be afraid of the cold; they'll inherit your blood, pt. iii: slush (alice) pg13
fandom: twilight
character(s)/pairing(s): alice pov; the cullens + bella, charlie, renee
rating: pg13
word count: 3846
spoilers: new moon au.
notes: this is part three of five 'times bella never got turned into a vampire'. title and opening quote (translated) from regina spektor's 'apres moi.'
summary: au. jacob isn't there to pull her out of the water.
February. Get ink, shed tears.
Write of it, sob your heart out, sing.
While torrential slush that roars,
Burns in the blackness of the spring.-
“Ap`res Moi”, Regina Spektor
iii. slush
“No— I said in candy apple red, not burgundy. Candy app- do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Candy apple red,” the sales girl replied in a bored monotone, and I could hear the papery rustle of a magazine through the phone line.
“Yes. In a size 2.”
“I’m sorry?”
I groaned, getting fed up quickly. My hands fluttered around wildly, and even though she couldn’t see me, I hoped the edge was evident in my tone.
“It’s very simple. I’d like item 4725 in a size 2 in candy-“
I gasped as the vision hit, the phone clattering to the floor.
Bella. Cliff. Jump. Scream. Water. Splash. Rocks. Blood.
“Alice? Alice what did you see?” Jasper’s voice cut through my horror, and I clutched at his shoulder the way he was gripping mine.
“Bella, jumping off a cliff. Oh Jasper, there was so much blood!” I wailed, as the full effect of the vision struck me. My friend. My sister. Memories of forcefully painting her nails, of giggling on couches, of her and Edward, rushed my mind, and I placed a steadying hand to my forehead. Edward. Too much, too much, too much.
Bella was hurt badly. Or at least would be very soon.
I snatched up the phone from the hardwood, ending the call with the bubble-brained sales girl and dialing a new number.
“Who are you calling?” Jasper questioned, his face a patient mask of worry. This must be quite complicated for him, considering.
“I’m booking a flight to Forks.”
“No, Alice. You know what Edward said-“
“I don’t give a shit what Edward said,” I imitated his drawl, rolling my eyes. I pressed 1 for booking. “Bella is hurt, and I’m not going to just sit around and do nothing.”
Jasper waited impatiently as I bought a ticket for a flight leaving in just over two hours.
“You don’t even know if she’s alive.”
I swallowed.
“No. But I can hope. And if not-“ I grimaced, “Then I’ll help Charlie any way that I can.”
He crossed his arms over his chest, his disapproval practically emanating from his pores.
“If Edward calls I’m not going to lie to him about what’s going on.”
“If Edward calls-“
I paused as another vision rocked through my sight.
Bella. Hospital bed. Beeping. Alive.
I grinned.
“Tell him I’m with Bella at Forks hospital.”
The flight was practically torture. And not just because it had been weeks since I fed and I was stuck in an air tight steel drum with a hundred hungry heartbeats pulsing away all around me. But because I couldn’t see any more. I spent take-off to landing searching the future frantically for any change in Bella’s condition, but the future was stagnant.
Bella’s heart monitor beeping. Bella’s hands lying peacefully by her sides. Bella’s eyes closed.
I didn’t bother hailing a taxi.
I slowed to a walk once I came within sight of the hospital entrance, slipping through a back door that nurses and doctors used on their smoke breaks. There was certainly an advantage to having a father who had worked here before.
The nurse at the front desk glanced up as I tapped twice against the counter, knowing she wouldn’t hear my approach.
“Alice Cullen!” She squeaked, her hands coming up to rest against the sides of her neck in shock. I chuckled internally. Maybe some humans were more intuitive than they appeared. “What are you doing back? Is Dr. Cullen-“
“I’m alone,” I clarified quickly, not having time for her and her crush. “I’m actually here to see Isabella Swan.”
The nurse flushed at my obvious understanding of her intent, before nodding once to herself.
“Right. You two were close before you all left town. She’s in room 237. But-“ her hand shot up to still my quick departure. “Prepare yourself. She isn’t awake and it doesn’t look good.”
I nodded solemnly, confirmation for my visions that I didn’t need.
Spotting Charlie in a chair situated just outside her room, I made an effort to shuffle my steps loudly. When he did glance up, his expression was distant, overwhelmed. Poor guy.
“Alice?” he questioned warily, not trusting his own eyes.
“Hey Charlie. How is she?”
I checked ahead again. Bella’s eyes closed. I sighed.
“I-I don’t know.” His eyes found the twisted baseball cap in his white-knuckled hands, sniffling quietly. “Some fishermen found her when they were rowing away from the storm. Said they saw her fall. Pulled her out of the water, got the water out of her lungs. I was already here at the hospital, you know, for Harry. Sue should still be here somewhere. But then I heard a doctor say…” his rambling dwindled off, and I was almost glad he was too distracted to ask how I knew about Bella’s fall, or even how I got here so quickly. My excuses were thin. “Renee is coming.” He nodded to himself. “Renee will know what to do.”
And Renee did come. She arrived the next day, still slightly damp with Florida sweat and hair in a state of frazzled disarray. Her eyes were wild, her movements jerky with constant panic, and she was there. But she didn’t know what to do either.
“So this is- she’s just asleep right? Nature’s way of healing her from the trauma?”
The doctor glanced warily at her chart.
“Ma’am, your daughter is in a coma. The impact when her head hit the rocks fractured her skull and immediately sent her into severe unconsciousness. Her CT revealed a cerebral contusion. Only time will reveal the extent of the damage.”
“But she will wake up, right?” Renee demanded, hysterical humor in her voice.
“We will monitor her for intracranial swelling, but all we can do now is wait.”
“Wait.” Whether it was a question or not was unclear.
And we did wait. Charlie with a cup of coffee permanently glued to his hand, Renee fluffing pillows and rearranging flowers and flipping through channels to find something Bella might like, though we both knew Bella never really liked watching television. And me with my eyes closed, prodding the future with my boney, precognizant fingers.
This was how I knew he would be here almost as soon as he did.
“You came.” I said in an even voice, my eyes never opening.
The hospital was quiet and dark, visiting hours having ended ages ago and most of the nurses either off duty or sleepily conversing at the front desk. I had only snuck back in an hour ago.
I heard him walk to her bedside, and fluttered my eyelids just as his hand, hovering over hers, curled into a fist and shot into his pocket.
“Of course I did.”
I tried to contain my thoughts for straying to I told you so’s, or even more hurtful jabs of you didn’t seem to care too terribly much before, but from his pained expression I guessed some of them slipped through. Or maybe that was just his face.
“Who-“
“Jasper.”
I nodded
“What are the doctors saying?”
I focused on remembering the man’s exact words the day before, every tick of his face and how I’d decoded them at the time to mean something more.
A 4 on the Glasgow scale, limited response to painful stimuli, no eye movements or sounds.
“No sleep talking?”
I shook my head, somehow knowing that this would hurt him more than the rest.
“Not a peep.”
“But they didn’t say-“ he swallowed thickly. “She’s not in a vegetative state.”
“No.”
There was a pause in which Edward just stared intensely at Bella’s unconscious face, as if he could make her spontaneously awake if he wished it hard enough.
“What was she thinking?” he suddenly whispered fiercely, taking her shoulders into his hands briefly as if to shake some sense into her, before he let them drop. “She promised to take care of herself.”
I resisted the urge to scoff at his logic. You take away the love of a girl’s life and you expect her to, what, forget? But I didn’t say it aloud because I knew that’s exactly what he thought and it wasn’t what he needed to hear.
“She wasn’t trying to kill herself.”
His eyes flashed to mine.
“Her friend Jacob came by this afternoon. Seems the kids down there go cliff diving as a recreational hobby. Bella was stupid about it, but not suicidal.”
He let out a breath and I wondered if this was a burden off his shoulders, or if it made things better on him at all. Probably not.
But he stiffened again as he read deeper into my memories of the boy’s visit.
“Werewolf?”
I shrugged, unsure.
“I’m guessing.”
He let out a sound that came close to a pained moan, before his face drained of all emotion. This was problem-solver Edward now.
“Did you call Carlisle?”
“He’s flying in tomorrow. But I don’t think-“
“Stop.” His hand rested flat against the air between us. I knew he could hear me think it.
It wasn’t looking good. There was no guarantee that Carlisle would be able to help. There was really only one chance for her.
His face went blank, almost wild in its stagnancy, and then he was gone.
It continued like that for another month; Charlie and Renee visitors during the day, and Edward prowling in the shadows of her hospital room at night. I watched with a growing irritation that had little to do with my useless visions.
“This is the way it’s supposed to be. Death. Death is normal.” But he sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
“Normal? She jumped off a cliff after her vampire sweetheart left her because his brother tried to eat her. What about this is normal? You can’t put her in a vampire world and expect her to live by human rules.”
“But she is human. Or maybe you’ve forgotten.”
If you don’t change her I will.
Edward was before me in an instant, threat in every tensed twitch of muscle, in the narrow of his eyes. My expression hardened.
“Don’t you dare.” He spat. “If you even so much as-“
“She is my sister, Edward! I’m not going to just sit by and let your insecurities with what we are end her life when you know this is what she’d want.”
He leaned away from me, his expression suddenly more depressed than angry.
“She doesn’t know what she wants. She doesn’t understand what it would mean.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I will never understand how Bella put up with that. Do you realize how condescending you sound? She is a fully aware human being,” my eyes flickered to Bella in the bed, resisting the past tense implicit here. “She’s an adult. Even if you were her father, as you insist on acting, instead of her ex-boyfriend, you couldn’t say you have the authority to dictate her choices.”
He shook his head, not listening (never listening) and I threw up my hands. I didn’t need a vision to tell me he would persist in talking in circles if this conversation continued.
Another month passed.
“She’s no longer responding to pain, Edward. They had to put in a breathing tube this morning.”
Edward’s head bowed, moonlight striking the wild tips of his hair. His eyes were practically bruised and his face was so terribly pale.
“I know.”
The comatose father of four sharing the room with Bella died. I stared at the plain white sheet of the now vacant bed, laying a gentle hand over the pillow. I would have cried if I could.
“Just…” Edward bit out that night, silencing me with a hand. “Just go.”
My glare could have shattered glass.
Charlie gradually spent less and less time at the hospital, resuming his normal work schedule with a kind of hesitant relief that ached to witness.
“Maybe she’s not going to wake up.”
Renee’s hand smacking hard against his cheek practically echoed down the hall.
“Don’t you dare say that. She can hear you!” She moved to sit beside the hospital bed, running a soothing hand over Bella’s hair. “It’s okay, baby. You take your time.”
I came into the room one night to hear Edward whispering softly into Bella’s ear.
“You’re Bella. You’re still Bella and I’m Edward and I love you. I love you. I lied before, in the woods. Please wake up. I can’t-“ His eyes darted up to mine, standing in the doorway. His expression held utter desolation, helpless desperation. He was drowning.
“I can’t let the last thing I said to her be that I didn’t want her.”
It was that night that I decided.
Forging the documents was easy, and convincing Charlie and Renee to transfer Bella to a more-equipped facility with better doctors was a simple sell. Charlie wanted to be let off the hook; Renee just wanted hope.
Pulling it off without Edward’s knowledge, however, was a bit more difficult.
“You need to hunt.”
“I’m fine,” he lied, placing his hands over his eyes either to hide the evidence or as a habit of stress.
“Mm-hm,” I hummed sarcastically, “And if a patient starts bleeding… then what? You think you wouldn’t slip?”
He flinched and I knew I’d won.
Driving the emergency transportation van to one of my and Jasper’s properties in central Canada myself, I checked every few minutes on Bella’s vitals, even though I knew they had remained steady. We’d make it to the house; I’d seen it.
I didn’t tell the family; I knew there was a chance one of them would object, or accidentally let it slip to Edward in their thoughts. Carlisle had left just a week ago to Edward’s chagrin. He had done all he could but, in the end, that was nothing more than examining CTs and repeating the same diagnosis as the first doctor.
I’d hunted hours before leaving, and again when we’d arrived, quickly darting into the forest spanning the back of the property. Just to be safe.
Bella looked so peaceful lying on the dining room table (ironic, I know), and if I didn’t know better I’d think she was sleeping. I pretended for a moment that she was; strange Bella, napping on the furniture.
The machines whirred away as I touched one finger to the dip of my bellybutton, the only hint left of my humanity. It was the only evidence that I had been born, that I’d had a mother a father, despite how cruel I’d found out they’d been, instead of hatched or sprouted in the soil or created in a science experiment. But Bella wouldn’t have that problem, not if I had any say in the matter. I vowed that even if Bella forgot everything, right down to her name, I would hunt down every last detail of her life and offer it to her like sugar in war.
I unhooked her from the machines swiftly, only pausing once to speak to her, wondering idly if she could hear me.
“I hope this is what you really wanted.”
In the next moment my teeth were sinking into her skin.
(слякоть)
I was watching the Grandfather clock anxiously when Bella’s eyes opened, my vision from two hours before mirroring the tick-tock of the swinging pendulum perfectly.
Our eyes locked.
“I fell.”
I nodded.
“Am I dead?” her expression was so perplexed, with the slightest undercurrent of irritation at the possibility that she could indeed have left the mortal coil, that I laughed.
“No, Bella, you’re not dead.”
She studied me for a tension-filled moment, before flying across the room and wrapping her arms tight around me.
“I missed you.”
I grinned softly into her hair.
“I missed you too. But you must have questions.” I was hesitant to switch topics to more unpleasant things, but to my confusion Bella merely shook her head.
“Not really. I’m pretty sure I got everything.”
At my confounded expression she giggled.
“I’ll explain later.” Her face suddenly lit up in delight. “Let’s go hunting. I’m parched.”
It was over the corpses of a half-dozen drained deer (all for her) that she explained her visions. They were similar to mine, in a way, in that she could see what was coming. But it was more than that.
“Have you ever heard of Chaos Theory?”
My eyebrows scrunched together.
“You mean ‘a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and causes a tornado off the coast of Texas’?”
She nodded solemnly.
“I can see that. The way one event leads to another, and then more after that… it’s strange. It’s as if I’m surrounded by twisting ribbons, coming from all directions, and I can follow where they lead with my mind, or trace them back to where they started.
“I know that the hamburger that man is eating in a cabin fifteen miles from here will drip grease on the floor as he carries the dish to the sink, which will then cause him to spill his orange juice as he slips on it tomorrow morning. His shout will cause his dog to come running, knocking over a lamp in the process. The shattered pieces of it will be swept up and taken to the trash can down the road, where he’ll meet a woman by chance that he’ll someday fall in love with. But some of those shards will skitter under the carpet, and when they’re moving into a bigger house in ten years, she’ll cut her fingers on it and get an infection. And so on.
“Most of the ribbons are like that. Endless.”
I gaped at her.
“Don’t worry though, she’ll be fine. Shot of antibiotics should clear that right up. I doubt she’ll miss that finger.”
“That’s not what I- I mean- you can see everything?” and it wasn’t exactly jealousy that strangled my voice, but perhaps a touch of ashamed curiosity. I couldn’t see everything, and it was always subjective.
Bella shook her head.
“It’s very difficult to concentrate on just one string, especially with them crossing this way and that, interweaving.” She closed her eyes tightly, “It strains my eyes to try to look at them all.”
“I can imagine,” I shuddered, trying to picture every vision of every choice anyone would ever make flooding me all at once. It hurt just to visualize.
I paused.
“Wait,” I eyed her warily. “If you know all that about a human, aren’t you tempted to, you know…” I trailed off, not wanting to give her any homicidal ideas if they weren’t already there.
“No. I’m just fine.”
And she was; her eyes were still red, but lightening. Not even black with hunger.
“How?”
Bella smiled then, slyly.
“If I kill him now he’ll never get the girl.”
I laughed, relief stretching out wide and contented in my belly as I laid back against the grass, and Bella did the same beside me. For a few hours I didn’t worry about the messages probably piling up in the inbox of my deadened cell phone, or how Edward was most likely going to kill me when he found Bella immortal and stone. (By now he knew she was missing, and if the scare wasn’t enough my choice to go over his head would sure do the trick.) I didn’t even really think about the past, the few months of constant worry over a best friend dying slowly in front of me, except to be grateful I was no longer there.
I was just… happy.
“He’s going to come eventually,” Bella suddenly piped up beside me, just as dawn was blooming beyond the tree line.
I glanced over at her, curious about her steady tone. For all she knew, Edward wasn’t in love with her anymore and would simply be miffed that he would have to put up with her for eternity.
“He does love you, you know. He came, every night.”
Bella nodded calmly.
“Yes I know. I could hear him.”
I chuckled internally; Renee was right about one thing at least.
“And now?”
She settled her eyelids into graceful slits, her dark eyelashes standing out starkly against her pale skin. It looked like she was thinking, maybe meditating.
“You changed me into a vampire. I was dying. I was in a coma. I hit my head. I went cliff diving. Jacob told me about the sport. Jacob became my best friend. Jacob brought me back to life. I was broken. Edward lied and left me in the woods. Edward decided he knew what was best. Jasper attacked me.”
It took me a moment to recognize that she was reading her fortune, only backwards. She was tracing the ribbon back to the beginning.
“Sounds about right.”
Bella sighed, sitting up regretfully and clutching her knees to her chest.
“Do I have to deal with all that today? Can’t I wait until tomorrow?”
“You tell me,” I allowed, brushing a stray piece of hair behind her ear, “We can hold him off as long as you want.”
I snorted as she rolled her eyes.
“Yeah right. He’s going to come busting in through that door the second he figures out where we are.”
I frowned.
“I hope not. I rather like that door.”
So we existed, together, and it wasn’t waiting. I don’t think I could have stood another day of waiting. I missed Jasper horribly, wished that I could call him and tell him what was going on. But there was Edward.
I growled to myself.
Edward and his damn mind reading.
Surely he must have figured out what had happened by now, must be seething with rage at me, pitying Bella for falling victim to hideous, overzealous Alice. But then again he probably could have found us weeks ago if he was truly searching; it wasn’t too difficult to check out six properties spanning the world when you could run long distances and swim the oceans. Maybe he was giving us space. Maybe he understood that Bella couldn’t handle being faced with the man who had broken her and left her pieces scattered for nearly a year, even if she knew now it had been “for her own good”.
And I asked her about that. Yep, she thought it was condescending too.
We were so cut off from the rest of the world that it was easy to forget that the rest of it, beyond our little nook, still existed. I took her hunting; she rediscovered the cache of 60s literature that lay dusty on a shelf. She worked on her control, finding it was easier to resist the blood of hikers when she knew who they were, who they were going to be. My cell phone remained off. And she still wasn’t ready.
Watching Bella was like baking bread.
It was on a rainy day in July that she settled her book into her lap, folded her hands over her stomach and breathed out once.
“I’m ready to see him now.”
I took the door off the hinges, just in case.