Stephenie Meyer owns me.

James Blunt, I think?

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3. troix
~ I saw an angel, / Of that I'm sure. ~

Up until yesterday, all she would find when she looked into her future was a journal full of secrets and a melancholy so thin and clingy it felt like a second skin.

Up until this morning, her heart only beat for her disconsolate, lifeless father.

Up until now, she had only assumed Earth was the middle ground, the intermediary between pre-life darkness and whatever the hell comes after. Emptiness and vacant curiosity were her constant companions . . . the thing, though, was that's exactly how she wanted it.

It's so obvious to her, though – it's one of those moments caught in a mental snapshot, one of those moments you're positive you'll remember forever. Because Bella sees something new.

And she can't define it.

But it's laying there between them. It's so clear. Real. How can all these people not see it, not feel it? Not taste it?

Why won't he meet her eyes?

She hears them, vaguely, through a thick fog that clogs her ears and leaves her lightheaded. Alice is talking to her, introducing her to the devastating, indifferent blond that studies her nails and the Roman god that stands before her, and they're all sitting down at the lunch table, but Bella remains on her feet. If she takes one step forward, she will fall, and for some inexplicable reason, she doesn't want to embarrass herself in front of him.

She doesn't belong with these angels.

Time is passing in odd spurts and lags, slowing indeterminately and then picking up speed fivefold. She registers with a start that she's sitting in a plastic chair, with a tray of untouched food set before her, without really knowing how she got there. When her surroundings start to make sense, her eyes don't leave his, even if their gazes don't meet – he looks right through her. Over her shoulder. Above her head. Anywhere but her face, and it's killing her.

And she recognizes, with a little squeak that is lost underneath Alice's consistent stream of birdlike chatter, that she wants him.

She longs to carry a semblance of normalcy, of routine, outside of her awkward, tortured-soul journalistic tendencies. She wants to know why, exactly, her heartless mother left for the Arizona desert and never returned. And she wants her father to be the man he used to be before the love of his life hit the road and didn't look back.

But Bella's never wanted anything, anyone, more than him, in all her life.