Alphabet Soup
Five years from when Edward and Bella graduate high school, they are still together, and Edward has finally given in to her request at immortality. However, in a mix of events, they have a human child, Kathryn, and while feeding her, Bella ponders the sequence of thoughts stemming from alphabet soup.
Kathryn was the cutest daughter a "girl" could ask for. Her brown hair was short and soft, big cheeks accented by the large dimples. Her eyes were surprisingly green, and her skin quite pale, but not as pale as Edward or me. She was fairly pudgy, but as all babies are. Her laugh was music, and she was the apple of her father's eye. He would constantly dote on her, attempting to make her smile and to hear that laugh.
He was out hunting now, as I probably should do soon. It was lunch time for Katie and she had moved on to the semi-solid food, like the alphabet soup I was feeding her now. She gurgled and giggled whenever I flew the "airplane" towards her mouth and she swallowed obligingly.
As I spooned the alphabet soup out of the bowl, I kept noticing the words the letters seemed to randomly make, in no apparent fashion, completely coincidence. A few were trite, like the words "me", "ads", and other short common words.
But at one point I looked into the bowl, and I could swear I was dreaming. The letters very clearly spelled out "eternity".
Eternity. Such a loaded word. When I was in high school, I did not know the extent of the word. To me it was only the longest time span I knew, which then was only eighteen years worth of time. Now I had watched as time happened all around me, but passing me and my family over.
Jessica was now married. To a Port Angeles man named Greg. They had met at college and married two and a half years later. She lived in Port Angeles and I hadn't heard from her in a long time. What hurt the most though was needing to turn down her wedding invitation, even to be in the bridal party as a bridesmaid, simply because she had planned an outdoor wedding.
Renee was happy, that's all I knew. According to her, I was dead, died in a car crash with Edward while bringing our college supplies and "stuff" to college junior year, even though by then I had already been a vampire for three years. Alice secretly checked every so often on her to see how she was doing, and as far as I knew, she had had another child, with Phil, and they were living happily. My little sister's name was Jacqueline. I hated not being able to see my little sister, Jackie for short, being an only child my whole human life.
Charlie's story was a sad one. About a year after Edward and I had "died", he was involved in a deadly shooting in the La Push woods. He died in my arms, when I found him crumbled in the woods, abandoned by his comrades in their rush to safety. His last audible thought was, "Bella, I knew you were still out there, I never stopped looking. I love you Bells." And then he died. That night I cursed myself for not being able to shed a tear, even though my father had died in my arms.
Neither of my parents had ever met Katie. She was a strange case, one Carlisle was still working on, but I had become pregnant a little less than two years ago and she came out a human girl. According to Carlisle, she would become a vampire before her 18th birthday, but he couldn't be sure. For now though I wanted to give her a normal life, which is why I was spooning her human food that was "educational and delicious!" Ha-ha.
The word "eternity" had cleared up by now, leaving a very legible word floating at the top of the soup. This word represented the only reason I was who and what I was today. The only reason I didn't hate being a vampire and leaving my family. The reason I didn't even mind.
Boy, was alphabet soup smart.
The word was simply:
Love
(A/n cute huh? Sorry about Charlie, but I was just writing on whim here)