Once Bitten Twice Shy Chapter 29/30

Author: Lifelesslyndsey

Category: Twilight

Pairing: Bella x Peter

Summary: Clinging to Angel ideals, trapped in a vampire body, with very human urges. He was very confused. Peter was an indecisive vampire with an identity crisis. Bella was jaded and self-isolated. In short they were perfect for each other.

Rating: Mature audiences only for Language & Lemons

Word Count: 4,035

Disclaimer: I own nothing

Beta'd by me, but that may change. Who knows.

A/N This one doesn't end in heartfail, promise. I cannot, however, promise that the end isn't anti-climactic.

Previously on this fucking soap opera of a fic,

I clutched it to my chest, as Jasper shoved me into his truck. Where was my truck? Where were my things? More importantly, where were Bella's things?

Where the fuck was my cat?

"Peen," I said, quietly, a mumbled broken word, but Jasper understood. He opened the cab-doors, fishing out my wrinkly mess of a companion. One hand still curled around the box, I took Peen into my lap, holding them both just a little too tightly against me as we drove.

It was all I had left

And now. PeterPOV

"Where are we going?" I asked, as the Indiana border shrank in the rear-view mirror.

"Where ever you want to," Jasper replied quietly, both hands wrapped around the steering wheel. "Alice saw that you would go to Forks. I thought I could take you there."

"Okay," I replied, just as quiet, while wondering why we were whispering. I imagined it had something to with me, and the look Jasper was giving me. A look you'd give a lost-child, or a wounded animal. Don't scare it, it'll run.

It was surprisingly fitting.

Jasper said nothing else, but continued to quietly leech away any emotion I was feeling, as he had been for the past half hour, leaving me a docile husk in the passenger seat. It didn't leave me feeling good. I didn't feel light. I felt empty.

I accepted it wordlessly; he was doing what he could. I wasn't sure I had it in me to fight it anyway.

We were nowhere near Forks; the thousand mile stretch of highway might as well have been a million, for all it was spent in aching silence. Jasper stopped for gas, letting Peen relieve himself in the tiny half-dead stretches of grass beside the pumps. It hurt to watch, remembering floppy lace-less purple Converse, and Peen's makeshift leash. Everything reminded me of her.

Bella was right. She was everywhere.

Raindrops splashed against the windshield, leaving blurry smears of rainbow-water across the glass, quickly pushed away by the wiper blades. "Are you going back?" Jasper asked, somewhere outside of Cherry Falls, North Dakota. "To Heaven, I mean."

"Angels don't go to Heaven," I replied, my voice low and even. I was inadvertently being hypnotized into a trance by the wiper-blades. Back and forth. Swoosh-swoosh. I didn't mind; I welcomed the distraction. "We go to the Host."

"Oh," Jasper said quietly, as miles of white road-side lines disappeared behind us. "Are you going back to the Host then?"

I hugged the little box harder against me, my nails cutting crescent-moons into its smooth cool surface. "No."

"I think you should." Jaspers eyes flickered toward me, a stealthy move to gauge my reaction.

"You'll never see me again," I informed him. In light of total and utter travesty, I had forgotten the excitement of finding my brother. "They aren't my family. They...I'm not an angel, Jasper. I'm not an Angel any more, and I..." I hate them. For doing this to me.

He licked his lips, a nervous habit that had seemed to last the decades since last I saw him. "You don't really belong here, though," he said. "You...I trapped you here."

And maybe he did, but I would never regret it, not with the memory of a living, breathing Bella still fresh in my mind. "You made me real," I replied, words forming before I really understood them. "You made me tangible, touchable. You gave me a life before I knew what it was like to live, Jasper. I don't regret it. You...you gave me the closest thing to humanity I'll ever know."

"I just...if I hadn't..." His words were stuttered, stilted, broken. Very much like how I felt.

"I loved her," I said. "And without you, I'd have never known what that felt like."

"It is better to have loved then lost, than to never have loved at all?" he asked in proverb, and I only could nod.

There was no segue, no gentle introduction into the following subject; I simply said it, and did not know why. "I was sent to kill you."

"What?"

"Well not you. Maria," I reiterated. "Vampires were created with the sole purpose of altering the fate of the living, of God's most beloved creation. Vampires they don't...it isn't that we don't have a fate. It's that it isn't known. Because we are essentially evil. So, it was my job as an Angel, as Micha, to kill vampires. Obviously I couldn't kill them all; just the ones who were altering fate to the extent that it was affecting the Path. Maria's army was obliterating huge chunks of fate, killing thousands, and turning hundreds. Fate didn't see you though, couldn't see you, maybe. You were exactly the kind of curve-ball Heaven feared."

"I knew there was something different about you," Jasper admitted. "Your emotions, even now...they don't feel like anything I've ever experienced. It isn't that they are dull, but kind of...echoed, some how. It's hard to explain, but I knew you were different. The way you smelled, the way you tasted. You didn't...nothing. You didn't taste like anything."

"Which is most likely why I have no scent," I agreed. "Why it's physically impossible to detect my presence before seeing or hearing me. There are often Angels hidden in the wings. Like you saw with Azrael."

"That was Death?" Jasper asked with obvious awe. "You...you don't ever think how real those things are."

"Azrael is an asshole. He always has been. Not that...not that I should have done what I did...I..." I shook my head, forcing some semblance of my usual calm. "I could have trapped Bella's soul on Earth...and...that's just... But he's always been a jerk. He has some serious power issues. Thinks because he collects souls, he's better then the rest of us. I controlled fucking Destiny for fuck's sake; he was just the fucking collection crew."

"They're your brothers, right?" Jasper questioned. "That's how you look at each other?"

"The Angel collective is often referred to as the Brotherhood. There are no female Angels," I replied, finding comfort in the abstract discussion that was very much about nothing and everything at the same time. It wasn't about Bella, and that mattered.

"They all...uh. They all kind of look..."

"Girly but not?" I supplied. "Technically, they're not male either. They don't even have junk, Jasper. Smooth as a baby's bottom down there. Waking up with a dick was a weird experience." There should have been laughter, his or mine, at that, but there wasn't.

"They're androgynous, really. When I came to earth, I could have just as easily have been sent as a female. Were it any other kind of job, I might have been. But I needed strength and size on my side, so I was given a male form. I didn't look much different then I do now, less defined. Softer."

"Gabriel looks like..."

"You?" I smiled, a small shard of what it could have been, what it was once, not so long ago. "Yeah. I thought so too."

Jasper was quiet then, minutes ticking into hours, as we passed border after border, the sun finally setting beneath the horizon. One day faded into the next, and then another. I didn't even know what day it was. Monday, Tuesday, they were all the same to me. The silence couldn't last, it never did.

"What's God like?"

I looked up from where I had been staring at my feet. "What?"

"What's God like?" Jasper asked again.

"I...uh." I blinked, because...being asked to explain God was like being asked to swim upstream. You could try, try your hardest, but you'd never get anywhere. "He's big. Loud...I think. I can never tell. Normally, I just hear him in my head. He's more forgiving then people realize." I held up Peen, his tiny purring body cupped in my hands. "He obviously has a sense of humor."

"Have you like...met him?"

"God? Uh...You can't really meet Him. I mean, He's just...He isn't a man, really. He's mostly...just there. In my head maybe, it's hard to tell. But He's...well He's my father. I don't know if He's like other fathers, but He loves us. God kind of is love, so that's a given. When I was younger, He told us stories. About humans, and creation, and love. Taught us to love all His creatures equally, taught us kindness and indifference. Taught us to watch. He was...He was always there."

"And...and when you were changed?"

"I didn't just lose God, I lost myself," I said sadly. "Lost...everything. I couldn't hear them, but sometimes if I tried I could hear...well. Fate. That's how I knew things, in the army. It's like a radio, in my head. But it's on AM, so most of what you hear is white-noise and shit you can't understand, or don' t care about."

xXxXxXx

I could hear the ocean waves crashing into the beach somewhere, and the air tasted like salt, just as I remembered it. It hadn't stopped raining, every drop falling from the sky and smacking into the earth so hard I could hear it. One after another, they fell, smearing across my face like tears. I closed my eyes against the rainbows, didn't want to remember the way they'd clung to Bella's lashes as she smiled and told me she believed in God.

Jasper cut the engine, and we sat in silence. "Bella gave me the keys," he said quietly, dropping said keys into my hand. "I think you should go back to Hea...the Host, Peter."

"I only just found you," it hurt to say. Hurt to voice the fact I was going to lose everything I ever had all at once.

"You're...you're not a vampire, Peter. You're an Angel, and you don't belong here. I wish I could have known you...as you are now. But I've always looked at you like a brother, and always loved you. I want you to be happy. Go home, Peter."

"It won't make me happy."

Jasper frowned, and it aged him. It was easy to forget in the face of the perpetually-seventeen that they'd seen more than many a man. Jasper had been a vampire longer than I, if not by much, but he'd lived it, perhaps harder then I had. And even though I was older, Jasper had lived far longer then I had.

"I could stay," he offered.

"Take your own advice, brother," I replied quietly, my hand already curling around the door handle. "Go home."

xXxXxXx

The house was as I remembered it, a tiny two-story thing, with faded yellow shuttered windows. The bushes had been trimmed neat, and the grass mowed. Probably someone from the Pack, I thought. They loved Bella. I wonder if they knew? Would someone have told them? Jacob's words echoed in the back of my mind.

Fuck. She'd told him, that day. She'd told him that the medicine wasn't working, and that she wasn't sure she was going to make it. And he'd begged her, hadn't he? Begged her to let me change her. It all made sense now. It made so much sense. It doesn't have to be this way, he'd said. You'd always be welcome here, he'd said.

'One day, she's gonna leave us both.'

I didn't go home, like Jasper had suggested. I didn't even know how to go home, had I wanted to. There was no spreading of wings, and shining rays of light leading me towards the sky. Instead I sank onto the tiny couch in the tiny living room, curled into a pathetic ball, clutching the fucking Goonies shirt in one hand, and Bella's urn in the other. Peen curled into my side, and somewhere in my mind I realized I hadn't fed him in two days. I needed to feed him. I needed to get up off this couch.

I didn't though.

It had been five days since Bella had died.

Five days since I stopped living.

"Gabriel?" I called, but Gabriel didn't come.

For the first time since I met Bella, I was alone.

Days and nights melted together, the lines of reality and time blurring. I didn't leave the house, or the living room, glued permanently to my perch on the couch, until my joints and muscles grew stiff from non-movement. I sat so still I could feel the world spinning, spinning me with it. Shafts of light shifted through the blinds, painting lines across the baby-blue carpet. They came, and they went, and I was sure that meant something. Time was lost on me. Everything was lost on me.

The duffle bags were still beside the door where Jasper had left them; where Jasper had left them when he left, because I asked him to.

He'd have stayed and suffered at my side, I was sure of it. But as fast as I was falling, I couldn't pull him down with me.

xXxXxXx

Peen's warmth had disappeared, and I hoped that he was out somewhere, foraging for food. I was a statue, sprawled out and dead across the living room floor, where I had fallen, maybe five or six hours ago. I couldn't get up, couldn't right myself. I didn't even know what day it was. I didn't even know how long it had been since...

"Peter?" It was Jacob. I could see his copper colored bare feet, toes dug into the plush carpet. He smelled worse than usual and I wondered if it was raining. "Jesus, Peter." Something fell to the floor, a stack of envelopes. They scattered across the floor as he knelt before me.

Jesus wasn't here. That little bastard had been pretty much absentee for the last century. Not that he didn't deserve the break, or whatever.

"Come on, Peter." Warm hands eased their way beneath my arms, hauling me up effortlessly. He eased me gently back onto the couch, ignoring the awkward popping of my stiff limbs. "That's it, come on."

"Jacob." The word was rough, tearing out of my throat in rasp. I swallowed, working the venom across my mouth. "Jacob." It didn't help. I sounded like shit.

"Jesus Christ," Jacob said, crouching before me. "When was the last time you fed?"

Honestly? I didn't fucking know. "I don't know." I didn't even know what fucking day it was.

"Your eyes are like...flat black," he replied. "Was...was it before?"

"Yes." I blinked, holding the heavy box harder against me, till the soft-stone threatened to break.

Jacob breathed, falling back on his haunches. "Is that..."

"Yes."

He swallowed, nodding hard. "She...the cliff. She wants the cliff right?"

"Yes."

"She asked me to...she wrote me a letter and asked me to let you pass. As my right as Chief of the Quileute Tribe of La Push, you are welcomed on our sacred grounds as husband of our Honorary Sister, Isabella Swan. You may come and go freely." Jacob paused. "I trust that you won't hurt my people. Bella wanted the cliffs, and she wanted you, and if I can give her nothing, I can give her that. Come...come when you're ready." His eyes were full of tears, heavy drops clinging to his lashes. "I...I have to get back to Leah now. But...you're always welcome in our home Peter."

I nodded, feeling new sobs rise in my throat. He seemed to understand, letting himself out as we both began to cry. It was a touching sentiment, really, his trust in me and in Bella.

It made me ache.

I stared at the floor, where letters were scattered, long white envelops filled with whatever some one would send to a house where no one lives. A wide, orange envelope caught my eye, Peter M. Legion scrawled across the front in neat curved letters. I plucked it off the carpet with shaking hands, tearing at the opening.

Pictures spilled out, one after another, brightly colored 4x5 pieces of history painted across the carpet. Our history, written in road side attractions. The biggest pit in the world, the twine-ball, the torture-house, the rickety old dinosaurs. There we were, happy smiling faces staring up at me. I picked the one closest, where her mouth was pressed against my cheek, atop a garish purple dinosaur, as we blinded ourselves with a flashbulb. That had been a good day.

"Gabriel."

He didn't answer.

It was too much, and the house was too small, swallowing me whole with its neutral-toned painted walls. I had to see her again. Even if it was just once. Even if it would rip out the remainder of my heart. It didn't matter, it belonged to her anyway. I had to get home. I had to...just...I had no idea how. Was it too late? Had I spurned my welcome?

"Gabriel?"

Silence.

With Bella in hand; a box, a shirt, and one happy photo, I bolted out of the house, feet tearing through the back door till I felt the ground soften beneath my feet, layers of soggy dead leaves coating the ground.

"Gabriel!"

I didn't know where I was going as I ran through the rain, hundreds of tiny rainbows lighting my way. I weaved through the trees with my heart in my throat, stumbling to a stop on a cliff top.

The cliff top.

Rocks crumbled at my feet, where the tips of my boots overlapped the edge by inches. "I want to come home!" I cried out, against the wind. "Gabriel!"

"Then you must fly, Little Brother," Gabriel called, his voice booming like thunder. The waves crashed harder against the beach as the storm rolled in on an Angels wings. "Let Bella go, Peter, and fly. You know the way."

My wings tore free as if they were beckoned, shredding through my flesh and my shirt. I growled, snarling through the pain, but it was carried away by the roar of the ocean beneath me. I let go of the picture first, followed by the shirt. I watched them flitter away until the waves swallowed them down.

The box trembled in my hands as I flipped the tiny latch. The effect was almost instant, wind catching the dust in a whirling spiral, sprinkling my Bella across the ocean. Millions and millions of pieces of my heart flew across the sunrise, and I opened my wings and followed them.

xXxXxXx

I didn't crash into the waves as I had expected, but I didn't fly either. The sensation was like falling up and down all at once. I woke up sprawled out across white fluff, wings stretched out as far as they could reach beneath me.

Brown eyes stared down at me, mouth curved into a smile. "Bella?"

"You've kept me waiting a long time, Peter."

I sat up slowly, staring round in wonder. "We're on a cloud. Heaven really is full of fluffy fucking clouds?" I asked, incredulous through my disorientation.

Bella shrugged, sinking down beside me on the cloud. In her arms she held Peen, his regular purring, wrinkling mess.

"Did I kill him?" I asked abruptly. "I didn't feed him! He starved to death."

Bella laughed, a tinkling brilliant sound that erupted all around me. "No, you didn't kill Peen. He isn't really a cat, now is he?"

"They told you that?" I asked, looking around for one of my brothers. "Where is every one?"

"It's just us," Bella replied, laying her head upon my shoulder. I turned, burying my face in her hair. The scent was bittersweet; a reminder of what wasn't mine any more.

"I wanted to tell you," I replied quietly. "They wouldn't let me."

She shrugged, turning to kiss my cheek. "Faith isn't faith if you have proof. I had to believe without knowing. Just like you did."

"But I did know."

She smiled, shaking her head. "But you didn't."

"I knew that God was real," I replied, wondering if maybe this wasn't Bella, or Heaven at all, but a proof that I'd really and truly lost my fucking mind.

"Do you trust me?" she asked, cocking her head to the side. "Even now, after all this? Do you trust that God has a plan for me, even after death?"

"I..." That had always sparked a sort of repressed interest in me, even when I was nothing but an Angel. I had always wondered what happened after, for the known Fate ended with Death, but we'd always known there was more. "Yes. Yes I do."

"And even though you don't know what it is, you know that God loves me, like he loves you?" she asked. "That whatever comes after this, it's worth it?"

"I trust God," I replied and it pained me to say it. Because even though it hurt losing her, I knew that God loved her.

"You have Faith," she explained, nudging Peen out of her lap. "You just had to find it. You had to let me die, Peter. You had to let me go. Sacrifice is a sure way to get into Heaven."

"I don't belong in Heaven," I replied, pulling her close. I wasn't sure how long our time would last, but I planned on making the most of it. "And what did I sacrifice?"

She gave me a wry smile. "Don't think that I don't know. I didn't then, but I do now. You would have sacrificed your soul, your grace for me."

"But I didn't. You died." It hurt to say.

"So instead of sacrificing your grace so that I could live, you sacrificed your love so that I could die." She smiled. "And God is grateful. Letting me die was harder than letting me live. You did not choose the easy path. You gave up yourself for me."

"And I'd do it again," I replied in earnest. "I'd tear of my fucking wings for you, Bella."

"Because you love me," she replied as if it was an answer. "You love me. Not as a Vampire loves its mate, though some do love them deeply. And not as an Angel loves all things. You love me as a man loves a woman. You love me like a human loves. Humans go to Heaven, Peter."

"I'm not human," I whispered.

"And yet, here you are." She smiled, and linked our hands, pulling me up to a stand. "Gabriel told me something very interesting."

"You met my brother?"

"Yes, I did. I'm very sorry about the feather thing, by the way." She laughed, pulling me across the cloud. None of this seemed real, and I was well versed in the Unreal. "Anyway, he said that religion, and belief, and the world? It's not like an ant hill at all."

"I thought it was an apt description, to be honest," I replied, with an awkward shrug. I had the strangest sensation that I was speaking Enochian, and that she could understand. It was disconcerting.

"Yes, well. Anyways, he said it wasn't like an ant hill. He said it was more like Monopoly."

"The game?"

"Yes the game," she replied, peering over the clouds edge.

"What does that matter?" I asked, pulling her from the edge. I didn't know how Heaven worked, but I'd had enough jumping of edges for the day.

"It matters more than you know. Gabriel told me that the World was like Monopoly, so I asked God for a re-roll."

I laughed. "Like our first kiss."

"Mmhm, yes. And just like you, God said yes."

"What?" I held back as she tugged on my arm. "What?"

"Re-roll, Peter. We get to do it over. We get to go back."

"I can't go back. I'm an Angel. We don't go back." I said, eyes wide as Bella danced at the clouds edge, our fingers still linked. Her brown hair fell like a curtain as she tilted her head.

She looked back at me, eyes sparkling in Heavens light. "Where are your wings, Peter?" she asked. "Angels have wings."

I rolled my shoulders, expecting to feel the familiar weight, but nothing came. There was no flutter, no out stretched of feathers. They were gone. They were fucking gone. "Holy shit!"

Bella laughed loudly, nodding back behind her towards Peen. "Thank your father, and let's go. We have a life to live."

"Wait!" I said, but she didn't. "Wait! Wait? Peen's God?"

Bella smiled, shrugging her tiny shoulders, as she stepped over the edge, pulling me with her, back to Earth.

-End