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Alaska was everything Jamie thought it would be. Barren and endlessly white, it sucked all colour and wetness from the air, a hard sun brightening crystals of the pine trees. But despite all the refreshing blandness, Jamie wished he could feel the cold on his skin. To have a shiver start from his neck and end at his ankles, something painful but familiar rattling his spine.
They had kept to the shores, then staying to the mountains as they got closer to Denali. Carlisle ran beside him, sometimes in front but always near enough to be able to keep an eye on him. The woman circled his left, braided, auburn hair flapping behind her as she swept over mud and dirt. She was small and had a glow to her, a kindness that held little pity in it. Her name, she had told Jamie softly in the kitchen of her house, was Esme. She had been nice to him, paying little mind to the eggshells the others saw around his feet. She kept him at ease in the wilderness.
In a controlled flurry, he had met them. What they were he had no word for. A gathering? A clan? A coven or even a flock? He had not thought of the term family until he heard Emmett's laughter, a sudden thunder that burst through the wall and startled Jamie enough into standing. Then it was the voiceless warmth he saw between them, familiar when just existing beside one another.
Jamie didn't understand it, couldn't understand it. He sometimes imagined them with red eyes instead of their shaded golden, how it really would seem to be monsters playing house then. Carlisle had told him that the part of them, the unspoken and bloody part was behind them. Not buried or forgotten but just a shadow, silent at their heels but never to darken their path again.
His childrenhe calledthem, his family, his companions. Esme, who was the greatest friend of all, a mother to the motherless in all of her soft edges. Alice and Rosalie, daughters with halos of beauty, wistful and hard in their opposites but nonetheless wielded to the foundations of what made them truly them . Then the sons; Edward, Emmett and Jasper. Jasper, whose cold breath had been down his neck since they left Forks.
In the intervals that they stopped, he would look back southward. Never letting it tick on his face how yearning and impatient he was to get back home, to his family, to his Alice. Jamie had watched him and he had felt sorry for being the odd pull in their orbit, how pathetic it was of him to split lovers even in death.
It had taken three of them to escort him because they knew that three would be enough. Jasper for Jamie's fear. Esme for Jamie's calm and Carlisle for Jamie's familiarity. They had fed twice, making sure that Jamie got his fill of moose or deer, giving him a wide berth until he pacified himself then encircling again. He thought them vultures around a carcass, watching and moving, incredibly perceivable to the animals still living. A reminder of death to the already dead.
