i was all horns and thorns...

unfinished fic dump 6

2015-02-08T11:35:48Z

aurora
twilight. alice/edward/bella. '... and then they all made out' seems to be the moral to a lot of these unfinished fics

“Bella.”

“Mph.”

“Bella, honey, can you wake up for me?”

“Mrgle.”

“Why don’t you just pinch her, Edward?”

“Restrain yourself, Alice. Bella wake up.”

“But then the peacocks will get me.”

“Peacocks? What have you two been up to, Edward?”

“Alice, if you have nothing helpful to add then please just don’t say anything at all.”

“Alice?”

“Yep! That’s me.”

“Aaah, why are you so loud at…” Bella’s head swivels toward the alarm clock. “…two-thirty in the morning?”

“One of the many perks of being a vampire is never having to sleep. Also, immortality. Both quite helpful when annoying your future sister-in-law.”

Bella blinks into the all-consuming darkness, willing her eyes to adjust so she can find Alice’s face and smack her. She settles for pointing a finger in the general direction her voice is emanating from. She thinks.

“You woke me up,” she states accusingly, her head never leaving the pillow.

“It was important!”

“You woke me up. And judging from the chipperness in your tone, doom is not in our immediate futures. So that means you woke me up for no reason.”

“Man, you’re grouchy when you’re sleepy. Edward never told me, but you are such a sourpuss.”

“That’s because I know better than to wake her up from her beauty sleep. Not that she-“

“Needs any beauty sleep because she’s beautiful no matter what, blah blah blah. No offence, Edward, but sometimes you read like a romance novel character. Except without all the se-“

“Was there some reason that I’m awake? Or is this how you get your jollies now? Is Emmett waiting in the corner getting ready to yell boo?”

“No, though don’t give him any ideas.”

“True. Once was enough.”

“But the look on your face was just. So. Funny.”

A growl.

“I don’t think Edward appreciates my magnificent tumble down the stairs afterwards, though.”

“Oh please. It was two. Two steps. And you fell onto a cushion, which I, thankfully, had the foresight to lay down for you.”

“If you had a vision of her falling, why didn’t you stop Emmett?”

“The face, Edward. Don’t you remember?”

“I think he was too busy having a coronary.”

“Vampires can’t have coronaries, Bella. No, what he had was called a snit-fit. Don’t make excuses for him.”

“It was justified!”

“Oh, hush.”

“Um, guys? Not that I’m not enjoying listening to you guys bickering but is there a reason you woke me up out of a sound sleep?”

“Oh. Right.” With that she hears a click, and her bedside is flooded with light from the lamp, blinding her in the process.

“Ak!”

“Whoops! Forgot about that while human pupil dilate-y thing, sorry. But we’re taking you to see an aurora borealis! Isn’t it exciting!”

“It was supposed to be a surprise, Alice.”

“Don’t talk to me about surprises. I haven’t had one of those in a century.”

“Focus.”

Bella sat up on her elbows, feeling her sleep-addled muscles protest against movement. And consciousness.

“A what? Why is the light on? And why are you- oh no,” she groaned as Alice went foraging under her bed and produced Bella’s tennis shoes. She turned toward Bella’s drawers and pulled out a hoodie and jeans. “You mean we’re going outside? It’s freezing!”

Alice looked at her strangely. “Well we have to be outside to see it, obviously. And it’s March; what did you expect?”

Bella harrumphed as she swung her legs over the side of the bed.

“I expected to be allowed eight hours of sleep without a harebrained vampire deciding the night sky was more important. Next you’ll tell me I have to sleep on the ground.”

Alice smiled guiltily. “I brought us a blanket at least.”

She held the fabric up for Bella inspection, and she glared. Unsatisfactory.

Alice grinned as if she was the mind-reader in the family and had Bella’s number. “There’s a heated one in the car. We can use the car battery to keep it going.”

Improvement.

They made a halting procession out to the car still idling in the driveway, Bella still cocooned in her comforter, Edward pecking about like a mother hen trying to make sure Bella didn’t trip over her wrappings, and Alice skipping backwards just in front letting her excitement out in manic bursts of clapping. It was a wonder Charlie didn’t wake to find his daughter being whisked away (kidnapped, Bella growled) into the night.

The sky back home with her mother had been choked with Phoenix smog, a dense night pricked by a small handful of stars. But Forks’ sky was glittering with a pantheon of delicate light, a vision of wonder nearly as tactile as an arsenal of freckles on pale skin.

Bella and Alice both laid their heads on Edward’s lanky, lean torso, their faces side by side but their bodies facing opposite directions. Bella glanced over to find herself nose to nose with the other girl, quite literally – Alice’s little button nose was mushing slightly against her own, and she could feel her empty breaths against her lips. Her eyes crossed trying to inspect the point where they touched. Bella’s eyes flickered up from where they’d unwittingly wandered, to find Alice staring at her intensely with eyes as unreadable as cool black marble. Edward’s hand that had been absentmindedly stroking Bella’s hair paused, and his other that had been clutched in Alice’s fingers that rested on her stomach clenched minutely.

“Do you think there are aliens out there somewhere?”

“Um, I really don’t want to think about little green men witnessing what we just did.”

“ET must be scandalized.”

unfinished fic dump 5

2015-02-07T14:57:56Z

reunion
twilight. alice and bella get ready for their high school reunion.

“Hold still.”

“What are you doing?”

“In what universe does fluttering your eyelashes constitute holding still?”

“Sorry, sorry.” A beat. “Are you sure this is okay?”

“Carlisle wasn’t worried.”

“But… what if they know?”

“I thought you’d known be long enough to have faith in my cosmetic skills, dearest Bella.”

Bella was careful not to make a comment disparaging the woman currently wielding a lethal-looking eyelash curler. But there was a reason she usually did her make-up – no matter how sporadically it was applied – by herself. She and Alice didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye on the line between ‘light brushing of mascara’ and eyelashes leaden down with gunk. Even her super-strength eyelids sometimes floundered under the weight of Alice-applied cosmetics. But Bella supposed this didn’t really count in the same sphere. She didn’t read fashion magazines but she had gathered that make-up was usually applied to make one look younger and more alluring; they had slightly different motives on this occasion.

“Why didn’t Rosalie and Em do this last year? They were in town.”

“Do you think Rosalie would have left the house looking anything but her best? I think she’d rip her face off if she ever found a wrinkle.”

They both heard the distinct sound of Rosalie huffing indignantly downstairs, rustling the pages of her magazine like a disgruntled cockatoo ruffles her feathers.

Alice and Bella shared an amused look in the mirror over the smoothed tresses of her wig. The brunette-turned-faux-graying-middle-aged-mom fingered the ends of the fairly convincing hair piece, rounding one tendril around her finger. Alice spun her around in the dressing chair once more, inspecting the strategic shading she’d filled in around her eyes, mouth. She actually looked almost forty. Alice nodded, pleased.

“You’ll do.”

Alice had already given the same aged treatment to her own face and when the sisters-in-law stood side by side facing the lighted mirror, Bella could almost believe it; that they were growing old, gracefully; that they would one day be white-haired and stiff-kneed and tilting over the arms of wing-backed chairs to just make out the tiny words of their grandchildren. The one chink in their illusion was their hands; Alice said there wasn’t much to make their fingers and palms show the years they’d lived. So their hands shone out, pale and unlined, from the sleeves of a thirty-eight year old that was finally wearing a face that matched the number.

“Twenty years,” Bella murmured, almost not believing it had been that long since she’d walked across that stage, wearing that hideous yellow gown, heart thumping nervously as she tried not to trip. “I feel old.”

Alice chuckled, briefly linking her arm around Bella’s waist before skipping over to the closet to pick out the perfect pair of ‘thirty-eight but still fashionable’ shoes. “Try celebrating your one-hundredth.”

unfinished fic dump 4

2015-02-07T14:44:23Z

if life's a peach then, honey, you're the pits
the office, jim, pam/karen. jim and pam break up while she's going to school in new york. and he's fine. until she starts dating karen.

Something occurs to Jim, as the fist is flying towards his face and he’s about the get a lesson in velocity (distance divided by time, in case you were wondering):

Life just isn’t fair.

Yeah, the sentiment is expressed fairly often and, true, he probably should have known better by the ripe old age of twenty-seven. But he just couldn’t bring himself to accept the truth of pessimism (which, funny how it turns out, is actually just realism unfairly chastised and wrapped in a shit bow by the dumb-ass optimists of the world) until just this moment.

And okay, he has a second realization as a million bursts of light explode across his eyelids:

Girls are mean.

Also: ow.

Pam calls Jim and instead of calling to tell him she failed her class, she tells him that she’s doing really well. Her professor think she should pursue it further and the dean approached her about coming back the next year for some higher-level classes.

“So…”

Pam sounds almost out of breath, the word blowing across the phone’s mouthpiece in a burst.

“So.” He stretches his legs out on his couch, trying to act like another six months is no big deal.

“I reenrolled for next semester.”

Jim tells himself of course. That he hadn’t hoped she’d come home anyway. But that seems silly and selfish now.

“Mm-hm.” And he feels like an ass for not saying how great it is, for not pointing out all the cool things she’ll get to do in the city during Christmas.

It’s not just six months. And the distance stops being just about the long drive.

Pam breaks up with him. It isn’t sudden - he’s actually been expecting it since she left for that first class – but her voice sounds so clear, so unburdened, that he feels heavy in comparison.

“I’m not sure when I stopped being the receptionist who doodles in her free time to the artist who happens to answer phones for a living but whatever it is I don’t want it to stop. When I was with Roy… it was different. I was different. But you’ve really helped me go that extra step. I can finally do what I want now.”

This all makes sense to him. It’s the next part that he’s having a little trouble wrapping his mind around. See, Karen got promoted. Which, don’t get him wrong, is great for her. Really. She’d always been more for the corporate ladder, the ascending to higher levels of Dunder-Mifflin greatness.

But this new shiny job of hers? Is in New York. With Pam. And the whole thing makes him think that there should be a more explicit word for irony. Or that the one that exists should be inherently dirty. Because he knows it’s not normal for a guy to have a town full of exes. That the mere act of dumping someone (or being dumped, in one case) shouldn’t be enough to draw them all towards one another. It was like he was a polar object and they were magnets and something about that analogy in itself was just so so wrong.

He hears things. Keeps tabs on their Facebooks (it’s not stalking if they’re all friends, right?). So he notices when Pam’s relationship status changes from single to it’s complicated. He has to know what that means. He can’t sleep. Does that mean she’s casually dating? Friends with benefits?

And then one foggy morning he’s scrolling through his news feed when he sees it. Pam Beesly is now in a relationship with Karen Fillipelli.

And he’s fine. He is. He calls Pam, and their conversation is light, polite; he doesn’t grind his teeth when he hears Karen laughing in the background, a comfortable part of Pam’s ambient noise, now.

He’s fine.

It’s when he’s in New York for a conference that their worlds’ collide. He knows he shouldn’t have gotten drunk. Because one second he’s sitting in a bar thinking, I should go visit Pam and Karen, and the next thing he’s on their doorstep at three in the morning, scotch-heavy fist pounding on their door.

Pam is actually the one who punches him: he’s drunk and goes to their apartment to be an ass, so it’s not like he can blame her. She feels really bad about that later, when he wakes up on their couch. They have a nice talk, and he goes home fairly at peace with the whole thing.

He meets someone later on. And she isn’t Pam, and she isn’t Karen. He’d like to say she was somewhere in between, because it sounds poetic and like stories should end, but she isn’t. True, she’s funny and sweet like Pam, and confident and sarcastic like Karen, but she believes in him like neither of them ever did. She loves him from the beginning (she’ll say it’s from the minute they met, but he suspects that’s just a line), and she lets him love her back.

unfinished fic dump 3

2015-02-07T14:23:38Z

rusted firm, no lie
lost. after the finale, sun's conscious drifts between realities.
a/n: honestly not sure where this one was going? something deep and metaphysical i'm sure, lol

Can you map the path a soul takes from the open mouth of a corpse? Does it linger? Will it bloom and fade like the breaths of an Eskimo, or drop water-like into an ever leaking pool?

Tell me a story, a small child asks her nurse maid, tell me what happens after we die.

No one knows, jagiya. But some say a soul simply wanders, searching for a friendlier world, like a rabbit frightened from its den.

Sun will think of this for many nights, and then, gradually, will forget it.

o

It’s dark and she’s cold. Her clothes are damp.

The world sharp and jagged and why is everything suddenly so quiet?

Sun wakes to the repetitive beeping of a heart monitor.

“Thank fuck,” Sawyer curses from her bedside, and she doesn’t recognize the lilt to his voice. Her brow tightens, confused. But then she remembers – Sawyer’s daddy’s truck swerving into the corn field, the brightness of her eyelids as her head hit the window…

Kate shushes him from her other side. “You can go back to sleep, Sun. It’ll all be better in the morning.”

Sun wakes to the repetitive beeping of a heart monitor.

The florescent bulbs sting her eyes. She blinks.

“Go back to sleep,” Jin murmurs softly in Korean, and she almost doesn’t understand the syllables. Almost. She remembers being shot with a sudden clarity, her fear for the baby. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”

Sun wakes to the repetitive beeping of a heart monitor.

The sound fades as she opens her eyes to an abandoned stretch of beach, dawn arriving on a glittering wave. She coughs a mouthful of water into the sand beside her head.

Sleep, the trees whisper, and she does.

unfinished fic dump 2

2015-02-07T13:55:25Z

do you believe in magic in a young girl's heart
glee/hp crossover. the top students from Lima’s McKinley School of Witchcraft and Wizardry get sent to Hogwarts for the Triwizard Tournament. ummm... there's not a really a plot to this, just random American Hogwarts headcannons and character interactions.

The day Rachel Berry got her acceptance letter to the Lima’s McKinley School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was the day that a star was born.

(Not really, though, since Rachel was born eleven years earlier so that’s technically her real date of origin, and has she mentioned that she’s been tap dancing whilst levitated since she could walk?)

Naturally, the letter came as nothing of a surprise to the Berry household, both her fathers being pureblood wizards, but that didn’t stop her from running through the house, slipping and sliding on her eleven year old stocking-clad feet, waving the parchment through the air like a conquering flag. It was still hung above her bed at home in a gold frame with stars winking around the perimeter.

She didn’t know many kids her age, wouldn’t have known how to speak with them, besides Noah from down the road, who she only knew because their parents were members of the same Sephardic wizarding community (a small pool within a small pond, they were practically raised together) who pulled her pig-tails and called her crazy, but always saved her the strawberry Bertie Botts Every Flavor beans because he knew they were her favorite. On the whole he was quite unpleasant though.

When she got to McKinley she discovered that the world was in a greater state of disrepair than she had realized; children her age were rude, messy, and spent far too much time talking about brooms and enchanted nail polish. (“It changes to match your robes,” a blonde Hufflepuff said flatly, not comprehending that some people had a Transfiguration essay due that would not be improved by a smear of confused lacquer that was attempting to mimic the shade of the drapes.) But Noah was sorted into her house, and they were sort of friends, so that was okay. And she met some people from Ravenclaw that she studied with, since Noah never seemed at all interested, though that Kurt boy and his friend Mercedes had personalities that were quite strong. (Which she knew a thing or two about.) Half-way through first year, that horrible girl Noah had befriended at the start of term (she wasn’t jealous of Santana, not a bit), sauntered up to her in the common room after a class where Rachel had told Professor Shue off for improperly explaining the contraceptive charm, and with one hand on her hip, proclaimed, “You’ve got a shit fashion sense and your voice makes my ears bleed, but you’ve got cojones. Wanna jinx the boys I saw peeping in the girl’s Quiddich locker room?” All in all, things were bearable.

She wore printed sweaters under her robes and knee socks that almost reached the hem of them (but if you asked the right boys on the Quiddich team they’ll tell you how one time she was twirling around at choir rehearsal and they found out her skirts under them barely exist at all.

She’s at the top of her class by the end of second year, nosing past Quinn Fabray on the list (which, honestly, Quinn’s transfigurations are underwhelming at best, so it’s really no surprise.) Her one weak spot is Potions- the needless cruelty that no doubt lends to acquiring those rat tails made her well over with tears and her vegan stomach clench. She has no use for flying, hates how recklessly dangerous it is (not to mention the splinters) but there was a brief period when she became obsessed with statistics and game plans and the Chudley Cannons’ chance at next year’s World Cup.

(This was in no way related to her equally brief feelings of affection towards a certain awkwardly built Beater who happened to captain the Hufflepuff team. Not at all.)

By the start of fourth year she was moderately well-liked by a decent portion of her year, on track to break records for number of house points won through sheer stubbornness, and fresh from a summer spent in Bali with her dads.

All this was to say that when Headmaster Figgins announced that the Triwizard Tournament would be held at Hogwarts and the top three witches and wizards from each house would be eligible to go and compete, Rachel didn’t hesitate to begin packing.

Excerpt from McKinley, A History –

After a wave of immigration from Great Britain just before the Muggle WWII, who through divination and just plain paranoia started to leave at the first signs of tension, the witches and wizards decided to found a school in the image of Hogwarts, the school of their childhoods. But some things got lost in translation. The founders had originally nixed the idea of carrying over the Slytherin house, since it had only seemed to cause problems back home. They’d created the Deercot house instead, which valued independence, sense of humor, and Muggle studies – in an effort to curb the pure-blood enthusiasts – but it was a failed experiment. The sorting hat seemed unable to place every fourth student or so, sputtering under the effort of placing the natural-born Slytherins in any other house, and so Slytherin returned.

Only the cowboy hat they used for sorting never quite got the message, or was being particularly obstinate, because every year it made a small handful of students, mostly half-bloods or purebloods that found the non-magical fascinating, into Deercots. They formed a band of roving pranksters, who considered themselves entirely apart from the other houses, and went around terrorizing first-years, asking if they were sure they didn’t want them to explain the espresso machine one more time because, really, it was quite fascinating. The Great Whoopie Cushion Attack of ’97 was legendary, because none of the other students knew how to guard against it. They knew the counter-spell to the Jelly Legs Jinx, but not how to watch where they sat. There was also that one time they tried to secede from the school in ’81, which proved unsuccessful when they realized that without the school they’d be cut off from magic, and none of them actually knew how all their Muggle trinkets worked.

(Rachel is friendly with one though, Tina, who had fallen in lust with the Muggle goth fad and hadn’t let it go.)

The three most talented witches and wizards from each house are chosen to represent Lima – Rachel (naturally), Santana and Noah from Slytherin; Finn, Brittany and Sam from Hufflepuff; Quinn, Kurt and Mercedes from Ravenclaw; and three students Rachel didn’t associate with from Griffindor.

(Ever since an army of former-Griffindors had lost the war in ’63, they had been rather ostracized. I mean really, is planning a line of attack really that much more difficult than charging in blind?)

Tina was the lone representative from the Deercots, though, which could either be because the house was so small (insanely small; a shed really) or because the rest had refused to take part in a fit of that famous Deercot independence.

She knew schools’ contestants usually arrived on flashy vehicles with flying horses or monstrous ships, but Headmaster Figgins waved off anything high budget with an assertion it was wasteful. So they ended up flooing in. She could tell by the students of Hogwarts’ faces that it was rather anticlimactic, with Kurt coughing exaggeratedly in the lead and Santana just behind threatening bodily harm if the soot permanently stained her robes.

Lima students didn’t wear uniforms beyond the robes, but Rachel knew most European schools did, and when she looked around the courtyard it wasn’t that difficult to pick out her schoolmates from the crush of Hogwarts students. There was Quinn in her tailored blue robes, the prim chiffon tie of her buttoned shirt underneath showing above the top clasp of her robe. Kurt was wearing traditional black, but with a fedora and bow tie, and beside him Mercedes was in purple, glitter zebra stripes catching the sunlight. Santana’s robes were ostentatiously red, just edging on orange, just to make it clear they were not under any circumstances to be confused with Griffindor colors. It made Rachel smile, how alike they were in their differences. She was so busy smiling fondly that she didn’t notice the redhead about to trip over her rolling suitcase and come crashing into her, until he did just that.

“Arg! The fringe of orange cried, and he managed to catch himself before they both went tumbling to the ground. He steadied her by her elbows, shook the hair out of his face and promptly turned as scarlet as his hair. “I am so sorry. Bloody good job I’m doing at inter-school cooperation, knocking into people like this.” He seemed to be muttering to himself more than her, but Rachel put on her best show smile and held out her hand.

“That’s quite alright. I’m Rachel Berry.”

“Ron. And again I am so so- Slytherin.” Ron had been trying to straighten her luggage scattered around her feet, and at that moment found himself eyelevel with her Slytherin prefect badge.

“Well, yes,” Rachel clarified uncertainly, and her megawatt smile dimmed just the slightest. At that moment two more Hoqwarts students made their way over to Ron’s side- the boy, a bespectacled, lanky thing with an oddly shaped scar that could only be Harry Potter, that was eyeing Ron ruefully, and the girl, hair so bushy Rachel thought she would politely offer use of her hair straightener, was already eyeing Rachel suspiciously.

“Alright there Ron?” Harry Potter questioned, wiping some dirt off his shoulder.

“Brilliant.” Ron took a further step back from her, firmly placing himself by his friends’ side. “Just didn’t have my eye out for this one’s massive pile of luggage.” Somehow this had turned into her fault?

“Oh,” Harry had just noticed the snake crest on her bags. “You’re in Slytherin?”

Rachel let the last vestiges of her courteous smile drop and allowed the frown that had been building to firmly settle on her face.

“Yes. Is that a problem?” The frizzy haired one was just beginning to form a response, when Rachel felt two people walk up to her sides. She glanced over at Santana on her right and Noah at her left, and recognized the hard set to their jaws. They were evenly matched now, three to three, and they looked to be some distorted mirror image of each other: Harry and Rachel’s dark hair and unsure expressions, Ron and Santana’s sharp looks of suspicion, and the girl’s and Noah’s frankly ridiculous hair styles.

The confrontation ends in a stalemate, and leaves an unsatisfied, sour taste in Rachel’s mouth.

Dumbledore informed them that they’d be sharing rooms with the Hogwarts students of the same house, and then eyed Tina, sitting awkwardly in the corner, and suggested they’d make other arrangements for her. They never got around to it though, and Tina was left wandering the halls that night. Thankfully the Room of Requirement had shown itself to her and she had happily informed them over breakfast that the sheets had skulls on them.

Rachel herself had had a rough night. Once they’d really started talking, the two Slytherin camps had had a… divergence of opinion.

“Nothing worse than Hufflepuffs. Except Mudbloods of course.”

Santana stood, and Rachel could tell she was ten seconds away from telling Noah to hold her earrings. Santana’s girlfriend was a Hufflepuff, and Noah, though usually too busy picking on first years to attend to inter-house rivalries, was scowling; his best friend Finn was also a Hufflepuff and his mother was Muggle-born.

“You did not just say those words to me. I’ll have your bal-“

“I’ll have you know that both Hufflepuffs and Muggle-borns are extremely vital to the magical world. 27% of aurors are Hufflepuffs, and approximately 1 out of every 3 important magical discoveries, most notably spell-work, are made by the Muggle-born because they bring a fresh perspective.”

Everyone was staring at Rachel, but her eyes were locked on this unpleasant blonde boy and his highly illogical opinions. Honestly, all it takes is a little research. “How many ground-breaking feats have you made-“ she hesitated on the last name, usually being insistent to dismiss nicknames or last names. Noah knew this, and his mouth dropped open slightly in her pause. “Malfoy.” She stared him down triumphantly.

“Are you sure she isn’t a Griffindor?” Pansy whispered to Santana, but in the silence of the Slytherin common room, the question boomed.

“Yep. She’s definitely all ours.”

Santana was looking at her with something like pride but with a pinch more smugness than the usual person, and Rachel smiled back.

Hogwarts seemed to divide their class schedules by houses much more than they ever had at McKinley. It wasn’t that she disliked the Slytherins – they were her people after all – but she missed Kurt and Mercedes gossiping in the back row, and Brittney’s questions that left the professor bewildered and unsure how to continue, and even Quinn rolling her eyes at Rachel’s excitement about their new essays. Sure, the houses at McKinley slept in the same rooms and hung out in the common room, but they didn’t always sit eating together or have all the same classes; Rachel found it rather creepy that they were confined to one long table of just Slytherins for meals. It was like they were being kept apart, which she didn’t find healthy in the least. No wonder the rivalry was so strong between the Griffindors and the Slytherins here; it’s hard to see the other side as people when you rarely saw them at all. She barely even came across people from the other houses, besides passing each other in the halls, and those she knew that did had to make an effort. Santana snuck nightly into the Hufflepuff girls’ dormitory, and she knew Noah was practically playing musical beds every week, because he bragged about it every morning.

Hermione took the empty seat beside her in the library that Wednesday. She folded her hand carefully in her lap, a two-pronged crease forming between her eyebrows. “I think we got off to the wrong start.” And she looked as if she was waiting to be laughed at, to be cursed and spit on, and Rachel wondered crossly exactly what the Hogwarts Slytherins had done to make her expect so little of the whole house. She smiled brightly instead and extended a hand.

“Me too. Truce?”

Hermione looked startled but, seeming to find no fault in neither her fingers nor her earnest expression, took her hand and Rachel shook it excitedly. Friends weren’t something she came by often.

“What are you studying?”

“Divination.”

Hermione appeared to be holding in an expression of distaste out of politeness.

“I know it’s not thought of very highly, but Daddy says I could have inherited the sight from Bubby, and I’ve always thought I’m a little psychic. I’m quite skilled for a witch my age, but my tessomancy isn’t perfect. I always seem to be seeing giraffes in the leaves, but logically not everyone I read for could be about to lose their left hand. I have trouble with ovomancy, for obvious reasons.”

Hermione looked at her interrogatively. “Why?”

“I’m a vegan.”

The other girl seemed to sink into herself at this point, appearing to be thinking something over. Rachel watched her think in one of her rare moments of silence, content to notate her own transcriptions of last class. When she roused, turning her serious gaze on Rachel, she set down her quill.

“Would you like to study for Potions sometime?”

Rachel resisted her initial compulsion to clap and do a little twirl, and instead picked up her quill again, smile wide and giddy on her face. “That would be nice.”

“You don’t act like a Slytherin” Ron pointed out, his arms crossed but face twitching, as if he was unsure what stance he was supposed to be taking.

“I actually almost got sorted into Griffindor, but I argued Ralph down.”

She saw Harry turn his head slightly at this, as if she’d caught his attention, out of the corner of her eye.

“Ralph?”

“The Sorting Hat.”

“You named your Sorting Hat Ralph? Some kind of queer ship you’re running over there.”

“Don’t be silly. Ralph named himself.”

Ron shook himself out of the murky waters of swamp confusion, only to return to another state of bewilderment.

“Why wouldn’t you want to be in Griffindor?”

Something about his expression told her not to insult the house whose table she was sitting at. She’d heard from Draco that Ron’s whole family was in Griffindor, going back generations. She thought that was nice, to have family traditions.

You don’t understand. At McKinley it isn’t like it is here. The Griffindors are kind of… ostrasized.”

“Whatever for?”

Rachel hesitated. “People don’t like to talk about it. Let’s just say there was a crew of Griffindors that lost a very important war.” She raised her eyebrows, and something like realization dawned on Ron’s face, before he frowned.

“I thought that was a Muggle battle.”

“It was, but then the magical community got involved… it was a mess. And everyone blames the Griffindors because they went in unprepared, no back up, no battle plan. It was grossly irresponsible. I know what you all think about the Slytherins here, and it’s not to that level, we don’t hate them or anything, but… it’s dangerous. That level of ego. Everyone says that Griffindors grow up to be reckless and big-headed. And I… I didn’t want that. I wanted to be a part of something great. But-“ she hedged, seeing Ron start to fume. “I’m sure you’re not like that. I mean, you wouldn’t go into to battle without a plan.”

Hermione seemed to be looking at Harry with a face of sharp smugness while he sputtered.

“Well, err, that is to say-“

“I see your grasp on the English language has much improved, Potter,” Draco drawled from behind her, “Pretty soon you’ll have mastered nouns. Maybe even a full sentence.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “What do you want, Malfoy?”

“Just checking to be sure you weren’t torturing one of my Slytherins. I thought for sure she could only be here under duress. Are they holding you hostage, Berry?”

Rachel grinned. “Nope. I’m here of my own free will.”

He sniffed. “Your taste of company is unbefitting of a Slytherin. But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’ve been temporarily struck blind and deaf. I can’t say the same for Lopez’s sense of direction. She appears to have found herself amongst the Hufflepuffs.”

They all turned to watch Santana sitting on the table in front of Brittney, explaining an article in the Daily Prophet to the blonde. She leaned forward to tuck a strand of hair back up into Brittney’s hunting cap. Rachel smiled.

“I think her direction is just fine.”

Rachel walked into the Slytherin common room to find Theodore blatantly hitting on Santana, and Santana blatantly rebuffing him. So basically it was a typical Tuesday.

“Listen, you little rat-faced twerp. I told you I’m dating someone else.” Rather than shrinking under her poison gaze, Theodore puffed up.

“My face isn’t ratty, it’s aristocratic. And I’m sure you get lonely with your lover all the way back in America. I could just-“

“What?” Santana violently shoved his creeping fingers away from her thigh. “She’s in another house, and she’s in the building and she has a nasty right hook,” which was a lie, Brittney even had a hard time eating gummy bears because she was afraid of hurting them, “so back the fuck up!”

Theodore seemed to be mulling that over, before his face it up.

“Don’t. Even. No one touches my girl but me, even if I’m supervising.” He finally deflated.

“I take it you don’t do much inter-house dating?” Rachel questioned curiously.

“Why would we?” Pansy piped up from one of the leather chairs by the fireplace, playing a game of wizard’s chess with Vincent which had devolved into a game of who could cheat better. Her queen was flirting her way past his knight. “Slytherins are clearly superior in every way.”

Rachel knew this to be a lie. Not from personal experience, mind you, but she’d heard enough talk from Santana and Noah to ascertain that Hufflepuffs were the best at foreplay, Ravenclaws the most creative in bed, and Deercots the best kissers. Slytherins were the dirtiest, but that was to be expected. Neither had any first-hand knowledge of the Griffindors’ skills, but she’d heard Noah grumbling once that they never put out.

Artie, one of the Griffindors, wheeled up to them. His mother had been hit by a magnified petrificus totalus curse just before he was born and it had gone disastrously wrong; he couldn’t move the lower part of his body and not even the most advanced mediwizards could counter it. He made it work for him though; his chair hovered about six inches from the ground and played Muggle rap music whenever he felt like he needed to make an entrance; she admired his courage.

When they’d announced the lists of student who would go to Hogwarts for the Triwizard Tournament she’d thought “well that’s a waste; what good would he be in the challenge?” She felt guilty for even thinking it now, and she smiled apologetically.

Did you know that if you sing magic it creates murals of the air? And each singer changes it, their mood and talent, so that each performance is different; no two are the same.

“I can see what you all are thinking when you look at people from other houses.” Hermione frowned, and even then Rachel knew she was thinking that she couldn’t know, no one could tell that. “You think ‘that Hufflepuff boy’ or ‘the girl from Ravenclaw’ and when it’s someone you don’t like, you think, ‘well he’s in Slytherin and they’re all alike.’”

Hermione’s face twisted, and Rachel hated this, fighting with her friend. But this was important, and at the moment they were both still calm. “And I suppose you’re quite different then. I’ve seen the way you all look at the Griffindors.”

“True. We’re not perfect. But what about everyone else? When I see Brittney, I don’t think Hufflepuff, I think about how much she misses her familiar Captain Snuggleteeth, and how she can be so sharp sometimes even though she can seem a bit… simple. And I know that Quinn is in Ravenclaw, but I also know how much she hates that we remember her from before she had all those cosmetic spells and that she always sits one row back from the edge in the stands during Quiddich games because she’s afraid of heights.” Hermione’s head was tilting, and Rachel thought, yes, finally, I’m getting through. “Their house is a part of them, but it’s not the whole thing. They’re still people. There’s more to them.”

Draco had picked up “yo mamma” jokes from the transfers but they hadn’t quite translated correctly.

The blonde stared down smugly at Harry.

“Your mother’s dead.”

(Noah kept having to pull him aside to explain the concept again as Santana viciously rolled her eyes.)

With the walls between houses down, Kurt finds that one of the Griffindor boys, Blaine, a transfer from the all-boys school in upstate New York, wasn’t that bad after all.

unfinished fic dump 1

2015-02-07T12:52:37Z

twelve operations in normality
twilight, all-human. where Bella, Alice and Rosalie have been friends since birth; Bella and Edward got married right out of high school and their friends still make fun of them for it; Alice is a yoga/meditation instructor and Jasper is in corporate law which causes some problems; Rosalie started having a fling with her personal trainer Emmett… four years ago; and most of the scenes resemble sex and the city a disturbing amount.

“Wait. Edward wears body glitter?”

“Shutupshutup! You don’t understand our love!” Bella folded herself up into grumpy origami, her lips going plump with a massive pout. “It highlights the natural line of his aristocratic cheekbones.”

“Sleeping with your trainer? Isn’t that a bit old hat?”

“You’re one to talk, Miss ‘I got married right out of high school.’ Talk about cliché. You were one suspiciously empire-waisted wedding dress away from a shot-gun wedding.”

“Well for about five minutes in a gas station bathroom it almost was.”

Rosalie’s eyes went wide, just as Bella’s slanted to Alice, betrayed.

“Made it seven years without this coming out…”

“What’s this? When? And why wasn’t I informed?”

Bella waved her hand dismissively. “It was nothing. Just a scare.”

Alice scoffed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so terrified. Even more than that time in junior year Charlie caught Edward climbing up your tree.”

“That’s understandable.” Rosalie patted Bella’s knee. “I’d be more scared of Edward’s offspring than a shotgun too.”

“I wouldn’t go throwing stones, Rosalie. Your chosen relationship is a one-night stand that won’t end.”

This marriage counselor thing wasn’t going so well.

“He eats people!” Alice finally squeaked, covering her face with her hands.

Jasper blanched. “That’s not what she- I mean I don’t- Alice, please tell the poor gentleman that I am not a cannibal.”

Bella answered Rosalie’s call at three in the morning, but her tone was unimpressed.

“What’s the emergency? Did Emmett’s muscles finally rip through his shirt?”

“Right. The clumsy girl who constantly needed to go to the ER married a doctor. Ha ha. Like I haven’t heard that one before.”

“Edward isn’t… I mean he’s not… He’s not a stalker!”

Poor girl said it as if it was something to be proud of.

“Bells, he snuck into your room to watch you sleep when we were kids. He followed you around that time we went to New York because he was afraid you were going to get mugged. We love him like a brother, but he’s only a few paint chips shy of ‘I’ll be watching you’ chartreuse.”

“But, mean- He’s just a little overprotective is all. It’s sweet, really.”

“Overprotective?” Alice stared down at her incredulously, quite a feat considering the woman had met a few rollercoasters she couldn’t ride. “When is that going to stop being an excuse? You know why we call you Bells, right?”

“Alice, don’t-“

“Rosalie, please open your hymnal to psalm 42, entitled ‘Bella defends her creeper husband repetitively and with futility.’”

Rosalie parted her hands as if she were reading an open book, and in a nasal voice: “And the swan doth protest that Edward isth not a stalker, and so her crazy hot and dutiful best friends doth dub her Bells- just as annoying and twice as repetitive.” She snapped her hands together.

“And one oh so pious in the ways of the swan, how many times a year do we hear the excuse ‘oh he’s just overprotective, tee-hee’?” Her impression was annoyingly on-target.

“At least fifteen, sister.”

Bella sulked. "I hate you both. So much."

Edward loves telling the story of how they met.

“Well I tried to steal her Rainbow Brite doll and she punched me in the nose. We’ve been inseparable ever since.”

“That’s not exactly true.”

“Oh?” Edward’s smile under a thin veneer of contrived confusion; they’d told this story hundreds of times. “When we were in fifth grade you didn’t talk to be for a week because Jasper accidentally pushed me off the jungle gym and I broke my arm, and you felt guilty because it was your idea to play tag in the first place. Since obviously you were just the most angst-ridden ten year old on earth.”

It was the longest week of my life, she didn’t say but always thought.

there will be blood (vampires of the fandoms, unite!) r

2012-07-09T00:03:35Z

title: there will be blood (but if you're not hemophiliac you don't have to worry)
fandom: buffy the vampire slayer/true blood/twilight
character(s)/pairing(s): (in order of appearance) emmett, willow, faith, rosalie, carlisle, jasper, edward, eric, alice, spike
rating: r
word count: 462
spoilers: none. this is crack, baby, we don't deal in spoilers.
notes: so a while ago i had this idea where i would blend the vamp mythology and general moral tone of all of my vampire fandoms into one epic crossover... and it turned into this ridiculousness. my apologies.

summary: vampire come out of the coffin and madness ensues.

The Pacific Northwest descends into fucking chaos the week the vampires plot their big revelation, like a prom-bound teen plans the romantic loss of her virginity, only to walk in on her boyfriend bent over the wide receiver of the rival football team, widely receiving his cock with his mouth. As Emmett would say, if he hadn’t skulked off to Isle Wherever-The-Fuck-Is-Not-Here, shit got real.

The Watcher’s Council is so busy trying to cover their ass by reigning in their Slayers, in an attempt not to get charged with hate crimes against the undead citizens of the world, that they nearly miss the apocalypse in Boise. Thankfully the Scoobies are already camped out on a tip off from Willow. Unfortunately, not all the interested parties are available to get their slayage on.

“This is bullshit,” Faith snarls across the table, in the third (highly publicized) meeting that week with the vampire queen of California, her palm itching for the stake she’d had to check at the door. “A month ago you would be slime on the pavement, and now I have to drink your weak ass coffee and smile.” She glares, repeating herself for the second (fifth) time, “This is bullshit.”

Rosalie taps her pale pink nails against the marble conference room table. “My apologies. You, after all, are a delight.”

Up further north, Sheriff Cullen and all his chickadees are attempting to mainstream… with mixed results.

“How about old people? Can I eat old people? Not like they’ve got much time left.”

“No, Jasper, old people are off limits too. Can’t you call up your old war buddy for help? Buddy? Billy? Buck-aroo?”

“His name is Bill, and no. I’ll be damned if I’ll ask for help from that idiot.”

Edward looks lost.

“What about murderers, the terrible ones? It’s practically my civic duty.”

“Not even the bad people, Edward. Don’t you have a new girlfriend, though? Surely you could ask her for a donation.”

“Lord have mercy on Satan’s soul, are you blushing Edward? Can we even do that?”

“I’m sure she’s a perfectly nice girl, Edward. Is she O negative? That’s your type, right?”

“You are both ingrates and I hope something horrible befalls you. I’m going to my coffin.”

Jasper holds out his fist and Carlisle bumps it with his own, a guilty smirk briefly gracing his face before schooling it back into authority mode.

“Get me Louisiana on the phone.”

On the other end of the line, along with the post-Sunnydale contingency, Eric is not pleased.

“I ask for negotiators, and you send me Billy Idol and Miss. Cleo.”

Alice waves and Spike fires off the two-fingered salute.

“Fucking amateurs.”

be afraid of the cold; they'll inherit your blood, pt. v: roar (edward) pg13

2012-07-08T22:58:42Z

title: be afraid of the cold; they'll inherit your blood, pt. v: roar
fandom: twilight
character(s)/pairing(s): edward pov; edward/bella, the volturri, carlisle
rating: pg13
word count: 5200
spoilers: breaking dawn au.
notes: this is the last part of 'five times bella never got turned into a vampire'. title and opening quote (translated) from regina spektor's 'apres moi.' this isn't me working out my issues with e/b at all, i have no idea what you're talking about.

summary: au. the volturri find them on their honeymoon.

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

v. roar

The end arrives while we’re honeymooning in Europe which, of course, was my first mistake: thinking we were out of harm's way anywhere on the same continent as the Volturri. But I thought we would be safe. I thought we had more time. I thought-

Regardless, I was wrong. They found us.

I suppose to Bella it would seem that the events that followed occurred rapidly, perhaps even in the blink of an eye, too quickly to even register. But for me it was with agonizing slowness; just enough time to see everything slipping away, but not enough to do anything to stop it.

One moment Bella was chatting away in the hotel bathroom about the spot where Jane Austen wrote Pride & Prejudice, and the next the room was eerily silent.

“Bella, love?” I called, rising from the bed, “Did you fall in?”

The grin slipped from my lips as I rounded the doorframe.

Alec, Demetri. Felix. Another nameless guard I didn’t recognize. Bella’s wide-eyed gaze as she stared at me, terrified, from above Felix’s large hand as he clutched her neck, holding her flush against his wide chest. Before I could react, Alec’s power wafted into my mind, rendering me mute and paralyzed, but not unaware, as I fell to the floor. Demetri’s black boots scuttled into my line of vision just before a bag was placed over my head.

Objectively, everything went quite quickly after that.

Our shared cell was iron-lined, thick enough to block out the guard’s thoughts outside. With only Bella as my company, it was the most silence I’d had within my own head since I was human, but with my racing thoughts I couldn’t enjoy it. She was still unconscious. Though she would be alright, I stared down at her, pained, knowing it was I who had done this, who had set these events in motion.

I took the moment to consider what the Volturri had in mind. They must not have decided what to do with us yet, or else Jane would have marched us straight to Aro and we both would be dead.

Maybe we were awaiting a judgment for our infraction against the law. Maybe they were still calling dibs. But perhaps they were simply playing games with us, like batting at an injured mouse with cat claws. I couldn’t be sure.

In time Bella came around, and I had to share the information I had gathered about our circumstances; namely, that I knew nothing.

With the passing of the days came no word, and the dumped bits of meager food rations for Bella. Her thirst was quenched by a dripping spickett in the corner. I could hear her stomach protesting as two days turned into three, then four, but I could do nothing to help her. I was totally powerless. And it wasn’t just her hunger; her desperation grew as well. Despite all the danger she had been strung through, she still had never expected this.

“We were always sorta doomed, weren’t we?” she murmured, stunned, and I didn’t want to tell her no, because that had been my assumption from the beginning, but yes seemed like a brutal answer. The glass is only half-full as long as it doesn’t shatter to pieces.

“Don’t say that,” seemed to be the only medium.

“But it’s true, isn’t it? From the beginning you were always one breath away from killing me. And if it wasn’t your own bloodlust it was someone else’s. But if Carlisle had never changed you, you would have died decades before I was even born. Maybe it’s not me who’s the danger magnet. Maybe it’s us, together.”

Her hair ran like silk from between my fingers as I swept a stray strand behind her ear, her pulse thumping unevenly millimeters beneath the pads of my fingertips.

“I can’t believe that.”

There. That was close enough to the truth not to be a lie.

The realization of our circumstance came to me as one of the guards broke the iron seal around us to dump a tray of unappealing food into the room for Bella.

I wish this fucker would just bite the bitch already, he thought thuggishly, Demitri’s got two on him turning her, but he’ll probably just drain her. At this rate I might beat him to it. Aro might as well just send down the kill order now since he’s taking so fucking-

With that the slat snapped shut, and I was left sitting in strangled silence.

“He’s waiting me out.”

Bella paused over the tray, turning to me with confused eyes. My heart sunk when I noticed she was even thinner and more sunken than yesterday.

“What are you talking about?”

“Aro. He’s letting us wait here until I turn you. Or until my bloodlust becomes so intense that I kill you.”

The blunt words lingered in the air like gun smoke, blue and sulfur and deadly.

Understanding dawned bright and awful in Bella eyes, but instead of horror I saw determination illuminated there in the aftermath.

“Do it,” Bella pleaded, her expression wild, “Turn me.”

I looked at her helplessly. “No. Not like this.”

She locked her jaw, her gaze scanning the space over my shoulder as if it held the tools to convince me. Her eyes whipped over to meet mine again.

“In Alice’s vision, the one where I’m a vampire?” I nodded low, pained. “Am I happy?”

I got the impression that she was asking not for her own knowledge but to prove a point. Of course she knew; I’d heard her once in the wee morning hours after having returned early from a hunting trip, asking Alice to repeat the details of that vision over and over, like the constant replay of a favorite movie scene until the tape crinkled in the rewind.

“Yes.” I swallowed, knowing I was losing ground. “Alice seemed to think so.”

Bella raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you know? You saw it in her head for yourself.” I gave my head a little shake, not knowing how to respond. She was right, I had. Bella’s expression turned suspicious. “What are you really afraid of?”

I tilted my head away, unable to meet her eyes. I feared losing her forever to bloodlust, despite how irrational it was, and I feared that the eyes of an immortal would finally see how much better than me she was. But neither of these were the dark reasons that clouded my judgment, that haunted my consciousness at every turn.

“I don’t know why you’re being so stubborn. It’s this or die for us now, and I’ve already told you it’s what I wanted from the beginning. I know you want it too, you’ve told me yourself. Why are you making this so damn difficult?!” Her breath puffed out in angry huffs like a bull faced with crimson, and if this were a different situation I might have laughed at her indignation. Such a sharp-tempered girl. She’d make an excellent vampire, a tiny voice in my head told me, and the thought sobered me.

“I don’t want you to hate me,” I whispered, shamed, because I could already hear her response in the air.

“But I’ve already told you-“

“I know what you’re saying. Now. But in forty years? Seventy? When your friends are all living their lives and your parents die and you want to have children? What then? I know you’ll grow to resent me, because how could you not? And I don’t-“ I hesitated, because this was the worst part of it, the most selfish part. “I don’t think I will be able to live with myself when you do.”

Bella was silent and I grew worried that my confession was the final nail in the coffin of our short-lived marriage. But when I raised my eyes to her face, her expression was speculative. I furrowed my brow.

“You don’t think you’re good enough to keep me happy. That I’ll want more.” It wasn’t a question, but I nodded as if it were one. To my great surprise, she laughed, for some reason tickled by the idea. “Bella Swan too good for Edward Cullen.” She giggled once more before sobering, looking quite cross with me all of a sudden. “I thought we’d learned this lesson.”

“I-“ staring at my fingers, at a loss, “I have no idea what you mean. Have we been trapped by vampire royalty before and forced to choose between our death or your change? Because I think I would remember that.”

She smacked me playfully on the shoulder, “No, dummy. I thought you weren’t going to let your own stupid opinions about vampires take away any of my choices again,” she raised her eyebrows, daring me to protest, “Last time you did that, we both almost died. Twice. Right in this building, if my sense of direction is correct.”

It wasn’t, but I understood her point. It didn’t mean I agreed.

“That was different.”

“How?” Bella spread her arms wide as if to encompass all the ways in which I was wrong, “Step one, Edward thinks Bella is in danger from big bad vampire things. Step two, Bella swears she loves Edward in spite of the danger, maybe even a little because of it,” I raised an eyebrow, but let her continue, “Step three, Edward decides he knows what’s best for Bella and shields her anyway. Step four, disaster occurs. The only part we’re missing here is that last one and it’s only because it hasn’t happened yet. But it doesn’t have to! We can still make this right.”

I could tell that this argument was fraying her already thin nerves, but this had been brewing for a long while.

She continued, this time using her ‘let’s be reasonable’ voice.

“I know you just want me to be happy, to do nothing that could cause me pain. But I’m the one who should decide what those things are, even if you think you know better than I do. This always second guessing me…” she paused, meeting my gaze with a harried, stern expression. “It shows me that you don’t trust me to make my own choices.” I opened my mouth to protest vehemently, but she spoke over me, “I know you don’t see it that way. But that’s how it feels. I need you to respect me enough to let me have this.”

I sat down heavily, releasing a lungful of air like I was dropping a brick. Did she really think I didn’t respect her? I did, of course, immensely. But this wasn’t 1918, I reminded myself grouchily. These days respect towards women, towards your beloved, wasn’t waiting to marry them before seeing them naked, or refusing to curse in front of them, or handling them like a mantle-piece treasure. It was seeing them like an equal, and treating them as such. I suddenly got the feeling that I’d been going about the last two years of my life very wrong.

“I love you,” I said, because it was all I could think to say.

Bella soft smile dissolved into fear as the bolts in the heavy door clanked when they were unlocked, and I rose to my feet swiftly. She pressed herself to my side and I wrapped a protective arm around her shoulders, ready to shield her if need be.

Jane’s expression was bored when she appeared across the doorway, and her thoughts were of a similar brand of apathy. She glared at Bella as if she were doing the vampire some inconvenience for existing, before meeting my hard gaze.

“Aro wishes to speak with you.” What she didn’t say was that the ruler was concerned that I hadn’t killed or turned Bella already, and he was hoping to speed the process along with more ultimatums. From her thoughts I could tell the rest of the guard were similarly anxious, and there was a good chance they’d try to convince Aro to let them have her. I tensed, but stepped forward, knowing I had no choice.

The damp, dark corridor gave way to sandstone, then an elevator, and I wondered how many vampires had ridden this same one on their way to their doom. I wondered if any of them had found the humor in the Italian musak, had died laughing inside. I didn’t suppose many, but immortality can give one an odd sense of humor.

More guards were waiting just outside the great hall, and I gripped Bella’s hip in my palm as they stared at her jugular hungrily, and they considered just how much trouble they’d be in if they ripped her away from me right then and drank. Thankfully Aro’s instructions had been precise; they wanted us both alive. For the mean time, at least.

The crowd parted for us, leaving us just inside the semi-circle surrounding the thrones. I was puzzled at first by the numbers. Usually the handing down of edicts and the often bloody application of them was a job handled by the three rulers and a small handful of guards, not the entire court. But I spotted some of the oldest and most powerful in the room, and it made me increasingly nervous.

Then I read their thoughts.

They were here for the show.

“My young friends,” Aro greeted happily from his perch, as if he hadn’t been keeping up locked in a dungeon for a week, but in the guest house by the pool, “It’s such a pleasure to see you both well.”

I could have laughed. I almost did.

I didn’t even need to read his mind; judging by his pinched expression, nothing could be less true. He was puzzled that I hadn’t succumbed to the call of Bella’s blood and I was shocked when I picked up that he was afraid if I took too long I really would kill her; he wanted her a vampire, not dead. Before I could dig deeper and figure out why, Caius was slithering forward, a scowl as ever embossed on his face.

Bella tensed, remembering how happy he had been at the idea of slitting her throat before.

“This is ridiculous, Aro. Just finish this.” Bella quivered at my side, but I couldn’t assure her it wasn’t her death Caius was championing. Not this time.

It was much worse.

Aro spoke up, glancing at his fellow king like he was embarrassed for his bluntness.

“Yes, well everything in due time.” He tittered happily, turning his eyes to my wife. “And you Bella? I apologize that we don’t keep much that’s appealing to humans in the way of food, but this time I made sure to be prepared for your visit.”

A tray somehow rolled out from the crowd, topped with grapes, figs and a leg of some kind of meat. All probably items Aro could recall from his human days; he gestured sweepingly toward it and Bella leaned forward involuntarily before catching herself. I knew she must be starving, fed barely more than scraps for days, but she retreated warily. She knew better than to accept such seeming charity.

Her eyes rose to my face with a question as I scanned Aro’s thoughts. I nodded.

“It’s safe,” I murmured in her ear.

Bella cautiously reached for a grape, plucking it from the stem like she was afraid it might bite her back. But she popped it into her mouth with no further incident, and she quickly grabbed another.

The crowd watched this exchange with fascination and, when Bella began to eat, disgust. Most were too old to recall the appeal of human food and, unlike me, found the sight of humans feeding to be revolting. I just thought she was beautiful regardless.

“Do you find the amenities to your liking?” Aro questioned with a half hopeful, half calculating smile.

Bella paused to downcast her eyes, a picture of subservience. But from the tight way she fisted the back of my shirt I knew she was irritated by the show.

“Yes, very much. Thank you Aro.”

Bella was just putting another string of meat in her mouth when Aro spoke.

“I’m glad. It’s best to enjoy such things while you still can.”

She froze, still mid-chew, and cast a wide-eyed look on the mastermind. She swallowed thickly, but didn’t speak.

“He’s going to offer us a position in his guard,” I explained stiffly, placing a lilt of sarcasm on the word offer. There really was no choice. “Or he’ll kill us both.”

Aro looked to me as if exasperated that I’d ruined a grand surprise.

“You could choose to join alone, of course,” he offered me kindly, and Bella bristled.

“And if we refuse?” I gritted out, already knowing the answer.

“We aren’t in the business of being denied,” Caius explained coldly.

Denials were on my lips, hateful spit building in my mouth to be reared back and shot like ammunition, but then I felt Bella’s soft, tiny hand on my cheek. I looked down into her wide, brown eyes and I knew immediately I would do whatever she asked of me. If she wanted me to lay down and be crucified right this instant, I would.

“Do it,” she pleaded, and I was reminded of the conversation we’d had just before we were sent for, and all the lessons I’d learned because of it. “It will be fine as long as we’re together.” Her warm hands pressed into my chest, and I nodded weightily.

“Delightful!” Aro clapped, jarring us out of our solemn exchange and reminding us of our audience. We both stared at him blankly for a moment, waiting for our marching orders, before he gestured impatiently. “Well? On with it then.”

Bella squeaked. “Here?” She quaked like a baby bird.

I glanced around pointedly at the gathered vampires, then met Aro’s eyes. Surely the moment Bella’s blood hit the air we would have a mob on our hands.

“I assure you that our friends have no intentions of hurting Mrs. Cullen here. They have excellent control over their baser natures.” I raised an eyebrow and Aro chuckled. “When they’re ordered to, that is.”

I took a rattled breath and turned to Bella. Her eyes met mine, but beneath the fear I saw her trust in me, shining out like a beacon. Without it, I don’t think I would have had the courage to lean down to her ear.

“Whatever happens, know that I love you.”

I felt her mouth the same words back to me, and gave a quick little nod as my lips found her throat. I sent a prayer up to whatever imagined or real god that was listening that somehow we could see through this, alive and together. I hoped someone was taking notes.

My teeth clamped down on her neck. Then all hell broke loose.

(грохочущая)

The parking lot was teeming with teenagers, the crowd awash with a rushed babbling as each group attempted to finish gossiping before the first bell. I leaned back against my car and resisted the urge to begin chipping off flecks of silver paint in my boredom. Surrounded on all sides by spoken and thought words that I had heard a million times in a dozen different dialects and decades, my mind sought out the one consciousness I wished to hear. A generically pretty blonde intentionally brushed past me as she climbed down from the high passenger seat of her linebacker boyfriend’s truck, but I blocked out both her hopeful thoughts and the wordless rage of the boy as I honed in on the other side of the lot.

A flash of brown hair and a wink.

I relaxed minutely, never having truly been worried. Pushing off from my car, I nonchalantly strolled into the school, heading for my English classroom. It was a tiny room swimming on four sides by walls papered with posters of Shakespearian plays and pleas to read over the summer, but I was thankful all the same for a little breathing room. There was a time, just after our escape from Volterra, that my family never would have allowed me to be unattended like this, so exposed.

I could still remember the screams just after I bit Bella, both hers and that of the ancient vampires around us falling victim to teeth and claws. Drinking barely a drop more than was necessary to secure her change, I sealed her wound with a swipe of my tongue and backed away against the wall, Bella in my lap with my arms wrapped around her. In the clamor of panicked thoughts and bloodlust it was difficult to discern the hunters from the hunted, the wails of a final death versus the battle cries. I saw a flash of fur moving among the crowd rushing towards the exit but dismissed the idea quickly. Until I picked out a web of thoughts from the tumult. The pack mind.

And then a clearing formed and I was faced with the unquestionable sight of Alice tearing Jane into pieces.

Carlisle found us first.

“Edward,” he breathed, suddenly on his knees beside us. Bella let out a keening cry, nails drawing blood from her own palms. “The change?”

I nodded, pushing a tangle of her hair back from her sweaty forehead. She quieted slightly at my cool touch but the stitch of pain wrinkling her eyebrows remained.

Carlisle tilted his head down to examine what of Bella he could, considering I was still wrapped protectively around her, and seemed to determine everything was normal, considering.

The battle still raged around us.

“We organized as soon as we were sure you had been taken here. We weren’t sure how to proceed at first, anything other than a suicide mission, but thank God for Alice.”

I gathered the rest from Carlisle’s mind. Alice had had a vision of a faction already forming among the Volturri’s own ranks. It became clear that some within the guard – a sizable group if the identities of the fallen were noted – believed that Aro’s personal interests were beginning to outweigh his duty. Various incidents, including the guard’s inaction against the newborn army, led many to realize that the rulers many counted on to carry out justice were becoming vain and inflated in their power with few results to back up their claim. It was decided that something needed to be done.

Once my family and our alliances – the wolves, the Denali clan, numerous nomadic friends – had agreed to join their ranks, the rebels poised to strike.

I could still recall the lavender smoke clouds rising amongst the towers of Volturri as I turned with Bella in my arms to board Carlisle’s plane, tinting the sunset an eerie violet and green, like a day-old bruise.

The new order was more rule-bound but decidedly more predictable and, perhaps most importantly, one that was supremely in the Cullen family’s debt.

I was shaken from my thoughts by a whiff of freesia down the hall, and I glanced up from my locker to meet a familiar gaze.

Penny for your thoughts?

I smirked and turned to grab my French book, knowing she could read my amusement in the bow of my cheek.

I’m fairly sure that would be a waste of money.

Bella bent down to take a drink from the fountain, the spray of water falling just short of her tongue.

What did I tell you about dwelling? It’s really your least attractive feature.

I checked my phone in the hollow shadow of my locker, partially to look busy and partially to get Alice off my back by responding to her text messages.

I thought you said that was my control issues?

I felt her moving down the hall toward me, but I didn’t glance up.

Oh, right. Forgot about that. Second worst then. Third is your incessant correcting.

I felt her fingers flit along my wrist that was peaking out of my back pocket in a movement too quick for human eyes.

Save me a seat.

I smiled contentedly, slamming the aluminum face of my locker into place and walking the opposite direction as my wife, a girl that by anyone else’s guess I didn’t know at all.

Bella likes to play games. It’s as if some parts of her were totally inverted in the change, leaving her bold and fearless, craving the power of all eyes on her now that she knows they’re not staring to be rude; they just can’t look away.

I might have interpreted it as vain if I hadn’t seen it through her eyes. It isn’t attention she wants, not exactly, and in this way human Bella and vampire Bella are one in the same; the attention is reassurance, a compliment paid to half-unwilling, half-desperate ears. What she’s really after is the thrill of it and here the two aspects of herself collide. This is just another cliff to jump, another set of handlebars to grip. Only now I’m there to ride by her side.

She’s devious in that collected way that never hurts anyone in any way but their pride. All her years reading through the lives of hundreds of women leading hundreds of lives resolves her to walk down many paths, hand in hand with a husband that she knows would never leave her. She’s curious, like a child questioning a fairytale, and I can’t help but oblige her.

I had thought that the differences between human and vampire would terrify me, would cause me to curl away in horror at her red-dampened lips and tawny eyes like I was looking at a stranger. But instead it vindicates me to see her confident and self-aware, traveling the world as if she were prancing across a map laid flat on hardwood. I find that she is the same in all the ways that matter; my love for her is rooted inside the deepest parts of her soul and nothing will ever change that.

At first I feared for her bloodlust, knowing it would pass but dreading the time until then. But thankfully, along with my thoughts, she has also inherited my memories of how to maintain self-control, the pain of my guilt when I couldn’t. She struggles, but not for long; she’s a quick learner.

Bella turns out to have a flair for the dramatic, for storytelling, and she blames it on all of the Shakespeare rotting her brain. (Her human life might have been a tragic romance, but her vampire life is certainly a comedy of errors.) Each new disguise is like new outfit, and she loves trying on people in a way that she had never appreciated trying on clothing.

We’ve been a wealthy couple from France (she still giggles when she thinks of my accent), a musician and author on the verge of their big break in the city, runaway teenagers living on the road. We’ve been Izzy and Eddie, Isabelle and Eduardo, Isa and Ed, but most often we don’t like the name of another’s on our tongues (even if it’s supposed to be us).

Sometimes we’ll buy pairs of abandoned luggage in airport baggage claim, laying out the contents and making up characters to match what we find. We’ll launder the clothes, tailor them to fit if necessary, and wear them like costumes. We read the books packed away inside, take on the accents of the bag’s intended destination (we have to guess which airport was home, based on whether the clothing inside was clean or dirty), and fill our ears with the CDs found. We construct elaborate set ups for how our two characters know each other; we’ve been business associates, lovers, a divorced couple sharing custody of a child, classmates on a band trip. When no connection comes to us we pretend to meet in bookstores, or waiting rooms, or by running into each other on crowded streets.

I would be just as happy to tuck ourselves away in an isolated cabin for years. To rid ourselves of the influence of the outside world. And we have, Bella knowing my desires and surprising me with a property in Canada in early fall, bought with shared wealth, and snowing ourselves in, not surfacing for any reason other than to hunt until the snow melted mid-spring. Bella is content to hide away with me, but our games excite her, bring her alive, and I can’t deny her that. In a way I feel that I’m regifting her with something I’ve taken from her; she can’t have her own human life, but she can have thousands of others. And I’ve grown to enjoy our performances; I’ve listened in on millions of lives, but I had barely lived mine for so many years.

Occasionally we’ll rejoin our siblings and play with the teen angst factor on the high school stage, pretending to get caught in closets and bathroom stalls and backseats in the student parking lot, passing dirty notes in that obvious, over the desk fashion that always gets them read to the class. We’ve been cheerleader and nerd (this one was my idea, and whenever my mind wanders to her paneled skirt she gets that warning look in her eye. Don’t even think about it buddy; never again.) Sometimes we even pretend to hate each other, volleying nasty insults over Tuesday surprise sandwiches in the cafeteria, pretending to trip each other and spreading rumors and protesting when we get paired together in every class (because we share nearly every one by design). Eventually we’ll cave, never lasting until graduation, and plan that epic slap-slap-kiss knock down drag out in the quad during lunch period, where everyone is there to watch. (These days are her absolute favorite; loves the tizzy in their minds when she slips her tongue into my mouth, like carbonation inside a glass.) A few will say they knew the infamous enemies would hook up all along, and I have to agree.

But this one has to be my favorite.

“Hello.” She jumps, her fingers curled up inside her hoodie sleeves and her eyes fluttering over my shoulder, seemingly unable to meet my eyes. “My name is Edward Cullen. You must be Bella Swan?”

She nods jerkily and I have to hide my grin. (She was always so good at this part.) Bella’s eyes meet mine, (brown brown brown, and even if they’re contacts it still kills me) and her lips curl for the smallest of milliseconds.

The teacher might be droning on about human bone cells instead of mitosis, and we both might be secretly listening to the girl named Abby behind us thinking about how she’s sure the two of us will be high school sweethearts, but it still brings me back to that first day I spoke to her so many years ago. I resist the urge to change history and lean over to kiss my wife.

Patience.

be afraid of the cold; they'll inherit your blood, pt. iv: burn (bella) pg13

2012-07-08T22:24:05Z

title: be afraid of the cold; they'll inherit your blood, pt. iv: burn
fandom: twilight
character(s)/pairing(s): bella pov; the cullens + bella, jacob, victoria, riley
rating: pg13
word count: 2919
spoilers: eclipse au.
notes: this is part four of five 'times bella never got turned into a vampire'. title and opening quote (translated) from regina spektor's 'apres moi.'

summary: au. bella has different luck during edward's fight with victoria.

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

iv. burn

The epiphany came to me like the flood after the arc. Both fights, Seth’s with Riley and Edward’s with Victoria, were too close to bet on, and there wasn’t enough money in the world to stake on how much I needed both to turn out favorably. Seth was just a boy, not even old enough to have his own driver’s license in most states, and Edward…

It hurt to even think of the possibility.

Then I remembered the sharp spike of stone in my hand from the miniature avalanche just moments before. Did I really have the strength to impale my own heart? The same heart I had only just imagined Victoria ripping out of me?

But I didn’t have to. I thought back to my eighteenth birthday, something I tried to avoid because of all its painful repercussions. All because of one small paper cut. I didn’t need a bloodbath to distract them. A steady stream would do.

My flesh tore under the serrated edge of the stone. I dragged it up my forearm, liquid thinner than cherry pie filling dripping to the foliage beneath my feet. My lip was gnawed to destruction as I bit back the whimper of pain, my vision cloudy with unshed tears.

My eyes met Riley’s as he paused, glossy chocolate meeting furious black, and then he disappeared.

My human vision wasn’t precise enough to quite follow the next series of events, but my hearing intensified to compensate for the lack.

It seemed as if time stopped. I registered that at the same moment Seth tore Riley’s head off with his teeth and a sound like metal, mere centimeters from my arm, that Edward turned his head to face me, his expression showing shocked horror. And then he howled in pain.

Reality stopped making logical sense. Time must have rewound, then skipped ahead, because it was only then I realized Riley had grazed his teeth against the wound in my arm.

I was briefly reminded of a snake who, once he’d locked his jaws, would cling to flesh even if his head was severed off.

And then the burning started.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed that Riley had bitten me, or even been able to distinguish the burn of my self-inflicted wound from that of the venom, if the pain hadn’t started to spread up my arm and into my chest.

I screamed. My veins were suddenly pumping acid. The venom spread to my stomach and I clawed at my flesh there, then it trickled to my knees and I dropped to the ground. But my eyes never left Edward, or the blur that I suspected to be his perfect form.

No. Not perfect. Not anymore.

A piece of pale marble landed near the spot where my head rested on the ground. It only took a moment, even in my tortured state, to recognize it.

Edward’s hand. I would have known it anywhere, even though it was no longer attached to the arm of its owner. How many times had those fingers touched me? Swept the hair back from my neck or stroked my cheek or slid along my ribcage. With trembling fingers I reached out and snatched the disembodied appendage up, holding on for dear life. It certainly wouldn’t do to loose this.

I wasn’t sure how it worked, if he could feel this hand from where he stood twenty meters from me, still fighting Victoria, or if my touch would be lost forever, only known to these inches of mindless flesh. As new flames ripped through my body, I couldn’t tell if I’d ever known the answer, or if the pain was interfering with my memory. So I held his hand as if it would comfort him, as if it would give him strength. I didn’t have enough will in me to worry, the intense fear that the rest of my Edward would meet flame was shooed to the back of my mind. I knew that somehow I should be praying that he’d survive, that he’d make it out of this.

But right then I couldn’t wish for anything more than death.

(ожог)

Drip.

It was like Chinese water torture. Or a bloodletting.

It seemed impossible that I had kept conscious through every second, that I had been awake through every torturous roll of the fire through my limbs, but I had. Yet at the same time I couldn’t remember a moment of it. Not how the pine needled ground had turned to sheets, or if the battle was over or still raging on. I didn’t even know what voices had spoken to me, beyond knowing that none had given me comfort at the time. Every tinny whine or low bass faded with the dull sound of the fire.

I forgot each moment, almost even before it had passed. Everything except for the pain. The pain stretched out behind me hauntingly and before me insurmountably, though, rationally, I knew I hadn’t always lived this way.

This was how I knew I was coming out of the other side. Moments began to catch and drag, if just seconds before slipping away. And then they stuck. Stuck and stayed. Words resonated, echoed even.

“-even consider this. How could you be so fucking stupid! You must have known she couldn’t just be left there unprotected. Either one of them would hurt her or she would do something to hurt herself. And to think I thought I was being melodramatic when I said I would ‘do the noble thing’. I didn’t think I was giving her any ideas!”

Jacob. Jacob? Yes, that seemed right.

Drip.

I wanted to frown at the repetitive sound, still plaguing me without mercy. This I could only recall because it had been a constant throughout the change.

“Bella?”

I froze. I must have shown my discomfort on the outside too, and they’d noticed.

It wasn’t a conscious decision to not reach out for help during the last moments of the transformation, once I remembered what my arms were for beyond being extra inches of flesh to feel pain. It was innate. They shouldn’t know how much I was suffering. That wouldn’t solve anything.

“Bella.”

It was a different voice this time. Smooth. Velvet. Two sets of hands rested on me then, one for each arm: one pair scorching hot and the other surprisingly tepid.

Two tepid hands.

An unknown part of me rejoiced at this inconsequential fact, though I didn’t know why.

And then another touch, feather light, against my hairline. That’s strange, I thought. I only heard two people breathing and shuffling around.

“Maybe you should leave.”

“What? No way! I’m staying here until she asks me to go.”

“She might attack you. Newborns are notoriously hotheaded.” His voice wasn’t smug at this, like I might have expected. It was… sad.

“Well then I’ll take that as my cue to leave. But until then…”

“She might not even recognize you at first. Either of us.”

There was a beat of silence, all except for my firecracker heart, the end nigh, and Jacob’s own heartbeat. He drew in a shaky breath.

“Really?”

And another, longer this time.

“Yes.”

The pain in my heart intensified, seeping from my limbs but soaking my heart in poison, retaliation for the lost territory. This was the end. The muscle in my chest seized, contracting in one last contorted drumbeat, before settling silent within me.

The room went completely still.

Drip.

It wasn’t until everything was quiet that I could really hear it, muffled as it had been by fire and pain and voices. Now I could make it out. It wasn’t water dripping at all. It was a whisper-light voice, right at my ear, chanting Bella Bella Bella, the strange absence of an accompanying breath puffing against my skin making it almost undetectable.

My eyes opened like a snap-hypnotized patient, muscles already tensed, my head whipping to the side, knowing something was wrong…

Victoria.

I scrambled back along the sheets, quicker than I could have blinked when I was human, tripping off the bed. My back hit the wall with such force that I left a dent in the plaster; I was surprised I didn’t break clean through and fall onto the lawn. My defensive crouch was obscured by fear, giving the impression that I was cowering rather than being an actual threat.

I barely even registered any presence in the room besides that red-headed demon until Edward moved. Closer. My eyes flickered to him, then back to Victoria, not trusting her for a moment.

He stepped even closer and Jacob hissed.

“What are you doing? She could kill you.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw Edward lowering himself to the ground. He scooted slowly towards me, taking care to avoid touching me accidentally. I thought momentarily he looked like a goof before all my thoughts were once again consumed by fear and confusion. How could Edward turn his back on her?

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

He was close enough now to me, so I reached out and grabbed his hand, hopefully not the one that had recently been severed off, dragging him closer. At first there was fear in his eyes. Scared of little old me? But it was quickly replaced by relief, and then bewilderment. He could tell by now I was fixated over his shoulder, and Jacob was across the room.

“What’s wrong sweetheart?”

“S-she-s-she’s-“ I jerked my head in Victoria’s direction, who was smirking at me, and Edward twisted his head to scan the area. When his eyes met mine again he was truly confused.

“What? Do you see something?”

Something I wasn’t worried about; it was someone that had me tied up in knots.

Instead of using my own hand to gesture and therefore detach myself from him, I manipulated his index finger and raised his hand to point. How could he not see her? Had she hurt his eyes too?

“Victoria.”

Edward’s forehead furrowed, a lock of bronze hair curling amid the gesture.

“Victoria? We took care of her back at the quarry. You don’t have to worry about her ever again.”

His face was still lined, because he could tell that that wasn’t the answer I was looking for.

“But she’s…” I pointed with his finger again.

“Bella what are you seeing that’s got you scared out of your mind?” Jacob piped up, and I’d almost forgotten he was there. He tensed slightly as my blood-red eyes focused on him, but they weren’t for long; Victoria uncrossed her legs from her position on the bed and rose. My hands clenched in response and from the expression on Edward’s face I could only guess my grip on his hand was stronger than I thought. I merely loosened my hold, bone crushing to bone bruising, because there was no way I was letting him go.

Victoria rounded the bed slowly and with a sickly sympathetic expression on her face she crouched down so we were eyelevel. She wasn’t crowding us, but anywhere in the vicinity of me or Edward (or Jake for that matter) was far too close. Did Edward only think he had killed her? Had she tricked him somehow?

“He can’t see me, Bella-sweetie. I’m dead.”

My eyes flickered to Edward, then Jacob, hoping they could offer some explanation. Maybe I was just hoping their ears would finally pick up on her presence where their eyes had not. They stared back blankly.

“You really don’t see her?”

Edward cocked his head to the side, regarding my carefully. When he spoke, his voice was slow, like a teacher placating a fussy child.

“See who?”

Victoria chuckled.

“Told you so.”

As if some latent instinct kicked in, or perhaps it was a buried memory, I recognized the strength that sat heavy and powerful in my limbs. I wasn’t a fragile human anymore; I didn’t have to fear her, no more so than would anyone else in this room. When I stood, the motion was more fluid than I could have guessed, though I barely even registered the movement.

“If you’re dead then why can I see you?”

My back was now to Edward, but I felt him stand behind me, hands poised to spin me around and ask questions to which I didn’t have the answers. I heard the wet sound of his mouth opening to speak but I held up a hand, silencing him.

Victoria rolled her eyes at my question, standing like a cobra might strike.

“I thought that was obvious.”

I rotated my shoulders, getting irritated.

“Stop trying to confuse me.”

“It’s not my fault you’re easily confused, little girl.”

I hissed, fed-up with the roundabout, circular shape to our argument.

“Tell me.”

I could almost see the syllables of make me being molded like clay in her mouth, before she thought better of it and smiled, feral and wide.

“That little elf bitch can see the future. Your boy toy can read minds. There are a lot of vampires in our world who know things they shouldn’t. See things they shouldn’t.” Her eyebrows rose to punctuate her point and I blanched. Was she trying to say…

“Are you suggesting my ability is to see the dead?”

Victoria’s face shined then, and if it wasn’t for the narrow, hardened set to her carefully concealed eyes I’d almost be inclined to think she was proud. That she was helping me.

“In a way.”

I scowled.

“Prove it.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Are you saying that you’d rather believe you’re the only schizophrenic vampire in existence than admit that I’m actually here?”

“You aren’t actually here. But yes. I always knew my brain didn’t work right.”

Edward let out a confused little whinny behind me, and I nearly jumped, having forgotten he was there. Briefly I wondered what he must be thinking about this whole thing, hearing only one side to this already convoluted conversation, and I found myself tilting my head, taking my eyes off Victoria for a moment to read his expression. He looked so baffled it was almost pained.

She gave a delighted giggle and I glared in her direction, a flicker, before scoping Edward out again.

“I believe, for the first time in your relationship, he’s starting to agree with you.”

At Victoria’s words I studied him more carefully, and I couldn’t say she was wrong. It was startling, truly, to see the second-guessing in his eyes and feel it reflected into my own chest. Doubt begets doubt.

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

Edward’s eyes cleared instantly, like a hastily wiped chalkboard, but I could still see the faint white markings of his hesitance.

“Of course not.”

“He’s lying.”

And, despite the source, I knew it was true.

My eyes squeezed shut, giving my head a little shake, feeling the heavy thoughts thump against the inside of my skull. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

“Why are you doing this to us?” My gaze refocused on fiery red waves and cherry lips, feeling weary even though I knew I’d already caught my last nods of sleep of my now eternal life.

“Well, see that’s the thing: I don’t really have a choice. Vampires aren’t like humans. We don’t pass into the great beyond after the ripping and the burning and the blackness. We linger. Death doesn’t cure the ailment of our immortality.” I stared at her, horrified. That would mean…

“But that’s the best part. I had planned on torturing you and, when I got bored with that, killing you painfully. But humans break so easily. Accidents happen. They practically curdle like milk if you leave them for too long. This… this is so much better.”

Edward moved beside me, grasping my wrist within his tapered fingers and tugging me around to face him. His gaze searched my face. I looked toward Victoria; maybe for answers, maybe because I knew she was the only one I could trust to be what I expected.

She considered, pursing her lips.

“You know he doesn’t really love you. He loves the idea of you. He loves to be loved in that he hates it, and that he loves to hate himself. But even he knew it wouldn’t last. He didn’t want to turn you from the beginning because he knew eventually the illusion would shatter. This is just a fluke; now he’s stuck with you.”

I shook my head, unable, unwilling, to understand what this would mean for me. For us.

“Bella?”

Carved marble jaw, amber irises, perfect lips, but his eyes. His eyes held doubt like vial would hold poison. Wrong wrong wrong.

Because that was the thing. There wasn’t any danger lying in wait that hadn’t already struck. Because when I looked at Edward I didn’t see the man that would love me forever, love every selfish, flawed part of me, but the man that would always think I was a little bit crazy. Even if I convinced him otherwise, even if they all eventually believed me, I would always know that he hadn’t been there from the beginning. He had always been looking for an explanation for why I could possibly love him. I knew him and his martyring mind well enough to realize that he would rather think I was insane than believe that I loved him of my own free will.

Victoria’s lips curled and I was almost sick.

“Forever.”

pt. v >>

be afraid of the cold; they'll inherit your blood, pt. iii: slush (alice) pg13

2012-07-08T22:15:35Z

title: be afraid of the cold; they'll inherit your blood, pt. iii: slush
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.

pt. iv >>

be afraid of the cold; they'll inherit your blood, pt. ii: ink (carlisle) pg13

2012-07-08T22:10:21Z

title: be afraid of the cold; they'll inherit your blood, pt. ii: ink
fandom: twilight
character(s)/pairing(s): carlisle pov; the cullens + bella, victoria
rating: pg13
word count: 1737
spoilers: twilight au.
notes: this is part two of five 'times bella never got turned into a vampire'. title and opening quote (translated) from regina spektor's 'apres moi.' uh, so these kind of get more disturbing as i go along?

summary: au. edward hesitates in the ballet studio.

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

ii. ink

If my heart hadn’t stopped beating in a potato cellar four centuries ago, it would have frozen in my chest the moment I stepped into that ballet studio. The blurred motion of Jasper and Emmett joining the brawl between James and Edward was only secondary in my mind as the scent of Bella’s blood hit my senses. It held only an iota of the appeal that it once had; just enough to remind me why I’m here. Of what’s at stake.

“Carlisle!”

Edward’s voice rang sharp with panic at the same moment that I flitted to his side, leaning over the broken girl that had become nearly as integral a part to our family as Jasper or Alice, or perhaps even myself. Blood seeped at an alarming rate from her scalp. I brushed aside her dark waves stringy with the crimson liquid to access the damage.

“She’s lost some blood,” I ascertained by the rather large pool by the broken mirror, “but the head wound isn’t deep.” Edward made a move to lean over her, and I held out a cautionary hand. “Watch out for her leg, it’s broken.” The ivory splinter of bone was visible poking through her skin, and I winced empathetically. But that wasn’t her only fracture.

I felt gently along her sides, smelling the blood pooling there. “Some ribs, too, I think.”

“Edward…” Bella’s voice gurgled drowsily, her face contorting with pain, “Edward, it hurts.”

My eyes scanned her body for further injuries, because something wasn’t quite right…

Three things happened nearly at once: Edward turned to me to question me about controlling her pain level, Bella cried out in fresh agony, and my searching eyes found the bite mark on her hand.

“My hand- it’s burning!” she shrieked, clenching her fingers into a fist against fire.

“James bit her.” I clarified, mostly to myself. I was faintly and briefly glad my family had disposed of him, but the spiteful thought was quickly replaced with concentration as Alice handed me my supplies and I began to stitch up her head wound.

I was only faintly aware of the argument between Alice and Edward, mostly because it was as predicable as it was stubborn; Alice must have flashed her vision of Bella was one of us through her mind because he protested vehemently. Any fool could see how much Edward abhorred even the idea that Bella would be damned to this life.

“There may be a chance.” I hedged, “See if you can suck the venom out.”

Edward tensed beside me, no doubt disbelieving his ability to resist temptation to quite that degree. The same pained skepticism was in his tone as he spoke.

“Carlisle I…” His ebony eyes gave him away. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

There was a beat of silence in which the only sound was the frantic galung-galung of Bella’s heart, her moans of agony and the scuffle of her body as it writhed on the wood floor.

“You’re running out of time.” I warned. I wouldn’t wish to be inside his head at that moment, for it was an impossible choice. Risk taking her life by draining her dry or doom her to an eternity feeding off others.

Alice must have been humming with energy, but she was wise enough to keep silent, fluttering over Bella’s leg with the attention of a war nurse.

Unfortunately for Edward, time slid the alternative away from him.

“It’s too late. The venom is diffusing into her tissues; her veins are sealing closed.”

Edward remained motionless.

“Son, I-“

“No.” He raised a hand in defiance to my consolation, my reassurances. His jaw was locked and the direction of his thoughts was plain. Bella screamed and, if possible, his expression slipped deeper into grief. “I’m so sorry, Bella,” he scooped her into his arms, cradling her tortured body against his chest. “So sorry.”

The hot asphalt of the street was beneath our feet, the burning frame of the ballet studio lay in our wake, and the scent of venom and blood intermingling led the way to our destination.

(чернил)

“Edward?”

I glanced up from the medical journal on the desk in front of me, just as Bella darted into the room. She probably could have been able to tell he wasn’t here if she had stopped to listen, but from the frantic edge to her voice, I doubted she was thinking rationally.

“He’s out hunting with the others, remember?”

My voice was cautious, placating even. It seemed to calm her.

“Oh.” Her shoulders slouched forward, more out of habit than any kind of tension. Vampires didn’t exactly have sore muscles. “Oh that’s right. Thank you, Carlisle. I’m sorry to bother you.”

“It’s no trouble at all.” Now my voice was the one with a keen bit of tension, desperate to hold her here. She rarely left her and Edward’s room these days. “How have you been feeling lately?”

Her eyes softened briefly, then sharpened, the way they always seemed to when she deemed someone was putting too much effort into fretting unnecessarily over her.

“Just fine.”

Her voice was small, fragile even, for such a strong creature.

The way she’d called out Edward’s name a few moments ago reminded me of the way she’d woken up in this new world and I winced momentarily as I recalled her beginnings.

“Edward? Where’s Edward?” her red eyes wide like an earthquake victim’s after the fall.

“I’m here,” he’d assured. His smile would only have been comforting to someone who either didn’t know him very well, or who wasn’t paying much attention. Bella was neither.

“What’s wrong?” she’d cooed sympathetically, smoothing her thumb over the creases in his forehead. But then her hand froze, inching away. “Don’t you want me anymore? Like this?”

“Of course that’s not it!” he’d boomed, trapping her hand and bringing it to his lips. “How can you even say that?”

She’d smiled then, timid but still scared.

“Good.”

It had been three years, and they’d barely budged an inch; Bella disoriented, Edward berating himself for not saving her, Bella fretting over his constant martyring.

Edward worried over her constantly, his guilt melting with his already apparent fear for her well-being. The change in her merely altered the nature of his concerns; human food for blood, horror at our kind for regret over her choices, falling down for massacring the local town.

Bella rarely spoke, and if she did, it was to Alice, and only in whispers. I didn’t think Alice had ever spoken so quietly for so long in her entire life. For the most part she communicated with Edward through her thoughts, and they had silent conversations across rooms more than they voiced them aloud. It was a strange existence.

And that was the most pronounced change to the arrangement; Edward could hear her thoughts now. The scientist in me had theorized, in fact could have sworn, that her resistance to his gift had meant something about her ability in this life.

I was wrong.

She lived in a constant state of frazzled disorientation, as if she still wasn’t quite sure why she could suddenly break walls and she no longer slept. She spent most of her time that wasn’t with Edward exploring the many empty rooms within her own mind, marveling at the wide berth of her thoughts, or penning letters to her loved ones that she could never send. When she ran out of people in her family, she moved on to strangers, people she had met in passing. A cashier who seemed sad one day. A boy she had barely known in Arizona who had picked up her books after she fell once. Laurent, apologizing for the death of his friend.

Bella shifted awkwardly on her feet in the space in front of my desk, already inching towards the door.

I smiled kindly.

“You can go now Bella.”

Her expression was one of relief, and then she was gone.

Only one ear was idly listening to the downstairs rooms, keeping track of Bella as she shuffled around the living room. She went to poke around the kitchen, the way she often did, as if she thought that perhaps if she sat long enough there that she might want to fix a snack. It was another of her behaviors that worried Edward to the point of insanity. He came to check on her often.

So I didn’t think much of it when I heard someone slip in through the back door, thinking it was just Edward making sure she was alright.

“I know you,” came Bella voice from below, and my forehead wrinkled in confusion. Well that was odd.

The voice that replied, however, had me bolting from my chair, racing down the stairs.

“You should. Your mate killed mine, after all.”

I rounded the corner just as a sound like ripping aluminum echoed through the house.

And there Bella stood, Victoria’s arm dangling from her grip.

“Oops,” Bella breathed.

“Bitch!” Victoria screamed, and lunged for her, just as Edward knocked her to the floor. He tore off her head. Her red hair shimmered, disembodied, as he tossed it to Jasper and the fire Emmett was already building in the backyard. They made quick work of the pieces, Edward’s rage that the woman had dared to enter our home with the intention of killing his mate causing his attention to focus diligently on her absolute destruction.

I noted the dismemberment from the sidelines, refusing to take part but never a thought to stop them. Sometime violence was as practical as it was horrible.

Bella watched with her lip between her teeth, her eyes wide and glossy, and when all Victoria’s limbs were smoldering, she ran to him.

“I- I- I didn’t mean to,” she whimpered, Edward pressing her to his chest as he gazed at the flames watchfully.

His expression molted from confusion to shock as he no doubt read her mind.

“It’s okay Bella, no one is angry with you,” he explained with an edge of hysteria, unsure how to comfort guilt that was childlike in its innocence.

She raised her head from his shoulder, finding his eyes. “Tell her I’m sorry?” she pleaded intently. He stared at her for a pregnant moment, searching for something in her stare, or perhaps it was her mind, that he never found. He nodded slowly.

“I’ll tell her.”

pt. iii >>

be afraid of the cold; they'll inherit your blood, pt. i: torrent (jasper) pg13

2012-07-08T22:04:19Z

title: be afraid of the cold; they'll inherit your blood, pt. i: torrent
fandom: twilight
character(s)/pairing(s): jasper pov; the cullens + bella, canon pairings
rating: pg13
word count: 2682
spoilers: twilight au.
notes: this is part one of five 'times bella never got turned into a vampire'. my foray into 1st person, to see if i could work through my issues with it. title and opening quote (translated) from regina spektor's 'apres moi.'

summary: au. jasper decides to kill the human girl after edward stupidly saves her from the skidding van. it does not go as planned.

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

i. torrent

A Cullen family meeting had never felt so much like a round of troops discussing strategy, tempers high and tension tight like my decades spent rounding up immortal troops with Maria.

“I won’t let Alice live in danger, even a slight danger. You don’t feel about anyone the way I feel about her, Edward, and you haven’t lived through what I’ve lived through, whether you’ve seen my memories or not. You don’t understand.”

I thought of the scars on my neck, then of the perfectly pale, unmarred skin on Alice’s, and even the thought of any harm coming to her made my spine stiffen.

“I’m not disputing that, Jasper. But I’m telling you now, I won’t let you hurt Isabella Swan.”

I could feel his determination in the solid force of slate grey around him. Even though I knew I could probably take him in a fight, I tried not to think the words. Edward was my brother, not the enemy.

“Jazz.” Alice’s voice filtered into my thoughts. I felt unwilling to turn away, an instinct left over from years in the south spent watching my back every moment, but I looked over at her after a second of unease.

“Don’t bother telling me you can protect yourself, Alice. I already know that. I’ve still got to—“

Words of safeguarding and husbandly duties died on my tongue as she spoke about her prophecy of the human girl and her as friends. The vision, it… complicated matters. I reeled away from the notion of hurting Alice that way, by depriving her of the companion she sought. I knew she was content in our life and this family, but I could also sense her longing. She had only a predilection for shopping in common with Rosalie; she was very fond of Esme but she considered the woman to be more a mother she never had than her friend.

And then there was her vision of Edward falling in love with the girl.

It would be an understatement to say I was stunned. We tried not to get too involved with the humans that we came in contact with. Far too dangerous. I was still pondering the puzzle of Isabella Swan as I scaled a mountainous fir tree and settled on one of its boughs. Maybe there was something about this human, this girl…

Edward’s actions confounded me. He couldn’t yet be so in love with her to have lost all sense of reason. If anyone ever found out the truth behind his miraculous rescue—

The Volturri drifted unbidden into my thoughts. I had only had two run-ins with the ancient monarchs, once during a close call with Maria and again during my time with Carlisle. Despite the fact that the situations had been worlds apart, I only sensed one emotion from them: greed. Greed for power, greed for violence. They could be counted on to kill us all if we slipped. I respected their duty to keep order, but feared what would become of us if they deemed our family in the way of that chore. Did Alice’s promise that everything would be fine include them as well?

I couldn’t be sure. And that there was the thought that propelled me back down the tree, through the forest swiftly.

The Swans’ house was quaint, large enough for two people but perhaps not if those two people didn’t really know each other. I remembered her emotions on that first day, how her fear had been turned inward, not outward towards those who could judge her. It was curious; I’d never traveled alone when I was human, always joined with the friends who had enlisted in the war alongside me. I used the question to distract myself from making any decisions as I crept up to the back door, listening silently to the girl arguing on the phone with someone. I only heard one heartbeat; her father must have returned to work. That was good, I told myself. No more blood spilt than necessary.

I tested the air around her as I slid an unlocked window open on the first floor. There was frustration there, yes, but also an odd mixture of patience and affection. Her and her mother, I gathered from the context of the call, must have a strange relationship. She talked her mother in circles over the issue of returning home, her tone holding the same emotions as that my ability indicated was emanating from the rest of her. More like friends, or a parent communicating with a small child than the other way around. Very odd indeed.

Bella hung up with her mother, the plastic click of the end button followed quickly by the sound of the phone being set down. I crept up the staircase quickly, not sure if the call would be followed by a trip into the hall and not wanting to be discovered until I chose to be.

Her emotions were a mess, shrouded by irritation and confusion. But the underscore of concentration and curiosity was most troubling, I decided. I didn’t need Edward’s mind-reading ability to tell me she was contemplating my suddenly-impulsive brother and his less-than-human antics. I was making the right choice, I nodded to myself, stealing my body tight against the opposite wall. Best end this before everyone got too involved to back out.

But as the girl rose from her bed and made her way toward her door, closer to me, her scent hit me full on. I found it difficult to believe she could be more appealing to Edward than she was to me. But if she was, I was in awe of his restraint. These thoughts, of course, retreated to the logical portion of my brain the second she was in sight, and I could make out the faint throbbing of her jugular. She hadn’t spotted me yet, that much was obvious by the relaxed set of her shoulders and even tempo of her heart.

One taste, I decided, wouldn’t do any harm. To kill her without it would be like setting food out in the sun to spoil. A waste by any standards.

I hadn’t realized I was gripping the doorframe in my hand until it splintered in my palm, a second before the sound reached Bella’s ears as well. I could have bolted, hidden in the closet like some guilty adolescent, but for whatever reason I remained. I watched in fascination as her heart rate spiked, her eyes widening as they darted to my menacing figure.

She took a quick step away, and it wasn’t even until she was falling that I noticed she had been standing at the top of the stairs.

The rest of the staircase was hidden from my view, but I could certainly hear the thump of her body hitting the plane and angle of each step, the crunch of bones and slap of skin as she broke like the fragile human she was. I had barely a moment of wallowing in pity for the girl, lying twisted as she was at the bottom of the stairs, before the scent of her blood pooling on the floor hit me and all rational thought was lost.

The next thing I knew, a strong grip was tearing me away from Bella’s body, teeth torn unjustly from her throat before I’d had my fill. I struggled valiantly, but there were two and I was blinded by bloodlust, my vision streaked in red and eyes for only one thing. But my thrashing grew weaker as I came back to myself, until the point where I could identify one of my assailants as Emmett and the other as Rosalie. I stilled.

“What-“

“Carlisle! What should I do?” Edward’s frantic voice pierced once and for all through my haze, and I suddenly became aware of the human girl convulsing a few feet from where I was being held. Well that wasn’t what I’d intended at all.

He turned to snarl at my thoughts.

“I’m sorry, son.” Carlisle spoke gravely, and Alice rested her hands on Edward’s shoulders. Somehow he was keeping it together, despite the fact that his hands were practically dripping in Bella’s blood. His will would always be stronger than mine, I realized. “There’s nothing more you or I can do. The change… it’s to the point of no return.”

He hung his head limply, his face crumpling as if in true agony.

But then he swung towards me, and Alice’s comforting hands became restraints.

“You did this to her.”

I nodded, no point in denying it.

“To keep us safe.”

To clean up your mess, I thought but didn’t say, yet the effect was much the same as if I had spoken the words aloud.

And I didn’t need to make use of my gift for him to share in my guilt.

(врезаться)

Bella’s change took nearly four days; blood loss equaled less liquid to pump the venom into her system, and therefore a more drawn out transformation. I cursed myself for the poor planning and lack of self-restraint that caused the girl even more pain. Lord knew she didn’t deserve it.

I waited by her bed like a doctor with no medicine, a soldier with no war or weapons to fight, an angel with no God or a demon with no sin.

Edward had disappeared along with his guilt the second after he’d deposited her on his bed. And I guess that would always be the difference between us: he might have the willpower to restrain himself, but he couldn’t deal with the consequences if he ever gave in to his whims.

Her vampire eyes open eighty-six hours and twelve minutes after her human eyelids had closed, and I have only two seconds to ponder a correlation between their dark color and her blood-loss before I drop to my knees.

It’s as if a piece of my person, of my soul (if that’s even still there) is being wrenched away from me. I gasp once it’s gone, leaving a purely metaphorical gaping wound inside of me, and I look up at the terrifyingly beautiful girl standing above me.

“You feel guilty.” She states plainly, her head cocked to the side.

I nod weakly, trying to gain my bearings. She crouches down in one fluid movement.

“But it’s more than that. You’re…” she trails off, searching. And if I hadn’t done the same so many times before, if I hadn’t ever tasted the mood around someone, trying to gain insight, I don’t think I would have been able to tell what she was doing. But I was reminded and the hole inside me ached. “You’re relieved.”

She regards me curiously, void of anger, the emotion I would have expected. Part of me was waiting here for my execution.

And then she’s grinning. “And now you’re confused. That’s okay. You wouldn’t be the first.” But then she trails a single finger down my cheek and I’m all too aware how much stronger than me she is at this moment. “But tell me why you’re relieved.” There’s something in her otherwise-light tone that suggests it isn’t a request.

“Because maybe there’ll finally be someone else in this family that just doesn’t belong.”

Bella nods, standing just as quickly as she’d bent down. And then she’s gone.

I hear Alice gasp downstairs, her choke as the same effect Bella had on me affects her as well. Yet, even as I think through the connection, I feel my gift return to me, seeping back into the chasm within my chest. Suddenly, I can feel her confused panic instead of just listen to it.

“Alice!” I holler as I streak down the stairs, afraid for her far more than for myself.

“I’m going to love you someday,” I hear Bella repeat behind me as I take Alice’s shoulders in my hands, searching her face for signs of pain. But she’s only shaken.

“Yes.”

Bella grins; I see it reflected in the shine of Alice’s eyes as she mirrors the expression.

“I like that.”

When I finally turn, I see Bella clutched to Rosalie’s side while the blonde flutters over her like a mother hen over her chick. I’m suddenly struck by the irony that not a week ago Rosalie had been pleading for the same girl’s death. I snort.

Rosalie barely has time to glare at me before Bella’s head snaps up, her gaze speculative.

“You wanted me dead too.” But Rosalie has only shrunk back a bare millimeter, surprisingly guilty, before Bella shakes her head. “That’s okay; I understand.”

I connect the behavior to the ability only a moment before Edward appears at the back door, looking pained. She’s drained him as well.

“Well, aren’t you just the prodigal son returning only after the smoke has cleared. Have a nice mope, did you?” Rosalie sneers, back into protective mode now that she’s been forgiven for her own hand in Bella’s change. She must have figured Bella had done the same for me, or else parts of me would be flung all over the house already.

“Rosalie.” I’m surprised by the even base-line of Bella’s voice, and how she doesn’t even stutter now that everyone’s eyes are on her. The shy part of her must have died along with her heart. “Leave him be.”

I can feel a tug on that essence that had been stolen before, but it’s only for the faintest moment in which her eyes flash to mine, a thank you for borrowing, before she returns to her sentence. “He feels guilty enough as it is.”

“What’re you…” Rosalie questions, eyeing me, then Alice and finally Bella. “How are you doing that?”

Bella grins slyly.

“I’m a black hole.” She turns to Carlisle, who’s suddenly appeared at the bottom of the stairs. “Isn’t that right?”

Carlisle’s expression is concentrated. “I suppose that’s one way of putting it.”

Bella’s gaze turns sharply on Edward, her eyes narrowing.

“What was that? Your thoughts were too scattered for me to keep up.”

He stares back, broken, and if he’s surprised that she can hear his thoughts and he can hear no one’s but his own, he doesn’t show it.

“I’m sorry. For what I did to you. This is my fault.” His eyes meet mine. “Even if it wasn’t my teeth.”

But to my surprise Bella merely rolls her eyes.

“Please. You’re always looking for excuses for self-flagellation. You think you’re a monster, that you don’t deserve to be happy because of the terrible things you’ve done. Well, don’t count on me to help you out with that little pity-party.”

Bella sits down with finality on the couch, facing away from Edward with her arms crossed.

Emmett stifles a laugh and Rosalie doesn’t both to, throwing herself down beside Bella.

“Lucky you, Edward. You’ve finally found the only person who could make you feel like shit by not making you feel like shit. It’s fate, really.”

Bella giggles, like it was some inside joke, which it might as well have been. She knows Edward better now than any of us could in our half-century of history living among each other. Fate indeed.

But there is some part of me that aches as I watch Rosalie and Bella talk, Alice skittering past me to sit on the newest addition’s other side. Bella fits. She belongs, and if I have to guess, the contentment wafting off of her in gentle waves is due to the fact that she hadn’t felt that in her human family. Her old family. Even Edward drifts closer, like a magnet to metal or a moth enraptured by a flame. Boy is toast.

And I remain. Forever on the outskirts.

“Jasper?” My distant gaze flickers to hers, finding not pity but encouragement in her deep red stare. Acceptance. She tilts her head to the chair opposite her. “Come sit?”

And it’s a question because it really is my choice. Stay or leave. Inside or outside. To belong or to shun.

I take a deep breath and head for the chair.

pt. ii >>

office drabbles

2012-07-08T21:51:38Z

title: pina coladas breed discontent and rebellion (or how ryan closed a door and the window was locked)
fandom: the office
character(s)/pairing(s): erin/kelly
rating: pg13
word count: 100
spoilers: none? idk i haven't watched in a really long time, so no.

“I think Ryan wants to have some kind of weird sex orgy. With us.”

Erin cradles her pina colada, careful not to slosh. Kelly, however, is less mindful.

“He said that?!” she shrieks, red splattering across the laminate. What’s left of her fourth daiquiri causes her emotional range to take a dip. She pouts down into her glass. “He never tells me anything.”

The pale brunette pats her arm.

“No worries.” Erin shifts closer. “We can, if you want.”

Kelly pillows her cheek against her hand. “Nah. Ryan is totally lame.”

As it turns out, they don’t really need him.

title: tea vs. coffee deathmatch: two beverages enter, only one is poured out
fandom: the office
character(s)/pairing(s): pam, ryan
rating: pg
word count: 100
spoilers: set early s3.

A wisp of steam curls from the spout of Pam’s blue teapot, and with it, associations she’d rather forget.

“Coffee is far superior.” Ryan lets the break room door shut behind him. Pam exhales, grateful for the interruption. “Seriously, I’m surprised you’d drink something so lame.”

Her eyebrow tilts as she dunks a bag of green tea into her mug.

“Last time I checked, tea never gave anyone an ulcer.”

“It think it’s safe to say my boss and stalker already took care of that.”

“Such an ass.”

“You know you love it.”

Pam just smiles.

(She kind of does.)

title: waffles with syrup: gateway vice to lesbianism
fandom: the office
character(s)/pairing(s): pam/karen
rating: pg13
word count: 100
spoilers: none.
notes: based on a text from last night: (281): She was so adorably desperate I didn't have the heart to tell her I wasn't a lesbian. So now she's making waffles, may switch teams over this.

When Pam starts dating Karen, it’s an accident. An unknowing, silly accident.

It starts with dinner. Followed by a movie. Followed by coffee. Followed by cuddling, her uneven heartbeat merely coincidental. (In retrospect, Pam feels like a moron.)

She catches on after two weeks, when Karen’s fingertips skim her waist under the covers and slip under her shirt. The warm pooling between her hips muffles any shock she might have felt.

In the morning, Karen is whirling around the kitchen with waffle batter, dropping a maple-flavored kiss on her lips, and Pam thinks, yeah. I could get used to this.

i will follow you north (pam/karen) pg13

2012-07-08T21:36:11Z

title: i will follow you north (and south, east and west)
fandom: the office
character(s)/pairing(s): pam/karen
rating: pg13
word count: 3701
spoilers: none.
notes:

summary: au. karen was the one to start at dunder-mifflin, not jim. simultaneous evolution of pam, her art, and her love life.

west

Oblivion is white, she decides. White and perfect and endless. It doesn’t crowd, nor drown, nor live in a way that isn’t absolute truth. It’s the clear ring of the worker’s high-pitched pounding on the new bridge across town, singing through the half-nude trees; the lack of modesty in the branches’ barren bareness. It’s the curl of toes over edges, the haze below within the precipice.

It is naïve hope; it is the beginning of every story.

Pam begins to wonder if this is what going insane feels like. The light next to the entryway keeps flickering sporadically, florescent and pale and on and off and then on again. The faucet in the ladies room is leaky and she swears, however improbable, that she can hear it, constantly.

Plip-plop. Flicker. Plip-plop. Flicker.

She feels as if there is something she’s missing, some absent joy or swollen fulfillment that once was but had abandoned her without word or memory. Inside this void, days aren’t days, but tiny rubber bands that stretch and stretch then snap back at her viciously. She can’t say when the feeling began, or if she’d always felt like this, like she was tired in a bone-deep kind of way that no sleep could cure.

It’s a terrible feeling to need something you can’t name.

She feels discontent while awake and asleep her dreams are filled with blind horses that gallop over sand dunes then disappear over the horizon, the riders that saddle them dressed in grey with cloths draped over their faces.

Five-fifteen finds Pam buckling herself into the passenger seat of the truck, listening to the ornery engine start with a nostalgic smile pulled taut across her lips. Roy backs out of the parking space as the cab hums and purrs, and she pretends her head is pressed to the soft, warm belly of a great wolf.

Autumn leaves scrape against the pavement as they drive past, miniature tornadoes swirling them into chaos. The traffic light up ahead will only blink open one of her three, multicolored eyes at a time, and Pam anticipates with which shade she will look upon them.

This is where the beginning sprouts, when even the earth cannot feel the stirrings.

She stares at the blank canvas, and though she sees opportunity and revelation there, she has no idea where to start.

north

The whole of her palm is stained black, inked dark with charcoal smoothing over the lines and creases there, her future suddenly faceless and unreadable.

The valleys under her nails are choked with soot.

Pam tugs a sweater over her shoulders, burying inside the folds of the thick fabric as if they were the arms of a lover. The clock ticks against the insides of her skull.

She often feels as if she’s sinking and is merely peering up through the tangle of seaweed and dirty aqua blue, slowly growing cold.

“Hey,” comes a soft voice from above the ripples, and she surfaces to mauve lips bowed gracefully upward and straightly chopped bangs. The lips part. “I’m looking for Michael Scott?”

Pam blinks three times before plastering on her receptionist smile, politely plastic, and spinning her body sideways to angle toward the woman.

“Are you here to interview for the new sales position?”

She expecting a curt head bob, or maybe a cheery yes, but instead the woman scoots her forearms to rest against the desk, her head dipped low and her body slouched and looming.

“Well according to your boss I already have the job, as long as I quote ‘bring the twins along with me every day.’ I’m assuming that was a reference to my breasts, one that I hoped was a tasteless joke made ironically, but from your expression I’m guessing not?”

She hadn’t realized her face had twisted in morbid delight, her brow furrowed but her grin wide and amused. She’s suddenly very aware of the expressive shapes her muscles form under the skin of her face, the angle of her jaw, the set to her lips. What it’s saying to anyone who might look at her; if it’s giving her away.

This is when she realizes she hasn’t felt this spark of humor in two years.

“Afraid not,” Pam chokes out.

There’s a commotion as Michael comes barreling out of his office, accusing Pam of keeping the hot new girl to herself. He disappears with a misplaced word and a grumble just as quickly as he had appeared, and Karen looks over at Pam with wide, startled eyes.

“Any advice?”

Pam pops her lips, considering.

“The key is sarcasm. He can’t tell the difference, so you can insult him back as much as you want.”

Pam surreptitiously eavesdrops on the interview from the corner of her eye and an “accidentally” pressed conference call button on the phone in Michael’s office. She spends the next hour ducked low and guilty in her chair with the receiver cradled closely between a hunched shoulder and her ear.

And later:

“Hey,” Karen calls from the coat rack and Pam fakes a startle, as if she hadn’t been spying the whole time. She’s suddenly very aware of the other woman’s presence behind her left shoulder, like a devil perched there whispering all her darkest secrets.

Pam cranes her neck instead of spinning in her chair, deciding it appears more nonchalant. Karen walks into her direct line of sight, offering a suddenly timid smile.

“I was wondering. If, um, you’d like to go get a drink after work sometime.”

She tilts her head, considering the offer instead of knee-jerking her way into a polite response. The bud of a genuine smile begins to bloom on her lips, her mouth opening to respond, when a gruff voice crops up from the doorway.

“Ready to go, Pammy?”

Her eyes dart to Roy, and finds that guilt is a deciding factor in the press of her lips. But for what?, she questions herself, as she nods dreamily.

Awkward introductions are made. Pleasantries are exchanged.

Pam becomes aware, not all at once but in tiny increments, that Roy can’t stop looking at Karen, Pam refuses to stray her gaze from Roy and Karen can’t take her eyes off of Pam’s ring finger.

Strange.

“Maybe sometime,” Pam answers belatedly, as she winds a scarf Roy’s mother knitted for her tightly around her neck, tucking the frayed ends into her puffy coat. Off Karen’s confused look, she clarifies, “That after-work drink?”

Karen picks at her cuticles, shifting from foot to foot, as if she’s not sure what she’s still doing here and is hoping gravity (or perhaps teleportation) will take her somewhere else if she wills it hard enough.

“Sure,” she offers a tight, polite smile, “Anytime.”

And later still:

“So that new chick seems pretty nice.”

Only the lilt to the way he says nice sounds more like hot.

“Yeah,” Pam agrees from the inside of the refrigerator, the cool air soothing her burning cheeks, “She is.”

The vague shape of a dark, ominous thing arises on the butcher paper, heavy shadows and bright, unrealistic highlights making it appear distorted and strange. She still can’t bring herself to smudge the edges and pull some grey from the background, to give it depth.

It could be an airplane, she decides, sitting back and sipping a long-gone-cold cup of tea. Or the interior of the beat-up car she owned in high school. Anything that could take her away.

east

A faint, verdant vine grows under the steady pressure of a similarly-colored pencil, weaving through the intricacies of fuchsia and sky blue and violet already budding tentatively on the page.

Colors bloom and recede, knuckling under beneath bolder colors, fuller petals, and a more confident hand.

The sun rises like an Easter egg paint palate, with melted, dripping colors and translucent clouds.

Sitting cross-legged on the lacquered floors of an echoic living room, Pam spreads the Sunday paper out flat before her, as if to replace a carpet she has yet to buy. This is too early for her, even she knows that, but there’s a promise to the cracking of a new day, the chilled, spring air causing her bare toes to curl on her new front stoop as she retrieves said paper. It is hope, and it is exactly what she needs.

She drags a rapidly darkening fingertip down the line of ads, searching for a couch and two chairs to keep watch over the first home she’s ever owned alone, the way Roy’s lay-z boy and rabbit-ear antennas used to in her old house.

She doesn’t regret it. Not the fact that Roy got the house, or that she spent her share of the wedding money on a recent model of a used car and a modern apartment, or that she split with her ex-fiancé in the first place. It was time, she’d explained gently over dinner one night a month ago, and they both knew it. Pam could tell that Roy hadn’t realized this yet, that he was still in a holding pattern of blaming all their problems on her absence, and not the other way around. The hardest part was always letting go; once that was done, the joy came from rediscovering all the other things you can do with two free arms that you’d forgotten while you’d spent all that time holding on so tight.

Three, quick knocks rap against her screen door, and it’s only then that Pam notices the time.

“Come in,” she calls to the visitor, and Karen’s head peeking inside follows the squeaky sound of the door being opened.

“You’re not ready,” Karen states matter-of-factly, resting a shoulder against the wall.

Pam looks down at herself; yoga pants, a holey t-shirt bearing the growling lion of her high school mascot and a loose pony tail.

“Yeah, no, I’m sorry. I lost track of time,” she apologizes with a guilty expression, and jogs over to her bedroom. “Just give me a few minutes to change.”

“’K,” the other woman calls out to her retreating back, “I’ll just wait here, make myself comfortable.” She looks around pointedly at the empty room. “Oh, wait.”

Pam tugs a blouse over her head and her reply is muffled by the fabric stretched over her face. “Yeah, yeah, I’m working on it.”

She emerges a few minutes later in a more respectable outfit of jeans, a colorful blouse with puffed sleeves and open-toed flats. This isn’t a special occasion, just a Saturday afternoon. And, despite a nagging thought in periphery of her mind, this is not a date.

She’d be lying if she tried to say that all of the growing and blooming she’s been doing the past few months has been without Karen’s help. It was Karen who suggested that maybe marriage couldn’t solve all their problems; Karen who encouraged her to pick up a couple art classes a few months from now; Karen who answered her telephone in the wee hours of the morning, Pam’s voice small and scared on the other line when she decided to leave Roy; Karen who stayed with her that first night in a strange, new apartment. She also doesn’t want to say that she couldn’t have done it on her own. She probably could have, eventually. But it would have been slow like carriage rides and full of just as many halting stops, and she’s made peace with that particular trade off.

Pam takes a last, evaluating look around the apartment before she locks up, and she’d be a fool to pass off the shiver that runs through her as Karen’s hand lingers on her elbow as she walks out the door as a chill.

She is not a watercolor any longer.

An imaginary garden inspired by the real-life blossoms of the park burst forth from Pam’s sketchbook, the small, rectangular page barely able to contain it all. The edge of the wooden bench digs into her thigh as she kicks her legs this way and that, patient with the artistic process but longingly eying the wide expanse of the mowed field. The world seems to have so much more color these days, and she can’t decide if that’s due to the tumult in seasons or the new way she looks at everything now.

Karen flips another page with a papery shuffle beside her, and Pam smothers a sly smile by pressing the end of her pencil to her lips. With the warm, steady pressure of another’s thigh against her hip, the jungle on her paper continues to intertwine.

south

A dramatic, scarlet arch sweeps under the pads of her fingers, blended soft by her warm skin and the steady press of confidence. Red prints leave a kind of trail from the undersides of her knees to the hem of her thin, make-shift bathrobe, up to the tip of her already freckled nose, impatience and contemplation leaving its mark everywhere.

The shadows form slow and dark on the shape’s underbelly and the creeping reach of its silhouette against hardwood; highlights follow, stinging the shiny, patent bow and a miniature gold buckle with a white white glimmer.

The office is sluggish in the July temperatures, despite the air conditioning’s exorcism of the heat from their midst. Pam finds that she doesn’t mind the dull tick of the clock or the click of Kevin’s nail clippers or Angela’s prim cough when Pam curses at a paper cut, so long as she remembers both the death of this workday and the salvation waiting just beyond it. She raises her eyebrows at Karen from across the room, telepathically communicating both a promise for later and amusement at Michael’s antics.

They haven’t mentioned the evolution of their relationship to any coworkers, both dreading their reactions and wanting to retain their little bubble of joy as a private matter. Pam’s nearly positive that the camera crew knows; when the producers arrived with their equipment and questions and red, steady lights nearly a month ago, they were worried that their sole purpose would become outing them on national television. But that’s not the type of footage they take; they’re more concerned with quiet moments and smiles hidden inside euphemisms as a break from Michael’s loud, obvious antics. They need balance, softness, and if Pam and Karen haven’t become the unspoken poster couple for non-relationship relationships, then they have no idea what they are. Pam had always been frustrated by the ‘will-they-or-won’t-they’ plot; this is more a game of finding plastic babies in king cakes.

It’s strange, the way she has to wrestle with her lips to keep them from smiling constantly. How she struggles with the decision every morning over whether to wear a turtleneck to cover up the reddish, purple mark in the oval of Karen’s lips, or draw a big, bright circle around it in felt tip and tie her hair back. She’d trying hard not to imagine the way Karen’s legs looked in that dress last night, or how she had eyed the dipping expanse of Pam’s collarbone. She has a lot to be happy about.

Pam’s taking a new set of art classes, this time in pastels. Warm shades always seem to color her hands, as if the tips of her fingers are perpetually on fire, catching light switches and keyboard keys like lit matches.

Her life is beginning to feel not like work and pleasure; not divvied up and cut with a serrated blade down the center into two, neat halves, but as one life. She begins to notice the splashes of color on the planes of grey-ish white supply shelves, and she calculates how much red, yellow and blue would go into transferring them to paper.

And in her budding relationship with Karen, she wonders over a careful cataloguing of her feelings like indexed folders, adoration and gratitude and frustration stacked next to a tiny one labeled ‘love’ that is just beginning to thicken.

She is one person who lives, one heart that loves, one mind that contemplates, one woman that desires. The richness of beauty is everywhere, she’s discovering; not only in the slickness of pastels on her fingertips or the smoothness of Karen’s caramel thighs, but in the sweep of blinding light inside the copier and the murmur of voices in an otherwise quiet room.

She is uncovering the fullness of life and she will never let it go again.

Pam’s back presses into the meager cushion of the rocking chair, the buttons of someone’s work shirt digging just barely into her skin; whether it’s hers or Karen’s is up for debate. She eyes the pair of shiny red heels on the hardwood floor of her bedroom, and looks back at the pad of paper in her lap, the shoes partially rendered. She tries to place the moment of disposal last night, the sound of them hitting the floor – clack, clack, one right after the other – but the sensation of Karen’s hands on her waist, warm breath on the slope of her neck, hazy words slurred carelessly into air spooled tight, all rushes her and she can’t remember.

Karen stirs across the room, the covers shifting over the sinuous movement of her shoulders, and Pam finds that the moment of impact, the second leading up to this sprawl of red patent leather and askew, fashionable bows is far from the most important matter.

center

The paint under her nails could almost be mud, could almost make her a gardener of flower bulbs and roots instead of one of ideas, one of form and color and negative space. But the brown tint is too citrus and gummy to be dirt.

The angled brush catches around a scalloped shape, the interruption of a rounder one, then the divots in each. A warmer brown emerges on her palate with the addition of a touch red, maybe a bit of blue; the folds and large billows of a background shape come into being with that particular color.

Careful not to touch and dirty the photograph, Pam squints and adjusts, capturing absolute perfection with the accuracy of her faults.

“We’re lost.”

“Nope. I refuse to admit it. We’re just… directionally challenged.”

“Which is fancy speak for ‘we’re lost’.”

Pam squints down at the map spread out like a papery ocean in her lap, then out at the road, trying to discern North and South and 21^st Street versus 21^st Avenue. She isn’t having much luck. The darkening sky moves closer and the thunder seems like it’s chuckling at her inability to navigate. Smug bastard.

“Wait… I think I’ve got it.”

Pam manages to sort out the grid of streets, matching passing signs to the map and synthesizing them into a small, imaginary you-are-here dot in the paper city.

Karen pulls into a metered spot in front of a quaint boutique with French vintage and pink tulle in the window, taking the keys out of the ignition without making a motion to exit the car. Her hand snakes over the center console and squeezes Pam’s knee.

“You ready?”

She nods jerkily, still in a heady daze, and jumps out the passenger door before she can think better of it.

No tiny bell above the door announces their arrival and she suddenly feel like she’s intruding, like she’s somewhere she doesn’t belong. Pam swallows down the insecurities and hopes they’ll stay there instead of haunting her like an expired lunch; she distracts herself by glancing around the gallery. Art clings to the walls in neat tidy rows, some with ragged edges, others framed in black cherry, installations suspended from the ceiling over echoic wood floors.

Gertrude emerges from the backroom like she has a sixth sense about her art studio’s comings and goings, fluttering around them with little wings of “it’s so good to see you” and “nice to meet you” and “did you find the place okay?”. She adjusts the black plastic frames of her glasses with a single finger and lays her palms flat against the counter upfront, as if it’s the only thing that will calm her down.

“So… what do you think? Are you on board? We’d love to have you!”

Pam wishes she was talking to someone who could use periods at the ends of her statements once and awhile, and her stomach gives a nervous little wiggle, but maybe excitement is what she needs. This is a big step after all. She could use a fluffy, pompom laden cheerleader. They always seemed so confident at pep rallies; that’s part of why she hated them so much.

Karen, sensing her discomfort, places the steady warmth of her palm in the small of her back, letting her fingers graze up and down her spine. Pam breathes.

“How soon should I bring in my pieces?”

Pam nudges the photograph of Karen napping on their flee market couch, tilting it into the stream of sunlight. She traces the hills of Karen’s tucked knuckles, curled just beside her pillowed cheek. She wishes she could be rendering this painting from life, that Karen was really asleep beside her instead of this vacant furniture, but unfortunately one of them still keeps an office job.

The scarred leather of the sofa brings out the coffee tone in her skin and the mocha of her hair, each just a shade or two different. But certain items stand out starkly from the otherwise monochrome painting: the buttercream of her sleeves, the burgundy of her parted lips, and the gleaming gold of the ring circling an aptly named finger.

Pam can’t even remember all the times the clock had struck 11:11 and she’d found herself wishing for another life, or more courage, or a bolt of creativity. Now she only prays for things to stay just as they are, to hold onto the goodness that she’d found.

She feels whole.

i fell down the anthill for days (bella, nessie, charlie) pg

2012-07-08T21:07:56Z

title: i fell down the anthill for days
fandom: twilight
character(s)/pairing(s): bella, nessie, charlie
rating: pg
word count: 829
spoilers: breaking dawn.
notes: character death. title from neko case's "fever."

summary: “what happened to black being classic? i mean, this is a funeral for god’s sake. i can’t send you dressed in teal.”

Bella flings another useless armful of clothes across the bedspread, her golden eyes wild and her hair frizzed from her fussing. She’s been quiet since the phone call, but morning dawned and she just… snapped.

The rest of the family is hiding downstairs somewhere, unsure how to handle the situation. None of the others had ever stuck around so close to their human lives as to witness the deaths of their family. Nessie ascended the staircase slowly, as if approaching a baby bird, and peaks around the doorframe. Bella doesn’t acknowledge her arrival, but immediately begins ranting.

“Why don’t you have any black clothes?” She glares at the fistful of brights and pastels as if they are at fault for existing, for taking up closet room from more sensible colors.

Nessie chooses her exact words carefully, treading on delicate fishing line.

“Aunt Alice says it’s too depressing.” It’s a practiced mumble; any inarticulate Cullen is a manipulative Cullen.

The sound that emanates from her mother’s throat is unearthly, a tangled web of grief and helplessness and exhaustion. She’s just so tired. The last time she slept, her daughter was a baby. She was living in Forks. She could cry. The last time she slept her father was alive.

Rest in peace, Charlie.

“What happened to black being classic?” Her voice is hysterical. “I mean, this is a funeral for God’s sake. I can’t send you dressed in teal!”

She collapses into an arm chair, and her hands cover her face as if shielding her daughter from her non-existent tears. Nessie rests her hands on Bella’s shoulders.

Nessie knows how much Bella wishes she could attend the funeral herself, could stand up and speak about her beloved father, walk the gravestones and sprinkle dirt on his coffin. But the youngest Cullen is the only one of them all that actually looks her age, can pass for a granddaughter to a seventy year old for those not in the know. Most people still never knew that the Chief’s daughter and Edward Cullen had a child. Regardless, they didn’t know her face, not enough to know it hadn’t changed in near twenty years.

“I know you’ll miss Grandpa,” She whispers, kneeling down at her mother’s feet, and Bella shudders, nodding. “But he knew how much you loved him. You don’t have anything to regret.”

Bella looks down on her daughter and she can almost make out a ghost of her father’s features there. Beneath the shape of her face (Bella) and the perfection of her straight nose (all Edward) she can just see the girl’s grandfather, hidden but not forgotten. She’s suddenly reminded of his expression when she told him the family was moving; she remembered it clearly – his face pulled taught like paper, the lines there etched deeply like roads on a map. The parallel highways between his eyes deepened to ravines as his forehead furrowed in confusion.

“You leaving your old man?”

Bella’s chest had ached like it was full of iron, her motionless arteries like lead pipes, weighing her down.

“We’ll come back to visit,” she assured, but she knew it to be a lie. Charlie was already asking her the secret to her youthful face and she didn’t have an answer for him anymore; she was barely passing for twenty-six.

He sighed, tired and resigned and older than he should have to be.

“All right. I guess a family like the Cullens shouldn’t be tied down for too long. And Nessie- she’ll want to see the world I suppose.” She’d nodded, fighting tears that would never come, “But you’ll send her back to see her Grandpa? She grows up so fast.” You have no idea, she’d wanted to say, but bit her tongue and gave her father one last lingering bear hug, tighter than she usually would have allowed herself, baring a hint of her inhuman strength.

She had left him, only putting a card in the mail every father’s day, but she knew what she’d been sacrificing by becoming a vampire. It had been a long time coming and she was grateful for the extra time she had been awarded with him, for herself and for her daughter. Nessie was right; she had no regrets.

Bella cracks a wry smile, no humor there.

“When did you get so smart, huh?”

“Psht. I was born a genius, mama. Just took you this long to catch up.”

It works, and Bella gives a watery snort, leaning forward to gather her daughter in her arms like she’s getting ready to carry her to safety.

“You know you don’t have to go. You’ll be alone,” she murmurs into Nessie’s shoulder, and the girl nods, aware.

“Yeah. But… I want to. This way I can let you know how it goes.” She smiles sadly, wiping invisible moisture from Bella’s stone cheek. “It’ll almost be like you were there.”

The proud shine in Bella’s eyes could almost be tears.

time keeping (nessie) pg13

2012-07-08T20:57:01Z

title: time keeping
fandom: twilight
character(s)/pairing(s): nessie(/jacob); ensemble mentioned
rating: pg13
word count: 1096
spoilers: breaking dawn.
notes: i've always wanted to write an epic-length piece where nessie goes traveling around the world trying to define family and home, and spends time with the pack and the volturri and the other vamp hybrids in south america... but that's never going to happen, so have this instead!

summary: you feel like you’ve taken your mother’s place in the pack, slid right into the empty place she left behind, the seat still warm with her human heat. the vampire girl.

time [tahym] noun: duration regarded as belonging to the present life as distinct from the life to come or from eternity; finite duration.

Your wedding is relatively drama-free, at least compared to what you’ve heard of your parents’ nuptials.

You marry in the winter, beneath an old oak tree that you’d hung a swing from as a child. (Charlie is the only human there to grumble about the cold.) The ceremony is short and sweet, traditional where nothing else about the event could be, and the witnesses fill two very distinct sides: bride and groom. Your half is pale statues, shades of tawny and crimson eyes, snow dusting skin as if the flakes were falling on stone. But Jacob’s half is clunky and boisterous, russet skinned, overflowing from their seats and whooping when he kisses you after the vows. (Even the wolves from Sam’s pack wish the both of you well at the reception.)

The two packs have come to an agreement, mended fences. Not joined together again, but living in harmony. In-laws, almost. Emily’s kitchen becomes home base again, and you finally get to taste her famous blueberry muffins for yourself.

You feel like you’ve taken your mother’s place in the pack, slid right into the empty place she left behind, the seat still warm with her human heat. The vampire girl. You’d like to think that the other wolves like you more, that they recognize the vampire part wasn’t exactly your choice. That they regret that the split of the pack was over your annihilation, and your mother’s. But you’re not naïve, can hear them whisper about how fucked up the whole situation is (you’ve never told them your hearing is nearly as good as a full-vampire’s). Emily smiles at you kindly, though, as they gossip like hens in a coop, and you wonder what she thinks of you, without the wolf instinct to kill your family and being married to the head of the (former) death squad.

She doesn’t flinch when you play with her children the way the others too, and she laughs right along with you when you tickle them until they can’t breathe. This is a gift you can’t even begin to thank her for; the news of your infertility still stings, still makes you regret that Jacob couldn’t have married someone normal, someone that could give him babies. When Sam looks at you like you aren’t fit to be around children… it hurts you something awful, more than you would admit.

You bond with Leah, surprisingly, not just because of your shared barrenness, but because if there’s one person’s existence that Sam regrets more than yours, it’s hers. She tells you to appreciate the gift you’ve been given, that you owe imprinting as much for your happiness as she owes it for her sadness. But sometimes you wonder if it’s truly you that this mystical force has endowed with contentment, and not your mother’s peace of mind, or Jacob’s broken heart, or your father’s guilty conscience. (You won’t ever tell Leah this, of course. She’d bite your head off, call you ungrateful.)

Even still, the chair opposite Emily’s beside the stove becomes your second home while Jacob is out patrolling. (You live in fear that the Volturri will return, have nightmares that they will sneak up and snap his neck before you ever even had a chance to stop them. Only your father knows what wakes you up at night, and you’ve sworn him to secrecy.) You could help them, one more set of eyes and ears, but your human half takes precedence in Jacob’s mind when it comes to matters of safety, so you are regaled to the spot next to Kim and eventually Claire, asking if there’s any more sugar for your tea.

Life in that kitchen is nothing but bated breath, nervous glances at the clock when it begins to grow dark. They live in a constant state of awareness that the sudden appearance of a hostile Cold One could mean death at any moment, that at any given second their husbands could be dead and they just don’t know it yet.

You always contrast this with your father’s family in your mind.

The Cullen family home bears no clocks beyond those on fancy cell phones, the walls covered with relics from the past instead of the future. Because this is what you’ve discovered about your parents’ kind:

Time means about as much to vampires as it does to a rock. Past, present, future; it’s all relatively the same thing.

Humans don’t really acknowledge it, but their sense of time comes from change within their body. Blood pumps steadily, skin cells slough off, the stomach digests and hair grows. You’d read once that time was nothing but a unit of change; this is why vampires felt time differently, almost as if it was flying by while simultaneously never moving at all.

In times of crisis, where Emily and Kim would be twitching and pacing, it finds the Cullen women stock still, frozen in their dread, unable or unwilling to keep up their human charade. The most movement in a room full of panicked Cullens lies in Alice’s eyes scanning back and forth like a metronome, searching the future, or your father’s clenching fists, or your mother’s bit lip.

It’s as if stress makes vampires unable to pretend to be human, and humans unable to pretend to be anything else.

The next day is daylight savings, and the wall clock in your and Jacob’s kitchen ticks away above the stove, unknowing that it’s steady, unquestionable beat will be wrong in a matter of hours. You’d always thought the whole concept was silly; if time were real, wouldn’t it always be right? Jumping forward or back seemed to reveal that it was merely an illusion, tugging the curtain back to reveal the man behind it puling all the strings. In truth, you’d struggled to understand the need for time at all, a product of your vampire half’s immortality. But it’s a human construct and, like others, you’ve grown to accept it, living in a human world as you do.

The screen door creaks as Jacob arrives home from another patrol with Leah, and you sigh, letting the worries melt from your shoulders.

In the morning you’ll turn back the clocks and pretend it matters to you, that taking care over tiny hands will make you human, because even though you never will be, it’s far easier to pretend than to admit what you know:

You do not belong.

twilight drabbles

2012-07-08T20:45:25Z

title: teetering on the edge of a thin gold band
fandom: twilight
character(s)/pairing(s): bella
rating: g
word count: 286
spoilers: none.
notes: this was posted for a battle of some kind so long ago i don't even remember what it was for.

summary: bella falls out of love in phases.

After a time, Edward’s arms wrapped around her begin to feel like trapping of a straight jacket, pale and tight and stop stop I can't even breathe. At night she whispers into Alice's silk sheets, terrified of not needing him, of being the strong one, and Alice kisses her forehead.

"Be the best you that you can find inside you. The rest comes after."

She feels like a small child at the age of seventy.

(Bella begins to wonder if it always felt like this, but that she was too blinded by his beauty to really see him.)

She falls out of love in phases. At first she wants to want him, needs to be consumed. Then it's guilt, the stab of pain at the hurt look in his eyes as she pulls away. Like he knew it all along. But after, she rages against his expectations, resents his wounds that she could have sworn were made in self-defense.

But finally she loves him again, for all he’s taught her about herself, albeit unintentionally. She loves that he made her happy, for a time, and that he gave her the gift of an endless life to learn her own mind, her spirit. She loves that he can’t bring himself to hate her even as her back is turned and retreating, even if he’ll never understand. She loves him the way you do all great loves, with a fond remembrance and an honest gratitude, no strings attached.

Because she’s just beginning to feel a fire within her, coursing through her veins with a power that her blood never had.

She doesn’t need him, and that thought doesn’t scare her half as much as she thought it would.

title: we dance in dark suspension
fandom: twilight
character(s)/pairing(s): alice/jasper
rating: g
word count: 100
spoilers: none.

summary: the cullens decide to take a winter swim in alaska.

The midnight Alaskan air nips at Alice’s bare shoulders but she doesn’t feel the winter’s chill, only steps closer over smooth rock to the shoreline, letting the water taste her ankles. She tugs on Jasper’s wrist.

Upstream, they can hear their siblings splash and laugh.

Beneath the water is even darker than the night sky above, so blue it’s almost black, as they sink to the bottom. If it weren’t for her vampire eyes, she wouldn’t be able to make out Jasper’s waterlogged smirk.

Their frozen lips touch, and Alice wonders if they could walk to Japan, just like this.

title: these are just ghosts that broke my heart
fandom: twilight
character(s)/pairing(s): jacob(/bella)
rating: pg
word count: 100
spoilers: new moon au.

summary: jacob watches her fall a thousand times.

The air is damp and hangs as specters, seeping into your lungs with the altitude.

You can feel her in your marrow. The whisper of a breeze, a spray of salt from below, the rustle of reedy grass; if you were to breathe in deeply you’d smell her. Like jasmine.

Or maybe it’s death.

It’s her laughter just beyond the trees that draws you forward. The flutter of fabric in your periphery. She toes the edge of the cliff, grinning back at you with her hair whipping around her face and her arms stretched wide.

She doesn’t make a splash.

bebitched @ 2012-07-08T16:32:00

2012-07-08T20:32:05Z

Aaaaand the fic spam commences.

bebitched @ 2012-06-28T09:18:00

2012-06-28T13:18:23Z

Oh heeey there LJ. You still there? Yeah, me too.

If anyone is interested (or still checking their flist), I'm going to be posting all of my fics that I never got around to putting up for no reason except laziness and dead fandoms. It's mostly Twilight stuff that I wrote before I got out of that fandom and Office stuff I wrote before I stopped watching.

Cheers!

P.S. I hang out mostly at tumblr at this point, so come follow me if you don't already! I post about various BBC shows and movies I'm too invested in and random bits that I thinks are neat.

P.P.S. In the unlikely event that I write new fic after this batch, it'll probably go up on my Ao3 account, so check there if you still want to read :D

2012 scrapbook

2012-01-07T05:56:21Z

Films
A Dangerous Method - Batman Begins

Books
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Quotes

Memorable

complementary colors (rosalie/jasper/bella) pg13

2012-01-02T02:24:35Z

title: complementary colors
fandom: twilight
character(s)/pairing(s): rosalie/jasper/bella, emmett/alice
rating: pg13 (violence, sexuality, language, and the radical suggestion it might be okay for vampires to kill humans. gasp!)
word count: 5912
spoilers: eclipse (BD AU)
notes: this has been a long time coming. took me a while to grapple with plot without being distracted by the blinding 'holy shit pretty fucked-up immortals let me smush them together!' wait, did i just say plot? things happen at any rate.

summary: the rise and fall of the cullen clan, as told from the perspective of three of its members.

There is a rule, first unwritten and instinctual, then expressed and syndicated, stating that which begins must too end.

This is common knowledge. This is the natural order. This is red, yellow and blue on a color wheel, and the line of the horizon. This is simple.

This is easy to forget.

Part 1:

Each color is perceived using cues in the surrounding environment, such as lighting, adjacent hues, and the shape of the object, and is interpreted by the cone receptor cells in an individual’s retina.

Bella was a serious child.

“If you worry your forehead like that all the time, you’ll get wrinkles before you’re ten,” her mother would fret, hoping pigtails and strawberry ice cream would make her daughter more like a little girl.

It didn’t.

She would sit for hours in her closet with a flashlight, scouting the dictionaries for treasures. Looking up words like I and am and frowning, disappointed, when the definitions left her unsatisfied, never quite capturing the elusively of time and self.

This is how she learned that sometimes words fail.

Rosalie was confusedly spoiled, not knowing why she was rewarded with the pleasures she had and unsure why she didn’t have absolutely all the ones she wanted.

“But what if I don’t want a party?” She was on the verge of ten and mean about it, her indignant stomp disturbing a miniature hurricane of dust and ruffling her white eyelet dress. “All those people talk to me like I’m two and have ears too small for their heads.”

The cook stifled a laugh.

She was still too young to recognize the importance of appearances. Of making quiet, polite chatter with wealthy, polite people and acting like you had nothing better to do.

“But Grace baked you a pretty cake, see?”

Her mother was placating.

Rosalie examined the snow white frosting, delicate sugared violets crisply adorning the confection, and promptly turned up her nose.

A worker setting up the table caught her eye, then glanced away with a odd look. Men were always peering over at her like that, like she was an angel-harbinger of God’s word, and she never quite knew why.

Three years later she discovered her own beauty and she stopped asking questions.

Jasper was simple. He spent his childhood tapping fingers against wooden posts, memorizing the way the air smelled just before the rain.

His father’s soul was as calloused as his hands, working the cotton field diligently and with little thought elsewhere. The soil held no secrets.

“You have charisma, boy,” he’d say gruffly, tobacco rolling like a cow’s cud in his left cheek, “But that don’t make you a man.”

He grew as Houston did, watching families and businessmen and bachelors flock by the wagon-full, hoping to manipulate destiny the way one might jerk the bridle of a horse. That was something else his father had always said.

“Everyone has their own lot in life. Best make what you can of it.”

He tried his best not to drop crumbs from his momma’s cornbread on his grey uniform the day his infantry left town, taking the reigns of his own life.

Finally.

This was before.

Part 2:

A triadic color scheme adopts any three colors approximately equidistant around the hue circle.

They met on a dual-direction wind.

“You don’t want to be here,” Rosalie observed, taking in the tightly strung rope of his muscles, the blood red in his eyes and the cinched noose of his lips. It wasn’t too difficult to tell he was burning.

He regarded her closely.

“Neither do you.”

Of course in her case, by here, she knew he meant on the larger scale. Undead. In existence. Damned.

She bristled immediately, distrustful of those who claimed to know her better than herself, but he could taste the undercurrent of appreciation in her emotions, sweet in the air. Understanding was shared, passed back and forth to be ingested in equal amounts the way one might divvy up wine.

This was why they played the part of siblings in every high school performance. It wasn’t a challenge to pretend to be related to someone who understood all your deep, dark empty places.

The first time Bella saw Rosalie, she thought that wars could be started over her. That bombs could detonate with each swayed hip, tsunamis cascading with a fluttered eyelash, hurricanes and tornadoes and waterspouts raging on inhale and exhale, but that she’d still have a crowd begging for more. That Rosalie would flatter under the attention like a well-watered tulip.

The first time she saw Jasper, however, she imagined that he’d been dropped and broken one too many times, enough to make him crazy and sad and scarred.

She’d never been very good at reading people.

Rosalie swallowed her amusement, her venom, her phantom tears, as she watched this precious human everyone kept raving about taking up space in their living room.

From the way Edward angled his body around her, you’d think the girl had a “careful: contents fragile” sticker slapped on her forehead. And if she weren’t paying attention, she might squint to see it too.

She was no porcelain doll, that much was certain just by the barely-there bruises from her latest fall.

Dolls don’t hurt; they simply break.

She thought Edward didn’t give her enough credit; there was something to be said for the patient, fearless way the human had accepted them; once Rosalie herself got past the incredulity of it she could even see it. But there was an underbelly to the girl’s graciousness, the vice to every virtue.

The human’s lips puckered around the sourness of the unsweetened grapefruit juice Esme had unwittingly handed her (cold and bitter; ironic), but she hid her discomfort in a napkin in an effort, no doubt, to spare her feelings.

Rosalie almost gagged on this bout of sickening goodness. No one should be that understanding.

She’ll pay for it, one day.

“I reckon that’s a mistake.”

Rosalie directed the glare she’d been aiming at the phone towards the man over her shoulder, lips pursed like poison.

“He should know.”

Jasper strolled into the room, head ducked and hands in his pockets. His posture said defense, but she had him learned him well enough to see the fight in his eyes.

“You just want to prove that you were right. About him getting involved with the human,” He paused, breath stuttering. “Bella.”

Rosalie scoffed, chin pointed and defiant. “Not you too. He should have never-“ She clenched her teeth off of his beseeching look. She found the anger in herself surprising. She didn’t expect to care. “This is his fault. She was never meant for this, and now she’s dead. It’s his fault.”

If she was a lesser woman she might falter at Jasper’s grave expression.

“You know he’ll put it all on himself when he finds that Bella’s gone and drowned herself. He doesn’t need your blame for sport.”

Rosalie reached for the phone, and in the next instant Jasper’s fingers were curled around her wrist, not tight enough to hurt but enough to divest her of the phone with a flick if he so chose.

“Think about what you’re doing.”

Jaw locked, eyes stone, Rosalie pulled herself free. He let her.

“I have.”

Jasper studied his brother through the window pane as Edward stared at Bella. The branch he was perched on swayed in time with the shadow of her eyelashes cast against her cheek as her eyes moved beneath the paper-thin skin of her eyelids in unseen, sleeping terrors. She whimpered, almost silently, and he watched the chords in Edward’s neck twitch, tighten.

He slipped through the just-barely-person-sized opening of the propped window, padding over to the bed. The two looked down on the sleeping girl.

"This is your chance to change things. Bella and you… what you had was hardly a relationship." Edward met Jasper’s gaze, but only to glare his irritated confusion. "It was mutual infatuation."

Edward fidgeted. Ordered an expression of indignant anger, then sharp uncertainty, then let both drop. Fidgeted again.

“I love her more than my own life,” he huffed, like that was the tie-breaker, the answer that solved everything.

“Yeah. Reckon you do,” Jasper agreed, standing stiffly and slipping over to the window. “But love without respect or trust is barely anything at all.”

Story time with Bella was a last ditch effort to make her reconsider. She felt ridiculous, like they should be illuminated by a fire and ready to jump at the ghosty parts. But she wanted the girl to think, and being nasty hadn’t gotten her anywhere.

Rosalie didn’t pretend to show her everything. There was some details she squirreled away for herself, things she was proud and ashamed that she could still recall.

The pinch of bobby pins as Royce pressed her head onto the cold concrete; the quick unraveling of her perfect blonde curls.

The burn of shame that she melted beneath a thick film of hatred when she saw the way Edward looked at her. Dirty, his eyes seemed to say. Trash. Whore. (It hurt her more than she’d have liked.)

The sticky slide of Royce’s blood on her hands, the pleasing crunch to his bones. How it satisfied her in a way nothing ever really had again.

The tickle of razor blades at her wrists. How she’d laughed when they broke against her new skin.

The first time Emmett held her hand, how she wanted to cry and run and kiss him all in the same instant.

How it had felt to realize she were never going to have what she wanted, not ever.

And there were some stories that Rosalie never told her, at least not then. Like the time she pushed her little brother into the lake because he broke her favorite doll, and the panic in her gut when the water stopped blooming with bubbles. (She saved him, blue lipped and coughing, but he was fine. Mother fretted over him like she fretted over Rosalie’s lipstick.)

Or when Emmett drained his first human, and she had to pack away all her pretty dresses and fold his shirts and steal away into the night. The way her hands shook.

And when she visited her mother as she lay dying of tuberculosis in a high-class sanatoria, the stench of sick hanging heavy from the drapes and steeped in the carpeting. The way her mother’s mouth had worked around the notes of a silent pitch, too weak to scream about the dead come to life.

But most of all, she didn’t tell her how she’d felt when Alice had that vision of her suicide, how she’d been betrayed and jealous and destroyed and vindicated, like a difficult bridesmaid that trips walking down the aisle.

The first time Bella was alone with Jasper since he almost killed her, she made a point to keep her expression soft and unafraid.

“You can stop that pretending, you know. I can hear your heartbeat, quick as a hummingbird.”

Bella let out a little sigh, happy not to have to pretend. She was grateful that she didn’t need to word the complex tangle of her emotions right then; it seemed like all she did those days was try to phase something inside her she wasn’t even sure had a name.

“Okay,” she breathed, a smile like warming taffy on her lips, “I can do that.”

Later, that same afternoon, Bella would tell him that she didn’t blame him, that it wasn’t his fault. It was his nature. And Jasper would wonder what Edward’s nature was, and what it meant for them both.

They had formed a pretty little family.

Carlisle the proud father; Esme the gracious mother, Edward the prodigal son who could do no wrong; Alice the energetic ray of light and Emmett the comic relief.

And Rosalie and Jasper… they were the worn socks the others kept around because its mate only had one match. They existed without belonging, a cog in a machine only there for aesthetics.

But then there was Bella. And suddenly there was an innocent bystander, a temptress to Edward’s careful self-control, a blushing package of everything she never was. A cute little sister made of marzipan and ginger. And Rosalie hated her for that, for a time at least.

She should have known it was all about to change.

Part 3:

In reality, only imaginary primary colors can mix to form all perceptually possible colors. To do this the colors are defined as lying outside the range of visible colors: they cannot be seen.

Edward turns Bella on their wedding night, in some time zone at least.

It was unplanned and imperfect, (there is some metaphor for honeymoon babies here that Rosalie doesn’t have the stomach to make) and Bella writhes in agony for three days. Three days of Edward worrying himself into the ground with no one but Alice’s tinny voice over a cell phone speaker to talk him down.

Rosalie has never been a very precise reader of the emotion in people’s voices, but even she can hear the tremor in his, as if he were breathing straight into the shell of her ear. It hurts her; Edward is still her brother despite their animosity and Bella is her sister now despite her questionable choices. She can hear Bella’s screams even across a dozen latitudes, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, and she winces at each pitch.

There’s talk of charting boats and renting cargo planes, of getting there in time to see Bella rise, but in the end the family consensus is to let them be. That outside influence would only agitate them both further.

Rosalie can’t say she agrees.

Jasper slides his king across the board, the movement of marble on marble squeaking slightly. He places the piece on one corner, then the other. Opposite him, Bella quirks an eyebrow.

He shrugs.

“Seemed like a good enough idea at the time.”

They don’t play chess, nothing so rule-bound and patterned. They make up their own games with checkered boards and odd pieces, inventing guidelines as they’re convenient, consulting imaginary rule books in their minds. One time they used Candyland figures. It’s a challenge for him, the vagueness of it, so used to the regulations of combat.

Bella told him that she finds her new brain too hollow and fuzzy with her human memories fading, like her skull is full of gauze and cotton balls, and she fills her sunrises and sets searching for uses for the extra space. She said that while she loves the sharpness of her thoughts, the way they zoom around synapses with no effort, she finds herself easily bored because of it. He tries to help, brings her a new book from town every day and tells her stories of his life. But he can taste the static of her impatience in her emotions, though she’s even quieter than she was as a human.

He’s just happy he no longer tastes her blood in the air, and her resulting death in Alice’s visions.

Alice hovers like a ghoul just over Bella shoulder, and he too can feel the flicker of the new vampire’s annoyance. He loves his wife, but the poor woman babies Bella far too much. She blames herself for not foretelling her grim change and clings as her penance, waiting for the moment Bella might need something, anything.

But behind the curtain of her anxiety and irritation, Jasper is aware of the hurt that lies there; sometimes he feels as if he’s the only one who sees past her careful indifference, and he probably is. That flair of pain every time Edward avoids her gaze, each time he slips from a silent room to brood on his own.

Jasper watches Edward’s self-imposed exile with keen disapproval, knowing his motivation just as well as the fact that it is a mistake. He believes that by denying himself the pleasure of Bella’s smile, it will satisfy his penance for snatching away her human life.

His brother never realizes that by punishing himself, he’s punishing his young wife too.

Rosalie finds the entire situation ridiculous, and from the glances shared over Edward’s pouting head, she knows Jasper has to agree.

She had never supported the way Bella was so eager to lay herself down on the sacrificial stone for a man stuck in the mud and a love that might not last, but this was insane. The only thing worse than making the choice Bella had was Edward agonizing over it once it had already been made.

Rosalie had always regarded Edward with a kind of passive annoyance, but this she cannot forgive.

Bella’s world becomes a pace on eggshells and hot coals, needing to move but cut once having done so.

Esme tries her best to mother her and Emmett tries his best to make light and Edward doesn’t say anything at all. She doesn’t want any of it.

She politely turns Esme away; she doesn’t need condescension, can’t stand the sticky sweet of it dripping down her neck from every pat on the head. Edward talks to her, when he deems it necessary, like she’s an actual newborn, one that does nothing but cry and sleep and suckle milk. It’s irony at its finest when she realizes that she can do none of those things.

Emmett is chastised with a raised eyebrow when his jokes fall flat. No one particularly feels like laughing.

And Edward-

Edward is exactly how one might expect a grieving widower to act, if he had dropped a bomb into her waiting, willing hands. Sullen and silent, avoiding the eyes of the ghost of the once-wife that haunts his shadow.

Jasper is her saving grace, her one companion that doesn’t hover or avoid. And, surprisingly, Rosalie ranks as well; she doesn’t step softly around her, treating her like victim. Neither of them look upon her with pity, and they are neither shallowly kind nor needlessly blunt.

In a crowded room they gravitate towards each other; Jasper blandly picking at a hem, Rosalie turning her nose skyward, and Bella coolly meeting every eye.

Interlude:

Some believe juxtapositions of complementary colors, or colors lying opposite each other on the color wheel, will produce strong contrast, a sense of visual tension, as well as 'color harmony'. Others believe juxtapositions of analogous colors, or those beside each other in the spectrum, will elicit positive aesthetic response.

The love of vampire mates is fortunate in one way: a bond broken by death is immeasurably painful, true. But once the ties fall loose, for whatever reason, it is absolute. No doubt, no returns, and it is always mutual. A vampire mated to one who falls out of love suddenly finds themselves unable to feel the love that had once coursed through their veins. All at once, they feel nothing.

The Volturri call it il grande separazione, the great parting. Little research has been done on the matter; those with the means were apathetic, not the type to be mated at all, or were disbelieving that such a fate would befall their love, or had suffered such a chasm and needed little more proof than that.

This Carlisle never tells his flock. Worries it will upset them, strain the ties that bind. Years later, after the fall, he’ll wonder if a warning would have kept the creeping cracks at bay, or maybe it would have happened sooner. He’ll never know.

Part 4: The foundations of pre-20th-century color theory were built around “pure” or ideal colors, characterized by sensory experiences rather than attributes of the physical world.

There once was a girl, with hair like mahogany and skin pale as moonlight and breath that tasted faintly of bubblegum.

She was trusting, and beautiful, and naïve.

Bella kills her at the back of an English classroom after school, the lips suctioned to the wound at her neck still shimmery with the young girl’s lip gloss.

It is the first human blood Bella has tasted, but it will not be the last.

This is the beginning of the end. (Although it was truly over before it began.)

Part 5:

A negative afterimage is seen when, after staring at one color for a period of time, it wears out the cone receptors of that shade. Upon looking away, one will see the opposite color.

Blood red eyes. Cemetery dirt packed under her nails. His golden gaze, betrayed and disappointed. He knows. He knows.

Her own indignant glare. This is when he chooses to care.

“I’ve never-“

“I know.”

The blonde pauses, lip bitten in temptation. Not even a taste.

“What’s it like?”

“Like finally being whole again.”

“This isn’t how it was supposed to be. We were all supposed to be happy.”

“Life isn’t some damn dinner party, Alice. Stop meddling and just let the dust settle.”

The slip of silk against polyester; slow, measured steps.

“I can’t do that.”

Bella has spent much of her life looking down. Her words drop and get tangled in her shoes and she trips, falling, gravity laughing. This is why she remembers to watch where she’s walking. It’s a vicious cycle. The world beyond pavement and puddles is like a dream she had once but can’t remember, vibrant impossibilities that by her logic could have never really existed.

She used to think Edward was designed to pick her up when she fell. But she’s starting to think maybe all he does is keep her still.

(This is later.)

Her voice runs away from her and she tries desperately to catch it, but now it’s bouncing off the walls in tiny little echoes, multiplying and replicating to spite her, and she can’t take them back.

“I’m not going to wait for you anymore.”

It scares her how much she doesn’t want to.

“Everything is falling apart.” Alice trembles, shaken.

He doesn’t say that maybe that’s just another way of saying that something else is falling together.

“I’m sorry I changed you.”

Her answering smile is a vivid mark of crimson against the paleness of her cheeks.

“I’m not.”

Jasper knows something is off kilter the moment he walks into the living room. The air is thin, like stepping off a mountaintop.

Alice is waiting for him on their bed.

“Something has happened.”

Bella pauses as she walks past the tree stump, bending to brush a kiss to Edward’s forehead.

“Try to find some peace,” she murmurs into his hairline, and the wild bronze tangles quiver with her prayer.

Jasper dipped his hands into his pockets, shoulders hunched. This is (not) happening.

“We don’t need each other anymore.”

Translation:

I don’t need you.

This was always the downside of marrying a prophet; if she foretold the end, it was difficult to argue. He was left running in circles, arguing over whether the future caused the vision or the vision caused the future. It made him tired just thinking about it.

“There is such a thing as vampires outgrowing each other. And Emmett, he-“

His blonde mane shuffles as he shakes his head, hand raised for silence.

“I don’t want to hear about that. I can accept it, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever understand.”

But even as the words leave his mouth, they’re born into lies like maggots into flies; his chest already feels lighter, his head clearer, his heart scrubbed clean.

The house trembles as if waiting for another blow. But Emmett and Rosalie’s bedroom remains hushed for hours, door shut against the world. They expect shouting and shattering, the shrill sound of Rosalie’s denial; when she emerges a sun’s turn later with her chin raised and her eyes clear no one understands.

(Not no one.)

Bella takes Rosalie’s hand, smoothes over the marble carvings of her palm. She grins.

Hoods pulled low over their faces, feet pointed toward Alaska like racing compasses, the two women leave the Cullen family behind.

Come with us, they’d said, You don’t have to be alone.

Never liked the cold, always preferred sand. Jasper tips an imaginary hat in their direction, grinning. Go on, ya hear?

They are not running away. This is not a retreat.

The forest floor does not snatch at their heels as they trickle further away from a house that was never truly home.

In a suitcase he packs three things:

A collection of button-ups, squirreled away from every hijacked shopping trip.

A vestigial pistol he’s carried with him since the war.

His favorite pair of boots.

He tenses. Eyes the leather-bound bag. Tugs on the boots and throws the rest away.

He’s done pretending.

Part 6:

A pair of complementary colors printed side by side can sometimes cause visual vibration, known as clashing, making them a less than desirable combination. However, separate them on the page with other colors and they can work together.

Bella pulls her legs in tight, ignoring the flurry of snowflakes around her, bunching inside the crevices of her clothes. Beside her, Rosalie laughs, terra cotta eyes dancing, and between them their hands are clasped.

Inside her, something in her chest cracks, then floods. This is what it means to be free.

Houston is different than he remembers; it seems like an obvious statement since he hasn’t stepped foot in the city for more than a century, afraid of being reminded of the magnitude of his inhumanity. Automobiles and women wearing pants and houses clustered like cattle; this is not what he’s referring to. The last time he’d had a boot planted on Texan soil, he was running away, from Maria, from the monster he’d created, from the fear he felt at the evilness he was capable of that he hadn’t wanted to believe existed. He hadn’t known it at the time, but he was also running toward Alice, toward a life that taught him the value of human life, all the while preaching the irrelevance of his own.

You are not a monster, but you must restrain your impulses as if you were one.

Your thoughts will lie.

Your head and your heart must become one.

It turns out that he hadn’t needed penance, a holy water bath of shame, or at least doesn’t require it any longer; instead he must find some medium between Maria’s ruthlessness and Alice’s naivety.

In the daylight, Jasper attends to the plants hanging from his windows, reading philosophy in an old, leather chair, and walking the length of his long, narrow ranch house, isolated by acres of roaming ground. At night, he goes into the city, listening to live music, letting the complexity of human emotion wash over him. He no longer abstains from human blood, not entirely, and he finds that walking amongst the humans of Houston is nearly effortless with his eyes tinted a light orange.

He’s not Edward, doesn’t pretend this is some moral crusade; his victims don’t deserve to die, or not deserve it for that matter. This is life, the life of an immortal, and he can accept that now without taking it for granted.

Rosalie raps her delicate-looking knuckles against the flaking paint of the door, sniffing in distaste. An eternity to spend and he can’t even pick up a damn paintbrush.

“It’s open.”

The house is neat inside, more due to the simplicity of its contents than a dedication to cleanliness. She spots Jasper by the sliding glass window, hands clasped behind his back like a general surveying the theater of battle.

Some things never change.

“Bella with you?” Rosalie has a flash of previous visits, of Jasper’s blood-slicked lips sliding against her own, Bella’s hands sharply clenched on her hips. She might have blushed if her veins weren’t hollow. This is not one of those visits.

“She stayed back in Denali with the sisters. Something about terrorizing the local village and a spa appointment. I didn’t ask.”

Jasper raises a pale eyebrow. “I’m surprised she detached from your hip long enough for a weekend apart. You sure you won’t die of shock?”

She can read the desire behind his words; she always could.

Rosalie smirks. “Jealous?”

He chuckles. “Maybe.”

The afternoon progresses much the same, the shadows stretching out longer as they settle down for the night, as they bicker and banter, almost like the siblings they once were. Could have been.

They don’t talk about how Jasper met with Alice and Emmett a month prior, though she knows he did. She doesn’t ask how it had felt to see his ex-wife’s tiny body fitting so perfectly against his brother’s hulking form. Maybe because he’s afraid of how much it hurt. Maybe because he didn’t feel anything at all.

They do talk about Carlisle and Esme, the trunk of the Cullen family tree and the only part that remains intact. Since half the children had left decidedly and the other half drifted off, Esme’s home had been cavernous, empty. But with the spring came the thunderous footfalls of a recent addition; a new brother, Lucian. Found beaten and near dead, Carlisle had turned him as he had turned her, and before her Edward, and after her Emmett. Rosalie’s met him once. She was not impressed.

There’s a recession in the swell of their conversation, the sun setting through the curtains. A rattlesnake whips his tail beneath the porch.

“Come back with us.”

Jasper scoffs, dismissive.

“This sounds awful familiar.”

“No, listen,” Rosalie leans forward in her chair, letting her hands fall gracelessly between her knees. She remembers a time when her spine had been as stiff as a steel pole and her expression just as cold. Divorce has changed her; Bella too. “We’re moving out of Denali.”

Off Jasper’s surprised expression, Rosalie angles her shoulders, not quite a shrug. “We don’t belong there anymore. Bella and I… It isn’t home for us. We’ve talked about it, and we want to find someplace that will be, someplace new. Someplace just for us. And we want you to come with us.”

Jasper considers, scratching his chin. His dubious expression clashes with her fierce one.

“This is ridiculous. You’ve proved your point, okay? You’re not a soldier anymore, not fighting anyone’s wars but your own. Move on, Jasper!”

The echo of her piercing words rings through the air like vibrations through the metal of a bell, pressing into his eardrums and rubbing the neurons in his brain together like chicken wire.

“Yeah,” he concludes softly, glaring at Rosalie’s triumphant expression. “Maybe you’re right.”

Ironically it’s immortality that teaches Bella that nothing ever really lasts.

(Her wedding ring leaves no mark because vampire skin doesn’t change and accommodate like that.)

Rosalie is no wife and Jasper is no husband, nothing so commonplace, so identifiable. A caged bird can still sing, but does it fly? She has no interest in clustering words around a set of sensations and emotions just to be able to recite its definition. She said she never wanted that with Edward, but she had being lying to herself; she was chomping at the bit to call him friend, lover, maker. The only one she’d hesitated on was husband.

Bella really does hope that he finds someone to make him happy. Maybe another human, pretty with humility and pride. Someone to whom he can apply all the lessons their failed relationship taught him. That she taught him – chalk poised, pencil ready, apple perched precariously on the edge of a desk – but too late to save them from themselves.

(Or maybe it was from each other.)

She needed to learn that she was enough to be without him. He needed to learn that he was enough to be with her. These two lessons clash, obviously, and she sometimes feels guilty that she’s the one who had her own needs fulfilled at the expense of his. But only for a little while. This is why she inhales every room at the doorway, sniffing her way toward the next her.

(Don’t call it unhealthy. The normal rules don’t apply here. Not acknowledging that fact was part of their problem.)

This is why she loves Rosalie and Jasper. Neither of them look at her like she holds all the answers to the universe between her thighs. Like she’ll unlock her knees and they’ll suddenly be whole again, finding their souls and a meaningless redemption in her white hot center and delicate moans.

As a point of fact she’s no longer warm, no longer human, and maybe that’s the biggest difference. Jasper and Rosalie don’t miss the way she used to be, with her heart like a kick-drum and her thoughts like sand; they don’t regret her change. Not like Edward.

She never had to be the voice on the other side of grate, forgiving them for all their sins. Carlisle and Esme, bless their hearts, would only ever see her as Edward’s mate, or Alice’s best friend, or a daughter to be raised in a perpetual state of adolescence. To Rosalie and Jasper, she was simply Bella.

The End:

The juxtaposition of complementary colors is able to produce a strong contrast or tension, because they annihilate each other when mixed.

See, here’s the thing.

Eternity is a long time. That might appear at first glance to be an obvious statement, like saying that night is dark and ice is cold. Obviously eternity is long; it lasts for fucking forever. But there’s a true depth to it that only immortals can truly comprehend.

For example:

When human lovebirds whisper vows in plain white dresses and penguin suits, pledging forever and a day, there is an expiration date. It’s only until their foreseeable ends make themselves known and the reaper comes to claim. After that, all bets are off.

But to a vampire, it means until oblivion. Until the human race has died out or the sun finally gives a last little click, like the filament in a spent light bulb. It means that they will continue to love each other when midnight is eternal and they must feed from rats. When they can’t even remember what humanity felt like, smelt like, tasted like.

This is why vampires rarely marry: they don’t bother making promises they won’t keep.

Even the most savage are not that cruel.

They fall.

(Bella had an English teacher once who picked groups in class by pitching twice-folded names into the air and evaluating the patterns in which they landed. Clustered papers were meant to be, he would say, and the room would usually fill with groans as he read them aloud.)

And that’s the thing about spider fractures: they are unpredictable and scattered, separating sections of glass like love-sick rocks on two sides of a canyon.

But when you live long enough, you begin to see that nothing is random. Coincidence is just an explanation humans give to patterns they can’t see, lessons they don’t wish to learn from. What appears as happenstance is merely looking at fate too closely, your nose pressed flush to the little events that make up a moral life time. Immortality is just another way of saying you have enough perspective to take a step back.

Everything means something, and nothing means everything.

The universe is funny that way.

blame it on the humidity (pg13) edward/bella

2011-11-13T22:53:07Z

title: blame it on the humidity
fandom: twilight
character(s)/pairing(s): edward/bella
rating: pg13 (slightly sexual)
word count: 1756
spoilers: none. takes place sometime pre-breaking dawn, but you wouldn't know it.
notes: umm... i wrote this forever ago and am just getting around to posting it now. call it nostalgia for summer as i wrap myself tighter in my blanket cocoon.

summary: "i feel like i'm on fire." i thought this this was an excellent excuse for edward to tell me to take off all my clothes, but he was remaining staunchly silent.

“I feel like I’m on fire,” I moaned, laying spread atop my bedding in the cross breeze of two fans. It wasn’t helping.

Quite frankly I thought this was an excellent excuse for Edward to tell me to take off all my clothes, but he was remaining staunchly silent. I knew it must have occurred to him though, and I tilted my head to arch at eyebrow at him from where he sat in my rocking chair. He looked back innocently. Not a peep.

Heat waves in Forks were few and far between, the area mostly succumbing to the cool, damp climate of the Pacific Northwest. But when warm spells hit, they hit hard; this was day four of the highest temperatures coastal Washington had seen in decades. I was used to the dry heat of the Arizona desert, but the humidity here was oppressive.

The worst part was how woefully unprepared the citizens of Forks were for this weather. Most of them didn’t even know how to turn on the air conditioning, if they had any at all. It took Charlie hours of poking around in the attic to scrounge up the measly breeze of these two miniature fans.

And here I was, in the same room as a human-shaped ice pack, and he was looking at me like I was a plague-infested rat; it could give a girl self-esteem issues. (He’d double checked the thermostat to make sure I wasn’t faking.) I got the impression he thought I had manufactured the heat just as a plot to seduce him.

Well sorry, Mr. Vampire, I’m just not that talented.

“I think you’ll survive.”

“No, really, I feel a heatstroke coming on.” The sad thing was, I was being totally serious.

And then he was gone. I started to protest, but he was back a second later with a glass of water.

“Drink this.”

He leaned over the bed to hand me the cup, which was his first mistake, thinking I wasn’t desperate enough to tackle him. Which I was. And which I did.

Thankfully he was balanced enough to not to (a) fall over or (b) spill the water and therefore soak my sheets. Not so thankfully the boy was built like a brick wall, and I think I might have chipped a tooth on his abs. I clung to him for dear life, feeling like a baby monkey.

“Um, Bella.”

“Yes Edward?”

“Are you really desperate enough from the heat to accost me this way?”

I nodded vehemently against his stomach, the sloppy bun holding my hair on the crest of my head bobbing comically. My sweat continued to soak into his clothes as he sighed.

“Here.”

He pressed his cool hand to my nape, the fine hairs there damp. I arched my neck in pleasure and let loose a moan. There was no way he hadn’t heard that, but my face was already hot and my heat-flushed skin couldn’t get any more pink.

My sweat-slicked skin caused his hand to lose friction and slide into the space between my shoulder blades, which felt fantastic. I could already feel my body temperature drop. I pressed back into his touch and his hand slipped under the back of my shirt. We both froze.

Edward made to pull away, muttering something about impropriety, but I held fast. The only way he was getting me to let go was to rip my arms off. And I told him such.

“Now you’re just being dramatic.”

I tilted my head up to pout at him, flashing him my most pathetic doe-eyed, hunter-killed-my-mommy look. Edward frowned.

Suddenly his hands were back on my skin, running laps up and down the parts of my arms left exposed by my tank top and wrapped tightly around his waist. When I started to break out in gooseflesh there, his fingers hitched, hesitating, before dropping to the small of my back. He traced circles around the dimples there before dancing up my spine.

In my pleasure I loosened my hold around him and he took advantage, flipping me onto the bed. A little whine built inside my throat before he appeared over me, his arms braced on either side of my waist. He smirked at his new possession of power over this little episode and I glared while simultaneously maneuvering myself closer.

What can I say? I’m a multi-tasker.

Edward’s expression held deep disapproval, the kind you might find on a teacher’s face when disciplining a student for stealing another’s cookies, but he answered my unspoken request, dipping down to kiss one side of my collarbone, then the other. He rose, now resting on his elbows and his chin hovering over my cleavage.

“Is this heat really very uncomfortable for you?”

I wiggled my head up and down slowly, focused on the fact that his face was inches from mine, only belatedly remembering to look pathetic and heat-addled.

“Well I don’t want you to be in pain,” he murmured.

I nodded on a delay, mesmerized by his lips. “Oh no, wouldn’t want that.”

He grinned wickedly before sitting back on his heels. This time I really did whimper.

But his hands were slipping behind the crook of my knees as soon as the sound fell from my lips, and I stared up at him in a shocked daze as he parted my legs to rest on either side of his hips. I wondered if vampires could get hyperthermia, because he was certainly acting like he had a fever. Edward chuckled at my wide-eyed expression as he traced his fingers along my thighs, bare up to the hem of my admittedly miniscule shorts.

“I’m just trying to make you more comfortable,” he assured with a devious grin, simultaneously warning me that this was not going to become a habit. I mentally harrumphed, but otherwise found little reason to complain.

Edward hovered over me, his eyes questioning as they darted to my lips. As if I would say no. My back bowed like the business end of scythe which brought my face closer to his in a very non-subtle yes please god yes.

He touched his mouth to mine and it felt like he was running an ice cube over my lips. This brought an image – totally unbidden, I swear – to mind; Edward’s tongue running down my neck like gravity-slicked condensation, following the contours of my neck and chest like a renegade ice cube. The thought invaded my mind like a contagious fog, and in the haze I pressed my chest against him in an arching maneuver.

This made me realize one small detail: At some point, Edward had lost his shirt.

My shirt had ridden up from all the, ahem, activity, and the lower portion of my stomach was now sweat-slicked and flush against his.

At that moment I could have been cooking into an entrée inside my own skin and I wouldn’t have known or cared. The entirety of my existence was boiled down to the points where his skin met mine. I had a hard time remembering anything else at that particular time.

Well, at least that was my excuse for why I didn’t hear footsteps on the staircase. I guess Edward was really distracted; these things usually didn’t escape his notice. (Mental fist pump.)

But Edward hadn’t lost all sense; he paused above me, and in the light of the street lamp outside I saw his eyes pop, clearly startled as he looked down at me. A hand knocked heavily on my door at the same instant that Edward vanished into thin air. (Well, thick air. I hadn’t forgotten about the demonic weather.)

I called out breathily, “Come in.”

Somehow I had enough sense to yank down my tank top and wipe the dazed look of my face before Charlie poked his head inside my room. He was tugging along a giant, industrial-sized fan and I couldn’t help panting a little in happiness; Edward had been missing for a total of thirteen seconds and I was already suffocating again.

“You went to the home store?” I squeaked happily, resisting the urge to give the metallic thing a bear hug.

“Sure did,” he beamed proudly, “Got one for your room and one for mine. This way at least we’ll be able to sleep nights.”

Charlie stepped fully into my room and let out a whistle.

“Woo doggy, it’s got to be ninety degrees up here. How can you stand it?”

It’s a good thing he wasn’t looking at my face, because it was probably priceless. I tittered nervously, wondering where Edward was and if he was listening. He was probably laughing.

“Oh, you know,” I tried to chuckle, managing to choke on my own spittle, “Guess I’m just better at handling the heat.”

Charlie nodded absently, clearly not really listening as he focused on the complicated settings of the fan’s switch pad, and I breathed a sigh of relief. He might have me committed if he was listening carefully enough. He reached out experimentally and flicked one of the switches, bringing the roaring fan to life. It felt like a hurricane.

It was spectacular.

“Thanks dad,” I chirped sincerely, this time resisting the urge to hug him instead of the fan. I knew we would stick together like Velcro, and that’s just uncomfortable. He waved away my thanks and wished me goodnight before disappearing the way he came.

I sat alone in the center of my bed for a few moments, soaking up the intense breeze before calling out to my original cooling agent.

“You can come out now.”

I felt like I was cheating on Edward with the fan.

Edward’s face appeared outside of my window, and I appreciated the view as he maneuvered himself over the threshold, still shirtless. I stared up at him as he came to tower over me, my arms wrapped around my folded knees. If there was one time in our relationship where I was at a loss for words, this was it.

Edward grinned, and I got the distinct impression that he was laughing at me under it all.

“Well. I suppose you won’t be needing my services any longer.” He eyed the fan with what might have been jealousy and turned to go.

I grabbed his wrist.

“Don’t even think about it mister.” And we both laughed as he allowed me to pull him onto the bed with me.

The next day the heat broke, and I was almost sad to see it go.

Almost.

to the sun or the bears or the guns

2011-07-04T23:22:02Z

Happy 4th everyone!

Remember that theme writing challenge I started a month ago? Yeah.

It was the moment just before dawn, that crest of yellow waiting to break over the trees and drip down each branch. It would drive away the lavender light and paint each blade of grass with a bright green that was still drying as you walked barefoot into the yard, my cotton shirt whispering against your thighs. The wet strands would drag across our ankles, by August our knees, down to where the ground was still dark, where the crickets lived. We could hear them still, locusts too, singing the dirge of night to the fading stars. You heard a dove coo the morning welcome and you imagined it dyed indigo, delicate beak raised to the dawn, calling out for baby’s breath.

futile campaigning

2011-03-06T17:21:02Z

Miranda vs. Kelly?
Sheldon vs. Dan?
Eric vs. Nathan?
Buffy vs. Kara? (actually that one was kind of easy)

Are you trying to kill me FMM? And of course all the ones I actually chose are losing :(

So, if you haven't already voted:

VOTE.

Because if I'm going to betray my old babies for my new ones, I want it to count goddamnit! Or at least have them lose by less of a margin, as the case may well be.

guys, i can't believe it's march already

2011-03-01T22:18:48Z