Disclaimer: I do not own anything from the collective works of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga

Chapter 16: Unusually Large Hippocampi

Her father had been waiting in the kitchen for her, sitting at the table. He hadn't yelled at her for taking off or for seeing Pyotr. He didn't take away her phone or ground her for a month. He watched her with sad grey eyes. Then he hugged her, told her that everything would turn out alright, that he was going to help her through his.

And somehow, that was so much worse.

Her father was exhausted, she could see that. He was working nine hours a day at a law firm an hour and a half away. He was raising two teenagers, all by himself. He was still mourning the loss of his wife and son, not even a year ago. Yet he still told her that he loved her, that they would get through this too.

He sent her off to bed, telling her that she had a doctor's appointment in the morning. Louisa laid in her bed, staring up at the ceiling, pretending that she couldn't hear her dad talking to her dead mother. She knew that she was hurting him, letting him think that she was so mentally ill. But what else could she do? Tell him that vampires exist?

"…I had to leave Dorothy at home by herself when I took Louisa to the hospital…"

She rolled over and shoved her head under her pillow, trying to force herself to fall asleep.

She must have drifted off at some point, because her dad was shaking her awake, telling her to get up. She got dressed, eat breakfast, rode to the hospital, all the while, not once looking him in the eye. If he noticed her weird behaviour, he didn't say anything about it. Probably wrote it off as a symptom of her alleged illness or penitence for scaring him the night before. She tried to push away the guilt, but no matter how hard she tried, she still felt like a phoney. She was incredibly relieved when Dr Cullen called back into his office and tried very hard to look like she wasn't sprinting away.

Louisa followed Dr Cullen into his office, only to stop abruptly when she realised that the room was not empty. Jasper was standing at ease by the window, evidently having just been staring out of it. He didn't smile to great her, but she felt his emotions bump up against her, letting her feel that he was happy to see her. The other occupant of the room was Edward —the pianist with the odd taste in Halloween costumes— who was spinning in Dr Cullen's desk chair though he sprang to his feet when his father closed the office door behind him. The doctor offered her a seat on the leather couch by his desk.

She considered standing back up when she realised none of the men felt inclined to sit either. She wasn't entirely sure why she felt so uncomfortable sitting, but she was pretty sure it had something to do with either being surrounded by tall men who towered over her. Or it could be that she was would be sitting defenceless, easy prey, should the vampires in the room go berserk and decide to drink her dry. Probably because of the vampires.

Jasper seemed to sense her discomfort because a moment later it was gone, replaced with tranquillity. She blinked and he was sitting at her feet, back pressed against her shins. She was relieved that his chosen sitting place had been between the two other men, but she was suddenly very conscious of her hands and wasn't sure what she was supposed to do with them. Particularly when she noticed just how close they were to Jasper's wavy hair.

"Standing is just as comfortable for us as sitting," Edward said as if this clarified something. Well, it did, but she hadn't asked a question.

"I'm telepathic," Edward replied drily. "Did you not tell her, Jasper?"

"There were many things I had to tell her last night, none of which included you," Jasper snarked. His voice vibrated through his back and Louisa jumped at the sensation. "Louisa, just so you know, Edward can read your mind," he said. He turned his head to give her a confused look but didn't comment on her fidgeting.

"It's quite the experience," Edward said with a grin. "Though I must say, you have one of the most organised minds I have ever had the pleasure of reading. Your library is exquisite."

"Thank you?" Louisa responded, unsure if she should be flattered or not.

"You should be," Edward said. "Though I do wonder why Jasper gets his own book and the rest of the family is lumped together in a cardboard box labelled 'Cullen.' That hardly seems fair."

"She likes me more," Jasper supplied.

"That's enough boys," Dr Cullen said, finally stepping in. "We can discuss the matter of Louisa's box another time." He strode over to his desk and swivelled the computer monitor around so that she could see an MRI image of a brain. "You're patient history says that you fell off a cliff when you were seven."

"Yes," she replied slowly, glancing at her boyfriend and his younger brother. Wasn't this a violation of HIPPA?

"I have two M.D.s," Edward replied helpfully. "Jasper holds a PsyD and specialises in childhood development and axis two disorders."

"Which you do not have and neither of his statements are relevant," Jasper said evenly, turning to look up at her, his hair tickling her fingers. "Carlisle is trying to piece together a timeline, not discuss your medical history."

"I apologise, Louisa, I assumed you knew this already," Dr Cullen said, nodding his head before continuing on, undeterred. "You file say that you experienced a personality change after the accident."

Louisa shrugged. She honestly couldn't remember.

Dr Cullen smiled at her reaction and began to scroll through the MRI scans of her seven-year-old brain. "You showed remarkably little damage for a seventy-foot fall. A broken wrist and a concussion." He pointed out the areas of her brain with a pen as he continued to scroll through the pictures. "Your doctors found no significant damage that could not be attributed to the concussion, though they did note larger than average hippocampi."

"The hippocampus is the part of the brain that is involved in forming, storing, and processing memory," Jasper translated, sensing her confusion.

Dr Cullen didn't seem annoyed by the constant interruptions, and merely apologised, before switching over to a new set of pictures, these of a significantly larger brain. "This MRI was taken back in June," he said. "You were hit in the back of the head with a blunt object."

"It was a baseball bat," Louisa supplied quickly, hoping to move away from the topic. "I didn't have a concussion then."

"That is correct. The doctor noted larger than average hippocampi, but dismissed it because of your patient history." Again, he switched to a new set of images. "This was the MRI taken we took when we were trying to rule out brain tumours. It's clean and shows a perfectly healthy brain of a sixteen-year-old female."

She was beginning to sense a pattern. "How are my hippocampi?"

"Larger than we would expect," Dr Cullen replied with a smile. Once more, he switched to another set of MRI scans, making Louisa realise that she had too many problems with her head in her short life. Edward snickered but didn't comment. "These, however, are from the seventeenth of November."

The gentle breeze against her legs was the only thing that alerted Louisa that Jasper had moved. By the time her mind was able to process what had happened, Jasper was standing in front of the computer monitor, staring at it intently. She peeked around his lanky frame though all she saw was a similar picture of her brain. She took in the faces of the men in the room and judging by the serious their serious expressions, these new pictures were significant.

"Is it bad?" She asked, standing up to join the others.

"They have grown," Dr Cullen replied when nobody else decided to explain. "It's very slight; the radiologist wouldn't have been able to see it. I only noticed myself yesterday. I thought it was the wrong image at first. The changes are slight, but it is enough to look like a completely different brain."

"Don't brains continue to grow until, like, twenty-five though?" Louisa asked.

It was Jasper who answered her. "Yes, but not this rapidly, and very rarely a specific region."

"Do you think it's increasing the intracranial pressure?" Edward asked.

"It would explain the nosebleeds and the nystagmus," was Dr Cullen's reply.

Louisa would be lying if she said she knew what was going on. She knew very little about brains, but she figured that increased pressure around it wasn't a good thing. She tried to not panic, but when the phrase 'lumbar puncture' was thrown into the mix, her heart started to accelerate rapidly. Jasper finally tore his gaze away from the computer screen, either in response to her pulse or the high-level anxiety coming from her. He reached out and pulled Louisa to himself, her nose pressing into his chest. Edward and Dr Cullen broke off abruptly and began to apologise.

"It's cool," Louisa said, her voice muffled by Jasper's sweater. She tried to step away to face them, but found that it was impossible: his hold wasn't painful but it was tight enough that she couldn't move very much. He might as well have been carved out of stone. Louisa wondered if it was a vampire thing.

"If it's not a brain tumour, what would cause the growth?" Jasper asked, his voice rumbling in his chest, buzzing along her skin. Louisa tapped on his arm, hoping to at least remind him that she was still there. When he looked down at her, she tried to pull away again. He looked confused but gave her a little more room, allowing her to turn to face his father and brother.

It was Edward who responded. "On the seventeenth, you had a nightmare, correct? That's what woke you up."

Louisa's eyebrows raised in surprise. "How did you know that?"

"You were thinking about it during lunch yesterday," he replied. "When we were talking about Anna Sweet."

Louisa glanced up at Jasper, who was watching her, his expression flat. "You get used to it."

"Anyway," Edward continued. "I've been paying attention to your thoughts since early September." He walked over to a worn leather satchel—repaired twice, holds sentimental value — that was hanging on a coat rack next to the door and withdrew a spiral notebook from it. "I try to gauge how wary people are of us, or if anyone suspects what we are. You are weirdly observant, so I've kept a close tab on you. Until yesterday afternoon, I thought that you had no clue."

Goosebumps erupted on her skin and it had nothing to do with how cold Jasper's body was. Did that mean Edward seen the vision she had had of Jasper? If he could see what it was, did that mean it was real, and not just all in her head?

"A paranoid schizophrenic has hallucinations that can cause them considerable distress. The fact that nobody else can see what they see doesn't make it any less real to them," Edward replied, crossing back over to them. He hopped up on Dr Cullen's desk, narrowly avoiding knocking over a picture frame as he crisscrossed his legs.

Louisa wasn't sure if this made her feel better or not.

"For the last two months, I've been tracking your thoughts. I started writing them down, trying to find a pattern. I didn't see much at first, but then Jasper described how you read people. He said that you are usually correct, but the logic is off. I started focusing on those instead. Anything that could be considered a deduction is highlighted in green."

Favourite colour? Green like his eyes? No, he doesn't have green eyes.

"Every single one?" Louisa asked, unsure if she should be impressed or immensely creeped out by his dedication to his special version of stalking. "I make a lot of them."

"This is only the current notebook. There are two more at home," Edward replied, reaching forward to hand it to her, his tone indicating that he was very much aware of how many deductions she made it a day.

Yeah, definitely creepy she decided as she flipped the notebook open to a random page and focused on the words written in a beautiful script. Fountain pen… nostalgic for his past. The soft pressure indicated sensitivity and empathy. Leftward slant, reserved, introspective. A moderately long loop of the 'y'… the writer has a bit of a wanderlust. She tried to focus on the words themselves, but the book was snatched away from her before she had the chance. She blinked and looked up, only to see Edward with a fountain pen in hand, scribbling in the back of it. He handed it back to her with a look of annoyance.

"Graphology is hardly an exact science," he snapped.

She flipped to the last page of the notebook and read what he had just written. It was a detailed description of what she had just been thinking and with an addendum of why her reasoning was incorrect. All he had written was there was, 'graphoanalysis is a wishy-washy pseudoscience that does not hold up in court'. That was true. Louisa had heard her father's rants on the subject. Edward probably had too, with his own father being a lawyer. The notebook was once more wrenched out of her hands only to be tossed at her moments later.

"'Graphoanalysis was still accepted in 1917 and had only fallen out of favour in the latter half of the twentieth century. No reasoning how she knew the occupation of my father.'" Louisa read aloud. She looked up at Edward and blinked owlishly. "You need a better hobby."

Dr Cullen was able to disguise his chuckle as a cough, whilst Jasper made no attempt to hide his amusement.

She flipped to a random page and read the first entry:

9 October, 10:43 am: mentally refers to Emmett as Rosalie's husband. Does not provide a reason.

"That's an easy one," Louisa supplied. "She wears a ring on a chain around her neck. I noticed it when I first met her. She doesn't wear it at school because she doesn't want to draw attention to it, but she doesn't want to leave it at home."

"That's what I mean about the incorrect logic," Jasper said. "It could easily belong to a deceased family member."

"Considering that the style of the ring is about eighty years out of date, it would be a more logical conclusion," Edward added.

"I was still right though," Louisa asked, glancing between an interested Dr Cullen and an increasingly frustrated Edward. "Why does it matter?"

"My theory," Dr Cullen finally said. "Is that you have some sort of psychic power."

"You've known about vampires for a while now, whether you were conscious of it or not. You make jokes about us being vampires, or me being a mind reader quite frequently," Edward added. "Your 'deductions,' aren't deductions. They're you unknowingly using your power."

Louisa was suddenly very glad that Jasper had not released her from his hold earlier, because she wasn't sure if her legs would have been able to support her. "Psychic powers?" She repeated, her voice breathy. She understood the words of course, but at the same time, they felt like they were light years away. Her eyes squeezed shut, as if would somehow make the situation disappear. First, she finds out that vampires exist and now they were trying to explain that she was psychic? A laugh bubbled out of her lips, a manic, nervous sound that startled her.

She felt Jasper shift, and when she opened her eyes, she was sitting on the black leather couch again and he was kneeling in front of her. He must have done his not-really-teleportation-just-really-fast thing. That made her laugh harder. Why was she laughing? God, she sounded like a lunatic.

Jasper's lips were moving. Was he talking? He just kept saying, "Breathe, Louisa. Breathe."

Breathing sounded like an excellent idea, now that she thought about it. She inhaled, exhaled, in, out. Breathing. Breathing was good. Jasper reached up and wiped her face. When had she started crying? Breathe, in, out, in, out. Slowly. Relax, calm down. She could feel peace start to creep through her veins, Jasper's influence, no doubt. Relax, breathe, calm down, focus. Louisa closed her eyes again and imagined a desk drawer. Focus, calm down, breathe, relax. She imagined shoving her panic into it, stuffing, cramming. She needed a bigger drawer. Relax breathe calm down focus. Filing cabinet then. Stuff, stuff, jam, slam. Lock the drawer. Focus calm down breath relax.

She opened her eyes again. Jasper was still in front of her, one hand wrapped around her knee, while the other cradled her face. Skin to skin contact amplified his power. She shouldn't know that. Yet she did.

"What's happening to me?" She whispered.

Jasper didn't respond. He sent a wave of calm to her. He didn't know what to say. Words failed him, as they usually did. Never enough meaning. But emotions, those were loaded. Feelings were much easier to convey, understand.

"You think I'm psychic?" She asked, her voice distant, dissociated. They were probably wrong. They had to be wrong. Psychics didn't exist. Pseudoscience, like graphoanalysis. This was all just a really fucking bizarre dream and she would wake up soon, she had to, didn't she? Because vampires didn't exist and neither did mind readers. She kept waiting for one of them to laugh, shout 'got you!', but it never came.

In. Out. In. Out. Focus. Breath. Relax.

Louisa stayed focused on Jasper's eyes, afraid that if she looked away she would fall apart. Funny, less than twenty-four hours ago, she was convinced the Cullens was going to murder her (Well, the jury was still out about the rest of the family, but she was fairly certain that Jasper didn't want her dead). And now she was sitting in a room with three vampires, hoping that one would keep her from breaking into tiny little pieces on Dr Cullen's black leather couch. She was afraid to blink because if she did, he might disappear, and then where would she be?

Dr Cullen's voice sounded like it was moving through water. "We think it has something to do with memory."

"Which you think is the cause for my unusually large hippocampi," Louisa stated. She lifted her hand to cover the one Jasper had pressed against her face. He had large hands. Or maybe she just had a small head. Large hippocampi, tiny cranium. What a combination.

Relax breathe calm down focus.

Dr Cullen was explaining about possible compensation for the number of memories she gathered, growing so it was able to process more efficiently. It sounded dodgy to Louisa, but she wasn't the one with a medical degree. "My theory is that you are psychometric." She could pick up, gather, leftover information that had been deposited on objects, he said. The more emotionally charged a memory, the more likely it was to be left behind. The stronger her reaction.

"People, too," Edward added. Kind of like she was doing to Jasper that very moment.

Jasper didn't move away, didn't seem annoyed or disgusted at his invasion of privacy. His thumb continued to stroke her cheek, his eyes never once straying from hers. Of course he didn't mind. She couldn't control it. He lived with Edward, who was much more invasive. Edward, the mind reader. That sounded much more inconvenient than psycho-whatever.

Jasper can feel people's emotions and Edward could hear their thoughts.

An empath, a telepath, and a psychopath. It sounded like the beginning of a really bad joke. All they needed now was a psychic to complete the set.

"Psychometric would be a better term," Edward replied to her unspoken thoughts. "And Alice is the psychic."

Or right. How could she forget about Alice?

She felt tired, wrung out. She bet Jasper could tell that she was. She wanted nothing more than to rest her head on his shoulder and take a long nap. For the rest of her life, if at all possible. But first, she needed answers, and she couldn't get them if she hid. "How do you know?" She asked, at last, still looking at Jasper. She needed proof, data. Lots and lots of evidence, all of which would need to hold up in a court of law.

Edward had that damn notebook again, talking about visions in closets. MRIs and panic attacks. Dreams about the details of a murder that had never been released to the public (and yes, he had checked). Knowing the passcode to phones she had nicked. On and on and on. Things that had definitely happened, she was there for them, remembered each event clearly, yet she still had trouble wrapping her brain around it.

"You thought that my eyes were green," Edward said. "Just by holding a piece of paper I had touched. My eyes used to be green, but there is no way you could have ever known. It isn't something you could possibly deduce."

Eye colour? The word caught her attention, and her brain offered forth another memory. She finally turned her attention to Dr Cullen. "The day before my first appointment with you. I went to Vancouver with Rosalie."

"The Smoothie Incident," Dr Cullen interjected.

"Yeah, but before I threw it," Louisa started. For the briefest of seconds Rosalie's eyes, she could have sworn, had been a different colour. Not blue, lighter… almost…

"Violet," Edward interrupted.

Louisa wondered if interrupting people was a vampire trait too, like drinking blood or having really strong arms. "I didn't think much of it at the time. We were kind of busy."

The more Edward talked, told her of his findings, the less she needed to hear. Her brain began to fill in gaps that had always confused her: cases she had solved when it should have been impossible, things she had found that people swore were lost, secrets she shouldn't know but always did. From the day she had woken up in the hospital nine years ago, she had been doing it— looking, watching, observing. Her brain filled in the gaps with stories, gave her excuses for how she had known what she had known, trying to clear away the discomfort because of course the paranormal doesn't exist and of course she had a reason for knowing the impossible.

She knew all of these things, but it still felt wrong. She glanced at Jasper, still on his knees in front of her; at Dr Cullen, sitting behind his desk, watching her with a fascinated expression; at Edward, who had an intent look on his face, no doubt reading her mind, trying to unravel all of its secrets. Louisa got the impression that they were waiting for something. She felt a bit like an animal in a zoo, which was ridiculous to think because she was a perfectly normal human. They were the weirdoes in the room.

At the moment, all they had presented her with was anecdotal evidence. She needed to experiment, test their theory. Maybe she could prove them wrong still. Silence the tiny voice in her head that agreed with them. So she got a bunch of stuff right with her educated guesses. Correlation doesn't imply causation. Empirical data. That's what she needed. "Prove it," Louisa said.

It was Dr Cullen who came up with the idea. He instructed Jasper to move away from her so he couldn't distract her, influence her. She felt colder at the loss of contact and nearly rescinded her demand. But she didn't, because she wanted, had, to know.

Dr Cullen told her to close her eyes and focus on the object he placed in her outstretched hands. Louisa reluctantly did so, attempting to quell her discomfort at losing sight in a room full of vampires. Jasper wouldn't let them hurt her though, right? And Dr Cullen had been around on her on several occasions and hadn't indicated any desire to snap her neck. Really, it was only Edward who was the wild card in the situation. Something he could undoubtedly hear. Her thoughts were probably offensive, but honestly, fuck politeness. She didn't want to die today. Edward laughed, and she wondered if hearing everyone's thoughts over the decades had driven him insane.

"I'm just glad to see you are still rational," Edward clarified.

They started off with small objects. Edward's favourite fountain pen. A framed picture of the Cullen family, Jasper's wristwatch. Each time Louisa gave her deductions-that-weren't-really-deductions and Dr Cullen would make a sound of approval before switching to a new object. A medical journal Dr Cullen was reading, correcting with a red pen, annoyed at the questionable data that his peers had submitted. She felt the annoyance. It was like a pulsing thread, fluttering around like it was caught in a riptide or a hurricane. She tried to picture it more clearly, lunged for it with mental hands.

Edward hummed in fascination, breaking her concentration. Louisa slowly opened her eyes to look at him. "The mental imagery might help you focus," he agreed. "You're following the emotions that you encounter for the memory."

"She does better with older objects or something with more sentimental value," Jasper pointed out, confirming what they had hypothesised. His watch was new, just replaced after Emmett destroyed the last one during a wrestling match. The picture frame stood on a desk and was rarely moved.

The men stood around for a moment, brainstorming on how to test her further. Dr Cullen paused and told her to close her eyes again, which she did so grudgingly. As entertaining she was sure this was, it was incredibly exhausting. She had never felt the need to fall asleep sitting up as acutely as she did then. She wished Jasper hadn't been forced to move away. She could have used him as a support to lean on. She nodded at Edward's instructions to focus on a memory, follow the emotional path.

Something cold and hard was dropped into her palms. She manipulated it with her fingers, feeling the edges, the grooves and planes. A necklace with a cross. Made of bronze. Old. Very old. "It belonged to…" A fuzzy memory started to form. A stern man, very tall, grey hair, a roman nose. Father. Dr Cullen's father. "Your father was a pastor. Anglican." Very, very, proud. "You're religious." Protection. "You clutch this when you fly. You hate flying. God didn't give humans wings for a reason." Protection, God, fear. So much fear. Terror. She could taste potatoes in the air. She was hiding. Burning. He hadn't been protected, he'd been attacked by the thing he was looking for. Hunting. The pain was increasing, his heart felt like it was about to explode.

Louisa knew she needed to leave the memory. She grabbed the first thing she felt. A new thread. Grey, sickly. Sadness. A young man in a bed. Very ill. He was screaming, crying, his red hair sticking to his sweaty temples. Sadness, guilt… and maybe a little hope? She latched onto that instead. Followed it, a faintly glimmering thread, thin, delicate.

She burst into a new memory. An unfamiliar room. A teenaged girl sitting on a couch. He's near her and her scent is everywhere, floral, like honeysuckles. He's putting a cast on her leg, she's fallen out of a tree. She beautiful and his heart is dead but might start moving again when she laughs. She sixteen and he looks like he's twenty-three and he's very much a vampire who wants her to be a vampire too. Shame tinges the memory. How could he take someone so pure? He realises he knows this girl from somewhere. No Louisa recognises the girl from somewhere. No, not a girl. A woman. In a white dress. Her heart might implode with happiness as she looks at him. The woman's eyes are golden and her hair is swirling in the wind. How could one person possibly feel all of this happiness and joy and light? He was full. So full she wasn't sure how to swallow, breathe. Too much too much too much.

"Too much," she whispered. Her face was pressed against something hard, cold. Arms surround her, enclosed her, protected her. Jasper. She drew in a shuddering breath, his sweet scent tickling her nose. "Too much."

"Too much," he agreed, tightening his arms around her, one hand cradling her head, the other gripping her ribs. She had been pulled into his lap at some point, probably when he sensed her panic. She wondered briefly if he could feel the emotions she had felt from the object, or only her reaction to the information. But that was a question for another day when her brain didn't feel so itchy and swollen, burning like it was melting and about to pour out of her ears.

Instead, she tuned out Dr Cullen's and Edward's theories about what she had experienced and listened to the air whoosh in and out of Jasper's lungs, focused on how his fingers massaged her scalp and tried to identify all of the components of Jasper's cologne. Some sort of firewood burning. Apple and cinnamon. Cotton on a clothesline on a sunny day.

Relax, breathe, calm down, repeat.

"Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

A/N: It's finals week and I hate everything. Writing is a great distraction for me. What do you think? This was a fun chapter for me to write. Louisa is trying so hard to understand what is going on but it's hard to do that when everybody around you is nuts. Let me know what you think and any predictions you have for where this story might go. I already know, but it's fun to read what you think. -CheckAlexa