The walls of Volterra barely contained his rage with its cracked, diminishing stone.
Caius lingered in the deepest level of the Volturi's personal library with his brothers. He gripped the edges of the marble table. Some days he imagined her in the corner of his eyes and daydreamed his fingers twined in the dark of her hair, his shale digits pressed into the soft of her moon-pale skin as he traced words and figures into her skin. He often wondered about her habits, what she enjoyed in her free time, what made her happy, and everything under the sun. As long as it was about her. He had drawn her hundreds of times but never had one satisfied him; he never caught the brightness of her sandalwood eyes, the thousands of shades of black and blues in her hair, or the tender vein that ran through her body.
Absence made the heart grow fonder but that wasn't quite true. Absence drove him mad.
Four months of agony passed by.
Like an open wound salted with each day that passed without her.
His vampiric memory did not hold the image of her well enough to please him. Somehow, it almost seemed faded even though vampiric memory was perfect. Each second she spent away from their presence caused a part within himself to writhe in pain, his patience chiseled to the marrow as he longed to gaze at her for hours upon end and catch the light in her hair. He leaned back into his chair, hair brushing his face.
And he was inexplicably angry at her for daring to cause him such pain.
Someone knocked on the door and he shot up, red eyes boring into the wood.
"Enter," Aro said as he tensely flipped a page.
Even his brother could barely mask his upset any longer. Demetri entered with a moment of hesitation; all of their guard, as of late, were tentative in approaching any of them besides the witch twins. He bowed, his black and red cloak in one arm.
"I apologize, Masters. I've come to report my failure to capture the Queen once again as I lost their trail. I am unable to locate the newborn or even bring to mind the Queen's scent any longer."
"Where were they last?" Caius snarled.
"I believe in London, England, Master Caius."
"Now?"
Aro's feigned calm fooled no one as he set his book back down.
"I believe they returned to Eastern Asia if their pattern remains the same. The sole time I managed to catch a thread of the newborn's mind while in the Americas, it was severed and the Queen was scentless still."
"They keep disappearing before we can reach them." Caius' jaw shifted. He appreciate the idea of a canny, quick-witted mate who could outsmart the guard if only it wasn't being used against reuniting them. "What are they doing?"
Aro sighed and settled. He had subsided between upset and melancholy for the past four months, always asking nonsensical, yearning questions about their mate that was only answerable if she were with them in Volterra. His brother shifted into ponder and moping and abject absurdity he could no longer handle without Marcus' calm tempering their personalities into something more tolerable.
"How will she learn of our bond if we cannot even find her?"
"We must devise another plan to incapacitate the newborn but we do not know his weakness."
"Her wariness, brothers, existed long before we met her in the throne room," Marcus mused. "I believe her knowledge of our kind enlightened her of our power within out world along with our ruthlessness. She expected us to harm her and we met those beliefs with our nature."
"Do not remind me," Caius snapped, morose and angry. "I ordered Felix to injure our mate. I know of my mistake."
Their mate resembled a delicate flower, a rose that wilted at a simple graze of wind, and he feared for her, for them, due to her constitution. Her sharp tongue and bravery, according to Aro, did nothing to belie her daintiness, a figure of lace and silk that slipped from their fingertips. The moment one of their enemies captured her, they would surely perish due to her humanity.
"Perhaps," Marcus said, "we must do nothing."
"Do nothing?" Caius snapped. "She is our mate! Do you hear yourself Marcus? We will fall into catatonia if she dies."
"Yes," Marcus replied, severe. "It seems our actions have instilled fear into our mate and she has chosen flight and avoidance the longer we pursue her. Perhaps she will return to her creature comforts and home should we rein in our attempts to pursue her trail."
He scowled, teeth grinding in his mouth. "Fine but if it does not work, then we will return to searching."
"Demetri," Aro said to the tracker who had remained. "Do not track them any longer. We have another mission for you."
"Of course, I am at your service, Masters."
"You will surveil her home in Vancouver. Perhaps she will return there willingly. Come, brothers. It's time we went back to our duties and play our parts."
The night lights of Tokyo lit the skies.
Vince towered over her in his winter jacket, black slacks, and the loose, navy blue silk button-up she forced him to wear, and he kept the first few buttons open to reveal the silver chain draped over his collarbone. Arlen's long-sleeved, silk flower blouse and trench coat hid her cast and her leggings hugged her body, skin tight, as she drifted through the winter streets and he followed closely behind her. He pretended like he wasn't hovering and she pretended he wasn't overprotective; an excellent trade-off if one asked Arlen. She flounced with her phone in hand as she flicked through her social media with her bad hand.
She updated her Instagram with a profile selfie with Tokyo as a partial background, her eyes closed, before she closed the app.
"I can't believe you somehow made your wrist worse," he grumbled.
"Need I remind you that you're the one who got us into that mess? You're the one who pissed off the moose who picked the wrong person to blame and charge at!"
He sniffed and kept walking by her side as they passed through a little alley. She flicked through her phone as they strolled through the city and took in the fresh scents of the clean residential streets leading deeper into the real city where humans scurried in flocks on the sidewalk and in the shops. Except, something caught her eye on her phone and she shoved it in Vince's face.
"New internet cafe in South Korea! Let's play some games!"
Vince sighed. "Arlen, you idiot, you have a cast on. How are you going to even play?"
"I can still play," she said. "And I haven't played Age of Empires in so long... it makes me so sad and Instagram loves when you promote tech and games."
"What will you do if they find you through social media?"
"They're probably older than parchment and don't know what social media is. Do you think they're promoting the existence of vampires on Instagram?"
He rolled his eyes.
She held a cup of pearl milk tea in her good hand and sipped at it before she tucked her phone back into her pocket. "It's too bad you can't consume human food." She pouted as she held out her bubble tea. "I can't try more flavors."
"Fuck you."
"Oh, shut up, I saw how smug you looked when you took all the high scores in that arcade." She made a finger gun at him. "All the arcade games have VLD as the top score by miles. Competitive much?"
"It's the one good thing that came out of being an overgrown mosquito." He smirked and rubbed the back of his neck. "So, what are we going to do now?"
"I want sushi."
"Then the internet cafe?" he asked wryly. "Well, you'll have to do all the speaking in South Korea, Miss I'm-Fluent-in-Six-Languages."
Arlen smiled. The city light glittered like stars in her eyes and she leaned against him, laughing when he caught her with an exasperated sigh. "I mean, better than the time I watched a drug lord do cocaine from some girl's bellybutton three years ago in New York. We'll actually have fun and I know you're having fun!"
"Hilarious how we're having more fun when we're fugitives than in our normal lives," he said. "What's after South Korea?"
"No idea, it's your choice after that."
"How do you feel about mountain climbing in Sichuan?"
She tapped her chin. "How long should we stay there? We also need to keep picking places with terrible weather for you. Maybe we should head back to Russia?"
"No, they might search for us there."
"We'll figure it out later. Spend a week or two here and there."
He clicked his tongue and held out his hand. "Alright. Later, then. Now, give me your phone so we can take photos for the group chat and Instagram."
She handed her phone over and squinted when he accidentally caught her with the flash. "Retake that! Is my whole face in it?"
"I know better than that." He rolled his eyes. "Let's get your sushi so we can go game for a week straight."
Arlen gently stretched her fingers to the night sky, as if she could touch the barely visible stars. The two of them would be okay. They would survive.
Yes, I purposely kept the contrast of the kings being stressed to all hell while Arlen is just having a good time with her best friend as if the Volturi weren't hunting her down.