ofthefamily | Return to Volterra.

"About not going in there without some better plan," Jasper corrects patiently. He does want to help Carlisle and to keep this future as much as they do.

Edward's need to respond was broken off by gasp from Alice, the images, broken fast flickers of scenes, flooding into his head, even as he was looking to her suddenly.

Carlisle being taken down at the east gate. Being held by people, drug forward before a dais. A decree just out of being heard. Faces of those who hated him. The slam of a door. Echoing. The faintest flicker of red cloaks, fading and and out.

He didn't wince. "He's trying to run right now."

He is running. Most of the Volturi he passes are new and the faces are not known to Carlisle; they let him pass with only mild curses thrown his way and confusion in the air as to why he is running towards the sun.

They don't have to stop him.

The guard is returning.

Between the tension and Alice trembling with impatience beside him from whatever Edward and her have seen, it only takes Jasper a second to decide. However bad of an idea this may be.

"Which way did he go?"

A plan will have to formulate as they follow, but Jasper's thinking cloaks for cover already. They'd stick out like sore thumbs right now.

"East gate."

Jasper makes the decision and it shifts other things, because Alice is trying to hold on so hard to everything happening right now. He can see the room, even though she can't tell where. Just the room.

Which leaves him filtering through the chaos.

Trying to find someone, anyone, with a view anything like the images of where they are in her head, pulling on red cloaks silent and still.

"That way is the East Gate." Edward pointed, "But cover is that way. I can't tell exactly where yet. It's --- big." And there aren't people on every corner trying to people helpful guide posts of eyes and minds like tour guides.

And half the mind he has gotten a good taste of....

Running.

Il stregone runs for the door to exposure as the sun rises over the human world and doesn't even notice when the last of the red cloaks file in from their nightly rounds and stop when they recognize the starved vampire ahead of them.

One guard - a lieutenant, if Volturi cared about rankings and title or anything besides working for the Three - decides to speak.

"Non puo partire, eretico."

Heretic.

It has to be now. Carlisle crouches, knowing the answer to the demand he still has to voice.

In English:

"Let me pass."

"I'll scout for cover. You two stay near to here and then we'll go," Jasper starts to say, but the hand on his arm stops him, Alice's fingers curling into the sleeve of his shirt. Her eyes are vacant, lost in a vision that she blinks out of all too soon.

"We go together," she says, calm yet tense. They can't help Carlisle yet.

They can't, is what she means, what she thinks.

Neither of them will stay put, or stay remotely calm, if he leaves. Edward can't help wishing even as she's stopping him that she wouldn't and hadn't.

The guard about to start with Carlisle. They can see it coming, the vision firming up with each of the words only Edward hears, and it hasn't. Carlisle doesn't know and wants so. Wants so little, what they consider here so treacherously much. He wants to cave in the man's face for what he will do.

Edward frowned, looking toward Alice and then Jasper, trying to focus. He can't go to Carlisle yet. Can he at all? Focus. A girl in the room with the cloaks, two fingers at her lips, having come from eating.

"This way."

Away from the East Gate.

Away from where his focus lies.

Through twisting hallways, avoiding others.

They always move in concert - an illusion of floating with the long cloaks that obscure skin, faces, eyes.

Aro favored this one for nearly a century and he wants to flee? Into the sunlight and day?

No.

The guard surrounds him.

Now.

Carlisle lunges for the lieutenant first, faster than expected from him - from one so starved who was never as strong as They, who hunted as was meant for their kind -

The lieutenant's head snaps easily beneath Carlisle's grip

and the guard descends.

Alice jerks--winces as Carlisle makes his move. She stops in her tracks, her hand dropping from Jasper's arm, her chest tight--as if she needed to take a breath.

She tries to take an experimental intake of air, to see if it helps. It doesn't. She shakes her head and takes a hesitant step forward. "Keep going."

Jasper snatches up Alice's hand again as quick as he can. She may not need it, but he as sure as Hell needs her touch to keep calm.

And he doesn't want to ask what she saw.

Walking through the halls of Volterra, where the corridors seem endless and choked with tension, is not somewhere he ever imagined himself being. Simply hearing the stories was enough to scare him into keeping his head down in the past so he never had to.

But, Carlisle.

"Any resistance ahead?" he asks Edward in a terse whisper, almost stepping on his brother's heels with how close he keeps.

When the future becomes the present it goes from Alice, but it stays with Edward. Edward whose step doesn't hitch, but the entirety of his ability to process does when over a half dozen other launch themselves at Carlisle.

A pile or red, with flashes of gold, the surmounting heave of hate and satisfaction that finally, even when it's met only with the mad desperation for freedom. The feral edge of each, so much more monster and even victim than men. The obvious imbalance to the fight.

Then it's only Alice's words that draws him back.

Back from the brink of a flicker in her mind.

Where he'd almost torn off the other way.

He doesn't look at her, or regret it.

Edward shook his head to Jasper's question.

Not yet at least. He moved them through the space, relying far more on Jasper's attempts at calm and Alice's flickers of the hallways, the room, before they reached it, than he ever let on with his specific, determined, silent gait.

Only a few more walkways now. Things were piecing together.

It take five guardsmen in the end to hold Carlisle prostrate and still manage to move him to the main chambers of the Three, Carlisle not screaming, but talking, speaking all the while. They will hear him -- even if they would not let him go.

"Blind servants of the Three who do not question what they are told with the minds that survived their deaths - I kill your kin and you take me to Them instead to follow orders instead of taking me yourselves -- "

And under even the bravado there is a clenching of addled terror, of Please don't take me back to Them you can kill me here I won't mind just don't take me back --

We can't act now we can't act now we can't act now-- her thoughts are a mantra directed at Edward as they rush down the hallway. She has to keep him here, in the now, with her and Jasper. He cannot help Carlisle yet. He would mess everything up.

Things cannot get worse than they are about to be. She can't let that happen. She is a guardian of the future. Specifically: their future.

"We need to get out of the open." She whispers. "I can still see what will happen and Edward can listen to Carlisle, but we need to hide. We need, please."

Jasper could not agree more. Every step further puts him more on edge until, finally -

"Just - "

He grabs Edward by the shoulder, pushing and shoving Alice and him into the nearest room. A hiss greets them and Jasper, moving as fast as he can, grabs the occupant by throat, strangling a cry of alarm.

He breaks the neck - cleanly, smoothly, he's done this before - and the head drops to the floor before the vampire could so much as twitch out of his grasp.

"Check the cabinets."

Edward would really like to care more about that -- but he doesn't. He looks to Alice, and then to Jasper, even as he was paying attention to all the minds closest to see if they'd heard the hiss.

But no one cared if someone hissed in Volterra. There were always fights and violent outbursts in the shadows. There was always someone to put someone else in their place, to try to usurp the place of.

Edward said, at the quietest, "We're still in the clear."

The stregone is not.

Two vampires who come close enough to Carlisle to gag him lose fingers as they continue to progress towards the Three, passing doors of nondescript rooms and cells much like Carlisle's last abode in the past recent weeks.

Carlisle is near to panting, thinking of all sorts of things to keep his mind centered -

Name the bones of the human body and the tendons which connect joint to joint. In English. Italian. Focus.

- ready for what is ahead of him.

Still he struggles, throwing taunts at the guardsmen who remain silent.

The taunts bore the guards who hold him but only because they cannot do anything about them.

The swarm of red cloaks leave the hallways and tunnels, preparing to approach the main rooms of the Three.

Alice stares at her husband with wide eyes for a moment, her chest tight with worry. "R-right."

Instead of checking the cabinets, she slumps against them. This is taking too much out of her. She shouldn't be here.

She can't be anywhere but here.

"Alice."

She cannot fall apart on Jasper now. He needs her. He just -

He needs her.

He moves around her to rummage through the cabinets himself, shoving a blood red cloak (and a wave of calm) into her arms once he finds one. He tosses another to Edward as he pulls on one of his own with a grimace.

Where is Carlisle now?

Edward pulled it on. Not looking at it and hating it all the while. How many memories, how many random faces in them. In his memory and in his mind now.

Between the clamor of voices raising as the information passed and Alice, who's should his gaze stopped on a second because of where-how she was, he said. "Everyone's going to dais."

Everyone.

Pulling up his hood, covering his hair and obscuring his face, he turned back to the door they'd come in through and opened it again.

Carlisle arrives first to the central court of the Three, a raised dais and three high-backed ornate chairs the only furnishings in the slate-colored marble room. Circular and high-columned vaulted ceilings - Carlisle remembered thinking it near holy when he arrived here from France. Now he just feels surrounded.

"Aro. Marcus, Caius," Carlisle speaks freely as the guardsmen shove him into the center of the columns and retreat to their positions behind them. Carlisle trains his black-colored eyes to the occupants of the dais thrones. The main subject of focus to Carlisle was Aro himself, sitting in the center chair and looking at Carlisle as though he had just committed the most grievous of acts.

Maybe he did.

"Why, Carlisle?"

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