A/N: Here it is! The next chapter! It starts out in the same time-skippy fashion as the previous chapters, but I kind of got off on a tangent, and the next chapter will actually be from Nessie's point of view again and pick up more or less directly from the end of this one. I hope you all enjoy this chapter! And if you haven't, check out The Dancing Angel Outtakes, another story with short outtakes from this one that didn't quite make it into the final story. There's two now and about 6 more to come.
Lastly, I'd like to dedicate this chapter to my lovely reviewer EBRAJERCECullen 130! Your review was really sweet and encouraged me to get this chapter out as quick as I could :)
***Disclaimer: Twilight is not mine.***
After a blissful summer on Isle Esme, Nessie was looking around 16 years old, and we were moving to Buffalo, NY. Surprisingly Buffalo has fairly sunny summers for one of the rainiest and most overcast cities in the US, but since we spent the summer on Isle Esme, that wasn't an issue. It was strange to see my little girl so grown up looking. Despite the fact that she was only four, she looked barely a year or two younger than her father. I' m so thankful that we get to have our baby girl forever, but it was sad to see her childhood fly by so quickly.
Of course, moving meant that our story had to change again, but this time it was closer to the Cullen's story from when I moved to Forks. This time though, instead of Rosalie and Jasper being the foster kid siblings, Edward and Renesmee were. The rest of us were supposedly adopted. Emmett, Rose, and Jasper were now seniors in high school, Edward and I were juniors, and Alice and Nessie were sophomores. Carlisle was working at a local hospital, and Esme was a stay at home mom who "homeschooled" us. In reality, Nessie was the only one being homeschooled, and since she was now at the level of an advanced high school senior, most of her lessons consisted of her reading books about topics that interested her and practicing piano with her dad.
Of course Nessie continued dancing. She found a studio about an hour (if you drove the speed limit) from where we were living that she fell in love with. Claiming 16 now, we had Jenks make her a driver's license for this identity, and after a few lessons with Edward, we allowed our four-year-old daughter to drive herself to dance lessons. Claiming sixteen also meant that Nessie was one of the older girls at the studio and would have to break into tighter knit groups of girls to make friends. Of course this turned out to be no problem, but like everyone in Forks, all Nessie's friends from dance thought her siblings were weird for dating each other.
Since she was supposedly sixteen, Nessie didn't have to hold back as much skill-wise. She was placed in Ballet and Jazz D and Pointe and Lyrical C. Since lyrical dance is pretty much a combination of ballet and jazz, she thought it sounded fun and decided to give it a try. Nessie's teachers also asked her to audition for the company, but after talking about it with Edward and I along with running the idea by Carlisle, she decided not to. It would involve being away from home more than she already was along with lots of travel to potentially sunny places, neither of which she wanted. A request from her teachers that Nessie did accept however was to help teach the beginner ballet class consisting of mostly four and five year olds. Emmett especially found this amusing since Nessie was four years old herself, but Edward and I were mainly just proud of our daughter's willingness to help.
For Nessie's birthday that year, the whole family gave her something she had been wanting for quite some time now: a trip to Disney World. Alice had spent a good deal of energy finding the perfect week to go when it would be overcast the majority of the time. That way, we could all enjoy the trip. We would be going the first week in Febrary, and it was only supposed to be sunny one day while we were there. Since we had also gotten Jacob a ticket, this would allow Nessie to still go to the park that day. When she opened her present to find a pair of Mickey Mouse Ears, a pink Snow White (who was still her favorite Disney princess) graphic tee-shirt, ten plane tickets to Orlando (one of which departed from Seattle rather than Buffalo), and ten Disney tickets, she squealed so loudly that Emmett joked about people in the next state over hearing her.
Times like this reminded us despite the fact that our daughter looked sixteen, Nessie was still a little bit like a four-year-old girl at heart. Then again, I had never been to Disney World either and was almost as excited as Nessie, so maybe anyone would have reacted the way she did. After she emphatically thanked us all, she proceeded to call Jacob, who already knew about the trip and was going to pick his tickets up next time he visited, and then Charlie who had recently gotten over his "need to know" mentality since his wife, Sue, had finally forced him to go to a council meeting and hear all the legends a few weeks prior.
The phone call I received after that meeting was very interesting and also explained why Alice had been giggling and giving me pointed looks all day. Nessie's rapid aging was no longer something we had to hide from my dad; in fact, we really didn't have to hide anything about our family since he was now an honorary Quileute. This certainly made things much easier on that front, but I still had no clue what to do about my mom. Charlie—who she had begun to call and complain to about my lack of contact with her—and I could only continue to placate her for so much longer before she up and came to Dartmouth, where she thought Edward and I were currently living. I mean it had been almost three years since she had seen me, so I couldn't really blame her, but I really didn't want to devastate her with my death.
It wasn't fair to Charlie though, to make him run avoidance on mom for me, so one night after Renesmee went to bed, I called a family meeting in the dining room. I announced that I was finally ready to let my mom think I'd died, and we all began planning out the elaborate ruse. Charlie and the wolves would have to be in on it of course, but to everyone else, this would be the end of the girl who used to be Bella Swan.
We were still planning the next morning when Nessie came in and joined the conversation, insisting that she wanted to meet my mom at least once, so she was worked into the scheme and given a character to play. We finally finished planning around noon, and Esme went to fix Nessie some lunch while the rest of us made calls and arrangements.
It was decided that it would be more convincing and easier on Edward if both of us died. That way he wouldn't have to go through what it was like to think he'd lost me again, even if it was only pretend. That being the case, the two of us decided to spend the week of our deaths and the funeral on Isle Esme for a mini vacation. So not to ruin Christmas, our deaths would take place in mid January, and our story was airtight.
The two of us were driving back to school from Troy, Michigan—we went with the last place we lived instead of our current residence since we hoped to finish out the year here in Buffalo—when the car, a Volvo identical to Edward's to the casual observer, slipped on some ice and spun into the guardrail, killing us both instantly. Thankfully we were the only drivers on the road at the time so no one else was hurt. However, our bodies were mangled beyond fixing, so it would have to be a closed casket ceremony, which removed the need for playing dead. Carlisle had been the first responder to the scene, and the one to declare us dead. We were taken to the coroner in Troy and put in caskets there to be flown to Forks where the funeral would take place. Our obituaries would appear in both the Forks paper and the Hanover paper since we had been attending Dartmouth, but since the funeral would be in Forks, none of our fellow students would be able to attend.
Nessie was going to play a long lost cousin of Edward's named Vanessa—who also happened to be an orphan—who he had been recently reunited with before our deaths. It was decided that she should straighten her hair and wear blue contacts to reduce her resemblance to my human self. She would come down with the rest of the Cullens, and our cousins from Denali would come as well to mourn the loss of their dear cousins. The wolves, Charlie, Sue, and the vampires in attendance would be the only ones to know that the two coffins buried that day were empty. After the funeral, the Cullens would announce their plans to move to Australia, where Carlisle had just been offered a job, so that they could be away from all the reminders of us.
That afternoon, I faced the fun job of calling both Charlie and Jacob to inform them of our plans. Charlie joked that he would have to work on his acting skills, but I could tell that he was glad to soon be rid of Renee's incessant phone calls despite having to pretend I was dead every time he talked to her for the rest of his life. He asked if there was anything he needed to do, but I assured him that we could handle the details if he could convincingly act like I was dead. Jacob on the other hand wanted to hear every single facet of our story before proceeding to thoroughly make fun of it and end the call by telling me to let Nessie know that he couldn't wait to spend the week with her.
I made a point over the next few months to reassure my mom of my happiness in my emails. I tried to be subtle about it, but every email I sent included things along the lines of how happy Edward and I were, how glad I was that I had moved to Forks to live with Charlie, and that I loved her. Unbeknownst to her, these lines were my way of telling her goodbye since she would never see me again. These emails also served as a way to introduce her to Nessie's part in the story so that her presence at the funeral would not seem so out of place. Alice even photo shopped a few pictures of Edward and I so that I looked closer to my human self, and I sent these to her as well. I knew this would be hard on her, but she had Phil so I wasn't worried that she wouldn't be taken care of. I also wanted to leave her with as much reassurance as I could. My rough "human voice" was as close as I could get, and I was able to answer my mom's phone call that Christmas. It would be her last memory of me, and I wanted it to leave nothing in question regarding my happiness.
With the help of J. Jenks, we had all the papers and anything else we could possibly need by January. This once, I let Jasper deal with him again, and after telling J that Edward and I needed to go into hiding, the death certificates were forged and everything was arranged. Even though no one seemed to remember them, Bella and Edward Cullen had indeed been going to Dartmouth and paying tuition these past three years. The wreck was well documented, and we even went so far as to actually crash the duplicate car and decorate it with splatters of fake blood before Edward and I took off to Isle Esme. Carlisle called Charlie, telling him that it was time, and then he proceeded to call my mother, something I was happy to be gone for. Two coffins were purchased and shipped to Forks, and the Cullens bought plane tickets and went back for the funeral.