Okay, I'm trying my hand at a twilight fanfic with a twist, obviously. Bella's a mute. Yeah, I don't know how it will turn out either, but I wanted to try it anyway. Work with me. If you like it, let me know. Its simple, just click the review button and review away. It would be greatly appreciated. You can let me know if you don't like it too, though I obviously prefer the former...
This is just the prologue, so its short. Kind of a test too. If no one likes it, I probably shouldn't continue, but if you guys do, well, great! Again, this is kind of an experiment, one I can only hope goes well.
Cheers.
*I don't own twilight or any of Stephanie Meyer's characters. Sorry. However, any details/anything(s) not in the book are by me (duh). Feel free to commend- or scold -me on that.
-Prologue-
Losing Heart
When you can't talk, you become good at listening. Even before I became a mute I was good at that- listening. To people, things, the little noises an average person tends to ignore. Footsteps on pavement, dirt blown by the wind, even the quiet sound of a book's page being turned across the classroom; I heard it all. I was, as Renee put it, an observer. It was in my nature to watch, learn, and listen. I was a quiet kid, eager to simply take in the world around me in my own unobtrusive way. Yet when you aren't distracted by the sound of your own voice, you quickly discover that your surroundings become that much clearer. At least, I did. I suppose that's the one good thing about the car accident- it opened my eyes and ears, even as it permanently crushed my vocal cords and forever damaged a large chunk of my heart.
Loosing Renee- my mother –did that to me.
They waited to hold the funeral until after I was out of the hospital. My neck still wrapped in suffocating gauze, legs weak from lying prone for nearly two weeks in a temporary coma, my body black and blue from the various bruises and grievous wounds I'd received, I stood trembling at my mother's graveside and silently cried.
It was the only way I would ever be able to cry.
I've never been talkative. I'm shy by nature and if I think about it now, I'm sure some of my fellow schoolmates from Phoenix had morbidly joked (upon hearing the news) that I was now officially a mute instead of unofficially one. Yes, I was that quiet. But its one thing to choose not to speak and quite another not to be able to.
The latter is much harder.
I wasn't able to say any parting words as they threw dirt onto my mother's coffin. My throat, broken beyond repair, could emit no mournful cries of grief, even as the tears slipped from my exhausted eyes. It killed me, having to stand at the funeral in silent anguish, frozen in my mute sorrow. Instead I was forced to see, smell, and hear- all with great clarity.
I smelled, when I could not speak, the rubbing alcohol on my freshly cleaned injuries, equal parts overpowering and nauseating.
I heard, acutely, the bits of crushed rock in the soil that fell from the undertaker's shovel as it rattled raucously against the mahogany of my mother's polished casket.
It was a sound I would never forget.
And I watched, when I could not, for the life of me, release a sound, other nameless people weep for a woman they barely knew.
I think I hated that the most.
I became a mute through a series of metal screams and ear splitting noises, amongst shattering glass and combustive car bits. I became a mute the day my mother died before my horrified eyes, blood seeping from her still body and leaving her skin pale and completely lifeless. I didn't have a say in the matter and I learned, upon waking up, groggy and disoriented in a lonely hospital bed, surrounded by the smell of antiseptic and a series of beeping machines, both of which continue even now to haunt my dreams, that I would never have a mother, nor a say, ever again. I was silent and I was motherless and I became, from that moment on, a full time listener. Not by choice. Not solely by nature.
But it happened anyway.
It was in my new position as an observer that I moved to Forks to live with Charlie, the father I'd never known I'd had. I left behind Phoenix, my late mother's fiance, Phil, and everything I'd ever known. I left behind the warmth of the desert sun, the small one story house I'd called home, and all memories of my sixteen years in existence with Renee.
And, unknowingly, I stepped- without a word of protest -into the world of vampires. One where no one would hear my silent screams of help, should I attempt to give them.
I was a mute, and I was alone.
The good, the bad, the ugly. Whatever. Review please? It would make my day.