A/N: Welcome to LU, new readers: bloodlion, crazytwilightbandgeek, and Supernatural Sam and Dean! You guys are awesome! And to all you readers mentioned in previous chapters, I love you guys too!
Okay, so no one guessed the line from chapter five. Here's the answer:
"Fine, bordering on chipper, and tomorrow, planning on being obnoxious." The line was from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (don't own that either) said by Joyce in the hospital :)
Better luck next time people!
Chapter Seven: Home
BPOV
It was almost time. Today was the day I went to the bookstore.
There I go. I watched as my human self walked into the bookstore. There was no angel statue on my way in. So where did it come from?
I looked around the parking lot to see if I could spot it elsewhere. Nothing. I looked back to where it would appear and jerked in shock. There it was. Sitting on the corner, crying. I watched it unblinkingly for any sign of movement. This was something clearly supernatural, I just knew it. I didn't know how this statue could take me out of my time but I was fascinated as hell to watch.
I heard my own voice from inside the store.
"Alice, what's going to happen?"
I couldn't hear Alice's response from here, but I knew that she was panicking and that the phone would cut off, right about...now. I heard a small gasp from myself inside. I started counting down from sixty.
As I got to twenty-four, I heard myself take a deep breath and step out of the shop.
Eleven...I'm at the corner. Ten...I round the corner. Nine...I stop short, seeing the angel. Eight...I drop the bag with the book in it. Seven...I gasp and stare at the angel. Six...My heart rate increases as I continue to stare. Five... I take an unconscious step back and continue to stare. Four...three...two...
I felt a strange tingling in my hand, I reluctantly looked down at it to find that it was slightly transparent, and as I looked at it, it became solid again. Then I realized my mistake and snapped my head up again to look at the angel, and was met with a horrible sight.
In the second and a half that it took for me to look at my hand, the angel had made it's way silently to about three feet from me. It's face was horribly transformed from the sad look of an angel crying, to a terribly grotesque demon with a fierce, wrinkled forehead and nose, it's jagged, sharp teeth bared. It's arms were raised with the fingers curled onto claws. But it was frozen in stone like this, and even through my indestructibility and immortality, I was terrified of this creature.
I kept my eyes locked on the terrifying angel, and backed away, careful not to blink. When I was a good ten feet into the trees behind Border's, I allowed myself to blink once, rapidly, as only a vampire can. The angel was closer, looking even more grotesque if that were possible. I blinked again, it was all the way in the trees now, only five feet from me. I stepped forward, keeping my eyes on the angel. I bent down, eyes still on the creature, and grabbed a large boulder. I wasn't going to risk touching this thing in case I end up back in time again, so I hefted the boulder like it was merely a pebble, and flung it with all of my considerable strength at the angel. A sound like thunder rent the air as the angel was blown in several pieces.
I kept my eyes on it for a moment, unsure if it was safe, yet. I backed away several feet, and swiftly blinked. Everything was the same. I blinked again, slower this time. The broken angel did not pull itself back together. I was afraid it might do that. I blinked a few more times, just to be sure, and when the creature still did not stir. I walked back to the parking lot.
I took my cell phone out of my pocket. I had kept it, all these years, hid it from everyone. It would have been tough to explain what it was to someone in the '20s. I had kept it in perfect condition, so it was the same as it was a hundred years ago. I walked up to my truck and unlocked it, the key, too, I had kept. I grabbed the car charger and plugged my phone into the cigarette lighter, and turned the truck on. It roared to life, god, I missed that sound.
I looked out the front window and saw a Border's shopping bag laying where I left it not a moment ago. Leaving the truck running, I got out and walked up to the book, I picked it up. All this trouble for Wuthering Heights. I smiled to myself and went back to the truck.
I sat down in the driver's seat and turned on my still charging phone. As soon as it was on, it started ringing madly.
"Hello, Alice," I greeted her cheerfully.
"Bella?" she was obviously in shock. "How... I... um... What the hell happened to you?"
I laughed my new bell-like laughter. "I'll tell you in a few hours when I get home. This is a story definitely worth hearing. Make sure everyone is there when I get there."
I hung up and took my phone and book with me, leaving the charger and the tuck behind. As much as I hated to leave my truck, I had to admit, bringing it with me was just going to draw attention. I took the key with me after locking up my truck and ran back to Forks.
EPOV
I didn't have the faintest idea of what was going on. All I knew was that, Alice had called a family meeting in the living room and wasn't telling us what we were meeting for. I had tried to hear in her mind what was going on, but I heard terrified gibberish, it was really starting to scare me.
"That's it, I'm leaving!" Emmett said, having had enough.
"No!" she cried. "Just a few more minutes and you'll see what I gathered you all for."
Emmett huffed and sat back down.
A minute later, we all heard a familiar sound. It was the sound of a vampire running towards us through the woods. Everyone except Alice looked to me to find out if it was friend or foe.
I listened for their thoughts... and heard nothing. That made me nervous, the only time that had happened was with Bella. I continued to listen to the footsteps of the unknown vampire as they approached the house.
The vampire walked up to the front door, took a deep, unnecessary breath and tapped lightly on the door. Alice got up immediately and went to answer the door.
"Brace yourselves, people," she said dramatically, though I detected a hint of confusion and wariness in her thoughts. "A couple of you aren't going to like this," her eyes rested on me and Rosalie for a moment before opening the door.
What we saw there, made every one in the room (besides Alice) gasp in shock. It was Bella.
She stepped forward with such grace that I had never seen in her before. Her movement rippled the air and brought her scent to me. It was the same scent, without the burn. It was definitely my Bella. But how? When? She walked all of the way into the room before looking at all of us with her new golden eyes—wait golden? She's not newborn?—and smiling the most dazzling smile I had ever seen.
"Hi, everybody," she said shyly, and her voice was like music.
"No way!" Emmett blurted.
"How..." Jasper couldn't even get his thought out.
Rosalie's thoughts were a jumble of furious cursing and sad lamenting.
She's so beautiful! Esme.
"So it was you!" Carlisle's comment made no sense. In his mind, he was remembering the year I was changed. In the hospital there were three sick people lying side-by-side, the first was my mother, the second was me, and the third was a girl who looked remarkably like Bella, except wasted from the sickness. The name Carlisle held in his memory for that girl was Marie Webber.
"Marie Webber," I whispered, knowing that name from somewhere.
"Yes," Bella said, gently. She seemed to be answering both Carlisle and myself.
"But that's not possible," Carlisle objected.
"But it is," Bella said gently. "Remember I said I would come back? Remember, I told you she would die and that you had to save him, for me and for her?"
Carlisle remembered a conversation he had had with a newborn, just before she left and didn't return. The name he had for her was the same as the sick girl in the hospital. Marie Webber.
That name was so familiar. I wracked my brains for the half forgotten memory. When I thought of the name Marie Webber, I got...
"A lovely name, to be sure, but I don't think it quite suits you."
Bella! I saw Bella! In my human memories? But how?
"Marie Webber," I said louder, looking directly at Bella. "A girl I had a crush on when I was human. She moved from England to escape the war but had nowhere to go," my memories were flooding back to me. "She was going to find work in a factory but I offered her a place to stay at my parents' house. My mother took her in and all but adopted her. She called my mother Eliza. They were great friends. After my mother got sick from the influenza, Marie got it right after." I looked at Carlisle, remembering. "You were there, you had your team take them both to the hospital, my father had been taken from work there as well. I was the only one healthy. I wanted to come and see them but you said it wasn't safe, that I would catch it. But I caught it anyway and was placed between them. Mother tried to nurse me but got sicker because she wasn't resting. Marie was dying. I saw you take her to the morgue."
No one else could see where I was going with this except, it seemed, Carlisle and Bella.
"Isabella Marie Swan. Best friend Angela Webber," I finally pieced it together, and everyone else got it then, too.
"Yeah, that was me," Bella said. "That day that you walked up to me on the street, was my first time in Chicago. I literally just got there barely twenty minutes beforehand."
"I'm lost," said Emmett, speaking for the whole room. "Bella, how did you become a vampire? Who did it? And how are your eyes already gold?'
"Weren't you listening, Emmett?" she asked, smiling. "I caught Spanish Influenza in 1918."
Everyone gaped at her, even Alice. Carlisle seemed to have expected that answer, though.
"But you're only seventeen," said Jasper, confused.
"I may have been born in 1990 but I've been around for ninety years."
Shock followed her statement.
"How?" Alice screamed exasperated.
"I'm not entirely sure, myself," she said. "To you it was just a few hours ago that I disappeared at the bookstore, but that was seventy-three years ago for me. At the bookstore, as I was leaving, I nearly run into a statue of a crying angel. You said I had less than a minute before my future cuts off so I was counting down in my head. When I got to one, I blinked. That's all I did, just blinked and found myself in the middle of Chicago, 1918."
Everyone stared.
"That doesn't explain how you were changed," said Emmett. "Who changed you?"
"Carlisle did," she said, as if it were obvious.
"What?" Emmett was still confused.
"She was dying of the flu," said Carlisle. All eyes were on him now. "She asked me to change her, but I didn't understand how she could know. When I saw the scar on her hand left by James, I thought that someone as amazing as she was for surviving a vampire attack, shouldn't have to die of the flu, so after Elizabeth pleaded with me to save her, I did.
"But as soon as she was finished the transformation and after she had hunted, she left, promising to return."
"Why did you leave?" I asked. I was changed not days later, we could have been together.
"To preserve the future," said Alice, understanding. "If she had stayed, then she would have created an impossible paradox. If she had stayed, then the two of you would have been together when human Bella starts school in Forks, you and human Bella never fall in love and she never learns our secret, she never gets bitten by James and therefore, there is nothing to draw Carlisle's attention to her to change her, so she dies in a hospital of the flu."
Just the idea of that made my head spin. "Oh," was all I could say.
"I almost created a paradox a few hours ago, before human me got sucked into the past," Bella said. "That crying angel statue was apparently the reason for my blast into the past, because it wasn't a statue; if you look at it, then it's a statue and doesn't move, but look away and it attacks. When I blinked, it sent me to the past. So I came back to check it out. I was staring at it for the longest time, not blinking, so when human me rounds the corner, there it is, all innocent-looking. Human me is staring at it like I remember doing, and I'm counting down in my head. Just before I get to one, my hand starts tingling, I look down to find I'm disappearing, as I look, I stop disappearing. When I look back at the angel, human me is gone and the angel has moved. Towards me.
"If I had kept looking at that angel, it wouldn't have been able to send human me into the past, and therefore, I wouldn't exist in this form, but if I didn't exist, then there would be nothing to stop the angel from sending me to 1918. Paradox."
"That hurts my head," Emmett complained.
"Welcome to my world," Bella and Alice said at the same time. They looked at each other and laughed.
When we all loosened up a bit and Bella's crazy explanations were over, we sat around and listened to stories of her travels. She mentioned meeting different nomads, being chased from territories, learning about her ability.
After all the stories were told, Bella asked me if I wanted to go for a run with her. I wasn't used to this new, stronger, faster Bella, but if I was being honest with myself, I was loving every minute of it. We ran to our meadow in the woods. When we got there, we just sat and stared at the sky. It had gotten dark since Bella came home and the clouds were away so we got a breath taking (figuratively) view of the stars.
"Do you miss it?" I asked.
"Hmm?"
"Being human. Do you miss it?"
"Not really. I mean, if I was still human, would I be able to do this?"
She suddenly rolled over and pinned me to the ground, kissing me with a strength I was not accustomed to. It was exhilarating, and I realized that I didn't have to be careful anymore, I could kiss her back just as forcefully and not worry about harming her. So I did. We were like that for several minutes, hands in each other's hair, kissing more deeply than I had ever allowed, until we finally broke apart, panting for air we didn't need.
"No, I suppose we couldn't do that when you were human," I said after a moment.
"I want to show you something, Edward," she said tentatively.
"What is it, love?"
She didn't answer, instead, she placed a hand on either side of my face, pressing her forehead to mine. She closed her eyes and seemed to concentrate.
For a moment nothing happened. Then... I love you, Edward.
The only thing I could think of doing in that moment was kissing my Bella with all the love I felt for her. I didn't understand what had just happened, but I knew I had heard my Bella's thoughts. I broke the kiss.
"Bella, how...?"
She smiled. Practice. You always wanted to hear my thoughts...
I kissed her again, softer this time.
"Thank you."
A/N: So that's it, just the Epilogue left. If you liked it, tell your friends about it. If you didn't, you probably didn't make it this far through the stroy anyhow :) Anyway, I love you so show me the love! R&R!
