by Alicorn
Gianna went still and quiet. "I don't know what to think about that," she said after a silence.
"It's worth it," I told her again. "And you'll get it easier than me. We'll put you in a coma too and as soon as you come out of it, a broken spine will cut off most of the pain - I didn't think of that until hours after I woke."
This had probably not been a clever thing to say, I decided, after looking at Gianna's expression. The pinch to my neck was so laden with positive associations of relief and mercy in my head, and I didn't think of the injury the way any given human likely did. In Gianna's mind, "broken spine" was probably very high on the list of things least pleasant to experience. I had memories of two hundred fifty nine thousand, one hundred and twelve seconds which each would individually place higher on that list than anything I would have been capable of experiencing with fully human mind and nerves.
"But we won't push you into anything you don't want to do," I said reluctantly. But on the other side everything is beautiful and you can keep it all forever...
"If Ilario's going to do it, then I will too," she said, and that sounded firmer than her previous statement.
I grinned at her.
* * *
The rest of the flight was mostly small talk, tidbits about our respective lives that had for whatever reason not made it into our e-mails. Gianna was 23; Ilario was her only sibling, and two years younger; their parents were alive but irretrievably senile; she'd found the Volturi ten months previously (I was briefly startled to realize that Gianna had known vampires for longer than I had, when I felt like I'd known them forever).
Edward picked us up at the airport. Rosalie had gotten around to buying at least a few cars, apparently, because the sleek black thing he drove was definitely not a rental. I wondered if she'd grabbed one for me - she'd asked me what kind I wanted and I told her I had no idea, and was willing to leave it up to her expertise. She wasn't quite as pleased as Alice with permission to buy me a new wardrobe bursting with chiffon, but she'd seemed to find it a compliment.
I hadn't yet directly taken much frivolous advantage of practically unlimited financial freedom, although Edward had troubled to make it very clear that, as his wife, I was entitled to it as much as he was. He'd informed me in no uncertain terms that I shouldn't hesitate to whip out my shiny black credit card if I saw something I liked. ("But if you need more than a couple million dollars at a time," he'd said, "let Alice know so she can spook her stockbrokers first.") Mostly I'd deferred various purchases to people with a specialized interest in making them. Now that I was moving around in the human world without much trouble it was probably time for me to take a more personal interest in my possessions.
Conversation during the drive between the airport and the house was limited; I did want to talk to Edward about my insight on Aro and the condition of Gianna's release, and he like everyone else in the family needed to be informed about Ilario. However, the first conversations were best kept between the two of us to start with, and the second would be more efficient with everyone there.
He drove fast, of course, and it didn't take long for us to reach home. The cars were living outdoors for the time being, but I could see the skeleton of a garage going up. The house itself looked completely refinished - fresh paint and sanded surfaces and new window glass. Esme had been busy over the last couple of weeks. We brought Gianna into the house, gave her a purposeless little room with a bed in it on the first floor, confirmed that someone had brought in some groceries for her to feed herself and generally deal with human needs, and let her alone to settle in. It was surprisingly unceremonious - having Alice around took a lot of the oomph out of significant lifestyle changes.
When Gianna had shut the door to her new room and could be heard unpacking, I turned to Edward. "I believe," I said, "that you've got a threshold to carry me over."
"I believe I do," he agreed.
* * *
I spent four minutes running around in our cute, tiny cottage, inspecting everything and exclaiming over it. Edward had already seen plenty of the place, in Esme's mind and Alice's, and didn't need to investigate so thoroughly; he watched me with a fond and indulgent look on his face. Alice had been in the house before, and moved all my clothes old and new into a closet that was almost half as big as the entire rest of the building. Edward's were relegated to a corner of the crowded walk-in, pushed there by my inordinately large collection; she was not quite so fond of buying men's clothes. She had not been able to quite resist buying me posh swaths of dress-shaped silk and satin, but there were only half a dozen of the most impractical numbers. The rest of it was more discreetly upscale.
It was a compact home, so in short order I'd seen everything and returned to Edward's side.
Simultaneously, we said, "We need to talk."
* * *
"What's your thing we need to talk about?" I asked Edward.
"It's kind of a long story - what's yours?" he said.
"I have several," I replied. "One is that I thought about something that might constitute a limitation on Aro's power, besides my immunity. It might or might not have already occurred to you. The second is about what I had to tell Aro to get Gianna out, and what we need to do about that. And then there's a favor I want to do for Gianna. Why don't I start one of mine, and then it'll be your turn?"
Edward nodded, and I related the thought processes and dialogue that had led up to the situation with Gianna. "So," I concluded after the explanation, "unless we have a brilliant alternative plan, Gianna needs to have, or be noticeably pregnant with, my child by the time Aro investigates us, on some unspecified date on the order of a year or two from now. I guess that's probably enough time to find a sperm donor." I winced apologetically. "I didn't have a chance to consult you, or time to think of anything else I might want a human for that Aro would find plausible."
"And how do you feel about that?" asked Edward. He was carefully looking neutral about it - probably trying not to pressure me either way with his own feelings.
I hadn't stopped to consider this in any detail. I took this invitation to do so, and thought.
When I'd said to Aro that I needed Gianna to bear my children, I had been motivated by the need to get her out, to save her. Now that she was freed but would be checked up on, any comparatively weak opinions I had about child-rearing were close to irrelevant for purposes of what I would do. I didn't hate the idea so much that I'd let Gianna die to avoid it. I didn't love the idea so much that I'd demand her participation even if I found a way to bail her out for free. But there was a reasonably wide range of possibilities between those two extremes, and Edward - as well as I - wanted to know where I was on the spectrum.
I wasn't thrilled about the sperm donor part. Some stranger's child. But Edward had gone and become a vampire before collecting gametes had been medically realistic, so that meant that (sooner or later) I needed to figure out how I felt about having children without the chance that they'd have his hair or his nose or something.
I supposed a pair of vampires who never needed to sleep would have a leg up in the parenting department. I was only seventeen, but it wasn't like I was getting any older. With twenty-four hours in a day, and each second sufficient time to actually accomplish something, I didn't find the prospect of adding childcare that terrible of a time sink. So maybe it'd take me two or three times as long to learn Farsi when that came up on my list - wow, an entire week and a half per language, the horror.
Kids were typically cute, but varied in personality as much as adults did. The odds were pretty good that my own would be similar to me in at least some ways. Paging through descriptions of donors would be another level of control. There were plenty of people with adversarial relationships with their parents, but I'd gotten along all right with mine, and they'd gotten along all right with theirs. If there was any genetic correlation, there would probably be no serious issue there.
I wondered what it would do to a human child, to have vampire parents. Among ot
her things, we weren't warm and huggable. I supposed we could wear fluffy coats or something, if that seemed important. In most visible ways, we could pass for human, though; we'd be likely to raise a quirky kid, but probably not an outrageously bizarre one unless we were very incautious. It might be wise for Edward and me to live alone with our child in case a scraped knee set Jasper off. For that matter, I would need to test myself around fresh human blood before I could be sure of mothering a human baby safely.
The timing wasn't ideal. We wouldn't be the first couple to wind up with a honeymoon baby - or the nearest artificial equivalent - but a child would restrict us in some ways. For example, if I decided I wanted to spend a year living in the Mariana Trench for no particular reason, that would not be something I could do with a toddler. After fifteen or twenty years, though, my offspring could likely be left more or less to his or her own devices. And I didn't think I'd run out of child-compatible things to occupy myself with in that time.
The fact that Edward and I wouldn't age and the child would could get awkward. We looked a bit young to be parents to an infant, let alone an eight-year-old or a teenager. That would just mean that we'd have to teach him or her to call us by our names and pretend to be our niece or my sibling or something in public, though.
And I could show Charlie and Renée their grandchild. That wouldn't be a problem as long as we found a way to be away ourselves at the time - drill the kid on airport procedures, send them to Washington or Arizona, let the relevant grandparent pick them up. It might be, in some small way, compensation for the fact that there might never be a way for me to see them again face-to-face.
"Well," I said finally, having spent about forty seconds to fully mull over all those thoughts, "it's sooner than I had in mind, but I kind of like the idea of having at least one."
"That's good," said Edward in relief, touching my face, "because I found out after you left Rio that it may be possible for vampires to have children."
* * *
"Does Rosalie know?" I asked immediately.
Edward winced. "Not female vampires," he said. "At least not that I discovered."
"Spill," I insisted.
"After I saw you off to Italy," said Edward, "I went back to the island to leave a note for the cleaning crew, so they would know that we weren't going to be there as long as planned. They were there when I arrived, but one of them had brought her cousin to help, who's familiar with a lot of local legends and had a good guess of what she was looking at as soon as she saw me. Since all she'd heard about who was using the island was that it was a young couple, the first thing she thought when she saw me without you was that I'd eaten you." He smiled wryly. "I explained that you were my wife and had been called away prematurely, and her next thought was that you were pregnant and rushing home."
"She still thought I was human at that point?"
"Right - but I didn't understand how she could think it anyway, when for one thing I'm a vampire and for another you wouldn't have been showing after only twelve days."
"It didn't occur to her that a lot of humans cheat on their spouses?" I asked dryly.
"Didn't cross her mind just then, at least, which was curious," Edward replied. "I managed to convince her I wasn't going to hurt her, or you, and I got her talking. The Ticuna Indians, of which she was one, have legends about vampires who seduce young women - and their stories say that pregnancies can result."
The vague plans for raising a human child evaporated in my head. We could have our child. I felt my face spreading into a much less ambivalent smile...
"But," said Edward (I froze), "the pregnancies are supposedly unnaturally rapid. That was why she'd thought twelve days would be enough to notice. Start to finish, it takes about one month - but you can imagine the toll that takes on a human body, going from zygote to infant nine times faster than normal. She didn't know of any stories where the mothers survived. Not least because the children aren't at all typical."
"Not typical how?"
"That, she didn't know much about. But if there are stories about half-vampires, there might be actual half-vampires, somewhere - South America would be a good place to start. I wanted to come straight home to meet you and discuss it before investigating any further."
"If it'd kill Gianna..." I said uncomfortably.
"These are old stories," he told me. "Perfectly ordinary pregnancies were dangerous then - no modern medicine. And vampire venom can do some amazing things. When Esme was found at the bottom of the cliff, she was brought directly to the morgue, because they didn't think there was a chance they could save her - but her heart was beating, and Carlisle turned her and now she's fine. None of us were in such good shape - you were the only one in perfect health. I know Gianna was hoping that the Volturi would turn her anyway."
"She was, but not for the reason you're thinking." I told him about Ilario, barely clinging to life. "Now, I asked her, and she said she'd still like to be a vampire even if he didn't need her help to turn, and she said she'd be willing to help us out with surrogacy - but I don't know if she'd sign on for pregnancy-on-rocket-powered-roller-skates that's believed to regularly kill people just because we might be able to save her with venom at the end of it."
"Of course if we determine that there's no way that's safe for her to carry a half-vampire, she shouldn't," Edward assured me. "But it seems worth investigating." There was a trace of something in his voice that he was trying not to make too obvious - perhaps it really mattered to him that our child be biologically his own but he knew that it would do no good to press the issue if I thought it would be at the expense of Gianna's safety.
I nodded. "I think it's safe for us to take six months to research and decide," I said. "Even if Aro checks in after just one year and we wind up going with a slower-developing human baby, she'll show by then."
"I agree," Edward said.
"Is there going to be any trouble dealing with Ilario?" I asked.
"I don't think it would be wise to have him and Gianna in the same place when he's first turned," said Edward. "Unless he adjusts like you - which he might, if your theory is correct - then it wouldn't be safe for her."
"So should Ilario go somewhere else, or should Gianna?" I asked. "And where to? The Denalis have already got David, and he's not unusually well-adjusted - Gianna can't go there. Ilario could after he's turned, but it's not obvious how we'd get an uncontrolled newborn to Alaska safely."
"It might be necessary for the family to split up temporarily," Edward said. "We'll discuss it with everyone."
I frowned, not quite happy with that idea. But if Ilario managed as well as he might, didn't eat his equivalent of Nils when tested, then it would amount to some of us taking him on a couple weeks' vacation in some remote area and then bringing him back. Fair enough.
"And my last thing," I said.
* * *
Edward had barely any idea how Aro's power worked. Aro didn't think about it explicitly himself, at least not in range. "When he's decided to find something in particular, and I listen, I can always catch that thing," Edward said. "But the rest of it is too fast. It doesn't spend enough time as a surface thought for me to read it. If there's a different way he retrieves absorbed memories and personal memories, I can't tell the difference when he remembers things."
"So that doesn't narrow it down," I said. "It looks like there are three possibilities. That he's as powerful as he wants everyone to think, or that he stores but doesn't automatically process everything from his targets, or that he has to know what he's looking for in advance."
Edward nodded. "I can't believe I never thought of this before - he has no reason to leave the Quileutes alone; by rights he'd want to obliterate them in case the activated version of the species ever resurfaces. But the most recent occasion wasn't even the first time he's read one of us since we encountered them seventy years ago."
"That means we can probably rule out the first, then," I said. "But is there a safe way to tell between the second an
d third?" We thought. The problem was that, of things that made suitable test topics, there were very few that we thought we'd like it if he came to think about them. It would be safe to make oblique references to werewolves and read his thoughts about them ifthe last hypothesis were true, because he'd assume that we were talking about the Children of the Moon and wouldn't have any special reason to go poking around the next time he read a Cullen. But if the second one were the case instead, then bringing up werewolves could lead him to dig up exactly the memories that would send the Volturi guard on a killing spree in La Push.
And in fact, if Aro ever had cause to discuss werewolves or a related topic with his own coven, this could happen at any time anyway... if Caius expressed skepticism that they'd truly driven the Children of the Moon extinct, if someone in the guard had a penchant for horror novels and discussed them over a shared supper, if Aro developed an interest in Native American culture...
I didn't say that out loud.
Instead, I said, "Edward, do you trust me?"
"Absolutely." This was not, as he used it, an emphatic form of "yes"; it was a description of his trust. It was absolute. And I needed no less.
"I want you to stop thinking about this, and not to bring it up with anyone else," I said. "And I may need to travel or use medium-large sums of money unexpectedly, alone. I want you to avoid thinking about that or talking about it any more than you have to. I might need you to pretend to our family that you're on a trip with me so the others don't become curious. I might ask weirder things unexpectedly without being able to explain."