Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, a twilight fanfic

Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers

"This is a story of boy meets girl. But you should know up front, this is not a love story."

Narrator, (500) Days of Summer

Her mother reads her stories of princesses and magic and soul mates meant for forever and happily ever after in a cheap motel at twilight.

Bella scolds her mother when the stories end with a happily ever after because Bella is sensible, Bella is rational, Bella is not her mother.

"You know that's not real Mommy."

Renee laughs softly and kisses the top of her head because her daughter is so serious for a twelve year old.

"It is for some people."

Bella coos over a baby with green eyes in the supermarket while Edward watches and he tries not to flinch. He can't believe how much he's asked of her, how much he's taken from her.

The next morning he's gone, and Bella collapses.

Alice drops by to make sure she's alive and brings Jasper with her, in the living her life sort of way, not the breathe in, breathe out kind of way.

"Listen," she says with a voice that poets have written sonnets about, "he just feels really guilty, and…"

Bella stares at her with some sort of hollow gaze and Alice reaches into her purse to avoid Bella's eyes while nudging Jasper's hand.

"Here's the ticket. You'll have fun. Pack a raincoat. And call me when you get back." As an afterthought she tacks on, "Thank you for convincing her, Jas."

Jasper manipulates her mood until she feels much more upbeat about an adventure, and she pouts at him because she knows he did this. He smiles at her straight on, no crookedness whatsoever and if her heart doesn't skip a beat but she might have forgotten to breathe.

His eyes are the same color as Edward's at the moment, golden and smoldering, and Bella looks away for reasons she's not entirely sure of.

When Bella looks back up, both Alice and Jasper are gone and she thinks about the ghost stories Billy Black would tell Jacob and her back when ignorance was bliss.

She packs the red raincoat that's hanging off her bedpost and spends twenty minutes debating if she should actually go. While digging through her nightstand for Wuthering Heights she finds a picture of Edward.

He is still as stunning as ever but for the first time Bella just feels angry. For leaving her, for being such an ass about it, for her being foolish enough to take him back after the first time he did it, for being stupid enough to believe him when he said he'd never leave.

Bella cuts his picture, puts it in a trashcan outside, and sets it on fire.

She then leaves the next day for London, England.

She hates London. She hates the rain and the fog and the cold and how she can never ever get warm.

She misses the sun on her face and the dry, hot heat of Phoenix. It's times like these that she allows herself to remember the feel of Jacob's warm hands delicately tracing her features.

She feels Edward's touch when she walks out of her ritzy hotel into the chill, and maybe that's why she hates London most of all.

The bar is discovered purely on accident. She's so sick of the cold and yearns for the warmth but ducks into the nearest bar instead.

Its name is the Leaky Cauldron.

There's a lanky redhead with somewhat greasy hair sitting at the bar, and Bella takes a seat two stools away.

The bartender takes one glance at her and hands her a glass of firewhiskey (what a funny name, she thinks, must be a British thing) on the house. She simply smiles her thanks, and grimaces as it goes down.

The redhead laughs in a way that doesn't sound like a laugh at all and raises his own glass towards her.

"Know the feeling, mate."

When Bella turns a back around, her glass is refilled but Tom the bartender is at the other end.

She doesn't think twice about it and rents a room upstairs.

The redhead's name is George, and she hasn't seen him leave the bar for two days.

They make small talk, and outside the sun shines.

"So what are you grieving for?"

Bella runs a finger around the rim of her glass. There's yet another kind of exotic, strangely named alcohol called butterbeer (which sounds disgusting) and she's trying to put off drinking it for as long as she can.

She closes her eyes and Edward, as always, is conjured up as if by magic. His perfection sickens her, and his cowardice is astounding.

"Disillusionment."

George nods thoughtfully, and motions for a water from Tom.

"A lot of people don't like what they see once the charm wears off."

Bella takes a tiny sip of her butterbeer and fights to keep the grimace off her face.

"What about you?"

George's face clouds over and he stares at a mirror hanging over various liquors across the bar. He doesn't answer until he tears his gaze away from the mirror.

"Fred."

His water has turned to wine and Bella doesn't believe her own eyes.

One morning Bella comes down for breakfast and orders a traditional English breakfast. No one told her how gross it would be.

The plate arrives and her nose automatically wrinkles and she grimaces unflatteringly as she takes a couple bites of each thing on her plate and then politely pushes it back.

George chuckles and smiles at her over his glass of firewhiskey and pushes it away full for the first time in days.

Bella's too busy looking at her feet (and avoiding his gaze) to notice the glass soar into the sink by itself.

After spending a week in the Leaky Cauldron, Bella remembers she has a room at Savoy waiting for her and the food doesn't really appeal to her at the bar so she leaves.

"Where you goin'?"

Bella turns around to smile at George and tells him she'll be back.

She feels him watch her walk away and wonders if she'll ever stop falling for lost causes.

When she returns to the bar, George is showered and clean and in a beastly wool sweater with a G on it.

She kisses him on the cheek and he pretends to not know who she is.

"Y'know, love, I am wildly popular with the broads around here."

Bella looks around the relatively empty bar and sees one old woman with about three teeth, a large bearded woman, and one frazzled mother with a small enfant.

"Ah, so you're funny."

His eyes flash for a minute with something that she's not entirely sure ofbut he's completely sincere and smiling when he says, "The funniest."

She ignores the slight shake at the end of the sentence and how he opens his mouth afterwards to debate about it with someone who can't respond.

George doesn't exactly clarify about who Fred is after the initial toast.

To be fair, Bella doesn't ask either.

"Listen, George, I'm-"

"Perfect."

He finishes her sentences and she lets him (even if it's wrong) because old habits die hard even when the partner in crime already has.

He leans in to kiss her tenderly and Bella swallows hard.

Half a world away, Alice gasps and giggles while the rest of the Cullen family is happy for Bella.

Somewhere in an undetermined location, Edward tries unsuccessfully to forget her face and calls himself a fucking idiot for leaving her, again.

It's been fourteen days of Bella and George and sitting at this bar sometimes drinking, sometimes not, telling stories about the things that don't really matter and Bella has to leave.

"I have to go home, George."

His face falls and the first thing she thinks is, oh god please don't order another firewhiskey, because he just stopped and according to Tom the bartender George has been camped out for months practically.

"So a pretty lady and a ginger walk into a bar…"

"This isn't a joke, George."

She takes his hand and a determined look changes his face while he nods almost to himself.

"I know. So do I."

Bella doesn't know that home entails going back to an empty flat above the shop that his brother and he built. That it means facing rebuilding a whole world she doesn't know about and hunting down lone survivors and mourning the many, many dead.

If she did, she might've stayed. But she doesn't.

So she kisses him on the cheek once, takes a deep breath, and walks away without looking back.

Fred thinks he loves Bella for staying at the bar for two weeks with him. Something even his extensive and supportive family had yet to do. He loves her for waking him up, sending him home, allowing him to see his mother smile wide and tease Ron and Hermione for locking themselves in a broom closet and scaring Harry half to death about hurting Ginny.

Fred knows he hates Bella for leaving.

When she gets home, Bella will look up the Leaky Cauldron in every London guidebook. She wants to know the address, just in case.

It's weird, but she can't find the address or the firewhiskey that she became so fond of during her stay so she tells herself it didn't really matter.

In reality, she tucks the small heartbreak farther away in her mind like she's done with all the others.

Edward delivers the kiss of death with a whispered "I love you" to a wildly irregular pulse point. She closes her eyes and inhales his scent and his velvet voice lulls her into comfort and prepares her for the unknown.

Somewhere outside, a wolf howls and there's a pounding on the door.

Bella's heart breaks and tears and she gasps out the world wait right as Edward's teeth pierce her skin.

The fire starts burning and burning and burning and there's so much yelling and god she hopes she's made the right-

Well, Bella's always been indecisive.

AN: So there it is. My new crossover. I can't stop writing them, I think it might be a disease. But I love the couple officially in it's weird un-happily ever after, angsty way. I hope you were all suprised that Bella was a vampire the whole time, because I tried to leave little hints that she was the entire time. Up next: another Nate/Serena piece and one Blair Waldorf centered one. If you liked it, please review!!