Emmett had never been good at silence. Even now, with a century of practice carved into his skin, silence sat wrong in his chest. The world had become too still for him the moment he opened his eyes as something other than human, and though he had learned to bear it, he often filled it with laughter, with jest, with brute noise. But tonight, the silence had a different gravity. It wasn’t the silence of empty mountains, or the suffocating quiet of self-control when a human heartbeat pulsed too close. No—this was your silence.

You sat across from him, body curled loosely into the old rocking chair Esme had insisted on keeping though no one in the house used it. The lamp beside you hummed faintly, golden light kissing your skin, setting your features into sharp relief. Your angular eyes—the storm-grey kind that made even Emmett feel seen through—didn’t meet his. You were watching the window, though he knew you weren’t looking at the world beyond it. You never really looked at the world the way everyone else did.

You were different. You had always been different. He felt it before he knew you, before he learned the cadence of your voice or the scent that rose from your skin like heat from coffee—mint mocha edged with pear, impossible to ignore. He’d thought the world itself had shifted when he first caught it, as if fate had slammed its palm on the table and said, This one. This one is yours.

Emmett was not a man of complications. He fought, he laughed, he teased—he survived. Yet with you, there was no surviving; there was only drowning. You were small, delicate-looking, cherubic almost, but he knew better. He’d felt the quiet strength under your frame, the unusual power that thrummed through you even as a human. He wondered sometimes if you had been born carrying a piece of the same eternity he did, just waiting for it to be claimed.

And God, the thought of it tempted him. The urge to ask Carlisle to turn you, to keep you bound in his forever, sat heavy in him each night. But it wasn’t his choice. It never could be. Your indifference—the calm, calculated way you regarded life—kept him chained in a patient torment. You didn’t cling, you didn’t beg, you didn’t speak of forever the way he did in the desperate cadence of his thoughts. You thought in spirals, manipulative, brilliant, always ten steps ahead. Sometimes, Emmett feared you already knew how utterly he belonged to you, and simply enjoyed letting him stew in it.

Your head tilted then, curls falling against your cheekbones, catching in the lamplight. A faint smile ghosted over your lips—seraphic, unreadable. His chest tightened.

Emmett leaned back against the sofa, fists loose against his knees, dimples tugging into place though no sound left him. For once, he didn’t joke. He didn’t break the stillness with one of his easy quips. Instead, he let himself feel it: the raw, consuming want to protect you, to keep you, to make sure nothing—not bear, not man, not time—ever dared to touch you.

His memory betrayed him then. He thought of the bear that tore into him decades ago, how claws and teeth shredded the illusion of his humanity. He thought of Edward’s pitying eyes and Carlisle’s steady hands, of fire burning through his veins until death became a distant myth. He thought of how easily that story could have been yours.

The difference was clear. If it had been you lying broken in the woods, Emmett knew he wouldn’t have carried you for miles. He wouldn’t have weighed options or prayed for your survival. He would have ripped the world apart and damned consequence, because the idea of losing you—you, with your storm-wrought gaze and your calculated silences—was unbearable.

You shifted slightly, catching him staring. Those grey eyes pinned him, calm, cool, dissecting as always. And still, when you looked at him, Emmett felt seen not as a monster, not as a Cullen, not even as the indestructible brute everyone else mistook him for—but as the boy who laughed too loud, who lost to a bear, who loved too much.

And that was the silence he could live with.