Summary: Bella hadn't meant to summon a demon. For god's sake, she was an English teacher! The last thing she needed was a three-thousand-year-old vampire overlord in her bedroom. Bella/Caius. Crackfic as fuck. AU.
A/N: Welcome to another dumb ficlet as produced by my garbage brain. The entrance fee is one brain cell. Please do enjoy, and thank you for your patronage.
Almost Like Pig Latin by Reveri
Part One
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Pinching the bridge of her nose with her fingers, Bella closed her eyes and took three measured, deep, weary breaths.
Maybe it was time she got a master's degree.
Scattered on her wooden floor of her bedroom were stacks and piles of student essays and examinations, arranged by various year levels and class standings, meticulously and diligently lined with comments inked in flowy red script and tear-stained correction marks. Bella believed that she'd been gracious enough with the theme and criteria she had set for Forks High's Advanced English Course term paper – "Suspension of Disbelief and the Velveteen Rabbit" – but it seemed that even the barest minimum would not be honored by her glass-eyed students. Not at all.
It was in the lagging section that the limitations of her wits were tested. Whatever Class F lacked in academic brilliance, they compensated with their propensity to procrastinate. Their narrative compositions oozed and dripped with sheer, train-wrecked bravado and half-hearted attempts at pretending they even read the source material, and Bella would have given them a passing if they'd mentioned the right animal names at least twice.
But alas. She was the English teacher, and it was football season.
An upstanding semestral class average was simply not meant to be.
The other members of the staff had forewarned Bella with raised brows: "Handwritten essays? In December?" But she didn't listen. With valiant trust in her students, Bella gave her best story discussion yet and assumed that one, maybe even just one kid, would turn in a term paper with a crisp, resounding take on what it meant to Be Real and prove the rest of the English faculty members wrong.
Her fault there was that she'd assumed.
With a loud huff, Bella turned her attention back to the paper-at-hand. "Right. Let's try again."
She squinted her eyes, trying to read her twelfth grader's Gothic penmanship for the fifth time that night. Leaving it to the will of the gods to make the obnoxious string of letters make sense.
Propping the thin sheet of paper towards her bedroom lamp, Bella pulled a face. "What? Ar… mob… bin… ation? Armobination?"
Bella adjusted the way she held the essay against the light in hopes that the almost words would reveal their true meaning once she held it at a certain angle. Just give me one sentence about the actual story, Alice Cullen, and I'll give you a C-!
Alice's father (the town doctor) had done Bella so many miracles (what with her perpetual trips to the Emergency Room) and the least Bella could do was give his stepdaughter a bit more leniency than others. A final try (followed by a choked sob of victory) allowed Bella to recognize the teenager's written report as ancient language. Latin, of all the possible dialects to use in an English Course term paper! Alice's intentionally haphazard scribble was a contorted attempt to revive pig Latin, and possibly to inspire Bella's very early retirement.
Damn it, Alice, not all books are about your witchy witch phase, you know!
"Atten… roben… dum eos, ad consien …drum?" Bella's brows pushed together and her eyes started to feel warm. "…ad ligandum eos, partier… et solvendum, et ad… congre… gantum eos coram… me?"
The brunette sounded out the words as she read them, once, twice, and then a third time, before she gritted her teeth together and exploded, "I hate teaching High School English!" She slammed down the paper and stomped a foot.
As if Bella's Thursday night wasn't going bad enough, suddenly, the temperature of her bedroom dropped and stung her skin, cold and as frosty as the worst bite of winter. Her lamplight flickered and gave out in a matter of seconds, then from the oblivion blackness, the center of her room began to glow dark crimson. With a thunderous crack, the atmosphere before her split into two.
Her startled scream never made it past her lips.
She watched the stark color of Hellfire emerge from the supernatural gateway that appeared before her, licking and drifting from the Underworld and into the mortal plane through her bedroom, disarranging all the term papers strown about the floor and making them float as they levitated and caught fire. She could scent the blood of hell's monsters from the beyond the portal as the charred scent of burning paper latched in her nostrils thick.
A pale man stepped through the rip in the fabric of space and time. With his dark bespoke suit, burgundy tie, white-gold wristwatch, and black Italian dress shoes, Bella had no second thoughts as to who she had unintentionally summoned.
The male's silver blue gaze scanned her bedroom before landing back on her. Red lips parting, the predator spoke in baritone.
"My name is Caius. Why have you summoned me?"
Bella could not find her voice and continued to gawp. She noted the sharpness of the newcomer's incisors as he talked. Caius' fangs were so unnaturally white and needlessly intimidating that she could not repress the shiver that went through her.
"I suppose, like all the others before you, you desire something along godliness… gold… glory." Bella's eyes shuttered. "A seat on a throne. An immunity to do evil. Or influence that precedes your name. Name it, then. If your request rouses me, I might not collect your soul as soon as it is due. Might," the vampire let a single, low laugh. "Go on, little human. What is it that you desire, great and maleficent enough to manifest the King from the depths of Hell?"
For a split second, Bella hesitated.
Bella thought about power, and riches, and notoriety – then ushered them far from her mind. She thought about asking for immortality – not for her, but for the father she loved – then ultimately decided against it. Finally, she thought about never having to correct idiotic secondary-level education written submissions ever again, and very nearly giggled.
A quick breath and a rushed utterance of one word after another, Bella began to ramble.
"While my life is stuck, and teaching teenagers is as close as to torture anything can possibly get… There's nothing much I want to change." She was living the life she chose to, Bella decided. She wanted to make it to the best the world had to offer on her own. "But… there is one thing I would ask for if I could."
It was a Thursday night, and Bella had spent most of the week groaning over her students' deficient theses, drowning herself in womanly woes all the while downing glasses of cheap rosé. Had it been a Friday night, Bella would have been caught doing the same activity, and reaching that conclusion she felt... sad.
"A romantic day-off from teaching." Bella announced firmly, looking up at the male to her front, bright-eyed, "Where the weather is great and I go for a nice walk and the world happens as it does. I'll meet someone along the way and, I don't know, feel, for the first time in a long time. The same sun, the same twenty-four hours; just lovelier."
Shaking her head back and forth quickly, Bella realized her faux paus and spoke again. "My name's Isabella Swan. Bella. It's nice to meet you, Caius."
Biting her lip, she held his gaze and asked, tone hopeful, "So. A romantic day-off. Can the King of Hell deliver, or is that beneath you?"
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Thoughtfully silent, Caius deemed the woman before him with a dead look. He tasted her thoughts and—
Caius blinked in surprise.
Serious! This human was serious. The woman wanted a good day and nothing more. How strange, and—
How deliciously pure her thoughts were.
A languid smirk made its way on Caius' mouth. "I'll think about it."
Pure souls always tasted the best.
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Bella watched as the man, vampire, king strolled casually to where she stood at her bedside, donning a thin slip of maroon satin and chiffon. Caius lifted his hand and his fingers – cold, cold, cold as it traced the outline of her thigh, belly, chest, neck – then caught her chin. His thumb grazed and pressed at her lower lip.
"It's very nice to meet you, Miss Swan," Caius drawled.
Bella's toes curled.
Abruptly, his hold on her was gone, and with four broad strides Caius had gone through and back to the Underworld. Her bedroom back to what it looked before she even knew he existed, no disturbance, no trace of the supernatural, no scent of hellfire or cold monsters, or burnt paper in sight.
Nothing amiss.
Bella's knees shook and she fell backwards onto her bed.
Drained and stunned beyond reasonable disbelief, Bella inquired to absolutely no one at all: "Was that even real?"
Notes:
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams is a classic children's tale of how toys Become Real once they are Loved. It's a staple discussion in basic English Lit courses. If you want to read it, an e-book is available if you search, and the whole story would take maybe ten minutes to read.
The summoning ritual was lifted from Supernatural's demon incantation. Pig Latin's Alice thought she was being funny by adding more and more nonsense to her homework, but some occults are better left untouched no matter how fictitious they sound, mmhmm?
This story would be a three-shot, at most. See you in Part Two.