Title: Doubts
Rating: G
Characters: Edward/Bella
Wordcount: 430
Spoilers: For Twilight.
Summary: According to the book the change happens in mere days. But what if it happened over weeks? What if the change began after the bite, slow but steady?
Disclaimer: Twilight books copyright to Stephenie Meyer. All Rights Reserved. No copyright infringement is intended, and no money is being made.
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He hid in a cellar, covered himself with rotting potatoes for three days...it was over then, and he realised what he had become.
Chapter 15: The Cullens - Twilight
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There is a constant throbbing in her veins, the hardening and slowing of blood as she cools into stone. Each night she sleeps less, and wakes earlier. In the last week her dreams grow stronger, become more vivid. When she wakes the last image or emotion clings on, staying in her mind like the final paused scene of a film. Or the last line of a book.
She finds herself dwelling on endings. On farewells. She flicks through her Austen and Bronte to see how they do it, trying to find herself in an older world's words. But Bronte never wrote about vampires - and Austen only mockingly. She hasn't read Northanger Abbey much before, not closely at any rate. But she does now, drawing a finger across the page where a character speaks of 'a kind of vampirism', and pausing at the moment where dark pretendings are exposed.
Bella realises she is living, has lived, will yet live in her own Northanger Abbey. She has built herself a careful world of pretendings and fantasy within this obsession. And now it hardens around her.
The pages are cool beneath her fingers. She cannot seem to grow warm. She layers sweaters, blankets, has a hot mug of cocoa. But amidst the throb and eb of pain there is a growing cold. She finds herself longing for the warmth of Phoenix. But when she looks at herself in the mirror, she knows she can't go back there. Not now.
Each day her face shifts, her features realigning into a smoother symmetry. And each day Bella loses a little more of herself. She is still stubborn, still clumsy, but it is becoming mixed with steadiness. Rockiness made stone, she thinks, and smiles a half-smile. A crooked smile.
Her old reliability and self-certainty in cooking and studying, the things where she was sure of herself, that has spread. She is not so much stubborn as quietly sure. A kind of patient certainty. Still clumsy but stiffly so, a brittle tension yet to her walking. Even as her face becomes more like the Cullens', Bella still hasn't mastered their smooth tread.
She is becoming a conception of perfection. Like he was for her, the first day she saw him. An exterior that belied 106 years of anger and complications. And suddenly, a small part of her, the part that daily ebbs away, doubts her old desires.
He watches her change, over those weeks. She speaks less each night. Once she seemed about to speak - but her jaw tightened around the words.
They both lie in the light of their field, her gleam less than his. Give it time, Carlisle says. It will brighten yet.
And though Edward loves, has loved, will always love her, he misses her warmth.
end.