Disclaimer: Stephenie Meyer owns sparkley vampires. Turns out I have a lot of junk.
Last time: Bella and Edward were changed, and the newborns went on their first hunting trip. Alice had a vision of the Collective that doesn't bode well for our heroes.
Day changed to night and the purple velvet sky lightened and turned pink with the dawn, but the vampires sheltered in the out-of-the-way house just outside of town didn't notice. For Bella and Edward, the revelation that they would never sleep, never tire, never change was off-putting. Their conversation with Alice, Jasper, and Eleazar about the challenges and benefits of immortality had not adequately prepared them for the reality of their new lives.
Five days after their change, in the small hours of the morning, Bella started laughing hysterically. Edward descended from the study, where he'd been blasting Mozart to try to drown out the voices in his head, to investigate.
With anyone else, he would have known the reason for the laughter immediately, but Bella's mind still posed a puzzle. She was an enigma to him, and for some reason he couldn't resist probing every mystery she presented for answers. His near-constant attention put Bella on edge, and the air between them was often blue with curses and insults.
"What's funny?" He looked between the hysterical girl and Alice, who sat across the room, staring. Alice shrugged.
"I just realized," Bella gasped, catching an unnecessary breath, "that this has got to be the longest day ever."
Alice snorted, and Edward raised his eyebrows. "Are you sure she can't take a nap?" he asked Alice. "She seems a little sleep deprived."
"Eternity is enough to make anyone a little hysterical," she reasoned. "Let her laugh."
"I'm not hysterical," he said, looking at Bella incredulously. "And I've got everyone's thoughts floating around in my head."
Bella sobered, and the smile slipped from her lips. "Excuse me. We can't all be as perfect as Edward Masen, vampire prodigy."
Carlisle had begun exploring their talents almost immediately following their first hunt, and Bella had been frustrated to discover that her "shield," as they had taken to calling it, was difficult for her to even sense, and impossible for her to manipulate. Meanwhile, Edward's talent took no effort on his part, and he seemed to adjust to it fairly quickly. She resented his easy mastery of their new life as well, and everything from his speed and grace to the sound of his beautiful new voice irritated her. He didn't even make a mess while hunting anymore, and she still ruined her clothes with every kill.
Bella bolted from the house, before he could respond to this new barb. Alice put a hand on his arm to restrain him. "Let me," she said gently. "This won't end well if you try to talk to her again."
She followed Bella, leaving Edward with nothing but the trailing edge of her thoughts as she ran: a slow, soulful song with lyrics in yet another foreign language. After several days of hearing nothing but songs and epic poems in her head, he was beginning to suspect that she did it for the sole purpose of blocking him. It was almost as annoying as Bella's radio silence.
Women are still women, even if they're vampires. Carlisle had come in from a brief hunting trip and watched the confrontation between Edward and Bella from a distance. Edward caught flashes of him with Esme, presenting flowers to his mate with a regretful face as she stared him down dourly.
"What did you do?" Edward asked.
Got carried away at work. I was at the hospital for a week straight before I made it home. Edward whistled, and Carlisle winced. Not my finest hour. In his mind, he surveyed the wreckage of his study. Wallpaper hung in shreds, picture frames lay shattered on the floor, and books were scattered across every available surface. She had even demolished the bookshelves.
"You left her alone when she was a newborn?" Edward said, remembering Carlisle's comment from days before about Esme destroying his study once. "Wasn't that dangerous?"
"She was a year old," Carlisle explained, thinking back to a smallish log cabin on the edge of a wooded area, "and we lived in a rather isolated location. She wasn't a danger to anyone. Except for me, apparently."
"Somehow I don't think Bella would accept flowers from me," Edward said. As he said it, an odd sort of twinge echoed in his chest. He catalogued the feeling carefully, as he had every new sensation he had experienced in the last five days. It was a hollow sort of pain, like the reverberation of a drum pounding in an empty room. Regret? The feeling was foreign, much like his sudden, unexplainable urge to protect her when he saw her in pain.
He left Carlisle and went in search of Jasper, who he found in the dining room, any empty room with neither table nor chairs. Instead, the floor was covered in maps that Jasper had ripped from Alice's atlas. He traced highways with his forefinger and studied the distribution of towns and cities between Lake Forest and a small, red dot somewhere in southern Missouri.
"Spit it out," Jasper said, not looking up.
Edward sat down on the floor next to where Jasper crouched, more for something to do than because he needed to. "Planning our road trip?"
"More like off-road. We can't go anywhere near human populations with you two in tow, which means avoiding roads, towns, subdivisions, highways..."
Edward stared at the map with a furrowed brow. "How is that even possible?"
"Illinois is mostly farmers' fields. Once we get into Missouri we should be able to keep to the woods until we get to Emmett and Rosalie. It won't be easy, but between Alice and myself I think we can keep things under control."
"You know that's really disturbing, right?"
Jasper looked up, momentarily thrown. "Huh?"
"When you say things like that and then imagine ripping Bella or me to pieces." Jasper flinched slightly, and Alice's face swam in his mind. Edward nodded slowly. "I understand. You would do anything to protect her."
There was an uncomfortable moment of silence, during which Jasper's thoughts strayed even further Alice-wards. Edward cleared his throat and stood back up.
"I think I'll go find Carlisle and see if he wants to go out for a bit. A good run would clear my head nicely before we leave tomorrow."
Jasper barely nodded, his thoughts snapping back to the task at hand as Edward departed.
Bella managed to avoid Edward until the group assembled the next evening, although she was only successful because he was just as anxious to avoid her. There was a crackling, unsettling energy that surged between them whenever they were in the same room. Bella interpreted the energy as annoyance and frustration. Edward, on the other hand, felt like a magnet, being tugged along full force until he slammed into an unyielding wall. At first, he assumed the wall was her shield, but he was slowly beginning to suspect it wasn't just her silence—it was everything about her. The fact that she couldn't stand him only made matters worse.
"Now, everyone remembers the rules," Alice said, addressing the small group of vampires on the porch of the Lake Forest house. They were packed for light travel—backpacks, windbreakers for show, and comfortable, sturdy clothing. "We play follow the leader and everything should go fine, barring any unforeseen snap decisions. Carlisle and I will head the group; no one gets to go faster than the leader. Esme, you're in the middle with Edward and Bella."
"Babysitting," Bella muttered. Edward fought to keep a straight face, but Alice just ignored her.
"And Jasper will be bringing up the rear. No one gets to go slower than the caboose." She winked at Jasper, who scowled.
"I'll show you caboose," he threatened.
"Can we just get on the road?" Bella interrupted impatiently. "We've all got perfect memories. It's not like we need to go over the plan so we'll remember it better."
"Just so," Alice said with a shrug. "Perfect memories or not, newborns are notoriously easy to distract. Keep your head in the game." With that, she sprang lightly off the porch and sprinted down the lane, Carlisle close behind her.
"Snotty little know-it-all," Edward said with a grin, following them up the lane.
"Oh, that's rich," Bella snarled, keeping pace with him. "Coming from the Know-It-All In Chief."
"Is that an official title? Because I like it." He smiled winningly, but Bella was unmoved. Her scowl deepened and she looked away, seeming to put all her focus on Alice's back.
Even at vampire speed, the cross-country trip would take all night, and after running in silence for an hour, Bella gave up scowling in silence. Cornfields were just as boring through her newly enhanced eyes as they were when she was human.
"Tell me about Emmett and Rose," she said to no one in particular. Alice glanced back, meeting her eyes for a moment before looking to Esme.
"Emmett is a good soul," Alice said slowly. "So is Rose, but she's a hard one to win over. I have no doubt that eventually we'll have her full support."
Hearing the "but" behind her words, Bella sighed. "Eventually, huh? What about when we first get there?"
"There are a few things you need to know to really understand Rose," Esme put in, looking between Alice, who had slowed down somewhat, and Bella.
Edward, who was listening to Esme and Alice's thoughts in addition to their words, gasped, and then frowned. "God, that's terrible. That poor girl."
"What? What's terrible?" Bella demanded.
"Like most of us, Rosalie didn't have much of a choice in how or when she was changed," Esme began, shaking her head at Edward, who looked as if he was about to interrupt. "In 1933, Rosalie Hale was a beautiful young woman at the center of the social scene in Rochester, New York. She was the belle of every ball, and very sought after. Unfortunately, she caught the eye of a passing nomad."
Edward grimaced. "He just took her? And left her like that?"
"You're getting ahead of the story," Alice chastised. "Royce took her, yes. Plucked her off the street one late night in April. After torturing her and starving her for several days, he changed her; he told her she would be his mate. Later she found out there was a huge manhunt for her. Her family offered a large reward to anyone who could give them news, good or bad. Of course, no one ever knew what really happened to her."
"When Rose found out what she had become, she sank into a deep depression," Esme said quietly. "She wouldn't eat. Royce held her captive for nearly a year, occasionally raping her and force feeding her human blood when she became too weak to resist him."
"She was a newborn, though," Bella protested. "She was stronger than him! Why didn't she fight back?"
"Rose wasn't mentally equipped for life as a vampire," Alice explained. "Something inside of her just... broke. She may have been physically stronger, but Royce was manipulative and cruel. Even the strongest man can be a prisoner of his own mind. Terror and despair are powerful weapons."
"So how did she escape? And how do you know her?" Bella glanced over to Edward, who had a look of intense concentration on his face. She grimaced, annoyed that he was getting a far more complete version of events through his mental eavesdropping.
"After about a year, Royce grew tired of caring for a catatonic vampire. One day, he abandoned her in the woods. That's where Carlisle and I found her," Esme said. "We nursed her back to health and showed her our way of life. She never drank from another human."
"Well, that's not entirely true," Carlisle said, calling back over his shoulder to join the conversation. "She tasted a bit of Emmett's blood, if you'll recall."
"A marginal amount, and not on purpose," Esme said kindly.
"I was wondering when Emmett was going to make an appearance in this story," Bella said. "Did Rose change him?"
"No," Carlisle said, looking ahead again. "I did."
"You did?"
"That was awfully hypocritical of her," Edward said with a frown.
"Don't judge her too harshly," Alice said. "In her position, you might have done the same."
"Done what?" Bella asked.
"When Rose found Emmett in the woods, he was dying from a bear attack. She looked at him and just knew."
"Knew what?" The exasperation was clear in Bella's voice.
"That he was her true mate," Esme said simply. "It's often very obvious when it happens. The strength of the attraction is just too much for us to resist. It isn't really a choice. She carried him more than one hundred miles to where she knew Carlisle and I still lived. She's felt guilty about that day ever since. They left us almost immediately for life on their own, though we still see them from time to time."
"Was Emmett very upset?" Bella asked, growing confused as Alice, Esme, and Carlisle broke out into laughter.
"Emmett is what you call a natural," Carlisle said with a chuckle. "Not remotely phased by the change, at least not once the pain went away. He took to immortality like a duck to water and never looked back once."
"He doesn't think of it like she does," Alice said with a sigh. "In her mind, she's no better than Royce, plucking a helpless victim from the world for her own benefit."
"But they're really mated? He loves her?" Edward asked.
"Yes," Esme said firmly. "But to Rosalie, that fact is irrelevant."
"She sounds stubborn," Bella commented.
"Pot, pot, kettle, kettle," Edward muttered under his breath. She heard, of course, and glared at him.
The next several hours of the trip passed quietly.
AN: I won't give you any excuses. Basically, life got a little crazy, as it sometimes does, and fic took a hit. Hope you like the update, and that some of you are still hanging in there, despite my horrible lack of updates. Thanks for reading.