A/N: And we return to normal scheduling ;D Sorry 'bout last week, hope you enjoy, and please review!
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Chapter 7: Significance
I breathed a mental sigh of relief as Charlie said his brief goodbyes. He backed what I dearly hoped wasn't meant to be subtly toward the living room, Bella already forgotten in the face of baseball. This was going better than expected. Bella was still firmly in her seat, glaring mournfully in her father's general direction. Better. Not necessarily well. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that she was sure to enjoy at least some of the party once she was there. It was becoming harder and harder to believe. Her hand was concealed under the table with as much subtlety as her father's shuffling, and I pried it from her knees as carefully as I could. She was making perfectly clear to me that she did not wish to leave the house, but there was very little alternative. If she stayed here Bella would be miserable, Alice would be furious, Alice would come here and make Bella feel guilty and Bella would end up at the party anyway, but would have a terrible time. I hoped against hope as she reluctantly uncurled her fist in my hand that Bella hadn't thought of another reason—excuse—to stay home. I didn't have it in me to argue properly tonight. But her shoulders sagged as her fingers laced with mine, soft and burning as ever, and I pulled what I hoped was gently on her hand as I stood. That she followed willingly I thanked God for, and counted it firmly a miracle. I didn't push my luck by speaking. It was hard to tell whether she was angry at me. I wondered briefly whether if she were, she would wish her hand were cold and didn't comfort me so. She always wishes her hands were cold, the stupid voice of misery chimed in helpfully from the corner of my head. I felt like telling it that was an incredibly cheap call, but resisted. Talking to one's own voices of reason is never a good thing.
It was already dark outside; trees in shades of brown instead of green, earth in shades of grey, wind rippling moonlight and stars burning different shades of heat in my eyes. I kept Bella's hand as I opened the door and she shut it behind us. I had always been taught in my youth to allow a lady first through a doorway, but caution overruled. I wondered briefly whether I was paranoid. It didn't matter. Opening the door to the cold outside, the darkness that I could see through but so could others like me…the thought of allowing Bella into that darkness without me before her was too painful to entertain. My carelessness, my thoughtlessness had seen her bitten, broken and very nearly killed. Killed or…I tried and failed to let go the tension as I dropped behind Bella to put her in my line of sight. I hated that scar on her hand more than anything but the foul monster who'd put it there. My lack of caution, my idiocy had seen her beaten and torn to pieces, horribly scarred, jumping at shadows for weeks and still afraid now, I was sure. She had been terrified. She had been hopeless. I had lost her trust, her belief in me so badly that she'd tried to sacrifice herself instead of waiting for me, and she had been left nearly dead, nearly turned, and unconscious for two whole days. I had no intention of letting that happen again.
We crossed to the truck in silence and Bella climbed into the passenger side without argument. I wasn't sure whether she was finally developing a sense of self-protection strong enough to stop her driving around blind in the dark, or whether she just realised that I was in no state of mind to let her do so. I didn't care as much as I should have. It was too easy just to be relieved at not having to fight.
The truck moved out of Bella's driveway exceedingly loudly—I smelled every creature for a mile scatter. We roared down the silent street like a monster truck with a cutlery set in its engine. I could hear house after house of families glancing up from their meals; incoherent, pre-linguistic flashes of surprise or curiosity or annoyance in mind after mind after mind. The noise the thing made was absurd. I tried to put pressure slowly on the accelerator, coax it up, maybe pull a little more power than it would usually allow…and heard only even more clattering noise and very little that sounded like a functioning engine. I could walk faster than we were moving, and in far greater comfort.
"Take it easy," Bella warned as the car groaned at a mile over the speed limit. Her voice was tense and less than patient.
She admitted it! She knew the car was a reinforced cardboard box on square wheels. If I had to take the damn thing easy going at the speed limit, it was not a working car. It was nearly as old as me, and not nearly as durable. I couldn't resist. "You know what you would love?" There were plenty of cars just as safe as the truck but with the capacity to move fast enough to be called a form of transport. I briefly weighed a few options in my mind. "A nice little Audi coupe." Bella groaned. I grinned. "Very quiet, lots of power…" Everything that this truck was not…
"There's nothing wrong with my truck." And it sounded depressingly like closing the topic. I shrugged to myself and tried not to sigh too loudly as the truck edged another half a mile faster and almost fell apart. This topic always sounded like it was closing. It never did. I'd convince Bella eventually. After all, this ridiculous vehicle could only last so long and when it finally gave up, Bella wouldn't have the money for a new car and I would. I considered that I should probably feel bad for thinking that, but didn't. The truck was an insult to the automotive industry—an insult to modern invention and intelligence. Really.
"And speaking of expensive nonessentials," Bella segued, and my attempts at positive thinking fell out the window at the threatening edge in her voice. I reflected wryly that Bella was probably the only person capable of really threatening me.
"If you know what's good for you," she continued, still scowling, "you didn't spend any money on birthday presents."
And here we were again. "Not a dime," I replied on cue. It was the truth, unfortunately. Bella had explained to me, of course, why she objected so to receiving gifts, but it simply wasn't logical. The idea that she could ever owe me anything, after all she'd given me…but the point of gifts was to make Bella happy, or it was meant to be, and if they were only going to make her miserable then they weren't helpful or necessary. Outside the trees flashed past and Bella didn't seem to see them. She had told me once that she couldn't, that they disappeared to a blur when I drove fast. I couldn't remember ever having eyes like that. Not that we could go fast in this thing anyway.
As we passed the last structures of central Forks, I reached out with my mind to check that all was ready at home. It was, despite Alice's fussing. Rosalie was being difficult and it was worrying Esme, but that was it. Emmett was largely oblivious, and resigned to the rest. Alice was being kept moderately under control by Jasper, her flowers and candles and silver were all in place, and the house looked…festive. And being the only one not buying Bella a gift was fine. Yes, there were practical gifts I would have liked to have given Bella—a reasonable car, college fees, more adequate winter jackets, all of the above…there were hundreds of gestures I might have made for sentimentality's sake, and there were any number of things I could have bought her that might have made her happy. But I could always buy her those things some other time. What mattered today was what Bella wanted, and what Bella wanted was, miraculously, to spend this evening with me. And not to be bought gifts. I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye and put the topic away. I was confident that she would like what I was giving her. I was relying on that to turn the night back around. I would take Bella home happy tonight, she would fall asleep at peace, and I would wake her up in the morning smiling. That was what mattered.
I sighed as I wondered for the thousandth time today whether it mightn't have been a better idea to stay at Bella's place. I could give her the CD there, we could lie around and listen to music or I could watch her read or…something. I tried and failed to let the tension out of my face. Bella hated the idea of parties as a rule, and I wasn't sure why I'd allowed my family to talk me into this. That said, I had a pretty good idea. I pressed my eyes shut just a moment, too quickly for Bella to worry about us crashing. Of course I'd let them convince me. They all wanted it so badly. I knew that Alice, and Esme, and probably Carlisle and Emmet and maybe even Jasper loved Bella dearly. Even Rosalie couldn't possibly resent her as much as she claimed to. My family didn't want Bella to lose her birthday over me any more than I did. And they were excited. Alice's enthusiasm was out like it hadn't been in years. Esme was bright with anticipation, and that made Carlisle just as happy. Jasper was swanning around the house all but grinning from the secondary effects of being an empath near Alice ecstatic. I didn't need to check to know that Emmett would be giving him hell for it right now. The thought made me smile. Emmett and Rosalie were home for the evening. The house was almost alive with the light of a genuine celebration, an actual event, something significant to smile about. Something human. Nothing much significant happened to us anymore. We had all been turned more than seventy years, and my family had found their mates long ago. The last major change for us had been Alice and Jasper showing up, and that was over half a century old. That was it for significance. So to have something new, to have something real…I wanted them to enjoy it too, as well as Bella. I wanted everyone to be happy, and I wanted us all to be happy together. I wanted some peace for us. They deserved it. Especially Carlisle and Esme, and Alice, stupid as she was being today. And so I had allowed myself to be convinced. And now there was at least a fifty percent chance that Bella would walk through the door and be miserable, and that would make the rest miserable, and we'd have one great disaster of a night.
I glanced sideways at Bella. It had to be worth a try. "Can you do me a favour?"
She pursed her lips, and I resisted the urge to sigh. This day was so much more difficult than it should be.
"That depends on what it is."
I closed my eyes a moment to compose my thoughts…to compose myself. "Bella," I began slowly, wishing the stress were less evident in my voice, "the last real birthday any of us had was Emmett in 1935." And that had hardly been a celebration. 'Birth' was a euphemism, though there was as much screaming as a real birth. Esme barely taking her eyes from Carlisle for months, torn as he was about changing another, Rosalie so obviously lost somewhere between what she irrationally insisted was love, though she'd barely heard a word from Emmett when she had Carlisle turn him, and the decision she'd made out of nowhere…and I had been so furious, for so little coherent reason. Furious at Rosalie's impulsiveness. Furious at Carlisle's allowance of it. Furious at how we kept growing, and growing, furious that another person had been damned like us. Furious at Emmett's newborn bloodlust and more furious at my own, still recovering from the late twenties. Furious at nothing and everything, in that way that I was in the thirties. The whole thought flashed barely a moment through my mind. The last birthday. The twenties and thirties and all the horror. I shook my head. "Cut us a little slack, and don't be too difficult tonight." I was struggling with my words. Bella wasn't being difficult, but what was I meant to say? Magically forget for a few hours that I've made you miserable? And it was important. It was important to my family, whether it was stupid and meaningless or not. I looked more down at my knees beneath the wheel than at my Bella. "They're all very excited."
There was one long moment of silence. "Fine." She sounded a little surprised, and less resentful than she could have. "I'll behave." I squeezed my eyes together hard and opened them again. It was all going to be fine. I needed to relax. There was nothing wrong.
But I couldn't. I sighed heavily, completely failing to hide it. I needed to relax. But I was too sick of everything.
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A/N: So this chapter was interesting for me. I think Edward gave us some slightly different parts of himself to the ones that he normally lets show. 'Significance' summed it up for me – not just the lack of significance in changeless eternity, but also the significance of Bella and of his family to Edward, the significance of the events of March to Bella and Edward's ongoing relationship, the differing significances of Bella's birthday and how they wear on both of them, and the significance of this car ride – the last conversation before everything moves toward changing.
I hope you enjoyed the chapter, and please review (anything from whether or not you liked it to full on concrit is always welcome!) :D Awesome person of the week award goes to averysubtlegift, who went through and wrote me really detailed half page reviews on every chapter. Thanks to all who are reading, reviewing, and showing their support!
