This Is The Darkest Timeline
Summary: Four times Marcus found out about Didyme's death, and the one time he didn't. A speculative fic, presenting four alternate universes to the canon Twilight timeline.
Warnings: Language, character deaths, implied violence, a number of incongruous alternate universes
Author's Note: Merina2 asked me to write her something which would make the month until the release of Breaking Dawn: Part Two go by a little faster. I interpreted this as an invitation to torture her favourite characters. I hope that you can forgive me for all of the beloved-character death, Miss Merina2.
The title of this story is shamelessly stolen from a concept introduced by the television show Community.
I
"Your seer makes mistakes," Aro says, withdrawing cool fingers from the unfurled pallor of Alice's palm. "The lovely Mrs Whitlock just told me so herself. Can you convince me otherwise, Edward?"
The golden-eyed vampire angles himself between the ancient and his human beloved, the lines of his body knifelike. "She is right this time," he says through clenched teeth. "She'll turn Bella. Carlisle will help. She'll be a vampire in a month, I can promise you."
The child is babbling as the cool tide of judgment turns against him. Marcus has seen it happen before, and with greater subtlety.
"Oh, my dear boy," Aro sighs. "Such faith in a certain future can only be the property of the young. When you have lived a while longer, you will understand my trepidation." The slim man does not stop pacing, but his attention turns to his brothers.
"Caius?"
He votes for the girl's death, of course. Marcus could not be less surprised. When his turn comes, he speaks against it. Reluctantly siding with lovers has become his hallmark; any change in that routine will pique his brothers' interest. After three thousand years, they still hope for the end of his mourning.
"We have a stalemate, it seems, and I am in the unenviable position of breaking it." The metal and wheels in Aro's mind click and grind so frantically that Marcus can practically see the sparks. "Your Bella is an anomaly, Edward, but not a desirable one, I'm afraid. A girl who does not respond to our gifts promises to be an uncontrollable newborn. If Jane and Alec cannot rein her in, how can you hope to do so?"
The conclusion is inevitable. Marcus closes his eyes, watching the fire of the boy's bond grow from red to gasping, fluttering gold. It's a lovely, tragic thing, but he has seen too much to be moved by it.
"Felix, if you please." Aro smiles pleasantly, as the human girl whimpers. "Do not be frightened, my dear. We will give you a painless end."
"You're monstrous!" Edward cries, struggling against Demetri's steely grip.
Marcus sighs. The tirade of desperate clichés has commenced.
And then, quite suddenly, Carlisle's son turns to him.
"How can you allow this?" he says, dark and hissing. "You, you of all people, after losing—" Felix has paused, restrained by some quick gesture of Aro's, and the boy flings himself at the opportunity. "He killed her! Aro killed your Didyme, because you were going to leave, and he didn't want her—"
Edward speaks too quickly, all mismatched words and jumbled meaning, but Marcus understands. The ink seeps into his eyes, until he sees nothing at all, and remembers less.
[-]
Three months later, the Volturi come to Forks. It is the summer's beginning, and the meadow where they meet the Cullens brims with purple flowers. They crumble quickly, crushed beneath boots and the careless paws of wolves, but the scent of honey lingers, tauntingly sweet.
Aro does not bother to lower his hood, to take Carlisle by the hand, to examine the tremulous newborn that clings to Edward's side.
"You have cost me a brother," he says, addressing no-one at all. The childish glee has abandoned his voice, leaving only frost and the weary toll of time. "After three hundred years of tolerance towards your combined eccentricities, that is poor repayment indeed."
"My old friend, please—" Carlisle begins, but Aro raises a hand. The golden doctor is too polite to carry on.
"Friend," the ancient breathes. "How true. We were friends once. But that is no replacement for the bond I have so recently lost."
The silence is absolute.
"Alec," Aro says at last. "I must request a favour."
There isn't any time for screaming.
II
"Fuck you," Athenodora purrs. Her fingers curl, graceful and then not at all, into a fist. She hits Marcus hard, a mean, quick punch to the gut that belongs in the arsenal of an eight year old with something to prove.
It doesn't hurt him, really. Nothing has in three hundred years, and she's never been exceptional.
"Do not forget that this confinement is your fault," she continues, all light and sweetness and fireflies. It's the voice of a happy girl, or a mad one with time to practice. The tower around them, the place that she cannot leave, takes the echoes and rips them apart into horrible things.
"Sulpicia," she says, "is so lonely. I'm not."
"Then why are you angry?" he says, with no true curiosity. Some people are born burning.
"Boredom." She sighs impatiently, as though the weight of eternity can be dismissed as easily as a rainy afternoon. "Sulpicia sulks too much, as does Caius. And they are my favourites. The rest of you—" Her hands flutter, dismissive.
"May I tell you a secret?" She stands too close to him. Marcus can smell lemons on her skin, and her mate, and cobwebs.
He nods, wondering dimly through the grey muslin of mourning.
"Aro killed his sister. She loved him more than she loved you, and he murdered her anyway." The confession is casual. Throwaway, even.
His mind doesn't run red. The breath doesn't leave his lungs in vicious gusts. He's forgotten how to do any of that. Instead, he chokes on a hundred questions.
"Oh, spare me. I have better things to do than find you your proof," she says, turning on her heel. "Well, no, I don't," she murmurs, but it isn't meant for Marcus.
He wouldn't believe her usually, but then, her usual pronouncements aren't accompanied by a sickly strand of fear looping through Aro's bond to him.
[-]
"Bored?" Marcus demands. The blood and venom in his mouth taste sharp and strange, triumphant.
Ruins smoulder around them. Aro's charred remains smell of lavender, and soon the wind will carry that away. Gods know where Sulpicia has gone. Caius lacks an eye. There's ash on Athenodora's blue dress, and that seems to trouble her most of all.
"Less so." She's holding her mate's hand now, mostly careful of his smashed fingers. The archaic grin she wears suits her.
"Will you—?" Marcus gestures at the bonfire, then at himself. He will not beg for death, but he can ask. He's hasn't thought to request this of her before, and sometimes, the gods are merciful.
"No," she tells him. "You have your justice to enjoy." The trill of her laugh is almost like Didyme's—playful, and meant to be obeyed.
III
When Chelsea stands on tip-toe, her eyes blown wide with hope, and a lover's confession on her lips, Marcus can find nothing to say. He knows so little of her, this girl who tethers him to life, to the red rock of Volterra.
"You don't have to love me," she whispers, filling the silence. Her nails, shorn short and blunt, tap a frantic pattern on the old oak of his chamber's door.
He glances at her, gaze catching upon sparrow-coloured hair tumbling in waves, phantom freckles all over her nose, the sinuous jut of her shoulder, and decides.
"I will not," he says, "but come in."
She's nothing at all like Didyme, but really, that's what he looks for in the women he discards.
[-]
Marcus expects Chelsea to be an unparalleled manipulator, a creature of mirror shards and seductions. She's earnest instead. A storyteller drawn to surprising sweetness and blissful endings. Even her kisses taste of honey.
He'd thought once that her gift heralded a defect, a mad desire to make people adore and obey. Now, he revises the theory. A sad little girl grew up wanting everyone around her to fall in love, and stay together, and never, never feel alone. Once he realizes this, Marcus' hands turn gentle. He traces the speckles on her spine with long fingers, shaping them into constellations, and whispering the kindest things he can think of, all the while hoping she understands.
Perhaps Chelsea does. She returns to him night after night, exploring him with devastating eagerness, and asking for nothing in return.
[-]
A half-century into their arrangement, he gives her a necklace, all garnets and gold and fairy tales. The stones match her eyes, while the fanciful loops and twists resemble spilled sunlight on the snow of her skin.
"You care about me," Chelsea says, drawing her arms around herself protectively, as though she shields a secret.
"I do. Surely you can see that." Her talent has its limits, but this is not one of them.
"I have to tell you something," she says, curled inward like a wounded thing. "I know why Aro created me. The real reason." The words come out in rapid gasps, as though she can only say them all at once, or not at all.
"To keep me from suicide," he agrees, no longer fearing the term.
"Because he killed your mate. My gift was the closest replacement he could find quickly." The look on her face speaks of dark anticipation, the black certainty that she will die for this.
Marcus does not move. No fire rises in his belly, no thirst for retribution. Just hollows and silence, as ever.
"I know," he says.
"How could you?"
"I think I have known for centuries." His Didyme's death was a perfect coincidence, so lovingly orchestrated that it was practically intimate. The sort of thing only a brother would plan.
"And—?" she says, drawn tight and fraying.
"What would you like me to do?"
"Why would that matter?" she demands, suddenly vicious. For the first time, he sees the old copper of jealousy in her bond to him.
"You understand happiness," he says, and that has become reason enough.
IV
Caius hates Didyme's gift. It fills his head with wool and wine, until he can't recognize his own thoughts. It's a palliative, a quiet numbing, and the last thing he wants. When his own mate wakes for the last time, clear-eyed and ordinary, he kisses her palm with the sort of gratitude he didn't think he could feel, once.
He grows to hate many things in Velathri—Marcus' softness, the way Sulpicia pretends to smile, and Aro's orders most of all. That revelation comes when the scars grow too numerous, and the fear, the impulse to glance over his shoulder again and again, does not die away after a few nights' peace.
When he says so, the words pressed against Athenodora's shoulder and muffled by her hair, she laughs. "I didn't know you were permitted to complain," she says lightly, and he hates her too, for learning so quickly and well.
And yet, he has no hand in Didyme's death. Nobody will believe him, but there it is.
[-]
Caius cannot say why he tries to comfort Marcus in the aftermath. It isn't as though he particularly likes his brother, who drips sentiment and wants to belong with unseemly desperation. Nonetheless, he reluctantly finds himself in the corner of Marcus' chambers, speaking tentatively to a shadow.
"I am sorry," he offers, eying the distance between them and finding it satisfactory. He hasn't come to fight, or to lose.
"How kind of you."
This is the Marcus he dimly remembers, the newborn whose edges still gleamed and cut. If he stays in this mood, Caius decides, he has a chance of surviving.
"Do you think I would stand here and say so if I were involved with her end?" he hisses, careful not to mention the dead girl's name.
Marcus weighs the statement, black-eyed and baleful.
"Perhaps." He sighs, raising his head. It is no longer possible to guess his age. "What are you implying, then?"
Caius halts. Counts his words. Chooses them on instinct alone.
"Consider the circumstances of her passing, and who will gain the most from it."
"She was his sister," the dark-haired man says immediately, repeating a well-worn thought as though it is an argument.
"You have overlooked many things in the past centuries." The bitterness in his voice is unmistakeable, and he makes no excuses before departing.
[-]
The cold crash of marble and bone draws the white-haired immortal to the courtyard. He expects to see two of the newborns—whom Aro so fancifully calls his guard, and Caius, talentless nuisances—sparring, but it is his brothers he encounters instead. They do not strive for elegance in their harried, desperate motions, but for supremacy. The conflict's cause is obvious, etched into every grief-scraped angle of Marcus' features.
Separating them should be a priority, but he's fascinated by the blur of fists and teeth, the sole battle where their gifts are useless.
Aro does not fight well. There's something graceless about him, a heaviness and a lack of balance. The breathtaking nastiness that promises victory isn't there, and Caius smirks. He hasn't had much opportunity to feel superior. Besides, he enjoys duels to the death.
He hears the light patter of feet behind him. A moment later, Athenodora peeks over his shoulder, before twining her arm around his waist, and lingering there.
"We are hoping for Aro's victory, I suppose," she says. Perhaps concern will fissure her façade of ice and sensibility later, but he doubts it.
"Yes." There is nothing to be gained from Marcus' triumph, and the death of the only brother who can rule. It's a pity, Caius decides, that Didyme's mate will be betrayed from all quarters before his end, but the thought carries no real sting.
"You should probably shift the odds, then." Her smile is a naked blade, and his mirrors it in a heartbeat.
i
Marcus plays a game sometimes, when the night drags. He imagines the members of his coven in his own situation, terribly alone with the memories of murdered mates, chambers full of decayed belongings, a void with a name.
Aro would go mad, he decides, the jolting insanity of a raw nerve. Without a mind to rival his own, and lacking the pantomime of lust, betrayal, reunion, repeat, the shine of glee would leave his eyes. Lacking that, what was he but a lunactic with a throne?
Caius, without Athenodora, would be a calamity. The year of her end, in the history books, would be a litany of fire, strange fever, misaligned circumstances, and the odd murders of hundreds. At the end of it, Caius would be dead too.
Sulpicia—Marcus cannot decide. Her theatrical madness would rival her husband's. If she clung to sanity with shivering hands, the Volturi would find themselves under the thumb of a girl who no longer cared what she lost.
Athenodora's sorrow would be quiet and contained, invisible to those who did not know how to look. Vanishing from Volterra, she'd reappear somewhere she had never been before. The stories would begin there, of beautiful wraiths and the lives they claimed.
At the game's end, the truth meets Marcus' eye, and does not look away. His coven, cynical though they are, would scorch their mourning into myth and memory.
And he has not even tried.