"She's on level C, room 26," the receptionist said dryly. She typed a series of numbers into her computer and clicked on the side of her headset. "Isabella Swan has a visitor. Bring a sedative and escort him to her room."
She hadn't even asked me for my name. Was there no security here? "You just let people waltz right in?" I asked irritably. "Level C is for the extreme cases." She's already nuts. What harm are you gonna do? she thought.
The knife that had been lodged in my chest since Alice told me Bella was here twisted and I struggled to keep my face composed. A young man walked into the room.
"You must be Isabella's visitor. Follow me."
I got as much as I could from his mind. Bella was in a padded cell. She had started in level A. When I left, she became catatonic, and when she snapped out of it, she jumped off a 100 foot cliff into the ocean.
Jacob Black had seen her and got her out and from there Charlie and Renee decided hospitalization was the safest option for her. He was very familiar with her case, and had a good guess for who I was, which explained why he wasn't speaking to me.
Can you read my mind? he thought suddenly. Of course. She was level C. They probably thought she was schizophrenic if she'd told anything close to the truth. I nodded curtly. Bella wasn't crazy. She couldn't be. Had they locked her up for honesty?
Shit, he thought and started blocking his thoughts. He did a good job, as if he'd been expecting me to show up for a while. It made me wonder how much the staff knew about my family and I.
We walked past lots of rooms with walls so thick I couldn't clearly hear the minds of the patients inside. He put a card in a slot by the elevator. It opened and he chose the lowest floor, two levels underground.
"How much do you know about Isabella's path here?"
"Only what passed through your mind upstairs."
"In the beginning, she pretended to recover. They're less careful about that in level A, and she went home after a few weeks. We know she took up music, but none of us have ever heard her play. She was out of the house a lot, so it took a while for her dad to get worried when she didn't come home. Some Quileute boys found her tying a noose in a meadow somewhere in the woods."
"No." I didn't mean to say it out loud. My feet stopped moving. The meadow. Our meadow. A noose. There was a plethora of unstable reasons for jumping off cliffs into the ocean. There were very few options for making a noose in the middle of the woods.
"Not in our meadow." She had planned to end her life there. I felt sick, my mind creating the image before I could stop it. Bella, lifeless, swaying from a tree from a knot of her own making.
"You don't have a lot of experience with girls do you?" he said without pity. Good. I didn't deserve it. "The suicidal ones generally go for irony in their deaths." I had cut so much deeper than I meant to, in my attempt to separate us.
"She was brought back, to level B this time. There are only a few differences from standard short-term hospitalization. More staff, plastic silverware, timed showers, and cameras where necessary. I was assigned as her therapist soon after and saw that she was steadily getting more agitated. She stopped talking to people and ignored any attempts to normally interact with her. She started pacing in her room and wouldn't go to bed without sedation. She started muttering to herself, things that didn't make sense to anyone else. At first I thought it was the stress of being indefinitely placed in a mental hospital, but it didn't take long to find out that it went much deeper than that.
We had gotten in the habit of sending strong staff members into her room at eight thirty, because she wouldn't stop pacing. After about a month of this we found out exactly how deep it went. That day we sent them in and they didn't come out. We got worried and I was sent in with three others in case we needed to help."
His face blanched as he recalled the memory. I saw through his dread-filled mind the hallway, the brisk steps echoing in the eerie silence. "She had brought in her own money and hidden it under the floorboards." I hid Bella's things, her reminders, under her floorboards. Did she know that?
"At some point she used that money to buy a pair of nail clippers from a short-termer. She had been hacking at that wooden bedpost for who-knows how long, carving a stake." He was definitely right about the irony, but there was no humor in it. Also ironic, I noted, was the fact that it was my absence, and not my presence that had turned her life into a horror movie.
"By this point, we couldn't get much more out of her except that her intention was to kill herself. When they came in, she panicked and stabbed them, or staked, rather, in the heart. Very precisely. To this day I can't understand how she overpowered two fit, grown men."
He was unable to continue in words, but I saw everything in his thoughts. He followed three men into her room. The door opened to reveal Bella panting, still clutching a crudely-made stake that was lodged in a man's chest. When she looked up I saw a look in her eyes I'd seen many times before. The look of a cornered animal.
Blood was everywhere. Smeared on the wall above a body crumpled in a corner by a bed that was tilted, broken, and spattered with more blood, just like her face. I've filled her life with blood, I thought with grim horror.
She jumped up, her arms covered with the red life still gushing from his chest. She lunged at one of the men in front of her therapist and almost hit her mark, it was a punctured lung for certain.
She spun towards another but he was faster and put a towel over her face. She pushed the stake into his shoulder but let go and stumbled backwards. She struggled against her drooping eyelids.
"He is displeased." she said and collapsed. She was not still. She thrashed in her sleep as if she were having a seizure. Who is displeased? Before I could ponder her words, the therapist next to me stopped and we were at room 26. He put his card in the slot and gestured for me to step in before him. I turned the handle and pushed in.
I stepped inside and saw the love of my existence for the first time in three years. She was restrained in a sitting position, and her neck was twisted around as far as she could reach, trying to cut the cell padding with her teeth. I wanted to throw up.
She jumped at the sound of the door clicking back into place. The only progress she had made was spreading her saliva on the wall behind her. At first she was livid, baring her teeth at the therapist, and then she saw me.
Her eyes welled up with tears and she struggled against her straight-jacket. "I'm trying, I'm trying..." she muttered.
"Isabella, you know there's no way for you to hurt yourself in here," he said tiredly. She responded with the human version of a snarl. I watched sadly.
"You have a visitor, today. A real one." he said, ignoring her.
"He's here everyday. Why would you call him a visitor?" I was speechless.
"He hasn't seen you since that September, Isabella. But he's here now." She laughed and looked at me, tears still running down her face.
"He's so stupid, isn't he Angel?" She nodded, answering her own question. "He thinks you're him. But he would never come find me. You're the only one who cares. You're trying to help me."
"Who's he?" Was I a masochist? I knew who it was. She frowned at me. " You know who he is. Him." She wouldn't even say my name.
I took a few steps forward. I wouldn't. I stopped, hearing the thoughts of the therapist behind me. She hadn't had conscious human... erm... physical contact in over a year. You should wait.
I could only stand and watch her return to trying to cut the wall. "Please don't," I whispered, unable to find my voice. Her head whipped in my direction.
"Why?" she demanded, almost angrily.
"You'll hurt your neck," I said helplessly.
"That's not a bad thing," she said, "it's progress. You know that."
"Bella," I paused. "Bella, I'm not... Angel." She froze and then started thrashing, trying to free herself from the horrible restraints.
I wished I could free her, but the image of her holding a weapon to her heart burned behind my eyes. "Bella, Angel isn't real. He's just a hallucination." It sounded cold, but I needed to fix the delusion she was under.
"FUCK YOU!" she screamed, eyes shut, still crying. "He cares more than you ever did! He actually wants me to be happy!"
"Then why does he want you to die?" I demanded, horrified that this Angel was created in my image.
"Because I want to be dead! He wants to help me," she said, refusing to look at me.
A thousand more knives stabbed through my chest and I decided there was nothing more to say. I simply sat down against the wall facing her and watched her struggle.
Her heart rate grew dangerously high and suddenly stuttered. She drooped, sliding down the wall until she was spread limply on the floor.
Her head was bent at a horrible angle and the crazed, obsessed emotion had died in her eyes, leaving nothing. The only evidence she was alive was her weak heartbeat and the slow trickle of tears from her eyes.
I ignored the man in the doorway and went to her. Delicately I lifted her head and shoulders and rested her in my lap.
"Bella," I breathed, "I'm so sorry. I'm sorry I hurt you."
"I- I know," she said, and I could see a ghost of the girl I had known.
Her heart was still slowing, weakening. I stroked her face. "Stay with me, Bella. I need you," I said. My eyes stung.
"I- can't." she said, her voice barely a whisper.
"I love you." I told her. If nothing else, she had to know this.
"I- love you... too," she said weakly, and closed her damp eyes for the last time.
A/N: So, Bella's heart stops, but if that's too depressing, you can imagine Edward makes her a vampire and she fully recovers mentally.