"Juliette?"

"I heard you the first time."

Except she hadn't, not really. Her ears were still ringing, her gaze distantly focused on a fixed point somewhere halfway between her spot on the cream linen couch and the grey carpet. She had a mug of hot cocoa complete with tiny bobbing half-melted, half-toasted marshmallows in her cupped hands, keeping her warm after how much her body temperature had dropped on the journey to the Cullen Household, deep in the woods. Her cheeks were still pink from being wind-whipped, the back of her head still tender and her back covered in analgesic patches for where the bruises were forming from her fight with Jasper. She had not yet seen the boy who had tried to kill her, but she couldn't really focus on anyone but Doctor Cullen, not even as his sweet wife Esme returned with another blanket to gently place over her shoulders, as if afraid she would be spooked. None of it registered in her mind. As far as she was concerned she was far away, seeing the scene from outside of her own rigid body.

I'm dying.

"So your daughter's…visions. They uh, they see me…?"

"The visions only confirm what we already know." Carlisle shakes his head. Jules understands now why Edward had been so insistent that his father tell her the news, even as she struggled to accept the words. She was drowning in her own mind, the vampire's words muffled and distant as she slipped further and further away. She was grateful for him, in some strange twisted way. The good doctor was good at explaining what she could not even begin to comprehend. "Your gift, Juliette. It is rare even in our kind to have a gift so powerful and to have developed it as much as you have while you're human. It's not common in the slightest, but in every case there has ever been…"

"They die." Jules finishes for him, eyes a little wetter now as she moved her gaze down to the bobbing marshmallows, the steam rising from the mug in little bare wisps. The palest of pastel pinks and blobs of white swam at the surface of the thick dark brown liquid.

"They become vampires." Carlisle corrects her patiently, tone still gentle. Jules wonders if his voice is always that soft, that kind- if it is simply his nature and if it's simply his natural tone- or if he's talking to her like the police who came to her door that night with the news of her father on purpose. If it's supposed to make her feel better, that tone. She hadn't mourned her father then, hadn't felt the heartbreak. She'd just felt numb. Empty. It was the exact opposite now. There was too much inside her, too much fear, too much hurt, too much information. Too much. "It is the nature of your gift. Vampires develop gifts based off their strongest personal trait, in theory, and your gift is a premature development of your…fate."

"I don't really believe in fate sir." Except there is no conviction in her voice. She had always wanted answers. Wanted to know how she could do the things she could, feared what would happen if she ever tried to find out. Avoided hospitals out of the fear of what the scans would show, paranoid she would be prodded and poked and experimented upon.

This, this was not expected. This was far worse.

Rosalie was silent as the grave, perched upon the arm of one of the twin brown leather armchairs across the carpet from her. Edward lingered in the corner of the living room by the wall of floor to ceiling glass panels, arms crossed. They had both changed out of their clothes while their father tended to her in his private office. Esme Cullen stood behind her, rubbing her shoulder over the blanket in an attempt to soothe her while Carlisle stood in front of the feature fireplace to her immediate right.

"Alice was the first we came across." Carlisle sighed, sharing a glance with his eldest son. "She has no memory of her human life, we suspect due to trauma, but when she woke after her transition she was in a psychiatric institution for her precognitive ability. Upon our discovery of you and your own gift through my daughter's visions, we did a little research. A friend of mine from Egypt found a boy centuries ago who could make fire out of nothing. He too was turned."

"Coincidence." She tries.

"No. It's more than that." Edward finally speaks. "We have family in Alaska, others of our kind who share the same ideals as me and my family and who practice the same diet as we do. Eleazar has the gift of recognizing special abilities in others, both human and vampire alike. In his three hundred years every human he has come across with a premature gift has been turned one way or another. They are destined to become one of us- you are, no matter what you choose to believe in. No matter what we wish we could do to change it."

"Your gift is your symptom." Carlisle tries to explain once more. "Alice's visions are simply the scans that tell us what we already know from your symptom. I am sorry, but there's nothing we can do but try to give you as much time as we can provide."

"And we will." Esme vows from behind her. "Give you as much time as we can. You aren't alone in this sweetheart, we won't allow you to be."

The silence is thick with tension as Jules' jaw tenses, eyes brimming with tears now as she gripped her mug harder. "How long?"

"I don't think that's-"

"How long?" She repeats, willing her voice to keep from breaking.

"Your hair hasn't changed in most of Alice's visions." Edward's voice is barely above a whisper, hardly even audible. This somehow makes it worse, like a softspoken confession- a raw truth. She could hear the utter hopelessness of her condemnation in his sweet, lulling voice. "At most, a few months? The latest vision was in Seattle outside of a Chinese supermarket. The snow just started sticking to the ground."

She bites her tongue to keep from crying out, nodding shakily before she set down her untouched too-hot cocoa. "I need a- yeah."

She doesn't wait for a response, surging past them all before she could fall apart, rushing out the glass panel Edward pushes open for her. It's colder now as the sun sets, the air biting at her face as she jogged down the back porch steps, stuffing her hands into her jacket pockets as she tried to get far enough away from it all. Out of sight.

Jules doesn't really remember breaking down with her back against a tree, crouched down sobbing like a wreck into her hands. She had never been a pretty crier, and no matter how much she tried to hold it all in it came flooding out of her in wretched, pathetic sobs. She took a breath through the snot, wiping at her eyes and her nose in a vain attempt to get a grip as she shook her head and her hair whipped back and forth with her movement."This isn't real. This isn't real. Mon dieu, dites-moi que ce n'est pas vrai."

Except she doesn't really believe in god, or a higher power. She doesn't really expect anyone to answer her either, to tell her that it's all a lie, that she hit her head too hard while hiking and this was all just some fucked up fever dream. Jules doesn't have someone to hold her and tell her everything's going to be okay, because as she was coming to accept, things were not going to be okay.

She only had months.

She stayed out there longer than she really intended to, hoping in some desperate way that if she didn't go back inside the house she wouldn't have to face this new reality. That it didn't exist out here in the woods, as the light grew dimmer and darker and the creatures of the night began their songs in the trees. Little chirps and foreign hoots occasionally interrupted her solitude as she continued to wrap her head around everything she now knew. The buzz of insects grew louder into a steady hum, oddly soothing her frayed nerves. And still she could feel that familiar tingle at the back of her neck as she gained new company.

She wasn't surprised that it was Rosalie who came to find her. Hurt, maybe, that small bitter part of her heart still stinging with her imagined betrayal by the girl who had toyed with her emotions and kept secrets from her. Jules doesn't have anything to say to Rosalie, eyes tired and body drained and aching from her injuries, the balmy smell of the patches on her back familiar to her nose now. Rosalie had a fresh mug of hot cocoa in her hands, offering it out to Jules who accepted it with a touch of shame as the blonde gave her a little remorseful smile. A truce, Jules realized, as she moved around her and gracefully lowered herself onto the forest floor next to her. The mug is less hot than the one Esme had given her, and Jules sipped it gratefully, not realizing how hungry she was until her stomach growled. "Esme's cooking you dinner. Alice texted your Uncle using your phone to tell him that you'll be home after dinner and that you ended your camping trip early. He said he won't be home from fishing until the morning and not to wait up. Leah wants you to call her as soon as you can. She's worried about your ankle."

"Thanks." Jules sips more cocoa. "I'm sorry I yelled at you earlier."

"You don't mean that." Rosalie rolls her eyes with a bitter snort. "You were right about all of it. I know you're not actually sorry about speaking the truth, and I'm not going to apologize for what I did to protect my family and to protect you."

"I'm still struggling to wrap my head around why you'd even bother with the latter." Jules chuckles, but her voice is hoarse from emotional exhaustion.

"The truth?" Rosalie sighs, and Jules raises an eyebrow at her as she turns away to look out at the dark forest. "At first, I was worried that Alice's early visions of Jasper turning you would come true and my family would be forced to flee. When those visions changed to strangers turning you, I began to worry that you would cause mayhem in town as a newborn and my family would be implicated."

Jules is filled with more questions at Rosalie's answer, but the blonde cuts her off just as she opens her mouth to ask what a newborn is. "But then…we talked, and you were so strange, so unusual. And then you called me out on all my tricks, actually saw me behind all of this, and I…I felt human around you Jules. Like I was really your friend and you didn't care about any of the irregularities, you just brushed them aside as if they didn't matter. And I coveted that. I didn't want to lose that. I didn't want to lose the first real friend I've ever had since the day I died. I don't want you to die. I want you to live for as long as I can give you… because you're so full of life it makes me feel alive too."

She felt her eyes were filled with tears again by the end of Rosalie's soft confession, and she didn't even care that she could see through her blurry vision how startled the vampire seemed to be by her own words. Rosalie turned to her with a pretty knot between her furrowed brows, eyes golden once more. "I'm sorry, I'm not sure what came over me, I-"

Except Jules only leans over to rest her tired head against Rosalie's shoulder, ignoring the way she freezes underneath her. A moment later, Rosalie breathes, and Jules' eyes flutter shut with peace as she feels the faintest brush of lips against her hair.