Chapter 1: Fade

Disclaimer: So not SM.

"Now I'm older and I feel like
I could let some of this anger fade
But it seems the surface I am scratching
Is the bed that I have made
I never meant to fade away"
-Fade, Staind

"California," a teacher had once told me, "is a place where everyone is going nowhere, fast."

The whole atmosphere of the state just suited me. In Los Angeles, it was sunny enough that I felt comfortable - a small reminder of the heat of Phoenix. There were millions of people all around me who had no idea where the hell they were going, but they sure as fuck were going to get there as quickly and noisily as possible. Just driving down the street, I felt like I'd lived all my life in slow motion.

It was ideal for my purposes. With so many people around constantly, I couldn't ever really be alone, and yet they were all moving around so fast, I doubted any one of them would take the time to notice me. Imagine that. I wound up in Los Angeles because I craved solitude in a crowd.

I found a hotel that seemed to be in the center of things, yet not in a bad part of town. From my room I could see the music store next door and the employment agency across the street. Next to the agency was a bar. It was a good place for a bar. Employees could pick up their checks every Friday and run in to soothe the ache of a tiny check or celebrate a nice big one. Good marketing, that.

Maybe I picked the place because some of those people had even less then I did, needed even more. I didn't really think about it that hard. I probably just picked it because I was tired, and I wanted to get out of the car. My mother would have spun some bullshit about fate guiding my choices, but I didn't really know if I believed in fate just yet.

So there I stood in the middle of a random hotel room in California. My bags were unpacked too quickly and with my hands stilled, I didn't know what to do first.

I had stopped running.

It didn't mean I wasn't still lost.

I ran my hand along the plain wood dresser walking it's length until I stood in front of the mirror that it hosted. Strange that this dresser would have a mirror. Most motel rooms had one mirror in the bathroom area and no more.

It seemed strange that I would notice something so inconsequential, but I was grasping at straws so I didn't have to think about anything else.

Standing in the center of the mirror was a sad looking girl with sunken, tired eyes. I tried a smile on for size and sighed. Hideous. I remembered the girl who used to look back at me. She had awkwardly large ears and a smile full of white teeth. I stared at myself, transfixed, and wondered where that pretty little girl went and when she had been replaced by this zombie-like almost-woman with limp brown hair and a crooked, broken smile.

"In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a young man who chanced to anger a Goddess, Hera I think, with his inflamed ego," my father's voice rang in my ears, a distant memory from when I had been a little girl and in love with Greek myths. "She bewitched him-"

"What's 'bewitched' daddy?"

"She put a spell on him. She tricked him into falling in love with his own reflection. She doomed him to an empty life, staring at his reflection in the water, waiting for an answer that would never come."

"Did he spend the whole rest of his life there by the lake?"

I could still feel the rumble of his laugh beneath my ear as I lay on his chest. "Another Goddess took pity on him, and turned him into that yellow flower you see by the lakeside. The one that droops, always looking for itself in the water…."

His voice faded and I was left alone in an empty hotel room.

The first ten years of my life had been so blissful. Then it had all gone to hell. How everything got so unbearably twisted so suddenly wasn't something I could easily wrap my head around. All I knew is that I fell from Heaven and hit the Earth with such force I shattered into a million pieces. Of course, I didn't realize that until much later - that I was so fractured.

For the way my life started, you'd have thought I would be fucked up right off the assembly line, but that's not the way it was. My mother left my father not that long after I was born. At first, she wanted to take me with her, but somehow, he managed to convince her to leave me. It was better; Renee was still a child when she'd had a child. She was flighty where Charlie was steadfast.

Charlie was the best dad I could imagine having. He didn't always know what he was doing, but what he messed up in practice he more than made up for in how much he loved me. He'd played with me all the time, and talked to me, not just in the babbling, gibberish-speak most adults aimed at children but like I was another human being capable of logic and even discussion. He told me about everything, filling my head with stories and knowledge and everything there was beyond the city, state, even country we lived in. When he wasn't working, I had his undivided attention. It was like being the sun of you're own little universe.

He did work. A lot. Even in a sleepy town like Forks, Washington, the small police force kept busy. When I was around eight, I discovered the fine art of manipulation. Charlie so very rarely said no to me, and when he did, I usually understood. But... every once in a while, I really wanted something. One day, I was sick and needy for attention, I pitched an epic fit when he left me at his friends, the Clearwaters, so he could go to work. I poured the guilt on so thick it was amazing the poor man could actually walk out the door. Walk out he did, but not before he promised me the expensive art kit he'd previously vetoed.

I didn't use it often. I swear I didn't. I wasn't a bratty kid. But... I was a kid. Over the next two years, I used his guilt at leaving me with friends and neighbors so often to get what I wanted a handful of times.

Then, when I was ten, it happened.

Charlie had taken me up to Seattle. I was a clumsy little kid. Fuck, I'm still clumsy now, but I try to be careful. But that day, I tripped and stumbled, falling right into the path of oncoming traffic. I remember my knees hitting the pavement. There was a cacophony of noise: cars with brakes squealing and horns honking, the screams of people from the sidewalk, and my dad screaming my name. Then I was flying backward - toward the sidewalk.

The strangers on the street tried to keep me from seeing my dad's broken body. They weren't successful.

Time was a blur for a little while after that. My mother came from Phoenix to get me. She told me it wasn't my fault, and I believed her. Even then I might have been okay except...

After spending several years roaming when she left my father, my mother had wandered back to Phoenix and her mother, my Grandma Marie. Around when I was seven she married a man named James Damon. Before I came to live with them, I hadn't thought about my stepfather much. When I was visiting my mother in Phoenix, he was fun. We did all the fun things: mini golf, arcades, basketball games that bored me almost as much as my dad's fishing trips. But after I was living in the house everything changed.

I should have known I was in trouble the day after I got there. James had a sixteen year old daughter, Victoria. We had to share a room. Victoria was not pleased. She threw a world class hissy fit, yelling at her father and my mother until James looked like he was going to spontaneously combust. He stood so fast that his chair tipped over, and he grabbed Victoria's hair, twisting it so she screamed. He dragged her that way, screaming and pleading, "No, Daddy, no," all the way upstairs to our room. I didn't understand the sounds I heard then, but I would come to know it really well - the sound of a leather belt hitting bare skin, and Victoria's shrieking cries. I was flabbergasted. I didn't know how to react. The only thing I could do was take my cues from my mother who didn't even flinch. She just kept talking to me like nothing at all was going on upstairs.

When James came back down, his mouth set in a hard line, he took my hand. I wanted to shrink away from him - that I remember - but I was still naive enough to think that my mother would never let him hurt me. He took me upstairs to our room where Victoria had her nose pressed into a corner, her pants around her ankles, and angry red stripes painting her backside. She was still sobbing. James stood behind me, making me look though I didn't want to, while he taunted her. "See how the baby cries, Isabella? Isn't she a fucking crybaby? This is what happens to whining little brats."

I was ten years old, and I didn't understand what I was seeing, what I was hearing. I wanted to forget. For a time, I was able to. I settled into the house, and things were okay. Victoria hated me, but I did as my mother said and paid no attention when she tried to instigate.

Of course, as it turned out, Victoria was the master of manipulation. I'd been living there for less than two months when she found a way to set James's target on me. She knew exactly what she was doing. She chose an evening when James had clients over for dinner, and we had been told to keep ourselves busy and not to make an appearance unless someone called for us.

If I was being honest, I don't even remember how she did it. She triggered that instinct in me – that need for fatherly attention. I made a scene in front of his guests. I was at the top of the stairs. He didn't look guilty, like my father had, when he came up after me. His face was livid - red and angry.

Something in me told me to run, but it was too late. He grabbed me by my hair, pulling me back towards him even as I started screaming. There was a horrible ripping sound and then I was dizzy. Like in movies, the world slowed down, voices became thick and sluggish. The room seemed to be spinning and I felt only two things: confusion and pain.

He was yelling at me, though I don't remember what. I don't think I ever heard any of it. I was scared. Despite that I had seen what he was capable of, I wasn't prepared when it happened to me. My father had never spanked me, and neither did James. He hit me. Hard and repeatedly. Even through the tremendous pain - unlike anything I'd ever felt - I didn't understand what was happening. I still didn't really believe it.

Then he stopped. He stood there for many long moments, his chest heaving. He towered over me, making me feel much smaller than I was. When he squatted down so he could get in my face I remember only a stark terror. The sound of his low, threatening voice I remember plenty clearly though. He warned me that if he heard so much as a peep from me the rest of the night, he was going to make me very, very sorry. I believed that. I was already sorry, though for what I didn't really know. He left then, and I just stayed where I was on the floor, not moving. I think I must have been in shock.

I don't really remember what happened right after that, but eventually my mother came in. I was sobbing those heaving sobs, hyperventilating, and holding a fistful of my own hair. She hugged me briefly and led me to the bathroom where she began putting soothing Honeybutter cream on my new bald spot.

"You know how your father gets when he has his clients over," my mother said calmly. "You've embarrassed him," she said simply.

"He's. Not. My. Daddy," I hissed through my sobs, and my mother only sighed.

I opened my aching fist and watched my hair fall from my hand, some hairs sticking to my fingers like the remainders of an accident scene, the shattered glass and pieces of plastic headlight that someone was going to have to sweep up after the ambulance, the cops and the tow truck left. My shoulder hurt, my head throbbed and my mother was talking as if we were discussing what I wanted for dinner that night. I was shaking and my world was falling apart and my mother was as calm as a lake on a windless day. I was still hiccupping, my sobs beginning to ebb away slowly, my mind numbing as the cream soothed my burning scalp.

My shoulder was so badly bruised that I couldn't lift my arm for days. I stayed home from school.

What hurt worst was that, from that point on, it was blindingly apparent that my loving, gentle father figure had been replaced by a monster of a man. Even after that day, I wanted so badly to glean some fraction of Charlie's affection from James. Every time I tried, I was rebuffed or shut down.

James wasn't Charlie. James didn't deserve to be a father.

The more I realized that, the worse things got. My father had raised me to understand that respect was something to be earned. While I was taught to be respectful to my elders, I was also taught that not all adults were worthy of my respect. On the other hand, James believed I owed him respect and absolute obedience for no other reason than that I lived in his house and followed his rules.

Even if we hadn't butted heads, there was always Victoria to consider. My darling, red-headed stepsister did everything she could to throw me under the bus. The worse I looked, the better she looked, and while she didn't escape every beating, I took more than my fair share because of her lying mouth.

And my mother did nothing to stop it.

Almost worst than James's fists and his belt were his words. His words became more abusive than any blow. That whole child's rhyme about sticks and stones wasn't true. Broken bones could mend, but wounded souls were trickier to heal.

There are only so many times you can be told how worthless you are before you begin to believe it, no matter how much you tell yourself that they're just words. It was that damn unconscious part of myself that let the words in. Each time, each insult, each bad word he directed at me, left a mark that no one could see, carving me away like a badly whittled piece of wood.

My stepfather thought I was worthless.

And that was what I heard every day for nearly eight years before James finally left my mother.

Back in my hotel room in Los Angeles, I looked at my reflection in the mirror.

"You worthless piece of good-for-nothing shit!"

I gripped the edge of the dresser, struggling to remain upright as my knees began to give away from beneath me.

"You're a bitch."

I had argued with him at first, screamed and yelled back at him. It had hurt so badly each time.

Then one day, years later, I hadn't shouted back. I'd let him yell. I'd let his words fly at me and I did nothing. I said nothing. Most mercifully of all, I felt nothing.

Now I looked at this shadow of a person in the mirror and questioned my worth. It suddenly occurred to me that James might have been right all this time. What good was I, what use to anyone, even myself? Why on earth had I stopped myself from slipping away?

All at once pain washed over me. It was like falling through the ice of a frozen lake. First, a cold like none I'd ever felt engulfed my skin like ice fire, cutting straight down to the bone and leaving me breathless. A tightness surrounded my heart and seized my lungs. I couldn't breathe. I was drowning, my heart racing even as my chest seemed to close in around it. I couldn't think. My mind was seared in the same white hot agony as the rest of me. My chest was full of razors that cut into me with each attempted breath I took.

Ice and fire and someone was squeezing every last bit of air out of my lungs, slowly, like a balloon forgotten by a child days ago, drooping bit by bit to the floor.

My knees hit the floor with an audible thunk, and the spell was suddenly broken.

Full awareness came back to me in pieces. First I felt my rapidly beating heart hammering its frantic rhythm against my ribs, working triple time to return life giving oxygen to my starved lungs. My body was wound tight, my knees on the floor, one fist held knuckle first against my lips while my other hand gripped the edge of the room's dresser as if clinging for dear life. I was shaking, sweaty, lightheaded and dizzy.

It was like waking from a horrible nightmare, confused and terrified. Every emotion that was hurled at me came with intensity like none I'd ever felt. It was like I was feeling for the first time. With a final shudder I pushed myself back on my haunches and then leaned against the dresser, pulling my knees up to my chin, rocking slowly back and forth.

So this is what reality was. This is what it was like to actually feel things from day to day. This was the definition of existence. To exist is to suffer, I remembered hearing somewhere. Something a jolly looking fat man said. It was like Santa telling you, "Ho, ho, ho, just when you think life's a bitch it has puppies, ho, ho, ho," in his most boisterous, cheery voice. Life was a horrible smile.

I was cold, but I did not wish for my blankets and my comfortable bed. I wished for something a little more nourishing. I wished for my mother's arms. Proverbially, of course. Renee had never actually been very comforting.

It was probably a product of being raised away from her that I was never close to my mother. Then again, maybe there was something more to it than just that. I remember having a vague feeling that she was less than pleased about my close relationship with Charlie - how I preferred him over her even in the brief time I saw her - but like any child's thoughts it was an incognizant musing, a diluted idea of what was actually going on. I was never quite sure what to do about that. What could I do? I was so young. A child only knows what she wants; they have no idea how to play the games that adults will often play with each other. I had no concept of public relations, and certainly not the faintest hint that I should have been playing a game with my own mother.

By the time I came to live with her, I was a reminder of her old life - a stupid mistake she'd made when she was nothing more than an 18 year old child herself. It wasn't that my mother didn't love me. She simply did not like me. I was like the cute but smelly puppy that you adored but could not stand to be around. The only problem was there are laws against leaving your child in a cardboard box by the lumberyard.

Some part of me wondered if she'd been secretly pleased when my stepfather started abusing me. She never did stop it. I asked her once, after he was gone, why she let it happen to Victoria. Really I was asking why she let it happen to me, but I wasn't ready to hear that answer. She said it wasn't her place to dictate how he raised his child. She was never good at doling out discipline anyway.

Here I was, curled on the floor of a motel room, proving the point of a stepfather who hated me and without a mother to pick me up and comfort me. Of the six billion people in this world, none of them knew I was suffering, or how completely alone I felt. And there was nothing to alleviate the overwhelming pain in my chest. There on the floor, I understood why people did drugs, why they couldn't stop. Any altered state would be better than the reality I was living. I wished fervently for the numbness to hit me as it always had in the past. I craved it like a druggie craved his next hit. I wished I was here, trembling on the floor because I was a drug addict instead of whatever I was.

I knew overcoming a drug addiction was horrible and painful; I'd seen all prime time news specials. But people understood addiction. It was easy to identify and the only thing you had to go through by yourself was admitting you had a problem in the first place. Once you'd leapt that difficult hurdle there was always someone or something there to help you. There were clinics and meetings. There were a thousand guides. Following the steps back to normality was a long and bumpy path, but at least, if you were an addict, there were maps available. Twelve steps wasn't an overwhelming prospect.

Mental problems were harder for people to understand. Yes, they had clinics and institutions, but you had to be drowning in the deep end to catch the attention of a lifeguard. People only helped if you attempted suicide or one of the voices in your head started telling you that guns were a good way of getting rid of the more unpleasant things in life.

I'd read about a guy who hated dirt. One day he took his gun and used it to clean a spot. The kicker was the spot was on his son's head.

I had nothing on that guy.

Mental illness was not a physical barrier. Once that proverbial switch had been flipped and I admitted that I had a problem, I should have been able to return to the land of the fully functional. If you knew what you were doing wrong, just stop doing it. It should be so simple.

But if normality was a switch then the wiring was faulty if it worked at all.

I glanced down at my hands to see they were still shaking. I realized I was shivering like a naked child. I laughed bitterly. The shakes, mood swings and anxiety attacks. All symptoms of drug withdrawal.

I'd heard somewhere that drug abuse was a symptom not a sickness. It was what troubled people turned to for their escape, to ease their pain. I entertained the thought of finding some drugs to escape to. Possibly the kind you cooked on a spoon because I didn't like smoke…but then again, I hated needles. Either way, I figured it couldn't possibly be that hard to find some sort of illegal substance. I was in Los Angeles after all, and I'd heard all my life how big of a problem drug use was across the nation. If I believed the news, I wouldn't have to go farther than the nearest elementary school to find something. There were probably stores of weed, possibly bags of cocaine stashed in my mattress. It would certainly explain why the mattress felt so lumpy. The hotel manager was probably some minor drug lord with the hotel serving as the front for his actual business.

With all the money he was raking in, it was rather insulting that he couldn't even spare enough to put mints on the pillow.

Perhaps, I thought, I would go see him in the morning. He could teach me how to roll a joint or do a hit. Anything to calm my nerves and stop the shaking; anything that could turn the light on in my dark, upside down world. Any light. I would kill for psychedelic colors. I would take a hippopotamus in a tutu or better yet, a Speedo. Or what about Dumbo's little pink elephants? Man, that was a trip. And he was a cartoon character! Get me in on a little of whatever Alice was doing. I wanted to see Wonderland too. Let me float above the city like that dog in Half Baked. I'd take anything except this.

I sobbed quietly with my knees pulled up to my chest, riding this latest wave in my sea of depression into a calmer harbor. No, there was no point in starting a drug addiction. Right now I was a slave in the sea, forced to roll and tumble with the waves because I could not swim to shore. Drugs would only render me unconscious in the water, and when I woke up, I still wouldn't know how to swim. I wouldn't even be able to stand on solid ground.

"Just one more hit of the numbness and I swear I'll go clean," I muttered to myself. I started laughing somewhat hysterically. Little titters and maniacal giggles that made me sound a lot crazier than I actually was. I looked into the mirror and a fresh set of giggles overtook me. I pointed at the stringy haired, mess of a girl as she giggled at me. "I'm sure they miss you in the room with the padded walls. You'd better be careful, Isabella, or the men in the white have a pretty huggy coat with your name written aaaaallllll over it."

I cracked myself up.

Finally, my mirthless laughter subsided into an occasional, hiccupping titter. I might have laughed longer but I was too busy shivering to keep it up. My chattering teeth distracted me from how damn funny I was.

I wrung my hands together fitfully, trying to instill some warmth into my cold fingers. Slowly, I pulled myself up onto the dresser, pressing one hand against the mirror, nose to nose with it. The saying was that eyes were the window to your soul - your inner self. I just needed a glimpse. Show me something that was worth saving, I thought silently at the sad-eyed reflection.

Of course, no one answered. I saw the same stupid girl that James had repeatedly called out as worthless.

I began to feel my lungs tighten, my breathing becoming erratic. Not again. But even as my skin began to get cold and clammy, something flashed in the mirror. Like the week before, in Texas, it was just a glimpse. I gasped and nearly fell off the dresser, but managed to catch myself just in time. This time, I recognized her.

When I was young there was this girl. She was my age and we did everything together. She was so confident - very sure of herself. This was a little girl who was loved and protected. She had the world at her feet and a whole life of limitless possibilities in front of her.

In that fraction of a second that I stared into the mirror, I saw her face. She must have been lurking in the corners of my mind all this time. I remembered her clearly now. Her chubby, child's face. Her laughter. The spark of life in her eyes. This girl shared my childhood, but not my fate. Where was she now? What was she doing? What was she worth? If I hadn't tripped and fallen, forcing my father to give his life in return for mine, would her fate have been mine? Was she off living a life that could have belonged to me?

By the time I pressed my foot to the floor of the hotel room, my legs were asleep, and they tingled in protest. I kept my eyes on the mirror in hopes of catching a glimpse of that girl again but saw nothing except my bedraggled image. I sighed and swept a trembling hand through my hair, twirling the thick, limp strands through my fingers and chewing the inside of my cheek nervously.

It occurred to me only later that I had reached a fork in the road - one of those all important moments that change your life forever. In retrospect, it was probably good I didn't realize the gravity of my decision at that point. I could have just climbed into bed and let tomorrow come without making any effort to control who I was or what happened to me. I saw later how easy it would have been to fall back asleep at that point. Some strangely omniscient part of me knew I would not have woken up after that.

But I didn't shut down. Staring at my trembling reflection, I made an unconscious decision to start moving forward.

I tilted my head back and forth, my eyelids drooping in exhaustion when I thought of the bigger picture. There was so much I needed to do, needed to know. It was too much. I grasped for something easy.

My hair hung long and wavy down the middle of my back. In the summer, the brown was streaked with auburn, sun kissed highlights. If I had ever stopped to consider it, and at that point I hadn't, my hair was probably my one great physical beauty. Not at that particular moment, of course. At that moment it looked as limp, useless and ugly as I felt.

It was something I could handle - something within my capability of changing fairly quickly.

I slipped under the covers that night with a feeling that I had accomplished more with that one thought that I had in years. In my heart, where there had existed a tremendous weight for as long as I could remember, I felt a small spot of warmth - a lightness beginning to emerge as small as a zygote developing in the womb.

Though small and virtually undetectable, something akin to hope had started to grow. My one wish that night was that it would not vanish when I woke the next morning.

A/N: Because I know you're going to ask, yes this story will be more than just Bella. We will meet a beautiful boy with bronze hair next chapter.

Thanks to jadedandboring and barburella for holding my hand.