Summary:
Bella Swan, on the run from her past, dwells in a small town with a hope of healing. Book store owner Edward Cullen is running from his past, too, and hires Bella on a whim after she losses her voice. Will these two lost souls heal together? Or will Bella leave this town in worse shape than she arrived? All Human AU.
Trigger Warning: This story contains references to violent acts and has a short scene of attempted non-con.
A/N: While my mom was in the hospital, I wanted to take a pause from my work on the story "A Perfect Submissive." I wasn't in the right headspace to work on a story like that at the time—so, I was inspired to write something different. I wrote the entirety of this story while in the waiting room in the hospital and at my mom's bedside. I'm finishing the last chapter of this up today as I'm posting this, so don't worry about this one being another WIP to add to my list of WIPs. The story is already finished, and I will be posting every day until the entire thing is published on here!
I also wanted to take a moment to say thank you for all of your support while my mom has been in the hospital. As many of you know, one of my mom's brain tumors was growing so large that it was pressing against her brain stem and therefore affecting her ability to do basic things such as walk. The tumor was growing so rapidly that they had to perform an emergency surgery a little over two weeks ago. Those days were really rough and her time in the ICU was pretty traumatizing but fortunately, she's back in her home now and recovering. To all of my readers, thanks for all of your support and prayers during this time! Seeing all of your messages and comments helped me get through this while staying strong for my mom. It really meant the world to me that you would take time out of your day to write such kind things. I love you all so much! Thank you!
I'll shut up now, then. Please enjoy this fic! It's going to be an emotional ride!
Prologue: Seafoam and Sea Witches
"People pay for that they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead." – James Baldwin
The year I had turned cute, I realized what true pain really was. Cute and pretty seemed like the words left for when there was nothing else to say. Never had I been called intelligent or even witty—just cute, like it was enough to sum up my entire existence.
My existence was minuscule after all.
Sometimes, when we're up really high, we realize just how tiny we are. At seven, the year before I became cute, I had somehow found myself on the roof of our apartment building. The Texas summer of '98 and the sun had been blazing, causing beads of sweat to dampen the cotton of my shirt as I sunbathed on top of five stories. Frank, the man who had lived two apartments away from me and almost always looked like a corpse in his suntanned leathery skin, had one day accidently shown me the staircase leading to the roof for maintenance workers. Seven and too curious for my own good, I took it upon myself to keep watch over the apartment complex from the roof. I told myself that I was a sort of superhero, protecting my small home from danger.
In a red sweater tied around my shoulders, immolating a cape, I had ignored how blistering hot my skin felt as I took a trash bag around the complex to pick up abandoned fast food bags and dirty needles. After a few too casual run-ins with our neighborhood flasher, I did what any good superhero would do: tape newspaper over his front window so he couldn't surprise Mom anymore as she would head off to work in the early morning. I had seen the man's protruding belly one too many times, which nearly covered the little turtle head between his thick thighs. Mom said he "got off" at people looking at him, and at the time, I didn't know what "getting off" was. I was innocent then and too chubby in all the wrong places to be considered cute.
When Mom remarried Phil, my days of being a superhero ended. No longer could I lounge on the roof in the Texas heat, wondering what it would feel like to fall. If I jump, will I sprout wings and fly away from this place? Would I be able to fly toward the sun? Thankfully, I had never had my Icarus moment—at least, not as a child. Much later in life, I would experience the sensations of approaching the sun, feeling its heat, before harming my wings and tumbling back down to Earth.
"Wow, Renée. I didn't know your little girl was such a cutie."
At eight years old, I had been called "cute" for the first time. That was before puberty hit, which caused me to always cross my arms over my chest as I talked to Phil. Even then, I had seen the way he looked at me and knew it was strange. As my flat chest turned to "big bites" and my nipples began to sting, he smiled at the way my nipples would become hard and press against the thin fabric of my shirt.
"Look at you … really developing into a woman," he had told me in his southern drawl as he held onto Mom's hand over the breakfast table.
Without looking away from her tabloid magazine, Mom said, "We'll have to take her bra shopping soon. All the boys have probably already noticed she's going through her special time." Mom had then looked up and winked at me.
Bra shopping—a family activity according to her.
In the end, Phil ended up taking me, letting the department store staff gush over me as I tried on things too frilly for my age. He had insisted on seeing every style to make sure it was "appropriate" for me, almost as if he didn't understand the irony of the entire situation.
No one had given him a strange look. None of the staff seemed to notice my discomfort. Phil was too charming for his own good, after all. He flirted with everything that moved as if a blush from a woman was as good as gold. Unfortunately, it wasn't just women he was after … it was children too.
If Mom noticed, she never spoke up. Maybe she was far too smitten to really see him like I did. At eight, I was wearing my first training bra, and at nine, he started to touch me. Thirteen years old, I had run away from home, wanting to find an escape to different scenery. I stayed wherever I could. Motels. Rest stops. Hotels, if I were lucky. I still had my red sweater, which I tied around my shoulders like a cape when I wanted to feel brave.
Superheroes didn't always have homes, after all. There are always too many people to help, so they must move from place to place. That's what I did—moving from place to place, city to city, saving what I could until evil found me and dragged me back to that little town in Texas.
Nearly a year on my own and I was a changed person. If you could call a child a person really … I was never treated like one. I had started middle school with a grit seen in adults—a jadedness that would come from "seeing some shit," as Mom always described it.
As a preteen, I was wild. Nearly crazy. Out of my head on any given day. Mom hadn't been watchful enough to put me on anything, and I'm sure that had she been, doctors would have filled my mouth with pills. I'm sure I'd have pills in all different shapes, colors, and sizes, all in the hopes of being cured. Of course, my "cure" would be finding the result of a semi-normal existence. That semi-normal existence would never come however, and I had never once wished for it. Superheroes weren't normal, after all—even semi-normal. They were far too out of this world for that.
I wanted to be out of this world too. However, as I swam into my teen years, now full-busted and still a bit soft, I was ready to be boring. At least, the sort of "boring" that my mother was—going to work in the morning after too much coffee, staying away from home for nearly ten hours, coming home to a few glasses of wine before passing out on the couch in front of her late-night TV dramas. She seemed happy enough … at least, she had a husband who seemed to love her when he wasn't abusing her daughter and losing job after job.
High school marked a period of endless moving. I hadn't been able to unpack before we were packing up again and taking off to a new town. I switched school seven times. Every lunch period, I sat alone, pouring over fictional stories as if their main characters were my friends. Everywhere I went, everyone already had established friends and an established life. I was the odd one. The chubby one. The smelly one. It wasn't until seventeen that I became cute again.
When I lost a bit of weight, I felt what it was like to be noticed. One day, after coming back from winter break, a time which I had been too on edge around Phil to ever eat anything, I came into my senior homeroom to find everyone's eyes on me. Most of my classmates, who had seen me five days a week since the beginning of the semester, looked at me as if they had never seen me before. The boys had blatantly stared. The girls had seemed snide and unfriendly. I took my seat in the very back of class next to the only girl who didn't look put out by my existence—Alice.
"Did you complete all of the readings?" Alice had asked without seeming any different than she normally did. Unlike everyone else, she wasn't put off by my appearance, and if she was, she at least had the decency to allow me to feel somewhat normal. "I fell behind after the first few short stories and didn't read the rest."
In my quest to become "boring," I decided to finally become a responsible student. Boring people are responsible, right? At least, the two things seemed to coincide for me. After giving her a small, thankful smile, I pulled out my binder and opened it to my tab of notes.
"Bella, a pretty girl like you doesn't need to study. That's for the ugly chicks. You'll find a man to take care of you and will never have to think about any of this crap." These words from Phil had rung in my ears as I leaned across my desk to show Alice my color-coded notes.
After a few minutes of chatting, Alice had asked, "Are you okay today, Bella? You seem a bit out of it."
When was I ever not out of it? Instead of pointing out the obvious, I had given her a polite smile and shrugged. One of many things I loved about Alice was the fact that she never fished for information. If I wasn't ready to tell her something, she always respected me. Even though this first conversation of ours centered entirely around school, it marked the first moments of our friendship.
While she didn't like to challenge me on things, Alice didn't like Mike from the start. I had met him during gym class one day after a failed round of volleyball and hit it off with him right away. He was tall, tan, and charming—the picture of that all-American boy seen in Abercrombie ads. Mike was easy going and a stark contrast to the masculinity I was used to.
"Shit—I'm so sorry! I really didn't see you there!" I had said, jogging over to further apologize and chase after the volleyball that I had just bounced against his skull.
He had waved the whole thing off. With a white-toothed grin, he said, "It's no problem. Wait … you're Bella, aren't you? Bella Swan? I've been hearing all about you."
"All about me? What's there to talk about?"
His gaze moved over my body. "A lot."
The casual conversation caused by an accidental smack to the head by a volleyball sparked the first love of my life. At least, what I thought was the first love of my life. With him, I had fallen so fast. We had gone from strangers to soulmates in a matter of days. The amount of time hadn't raised any red flags—I just thought that's what true love was. It didn't need reason or explanations. It was something that could only be felt and understood by the individual experiencing it.
My love for him grew as my friendship with Alice diminished. The more she would speak out against him, the more I would avoid her in the hallways and ditch her at lunch. Eventually, she stopped talking to me all together, and instead of being sad about this, I was relieved. I wouldn't have to worry about her anymore. Instead, I could focus entirely on Mike.
At nineteen, I was married. At twenty, I was pregnant only to lose the baby just a few months before the due date. At twenty-one, Mike, finishing his biology degree before moving on to his pre-med track, started to abuse me.
Somehow, I felt like I deserved it. Almost as if I had brought the abuse on myself. Instead of thinking to blame him, I wondered what I did to deserve the smacks. That's all it was at first—smacks here and there whenever I did something he didn't like or agree with. Then, these smacks turned into punches and these punches, turned into cuts. Before I ran away for the second time in my life, he had threatened me with gasoline. There was a diary shoved under my mattress that acted as an instruction manual if I ever went missing. If I was going to die young, I knew it would be by his hand.
"You know—you know deep down—there's no one who could love you like I do."
I couldn't count how many times Mike told me this. Every time he had believed I looked flighty, he reminded me how unlovable I was. In those moments, I regretted opening up to him. When things were good between us and time felt like nothing more than a concept, I had divulged every single one of my secrets. Drunk on what felt like love, I told him about Phil, pouring my heart out until there was nothing left to give. Then, for a moment, I hadn't felt so alone. Someone else in this world knew of my secrets, and I was no longer alone to carry the weight of their burden.
Never had I thought that he would use these truths against me. That hurt more than any physical violence. At least, bruises would fade. At least wounds would heal, turning to faint scars that would be camouflaged in my sea of freckles. The way he had taken the most vulnerable part of me and exposed it in venom made my bones feel as if they were melting. I had felt like I was fading away—like my body was preparing to evaporate into the universe.
As a child, I had The Little Mermaid on VHS. The Disney classic was so light and happy compared to the Anderson original. Young and curious, I found the original fairytale one day in the library at school. It was contained in a volume of classics and had old illustrations bordering the paragraphs.
In the original The Little Mermaid, a young mermaid willingly gives up her life in the sea to gain a human soul. After watching a birthday celebration in honor of a handsome prince, she falls in love with said prince as she saves him from drowning. Of course, the prince in his life-or-death struggle didn't see her and never knew that the young mermaid saved his life. Stupid and in love, the young mermaid visits a sea witch and gives up her beautiful voice for legs.
So far, all of this is like the Disney animated version. However, unlike this 1989 classic, in the original, the young mermaid constantly feels like she's walking on sharp knives as she moves around on her new legs. In addition, she can only obtain a human soul if the prince falls in love with her and marries her, as part of his soul will flow into her. Otherwise, at the dawn on the first day after he marries someone else, the young mermaid will die of a broken heart and dissolve into seafoam upon the waves.
As a child, this idea of dissolving into seafoam terrified me. Despite being a fairytale, the entire story had unsettled me. Once the little mermaid is found on shore by the prince after her deal with the sea witch, he is mesmerized by her beauty. He loves to see her dance, and she performs for him despite suffering excruciating pain with every step. Due to her beauty and grace, the little mermaid becomes the prince's favorite companion as he takes her everywhere with him. During this time, the prince never falls in love with her. When the prince's parents encourage him to marry a princess from a neighboring kingdom, he expresses that he can't do it because he doesn't love the princess—instead, ironically, he loves the woman who saved him from drowning, Mute, the little mermaid can't tell him that she was that person.
So, as the princess from the neighboring kingdom lies and claims she was the woman who saved him from drowning, the prince declares his love for her, and they announce their wedding at once. Heartbroken, the little mermaid prepares for death. Her sisters rise from the water, carrying a dagger they obtained in exchange for their long hair. If the little mermaid kills the prince and lets his blood drip onto her feet, she can become a mermaid again. However, too much has happened, and she still loves the prince too much to harm him. So, the little mermaid throws the dagger into the ocean as the dawn breaks. Then, in the sunlight of a new day, her body turns into foam, and she becomes luminous in the air.
The idea of turning into foam had once been terrifying, but as I grew older, the idea became strangely romantic. How I wished I could evaporate into air, becoming something greater than myself. With every punch I took—with every truth thrown back spitefully in my face—I wanted to dissolve into air. Just like that twisted tale, I had lived a life for someone else, enduring the pain of walking on knives just to dance for a man who didn't love me. Even in a town that looked like paradise, I was living in my own personal hellscape.
One day, I decided to become one with the air in my own way. Mike had left for work early, seeing me off with a smack to my ass and a kiss on the cheek. I had forced myself to bear it, knowing soon I would be something resembling seafoam.
At twenty-four, I took only a backpack, leaving behind the only chance I felt I had at happiness, no matter how delusional that was. There was a bus station nearby, and I boarded and rode it to its final stop. Then, I moved to a different bus, doing the same thing. I did this until I couldn't recognize anything anymore. When I finally stopped for the night, I wasn't sure what town I was in. There was only one thing that was certain: this wasn't home yet.
"You've built up quite the appetite," an old waitress at the first diner I had come across said to me after my day on the road. "You finished that plate mighty fast. You want anything else, sweetheart?"
My stomach had responded for me then with a grumble, and I reached for the menu, ordering the first thing that sounded good before pushing my plate toward her. I sat there without a phone and only a few hundred dollars in cash to my name. I knew that soon I'd have to settle down somewhere for a bit and find a job. This night, however, I let myself just exist.
For the first time in my life, I could breathe without feeling strangled.
A/N: Just a reminder: I'll be updating this fic every day!
P.S. I hope I'll get to see some of you at TFMU!