Author's Note: You know how sometimes you gotta give a little to get a little? Well, in order to get the devil to write a beautiful, exciting Bella/Carlisle thriller I have to offer up a Carlisle/Bella/deer!Edward fic in return. Sorry, people.
I can't believe what my life has turned into.
There are not a lot of places that fit the sound of their names.
Take Paris, for instance. She had never been there, but it had always seemed a bit disappointing to her that a city so old and so filled with life and culture should have a name that, for all that she knew that it was the other way around and the hen actually came before the egg, only really fit white kids with tacky parents. Rome, by contrast, had the regal weight one would expect from the city that once ruled the world.
Forks, too, had lucked out, though she didn't realize this until she moved back there to live with her father.
Forks, like branches cracking softly under your feet, a sound too rotted by rain and moss to be as the quick, dry snap of a twig would have been, was a quiet and unassuming name, with a cozy, homey sense, regardless of whether you actually considered it home or not.
Isabella Swan did not, but she was hoping she'd get there.
Eventually.
Her father had certainly done everything within his power to make her feel at home. He'd given her a car, fixed up her room and the fridge was stocked. Better yet, he'd left her alone as soon as she was safely installed in her room, and that was something she, ever the loner, greatly appreciated.
Still, there was no denying that the air all around her was humid and smelled like rain, even when she'd been at the airport, and no building they had passed on the drive home had been taller than a four or five floors. That in itself didn't bother her, she had never been a fan of outrageously tall structures anyway, but the sum of a town filled with humble, small shops and houses and the occasional splurge of a grey brick warehouse was that it felt lifeless.
Towns like Forks were the reason why the term «sleepy town» had come to exist in the first place. And coming straight from the bright, vibrant Phoenix Bella could only feel like she'd gone into exile. It was her own choice, yes, and she had never felt at home in Phoenix either, she'd been too awkward and lonely for that, but she couldn't help feeling pitiful.
So perhaps it was in an effort to cheer herself up that her pickup's maiden voyage (she was very disappointed to find that the radio was broken, otherwise she'd have played «Like a Virgin» because that is what dorks do when they're alone. As it was, she had to hum it herself, which did have the advantage of allowing her to change the lyrics to better fit the pickup. I'd been driven, I was sad and red, but the mechanic made me feel, ooooh he made me feel, shiny and new…) ended up being into the town's outskirts, where the brave attempt at civilization that was Forks ended and the thick forest began.
When in Rome, do as the Romans, and when in Forks, introduce yourself to nature before the people because Forks is nature, it just happens that people are living there. It felt… important, in a way, that she did this, like a show of respect to prove to whatever ancestral spirits that were probably watching them all from the trees that she was going to be a very good citizen.
And so she wandered into the woods, a bit aimlessly, a bit fearfully, for the path wasn't marked and there was no way she'd find her way back if she got lost, she had the feeling that she'd been wrong about Forks. For with every step further into the woods she was sinking further, not into a forest but into a quiet, misty world unconnected to civilization, one that might not be there if she were to return later with other people.
It felt supernatural.
Perhaps she should not have been surprised, then, by what happened next.
She walked at a leisurely pace, slow enough that she did not feel at risk of stumbling, taking in her surroundings. It was nice, being in the woods like this: already she felt a stone lift from her heart, for this kind of scenery would have been unheard of in Phoenix.
She could get used to this.
It was in that moment that she heard a strange noise. A whisper, like the sound of wind through leaves except blurrier, almost inaudible but for the certainty that she couldn't have imagined anything like it, and it came in an ominous crescendo that made her heart seized in her chest.
The sound, which couldn't have lasted more than two seconds, was replaced by a deer standing in front of her, and she froze completely.
They were standing maybe thirty feet apart, but it felt much closer, and the deer was watching her with a shrewdness that felt not at all deerlike.
As she looked into eyes that were an unnatural pitch black, three things became very clear to her.
One, this was her first time seeing a deer in the wild and yet it wasn't, because this was not a deer. Deer are jumpy, delicate creatures, all too aware of where they stand on the food chain. This creature, this not-deer, on the other hand, seemed to not so much have missed the memo so much as never been concerned with it in the first place. A wolf would be a fool to approach it.
Two, she was in danger. The look in its eyes was too shrewd and its stance was too bold for her not to be. She was the prey, make no mistake.
Three, this deer was the more heartbreakingly beautiful creature she had ever seen in her life. Its fur was a mesmerizing bronze color she hadn't even known existed, and even from a distance she could tell that it would be softer than the softest of kittens, and that was to say nothing of how perfect it was, as if Plato had been right about the cave allegory and she was looking straight at the original deer, the immaculate deer that all other deer had since tried and failed to emulate.
This knowledge came to her almost instinctually, a grim certainty rooted firmly in the same part of her that got scared witless by «The Blair Witch Project», just as she knew that running or screaming wouldn't do any good. Nobody could hear her, and deer are fast anyway.
And so they stood there for what felt like forever but couldn't have been more than three or four impossibly slow seconds, the deer dissecting her with its eyes while she felt oddly removed from the whole situation, as if this was happening to someone else.
Then, clearly done considering her or perhaps giving up all pretense of being anything but a beast, the deer crept into a crouch- and pounced.
It happened so quickly, there was no time to flinch or even fully realize that the deer had moved beyond the primal oh- that fell into her brain.
She would have died, of that there was no doubt, had something equally fast not crashed right into the deer right before it would have crashed into her, intercepting it.
The deer fell to the ground with the intercepting force, and Bella was stunned to find that it was a man. The two wrestled for a second, movements too quick for her to follow, before the man succeeded in kicking the deer back down the path, where it somehow landed on its feet and sank into an immediate crouch.
The man was just as fast, wasting no time in teleporting to right in front of Bella, where he too sank into a crouch, though with his arms spread out. He was shielding her, she realized.
The deer saw this, and let out a genuine, honest-to-God terrifying growl.
The man turned to look at her. He was blond, she realized dimly, and too beautiful to be human. «Run,» he said.
She wasted no time in obeying him, sprinting faster than she knew she was even capable of as the sound of trees breaking like matchsticks and stones cracking filled the air behind her.
She didn't say anything to Charlie about what she'd seen, and she wished the reason for that were that she thought it was all a dream or that she didn't think he would believe her.
Not that she thought he would, but that was not the reason.
No, if anything she felt that whatever she had seen out there in the woods was something she had not been supposed to see, something she was not privy to. Walking around telling people about it felt… graceless. Whatever she'd seen had not been of this world, and there was something in her that screamed in protest at the thought of sharing it with others. Doing so would reduce it to her go-to party anecdote, Bella's bizarre woodland adventure.
Scratch that, telling others would ruin it.
She went about her life as usual, going to school, meeting people and feeling not unlike a single rabbit that had been thrown into a pen of rabid hungry dogs as everyone clamored to get to know the shiny new student. It was exhausting.
She even noticed curious looks in the grocery shop as the occasional someone recognized Charlie Swan's long lost daughter, home again at last.
Summa summarum, the 1208 people living in Forks felt more like 12, all of whom except Charlie were decidedly clingy, and she was greatly saddened to find that much like in Phoenix she couldn't seem to truly connect to anyone, not even sweet Angela. She was constantly surrounded by people, which had the admittedly sweet benefit of making her no longer look like a loser, but she couldn't help feeling like a clown in a suit. A loner is a loner is a loner, and no matter how nice and inclusive her new classmates were she couldn't seem to feel like she was one of them.
But perhaps that was just status quo to humanity and she'd missed out on the confidence or zeal or whatever it is that makes everyone else be okay with it.
She would not have forgotten the incident in the woods, that much was impossible, but she had accepted it as a freak incident, a supernatural anomaly in what was otherwise going to be a very normal, boring life. If anything, she felt oddly honored to have witnessed what she did.
So perhaps she would have put the incident behind her, letting it remain a fond, strange memory in the back of her head making her just a little more likely to believe in stories of things that go bump in the night, hers and mother nature's little secret, but for the fact that a week later, on her drive back home from school and out of the corner of her eye, she chanced to spot that same beautiful bronze deer, standing right in front of Clegg's Hardware as if it had any business being in her world.
She turned her head to look at it, almost turning the wheel as well, only to find that it had disappeared in the fraction of a moment it had taken her to turn her head.
She would have thought she'd imagined it except there was no way, the deer had definitely been standing there, and it had been staring right at her.
It had been there for her.
She drove slowly the rest of the way, let her pickup roll into the driveway more than she actually pushed on the gas, feeling no desire whatsoever for anything resembling speed.
She found her father in the kitchen, nursing a cup of coffee and chuckling at something in the paper.
«Charlie?» she said, wishing her voice was stronger.
He looked up at her and must have seen something in her face because he put the paper down immediately. «What's wrong?» he asked, sounding slightly afraid of what she imagined he feared might be a Renée division problem.
She bit her lip and leaned against the doorway, not sure how to proceed or even if she should.
This moment was a decision, she realized, the pivotal moment where she decided whether to bring the deer and the man into the real world or not.
She felt no desire to, much like she imagined Persephone had looked at the grapefruit seeds and felt apprehension curl in her stomach for reasons she couldn't put into words, but Persephone needed to eat, and Isabella Swan needed to do the sensible thing, and the sensible thing was to not keep something that could be dangerous, life-threatening even, to herself. And she did feel threatened.
And really, the deer should have known better than to come on onto her turf.
So, darting her tongue out to wet her lips and giving her father a smile that was her best shot at casual, serious and genuine all wrapped into one, she drew courage into her and asked, «Do you know anything about any weird deer in this town?»