This story is written in the first-person point of view, and sometimes switches between characters by scene or chapter. (Please do not panic; I do not repeat each scene from various points of view.) I do not label my chapters with character names, subsequently, your key is thus: Chapter titles that are short & succinct are Bella's, long witticisms are Esme's; song titles are in quotes, belonging to Edward, and Rose's are questions, finished off with an interrobang (‽).

Chapter Notes:

Much love to head-a$$-kicker-in-charge, cookEgawd, my muse, Blackjacklily, to MunkeeRajah for megabetaing, and to Detochkina, who, although she claims to only be a pre-reader, is far more.


"At My Most Beautiful"

I sat on that garden bench with Esme until late in the afternoon. I felt the weight of my guilt pull down on me. I knew Esme's mind; I also knew better than anyone else that she prided herself on being able to maintain the sweet-tempered and tender demeanor that the others considered her hallmark. However, the mercifully mild Esme had read me the riot act twice over the past two days. I had to accept that this meant I had been really stupid, really stubborn, or likely both. The problems with my behavior became tortuously less ambiguous as our conversation continued.

After I finished spewing my impotent rage at her, her expression softened, the tension lessened and our discussion settled into a more relaxed rhythm.

"I've been so naïve. I thought that if I took myself out of the equation, I would be removing all the danger I had brought along with me."

"I know, Agapatos. But you know that there are other dangers besides our kind. I recall that if it weren't for you, Bella would have been assaulted on that day in Port Angeles, yes? And run over by a van in the school parking lot before that? Furthermore, you know that although her blood sings to you like nothing else, it nonetheless holds an abnormally desirable appeal for the rest of us as well. We cannot defend our Olympic territory from the other side of the country, and she may choose to travel just about anywhere; any of our kind could wander through and discover her scent." She paused. "In the face of all this, you let yourself forget these things, despite having perfect recall. Do you know why?"

Obviously she felt she knew why, but she wanted me to figure it out for myself. The more this conversation went on, the dumber and more pathetic I felt. In desperation to save my ego, I reflexively tried to defend myself.

"I had surmised that somehow those events had occurred because of me as well. After all, she survived just fine for the seventeen years before I came along."

"This is true. And even with you around you may have to accept that you may not always be able to save her. She's even still alive in spite of the danger she has faced since we left. Perhaps to some extent she may just be the fortunate recipient of an amazing amount of dumb luck. Who knows? Regardless, this isn't about being her savior. It's about being a responsible partner; her true companion. In this case it means giving her the means to save herself."

"I'm terrified that she'll end up hating me. How could she not grow to resent me for stealing her life, her soul?"

She let out a long, deep sigh. "It's an amusing coincidence that when it comes to Bella, you and Rosalie have a lot in common."

I stared, incredulous and more than a little annoyed.

Hear me out, she thought. "We all know that Rosalie is jealous of the opportunities that Bella's humanity affords her. She's entirely convinced that her wants are right and true, and are just as right and true when applied to Bella. She has applied her morality to Bella, and since Bella rejects it, Rosalie takes it out on her through callous behavior. You've inadvertently done the same thing; Bella wants to be one of us for her own reasons, you want her to remain human for yours, and you've placed your will above her own."

I began to protest but Esme held up a hand.

"Yes, it's out of love, not jealousy—but the essence is the same when it plays out in the same way and results in the same outcome. In this case it's that Bella ends up punished because she doesn't want what you want for her."

I considered this while she went on. "You and Rosalie both come from a position of thinking that you are older, wiser, and are more informed, and that with her youth and inexperience she can't possibly know what she wants, right? There's a lot to be said for looking at immortality from Bella's perspective—she's now faced death several times, and that must have—" She searched for the right word. "—suffused her viewpoint, don't you think?"

She continued, "When you and Rose look at Bella you see a girl that can't possibly have static desires. I, however, see a girl that knows exactly what she wants, she just doesn't want enough. There's a difference. Regardless, it's unchangeable. We can't make her want more than this for herself. More than us; more than you. Nor should we. It's not our place to live her life for her."

"Also, you know that our regret is rare amongst our kind. Most of us revel in our immortality. Perhaps Bella is less like us in that she truly, effortlessly would love living life as one of our kind, and would perhaps even thrive as one of us. Would that make you feel any differently about her?"

"Nothing could make me think less of or feel less deeply for Bella," I said.

"I know this ... but do you?" She looked at me wanly.

As Esme continued to speak, her words were uttered as quickly as they manifested in her mind, so I could tell that there was no contemplation of what she was saying; she must have been wanting to say these things to me for a long time.

"You know, we're no different from anyone else in that we always want what we cannot have. I wax nostalgic about human life just like the rest of us, but really—at this juncture, how much would change for the better if we were to reclaim our humanity? We exist in a different place now. As tedious and treacherous as vampiric politics can be, how much would you really be able to involve yourself in human political affairs? How invested would you be in the current events of mortal lives when you can't erase your knowledge that there are larger forces, completely outside of human control, that factor in? Oh, and the perspective that living longer has given us! We may be somewhat constant, but we can still grow; consider how much Jasper's viewpoints on the Civil War have changed since he walked the earth as a Confederate soldier ...

Esme's face grew more animated, her eyes widened and her lips formed a prideful smile as she considered her son. The smile was, however, short-lived.

"Our physical swiftness blinds us to the larger reality. The concept that we are unchanging is ridiculous; it's a complete myth. Nothing in this universe is unchanging. We are simply like trees. We grow slowly while time and everything else around us races at what we perceive as blinding speed."

She was giving me so much to think about that I could hardly process it all as quickly as she articulated her thoughts. I frequently prided myself on being the intellectual amongst my siblings, but occasionally I was reminded that in all my reflection and contemplation, I had nothing on the wisdom of neither Esme nor Carlisle. I often worshipped them for it, and even through all my fresh angst, guilt and anger, I felt my understanding of myself and the situation at hand become clearer for me every minute she spoke. There was no way I would interrupt her now.

"And family ... if we were human again we would probably all decide to have children, but then we would likely all obsess over the mortality of whatever offspring we produced, much like you worry over Bella."

She paused, and I suspected it was to let her last statement sink in. I tried to imagine all of us running around trying to protect vulnerable, fragile human children, and once I could adequately picture the misery of constant worry, I banished the thought from my mind. Esme stood, and I followed suit.

"Beyond that, our biological families are all long gone; we have no attachment to whatever descendants they may have produced. We are wholly and completely each other's family now. Would we disperse? I don't think we would. Our structure as a unit is fixed whether mortal or not."

She closed her eyes. "We would rid ourselves of the blood thirst ... certainly that's not to be underestimated ..."

Her eyes opened and she looked off into the distance. Slowly she began to move forward, and I stayed glued to her side, trying not to make any sound that might interrupt her thoughts. "But really, even if we could be human, that time has passed for us. We have no place in this world as humans. That type of life would no longer be useful for us. It's too late."

It reminded me of what Bella said when she first revealed that she cared for me. She told me that it didn't matter that I was a vampire, It's too late.

I nearly panicked then. It pained me just as much to hear those words coming from Esme, but this time I was resigned to the truth of her words.

I had stopped in response to my trepidation, but moved to catch up to Esme when I realized she was several feet ahead of me. She was so quiet now that even I could barely hear her.

"Even our constancy is as much a blessing as curse; things happen to change a human's constitution all the time, but as a vampire, I do not live in fear, thinking that my husband will one day come home and decide to abuse me. I even think of you, my son who once wanted so badly to be a soldier. You will never come home, traumatized from the evils of war, striking out at everyone that you love in your pain. Of all the things we do remember, the pains we felt while we were mortal isn't something we recall too well. Alice has had no reference point until recently, but do you recall the agony of the spanish flu as it took over your body? The torture of watching your parents succumb? Rosalie spends a lot of time musing about the children she never had, but does she dwell on the moments before her death when she lie on the ground beaten, violated and bloodied? The vulnerability and helplessness that she must have felt while those beasts manhandled her? I'm not sure it occurs to her that to become human is to return to being weak and unprotected. Life on this plane is guaranteed neither to us nor to mortals, but at least I will never have to watch the ones I love waste away in illness."

I felt so foolish. I reflected on what Esme had said the day before. Sure, part of my motives had been selfish. I had always been selfish when it came to Bella. If that weren't the case I would have stayed away from her after Alice had her first vision of Bella living as a vampire. But my stilled heart truly was in the right place in wanting to save her from this life; from what we are. Was I wrong in how much of a hell I considered this life to be? I didn't think I was entirely. In retrospect, if I really wanted to scare her away from me I would have told her in agonizing detail every thought I had within that hour after I first caught her scent. I had managed to come up with no less than twenty ways to kill every child in that room so that I could get to her without witnesses. It didn't escape my notice that thinking about killing her this time no longer caused my mouth to pool with venom and my throat to scorch with thirst. Instead I felt sick, and a little deranged.

"But we do wrestle a demon every minute that we live. She can't ever understand the horror of the monster that takes over until she experiences it." I tried to hide the melancholy in my voice, but failed.

"No, she can't. But she does have the advantage of you. None of us had the benefit of forewarning. Perhaps she will be better equipped to deal with the feral side of our nature than any of us."

"There's no way for us to know that for certain," I said.

She nodded in agreement and her gaze narrowed onto a single point in the distance. I understood then that she was walking towards her rose garden.

"And what about saving her from me?"

She didn't miss a beat with her response. "When James attacked her she bled from at least five different injuries. Everyone had to leave her side but you and Carlisle. Let me repeat: everyone but Carlisle and you. You didn't attack her when the smell of her blood was at its most potent. All you could think about was preventing her from dying. I think if you're really honest with yourself you'll find that nothing, not even your thirst, could supersede your desire to keep her alive."

Perhaps Esme was right about this. I had spent several seconds during my talk with Esme yesterday contemplating the possibility that Bella could be dead. Those short moments of absolute torture certainly helped to make her point. I couldn't imagine myself being responsible for invoking that upon myself. It would be tantamount to ripping myself to pieces; it just couldn't be done.

"If you're right, then how am I supposed to change her? How could I possibly bring myself to end her life?"

The thought of it still enraged me. As much as I wanted her for myself, wanted her beside me for eternity... even after all Esme had said, and I had to admit now that everything she was saying made sense, there was still something primal, something integral to me that wouldn't let me think of biting Bella. Of watching her scream as the fiery hell took over her body. I had never been able to reconcile my bipolarity—the part that wanted Bella at my side, and the part of me that wanted her to run from me as far she could manage to get.

Esme kneeled before a single rose that had begun to wilt.

"Good question. I don't have an answer to that one. Perhaps you won't have to be the one to change her. I wish I knew. I think that the first step is just moving past the inevitability that she will have to be changed if you want her to truly live."

She carefully pinched the flower's stem away from the rest of the vine, and handed it to me.

"The sooner you stop drowning in angst over this fact, the better."

All of this led me towards thinking about the one factor that I tried to ignore the most: the inescapable fact that I loved her, desperately so, and we all knew that my love and need for her were inexorable. I had learned so much about myself since I met Bella. I thought about how much I had hurt her; how I was so incredibly rude to her for weeks after that first day in biology lab, and how I had continued to wound her in so many ways since. Could I manage to be with her and not cause her anguish in some way? Could I really be part of her happiness? Though Esme seemed to be convinced that I could fight my way back into Bella's good graces I was still convinced that there was a large possibility that she wanted nothing to do with me.

I would soon find out whether Bella would forgive me or if I was to be condemned to an entirely new level of damnation.


Gray Matters.

I woke up to a steady but loud hum that seemed to envelop me. For a minute I thought I was in an airplane, but that didn't make any sense. I listened more carefully, and I thought I heard the quick but noticeable, rhythmic pulse of a tail rotor. I opened my eyes. The next sounds I heard were faint, but the speaker's face was animated. I could tell she was yelling.

"Can you hear me?"

I nodded.

"Do you know where you are?"

"A ... hel ... copter?"

"So far, so good, my new friend! I'm Elana, and I and my friend Jeff here taking you to the hospital. What's your name?"

"Isa," I whispered. I noticed I couldn't move my head, and my lungs burned.

"Let's try that again; it's hard to hear you, you know. What's your name?"

I hoped that her wisecrack meant that I wasn't bleeding from twenty different places and that I might be alright.

"Eeeeee-sahhh-belllll-uh." I elongated the syllables. The "uh" sound came out choked and late because it hurt to speak. I wasn't sure she heard it.

I noticed then that I couldn't move anything. I think my eyes widened, because the woman standing over me tried to sooth me.

"Okay then, Isabelle, you're going to be alright, we have you strapped in and wrapped up pretty tight here, so you won't be able to move much. I need you to tell me if you can feel things though. I'm going to touch you in a few places, okay?"

I blinked, then mouthed, "kay." I wasn't going to bother correcting my name again.

I felt pressure in several places when Elana prodded at me, and didn't feel them in others. She tried to reassure me.

"Don't panic if you can't feel me here, there could be a lot of things going on. You're going to be fine, alright?"

Her pronunciation of fine sounded like foine. I started to recall what happened. It hit me that I had jumped off the top of a cliff, fell over ninety feet and slammed headlong into a small mountain of rock face. Worse yet, I jumped to escape Victoria, who had finally found a way to get to me. There was little hope in me that I would be foine.

I heard her yell louder in a direction I couldn't track. I could see her make hand signals while she spoke. "Code orange, Trauma One, Presby!"

Once again everything faded to black.


Cracking.

When I woke up again, I felt the heat of the midday sun on my face. I had just enough presence of mind to know that if it were close to noon then I probably wasn't at Jameson North, the hospital closest to the area where I fell; too much time had passed. I was far from McConnells Mills now. I couldn't ask any questions, though, since I was being moved from the helicopter to the building and everything around me was quickly shifting past my vision. Now I was absolutely convinced that my injuries were extensive, and I tried to brace myself for what was to come. I wanted more than anything to go to sleep, but once I was wheeled into the building I heard more people yelling at me, asking me questions. I'm not sure if anyone heard me since I could only utter weakly. I didn't feel the needle enter, I only felt a sensation of cold travel up my arm.

Damn it, blackness again.

I was getting tired of this.

The next time I woke up I felt like I had been hit with a phalanx of angry Spartans, with a SWAT team holding battering rams right behind them, ready to finish off whatever had been left behind. Really, it was that bad. I couldn't move anything, there was a huge tube in my mouth that extended down my throat, every muscle I had screamed in protest, and I ached down to my bones. My thoughts were fuzzy at first, but eventually I could see past the pain to focus on yet more pain. The lights in the room were bright enough to blind me, and I screamed in response.

"AAAAAARrggggghhhhhhhhggguh!" was all that came out.

Two seconds later I heard a voice. "Oh, welcome back! Gimme a sec, looks like you can breath on your own now, so we're gonna take that trach tube out so you can talk to us."

"MmmMMmMmmAAaaarghuh!" I gurgled in protest, and blinked my eyes frantically. Why was it so damned bright?

"Eyes. Eyes? Light? Is the light bothering you?"

"Mmmmguh."

"Sorry 'bout that. I'll turn 'em down for ya. Be back in a sec."

Thirty minutes later the tube was out, but that did not make me much better of a talker. My throat was raw and every sound I could make come out was scratchy. From somewhere in the room I heard another disembodied voice. I tried to track the sound again, but I still couldn't move my head.

"Hey, stop that now, you're in a neck brace and you shouldn't try to move your head."

I heard pages flipping, probably on a clipboard.

"Ah, here we are. Isabella Swan, right?"

"MMmMmmmguh." I found I really wasn't much better at speaking even with the tube out.

"Uh-huh. Congratulations, you're the luckiest girl this side of the Mississippi today."

All I could do was blink.

"Don't worry, I won't expect you to respond unless it's important, and I'll let you know when it's important by saying 'What? I can't hear you!' repeatedly until you get so annoyed you can't help but respond, okay?"

What was with the medical professionals around here with their twisted, morbid senses of humor?

"Okay, now down to business. I'm Dr. Baldwin, and I'm your orthopedic surgeon here at UMPC Presbeterian Hospital. Normally, you'd be talking to an internist right now, but they all jumped ship since you don't actually seem to have enough internal injuries to interest them." He chuckled at his own lame joke.

I recognized the name of the hospital; it was one close to campus. I tried to squeak out my question. "Ow... I get 'ere?"

"Ah. The helicopter brought you here because this hospital is the closest level one trauma center to where you were injured. Your paperwork here says you're a CMU student, so I'm sure they've been contacted and will subsequently be contacting your next of kin. As soon as I hear something, I'll be sure to let you know."

I groaned.

He noticed. "Or not? Let's see here." he read my chart. "You came in with a punctured lung, but it seems to have re-inflated beautifully after a catheter aspiration. You lost a bit of blood, but don't you worry, we have plenty here. We've put you through all the tests we can think of and the end result seems to be a flexion fracture at C-4 and an extension fracture pattern I see at T-12. That means you've fractured your spine in two places, and they're not even bad enough injuries for me to have to go in and have some fun tinkering around a bit."

He pointed to my arm. "You have a hairline fracture on both your left radius and humerus—"

He moved to my leg now. "Your left fibula—"

He pointed lower. "And last but not least, your ankle. It's only fractured, too. You didn't even have the decency to completely break anything." He smiled. "In all seriousness, Isabella, with the usual amount of blunt force trauma from a fall like yours? We normally see all sorts of internal bleeding from the liver and spleen, severed spines, paralysis. Death. How far did you fall?"

I looked at him.

"I heard it was something like ninety feet? Most people die when they fall more than fifty. You fell almost twice that and you have a nothing more than a few fractures, some cuts, scrapes, and a lung with a bruised ego. Either you did something smart that saved your skin or you've got some serious luck."

I didn't feel so lucky right now, and I still had the threat of a vengeful vampire hanging over my head, but I would take his word for it. I wondered where all of my climbing gear was now. I thought that if I ever got my hands on that last cam again I would kiss it every night and keep it under my pillow for as long as lived, even though it was metal, pointy and likely to punch a hole in my skull if mistakenly expanded. When I noticed that the doctor was looking at me, waiting for an answer, I tried to smile at him to acknowledge that I was listening.

"You'll feel better in a few hours. We're going to put you in some splints until the swelling goes down, then we'll put your leg in a cast, and everything else just gets a brace. You'll be in those for eight to twelve weeks or so. There's one little weird thing going on with your blood that we're checking out—it may just be some form of anemia or something; I'll let you know. Other than that, we'll observe you and your lungs for a while, then cut you loose. I don't know the whereabouts of your parents—do you have anyone local that can take care of you, or will we have to keep you until your folks show?"

"I have family here," I managed to scratch out of my sore throat even though it was a bold, big lie.

I had no idea how I was going to manage, but I wasn't going to let Charlie drag me back to Forks and lose a semester of school, especially when I couldn't afford to pay for any extra time. I wasn't close to anyone here and I had no friends that I felt willing to burden with my care, but I was going to manage to get to my classes even if it meant wheeling myself one-handed and taking notes with a pen lodged in my teeth. I started tallying a mental list of a couple other TAs and climbing comrades that might be willing to pick me up from the hospital and drop me off at my dorm.

"Oh, good then," Dr. Baldwin said. "I'm leaving for now. I have a surgery, but a nurse will be in around in ten minutes or so to check on you. You probably won't notice her a bit though, because I'm going to up your meds a bit and send you back to sleep now, 'k? I'll see you again after six or so."

I gasped when I heard what time it was. It hurt. I garbled, but no one heard me: "Six o'clock. I was supposed to be there at six. Waaaaaaiittt ..."

Before I could do anything about it, everything started to fade to—

Aww crap, not this again—