𝐏𝐔𝐍𝐈𝐒𝐇𝐄𝐑, sam uley ✗

𝐓𝐖𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐘 𝐅𝐎𝐔𝐑

┏━━━━.˚✧˚₊ ᗢ₊˚✧ ﾟ.━━━━┓

OH, FATHER DEAREST

VAMPIRES DIDN'T GET NAUSEATED, but just the sight of Laurence Eubanks had Talullah's stomach absolutely rolling.

Aside from her brief sighting of him when she and Sam had been holed up in her bedroom, the last time she could remember seeing him was on that fated day when she had told her parents she didn't want to go to med school. She could still remember her mother's anger, and her father's insistence that she go out of state for school.

And now here he was, grip tightening on the child on his hip as he stared at his daughter— a girl back from the dead.

"Talullah?" came his hesitant voice, eyes eventually raking over her rigid figure before settling on the dangerous red hue eyes. "You're a— h-how—"

Her eyes almost bulged out of her head. Of course there was another human who knew of her kind's existence, and of course that human just had to be her father. "I don't remember," she responded almost pathetically, answering the 'how' of his stuttering statement. "I've been here for a bit..."

As the two looked to each other, it was as though neither of them could really understand how the other was standing before them.

There was a beat of silence before the child at the man's hip piped up, pigtails swinging around as she looked to him. "Whose that, papa?"

If Talullah had a heart, it would've stopped at the revelation. "Papa?" she questioned, her eyes now locked onto the little girl's face. It was so much like her own, except where the vampire had a birthmark on her cheek, the child's was on the right side of her temple.

Now that she was looking at her, it was like staring into a bizarre mirror. Perhaps this was what Talullah looked like when she was younger, when she was able to be held in her father's grasp comfortably.

Funny how she'd spent the last three years of her life in Italy as a pawn, where no decisions were truly her own, while her parents had seemingly gotten busy in an obvious attempt to replace her. Would they still have conceived if she went to Cornell like they wanted, or was her disappearance the deciding factor in why they chose to have another child?

Laurence sighed, so quiet that if Talullah was human, she wouldn't have heard it. She saw him look at her in her peripheral for a second, her own gaze unwavering from the child. "Annie, this is Talullah," he said to the young girl, bouncing his hip slightly to make her giggle. The sound was softer than anything she'd ever heard. "She's a friend of Sam's."

"A friend of Sam's?" she asked through gritted teeth, and she was almost shocked by the certain cruelty in her tone that she hadn't heard since Volterra. It should've frightened her —the lingering effects of the Volturi's claim on her— but in that moment she couldn't find it in herself to care.

She was suddenly all too angry, and Laurence could tell. As much as she was his daughter, she was something else now. "This isn't the right time or place to have this discussion, Lulu."

The brunette saw red, and within an instant she found herself speeding up to the man. He stumbled back in response, and Talullah was able to see a spec of fear appearing within his eyes. His eyes that were so much like Annie's and now nothing like her own crimson ones.

She stopped before him, hands twitching at her sides. "You don't get to call me that!" she seethed out, inching her head closer to his as she stared unblinkingly. Unbeknownst to her, her eyes were now a pitch black. "I'm your own flesh and blood, and yet you still dismiss me?"