Disclaimer: I do own any part of Twilight/New Moon/Eclipse. Said works belong to Stephenie Meyer, whom I am not nor claim to be. I covered myself, right?
Just A Little Bit Dramatic: Audrey, this is my review. Absolutely fantastic! I loved it! Well worth the wait to edit. Hardly anything to do. You seriously don't need me to edit, you do it all. Would you ever do a sequel? I think it'd be wicked. But yeah, good job! I'm so proud of you!
I had the unfortunate habit of biting my lip when I was nervous, anxious, or downright scared. Such as now. I had been sitting in my kitchen drinking coffee, the best drink ever invented by mankind.
One of the great qualities of coffee is the caffeine, which allowed a person to run on sheer adrenaline for days, or at least hours, in which they didn't require sleep. It was the prized possession of college students everywhere for this very quality, most especially when the beast that was finals reared its ugly head.
It was for this quality that I chosen to drink it. Edward was not due back from hunting until the witching hours of the early morning, and I wanted to be conscious, not drooling in sleep, when he arrived.
This was where my plan hit a very large roadblock. I fell asleep. A feat supposedly impossible with the four cups of straight caffeine I consumed. But I did it anyway; I guess no one informed my body of the caffeine equals no sleep rule. I wished they had.
I didn't know it even happened until after the fact. One moment I was staring into muddy brown liquid, the next I was blinking and bleary eyed with my head down on the table. With one addition. A man.
This man had purple hair twisted into thick dreadlocks that ran down his back in a river that looked graceful even in stone-like stillness. This alone wasn't really unusual, what with the modern era of punks and rockers. What set him apart was his eyes, or lack thereof. Instead of eyes, he had two black, empty holes, deep and shadowed by his thick brow, which seemed to spiral into eternity, past eternity, into nothingness.
His forehead was high and wide. His nose, long and curved into a beak, like an eagle's majestic razor. Thin, dry lips barely made a ripple in the lines and creases of his long wooden face.
His eye-less state did not affect him as far as I could tell. He stared at me openly, unabashedly, in a way that nearly convinced me he was an illusion, nothing more.
His immobility didn't stop my mouth from wrenching open in an attempted scream and hands from clenching into fists with nails breaking the skin. 'Attempted' because no matter how hard I strained my vocal cords with harsh desperation, I couldn't make a sound.
My eyes darted in search of a weapon, anything, anything to defend myself from the lurid apparition in my kitchen, when my hurried gaze caught on the stove. I had been boiling a pot of tea, to relax from the coffee. The steam from the pot was frozen. It looked like a painting.
My hands yanked at the mug to hurl it at the spectral smoke. I just about fell over, for the mug may as well have been bolted down with steel and iron. I gasped, choking back a sob of pure terror. What was going on? I gripped the handle and pulled up using all the force in my frenzied, albeit small, form, to no avail. I sank down to my chair in defeat, letting the sobs ring in the hollow feeling room.
In my condition of sudden detachment, I realized: everything was unmoving, not only the steam, pot, and mug.
"Are you quite through?" a deep, gravely voice intoned. I yipped and swung around to face my phantom visitor. His mouth showed no signs of having moved, but I knew the noise had come from him.
My lips parted, but nothing came out; this time I was speechless from the skittering well of panic that was my mind.
"Good." The same sound with different syllables echoed from the statue. He tilted his head so that his sockets bored into mine. "Your hysteria was irritating."
"W-wa-why are you here?" I stuttered more than spoke, shrinking away from his sightless gaze.
"You, in a word, fascinate me. You willingly pursue a courtship with a vampire, a murderer of your kind, with full knowledge of the probable consequences. Yet you display no fear, unusual to the extreme. Most humans," he leaned forward as if to share a tantalizing secret. "have a immeasurable, unrequited fear of death."
"I am not most humans." I said, not a trace of fear or uncertainty in my voice. Every doubt had been wiped from my mind. I lifted my head defiantly.
He smiled. It was barely noticeable, the edges of his lips twitching upward momentarily. It disappeared as quickly as it had come.
"You didn't answer my question." I phrased without missing a beat.
"You are clever. I did not, in fact, answer the meaning of the question you voiced, which is the same as not answering it at all." He spoke slowly, almost monotonously, articulating every vowel and consonant clearly and crisply. The way he worded things, his manner as he spoke, it was from another era more sophisticated than this one.
He entwined his fingers and leaned back, considering. "I am here to present you with an opportunity."
"Which is?" Apparently encouraged by my somewhat doubtful response, he stood, towering over me at what had to be seven foot five, his hair swaying like branches in a thunderstorm. I craned my head all the way back to look at him, wincing from whiplash.
"The ultimate opportunity, the likes of which have never been dreamt of by human-kind, an opportunity your deities would even lunge for."
"Enough with the propaganda; sit down and explain without all the flowers and rice." Came my annoyed command. He smiled the same twitchy, condescending smile and lowered himself. "Now, straight out this time or this lovely conversation we've been having will come to a very sudden halt on the part of the smaller party." I had no idea where this ridiculous courage and self-confidence was coming from, but I liked it.
"As you wish. You are being given the chance to change everything, your entire existence as you know it."
"Sounds convoluted. Care to elaborate?"
"You will be sent back in time, to a place essential…"
"Hold it! Sent back in time? What are you on?! I don't care how schizophrenic your hair is or how eye-less your eyes are, time travel is not possible except in two dollar sci-fi paperbacks sold in Wal-Marts everywhere!"
"For humans, perhaps. But as you have undoubtedly guessed by now, I am not human." He declared a bit pompously with a great deal of what he must of thought was grandeur.
"Yeah, yeah. Same old twisted story that really should be told on a psychiatrist's uncomfortable leather-and-suede couch. So is, I dunno, everyone else in my wack job life." I grumbled.
He seemed a bit put out by my lack of enthusiasm for his species, but continued explaining anyway. "You shall be sent back in time," he paused, glancing at me to see if I would lose it again. I didn't. "To September 5, 1918, Chicago." My eyes widened in recognition of the date and place. He chuckled. "I knew you would connect the pieces of the puzzle we have given you. With your knowledge of the past, or the future to where you will be going, you can change everything. You know when and where your mate, Edward, was transformed. With this knowledge, you can't prevent that from happening, effectively changing your future. We are curious to see how you will react." He crossed his arms with a self-satisfied air and one sided lip twitch I thought was supposed to be smirk. He didn't clarify the 'we', and I didn't think he was going to.
Not that it mattered to me; my head was reeling from the mere thought of what he proposed. Stop Edward from being changed. I was physically winded. My head snapped up as I was abruptly filled with cold, burning rage. Who did he think he was, to screw around with our lives? What gave him the right?
As if reading my thoughts: "This is nonnegotiable."
There was no subtly in this transition, unlike the previous one. Colors blurred and swirled into a merry-go-round on crack, a tornado of senses: sight, sound, scent, touch, even taste were inexplicably warped. I spun so fast I thought my head would go sailing off my shoulders. Right after puking up everything I had ever eaten.
Just when I was positive my last bit of endurance had been sucked away by this roller coaster from hell, I slammed on concrete so hard I thought my skull had splintered into one thousand little pieces, each in an uproar to be heard, and my lip bled from my teeth carving into it.
"Ow." I whimpered piteously. My body moaned with me. "Couldn't have given me a nice, quite landing in an airport, or say, a mattress, could he? Nooo, I simply had to go slamming into concrete. I am not a rubber doll, I break. I don't know what about that very simple concept he couldn't get his head around. I wish someone had deigned to tell me an international 'Anger, Insult, and otherwise Abuse Bella Day' been declared; that's very helpful information to have." My incensed self-monologue was interrupted by a whinny. A real, actual, honest-to-god horse whinny.
My head jerked up, and if I wasn't seriously considering checking myself into the nearest ER to make sure I wasn't, you know, dying, I would grin stupidly and laugh, "Oh ha ha. That's the last time I eat cheese and mayonnaise before bed, if these freak show dreams are to show for it."
As it seems, the man, whose name I never got, was not lying or in desperate need of some Thorazine, SAT. Horses pulled buggies over cobbled streets. Those same cobbled streets were strewn with foul-smelling hay that pushed up against brick sidewalks lined in gas lamps. Right next to them, large clunky cars straining themselves to go 20 miles an hour plowed through throngs of people wearing suits, top and wide brimmed hats, shawls, and floor length dresses. It really was 1918, Chicago, and I didn't have a clue what to do with myself.
Lets recap:
I was injured
I was in an unfamiliar place where I didn't know anyone. Okay, I take that back. I knew one person. But he didn't know me.
I was wearing…I had been wearing a robe and flannel pants. But now I was being suffocated in a frilly white dress that bruised my jaw and tangled up in my heels. If my gushing head wound didn't kill me, the dress and heels would. Lacy white gloves reached my elbow creases and my body was having trouble doing its job, i.e. making my lungs move in and out, aka keeping me alive because of a corset. That meant I could add:
I was slowly being strangled by a dress.
Altogether not a bright list. But I tended to have a survival streak, and I really, really wanted to keep it up.
I levered my arms and half-twisted my body so that I was more or less in a forward upright position, though a bit crumpled. After whimpering "ow!" every two seconds and hanging for dear life on the nearest lamppost, I was standing. I was proud of myself.
Now, the first order of business…find Edward. I wasn't sure why this was so urgent that I couldn't get some morphine at the very least, but I had a feeling "the Man" had something to do with it.
Oh well. If I fought it, I would probably end up even more battered, if that were possible. I didn't want to find out, I knew that. So I started half-limping, half-swaying like a drunk instead of walking, but I wasn't too worried what the twentieth century aristocrats thought of my habits.
I was filthier, more exhausted, and more fed up than I ever been in my life. After hours of fruitless searching, I realized: I didn't have the damnedest clue where Edward was, and that Chicago was a very big place.
I couldn't keep wandering aimlessly, that was stupid. The only positive side of this was that my wounds had healed faster than they should have, but I wasn't complaining. I had my eye-less friend to thank for that. Not that he had come out of nowhere and told me, or anything.
I staggered to a park bench and fell into it, glad for even a momentary rest. I wracked my brain for any information Edward could have given me that I could use to find him. His father had been a prominent lawyer, which meant he would live on the rich side of town. His last name was Mason…ugh. I could have just looked in an effing phone book.
I spit, almost breathing fire in fury. To have saved myself so much effort… but it was too late to start my phone book crusade. That would have to wait for morning. My stupidity had cost precious hours, and the sun was setting. This bench was destined to be my bed, for that night anyway. So I curled on my side, trying to gather heat, and fell quickly into a dreamless sleep.
A blast of searing light jerked me unpleasantly awake. The smell of roast beans and meat filled my nose, and I wondered where I was. I sagged when I remembered; sometimes ignorance really was bliss. I could have lived without knowing I was in 1918 Chicago searching for my soon-to-be-vampire boyfriend-a-hundred-years-from-now. I could have lived without living it.
I sighed and wrenched myself up. Second order of business: a phone book. Turns out a phone booth was half a block away, and, back in 1918, they kept phone books in phone booths that, along with numbers, listed addresses and occupations. I flipped to the Ms and found; Mason, Edward – lawyer, twenty names down. Bingo.
I found his house without too much trouble. It was enormous; a three story creamy white monster with a great sprawling lawn, wraparound porch and massive oaks. A path winded up to a cherry door framed by round bushes. It was all so very picturesque, like a Norman Rockwell painting. Like the one with the dogs playing billiard or poker or something. As close as you could get to a perfect family, and a perfect family life.
I stood blankly at the gates that blocked that the driveway from passer-by, miscreants, and vagabonds. Undesirable people. People like me. It hit with an icy pang; I knew no one, not one single person in the whole, wide world. Anyone I knew wouldn't be born for nearly one hundred years. Edward didn't count; a mutual knowledge between two people had to exist to be considered a relationship.
I swallowed and snuck around the back and crawled through some bushes, then crept to the bay windows, feeling like some perverted stalker. I sucked in a breath as a recognized Edward with two other people in a living room arrangement. He was tanner, shorter. His hair wasn't quite that spectacular shade of bronze, and his features were blemished. His eyes were such a breathtaking shade of green. He was human, and flawed, but still perfect in my eyes.
The other people were a woman and a man, respectively. The woman's hair was red; she was pale and freckled and looked roughly forty with laugh lines and green eyes like Edward's. The man was a carbon copy of Edward in thirty years, complete with salt-and-peppered brown hair and crow's feet. His parents.
He stood up, kissed his mother's cheek, nodded to his father, walked to a door and pulled out a coat and hat, then left out the front door. I ran to the front in time to see him jump in a gray car filled with five or six other teenage boys, then drive off, their laughter and shouting trailing behind them with the exhaust.
I watched them from the shadows for days. I cowered in bushes and climbed trees, sleeping behind their shed and stealing food from the kitchen when their maid and cook had their backs turned like the homeless person I was.
I watched Edward, mostly, though I observed his parents a few times to decide they were kind and generous people and I liked them very much. So did Edward. He complimented his mother and discussed politics with his father; he was the apple of their eye, any blind fool could see it.
I watched him play his piano, and eat dinner and do his homework. I was in agony when he was at school or off with friends, which was often. He was very popular. He, and his family, even hosted a party.
Their house was filled with fancy men and woman. The youths gathered around Edward, the girls flirting with him and the boys acting his best friend, clapping him on the back and congratulating him for one thing or another. They drank and were merry, and I hated them for it.
I spent the remaining time feeling sorry for myself, watching his parents, and making myself stay alive. I elected to stay in my current arrangements, since they allowed me to watch Edward as frequently as possible. I made it a point, however, to turn away when he was dressing, staring at a bird or a tree of wall until he was done. I was beginning to realize why he was fascinated with watching me a hundred years from now.
I wasn't sure what the Man wanted me to do, not that I would follow his orders away. Until one day, I found out.
Edward's father fell sick, shaking and sweating and vomiting. They took him to the hospital when he didn't spring back up like it was some street bug. He never came back. Edward and his mother returned, she sobbing uncontrollably and he patting her shoulder and hugging her and seeming generally lost. He surrendered his mother to the care of sympathetic neighbors and went into his room and cried.
The house that had been so full of love and life and laughter was now dim and silent. A few more aching days passed by, the people more wraiths than alive. The funeral was on a Tuesday.
It wasn't long before Edward fell sick, sick like his father, the sickness that would lead to his eternal existence. This time, they didn't wait for the hospital trip. I followed behind their car as best I could. The antiqueness (to my twenty-first century mind anyway) of the car and Chicago traffic was my biggest aide-and-abettor.
The hospital itself was cramped and crowded. People, worn and tired doctors and nurses, rushed around while patients lay on cots and blankets on the floor, there were so many. The smell of disease and death permeated the place. No wonder why.
Edward's mother didn't leave his side, which made it hard for me to see him. She cleaned him up when he got sick and wet him rags for his forehead and comforted him in his delusions when he cried out. I didn't have to wait long for an opportunity. She was soon sick in the bed next to Edward.
I saw Dr. Cullen, Carlisle, not long afterwards. He was exactly the same, not that I expected him to be different. Same golden eyes, same golden hair and movie star good looks, same compassion and charity. I was so glad to see him.
I posed as a nurse to tend to them both. The real doctors and nurses were too busy to notice or question me, and if they did, they were probably grateful for even the tiniest help from my inexperienced hands. I wiped their foreheads and soothed them as well as I could. I knew they were going to die; I just wanted to make them, both of them, as content as possible. It wasn't easy to die.
Mrs. Mason died on a Friday. Edward was so delusional, so far gone; he wouldn't have understood if I told him his mother was dead. So I didn't tell him. Dr. Cullen noticed I was always here by Edward's side. He came to ask me once.
I locked eyes with him, and shook my head, slowly, left to right. He backed down, and I only saw him when he was trying to help Edward. That was rare; there were so many people who needed his help.
I talked to Edward constantly, keeping an up an endless stream of prattle end I zoned out on after a while. But I never stopped, and I never ran out of things to talk about. I talked about everything; I talked about nothing. I talked about the weather. I slept two hours a day, maybe less. Ate a few pieces of stale bread offered to me by someone, I don't know who, just to keep myself going.
On Sunday Edward's breathing stopped. For two seconds. Five seconds. Six. I screamed for Dr. Cullen louder than I had ever screamed. He dashed through the door and did something; I wasn't sure what. I was too focused on Edward's face, crumpled and dirty and sweaty. He started breathing again.
"That was a close call," Carlisle said. I nodded numbly. He stopped breathing twice more that day. Each time I yelled Carlisle's name, and he came running.
On Monday, Edward's breath stopped yet again. Five seconds. Calling Carlisle was automatic now. Ten seconds. Carlisle did his fancy life saving trick that I still didn't understand. Fifteen seconds. Too long. Why wasn't it working?
I looked at Carlisle. His face was drawn and sad and the shadows under his eyes seemed longer. But his eyes glittered…with hope. He was looking at Edward's still form. I could almost see the wheels in his head turning.
I realized what would happen now. Carlisle would drag Edward off to his apartment, bite him, let him transform, and that would be the end of it. Story finished. Everyone can go home. And then I knew why the Man wanted me here. Twenty seconds.
Images flashed in my mind rapid-fire. Edward smilingly loving at his parents, embracing them, they looking adoringly at him. His laughter with his friends, his tolerant expression when the girls made passes at him. The enraptured look when he played his piano. His house; his lawn. Jump to the future. My time.
His stony glare at nothing. His annoyance at hearing disturbing thoughts in people's heads. His black, black eyes when he didn't feed. His clenched fists, digging into the table, splintering it. His hating glower at me for the delicious scent of my blood. His look of agony when the scent over came him. His distance and depression and years of loneliness. His century of fighting his impulses. His century of hating himself. And then my mind was made up. Thirty seconds.
My hand shot out to touch Carlisle's shoulder. He looked at me, shocked. No human had ever touched his vampire self. I shook my head, desperate. "No. Please don't. Don't do what you're planning to do. Please. No."
His mouth parted and his eyes widened. He recoiled a bit, like I might bite him. He was going to speak, but I shook my head. "Not here. Your place?" it was his turn to nod.
Edward jerked violently. We gazed at him again. Fifty seconds. "He's dying." Carlisle whispered.
"I know." I thought I could hear it then. Edward's heart slowing. Beating slower, and slower…and slower. Until it stopped. Sixty seconds. A minute.
I looked at Carlisle, clearing my throat. "Shall we?" we walked outside the hospital. Neither one of us had any reason to stay anymore. "Would you mind terribly carrying me?" I asked politely. Not that I felt anything, but I thought it was polite. "I'm afraid I can't travel as fast as you can." He agreed, naturally. How could he not?
His apartment was small and dingy and in the red light district. I sat across from him and explained how I knew what he was going to and who I was and where I came from. I told him everything, about the future, about my now nonexistent relationship with Edward, about the Man. He was shocked. But he hid it well.
"I'm afraid…I'm afraid I can't let you leave, knowing what you know about my kind." He stuttered. The one and only time I heard Carlisle Cullen stutter.
I closed my eyes. "I know." As an afterthought: "a single clean bite to the neck should do it." He placed his hands gently on my neck, and bit. Before I faded into my abyss of emotional and physical torture, I heard: "an interesting choice. Very interesting." From a profound male voice.
So I stayed with Carlisle through the years. My human memories did eventually fade, but I never completely forgot Edward. I forgot most other things; my father, my mother, little details, like how his hair would fall over his eyes.
I fought the temptation of human blood, more for him than anything else. Didn't want to let his memory down, I guess. I went to school. I told Carlisle where and when to find Esme. I knew he changed Rosalie for Edward. I also knew she was unhappy as a vampire, but thought that just because I destroyed my love life didn't mean she deserved the same.
I told Carlisle to change her. Two years later, she found Emmett. Fifty years later, Alice and Jasper joined our family.
I still loved them like my family. It was hard at first, with the memories so fresh and raw, but they faded. And so did the pain, after a while. I was able to function, to hunt, to joke with my family and enjoy life. But I didn't forget.
Every year I went to Chicago at the anniversary of his death, and to Forks where we were in love. I think Carlisle knew where I went, but he never told anyone, just like we never told the rest of family when my real birthday was.
Many, many years later, we were sitting in a cafeteria in a small school in a small, insignificant, rainy town on the Washington Peninsula in the middle of January. Turns out Charlie and Renee Swan did have a kid, a boy. She still left Charlie anyway.
We were bored and disgusted with the humans' antics, as per usual. They were vain and childish and annoying. Today, they were raving about a new student. Fresh meat for them to chew over and pick apart and spit out when they were done. And we were called monsters.
I was staring absently mindedly at crumbling foam that held up the roof, waiting for the day to be over so I could home and play with my family. There was a commotion at the end of the cafeteria.
The new student came in, and everyone was vying for this nameless, faceless person's attention. They chose a table, and the clamor settled into a dull murmur of gossip. I sighed and swung my head around to gaze at a different point of empty space when a flash of color caught my eye.
The new boy. A lock of glistening bronze hair that fell into startlingly green eyes over tan, taut skin and a painfully handsome face. He gasped as I focused solely on him my eyes boring into his. He stared, entranced.
"Isabella Cullen's staring at you, Edward."
The universe has a perverse sense of irony.
author's note: Okay. There is my very, very long oneshot. But I typed it in two days, half one day and half another, so give me some credit. Thanks to my beta who is queen of the betas, Just A Little Bit Dramatic. She read and edited it in like ten minutes, which is, you know, really really awesome. So props to her.
Guys, as nice as "This is good" and normally "update soon" is, I would like some real feed back. Tell me what you liked, what you disliked. If you liked everything and it was perfect, (which I really doubt) feed my ego and list some stuff you especially liked. Please? Telling me I'm pretty wouldn't hurt either. Nah, just kidding. : That would be weird.