THE MOON
"This is the key of sleep and dreams. The Moon's three phases of intuition concern body, mind, and spirit. The Moon Mother watches over the birth of Spirit into material manifestation. […] The Fool is still on his journey—learning, falling back, and then again advancing."
—Eden Gray, The Complete Guide to the Tarot
"Divinatory Meaning: Intuition, imagination, deception. Unfoldment of latent psychic powers. Unforeseen perils, secret foes. Bad luck for one you love.
Reversed: Imagination will be harnessed by practical considerations. Storms will be weathered, peace gained at a cost. No risk should be taken."
—Joan Bunning, Learning the Tarot
—
MARCH 1958
CALGARY, ALBERTA
The tangle of Alice Cullen's head was not easily traversed. The mind of a vampire was arranged with the same surprising configuration as the mind of a human. Where the differences lay was that the wells were deeper, the neurons fired faster, and the soft matter behind the eyes was pushed and bent to lengths that humans could not comprehend. (Nor could they survive.) Their brains, the ones that were designed to translate input, render thoughts, ideas and sensations, that stored things in whichever ways they deemed necessary, were designed for peak efficiency and without flaw.
Vampires were the perfect predator. Vampire senses were more reliable than any other creature's on the planet. Vampires possessed perfect recall.
Alice Cullen's mind was built to store memory, as ironic as that seemed now.
Her 'childhood' consisted of early, nomadic years where she taught herself how to hunt, how to avoid detection, how to dress herself without tearing clothes into shreds. Her 'adolescence' had consisted of lessons both tedious and significant. Alice learned how to obtain and spend money, how to blend into a crowd and hold her breath, how to differentiate between her realities.
Until she was fifteen, Alice hadn't realized how rare her gift was. The channels of her mind could switch between the past, present, and future with such swiftness that they felt simultaneous. A pair of nomads she'd met outside of Bridgewater once observed the way she did not know how to differentiate between tenses when speaking. The woman, Sally, had remarked upon it as "cute" but the man, Chip, had watched Alice carefully for the rest of their short encounter.
Alice did not know if he'd ever figured it out. The pair were killed by an army on the outskirts of New Orleans six months later. Alice could have warned them before they'd parted ways, but she'd wanted to see that army in action. Jasper and Maria hadn't fought Marc and his forces since Alice had been alive, but they talked about the Louisiana coven often and Alice always learned best by watching.
She didn't realize that what she was doing—letting them wander toward their avoidable death—was wrong until a few years later. Most vampires retained some measure of a moral compass leftover from their human years. Alice had to learn, on her own, that the louder a human screamed, the more pain they were in. And that pain was one of the worst things to experience.
That had been a shame for her to learn. She'd liked the noise. She hadn't liked the visions that proved that noise attracted attention, attention was bad, and attention could get her destroyed. But death would stem from pain, and pain was bad, and Alice's visions told her that these were things she could inflict, but that she could resolutely not suffer.
Alice did not possess her visions. She'd grown up being secondary to them; an attachment to the ability. If you'd asked her, she was possessed by them. They were the higher power. They were the controller of her fate. They were her compass, both moral and physical.
After a couple of decades Alice got a better handle on her mind. On how to tell past from present and future from fate. Visions did not always come true. Visions, in fact, rarely came true at the beginning. She'd seen so many possibilities, made more decisions than actions, and moved through life so slowly at first, that it brought her a sense of wonder when she did proceed through the world and when a vision did become reality.
Jasper became a recurring vision right around the time that she decided she wanted to see more of this man's sad eyes and violent tendencies. He'd entranced and fascinated her and the vision of him saying her name made feelings stir within her. The memory of that vision was her only comfort for a long, confusing time, and she clung to it with all ten fingers, and with every channel in her head.
Memories of visions were always soupy in Alice's mind. Strands that wove one footstep could splinter and flicker into thousands of ways that the second foot could land. No two tendrils ever came to fruition at once. Each shatter and fragment led to a new trail, a different path, and once that path was taken there was no reversing.
No world existed in which two different versions of the same vision could come to fruition.
The ones that eventually materialized solidified themselves into scenes with a firmer press. The entirety of the scene pulled itself so tightly upon recollection that the edges of them were always wrinkled and folded, reminding her of how, at one point, it had been more incorporeal than tangible. More possibility than reality. A future that had become fate.
But sometimes, Alice liked to look past things she didn't want to see. Inside her head and with her eyes.
There were few visions in Alice's memory that she pretended not to possess, and one of them was:
Jasper had not paused, had not hesitated, and had not looked twice at anyone besides his first target.
A step, turn sideways, forty-two degrees. Pivot left foot backward, left shoulder dipping. Momentum gained by hip placement, shoulders turning. Left arm reaching and pushing all at the same time. Right hand clenched tight.
It had been startlingly easy for Jasper to kill the first man in front of him. No words had been exchanged between the two. No warning had been given prior to this act of violence that indicated that one less vampire was about to be standing amongst them.
(But this was what Alice had seen.)
The ground around them had been snowy, calm. Beautiful and serene.
The woman that had unnerved but somehow still endeared herself to the Cullens' stood across the yard, watching Jasper's violent approach.
("I should've told them," he would speak, weeks later, suffering from the aftermath of what had happened. Alice had only sat in silence beside him. Her gold eyes stared down at her hands in her lap, unable to meet his red ones. "I should have been honest about who she is. Who I was—am, who I am—long before she found me.")
Jasper and Maria stared one another down, a second newborn jumped in between them, and was pulled apart like so:
A feint to the left. Purposeful placement of a leg that brought itself upward. The sound of a ribcage splintering and a knee jerked back. The grip of a hand and a heave downward. The sound of air exiting a body in a crushing deflation. A neck could pop, if bent at the correct angle. (More of what Alice had seen. Of what she'd expected.)
A noise of anguish from a different woman, further away. The sound of fear forcing Jasper's head to turn, inspiring his split-second confusion, and then the shuttering of eyes. Recognition did not dawn. The hollow golden gaze stared through the bystanders and disregarded them with practiced ease.
This was the way Alice chose to look at this memory. Detached. Analytical. Impersonal. Because this was the way she had been shown it, two minutes before it had come to fruition, shifting from vision to reality as it unfolded. Alice had known that the murder of these two—so far—harmless vampires, would occur. She'd counted on it, really. She did not like Maria. She did not trust Maria. She was absolutely fucking petrified of Maria, and she knew that Jasper would be there soon. That Jasper would kill the pair of newborns and then Alice would feel safer because of it. Alice knew that Jasper would protect her.
Alice had not looked far enough to see what happened after:
The air thick with fear did not spare them. Esme's original gasp—calling out in horror as men were murdered feet from her newly squared-off garden, covered in a fresh layer of early-spring snow—had sounded like a meek hum in comparison to the way she cowered, a cry ripping itself from her throat as she crashed backward into Carlisle's arms, a shaking hand pressed over her mouth. The atmosphere had shifted in an instant, and they'd reacted in ways Alice had not anticipated.
Alice, who stood silent at the center of her family, watched in horror as Rosalie flinched in a way that Alice had only seen happen in old, terrible visions. Emmett hissed and stumbled forward, as if leaning into a strong gust of wind, a deep warning growl bursting forth without preamble. Edward was still frozen on the periphery, as if he couldn't understand what was happening. He and Jasper had only been home for seconds and now, terror had stunned him into inaction.
Alice's panic made her head spin, her body feel brittle, and she could not fathom why she'd been afraid, too.
Jasper had approached Maria and Maria had stood and waited for him. Jasper reached out toward her, furious, prompting Carlisle to shout his name, as if diverted attention would save Maria from the same fate. Alice never saw what Carlisle would say next. (Not in her mind or in their reality.) All they did was watch as Maria backhanded Jasper swiftly across the chin and he stumbled, a knee finding the ground just as their collective fear audibly morphed to fury and then switched back to fear.
Feelings that were not their own.
Alice had not recalled which of her family members had retreated into the house to pull themselves out of the corrosive orbit of Jasper's ability, but she knew that she remained, and somehow she'd ended up on the ground. And when Jasper turned toward her, for the first and only time in her life, she'd been scared of him.
(She still didn't know whether or not, in that moment, it had been her own emotion.)
This memory found itself detached from the original, shorter vision of this encounter. The vision of Jasper attacking and killing and protecting. Because that vision—those first few seconds of violence and death—was what had been expected. That first vision had been what she filed away in her vast memory bank. That first vision was all that Alice had wanted to happen. A display of power from the man that she loved proving to the woman he had once loved that he was no longer beholden to her lies. That was what Alice had wanted. That was what Alice thought this scene would prove.
Alice had so rarely been wrong before that.
Edward and Carlisle had braved the storm of fiery hate and stinging fear in order to plant themselves between Jasper and Maria. Maria had not yelled, had not claimed self-defense, and had not attacked further. Maria had turned toward Alice, while Jasper picked himself up off of the ground, Edward hovering uneasily above him and Carlisle focused on mediating, and smiled sweetly.
Alice had not wanted Carlisle to invite Maria back inside, nor had she wanted him to apologize to her, but he had. Alice had not wanted Esme and Rosalie to avoid Jasper after his violent display and tsunami of explosive terror, nor had she wanted to witness the stress that their reaction caused Jasper, but they had. Alice had not wanted to stand on the edge of the family room and watch, in horror, as Jasper flinched every time Maria looked at him, nor had she wanted to see Maria reach out and stroke his arm, whispering words she knew Alice could hear…
But she had. Because this had become a problem she couldn't solve.
Alice had not wanted to leave Calgary, but seventeen hours later, Jasper had regained his composure and reclaimed his red eyes.
Maria had wandered into town to hunt after a tense farewell—despite Carlisle's desperate plea for her to feed elsewhere—and the Cullens had followed. They had not been able to prevent her from feeding in their neighborhood, but like imbeciles, they'd tried. Esme, Emmett, and Jasper slipped up within twelve seconds, and more humans than just the two homeless women freezing to death in the alleyway beside the girls' boarding school died that night.
Later, when Rosalie screamed at Alice, demanding to know why the hell she hadn't seen this coming, and why she hadn't done anything to stop it, Alice did not know what to say. The truth was that Alice had been counting on Jasper's violence to make her feel better. Alice had known, less than two minutes before Jasper and Edward arrived home, that the death of Maria's two newborns would make her feel protected. The truth was that the promise of death inflicted by Jasper's hands made her feel loved. The truth was that Alice had made a mistake when she did not insist everyone remain inside, and when Jasper's mind veered off course further than Alice had seen coming, she had not possessed the ability to realign it for him.
(Alice did not mention to Rosalie that she had fallen in love with Jasper when he was more monster than man. That she'd also never experienced his gift in that awful, horrible way before. And that, for a moment, she'd selfishly chosen to trade her discomfort for all of theirs.)
The truth was Alice had been afraid. And Alice did not know that these actions—two swift murders she'd craved—would be followed by a complete shattering of the man she loved. Because Alice had not looked that far.
So, this was the way she chose to see things: analytical, detached, and without feeling. When the Cullens met Maria of Monterrey, it went well until it didn't. The disaster had been unavoidable and the death had been a natural consequence of what they were. Alice's visions hadn't prevented the collapse of their home or the temporary crippling of her and Jasper's relationship with their family.
The memory of the vision she used to soothe herself in Maria's presence had led directly into the memory of the grievous miscalculation she'd made that caused her family to spiral. The scene had started off taut around the edges, hazy yet firm with its completion, and then shifted to a true, vivid recollection of the day Alice made a terrible mistake, all connected when future met fate.
Later on, to appease Carlisle and to earn back everyone's trust, she admitted to this:
Alice's first mistake had been trusting her visions blindly. Her second mistake had been assuming everyone's mind operated the way hers did. And her last mistake had been underestimating the way Maria of Monterrey still held power over Jasper.
A/N: I am a lying liar who lies. Never believe me when I say 'update tomorrow'. Like, just assume I'm fucking with you.
