a/n: Twilight characters belong to Stephanie Meyer. The plot and characterization is mine. This chapter is shorter then most will be, but it is setting the stage for the story.
Benedick: "What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living?" Beatrice: "Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick? Courtesy itself must convert to disdain, if you come in her presence." Much Ado About Nothing (1.1.118-23)
Chapter 1 – Are You Yet Living
Bella had anticipated a calm night. She had no bedtimes to adhere to, no early morning shift, and no responsibilities for a whole twelve hours. The anticipation of normalcy kept her motivated all week, especially since she did not have the dreaded night shift on Halloween. Without a doubt her worst cases of the entire year manifested on that night, and it shouldn't surprise her anymore.
The Halloween after she graduated from the academy had been the worst. She and her first partner were amongst the first to respond to an exceptionally gruesome scene. A husband had gone mad and assumed his wife was cheating on him with their neighbor across the street. When Bella arrived to the townhouse she was met with a woman who paramedics were trying to stabilize. The husband had done all he could to mutilate her figure, and the flesh on her face was bruised and cut, and a stab wound on her arm appeared to be bleeding through the bandage put in place to assist with the clotting.
The emergency call was placed by her nine-year-old son, whom Bella found sobbing in his closet while clutching his knees and rocking back and forth. After assuring the boy that she was going to keep him safe while the paramedics took his mother to the hospital. It was only after she coxed him out of the closet that the bruises on his body became visible in the dim light of his bedroom. Once she had him safely away from the house, he was comfortable telling Bella how he found a scary man wearing a joker's mask hitting his mom. He jumped in to help and the man beat him until his mother diverted his attention back to her. Trying to explain to the little boy that his father would not be coming to get him was difficult to say the least. How to explain that the man with the joker's mask was really his father went outside Bella's training.
The worst part was that the man across the street turned out to be a seventy-six year old paraplegic woman. The mother would visit and keep her company since the elderly woman's children could not be bothered to look in after her. The husband had been so delusional when he had his court date that he kept insisting that the old woman was really wearing a "padded saggy bra" and had "man parts under there" all the while maintaining his wife was a cheating bitch.
Bella as the officer assigned to the case took the witness stand and looked sadly to the middle of the courtroom and saw the wife clutching a friend's hand while her right arm remained limp and useless at her side. Several reconstructive surgeries had done little to reclaim her once beautiful face. The wife's eyes were glazed over and withdrawn, simply trying to cope.
As a special victim's officer, Bella saw more cases like this, and sadly became slight desensitized to the sight of women, and occasionally men that sat in the courtroom watching their perpetrators stand trial. The desensitizing was not apathy, Bella knew that if she ever became apathetic it was time to quit her job—no this was how she dealt with the emotional rigors of her job. If she did not remove herself to a certain degree, she was sure to follow her first partner's path and suffer an emotional breakdown. Bella was well aware of the effects of mentally shutting down, and she had too many responsibilities to fall into that place ever again, especially with a responsibility that was more valuable then her own life.
This Halloween was the first she had off, and Bella simply blocked the cases from her mind and enjoy this bit of normalcy with her small group of friends. Well, friends was a bit of stretch. The group of ladies that Bella was surrounded by on this particular evening were more like acquaintances who were determined to push her back into the world. Most were women Bella either worked with, or spouses of her colleagues. They took it upon themselves to force her into joining them for a 'ladies night' that included dinner and tickets to a local theater groups opening night production of Much Ado About Nothing.
Although none of the women would come out and state it, most were utterly confused how a beautiful and intelligent woman such as Bella could find herself so utterly focused on work and seemingly nothing else.
Truthfully the acquaintances knew very little about the reclusive Bella, and this was their opportunity to drag it out of her. Some wanted to know about where she moved from. Bella's standard answer applied,
"A small town in Washington State," Realizing that was a dead end, another contingency group asked the question they had been dying to know, whether Bella was single. She certainly did not have a ring on her finger, although in her line of work it was not always a good idea to flaunt shiny jewelry around criminals so it was not an absolute indicator of her marital status.
"Yes," was Bella's simple reply. This contingency quickly went into action trying to convince her to accept a call from a friend of theirs who they knew would be perfectly suited for someone as good-looking and successful as Bella.
"I will give Marc your number, you two would have such a good time! Please say you will go out with him," when Bella gave a non-committal shoulder shrug the women looked disappointed. They ordered a few more drinks to loosen Bella up an asked her again, to which she lazily replied,
"Sure, why not," the contingency squealed, and one immediately texted Marc Bella's phone number. She also included a picture she snuck while Bella was not paying attention and laughing politely at a joke the waiter made had he brought yet another round of drinks to the table.
Marc's reply was almost instantaneous and asked when he thought they would be done for the evening because he most certainly wanted to give Bella a call as soon as she was free. He even debated meeting them at the theatre to introduce himself that evening, but thought that might appear a little desperate. The text reply he received moments later confirmed his assessment and suggested he wait until the morning to contact his new love interest.
Despite the obvious prying into Bella's personal life, she was having an enjoyable evening with women who made her feel welcomed into their circle, if only to dig up some gossip on her.
A short walk from the restaurant brought the women to a small, but well kept community theatre. The patrons were dressed well, but not in the lavish garments of the more prestigious playhouses in town. This made Bella feel entirely more comfortable. She was never one to dress up in fancy dresses; she simply did not have the aptitude to pull together an ensemble acceptable for those types of circumstances. Although this evening she was rather proud of the simple black dress and pumps she put together. Certainly not a fashion statement, but she thought it suited her.
Bella also enjoyed watching the Shakespearian comedy. Admittedly, she was more familiar with the playwright's classic tragedies, having been force-fed the likes of Romeo and Juliet in 11th grade English. However, the humor of mistaken identities and underestimating characters of Much Ado connected well to the family and friends she had left behind when she moved to Chicago. For the first time in a long time, Bella felt as if she could laugh at her own precarious situation. Shakespeare was so brilliant that he was able to create and mend problems in less than three hours and an intermission, while Bella was still trying to mull through her own chaotic life after five years.
The play ended and while they made their way outside of the theatre the women chatted about the characters and how well the showing performed in comparison to other productions they had seen. Bella was intently listening as one of her colleagues described her vacation to London with her husband where they saw the same play with an all female cast at the reproduction Globe Theatre. She was in the midst of praising the female Benedict, when her story was interrupted by a man running toward their group, waving his hands frantically, and shouting.
"Bella! Bella, is that you?" Bella turned around as the bronze haired man approached the group while maneuvering around the crowd of people who had just exited the theatre.
Some of the women gasped at the gorgeous specimen coming toward them. His lean body, while covered by a coat to keep out the night chill, fit him like a glove showing off his broad shoulders and well-built abdominal muscles. His velvet voice hypnotized the unsuspecting women, and had Bella not been trained and practiced as a special victim's officer, she too may have let her guard down.
As the man approached the women, he came within feet of his target, "Bella, it is you—," the statement still ringing in the chilled air as Bella pulled pepper spray from her purse and directed the can directly at his face before kicking him away using her body's leverage as she had been taught at the academy and taking off into a sprint down the sidewalk.
The half of the group that worked with Bella in the special victim's unit followed after her to make sure she was not going to be physically harmed. After all, despite the man's obviously gorgeous looks, their instinct was to ignore the charm and look out for the welfare of the 'victim'. They had seen firsthand how even gorgeous men could become tyrants.
Meanwhile the other half of the group composed of Bella's male colleagues' wives stayed behind with the charming man who lay at their feet in a semi-blind state. The lady who sent Marc the text message earlier in the evening knelt by his side and tried to determine if he was injured. Stranger-danger and husband be damned, this man needed her undivided attention.
"Sir, are you alright?" she asked while flaunting a bit of her cleavage at the man. Of course the matter that he could not see since the pepper spray was still impairing his vision did not prevent her flirting.
"Is Bella still here?" the bronze headed dream of a man asked while pinching the bridge of his nose.
"No, she ran down the street sweetie,"
"Do you have her phone number, anyway to contact her that you could give to me?" he asked blinking repeatedly while his eyes continued to tear up and attempt to expel the poison that was hindering his vision.
"How do you know Bella?" the women finally let her senses kick in and momentarily ignored his physical assets to protect her newfound friend.
The coppered haired man sighed while pulling out a handkerchief from his coat pocket to wipe water from his eyes before looking up at the women knelt around him. His emerald green eyes met each of them before he spoke the words out loud that none of them expected to hear. The women had seemingly extracted all of highlights of Bella's personal life earlier in the evening over bottles of cheap restaurant wine, they were certain that nothing he could say would be of consequence. That is until he said four little bewildering words.
"Bella is my wife."
Down the street Bella had already hailed a cab and her brand new friends crowded in with her as they started barking out home addresses to the driver. At first none of the women even mentioned the incident they just witnessed outside the theatre. Finally the question broke the air, and although Bella was not sure who actually asked it since everything was fogging together in her mind, she imagined that the group collectively asked the question.
"Bella, who is he?"
Bella's colleagues felt the new openness that she had displayed earlier in the evening should privilege them with additional information. Although she was on the short side of the height spectrum and remained thin, with more curves then her late teens, Bella was still a force to be reckoned with.
One of the ladies in the cab had seen Bella when she was on duty pursue a perpetrator who was still hiding out in a victim's home. The man had made the fatal error of taking off on foot through the home's front door while Bella made an aerial move off the front porch, body slamming the two-hundred pounds-and-counting man to the ground before using a tazer to subdue him and hoisting his dead weight back to her squad car. Bella simply tossed him into her backseat, shut the door, and smoothed out her hair as a wayward curl escaped the ponytail. She calmly walked back toward the house to assure the victim her attacker was in custody before informing her superior officer who was still investigating the scene that she was taking off to the station with the, "perp's sorry ass" in her backseat.
By any stretch of the imagination the well groomed man who had tried to gain her attention outside of the theatre posed little physical threat to Bella, and her colleague could only ascertain that his presence took on a more emotional toll for her friend.
Starring out the cab window into the oncoming traffic, Bella took a deep breath and held it before letting out the air slowly. She recognized the symptoms her body was displaying as shock, and she took another deep breath to calm her voice before answering the question that was on everyone's mind, who is he?
"The worst possible asshole."
Yes, Bella had anticipated a quiet night filled with drinks and entertainment. A night such as this was a rare occurrence in her life, but not extraordinary. Even if a psychic had told her, she would have never expected to see the ghosts of her past rise up and haunt her on this Halloween night.