XXXVI.

Finished.

Everything was finished.

I forced myself to remain in place, listening as Isobel strode away from me, as she stomped up her stairs, and as she threw herself on her bed and began crying.

This was what I would remember - this failure. This was what I would take with me to my grave. If I had been human - or more principled - or less principled - if I had been nearly anyone other than myself, none of this might have happened. She wouldn't have walked away from me, and I wouldn't have made her cry.

I got in my car and pulled out of the driveway in a haze of almost apathetic gloom, knowing that I needed to go home, but uncertain how to care enough to make it back. It would be easier just to drive - drive until I ran out of gas, and then get out and run. Or walk. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

With a sigh and a conscious exercise of will, I pulled myself together. No matter how inevitable my death was now that Isobel and I had reached this point, there were things I needed to do before I went crazy. I owed it to my family to say goodbye, for one thing. For another, I wanted to be certain that Alice would keep her eye on Isobel's future whether I was there or not. Isobel knew enough about us that I didn't want to leave her wholly unprotected.

After that - I would need to decide where to go, not run away haphazardly. I didn't want to put anyone else in danger when I lost control of myself. I certainly didn't want to find myself stalking Isobel either in my capacity as a jealous lover or as a thirsty vampire.

Perhaps I might even go to Volterra. If any group of vampires could keep me from becoming a danger, it was surely the Volturi.

Or, given the fondness the Volturi's de facto leader, Aro, had for witches with the sorts of unusual abilities Alice and I displayed, they might simply decide the most expedient course was to turn Isobel in order to keep me sane. Besides her importance to me, she, after all, had that mental silence that Alice had already predicted would pique Aro's interest.

So Volterra was out. What other options did I have?

There had to be other options somewhere...

None immediately came to mind, though, and, in spite of knowing that I needed to think and plan, I fell to brooding for a few minutes over what I had lost. I wondered if, on some level, I wouldn't prefer it if someone took the choice away from me and turned Isobel without consulting either of us.

I wondered: was I that selfish?

Of course I was, and the only thing standing between me and that selfishness was my determination to do what was right. In order to do what was right, I needed to stop wallowing and think.

The first thing I had to deal with was my family, so I should start there. It was after school, so, minus Carlisle, they would likely all be at home. Had Alice been watching my afternoon play out? Would they know?

They weren't going to let me end my life without some kind of struggle. In particular, Alice, Emmett and Jasper were likely to try talking me into turning Isobel again - and Esme might be right there with them.

And if I continued to resist, they might choose to do what was best for me even without my consent - just like the Volturi.

This was not a contingency I had planned for. Rosalie would be on my side, at least, as would Carlisle, no doubt…

Well, the first step was to get close enough to the house that I could hear what my siblings - and possibly my mother - were thinking about without any of them being aware that I was nearby. I had no desire to deal with them right now. All I really wanted to do at the moment - besides anything that involved getting closer to Isobel either legitimately or surreptitiously, of course - was run away and howl my grief out at the sky. But - I had already committed to giving up my sanity and life for her protection; I couldn't balk at dealing with my family for her.

The time for destructive mourning was coming. For now I was still capable of fighting against my own selfishness, and to do that I needed to keep myself together.

I pulled my car off the road a couple of miles away from home, and cast my mind that direction, prepared to spend as long as necessary listening to thoughts and conversations.

To my surprise, the house seemed largely deserted. I heard only one set of thoughts within or anywhere nearby - Rosalie had taken over the living room with three large whiteboards and was working on one of her favorite on-going projects: an analytic solution for the n-body problem in physics.

It was nice to know, I supposed, that someone wasn't agonizing over details of my personal life that were no one's business but my own. It was like Rosalie to take advantage of everyone else's preoccupation by moving into and claiming what was usually communal space, but that made it all the more likely that she would tell me where the rest of the family had gone - if only to get me out of her way faster.

I pulled back onto the road and finished my drive.

Rosalie's thoughts flickered to me as I opened the door - it seemed she had been expecting me, probably courtesy of Alice - but her mind was focused on the math and theorems that covered her boards.

"Hold on," she grumbled as I stepped into the living room, crossing out one set of equations and scrawling a few keywords that probably made sense to her, at least, beneath them. "Okay," she sighed surveying the result, her mind still hardly on me at all, "before I answer what I know you're dying to ask, I have one question for you: are you giving up on Isobel because you would rather die than turn her?"

I felt my brows furrow, sensing suddenly that maybe Rosalie wasn't as focused on her physics problem as I had assumed. And yet...her thoughts were centered on it, and she hadn't so much as glanced at me. "No," I said slowly. "I'm afraid that you're right about that much: I'm too selfish not to choose her if she were to choose me." Not choosing her felt like ripping my own heart out - or, well, not my heart, since it was no longer necessary. But something that might be said to be similarly vital for vampires.

I was too focused on my own hurt to immediately notice the change in Rosalie's thoughts.

By the time I did notice, it was too late.

In an instant, she was on top of me. Instinct took over, thankfully, since my mind was still trying to catch up, and I began fighting back as she tried to wrestle me onto my stomach. "What are you doing?" I snarled at her, unwilling to do more than fend her off until I better understood what was going on. Somehow, incredibly, she was still managing to mostly think about math, combined with her immediate responses to my actions, rather than anything that might hint at her motives.

She was getting uncomfortably good at this mental smokescreen thing she did with math. I decided, as I tried unsuccessfully to throw her off of me, that was never going to trust her again when she was focused on some sort of equation or theorem. It should be an easy resolution to keep, considering how little time I had left.

Her only audible answer was a grunt, but my question triggered a handful of memories that managed, once again, to paralyze me very briefly with shock.

"Alice saw what?" I exploded as Rose finally managed to force me onto my stomach. "Rosalie!" I yelled when, instead of answering, she began binding my hands with something - a bike lock cord?

"Don't bother to struggle," she told me. "Alice and Emmett tested the tensile strength of several of these, and he couldn't pull this one apart at all. So unless you've got a pair of wire cutters up your ass - which might explain a lot, actually - you're not going to break this. I'm going to use some tubular webbing and a beer knot to tie the ends together, so pulling will just make it tighter - and Emmett got a good-quality locking carabiner as a backup."

"Rosalie, I don't care about your new bondage fetish," I growled. "Tell me what Alice saw!"

"Why would I do that?" she asked. "She only told me enough to convince me to help. If you want the full story, you're going to need to get it from her - which you will as soon as I text her."

I felt her weight shift and knew she was reaching into her pocket for her phone. "Look," she continued as she sent the text, "if you were acting this way out of a principled desire to leave Isobel alive as a human, I wouldn't interfere. But if you're just flailing around haphazardly, you need to know what Alice has to say before you resign yourself to losing your mate and going nuts. Even though we don't always get along, you're still my brother and I don't want you dead." She paused, wondering if what she had said sounded too sentimental. "I mean," she continued, her eye-roll evident in her voice, "do you even know how impossible Esme and Alice would be to live with? Not to mention Emmett. It's bad enough when a boy loses his puppy, but when a puppy - Emmett in this case - loses his boy? Just pathetic."

Under other circumstances, I would have smiled at her unwillingness to admit to any real affection for me, but right now I was too irritated. "You don't need to tie me up," I snarled at her. "I want to hear what Alice has to say. And couldn't she have told you that I wasn't acting on principle?"

"Maybe it's escaped your notice, but I can't read minds, Edward," she responded tartly. "I don't trust you not to take off running, just like I didn't trust Alice not to say whatever was expedient to get my help. Alice is very much an 'ends justify the means' person, in case that has also escaped your notice."

She did have a point about Alice - a point I would have appreciated more had she not tied me up. Though...that smacked of the sort of idea Alice would have come up with, too. Or Emmett - I fully expected that he would have a good laugh when he came in and saw me trussed up on the floor, with his mate's knee pressed against my back to hold me in place.

Rose's text must have done its job, because I heard the minds of our siblings - and Esme - returning. Emmett and Jasper were making snarky jokes about me, while Alice was an all-too-familiar ball of stubborn determination. Esme was just worried - about me, about Isobel, about the lengths she had let Alice go to in order to force me to hear her out. From her mind, I learned that Carlisle had agreed that the intervention was necessary, but had objected enough to the means that he hadn't even tried to get any time off to come home for this. It surprised me that he agreed at all - I would have expected him to value Isobel's humanity more highly than that.

But, then again, if what I had glimpsed in Rosalie's mind were true…

I didn't understand, though, how Alice could come to the conclusion that I was Isobel's mate. Humans didn't have mates, not like vampires did. As Rose had, I suspected it was some sort of trick on Alice's part. Rosalie, as she had pointed out to me herself, wouldn't necessarily be able to tell, because she couldn't read Alice's mind.

I didn't know what a trick like that would solve, though. And...if it weren't a trick, but the truth...it would change - well, everything.

So I wouldn't run away, because I had to know.

"You can untie him now," Alice called out as she came inside. Sorry, she thought at me. Isobel did pretty well at keeping herself under control, but if she hadn't - if you had told her differently or if some of her stronger feelings had managed to slip out - it really would have been necessary.

Hold on, Isobel hadn't expressed her strongest feelings? And why would she hold back if she was breaking things off with me?

Rosalie took her knee off my spine and helped me sit up as I tried to make sense of Alice's thoughts. She was already deftly untying my hands as the others entered the room. In spite of my sudden uncertainty regarding what, precisely, had happened today, I cast a sullen glare at Alice, not at all ready to forgive her for this indignity.

"Well," Rose sighed before I could decide what to say, "I'm off, then."

"Aw, come on, baby - you don't want to stay and watch our little brother get his ass handed to him?" Emmett wheedled. "Emotionally speaking, of course."

"I'm older than both of you," I growled at them. It was true in an absolute sense, even if I had been turned at a younger age.

Rose ignored both me and Emmett's half-joking tone. "No. I played my part against my better judgment, and I'm done now."

"Thanks, Rose," Alice told her softly.

"Yeah, whatever," she sighed. "I'm going driving, so don't come looking for me."

We all watched her stalk fluidly from the room.

"She gonna be okay?" Emmett asked me in an undertone as we heard the side door slam.

I fixed him with a cold look to let him know that, even though I was answering, he was unequivocally on my shit list. "She's upset that she has, once again, chosen someone she cares about over her principles," I answered, listening to Rosalie's thoughts spin unhappily. At least she could admit to herself that she cared about me, even if she had an aversion to saying it - or even implying it - out loud.

"She'll deal with it the same way she has been for the last however-many decades," Alice added with a sigh after a quick check of the future, "and by tomorrow the pretentious bitch facade we all know and love will be firmly back in place."

Emmett gave her a goofy smile. "I really love that facade."

She patted his arm. "Believe us - we know. We couldn't avoid knowing if we tried."

"Especially when you're loving it four or five times a night," Jasper muttered from the corner where he had stationed himself.

"Children," Esme interrupted, recalling them to the task at hand before Emmett could do more than grin proudly.

I looked at Alice and she looked back at me. "Humans don't have mates," I told her.

"Apparently that's not true - at least not when a vampire is involved," she replied.

That smirk she turned on me when she had something really amazingly clever to tell me - or at least when she thought it was amazingly clever - began peeking out, so I waited, unable to pick up her news from her carefully-blanked mind.

Emmett, not one to understand or enjoy cat-and-mouse games, jumped into an explanation well before Alice got tired of drawing out the anticipation. "After we talked - you know, last night - I wondered if humans really didn't feel the mating bond. I couldn't think of anyone we've ever heard of who found themselves mated to a human without immediately turning him or her, though, so I started asking around - "

"And when he asked me," Alice said, taking over with a touch of irritation at his spoiling of her dramatic moment, "I realized that we really didn't know. Since you wouldn't talk to me, things were set to go pretty badly between you and Isobel. That gave me a chance to look at futures in which she lost you, either because she broke things off or you stormed off and set yourself on fire in misplaced despair…" She rolled her eyes expressively. "At first, I was just looking at what happened if I asked her about her feelings right after, but I realized that didn't prove anything. Although - she is pretty attached to you, Edward," Alice's eyes brightened and went sort of dreamy looking, "probably even in love with you, although she doesn't know to call it that since it's her first time."

A shiver of mingled pleasure and pain went through me. Could it possibly be true? I wanted it - her - so much that I feared the very strength of me feelings would make any kind of parity between us impossible. And...what did it mean for where things stood now?

"It was harder to look further into the future, of course," Alice went on, "but I was very determined to find Isobel again in five, ten, twenty years and find out how she was doing and what she thought of you, so I managed to get a few glimpses." She began mentally spreading out her visions for my benefit, so that I could try to spot whatever it was she had seen.

Only to be interrupted. "Tell him about what you figured out!" Emmett demanded before I had a chance to examine much of anything.

She shot him an irritated look. This was why Alice and Emmett - thankfully - didn't usually conspire together. Both liked conspiracies, but Alice had a decided flair for dramatic presentation, while Emmett was too impatient to care for those sorts of niceties. He blurted everything out more or less instantly, much to Alice's all-too-apparent dismay.

Alice shot him a glare that he either didn't notice or entirely disregarded. "Isobel does feel the mating bond," she said with a sniff, "but there's a key difference between her and you - between humans and vampires - that makes it less...all-consuming, I suppose you might say. I'm surprised it didn't occur to me before. Losing you wouldn't be as devastating for her as it is for you for one simple reason: she can forget."

She could forget me? For a moment I didn't understand - how was it a mating bond if she could forget me?

Then it dawned on me. Alice had specifically left off the reference to me for a reason. Humans were capable of forgetting in general - in fact, they were incapable of remembering with any kind of clarity. I retained enough memories from my own life and had read enough books to know that it encompassed even those things - and people - they would rather remember. "Time heals all wounds" had not become a cliche because of some magic that the passage of time carried - rather humans were naturally incapable of truly holding on to any past pain or pleasure. In the moment of their pain, they might begin habits that damaged them into the future, and old habits of feeling could sometimes rear their heads in order to wreak havoc on a situation, but the original feelings themselves faded as inevitably as old leaves.

"What happens to Isobel?" I asked Alice.

"Well, it depends," Alice answered. "Isobel is stubborn and would walk away from you if she thought you couldn't be trusted. That generally tracks with her best outcomes. She would find someone else - or, more likely, a number of 'someones' in slow but steady succession - the memory of you would fade, and every time a wistful 'what if' crept in there, she would have something to tell herself to fight it back down. If you left her, that would be worse. Generally speaking, she would have a hard time even pretending to settle down, even though she wouldn't want to pin her restlessness on her lingering feelings for you."

Alice told me her conclusions rather than showing me mostly for Emmett's sake, but she kept the worst back to share with me alone. When she had finished speaking, she continued in her thoughts, mentally offering up a handful of other futures - truly bad futures in which Isobel ended up as an alcoholic, or depressed and suicidal, or in some other self-destructive place. These were less likely, Alice thought, usually needing some second trauma fairly soon after you leave her or she leaves you. But...they do show how trying to deal with your loss saps a lot of her resiliency. None of these futures really exist anymore since I decided to intervene with both of you, which argues that Isobel isn't very susceptible to those life choices without some kind of powerful motivating factor.

Oh good, I thought, it was great to know that I had the capacity to completely ruin any hope Isobel had for happiness.

But - then again, she might have said the same about her effect on me. Hadn't I walked into my plans for today fully aware that they might end in my death?

"So what does this mean?" I ground out. "She just decided to leave me."

"No," Alice told me, her voice colored with impatience, "she didn't. If you had been listening to her instead of to everything you feared she was saying, you would have heard her telling you exactly what you need to do to help her feel safe again."

Was that...true? I thought back to what Isobel had said. Maybe the right now in her repeated "I can't deal with this right now" deserved emphasis?

"Edward," Alice continued, "you made a mistake. It's your bad luck that it happened to be a mistake that touches on some of Isobel's biggest fears and insecurities, but it was a mistake. You realized it was wrong, stopped, and then admitted to it and asked for forgiveness. Isobel isn't stupid. She'll realize that stuff is important once her initial feelings of outrage, fear and betrayal settle down a little."

"Will she?" I whispered, pleading with Alice silently not to jerk me around.

"Edward," Esme said, looking almost as desperately heartbroken as I felt, "she will. She's meant for you."

"If she weren't," Alice said in a lighter tone, a smile lifting the corners of her mouth, "do you really think she would have gotten involved with you - with us? We're obviously trouble, even if Isobel only knows the parts of it that revolve around us as individuals and not around vampire society - if you can even call it 'society.' Like I said before: she isn't stupid - if she weren't meant to be with you, she would have taken one look at how weird we are and would never have looked at or spoken to any of us ever again."

"Especially after your show in Spanish class that first day," Emmett rumbled helpfully.

"Thanks," I told him wryly, rolling my eyes. I had managed to stop thinking about that terrible first meeting when I had almost killed the girl fated to become the love of my life. It did wonders for my self-esteem to be reminded of it. I fixed my eyes on Alice again. "What do I do?"

"Now he wants to use my powers," she muttered, making Jasper snort with laughter from his corner.

"Alice," Esme said, the warning in her tone clear.

"I know," Alice huffed before turning her attention to me. "Just do - or rather don't do - exactly what she said. Leave her alone. Let her think. Let her miss you. Tomorrow I'll apologize to her for my role in all this, but she'll forgive me fairly easily. Her insecurities are mostly about romantic relationships, I think, not friendships. After that - well, it depends on a lot of factors and it might take some time, but if you keep up your end, there's really no risk of her deciding to ditch you. It's not a decision she could make on a whim anyway."

I let out a slow breath and then nodded. "That sounds like something I can do," I told Alice. It would be hard, yes, but I had already faced up to dying. After that, everything else seemed a little less dire.

"Yes, you can," Alice agreed. "I've already seen it."