Hey, y'all! Today is my twenty-fourth birthday. To celebrate I've decided to start posting a little story I've been working on, one which, appropriately enough, begins with a birth. I hope that for those of you who are keeping up with The Slow Burn, this will provide a welcome palate-cleanser from all the death/gore/destruction/sexual frustration/cheap laughs. Also, proof that I do have a soul, withered and rotten though it may be.
Enjoy!
She can hardly tell the difference between sleeping and waking, except that when she's awake everything is black or dark red, and when she's asleep there are thousands of lights that swirl beneath her eyelids in patterns too elusive to recognize. Nothing looks like anything; even if it did, she is too little and inexperienced to know it, because she hasn't been born yet.
Before long, she can hear things, and not long after that she can differentiate between the sounds. Some of them are voices. Some of the voices she loves more than others. The close, loving, raspy woman's voice, the voice that sounds tired and happy, that one is her favorite for a while, just ahead of the ringing, protective voice.
But one day she hears a new voice, and it leaves them all behind. It is warm, and dark, and low; it vibrates through the womb and into her ears, her belly, her feet, and it makes her kick and squirm with happiness. When she does this, she hears distressed sounds from the raspy voice, and then the dark low voice sounds distressed too, and it is all so terrible that she can't move for fear of making it worse.
The first dream she can remember is of meeting that warm, dark voice. What will it look like? What will it say? She hopes that voice will like her, because she loves it already. In her dream, the voice feels slippery and soft, like the skin on her tummy, and it looks like burning red swirls that coalesce into ten fingers and ten toes. Fingers and toes are her favorite things to play with, her only things to play with, and she is certain that this wonderful voice will have them in abundance. She doesn't speak its language yet, but she is sure she can learn.
After a while there isn't room for her anymore, and she is terribly uncomfortable, and one day she moves a little too fast by accident, and then there is a horrid loud sound, and the hard curved thing she has been living in suddenly has cracks in it. She panics because the cracks are getting bigger and pinching her skin, and it feels bad and the warm dark voice is getting louder and scareder, which makes her scared, too. Then she is lifted into a cold place where there is a bright, hurting light, the brightest she's ever seen, a thousand times brighter than her dreams. It startles her and hurts her eyes, and she lets out a yell to scare the light away. The next thing she sees is a pale round shape with two brown things in it and a hole at the bottom, and the hole opens and the raspy voice comes out of it, and suddenly she realizes this must be what the raspy voice looks like. She is happy to have this knowledge, so happy that she leans forward and bites the raspy voice somewhere below its face. It tastes so good she tries to bite it again, but she has already been snatched away, handed to the ringing protective voice and hustled into a place that is blessedly dark again.
The ringing protective voice is pretty, she is sure of that. Her vision is getting clearer all the time, and she can make out that the hole at the bottom is colored red with white things in it, and the two dark spots at the top are black with gold around them. She never knew there were so many colors in all the world; for her whole life, the only color she could see was red.
She is eager to find out about colors, and what she is most eager to find out is what color the warm dark voice will turn out to be. She can't wait to meet it. She looks around, her eyes darting from shadow to shadow, always looking for the voice, always disappointed. The ringing protective voice holds her in arms that are cool and smooth, and strokes the top of her head with careful hands, and whispers pretty sounds in her ears. But around the pretty sounds she can hear other things, panicked sounds from up above, rustling sounds from far away, and a heartbeat.
She knows all about heartbeats, because she likes to listen to her own heartbeat when she is sleepy, but this heartbeat is a tiny bit different. It's louder, and faster, and layered over the top of it she can hear hoarse breathing and quiet steps. She looks over at the heartbeat, and she sees that it belongs to the warm dark voice. She doesn't know how she knows, because it hasn't said anything yet, but she knows. It is mostly colored red and black, like the place she lived before she was born, and that makes her feel safe and reassured.
She is positive that the voice and the heartbeat will love her as much as she loves it. And she can see already that it has plenty of fingers and toes.
Soon, she knows that her name is Renesmee. She is learning fast: she knows about names, and what things look like, and she is very good at grabbing hold of shiny swingy things, even though she is only a few days old.
The warm dark voice is named Jake, and he calls her Nessie, which she likes better than the longer version. She likes when he is holding her, because she can take bites out of his skin. It tastes good, sort of sharp and salty. He doesn't mind when she bites her. He thinks it's funny, and tells her so. He thinks everything is funny. As far as Nessie is concerned, the whole world is full of nothing but beautiful smiles from the pale ones, and rumbly, tickly laughter from Jake.
She never hears the raspy voice again, because the next time she hears it, it isn't rasping. For a while she's not even sure if it's the same voice, but then she sees the face through the window and, even though the eyes are red now and the skin is all sparkly, it's definitely the same face. Rosalie, the protective one, is holding her up to see what's going on outside. Jake is standing there, talking to the no-longer-raspy voice, calling it Bella, when Bella tries to attack him. And just like that, she learns that sometimes people can hurt each other. She is angry at Bella for trying to harm her Jake, and she is relieved that Seth jumped in the way. She forgives Bella quickly, because she loves her, but she wishes she didn't have to learn about hurting people quite so soon.
She is taking a nap later on in Jake's arms while her parents are gone and she has a frightening dream. In her dream, Bella attacks Jake again and again, and sometimes Seth can't stop her in time, and Jake is covered with blood. She knows all about blood, especially Jake's, but she doesn't want to see it spilled indiscriminately on the ground like that. And then, even worse, she dreams that she is the one being attacked, and Jake knows that she is too little to fight so he jumps in the way like Seth did. She is so scared to see Jake lying on the ground, bloody and bony and gasping, that she scares herself awake. Jake wakes up at the same time she does; he was dozing, his head back and a line of drool on his cheek, and although she doesn't cry out loud he can tell she is upset.
She touches his cheek to show him the dream, and he cuddles her to his great big beating heart and says, "I know, Nessie. I dreamed it too. I promise I won't let anyone hurt you."
Nessie knows by this that he doesn't get it, not really, so she touches him again, shows him just the part where he is hurt on the ground. It's painful to relive, but it's important that he understand.
"You're worried about me?" he says. She purses her tiny lips. "Oh, Ness, don't worry about me. It's pretty hard to kill a werewolf." She knows that werewolf is what Jake is, and Seth, and Leah, and the other red-and-black people.
She is comforted by that, so comforted that she takes an extra big bite out of his arm to celebrate. But she knows that "pretty hard" is not the same as "impossible," and so she touches him again, right where the bite-mark is already healing, and shows him a new image, one where he is attacked and she jumps in the way.
"Aw, Ness, you're too little-" he starts to say. She is impatient with this reasoning, and shows him another image, where she is ten feet high, each of her delicate baby fingers as long as a plantain. He chuckles, but he seems to realize that she's serious, because he says, "How about this, I'll teach you how to fight when you get bigger. Would you feel safer then?"
In answer, she smiles and cuddles closer to him and goes back to sleep.
I don't know yet where this story is going to go, but if there's interest, leave me a review and I'll keep working on it.