cars anymore.

He still remembers the day Alice realized their mistake, not packing things away. The day she tore her closet apart because nothing smelt like him anymore. The great gulping sobs and desperate pleas for Jasper to come back. It had been hell to listen to, obscene and terrible. Seth had gone to the Res, and he’d hidden out in the garage, amongst Rose’s forgotten babies.

Alice had shut herself up in her room until they left again, a week later. He was near-certain that she had never cleaned up the mess either, unable to face it. Thinking of all of Rosalie’s cars, undisturbed in the garage, all of Rose’s interrupted projects and plans, he understood.

Breakfast passes without incident - they’ve got the act down to an art form, where Seth artfully trades his empty glass for Alice’s lemonade, and Emmett orders a sandwich to go, ostensibly for Seth to eat later. The most notable thing about them is Alice’s outfit and make-up, and honestly, it doesn’t even stand out that much. People wear what they can afford, what they can find.

“So, which way?” Emmett asks as they make their way back to the Jeep. The Jeep has held out like the true hero of the last few years - other than running out of gasp a few times, and a busted radiator that was an easy fix, it hasn’t faulted. But that was Rose; thorough, reliable, and thoughtful. She had covered every base when she rebuilt it, and there was nothing that would separate him from the damn SUV. Rose’s last gift.

“Up through Wyoming, I guess,” Alice said, snagging the passenger seat before Seth could, and reaching over to sync her tablet with the GPS. “The roads are better. No trouble that I can find.”

Emmett nods once - Wyoming has become a popular route; the roads have held out well, it’s quiet, and a lot of the smaller towns have managed to say afloat. Utah and Nevada are goddamn train wrecks - their sole journey through Nevada had nearly gotten Seth injured.

They pull back onto the road, and Seth has control over the radio and is currently obsessed with the sort of weird-ass music that would have given Edward a stroke. Alice is tapping away at her tablet, probably making sure there’s money on their credit cards, that the house is still okay, that Charlie Swan hasn’t bombarded them with emails about their welfare (he’d tried to send them money once, worried they’d get stranded without food or gas. Alice hadn’t accepted it, explaining that Carlisle and Esme had provided them with more than they would ever need, but Emmett appreciated that gesture. Understood Charlie had done it for Alice - for Bella and Edward - more than anything else.)

Alice gasped suddenly, the tablet slipping from her hands as she sits straight up, her eyes unfocused.

“What?” Seth looks alarmed, and Emmett always thought that it was kind of cute, the weird relationship Alice and Seth had built - both of them taking the overprotective sibling role as needed. Seth needed to be a little brother, needed that security in his life. And Alice had realized quickly, how lost Seth was, how alone in the world he felt - she probably remembered that feeling vividly.

“Alice?” Emmett pulled the car over. Alice’s eyes were wide, and she reached out and grabbed Emmett’s arm.

“Please please please,” she whispered, not reacting to them, and then gasping again. Emotions flickered over her face too fast to decipher and suddenly she was back, her eyes lit like they hadn't been in years, before she buried her face in her hands.

“A rat,” she mumbled. “A goddamn rat.”

“Alice, what’s going on?” Emmett said. “Talk to us.”

“I don’t know,” she said, her eyes shiny as she looked back up. “But I… I saw something. I saw them, Emmett. A rat just ran across the dashboard and everything changed…”

“What rat?” Seth asked, looking confused.

“You saw them? In the future?” Emmett asked urgently.

Alice nodded. “I did. I saw them at home. They didn’t know what was going on. That any time had passed. But not yet. The rat started something we need to get them back… Emmett, we have to go to New York.”

--

Chapter Text

Getting the full story out of Alice had not been easy. She’d been furiously tapping away at her tablet and shushing them as she had done her research, sinking into half a dozen visions intentionally - Emmett had caught her wiping at her nose, and the sharp tang of venom on the air, meaning that she was forcing them and that worried him beyond anything. 

Alice had tried to force her visions back when they had first lost everyone. It had been a few months of that low-hanging cloud of grief and shock, and one day she just hadn’t come out of her bedroom. She’d stayed up there for three and a half days before he’d gone up to investigate and explain that he understood the need for solitude, he did, but her absence was upsetting Seth.

She’d been sitting in the middle of her bed, that fancy iron bed that Jasper had built for her, with the flowers and butterflies moulded to the posts and had never said a word against the frilliness of it. 

(It had been Rosalie that like frilly, feminine furniture. He’d teased her over her choice of four poster beds, over canopies and hand-painted headboards; the mink-coloured velvet with the gemstones so many times. She’d finally picked a Japanese-style bed frame for their very last bed, one that he had liked, and he regretted it now. That he couldn’t let his wife have her one little girlish indulgence without turning it into a joke. If he’d known he’d never break another bed with Rose, he would have picked one carved and painted and frilled, just for her.)

Alice had just been sitting there, cross-legged, staring into space with a towel in her lap. He’d been confused for a split second until his brain connected all the details - the sharp, acidic scent of venom; the raw, shiny trail running from her nose down her chin and throat and leaving a white-yellowy stain down her top and onto the towel. Her eyes were unfocused but pitch black, and there was something wrong about how she was rocking, how her hands were clenched together. 

Pain. She was hurting herself, in whatever vision she was stuck in. 

He’d yelled and shaken her and she’d come back to herself with an agonised gasp, her hands closing over her head… it had been a mess, and when he’d confronted her (insisting that she could breakdown and fall apart in a million ways and he’d be there for her, but he would not and could not stand by and watch her intentionally hurt herself trying to find a loophole, a solution. They were gone. No vision was going to show anything different.)

Now, he doesn’t say a thing, and Seth silently offers her some paper towel so the venom doesn’t drip on her top. 

It’s five hours into their drive that Alice cusses and shakes her head. 

“Stop,” she says, finally and Emmett’s heart might be dead but it is pounding. 

Did she get it wrong? She got it wrong and they aren’t coming back. Whatever she saw was a mistake - maybe an old home movie or mistaken identity.

That tiny spark of hope - “I saw them at home. They didn’t know what was going on. That any time had passed” - hurt as it spluttered out. He wasn’t that lucky. He’d used up every ounce of his luck the day Rose had found him and that bear, and anything that had come after was just borrowed. A debt that had to be paid in full, and he had. No refunds.

Alice climbed out of the Jeep as he pulled over, taking a deep breath in the fresh air, the smell of her venom sharp as she went to pull out some water from the back. 

“So,” Seth said, finally speaking up, “what were you really seeing?”

Alice dumped the water on a ragged towel to sponge off her face, the venom bleaching the colour from the fabric quickly. 

“I got the timing wrong,” she said finally, tossing the towel in with the paper towels in the old bucket they used for that purpose. “We need to go back to Forks first, and prepare.”

“Alice, you need to stop and you need to explain everything,” Emmett said finally, irritation in his voice. “If we’ve got time to go to Forks, you can damn well tell us what you saw.”

Alice blinked at him and for a second, he’s seeing her. Not as the ‘Alice’ in ‘Alice-and-Jasper’. Not as Alice-Alone or as Alice Cullen or as the mental patient or the family psychic. Simply as Alice, imperfect and impulsive and smart-mouthed and sly. As his other half in the fantastic hell of the last few years. Fragile as hell and constant as the setting sun. 

“The fucking Avengers are attempting time-travel,” she began and faltered. “Listen, I never really paid attention to them when they stopped colour-coding their outfits, but one of them was trapped? I think? A rat ran across some kind of control panel and triggered something and now the Avengers are going time-travelling. Whatever they do is going to work, Em. They’re going to bring them back.” 

Silence.

He wasn’t expecting that. 

—

The really dumb thing is that Emmett has always been a big fan of Captain America and the Avengers. He had a bunch of the old, original merchandise and stuff from World War 2, from Cap’s beginnings. Rosalie even got him one of the original Bucky Bears as a joke for one anniversary. It’s sat on the top of the bookcase in their bedrooms for decades. 

He (and Jasper as well, he wants to be clear) lost their shit when the first Iron Man suit appeared - Esme had teased them, acting like kids over the news footage of that technology (and promptly forbidden any attempts to build their own because the very last thing the Cullens needed was the American military knocking at their door because they’d thought a fun weekend activity was hunting down materials for a homemade tech-suit — “and that includes you as well, Rosalie!”).

The Battle of New York had been ugly and terrible and a million other terrifying things, but it had also been incredible. Maybe because Captain America was back!  And it was definitely him! There was no actor alive that could fake Cap that goddamn well, let alone with the kind of strength and training displayed in that battle.

Or maybe because Iron Man’s suit was even better than ever, and he’d caught Jasper sketching out the design during the newsfeed, his brother looking positively transfixed at the potential behind the Stark tech. 

Or because maybe seeing superheroes saving the world made him feel a little less inhuman - that he could criticise the Hulk’s technique, point out the gaps in the Avengers’ approach, scoff at a missed shot, and just enjoy the idea of being able to go out and use what powers he himself possessed for good. 

Maybe a few times, after the battle, he mused about what it would have been like to be on the ground, allowed to join in the fight. Rose hated fighting, but Jasper would have (probably) been up for it. Alice might have tagged along if Jasper was going, and he could imagine his sister taking out one of the freakish battalions in wedges and a mini skirt. 

He might have even gotten his hands on that shield, just for a minute or two. 

Edward had laughed at him when he heard those thoughts, not meanly - more in a friendly, appreciative way. And maybe that debate was dumb and pointless, but there had been more than one day where he and his brothers had debated their own family’s fighting skill in relation to the Avengers. 

Yeah, the debacle with Ultron had been seriously messed up, and they had spent several days in the middle of the national park, waiting for Alice to give the all-clear to go home again. Ultron could have ruined everything, and Rosalie had been furious at the lazy, irresponsible approach to technology, privacy, security, and AI that Tony Stark had taken. (The whole ordeal had been ridiculous and scary, but it had been good, too - just a weekend in the woods, hanging out. That even if some psychotic A.I. had destroyed their carefully built lives, they still had each other and a national park full of game.) 

He’d watched the press conferences after the Blip with Seth and Alice. Seen that most of the original Avengers had survived, but there was no real joy or satisfaction in that. He saw the spaces in their ranks, carefully and obviously left so that the public knew that they had lost people as well. (Rose would have been pleased to see the Vision gone, and Carlisle would have had long discussions with Edward about the loss of Wakanda’s King and the economic and worldwide ramifications of that). 

Mostly, watching Captain America and the Black Widow fumble through press conferences and short interviews in the wake of the disaster, Emmett felt old. Like he’d suddenly and finally outgrown superheroes. 

Esme could throw a punch, it wasn’t hard.  And if you were going to go around calling yourself a superhero, you needed to be able to get the job done. It was as simple as that. 

Standing in front of his sister, telling him so earnestly that it was going to be the Avengers that fixed this shit, he felt… tired. He felt like Carlisle probably did every time Emmett came up with increasingly outlandish money-making schemes (mostly just to make his pseudo father pinch his nose and explain to Emmett once again why the idea was at best, unfeasible. Carlisle always was an easy mark.)

“Alice…” Emmett began and Alice scowled.

“Emmett, I have seen them. I have seen… Esme shrieking when she sees the dining room wall, and I’ve seen Carlisle nearly crash the Merc trying to get home, and Bella confused why she’s in bed in the middle of the day, and Jasper and Edward running back to the house and Rosalie is just yelling… I’ve seen Sue Clearwater crying, Emmett!” She stamped her foot and Seth looked so hopeful. 

“You saw my mom?” he asked, his eyes wide, and for a second, he’s still that confused kid that came looking for guidance at the home of his natural enemies because that made sense in some strange, twisted way. 

Seth had had a raggedy Avengers t-shirt when he arrived, that he slept in. Emmett idly wondered where that t-shirt was now. 

“Sue was there. I can’t see Leah but I’ve never been able to see wolves,” Alice said kindly and Seth is nodding urgently. 

“If Mrs Cullen was mad about the wall, that means she’s come back,” Seth says, a sense of urgency in his voice, and Emmett feels sorry for him - needing Alice to be right that badly. 

“Talk me through this, Alice,” is all he says, but his head is already a million miles away, clinging to Rose and making her goddamn swear she will never fucking leave his line of sight again. Smelling that lemons-roses-cars scent that he misses so bad he’d dream about it, if he could. Anything and everything she wants is hers, as long as she never, ever goes where he can’t follow again. Listening to Rosalie demand for him to explain what he’s going on about and why he’s being strange. The weight of her arms around his middle, her bracelet (the fancy one that can’t be taken off) pressing against him, and her head resting against his shoulder. 

He’s getting his goddamn hopes up. He’s pinning every single moment of… not peace, but acceptance - on Alice right now. It’s like realising too late that he’s falling and it’s a long way down, and he’s too far gone, so he might as well accept it and throw his lot in with Alice and Seth. 

“Time-travel?” he presses when Alice fixates too long on unimportant details. 

“I can’t see much, I just get flashes - of the ‘50s, I think? And of the Battle of New York,” Alice says decisively. “They’re looking for a trigger, I think. I don’t know, and I can’t see enough clearly to decipher it - there’s someone else blocking my visions.”

“Maybe that’s the part we’re supposed to focus on - the time travel, not the rescue,” Emmett said, possibilities blooming in his head. 

Go back and save Rosalie. 

Go back, stop Jasper from trying to eat Bella, so that they never leave.

Go back, and find Bella in Arizona, and leave the pack alone, to be normal kids. 

… Go back and protect Rose. 

Go back and rescue Rose and give her the family she wanted. The little boys with blond hair and the little girls with mischievous eyes. The house with a vegetable garden, summers at the shore, weddings and birthdays and graduations and… and…

He sees it in Alice’s eyes too. But there was no overlap in her human life, and Jasper’s. Maybe she could go back and save him from Maria, let him live out his life like a normal guy. Or maybe she could go back and find out who she was and just go off and find Jasper sooner. 

Go all the way back and fix all the little snarls and all the hurts they carried with them. A second draft of the story, one that granted all their wishes, erased all their regrets. The temptation was tangible.

“No.”

It’s Seth who speaks, and his voice is angry. Desperate.

“You aren’t going time-travelling.” Seth looks between them. “Running away so you don’t have to deal with this? That’s just fucking selfish.”

“Seth,” Emmett began but paused. Seth was right. Running away to the past didn’t solve anything. Mostly, it involved either dragging Alice and Seth with him, to a place where they have less than they have right now, or leaving them behind. And he cannot, in good conscience, do either. Not even to give Rosalie the one thing that she’s always wanted beyond anything else. 

He might not be a good husband, but he’s trying to be a good brother. 

“You get to run away from this! I don’t! I still end up right here, alone!” Seth spat, and Emmett didn’t need any special skills to detect the panic coming off him. “There’s nowhere I can go and-and be with Mom and Leah and the Pack where this doesn’t happen… I-”

“Seth.” Alice’s voice is soft, kind. “Just imagine, for a moment, you had a chance to go to a place with your mother and your father and Leah. Where none of this had happened and all the bad stuff and the hurt could be undone…”

Seth falters then, at the mention of Harry Clearwater. He understands a little, then. But he’s got a point. He and Alice can run away into the past and leave this mess to someone else, and be with the person they love the most. 

Seth can’t. Seth is tethered to this time and space, irreversibly. And that means Emmett and Alice are too. 

“We’re not going anywhere,” Alice finishes. “It just sounded… nice.” She looks back at Emmett. “But maybe we could join that fight against the monster? Before everyone vanished?” She looks uncertain and then shakes her head. “I need to hunt before I look again.” They’re lucky that they’re close to some kind of wooded area as Alice takes off, a black streak in the air as she runs off. 

“Will the Avengers even let us fight with them? Or let us time-travel?” Seth asks, still irritated, as he rummages in the back of the Jeep for snacks and a soda. “Will time travel take us to the battle or do we have to get there ourselves? Wait, if everyone’s still alive, do we take them with us?”

There are, of course, a million variables with time travel. Emmett dabbled in astrophysics back in the late 70s, and he’s never met a vampire who doesn’t have a kind of weird relationship with the concept and passage of time. Hell, more than one visit to Denali has dissolved into a half-yelled debate over the merits of time travel (Kate has - had - many opinions on the subject). And the thing is that Emmett can’t answer them. Depending on whether Stark Industries has been testing time-travel for a while, or if this is entirely new research held together with duct tape and determination, there might not be solid answers. 

Let alone the human element - all three of them would be laughed out of their homes if they showed up (would they replace their past selves, or would there be two Seths and Alices and Emmetts? Another problem) demanding they immediately head to a notoriously security-conscious African country to fight a giant purple space monster from decimating half of all life across the galaxy, even with Alice’s visions.

And Seth’s a shifter, they’re vampires - what works for humans might not apply to them. As they wait for Alice to return, it feels like maybe time travel is a false flag. That the past is the past and messing with it sounds like a recipe for great and terrible things. 

It’s a shame his mind keeps going back, longingly, to the great things as he waits for his sister to return with answers.

—

Alice is gone maybe an hour and comes back with brighter eyes and determination in her stride.

“You saw?” Seth asks, standing up and stretching. He thinks it’s funny, how Seth went from this kid who - for fourteen - was tall and muscular. But in hindsight, that kid was a scrawny thing. 

Sue and Leah aren’t going to recognise him, and that’s a melancholy thought for someone who hasn’t changed physically, since the 30s. 

“I saw.” Alice stops in front of them and rocks back on her heels. “We have a little more than two weeks before we need to be in New York - I think I’ve got a decent read on the location of the compound, especially if I use one of the computers at home to get a look at the satellite shots in the area.”

Jasper’s computer, the one on the third floor. The only one of the family’s computers they didn’t disable. Rosalie and Jasper ran the family computer systems with military precision, and both Emmett and Alice had realised quickly that most of them needed to be taken offline or risk a security breach that they wouldn’t be able to deal with as efficiently as their spouses could. Jasper’s desktop had only been allowed to remain out of sheer necessity for financial and identity management. And now hacking into satellite images for the superhero compound. 

Esme had forbidden them from using family resources or hacking to snoop on the superheroes years ago.

“What then?”

“We get a fixed location, we reload the Jeep, and we head to New York. The future is blurred past a certain point, but everyone being back at home is fixed at the moment.” Alice looked thoughtful. “There’s definitely someone there blocking me. I thought it might be a time-travel paradox but it’s definitely a person.”

“What do we need from Forks?” Emmett asked. They were still nearly a month away from actually needing to head back. 

“Gas for the Jeep - there’s a severe shortage on the east coast. Restock food and medical supplies for Seth.

“And we're probably going to need Jasper’s guns.”

Chapter Text

six. be prepared

It’s the fastest trip they’ve ever made back to Forks, even though Alice says that they don’t have to rush that much. But Emmett’s already decided that he’d prefer being early than late.

Alice spends the trip logging visions, drawing and noting down every single thing she has seen so far - he’d forbidden her from forcing visions, especially so close to Seth, when she had already given herself a nose ‘bleed’. She hadn’t been happy, but she’d finally agreed.

Seth has taken over the front passenger seat, trying to get through as many college assignments as he can on Alice’s advice - whatever happens next is going to be chaotic, so the last thing that he needs to worry about is school work in the aftermath.

He had spent most of the trip demanding Alice go over what she knew in detail, and she had remained impossibly stubborn about what she revealed.

“Nothing is certain, Emmett,” she had finally snapped. “I’m only as certain as everyone else is, and you aren’t. Our choice is we play this hand and try to get them back or we don’t. That’s the only definite thing I can tell you.”

(Will they be okay? Will she be okay? Will they remember? Will they be human if they come back?)

(Will they be okay, Alice?)

(What’s going to change, Alice?)

(What aren’t you telling me?)

By the time that they pull up to the Forks house, Alice is treating everything like this is a military operation whilst still barking orders at Seth to get some sleep and not spend hours awake playing video games.

(If this works, Seth is going to have to deal with Sue Clearwater and Alice being on his ass about eating and sleeping and studying; and watching their family have to meet and know this version of Alice is both incredibly funny and incredibly sad.)

The Forks house still looks wrong, even after all this time - no cars out the front, no colour, no life. The outside of the house could do with a fresh coat of paint, and all of Esme’s gardens have overgrown and gone to seed. All the cars are in the garage, instead of pulled around the driveway - they only need the Jeep, really. It had taken them weeks to psych themselves into going to the hospital to reclaim Carlisle’s Mercedes. All lined up, tucked in with their covers for some future they never thought was coming.

(He’s been meaning to pull out the Prius for Seth but he can’t bring himself to do it. Rose had been so transfixed by pulling apart an electric car, seeing how far she could push it, improve it. He just kept putting it off. It was just another thing that still felt too hard.)

He feels like he should have taken better care of the place, except what was the point? It was just them and this version of the world. The dining room was a struck-through list of the dead, and a crudely drawn map tracking their road trips, all over that fancy french paint Esme had giddily painted the least-used room in the house. Alice had started a family portrait in the upstairs hallway during one of her uglier periods - they all hated it because of how fucking realistic it was, and she’d angrily slapped black paint over their faces the last time she found Emmett staring blankly at that perfect replication of Rose.

Seth had begged him not to let her paint portraits again.

He’s trying not to get his hopes up, that this stupid plan is going to work and they’ll all be coming home just the same as when they left and looking at the wreckage of Esme’s home… well, karma might bring them back just because he really doesn’t want to have to explain any of it.

Alice is still listing all the things that they have to do before they leave again, an endless litany of both the inane (cleaning and restocking the Jeep, laundry, charging all the electronics and battery packs), to the more unusual and difficult (getting satellite images of the Avengers’ compound, creating 3D models, overlaying the lot with maps of New York state to get the right GPS coordinates; somehow locating enough ammunition and two full tanks of gas that they can safely stash in the back without getting found out - gas hoarding comes with a steep fine if they get caught; clean and test all of the family’s guns, and hunting until they can’t take another drop.)

Seth sleeps whilst he and Alice clear out the Jeep - they’ve got it down to an art form these days. They do all the maintenance themselves because Emmett doesn’t want anyone to touch Rose’s work, and you couldn’t be a Cullen and not be given some rudimentary engine and car maintenance skills. By force, if necessary - Rosalie took it all very seriously.

Had taken it all very seriously. Would take it seriously.

(This was all fucking with his head, he didn’t know how Alice lived like this - in a realm of possibilities.)

Alice hasn’t touched her Porsche in years. He knows why - Jasper’s sunglasses are still on the dash, one of his jackets on the backseat. The same way Rosalie left a handbag on the passenger seat of the BMW. It’s still there, waiting.

It’s easy to find grief in every corner of this damn house.

“How much damn soda does Seth drink?” Alice mutters, dumping empty cans in the recycling bin, scowling. The era of harassing Seth into not eating junk food has long since passed, but Alice still complains and insists on including inedible health food in their grocery orders against all logic.

Emmett thinks it’s funny that his sister, who has never been maternal, has picked that hill to die on. He and Seth aren’t above donating the worst of the health food Alice buys, but she persists.

“Enough to make those stocks you bought back in the 80s worth it,” Emmett jokes back, but Alice huffs. The stock market is only just recovering, and Alice is antsy to go back to her favorite game. He’d asked her once, how much money they’d lost and Alice had laughed darkly and told him he didn’t want to know. That the House of Cullen was still obscenely wealthy, could wile away their days without worrying about a thing. But she’d been resentful that she’d failed, that she hadn’t been able to protect them from that shortfall, that she’d lost the game.

She’ll get it all back, and then some. He has faith in her.

It’s early morning when Seth stumbles out of his bedroom for coffee and breakfast, and Alice takes that opportunity to vanish into the forest to be able to go over her visions again, to make sure they are still on the right path.

There’s an odd sort of tension, knowing that they have a deadline, a purpose. Never have any of their road trips had such a fixed schedule, had a final destination. Seth is kind of halfway between jittery and sluggish, and it’s Emmett who gently suggests he go for a run, go check on the res before they head out again.

“Alice has enough chores for us that this might be your only chance.” Seth laughs at that, and Emmett’s always been impressed by the way the kid rolls with the punches, takes each blow as it comes; how he catches his breath, and climbs back to his feet again ready for whatever came next. He doesn’t know many grown men or - vampires - who would take as many blows as Seth has and still find joy and humour and just anything good out of life anymore. They’re all familiar with the stories in the media, of the people - especially kids and teenagers - that hit rock bottom after the Snap and then just kept digging down.

Not Seth. He looked around and started building something for himself. 

If he wants to be honest with himself, Seth’s done more for him and Alice than they did for him. He gave them purpose, yes, but he gave them some humanity. He’s not going to deny that the void Rosalie left behind didn’t inspire violence and anger and a pain that wanted to claw out a bloody pound of flesh or two. To have him sit well and still, surrounded by her clothing and her scent until his joints seized and his skin began to mottle and flake. There were dark days, and having a kid around - a lost boy, an orphan… it didn’t fill the void, but it made it quieter.

He’ll take what he can get, honestly. And he’s more grateful to Seth than he can say.

—

Charlie Swan shows up two days later, obviously finding out they were home from the grocery delivery; there’s no way to keep a secret in this version of Forks.

It’s not a great time for him to show up, and even less great is the fact that Seth cheerfully invites him inside… to where Alice has every single gun in the house laid out on the dining room table. It’s not a small collection, honestly - they have a few family guns that they kept as part of their cover. Nothing fancy, just practical. But Jasper had collected a few over the years, enough that looked impressive spread out for cleaning and testing.

Charlie had gaped at the guns and then at Alice, still focused on dismantling one of the Glock pistols with the confidence of someone who knew what they were doing (as if a good Southern boy like Jasper would have brought guns into the house without making sure his wife knew how to clean, fire, and handle a firearm - even if she was entirely bulletproof).

Charlie’s worried about Alice a lot over the years - he’s tried to talk to Emmett about it a few times, and there’s not much Emmett can say.

“Sorry Chief, my sister lost half of her reason for existence in the Snap. Since she’s an immortal amnesiac, psychic ex-mental patient, she’s doing about as well as she can. I’m doing my best, and she’s eating and talking and not actively contemplating doing herself serious harm to my knowledge, so I consider everything okay.”

He knows that Charlie is projecting his sadness over Bella onto Alice, that his daughter might be gone but one of her closest friends is still alive and Charlie wants Alice to live the life that Bella never had. Alice’s still alive and supposed to be a college graduate by now. Not disappearing for months on end with her older brother and a kid from the reservation that Charlie’s not entirely sure how they know.

“…What is going on?” Charlie looks stunned and exhausted, and Seth is frozen in shock, realizing his mistake. Emmett is wondering what lie Charlie will believe, and Alice is still going over the guns like a seasoned professional.

“Where did these come from?” Charlie just looks at them as no one says anything, and Alice snaps ammunition into the rifle that has to be nearly half her height.

“Charlie,” she says seriously. “What would you do to get Bella back?”

Charlie’s face changes from horrified to well-worn grief and then to the sort of patronizing understanding that has become a fixture from any ‘adult’ that manages to corner Emmett and demand answers about how the poor Cullen children are coping.

“Alice…” Charlie begins, and the compassion is almost visibly leaking off him.

“She’s not crazy,” Seth blurts out and Emmett watches as Alice freezes for a micro-second, the surprise that flashes over her face at that statement and he wonders how many times his sister has heard the opposite of that statement - all the times forgotten in her human life, all the times in her vampire life and then after the Snap. Hell, he used to make jokes about it - ‘Crazy Alice’ - until it wasn’t funny or cute anymore. Until she was talking to thin air and staring at nothing and destroying her closet.

“The Avengers have found a way to bring everyone back,” Emmett says lamely, hearing how hollow his words sound. Like he isn’t pinning every hope and ounce of determination in his body to this endeavor. “We’re going to help.”

Charlie’s eyebrows raise even higher as Alice begins dismantling another gun.

“Guys, that is… so, so far out of your realm of responsibility,” Charlie began. “Alice, you and Seth have no business being anywhere near that kind of fight, you’ll get yourselves killed.”

He’s not expecting what happens next. None of them are.

Not for Alice to pick up the nearest handgun and fire it twice into the floor (into Esme’s beloved reclaimed floorboards, oh god); before Charlie can do more than jump away she closes her hand over the barrel and fires twice into her hand.

Charlie Swan is going to have a heart attack, his eyes are falling out of his skull and he’s gaping at Alice.

Alice, who tosses two crumpled bullets onto the dining room table, flashes Charlie an unscathed hand.

“You can use your service weapon if you think it’s a trick, Charlie.” Her voice sounds slightly distant, as if she’s trying to hold herself back from this conversation. “But if you could do that, would you go? If it meant they all came home again? Nothing can hurt more than not having them here.”

Charlie just stares at his sister like he’s seeing her for the first time.

“You’re like them, then. Those Avengers,” he manages, looking older than ever. “Is that why you survived? Because you’re stronger and… different?”

They can all hear the unspoken question - did Bella die because she was weak? Did they steal her rightful place amongst the living by being Other?

“No,” Alice lets out a laugh and gestures behind her at the list of struck-out names. “No, we died like the rest. I’m not one of the strong ones. And we’re not like the Avengers. We’re just…”

“The Cullens. We’re just the Cullens. Local weirdos,” Emmett breaks in; he can see the toll this conversation is costing Alice and a sudden awareness that it’s always going to be safer for Charlie if he knows less.

“And you?” Charlie looks over at Seth who just grins at him.

“Family secret,” he says, before meandering over to the table. “Which one’s mine?”

But before Alice can slide anything over to him, Charlie is there.

“Do you know even the first thing about gun safety, Seth?” Charlie is all business, as he measures up the handguns on the table. “Harry was gone before he would have taken you out.”

“Mom showed me with the rifle once but said I was too distracted,” Seth admits.

“Well, it was Sue’s dad that showed me, so let’s do this right.”

And that’s how Charlie Swan ends up teaching Seth to shoot six days before they leave. He has a hard time looking him or Alice in the eye again, and he sees that eat away at Alice just a little bit. She had always had a soft spot for Bella’s father. Charlie Swan was the closest she had ever gotten - would ever get - to seeing how real parents behaved, what a human family was like.

Because no matter what, Carlisle and Esme would always be too young, too displaced, to ever capture that. That they had all lived too long, were all too strong and fast and smart, to capture that typical family dynamic. What they had had always been good, had always worked well, and neither he nor Alice would ever complain (especially not now) about their family. But he understand what Alice sought out from Bella and Charlie, what she savored being adjacent to that.

He envied Alice that, in some way. She has no memory of her human family to hold Charlie and Bella up to; she could simply appreciate them as they were, without the brand of regret he has when he tried to remember his mother; or when Rosalie thought of her brothers, or Esme and her son.

But Charlie’s distance wouldn’t matter - they’ll bring home Bella and everything will be okay again. Charlie won’t have to keep trying to fit Alice into the hole that Bella left behind. Alice won’t have to pretend that she’s not hurt that revealing her true self to someone who she cared about, even just a little, resulted in this polite but distant rejection.

They can fix this - he’s got faith.

—

Charlie is - unexpectedly - there to see them off, looking more like he’s present at a funeral than anything else. In the early morning light, it’s easy to see how much older Charlie looks - the grey in his hair, the dark shadows under his eyes. It hasn’t happened overnight, and it’s a stark reminder that just because things don’t change for him and Alice, that they don’t change, that it’s not like that for everyone else. That the weight of all that has happened sits differently on humans than it does on an immortal.

“You got everything?” Charlie asks gruffly, as he loads in the gun bag; Alice has been thorough, had returned from Newtons with a cardboard box of ammo and a scowl on her face. There’s nothing Alice hasn’t packed, honestly. He’s pretty sure he saw a ski parka in one of the boxes.

“And then some,” Seth says with a grin, a breakfast burrito in one hand and a coffee in the other.

“Good. Don’t do anything stupid, okay?” Seth chortles at that, as if barging into the Avengers compound to join some kind of fight isn’t the epitome of ego and risk, and one of the wildest things the Cullens have ever attempted. And Seth? Well, he’s a long way from shot-gunning a beer and going cliff-diving at La Push.

Stupid doesn’t even come close to what they’re about to do.

“We’ll be fine, Charlie,” Seth says, taking another bite out of the burrito. “If things go wrong, I’ll just use one of these two as a meat shield.”

Alice is wearing yoga pants and a t-shirt with glitter on it - all black, of course - but it only highlights the ridiculousness of what Seth has just said.

“We’ll be fine, Chief,” he adds cheerfully, digging deep for the act. “Worst case scenario is that we get stranded and have to walk home.” It’s easier than he thought, to all into old patterns of convivial Emmett, the himbo-bro looking for the next prank or joke or funny story.

Charlie looks mildly horrified at that, even when Seth laughs.

“You kids get stuck anywhere, and you call me. We’ll get you back home somehow.” The determination in his voice makes Emmett feel sorry for him; as if there are any travel options available to them that Charlie could afford.

“It sounds like you’re all doubting me,” Alice says, pursing her lips in irritation. “As if I would let us get stranded.” As if it would matter - Alice would expect them to run home if shit hit the fan, and never consider that a problem. Not to mention airline travel might be offensively expensive, but Alice could afford it. Alice probably had standby tickets already booked.

“Never,” he says and Seth nods and then shakes his head trying to assure Alice no one would even expect her to make a mistake.

“Good.” She nods once and goes and climbs in the passenger seat, ignoring Seth’s indignant cries that he already called shotgun whilst she was doing her make-up.  But Alice just ignores him, already primly setting up the GPS.

“How does she manage to be more annoying than Leah? That’s her real gift,” Seth grumbles.

“It’s the visions,” Emmett says flippantly, and mentally wincing when he notices Charlie’s eyes widen.

“We’ll call you when it’s all over,” Seth turns to Charlie, flipping topics instantly. “But you’ll probably know, I guess, because everyone will be back? I’m not sure how it works.”

“Yeah, about that,” Charlie rests his hands on Seth’s shoulders - it might be possible that Seth is taller than the Chief now. “You keep yourself out of trouble, and you call me when you can. Anything you need. I want to make sure all you kids stay in one piece before anything else.”

Alice has gone still inside the car, and he knows she’s listening. Knows that Charlie doesn’t fully believe in what she knows, in what they can do. But that he is also very worried for all of them - certainly more worried than afraid of them and what they are.

“It’ll work,” Seth says decisively and somehow that is the signal to climb into the Jeep. The way Seth says it, it’s not a hope or a wish or mindless optimism from a kid that can find it in any situation.

It’s a certainty, a bet he’d make without second-guessing. All-in.

So that’s how they leave for the last time, with Charlie Swan raising his hand farewell in the rear vision mirror and Seth’s words hanging in the air.

It’ll work.

—

It’s a long trip.

It didn’t feel like it would be when they were planning it out, when they were hunched over the map Alice spread over the dining room table so that she could mark impassable roads as they planned. The little coil of red ink that tracked across the country, that marked out rest stops and meal spots for Seth, hunting grounds for them, and routes where they wouldn’t draw attention (the gas is hidden inside the backseats of the Jeep, just in case they get checked because Alice has never once managed to forge the gas-allowance papers well enough. She blames the ink).

But it is. It’s terribly long because everything they are betting on is on the other side of the country; this is a wildcard that could very easily go sour and leave them with nothing. Less than nothing.

Not only is he not sure how he’ll deal with it if this turns out to be nothing, but he’s got a rising sense of unease about how Alice will react. Because it really does feel impossible; time-travel. If this is what Alice is wrong about, if this is the very first time he should have bet against her, he knows that putting her back together will be ugly.

And Seth. Seth deserves a home, deserves to go to a college class in person, and meet people with normal problems. Spend time on the res and rejoin his community. That this three-man war they’ve been fighting has to end, one way or another. And as they pass miles and miles of worn-out freeway, of forgotten cars on the side of the road, of abandoned gas stations and falling-apart towns… he’s becoming grimly aware of the sheer size of what they are trying to accomplish, and he’s not sure how anyone - even gods and monsters - can manage it. This is the last road trip, the last fight. He knows this before he’s even decided it. That whatever happens, the next time they go back to Forks, it will be for good.

It’s not an easy trip, either. One of the hunting grounds is less robust than Alice saw, and neither of them feel good about taking the three skinny deer they finally find so they go without. The motel they stay at is freezing cold and damp, and Seth might be special but he’s still human and Alice is furious. They end up trading a half-gallon of gas to a stranded family - the husband’s eyes wary and the mother’s desperate - when they accept a handful of grimy dollar bills for something that is worth closer to fifty bucks.

Seth gives the kids snacks out of the trunk, their eyes wide and excited as he tucks another granola bar into their pockets. Alice gives them both the full story after they’ve pulled away; the money was been put back in the youngest child’s pocket because sleight of hand was always a favourite game in the family. But their story is like so many others - headed towards the Canadian border in hopes of something better than another broken-down town.

The radio cuts in and out, and Alice patches their phones into the car so that they can keep cycling through the road trip playlists; Seth started making them years ago - Dumb Songs Leah Was Obsessed with in Middle School and Songs Mom Would Sing Along to But Get the Lyrics Wrong Every Single Time. They’ve added dozens since then - Music that Edward Forbid Ever Be Played in the House and Songs with Lyrics We Definitely had to Explain to Carlisle are the two safest ones. He can’t listen to anything by Billie Holiday because he and Rose always danced to her music at their wedding. That was tradition. Alice can’t deal with David Bowie. And Seth always skips the Beatles - his parents’ favourite records, he had once said.

But the songs start sounding more like a funeral dirge, one for all the things they remember and have held tight to for the last five years. They start blurring and blending together, and when the music cuts out again, somewhere around Illinois, Seth doesn’t turn it back on. They just sit in silence, watching the road stretch before them as the sun goes down. 

It’s a long trip.

—

“Alice?” It’s after midnight and they’ve just crossed over into New York State; Seth is passed out on the backseat, snoring lightly, with headphones on. There’s no way he can hear them.

“Mmm?” Alice has a bottle of reeking nail polish on her knee, laser-focused on her manicure. He doesn’t ask.

“Are we going to die?”

She lets out a puff of breath and looks over at him; the shadows and light playing over her face makes her look haunted (like the question came too late and she’s the answer; dead and gone, the ghost of lost girls).

“Maybe? I don’t know,” she says quietly. “I can’t see, there are too many inhuman variables. But…”

“But?” He jumps on that too fast.

“I keep hearing ‘one chance’. Someone keeps saying it over and over again, and I cannot get a fix on who or why or anything,” she closes her eyes. “I know this is the path we’re supposed to take. I wouldn’t have pushed it if I thought there was too much risk. But I hate that I don’t know enough.”

Silence.

“We get Seth home at all costs, in one piece.”

“Agreed. And… I left a note.”

He looks over at her again. “A note?”

“For the family. If we don’t make it but they do. Just so they know that we went down fighting to fix things. Like they would have done for us.”

And they both fall silent.

He imagines that for a moment, to waking up and finding a note. One that says Rose died fighting to bring him back, as if that wasn’t a worse hell than being the one that was left behind. As if the price that was paid was worth him. He knows why Alice wrote it, but it still feels like a special kind of cruelty.

“Emmett?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s the first thing that you’re going to say to Rose?” A drop of nail polish falls onto the knee of Alice’s jeans. “When you see her again?”

The hole in his chest feels like it widens at that question; as if he can pour five years of grief and rage and fear and loneliness and deep, all-encompassing love and wonder and relief into a single sentence.

“I have no idea,” he admits after a pause. “You?”

“To Rose?” Alice smirks and he chuckles before he watches Alice’s face fall. “Em, I don’t know what I’m going to say to any of them.”

He doesn’t have advice or a solution or anything for this. He could tell her to look for a vision, but that’s only as certain as she is… As much as he is hoping-planning-praying that this all works, that Alice plays this hand right, and he’s going to have Rose back, he still cannot picture that moment, cannot imagine how it's going to feel or what’s going to come out of his mouth. Not once it’s over.

But now? Right in this second as Alice stares out the window with a frown and lights on the horizon indicate some kind of town… well, it’s not hard to find the words.

I’m coming home, Rose. I promise. I swear. I’m coming back to you.

—

It takes the best part of the week, but they make it.

The Avengers Compound is exactly what Emmett expected. Sleek and modern and clearly no expense spared. It’s the kind of place that he and Jasper - and Rose - could cause millions of dollars of very entertaining chaos very quickly. And for a moment, there’s a spark of anger at home nice this place is when so much of the goddamn country has fallen to ruin. The grass is still mowed, the windows are clean… it feels like an insult.

But at least it’s in one piece, at least they’ve made it.

It takes Alice an embarrassingly short time, leaning through the driver’s side window, to disable the gate that lets them in. (She huffs and points out that it took an entire day of visions in the middle of the Olympic National Park to work out how to crack it efficiently. It wasn’t luck or bad security or particular skill. But Emmett knows that his sister is clever, smarter than she gets credit for, and the end result is the same: they’re in.)

They drive slowly towards the main building, an obscure gesture of peace and not aggression; he doesn’t want to start a fight upon their arrival, wants to give whoever is in residence an opportunity to greet them rather than them simply invading one of the most secure bases in the country, demanding to help. 

Of course, he continues to be the universe’s personal punchline as red lights flash around the face of the building and shutters begin to close over it.

“I think that they know we’re here,” Seth says, and Emmett mentally swears - he wasn’t anticipating a warm welcome, per se, but this is… not ideal. This is not the beginning of agreeable negotiations. This is how they end up arrested and ... he didn't even want to finish that thought. 

“Probably just a response to the security system being overridden with a hairpin and an old USB,” Alice shrugs it off, leaning forward to get a better look at the campus. Emmett’s suitably impressed, honestly, at the maps Alice organized and the 3D modeling she showed them - it’s pretty damn accurate, right down to the fucking ugly Memorial Fountain.

But the way that Alice is looking around is making him… not nervous, but like maybe Alice has more of the story than she’s disclosed. A wave of irritation washes through him, but he knows the drill - don’t bet against Alice, even when it seems hopeless. Even now. He has to be in this, all or nothing. She knows what she’s doing, and if leaving him and Seth in the… not the dark, but maybe in the shadows, of some of what has to occur, well, he’ll go down willingly if it means that Rosalie comes home in one piece.

“Park there,” Alice points; it’s a decent distance from the front door, but Emmett’s not about to argue.

It’s not at all like all the times that they’ve gone looking for newborns. That’s just wandering city streets at night, stopping to get Seth food or maybe helping someone down on their luck to get to safety. This time, Seth is positively buzzing with energy, as they begin to get their stuff from the back of the Jeep - Alice wordlessly hands over guns to both him and Seth; Seth is pointedly handed a Glock, the one that Charlie insisted was best for a beginner.

He gets the gold one and flashes his sister a grin and she rolls her eyes. He doesn’t comment on the fact that the one she straps to her leg is one of Jasper’s most prized possessions.

He’s not expecting Alice to throw a motorcycle jacket at him.

“Cover up. The last thing we need is to start glittering,” she tells him as she zips hers over her outfit. “There are spare shorts for Seth in one of your pockets.” He’s not surprised - he’s usually tasked with carrying Seth’s stuff when he’s in wolf form, he’s more impressed that Alice managed to get shorts folded down into a pocket that flat.

“Seth, the gun is only if you need it,” Alice says, as she pulls on gloves, and passes Emmett a pair. “It’s only a tool - I’d honestly feel better if you were a wolf for whatever happens next. Do not hesitate to shift.”

“What do you mean?” Seth looks up from strapping the gun to his belt, and Alice looks away and slides what looks like a package of bandages into her pants.

“Alice?” He presses, and when she looks at him, she doesn’t need to say a word. They all know. Whatever comes next is going to be big. Bigger than she has ever alluded to - before now.

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you more because I can’t see through it. It’s just a mess. But… the future is still there and it’s still clear. I can still see them at home,” she finally says as they lock up the Jeep. “We’re on the right path.”

“Okay,” he nods - that's all he needs, really, to see this through - and Seth tosses his water bottle back into the Jeep before they lock it. “Let’s do this.”

“Where is everyone?” Seth wonders as they move towards the building that is still locked up like a prison. But there is not a single person nearby - there are definitely people inside, but no one has approached them or even noticed.

And then…

There’s a beat. Maybe it wouldn’t be noticeable if his senses weren’t as sharp as they were. But for a moment, it’s like the universe blinks or takes a huge breath. It’s… it’s a nice feeling. A good one. If he had to describe it, later, it would be the closest he’ll ever get to knowing how Jasper’s gift felt.

And then there’s a bird. A fat little grey thing that swoops past the fountain, one that wasn’t there before, one that comes together out of nothing in the middle of its flight, small enough to fit in Alice’s cupped hands.

Seth is staring at it, as well. At the sudden appearance of two security guards in the distance, outside some kind of storage shed beyond the main building, both of them stumbling.

And the sudden sound of a cellphone ringing from his sister’s back pocket.

Alice frowns as she pulls her phone out, glaring down at the screen before she stops dead. If it’s possible, all the blood leaves his sister’s face, her lips parting in surprise as she actually fumbles to answer.

“H-Hello?”

“Alice, Alice where are you?”

The sound of his brother’s voice, even through a phone speaker, is like a sudden shock, like the world has become sharper and more real in that moment. That’s Jasper, that’s his voice on the line. Not another phone video or old recording. That’s him. Which means…

“Jasper?” Her voice shakes, and she sounds like a child. “Jasper, is that you?”

“Alice…”

He can feel his own phone ringing in his pocket, and he pulls it out without taking his eyes off Alice; Seth is gaping at both of them, his own phone in his hand as he begins firing off text messages. They can still hear Jasper demanding to know where she is but Alice is frozen, her eyes wide as she stares up at the sky.

“Get behind the Jeep,” she says, reaching out for Seth’s arm. “GET BEHIND THE JEEP! EMMETT!”

“Emmett?”

He takes a moment to look behind him before he answers Rosalie, and he wishes he didn’t. He wishes he had told his wife he loved her and he was coming home.

He wishes he’d stayed in Forks to wait for her.

Too late now.

“Jesus Fucking Christ,” is all Seth manages to say as the missiles sail through to the compound and all three of them are thrown backward as the world explodes around them in blue light and a shower of metal and glass, and the last thing Emmett hears is Rosalie calling out for him from his phone.

--

Chapter Text

seven. second chance

The first thing that Emmett is aware of is the taste of gasoline in the air and the fact that he’s face down in what appears to be a crater. 

The second is that the world is dark from the cloud of dirt and debris that is in the air. 

“Seth? Alice?” He bellows but his voice sounds almost croaky and he can only blame the chemicals and shit that he’s breathing in and ignore the little gasp of panic that vampires shouldn’t be affected by stuff like that. “Alice?”

He’s half expecting to find his sister looking like a broken doll in the dirt, to find Seth burned up and dead. 

Instead, he stares blankly at the scene in front of him, taking a moment to comprehend what he’s seeing. 

At the shell of the Jeep.

Rose’s last gift. 

It’s… gone. There’s no salvaging it. It’s a burnt-out frame, something reminiscent of a war zone. 

His ears are still ringing.

All their stuff is gone. Burnt to a crisp. And for a moment, it’s too much. The photo of Rose he had on the visor; Alice’s tablet and stupid fancy handbag; all Seth’s schoolwork and soda and their clothes and phone chargers…

There’s nothing left.

It feels like an omen. 

“Emmett!” He blinks and looks behind him to see Alice standing outside of the crater with Seth, who has an angry cut on his face, and an equally impressive bruise on his temple but looks surprisingly energized. 

“I’m sorry, I … I didn’t see that coming,” Alice admits, as she joins him; she’s just as filthy; her sunglasses are cracked down the middle but they are still tucked on her head. 

“Neither did I.” He tries to turn it into a joke but it falls utterly flat. 

“Come on, they need help.” Alice tugs his arm. 

“You okay Seth?” Emmett asks as he climbs out of the crater and stopped dead for a moment. The missiles had done their work; what had once been a gleaming, state-of-the-art facility was now little more than burnt-out rubble. It was unrecognizable as anything and Emmett suddenly wondered about the guards that rematerialized before the explosion. There was no way that they had managed to survive. 

Not to mention anyone inside the facility. 

How many of the surviving Avengers were now dead? How could they not be?

And the fucking spaceship was still hovering over the remains, like some kind of sentinel waiting to pick at the carcass, to see signs of life. 

Seth just laughs at the question, and holds up his phone - the screen is physically hanging off but flashing in a desperate attempt to function.

“We’ll get you a new one,” Emmett says automatically and it feels like a profoundly stupid thing to say. 

“Come on! Can you imagine what the others will say? I got blown up by aliens!” Seth sounds slightly hysterical and it's Alice’s arm around his middle that stops him from half-bouncing. 

“We’re okay. We’re alive, and they’re back. We just need to…” Alice begins and looks uneasy. “I… I couldn’t get a decent look, because of the androids and aliens and the talking raccoon. But I think there’s going to be a fight and they’re going to need us. Badly.”

“How badly?” Emmett asked, resting his hand on Seth’s shoulder.

“We lose, and we’re all dead. You, me, everyone on this goddamn planet. It’s all over for everything and everyone,” Alice said. “We win this… we get to go home again.”

Home. And for a moment, the image in his head is of the Forks house as it was five years ago, with Rosalie lying on the grass reading, and Esme occupied in her gardens, bees darting around her head. The perfect summer day that was nothing special until it was gone. 

Home isn’t a place, it’s a people. And those people need your help.

“Whatever they need, Alice.” And he means it in a way that he didn’t know he could. That if this fight is for everything, he can’t stand by. He cannot sit on the sidelines for something like this. If he has to stand for one thing, to put his name and face to one fight, one principle, it’s this. It’s ending this misery and being able to go home to Rosalie and his family, to getting Alice and Seth home safe. 

“Never bet against me, Emmett. I’m putting all the cards on the table,” Alice frowns. “It’s too quiet.”

“There’s a good chance they’re all dead Alice,” Emmett says as his sister darts off, Seth following her with a horrified look thrown in his direction.

Alice snorts. “I saw all this, they’re still alive.”

He’s really not sure how, since there’s just wreckage and a crater in front of him. There’s too much smoke and debris in the air to smell any blood, but he’s not optimistic. No supplies and a bunch of dead superheroes. Feels pretty on-brand, honestly.

“Emmett.” Alice is looking at him with that understanding look she gets, that she uses when he broods. She says she can sense it, after being married to Jasper for sixty years, and being Edward’s closest sister for fifty. It’s the look he best associates with Jasper, on his bad days. The one that is a bear hug, a hand up-and-out of the grim corners of the mind. It’s the Alice that Emmett fiercely misses, honestly - the one that always had a plan and never backed down. 

“They aren’t dead. I promise. I wouldn’t drag you across the country just to bury Captain America.”

And Alice is off towards the building, Seth trotting obediently after her and Emmett taking up the rear. 

And tries to ignore every single one of his senses screaming at him that things are going to get worse before they get better. 

—

It’s weird to meet your heroes. Or a hero. Emmett’s still kind of lost on how he feels about Captain America, the Avengers, or even the version of himself where he cared about any of this. 

But it’s another thing to see Captain America in the flesh. And it’s not disappointing; it’s better than if it was some kind of creepy meet and greet, to see him like this in the trenches. That there’s something but more real and more human seeing him just as filthy as they are, cuts on his face, and that look like he’s just barely won the last round.

That feels like a mean thought, that he’d rather see a wounded man than one signing autographs at Stark Tower. But this, this is what Captain America was all those years ago, back in World War Two with the Howling Commandoes. That he was never too good or too important or precious to fight the good fight. If ordinary grunts were good enough to fight, then so was he.

The Shield catches his attention almost immediately, and it’s honestly everything that Emmett ever imagined it would be. 

The Shield. There’s a really nice metal replica in his gaming room back in Aspen, one that Rosalie commissioned for him years ago, and it doesn’t look like this one. This one just looks like the metal that was used for it was special, that it’s something above the rest.

(That was the part of Captain America that Carlisle always liked the best - he wasn’t known to carry something to harm, a weapon to wound, but an item to protect. Jasper had started talking about the effectiveness of a shield in battle, at the injuries that could have been inflicted, but Carlisle had already been transfixed by the idea of defending the vulnerable above all else, that the very symbol that represented him was one of protection.)

It honestly looks like Thor’s Hammer to his eyes; something that cannot be touched, cannot be lifted by someone it wasn’t built for. He’s not really someone who believes in holy objects in the sense that the unworthy can taint something so much bigger than they are. But he does believe in the power a person can imbue into the things they love and the things they believe in. In the belief in the power of a symbol. 

As they maneuver closer, he’s not expecting the hiss of hydraulics and the sound of movement and suddenly they’re seeing Tony Stark, Iron Man, in the flesh. (Later, Seth will blurt out that Tony Stark was short, and he’ll laugh himself stupid because faced with over a billion dollars of suit tech, and a real-life billionaire who had actually made an attempt at investing in improving life, and Seth thought he was short.) The armor has been through it but is still goddamn impressive.

And then there’s Thor. A living god. An alien. Sharp-eyed and more stern than Emmett ever pictured him, the man has to be taller than Jasper. It was rare that Emmett didn’t feel like the biggest person in the room, but the bulk of Thor made him feel thoroughly average.

And all three men made Alice look tiny, and he stops as he watches Alice make her way toward them. Years of watching Alice cling and climb and fold herself around Jasper, and then years of her being on her own had desensitized him, obviously. Even next to Seth, she’s just Alice-sized. But his instincts are telling him to put himself between Alice and the Avengers because she’s completely dwarfed by them. 

Seth bounds along behind her, the gash on his face already healing, and his broken phone tucked faithfully in his back pocket. 

He pinpoints the second that both of them are spotted, and any thoughts of lingering back vanish, seeing Iron Man’s Repulsers loading up and aimed at his sister’s head. He’s spent a lot of time debating this technology with Jasper and they always agreed on one thing - that it was entirely possible that some of the Avengers' tech could harm a vampire. 

And there was no way on Earth that Emmett was going to test that theory on Alice. 

He’s in front of her in a second, and all three men flinch at how quickly he moves - he sees Thor and Captain America exchange a quick glance at his speed, but he’s more focused on the Repulser that is now aimed at his face. 

“Who are you?” Captain America demands and Emmett kind of feels sorry for his old self, a self who would have been delighted to hear the real Captain America address him, to see an icon in the flesh, and not just notice how clearly exhausted and wrung out this man is, trying desperately trying to slip into the mask of superhero. 

(He was only five years older than Steve Rogers. He realizes that suddenly. That they grew up in the same kind of world, in between the two great wars; a time and place where - for most people - food and medicine and shelter and clothing were constant battles. That they’ve both seen the hard days and the easy days. In another life, maybe Emmett would have enlisted for the stipend for his family, and gone off to Europe to watch USO tours in the mud before a bullet sent him back to his family.)

Alice pops out from behind Emmett, scowling. “We’re here to help,” she informs them. “You’re going to need us.”

“This battlefield is no place for women or children,” Thor intones, looking back out through the wreckage, and Emmett makes the mistake of following his gaze as Alice lets out a huff of outrage and Seth loudly protests. 

Seeing Thanos in the flesh is like… it’s like facing a fear. A terrible fear, one that has haunted him for as long as he has known. And he’s both much, much worse than Emmett ever expected, and much, much less. 

He’s easily eight feet tall with a muscularity reminiscent of the Hulk, and mottled purple skin that reminds Emmett of the fresh bruising on his own victims over the years. He looks more like a bored CEO, waiting to belittle someone or remind them of their lesser intellect than the thing that ripped away half of all living entities in existence.

(Right now, it’s kind of impossible to consider that he could have snapped his fingers and taken out the people that Emmett knows; the ones that would go down fighting with even the breath of a chance. Snap. Rosalie. She wouldn’t have been shy, throwing a punch at his face and insulting him to boot. His girl always could throw a mean punch, even before Jasper trained them up. Snap. Maria, who fucking ruled the South with an iron fist since the goddamn 1600s wouldn’t have given this creature a second to fight back. She was terrifying and for all his jokes, Emmett wasn’t sorry they hadn’t seen her in decades. Snap. Jasper. Just… Jasper. His brother was one of the most powerful and terrifying fighters ever put on the planet. Nothing could change Emmett’s mind on that. His brother was the very best, and if this fucker had come at them in a fair fight, he would have bet all their lives on Jasper’s ability to walk away without breaking a sweat.) 

He’s just sitting there, in the center of the wreckage with his weapon and helmet, and it feels like the most obvious fucking metaphor for the wreckage that he caused, that he desired, five years ago.

Every goddamn day, hour, minute without Rose that had weighed him down. Every time he stood outside Seth’s bedroom door, listening to the kid crying and wishing he had Jasper’s gift so he could fix it without making Seth feel embarrassed or like he has to explain. Every time he looked at Alice and the darkest part of his mind let him notice how close to the edge her grief had pushed her and realize that there was truly nothing he could do to save her that he wasn’t already doing. Every single time they arrived home to an empty house, defaced and dark, and whatever was left of hope was eroded a little more. Like they all believed that if they came home enough times, eventually everyone would be waiting for them. 

And this was the entity responsible for that pain, for that longing, and frustration, and futility. 

He’s supposed to be dead. They said he was dead. They finally got around to avenging someone, and yet, he’s right here. Just waiting. 

“The press release said you killed him.” The words are spoken and it takes him a moment to realize that it was him who spoke. 

“I did.” Thor’s gaze looks haunted. “I took off his head.”

“Time travel got away from us for a moment there,” Iron Man says, sounding every inch his age. “You all need to get out of here, now.”

“No,” Alice is pure indignation right now, and all of them turn to look at her. “We are here because you need our help. And we can help. We wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need us.”

“Who are you?” Iron Man demanded. “Siblings?” His gaze flicks between Alice, Emmett, and Seth. On one hand, yeah, it’s a question that anyone would pose because he and Alice both have the vampiric beauty, the dark gold eyes, the pallor, and the black hair. Humans always see those similarities before they notice that the nose, the face, the eyes are all different. On the other hand, it irritates him that strangers always want to draw a line between them and Seth. It’s not as bad now that Seth is legally an adult and can’t be removed from their care, but Emmett is still wary. 

He also knows that Iron Man is probably running searches inside the helmet to find them in databases, to riddle out the truth of why they are here. How they are here, and at this opportune moment. 

(Alice does good work; on paper, they’re still the Cullens from Forks, Washington. Forks High graduates, sole survivors of their family. Their bills and taxes are paid, there’s a robust family trust that explains why none of them have jobs, and he's pretty sure that Alice gave him a degree in engineering or something. They look harmless on paper, right down to their grocery orders and cell phone plans.) 

“Family,” Alice says firmly. “I know you don’t know us, and I know you don’t trust us. But…” She pauses for a second, and Seth moves away - around thirty feet is their usual distance for Alice to be able to see around him without pain. But this time she scowls, jerking her head around, and for a moment Emmett wonders if she’s having some kind of seizure. 

Seth catches on faster than he does, immediately grabbing Thor - Thor - by his massive arm and pulling him away from Alice. Thor looks confused but goes along with Seth.

Alice pauses, her eyes flickering underneath her eyelids. Everyone looks confused, but neither Emmett nor Seth say a word. It’s only when Emmett smells the fresh venom gathering at her nose that he reaches out and touches her arm.

“Alice?”

“There are a million possibilities for what happens next but they all come down to two results. Either we win or we lose. Anything else is just … collateral.”

“You can see the future?” Iron Man takes a step forward and Emmett recognizes that wild look from other people who have founded out about Alice’s gift. Carlisle has cut off more than one ‘friend’ over the years that caught on to how Alice’s power worked and simply wanted. It’s a look that always had Jasper on guard, and now him. 

His sister is not a prize to be won or fought over. It doesn’t matter if it’s some nomadic jerk or Aro or goddamn Tony Stark. It’s not happening. 

“I can see my future. And that of my family,” Alice says clearly, a fantastic lie, and Emmett’s never been so grateful and relieved in his life. “It’s not an accurate science, and no, I didn’t see Thanos coming before it happened. I didn’t see any of this.” 

“Stark has a child,” Thor offers as an explanation as Iron Man half turns away, and Alice nods. 

“And that’s why we need to fight. There aren’t any second chances this time. Time travel won’t be able to save us because no one will be walking away from this. Three more bodies on the field, that’s three more chances we end this and we get to go home to our people.”

“Are you willing to die out there?” Iron Man’s question is rough and unkind. “Because that’s what’s waiting for us. You probably won’t make it home.”

Emmett wants to laugh and to brag that just a year ago, Alice took down a … well, not a newborn anymore, but a brick shit-house of a vampire in about thirty seconds, snapping his femurs clean through with a very precise move that practically had Jasper’s name signed on them. If there’s nothing else that Emmett knows about Alice, it’s that her survival instinct will always win out - knowing Jasper is probably pacing back in Forks is enough to get her back home at the cost of almost anyone on the field. 

“I wouldn’t have dragged my brothers across the country if I didn’t think we’d walk away in the end,” Alice’s voice is even and hard. “I don’t gamble unless I’m going to win - I might not be a nice person, but I’m not cruel.”

Seth scoffs at the comment that Alice isn’t nice. And Emmett is glad that Seth never sees that side of vampire nature. That the truth is that vampires aren’t nice. They are self-serving and entitled and typically their loyalties lie to themselves, their mate, and potentially their maker - in that order. (Carlisle says that the family dynamic, the animal blood diet, and their conscious choice is what makes it different for them. That they intentionally forged their bonds to each other, and reinforce them every day. That being a family is work, and he’s proud that they all choose it. It’s sentimental crap that makes Esme beam and Rose roll her eyes but Emmett’s always been sort of pleased that he opted into the sentimental crap. He likes to think that because he and Rose have never known anything else, they can’t fall that far.) 

Seth’s never seen that part of them, only seen Alice as the one forcing quinoa and oats on him because he has to be healthy; forcing skincare and clean clothing into his arms. Made sure his schoolwork is good, that he has money of his own, and that his birthday is always celebrated with cake and gifts. A good and kind sister, never someone who is truly capable of anything more vicious than a bad mood. 

“It’s not going to be easy and there’s a solid chance any of us can die. But we can win. And we’re here to help.”

There is a pause, and all three men exchange glances that hold a conversation. 

Silence. 

“You’re all fast?” Captain America finally says.

“Emmett and I are. Seth has a separate skillset,” Alice says. “Emmett and I are bulletproof and stronger as well. Fire is the only thing we’re going to steer clear of.”

“Some kind of mutation?” Iron Man asked and Alice shrugged.

“It’s better for everyone if we say yes, and you not ask any specific questions,” Emmett interrupts. “Alice, I’m not going to I-Europe to stand trial because the smartest man on Earth guessed.”

Alice rolled her eyes. “Emmett. I have this covered. All cards on the table, okay?”

He sighed. “Please, Alice.”

“Fine.” She looks irritated but lets it go. “We’re impenetrable as far as we know. Bullets, knives… they won’t work on us. I don’t know about alien weapons or Stark Tech, but I don’t think it would be quick if they did.”

“Can you fight?”

“Yes.” All three of them respond at the same time, and Alice smiles; they can fight. 

(Emmett would have liked to see the Avengers stop them, honestly.)

“Why … do you want to fight?” Thor asks, looking at them with a hard stare in turn. Alice looks away and Seth looks at the floor but something in Thor’s eyes reminds Emmett of the kind of pain that burrows into the bone; the kind of pain he never knew until he got home and Rose wasn’t there. 

“My wife.” The words are out before Emmett can stop them.

“My husband.” Alice’s voice is soft, and all three Avengers soften at the look that ghosts across his sister’s face. 

“My mom and sister.” Seth shrugs, but he touches the rubber bracelet around his wrist. Sue had boxes of the things around the house from various health and charity events. Something about them brought Seth comfort because Emmett couldn’t remember the last time that he’d seen Seth without one. Like the old brown jacket he’d worn thin that had belonged to Leah.

“I’m sorry,” Captain America offers. 

“We’re sorry too. No one should lose their people,” Alice says, and after a beat, the moment passes. 

“Good luck, I guess. Stay out of our way, stay alive,” Iron Man says, and the matter is settled, as they all move back to where Thanos is still sitting, waiting. 

“This is a trap,” Captain America announces, and Emmett genuinely misses Jasper. Jasper would have had a plan immediately, ready to go, and definitely designed at keeping Alice out of the action. He wouldn't be standing here, stating the obvious. 

No, that’s not right - Jasper would have left during the earlier conversation because it was wasting time, slit Thanos’ throat, and slunk back in without a word. Better to ask forgiveness than permission.

“That’s fine.”

“Where are the others?” Alice speaks up, and Seth snorts at the look on the face of the three Avengers when she speaks to them, obviously expecting her to stay in her own lane. 

“800 feet down, roughly, there are signs of life. Along with the stones,” Iron Man replies. 

“Seth,” Alice looks over. “Go see if they need help - especially the Archer; I think he needs some help. Rescue and recovery, do not engage, no matter how tempting it is.”

“On it.” Seth is already stripping, and all three of them are ignoring the confused looks going on behind them. 

“Seth, be smart,” Emmett interrupts, with a Look that has Seth grin and salute him. “I’m serious, I am not going back to Forks to tell Leah Clearwater her brother is dead.”

“It’s not Leah you have to worry about - it’s Mom,” Seth chortled as he unbuttons his jeans, and Alice turns around, and Thor is chuckling and Captain America just looks tired and kind of sick of them.

And then Seth shifts in one movement, and neither he nor Alice react when the three Avengers do. Seth looks up at them and huffs, before turning to leave.

"Jesus," Iron Man says, taking two steps back, and clearly trying to resist aiming his repulsors. 

"Fenrisúlfr," Thor breathes, his eyes wide. 

“That is… a very large wolf,” Captain America manages as Seth vanishes into the rubble. It makes Emmett nervous, to watch Seth go off on his own. It really doesn’t matter how much older Seth gets, he’s always going to be the kid, the one Emmett needs to keep in one piece. 

“Sam was bigger, wasn’t he?” Alice asks offhand, and Thor - frankly - looks delighted, whilst Captain America just looks bewildered.

“Nah, I think the rest of them are in for a surprise,” Emmett says, and his voice sounds fond, thinking of the objectively smaller wolf they started with. The baby of the group, the kid that was still collecting Pokemon and had the damn Avengers t-shirt. If someone had told Emmett a decade ago that he’d actually care about a member of the Pack this much, and it would be the little kid at the back of the group, he would have laughed himself silly. 

Doesn’t seem so silly now. 

“Thanos doesn’t have the stones. We just need to keep it that way,” Iron Man says, turning back to Thanos, who was smiling arrogantly in their direction now. 

“Just so we’re all in agreement,” Thor says as he holds out his hands. Mjolnir and a massive axe slap into each of his hands - the axe has to be almost the same height as Alice and must weigh more; a split second later, there is a lightning strike and his armor forms around him in one movement. 

Emmett would be lying if he didn’t consider the entire scene ridiculously impressive. That Thor is just as alien as he anticipated but also comfortably familiar and ridiculously formidable. 

It's somewhat of a comfort that Thor commands that kind of power. Like this entire task might be achievable with someone like that. 

“Let’s kill him properly this time.”

—

It takes everything in him to stay with Alice as the three Avengers approach Thanos. 

You could not live with your own failure. 

He hears Thanos speaking, mocking the heroes and the words make him want to dart out there and start yelling, to pick a fight on the spot. Start demanding how stealing mothers and fathers and wives and brothers and sisters without warning can be considered a failure. Being robbed is not a failure. Being caught unaware and watching billions murdered at random for simply… being. Not even counting the animals, the plants, the blades of goddamn grass.

I will shred this universe down to its last atom.  

There was no honor or legitimacy or anything but cowardice by a surprise attack; impossible hubris in being judge, jury, and executioner for everything, everywhere.   

And then, with the stones you’ve collected for me, create a new one, teeming with life that knows not what it has lost, but only what it has been given.

He feels sick. That the one spark of hope has lead to this. Time travel is fucked. He knew it from the start. Anything too good to be true always is. (Except Rose. And his family.) Seth knew it too. That all they’ve done is invited the monster back into the house and lay down the welcome mat. 

A grateful universe.  

Alice shoots him a look. She’s holding herself with the same tension when they were cleaning up the newborns; ready to lunge, ready for a fight on a hair-trigger. It's about to begin. 

“Born out of blood,” Captain America spits out, and the rage in his voice is like a balm to Emmett. That whatever mixed-up feelings he has about the Avengers, about their failure five years ago, Captain America knows. His failure weighs heavily - and not just because of the people he lost. But because of everything that was lost. 

They’ll never know it. Because you won’t be alive to tell them.

All three Avengers lunge at the same time and all Emmett feels is a deep sense of dread. 

—

The fight is one of futility, and he follows Alice’s instructions - support, not intervention. This was not their fight yet, not their rage. Their rage and grief and pain was different to that of the Avengers; theirs was tangled with the failure and futility and responsibility for how everything turned out. This was the second round that they had laid awake at night wishing for, and they needed to fight it alone. 

Even as Emmett’s hands twitched to throw a punch that would put Thanos on his ass, as he bats the superheroes around like nothing, he stays on the sidelines against every screaming thought in his brain. 

But when one of Thano’s hits side-swipes Alice and sends her careening into a pile of debris and the fucker laughs, Emmett lets out a snarl that seems to echo and has all eyes on him, as he moves to Alice’s side - she’s more annoyed than anything else; her cheek is cracked but it heals neatly as Emmett watches. He’s probably messed up and revealed too much about them, but the force that he hit Alice with… the way she fell like a broken doll… no one hits his sister. (Not without consent, at least, and he really didn’t want to think about Alice’s sex life that much.)   

The whole fight is… loud and constant movement and yelling and all they can do is make sure that the fight path is clear and try to keep debris from causing worse injuries than Thanos is inflicting. It’s unsatisfying and ultimately pointless, that he can’t be down there throwing himself into the fray, throw all the rage and misery into this fight - but Alice is insistent that this is not their moment. 

(If he sees Iron Man’s gauntlet in the dirt behind Thanos, and swoops in before the Titan can stamp down onto it, Emmett might throw a punch into the base of his spine, surprising enough that Thanos lets out a… not a grunt or a yell, but a sound of displeasure. Alice looks ready to murder him for that maneuver but she relaxes when Thor distracts Thanos from going after Emmett, and whatever was supposed to happen isn’t disturbed from the fact that he cannot keep his temper.)

And then everything… almost goes right for a moment. 

Well, for a moment it doesn’t. For a moment, even he and Alice are down when Thanos sends a flat wedge of steel at them at such a speed that they are both sent into the dirt; he hears the crunch of whichever of their cellphones had made it this far, of the gun Alice had pressed on him bending around his leg and rendered useless.

Iron Man is unmoving in the distance, Captain America is struggling to stand from another pile of debris, and Thor… Thor is on his back with the monster trying to press Thor’s own axe into his chest (the alien metal plating parting far too easily for Emmett’s liking; he doesn’t want anyone getting the idea to try that weapon on him or Alice…)

And then…

Whatever part of Emmett still looks up to Captain America, to Steve Rogers, gets to be the sole civilian witness, his arm around Alice as Steve Rogers stands before them, beaten and bloody with his jaw set and determination streaming off of him as he clutches Mjolnir in one hand, Thor’s delighted expression and maybe all that bitterness towards the Avengers was grief in disguise because if Steve Rogers can wield Mjolnir…

There is thunder and lightning, and if Alice is clinging to him a little tighter, he won’t mention it - the same way she won't mention the way he shields her when the fight gets too close to them. 

And then it all goes to shit again, as Captain America whips the shield - the shield - over his head and Thanos’ blade cuts through it like butter, like it’s nothing. 

His horror and Captain America’s is tangible. Thor and Iron Man are still missing - hopefully unconscious and not dead. The shield, that shining symbol that has driven so many men to be the very best they can be in so many different ways, is cut up and useless. Emmett can try and think of how to wield it now, to try and make this less hopeless than it is but it isn’t a shield anymore. It’s scrap metal.  

Thanos looms over Captain America, and Emmett is becoming intensely aware that once the Titan decides that Steve Rogers is down for the count, he’s going to turn on him and Alice, and for the first time, Emmett isn’t sure that he can take him. That he can make sure that Alice walks away - especially not with that blade. A bubble of panic is rising in Emmett’s chest. This is nothing he knows how to handle… he can’t… and leave Seth behind to face this mess?

It’s been a long time since he’s wanted to vomit, but the urge is rising rapidly, even with Alice’s grip on him tightening, as if she can feel his rising panic. 

And then Thanos descends on Captain America, smashing him halfway across the battleground. Cap can barely move; he’s injured, Emmett can smell the blood on him. But he’s still struggling to his feet, trying so hard…

“In all my years of conquest... Of violence and slaughter...it was never personal,” Thanos’ voice is deep and mocking, and the sound of it feels like reality gets a little sharper for Emmett. He’s got Alice tucked so close to him, he’s sure she’s uncomfortable. “But I’ll tell you now, the things I’m about to do to your stubborn, annoying, little planet... I’m going to enjoy it. Very, very much.”

And that's it. 

A Captain America who can barely stand, two Cullens who are so far out of their depth, and a teenage werewolf against an alien army of thousands, the monster that brought the universe to its knees, and the end of everything everywhere. 

He looks over at Alice who offers him a smile that is more of a grimace. 

This is for Rose. For Rose, the love of every single life he will ever live. For Carlisle and Esme for making him one of them without question, and Edward and Jasper for being the best damn brothers in the world.  

For Alice, who fought so hard and was the very best sister he could have asked for. 

For Seth, who never failed to be the best of them, to find that tiny fleck of positivity in the sea of shit they’d been dealt. 

And for every single person who didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, to say I love you, to stay a little longer. 

He wishes he’d gotten to answer his phone. 

—

And then…

… it’s just the crackle of a radio. 

—

It’s one of those sights that Emmett’s not going to forget. 

Of Captain Rogers, tightening the strap of his mangled shield on a probably-broken arm. Of spitting blood and possibly a tooth into the dirt.

He’s got Iron Man’s back, as the suit reboots and repairs; Alice is over near the pile of debris with Thor. Seth hasn’t reappeared from wherever he ran off to (Hawkeye, to find Hawkeye, and any other survivors of the base explosion and collapse - Iron Man had said that there should be at least five others in the wreckage along with the stones and that there was still signs of life. He really hopes they didn’t send Seth on a salvage mission.) 

And then Captain Rogers freezes, his hand going to his ear and a look of shock and incredulity on his face before the world opens up in front of them. Like tilted halos of light, ten feet tall - dozens of them, stretching up the battlefield. For a second, Emmett’s terrified that the world is eroding, that this is not the Hail Mary that they are hoping for. The hum of the halos is deeply unpleasant to his hearing - to Alice’s too, when he sees her scowling face pop up. 

The three figures that walk out take him a moment to recognize, without a mask. Black Panther (Rose would be annoyed with him for not recalling his first name, honestly.) But it’s the relief in Captain America’s stance at the sight of Black Panther and his companions that reassures Emmett; that whatever is happening is good. That this fight might just have been made a little bit fairer. 

And then more come. 

It’s more people than he and Alice have seen in a long time, people he fucking recognizes. A lot of people he doesn’t. More aliens on their side than he expected, honestly. And all of them… all of them look determined and defiant. 

(He knows that look. Or rather, a far more dangerous version. When his brother was mad, he looked like a serial killer. That was the look Jasper got when Maria threatened Alice that time. The look that made Maria back off - at least, pretend to back off. That’s the look he’d be wearing now, doing that weird hand-flex-clench he did before he attacked, probably looming behind Alice. He wonders what it says about how he sees his brother that he would give anything to see Jasper step onto the field right now. That this would actually seem slightly winnable if his weirdest brother just appeared out of those halos with murder on his mind.)

“This is where things get blurry. Well, blurrier.” He looks down to see Alice has appeared beside him, arms crossed over her chest, her glare directed at a cluster of … well, a cluster of aliens who would certainly fuck up her visions worse than Seth.

It’s almost not surprising when a few moments later the remains of Avengers Headquarters bursts open, concrete and debris flying around like nothing as a giant Antman explodes forth, with more fighters clutched in his enormous hand.

This is no small army, but nowhere near what they could have had. He thinks of the freshly returned armies of the south, of the Pack restored, of the Volturi, and the Chinese coven. With enough time and warning, Earth could have rained hell down on this monster and this army. 

(He remembers the stories, Edward’s shudder when he spoke of Jane’s power, and imagines Thanos crippled on the ground as that little horror inflicted her gift on him. Or Kate, with that crack of electricity that could bring anyone to their knees. Of the Southern Warlords and their special brand of pain and torture that haunted Jasper for years… It wouldn’t be the first time that Emmett imagined how that first battle could have gone right with enough time and preparation.)

Captain America speaks, but he’s too aware of Seth - still in wolf form - by his side, and Alice on the other. Too aware of the absolute sea of aliens ready to tear them limb from limb. That somewhere Rosalie is hitting redial and swearing, calling him every name under the sun because it keeps going to voice mail, without any idea that whatever happens next is the difference between seeing her, holding her, telling her how much he loves her, and how important she is to… everything. 

And … not. Everything, everywhere being lost. No Rose, no Alice, no Seth, no Forks. 

Alice already has her gun in her hand, racking it, as there is a roar from… from, what? Team Earth? Team Life? Team Fix-It? 

(He’s not here to avenge anything. He’s here to help them save it.) 

But they are yelling - a defiant battle cry, a roar of rage and grief and determination that is five years lost, five years stolen. 

And both sides surge forward. 

Let’s go.

Chapter Text

eight. all or nothing.

For a moment, there is simply movement. 

Feet against dirt and mud and debris. It’s an awkward pace for Emmett, but Jasper always warned against making the first move in battle situations. Don’t stand out or you become the primary target; pace yourself. Let them throw everything they have at you, tire themselves out, and thin out their forces. 

Then you rain hell. 

It’s good advice, and he trusts Jasper completely in three things: warfare, Alice, and getting away with pranking Edward. But right now, it feels stifling because he knows what is coming. People are going to die. There’s going to be blood and bone and bodies left where they fall. It is completely inevitable and useless to pretend that this would turn out any other way. 

No one on this battlefield are strangers to death, but it’s still unfair. Not when they are trying to fix things, to save themselves and every other living thing in the world. 

He’s already lost track of Alice. It was going to happen; she’s slight enough and fast enough that she was never going to stick by his side. He hates, so much, that she’s going in mostly-blind and it's only the light at the end of the tunnel - the sound of Jasper’s voice on her phone before the explosion - that is fueling her. He understands, but he wishes she’d stayed close by. 

Seth’s already lost in the masses, and Emmett has no way of finding him. Half the bodies on the field smell foul to him, sweet or sour or rotting. It would take him too long to locate Seth and he can only hope and wish and manifest that the kid is alright. That he’s strong enough and smart enough and they taught him enough that he’s going to make it through with the best story to tell. All Emmett has ever wanted for Seth is for him to be safe and happy. And that seems greedy and childishly optimistic right now.

There is yelling, war cries in languages he doesn’t know around them, but all Emmett can focus on is the sound of the feet hitting the ground. 

—

The truth is that Emmett never saw any kind of war.

He was born right before America joined World War One, and was a vampire before World War Two. There had been the shadow of the Great War over his childhood, from what he remembered, but it had always been something tucked away to the side. It hadn’t touched his family specifically; they had been simple people, focused on working hard, putting food on their table, and keeping a roof over their heads.  

And then he was gone before World War Two was anything more than a worry his parents would talk about in hushed voices (that memory is solid; the hum of his parents’ voices in the next room talking over the big things, the scary things that might actually come for the McCarty boys, as he drifted off to sleep next to his brothers.)

It was one of the few things that he had in common with Carlisle - and even then, Carlisle had seen battles as a medic, knew what the face of war truly looked like. 

Edward had been dazzled by the glamour of war before his death, and Jasper… well, it was Jasper. His brother had been fighting one war or another his entire life and death. 

The closest Emmett ever been to war? That had been the debacle with Victoria. And he wasn’t so arrogant that he believed that it came anywhere near what an actual war was. He remembers the news stories through World War Two, through Korea and Vietnam. He remembers seeing Carlisle’s grim expression, watching Jasper leave the room before the remote landed on the couch next to him, before the news pages settled. He’s never envied his brother for his role on the front lines, never really examined how that missing piece separates him from his brothers and Carlisle. It was just one of those things that weren’t part of his human life, and that couldn’t ever really be recaptured.

But this…

This is a war. This is being right in the middle of the trenches with fucking lizard people and aliens charging at him with no sense of self-preservation.  This is not knowing if the movement behind him is friend or foe or someone dying in the mud. This is having foreign blood dry wet and ice cold against his face and sometimes it smells good and other times it smells like rot and death; in not being able to catch a glimpse of Alice or Seth in the blur of bodies and movement, and the rising panic behind that the longer it goes on. 

It’s watching a woman in a leather jacket beat the ever loving shit out of an alien for crushing her flask underfoot, and a broad black guy take a bone-shattering punch to the jaw and not even flinch. It’s realising that this is not the time to pull punches or worry about hiding what he is - these people are like them. It’s a weird feeling made weirder by how isolated the last five years have been.

(It’s killing the first alien in two moves and not feeling anything except disgust and impatience because this battle is the only thing standing between him and Rose and going home again. He wonders if that’s how Jasper felt killing the newborns.) 

—
And then… blood. 

A woman in old-fashioned armor dies messily in front of him with a cry cut off into a gurgle, a spray of hot blood suddenly across Emmett’s face. Enough to make him recoil. The alien soldier responsible for the ragged tear across the woman’s throat and right down into her left shoulder, grins at him so widely and grotesquely, it feels like its face shouldn’t bend that way. 

The alien mistakes Emmett’s horror to be for the woman, to be for her death, and the knowledge that the woman’s lifeblood is splashed across him. That Emmett now fears his own fate, is guilty of not protecting this nameless woman.

Emmett is none of those things. He’s no stranger to death, to dead bodies, to the last sounds of life choked through grazing wounds and gushing blood. How many people has he put in the ground? Has Jasper? Alice and Esme and even Edward? How many times has it been up to them to deal with the corpse? How many limbs has he snapped, wounds gouged, bodies pushed and weighed down and thrown to make the death seem tragic instead of monstrous?

(Nothing that happens on this battlefield will be a truly new flavour of horror to him or to Alice. They’ve been Cullens for decades.)

Except…

The woman wasn’t human and her blood… her blood is like human blood on steroids, it’s enough to send his bloodlust roaring to the surface; it’s everything he’s never been allowed to want magnified a hundred times and against his skin. The animal brain wants to find more of that blood and take it for himself. The human brain is repulsed and furious that he’s going to be thirsty now, for whatever comes next. He needs to be better than this, at his very very best, to make sure he can get them - all of them - out of this mess. 

The only upside is that it’s not like a singer’s blood. He’s still got his wits about him, still has the good sense to wipe his hand over his face to get it off him, to mute the scent with dirt before he takes a step forward, over the body.  

The alien is dead in seconds, and Emmett is sorry it didn’t hurt more, that it didn’t get the choke of its own blood as it realised it was already over. But there’s no time to dwell on that as more of them appear, descending even faster than before. 

The battlefield is nothing less than a vortex towards hell, with no true way of resisting or pulling back to safety. He rips another alien in half, with a sound that is too dry to be any kind of humanoid, spraying his front with greasy bodily fluids but he doesn’t stop. He hasn’t seen Alice or Seth since this began, he hasn’t stopped long enough to look around. 

(He’s trying so hard not to really see the faces of the dead he passes, just in case.)

He’d like to say he has it under control, that he’s methodical cutting through the wave of enemies. But he’s not - it’s thrashing, desperate, and messy. He’s just holding his breath and staying alive and clawing his way through. 

(It’s easier than the newborns, he’s decided. In comparison, the aliens snap and tear like children’s toys. Even the ones with strange, reptilian plating are cut down easily. But they fight hard, and there’s so many, it’s a mindfuck. It’s hard to keep track of all of them, when they look so similar and the light is so murky. But it is easier and that’s all that he needs to keep going.) 

He tears through one body like a stump of wood, ignoring the sound the alien makes before it dies, arching its body in the horror of where it has found itself. He doesn’t even drop the pieces when he hears it. 

A howl. 

A howl that sends sparks of relief down his spine, a howl that takes him back to the damp forests of the Pacific Northwest and it is the exact kind of reassurance that he needed, holding half a body in one hand. 

Seth. 

Emmett needs to see Seth with his own eyes, to make sure it’s not just optimism or some other kind of creature on the battlefield misleading him. He just needs to get through the sea of violence to get a better look around. He wants eyes on Seth - and Alice - just to know that they made it that far. 

It’s not difficult to make a path - albeit, at human-pace - by using the raggedy half of body that he’s still holding as a make-shift weapon. Thankfully whatever the creature was, it has some kind of solid skeletal structure, one that does enough damage to allow him to move through the battlefield, much to the visible horror of several magicians in robes as the body begins tearing and whatever passes as its skeleton begins to break into pieces. It is repulsive, but effective - just ask the alien with a stump of alien femur through his eye-socket. 

There’s no time to be kinder, to be more gracious, when he could lose Seth again. 

And then Emmett sees him. 

Seth, almost dwarfing Hawkeye, running backup as the archer dives across the field with the ugliest piece of armor that Emmett has ever seen. There’s even something to be said that Seth isn’t even that muddy yet; it’s stupid but it feels like relief. 

(Seth’s always going to be that optimistic kid trying to hide his grief when he came looking for them, it doesn’t matter how old he gets or how big he grows. If Emmett could have left him at home for this one, he would have.) 

Seth’s jaw closes around one enemy, and he throws, leaving the body to crumple into the mud as the rest of the body sails off. It would be almost funny if it wasn’t so fucking terrible that Seth is here. 

There’s not even any time for Emmett to go to him, to reassure him that they’ve just got to get through this, to help Seth get Hawkeye to wherever he’s going. He still hasn’t seen Alice. But he turns his back on Seth and dives back into the mix, still holding his breath. 

(Honestly, the newborns might have been tougher to put down, but at least that battle had been fast.) 

—

Emmett needs to admit it, even just to himself - even as it weighs on him that he’s killing without discrimination, that he’s not thinking about the creatures as living beings, there’s a sense of exhilaration about getting to throw a punch with all of his strength behind the motion. Without having to slow down, without having to hold anything back, to move exactly how he was designed to. 

And it’s better than hunting newborns with Alice, only because even though the aliens go down easier there are so many of them that there’s always another one to take down. 

More than one fighter on their side is caught unaware by his speed; he saves two Wakandan warriors simply by being faster than both of them and their opponent - crude but effective. When they stare at him, it’s almost like they might recognise what he is. But that’s something to worry about later. 

Emmett finds himself moving down the front-line, trying to thin out the enemies before they make it across to the Wakandans and the more breakable fighters. It’s not easy, but it’s something.

He’s dismembering a particularly solid alien when there is a streak of gold light, moving faster than anything that Emmett’s ever seen in his life - including Edward - racing down the battlefield lines. And it’s… it’s almost hopeful. He’s not one to believe in signs nor outright dismiss them, but that golden streak feels like he was supposed to notice it, to notice that he is surrounded by people who are like them. People who are too fast and too strong to fit in. 

They just didn’t have to be disemboweled by a bear or gang-raped or thrown off a cliff to become that way. Hell, there are enough aliens and mutations on the field that maybe some of these people were just born like this. 

(It was a common family debate back in the day that in a world with vampires and werewolves and shape-shifters, they couldn’t be the only things out there. Carlisle always kindly humoured his arguments, and had congratulated him when superheroes started appearing, but this is different. This is a future where he gets to trick Edward into racing this gold-streak and getting his ass kicked and just that singular stupid thought, the possibility that this is all going to end in a way where Emmett can go back home and make stupid bets with his oldest-and-youngest brother… That’s his light at the end of the tunnel.)

An alien flings a sheet of metal in his direction, but Emmett plucks it out of the air like a paper plane, his gaze solid and unwavering as he approaches his opponent. The alien doesn’t back off, and he’s one of the ones that are leather-skinned, with a fluid-filled internal layer to protect the skeleton. 

It breaks apart just like a human, wet and reeking of rotting meat, with a screech that sounds bird-like and enraged. Hive-minded, tiny-brained creatures sent to destroy and maim and feed mindlessly, he reminds himself when that voice that sounds a lot like Esme whispers in his ear that he’s a killer. It has to happen, there are no second chances out here. That was the lesson they learn over the last five years, and the Cullen legacy of propriety and humanity and empathy has never faced down this kind of hellscape. 

(But also they live in a world where something vaguely female shaped can run faster than his eyes can track; where there’s a talking raccoon, fucking flying horses overhead and a one-hundred foot superhero scooping up aliens like popcorn, where he’s pretty ordinary really, and this is a version of their world he cannot wait to show Rose.)

—

It takes time before he spots Alice, and the relief in his veins is hot and sudden when he realises that she’s unharmed. Her jacket and shirt are a mess, but she’s still moving easily and the only thing marring his sister’s skin is alien blood and mud. 

Alice is in the middle of an encroaching circle of aliens, all of them armed, but he only pays attention to the animalistic look on her face. He knows the look on her face; recognises it from the person she learned it from.

I hope you know just how far your wife would go for you, Jas. You’re a matched set in every way.

He can sees Jasper’s training, Jasper’s fighting style in every movement - in the merciless way she jams her gun in the crook of necks and and pulls the trigger, not even stopping to wipe away the alien blood streaked on her face and hands, the way she snaps a kick that has the notches of a spine cracked and bent, the speed in which she moves and reacts. 

He remembers when Alice was just the brightly coloured flash twirling past the corner of his eye, the sister he would tease and would lose too many bets to, with her fancy clothing and her insistence that the family had to do everything like they were properly human. 

And he knows she’s never going to be that girl to him anymore. That no matter how this ends - if they live through this and get home, and Eddie still decides to marry Bella, and she joins the family - that Alice will always his baby sister in a way that is forged different to the rest of the Cullens. The same way Seth is always going to be the kid brother. It scares the shit out of him, that he’s never going to be able to fix or outrun that responsibility.

(Putting everything back together never seemed so real and messy to him before this minute - before seeing Alice cut through the aliens methodically without flinching. The goal was always to get his family back, to have Rose back - and it still is. They’ll have to drag him off this battlefield in pieces before he stops. But it’s never going to be like it was. He tricked himself into believing it would be. Some things, the scars run too deep. The survivors are always going to be able to see the seam of it all and what it took to get it back. And all it does is make him hate Thanos more, make Emmett even more determined to win this thoroughly and definitively.)

His plan is to cover Alice’s back when an Asian girl with a glowing katana appears, looking worse for wear but just as grim and determined as anyone else. Emmett doesn’t even have the time to make sure the girl - or Alice - are okay because another wave of aliens comes roaring up. 

(But if he had to bet, he’d always bet on Alice.)

—

It’s hard enough to get across the mud-slick the battlefield has become without running into another alien, another fighter. He hardly recognises half of these people, but more than one he saves from a killing blow - a big-eyed alien girl whose face lights up as he snaps the spine of the alien looming over her. She reminds him of Alice, when she first arrived back in the 50s. But he doesn’t pause, his eyes sliding over the battlefield, always looking for Alice or Seth, and mentally cursing himself out for not realising that all-black outfits would not be helpful in a battle situation. He should have insisted on reflective racing stripes or something. 

Next time.

(Wait, no. There would never be a next time, a need for fighting ensembles and funny little vests for Seth with reflective panels because they would never find themselves in a fight like this again. That was a promise he was making to himself - for himself.)

That’s when he finally finds Seth again, mud-slicked but alive and fighting like his world depended on it.  

“No, no, no,” he’s already moving when he understands what he’s seeing. Wolf Seth, who is no small opponent (last summer, when they’d been bored… well, the short story is that in his wolf-form, Seth weighed more than double of what Alice does) - is somehow tangling with three aliens, and Thanos looming behind like the shadow of death, his eyes firmly on Seth.

There was no fucking way that the giant purple asshole was laying one goddamn hand on Seth whilst Emmett still had venom in his veins, and his head attached. 

He sees Alice lunging across the battlefield from the opposite direction, her eyes focused fully on the potentially disastrous scene before them. 

“HE’S A FUCKING KID,” Emmett hollers pointlessly, but Seth surprises both him and Alice as he takes the arm clean off an alien, the limb cracking into pieces under the force of Seth’s jaws, before darting with a swiftness that wasn’t expected heading towards Alice before Thanos could move against him. And Alice is there, giving Seth cover to run into the crowd, Thanos giving her a dark and knowing look. 

Bad, very very bad. He doesn’t want Thanos’ eyes on his sister, doesn’t want that creature to notice them amongst all the other bodies. They aren’t special and do not deserve to be remembered. 

“Watch out, man!” someone yells from above, and he looks up, the anxiety receding, but the mistake is made. 

(Always keep moving, goddamnit. Jasper’s voice in his head sounds exasperated.)

A snake-like alien strikes, with a blow that shakes him to his bones and before he can use his momentum against the monster, he’s hauled across the battle field to land flat on his back in the mud, his left arm torn off and venom pouring from the wound. The pain is sharp and alive as he re-orientates himself - it’s been decades since he lost anything more significant than a finger, and it always makes his head spin (he has no idea how Jasper managed to survive entire campaigns in the south, because he can’t even sit up right.) 

The alien is laughing at him, mocking him, as his broken arm is discarded in a pile of rubble (still twitching, ugh. No matter how many times he loses fingers, toes, entire limbs, the twitching never stops being messed up). Thanos smirks but has already turned away from them, to venture deeper into the battlefield. 

Leave Alice and Seth alone. Fuck, Alice, keep Seth out of trouble, please. 

Two horrified superheroes that he doesn’t recognise are staring at him in complete horror, probably expecting him to bleed out - this should be a death sentence, and there’s no way to do triage in this mess. He’s seen a lot of bodies on their side drop in the mud with wounds that could be treated in any other circumstance, but here and now they get to die underfoot because no one has the time or the supplies or the place to save them. The entire world outweighs saving one bleeding warrior. It’s unfair, but it’s how this has to happen. 

He’s oddly pissed off about the arm, honestly - it fucking hurts. He’d been less mad about the time that Peter took his right leg, honestly. This felt like a matter of honour. 

“Pay attention Emmett!” Alice says as she tears past. Her jacket is long gone, and her arms are luminous white in the dull light; not offering him help, she’s clearly got a target in mind. Thanos is nowhere in sight, but neither is Seth. Good, that’s good. He scowls at her departing back as he scrambles back to his feet, eyes locked on the alien. 

“Nice move,” he says conversationally as he approaches the alien, who is beyond irritated he’s still moving. “Unluckily for you, this isn’t my first rodeo.”

(Jasper would be proud, he likes to think. Will be proud. More than sixty years of wrestling, play-fighting, and training, and he’s ready. This might not be the Southern Wars - down in Monterrey, they don’t go down as easy as these hydrostatic skeleton bug aliens - but Emmett was trained by the goddamn best.)

It takes three moves - punch, trip, stomp - to have the alien crushed at his feet, eyes dull and dead, and he has to stop himself from shredding the corpse  to burn out of habit. It’s an efficient kill, and then he’s moving quickly towards his discarded arm - ugh, still twitching. 

“Hey, you need to sit down, we’ll get you out of here.”

The man in front of him isn’t recognisable at first. Shaggy brown hair hangs in his face, and he’s swathed in Kevlar. It’s the arm, the once-silver left arm that allows Emmett to identity the man - Bucky Barnes. Cap’s best friend. The legendary marksman. 

“It looks worse than it is, Sergeant Barnes,” Emmett manages as he reaches out for his broken arm. “Just need it to reconnect fast.”

Sergeant Barnes isn’t expecting Emmett to be lucid, or for his arm to line up roughly in the joint; he covers Emmett’s back for the precious moments it takes for his body to recognise and reattach the join sending a shower of warmth and sparks down to his fingers. 

“Fuck, I hate that feeling,” Emmett mutters, flexing his fingers. 

“I wouldn’t know.” Barnes looks back at him, and it’s a joke. A joke in the middle of the battlefield with the guy that really lost his arm in WWI. 

“Big fan, Sergeant,” Emmett manages. “From back in the day. And right now.”

Barnes nods once, racking his gun. “Glad I could help.”

And that’s it, he’s gone, spraying bullets casually into a group of aliens. 

Emmett might still have a complicated mix of resentment, disappointment, and respect for Captain America but Sergeant Barnes seems alright and it’s oddly reassuring. 

—

He’s not really paying attention when the Scarlet Witch takes on Thanos; he’s following the gauntlet with the stones, trying to cover whomever is carrying it with enough subtlety that nothing comes after him. That he can just swoop in and get the job done. 

“Rain fire. Wipe them all out.”

He’s not that lucky. It wouldn’t be that easy. Nothing ever goes to plan. 

(That feels like the family motto sometimes.) 

The missiles descend from the heavens indiscriminately, and he grabs two fighters and drags them underneath a mountainous corpse dangling precariously over some debris. Enough space for them to crouch and wait. He can see Seth, hunkering down underneath some metal, and Alice literally rolls out of the way of one blast to grab some metal and keep running. Always in motion, that’s Alice. 

(Maybe that’s what’s been wrong the last five years; she slowed down. That the frequency that she operates at is the only thing that holds her together. And that all these things that he’s noticed, every little fracture and crack, he’s going to have to tell Jasper and Carlisle about and she’s going to hate him for it.)

The missiles don’t stop; it’s a proverbial downpour against both sides. Thanos is destroying his own forces in the hopes that it’ll give him an advantage. He’s not going to think twice about the bodies, about the cost of this whole damn battle.

And amongst the noise - the sound of the missiles hitting the ground, the brick and metal crumbling and twisting, of the living trying desperately to find shelter with allies, he hears it. The groan and slide of the earth buckling and giving in. The tumble of dirt, the heave of water and Emmett is suddenly and intensely aware that the battlefield is a fucking crater in the earth. He and Alice can take this fight into a flood, but he doubts there are many others around who will survive a fucking tsunami. He hopes Seth has the sense to get himself to high ground immediately, and not try to goddamn doggy paddle. 

He can see the Spiderkid flying around overhead, dodging the missile blasts and that shit is terrifying. The fact the kid hasn’t been blown out of the sky is setting his teeth on edge. 

There’s just fire and dirt and noise, and right now, the only thing that Emmett can really do is keep the two fighters next to him - one with a dislocated shoulder - alive. They both seem oddly confident in him, and that’s a strange but pleasant feeling. He doesn’t really spend enough time with humans, and when he does, they find him off-putting. He’s kind of used to it - he was too old for high school way back when he was changed let alone now, and underneath it all, he’s a predator. Physically, the most intimidating of the family. It’s just not a combination that makes him approachable in school. 

And it’s not like he’s lonely or desperate to make a human connection like Alice or Carlisle. It’s just how life is, and he’s got his wife and his brothers and his family, and the motley line-up of cousins and friends that they might not see for decades at a time. But the idea that these two fighters can look at him and see past the danger, and probably every instinct in their body, and trust that he’s got their back when they’re wounded and in a pretty damn terrible place on the battlefield… Well, that’s kind of nice. He might get why Alice was so determined to befriend Bella. To be see as the person he is, not what he is. 

(Maybe as a gesture of goodwill, to encourage this kind of acceptance of him, he plunges one hand into the mud and pulls out a weapon - some kind of gun - and tosses it to them. The gratitude on their faces, as they check the weapon and ammo, is a nearly tangible thing. He hasn’t even thought about the fighters on the field who need shit like ammo to stay alive. He fumbles into his pockets for the spare cartridge from his own lost gun, and offers it to them. If it doesn’t fit their weapon, maybe they can pass it on to someone else.) 

The water and mud rushes through the battlefield, but in a much smaller wave that he was waiting for, and a quick inspection shows that one of the wizards is somehow holding up a … mud and water tornado-wall to protect the battlefield. It looks risky as fuck - one blow to the back of that guy’s head, and it’ll be a disaster. But for now, it’s a solution, and the few inches of water magically recede, back towards the break in the wall. 

And then… the missiles stop. Or rather, they stop firing as they swing upwards. It’s welcome relief as everyone peers out from where they’ve found cover - more than a few bodies on both sides are limp on the battlefield. 

“…What…” Emmett says under his breath as the missiles begin firing into the sky at nothing. 

(He’s not religious, but if this is the moment that God or Jesus or Zeus turns out to be real, able to fly, and is coming to the rescue, he will never prank Carlisle’s crucifix again.) 

He can barely make out what - or who it is - just light, like a ball of nuclear fusion hurting towards earth and straight through the warship like a bullet. It’s like a knife through flesh, the light is so powerful, and for a second Emmett can see the outline of a person - a woman - within the ball of energy. 

But whomever it is, it has made the difference. The missiles are gone and the warship is falling down to earth in a crumbling wreck of metal and fire, sending even more water into the sky and towards the water-break the wizard is holding steady. 

There’s no time to make sure the fighters are okay, and don’t need assistance to higher ground or anything. There’s a roar from Thanos’ surviving forces and Emmett grimaces as he dives back into the fray.

The fight is going on too long. That weighs heavily on Emmett’s mind. 

There’s magic and space lasers fired - one catches his right leg and it stings for a moment but there’s no wound; the pain is enough to make him even more wary of them. And there’s that Spiderkid flying through the air clutching the fucking gauntlet, and it makes him oddly angry to see a kid no older than Edward on the battlefield, and playing such a dangerous role in the fight. 

It makes Emmett think harder about the version of Seth who fought in the newborn battle against Victoria. It makes Emmett judge the past versions of himself, his family, and the Pack more harshly in hindsight. That younger version of Seth had no business being there, no matter what kind of gifts or powers he had. And seeing the Spiderkid now, well, it feels very much like if Seth was still that fourteen year old kid and on this battlefield. And for all the stupid shit, all the stuff he didn’t quite think through over the last five years - and the last seventy, if he’s being honest - Emmett would never again let a kid, even a supernatural kid, fight an adult war. 

And then…

He’s not really sure on the details, but all he knows is that he’s watching an old van in the middle of the battlefield get blown apart by Thanos’ fucking sword thrown like a javelin across the battlefield. There’s no stopping it; whatever is in the van sends out a blast of pure blue and white energy that knocks most of the fighters off their feet and into various piles of rubble.

For fuck’s sake. They should have disintegrated that goddamn sword. That’s Emmett’s last thought as he is hurled off his feet and into a pile of debris. 

He lands hard, his head hitting a metal panel that leaves an almost perfect indentation. But his attention is on the yelp of pain from his left - Seth, who has hit the ground at a terrible angle and can’t seem to get his back legs under him again. 

He hadn’t even known Seth was that close by. 

No, no, no. He bursts from the debris with an explosive force, already half moving towards Seth, barrelling through disorientated and dying aliens to find his little brother. The Spiderkid is with Seth looking worried, and Emmett brushes off the kid’s concern as he lands next to Seth, Alice skidding in to land next to them, her jeans shredded at the knees. 

“Shift back, Seth,” Alice orders, hoisting him in a position like a human with his shoulders and back propped up. It looks ridiculous, especially for a wolf the size of Seth, but it’s the ideal position as Seth turns back into a human, groaning in pain and clenching his teeth. There are faint bruises all over him, cuts too, but his left side is purple and his left leg is extremely broken. 

“Can you feel your toes?” Alice demands, with the practicality of a field nurse and the bedside manner of a battalion general. Seth grits his teeth and nods. 

“I can feel everything,” he snaps, and that’s how Emmett knows that Seth’s blown past ten on the pain scale - he doesn’t give a shit that he’s fully nude in front of Alice, and he’s snapping at her. 

“Gonna have to reset it now,” Emmett takes over because Alice has never been particularly good or empathetic when it came to first aid - which surprises him because Jasper was always so careful with her, so kind. He remembers Alice getting bitten during the Calgary incident, and Jasper cradling her and tending to her hand like he was rebuilding an ancient artifact. 

Rose had always had an excellent bedside manner, from her medical studies, and a surprisingly high tolerance for Emmett’s bullshit, even when it got him hurt. Probably where he learnt it from, honestly. 

“Do it,” Seth is gripping Alice’s hand; she’s watching the battlefield like a hawk, to make sure that they’re covered - and probably to give Seth some dignity. 

Four cracks, four howls of pain, and the deed is done. The femur is correctly aligned, the ribs are carefully and efficiently nudged into place. Seth’s all sweaty and breathing hard, his eyes closed, but he’s going to heal clean - assuming there are no horrific internal injuries that are slowly killing him. 

…It’s been a long day, his brain is borrowing trouble.

“Alice, can we get Seth some clothes?” He looks up at his sister, but Alice is already distracted, watching the battle with laser focus. 

The battle is … it’s everything that Emmett would see in his worst nightmares if he could sleep. Iron Man and Thanos charging and grappling over the gauntlet;  it’s so close and so very, very desperate that neither of the Cullens can intervene. The chance that their speed could cause confusion and give Thanos that edge over Iron Man… 

And then Iron Man is tossed aside like a toy, Emmett’s jaw clenching at the inevitable… 

Thor and Captain America take over and for a second, with lightning building and the rage on their faces; Thor’s weapons biting into the Titan… but neither of them expect Thanos to fight back with Stormbreaker biting into his armour, and Mjolnir tight around his throat. In three moves, both Cap and Thor are discarded, and Captain America is unconscious on the other side of the battlefield, forgotten. 

It feels symbolic in the worst way. 

And then Thanos has the gauntlet.

Emmett can see the energy twisting around him as the stones react to Thanos’ donning it; the energy is a beacon on the battlefield. It’s unnatural and, despite the bright colours threaded through the energy, is utterly sinister. An unspoken and unbreakable contract. Every instinct he has is screaming for Emmett to get the fuck away from those gemstones. 

This cannot be it. This cannot be the end. Emmett cannot do anything more than simply guard Seth and hope-pray-beg the universe, in his head, to let them have enough time for Seth to heal. To heal and win and go home to his family. That he didn’t break Seth’s bones and isn’t watching his sister out of the corner of his eye, just to have them crumble to dust. To know that Rosalie and Jasper and their entire family died wondering where the hell they were. 

To die knowing he never ever got home to Rose again. Rose, Rose, I’m sorry. I tried. 

The snap is there, moments from repeating history when that saving grace, that bolt of glowing energy is back; a woman throwing all her weight into stripping the Titan of the gauntlet with a strength and confidence that has Emmett’s stomach twisting in things he’s decided aren’t worth feeling yet. Not with Seth hurt, and everything happening so fast. 

The woman has Thanos on his knees, the gauntlet slipping, and maybe, just maybe…

“Come on,” Alice whispers, crouched like a big cat ready to lunge and he really, really wants to know exactly how much of this Alice can see. What, precisely, she’s waiting for. 

(For a second, he forgot the new family motto.)

In the last second, Thanos has one of the stones loose in his hand, and punches the woman hard enough to send her flying across the battlefield with a sonic boom and a long scorch mark on the field. Alice hisses low and angry, still waiting, and Emmett wonders if maybe that was it. That was the moment they lost. 

There’s nothing left to give. 

(If Alice tries on her own, if Alice lunges out to take on Thanos, Emmett doesn’t know what he’ll do. The idea is incomprehensible, and rapidly becoming his biggest and worst fear. It’s a razor-thin possibility, and Emmett doesn’t know if he could - or would stop her, and if it’s worse that maybe he would. Maybe he wouldn’t let them pay that price.) 

Instead, as Thanos imperiously returns the stone to its place on the gauntlet, Iron Man is back on his feet - Tony Stark, really. His helmet is long gone. The armour is scratched and dented, and it looks like this fifty-something year old man has been flung around the battlefield. Bloodied, beaten, and defiant in that special way of the old and rich. 

And Tony Stark just… reaches out and pulls the gauntlet, like a child trying to snatch away a toy from an older bully. Just furiously tugging, latched on for dear life, the hydraulics of the armour straining and groaning as they struggle to keep up. 

Tony Stark is on his feet for less than a second before Thanos has him beaten and tossed into a pile of rubble. 

There’s an arrogant smirk on the Titan’s face as he turns back, poised to snap. He's won this. There’s no other way. Emmett’s not sure what’s worse: the anticipation of death, of losing this fight, or the fact he’s still not sure Alice isn’t about to dive at Thanos in a hail-Mary act of desperation. He’s also not sure if he’s close enough to grab Alice, to pin her to the ground and admit that there are some prices that he isn’t willing to pay. 

“I am inevitable.”

Those words will haunt Emmett, even when he is just particles on the wind. Even when this world is dead and gone, those words will linger. That every single moment has lead to this, to losing and failing and never ever seeing Rosalie or the rest of his family again. That the last five years have just been a long slow march to destruction. They should have let it be. At least if this shit hadn’t gone down, Seth would get to have a life. He could have remembered Rosalie every fucking day until the end of time, and that would have been better than a world where Rosalie was taken for a second time, and utterly forgotten. 

The snap is empty, hollow, a rattle of the iron plating on the gauntlet. 

It is empty. 

The stones are missing. 

And - Emmett thinks his own hands are shaking, as he turns to look over at Iron Man. Tony Stark, the billionaire trying to do the right thing. A middle-aged guy with a heart condition. Holding up his hand as the gems find their place on the armour. 

“And I… am Iron Man.”

Snap. 

The world stops. Again.

—

The energy that rips through Tony Stark is caustic and one of the angriest and most dangerous things Emmett has ever seen in his life. 

Which is why he is the opposite of pleased when he sees Alice launch herself from her landing spot to tear off Iron Man’s other gauntlet and grasp his hand. 

“Alice!” Emmett’s yell is so loud and terrified, it sounds hoarse and like an old man. Seth lets out a cry too, but he’s frozen as his injuries continue to heal. And for all his strength, Emmett’s always had the slowest reflexes in the family; there’s no way he can move fast enough to save his sister. 

“Never bet against me, Emmett. I’m putting all the cards on the table."

Alice meets his eyes, wide and defiant… and urgent. 

“I don’t gamble unless I’m going to win - I might not be a nice person, but I’m not cruel.”

He doesn’t know what makes him move, not really, when Alice holds out her hand. But he does. He’s on his feet and he grabs Alice’s hand like he’s holding on for deal life a split second before the energy hits. 

And it’s like… it’s like being burned alive. It’s like being changed again, remade, and he can taste his own venom and stale blood in his mouth and it’s the worst mistake he’s ever made.

Right up until someone takes his right hand firmly and he manages to look into the eyes of a blonde woman - he wants to shake her loose because this will kill her. It’s killing him and it’s burning Alice up from the inside and he’s glad he’s going down with his sister because otherwise he’d have to face Jasper and say that he watched Alice get killed and didn’t even try to save her. Being burnt alive is better than that. 

(Is this what it feels like to be burnt to nothing? Just in pieces amongst the fire instead of clinging to his sister and a stranger? He’s going to be sick.)

Except…

More people are taking place in the daisy-chain - monsters and aliens, humans cursed with power. He sees the golden runner held back by a companion; a man in a leather jacket shouting something he can’t hear. The archer faltering in the line up, realising the risk; Thor and a woman with a sword tearing over like their lives depend on it. 

And there’s the Captain; upright and conscious again, Steve Rogers throwing down the remains of the shield in the mud, and taking his place in the line up amongst the rest of the people who are trying something they don’t understand, but are willing to try one last thing to make this work. To save one of their own.

(Sometimes your heroes don’t let you down. Sometimes they turn out to be messy and human, but they always come through in the end.) 

There’s a rush of pain and when he hears Alice scream, he doesn’t realise he’s yelling too. 

His left forearm splits open like overripe fruit or rotting meat, from wrist to elbow, and he can see all the layers of bone, muscle, fat, skin all crystallised in golden venom that is melting and fizzing like hot oil as he stares. 

Rose, Rose, I did this for you. I love you more than I will ever be able to say, and I did every single thing I could to get home to you. Please, please forgive me. I love you so much and I need you to keep living. I need you to know that the only thing I want for you in this life and all the others is to keep being Rose. Yell, scream, rage - don’t be mad at Alice, she tried so hard to fix everything. Be mad at me for being a dumbass who thought he caught tangle with aliens and mutants and magicians and still come home to you. But please, please keep living. 

There’s just a long tunnel of light in his vision; he knows Alice is beside him, her hand in his, more than he can actually see it.  

Don’t you dare fucking die, Alice. I will drag you home in fucking pieces for Jasper to figure out if I have to. I am not going to face down your husband and tell him you got blown up. I’m not going to be the one to take the blame for what we did to the house or show Sue Clearwater all the stuff we kept for Seth or explain to Carlisle how much money was lost. Jesus, what if Maria figures out what we did to her newborns? You’re the only one crazy enough to tell her to go deal with it herself. This only fucking works if we all go home again, Alice. 

And then…

Seth’s gonna be okay. He’s going to need a ride home and us dying might mess him up a bit, but he’ll have his mom and his sister, and it’ll be okay. 

There’s nothing but white and he has to force his eyes shut. It’ll be okay. 

(He wonders what Tony Stark wished for when he snapped.) 

—

And then, it’s over. 

Like the world has taken a breath. One minute, he’s in hell, waiting to die, to dissolve into nothing as part of a daisy chain to somehow save Tony Stark? Maybe? He thinks that’s what they were doing?

(Never bet against Alice.)

The next, he’s propped up against some debris, gasping for breath that doesn’t burn on the way down like he needs to breathe. His arm is on fire and he’s intensely aware of all the joints on his body, but he’s alive. He’s in one piece. 

Emmett spots Alice a few feet away, but it might as well be on the other side of the country it’s so impossible for him to move. She’s so very still, and Seth is leaning over her. He can’t hear what Seth is saying to her. He hopes Alice is answering. 

And then there is Thanos, surrounded by a ring of people who took on the energy of the glove. None of them look like they could stand up, let alone continue the fight, but Emmett knows that if Thanos raised his hand again, they would all rally. They’ll go down fighting, tooth and nail. If he has nothing else left, Emmett figures he’ll at least be a decent human shield for one last stand. 

Thanos simply stares at them all. He doesn’t get up, he does not speak. He just stares at them - the humans and aliens crumpled around the battlefield, with nothing left to give but everything to lose. He stares at them with hard eyes but there is some kind of terrible understanding in them as he goes to sit down in the wreckage, as if he is amongst his own people. Soldiers in arm, all of them. 

Thanos never takes that seat. He simply… drifts away on the wind, dust and dirt that tumbles amongst the bodies of his army, of their army, indistinguishable from anything and utterly forgotten. 

Emmett is hazily reminded of Victoria and her newborns. Of the half-dozen fires they lit to deal with the body parts fast. Of the way the smoke turned purple and the ash in the air tasted almost metallic. The newborns they hunted after the Snap, Maria’s army loose on Monterrey; even burnt in dumpsters, with Alice tossing in lighter fluid or cheap liquor to encourage the flames, the ash on the air always felt heavy and significant. Like a warning. 

Thanos’ and his army aren’t like that. It’s no different than dust on the wind, like when he stops short after a run just to spray dirt at Edward and Jasper, who always beat him. It’s nothingness; the only smell and taste is the fires burning around them, the blood and reeking bodies of the wounded and the dead. 

Thanos and his army are gone. 

For some reason, Emmett thought it would happen differently. With a pound of flesh, and yelling. But maybe nothing… maybe that fate is exactly what they all needed. 

(It’s like they never existed at all.)

—

Time passes. 

(Blink.)

Seth is somewhere behind him. He hopes he’s healing okay; he doesn’t think he has it in him to reset Seth’s bones again today. He’ll do it, but he doesn’t want to. Better if Seth heals clean the first time around.

(Blink.)

The light is different. 

(Alice still isn’t moving.)

Everyone is crowded around someone over to the left of him and he wonders if anything they did matters.

(Tony Stark doesn’t deserve to die after saving them all.)

There are people leaning over him, looking worried. 

“He’s got no pulse,” the woman says, sheathing a sword efficiently. “He’s not going to make it, if I understand Midgardian medicine.”

“He took more than a few hits,” says a male voice Emmett’s trying to place. “We need to get a medic over here.” 

His mouth tastes like rotten blood, and has dried out; it takes more than a few seconds to regain the ability to speak. 

“D-Don’t need one,” he manages through numb lips. “My sister…”

“She’s being looked after, she’s conscious.” It’s the blonde woman again, the nuclear reactor, the who took his hand. “You’re alive.”

“Thank fuck for that.” He coughs - coughs - and for some reason, that’s the trigger his body needed because he can taste his venom again, peeling his tongue off his mouth. “My wife would have murdered me if I got killed out here.”

There’s a pause, and the dark-haired woman with the sword smiles. “I think she will be pleased that you fought with honour,” she says. 

“Rose’ll be mad Alice got us mixed up in this,” he says absently as he looks down at his left arm and sees the wreckage. For a second, he mistakes the wound as still being open down to the bone; it’s smaller than when it happened, taking up the bottom two-thirds of his forearm, and is just faceted golden venom layered to look almost like a prism. 

Then he touches it to see if he can prompt his body to kickstart healing again,  and realises that this weird crystallised tear is solid in his arm. There’s no pain when he touches it, it’s just… his arm. It’s a darker yellow than venom that stands out against his skin, and Emmett has no idea about it. Maybe it’ll keep shrinking?

“Your sister has the same wound,” the male says kindly. “From channelling the power of the stones. She says it isn’t causing her any pain.”

“We have people who can treat it.” He fumbles for the words. It’s just something else to deal with, to figure out, and his head still feels like there’s something bouncing around inside of it. “I need a minute.”

“Well, we’ve got a lot of those now,” the blonde woman says. “Take as much time as you need.”

—

It feels like it takes him hours to remember how his body fits together and how to use his arms and legs, just lying there staring. A few fighters wander over to check on him, and they seem almost grateful he’s conscious and able to hold a conversation. 

Iron Man is beyond critically wounded, and the snippets he deciphers imply he probably will only live long enough to say good bye to his kid. A lot of people are involved in getting him off the battlefield, and somewhere they might be able to help him. 

Sergeant Barnes comes by, looking at him inscrutably, and comments that he’s glad Emmett’s arm held out before wandering off. The wild-eyed alien girl pops up, looking strained but happy, and thanks him again. 

And finally the Archer, Hawkeye, shows up looking hollowed out and grim. But he’s the one that talks to Emmett a while - mostly about his kids, who were all taken. His wife too. 

“Someone said you lost your wife?” He looks over at Emmett. 

“Yeah. She’s back, and she’s probably really mad,” Emmett replies, flexing his hand for the first time successfully. There’s sparks running down both arms and his legs, which can only be a good thing. “Not sure who is going to be angrier, honestly - my wife, Alice’s husband, or our… mom.” 

Hawkeye chuckles, and stands up, offering a hand to Emmett. “Need help?”

Despite the fact that Hawkeye is nearly a foot shorter than him, Emmett is back on his feet and limping through the wreckage like an old man, looking for his siblings. 

Alice is already with Seth, and they are both leaning back against the debris, with their arms around each other. Seth is wearing a pair of weird pants and a robe that Emmett suspects were stolen from bodies, but he doesn’t care right now. There’s a ragged bandage around Alice’s left arm, and she offers him a grimace as he makes his way over. 

He doesn’t know what to say to them right now as he takes the place next to Alice. There are a million things that need to be taken care of right now - they need to get somewhere sheltered in case the sun comes out, he and Alice need to hunt, Seth needs some kind of hydration pack and probably a bump of fuckin’ fentanyl or something because the bruises on him are still darkening. 

They need to figure out how to get across the country as fast as possible in a world that is currently in chaos and absolutely no transport to get them there.  

They need to call their family, and tell them that it’s okay. They’re okay. 

(That thought kind of makes Emmett want to laugh and to cry. He was so sure that one of them wouldn’t make it. That he’d be bringing a fistful of Alice’s ashes back to Jasper, or being the one to look Sue Clearwater in the eye and explain that he didn’t do enough to protect her kid. He didn’t think he’d get to the finish line, and still have them both in one piece and now he’s not entirely sure what to do next.)

He looks over at Seth and Alice, the exhaustion written on both their faces, trying to figure out a plan. Neither of them look capable of much beyond standing up. 

“It’s okay Emmett,” Alice manages in a hoarse voice, and she shifts to lean into him. “It’s okay, I fixed it. It doesn’t matter what they know now. I fixed it all.”

Her head is heavy against him, sliding down his arm a little, and he manages to lift his arm enough to steady Alice before she face-plants in the dirt, still muttering about fixing things for good. 

“That was the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever seen the two of you do,” Seth says so matter-of-factly that he wants to laugh but he doesn’t know if there will ever be a time when he can summon the energy for laughter or movement or anything. He has never felt this tired, this burnt out and completely done in his entire life. 

“But it worked,” Alice replies, and this time it’s Seth that reaches forward - wincing as he moves - to prop her upright. She needs to hunt; her eyes are so black they look empty. 

“Never bet against Alice,” Emmett manages. There are a million thoughts in his head but he can’t find the energy to speak them out loud. “Not even when she’s going in blind.”

Alice manages a puff of laughter at that. 

“We have to go home,” Seth reminds them, and they both nod. 

“Just…” Alice takes a breath and closes her eyes. “Just give me a minute.”

All three of them settle back against the debris, a reeking pile of survivors just watching people fish themselves out of the dirt, tend to the wounded, and pick their way out of the battle site. Emmett wonders if Alice’s throat is burning as much as his is right now, with the rising scent of blood as the wounded are moved around the battlefield. 

The smoke in the air is still hovering but there’s light filtering through now. They probably have an hour or two until they’ll be sitting in broad daylight. If he could move, he’d be helping dig out the bodies, give them the respect they deserve. Shifting debris away so that the recovery effort could be better. There are voices and noise behind them; probably some kind of first aid response team finally being let through. He’d suggest they go help themselves to a few bags of blood but that’s probably in poor taste with people actively dying, and he knows that would not sit well with Seth. 

(It’s mostly the risk of upsetting Seth that stops him from suggesting it.)

And as he watches the world move around him; Alice resting between him and Seth; Seth testing his busted leg tenderly, he realises it’s over. It’s never going to be just the three of them again. No more empty rooms, no more waiting for people who weren’t ever coming home, no more planning out food for Seth or hunting for them. The fragile, makeshift normal they created is gone - just gone on the wind. There’s going to have to be so much of everything, of moving and talking and explaining and so much fixing… And he’s so tired, in a way that feels like a ghost of his human life. His arm still feels burnt out, his clothes are so encrusted with blood and alien bodily fluids they feel like cardboard against his skin. Esme and Rosalie are going to have a conniption over how disgusting they all are. Esme will probably hose them down before they’re allowed back in the house. 

That’s an oddly comforting thought. 

It’s going to be okay. But for now, he’s just going to sit here with his siblings for a bit, and then he’ll figure out everything else. 

I’m on my way Rose, I promise. 
 
—