Chapter One: Esme's New House Is Haunted

It was a privilege to live a whole life, Edward mused, gently folding another starch-stiff shirt, the cloth miraculously clean despite its many years being hidden away in this dusty attic.

To be born, to grow, to run freely, to be burdened, to fall in love, to die. It was a privilege to have and lose and find and long and all things that make the soul feel like a tangible thing rather than a concept, some far-off idea that has been written and studied for years but has no real definition. It's something that's easy to forget. Those integral parts of life that make it worth living, or even just existing, blend into the everyday. To have a body and be in the world and struggle to understand it; those are what constitute a life.

Some humans believe that their life is composed of the various parts that make up the whole, parts that feel so vastly different that it's almost like they were a completely different person. And who says they weren't? A parent was once a child, a worker once carefree, a body once a cell. All are composed as a whole, but unique on their own. The thoughts that once consumed your entire life suddenly mean nothing at all. A person, once your entire life, becomes nothing but a memory. A decision made 10 years apart is filled with the knowledge and wisdom collected in between that didn't exist before, so the outcome will always be different.

To a vampire, one moment changed everything. Unlike the common human experience, the change blends so seamlessly into every single moment, every day, every year, every decision that it goes unnoticed until one trigger that causes a moment of reflection. To a vampire, that change is a blip in its life, but the difference is night and day. To go from one day being so afraid of death it drives you every decision, to all at once becoming death itself…

It feels unexplainable, no matter how many words you learn.

That struggle of how many different lives a human leads, those multiple that make up the whole, suddenly takes on new meaning. You were not what you once were, and yet, you will always be the same. To live so many years, to know that eternity is waiting, to not have the innate fear of living that most people do. What is the point of working to get better at something if there is no pressure to get it done? What is the point of surviving if the days endlessly bleed into each other until it feels like one never-ending film, an onlooker to your own life that should fill you with all of those wonderful mishmash emotions that somehow make meaning that only end up feeling forced or faked? Life is a constant existence of opposition.

At least, that was the only way Edward was able to think about it,

It was easy to fill those endless days at the beginning. At first, it was learning to control his most basic instincts, feeling more animal than human by knowing nothing but hunger and how to satiate it. While difficult, it was easier with the help of a devoted Father, something he only remembers vaguely craving in his past life, but Carlisle was a kind and patient teacher. It took many years, but slowly he was able to trade his nightly forest walks for afternoon city strolls, basking in the pockets of silence between crowds. An introduction of Mother returned him to his early years, craving her endless attention and spending as much time with her as possible, practically glued to her hip. Both son and teacher, Edward remembers fondly the first time they were able to sit at the park, hiding under the shade of the tree to lounge like the normal families around them. Esme had never looked happier.

A "teenage crisis", as his Mother calls it, a dark period of his life, that changed the course of his existence into a neverending spiral of self-loathing. It was easy to ride the wave of dulled distance that his vampire life brought him, to hide behind those emotions to justify his own actions, despite their now glaringly obvious atrocities. Sometimes he wishes he had those feelings again, just for a little while, just to break up the new dull that replaced the old.

Anything, he sometimes thought, anything was better than apathy.

It was now in that aftermath that he lived his timeless life. Try as he might to fill his life with something other than dullness, it never lasted long.

He had to admit to loving the opportunities presented to him with these new hours. He was able to go back to school, relearn the things that slowly disappeared from his memory, and feel the joy of learning something new. He was able to rejoin Carlisle at the hospital again, just like old times, and actually do something to help people. He got to learn new skills and try new hobbies. He even got to lay in the sun for a whole day and not worry about dehydrating or starving or having to get up to use the bathroom to distract from the quiet serenity of nature.

He loved the new family that found him. Esme and Carlisle guided him with a gentle hand and endless love. Two new women in his life, opposite in every way, Alice and Rosalie were like the sisters he never had, always keeping him on his toes, and annoyed him to no end. His newest brother, Jasper, grounded him while Emmett, his not-so-newest brother, pulled the rug out from under his feet, and both laughed when he made a fool out of himself. He loved them more than life itself. They gave him those precious fleeting moments of happiness, of distraction that kept him out of his own mind. Jasper placed a book in his hand, one selected from Carlisle's suggestion, while Esme sat beside him, Alice humming quietly across the room as she worked, Emmett obnoxiously whittling next to her, while Rosalie indulged him in a boisterous argument about the newest passage he read. The family he didn't feel he deserved, so he held onto it with all his might.

He would do anything for his family. Anything.

Which, unfortunately, led him to help Esme with her latest project, the only one to really be doing any work at the moment.

She was a kind Mother, probably kinder than she ought to be, what with 5 inhuman young adults running around the house. She let them have minimal chores during the school year so they could focus on school despite everyone's insistence that they didn't need the extra time, in exchange for every couple summers being asked to help sort out the house she was working on. It was surprising that she was keeping the tradition going, what with the abrupt change they had to do earlier this year that brought them back to a place they had stayed in less than 100 years ago. Not completely out of the ordinary, but Emmett needed time to heal, and the house was the closest that was ready to live in.

"We need some normality," Esme mused as she planned the trip. "Well, as normal as a family like ours can. And this place was too beautiful to pass up!"

This year's project was the furthest from their settlement yet, all the way in this sleepy town on the East Coast. Despite their return to Forks for the school year on the year prior, and the trend they've had for staying on the West Coast, there was something about this house that called out to Esme, so here they all were for the next week. The downstairs needed the most work, with crumbling walls and ivy growing out of every nook and cranny. Originally, there was no indicator that there was an attic, not until Emmett got a little too rough and accidentally uncovered the furniture-covered door. Straight out of an old novel, the wardrobe would have been too heavy for any normal human to move without help. The door was completely hidden behind the massive wooden case, not a hint that it was there, with a dented doorknob that suggested whoever placed the wardrobe all those years ago couldn't care less about the state of the place.

Esme had stepped out to grab some more spackle from the store, Alice accompanying her (claiming it was so that Esme would know exactly what brand would yield the best results even though this wasn't the first home Esme restored and she already had a list of products she trusted). Rosalie had respectfully declined this trip, instead going to the vintage car show with Carlisle for their yearly father-daughter trip. That only left the three boys to make decisions while the usual leaders of the house were gone.

It was moments like these that Edward really got to muse about the hilarity of his family's hierarchy. The three looked at each other, each gesturing for the other to walk up first, to make the first decision in a place none of them felt comfortable in. People? Leave that to Edward. Planning? Leave that to Jasper. Attacking? All Emmett. But knowing whether to go up a dilapidated flight of stairs into a very old-smelling attic in a home that was being restored? Well, that was out of any of their depths.

"Are you getting any feelings?" Emmet whispered conspiratorily, his burnt orange eyes wide with the closest a vampire could have to fear. Jasper and Edward gave him a funny look. "What?! It's a justified question."

"I'm an empath, not an Anthropomorphist." Emmet furrowed his brows.

"A what-?"

"It's someone who attributes human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities," Edward replied.

"Okay, Mr.Dictionary." Edward rolled his eyes and Emmet turned back to the blonde. "We're vampires. You have powers. Can't you get a feeling if it's dangerous or not?"

"That's just instincts. You have those." Emmet sighed at his brother's response.

"Not what I meant and you know it. This is a secret door, behind an old wardrobe, in an abandoned house." He gestured wildly up the dark steps. "Use your freaky feelings tingle and tell me if it's haunted up there or not." Jasper and Edward shared a glance, exchanging a small smile. Edward was happy to see his brother was feeling a bit better, enough to have some of that ridiculous superstition return to his regular vocabulary. He was sure Jasper was going to include this little conversation in his text to Rosalie later, one of the many update texts she asked him to send as she spent time away from her husband when he was still recovering.

Jasper was the first to move, carefully positioning himself in front of the other two to walk up first. He bickered quietly with Emmet that there was no way for him to tell if a house was haunted on 'feelings alone', and that if he could he would have felt it long ago. A simple platitude, if nothing else. There was no doubt in any of their minds that there was no person upstairs, they would have heard or smelt them long ago, but even Edward could admit there was something off about this attic. Caution was always better than carelessness. Edward had to stop himself from rolling his eyes at Emmett's internal monologue about ghosts and ghouls that resided in old houses, stepping behind Jasper, readying himself should anything strange occur, just in case.

Once upstairs, it was easy enough to see the real price of hiding away from the outside world. The downstairs was filled with evidence of squatters over the years, rotting food, and left-over knick-knacks here and there that didn't match the time period of the peeling wallpaper, but up here, despite the heavy layer of dust, everything looked frozen in time. Mannequins with dresses still draped with pins, a rack of winter coats that were drooping on their rusted hangers, an opulent mirror with a hairline fracture in it, hidden behind a lace sheet. There were chests and boxes filled to the brim with jewelry, decor, and housewares. Furniture, both big and small, were stacked neatly on the far wall, plush chairs that had sunk into one another after being stacked for so long. There was only one window high up on the wall, no doubt the one Edward saw as he approached the house earlier that day, too far to do much more than cast colorful shapes on the floor from the stained glass. There was a familiarity in the items around the room, clothing pieces he vaguely remembered as a human, though only the oldest women in his social group still wore them.

"You lived through this era, little bro!" Emmett cried, immediately blowing past both people in front of him to beeline to the rack of clothes. Edward wasn't allowed a correction before Emmett's newly returned childlike control grabbed a corset by its hook, snapping the fragile bonning of the piece into brittle sections. His sheepish look made the other two roll their eyes, though Edward did notice the wince on Jasper's face from destroying precious history. "Uh…oops?"

"It's like a time capsule," Jasper commented, mimicking Emmett's movements, though with much more care, and gently pulling a dress from the rack. The lace and beading made it look far too heavy to do any dancing in, though Edward knew from the bodice that a young woman, probably around his age, would have worn it for a ball or social gathering to impress the gentlemen in the room. Jasper's thoughts mimicked the look of familiarity in his thoughts. "How long do you think this had been hidden away?"

"I think we're the first creatures up here in decades," Edward replied, following their lead to carefully open one of the many chests to reveal a stack of papers. "Take a look at this."

The papers, though nearly crumbling apart at the edges from age, were legible enough to read. Letters, most of them, all addressed to the same man, one Mr. Dorsey Carnall. The top of the pile all seem to be from the same woman, one Mrs. Theodora Whitney, who frequently wrote about the elder man's will, the last one being dated 1887. Both Edward and Jasper exchanged glances at the crass way the woman spoke about the man's diseased family, demanding his will all be given to her and not some other gentleman, no other identifier other than his name, 'Tommy'. The more they moved into the pile, the more the letters mixed with other lost names, most wondering about the man's health and lamenting the loss of his direct family.

"Letters that catalog this man's last years alive, and they're all about his sadness and his money. What a lonely life." Jasper patted Edward's shoulder comfortingly. Try as he might, he couldn't stop the barrage of their thoughts from entering his mind, both equally concerned that his mood dropped so quickly.

"You know better than anyone that this box wasn't everything." He lived a whole life outside of these letters.

"Yeah!" Emmett, as always, was just a touch too loud for the enclosed space, echoing words around them. Come on, Eddy, don't depress yourself. "Maybe whoever cleaned after he died just chucked everything into a box. I bet if you look around some more, you'll find this guy lived a sweet life up until his death. No need to get all depressed for a guy you haven't met." Edward ignored the heavy elbow Jasper dug into his brother's side at the comment, choosing to glare despite the relief he felt at Emmett's continuous ability to say whatever he was thinking out loud. Makes it much easier on Edward, who spends most of his time trying to differentiate the difference between thoughts and spoken words.

"Emmett." You're an idiot. Edward didn't need his mindreading to know the unspoken language of Jasper's tone. "Didn't Esme want you to take apart those cabinets downstairs? What are you still doing here?"

"Oh sh-" Emmett turned, nearly crashing into the door in his haste to get back downstairs. Although Esme was always a saint of patience, Emmett had already filled his quota of mess-ups for the day. If Esme returned before he managed to clear the kitchen, he knew there would be her patient little sigh of disapproval, and that hurt more to him than getting his arm ripped off. It was silent only for a moment before the two heard a crash downstairs.

"I'll go check on him," Jasper sighed, returning the dress carefully back onto the rack. "Are you coming?"

"If it's alright with you, I might stay up here. These things'll have to get organized eventually." Edward barely spared him a glance. "Don't think that. I'll be fine. You'll know before I do if things get too intense for me." Jasper gave him a once over, asking one more time in his mind if he would truly be okay alone, before heading downstairs.

It took some effort, but Edward dislodged himself from the letters, conceding that if he continued to read them it would only hinder his mood even more. He instead moved to the other side of the room, boxes seemingly filled with more household items that lost their purpose over the years. He sorted things quietly for several hours, wrapping the precious pieces that could be donated, and setting anything else aside to be thrown away later. Esme checked in on him as soon as she returned, marveling at the pile of things that surrounded him, before leaving him to his own devices (not without a little prodding). Alice also popped by to say hello, but, as a girl who only valued old things as long as Jasper enjoyed them, she didn't care much for the goblets Edward was sorting through and returned downstairs to help Esme finish peeling up the old wooden floor to reveal the original tile below it.

He was both relieved and lonely. There was something peaceful in the work he was doing, taking several extra seconds to gently clean an old vase or reminisce fondly on the ceramic ashtray, but he was also starting to feel extremely isolated from the others the longer he was up there. Edward could hear the pairs as they worked, two doing genuine work while the other two changed from genuine demolition work to a game of karate chopping wall debris.

It took a long time to get adjusted to the playful side that Emmett brought out in Jasper, but Edward always indulged them when it happened. He noticed the way he became comfier with the Cullens, noticed the way he allowed his gift to guide him more than before. No surprise he liked being around Alice the most, her infectious happy attitude must be a nice change for him, but more often than not Jasper let his leading emotion seek out the others in the house that matched him. Almost a reassurance of his own feelings, Edward mused, a confirmation that what he was feeling was correct. Emmett was open and inviting, even when he didn't want to be, so it was easy for Jasper to get overtaken by his emotions, which, more often than not, was some form of goofiness. The life that Jasper led, both human and vampire, made plenty of patience for some tomfoolery, a chance to act like the stupid 19-year-old he should have been. And, with the guilt that has been eating Emmett up recently, it was nice to have a break, to feel a little normal, as normal as he could, at least for a little while.

He let the thoughts of the two on the floor below him play like a song in his head, broken up only by the childlike giggle they would let out when a piece of debris exploded into fine dust. He knew Esme wouldn't be too upset if he joined them, in fact, she would probably be overjoyed just like she always was when her kids got along. There was so little she asked for, after all.

But he was far too comfortable to move now, and there was something…therapeutic about sorting the old pieces of jewelry, carefully tucking them into spare pieces of fabric or their appropriate boxes. This one was too rusted, barely hanging together, so he dumped it into the trash, but the one next to it only needed a good wash before it was as good as new. This one had a beautiful gem, so he ripped it out of the crumbling metal to deposit it into a small box he found, before carefully wrapping the intricate necklace that was hidden underneath. The methodic movements had him in a nice rhythm, similar to the trance he entered when he organized his music back at the house or the books in his Father's library. Pick up, examine, wrap, toss, pack, repeat.

He moved slowly, or as slowly as a vampire did when no one was looking, tracing his hand over each piece with sharp eyes, using the little he knew about history and its many ages to see if anything was worth salvaging. He knew Jasper would throttle him if there was any historical value in any of the pieces that he tossed, so he paid extra attention to those that looked well-loved or unworn. Every new item in his hand gave him a little more space for mindless thinking, a perk of being a vampire if he was being honest, trying hard to ignore the stray thought here and there of the sadness of the old owner's last few years.

He stood, reaching for another jewelry box that was shoved just as carelessly as the other things, this one half hanging off an armoire. This box was similar to the others, covered in dust that swept away to reveal the complicated gold flower design. The dark blue outside still held a brilliant shine, the gold siding still looking good despite the time it's been hiding. The inside was velvet lined, sparse save for a few earrings and a necklace that miraculously looked in good condition despite the relatively cheap material it was made out of. Silver, he knew, would have tarnished left in this musty attic for as long as the other items up there, but this was perfectly new, the pendant in an intricate frame surrounding the painting of a Victorian couple that almost looked freshly done. Edward's finger hesitated over it, tracing the air around it. For some reason, this piece in particular caused him pause, some strange feeling surrounding it, almost like it was thrumming with life. The design was similar to something he recalled seeing only a moment ago…

His eyes raised sharply, suddenly, scanning across the room towards the painting propped up on the far wall. Though draped with a piece of velvet, a curtain of some kind, it was tossed haphazardly enough that he could make out the bottom half of a portrait. A woman, though he couldn't tell the age from there, poised and delicate in her stiff posture. Her dress was beautiful, no doubt even more so in real life, deep blue and covered in layers of ruffles and lace. The large sleeves hung low on her shoulders, exposing her collar bones and the beautiful, ornate necklace hung around her neck. Near identical to the one that he had in his hand, but this painted woman wore it attached to a velvet collar, glimmering gold instead of the dull silver in his hand.

A replica? He thought to himself. But why make a replica out of different materials?

His eyes slowly drifted back over to the stack of letters across the room. Though he didn't have a single letter from the man himself, no doubt lost to time and recycled a hundred times into modern things, there were very clear indicators of the life he led, both in the words of others and the items around him. A loving wife, though not a hint of her things despite the portrait and a replica necklace, a daughter he adored more than life itself, an accident or accidents that took them both away from him. The countless different acquaintances and friends that wrote to him in his time of grief and well after. Edward tried to wrack his mind for notable events of the time, things that maybe could be the reason for those who obviously loved the man to be so far away in his time of need, and felt the hole in his being ache in sympathy.

All alone for the last years of his life without anyone to mourn with him, to take care of him. No one to take care of his things after he passed, beyond shoving all of his possessions into the attic, never to be seen again.

He couldn't help his eyes from focusing, eyeing the writing on pile of papers he barely made halfway through, his keen vision drifted over the words he could see.

"Condolences…our hearts…happier place…" he murmured to himself, feeling both annoyed and emotional. He knew logically that the people in the letter were just trying to offer some comfort, a scrap of empathy for a man who presumably lost everything dear to him, but just as he felt, the words read as nothing short of empty. He knew from experience that human families were greedy (so far he had been very lucky in his second existence that his family wasn't), he's faux inherited to himself more than once with complications from long-distance relatives trying to get a scrap of the fortune he possessed, so the flutter of kinship deep within him wasn't surprising to feel. He barely registered the brush of cool metal under his hand as he thought through the various ways he could organize the delicate letters to unravel the man's life. A week they had been there, a week pulling apart the floorboards of a place this man may have been born and died in with no regard at all for who he was. And now, presented with the opportunity to learn, how could he pass that up? It was the closest thing to getting to know the man outside of a supernatural force, and as far as he was aware, there was no such thing as-

"--despite the many chances you've had, you continue to drift away! How is your hand close and yet so far from its surface? Lower your finger a touch and…"

There was so little that could startle a creature like him.

Children of the Moon? Sure. Shapeshifters? Probably, but he'd never openly admit it. He hadn't had any experiences with witches or spellcasters, though Carlisle insists they're out there somewhere. Honestly, it was hard for even another vampire to surprise them, let alone anything remotely close to human. But here he was, startled in a way he had never experienced before, the closest he could fathom a human heart attack would feel like.

With a yelp, he stumbled back from the voice. If he were any less a creature, he would have been on the floor in shock, tripping over the mess under him in a humiliating manner.

"Oh!" His head whipped up at the delicate voice.

And, there, before him, was a ghost.