Title: Shadow to Light
Author: Girl Who Writes
Characters: Alice, Jasper
Word Count: 6473
Rating: T
Genre: AU, Angst/Romance
Summary: In 1918, Jasper lures the newborn known as Mary-Alice back to Monterrey. He is lost to her before it even begins.
Notes: TRIGGER WARNINGS for implied/reference sexual assault; body-horror.
A third chapter in one year? In this economy?
I'm sorry this took so long - it combined two things I hate (dealing with canon, and fight scenes) so it was slow-going. But we're here and Mary-Alice gets her battle, and a few little flashbacks for context. I'm genuinely worried about the quality of this chapter because it's so focused on my two weaknesses as a writer that I hope it's not a disappointment.
Thank to everyone for the reviews, the kudos, the messages and the enthusiasm. And the Jalice Network Discord crowd deserve a special thank you for motivating me so enthusiastically with an extra-special thank you to Lilia for looking up canon details so I didn't have to, and for Miriam putting up with my self-praise every time I hit another 50 words.
Eight. I'm not very good at being alive.
—
She is the first to move; she can feel the shift of the ground, hears the beating wings of one last fleeing bird, and then she snaps into movement.
The Major is only a stride behind.
The Cullens follow their leader, and then the sound of the wolves' beating paws join in, with a low rumble. Some are looping back behind the group, to catch any stragglers.
They are swift, efficient. It's a good manoeuvre, keeping the army in the mouth of the field; easier to eliminate the newborns as soon as they arrive. Her mind is flipping through the possibilities that she can see around the wolves as she runs, evaluating the battlefield, the placement of each Cullen - their speed, their centre of gravity, their proximity.
And then they are here, and there is no time to thing and plan and consider; she is in the moment and she must fight.
—
She remembers her first battle; not for any specific reason, just that it was the first. The dirt and the motion and how… disorientating the whole thing was. How quickly it happened.
Her clearest memory of that night has always been the Major. He had torn through the other army like they were paper, without pause, skulls and limbs crushed in his wake. He'd been utterly in control of everything on that battlefield, and everyone else was a set-piece.
She fights of course, somehow manages to take down some faceless newborn thanks to a combination of both luck and momentum. Her visions flash at the back of her eyes, showing her where to step, where to duck, where to hit to preserve her own life. And it works just fine.
And at the end, when they are feeding the fires, she felt the Major's eyes on her and she doesn't need to be gifted to know that her survival is surprising to him, and to Maria. No one expected her, barely ninety pounds and five feet tall, to be a remarkable soldier. She had always just been cannon fodder, and that thought had rippled in her chest uncomfortably, especially with all that she knew of the Major and herself, and what was to come.
She keeps the pyre burning. She'll be fine, and so will he.
(And they were.)
—
Everything happens so fast.
The first one she destroys is a woman a little older than Esme Cullen and who snaps angrily at her. She's quick and agitated and that's more annoying than difficult; she hates getting bitten.
What's more annoying is the flash of a vision, of the little girl waiting for a mother that will never come home.
It is what it is. She might see the future, but she can't change the past.
She takes her down quickly; she might not have the sheer strength of the Major to shatter heads with a single punch, but she's been playing this game long enough to have her own tricks. The woman comes apart at the joints easy enough, and Mary-Alice flings to pieces far enough away to give them time before they have to burn.
The second is a man who is the oldest on the field, all grey and solemn. His eyes are red, and he's tall and skinny, and he recoils back from her when he sees her; he's not the first and he won't be the last.
Is it because she's so small, nearly childlike in her appearance? He's too new to know about Immortal Children, though she's played the role before. A reluctance to hurt a child, even a dead little monster, is commendable, if not particularly helpful.
Is it because, amongst all the golden-eyes fighting them, hers are still solidly red, and yet she stands against them?
Or is because he's realised he's about to die?
Alas, she takes his head off without pausing, because this is not a world where you get to have a conscience.
Or second thoughts.
—
The worst battle they ever fought was during Charlotte's newborn year.
(There is still a little resentment there, for that girl. If only… well, she changed things and that made things harder than they should have been. But mostly she's made peace with Charlotte and Peter, especially with all they've done for the Major. But still, the if-onlys and lost futures lay in the back of her mind and she'd be a fool if she didn't have some regrets.)
It was the largest army Maria dared raise - more than twenty of them; fifteen newborns of various ages, and the rest of the salvaged soldiers, the ones who survived or were deemed worthy.
In a blood-stained dress and with mud on her feet, she didn't feel worthy of much. When she's on her knees in the dirt, pulling apart a body with her arms smeared with foreign venom, she doesn't feel special at all.
It's a goddamned slaughter, and her eyes seek out the Major; limping and angry, but intact. Peter, trying to be everywhere at once as everything goes sour, and not being the least bit helpful.
The scream is to her left, and vampires don't scream. Soldiers don't scream. They growl and hiss and whine.
Newborns do scream, especially the girls. Human vulnerabilities linger, so do fears. Sometimes the mind is more powerful than all their physical advantages, and the newborns panic. Some of them rip and tear, others forget and just scream for help.
Charlotte's a screamer, apparently. And usually Mary-Alice leaves them to their own devices - sink or swim, she is one person and she needs to keep herself alive and the Major in one piece. She has no time for dizzy girls who can't save themselves…
Except she does, and it takes no effort to hurl the two vampires off Charlotte before her head is completely off, shoving them back into the fray, and then beheading one when he tries to return to finish off Charlotte.
Two of Charlotte's fingers have been snapped off, and Charlotte's eyes are wide in horror and pain. One of her first battles; she keeps less track of the age of the newborns - it's fairly irrelevant.
She jams Charlotte's fingers back into the girl's pocket and shoves her back towards the edges of the fighting without a word because this is a bad battle, and there's no time. The only thing that's going to save them right now is the amount of competent soldiers Maria has kept around this long, and the sunrise. Doesn't matter what happens, everyone will scatter when the sunlight shifts over the horizon.
It happens like she sees, and twenty-something becomes eleven by the time the sun shines on the Monterrey territory. They've all got a new scar for their trouble, and Maria is … agitated, her anger like kerosene waiting for a match.
Bad business, the lot of it. She stays out of it.
She catches Charlotte with Peter later, Charlotte in his arms practically shaking, and Peter soothing her, his lips brushing her hair. They both look up to see her with wary looks on their faces, and Charlotte holding her reattached fingers tenderly.
It's none of her business (not yet, at least, but later when they scramble everything up) and she's headed up to let the Major bed her however he sees fit, so she's in no position to judge, yet.
But even then, she knew that look, that tenderness Peter showed Charlotte. She knows it, buried so far in the back of her heart and mind that she sometimes wondered if she lost it. It's… fantastically dangerous, a looming cloud of disaster, and a game that she knew Charlotte was incapable of playing.
—
In the mess of things, she calmly recognises that none of these newborns have been trained even the slightest bit. Victoria has sent them all here with nothing more than an order to destroy, and she wants to laugh at both the audacity and the laziness.
(Her suspicions on who shaped Victoria's plans are practically confirmed; just like Maria to stack the deck. No, as long as the sun rises and sets, Maria would never intentionally get the Major killed. Not unless it was her own talons prying off his head. And Mary-Alice will crush her hands to powder before she lays a finger on him.)
She finds that the first of the newborns to enter the field were the wildest, the weakest; possibly the only strategy Victoria bothered with. The rest are angrier (hungrier) and that brings more risk, more violence that she doesn't really care for.
She's doing her best to keep the Cullens out of direct danger, futures folding across her mind like origami. The problem is, she's not paying enough attention to her own future, and that's… laziness and arrogance and a fucking newborn mistake, and she curses herself when the newborn clotheslines her into the mud.
The Major is there before the newborn can close his jaw over her throat; instead, the newborn sinks his teeth into his forearm, and the Major snarls. And then the newborn is dead and Major pries the head off his arm in one sweeping move.
She is annoyed; annoyed that he thought she needed that help, annoyed that the newborn manoeuvred into such a position, annoyed that she played it so close to the wire. She shoots a glare in his direction, but he is too busy keeping the army busy – they are less organised than Maria's troops, or even useless Valeria's, but more organised than she hoped. And they have clearly been given a vague plan of attack – only the strongest are targeting the male Cullens; the rest are zeroing in on the females.
It's lazy, grade-school strategy that makes her angrier. But they are quickly learning that the smallest of the fighters is not to be trifled with.
She has to be faster, to think and act before anyone moves; like a demented chess game. There's one newborn carefully manoeuvring Esme Cullen into a vulnerable position, and just before she lunges (and Esme would have lost an eye, and there's nearly no hope of saving those; she's tried before - she doesn't want to have to go through that again), she is there with a fist-full of the newborn's throat and Esme looking at her wide-eyed as she shreds the predator to pieces. She doesn't stay to acknowledge or check on Esme, but keeps moving. (The scar would have been grotesque, and even with her very best efforts, the matriarch would never have been able to see out of the new eye.)
The wolves are darting quickly in between fighters, and some of the smaller ones are pulling limbs and severing torsos and making sure no one can put themselves back together. She didn't think to tell them to sort the parts; it's easier to take what's needed if they don't have to rifle through random piles, but what's done is done and it wouldn't be the messiest job she's ever undertaken.
Not that this is a pleasant experience; her hands are tingling from the venom on them, she's covered in mud and slush, and she's ready for this to be over. The stakes are higher in this battle than she's used to. Once upon a time, she only had to worry about her and the Major. Now she's got his entire family and the wolves to watch over, and it's a lot. Her gift doesn't like it; she can't see the wolves at all, but if she focuses hard enough on the Cullens, she can see something.
She sees a flash of red hair and can smell Victoria's scent on the wind, but right now, that is someone else's problem, because one of the wolves has been cornered by two fighters, and they're in trouble. But Emmett Cullen is suddenly there, growling at the newborns and shielding the wolf, and it takes him and Rosalie moments to turn the tables on the situation, and the wolf darts back to his pack.
By then, Victoria has vanished.
—
There weren't many battles that Maria actively fought in.
No one wanted Maria on the field. That was the truth. If Maria was there, they were past the 'hardest fight' or the 'worst fight' or anything beyond that. They had reached new levels of danger and risk, and Maria wasn't happy.
She was a General, she ordered her soldiers about. She didn't set foot on the battlefield unless she was displeased.
And it was instinct to scatter, fall back, when Maria appeared; training or battle, the world went still when Maria took the floor. But that was the worst thing to do in the middle of a battle, enough for her just to take off the heads of her own soldiers if she caught them backing off. They had disappointed her enough by then, let alone leaving Maria to finish the fight.
It was better to flank her, to fall behind and wait for her signal - that constant obedience that guaranteed their longevity. The Major taught her that, taught Peter that. That's how it always was - Maria in the centre, then the Major on her right, and her and Peter flanking the Major.
Back then, Maria was the best of them and the worst of them; every year of her existence showed itself in her power and skill. She had no gift, had raised herself up, and trained and fought and survived every battle she faced, and been tempered into a weapon that no one wanted on a battlefield.
Combined with the Major… she remembers those battles best. The ones where they couldn't win, but Maria made them try anyway, before she intervened. The ones where Maria and the Major cleared the battlefield and cemented their reputation as deadly, as not to be trifled with.
They'd only seen Emile and Maria clash on the battlefield once, and Peter said the fight hadn't been for mortal eyes when he retold the story. That the battlefield was hollowed like a bowl from the force, that it was like the end of the world and the end of time, and both of them bore new scars, and yet they both walked away. She remembers it like that, only it didn't look real, like the lives of her and the Major and Peter and the others were on the line if Maria lost.
As if they wouldn't have ripped apart Emile's fighters the second he fell; as if Maria wouldn't have scooped up the head and kept it as a trophy for as long as it amused her, to watch the eyes turn black and grey, to have Emile stare out and watch as she swallowed up Louisiana into the Monterrey territory.
Emile would have done the same to her.
The last fight with the Major, something changed. No one breathed a word, no one flinched or murmured or did anything unusual. She flanked the Major but Peter was already gone with Charlotte by then, and for once… the Major was a force of nature. Maria was still as deadly as ever but the Major was sheer destruction.
Maria noticed. She knew that. Because that's when everything started to shift, when it was like there were cracks all over Jasper's facade and there was nowhere else to go for him. That Maria couldn't hurt him today or tomorrow (she wouldn't win), but it was coming.
And then the Major was gone before Maria could enter the field again, and Maria was still terrible, and she was alone in flanking their leader, but Maria didn't scare her, and she could take care of herself.
No one ever wants the General in the field.
—
She pauses for only a second in the middle, to survey the battleground; Esme and Dr Cullen were closing in on one girl who doesn't appear to be doing more than defending herself; Emmett and Rosalie are methodically applying the Major's lessons to their share, and the wolves are snapping and tearing up as many as they can, their jaws cracking through vampire flesh impossibly. It's a terrible sight.
And then, the Major, tangling with the rest.
The most troublesome newborn is male, a head taller than Jasper and twice as heavy. He knows how to fight, and is manipulating the other newborns into guiding the Major into his downfall.
And so she is there, with a throaty snarl, as the newborn takes a wild snap at the back of the Major's unguarded neck. She flings him off the Major, but gravity pulls her down into the mud.
For a split second, there is a chaos. Mud and rock, and iron-like hands clamped around her wrist, and then her ankle. She is half-pinned for moment, and twists roughly. His teeth sink into the flesh of her thigh, and the pain flares hot and wild in her leg. A bad bite, one that will make its presence known for a long time. One that would take anyone else out of the game, unless they had been raised in the Southern Wars. If you were down, you were out, and she is never out.
Instead she presses her bony knee forward so fast and so certainly that it is over before he understands her trick. She catches him under the chin hard enough that even his venom-coated bones crack. He howls in pain as she pulls back, only to jam her hand below the space where his jaw was, ripping his head off messily. The venom spills over her hands and leg, and she hurls the head as far away as she can.
"What the hell was that?" the Major hurls her to her feet, his hands clasping her arms tightly. His eyes are black, and his sweater is torn. The bite he got on her behalf is purple and ragged, and she's still mad about that.
"Covering your back," she snaps, pulling out of his grip. "He had you cornered."
"He had you pinned," the Major is angry and it's been a long time since she's had to face that anger, and instead of making her cower, it makes her twice as mad but this is not the time nor the place to get into it over stupid manoeuvres. She turns away and then they are both moving to where Emmett is holding off the late comers, Rosalie already dismembering the bodies littering the field.
She says nothing, just begins taking apart the torso beneath her. The bite on her thigh feels like fire but if she can feel it, she's still alive, and the Major isn't harmed despite his very best efforts, and the rest of the Cullens appear intact - she has no idea how Isabella and Edward fare, with the two wolves guarding them, but she has already decided that is someone else's problem to worry about.
Until she realises of all the heads that are scattered around the field, none of them have red curls.
—
They were always a good match in the battle; she always looked like a weak link, a future victim because of how small she was, and he was destruction made flesh. There was always the idea that he would protect her, at his own peril.
A falsehood. She didn't need anyone's help, but it was always too late for them to realise that once their mistake became obvious.
There had been something reassuring about him in battle, when they were back to back, covering the other. Sometimes it was him and her, sometimes it was him and Peter - Maria didn't like them to get too used to fighting alongside one person, for sensible reasons like the loss of half a pair, or to become too predictable.
And because Maria didn't like the idea that their loyalties could be divided; their minds and souls and bodies had to belong solely to her.
(She still believed that even when the Major slipped out of her bed and drew Mary-Alice into his; when Peter kept Charlotte to the back of the battles; when they all pulled away, trying to find safe harbour and loyalty and a fucking way out. Maria was a victim of her own ego, in the end.)
Neither of them took a blow for the other, and there wasn't any protection from bites. And she watched like a hawk, watching that the Major wouldn't falter, wouldn't get any smart ideas about keeping Peter alive before himself. Watched that she wouldn't fall, that she would get back up. An invisible shield for him, that's how she had to think of herself in the middle of those fights. Not a person or a friend; just a tool designed to protect the Major.
It's an ordinary fight, nothing special about anything, and she takes the fall, tumbling back and onto her feet, but she's a beat too slow…
And the Major flings her behind him before the grasping fingers take off her head; he's snarling and the would-be murderer is in a million little pieces and that's when she knows it's time for him to go.
There's nothing holding him together anymore; he's too close to having nothing left to lose and Maria can see that he's too far gone, too dangerous and depressed to be useful for much longer.
Peter will return for him soon, she can see it.
And as she realises she has to let him go, his future blooms in her mind.
(Later, afterwards, she lets herself mourn him - just for a moment. She lets herself worry at that tiny secret part of her heart that warms at the thought of him, at the pain that he won't be with her any longer. And then she stands up and tells him he has to say yes.)
—
It shouldn't have been a surprise.
It should have been their first warning, their first conclusion.
At heart, Newborns are animals, after all. Fight or flight.
They catch a few who have scattered, mostly younger people - teenagers, college students, and Victoria's rage has made her sloppy and crazed because this army is just… never-ending. Maria really gave her none of the tools or the insight to take victory.
She and Dr Cullen have just pulled apart one boy, whose wild eyes were full of fear, and maybe she's not so cold to all of this as she once though.
And the vision hits.
She jerks around awkwardly and is already moving, but it's too late. She's not seeing the moment of death, she's seeing him already dead; that's why she can see him. It's sharp and fixed and there's no stopping it but maybe …
The crunch of bone is loud and final because there was never a maybe, and she wasn't fast enough; the murderer is a woman with hollow eyes, crushing and shaking the wolf and everyone is frozen for a moment. And she can see what happens next, so there's no hope.
The howls and wails from the wolves are sudden, and they recoil as if they are in pain, and maybe they are. Maybe their connection is enough that the loss of one is agony, is like losing an arm or leg.
(Maybe it would be the pain if the Major had fallen. If she hadn't seen, hadn't been fast enough for him. That is a thought that is sharp and cold and threads itself through her and she needs to stop with that kind of thought because it's just a wolf. Just a boy. Just someone who doesn't get to go home again.)
It's Esme Cullen who pries the dead wolf from the newborn's grip, and two other wolves that rip her down and chew her into tiny pieces, taking their pound of flesh in her screaming and struggling even when she's just a torso-face-eyes… There's no neat dismemberment when the wolves fight.
She scans the future around the wolves, and hisses low.
"Mary-Alice?" the Major is there, looking stern and she looks up at him, almost insolently.
"The Volturi guard are coming," she spits, irritability rattling around her for a moment. "Four of them."
The Major's frown deepens, and he nods. "How long?"
"Fifteen minutes, roughly," she kicks a discarded limb disdainfully, ingrained fear of the Volturi making her agitated. A nasty battle, an unnecessary death, and now the thrice-damned Volturi.
This hasn't gone right at all.
—
The next fifteen minutes are the kind of chaos she doesn't care for, since the wolves are blocking her visions. She finds herself pacing, flipping through the small amount of future she can see.
Another of the wolves is injured, but Dr Cullen reassures everyone that it is entirely treatable; Isabella has fainted, and she's not particularly impressed with that, even if the girl is nursing a few wounds that don't look comfortable.
(Isabella smells good. Such a waste for her to just bleed into the snow. It hasn't been that long since she fed, and she did agree to Dr Cullen's negotiations on her behalf. But… just something to take the edge off. She won't break the treaty, but perhaps there will be an accident - a fallen hiker, a careless driver… Her mouth fills with venom, and she pushes those thoughts to the side.)
Edward is quick to tell them of Riley and Victoria's demise, and she's relieved that the redhead is destroyed, that has to be said, if a little disappointed she didn't get to tangle with Victoria herself as something of a farewell lesson in engaging enemies without doing the reconnaissance. Alas, Isabella's potential murder has faded away into nothing but a memory and that was always the goal, so it's a good ending. Her purpose is fulfilled - the Major survived, Isabella survived, the house of Cullen still stands. A good ending. Almost.
There's a hostage, as if that isn't the worst idea any of them thought of. Bleeding hearts, trying to save the irredeemable. A girl who looks younger than herself, who is frightened and confused and most certainly more tempted by Isabella than Mary-Alice herself, and is being corralled by Esme Cullen and the Major. Esme Cullen is being very polite and patient with the girl; if Maria caught a newborn acting like that, they'd be missing limbs for every day it took them to learn some feeble control. It's memories like that that make her glad it was the Major that found her, and not Maria who turned her.
The wolves aren't doing well and she wonders if she should say something. That she hates them and wants them to go away, but she's sorry that there was a death. That she thought of them as acceptable sacrifices up until one of them died. Death and destruction has loomed darkly over her shoulder for so long, she forgets it isn't like that for everyone.
Edward is giving her a look over her shoulder and she decides if he's going to rummage around her head, that's his choice and he can deal with what he finds in there.
The Cullens urge the wolves to leave before the Volturi arrive, trampling over the canine tracks and lighting hastily assembled pyres to cover the smell, even though a cloud of venom and smoke burns her nose and chases any other scents away.
She paces some more, the visions returning like falling snow as the wolves retreat, and she wonders what happens next for them. How they explain a dead wolf, how they bury him. How Isabella will return home with blood leaking from her head and face, and her leg and arm bent all wrong.
She feels the crawl of the Major's gift over her skin, and she nods at him absently, not letting it settle - there's still the last hurdle, the last duty.
To face down the Volturi guard in person and be judged.
—
It's a grim scene that the Volturi arrive to find; the dead wolf… boy has been taken home, along with the badly injured one. And whilst she knows that a single fatality is an exceptional achievement, that she and the Major haven't lost their touch, it still feels… bad. She sees the Cullens hurting and could see the way the wolves seemed so… diminished, and she is… sorry the wolf died. She really tried to keep them all out of danger but she failed.
But none of them can dwell on that because the minions from Volterra have arrived, and she wants to hiss at them, to vanish into the forest where she is no one. But she wouldn't let the Major face them alone. Couldn't.
There's a discussion between Dr Cullen and the small girl in front of them (and they said she was easily mistaken as an Immortal Child), who is imperious and powerful - her eyes bright and freshly-fed, and that makes her feel resentful; that the best she's going to find later is the cooling blood of the dead, or a damn squirrel.
"And who is this?"
"This is Mary-Alice, Jane. An old friend who came to assist us with the fight." Dr Cullen says it so simply, so easily - as if that's what she could be if she wanted it - but this Jane narrows her gaze, and for a moment she wonders if this little minion has some kind of gift of divining the truth, of recognising when she isn't being told the whole story.
And then, pain.
It slices through her, right into her heart and mind and marrow. It sharpens the world to a single tiny point of nothingness (she thinks there might be a question?) and it feels like her chest will burst. She is vaguely aware of yelling, of hands pawing at her, and that makes it worse - the barn, the smell of old hay and dirt and blood; arm around her throat, hot reeking breath in her ear; not like the Major just grasping hands too tight let her go let her run…
The pain stops as quickly as it starts, and she is on the ground in a tight ball, her arms over her head. Everyone is staring, the Major kneeling beside her with a murderous look on his face, his hand gentle against her back, and the world tips the right way up.
"I came because I saw the damage the newborns were doing," she says, remembering the question through gritted teeth, wondering how this Jane would look with gauges in her face, with a bite taken out of her cheek. Jane would look nice carved into neat little anatomical pieces, she believes that in her heart. "There were too many of them too quickly. It was an army. The law must be upheld."
Both Volturi scouts exchange looks and nod for her to stand. Her knees feel like they've just been reattached, and the Major steadies her which is embarrassing and unacceptable. Whatever hideous power the girl has, she's seen worse. Felt worse. Even if her lungs feel like they're aching.
"The Cullens should be grateful," says Jane silkily, and she has passed whatever invisible test was required.
The newborn girl that Dr and Esme Cullen allowed to surrender isn't as lucky, and Edward makes the human girl turn away from the scene as this 'Bree' is ripped and thrown into the pyre without ceremony or any chance of clemency. It makes her feel angry and cold, that that might have been a possibility for her but the wolves are gone, and surely she would have seen it if it might have happened…
At least Maria let them plead their case. Most of the time.
She takes a step back from the burning remains, and the Major is there, a steady barrier, trying carefully not to touch her now. She doesn't blame him; she is covered in mud that is drying up and down her torso, the venom sticky on her hands and face. It's turned the few clean patches of her dress a sickly yellow colour, eating slowly away at the fabric; she'll need to find a new one.
The Volturi leave quietly, nothing but a swish of grey cloaks, and the Cullens are left to clean up the wreckage like good soldiers.
It is the way of war.
—
They keep the pyres low, so not to attract attention from the town as they gather the body parts. It makes the process slower, but it is what it is. She thinks she prefers it to the massive pyres of the South, actually. But then, the last thing she burnt on a pyre were reeking human bodies in wet, meaty chunks to hide their feeding, so perhaps anything is an improvement from that.
It's not a difficult task, and she falls into the old rhythm of separating joints, of stacking them neatly to catalogue them. None of the clothes are salvageable, though she finds a cracked watch that is nice and she slips it onto her wrist, admiring the little chain that holds it together.
Without being able to take clothing, she moves on to the heads - specifically the teeth; she's long since given up with attempting anything with eyes. She's adapted in the last few years, started using the jaw as a hinge during battles, as a point of destruction to make the afterwards an easier process. The only downside is that when fighters are still alive, the venom from the glands in the mouth tends to pour out upon dismemberment, and it's messy.
But it saves time later.
She cracks teeth out of the jawbones with practised ease; once she has a canine or two, she uses them to carve up the rest, the skin parting easily for her to find her quarry. She notes that the teeth of these vampires is far nicer than anyone she ever carved up in Mexico, that's for sure. But they were newborns.
"What are you doing?"
She looks up to see Rosalie, standing there in a torn parka, watching her with a frown. The others are looking over, and she goes back to her task.
"Salvaging."
There's a decent hand near her foot, one that would be suitable for Rosalie or Esme in the future, should they need it. Skin tone, nails, size… And the big fighter that went after the Major, he wouldn't be bad for Emmett, if necessary. Men that size aren't easily found; a boon for them today at least.
She snaps the newest head back, so the maw gapes open in a horror-movie scream and she begins her cuts, thinking back to Dr Cullen and his medical texts so that the teeth come away easy.
"You need to stop."
She looks up at Rosalie, expecting rage or maybe disgust from the prettiest Cullen, the doll of a daughter.
Instead, she gets wide-eyed horror, and the rest of the Cullens moving closer.
"Mary-Alice…" even the Major looks startled, discombobulated, and that's truly what makes her pause in her task.
"Why are you doing that?" Esme Cullen asks softly, her eyes fixed on the head in her hands, leaking venom into the snow.
She shrugs and looks back at the broken face. "Teeth will cut anything," she says finally. "And fingers and hands might need to be replaced. We got out lucky this time, but next time…"
She feels wrong, like she's done wrong and made a terrible mistake, and she looks up at the Major before remembering that this kind of harvest only really started after him. It was always Emile who took apart bodies for spare parts, not Maria's army. Not until things got… difficult.
He's looking at her with an expression she can't read and she frowns.
"I don't think that's necessary," Dr Cullen says finally, and everyone is just staring at her and she really wishes that they would stop. "No one lost any extremities, and I'm afraid storage isn't an option. We need to burn all of the remains, Mary-Alice."
She feels like a scolded child, but she nods, and gathers up her materials.
If she slips a few of the teeth she's already pried out into her pocket, well, better armed and dangerous than not.
—
It feels like days since she saw the Cullen house for the first time. White and grey wood, glass, dainty little gardens. It's a relief to see it, and that's the first time she's thought that of any place that wasn't the mansion in Monterrey.
Esme Cullen leans against the doctor, and she knows the destruction of the hostage weights heavily on the woman. A handful of kind words, and she cared about the girl, was sorry she couldn't be saved. A curiously soft woman. Lucky to be able to be that way in their world.
Emmett has his arm around Rosalie's shoulders, the blonde with her arm around her mate's waist. They move in sync and talk in low voices and she's glad they were there today. They were consistent and capable, and she likes that the Major has those kinds of people in his family.
Edward has gone ahead, to get Isabella back to the house for appropriate medical treatment, and just watching the mind-reader around the human girl makes her feel claustrophobic. Hovering and touching and caging in; pushing and pulling her every which way to his whim. She doesn't like it, not at all.
Except her mind keeps going back to the feeling of the Major's hand against her back when she came out of that… Jane's fugue. Grounding her, bringing her back, guarding her. That was okay. He had her back, like he used to.
She shouldn't go back inside their house; she's all mud and muck and venom has since disintegrated a patch in her dress the size of her hand. She should go to the river, should wash up before she goes into the house to hold her breath and pretend Isabella isn't leaking and just stop.
Just stop for a moment and think.
She came here for a purpose.
To save the Major. To protect the Major and his family. To get away from Maria and the South. To survive.
And she's done that. She's checked every single thing off her list and now…
She doesn't know what she's supposed to do now.
—