A/N and general disclaimer: I do not own anything related to Twilight, be it characters, setting, stories, etc. No profit is being made from this fanfic and no copyright infringement is intended. If you feel like I am stealing something from you, please notify me immediately. That being said, I thought it would be fun to take SMeyer's vampire anatomy to its logical extreme and write it not only so that it makes sense, but also protraying actual consequences (and therefore ruining the obvious Mary Sue fantasy that was Breaking Dawn). Vampirism was supposed to be a sacrifice for Bella; let's make it that. Here's my take on her transformation and all that pertains to it: consequences both in- and external. Also, other than was the case with BD, this fic has a) character development, and b) a plot. I am being very generous with the characters and trying to portray them the way SMeyer intended, not the way they actually are. Please tell me what needs to be improved, if you can. I hope it's enjoyable.

EDIT: I only now just got how you format documents to make reading easier on the eyes. Sorry about that.

EDIT THE SECOND: Guys, I have to tell you right away that I couldn't keep the original promise. I wrote the characters as they are and not as SMeyer intended (sorry, Steph). The temptation was too great. The plot of this little story is completely different because I really think that BD doesn't have one. I want to take a book that is nearly universally mocked and try to write a coherent tale - a fun little excercise. That, in some circles, is called a spitefic. My story is, however, not a parody. It's meant to be an adventure / horror story that is entertaining to read. I don't mock people, but I do think it's fun to rethink stuff I didn't enjoy in a published work. This site isn't just reserved for heaping praise onto the original author. I am in no way attacking SMeyer, but I do feel entitled to an opinion about her books. She put them out there. I read them. I have an opinion. I think there's a lot wrong with these books and that that's worth exploring. It's a little bit hilarious to me that someone got all butt-hurt over the summary (whence I called BD a Mary Sue fantasy, which it is) and didn't even read my story, but thought it necessary to accuse me of plagiarism all the same. It's an original story and everything that does not belong to me is mentioned as such. I don't expect universal praise, but for crying out loud, accusing someone of a crime just because you got your knickers in a twist over a summary that criticises a book and insults no-one is not cool. What is it with people trying to silence dissenting voices? Crikey.

That being said, I hope you have fun with my take on Breaking Dawn. Please share your opinions and air grievances if you have them. I am interested in everyone's thoughts. Thank you for your time. Enjoy!


Be Careful What You Wish For

Chapter One

1 Isabella Marie Swan Cullen remembered little of the birthing process. There were flashes of images: terrible, sickening, unnameable pain in her back, followed by a nasty, awful, wet cracking sound (her body! Oh God, oh God, her body was breaking in half, she was breaking, tearing up, dying, breaking, tearing ripping bleeding dead dead dead oh God oh God oh God what had she done to herself what had she done oh God) and then numbness; blood everywhere; the ground flying up to meet her, and Edward carrying her up into the mansion's second story; excited voices chattering, but no pain, no pain, no anything; blotches of blackness mixing with the glaring lights, as her consciousness slipped away; more voices; some pain on her chest – something biting her, ripping through skin and fat and muscles and tendons with razor-sharp teeth, chewing on her flesh, the stench of it unbelievable, the horror, the horror, oh God the horror. Then…

…then, there was blackness.

Unfortunately, it didn't last long.

Fire burned through her veins. Liquid acid, dissolving her tissues from within like necrotising fasciitis, eating the life out of her, scooping it away cell by cell, burning, ripping, shredding, killing. She could not move her legs; her spine had been broken. She could not open her eyes; her eyelids had melted onto the eyeballs, as if someone had pressed a red-hot iron against her face. Her arms shook uncontrollably, making it worse, making it all so worse, as her old skin stuck to the surface of the metal table she lay on, freezing and burning her at the same time, ripping off in strips, filling the air with the horrible stench of putrefaction.

Her lips were welded together as well, so she could not scream. In her mouth, her gums dissolved, her teeth tumbled backwards into her throat, making her vomit guts and acid into her mouth, her throat, her airwaves, her lungs. Her tongue swell and cracked open like a slug in a microwave. Hot, putrid blood and festered tissue trickled down her gullet. Every breath was ash and fire in her poor, mangled, pureed lungs. She writhed upon the table, twitching, whimpering, trying to breathe, trying not to throw up from the pain and the stink of her decay and her last incontinence ever, trying to endure, trying to pray for an end, just an end to all this, God, please, just one second of no pain, no suffering, no burning melting dissolving ripping rotting dying, just nothingness, oh God.

Amidst all this, there was one crystal-clear thought though in her fractured mind: part of her prayers were being answered, even if in the most cruel of ways. She was dying, after all. She'd gotten her wish, hadn't she? Edward, her husband, the love of her life, had bitten her, and it had not been too late; she was shedding all of her that was human. She was becoming a vampire.


2 She had no idea how long it took, this awful process of…transformation? How to call it? Why call it anything? Whatever it took to make the pain go away, she'd do it; whatever they told her to say or do or think or be, anything, anything to just make it stop make it stop make it finally stop. She was liquefying inside her decomposing, sore-covered skin; her body had been broken and was now rearranging itself piece by piece, wrecking all that had been to make place for the new. What was this new, anyway? What was this going to do to her? How was it going to end? Did it even matter? The beauty, the allure, the sparkling glory, everything was just a dim memory dissolving inside her rotting brain, the images fractured and distorted into nightmare fuel: the beauty was marred, the perfection decayed, the gods of her fantasies turned into gibbering monsters of black eyes and unhinged jaws, dripping poison.

No time for regrets. No time to ask herself what she'd done when she'd insisted on pursuing this. No time to be bitter about her insistence that it would be worth all the pain. It wasn't. Whatever else came, it wasn't. As the skin on her arms blistered, cracked, and started sloughing off her raw and putrid flesh strip by strip, she couldn't even scream. No, it wasn't worth it. It couldn't be. It just couldn't.

Finally, though, the unspeakable, universal agony that had become everything forever, that had become the very core of her existence, started to fade. It happened as slowly as it had begun, but after an eternity and a half, she could feel it: numbness. The air and dust-motes settling on her reformed flesh didn't sear as badly, and eventually, they hurt not at all. Her heartbeat, which had been frantic and excruciating, slowed and slowed and slowed, and with every deceleration, the pain grew less. The decayed matter in her caved-in mouth was absorbed into her mucous membranes. Her teeth, tongue, palate reformed. Her mangled and broken body adjusted itself on the metal table without her doing anything of her own volition, and the surface felt warm and pleasant against her skin.

As the agony slowly made way for blessed numbness, and the stink of rotting flesh and excrements began to be replaced by something sweet and intense, like a scented candle to the face, Bella was vaguely aware of someone handling her body, removing the tattered and soiled clothing, moving her, washing her gently, dressing her. It still hurt and she was still sore, but it wasn't anything akin to melting alive in her wrecked shell of a decaying corpse. Pain went away, as did thoughts of God and regret and fear. Why be afraid? There was numbness to drown in, and that was good – it was better than anything she had ever felt in her entire life.

Another eternity later, the pain was gone completely. She wasn't breathing anymore, either, but listening to what she knew were the last of her heartbeats. Dun-dun. How odd to be looking forward to the ending of the last thing that still tethered her to humanity. Dun-dun. Was this what being damned to a soulless existence felt like? Did it even matter anymore? The pain was gone. Dun-dun. She tried to remember the last things she had thought, she had felt, before the pain had started. Her mind drew a blank. This was odd, too, and weirdly alarming.

Hadn't something been going on? What had triggered her death again? There had been something inside her – something. Something. The sound pulsed through her entire body, like a fever: dun-dun. Something had been there. It had mattered. Why couldn't she remember? Why was this all so blurry, when it had mattered so much before? She tried to think about it, to recall, but couldn't quite piece together the foggy fragments of lost memories. There were bits of images, but they were slipping away, as if they'd never been there in the first place. They didn't matter anymore. They were gone – gone forever.

Dun-dun.

Dun-dun.

Dun.

Bella Swan Cullen's heart beat its last. The transformation was complete. She opened her eyes to the world and saw it for the first time.


3 She saw everything. She heard everything. Her eyes were flooded with images her brain was unable to decipher: air, light, dust, wood, faces, sparkles, surfaces, edges, dimensions. Everything was everywhere, all at once. She couldn't focus on any one thing, but saw it all with the same clarity, zooming in on all and seeing nothing. The pain that shot through her skull was blinding. The moment she thought about doing it, she'd clapped her hands (were those her hands? What had happened to her hands, these weren't her hands, oh God, oh God, oh God!) over her ears and screamed.

The sound reverberated through the air (and it was everywhere, everywhere, no escaping it, no running away, no seeing, no understanding, oh dear God), hit obstacles, ricocheted, hit her eardrums again. The sound of her weirdly textured skin (not her skin, not her hands, not her) being crushed against her ears, the scream echoing, voices, fabric whooshing against skin, cars driving by in the distance, wind howling against the edges of the house, crickets chirping, birds singing, mice skittering, leaves rustling, dear God, she could hear nothing, she was blind and deaf and deaf and blind and oh God, her mind, she was going insane, she-

"Bella! Calm down!"

The voice pierced the cacophony of unintelligible, clashing sounds like knitting needles being stabbed straight through her ears and into her brain. Unable to help herself, she screamed again, blinked, tried to see, tried to hear, tried to understand something, anything. She wanted to get off that stupid goddamn metal table, and the moment she thought it, she was scrambling backwards, flying, crashing into a hard surface. Clawing at the air in front of her, she went down on her behind. She wanted to cry, to moisten her poor, tortured eyes, to give them a break, but all that she got was a burning, tingling sensation in her eyeballs. Good God, she couldn't even cry anymore. Hugging her knees closely to this weird, alien body she now inhabited, Bella shut her eyes as closely as they went and tried to stop screaming.


4 She had no idea how long she sat there, cowering on the ground, curled up and trying desperately to make sense of something, anything – hours? A day? A million years? Might as well have been. At some point, someone had told whoever was there to clear the room. A voice spoke harshly to her, the impatient (was it? She couldn't quite tell anymore) tone making her twitch violently and claw at her own ears in a blind, raw panic. Someone else yelled at them to shut the pie-hole. Then, someone (the same someone? She had no idea, nor did she care much) had carefully sat down next to her, put arms around her, rocked her.

"It's all right," the person had said lowly – he. It was a male voice that sounded vaguely familiar, even though she couldn't exactly remember how or why. "Calm down. I know it can be overwhelming, at first, but you'll learn to handle it. Focus on the sound of my voice, Bella. Try to tune everything else out."

She tried, but it was so much, too much going on around her, tearing at her eardrums and her sanity. Wailing and flinching at how the sound rebounded through this goddamn room, she pressed the heels of those clumsy, heavy, alien hands to the equally alien ears, but it didn't make it better in the slightest.

"Focus only on my voice," the man – boy? Whatever – said, his voice hardly above a whisper but still a painful addition to the universal cacophony. "You can do it. I know you can do it. You have to."

Yes, she had to, if she didn't want to go insane, but how to do it? It was all so much. It was all too much to bear. She wished she could cry. She wished that they had let her move on to whatever awaited humans after death.


5 Time lost all meaning in a world that was constantly loud and bright, and in a body that did not allow its occupant to ever sleep. No-one had told her what a burden that would be. No-one had told her about the blindness and deafness, either. No, she was stuck in this rock-hard, cold, heavy, unwieldy, clumsy, alien thing now, and had to teach herself the most basic things – things she had taken for granted for most of her life. She couldn't make sense of what she heard. She couldn't make sense of what she saw. She couldn't control the quickness, the readiness of her movements. It was as if she were caught in the worst acid-trip of all time. There was one thing to be grateful for, however: at least she didn't have a working digestive tract anymore, because if she did, she'd be forced to wear diapers.

Even worse than being a huge, helpless baby was the thirst. Oh God, the thirst. Her mouth was constantly parched, her throat dry and cracked and burning, the pain even worse than having to listen to everything going on at once at all times, every second of every damn day. From time to time, someone (the someone who'd been tutoring her, that much she could already tell) put a bag in her hands. It felt weird and squishy, but inside it, was much-craved relief: cool, salty-sweet, metallic liquid, which she sucked up greedily, yearning for it to finally kill the red-hot agony in her throat, the heaviness in her limbs. It was blood, of course, and it was glorious. There was nothing she could remember ever tasting as a human that had been this immensely satisfying, whose consumption had been this…well, sensual.

But then again, she couldn't remember what she'd used to eat as a human, so there was little basis for comparison.

At some point – weeks must have gone by – she managed to start singling out different noises. Like her tutor had said, she learned to focus on one noise at a time. It was a painful, laborious process, and even after all this frustrating time of sitting in a corner, blind and deaf, it was still difficult to tune out much of what was going on in the world around her. Piece by piece, though, she managed. Yes, this was a conscious process every single time, unlike it must have been when she'd been human (it must have, otherwise she'd gone mad at some point). Still, there was relief in experiencing success, and she clung to that, built on it.

Next up, she had to learn to see again.


6 Seeing, making sense of all the information flooding her brain, that was even more difficult than learning to hear. It took the Tutor a good long while to convince her to even open her eyes and try looking at anything that wasn't the reddish, pinkish, disgusting insides of her eyelids.

"You'll manage, I promise," he said for the millionth time, an arm around her, as she leaned her head against his shoulder. He was warm, and leaning against him felt pleasant. She decided that she liked him. This probably had something to do with the fact that his presence invoked a feeling of vague familiarity in her, but she decided not to dwell on that too much – one thing after the other and all that jazz. "It'll be okay, Bella. I'm here. I'll help you."

"I can't," she said, wincing at the tinny, unfamiliar sound of her new voice. If she could have, she would have shivered, but her skin was no longer able to form gooseflesh. "Please don't make me."

"I'm not gonna make you do anything," the Tutor said, "not ever again. But you need to see. Your eyes work perfectly well. All you need is to learn to understand the information they're sending your brain."

She knew that he was right. She wasn't blind, after all, and after all this frustrating time being stuck in a body she didn't know how to navigate, she finally sympathised with people who had a handicap. Hadn't she used to look down upon these so-called human imperfections? The thought rang a bell, but she couldn't quite recall. In any case, choosing to stay blind out of cowardice was insulting toward those who'd give anything to have the ability to see. Now she knew how awful the feeling of absolute helplessness was. She had no intention of being useless dead weight for all eternity.

"Okay," she whispered, nauseated by that awful voice that wasn't hers.

The worst thing was, she could hardly remember what her real voice sounded like anymore. It had melted like the rest of her human body. It had died and rotted and was now gone forever. But what use did it make to mourn for something that she could only vaguely recall? Probably none, but she couldn't help feeling weighed down by the thought of her loss – if her voice, her eyes, her ears were this strange to her, then what had happened to the rest of her body? She decided to tackle one issue at a time. Getting herself worked up and in a panic would do no-one any good at all, least of all her. She needed to get a grip on herself, and fast.

Cautiously, she commanded her eyes to blink and then open. The sight of everything at once assaulted her brain, and wincing, she shut her eyes again.

"It's just like you did when you trained your hearing," he said patiently. "Focus on one single thing. Here" – He gently took her hands and placed a relatively soft, cubic object in them – "look at this, and only its surface. Tune everything out. Zoom in on only one thing at a time. You can do it. I know you can."

It took her longer to force herself to re-open her eyes, but when the overwhelming visual stimuli drowned her in confusion and pain and fear, she managed to resist her instinct to protect herself and kept looking. There was something in her weird, pale, grainy hands, all right: a cube, made of different, moving layers, divided into smaller, differently coloured bricks, whose texture…

No. No, he told her to focus on the surface, to zoom in, to stop seeing everything at once with the same sharpness, to…

About five seconds later, she shut her eyes again, grimacing. Her head was aching dully, and she was trembling. Her throat felt parched again, too. What a failure. This was hopeless.

"Excellent," The Tutor said cheerily, and to her, it sounded like he was being honest. Again, there was that feeling of familiarity, and again, she was unable to pinpoint it. "That went better than I expected. You're doing great, Bella. Another month or two, and you'll be able to leave the room. I'm very proud of you."

If she'd still been able to, she would have burst into tears, but that relief was now denied to her forever. She hadn't known what an awful compromise she'd made for the sake of eternal youth, and it felt as if this were only the tip of the biggest iceberg in the history of forever.

Forever, huh? What a joke. What a terrible, irreversible, cosmic joke – and it was all on her.


7 Slowly, very slowly, and beaten back several times by failure, frustration, and fear, Bella taught herself to use her brand-new eyes. It took her over a month to be able to identify the thing the Tutor had put in her hands: it was a Rubik's cube – she vaguely recalled those. Hadn't she had one as a child? Not that it mattered. Maybe it did. She couldn't remember that, either. Once she managed to zoom in on the cube and not on effing everything within her field of vision, she made huge progress very quickly: another two weeks, and she could look at only the cube's surface instead of every detail of its anatomy; another month, and she was able to lift her gaze and look ahead without wanting to claw her own eyes out and die. Two weeks after that, and she mustered all her courage to ask the Tutor a very important question:

"Do you think that I'm ready to look at you, now?" The sound of this tinny, high-pitched voice coming out of her new mouth (which she had some trouble operating if she didn't take care deliberating her actions, first) still made her cringe, even after several months of sitting in a corner getting used to it. It just wasn't her, she guessed. Fuzzy memories or no, nearly two decades of having one voice trumped less than half a year. In her mind, her voice still sounded like it had before her death.

The Tutor took his sweet time to answer. It probably wasn't more than a minute, but by God, did it seem like a flipping eternity! That was another weird side-effect of the transformation: time just didn't go by as quickly as it once had.

Finally, he said, "I think you're ready, sure. Give it a try, but don't be too hard on yourself if it doesn't work out."

"Okay, I won't," she heard herself saying (and the quicker reaction time made the once so well-honed brain-to-mouth filter she'd once had useless; the Tutor was able to attest to thousands of her failed attempts at keeping profanities to herself), and meant to turn her head to look at him.

As if anticipating this, though, he clapped one big, warm hand across her eyes, causing her to flinch heavily and ball her hands into fists. Her whole body jerked, and she hit the back of her head against the wall. There was a low thud. Plaster rained down on her hair. Dang it. Some acute vampire instincts, these were. They'd be impressive if she weren't so terribly useless.

"Keep 'em closed, Bella. I'll sit in front of you, at the other end of the room. Don't want you to be more overwhelmed than you need to be, okay?"

"Okay," she echoed thinly, feeling stupid and nervous and scared.

There was no more surge of adrenalin to signal danger or distress, but fear? That one was even harder to shake than frustration. She focussed on the loud and clear, sharp sound of him getting up to his feet, slowly stepping across the boarded floor, and sitting down again. The rustle of his clothes' fabric against his skin and then the wooden boards stung her ears, but she managed not to lose focus of her hearing. At least this, she was learning to master very well. It was about time, too. She was getting impatient with doing nothing but sitting around and trying to see and hear something all day long, for months on end.

"Okay," he said lowly, a slight tremble underlining his voice – anticipation? Nervousness? She couldn't tell. All her instincts were off, and everything was one big, complicated, three-dimensional puzzle. "Open your eyes."

After two seconds of listening to a heartbeat that was never going to come back (and how empty, hollow, and unreal this made her feel), she cautiously made herself open her eyes. Remembering her arduous training, she forced herself to blend out the overwhelming force of the high-definition everything her eyes were commanding her to see, and zoomed in on the large, hulking figure that was sitting about three metres away from her, cross-legged.

At first, it was too much. There was so much to absorb! Her stupid, useless vampire eyes wanted to see everything, focus on it all at once, flood her brain with all this superfluous information that it could not possibly hope to compute, not at this speed, but she ground her teeth and stood her ground. It took her about a minute – an agonising eternity, given the circumstances – until she managed to filter out what she did not need, and then…

…and then she saw him, large as life and twice as beautiful. She could see everything about him, now: the pores of his skin, the texture of his hair, the subtle scheme of colour in his brown eyes. The feeling of familiarity flared up, and for a millisecond, Bella almost felt like herself again.

"Do you recognise me?" he said softly.

She nodded once – the brusque, curt movement of a bird tilting its head. "Yes," she said, clinging on to the sensation of being who she'd once was, in her own, human body. It was almost a shadow of happiness. "You are Jacob. You are my friend."


8 Jacob's smile broadened considerably. There was a twinkle in his – very much alive – dark eyes. "Very good, Bells. You're doing awesome."

Now that she could see him, now that she knew him, it was a marvel to her that she'd taken this long to recognise who he was. Was she so far removed from all that she'd been, that it took a visual cue for her to recognised someone….someone she'd once loved? As she focused on him, on his face, his smile, she managed to single out the scent of his skin, too: warm, earthy, clean, alive. He had a heartbeat; she could make it out amongst all the other sounds. She could actually zero in on it, now, after months and months of two steps forward, three steps back. There he was, Jacob, her friend, someone who had once made her life bearable again, someone who'd been there for her despite her awful treatment of him, someone who was still here.

He was still here.

She heard herself laughing, for the first time since she'd shed the last decayed remnants of her human physiology. The sound was hollow, chiming and metallic, but she hardly cringed; the relief, surprise, the sudden feeling of being light as a feather weighed heavier than the alienation. Was this happiness? It must be; she recognised it.

"I know you," she said, laughing. "I know you. I know you!"

Before she knew it, she'd jumped to her feet, because she felt like dancing. Her feet got tangled, somehow, though, due to the surprise of the sudden, unplanned movement, and she would have gone crashing down, eyes closed to escape the vertigo of changing perspectives, but someone caught her. It wasn't Jacob. No, someone had just now rushed into the room and caught her. She steadied herself in the person's arms and then pushed him or her away, tumbling backwards and hitting the wall with a bonk. Luckily, though, she managed to keep on her feet, this time.

"What did you do to her, mutt?" the newcomer's voice barked harshly, haughtily.

"More than you have, asshole." Jacob returned, not sounding very impressed.

Bella pushed aside the welling feeling of knowing that new voice, too, to make room for boiling-hot anger. "Don't you ever insult Jacob! He's my friend!" Her eyes flew open despite herself, and she focussed her vision on this unwelcome intruder. Only when she saw his face and recognised it, did she realise what she had done, and that she'd done it without deliberation. The joyed wonder of having been successful made way for puzzlement and shock. "Edward? I know you, too."

This couldn't be right. It…it just couldn't. From her memories surfaced the image of someone of godly beauty, with immaculate skin, perfect hair, and butterscotch eyes, sculpted features and a perfect, chiselled body. What she was seeing now was undoubtedly the same person, but…not, in a sense. The skin wasn't evenly white or smooth: it was granulated, somehow, textured, pockmarked like old granite. It was greyish, whitish, flecked.

There were cracks and veins on it that her old eyes had been unable to see. With a skin this uneven and crystalline, no wonder he reflected the sun in a million little sparkles. His eyes, surrounded by black spots akin to necrotising onions, were garishly yellow, and behind the iris, she could see a sickly-looking, pinkish fluid flowing through the tiny capillaries. The same was true of what she'd used to call his cupid's mouth: the surface of the lips was cracked and rubbery, but just below this unappealing surface were the capillaries, swimming in that weird, mucous liquid that looked like the most repulsive mix of pus and blood. Even his hair was granulated and spiky like an ant's legs under an electron microscope.

"This can't be right," she said tonelessly. Her mouth was parched and her throat burning. Her head hurt from the effort of focussing on one sight, one sound, one smell, one thought, one movement. This was too much. This was too much. "It can't be."

"Bella, it's okay," Jacob said. He took a step forward, but Edward – turned out her nightmarish visions hadn't been so off, after all – snarled and got in between them.

It was an ugly, penetrating, threatening sound that made her want to punch through the wall and run far, far away. Luckily, though, all she did was hit her fists against the wall once, caving the parts she collided with in and making it tremble slightly.

"Bella, stop panicking," Edward commanded, his voice weirdly strained. What was this, impatience? She couldn't tell anymore. She had forgotten how to identify this kind of thing. "It's all right. You're still seeing too much. You'll get used to it, and at some point, I'll look to you the way I always have."

"You're lying!" It was out before she could even try to stop herself. "It's not true. This can't be real. It can't be." The thought alone made her feel like screaming again, but before she knew it, she'd raised her own hands in front of her eyes and focussed on them. "Oh, God. Oh, my God. This can't be real. This can't be real!"

These weren't her hands. This wasn't her skin. This didn't even look like skin, it looked like floured, pebbly granite, all surfaces and shadows and weird shades of grey and white and beige and pervaded with ugly, pinkish veins. Her fingernails were a nightmare, too, whitish and sickly. Visible, underneath their surface, was that disgusting pus stuff swimming in her dead capillaries. What the hell was this? This wasn't her. This wasn't a living being's hands. This was a corpse's body. She was a walking, talking cadaver, a carcass.

Panicky, she pushed Edward aside – and how effortless she managed to do so! Incredible – and placed herself in front of a huge and tacky mirror someone had strategically positioned at the far end of the room. In the mirror, she saw something she could not take her eyes off. Unmitigated dread spread through her as she desperately wished for the ability to cry, or even to throw up. Her face was a nightmare. After looking at Edward and seeing her own, mangled hands, she'd expected something awful, but this? Nothing like this. The…the thing that stared back at her wasn't her. It had flawlessly symmetrical features that went beyond uncanny valley. It didn't look human in the slightest.

The thing's eyes were rounder and much larger than they'd once been; the distance between them was perfect, now, if one could call it that. They were doll's eyes, at least in shape and position. They had the same blackish, dead-onion-peel look around them, but the irises weren't yellow, they were bright red. The thing's nose was smaller, straighter, but the nostrils were covered in little pinkish veins in which that awful liquid swam. The mouth, that mouth she'd always squinted at with a mix of pride and annoyance, had lost all individuality: it was perfectly formed, the lower lip plumper than the upper lip, and it was red and rubbery like a prop. Just as was the case with Edward, she could see the tiny capillaries running through the lips, pink and sickly and disgusting.

The thing's body wasn't hers, either. Bella had always been thin and narrow, but now, her waist looked almost anatomically impossible; her hips were slightly rounder, her legs longer, her breasts evenly sized. For a brief moment, she wondered whose bright idea it had been to clothe a transitioning human / fledgling vampire in a frilly blue cocktail dress, but the thought was drowned in abject horror. This weird, inhuman thing staring back at Bella was not Bella. She did not recognise herself in this undead being at all. Bella Swan had disappeared. Instead of being conserved and improved for all eternity, as she'd expected to be, Bella Swan had been killed. She had ceased to exist.

There was nothing she could do but stare back at this unholy monster and scream.