A/N: Thanks to the ever amazing The Carnivorous Muffin for agreeing to beta this chapter.
It was a quiet plane ride back to Forks.
Renesmée spent most of it sleeping, having refused to miss a moment of her vacation.
Still, even when they got off at Heathrow and waited three hours for the plane headed to Seattle, the silence remained.
It was a comfortable silence, the only communication being Renesmée's hand in Carlisle's. Every so often, his lips would quirk upwards in response to the way she viewed the world.
For the umpteenth time since they departed for Ireland, she was glad she'd gotten this time alone with her grandfather.
At that thought, Carlisle's face lit up. He gave her a brilliant smile. «Likewise, my dear,» he whispered.
They smiled at each other.
«Jesus Christ, wonder how old she is. What a creep,» a twenty-something brunette standing by the perfume store muttered to her friend. They both gave Carlisle a dirty look.
Carlisle's smile stiffened.
Renesmée giggled, and placed her chin on his shoulder. «Remind me how old my passport says I am?»
«It says you're awful. No age listed, they just printed «awful». Jasper said he's never seen anything like it.»
She pouted up at him, lips twitching, but soon succumbed to laughter again once she heard the young women agree between themselves that guys with Carlisle's looks were always fuckboys.
Carlisle, to his credit, couldn't keep a straight face at that either.
Yes, Renesmée had a lovely rest of her vacation, even the commute home was great.
(Well, there had been a moment with Siobhan on Christmas Day, when Carlisle had gone off to church, when they had both stared at each other. They barely knew each other, yet in that moment, Carlisle's admission had been a shared thought between them.
Now that had been an awkward silence.)
It was when she got home that things began to feel…
Not different, per se, but not the same as ever, either.
Something had shifted, something she couldn't place her finger on yet.
Her parents, Esme, and Jacob were all there to greet them at the airport.
«Nessie!» Jacob cried, as if she was returning from the war in Iraq. The second she was within reach, he pulled her into his arms and spun her around, making her almost dizzy.
She laughed a little as he put her down. «Nice to see you too, Jake. Hey, mom!» she beamed, turning to see her mother smiling warmly up at her.
Behind Bella, Esme was kissing Carlisle lightly on the lips.
Renesmée focused firmly on her mother before her thoughts could wander towards what she'd learned about her grandfather's love life.
«Nessie, darling,» Bella said, and before Renesmée could think anything further she was enveloped in her mother's thin, cold, arms. She drew in Bella's familiar scent, and sighed.
It was good to see her mother.
«I'm so sorry you missed Isle Esme, Nessie,» Bella hummed. «But I promise you can come next time.»
It appeared her mother had forgotten that Renesmée herself had opted out of Isle Esme.
Bella drew back, and this time it was Edward's time to hug Renesmée. «Next Christmas we'll be together,» he assured her.
Jacob nodded energetically.
«You as well, Mister,» Esme said playfully, bopping Carlisle on the nose. «We missed you.»
The drive home, divided in two cars as Carlisle and Esme drove the Mercedes and the rest of them filed into Edward's new Audi, was filled with assurances of all the things the four of them would be doing together in the coming weeks to make up for the lost time.
No one asked how Ireland had been.
Life returned to normal.
Carlisle went back to his long shifts at the hospital, Bella and Edward returned to making sweet love to one another two rooms away from where Renesmée was desperately trying to sleep, and Jacob… Well, Jacob was a bit shaken from the two weeks spent apart, but for the most part he was the same as ever.
(It was the longest Jacob had ever been apart from her, and it showed.
Something, something, schmeparation schmanxiety.)
It seemed Renesmée was the only one who was a bit… out of step, she supposed was the word for it. The world hadn't changed, but she had.
At first, she tried to put it out of mind.
Her grandfather had not popped into existence on the day he bit Edward. He had been alive for centuries before he created his family, it was only natural he would have a past.
And yet…
She just couldn't reconcile herself with it.
Overnight, her grandfather had become so much more mysterious than she could ever have guessed. Oh, he'd always been interesting, but like the rest of the family he'd been… known, she supposed was the word for it.
Renesmée simply couldn't look at him the same way.
She'd look at his lips, and try to reconcile herself with the knowledge that they had once kissed Aro's. God alone knew where else they had been. She'd call forth the memory of Aro's face, and try to imagine seeing the loved one Carlisle had described.
She'd look at Esme sometimes, too, with her kind eyes, soft features, and caramel curls, and wonder if there was some ineffable commonality between her and Aro that onlyCarlisle could see, something to explain how one person could fall for two such different people.
And, for all that she tried not to, she would find herself trying and failing to picture her grandfather and her would-be-murderer together.
Each time she came up empty.
Renesmée wondered if the issue was perhaps homophobia. It seemed when humans got overly meddlesome in the love lives of their peers, it was because it went against their world views. Perhaps, then, Renesmée had internalized something at some point in the past six years since she first had that startling realization of I am within her mother's womb, though when she searched her memory nothing particularly formative came up.
(As it was, the day she learned what homosexuality was had been a memorable one.
Edward carefully curated her education, so it had not come up in science class. Not that sex had, either. As it was she had yet to learn the full mechanics of that, though the nightly displays her parents put on had done much to fill in the blanks.
No, homosexuality had come up when she was learning history with Carlisle.
He had been teaching her about Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king who conquered all of the Persian Empire and then some, who became a god, who burned so brightly that he ignited all the Western World, redirecting the course of history and burning his name into the world's memory so that there was, now and always, only one Alexander.
He also mentioned Alexander's lover and best friend, Hephaestion.
At first Renesmée thought that was very progressive of Alexander, to have a female best friend like that.
Then, when she asked if Hephaestion had to crossdress like Hatsepsut and Smenkhare, Carlisle had given her a funny look.
That had been how the history lesson turned into a lesson on sex, partnership, and a brief overview of the Stonewall riots and the AIDS epidemic because «it's very relevant to the humans alive today, Nessie.»
That had also been how Carlisle and Edward got into a memorable not-quite-fight about whether Roxane cleared Alexander of all sleeping-with-Hephaestion charges or not.)
No, she would have been just as shocked if Carlisle had slept with Aro's wife, for that matter. Homophobia wasn't the issue here.
No, the problem was that she had learned this massive, earth-shattering thing about her grandfather, and something had changed. She was closer to him now, knew a part of him that no one else in the family did, and she had gotten a look into his soul.
But, like a dream, all of that seemed locked away. The boat had rocked, but looking at the water around her, Renesmée could see no ripples.
She contemplated asking Carlisle. She wasn't clear on specifically what she'd be asking him, there was only that ever-increasing urge, no, need, to know. To understand. But no, he'd said what he wanted to say, and for her to start interrogating him would only jeopardize the newfound closeness between them.
A month went by like this, with the family back to normal, and Renesmée not quite.
It was late January when the consequences of thinking illegal thoughts in a household that counted a telepath among its members made itself known.
She was in Carlisle's study, having found a rare moment to herself just before Jacob arrived from the res to spend the day with her. The rest of the family was out hunting.
She made her way over to Carlisle's old painting, the one Aro had gifted to him.
She remembered the first time her grandfather had shown it to her.
She'd been only a day old, they were still waiting for her mother to wake up. Jacob had been asleep, and it had been Carlisle's turn with her, so he'd decided to give her a tour of his office (well, the new makeshift office while his real office doubled as an OR) until she fell asleep in his arms.
Everything had been so very new then, and so terribly exciting after the blackness of the womb. It hadn't been at all what she'd expected, either, as she lay in the darkness waiting to be born, wondering what would happen to her once her mother couldn't protect her anymore, wondering if she would kill her mother before she could get out.
Finding the world safe and full of wonders, then, with her mother peacefully asleep, had been truly wonderful.
She had recognized her grandfather when he first held her, too, his kind and reassuring voice one she remembered hearing, even before she knew how to divide the phonemes into words.
Renesmée hadn't blinked once for the entire tour, trying to take in not just the paintings, but the walls, the furniture, and the dust motes as well. She remembered how Carlisle would laugh to himself in wonder each time he stole a look at her face: apparently she looked hilarious.
She'd been very interested in the Volturi painting, big, bright, and colorful as it was. Even more so once she recognized some of the two-dimensional strokes of paint as depicting her grandfather.
«Yes,» Carlisle had said, his voice warm, «that was gifted to me by a friend of mine. He's the one in the middle.»
Renesmée had reached out a chubby hand to paw at the painting, and Carlisle had taken a quick step back, and then another to the side so she could look at a painting of clouds instead. (She hadn't liked that as much.)
He had not told her, then, of who the Volturi were, nor of what they did.
That had been a surprise reserved for a few months later.
Now, as she looked upon that painting, Renesmée wondered, not for the first time, just what Aro had liked about Carlisle so much. That Carlisle should adore Aro was incomprehensible to her, but she could see how her grandfather had been deceived. From what she'd seen of the old tyrant, he was perfectly charming when he wanted to be.
It wasn't hard to understand why Aro had liked Carlisle, either. Everyone did.
But, given what she had just learned about her grandfather, the hidden depths she had uncovered…
She had to wonder just who the Carlisle Cullen that Aro had known had been.
The door creaked open, and Renesmée fell into a startled crouch.
«It's me,» Edward's soft voice called out. He ducked his head, and shot her an apologetic smile. «I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you.»
She slowly straightened. «It's fine,» she whispered.
Edward moved into the office, nearly soundlessly, to stand next to her before the Volturi painting. He appraised it, eyes on Aro's rendition.
Renesmée very carefully focused on color theory, on Solimena's use of shading and palettes to accentuate the difference between the vampires above and the humans below. For Carlisle's eyes and hair, she noticed he had used the same golden color.
«I found a mountain lion almost right away. It was a short hunt,» Edward said, not taking his eyes off the painting. «The others will be gone for another few hours.»
Renesmée nodded wordlessly.
«Look, Nessie,» Edward started, shifting his weight as he turned to look at her. His bright eyes were intense. «I heard what you were thinking about.»
Renesmée looked back at him, feeling not unlike one of the squirrels she liked to catch.
«It… troubles me as well. I won't deny that,» Edward admitted quietly, turning his attention back to the painting.
Renesmée gaped at him.
Edward knew?
Oh, that—
That was oddly hurtful.
Apparently Renesmée wasn't the only one Carlisle had confided in.
Her hands balled into fists and she pursed her lips, looking away from Edward.
Edward smiled lightly. «He does not often speak of his time in Volterra. But, this was what I wanted to talk to you about.»
He turned away from the painting, and guided her out of the room, into the bright, spacious, living room.
«It bothered me, for many years, that my father would willingly live with those of our kind who do not share our diet. And not just any coven, but the Volturi, who slaughter people by the hundreds every month… I trusted Carlisle when he said Aro's love for the arts made up for his vulgar lifestyle, or rather, I trusted that Carlisle had allowed this glimmer of sophistication in a vampire to overshadow Aro's heinous nature. A mistake born of loneliness.»
Renesmée blinked several times, and tried very hard to keep her attention on a sketch Edward had made of Bella as she was as a human that hung above the piano. She studied the way the lines melded into each other to form hair, the way Bella's eyes seemed brown even when the sketch was graphite.
Edward, it seemed, did not know what his daughter knew, nor had he picked up that there was something in particular that Carlisle had confided in her.
She concentrated intently on that graphite, desperate for it to stay that way.
«Then…» Edward heaved a sigh. «Then I learned of Chelsea.»
Renesmée looked sharply up at him. «The one who breaks up covens?»
Edward's lips twisted into a smile Renesmée didn't like at all. «Chelsea's power is to amplify or weaken relationships. The closest of friends become enemies, and acquaintances become trusted companions…
And that's without mentioning Corin.»
Renesmée's heart was beating, beating very rapidly.
«Corin?» she asked breathlessly.
Edward nodded severely. «Understand, Nessie, I don't mean to frighten you. With your mother, their gifts can't touch us. We don't have to worry about the Volturi. If anything,» that same smile flitted across his lips, «they might be the ones who should be worried about us.»
Renesmée nodded quickly. «Yes, yes, I know, I'm not afraid,» she babbled, which for the record was far from the truth, but she did not want Edward to get distracted from the very important, no, terrifying thing he'd been about to say. «Who's Corin?»
«She's… addiction. A drug, if you will, in vampire form.» Edward reached out to grab her hand. Renesmée almost pulled it back.
«How?» she asked tonelessly.
«She is everything pleasant, every concern disappeared like yesterday's weather, the past and future made immaterial. Her gift is to make people content, and addicted to that feeling of contentedness. She, perhaps even more so than Chelsea, is how Aro keeps his guard under control.
They are, quite literally, under a spell.»
Renesmée's body sank into the couch without her giving it leave to do so.
Edward continued, not catching his daughter's sudden state. Perhaps understandable, as her mind felt suddenly very empty. «Eleazar never experienced her for himself, he refused to for all that Aro tried to beckon… but all the rest, including Chelsea herself, including even Caius, including Aro's own wife, are beholden to Corin.»
Edward sat next to her and squeezed her hand again. «I suspected foul play surrounding Carlisle's stay in Volterra the moment Eleazar told me about Chelsea, but once he told me about Corin as well… imagine it, Nessie. Carlisle would not have been able to mind the thousands of humans killed, would have been too content staying in Volterra to ever want to leave, and on top of all that was Chelsea, turning what might otherwise never have grown beyond friendly curiosity into a decades long friendship.»
He waited a second for Renesmée to say anything.
When she stayed silent, he continued. «I'm not telling you this to scare you, Nessie, but so that you'll understand that Carlisle is not to blame for his sojourn in Volterra. We should be very grateful he was able to break away at all, in that one act he proved he has more strength of will than any of the other poor souls trapped in Volterra.»
He smiled down at her. «I promise you, Nessie, none of what happened in Volterra was of Carlisle's own volition.»