A/N: Hey! Yeah, I'm back. Disregard my bullshit. I'm not going anywhere, and yeah, I'll still be writing FFVII no matter how many people are in the fandom. How fucking shallow, mate. Anyway, just don't fuck with me, because I'm the kind of person who will not sleep until you pay for coming at me. It's near impossible to cyberbully me. I get a lot of amusement out of it and my skin is thicker than T-Rex's. So...
I'm still pissed off that my good friends were hurt by such abject stupidity and lameness though.
I'm on my 40 days til Passover fast - yes I am a believer, yes I am going to hell - but not being on Facebook etc, I haven't given this chapter to Kim to edit, so it's probably full of mistakes. Eh, I embrace my imperfections. Actually, they make me kinda anal, but I'll survive.
***ETA: This chapter is now edited.
Black Swan
Chapter 35
While Emmett crushed me to him—not coming even remotely close to asphyxiating me like he once would have—Rose's reaction to me is the complete opposite. She slaps me. Repeatedly. In fact, the instant she saw me, her expression quickly turned from engulfed to furious that for a single moment I was certain she was going to murder me.
"How many times are you going to do this to me, you bitch?" she sobs after roughly yanking me into her arms and holding me tight against her.
"I missed you too, Barbie," I murmur, but it's all for pretenses. My five year memories feel only days old. The last was when we went hunting for drunk humans and used Edward as our lookout. It was the day before I was killed, and the next morning Esme told me, for the infinite time, that she was ashamed to call me her daughter.
It's on the tip of my tongue to promise Rose we'll go hunting again, but it's something she appears to now do on her own, and in abundance. Enough to change the hue of her irises.
Before I laid eyes on her and saw the color of hers, I smelled the human blood in her veins. She's given up feeding from animals. Both her and Emmett.
"Oh my god." She draws back and hastily dries her eyes, when her sharp gaze zeroes in on me. "Where the hell did you get this?" she suddenly demands, grabbing my chin in her hand and angling my face back and forth to inspect it.
"I burned again," I answer, smiling discreetly to myself as her face loses all expression. It still seems so odd to me, though. I woke a vampire, and I fed, so I'm still not sure how it all came about.
Jane believes too much of my vampire blood was killed by the werewolf venom, enough that I was forced through another transformation, albeit a briefer one. Whatever it was, I've since noticed that more than just my outward appearance is more refined. My strength and speed has increased and my senses are a lot sharper.
I'm still struggling to manipulate my shield, though. On the plane back to America I managed to stretch it roughly a foot in diameter. That was an interesting trip, but being able to hear the thoughts of the humans onboard proved entirely too distracting.
Jane and Leo caused quite the stir, and for thirteen consecutive hours, the entire first class cabin attempted to work out the mechanics of the two of them.
In truth they shocked the hell out of me initially as well, but Jane refused to leave the country without her mate, and so we took a slight detour back to her dwelling to pick him up.
"A word of warning," she stopped me at the entrance of the large, hilltop farmhouse south of Florence not fifty miles from Volterra, "he's a generalization of every gay caricature over the last half a century, but he's not putting it on. I thought he was."
"Okay..." I offered, failing to hold off the smirk.
Hers quickly followed. "He's also very...flamboyant, and well..."
"Caricature, I get it." Though, I couldn't help wondering about the logistics of it all. Their relationship flies in the face of everything Carlisle once explained to me when it came to mating. I suspect he was sugar-coating it in the event Edward awoke and realized I wasn't his.
"You want to know how a lesbian and a screaming homosexual of the opposite sex can mate," Jane puts to me after evidently comprehending my expression.
"Maybe not quite as eloquently," I teased her.
"It's the most bizarre thing," she mused. "I still have those inclinations and desires, but my outlet for them is Leo. The thought of being intimate with a male always repulsed me, but with him... It's simply him. He doesn't make me feel like anything is incomplete or missing."
I broke into an immediate smile even as my heart fractured within my chest. All I ever wanted was for Jane to be free from Volterra and to find her mate, but knowing mine was wandering this planet with the belief that I was dead was unbearable. "That's great. I'm really happy for you."
"It's great," she agreed, nodding once, but she was beginning to appear nervous. Jane is never nervous.
"Jane, you're stalling," I stated the obvious, raising a dubious brow.
"I'm...—alright, he also has no filter whatsoever." She was practically wringing her hands, and I came infinitely close to laughing. This was a side to her I never expected to see.
"Jesus, I might be a child of the 1950s, but it didn't define me."
"Okay—"
"Jane." A thick Tuscan accent cut her short, and I turned to see her mate standing in the doorway. I'm fairly certain my bottom jaw hit the ground. "Il mio amore."
Leonardo is a strapping specimen of Italy, standing at just under six feet, and only fractionally older than me, but the way he was dressed made him look like he raided the set of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. He was bare-chested beneath it, and wore only a pair of leopard-print boxer shorts. His face was heavily made up in a similar theme that came very close to, but not quite, drag, and his hair was in the half-shaved style that was very popular among humans at the time—only exponentially more exaggerated in the five years I'd lost, apparently.
"Leo Tesoro," she replied before the two of them greeted each other. They kissed repeatedly, felt each other up, giggled and kissed more before Jane evidently remembered I was not five feet away. "Oh, I'm sorry, my love. Bella, this is Leo. Leo this is—"
"The Phoenix herself." He stepped forward, took both my hands and kissed my cheeks back and forth three times. "Oh, honey, that mate of yours..." he added against my ear without bothering to lower the tone of his voice. "If you don't snatch him up quickly, I may defect." He laughed openly, and Jane, quickly joining him, swatted his arm.
"Behave, Leo."
"Mind the silk, treasure," he replied before he took her into his arms and they descended into another round of kissing. At that point I was certain I was either dreaming or hallucinating.
Their displays of affection continued throughout the flight home, making everyone onboard question everything they'd ever known when it came to sexuality.
The humans also wondered about the three of us, the odd similarities of our complexions, our unnatural beauty, and identical ruby eyes. Or the fact that we didn't eat or drink a thing for the entire flight. They're a lot more perceptive than I have ever given them credit. Still, they weren't even remotely prepared to give a voice to their suspicions, but that will always be their downfall; the only evil they believe in is their own.
. . .
The home my parents now occupy north of Chicago is classically Georgian and almost the polar opposite from the modern contemporary we lived in at Forks. It's decorated in the same style, while in the living room left of the foyer sits a large black grand piano. I don't need to be told who it belongs to, and it's enough for hope to warm in my heart.
Maybe Edward returns home frequently enough to use it.
Esme and Carlisle are away at some kind of medical conference in Springfield, while Jasper and Alice now maintain a separate residence from our parents in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For half of the time, at least, and after Rose recovered from our reunion, she called Alice home with the excuse of a family emergency.
She and her mate travel on foot and arrive not thirty minutes later; both sporting a pair of dark amber eyes.
They're only half vegan now, and it seems, a lot more has changed over the last five years than I initially thought.
While Jasper only stares at me from a stance of suspicion, as though I were a dangerous anomaly he must protect his mate from, Alice draws her breath audibly in surprise and for a moment or two appears unable to move.
"I knew it," she whispers to herself, before taking a single step and pulling me into her arms. "It changed. I stopped seeing Prom. It changed and I didn't think anything of it. I just...I just thought you were going to change him early. I should have realized, Bella, but I didn't. I'm so sorry," Alice begins to ramble, as tears flow endlessly down her face.
"Stop blaming yourself. I never let you see my future," I attempt to reassure her, but she only shakes her head stubbornly.
"But I could see everyone else's—Jasper's, Rose and Emmett's and... and you were just...gone," she stammers.
"I'm here now," I say gently, fighting the urge to pull her back into my arms. Alice's manic, overly enthusiastic personality has more often than not annoyed me, but I have always loved her as equally as I do Rose.
Releasing an encompassed breath, her eyes fall to the ground. She's not having a vision, but her mind is overrunning with previous visions of me. Of me now, in my resurrected state. "I thought I was going mad," she adds, meeting my gaze and pausing to half laugh ruefully to herself. "I kept seeing you. I couldn't see Edward's future because he keeps his shield tightly closed around him, but I swore I was seeing you with him in Rose's. And in Carlisle and Esme's... I thought I was going mad!" she echoes, her expression so consumed by pain I'm beginning to feel plagued by it.
"Can-can he manipulate it?" I ask, needing to clear the emotion roughly from my throat to speak. At just the mention of Edward, Alice recalled memories of him that nearly brought me to my knees. The beautiful, terrifying avenging angel he was in the minds of Jane and Aro is gone, and through Alice's he's a deeply tortured immortal with a palpable anguish reflecting behind his deep red eyes.
God, I have to find him.
"He can," Alice answers, her voice almost immediately softening in response. "He taught himself to."
"He taught himself to..." I mumble, coming close to scoffing to myself. In five years he's become a better vampire than most of us.
Alice only flashes me a pained smile, when it suddenly occurs to me that although I can now stretch my shield several inches, I can't simply turn it off and on like I once could.
"What are you doing?" she asks, her brow knotting in obvious confusion when I take a step closer to her.
"Read me, Alice," I practically plead, expanding my shield so it covers her as well.
Her surprise is quickly replaced with comprehension, and I watch her mind intently as she searches for a future that includes Edward.
A vision slowly forms from shadowed obscurity to a sharp clarity of my immortal mate moving through the woods; traveling at such a speed the scenery around him blurs together in different shades of green and brown. There's an intensity in his eyes, and as they move in every direction, closely observing his surroundings, there's also a certain anxiety behind them.
He reaches the outskirts of the woods and stops so suddenly the forest floor erupts before him. He stands stock-still, his gaze fixed ahead of him, his expression an amalgamation of deep-seated pain and shock. "Bella," he mouths even as no sound passes his lips.
"He's going to find you," Alice begins when my gasping sob cuts her short.
My hand inadvertently rises to my chest, the other over my mouth as my eyes well with tears that spill over and down my cheeks.
"Bella...can you—"
"She has Edward's ability to read minds," Jane answers on my behalf as Alice's mouth falls open in disbelief.
"And he has her ability to shield..." she whispers in awe. "Oh my god—Bella!" She plants both my hands to my shoulders, suddenly serious. "He's not far away. He's going to see you in the minds of other vampires and immediately come here."
. . .
My parents arrive several hours later, because while Rose gave them the same story of a family emergency, the animation in her voice was proof enough that there was no immediate danger. Unlike Jasper and Alice, they drove, but then, very few events will reduce them to travel on foot. Perhaps if they knew, but their daughter risen from the dead is not exactly news you can break over the phone.
Esme doesn't slap me, nor does she wrangle me in her arms and squeeze the air from my lungs, but she does cry. She stands before me, her face a perfect picture of heartache, and crying so much her small shoulders wrack with tears.
"Oh, Bella, my dear Bella," she sobs when she's able to find words. She raises a shaky hand to my cheek, while her thoughts are brimming over with Edward. Only, they're not of Edward as a vampire, but Edward as a human, completely defeated and dejected, his jade green eyes in turmoil and devoid of all life. "He-he will be so happy..." she utters behind a shuddering breath, and this time, she unwittingly shows me a fractured image of Edward slumped over my dead body on the bed she had bought for him in my old room as though he were just as lifeless.
I turn away from her, for my own sanity, and my eyes find those of my fathers. Without any of the restraint and stoicism he's always been known for, his expression crumbles and he draws me to him. His mind is also filled with my once human boy, but mostly they're of his wife and the very evident pain my death caused her.
It's not lost on me that I once treated my mother atrociously, and in a way it surprises me that my death devastated her.
God knows I don't deserve it.
After, I allow my father to examine me, and finding me in perfect health—albeit considerably stronger and with my new-found telepathy—he sits me down in an effort to make sense of how any of this came about.
I have no patience for it at the moment, though. I still haven't had a proper chance to speak with Rose, because with my closest sister there has always been an honesty that is nothing if not brutal. I need that right now. I need Rose to fill in the discrepancies between Jane's story and Aro's and give me a clearer picture of Edward as an immortal.
"Carlisle, not now," I say softly, severing my gaze from his with a discernible measure of guilt. As his newest daughter, my father often felt the brunt of my frustration, and it's not lost on me how I treated him, either. "I just...I need to process..." frowning, I allow my head to drop, my eyes finding the stark white tiled-floor of his examination room.
He takes a measured breath and expels it. "Very well. Have you fed?" He scrutinizes the shade of my eyes closely; his, like his wife's, are the exact same color of rich butterscotch they've always been.
I nod once. "Yes—from humans," I answer the question he didn't ask, nor needed to.
His breath shoots from his nose, again drawing my attention. I glance up and realize he's fighting the obvious urge to laugh before he leans his long, lean body against the edge of his desk and slides both hands into the pockets of his pants. "That doesn't surprise me. Shall we talk tonight?" he proposes, his brows rising high.
"Tonight," I promise.
My parents' home, smack-bang in the middle of suburbia, surprises me. Their house, although large and on a tree-lined street situated on almost half an acre only a couple of blocks from Lake Michigan, offers barely no cover from prying, curious eyes. In every direction there are roads and commercial and residential dwellings overrun with humans coming and going.
"It's only temporary," Rose says as we walk at human speed to a small park at the end of the road that backs onto a golf course. I'm restless and eager to break into a run, but that's obviously out of the question. "They're closing on a house in Lake Geneva, but it's definitely a pain. There are people everywhere here." She grimaces, making the smile return to my lips.
Rose never changes; she's always been such a reliable constant in all her vanity and disdain for both our world and that of the humans.
"I can still barely believe it," she ponders after sitting herself down at the empty gazebo we discovered at the far end of the park. I sit beside her, my eyes scanning the small woodlands to the west, wondering whether that's where Alice saw Edward emerge from. It's early afternoon on a near cloudless sky, and the canopy of trees appear almost to dance in the mirage of sunlight. "When I saw you I was certain it couldn't be you. Until you opened your mouth." She smiles wryly and I quickly join her before we both descend into a moment of silence. "You look like you've aged."
"I have—apparently," I admit. "If you say I look older than Edward I'll kill you," I pre-empt her when her grin shrewdly becomes a smirk.
"Hmm, you'd be very close," she notes. "You look maybe...nineteen or twenty."
"I can live with twenty," I decide. Twenty-one definitely not. My mate has to be older—call me old fashioned.
"Have you forgotten you're close to eight decades older than him?" she reminds me.
"Be quiet and tell me more about him. And don't hold back. And, most importantly, don't give me a Disney story like Jane."
She sighs heavily and follows my gaze to the cluster of woods before staring down at her neatly painted nails. It's obvious what she's about to tell me grieves her. "He's not in a good way, Bella. He's just so...lost."
"I can imagine," I murmur, frowning at the images she's unaware she's projecting to me. If I thought the bloodthirsty killer was hard to face, the broken, brooding vampire is a lot worse. "I just... I wish I told him..."
"Told him?" she coaxes me to elaborate.
"That I loved him—that I fell in love with him that first damned day I carried him home."
Her smile is sad, but at the same time, it's practically droll. "Because you're a stubborn wench. You'll have plenty of time to tell him soon, so stop acting so woebegone."
I nudge her teasingly with my elbow, and distracted, I again fall quiet.
"He'll find you, Bella," she evidently feels the need to reassure me. "He stops in every six months, or so. Jane might be his maker, but he sees Esme as his mother. He even calls her 'Mom' from time to time. She loves it, as you can imagine."
I scoff softly half beneath my breath. "I can imagine. So, tell me about Kate. I heard you don't like her."
"It's not that I don't like her," she corrects me, sounding almost offended, "it's just that I didn't appreciate Jane's attempt to replace you. Edward felt the same. Her mere presence made him furious. Jane sent her to us to keep her safe. What?" she enquires in confusion after I put my hand up to stop her, but even as she told one story, her mind reflected a different one altogether; one of her and Edward speaking alone in her room.
"Stop talking." I shake my head with impatience as her memory instantly fades. "I mean, you were just thinking about him—do it again."
"God, it's so unnerving that you can read our minds too, now. With Edward it's easy, he's not around much, but with you—"
"Your mind is as shallow as you are, bitch," I interject. "You think about Emmett and yourself, and that's all. He was in your room..." I raise my brows in emphasis to get her back on topic.
"Yes, it was during the first few months after he came to stay with us."
"Don't talk—think!" I snap.
"You're still so touchy," she observes before sighing in resignation and closing her eyes.
"Why do I feel like she's still alive?" Edward practically pleads in the rich, resonating pitch all vampire males possess. "I can still feel her," he stresses, his expression contorting with pain, and clenching his fist, he slams it into the cushion of the sofa he and Rose are sharing.
"You can't do that to yourself," Rose says gently, her own pain still unmistakable in her tone. "You can't."
"I can't help it. Just being here... I-I feel like she's going to walk into the room at any moment and say 'where the hell have you been, you idiot boy!'" He laughs, but it's completely afflicted and without a shred of humor. "Jesus, I'm losing my mind."
"I'm so sorry, Edward," Rose whispers, sounding dangerously close to tears as the image wavers before my eyes and is gone.
"He knew, Bella. We didn't believe him, but he always felt your presence the way all mates do. If you were dead he..." she doesn't finish and instead bows her head and releases a gushing breath.
"You couldn't have known," I reply my voice softly breaking in the back of my throat, and pausing, I forcibly rein my emotions back.
Mirroring me, Rose clears her voice and shakes her head with a strange kind of awe. "He's so strong. Emmett once pulled him from his room and told him to take his anger out on him, and well, Edward's not stronger but he's faster, and with his ability to read minds he was always two steps ahead of him. Emmett couldn't bring him down."
An easy grin pulls on my lips; I'm not at all surprised that my mate is such a gifted immortal. "I'm sure Emmett was really happy about that."
Rose laughs lightly. "Oh, he was, but then they arm wrestled. Emmett won—just. He doesn't like to talk about the just."
I laugh with her, but it's stiff and unnatural. "Is he coping—even a little bit?" I ask, needing just a fraction of hope to hold onto.
Rose expels another heavy breath and refuses to meet my gaze; it gives me no comfort. "He thinks he lost you, Bella, but he'll find out you're alive. Did Alice see him returning?"
I nod my head slowly, even as I shrug with a sense of helplessness. "Yeah. I saw him speak my name, but I wasn't in her vision. She's seen the two of us together though..." At this point I feel like I'm attempting to convince myself of it. I need something recent, but I know Alice's visions can't be forced.
"She's been keeping a close eye on him in case..." she lets it go, and it's not exactly hard to guess why.
"He won't," I mumble, but I'm just as uncertain as I sound.
"He keeps himself busy. He spends a lot of time around other vampires. He seeks them out around the world. They all love him, of course, and he's broken many a hearts along the way."
"Of course he has." He was beautiful as a human, but as an immortal he's easily the most beautiful among us. Rose notwithstanding.
"Tanya took a liking to him," she relays just as I whip my head back to her and glare. "Relax, I overheard him telling Carlisle she's just another 'plastic blonde'." She quotes with her fingers. "I really hope I wasn't a part of the others he was referring to."
I break into a grin and almost laugh, but I don't. "You haven't seen him kill, or anything like that?"
She clears her throat again, awkwardly this time, making me immediately suspicious.
"What?" I ask, my eyes narrowing.
"I haven't seen him kill, but I've seen him feed..." she alludes and doesn't elaborate.
"He lets them live?" I ask in surprise. Actually, I'm shocked in lieu of what Aro showed me of him.
She nods. "He will kill if he comes across someone truly evil, but the few times he went hunting with me and Em, he fed from several after knocking them unconscious first. Now, don't be angry"—she all but shies away from me as I immediately tense—"but he prefers to feed from females."
I huff, but I can't deny the relief flooding me. "You expect me to be jealous of his food?"
She breaks into a small smile and shrugs. "Just checking."
"So when did you and Emmett return to the carnivore diet?" I ask lightly as a grainy image of the back of Edward's head angled into the neck of a blonde passes quickly through her mind.
"After we lost you. I just thought...fuck it. I made the decision not to deny my nature anymore, and Em is completely on board. Garret sends Alice and Jasper human blood every month or so, and that's how they take it, but they still feed from animals primarily."
"Thank god you finally came to your senses," I tease her gently. "I can imagine how Carlisle and Esme took it."
She shrugs again, dolefully this time. "Actually, they were a lot more accepting after you died. A lot of things changed."
"Except for them."
She half laughs flatly in agreement. "Some things will forever stay the same."
I only hum, and again glance toward the small woodland to my right, tuning my senses into my mate who's wondering the planet alone. I have always been able to feel him, but Edward has nothing to compare his vampire intuition to. I know only one thing at the moment though; the longer we're apart, the more the coils of panic are wrapping around my heart.
"I'm assuming you know about Capitol Hill?" Rose breaks my distraction apprehensively.
I nod regrettably. "Aro showed me."
"You would have done the same thing, Bella, you—"
"I know," I concede with a deep sigh because there's no debate; I would.
"Aro originally invited Carlisle to accompany them, but he refused. I almost joined them, but Em..." she confesses only to abandon it.
"I would have seriously considered it, myself," I admit, but in truth, I would have needed no encouragement. I'd willingly unleash bloodshed on any human or immortal without thinking twice if they killed my mate, or any member of my family. No matter the infamy, or brutality, behind Edward's actions, they were done in vengeance for his mate, and no immortal alive could condemn him for it.
It still bothers me though. That my once innocent human was the one responsible for it.
Rose is quiet for the longest pause, before sighing wearily. "Bella, there's something more..."
My breath stills and I turn to her, not sure I wasn't to know. "...What?"
"The people responsible for your death—your human death, I mean—"
"Oh god..." I groan, needing no further explanation. "He tracked them down?"
She nods, her gaze again falling to her lap. "The ones who were still alive, yes. The media dubbed him The Granny Killer since the only survivors were female."
"Did anyone connect them with what happened to me?" I ask, and her knotted brow alone is answer enough.
"Some did, yes, and there was conspiracy theories all over the internet. After, Aro sent Dimitri to track down Edward and warn him, but Edward..." she breaks off to scoff and there's a definite edge of pride behind her emerging grin, "he tore him apart and sent him back to Volterra in a box.
"He killed Dimitri?" I burst appalled.
"He didn't kill him per se, but let's just say, Dimitri refuses to track him again." This time there's no mistaking the amusement behind her eyes. "Though, to be brutally honest, once Edward found out, Dimitri quickly found himself the one being tracked."
I exhale heavily and allow my shoulders to slump with it. While I'm as equally proud, I can't deny that Edward's strength and ability are beginning to concern me. Not to mention the fact that he is evidently still a very reckless newborn.
Will I be able to handle him? I'm not so sure.
"You okay?" Rose asks after a moment of eyeing me skeptically.
"Why wouldn't I be?" I turn to her, poorly executed poker face intact. I'm far from okay, after all.
"Bella... he avenged your human death," she emphasizes, and that's when I understand.
The anger I once felt over the teenagers who killed me is long gone. It's gone as if it never existed.
A/N: You know your poison, lurk, review or flame. Flame and I edit anons and tell you to fuck yourself, just an FYI. Tell me I suck constructively and I'm good.