Title: Jar of Hearts
Author: Girl Who Writes
Characters: Emmett, Alice, Seth
Word Count: 3059
Rating: T
Genre: Angst, Found Family, Drama
Summary: There might be something in that, taking the last gift-gesture-offering Rose ever did for him on their End-of-the-World Road Trip. Alice can rip the heads off newborns, he can drive around in the SUV his wife carefully and lovingly put together just to please him, and maybe he'll buy Seth a beer in Tijuana.
Closest thing they'll ever get to therapy, he supposes.
three. roadtrip
They're almost in Arizona when Charlie calls to find out where the fuck Seth Clearwater is, because apparently he's been tangling up his story all over town - he's told anyone on the Res who asks that he's staying with Charlie. He's told Charlie that he's staying with Colin or Brady.
Alice scowls at Seth through the rearview mirror and begins to weave a tale of being told Seth had permission to join them to go see their cousins - in between lecturing Seth about setting them up for a kidnapping charge across state lines.
By the end of the conversation, Charlie's trying not to snigger at Alice's increasingly indignant rant at Seth, at law breaking in general, and at fucking son-of-a-bitch moron drivers, sweet Jesus. Emmett and Seth are howling at Alice's cussing and even Charlie is a little bit shocked at her language (later, when the boys are picking on her about it, she rolls her eyes, looks over the top of her heart-shaped sunglasses, and reminds them both - quite primly - that she married a goddamned soldier.)
Seth's favourite part of the whole ordeal is that Alice isn't even driving.
But Charlie clears Seth accompanying them, so that's one less problem. Of course, it means his Jeep stinks of human food, and that they have to stop, but they still make good time up to Alaska.
It's a hard drive to make - closer to the cities and urban, abandoned cars have been moved off the road. But in the rural areas, cars are still scattered, seemingly abandoned or crashed. Most of the bodies have been removed, thankfully. But still, only most. And it's been weeks - months - since it happened, so those bodies aren't in good condition.
And not all of them are adults.
They start out burying the people they find (well, Emmett and Alice do - they both insist Seth stay in the damn car), but then only the children.
Then they just stop because they are both tired of handling rotting bodies who never should have died, let alone forgotten on the side of a long, empty stretch of highway. The graves they've already dug haven't got markers or anything. Just a hole on the side of the road.
It doesn't feel like enough.
The house in Denali feels wrong before they even get out of the car. The house has always had a sense of otherness, thanks to the fact that it's the permanent residence of immortals. But right now, it feels more forgotten, lesser in a way.
Tanya's walking out the front door the second the car pulls up, and she looks old. Tired and strained, and she walks straight into the hug Alice offers.
Seth gapes at the house - the enormous glass-and-wood lodge, tucked carefully in the wilderness where it is mostly forgotten. It might be on a map somewhere, might be noted down in some database, but it is mostly overlooked, a sanctuary in the middle of nowhere.
There's not really much for them to say or do in Alaska, Emmett realises; Carmen and Tanya are more than capable enough to manage on their own.
Except… Carmen looks like a ghost. She looks disorientated and disinterested, and there's a part of Emmett that is cold and dead that is perversely fascinated with all the different ways there are to fall apart after the loss of a mate. He's walking around like a hollowed-out old man, Alice is… not quite there, a little unbalanced.
Sometimes he wonders if Rosalie should have stayed, should have taken his place instead. He would have given it to her, without question. Rose only deserved good things, easy things.
But then he wonders. If living through it all really was easy or good. It doesn't feel like it, most days. It's a heavy weight in his chest and a constant feeling of leaving something behind (he's got one of her hair ties around his wrist; it's dumb but he always had one on him just in case - at school, when they went hunting, everywhere; he's also got one of her shirts in his bag. It won't smell right, being crammed in with his stuff, but he brought it anyway).
Rose wouldn't have been happy in this world. She wouldn't have known what to do with Alice or Seth. She would have been angry at the disruption to her life. She would have been afraid and lonely and lashed out at everyone.
No, not good and easy at all.
Then he wonders how Jasper would have faired, without Alice, and that is a grim, grizzly train of thought. Thanos would have begged for death, if Alice had been taken and Jasper left behind. He's only ever seen a glimpse of the monster behind the man over the decades since Jasper and Alice joined the family, and it's enough to think that perhaps nature intervened and tried to protect everyone from what Jasper would become without Alice.
They stay in Alaska for two days; Tanya and Carmen are ill-at-ease with Seth, even after they explain who he is.
"But," Tanya had frowned, "why is he with you?"
He didn't have an answer for that.
Because Seth was… he was Other, like the Cullens. He understood what it was like to be special and expect to be strong enough to survive and to save; to be beyond the reach of petty mortal shit. He was a fucking kid, who'd lost his family, his friends, and most of his community. Fuck, at this rate, he'd lost his childhood too. He was the natural leader of what remained of the pack, and he'd done something fairly smart - looked for adult guidance.
A shame that the only thing he could find in its place was him and Alice. If someone had ranked his family by 'best choice to care for a teenage boy' he, Alice, and Jasper would have been dead last. Edward would have ranked higher.
(It still feels weird to think or talk about Alice without adding 'and Jasper'. Like he's mispronouncing a word.)
But it is what it is, and Seth's still clocking more hours doing online school than online games on the laptop Alice gave him, plus there's a bunch of food in the back of the Jeep, so they aren't failing too badly.
Seth turns red when Tanya smiles at him, and Alice banishes him to a guest room, loudly forbidding any imprinting for the next decade, and that just means Emmett has to explain imprinting to Carmen and Tanya, and Alice has to read the riot act to Tanya about not flirting with the fourteen-year-old boy upstairs and it almost feels like old times.
They go hunting whilst Seth is asleep, and it's obvious that nothing is the same. So much of the forest surrounding the house is just… gone. Empty, as if there was never trees looming over them, underbrush to push through. There are less animals to track and hunt, no excuse to be picky.
It was probably the same around Forks, truthfully, except there was that cloud of grief and horror surrounding him and Alice when they hunted - that was where Edward stumbled and fell. That was where Jasper couldn't run any longer.
That was where he heard Alice scream when Rosie disintegrated.
In the harsh light of day, the situation feels much bleaker, much bigger outside of the insular forests of the Olympic Peninsula.
They don't see a single bear.
He's not entirely sure why they've come to Alaska, except he sees Carmen and Alice go off together, finds them sitting quietly together talking. On one hand, he wishes that he could sit with them; that he lost Rose just like they lost Jasper and Eleazer, but on the other hand, he doesn't want to be a part of that particular club. Doesn't have words left to comfort Carmen. Most of his platitudes have started sounding hollow.
Alice vanishes one morning, and leaves him to help Seth with school work, and he grimly realises they have nearly four more years of this until Seth graduates. But things will be different before then; they'll be back in Forks and Seth can ask paid professionals to explain algebra to him.
When Alice returns, it's time to go - she's been off in the wilderness, trying to See around Seth, and deciding to go off on her own is, apparently, the best way.
"Call us if you need anything," Tanya says, pulling all three of them into crushing hugs, and if Seth turns red and tries to look down Tanya's top, Alice pretends not to notice.
"Where are you headed next?" Carmen asks, as Seth climbs in the back, clutching an energy drink they're all going to regret.
Alice smiles. But it's the wrong kind of smile; it's sharp and sinister and looks wrong on her face. A Cheshire Cat smile, a Joker smile, and Emmett wonders if after all these years together, if Jasper's reactive violence hasn't bled into his wife a little.
"We're going to Mexico."
—
The trip to Mexico can be described as long.
If the Jeep wasn't Rosalie's last gift to him, then they probably could have run there faster, even with Seth in tow. But there won't be anymore perfectly modified cars ever again, so he's staying with the Jeep.
Alice gives up the passenger seat once they make it through to Alberta, apologetic that Seth's been crammed in the backseat. But then Alice starts muttering to herself, tapping away on her phone, and seems distracted and irritated when Emmett tries to get her attention.
He can't make out what she's saying at all, it's just an irregular hum, and he wonders if she's having more of her one-sided conversations with Jasper.
The trip takes a week, winding through landlocked states. It shouldn't take so long except everything is in chaos; they lose an entire afternoon carefully shifting some abandoned cars off the road to get the Jeep through in the middle of backwoods Montana. They spend hours waiting for gas every time they stop. And Seth might be a mystical shapeshifter, but he needs a proper bed, and hot food, and human moments; they have varying success at finding all three, but they try, and Seth is nothing if not agreeable and grateful for even the smallest attempt at making him comfortable.
They find an abandoned farm in Wyoming and they let Seth transform and run for a few hours at dusk, sitting on the front of the Jeep in silence until it's dark enough for them to hunt, as well.
It feels like the world has ended, some days, and they are the only ones left - to him, at least. Maybe that's why Alice is talking to herself - it's the only sensible answer she'll get.
Some towns are empty; no one for miles. The information that filters through the internet mentions people heading to the cities, to the larger towns, because the population is too small to keep so many different settlements functioning. There's no money or survival if you've lost your entire farm, if the hospital or the school is unmanned.
And Emmett wonders if he's been cured of human blood for good now he's seen so much of it spilt, stale and rotting, on the backroads of the country. It feels like everything smells just a little bit like decomposition right now. He's not sure if that's him or if that's everything.
And they get closer to Mexico.
—
They arrive just as the day turns to night, and he expects… he's not sure what he expects, honestly. Maybe setting up in the motel they've found, that Alice has declared a safe distance from any of Maria's plotting, and getting Seth some fresh food - he hasn't complained, but even Emmett's tired of the pre-packaged, long-life crap.
Instead, Alice slips from the car, clad in jeans and a leather jacket, tucking her phone in her back pocket.
"I'll be back in a few hours," she says, like she's going alone.
"What?" Seth looks suspiciously at the pair of them, and it's only later that he realises the kid is terrified of being left behind. That he'll cling to their belt loops with his dying breath. His mom left, his sister left, his friends and pack left, and he took a chance on leaving everything else that was left to stick with them.
That makes Emmett feel guilty for no reason he can name.
"I can't see with you around me," Alice says gently. "It's a simple clean-up job, it won't take long."
Seth frowns and looks at Emmett.
"You aren't doing this alone, Alice. Even if we wait in the car," he says with finality. This isn't going to be an argument, because there's nothing to argue about. He's not letting Alice roam around in a city full of uncontrolled newborns, no matter how talented she is.
Alice scowls. "I know what I'm doing, Emmett," her voice is sharp, and she never likes reminding them of how long she was alone before she found Jasper; what the family knows about those years is quite vague and patchwork - as far as Alice is concerned, nothing important happened before she met Jasper, as if she popped into being on a diner stool just in time.
Rose always suspected Alice's real story was very lonely, very frightening, but no one asks when she so obviously doesn't want to talk about it. He knows what it costs for her to bring it up now.
"I know. But that doesn't mean I'm letting my only sister go newborn hunting alone," Emmett says, and Alice sighs and nods - her visions have gone dark, obviously this is not a battle she can win.
Emmett ends up wishing that he and Seth had stayed behind.
Alice is like a laser, zeroing on her targets with a single-minded intensity. He hears that hum faintly, of her talking to herself and he wants to ask her what she's saying, what thoughts are so important she needs to say them almost out loud but he doesn't get a chance.
The first one of Maria's abandoned acolytes is a girl around seventeen with matted black hair and a dress that Emmett mistakes for some kind of lace at first, except it's the remnants of dozens of meals dried across the front of her, ripples of dried, stale blood that have solidified into a repulsive black and red mass.
She snarls at them, her face bloody, and the pale form of a man beneath her. Alice just walks up to her and backhands her with a crack that makes Seth jump; Emmett flinches but he'd never admit it.
The newborn snaps at Alice, and in one movement, the girl is pinned to the brick wall behind them, cracks spiralling up her neck from Alice's tight grip.
"Who the hell are you?" the girl snaps in Spanish and Alice says nothing, just rips her head off by her neck, the screech sounding deafening so close. Moments later, her body is in pieces in a dumpster, along with her victim, and Alice has set the entire thing alight, her face blank.
Emmett makes a decision then, to leave Seth in a brightly lit burger place with a promise he'll be back in one hour because this is nothing a kid should see.
And he's so, so glad that he made that choice. Alice's hunt is something that will be burned into his brain for the rest of his life.
The next newborn is a middle-aged male who reminds Emmett of his English lit teacher back at Forks, right down to the salt and pepper streaks in his hair and the slightly off-centre nose. He's the worst of the night, Emmett silently decides, as he guards his hunt - a family of five that he's only half-finished. The father is extremely, viscerally dead and there's no putting him back together; the mother is choking and struggling for a breath that her torn throat will never give her as she bleeds out; the baby in her arms is long dead with its head taken up by a gaping wound. There are two young girls, clinging to each other in terror, and there is no way this ends well.
The newborn obviously thinks Emmett is more of a threat than petite little Alice, practically frothing at the mouth as Emmett approaches him, and grabs at one of the children. It all happens in seconds - the girls scream, there is a crunch of bone and more screaming, the rich scent of fresh blood, another crunch of bone and muscle, and then the newborn's head is half-torn away before Alice can get better leverage and finish the job. The dead child dangles from his grip, bent the wrong way; her sister has her head half caved in, and the mother still chokes on her own blood. It all happens so fast.
He should have stayed with Seth.
He lets Alice handle the rest of them - she's located six of Maria's surviving nine, and after the family, she takes them down swiftly and wordlessly, just a diminutive blur and the sound of tearing metal.
The sweet smoke clings to them as they make their way back to Seth, Alice's head down.
"I thought," she began and just shook her head. And he reached out to squeeze her shoulder.
She thought it would be closure, would feel like an ending or an achievement. That there would be some peace in ending Maria's life's work. Instead, she's just the same, but with blood on her boots and a tear in her jeans. The newborns barely got an opportunity to fight back, to give her the pound of flesh she was looking for.
Seth is waiting for them in the window of the store, a broad grin on his face when he spots them. Back to the motel for the night, now. And then tomorrow…
"So," he says finally. "What now?"
Note
- The number of abandoned towns would be incredible. Like, a big old yikes at that - especially when you consider that the National Guard might have to force people to leave their homes in this situation due to damaged infastructure, lack of resources etc. It would be very traumatic.
- I said it before, but there would have been *so* many Snap-adjacent deaths. Horrible accidents caused by people vanishing. Lives lost in the immediate chaos. It would have been ugly, and I can imagine that there would have been a lot of forgotten bodies from those accidents - especially in rural areas.
- I feel that Rose and Emmett had the most 'human' relationship of all the Cullens, and Emmett's grief very much reflects that. But the only thing that is keeping Emmett from being haunted by Rosalie - like Alice is by Jasper and, to a lesser degree, Bella was by Edward - is his sense of responsibility towards Seth and Alice. This is not intended to imply that Rose and Emmett's bond was lesser.
- I decided not to go into Alice's visit to Carmen and Tanya, because it would have made it disjointed since this is coming from Emmett, but also because it was very much about shared grief. Alice could relate to Carmen's grief at the loss of a mate, where Tanya couldn't, and shares Tanya's grief at the loss of her sisters.
- Poor Alice had to learn that sometimes the thing that you think will fix everything is utterly hollow.