Title: What Dreams May Come

Summary: Bella and Edward settle happily into married life at Dartmouth but Bella's dreams of a mysterious child persist, drawing them into a centuries old deception with devastating consequences. A Breaking Dawn AU.

Rating: M

Disclaimer: Twilight and all related places and characters belong to Stephenie Meyer.

A/N: I don't have anything in particular to say this time, but I do want to say 'Happy Viewing' to those of you who will be going to see the movie over the weekend and commiserations to those of you like me who have to wait a few weeks for it to be released in our respective countries. As always, Read, Review, Enjoy!

Quote: Where there is no imagination, there is no horror – Arthur Conan Doyle


Chapter 11: Fright Night


Alice has got to be kidding me.

My eyes roamed over the newly delivered package before me, still unable to grasp exactly what it was I was looking at, skimming over lace and ribbon and ruffles…and was that a feather?

Trust me Bella, she had said. You will look amazing, she had said. Edward won't be able to keep his hands off of you, she had said. Well, actually, I thought, eyeing the shortness of the outfit, with the amount of skin I was about to put on show, that one was probably a given…if only because he'd be covering me up to protect me from wandering eyes all night.

I sighed, fingering the blood red material. The past two weeks had crawled by, marked by increasingly large work loads from my classes, and the utterly futile search so far to track down any information about my dream child, despite our family's best efforts. So when Cam had invited us to a Halloween party held by his student housing cluster, Edward had accepted on our behalf, cutting off my protests with a patient reminder that I needed a break which tonight's party would apparently provide quite nicely.

I had to admit that once I had gotten over my initial reluctance and handed over the hard job of finding a costume to Alice, that I'd been somewhat looking forward to seeing Edward dressed up. My mind had conjured up many different ideas that Alice could choose, from me being the Elizabeth to his Mr Darcy, or the Juliet to his Romeo to even being the Mina Harker to his Dracula, which I thought was deliciously ironic (I had shared that one with Edward, who'd vehemently vetoed the idea, despite the rather concerted 'effort' I had put into changing his mind). In the end though, Alice had instead sent over this corseted, ruffled monstrosity masquerading as a Saloon/Can-Can girl outfit.

With the party starting in less than an hour and no available alternative costume, I breathed in all of the courage I had and pulled on the black fishnet stockings and the knee-length, blood red skirt which was hiked up on one side to expose black ruffles, comforting myself with the thought of making Edward promise to surreptitiously crush all cameras in my immediate vicinity. After I spent a good ten minutes trying to wrestle myself into the matching red and black corset trimmed in lace, I gave into the inevitable and called out my husband's name with a defeated sigh.

"Edward?"

"Yes love?" came his voice from down the stairs, having decided to follow Alice's instruction that we couldn't see each other's costumes till we were wearing them (a small part of me took satisfaction in the fact that I'd be breaking that rule…take that Alice!) and therefore had gotten dressed in the lounge.

"Can you come here please? I need your help."

I had barely finished the sentence when I could see him reflected in the mirror, standing in the doorway with his eyes riveted to my half-dressed form. I whirled around, and began to wonder at the unfairness of life. In a match to my costume, Alice had dressed him as a Western gentleman, one of the more upper-class patrons of the saloon-visiting set, a look that suited him so perfectly that he could have easily been pulled straight from that time while I was stuck looking like one of the rejected extras from Moulin Rouge. He wore fitted black slacks with a cream shirt, overlaid with a burnished gold waistcoat and black tailed coat, finished off with a blood-red silk cravat and his usually unruly hair slicked back to perfection.

"Bella?" he prompted, when I had done nothing more than stare at him for a minute or so and a small blush took up residence on my cheeks under the heated gaze of his gleaming golden eyes and the lustful smirk I could see curling his upper lip. Suddenly, my outfit didn't seem like such a bad idea.

"I, uh…can't do up the corset by myself," I stuttered, breath shortening as he practically stalked towards me, all the lethal grace of a predator put to use as he crossed the few metres to where I stood frozen.

"Turn around," he commanded softly and I spun slowly on my heel till I faced the mirror once again, eyes glued to his reflected form as his cool hands lightly fluttered up my arms only to gently slide down the thin black straps to grasp the edges of the corset. With achingly slow movements, he worked his way from the top of the corset to the bottom, fingers caressing down my spine with every small silver clasp he closed. By the time he had finished, my eyes were closed and my breath was escaping my lungs in little more than wordless gasps.

His hands shifted to sneak around my waist, his body pressed against mine so close that I could easily feel the affect I was having on him. Sweet breath blew across my neck and I felt the light touch of his lips against my pulse point, the contrast between the tenderness of the gesture and the undercurrent of danger it provoked making my insides quiver with need.

"Edward," I whimpered, unsure if I was reminding him we had to leave soon or encouraging him to devour me whole. Apparently he took it as the former, his hands relinquishing their grip around my waist even as he murmured into my ear.

"I'm not letting you out my sight for the next few hours and when we come back home…" he let his sentence trail off, the smoldering look I could see in his eyes via the mirror finishing his thought better than words ever could, "I'll be downstairs."

"Wait," I blurted out, desperate to keep him near me, "Stay…you could help me with this hair thing," I gestured towards the feathery clip sitting on the dresser.

I could see him tense up, his hands clenched in fists by his side, looking for all the world like he was fast in danger of losing control

"Bella…" he practically growled, "If I stay, we'd never leave and that beautiful costume would become scrap material."

"So," I protested softly, but he'd already disappeared out the door, leaving me to finish getting ready alone, all the time wondering whether Cam and Keely would mind if we only stuck around for an hour…


"Are you having fun?"

The question was voiced loudly, yet I could still barely hear it over the noisy strains of Monster Mash echoing over the speakers.

"Do I look like I'm having fun?"

Edward just shook his head at my hissed response, chuckling and throwing a steadying arm around my waist as I stumbled back into him to avoid being run over by a rather tipsy Frankenstein. He'd long since given me his coat in an effort to prevent himself from inflicting harm on the male half of our fellow partygoers (apparently he wasn't the only one to find my outfit…'pleasing' to the eye) and I pulled it tight around my form as I caught a cowboy leering at me from his sprawled position in the corner.

The party had started off well enough as Cam and Keely (or should I say Gomez and Morticia) had introduced us to some other friends of theirs, people slowly trickling into the building dressed in a colourful assortment of costumes. Of course, then came the inevitable opening of some illegally-acquired liquor, the pumping up of the stereo volume and everything had just degenerated from there.

"Have we been here long enough?" I asked, tottering slightly in my black heels as I leant up to whisper in his ear for appearance's sake, since he could've easily heard me even if I was on the other side of the room.

"I believe we have been," he responded with a grin, eyes dropping to where his coat had gaped open slightly to reveal a hint of the black and red lace beneath, but before I could drag him bodily out the door and demand he drive us home as fast as possible, a breathless Cam appeared before us.

"Hey, Edward, do you think you could give me a hand for a minute? The band's finally rocked up and I need to move some of the furniture around to make space for their equipment."

My husband looked down at me and I nodded to let him know it was ok if we delayed our escape by a few minutes.

"Of course," he replied to Cam, then leant down to brush a quick kiss against my lips, "I'll be right back."

"I'll hold you to that," I said softly, watching as he and Cam weaved their way through the crowd. My vampire was definitely one of those people who looked good from every angle.

Deciding that I might as well find Keely to say goodbye before Edward returned, I grabbed my glass of coke from the table we'd been standing next to and started to carefully search out my friend, all the while avoiding dancing aliens and wobbly pirates. I had just spotted her chatting away to a Snow White I remembered being introduced to as a fellow English major named Ashley when someone bumped into me and I stumbled, barely managing to stay on my feet and keep my drink from being spilled all over the floor.

"Hey! Watch where you're going please," I exclaimed, only to find that the perpetrator had disappeared. Shaking my head at the rudeness of some people and downing the rest of my drink to avoid any future spillage mishaps, I finally managed to reach Keely and Ashley, who were apparently engaged in a heated discussion of the supernatural elements of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.

"No, their ghosts were merely used an allegory for the enduring yet haunted nature of their relationship, how their souls were destroyed by their love and therefore will be unable to find peace," Keely insisted, eyes lighting up when she noticed me approach, "Bella! You're the Bronte expert, do you think she used the ghosts as a specific literary metaphor or simply as part of the gothic fabric of the story?"

Glad that at least some people here were still sober enough to keep their conversations above grunts and slurred garble, I joined in, knowing that Edward would easily be able to find me when he was finished helping Cam.

Ten minutes of bantering back and forth over the supernatural undertones in the novel later and I inexplicably began to feel light-headed all of a sudden, my mind becoming increasingly clouded as the level of noise in the room became a dull roar in my ears. Blinking to try and clear the sensation, I thrust out a hand to lean against the wall as a wave of vertigo overtook me, nausea swirling up in my stomach so ferociously that it took a supreme effort to choke down the bile in my throat.

"But do you agree with the theory that Catherine and Heathcliff are the diametrically opposed halves of the one soul? That he is literally the devil to her angel?"

I registered Ashley's question but was unable to answer, my mouth feeling like it had been stuffed full of cotton wool and my eyes seeing nothing but a steadily dimming blurred outline.

"Bella? Are you ok?" Keely's voice was filled with concern, becoming even more frantic as my legs gave out beneath me and I dropped heavily to the floor, unable to control my limbs and rapidly losing my sense of sight, of sound. I could just vaguely make out her hazel eyes before they were replaced with burning gold and I faintly registered the worried calls of my name before darkness closed in around me and I registered no more.


I huddled against the cold wall of my prison, feeling the drops of moisture roll down from the moss-covered stone onto my body, the steady plink of them hitting the floor elsewhere a steady rhythm that had taken up permanent residence in my head. The thin scrap of coarse fabric which served as my only covering was rotting from the damp, providing only protection for what was left of my dignity and nothing else.

The gurgling of my stomach was a constant reminder of the hunger gnawing at my insides, the terrible ache of emptiness that I could not satisfy. They had denied me food as another of their 'experiments', wanting to know how long I could survive on only the dirty water which pooled in the corner of my cell now that my immortality had become recently fixed, my body no longer aging as a human's but forever frozen like a vampire's even as my heart still beat and blood still flowed through my veins.

A scraping overhead caught my attention, my eyes rising as the grating high above was uncovered to let in my few brief daily minutes of sunshine, the only warmth I ever experienced in this dank hole. I measured the passage of time by these few moments, the one thing I had to look forward to, the one thing that kept me sane asides from the faded memory of loving crimson eyes and pale arms wrapped tight.

Mouth parched, I waited till they took my sunshine away again before crawling across to the pooled water, cupping my hands in the freezing liquid, carrying it quickly to my face to let it run down my throat, though not enough, never enough to make me completely satisfied. As the water stilled from my disruption, I gazed upon the murky reflection in a familiar ritual to remind myself of who I was.

Dirty brown locks, wild and tangled framed a thin, pale face with gaunt cheekbones and paper-thin lips, once vivid green eyes now merely a dull jade, faded by the loss of innocence wrought upon me much too young.

I am mortal, yet forever.

I am a perversion, yet may soon prove a saviour.

I am Gabriel…and this is my eternity.

It was with a throbbing head that awareness finally returned to me, my limbs feeling heavy, my mouth dry. There was something cold and wet pressed against my forehead and as the fog began to dissipate from my mind, my eyes blinking slowly open, I realized it was a cold compress held firmly in the grip of familiar pale fingers.

"Bella?"

I groaned, trying to wet my parched mouth when a cup was brought to my face, cool water slipping between my lips. I gulped it down a little too fast though and began to splutter before I was gently propped up, a hand rubbing soothing circles on my back.

"Easy love, not too fast."

Edward's face came into view, his eyes filled with worry yet carrying a simmering undertone of anger which I had no explanation for. My gaze slid off of him to check my surroundings, surprised to see the dark wooden walls of our bedroom.

"Edward," I whispered softly, my head still pounding unbearably, 'What happened? The last thing I remember I was talking to Keely and then…"

I trailed off as his face became stormy, his eyes burning with rage. It was an expression I had seen only a few times before, the first being a tense car ride through Port Angeles the night he confirmed that he was a vampire.

"Someone slipped something into your drink," he snarled, face looking away so I couldn't see the murderous intent in his gaze, "You collapsed…and you've been unconscious for three hours."

His voice was harsh but I knew it wasn't directed at me. Fear trickled down my spine at his words, acknowledgement of what might have happened if I had collapsed away from the crowd, away from him, making me shiver.

"Do you know who…"

"Yes," he said shortly and I suddenly wondered whether or not the perpetrator was still breathing and hoped for the sake of Edward's soul that they were. Even though they probably would have deserved it, I didn't want Edward to have unnecessary blood on his hands because of me.

"What did…did you…"

I didn't know how to word the question but he must have gotten the gist of what I was trying to ask, answering before I had to fully verbalize my query.

"He's still alive. I found him through his thoughts and Cam called the police. They arrested him since he still had a packet of the drug in his pocket."

I breathed out in relief, reaching out my arms in invitation and soon finding myself wrapped up in Edward's strong embrace. He buried his head against my neck, shaking slightly and I realized how much my incapacitation had scared him, probably reminding him of the fragile state of my current human existence.

"I'm sorry," he whispered against my hair.

"What for?" I questioned, running a soothing hand through his hair and marveling at how quickly our roles in the conversation had changed.

"I should have been looking out for you, I should have caught him before he even had the chance to put anything in your drink. I usually make sure to monitor any thoughts that feature you but I tuned them out after I could no longer stand the perverted fantasies some of the guys were making you the star of. "

I shook my head, pulling back to stare into his now guilt-ridden eyes, the anger having merely acted as a mask for his own self-loathing.

"It's not your fault, " I said vehemently, perhaps a little too much so as the raised volume of my voice made my head throb even more and I felt the sudden urge to lie back down.

Edward, hawk-eyed as usual, noticed my wince and quickly shifted to lay me back down on the bed.

"We can talk more later," he said softly, running his fingertips across my forehead to ease the ache between my temples "You should still be resting."

"I'll rest if you promise me you'll stop feeling guilty over something that was not your fault," I bargained, eyes closing underneath his tender ministrations.

"Bella…"

"Promise me," I repeated as darkness began to close in again, even as I felt a niggle at the back of my mind that said I was forgetting something, something important.

He sighed, "How about I promise to not feel guilty again until you wake up and can reprimand for it."

"I suppose that will do," I compromised, knowing that if left up to him, he'd feel guilty for all eternity.

Eternity…why did that sound so…

"Gabriel!" I blurted out, the darkness momentarily receding as remembrance of my dream hit me full force and I sat up quickly, ignoring the wave of nausea that followed.

"Pardon?" Edward blinked, surprised by my sudden outburst but still having the presence of mind to wrap a steadying arm around my slightly swaying upper body.

"I had another dream, about the child, about Gabriel," I whispered, knowing now with complete conviction that Gabriel was truly his name, "Well, if I was unconscious I don't know if I can call it a dream, a vision maybe, except this time I wasn't watching a memory, I was living it. For a brief span of time, I was him."

I frowned, recalling the gaunt face that had stared back at me as a murky reflection. Lifting my face to Edward's, I also remembered the emotions that had swept through me, tears gathering in my eyes at the pain, at his pain.

"He was in a stone cell, so cold, lonely, so hungry and weak, at the mercy of someone, I'm not sure who. And he's not a child…at least, not anymore. He was fully grown, my age perhaps…"

Edward looked torn between asking me more and demanding that I rest but apparently his curiosity won out.

"Do you think it was happening now or…"

"In the past," I answered with no hesitation, instinctively knowing that it was a memory from long ago, "But I know in my heart that he's still suffering, that whoever imprisoned him still holds him captive."

I had to lay back down then, the sudden adrenaline of uncovering another clue to the mystery rapidly fading, replaced by the ever increasing darkness again. Edward stretched out next to me and I rolled into his embrace, needing to be immersed in the comfort he provided.

"We have to help him," I murmured, head nestled against Edward's chest.

"We will love," he promised, as sleep overtook me, "We will."


I didn't mention this in my A/N so I didn't give what was coming away, but I wanted to put my public service announcement cap on to say that drink-spiking is a serious issue and you should never leave your drink unattended or accept one from a stranger when at a club, hotel, bar or party.