"Tell your secrets to the night. You do yours and I do mine, so we won't have to keep them all inside."
-Save Yourself, Kaleo

Chapter One:
BPOV

My life came to an end on Wednesday, December 22nd, 1915.

It's a rather long and complicated story, one that I can no longer differ as a recalled consciousness or if I have simply memorized the event so thoroughly that I think of it as a memory now.

In just a sliver of time, I went from bleeding out in a snow-covered patch, my eyes growing heavy and peaceful, my last testament to God filling the air, to having a burning poison injected into my quivering body.

What followed was three days of excoriating torture.

Waking up from those three days was like being dragged through Hell only to realize that you had been denied entrance into the pearly gates of the great beyond and were now stuck in Purgatory, lost to God eternity.

I remember it vividly, as if it had all just happened yesterday, not decades ago. However, time seems to stop and stand still when you have forever.

The thought of it made me squeeze my eyes closed, my face scrunched up into a painful expression.

A constant, strong hatred burned inside me, knowing that I could remember every single detail, down to the second, when it comes to those three days. However, the memories I long desperately to cling onto from my past life, hang by mere threads of remembrance. The last fleeting moments before my heart stopped beating are dull and grey in my mind, and yet the worst moment of my existence is the most vibrant in my new, impeccable memory.

I pull my limbs and torso into a position that resembles a human ball, wishing that if I could curl up inside myself it would bring everything back. But the images, the memories, the faces all become dark and fade away too quickly for me to grasp. When I search for my mother's face, it is nothing but a blurry figure and a pile of curls, my father is a disembodied mustache floating in a space of nothingness. My brothers are but names…

I let out a strangled sob, my nails sinking into the mattress underneath my hands. The fabric tears easily underneath my inhuman manipulation.

The clouded swirls of my past life are all too much to bear as the minutes of my eternal existence tick by. I have heard it said that my 'kind' experiences years the way humans experience weeks, causing time to blend together. Upon blinking, you realize it's been one hundred years since your heart last beat, since you had a cup of coffee, got up and went to school since your mother held you last. But

I wasn't like the rest. I felt every second tick by at an excruciatingly slow speed. I have been dead for decades, but it felt like centuries without them. My family.

A soothing hand touched my back, tearing me away from the suppressive thoughts twirling around my murky mind, moving in a familiar pattern of small concentric circles. A gentle voice spoke, filling the space around me with a soft baritone, the words unintelligible to my ringing ears. However, the tone is enough for me to release the clutch I have on the mattress.

"Isabella, Love, you're home, you're safe, you're with me."

I gasp out into the air as if a giant weight had just been lifted from my chest, allowing me to take my first real breath. My head clears for a moment and the clouds of my mind part. I can finally see the faces of my mother, my father, and two older brothers, all of them standing by the ocean on the boardwalk. The sun sparkles off my mother's wedding band, my father clutching her close. Garrett and Michael coming towards me with large smiles on their faces.

"Oh!" I sit up, suddenly erect where I lay in a heap on my bed in the corner of my dark attic room, but everything around me fades away until all I can see is my family.

I can see their faces and I have a frantic urge to get it all down before the clouds cover back up the sun that illuminates their precious features.

I stumbled and tripped off the bed, clumsy movements that should no longer linger with the grace that comes with impeccable agility and the strength of 100 men. But my body, unlike others, felt so heavy and malnourished. The back of my throat burned in a constant fire, but it was a mere annoyance in comparison to the need I felt now. I feared I would float away if I did not find my way to the charcoals and paper that I knew lay somewhere in the large attic room. My eyes were blinded to reality; everywhere I looked I saw nothing but a warm glow of white light.

I collapsed on the hardwood floor in front of the large bay window.

"The sun!" I breathed out and a moment later the curtains had been pulled back, my mind illuminated further by the glittering light that streamed through the pane glass.

I stared into the blinding beams, getting lost in the warmth that filled my entire body. The same soothing hand from earlier suddenly took my own in his grasp. He led me over to where a large canvas was spread out on the floor, an array of mediums surrounding it. Once I was released, I dived straight for my stubs of charcoal. I put the pencil to the canvas, closed my eyes and felt the sun soak through my skin, the sound of the ocean lapping against the boardwalk deafening in my ears.

-IISEID-

Carlisle stood back and watched his daughter lose herself in her work. The lines and smudges she sketched turn into the familiar faces he had come to know so well from the many portraits that were scattered throughout the attic. He turned away. His dead heart was too full of emotion to bear it.

He sighed deeply, slowly making his way to the door where a patient and concerned Rosalie sat in her usual armchair, positioned just outside the door of the attic room. An abandoned book lay in her lap.

"It wasn't nearly as bad as the last time Carlisle," she said.

Without hesitating he pulled her into a tight embrace, letting her sooth him as she always did, "You can't beat yourself up every time she does this."

He pulled away from his second pseudo daughter, a vision of blonde locks and perfectly proportioned features, a little rough around the edges, but truly as lovely as her name suggests.

"It's been over a century Rose and I don't think she's ever going to get better." He sighed, rubbing his hand across his face roughly.

"We can't let this go on forever Carlisle." She grabbed his hands hoping to choose her words delicately when she spoke again. "Don't you think it's time to think about getting her some help or-"

"Or what?" He spoke harshly, lashing out. Her words were too honest for him to deny. They had run through his head for over 100 years now.

"Or we have to think that Bella wasn't meant for this life…" Her words struck him violently as they fell from her mouth, slapping him across the face.

Carlisle took his daughter by the shoulders, his fingers firmly planted into her diamond hard skin, more like concrete than real flesh.

"Don't say that, don't you ever say that again. She belongs here! With me…with us. She's our family." His words came from a place of desperation, regret, and utter devastation.

If Rosalie had the physical ability to produce tears, she would have in that moment, with her father's blazon yet dead eyes staring down at her. Instead, she was left with a throat coated thickly with emotion and venom. Her next words bounced off the walls of the small attic alcove where they stood.

"But we're not her's Carlisle…"

It stung, the words scarring him as soon as they left her mouth, rolling off her tongue only to sink into his skin, dissolving into a deep slow burn.

Left with nothing else to say and the overwhelming urge to let out a piercing growl of pain, anger, and heartbreak, he released his daughter from his clutches, sprinting down the stairs and out of the house in less than a second.

Once again, the Doctor's daughters were left alone.

The sun was beginning to set and Rose knew that it was now her turn to stop her lip from quivering and swallow the emotion rolling up her throat so she could help Bella, the only sister she had ever known.

She grabbed her book off the armchair she spent so much of her time in and pushed open the attic door without any hesitation.

Bella was still hunched over the large canvas, a product that Carlisle ordered in bulk and had delivered every second Saturday of the month. Black smudges of charcoal-stained her skin the whole way up to her elbows, her hands moved at an inhuman speed as she desperately worked to etch out every detail she saw behind her closed eyes.

Rosalie moved around the room, working to right the disorder that often came with Bella's 'episodes'. She slipped a new set of sheets over the destroyed mattress in the corner; knowing that it would once again have to be replaced. She made the bed slowly; fixing the comforter and fluffing the pillows, even though it would all be destroyed again once her sister dragged her body back onto the bed.

It had only been a few minutes, but by the time she finished and turned back to her sister, Bella had stopped moving, her body slumped over her newly created piece of art. Her hands twitched with small tumors that ran down her arms.

Rosalie slowly approached her like one would a wounded animal. Much like Carlisle, Rosalie knew that rubbing small circles on her back was the best way to calm her, something they believe her mother did when Bella was a child. A comforting act that brought her back to earth.

"Rose?" She croaked out.

"I'm right here Bells." She spoke softly, continuing the movement of her hand. "Are you finished?"

It was a question that she always asked her sister after she floated down from the sun, the glimmer of her human family washing away slowly.

Bella sighed, a small broken noise coming from her mouth.

"Yeah Rose, I-I'm done."

"Welcome back, let's get you in the bath." She didn't even bother waiting for Bella to pick herself up off of the floor. She lifted her sister with ease and carried her to the bathroom where a large bear claw tub was waiting for her.

Rosalie sat her on the edge of the bathtub, removing her navy blue drop-waist dress, also stained with black charcoal.

Bella looked down at herself and a sob broke their comfortable silence.

"I'm so sorry Rosalie," she cried, "you just finished this dress last week." She looked at the piece of clothing that her sister had thrown on the floor once it was removed from her body as if it was a dead puppy laying at their feet.

"Hush Bella, all it needs is a good soak in the sink." She cupped her chin in her hand, lifting her gaze up to look into Rosalie's topaz colored eyes. "Plus, I have three new ones hanging in my closet downstairs for you. "

"Why do you bother taking care of me?" Bella whispered.

Kneeling in front of her broken, tired, and sad sister Rosalie didn't have to think about why she did such things for Bella, it was something that, although tiring and heartbreaking, she would never cease to do for the lovely brunette in front of her.

"Because you are my sister Bella, and I would go to the end of the world for you."

"But-".

"No but. I will never forget a time when you bothered to walk down an alley and take care of me." The reference to how Rosalie came to be apart of their family hung heavy in the air, but in its sadness, memories of happiness followed. "We take care of each other."

"I love you, Rose."

"And I love you B."

They smiled at each other and even after the hellish afternoon of torn mattresses, a distraught doctor, and blinding sunlight, they both felt loved and content.

"Now, let's get you to the bath."

Sometime later, Rose left Bella to sit in the bathtub. She would return to drain the water once it turned icy, not that the temperature mattered to their dead skin, and refill it to the brim at a scalding heat. Her sister would sit and soak until morning, thus completing the full routine of crazy that came with Bella's 'episodes'.

She descended the stairs, stopping only for a moment to glance at the canvas that lay on the attic floor. After decades living with Bella, she had come to know the faces she saw now very well. She could imagine them all walking up and down the boardwalk in the summer, little Bella running ahead of them all. She had imagined Christmas' surrounded by these people, Bella's mother saving an extra special present for her daughter under the tree. She even imagined meeting the handsome brothers, wondering if they were anything like her sister. If they were, she knew she'd fall head over hills for either of them.

She never did know which one was Michael and which one was Garrett. She didn't have the heart to ask.

-IISEID-

I felt tired…so completely and fully exhausted. As fatigue goes, it wasn't a feeling that necessarily came with immortality, and yet here I was, my body feeling like it would crumble if anyone moved me too quickly.

It had always been this way. As soon as the sun faded from my eyes, allowing me to once again see the dark attic and the wreckage I had left behind in my state of panic, my body would collapse in on itself. Even Carlisle couldn't describe it.

I could hear his voice now stating that the only similarities he could recall in all his years were that of a starved vampire, their dead tissue eating away at itself from the lack of nourishment that our kind needed to remain strong and stealthy. But much of my behavior was a mystery to my Sire, who, if possible, looked sadder each and every time he laid eyes on me.

I didn't want these 'episodes' to plague this existence of mine, and yet they felt like they were apart of me. I would be lying, however, if I said that I didn't wait in anticipation for the moment the wall parted in my mind and the blinded vision that kept me from seeing the real world would return. It was then that I knew I would be allowed to see my family once more.

It was like a drug. Each and every time I took something from my body, leaving me weak and vulnerable. But I was too addicted to the high of it to actually care.

There might as well be track marks scarred deeply into the creases of my arms. Instead, I was left with blackened skin stained up to my elbows, serving as a visual for my shame, just as well as any needle marks could.

My arms seemed to come back to life the longer they soaked in the near boiling water of the bathtub. I began to rub the charcoal off my skin in slow passes with the washcloth Rose had left on the side of the tub for me.

The bath water clouded over with a grey sheen as the black dust separated from my porcelain skin.

Once the last of the charcoal was gone I lay surrounded by murky grey and now lukewarm water. I could easily reach up and drain the tub, get out, towel off and slip into the comfortable clothes Rose left sitting on the bathroom vanity. But I didn't.

In an hour or so, my sister would be back to refill the bath, allowing the dirty water to drain around my naked body. I never had enough shame left afterward to care to try to shield myself from her view. She knew me more intimately than any other person ever had.

More than Carlisle as he sunk his teeth into my jugular.

More than my mother as she birthed me from her own womb.

More than Robbie Mitchell, who although just a dark blimp in my memory, gave me my first kiss.

I sighed, letting my mind clear, sinking further into the soiled water. My head dipped down below the surface cutting me off from what lay beyond the bathtub, as much as a super hearing vampire could.

I tried, as I always do when lying here, to picture the glowing faces I had seen in the otherworldly sunshine just a short time ago.

Just like always though, no matter how hard I concentrated or pulled my conscience train of thought to the surface of my mind, I couldn't come up with the memories. My family was destined to remain nothing but cold sketches manically created by a certifiable girl stuck in the wrong era.

Not every day was like this…but most days I didn't fare much better. I laid in bed a lot, acting the way that any normal human would if they were 'depressed'. But the problem wasn't that I felt depressed, it was that I often felt nothing and in the course of a second I would transition to feeling everything.

Carlisle couldn't explain it. I knew that killed him inside, to know there was no magical diagnosis with a prognosis and medication regiment to go along with it. So little was known about how an immortal's body worked and even less about their minds. In his one thousand years, he had never met anyone like me.

I hear them whisper when they think my mind is too far away to comprehend.

Rose's words ran through my mind even now…" we have to think that Bella wasn't meant for this life".

I could laugh thinking about it.

I knew I wasn't made for this world. I know you might think that there are no individuals that are supposed to live the way we do, but you would be wrong. I've met damned creatures that believe they didn't start living until the moment their hearts stopped beating. But I wasn't one of those vampires. I knew the moment my eyes opened, showing me the vistas of color that I had never been able to see before, that I would have rather died.

I wish he'd left me to bleed out in the snow, just the same as Rosalie wished he'd just snapped her neck like I begged him to.

Now, look at us. What do we have now?

I opened my mouth, inhaling enough dirty water to fill my lungs. I pretended I was drowning.

A/N: Something new that's been swimming in my head for a while now. Let me know if you enjoyed. New posts every Monday.