Hello! Finally! I've had this new chapter ready for more than a week but the stupid uploader thingy wouldn't let me get through. But here you go! Sorry about the slowness, as always, but if you won't give up on me, I won't give up on you! I'm definitely in this for the long haul. If you like my little story, review it; if you really like it, tell someone about it. Thank you endlessly for reading.

I'd like to be under the sea in an octopus's garden with mllebojangles!

Everything belongs to SMeyer.

11

Bella was late getting home that evening, and it was almost full dark by the time Alice dropped her off. Once inside, she dropped her bag in the dim hallway and slumped against the door. She felt tapped out, bone-tired. She kept seeing Emmett kneeling before Rosalie, her hand almost touching him, not quite.

She sighed and headed for the stairs. A shower would make her feel better, then she might have the wherewithal to deal with her homework; after the scene with Rosalie, she hadn't been able to concentrate on anything much. As she climbed the first few stairs, there was noise from the kitchen, and Charlie's voice came out to her: "Bells? Is that you?"

"Yeah, I'm home," she answered. "I'm going up to –" she began, but he was coming down the hallway to meet her, his napkin still in his hand.

"You're pretty late getting in," he said. "You were at the Cullens'?"

Oh, not now, Bella thought, but she said, "Yeah, we, uh, lost track of time."

Charlie looked her over, his brow furrowed.

"Sorry," she added lamely.

"Huh," he said noncommittally. "Have you eaten anything? I started without you. It's just frozen pizza, but it's hot out of the oven."

Bella hesitated. She had forgotten about dinner, and pizza sounded good, frozen or not. But at the moment she didn't relish the thought of sitting down for a convivial meal with Charlie. "Um…" she said. "No, but… I'd really just rather –"

"Bella," he interrupted her, sounding exasperated. "Come have dinner." Bella blinked at this uncharacteristic show of paternal authority, but he was already heading back to the kitchen, and she followed.

She helped herself to a slice of pizza, then turned to go to the table, and froze. There scattered across the tabletop were months' worth of college brochures, mostly unopened, which she had shoved in a drawer. Charlie was watching her carefully, and she doggedly cleared off her space and sat down to eat. Giving a little huff of a sigh, he sat down opposite her.

"Look what I found when I went looking for the masking tape," he said. "There's a whole drawer full of these. I hadn't realized you'd gotten so many." Bella said nothing, eating her pizza. "So, Bells, what is your plan for next year? Have you thought about any of these places?"

Bella swallowed hard. "Um… sort of. I don't know."

"Well, have you applied for any of them?"

"I've… uh… I've kind of been thinking that I'd like to take some time off. You know. Get a job and save up some money."

She looked up at him and saw his disapproving frown. "Honey, you know you don't have to worry about the cost. Your mom and I have talked about it. We each have some money saved up, and we can help you with loans for whatever we can't cover." She shifted uncomfortably in her seat, feeling trapped. "Why do you want time off? You're always doing so well in school. Aren't you looking forward to getting out of here? Getting to college?"

She halfheartedly tried to make light of it. "What, are you trying to get rid of me?" But when she looked up, his expression was serious, and she felt her own face fall. She scowled down at her plate.

"Have you applied anywhere at all?"

She threw her half-eaten pizza down on her plate. A panic she couldn't explain was rising in her. "Dad, I don't want to talk about this right now. Can we please just leave it?"

"Jesus, Bella, it's May of your senior year! If you're not going to think about college now, when do you plan to get around to it, huh?" She felt tears brewing in the back of her throat and she stared stonily down at the table, trying to will them away.

Charlie tried a different tack, speaking more gently. "Sweetheart, I think you should reconsider. Look, I've checked out some of these brochures – a bunch of these places have rolling admissions which means you haven't missed the deadlines yet, and you can still schedule interviews . And if you want to transfer to a different school after a year, that's ok too. See, this one looks great… look at these pictures –"

She abruptly shoved her chair back and launched herself away from the table. The tightness in her chest was getting unbearable. "Dad, I can't deal with this right now!"

"Hey! Bella! What's going on with you!"

"I… I just… can't…" She struggled to keep her voice under control and failed. She hunched over the sink miserably.

"This is about the Cullen kid, isn't it?" he said heavily. "Honey, I know he's important to you, but this is your future we're talking about."

The silence after his words was deafening. Bella fought to get a grip on her rising panic. What's wrong with me? she thought despairingly.

"Can we at least talk about –" Charlie began. Bella whirled around and interrupted him.

"It's Edward," she said, as the tears began to roll down her face. "He's sick. He's really sick and he might die." Her voice was trembling uncontrollably, but she let it go, let the tears fall. A cold, distant part of her watched as the realization dawned on Charlie's face, and she let herself cry harder. "I'm so w-w-worried about him and I c-c-can't do anything ab-bout it," she sobbed. "I can't s-s-sleep, I can't think ab-bout anything…"

Charlie, looking horrified, had gotten up and put his arms around her; she abandoned herself and cried against his chest. He made shushing noises and hesitantly stroked her hair. That distant part of her felt a twinge of guilt for manipulating him so handily, but mostly she was relieved – relieved that now he knew, and relieved that there was no more talk of college, no more talk of the future, no more questions for which she had no answers.

When she had calmed down a bit, he helped her into her chair and sat down opposite her. "Can you tell me what's going on?"

She took a hiccoughing breath and said shakily, "He's been out of school for weeks now. They don't really know what's wrong with him. They think he got bitten by something when he was traveling, and it's doing all kinds of crazy things to – to his nervous system, I think."

Charlie rubbed at his moustache worriedly. "I guess this is why you've been over there so much lately. Jesus Christ, Bella, why didn't you say something sooner? Doesn't his dad know how to help him?" She shook her head mutely. "Well, it's not… it's not contagious, is it?" She shook her head again, fighting to keep from crumpling into tears again.

The concern was plain on his face, and Bella asked hesitantly, "I… I can keep going to see him, right?" Her lip quivered.

He answered hurriedly. "Oh, of course, sweetheart. You'll let me know how he's doing?" I'm so manipulative, she thought in disgust, but the relief washed over her as she nodded. "And, Bells, next time don't wait so long to tell me if there's something going on, ok?"

"Ok," she said, and just to put icing on the cake, she added meekly, "I'm sorry, Dad."

"Don't be sorry, honey," he said gruffly, looking uncomfortable.

In her room later, she brushed her hair before bed, watching her reflection in the mirror as if it belonged to someone else. The face was pale and composed; the eyes were flat and emotionless. What on earth was that about? she wondered. Why should his questions about the future have upset me so much?

Because she didn't know if she had a future, she realized. Because this unrelenting uncertainty was worse than any bad news could be. She had no clue what a future with Edward might look like, and the idea of a future without him was unthinkable. She was pinned between impossibilities, and could see no way out, especially not in Charlie's prosaic ideas of what she should be doing with her life. Later, she thought, setting down the brush. I'll think about it later. And if later never came, then she'd never have to think about it.

Each day at school felt as long as a week, but graduation came steadily closer. Bella floated through her days with a sense of unreality. She was detaching herself, distancing herself from the rest of her world, almost as thoroughly as Edward had; only the hours spent by his side felt at all real.

The conversations of her friends grated on her ears more and more. Their concerns seemed impossibly faraway and trivial, as if they were characters on a show that she only halfheartedly followed. The pity in Angela's eyes was too much to bear, so she stopped looking at Angela altogether.

One day as she and Alice approached the cafeteria, she stopped abruptly just outside the door, and couldn't make her feet take another step. The image of the table full of her friends – their bright open faces, their loud voices and their laughter – was suddenly too much for her to bear.

Alice was looking at her strangely. Bella asked desperately, "Do you mind if we sit alone today?"

"Of course not," said Alice simply, concern plain on her face. They filled their trays – or, rather, Bella filled her tray and Alice followed her, no longer needing to pretend – and slunk off to the Cullens' old table at the side of the cafeteria. She didn't look in the direction of Angela's table. Voices washed around them in a noisy blur, but around her and Alice was a little zone of blessed silence. Bella breathed deeply in utter relief.

After that day, by tacit agreement, she and Alice always sat alone. The quizzical looks – or, in some cases, glares – from the other kids couldn't touch her. She let the walls grow up higher and higher around her.

Edward was restless. He sprawled awkwardly in his chair, looking utterly out of place, as if his limbs were all the wrong shape for the furniture, or as if the room had been built for a different species entirely. Bella, studying for her history final, found herself watching him uneasily. His eyes were usually on her.

Jasper was sitting with them that day, and he also seemed incapable of focusing on the laptop that was open in front of him. His eyes flicked back and forth between Edward and Bella.

Edward abruptly slammed his book shut with enough force to send it spinning across the table. Bella jumped. He propped his elbows on the table and seized two fistfuls of his hair, as if he were holding his head in place.

"How's it going over there, Edward?" Jasper asked, his voice steady and calm.

"I'm sick of reading," growled Edward. "I don't see the point."

Bella said, "You know that we're trying to help Carlisle, so that he can help you when the time comes."

Edward scoffed. "Carlisle. He's too hesitant. He just wants to wait. We need to do something now."

"Well, what do you propose?" asked Jasper smoothly over Edward's impatience. The question only seemed to antagonize Edward further, and he snarled in Jasper's direction. Very slowly, Jasper closed his laptop.

"I know how you feel," said Bella softly. He went still at the sound of her voice. "The waiting is getting to all of us. But you know that we're all here with you – I'm here with you…" Her voice trailed away. It wasn't working, so instead she reached for his shoulder, wanting to soothe him.

A massive shudder wracked his frame at her touch. "Bella…" he breathed, then inhaled convulsively. He turned toward her, and his face was beyond inhuman; alien, incomprehensibly other. Her stomach plunged, cold and sick with horror as if she had seen a gruesome deformity in his face, but then he said again, "Bella," and his voice was rich with resonances that rang along her bones, freezing her in her chair. It was an instantaneous betrayal by her entire body; it was as if he had never before turned the full force of his seduction on her, as if every pull she had ever felt toward him had only been a fraction of what he was capable of. She was immobilized, torn between revulsion and attraction, desperate to hear him speak again, horrified that he might speak again, for surely she couldn't withstand another word.

"Bella, I think perhaps you should leave," came Jasper's voice, cutting through the hypnosis. She shivered all over, and felt herself break free. The great irresistible spotlight of Edward's attention had switched off and she felt hollow, emptied.

Edward swung his head slowly around to look at Jasper. Jasper was standing now, leaning across the table toward Edward, staring him down with all his might. For a moment Edward swayed, his eyes unfocused, but then all at once he snapped upright. Jasper reeled backward as if he had been struck across the face, and Edward stood up, his long frame unfolding forever until it seemed that his head brushed the ceiling. His face darkened into fury, a towering black rage.

"Don't you dare try to control me!" he roared. "She's MINE!"

He whipped around to face Bella, teeth bared, and he sprang at her with a snarl, seizing her, nearly snapping her neck as he pulled her in.

Bella screamed.

Faster than lightning, faster than thought, Jasper was there, ripping her out of Edward's grasp. She felt Edward's fingers bruising her arms deeply as Jasper tore her away, and then he had whirled her around, putting himself between her and Edward, trapping her against a wall and making a cage for her body out of his limbs.

"Emmett!" he bellowed. "Carlisle! Someone help me!" The force of his cry rattled Bella's bones, and she cringed, pressed between his body and the wall. Under his arm she could see Edward wild-eyed with animalistic fury, screaming unintelligibly as he tore at Jasper to try to get to her. Jasper held, solid as stone, one forearm curled protectively around her head.

Emmett arrived, nearly taking the door off its hinges. He thundered, "Edward!" and tackled him to the ground. Bella dimly heard the shrieks and crashes of wrecked furniture, then Carlisle and Esme were there, and they joined Emmett, who was having difficulty pinning Edward down. Edward continued to scream, his voice rising.

"Get Bella out of here, Jasper," Carlisle shouted.

Jasper stepped back from the wall and Bella nearly fell against him, reaching out blindly to catch herself with her hands. He held her up with an arm around her shoulders and steered her quickly from the room. She couldn't breathe. Something was wrong with her legs; she had only gone a few steps down the hall when she almost fell again. Without breaking stride, Jasper bent and swept her up into his arms. As he strode away the screams continued to rise, sounding like nothing that could possibly come from a human throat, metal grating on metal. Edward never seemed to draw breath. Bella grabbed a fistful of Jasper's shirt.

Alice and Rosalie were on the stairway as Jasper passed through the living room. "Help them," he said curtly, jerking his head back toward the source of the noise in answer to the question in Alice's wide eyes. Bella squeezed her own eyes shut tight.

Jasper turned, pushed open a door with his knee. Fresh air. They were outside. He moved to put her down, but she cried out and clung to him. He swore under his breath, then sat smoothly on the top step of the porch. She was shaking, long deep shivers that seemed to rise from the bottom of her gut.

"It's ok, Bella," said Jasper softly. "You're safe. Nothing's going to hurt you."

Edward's screams cut off abruptly with a high wail, and the sudden silence was almost worse than the sound had been. Bella buried her face in Jasper's chest, which was very still. She held on to her handful of his shirt as if it were her lifeline.

Then the screaming began again, but it was different this time. There were words, or, rather, just one word:

"BELLLLAAAAA! BELLLLLAAAAAAA!"

Jasper's arms tightened around her. The first sobs shook loose from her body, ugly sobs, convulsive and inexorable, wracking her entire body.

The front door opened. Quiet footsteps, and Alice's voice.

"Is she ok?"

"You can see for yourself."

"I mean, did he hurt her?"

"I don't think so. I don't think she's bleeding. I may have hurt her myself – I had to slam her against the wall pretty fast."

A sigh. "Carlisle says we have to get her away from here if we want any chance of getting him under control."

"You should take her home. I'm sure they could use an extra set of hands in there. Here, take her –"

He moved to transfer Bella to Alice, but Bella shrieked "No!" through her sobs and clung to him harder.

"Can't you help her? Calm her down?"

"Believe me, I'm trying." His voice was grim.

There was a pause, then Alice: "Maybe you should take her."

"Give me your keys."

The door opened and closed again. A jingle of car keys, and Jasper stood again, shifting her slightly in his arms. A car door; he bent and lowered her carefully into the passenger seat.

"Bella, you have to let me drive," he said gently, unhooking her arm from around his neck, loosening her fist where she had made a wrinkled mess of the front of his shirt. She curled into a ball in the passenger seat. He closed her door; his door opened and closed.

The car purred to life and accelerated down the driveway. Bella felt as if there were an elastic cord tied from her heart to the house vanishing behind her in the trees, tightening painfully the farther away they went.

Jasper was silent. She opened her eyes and saw that they were approaching her street. "No! Jasper," she cried out. He looked over at her with worried eyes. "I don't want to go home yet. Can we please just drive? Please?"

He drove out of town, the tires whispering over the wet road as the car wound its way through the endless forest of green mossy columns and green dripping canopies. Her sobs had subsided to the occasional ragged breath. She wiped her face with her sleeve; her upper arms hurt terribly, and the back of her head. Jasper glanced over at her occasionally; she stared ahead through the windshield.

The road he had chosen brought them out to the coast and curved along the cliffs above the water. The sky and the water were both gray, and the monotony soothed her. Jasper was content to drive in silence, and so they drove.

After half an hour of drifting in a gray fog, Bella lifted her head. They were approaching a headland and the road curved out to stay along the coast. "Jasper," she said, her voice creaky from tears and disuse, "can we stop here?"

"Of course," he said automatically, and pulled off to the side of the road.

She got out of the car. A breath of wind from the ocean ruffled her hair, briny with salt and earthy with the scent of wet rock and sand. She breathed deeply and went to sit on a rock, facing out toward the water. After a moment, Jasper came and sat beside her.

"He would have killed me," she said. The calmness of her voice surprised her.

"I've been worried that something like this would happen," he said.

She rubbed absently at a sore spot on the back of her arm. "You stopped him."

He glanced at her, then looked back out at the ocean.

She followed the direction of his gaze. Everything was gray: soft gray clouds, steel-gray ocean, gray waves breaking on charcoal-gray rocks. Nothing was vivid or sharp-edged; everything was as blurred as she felt. She blinked slowly, feeling nothing.

"Jasper," she said with an effort, "are you controlling my mood?"

His smile was wry and sad. "I figured it was the least I could do."

"Can you let me feel my feelings now?"

He said, "Are you sure?"

She nodded.

The fog lifted, not all at once but gradually, a shade at a time, as if he were testing her balance and allowing her to adjust to the strain before giving her more. He watched her carefully. At the last, there it all was: Edward in his madness, attacking her in hunger, teeth bared in his alien face. Anger, hurt, sorrow, betrayal, fear: it all came back.

She took a shuddering breath and let it out.

"You're ok?"

She pushed her hair back from her face. "I think so. I mean, I will be." He was still watching her closely, his brows drawn together. Her voice quavered dangerously. "But I don't know if Edward will be."

His face was difficult to read. "If anyone can get him through this transformation in one piece, it's Carlisle," he said. "We've known since the beginning that there was going to be a horrible time. I wish you hadn't been caught in the middle of it."

I'm always in the middle of it, Bella thought, and wrapped her arms around herself against the breeze. The movement hurt her. "Ow," she said.

"Are you hurt?" he asked immediately.

"Only a little – my arms." She finally acknowledged the slow ache that had been building in her head, radiating from the back of her skull. "And my head." She pushed up her sleeves as far as they would go, and they both looked for a moment at the deep purple bruises darkening her skin, bruises in the shapes of two gripping hands. "Well," she said ruefully, "I guess I'll be wearing long sleeves for a week or two." She rubbed at the back of her head.

"May I?" he asked. She tilted her head forward and he examined the back of her head with careful fingers. He hissed in sympathy. "You're going to have a bit of a goose-egg there. That was my doing – I do apologize."

"It's all right," Bella said, rubbing at the bump. She had a sudden vivid memory of Jasper slamming her into the wall, and she winced.

"I'm sorry," said Jasper.

"Oh, don't be sorry – I know you were protecting me –"

"No, I'm sorry about everything," he said. "I'm sorry for all the harm that we've done to you. I'm sorry your life has been turned upside-down. I'm sorry beyond words for any… distress… I've ever caused you." She looked down and kept silent. "Sometimes it seems that my family has done nothing but evil to you."

"Carlisle said something like that to me once. It's true that my life will never be completely normal ever again. But I don't mind," she said fiercely. "It was my choice. Never to have met Edward… I would never give him up, not for anything. If a normal life is a life without him, then I don't want it."

There was a sad half-smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Edward is lucky to have you," he said. "He loves you more than his own life. You know that, don't you? Regardless of what happened today?"

What happened today. She remembered Edward's face, his animalistic fury. The bruises on her arms throbbed. Her throat abruptly too tight for speech, she nodded.

Jasper was silent for a moment, looking out at the water with his tawny eyes. She wondered suddenly what color his eyes had been in his human life – stormy gray like the ocean below them, or blue as the sky hidden somewhere above the clouds? She almost had the courage to ask him, almost, but not quite.

"You're probably not going to be able to see him for a while," he continued after a moment. "I'm sure you know that, but I just want you to be ready. In truth, I'm surprised –" He bit back the rest of his sentence unsaid.

"What?" she asked. When he didn't answer, she urged, "Surprised at what?"

He sighed. "I'm surprised that Carlisle let him keep seeing you as long as he did. Then again, he and Edward both have always had an overinflated sense of Edward's strength." His voice was grim. "Perhaps they've both forgotten some truths about strength and weakness."

Bella felt bleak, looking out over the water. In retrospect, it did seem foolhardy of Carlisle to allow their continued visits despite Edward's deteriorating condition. Somehow it had never occurred to her that Carlisle might be wrong about something. It wasn't a comforting thought.

And what if he was wrong about other things? What if he was wrong about the viability of the blood transfusion? What if he was wrong about their chances of success? What if Emmett had been right all along, and this was really just a suicide mission, and she had been watching Edward dying right before her eyes and hadn't stopped him or saved him?

And what if today were the last time I ever saw him?

She could suddenly see him before her again, crazed and wild. She's mine, he had roared, and then he had taken her, like a possession, like a commodity. To be consumed and used up and thrown away. No gentle words or reassurance could stand in the face of that stark reality: he was bigger and stronger, and in that moment she had been a rag doll in his hands and unable to protect her body and the self that it housed. The bruises on her arms throbbed. He wasn't himself, she knew; he wasn't in his right mind. But there was something in him that could do this, and she couldn't stop him.

A heavy tear fell from each of her eyes and splashed on her hands. Jasper, no doubt sensing her mood, watched her with a deepening frown of dismay and contrition. She scrubbed wearily at her face with her hands. She was so tired of crying.

"I'm ready…" she said shakily. "I'm ready not to be feeling anything now. Please."

Out of sorrow for her grief and his own part in it, he gave her the kindest thing he could: tranquility and calm, a golden haze of serenity, the silence of sunlight and the dusty whisper of wheatfields. Defying the gray all around them, he conjured for her the languid Southern summers of his childhood, the deep honeyed stillness of a countryside unmarred by jet engines and combine tractors. He gave the peace he had known as a boy and which still, despite everything in his past, lay at his very bones. She sighed as it washed over her and leaned against him, exhausted.

Her head was heavy on his shoulder. Slowly, cautiously, he inhaled her scent: her hair, her tears, her fear, her love, the blood rushing just under her skin. He put his arm carefully around her shoulders, supporting her. She closed her eyes.