DISCLAIMER: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The legends of the Quileute belong to them. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.

1996

TonyPOV

I was feeling very pleased with myself. It had taken some time, but I'd finally managed to convince Grandpa Carlisle to let all of us talk to him about going to school like normal kids. Of course we weren't normal, but that hardly mattered; what mattered was that we'd been able to get our own way.

Of course, if it had been anyone else we were trying to, persuade, it would have been the work of a moment. When that dog bit Matilda back in the day, it took no time at all to drive it to end its sorry life.

It wouldn't have even been an issue if it wasn't for that idiot cop, Charlie Swan, who'd seen what we did although we didn't realize it at the time. Going to the mansion and finding out that Grandpa had dazzled the jerk, well that was just the icing on the cake really. But we were still in the shit for doing it in the first place, and the olds had watched us all like hawks ever since.

The first thing that happened was that we were pretty much grounded. Granted, we were only five or six anyway, but in our capabilities we were more like twelve year old humans, and not being able to go out and do things chafed on us. We'd hoped to be able to go to school then, and that idea had gone by the board. They'd kept home schooling us instead.

Then there was the dressing down we all got: it was meant to scare us onto the straight and narrow but to be honest it made us all laugh really. We knew that Jasper was the most feared vampire in the world, but somehow it didn't really register. Was it because we'd never needed to fight him, or because we had some powers of our own, powers he knew nothing about?

Maybe it was because living in Grandpa's coven had declawed him; he was a shadow of the vampire he must have been once. These days he was nothing more than Aunty Alice's handbag, and the only rebellion he ever took part in was each morning when he pulled on the cowboy boots that she hated so much.

As for Edward; I snorted at the thought of him. He believed that his power to read minds was the key to the success of the family, and that he was indispensable. He seemed not to have noticed that the family was now well supplied with mind-readers. Even after Grandpa Carlisle came home to say that we'd somehow coerced an animal to commit suicide he still didn't fully appreciate what we could do.

He'd picked that incident out of our young brains but there were other things we'd done that he didn't have a clue about. We didn't go out much at all, but there'd been the occasional trips to the supermarket or a store before and since. Those gave us the chance to do dumb but fun things like make someone push a shopping basket into a big stack of cans, or into another shopper, and then stand back and watch.

If we went to the park we could start fights pretty easily, just by stirring up the feelings of the kids there towards each other. There really was no limit to the stuff we could do, but Edward had no concept of that. Of course we hid our thoughts and never gave him a reason to think otherwise.

We were fully resolved never to let our elders ever know the full extent of our powers unless we really had to use them. This was Forks, Washington for fuck's sake, why would we need to? We had enough in our arsenal already.

We just needed to play along with the adults, and try not to dazzle or practice mind control on them, not Grandpa anyway. There was something a little grubby about manipulating someone as well-intentioned and protective of us as he was.

As for the others, the powers that some of them had made it a bad idea. Where the wolves weren't involved in our family life, Alice did sometimes get glimpses of things. There was the risk that Edward might catch a stray thought here and there. But at the very least, we'd have to rein in the pleasure we took in our activities, because our triumphant or mischievous moods would be sensed by Jasper.

It was a pain having to be, or seem to be, good but we were hoping for a payoff. We were hoping that after three or four years, we'd won back their trust enough for us to be allowed to do this. Being together was fun, and we'd learned a lot from our vampire teachers, but we needed to get out and about.

We were all looking forward to it. We were especially looking forward to testing our skills out on the unsuspecting Forks kids. Nothing too drastic, just some friendly neighborhood vampire hazing. For my part, I thought it'd be nice to get myself a servant; someone who'd do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, without question.

Grandpa Carlisle was slowly coming around, but Josie, my Mom was another matter. She was being very snoopy of late. It was hard enough to keep her out of my head at the best of times. She seemed to have a sixth sense about Matilda and I, and she knew when we were up to something. Whether she suspected it was about going to school was another matter though. I hoped not.

It was a good thing that we'd all worked out some time ago how to keep the family mind-readers out of our heads. Nothing too drastic, just diversion, pushing thoughts of kittens and unicorns to the front of our minds whilst keeping the important stuff buried deeper until we were out of range.

As for all of our empath Dads, and the Major, well that was a bit harder. But since we all had a bit of empath in us anyway, we had the ability to replace the emotions we were really feeling with fake ones.

The older we got, the better we were at making the fake emotions seem real. It was a better choice than just clamping down on our feelings, because if we didn't seem to ever feel, that in itself was a signal to another empath that something was up.

There was going to be a family meeting to decide whether our request to go to the town school was going to be granted. I was cautiously optimistic, and determined we would win this time. We all checked in with each other and then set off for the mansion at the same time, arriving en masse and entering the living room where our families were waiting for us.

CarlislePOV

Tony and Matilda had come to us, on behalf of all of the kids, to ask if they could go to school. It was hard to say no, after all Edward had been, as had Rose and Emmett. I'd homeschooled Josie and her peers, because there was no way for me to know back then whether they could be trusted among humans.

Perhaps my worries on that score had been misplaced, because they had grown up to be fine people, friendly and placid. They were an example to their own kids, and I hoped that those children might be the same.

That was until the poor dog died. I could only relate what Charlie had told me; it fell to Edward to pick the thoughts out of Tony and Matilda's heads, and those weren't pretty. We'd been lucky that they were young and he could still do that, I had a nasty feeling that before long they'd be controlling their own minds as well as they controlled others.

His bird's eye view of what they did left no room for argument; they had meant to kill and they had killed. The injury to them and their pride was minor, but the response was far from it.

I did what I could then. I kept them out of Forks as much as possible, to the point where their reclusiveness was talked about. I tried to teach them right from wrong. Sometimes I thought I was getting through to them; making them see the worth of a life. Sometimes I caught a smirk, or a glance, a hint of smugness, and the feeling nagged at me that they weren't sorry at all.

I spoke to Jasper and Edward about it but their powers weren't as helpful as they could have been. The children could shut them down, since they were mind readers and empaths in the same body.

I worried constantly about it. They needed to become part of the world at some point, and they seemed contrite; should I take them at face value or keep watching them? And what should I do about their latest request?

I thought back to our most recent conversation. Tony was persuasive. He pointed out that home schooling didn't help them to socialize around humans. He also said that since they were all half-human anyway, it wasn't as hard for them to blend in as it was for us.

I wasn't sure about that. Their eerie eyes had drawn comment more than once, and then there was the dog. Tony was defensive when confronted about that; he said it was a flash of temper, an overreaction on his part. He said he just wanted to forget about it and move on. I didn't know if I could believe him.

This time he seemed to be genuinely remorseful; was it churlish of me to keep bringing it up? Esme thought so, and she was normally both kind and wise. I relied on her judgment a lot, and I was leaning towards taking her advice again. This was Forks; what was the worst that could happen?

I hadn't given an answer when I was first approached; I said I'd take it under advisement and give my answer at a family meeting. Well today was the day of the family meeting, the kids would be here any minute, and I was no closer to deciding what to do about it.

Perhaps the meeting would show me a way forward. I could only hope so.

Over the next few minutes the family arrived; first Esme and our immediate "family" of Edward and the others, then Josie, her husband and the rest of Jasper and Edward's progeny, and finally the children.

The children seemed to have staged their arrival slightly after their parents; they turned up all together, and the similarity of their hair and eye colors in that situation was startling. Having never seen them all like that before, I was taken aback, and I think some of the others were too.

They all had hair of a kind of strawberry blonde, which seemed to borrow more from Jasper's blonde waves and even a touch of Edward's coppery tones, than it did anything their own parents had. The effect was angelic, or would have been had their eyes not had a kind of intensity in them that took their golden cast and made them seem otherworldly.

Our own eyes were golden, but that was from our diet, and they varied in color from time to time. These eyes didn't change much at all, the diet of these children was more mixed than ours, and like humans, the color stayed the same. It was just that the color was so disconcerting.

I collected myself; there was no point in dwelling on what they looked like. What I needed to do was to focus on how they'd been behaving and whether as a family we could afford to agree to their request.

There were too many of us for everyone to be seated; but we were vampires so it hardly mattered. I began the meeting in my customary way.

I looked around. "Are we all here now? Is anyone missing?"

I knew the answer to that but it was an icebreaker. Edward shook his head; the minds were all present and, at least as far as he could tell, open to him. It was our signal to proceed.

"Tony, perhaps you'd like to have the floor."

Tony smirked, and then began to speak. "We, that is to say, all of us children, would like to go to school Grandpa. We know we're more advanced than other children but we'd like to go to elementary school and then high school the same as anyone else would."

"Might I ask why? You've seemed happy enough being taught by us until now, and it's not as if you have friendships in Forks that you need to pursue."

"Maybe, Grandpa, we'd like to have the opportunity to make friends in the first place. We've been kept away from other kids for years now, and we're tired of it."

"Maybe, Tony, you'd have had the opportunity before now if you knew how to behave yourself in public," Edward snapped.

Tony bristled. "Are we going to go down that path again? Because as wrong as it was to kill that dog, none of us have drunk from a human."

Edward looked like he'd been slapped. He didn't talk much about his "rebellious period" but the reality was he had spent some time hunting and killing humans in an effort to be more of a vampire. It was a charge that could be laid at any of the senior Cullens except for me and Rosalie, but it didn't sting as much for the others.

Jasper was unashamed about his murderous past; how could he be otherwise, the scars that covered his body were like an alarm to another vampire. The rest of them had slipped up from time to time but had come to terms with it. Only Edward, with his moral code and prudishness carried any kind of burden from his past.

If I didn't know better I'd have sworn that Tony was trying to get a rise out of him.

Jasper thought so too. He fixed his gaze, which was usually benign, onto Tony.

"I know you think you're clever, but I can feel the emotions you're giving off, and the efforts you're making to rein them in. You're quite pleased with yourself aren't you? The only thing I can't work out is whether you're pleased at your ability to bait Edward or to kill a dumb animal. Gotta say though, neither is much of an accomplishment."

Tony flushed for a moment, his human side coming through, and then collected himself again.

"I don't know what you're talking about Uncle Jasper, really I don't. We've been over this before and Matilda and I are sorry for what we did. And I'm sorry for snapping at Uncle Edward but he can be so judgmental sometimes."

I needed to take back control of the conversation before things got any nastier.

"Does anyone have anything to say about Tony's request? Because I really don't think raking over the coals of his past behavior is at all helpful at the moment."

"It's helpful if you think it's a predictor of his future behavior." Edward was nothing if not dogged in his refusal to change the subject.

"Do you have any special insights about that subject that you'd like to share?"

He stiffened, and looked around the room. If I was going to take a guess I'd say he was trying to pick some thoughts out of a few minds to either support or counter his argument. I stayed silent, and waited for him to finish.

He began to speak, then stopped and shook his head.

"I'm having trouble getting a reading on what the children are thinking Carlisle. And it's a funny thing, but they all seem to be having the same thoughts. I don't understand how that can be."

That was curious. Did the children have some kind of power or special attribute that we didn't know about? There were no other children in the world like them, so it was possible.

I really wanted to grant them this request, to give them the benefit of the doubt, but something was nagging at me, something that made me feel as though I was flying blind. I couldn't make an informed decision if I didn't have all of the facts I needed.

I put Edward on the spot. "Can you see anything at all in their thoughts that would mean that they can't be trusted?"

He frowned, and his shoulders slumped a little. Running his fingers through his hair he finally said "No, but as I mentioned before I'm having trouble seeing much of anything. And I've got to tell you Carlisle, that worries me a lot."

"I see".

Turning to the children, and Tony as their spokesperson I tried a new tack.

"You understand that if we allow you to do this, you're representing us in what you do. If you go to school, and then behave badly, hurting someone or worse, that will reflect on us and we might be asked to leave Forks. We don't want to leave Forks, we like it here and it would be hard for us to settle anywhere else in the world now where we could be so free to go about our business as we pleased."

"We understand that Grandpa" Tony replied.

"Do you? Because I don't want to have to go around Forks cleaning up the messes that you kids might make. It might seem to you as if all we have to do is dazzle our way out of trouble but that's a last resort. We should use it sparingly; we really don't know what effect it has or how long it lasts."

I felt tired all of a sudden. I was being pulled two ways; my love for the children was warring with my concern for the people of Forks. Admittedly we were here in their town and maybe that wasn't in their interests either, but I had tried to tread lightly even if the others hadn't.

"Esme, what do you think my dear?" I needed a second opinion.

She smiled softly, and then gave me the way out I'd been looking for.

"I can see a way to do this that will work, but it will require some effort on our behalf. I certainly don't think we should send the children off with a smile and a wave."

I was intrigued. "What do you mean?"

"Send them to school but send some of us as well. While they're in the younger grades perhaps Rosalie and I can be there to teach them, and maybe later on more of us. We've all got qualifications of some sort, and the schools here are sometimes short of teachers. We could offer our services."

I tried to gauge the feeling in the room about this idea. Esme was on the right track but perhaps her choice of teachers was a bit misguided. I'd be wanting to see Edward and Jasper at least anywhere they were, vampires with no special talents would be limited in what they could do with them. But as a starting point, something to work on, it had merit.

"Does anyone object to this idea?"

Tony pouted. "We do. We want to go to school to get away from this constant supervision and try to be normal, not to have you follow us everywhere."

"Would you prefer it if we said no?"

"I guess not."

"Then I'll talk to the adults here, including your parents, and let you know what we decide. Our decision will be binding, if you don't like the terms of the proposal we come up with then you can continue to be home schooled. That is all."

"May we be excused?"

"Yes you may. We'll have something for you in a few days."

And with that I stood up, and left the room. I needed to go to my study and reflect, and most of all I needed to be alone. The burdens I'd willingly assumed when I decided to live here were becoming heavier and harder to bear, and that was my own fault. I felt it keenly.