Baker's Law
An Alternate Ending to Twilight
By Junaberry
The top of my head burned against the sun. This was reality.
You cannot change how things react to heat, how people react to danger, how a person reacts to another person. Or to another being altogether. To another species. To another form of life. To another dimension totally unknown but so tangible that the concept burns on your tongue, on your life until it leaves a mark, emblazoned into the flesh.
The buzz of an airplane brought me back to a level of distinction between life and surrender. For a while there, my mind had went off on a tangent. I didn't want to conceive what might happen to me. An hour from now, I could be dead. Or someone I loved.
This used to be a tactic of mine to overcome nerves. When I had a piano exam in those forgotten days of subservience, I'd just imagine an hour from now when I would be long gone from that room where that mean, permanently grumpy man sat where he observed and scrutinized everything I did. So that when the time came, I was guarded with the knowledge that it would soon all be over.
The shuttle to the Hyatt stopped at a stand down the street. I walked towards it, ridiculously aware of how every second mattered. My heart pounded a thousand miles a second, unhealthily so. Or so it should have pounded. I gave three dollars to the driver, intent on each action.
"This is the shuttle to the Hyatt," he said and eyed me suspiciously.
"Yes, that's where I'm going," I replied and found a seat.
The vehicle moved.
Baker's Law: do something.
I was doing something and I was reaching the full potential of what I could do. That was all that I was capable of. I was aware of this wholly but I still fidgeted in my seat and had to train my eyes to a certain person or object on the road or a house in the distance so I would not be attempted to fling myself over the side of the carriage and doom myself to a fate certainly unwanted.
At the hotel, I took a taxi to Scottsdale. The driver, like the previous, kept looking at me with furrowed brows like there was something about he that he did not trust even though giving a ride to a complete stranger is never a fully trustworthy profession.
"This the house?" he asked me, glancing at me in the rearview mirror.
"Sure," I said and exited. The taxi sped away like it was scared of me. Maybe my fear was somehow infectious. Everyone who got within a two meter radius was at the risk of contracting my deadly virus, my unmovable plague.
Its name was worry.
I ran along the pavement. I was vaguely familiar of the surroundings and it felt like I hadn't been here in a hundred years. The recent events had purged my mind of anything prior to this new beginning, this new environment I'd plunged into, fully unaware of the consequences that waited for me.
The dance studio stood there, on Cactus, just like the picture that Alice had drawn from her vision. I didn't want to think about waited inside it. But such a large part of me prayed to God, if one existed, that Renee wasn't there but there was evidence to the contrary. I didn't know what to trust.
I was near the dance studio now. So close that I could almost smell it. Maybe I could. The door pushed open and my breath stalled. Brown hair, blue jeans, flannel shirt. Things familiar to me. I had to familiarize myself with things I could remember, things that returned me to reality. I functioned best in reality. It was my whole world, wasn't it?
The purr of an Audio escaped me. I could only concentrate on the person running across the lawn at the front of the dance studio at a pace I hadn't thought possible for it. I didn't acknowledge the glint of the black paint as it approached us. I didn't see it. I didn't hear it. I didn't recognize it.
"Bella!"
I stood still.
"Bella!"
There were three footsteps, unaware of fate, and then a thud, sickening, bones crunching, slamming onto bitumen and the cease of a heart. Vaguely, there was a hollow in my throat and the gasp of another creature, of the same program as myself, as he smelt it and his entire body burned for its taste. Somewhere in the dance studio, he escaped through a window and ran towards the scent.
No. Not my Bella. Please.
Baker's Law: do something.
She did something. She died.