The Definition of Love
After new moon. When Alice makes a terrible mistake, how will it affect the Cullens? And more importantly how will it affect Bella? Told from Bella's POV.
Don't own anything.
AN: Yes, this is a result of the new movie. I also got caught in the fever….
For those who read any of my other stories, I feel I have some explaining to do. Yes, there hasn't been an update in any of the others stories in almost a year now. Yes, I was very much aware of that. I'm sorry, I had a very busy year, busier than I had expected. But I had some time off at the end of 2009 so I decided to write. I wrote a few chapters of my stories and I planned to post it slowly so that I could keep updating them regularly.
One problem though, my laptop kinda broke and it is, at this moment, being fixed far far way from me. Which kinda sucks because I had really important stuff on that, besides the chapters, and for some reason I had this insane urge to write. Hence the new story. Hopefully, my laptop will return as good as new with the new chapters intact and I'll be able to post them.
Now, to the story…
Chapter 1 – Isabella Marie Swan
What is love? Really. What does it mean when you say you love someone? What do you wanna say when you tell them you are in love with them?
Some believe it's when you want no one else, when two people became one. Forever. Others say love is friendship set on fire. If you look up the word love in a dictionary, it will tell you that love is a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.
I've always enjoyed reading, and I've read countless of epic romances where the couples were willing to give up their lives for the one they love. But I never understood them, what would you feel to be willing to sacrifice your life for someone else? What could be so powerful to make you go against every single one of your survival instincts? Truthfully, as I read all those quotes, I wasn't really sure. I mean, what is the definition of love? What am I suppose to feel?
None of them were really helpful, but as I searched online, something else caught my attention. Not because it erased all my doubts, but because as I read it, it gave me hope. Hope that if someday I finally figured out as to what love is, I could have something like this:
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. Love never fails. - Corinthians 13:4-8
But, I think I may be getting a little ahead of myself here. I mean, I never even introduced myself right? Ok, so let's start at the beginning.
My name is Isabella Marie Swan, but I prefer to be called Bella, if you don't mind. I was born in a small city called Forks, Washington, and I was 6 months old when my mom, Renee, decided to leave my dad. All I know is that Charlie, my father, took it really hard. Anyway, my mom took me to live with her in Phoenix, Arizona.
We had a lot of fun together while we lived only the two of us, don't get me wrong, she had plenty of boyfriends, but they were never really serious, and we got to spend most of our time with each other. Until the moment that she met Phil, and she fell madly in love with him. There we go again, this word LOVE, why does it make people do such strange things?
Anyway, Renee was in love with Phil, the problem was that Phil played minor league baseball, which meant that he had to travel constantly. Renee stayed with me, but I knew that she was sad whenever he was gone. So, even if I didn't understand what made her feel so unhappy, I decided to leave so she could be free to travel around with Phil.
I moved back to Forks to live with Charlie, I was 17 then. Sure I had spent some time with Charlie every once in a while, but still it took some adjusting when I moved in with him. Fortunately, it all turned all OK.
I wasn't really popular in Phoenix, quite the contrary actually, so it took me by surprise when it wasn't difficult for me to find some friends on my first day in High School, including Jessica Stanley, Angela Weber, and Mike Newton. Later I found out Mike took an interest in me as more than a friend, but that's just not important to the story I'm about to tell you.
Still they weren't the ones that would change my life in always I had never imagined, the ones that did it I met later; during lunch: the Cullens. Edward, Alice and Emmett Cullen, Jasper and Rosalie Hale and of course their adoptive parents, as if they needed any, Carlisle and Esme Cullen, to whom I was introduced soon after.
I started to date Edward around the same time I found out that he was a vampire, as were the rest of his family. Also, I found out that the rumors around the school that Jasper and Alice, Rosalie and Emmett were dating weren't exactly true. In reality, they were married for far more years than I was alive.
Oh, yes, I almost forgot, even though they were vampires, Edward and his family did NOT eat human blood, they liked to call themselves vegetarians, because they only took the blood of animals, but not without difficulty. I was witness to several episodes that shown how much they desired human blood, and how much they struggled not to have it. They said they resisted the pull of human blood because they didn't want to become monsters, I can't say that I disagree with them.
I must confess that Edward was my first and, up to this point, only boyfriend. And to tell you the truth, I was ecstatic to finally have found someone that liked me. I will tell you once again that was what they call a loser in Phoenix, and obviously, I didn't get much attention from guys, better yet, I got absolutely no attention from guys in Phoenix.
To this day, I still don't understand what Edward saw in me, why such a beautiful and graceful creature would waste his time on me. But I wasn't really complaining.
Right in the beginning of our relationship we came face to face with a coven of vampires that did drink human blood, and one of them, James, took and special interest in me over the fact that Edward wanted to protect me.
James took upon himself to hunt me, and terrorize me and the Cullens, until the moment that he finally got me alone. Over his own stupidity, James decided to play with me, stalling until Edward had enough time to find me. They fought and my boyfriend won. When the rest of the family arrived, they killed James.
I was almost turned into a vampire by James that night, but Edward was able to suck the poison out of me, preventing the change. I must admit that I wasn't entirely happy that Edward stopped it, I was more than glad to become a vampire, but Edward didn't want to condemn my soul.
When my 18th birthday rolled around, Alice convinced me to let her throw me a party at their house. She assured me it would only be me and the Cullens, after all, no need to test their still wavering control.
Alice, well, she was able to convince me of anything, even things I knew I would regret doing later. I really don't know why, I felt that I needed to give her whatever it was that she desired.
But anyways, when I was opening the presents, I accidentally cut my hands with a paper, which made Jasper completely lose it. He attacked me, and Edward pushed me to protect me as he lunged at Jasper. Problem was, he pushed me too hard and I ended up thrown against a table filled with crystals, resulting in a bigger cut and more blood.
Carlisle patched me up, as he was a doctor and apparently the only one in the house who could stand being with so much blood without attacking me.
Not long after that, Edward broke up with me and left the city with his family, because he thought it was too dangerous for me to hang out with vampires, of course he didn't really word it like that. He told me that he was leaving because he never loved me anyway, that he had made a mistake in dating me. Of course I believed him, I mean, I already thought he was too good for me, and I could not understand how he hadn't see it earlier. Besides he wasn't the first guy to tell me that I was ugly or repulsing or anything of the sort, remember: Phoenix.
So, yeah, I spend some months really depressed, seeing that I had lost not only my boyfriend, but also his entire family, which also included my best friend Alice. I knew it was useless to try to contact Edward, after all he didn't want me anymore, but I tried to contact Alice. I sent her several emails, hoping she would give me a sign that she still cared about me, but I never received any answer from her.
In this time I started to hang out with Jacob Black a lot. Jacob was the son of Billy Black, one of Charlie's friends, so he, I and his sisters used to play when we were younger, whenever I came to visit Charlie. Jacob was 16, two years younger than me, but he quickly became my best friend and the rock I had to hold on to after everything that was happened in my life. He had feelings for me and I knew it, and I'm ashamed to say that I used these feelings to keep him around me.
It worked until he became a werewolf, destined to kill vampires, and he kind of stayed away from me both to keep me safe and because Sam, the Alfa of his pack, ordered him to. After I found out of his transformation, we started to hang out more, but still not as much as before, as now he had his duties as a werewolf to fulfill, one of them being protect me from Victoria, James' mate, which wanted to kill me to revenge his death.
With nothing better to do, I decided to go cliff jumping, recreationally of course, thing is, I almost got myself killed because I couldn't fight the current. Thankfully Jacob found me in time, pulled me out and took me home.
Imagine my surprise when I got home and found Alice there. You can't imagine how happy I was to finally see her, for a moment I actually thought I had drowned and gone to heaven.
She told me she had seen me jump, but she hadn't seen me come out of the water. She thought I was dead, you could almost see the tears in her eyes, but sadly, vampires couldn't cry.
Another thing I think I forgot to mention, besides being vampires, indestructible, fast and incredible beautiful, some of the Cullens had others special powers. Edward could read people's minds, all but mine, Jasper could feel people's emotions and control them and Alice could see the future.
Anyway, due to some misunderstandings, Edward got the idea that I was dead, so he flew off to Italy to ask the Volturi to kill him. You see, being a vampire, it was not easy to get himself killed. The best way was to provoke the Volturi, some sort of vampire royalty that killed whoever broke their laws, the most important being the one that stated that vampires were to keep their identity hidden from humans.
So, there we go, me and Alice to Italy, to keep Edward from exposing himself. We got there just in time. I showed myself to him, and he realized I was still alive. So we were taken to the Volturi, after some debate, they let us go under the promise that I would be turned. We returned home, the Cullens moved back to Forks and Edward and I got back together.
And finally we got to the part that I was talking about in the beginning, you see, because up to the point that I saved Edward from killing himself, I thought he was doing it out of guilt, for leaving me and somehow making me depressed enough to kill myself or something along those lines. That I could understand, not that I agreed with it in anyway, but that I could comprehend.
But when I saved him, Edward told me that he was going to kill himself over the fact that he was so in love with me that he could not live in a world that I didn't exist. As I stated before, I did not understand that. I did not see what you could possible feel to sacrifice your life over someone else. That's when I started my search for the definition of love.
And after all my search, I'm disappointed to say that I did not love Edward Cullen.
And here it is. Not much of Alice, I know, but it is coming. Next chapter will be up in a week or so.
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