This was not Bella's first round with a serious concussion.
It wasn't even the only time in the last five years: in her junior year of highschool, just after she'd moved to Forks, she'd been nearly crushed by a van. Fortunately for Bella, she'd slipped on the ice, cracked her head open, and fallen onto the ground just out of range of the truck.
Bella had survived, had gotten out completely unscathed by the truck, but she had missed two weeks of school.
However, that had been a relief, only a few weeks into school at Forks and she'd gotten tired of her strange, inexplicable, popularity. Being concussed meant she had a free excuse to skip Tolo (which, for some reason, no less than three guys asked her to).
This time, however, the waiting was agony.
Her head ached all the time, she couldn't stare at any screens or even do anything, and she just had to stare at the ceiling and think that anything and everything might have happened to Marcus de Volterra because she was a clumsy oaf.
She'd had it all planned out.
She'd warn him that… people were dangerous, that he should be careful, that maybe he should keep an eye out. Nothing major, nothing that might grab his attention, but just… tell him something.
Of course, he hadn't believed her, acted as if he had no idea what she was even talking about and in trying to convince him she'd gone and concussed herself.
Now it'd been two weeks and that giant, walking, beautiful marshmallow for brains could have been accosted in every alley in the city.
Of course, after a few days of reflection, Bella felt as if she shouldn't have been surprised. Why did she think Marcus would know anything about people? Sure, he knew enough trivia to get by, but that didn't make him a person either.
He wouldn't know how people interacted with each other, how society really worked, the good, the bad, and the ugly. He just knew that humans had surnames and that they studied art.
And that wasn't something Bella could distill for him in a few vague sentences about scary people in dark alleys.
Maybe he thought he could learn what he needed to by teaching art to humans a few days a week. However, Bella was only one student, and hardly representative of your average bear. He needed—if he was going to make it out there, if she had to leave him to his own devices in only a few months' time, then he needed a hell of a lot more than that.
He needed a crash course in people.
Which was why, when the doctors finally permitted Bella to return to the classroom, Bella arrived not only with her sketch book but also her laptop and a DVD copy of Titanic.
(In truth, Bella would have preferred to hand him a book, but she had the nagging suspicion that Marcus wouldn't read it. At least with a movie, he'd see real people in real-ish settings, and she could actually make him sit down and watch it in only a few hours.)
He'd beaten her to class this time, sitting his stool as always, staring blankly at the wall. The way he sat there… it was as if he were a statue in a museum. There was a sense of movement in him, yes, but he was so very still, it was as if he had always been sitting there and waiting for her to arrive.
His sunglasses were off today, and his eyes were back to being a very dark brown, nearly black.
At her entrance, he looked over, and she very well might have imagined it, but a spark of anticipation seemed to enter his eyes. As if he really was glad to see her.
"You've returned," he stated simply, and she nodded vigorously.
"Yes, sorry about that," Bella said as she hurried to her table, flushing violently as she set down her bag and drew out her supplies, "My mom always says I was born with two left feet."
They'd hoped that, when Bella stopped growing, she'd grow out of her debilitating clumsiness. Unfortunately, that hadn't worked out for her. Bella's last growth spurt was years ago, and she still tripped over cracks in the sidewalk.
Apparently, Bella was just doomed to be the clumsiest person on the planet Earth.
Marcus said nothing to that and gave absolutely no reaction.
Instead, after a pause, his eyes drifted to her laptop, the power cord and adapter she was now plugging into the outlet, and the DVD she'd placed on the table. He didn't ask though, didn't even make a comment, just silently waited for her to finish whatever it was she was doing.
She decided to explain anyways.
"So, the thing is—" Bella paused.
Until now, both Bella and Marcus de Volterra had played by the charade that she was your ordinary human student, and he was your ordinary, human, nineteen-year-old professor. She hadn't let on that she, well, knew and in turn he had tried not to make it obvious that he, well, was whatever he was.
Bella couldn't exactly say, "I think you need a better understanding of humanity if you want to brave the outside world."
But she'd never do this with a human professor either.
There was no rational excuse Bella could think up for why she would ever do this.
Cursing herself, Bella decided to just go for it, and just say it like it was, "Well, I was—concerned, you know, last class. I just get this feeling that you—don't get out much."
Marcus neither confirmed nor denied that he got out much or if he got out at all. He also didn't ask why she was even saying this or who she thought she was. Nor did he look like he'd figured out that she must know or at least suspect.
Bella decided to take that as a good sign.
"And, well, I just thought that maybe, something that might help, is if while I'm busy drawing you could spend that time watching my DVDs. And after the movie's over we can, I don't know, talk about it."
Bella blanched as she remembered Titanic's run time, "I mean, I'll stay late! I have nowhere else to be anyway, just so long as I don't miss the last bus. I just—I don't know, it seemed like a good idea."
She suddenly felt very awkward, very embarrassed, that she had even come up with this. What had she been thinking? This was stupid. He'd never agree to it, and he'd fail her for her gall.
However, Marcus didn't say no, instead he had teleported to her table again (he really had to stop doing that) and was now gently picking up the DVD case and staring dully at Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover.
"It's about the Titanic," Bella clarified.
When he said nothing, just continued to stare dully, Bella (flushing even harder now), gently explained, "You see, in 1912, there was this really big cruise liner, the biggest and grandest in the world, that made a Trans-Atlantic voyage from England to America. It, ah, hit an iceberg and sank, and because they didn't have lifeboats and no one thought it would sink—well, a lot of people died."
After a pause Bella added, "This is a movie that's about the ship sinking."
Marcus looked at her with his intense, black, eyes and empty expression.
"It's very good! One of my favorite movies, really!"
Bella hadn't brought too many of her favorite DVDs abroad with her but Titanic had been a must. As it was, in her semester abroad, she'd already rewatched it twice since she'd gotten here. Bella had always seen Rose as a kindred spirit and, as a result, had always been a little in love with Jack.
The ending destroyed her every single time.
But more importantly, there was a lot of stuff packed into Titanic. There was a love story, discussion of society and social classes, greed, murder, mayhem, human hubris. In a very short amount of time, it was a story that said so much about people: good and bad.
When surveying her collection of DVDs, it had seemed like a good place to start.
Again, Marcus said nothing, gave no indication of any opinion. Bella gently took the box from his hands, opened it, and inserted the disk into the disk drive. As she waited for the DVD to load, she continued to babble, "You'll love it, I promise, and like I said we can talk about it afterwards or even during if there's anything you don't understand. If you have any questions, just let me know. So, you just sit here and watch, and I'll just do my drawing thing, okay?"
He stared at her blankly, then said, "You intend to draw me staring at a metal box?"
"It's the done thing," Bella said swiftly, "All the humans are doing it."
Goddammit, that last bit had just slipped out. However, before Marcus could ask her why she would refer to other humans as 'humans', the menu had popped up.
Eagerly, Bella clicked play, and motioned for Marcus to stare at the screen. He didn't, he kept staring directly at her, and then to Bella's complete lack of surprise he did his usual stripping routine.
She had almost forgotten about that, though, it was sad, that even after two weeks of missing it she was starting to get used to it.
Walk into class, Marcus strips, she starts drawing.
Probably helping was that he was so eerily professional about it. There was no sensuality to the way he removed his clothes, not a care in the world, and whenever he posed it was in a very neutral position.
When Marcus stripped it was very clearly not a prelude to sex.
Still, Bella might walk out of this class so desensitized that if she did ever see a man strip it'd do nothing for her. She'd just shout, "I've seen better," and leave the room. Marcus de Volterra was ruining her for human men.
After his clothes were neatly folded on the table, he looked at her again and ordered, "In thirty minutes, you pause this, and I check your progress."
Bella nodded and hastily put her pencil to the paper, "Yup, sure, absolutely."
Marcus waited for her to start sketching before he finally began looking at the screen. And Bella did try to concentrate, she did, and she managed to get down a crude sketch of Marcus staring blankly at her laptop (which, sadly, wasn't that much worse than her usual fare) but—
It was really hard not to get engrossed in the movie, even watching it in spurts as she was. She'd seen it so many times that she could practically quote it, and so it took very little for her to be sucked in, back into the past with a young Rose and Jack.
Thirty minutes passed; Bella did not hit pause. By the forty-minute mark Bella had completely given up on drawing, by forty-five minutes she'd pulled up her stool next to Marcus' to sit with him and get a better view of the movie. An hour in and she'd completely forgotten that she was sitting next to a naked alien, all that mattered was Rose, and Jack, and their beautiful, desperate, love that would never be.
Goddamn that floating wardrobe and its stupid plot device! Damn you James Cameron, they would have been happy!
And, as usual, by the time they first hit the iceberg, Bella was wishing she'd brought wine to steel herself. The iceberg, after all, was the beginning of the end. It was a reminder that, no matter how many trials and tribulations Rose and Jack overcame, they all knew where this ended.
Jack, sinking to the bottom of the ocean, long since already dead.
Bella was already starting to tear up when Rose and Jack successfully escaped the flooding underbelly of the ship. By the time the Titanic went vertical, she was already a blubbering mess, unable to see the screen due to the crocodile tears pouring out of her, and making strange hiccupping noises as she tried to stifle her sobs.
Fortunately, Bella had seen this coming, and had also brought an entire box of tissues with her to class. She went through them with reckless abandon.
By the time Rose let Jack go, swam for the life jacket, and desperately started whistling, there was no god.
There was only Celine Dion, sweetly serenading them, and reminding them that life and love would go on.
As the credits rolled, Bella remembered herself in between her tears, and hit the stop button. She carefully ejected the DVD, and with love and devotion, returned it to its case.
Then she remembered that she was sitting next to Marcus. She flushed, desperately tried to stifle her sobs, and in a croaking voice said, "I'm sorry, it's just—every single time. Every single time I watch him die, I just—"
She weakly smiled, dabbed at her eyes again, "But it was beautiful, wasn't it? Just—that's what real love is!"
And then Marcus said the most offensive, garish, thing any man could possibly say, "That was not love."
"What?" Bella asked dully, her voice cracking.
"They didn't love each other," Marcus said, nodding towards the box as if it displayed all the evidence he needed. He didn't even say it with passion or derision either, but like it was any old fact.
That Jack and Rose, apparently, didn't really love each other.
"Excuse me," Bella said, flushing in both her anger and embarrassment, "But what would you know about love?"
For a moment there was a flicker of… something, on his face, perhaps even hurt, but it faded quickly. Instead, he said, "They were in love with a fantasy, not each other."
He picked up the box and pointed to Rose, "She was desperately unhappy. In Jack the artist, she sought and found escape from the world closing in on her. The realities of poverty, of what marrying a man like Jack would mean, they do not touch her. Only the desperate idea of freedom, he is secondary to that, or rather, he is a part of that."
He then pointed to Jack, "He saw a beautiful, wealthy, woman in desperate need of salvation. She, beyond all others, is someone who needs him in a way he has never been needed before. Her entire world stands now upon his shoulders, and should he wed her he will be saving her from abject misery. That is heady, that is passion, but it is not love."
That was the most that Marcus de Volterra had ever said about anyone or anything. It was the most feeling, in fact, he had put into anything he'd ever said. Usually, it was yes or no answers, the shortest response to a question he could possibly give, or it was dry lecture.
He'd almost sounded like a person for a moment there.
And it was about how Jack and Rose weren't in love.
Bella wanted to rage at him, opened her mouth to do so, but somehow, she couldn't find any arguments. He… wasn't wrong, if you wanted to be cynical about it. That was much of the movie, Rose hating the cage she lived in and Jack offering her a way out, reminding her that there was a way out, teaching her to love life and herself.
"But that's not everything—" Bella said, "I mean, sure, she's rich and he's poor and there's so much standing in their way but—Don't you believe in love at first sight? Didn't you see how their eyes met that first time and—"
"The first time they met he saved her from suicide," Marcus interjected, actually interrupting her, "This is a woman who believes she has nothing left and then there he is, a beautiful man, who can free her from everything. Within only a few days, they are having sexual intercourse in the back of a carriage. Passion, yes, high feelings, yes, but not love."
Bella opened her mouth, closed it, and then just went for it, "You're wrong. You—I will bring the rest of my DVDs, you will see Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, both versions, and you'll see what love really is."
"I know what love is," he insisted, and for a moment, he looked truly sorrowful as he said it, but Bella just guffawed and motioned to her laptop.
"Clearly, you don't," she said, the last, lingering, tears still running down her face, "Because—because what kind of a person can watch that movie and insist that's not love?"
Rather than insist that he was that deluded person, Marcus simply repeated himself, "It was not love, Bella Swan."
He then took her sketchbook from her, flipped it open to the drawing she'd done today, and noted, "And somehow, you have gotten worse."
He closed it with a sigh, stared blankly at the dark screen of her laptop, and then said, "Tonight, your assignment is to draw the woman in this film like one of Jack's French girls."
Bella opened her mouth, closed it, and almost asked if he really meant for her to bring in a portrait of a naked Kate Winslet. Or maybe she just wanted to ask if he'd cracked a joke. So far as she'd known him, he'd given no indication of even understanding what humor was.
Unfortunately, Bella glanced at the clock, and her eyes nearly bugged out of their sockets. She was in very real danger of missing the last bus to Florence. She hastily stuffed her laptop, Titanic, and her sketchbook into her bag and sprinted out of the room.
She didn't get a chance to look behind her and see if Marcus was smiling, frowning, or as usual, displaying no expression at all.
Author's Note: Now, if you were to ask Marcus for a summary of what even happened in Titanic, it would be a very different movie. Near, Far, WHEREVER YOU AREEEEEEEE!
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Disclaimer: I don't own Twilight