AN: Thanks for the review, favs, and follows. Upcoming chapters will be longer. Also, expect this to be a long fic with slow burn. Nothing worth having should be rushed. Since I'm currently on bedrest, expect frequent updates as well since writing eases my mind. Someone also reached out about me taking over a few Rose/Bella fics. So, if this goes well, expect more fics soon. Happy reading!
-SoulfulSongbird
Chapter 1: Hellish Algorithms
BPOV
There was a saying from somewhere, by some old guy, that said something about things being given and taken away. Whoever the hell he was, I was starting to believe he might have been on to a revolutionary idea.
Since I was five years old, I had only one constant through every phase of my life. In preschool, puberty, and even pre-law she was there. At first, my parents shrugged it off. I can only guess they believed her to be nothing more than an imaginary friend. At night, flashes of this girl with the golden colored hair came to me in my dreams. In the beginning, there were no words. There were, instead, just flashes of stolen moments. I saw when she learned to ride a bike, her first day of school, and those incredibly heinous braces that lasted all through middle school.
The more dreams I had, the more I learned. But every night, it was the same girl. Rosalie Lillian Hale. Her dad called her his Rose and, truthfully, she was as beautiful as one. Once, I even considered her to be my soulmate. After all, how could my own imagination not create the perfect woman for me? But, I was wrong.
She never came. She never showed up for me and my life was ten times harder because of it. Where they had once considered it to be the youthful imaginings of a little girl, as I grew older and continued to wax on about the perfection of Rosalie, my parents grew tired and frustrated. Well, my father did, at least. He was a practical man by default. He thrived in situations with concrete facts. Rosalie situation was not something that was easy for him to understand. Overnight, I went from being daddy's little girl to being a thorn in his side.
My mother had always been slightly eccentric and much more spiritual than my father. Renee believed nearly anything was possible, because in a lot of was she held on to her innocence. It served her well now, as a preschool teacher and it was one of the things that drew us closer. I did not agree with everything she believed. But, I knew she did believe in the things only children had enough imagination to dare ponder. She didn't question the possibility of my dreams, rather she accepted them as fact.
The tension between my father and I was high all throughout my teenage years, until he spoke to my mom about having me committed to a psychiatric hospital, fearing that I was possibly schizophrenic. I could see the worry in his eyes, so I didn't push it. I knew he was reacting on what he saw, based on what he understood to be plausible. Still, it hurt to know that my own father could believe that about me. Over time, I just stopped spending time with him, resulting in our now strained relationship. When I did have to see him, I made sure to steer clear of anything pertaining to Rosalie.
Life got hectic after high school, and even though Rosalie still appeared in my dreams every night, I spent less and less time thinking of her during the day. So much so, I began to think of her as just a noise in the background. I knew she was there. But, as time went on, I was able to ignore thoughts of her less and less. The urge to find her, by the time I was legally able to, had died down. The more the years passed, the less inclined I was to do so. I was okay with her just being there every night when I closed my eyes. I had made my peace with that reality once already, and now I was being forced to do so again because she wasn't just in my head.
Rosalie Hale was real. She was in my apartment. She saved me from the fire.
I had been chanting that to my phrase since my arrival at the hospital and it didn't seem to make any sense to me. I knew what I saw. I knew what I felt when I saw her face. I knew that my heart nearly stopped beating at the thought that she was the one to carry me out of my home as it burned away, taking with it everything I worked for. I knew all these things to be fact, but it just wasn't adding up.
Personally, I considered myself to be a logical human being. I made my living on being a methodical, rational person, even with my dysfunctional brain. That's why I can say with absolute certainty that it is mathematically impossible for the events of the past twenty-four hours to have occurred. Yet, they somehow had. The searing pain of what was once my skin burning, and later, being peeled off like a bandage was still fresh in my mind and cemented the fact that it had indeed happened.
What made me most hesitant to accept this seemingly undeniable truth was that I should have seen it. I should have known this was coming. But, who really wants to predict their own almost death? Could I even call them predictions? I don't know. However, it was this solitary thought that occupied my mind while I endured the constant agony that threatened to pull me into a sweet, dreamless abyss.
Subconsciously and physically, my body was in shock. I knew that. I was trapped in the fire still. Every inch of flesh that remained on my body seemed to have engulfed the flames and projected that terrible sensation throughout my nervous system. In its wake, it left nothing more than an indescribable sense of panic and adrenaline. Just like in the fire, I could not move. My lungs rattled inside my chest as I willed myself to breathe. All thoughts of the world around me were gone. There were no nurses, doctors, and awful machines anymore. There was only me and the fire that consumed my body, leaving only muscle and tissue where flesh should have been. And smoke. Smoke that seemed to blanket me, like the everlasting comfort of my mother's arms, as ash and debris from the upper floors crashed around me.
If asked later, I will surely deny it. You know, when they talk of my miraculous survival. People will wonder if I ever wished for death. The only accepted response will be no, and I shall give it. But, when I laid there in my bed burning alive, I did wish for death. I wished for an ending to my pain. I prayed for it more than I've ever prayed for anything.
And then, she came to save us, to save me. Damn Rosalie!
Naturally that infuriating woman would show up, at the one moment that I wished she was miles away. I couldn't have planned that any worse. There was a plethora of other moments she could have chosen to make her existence more than just a figment of my imagination. But no, she chose the moment I've given up to want to be a savior. That's so like her, always wanting to be the hero. It's just too damn bad I never asked for one.
Restlessly, I lay waiting as the sounds of the world outside my mind slowly filtered in. The light streaking in through the blinds of my window seemed to come in at an angle that left one side of my body hot, while the other side shook from the chill in the room. Sounds from the nurse's station came in next, as the plexiglass door to my room slid open.
In walked my mother, continuing her bedside vigil as if she was waiting for me to say anything promising. I suppose, in a way, she was. I hadn't spoken a word since I arrived here. Truthfully, I wasn't entirely sure I could talk. Had it not been for the news, I would probably still be Jane Doe. So, it was safe to assume that my mother was hoping against hope. In fact, there was only one person I wanted to talk to and she was nowhere to be found.
They keep saying I'm lucky. That this could have been much worse. As far as I'm concerned, that's a load of shit. You know who says that? The lucky people and literally no one else. Everyone else knows how sucky the world is and can tell you exactly what a cosmic "fuck you" feels like. So, excuse me, if I think that being randomly selected not to die is bullshit, right now. All I know is whether I walk out of this hospital or not, Rosalie Hale is going down.