Horologia's Note: We'll get to Aro and his band of merry terror-makers in another chapter and a half. We haven't seen Bella in awhile, so we need to get to know her a little better before we have her running off to another continent because Horologia says so. Thank you for all of your interest in this so far. Oh, and keep your eyes out for the subtle shift in the writing style as things start making sense to our poor Bella (i.e. look for less emotional stuttering around, roughly, chapter three, until then, our heroine has a lot of things to take in and the style will reflect that).

Part One

There was a distance between them. One formed from far more than their time apart.

To the other patrons in the woefully overpriced cafe, they must have looked like an estranged aunt and niece scrambling for something – anything – to say to one another. How is the weather? Grey. How have you been? Grey. To the onlookers, Bella's weary and pinched expression was the distaste of an aging woman who resented the beauty of youth – particularly the youth perched on her hands on the chair opposite from her. Although that assessment was not entirely wrong, Bella tried not to envy the dead any more than she had to.

After all, weren't they all just perpetually young creatures with their lives forever on hold?

With Alice's unscheduled arrival the evening before, Bella had expected more than the awkward hovering that had occurred as she prepared her dinner, had expected a stilted conversation as she later pulled the stacks of poorly crafted essays from her bag and began a long evening of grading. By the time she'd turned on the news for white noise, Bella had realized that Alice was waiting for a particular conversation.

She still was; there was too much to say, and nowhere good to start.

Instead of speaking, Bella savored the warm, acidic tang of her drink and paid close attention to the darkness of Alice's eyes as she watched. Her old friend was hungry. Something struck her then, the idea that perhaps in her own youth all of those years ago, she had failed to realize that Alice's hunger was for more than just blood. That maybe there were things about the human that the vampire had envied, or the latter would not have taken so easily to former's company.

"We're in nowhere, Illinois. There are plenty of deer," Bella reminded Alice for the third time that morning.

"I'll be fine," Alice insisted.

The sky was overcast and shifted tellingly with the wind. Although it was dark, Alice would not have agreed to the table near the window otherwise, and Bella was thankful for it. From her seat, she could could gaze lazily down the sidewalk and enjoy the degree of separation from the world that the glass pane afforded her. The people who passed her by out there did not expect her to speak to them in here, and she took advantage of this until her coffee grew cold.

When she turned her eyes back to her friend, Alice was still staring.

"I don't know what you want me to say," Bella sighed.

"You don't have to say anything."

Bella snorted, it was not an attractive sound, "Liar."

Alice cocked her head slowly, and Bella was briefly reminded of what a confused feline must look like as it considers its prey, "You've changed."

Despite her gifts, there were things Alice would never understand about mortality, and Bella would give anything to tell her this and have it make sense. How your family and friends so rarely stand unyieldingly by your side as you age and grew and carve out a place for yourself among others who are aging and growing and carving. How the loneliness only sinks deeper if you let it get away from you - if you forget that it, unlike happiness, does not need careful cultivation to grow large enough to consume you - until finally the connections that were once so central to your being have become nothing more than a lost footnote in it all. How, in all of this you are meant to change; how that, in the very least, is required of you.

As a mortal you are not allowed to stay young forever.

And Bella had only been playing her part.

Instead, she spoke about the more recent years of her life while trying to avoid the mistake of reaching too far back – there was no sense in revisiting that too-raw period that could still make her throat and jaw tense. It grew easier with each stuttered sentence because, while Bella wasn't sure if she wanted to consider them particularly close anymore, Alice's eye were still the same wide, kind orbs of curiosity that they had been when they had first become friends. Even when Bella reached the parts about the red herring symptoms and the fruitless doctors appointments that had plagued the last several months her year, it was all so simple to say because she had never had to tell anyone before - had not had time to grow weary of the questions and the sorry glances and the awkward shifting of people who didn't know how to talk to her or be around her anymore because they knew that there would be a foreseeable future without her in it. Renée and Charlie only knew the threadbare basics, only knew that Bella had not been well and that she had been looking into it; the chair of her committee and her long-time mentor only knew that her dissertation was still being written despite the 'minor' health disruptions, and that she planned to defend it in the fall.

Then Bella told Alice there would be no fall, and the latter's expression gave away that it was something she had already known.

"Your blood?" she asked when it came to it, and Bella had to stop herself from laughing at the fact that it only ever came back to that with these creatures.

"My ovaries," she corrected her.

Cancer, like aging, creeps up on you when you aren't looking. By the time you are it is often too late. For some it pays only a brief visit before leaving again, but for others it's there to stay - for weeks, for months, or even for a very few brief years. Bella said this all to Alice, or something very similar to it, believing that her friend had it in her to understand.

The thoughtful tilt of Alice's head suggested that perhaps she did.

"How do you feel today?"

"Normal."

This wasn't a lie. Bella had only learned of her diagnosis the week prior and the prognosis three hours before Alice had met her on her doorstep. She was ill, yes, dying even, and had only approximately five months to feel like it, but that didn't mean that she had to feel it at that moment.

(It might have made her feel better if she did feel it because then she wouldn't keep finding herself thinking about life three, four, five years down the line before remembering that planning for any sort of normal future was like dabbling in a fantasy).

It began to rain.

With quick little droplets against the glass, the storm managed to announce to anyone listening that it had better things to do and places to be and was just attempting to get on with it. It wasn't even gloomy, just functional and a little isolating, much like this city that still found itself situated among expansive corn, soy and wheat fields. Bella had come to tolerate Champaign, Illinois like she had never quite learned to tolerate Forks. Perhaps, on some level, this was because she had always known that it would happily send her on her way again when she was done with it.

But this cold, late winter storm – although it didn't quite want to be there – reminded her of the Northwest Pacific, of the dark, moody and forlorn teenage years she had spent there, and it finally dawned on her what Alice was here for.

"I can't go back with you," she blurted.

Alice frowned, as if not entirely pleased that she had been called out before she could properly explain herself, "You have to let Carlisle look at you."

"No. No, I really don't. I don't have to do anything."

"He knows more about oncology than most doctors in this region," the vampire argued.

That may have been true – Carlisle had enough time to keep up with the literature, after all – but Bella wasn't so easily fooled (or manipulated) as she had been as a young woman.

"Forks hardly has the equipment to treat the flu let alone Stage IV ovarian cancer, at least not compared to the hospitals in St. Louis or Minnesota. Carlisle's knowledge means nothing if he can't do anything with it."

Black and gold – but mostly black – eyes narrowed briefly as Alice flinched; she knew that it was the truth, "Bella. Please. I'm not trying to trick you, this isn't..."

Emotion seemed to render her words unspeakable, and Bella couldn't help but feel sympathetic even if she didn't particularly want to. She was the one who was dying here, after all. But ten years was not a very long time for Alice's kind. To lose Edward and now her in such quick succession; Bella did not question the Cullen's familial devotion to her, she just couldn't help but question hers to them.

"It doesn't matter where you go," Alice finally confessed, "it all ends the same, but in Forks you can be around family."

After a brief pause she continued, "And I'm not just speaking of me, Bella. There's Charlie and Jacob, and Renée will be easily convinced to make the trip. I've seen it...if you stay here, you'll have your friends, your colleagues, but you won't have anyone who really loves you."

That stung, perhaps more than Alice had intended it to, but it was only because it was the truth. The last five years had been so good for her particularly because it had been easy to isolate herself from others in the world of academia. History, specifically. It was such an intensely and emotionally selfish line of work that she'd only had to share her thoughts on old primary documents and current politics to turn acquaintances into friends. Emotional concerns were quickly shuffled under the rug among the ranks of socially awkward intellectuals she had found herself in, simply because they didn't quite know what to do with them. Not really.

But this...this wasn't quite as easy as that.

"Alice, humans are not like vam..."

Bella remembered their setting, remembered that Alice's beauty may still be drawing attention to them, "you. We don't leave relationships for years and return to them again like nothing has changed. Everything has changed. I've made a conscious effort to move on, and you all...you all think you still know me, and you might in some ways because you can see where my choices will lead me...but you don't. Not really. And you'd realize that if I went with you, and maybe you'd resent me for that too."

She was rambling now, but couldn't find the right sentence to end on, "And I haven't spoken to Jacob in years. He's changed too, I bet, and I don't want to show up and pretend that neither of us haven't, and then get to know him again and care about him again only to die. That isn't fair. You know that isn't fair."

"What about Charlie, Bella? Renée? They know you still, and they love you."

That was low.

"They could come here."

Bella's reasoning was as hollow as it was selfish. To ask her parents to set aside their lives, which they would unquestionably do, to travel across the nation only to watch her die, there would be no real comfort in that for them. They'd have no friends of their own, no one who loved them to hold their hands when the moment happened or before it or after it or whenever they needed it really. She'd be asking them to experience the same deep isolation that she would experience, but she'd be asking them to do it without the comfort of knowing that there would be an end to it eventually (sooner rather than later).

And just because the Cullens wanted her back in Forks didn't mean she would be going for them.

As if Alice could see the changing mood on Bella's face, the vampire leaned forward, "We could leave today, if you wanted to. You could tell your father in person, so he doesn't have to hear it over the phone."

Now, she was being manipulated, but that didn't mean there wasn't a whole lot of truth in what Alice was getting at.

Still, Bella clenched her jaw and took a deep, steadying breath, "No."

Alice deflated, "..."

"Not now. I can't just pick up and leave; that wouldn't be right. Give me a couple of days, a week maybe. I need time to settle the paperwork with my committee and with the landlord. I'll have to pack my things and put them into storage so that my parents won't have to...later. And I'll have to meet with my doctors here, have my medical records transferred. The right way. People need to know that I'm leaving, and they need to know why."

Bella needed to leave a trail, needed the paperwork to remind her that she had been here, at least, if only for a short while.

She also needed more time to pretend that her life really could have been normal, if only she had tried a little harder.

"I have to do this," she added, not wanting to wake up in the morning to discover that one or all of the Cullen's had settled it in her sleep.

Alice nodded. Although her eyes looked lighter, it was clear that even though she had won this battle, there was nothing there to smile about.

They left the cafe quickly after, Bella feeling that she had already shared too much or herself with Alice to be comfortable in her presence for very much longer. She didn't dislike her (no one could dislike Alice). It was just that, before today, Bella had thought that she would have been able to move on from that part of her life, that she had moved on from that part of her life. Ten years was a long time.

After driving Alice back to her rental, Bella made the short commute to the University of Illinois campus, where she had a class to teach in the early afternoon and several, heavy conversations to have with her dissertation committee members before then. With the volume turned up on a station Alice had chosen, some local PBS-university collaboration, she stared, completely immobile, out of her windshield while trying to make sense of the morning, the evening prior, and what was happening to her.

The Cullens (or Alice, at least) knew that she was going to die. They knew before either of her parents did, and they had probably known the instant Bella had received the prognosis from her doctor, maybe even before. For some reason, they wanted her to return to Forks, this was in part because of Charlie and Renée (who wasn't there, but who could get their easily), but having her near her family and old friends was probably, definitely not their only motivation.

Did they intend to change her? Now? After so many years? Even though Edward's intentions had always been to let her age naturally and die the same way? Perhaps, but it was doubtful that they would go against his wishes now, even if she was going out naturally a little ahead of schedule. But...

If they asked her if she wanted it, Bella wasn't sure how she'd answer.

Immortality was great, but if she felt this lonely and listless as a mortal, she wasn't sure how she'd manage to spend the rest of eternity. Edward was dead, and love had not been easy since then...and she was getting ahead of herself...she had to die first, and before that, she had to park.

Someone honked; Bella swore. She'd turned the wrong way down one of the campus' lots, and was now facing a disgruntled student in a far-too-expensive SUV that looked like it could take on her sedan without much effort, but she was closer to the only empty space in a sea of cars than they were.

With an apologetic shrug, she took it, hoping that her tires wouldn't be slashed when she made it back later.

When the driver, a young male with a short cut, honked again and threw his hands in the air in frustration as she got out and shut her door, Bella gave another shrug and a wave before darting to one of the main walkways. Gregory Hall, the brick building that housed two-thirds of her three-man dissertation committee, was only a five minute stride from where she had parked, and by the time the youth she had just upset found a spot, she'd already be warming off in one of her colleague's offices.

Bella passed an all too familiar face on the walk, Meghan from the fourth-year cohort, coming from the direction where she was going. After waving, she shoved her hands into her coat pocket before calling out, "Do you know if Alan is in?"

"Weir? Yup. His office hours just began," Meghan had the attitude of a 1970s ultraliberal and the attire of a librarian who always looked, for some unknown reason, like someone who only ever chose to dress entirely in the dark. Her winter coat was tweed, and Bella had become convinced in the last four years that the rest of her was too.

"Yeah. Thanks."

"You coming to John and Amy's later?" Meghan began walking again, but this time backward so that she could continue the conversation.

Bella remained firmly in place, not wishing to tempt fate with her brand of coordination; she twisted her torso instead, "Uh. No. I forgot they were having dinner. I...uh...have other things to do tonight. And a friend's in town, picky eating habits, so...yeah."

"Shit. I bet your friend's a vegan. All right. Just send them a text or something. Amy wants to know how much food to order."

"Yep."

Meghan had already turned, and Bella kept her parting wave to herself. She made the rest of the walk to Gregory Hall with a miserable expression on her face, freshly aware that her life was being interrupted in some irreparable way, and walked heavily up the two flights of steps to Alan Weir's office. As her dissertation committee chair, he was perhaps the most important human being on the campus. At least to her. Which made the coming conversation one of the most important one's she would have in her life by extension.

Bella was nervous, but she wasn't afraid.

Alan had always been kind to her, encouraging even, but not in a suggestive way. It had been as if he'd spotted something brilliant in her intellect and had wanted to make sure it was grown properly, pruned regularly but not cut down. He cared in some odd, distant way about her life and where she would go with it, but had been unobtrusive and friendly in all of his inquiries. Like he was developing a relationship with a colleague he might like to have one day, not a student.

When she had first gone to him about feeling unwell (a painfully stilted conversation over a cup of coffee at the student union) he had been blank but understanding, as if he wouldn't worry about her until she gave him a name to go with what was making her listless, thin, and pale, but that he'd trust what she was saying to him because she'd given him no other reason in her time as a graduate student not to.

That blankness and lack of judgement had made it easy to discuss things with him - easier, rather, as she didn't want to burden him with her awkward symptoms and frustrations with the healthcare system. He'd given her his ear often in the last months, and now Bella was hovering on the threshold of his office as he spoke to an undergraduate, fidgeting like she was a nervous child as his eyes flitting between the girl that sat in one of her chairs and her, and she almost wanted to cry but couldn't bring herself to because he was showing several small signs of his own distress, as if her diagnosis and prognosis were written all over her face for the rest of the world to see if they only looked closely enough.

"Miss Crawel...Sarah," Alan often saved first names for his good students; Bella felt worse for interrupting, "I don't want to chase you out, but I think something's happened that needs my attention."

The young woman, twenty by the fading roundness of her face, looked put off but not upset, "I'll just email you the outline? I-I need an A on this, because of my midterm grade and..."

"Yes, an email will be fine. I'll look at it today, even, and give you feedback. With the effort you've been giving, you'll do fine. I know the midterm was just a mistake. We all make them," Alan was good with the neurotic types, since he himself and many of his research assistants fit the profile. Reassurance was sometimes all they needed, once, twice, and even thrice just to be sure it had settled in properly and wasn't going anywhere.

"Thanks, Dr. Weir," Sarah stood and shuffled past Bella with a nod of faint recognition, as if she remembered her as a teaching assistant from a previous semester. It was entirely possible, "Miss Swan."

"Sorry for interrupting."

"Oh no, it's alright," Sarah adjusted her bag with a slight frown, clearly sensing something was off about the older woman and caring in that lateral way that strangers sometimes do, before trotting down the hall.

"On a scale from A to F, how bad was her midterm, really?" Bella asked as she hesitated further into the office, valiantly attempting to beat around the bush before having to trod gracelessly through it.

How does one start a conversation with someone as good as a boss about dying?

"Really? Mid-range B," there was amusement and fondness there, "Sometimes I catch myself wishing that I had a room full of students that worry about getting anything lower than an A, but then I'm reminded of the horrors of grade inflation and, really, do I actually want that many stressed out twenty-year-olds biting their fingernails down to their knuckles in my office?"

He succeeded at breaking the tension where she had not, and Bella sat with a faint, omph, deciding to get it out in one go.

"I have to leave the program, Alan."

"That bad?"

It was very much jest and yet it wasn't. Something in her demeanor had told him exactly where this conversation was going, and he was reluctant to follow her there.

"They say I'll be lucky if I get five months out of this. We found it too late to operate and," she pointed to her midriff, obscenely embarrassed to mention her ovaries out loud to a man, particularly one with whom she'd had a five year professional relationship with no less, but she'd started this and was damn well going to finish it, "It's spread. The cancer, that is."

A pause and then she breathed heavily, "I have cancer."

I have cancer.

Sharing it with someone alive, someone who had had conversations with her about her health in the past that wasn't a medical professional made it a little too real. Tears stung the corners of Bella's eyes, but she managed to keep them from falling. How was she going to be able to say this to her mother or her father without curling up on the floor if she could barely keep herself together in front of someone she was fond of but didn't love?

Alan blinked and several muscles tightened in his face, like he was preventing himself from saying some worn out, empty platitude. You can't apologize for things like this, even if you really were sorry it was happening.

The pen he had been fiddling with stilled as he nodded just once, "What do you need me to do?"

"Nothing. Nothing. I just need to know what paperwork to fill out and..."

"Bella..."

"...and who to get in contact with at the graduate school..."

"Bella," more sternly this time

"We'll have to let the rest of the committee know. Preferably by the end of the week, and..."

"Bella."

"What?"

His brown eyes were serious, a rarity, and that was enough to snap her mouth shut.

Alan leaned forward in his chair, his elbows coming to rest on his knees as he folded his hands together, "I don't think you should be wasting time on formalities, especially ones that have been designed to make someone else's life easier. I've had enough students attrit from the program for...lesser reasons...over the years that I know who to contact."

"I have a class..." her voice broke. The graded essays were sitting on her coffee table at home.

"You had a class," that came out wrong, and by the way he briefly squeezed his eyes shut afterward and shoved a hand through his mostly gray hair, Alan knew it.

Softly, he added, "Would you like to tell your students?"

"No. I think it would be less awkward for everyone if I didn't."

"I'll do it, then."

"Uh...is there..."

"I'll need notification from your doctor. I believe you, but this administration is like a machine. You know that."

"Yeah...yeah," Bella considered standing, not entirely sure if she was being dismissed. Was this a permanent goodbye, or would she see him again before she left?

She settled on standing; sometimes natural farewells, even between people who liked one another, weren't meant to be, "I'll fax you the paperwork?"

Alan understood; she was leaving for good, "Give the main office your forwarding address?"

"Yeah. Okay." She breathed through her nostrils; her throat felt too tight.

"Okay," she repeated.

"How long will you be in town?" he was standing now too; it was becoming all too clear that neither were the sort comfortable with handling other people's emotions.

"Today's Tuesday? I don't know, I'll probably leave Sunday, Monday at the latest. I have to get to Washington, and I'd prefer driving over flying," Bella was rambling again, and had to take another deep breath to calm herself.

"Will everything be ready by then?"

"Yes. No. Probably not. Whatever I can't fit into storage I'll set out. These college kids will take anything," she tried to laugh, but it sounded more like a wheeze.

Alan nodded, and they both fell silent.

He sighed then, and gestured blindly to a photo of his only son on the desk. The boy was perpetually a teenager, like Edward had been, but there'd been no Carlisle there to give him immortality during the car crash that took his life. She'd heard of the story from a student in the year before her, how Alan had taken a full year of sabbatical after the accident, and how everyone had been surprised when he had not only returned but had returned with the same cheerful air as before. That had only been a couple of years before she had attended college; she'd done the math once, one night when she'd been feeling particularly morbid, and had come to the conclusion that Alan's son would have probably been close to her age now if he had lived.

They had never discussed it; he had never even alluded to it until now.

"You don't get used to this," Alan said, mostly to himself.

The way he said this made his treatment of her make a little more sense now, but it also didn't. It highlighted the sort of emotional void that had hovered between them all these years despite the support and the understanding. One that was filling up quickly now with the sadness of two people who were close enough hurt at the thought of the other disappearing entirely, but not close enough to be able to tell each other why.

Bella pressed the back of her hand against her cheek to keep herself from crying and hugged her mentor goodbye.

End note: And there you have it; Bella Swan had a life without Edward Cullen. Next time, I'll see you in Forks.

On a brief, serious aside, some of you may know what it feels like to tell or be told by someone about an illness as serious as cancer. I've been on both sides; it gets a little more heartbreaking each time. No one really knows what to say or how to say it, and I hope I conveyed that well here.