Chapter Text
Edward, April 2003
Forks Elementary didn’t have a proper SPED teacher. The closest thing they had was Mrs Daws, who ran the school library and sometimes subbed in when a teacher was ill. Carlisle and I asked how many special needs children this school had; the principal, Mrs Oldingham, ran through all of the strange children in her head, diagnosed and not.
“I’d be more than willing to come and make assessments for free, or make pro bono referrals to my colleagues in psychology,” Carlisle was adding.
“Oh,” she said tightly, “That will be quite alright, Dr. Cullen. We don’t make referrals around here.”
“Why not?” asked Carlisle politely. The answer in Mrs Oldingham’s mind indicated that it was because she didn’t like suggestions about how her school was run, and didn’t even want me volunteering here, but felt that it was impolite to refuse. He’ll be useful, anyway. Might be helpful to get those kids out of the class.
Honestly. Some people.
“Perhaps you could give me a list and introduce us all to them individually?” I prodded. Mrs Oldingham nodded.
“Yes, yes, I think that would be a marvelous idea.”
She was scared of us, I could tell. She was also scared of being scared, because it made her feel less in control, and I could tell that Mrs Oldingham was a woman who loved control.
“And I would love to meet your SPED teacher,” I added, just to make her a little uncomfortable. Served her (and the Educational Board of Forks) right for not employing a full-time member of staff when she had a possible eight special needs children on the books, with two more coming into kindergarten next year, never mind all of the middle schoolers and high schoolers in town. I enjoyed watching her squirm for a moment as she hemmed and hawed and eventually admitted what I already knew – that Mrs Daws was the best they had.
We got up and walked around the school, and I was introduced to the children. Their minds weren’t necessarily easy places to be – but then, I’d seen it all before, ever since I first got roped into volunteering with special needs children in the fall of 1987. Mainstreaming was just starting to go mainstream, and an emotionally-challenged boy who had been sharing a class with me had gotten overwhelmed with frustration and there had been a massive altercation in the classroom. As the only person who could read the boy’s mind, I had ended up calming him down, placating the teacher, and then rushing after the boy (who had stormed out of class after throwing his papers to the floor and flipping his desk) to explain how trigonometry worked. My mind-reading had given me the distinct advantage of knowing exactly what that boy understood and how he understood it in realtime.
Carlisle had been delighted that I had found a way to use my gift for good like that. I had protested, saying that it wasn’t good for anyone to bond with me – a one-off explanation didn’t hold much risk, but much more than that . . .
I had wanted to make Carlisle proud. And I had wanted to see the boy succeed. When we had graduated, two years later, his parents had been overjoyed at the progress their son had made. I had tried to keep my tutoring efforts quiet, but Steven must have said something, because they wanted to take me out to dinner to thank me, and of course I had to decline.
Carlisle had gotten onto me then, asking me if I wanted to pursue psychiatry. I had expressed a wish, in the past, to become a doctor like Carlisle, but I knew it would probably take another century, at the very least, to be able to risk being around that much exposed blood all of the time. He thought psychiatry was a nice marriage of that thwarted desire and my own abilities, but I refused. People’s minds are not pleasant places, and frankly I had enough trouble with my own thoughts without taking on the burden of someone else’s. One of the hardest parts of my day was hearing everyone’s sorrowful and evil, unkind thoughts. I didn’t want to deal with any more of that.
But in 1994, when I had been playing a sixteen-year-old high schooler in Quebec, I had ended up playing ‘translator’ when an autistic child melted down in class, calming him down and trying to find ways to explain that a combination of bright lights, social confusion, frustration and an itchy seam in his sweater had been overwhelming him to the point of setting him off. A few days later he’d had a mute meltdown, where he didn’t scream or cry, but found himself entirely unable to form words. Then a teacher had asked him a question, which he had been far to frazzled even to process, and I had made the split-second decision to throw my voice and make it seem like he was answering the question.
A few days later he had thanked me and begged me to help him more. I had ended up passing myself off as a talented reader of body language and helping him deal with his frustrations for the next two years, and by the time I graduated I had become the unofficial SPED assistant to the entire school.
I didn’t want to teach. I didn’t want responsibility; I’d botch everything, surely. But I wanted to translate, to use my gift for good, to lessen the enormous gulf in people’s understanding of these children, and what those children went through every day. Parents and teachers couldn’t hear what it felt like to be overwhelmed by bright lights and the hum of the classroom fan, to be distracted by every sound and flash of movement, to get utterly lost in glorious daydreams, to know what one wanted but not have the words to express it, to feel their mind seizing up in incomprehension, to be so frustrated so fast that all power of speech and self-control escaped oneself, to feel the absolute bliss of nail-drumming, or foot-tapping, or the feeling of rubbing something smooth or soft or crumbly under their fingers and cheeks and mouths. It was a whole different world, one which the adults knew nothing of, and thus needed to learn to understand.
It didn’t hurt that as telepathy went, I often found their minds slightly more tolerable than anyone else’s. A lot of these children tended to be sincere and well-meaning, sometimes to a fault. There was an innocence about them, sometimes, which made me want to teach and guide and protect them, and of course my heart broke because I couldn’t do that. The children needed safety – which I couldn’t give – stability – which our sunlight-dependent schedule could rarely provide – and strong emotional bonds – which I didn’t want to let them form with me.
So I kept myself limited to the role of talented volunteer. I wanted friendships with these children and didn’t; they simultaneously needed to bond with and trust in me for their own good and didn’t. I was a help to them, but a danger as well. If I could just keep myself to a helper with a knack for guessing immediate needs, I could be of great help. But I couldn’t go any deeper. I could never help in the way I wanted, not truly. So the work was tough, and fraught with complications, but at least I was doing something good. Well, as much good as an evil, soulless being like myself could do. There had been one boy, a few years back, no attention span or impulse control at all, but he had the most wonderful imagination, so I had let him dictate his stories to me (we had published them in the school paper) and I had taught him watercolours and oil painting. There had been a girl with synaesthesia, and I had taught her how to play the piano. The colours in her mind as she had played Ode to Joy for the first time had been nothing short of beautiful. These days, whenever I passed myself off as a homeschooler (much easier since the 90s – the relief at not having to go to High School had been immense), I was volunteering for ‘college credits’, and whenever I passed myself off as a college student, I was, well, volunteering in the local schools.
In time, I had begun to bring Jasper along. We had had a severely dysregulated boy in Calgary in 2000, and after endless discussions of safety and having Alice hover in the background in case anything went wrong, he had come down to deal with the boy’s temper tantrums one rainy morning and never looked back. Jasper loved this work, probably more than I did. He drew a lot of satisfaction in being able to calm a child down, talk things out, and then get them to do an activity which said child could succeed at and feel good about. He was endlessly patient and easy-going with the children, calming even without his gift, because somehow, all of these children felt safe with him once they got to know each other a bit. When he got started, there wasn’t a self-esteem raiser like him, and heaven knew these children all needed some self-esteem. Jasper was the type who liked to make sad people happy again, and after more than a century of not being able to do that, he absolutely blazed with happiness and satisfaction and hope at being able to do it again. Even in his human life, he hadn’t had a chance to do this very much.
Just another thing that Maria’s recent visit had taken away from him, albeit temporarily. He wouldn’t be volunteering in schools again until the crux of his trauma response was over, and he would be dealing with this particular problem for years. After we’d first gotten him we’d had two decades of flashbacks, depressive spirals, extreme guilt, dissociation and bouts of uncontrolled pathokinesis. We’d just gotten Jasper into a more relaxed mindset for about a decade, and now Maria had had to come along and ruin Jasper’s peace of mind, and all of ours by extension. When Jasper was suffering that much, he lost control of his gift, which of course meant everybody else was miserable too.
My thoughts returned to my surroundings. In a school like this, with a cold and unfriendly principal, the minds of the special needs children weren’t that pleasant; they were overwhelmed, self-esteem was low and coming out in streams of foul resentment and loneliness, and Brody Howells in Third Grade was deliberately making a fuss in all of his lessons so that he wouldn’t have to do any work and humiliate himself.
I took him out of the class there and then and taught him how to recite Invictus right there so that the rhythm could calm him down. Being able to recite a famous poem would do wonders for his academic confidence. It was something he would be able to show off at home, or to Ms Clallam, his teacher.
It would be much harder, at Forks Elementary (and Forks Middle School and Forks High School, for that matter), to do this all properly. I would have to take charge, to give primary care, instead of just being the conduit between student and teacher, simply because there weren’t enough people to do it. And that meant forming actual relationships with these children. I didn’t think it would be good for these children to form deep relationships with me.
I discussed this with Carlisle and Alice that evening. I explained my predicament: there weren’t enough SPED teachers in Forks to take any kind of lead with these children, which meant I would be picking up a lot of the slack. And since I was a walking impediment to the well-being of the children I was supposed to be helping, volunteering in the schools of Forks would be counterproductive. I had my thirst under control, I knew (my family thought so too), but that left other matters. One problem which my family understood, at least, was that special needs children needed a lot of routine and stability, and my attendance could be unpredictable, depending on the weather. They still thought I was being silly: we had near-constant cloud cover in Forks during the school year, and if sunny days were forecast I could always call ahead and let the school and the parents know that I wouldn’t be in.
It was harder for them to understand my main objection to volunteering: I was inherently psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually damaging for humans to be around, especially humans as vulnerable as these ones. Alice wondered where on earth I’d got that idea from, and Carlisle blamed himself sadly for my lack of self-esteem, musing that if he’d done better I wouldn’t think myself one of the damned.
“I’m quite literally a predator,” I explained. “Those children may not be in physical danger anymore, but the predatory instincts still remain. I’ll be constantly trying not to lure them in, to lull them into a false sense of security. If they do bond with me – which, I think, is going to be difficult to avoid in this instance, given the long-term close proximity and all of the decisions I’ll have to be making – it will be because they are attracted to me as a predator. That’s not a psychologically healthy or safe relationship for anyone, let alone a vulnerable child.”
“So in your point of view,” said Esme softly, “you’re worried that these children might be drawn to you for the wrong reasons the closer you become.”
I answered in the affirmative.
“Well,” she said gently, “It’s your decision, Edward. You have to do what’s best for you.”
That was wrong, actually. I had to do what was best for the children. So, naturally, I decided that I wouldn’t be volunteering until they got a proper SPED teacher or enough staff in, not that I had high hopes for that. I called them up early next morning to let them know. Mrs Oldingham was rudely civil about it, just as I had expected, and then I went for a run.
It was as I was coming back that it happened. I could hear my family’s thoughts from almost four miles out. I knew instantly what had happened: Jasper was having a pathokinetic outburst. I could hear his despair and guilt and fear. His mind was erupting in dark greys and unpleasant flashes of scarlet, accompanied by sensations of a lurching stomach and the closest thing that a vampire could feel to nausea. Ugly greens and dark blues were pumping through his mind, and he was struggling in vain for control. He hadn’t had any physical outbursts this time, but he was standing stock-still in the house where the attack had hit, in the motionlessness of our kind which was our way of responding to stress. I could see him through Alice, Esme, and Carlisle’s minds. Alice was walking up to Jasper, touching his face tenderly and taking his hand. He was responding to that – I could see a powerful flash of warm, beautiful gold burst upon his mind – and he was able to move enough to twitch his fingers in Alice’s hand.
And he wasn’t fighting the outburst either, which, we’d all learned the hard way, was a very bad idea. The harder Jasper tried to control his outbursts, the worse they got.
That didn’t mean the outburst was pleasant. Fear and guilt were roiling in everyone’s minds: the terror and helplessness was reminding Esme of one of her first husband’s beatings, and Carlisle was trying not to think about how he’d felt when he realised he was transforming into a vampire. If Jasper had broken down around any other vampire, they would probably have attacked him.
Alice, though. It was marvellous, how she complemented him at times like this. His fear was making her think of the first time she had woken up and seen the sunlight reflecting off her hands, not knowing who or where or what she was. But that first memory also included her first vision of Jasper’s face, and the feelings of longing and safety and love and comfort and belonging that went with it, and that feeling was what she was sending him to Jasper. She was reminding him – not so much with words – that however much he struggled, however much guilt he felt, however much she had to help him – he had saved her first. He reached out to that feeling of love and hung onto it with all his might.
I slowed down slightly as I approached the house. The stomach-churning fear and nauseating guilt made it hard to walk in, but Jasper needed to know that he was physically safe from outsiders. Alice’s love could ground him, but it wasn’t enough on his own: he needed to know that the rest of us were protecting him (and more importantly, her) at a vulnerable time like this. Only then could he relax enough to get the outburst under control.
I got into the house and called out that the land was empty for miles around. Jasper relaxed a smidgen more. I called Emmett and told him to stand guard downstairs. It would make Jasper feel safer, and if he felt safer then he could get on with his outburst and be done with it.
Emmett turned up in a few minutes and slipped out of hearing range to give Jasper some privacy. I did eight perimeter runs, then wandered around the Olympic peninsula for the next several hours, killing time by re-familiarising myself with the terrain.
When I got back, Alice and Jasper had disappeared – off to the woods to ride the storm out, Esme told me – and I headed into the lab.
I worked there for several hours. I heard Alice and Jasper come back in and quietly sit down where Rosalie and Esme were discussing the merits of various dress cuts. Another good sign, I thought: Jasper must be handling this pretty well if they could come back into the house after just a few hours after an outburst, even if they were both visibly subdued. In the past they would have taken two or three days. Carlisle thought Jasper was doing well because he felt safe enough to lose control.
The night was drawing into the small hours when Alice was hit by a set of visions. It was involuntary, I could read – she wasn’t looking for anything. I wouldn’t have trusted it otherwise. (Alice had been known to actively look for visions that she wanted to show me to make me feel better about myself).
They were mostly visions about Jasper, but I was in them as well. Jasper, struggling to hold himself in. Jasper, getting on the start of another depressive spiral and plunging the entire family into misery for months at a time, perhaps a whole year. Jasper, still struggling but avoiding his depressive spiral by SPED volunteering at the Forks schools. Me, supervising him.
I’d have to volunteer in the Forks schools after all. For my family. For my brother. For Alice, who was my closest sibling and one of the dearest people to me on earth.
At eight AM, I called up the principal, and informed her that I’d be in that morning.