Disclaimer: Stephenie Meyer holds the rights to her respective characters.

A/N: So, I don't exactly have an actual plot outlined for this story (I do have a general sense of where I want it to go), so the chapters will be more drabble-like than actually advancing to something bigger, if that makes sense? Previous fanfictions that I have written, I had an outline and never seemed to stick with it, so I'm hoping this flow will be easier for me to follow. Plus, that means shorter chapters, but faster updates than my usual. :)

The conversation between Edward and Carlisle, or Edward and Esme, or all three didn't last too long, which I was afraid was not a good sign but, as Edward made his way back into my bedroom, door already slightly cracked as an invitation, his expression told me everything.

I jumped at him, an overjoyed laugh leaving my throat at the same moment. He chuckled, catching me around the waist.

"There are a few mandates," he started but I shook my head, hiding my face in the crook of his neck, the smile on my face hard to contain.

"I don't care," I insisted, squeezing him tighter. He smelled good; too good, so I let go.

"Don't forget these things I do for you, Bella," he said exuberantly as he tapped me on the nose gently.

"I won't," I promised, clasping my hands before me. I didn't know how I was going to sleep tonight. "I need to thank them!"

Edward caught me around the waist as I made to hightail to Carlisle and Esme's room to express my never-dying gratitude for the opportunity, his nose crinkling just slightly.

"Wait until tomorrow morning," he insisted and though I didn't want to admit it, I knew the reasoning. A disgusted sound flew my throat and I moved to drop back to my desk.

"This family is obsessed with sex," I jeered, trying to rein in the many, unwarranted images his words brought about – mainly of Rosalie and Emmett. They were the most graphic about their sex life. At least the rest tried to hide it.

Edward rolled his eyes.

"Tell me about it," he said, but his tone was rough and I thought I saw a hint of something often hidden as he looked away from me quickly. His gaze dropped directly to the sketch I had been working on and, grateful for the redirection, I held it up for him. My heated face was beginning to cool as I illustrated for him the scenery of New York I had captured.

"I figured Esme would like a landscape of the western view she loves so much," I explained as Edward trailed his pointer finger along the Adirondack mountain range, an impressed look on his face.

"Was this going to be part of your plan to convince them to leave New York? Give her one of your poignant designs to rope her into it?"

I shrugged, letting the page fall back to my desk. "I thought it couldn't hurt," I answered and then beamed up at him. He only shook his head with a smile and told me to get some sleep.

xx

The next morning, after I had rejoiced countless times with Esme and Carlisle about how ecstatic I was that they were my parents and that they, in turn, had had the brilliant decision to allow me to attend school, Alice bustled me to her bedroom, showing off her hundreds of outfits she had recently acquired online.

"Honestly, the internet has been the greatest invention for me," she boasted excitedly.

"Really?" I imposed, raising an eyebrow at her. "Not the radio, or washing machines, or vacuum cleaners?"

Jasper scoffed from where he was sitting in the corner of their room, against the covered window. "Alice doesn't clean, Bella."

He caught something between his fingers before it hit his head – a coat hanger. Alice glared at him as he tried to hide a smile.

"Okay, Ms. Know-it-all. Looks like you don't need to go to school after all," she jeered and turned away from the two of us, who remained silently laughing, as she continued to hang up her new winter wardrobe.

"And a pea coat," she grinned happily, hugging the maroon colored fabric to her chest. She was so easily distracted. "Everyone in school will be gagging when they see me."

I glanced over at Jasper who rolled his eyes, but there was still a hint of humor in his honey-colored irises. No matter how eccentric and current she tried to be, Jasper never looked down on her, and I admired him for that. I, for one, did.

"I'm sure they already do." I could hardly hide the judgmental look my expression accompanied my words with, and Alice laughed shortly, without any humor.

"Gagging as in they will be jealous out of their minds, Bella. Learn the ways of the humans, would you?"

"I've been around plenty of humans and I've never heard one say that," I insisted, but I knew that I was going to ask Edward about it later today. There was no point in letting Alice know I believed her, by even an eighth.

"Can't you just look to see how they will react?" I asked, picking at a dainty pair of gloves on the desk before she slapped them out of my hands. I cradled my hand, feigning injury.

"Yes, but where would be the fun in that? I want to see each and every one of their faces when they realize that I truly am a Fashion Icon." Alice was, out of the entire family, the most delusion. Of course, anyone could be a fashion icon when their family was worth at least a billion dollars. When money wasn't an option, you could be any icon you wanted. But that reminded me…

"What did you see when you were hunting with Edward? He told me you were hiding something from him." Argument momentarily forgotten, Alice rolled her eyes and waved her hand dramatically as though to dismiss any claims. She dropped to the stool in the center of her large, walk-in closet as I curled up on the bed. I could see Jasper, out of my periphery, cock his head towards us. Clearly, he still did not know the vision either.

Jasper was the quietest out of all of us, but he was no less curious than the rest.

Alice's bright gold eyes met mine, weepy and shiny in their depth as though just the reminder of her taciturn vision brought back horrid memories. She closed her eyes for a moment, concentrating, before nodding slightly. She must have been checking where Edward was or, more likely, when he was returning to the house – he had left with Carlisle on some excursion to search out a first-edition record that the two of them had had some fond memories over.

"Do you promise not to say anything to Edward when he gets back?" she asked quietly and I nodded, though in the back of my mind I knew that if it was something he honestly needed to know, I would hint at him.

"And," she continued, whether or not she had picked up on my mediocre lie obviously not important to the vision, "before I tell you, you must agree to do as I ask."

I scoffed in derision at the same time as Jasper chuckled.

"We've talked about this, Alice," he warned, but his tone was no more chastising than his humored expression, and she ignored him nonetheless.

"Tell me," I demanded, not making any such promises or deals.

She pouted, but sighed. "It's Fashion Week in Paris after the holidays, and I need a new wardrobe."

My eyes trailed, disbelieving, to the completely filled closet behind her where she had, just moments ago, finished hanging up her new wardrobe. Her eyes followed mine briefly and then her brow puckered, glaring over at me. "For the spring season, Bella. We aren't all like you. Some of us actually care about the different seasons and the endless clothing possibilities."

I rolled my eyes but waved her on, knowing that was a losing argument. "What does this have to do with Edward?"

"Well, as soon as the vision of the two of us in Paris came through, I had an equally as potent vision of Edward joining us and, coincidentally, monopolizing all of your time with site-seeing."

That's what she had been hiding? Edward's appearance, because she didn't want him to tag along? I could feel the incredulity sinking through my bones by the second along with the knowledge that, had Edward known this was what she was hiding, he would have, undoubtedly, still been just as upset.

It seemed everyone in this family was overly dramatic.

"Alice," Jasper interrupted, moving to lean against the door frame that led into their enormous closet. His hands were shoved deep in his pockets, his head resting against the border. "I am assuming he insists on following along because of France's close proximity to Italy?"

Alice frowned, her shiny lips puckering like a small child. "It's not like we're going to Castellar," she complained, letting the French name roll off the tip of her tongue. "There's no waythey'd even know of our being in France."

They?

"And, besides, I'd be able to see if they did. Paris is nearly seven hundred miles from Volterra!"

Oh, they as in the Volturi. I shuddered just imaging being that close to them.

"And Bella has never even been to Paris," she wailed, throwing her hands in the air, her eyes wide and on Jasper, pleading.

"I've never been to Europe in general, Alice," I objected and she turned her starlit gaze on me.

"Exactly," she whined. "Don't you want to explore France, Spain, Switzerland?"

"Not if it's going to get me, or anyone else, killed," I huffed. "Besides, they have Fashion Week here, in New York."

She threw her arms out as though in a tantrum, her shoulders slumping. "It's not the same!" she cried.

"Take Rosalie!" I insisted, knowing full well I would never be allowed that close to Italy. The Volturi didn't know of my existence and I knew that there was no plan in the near future to change that.

"Rosalie hates Fashion Week! She thinks it's all over-glammed and senseless. The last time we went, she nearly killed two of the designers!"

I tutted, rolling my eyes as Jasper sighed.

"I'm not going, Alice. Sorry," I finalized. Besides, I didn't even think I wanted to travel without Edward. Could we even be apart for that long?!

I turned to leave with a shake of my head and smile as Alice floundered around on the floor, clearly upset, and I could hear Jasper trying to console her.

"All he was going to do was take her to the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, and to little gardens and cafés." I could practically hear the pout in her tone. But, honestly, that agenda didn't seem all that bad, especially with Edward.

"And then they miss the show and I'm sitting there by myself," she whined and, just as I was nearing the staircase, I heard Jasper say softly, "I'll go with you, darling," and Alice reply with a small, "You will?" and my eyes couldn't roll hard enough. God, she was impossible sometimes, but I was happy that she was happy.

The small grin was back on my face by the time I rounded the bottom of the staircase and found Esme sitting in the kitchen, a packet of printed picture frames spread out before her.

"Oh!" she exclaimed when she saw me, and waved me over. "Which frame should we go with this year, do you think?"

My eyes scanned the hundreds of options, landing on the pile of old photos to the right of the sink. I lifted the first one, trying my hardest not to laugh at the outrageous outfits from the eighties. Most were still very standardly dressed – Edward, Carlisle, Esme, Jasper – but Emmett, Rosalie, and Alice had taken it upon themselves to dress to the nines for each photograph, given the current style of the time. Alice and Rosalie were both donned with brightly colored leggings and hair scrunchies while Emmett wore a bright purple and blue tracksuit. They looked, to today's standards, ridiculous.

"Oh, come now," Esme chastised, watching as I bit my bottom lip to keep in a laugh. She reorganized the photographs into their respective years before I could completely ruin the arrangement. "You know we take a family portrait for every Christmas."

"Yeah," I answered, holding up the first picture they had ever taken. It was black and white and housed Carlisle, Esme, Edward, and Rosalie. Edward, as he had in the beginning years, looked irritated and appalled with Rosalie's presence, but ethereal and stunning, nonetheless. I stared at his face for a little too long and put it down before Esme could notice. She was too busy voting out frames to notice.

"Aren't these, like…incriminating? I mean, if anyone found these…"

"They'd think we were very good and very dedicated to taking old-time photographs," Esme insisted with a smile and I shook my head with a laugh.

I glanced over the photographs again, finding the first one I had been in. I was a mere infant, cradled in Rosalie's arms. That's when she and I got along, not that we didn't now, we were just very…different. I think she still saw me as a small child, and I was trying to prove that I was anything but. I was happy that Emmett and Rosalie were traveling to Africa for a little while. I didn't feel like hearing a never-ending lecture about my request to go to school with them next year.

Every picture following that year featured all eight of us housed in different locations – Edmonton, Ottawa, Nova Scotia, before moving towards New England: Maine, Vermont, New York. We moved around a lot in my first few years to stray from any wandering eyes, but it had been pretty standard ever since I stopped growing. But, just like the eight of us were a constant in each photograph, so was my proximity to Edward, save for the first year, though, if you looked closely, I was still reaching out towards him with my left hand.

The positioning moved from him holding me as a small child, to me on his shoulders, to me holding his hand, up until more recently where I was just standing either beside him or in front of him. There was, however, one photo from a couple of years back where his arms were wrapped around my shoulders, pulling me in to him, though it wasn't a stereotypical Cullen family portrait. Emmett had accidentally destroyed the tape for the other pictures we had taken that day, and a few candid shots were the only ones left.

Edward's chin rested on my shoulder, my smile showing nothing more than laughter as my hands gripped his arms, both of our heads turned to watch Rosalie, who was glaring over at Emmett as his fingers had pulled at the bottoms of her curls. Jasper and Alice were barely even visible in the picture as they had been in the process of moving positions, and Carlisle and Esme stood to the side, not even looking at the camera, instead watching the group of us with smiling faces.

It wasn't the best picture we had taken, but it was the most real and, ultimately, my favorite.

I smiled as I put it back in place, wiping a finger over the blur the surrounded Alice and Jasper. I wondered what the photographers thought when we lined up for photoshoots. I would have to ask Edward after we took ours this year.

"Pick one." I glanced over to where Esme had arranged five frames along the counter, each slightly similar to the rest. Shrugging, I pointed to the one closest to me – red and green. Esme grinned, and started taking away the rest when Alice's voice could be heard from the top of the staircase, "She's lying – she wants the blue and silver!"

It took everything within me to keep from rolling my eyes. Esme picked up the one Alice had been referring to – one I hadn't even seen – and I pursed my lips.

"Fine," I huffed. "She's right."

Alice's tinkling laugh could be heard for nearly a full minute.