Disclaimer: Not my sandbox.
Hi everyone! I'm very sorry this chapter took so long. I've been trying to find a good beta and as yet haven't been successful (if you know anyone, please pass their info my way), so I was super paranoid about posting this. Forgive any errors, please.
The late afternoon shadows dappled the forest floor where they sat, side by side. His long legs tangled casually across the wet moss, head inclined toward her smaller, cross-legged form. They had spent the whole afternoon hunting, and she had forgotten how much fun it was. She mostly ate human food these days because her family was determined to groom her into civility. She had missed it—the chance to run as hard and fast as her legs would go, the rush that came with overpowering something, bringing it to the ground.
Now, full of fresh, delicious blood, she barely remembered the horrible urges that had been plaguing her in ballet class. It was a perfect day, and she should have been happy, but she wasn't. Once again, she was alone with Jacob, airing her grievances. She didn't like being so angry all the time, but these last few months she hadn't been able to help it and couldn't really say why. Everyone was tired of her, exasperated. Everyone but him. She turned a small, white-veined leaf over and over in her hand, refusing to look at him while she spoke.
"I guess I just wish…I dunno…that I didn't owe her my whole existence."
He snorted. "Ness, I hate to break it to you, but everybody owes their mother their existence. Their father too, if you want to get technical..." He shifted slightly and rearranged his position. He did not want to get technical, apparently. Well, neither did she. Flushing slightly, she continued, still not meeting his eyes.
"I'm not an idiot. This is different. It's not that I never would have been alive in the first place; I know that's true for everybody. I mean that she, you know, sacrificed herself for me. I killed her, Jake."
"I think I saw her walking around this afternoon. I'm pretty sure she's not dead."
"Undead, anyway."
"Yeah, and if you ask me she seems pretty happy about it. Happy about you, too. I know your mom, Ness. There's no other choice she would have made."
Renesmee huffed in frustration. "I know that, okay? Geez. I…it's just too much, all right? She's already so much more beautiful than I am, so much more patient and sweet and perfect. You know, by the time most teenagers are my age their moms are ugly. Nobody else has to deal with this. Nobody else has a mother who's a college-age supermodel." She threw the leaf at the ground; it swayed unsatisfyingly in the air before landing softly by her right knee.
There was another reason, but she couldn't voice it. Her mother's self-control, her perfect ease among humans even though she was still such a young vampire…it looked like Renesmee would never, ever be her mother's equal, in any way at all.
He leaned toward her, touched her hair. She moved her hands to her lap so she could not be tempted to share that last, errant thought, and looked up at him.
"Don't ever say that," he whispered, tucking a curl behind her ear. Renesmee forgot what she had been thinking. "Don't ever let yourself believe she's more than you, especially…" he shook his head and chuckled, "especially not more beautiful."
Renesmee blinked. His face was very close. His eyes glittered black in the weak sunlight as he stared at her. He had done this many times before, held her and touched her hair and talked to her until she smiled again, but all of a sudden the distance between their bodies seemed tiny and his arms looked so nice and she was dizzy because he had said she was beautiful, and she had read…she had seen…
Before she knew what she was doing she was leaning towards him, letting her eyes fall closed. She pursed her lips a bit, her heart pounding in her ears as she felt his breath across her face, but then his hands were on her shoulders, pushing her backwards as he sharply said her name. She snapped her eyes open and he was looking at her with his brow furrowed, cautious.
"Nessie, I don't know what you were thinking, exactly, but…"
She ducked her head as terror rushed from her brain to her stomach. She wanted to be sick. What had she just done? What was he going to think? She chanced a glance at him. He was still looking at her, and he sighed and shook his head when she caught his eye. She felt the foreign sting of rejection at the very depth of her heart, even though she hadn't known she could want something like this ten seconds ago. She was mortified. He was not looking away.
"Look, Ness, you know you're my best girl, but you're a kid…"
"Only chronologically!" she said, feeling tears itching at the corners of her eyes. "You know I'm really a teenager." She sounded so desperate. Why couldn't she stop this craziness now and make him think she'd been joking, or something? It was like she was suddenly in the middle of a nightmare.
"Sure, sure," he said nervously. "I'm not a teenager. Things don't really work this way."
"Mom was seventeen when Dad was a hundred and seven!" She yelled furiously, wiping her cheeks.
"Yeah, well, that was different." He looked very uncomfortable now.
She took a deep breath. "You just don't want me. You don't think about me like that." Her voice was quivering, but she did her best to keep it even, reasonable. She could be an adult. She could. "It's all right, you can say so."
"Of course I don't think about you that way! That's not... You're still a girl, Ness."
That was it. He called after her but she was already running, and thirty miles later she realized that he hadn't followed. She kicked at the nearest conifer and wood splintered everywhere, showering her clothes. She was crying too loudly but she couldn't seem to stop. She sank to the ground and buried her head in her drawn-up knees, wishing the world could end now before she ever had to see him again…
Renesmee woke with a gasp and a start, as she had every morning for the past six weeks. Her heart was racing, her mind disoriented. This, she had long ago decided, was the worst part of every day.
There was something about that moment—that brief space when her thought process was somewhere behind her senses and she opened her eyes wondering why she was staring at a rusty sheet of metal or the open sky instead of the paneled ceiling of her little bedroom in Forks. Today there was a sloping plaster ceiling above her, with cracks running down to faded flowered paper on the walls.
She hated this moment because it was always followed by a rush of sweeping memory that seemed to weight her body to the ground and leave her wanting to do nothing but close her eyes again and curl sideways. Every morning of her life she lived this rediscovery, and at night she stayed up as late as possible, hoping to postpone it.
She blinked and stretched her arms. Beneath her was a nicer mattress than she'd slept on in weeks…
Of course.
The Muslim girl and her father. They had seen through her pathetic excuses about the friends she'd been staying with and let her sleep in the attic. With last night's memories came the tide of everything else, and confusion gave way to depressed certainty as she sighed and turned sideways. She was not at home because she had run away. She was alone, and she was a terrible, terrible person. Good morning, world.
She sat up, bedsprings screeching as she moved, and set her feet to the dusty wood planks of the attic floor. There was a small window on the opposite wall casting the gray light of early morning over her body. She had not slept too long, then. Good. She had to think.
She knew it had been totally reckless to show up in Paris. Any number of Cullens could arrive today, tomorrow, next week. Her aunts and her grandmother, especially, spent months here sometimes. They bought most of their clothes in Paris and they had taken Renesmee with them more than once—buying her pastries and taking her to museums. It was amazing how a city could turn them all into giddy, carefree versions of themselves, even a family of vampires. That feeling they all shared made it far too likely that at least one of them would come back, even if they had no idea she was here.
But that was exactly why she couldn't stay away. The first random train she'd hopped when she staggered off an oil freighter (as stealthily as possible, of course) had crossed into France, and once she was there the happy memories drew her forward like a magnet and she got the idea in her head that she could keep going, do whatever she needed to do, if she could just see Paris one more time and stand where they'd all stood together and remember that things had been beautiful before she'd begun to destroy them.
So, she came. She found her way to the riverbank almost by accident, led by instinct to a spot of sidewalk where she had stood years before and two feet shorter, holding Alice's hand.
"Alice, Alice, can we ride a bateau-puce?"
Alice threw her head back and laughed. "Bateau-mouche, Ness. 'Puce' means flea, 'mouche' means fly…" but she couldn't stop giggling. "You're hilarious, child. I know I'm supposed to be stricter with your school stuff, but sometimes… Bateau-puce. You are too cute."
"I'm going to learn French just fine! I'm going to come and stay here by myself when I'm grown up and you can come visit with Uncle Jasper."
"Why, thank you." But Alice's eyes had gone unfocused. "Yes…" she said slowly. "You might come back here, alone. But…"
She stopped talking and shook her head as if to clear it. "Sorry, of course I can't see you. I just get this sense, sometimes, that you'll be someone else someday. If you stay in Paris, it will be because you'll never be you again…" She was talking to herself now. She dropped Renesmee's hand and began massaging her temples.
"Never mind, little monster," she said abruptly, bouncing on her heels. "Shall we ride a boat?" She flashed Nessie a huge grin, grabbed her once again by the hand, and the moment was forgotten.
Apparently her subconscious was trying to tell her something.
Alice had been right. Here she was, standing by the same stretch of water, no longer a Cullen. She was someone or something else entirely. She had no family at all. Alice had sensed it right here, even if she couldn't see it, and Renesmee had made it come true and she could never, never go home and be Nessie Cullen again.
Was this it, then? She knew enough about the way her aunt saw the world to know that she still had a choice—it was hardly written in the stars that she couldn't leave Paris, couldn't keep going on to Istanbul or Moscow or Chiang Mai or anywhere else they wouldn't follow, but there was a strange feeling stealing over her. She liked this idea of stepping, chin raised, into her destiny instead of running like the coward she was from anything painful or difficult. She could do this. If she had to forsake who she was and everyone she cared about, damned if she wasn't going to do it properly.
But what if they found her? She couldn't face them, any of them. Oh, but she was so tired…that bit about being able to run again as soon as she'd spent a few minutes in Paris had been a major piece of self-deception.
Enter Fatima and this perfectly situated attic. As Saint Denis came to life outside the window, Nessie felt a brief, foreign peace steal over her. This was Paris, technically, but there was no way Rosalie or Esme or Alice would ever come here, and it was the last place they would think to look for Renesmee. It was close, so close, to a place they'd expect her to avoid but would probably check anyway, and yet just far enough away that if they were looking for her (and she thought they probably were), they'd never even think of La Zone.
She'd gotten a good look around yesterday on the walk from the metro to the bookstore, and she would be lying if she said she wasn't at least a little bit surprised. She'd never thought that France could be unattractive, but there really wasn't any other way to describe Saint Denis. It was made up mostly of gray, concrete blocks that rose eight or ten stories, all residential. The only color dotting the urban landscape through her window was some hanging laundry and several patches of wildly intricate graffiti. Renesmee was used to standing out wherever she went, but the attention she had drawn yesterday was unprecedented. Literally everyone here was African, and Nessie's pale skin and light hair put her under a very unpleasant spotlight. She didn't have to be her father to sense the hostility directed her way by a number of different men, but she was not a human woman and she had no reason to be afraid of staying here.
The only problem was that she was running out of money. She'd been in a bit of a hurry the day she left, so she had just grabbed a giant wad of cash from her parents' nightstand and stuck it in her backpack. Said giant wad of cash wasn't so giant these days, considering she couldn't tap into any of her family's accounts or use any of her cards without them knowing immediately where she was. At this rate, she wouldn't be able to pay for a place to live for more than a month, and that didn't even count food. There was nothing to hunt for miles, unless she started draining poodles. If she lived here, she was going to have to buy normal human food, and there was no way she could afford it. She didn't have any ID for Dorianne and she'd left her Vanessa Cullen passport at home (good riddance), so she was a totally undocumented immigrant. That would make finding a job…difficult. She'd never had a job before, anyway. What was she even supposed to do, if she managed to find some under-the-table work?
She could ask Fatima, maybe, but how? Hey, I'm here illegally and have no official proof of my own existence. Can you help me find a place where people don't ask questions when they hire you? Not an option, probably.
She should just go downstairs, she thought, as she stood and straightened the sheets on her trundle bed. She was hungry and she didn't want to overstay her welcome if they expected her to leave this morning. She pulled her dirty jeans back on and tried to cover her tangled, messy hair with an old bandana from the front pocket of her backpack. She really needed new clothes. In a few weeks, these jeans wouldn't fit past her butt anymore. They were already uncomfortably tight and exposed her ankles. When, when would she stop growing?
She made her way as quietly as possible down the creaking stairs to the first floor kitchen and found it empty. There was no one moving around in the other two rooms, either, so she headed for the stairs down into the bookstore. She paused on the top step, seeing a pallet and a pillow next to the banister. Suddenly remembering the skirts hanging in the attic's wardrobe, she realized that Fatima had given up her room and slept by the stairs. Nessie's face started burning—why was she letting this happen? She couldn't intrude on this kind family's life for another hour, eating their food and sleeping on their mattresses. She would say thank you and leave, and buy a loaf of bread somewhere for breakfast.
There was no one downstairs in the store, either. The lights hadn't even been turned on. Renesmee wandered through the dusty aisles, unhindered by the semi-darkness. She'd never heard of any of these books; many of them were in Arabic. There were little signs pasted to the end of each shelf; she was standing in the middle of "Morocco." She pulled down Camp du Sud and opened it; it was a volume of poetry. As she flipped through the pages she heard someone breathing from the very back of the store. She'd been taught well—she knew the noise was outside the range of normal human hearing, so she did what her father had always told her to do and continued to scan the book with her head bent, pretending not to hear.
"Can you read like that?"
Renesmee lifted her head to see Fatima framed in a doorway behind the stairs, watching her.
"What do you mean?"
"Without more light. Here," she said, reaching for a switch and illuminating the store. She walked over to Nessie's side and joined her in staring at the shelf. "Strange, isn't it?" she asked.
What? Surely she couldn't already tell that Renesmee could see in the dark. Was she that bad at being a covert vampire?
"The books, I mean," she clarified when Nessie didn't respond. "This doesn't really seem like the right place to be selling North and West African high literature does it?"
Renesmee put the book back on the shelf. "No, not really," she admitted.
Fatima smiled. "You're right, of course. I can't remember the last time I ever used that thing," she said, pointing at the register.
Renesmee just stared at her.
"Oh, we have enough money," she said quickly, flushing. "Just enough, really. My father's family was ridiculously wealthy. There's not much left now, but there's enough for him to keep this place running, even if no one ever buys another book."
Nessie wanted to ask all sorts of rude questions, like whether Abdul Dehbi was entirely sane, but she couldn't figure out how to word them tactfully. Fatima seemed to know what she was thinking. She opened her mouth, but hesitated before she spoke.
"It's the only thing he can do. He's a brilliant man and life here hasn't been exactly…what he expected. At least, it wasn't like his life here before, when he came to study. This," she gestured to the books in front of them, "is how he copes with it. I think he just has to hope that people will become the sort of people who want to read these books, if that makes sense."
"I suppose so." They stood in silence for a moment, and Renesmee decided it was time for her to leave. She opened her mouth to say 'thank you'…
"Can I ask you something, Dorianne?"
"Uh, yes. Of course."
"Am I right in assuming that you speak fluent English?" Fatima's open face was eager. It didn't escape Renesmee's notice that Fatima had worded the question so that she had not asked where Renesmee was from, as though she knew Renesmee still wouldn't want to tell her.
"Yes, I do."
Fatima nodded, still smiling. "Do you think, maybe, if you don't have any firm plans, you could stay with us for a few days and help me prepare for an exam? I'm afraid I'm going to fail, but there isn't really anyone I feel comfortable asking for help…"
It struck Renesmee that Fatima was more perceptive than she'd originally realized. Fatima knew Nessie would want to leave immediately, and this was a tactful offering of a little more time. She couldn't take it, though. This girl would sleep by the stairs for weeks if Nessie let her.
"Well, maybe I could stop by again for a few hours…" she was interrupted by a growling sound from the vicinity of her stomach. Fatima lifted an eyebrow.
"At least stay for breakfast. Or did you not like my cooking?"
Checkmate. "Sure," she said resignedly. "That would be great."
A/N-Credits for the title of this story go to Martha Gellhorn's The Face of War. I definitely should have mentioned that a while ago, sorry.
Frenchiness:
La Zone- A generic term for the public housing communities surrounding many cities in France and populated mostly by Francophone immigrants. St. Denis is one of the more well-known environs of this type and has the most highly-concentrated muslim population in all of France.
On that note, I am not muslim. I would like to think that I know a good deal about Islam, but since it isn't my faith tradition I'm bound to make mistakes in representing it, and if I do please do not take offense. Send me a message and let me know, so I can correct it.
Many thanks to those of you who left reviews. This time, I will write you back. I promise.
Next chapter coming soon!
