A.N.: Slight AU (but not AH), and I'm positive this has been done SO MANY TIMES before, but I had to get the plotbunny out. This is set during New Moon, in the time they spent apart, and if you've ever had depression/sleep issues, it might be triggering, just for forewarning. Thanks for reading!

This chapter is PG-13, for themes, but it might end up M.

It was difficult to move my bones, to get out of bed at all. Either my body was too heavy or I felt too weak - and when I couldn't sleep, I laid there limply, too feeble to move my fingers. I couldn't sleep very much, but I could pretend.

I don't know how I even did this before. (Before I met him.) I'd sleep and wake up and get up and dress myself, wash my hair, eat breakfast like nothing in the world was wrong. Working on automatic. It was simple, I guess I was just too stupid to think there was anything else to do with myself - get dressed, go to school, sit in classes, come home, and back to bed. There had been something to look forward to, a class party on the 19th or summer break, birthdays or movies or going out with my friends, something... something had kept me going. I couldn't remember what it was.
I couldn't remember how to get to sleep. And I wouldn't dream about him. Wouldn't let myself, not again, not unless I wanted to wake up screaming and sick. The red lights on my nightstand's clock said 3:49.

(It's Friday night - no, Saturday morning, and you're living dangerously, Bella Swan. Getting lots and lots of action, no wonder you look so tired in the morning. You're having so much fun. What kind of teenage girl are you? The boring kind, obviously. So boring. No personality. Nothing but books. All hollow.

Maybe, just maybe you should get some sleep.)

Why freaking bother?, I thought, yanking the sheets up higher and yanking a handful of my hair with it, to chastise myself.

I had bad dreams as a kid. You know the ones I mean - they're night terrors, straining your voice in your sleep to scream and scream and scream until you wake up, and the first noise out of your mouth is a strangled cry that wakes up the whole house. The dream itself was - maybe inane, there were no monsters in these dreams, and sometimes no people. They went away as I got older, but I went to a sleep therapist for a little while. Curling up on a big plastic-wrapped bed hardly made for sweet dreams, but the nurses were nice and there was a dreamcatcher hanging on the wall. My mom bought one for me the next week, like some kind of totem to ward the nightmares off. Letting only the good dreams in, she said. Like a sieve.

When I used to see Edward in my room at night, I thought it was another one of those same dreams. That within a few stretched-out seconds of dream-time he'd be doing something horrible to me and I'd be screaming my lungs out and Charlie'd come running. And I still had dreams now. Still had nightmares.

(Like the cross hanging on the master bedroom's wall. Really helped keep the sanctity of their marriage together, obviously.)

Back in Arizona, for one of my birthdays I'd gotten what I'd always asked for, a canopy for my bed. Blue gauze, pale blue like a foggy sky, and made to hang from the ceiling without a postered bed, provided somebody in the house was handy enough with a hammer and nails to get it up there. Charlie never got around to it, and my mother wouldn't ruin the paint. It makes you wonder why they even bought the thing. Mom at least kept the box it came in, tucking it away in the closet on a top shelf where it never came to light again. But that was supposed to serve the same purpose, in some weird corner of my little girl brain, like a mosquito netting to keep the dreams off. Or to keep the good dreams in. Pale silk. The blackness in my bedroom hung over me, except for the little bit of moonlight that crept in the window. Like a breath of snow.

Fairy-light, like a veil. A wedding veil, something in me said nastily, and another barbed thorn of pain went into me and I turned over, burying my face in the pillow. (Maybe I could suffocate myself.) Just as suddenly, another thorn gouged into me - an idea.

I rolled out of bed, in a tangle of long legs and long tee shirt, and when my feet hit the cold floor I winced. Padding across the cold floor by feel alone - stumbling and hitting my bare shins against something sharp and hard in the dark. I sobbed. Predictable. And then I came to it.

I tore the dreamcatcher from the wall, feeling the pathetic little twang of leather tie straining against the twigs as it came free of the nail. There were no good dreams any more, let me have the bad ones. This was stupid. Some stupid piece-of-crap cultural appropriation B.S., wasn't that just like my mom, and Charlie was only trying to be nice-

Whether it ended up in the wastebasket or on the floor, I couldn't tell and I didn't care. Back to bed with me, a little more satisfied.

Now it was 4:02. I really was going to be a zombie tomorrow.
Shut my eyes tightly, curl over around a pillow, count my breaths, count sheep, something...

And I was out. Out fast. I don't do that. That was new.

I slept like a baby. And I dreamed.

A.N. So, how was that? My writing style wants improvement badly, and I need to work on my flow, but I actually really like where this is going. It won't just be the stereotypical ~mystical symbolism-riddled dreams of Edward~, either. (Just to share a secret- I actually really liked how the movies pulled off her dream sequences, especially the one with vintage-horror Edward. Gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous. More like that than frolicking in a sparkly field of roses. Hot damn, would that ever hurt.)