Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight.

Author's note I: The ending of this chapter will probably shock you and might seem like it comes out of nowhere. It doesn't. It's been playing out in my head for months and you might benefit from reading the 2nd half twice, reading between the lines if you still find yourself going "wtf?!"

Author's note II: For the Rosalie and Emmett scene, listen to "On the Nature of Daylight" by Max Richter. For the 2nd flashback scene, listen to "Vladimir's Blues and "Written in the Sky" by Max Richter. For the last two scenes, listen to "Fly" by Ludovico Einaudi.

It took a lot for Emmett to grow truly angry at something or with someone. Usually the effort to piss him off backfired, and the offending person in question gave up long before they could reach his limit. The only exception to this, of course, was Edward, whose biting snipes at his wife and his general judgements of her and their marriage rarely failed to ignite indignation deep within him. Edward's simplistic way of looking at the world had never changed since he was turned in 1917, and the part of him that loved his brother (because in the end, he was still his brother) truly feared that he would only grow more and more archaic as the years crept on. There are no absolutes in this world. Conduct that was perfectly all right in Edward's time was not today, and the same held true vice versa. His brother's happiness depended on him learning this vital lesson lest he succumbs so far into his self-made isolation that no one, not even the ever compassionate Esme and Carlisle, can pull him out.

But Edward, for once, had nothing to do with his current vexation. That honor belonged to none other than his wife.

"What do you mean we need to leave?" He asked cautiously.

They were standing together in a secluded corner of Hoh rainforest, an hour west of Forks. It had not taken him and the family long to realize both Rosalie and Bella were missing. Calls to the two went unanswered and so Emmett set out to track his wife, starting with her favorite locations. She'd come here before, many years ago, to blow off steam.

Usually when Emmett found her after she'd run off, Rosalie would be fuming. She'd be tearing something apart, causing as much damage as she could to get whatever was bothering her out of her system. Today however, she stood in stony silence. Emmett looked around and, to his beguilement, not so much as a rock looked out of place.

"Rosalie, what's going on? We can't find Bella."

She hissed when he said the name, startling him.

"Rosalie," he said again. "Where's-"

"It doesn't matter. It's over."

He cocked his head in confusion. Her words made no sense but her tone...that cold, disgusted tone she reserved for the teenage hoodlums who thought they had a chance with her...made him pause with caution.

"What's over?"

"It," she hissed. "This ridiculous experiment. It's over. We were all wrong about her. She's not my mate after all."

Emmett blanched as the meaning of her words finally started to make sense.

"What happened?!"

She didn't answer and Emmett, truly starting to panic now, asked again with more urgency.

"She doesn't want forever!" Rosalie yelled, choking on the the last word. "She doesn't want to be like us!"

He gasped. He couldn't help himself. Rosalie finally popped the question then, after months of prodding from himself and the rest of the family. All of them, minus Edward, wanted Bella in the family of course, but it was implicitly agreed upon that Rosalie would be the one to do the honors.

"She said no?" His face, boyish already, looked even younger as the implications hit him in the gut. How could she say no?

Seeing his face, Rosalie scrunched her eyes and crumpled to the ground. He surged forward and held her as she sobbed silently into his shoulder. The anger exuding from her earlier fizzled as sadness displaced it. How could she say no?

"Why?"

"She didn't say…"

That didn't sound like Bella. He looked his wife in the eye and, when she quickly turned away, surmised what had happened.

"You didn't give her a chance to, did you?"

"It doesn't matter what her reasons are," she yelled, her eyes bright. Some of her previous anger seeped back into her voice. "I can't-I can't watch her die."

Emmett shook his head, slowly at first as he processed everything, then more vehemently.

"So that's it?" He asked her in disbelief. "You ask her once, she says no, and you're done?"

She looked him defiantly. "What more can I do?!"

"Don't give up!" He exclaimed. "And don't-don't say she's not your mate because we both know that's bullshit."

Rosalie stood up. Her eyes flashed with indignation but Emmett's eyes also shone. "We can't force her to turn!"

"We have years to convince her!" He countered.

"Fine!" She screamed. "You try and convince her all you want. But I'm done! She rejected me! Flat out rejected me! After how hard…"

She stopped talking, clearly on the verge of crying again. Emmett's heart went out for her but despite her pain, he knew she was wrong.

"I want to leave, Em," she whispered.

"No."

Silence. Rosalie looked at him, not quite registering his response.

"I want to leave."

"No. No. No!"

Rosalie narrowed her eyes and opened her mouth to make the same demand, but Emmett was done listening.

"You're being stupid!" Emmett yelled. "Shortsighted! You don't get what you want as soon as you want it, and you throw a tantrum? You demand we throw away what we've built here and high-tail it? NO!"

"She-"

"She's changed you! You're a better person because of her! You can't go back and you know it! If you leave her you'll be a miserable mess and I can't have that, Rose. I can't let you do that to yourself."

"I was fine before I met her, Emmett."

"No you weren't," he scoffed. "You fooled the family but you can't fool me. Something was always missing and I'm not talking about our marriage. Something was missing for you, period. I know you best, Rose, and I'm telling you: Bella is it!"

Rosalie threw her hands in the air, exasperated. She was not used to Emmett so forcefully demanding his way. There hasn't been cause for a lot of disagreement between the two. It was disconcerting to witness her mellow, agreeable husband glare at her like this.

But as irritated as she was with him, she knew he was right. A vampire can never forget...The shift in her, deep and reverberating inside her, could not be undone.

"She's changed us, too," Emmett whispered. "You know we don't change so easily but we have with her! We've all changed because of her and I'm not gonna let you toss her out of our lives! That's not fair. It's not fair to me and it's not fair to them!"

Rosalie fell to her knees on the ground. Perhaps out of anger. Or perhaps the grief she felt...the wound she was inflicting on herself with this preposterous insistence on leaving was finally now showing its toll on her body. Lord only knows what it was doing to her soul. Emmett's heart broke when he knelt down with her and looked into her eyes. He felt her pain as keenly as if he was stabbed with it himself, and he hoped for his as well as for her sake that they'd never live to see the day in which Bella no longer existed in their world. Rosalie was the strongest person he knew...yet he couldn't wager on her surviving Bella's death. If she couldn't, he couldn't.

"We'll find a way," he whispered to her. "You're not the only one who loves her!"

Rosalie's lips twitched. She was determined to keep from laughing out loud but Bella was making that quite difficult. The human, in the meantime, was grinning like a maniac at her girlfriend's losing struggle.

"It's no use," Rosalie insisted as she flashed her a steady smile. "It won't work"

Bella's own smile grew and she refined her power once again so that she barely felt it herself. Clumsy human fingers were never going to tickle a vampire. But her intricate control over the air meant it could caress Rosalie's skin in a way the vampire never anticipated, and Bella was enjoying watching her bite her lip and struggle not to burst out laughing.

"I don't think so," Bella whispered wickedly. She eased her power even more and her heart skipped a beat when Rosalie let out a soft sigh. "You can't win every battle, love."

With that she carefully lowered the caress to the small spot right beneath the underside of her breast-and Rosalie released a sudden, surprised (and magical, Bella thought) laugh from deep within her.

Bella cheered her victory. She didn't linger on it however because watching Rosalie was its own reward-far greater than winning a bet. Her smile lit up her face, and Bella's victorious grin softened at Rosalie's radiance. It wasn't her beauty alone that chased away every thought in Bella's mind. This carefree and utterly wild laugh was not an everyday occurrence, and she felt her insides ballooning in her chest for inspiring it now.

She let Rosalie's glow warm her up and, though she stayed fully in the here and now with her, filed these precious moments away to a special place in her mind. Unlike the vast, organized library that was the rest of her mind, this place was chaos by comparison. And it was small. But...it was growing. Fragments of memories lay strewn, ready to be picked up: Alice gleefully twirling her around in an outfit she liked; Jasper's animated civil war storytelling; Carlisle's surprised but pleased smile when she asked him to be her emergency contact at work; Esme, watching her sketch with pride; every one of Emmett's bear hugs; and Rosalie...Rosalie was everywhere. Her presence overwhelmed the others'. She overwhelmed even Bella's many happy memories of flying through the skies.

When the fire coursed through her, too painful to ignore, and she felt herself sieged and desperate to let it consume...everything...it was this trough of memories that saved her. It was this trough of memories that saved everyone around her.

She wiped angrily at the tears that ran, determined, down her face. She was too angry to cry, she thought bitterly. This hollowness in her chest-it was beyond anger. It was betrayal. Bitterness. Sheer disappointment. And absolute, heart-rendering sadness. Bella felt lost in a way she never felt in all her years alone. She was a high-flying balloon untethered from her pack, and she was drifting further and further away until the chance to return became a statistical zero. She was drifting too high-so high even her wings might not save her. So high she may as well explode with a pop.

Rain poured outside as usual, but Bella was safe from the downpour inside the car she had stolen in Whitehorse. It still had the new car smell. Hopefully its owner had a good insurance policy. Stealing it was surprisingly simple. All she had to do was run her wind over every contour inside the keyhole until she figured out the exact shape of the key, and then form the wind to solidify into that shape. Easy.

Everything was easy.

She could do what she pleased. Obtain enough money and worldly possessions to live like a queen. She couldn't see the future of the stock market like Alice, but there was no need when she could speed past a bank clerk, too fast for the cameras to catch her...when she could blow up any safe and unlock any lock.

But that's not what would please her.

"Don't", she muttered to herself, because what would please her...what would catch her breath with sheer pleasure that dwarfed the prospect of living in style till the end of her days, was fire.

Fire that touched and destroyed. Fire that connected her to things in ways no one in the world could possibly understand. It was as beautiful as it was mortifying. It was Godly.

People were walking past her and the car. She was parked on a side street near several cafes and clubs somewhere in Seattle. Men and women laughed and greeted each other. They shook hands. They hugged. They kissed. They led uncomplicated, happy lives. None of them had to cope with the fear of taking yet another life.

What to do now? For fifteen months her life was connected, through a thousand different threads in one way or another to a Cullen. Rosalie didn't understand—might never understand or approve of her determination to stay human. But what about the others? Were those threads already cut?

Did Bella have the strength to live without them? That was the question that haunted her these last days spent drifting without direction. Was she even capable of purging her heart of them…of purging her heart of Rosalie? Or was she as permanent inside herself as venom was in her?

Her vision was clouded. The clarity with which she could previously see her small plans and small hopes for the hundreds of tomorrows she got to live with Rosalie and her family…that clarity was gone now, replaced with crushing fear and self-doubt.

Could she ever move past Rosalie?

The crowd thinned enough, probably on account of the hour, for her to focus her attention more fully on each person she saw. There was a young couple, a man and a woman, smoking and talking quietly outside one of the bars. On a street corner, a handful of young men stood milling around in that irritating way only teenage hoodlums can manage. They looked familiar. In fact…

"Will," she whispered as she reached for her memory of her first encounter with Rosalie. That was the guy's name, one of Rosalie's harassers. And standing right next to him was another face she recognized…he was the one who threatened Bella and prompted Rosalie to jump in between them.

She looked down in surprise when she spied a light in her peripheral vision. It was her hands. Her hands were clenched into tight fists, and they were starting to glow.

She could do it in a heartbeat. She could extinguish those lowlifes' lives without leaving her car. She could do it with her eyes closed.

She could.

She can.

She didn't.

Instead, she got out of the car and walked up to the couple.

In the darkness, Bella slid out of the bed as quietly as she could. There was just enough light from under the door for her to get her bearings and find her clothes. It took a while to sort through the articles she found on the floor until she was sure she was wearing her own things.

"Hey."

Her hand was on the doorknob when the light turned on and the woman spoke. Beside her, her boyfriend too roused and looked up sleepily.

"What's wrong?" The woman asked. Becka. That was her name. And his was Rob. "We thought you were staying till morning."

Bella smiled politely and looked down slightly when she got up from the bed and approached her, completely nude. She had no reason to be shy, Bella guessed, not after the last few hours. Neither did Bella, but she nonetheless felt overcome with bashfulness.

"I'm sorry, but I need to go," Bella said.

Rob walked up to her too (after putting on a pair of shorts, thank goodness). "We had a great time," he said when he reached his girlfriend. They both smiled at each other before he added, "we'd love to see you again, if you'd like."

Bella smiled gently and accepted the hotel card they gave her with their number written hastily on the back. She took it, and let them each kiss her once on the lips before she said her goodbye and left the room.

The card was burned to ash before she stepped outside.

Too tired to fly or run, she walked back to the stolen car and programmed the GPS for Forks.

Author's note III: Yes, what you think happened did in fact just happen. Before you light a torch and burn me in effigy, please remember that a. I never gave Bella a sexual orientation (when Charlie asked her if she liked girls, she responded "I like Rosalie") and that b. I've made an effort to draw a clear separation between sex and romantic love in this story, i.e., Rosalie's history (by the way, pay attention to what Rosalie said in the last chapter: Emmett had/has his flings too!). Bella's allowed to indulge too and explore her sexuality or in this case, her depression-induced curiosity.