Rule One | Never Eat at Home

It was, in her mind, only right that she of all people would manage to get hit by a car while on vacation.

Because who else but Bella Swan would manage to get knocked in front of a goddamn truck while vacationing with her mom and… not step-dad, but something close to it. Her Phil, she supposed. The man who dated her mother. The man whose idea it was to go on vacation in the first place.

They'd gone to Japan, somewhere her mom had always wanted to visit. Somewhere spiritual, she said, different from America and the auburn haze of the Arizona sun. To go and see the tropics of Okinawa, the bustling streets of Tokyo. Parks, cafes, and little hole in the wall restaurants that had all but turned Bella into an addict for anything pan fried and covered in steaming hot buckwheat noodles.

Baseball was one of their main reasons for going, it being Phil's career and her mom's new obsession - a baseball maniac in the making who loved the roar of the crowds and the palpable excitement thrown about during an intense game. That made for beaches, ball games, and any shady place where they could relax beneath the boughs of a tree with leaves so wide you could use them as a hammock.

Not like Phoenix, a wide open desert devoid of any life except for that massive blip in the middle of mesas and mountains, all orange as far as the eye could see and constantly hidden behind a heat mirage. Sparse with palm trees, grass, and anything else green that could be taken and planted in a place that would have otherwise left them withered and dead, if not for the deluge of water that for some reason the residents felt worthwhile to drench them in. All for the sake of any spot of colour to break up the constant red.

At least, that's what Bella thought.

She did think Japan was nice while it lasted. Right up until the moment she got pushed into the street by a girl a few years older than her. A girl who was running from something or someone, she didn't know, but the girl was running like her life depended on it. And Bella stumbled right into her, tangled limbs and shouted curses, only for the both of them to get mowed down by a speeding truck. One of the little ones Bella was so fond of, with a snub face and wide lights. Something cute, if not for the fact that it left her needing an organ transplant and the other girl dead.

The girl's organs. Kidneys, she was told. Or one of them, ruptured in the crash. Told to her by a doctor with a kind smile and dead eyes that made her avert her gaze and fiddle with the thin hospital blankets that shrouded her with clumsy fingers. Unsettling, but he didn't linger much except for meals. Meals that she still couldn't keep down even after returning home. The plane ride back was an experience she tried to put out of mind, stumbling to the tiny washroom to empty out her sixth sick bag and grimacing as she tried to once more shovel back the grimy, bitter mess that was her clubhouse sandwich. She could still taste it, hear the vacuum whorl of the airplane toilet as it opened up and siphoned the half-digested slop into a little tank beneath her feet.

Maybe it was the meds.

She'd heard that some painkillers could change your sense of taste, and even a week after getting back to Phoenix she could hardly eat a cracker, let alone the other meals her mother tried to feed her. Like foul mush caked between her teeth, the thin grains of salt tasting of rust. Yellowed, packet-made chicken soup like an oil slick on her tongue, somehow watery and bitter all the same, yet pungent as it slipped down her throat. It was rotten, all of it, even though her mom took a spoonful for herself and tutted that it tasted 'just fine.'

Mom.

Bella could still picture her in the hospital, waking to see her sobbing - both happy and frightened to see Bella kicking, or at least breathing - after watching her get mowed down by a miniature F150. At least she still had the humour to rib her about it. "Only you, Bella. Scared the shit out of me, but it wouldn't be a vacation without you if you didn't manage to fall over at least once."

And then she sobbed some more, face streaked with salt and no whites to be found in her eyes, bloodshot and sparkling with tears. She practically threw herself on top of Bella, who weakly tried to pat her mom on the back, looking over her shoulder to see Phil rubbing his neck from the seat nearby. The man had never looked so horrid, deep purple bags beneath his eyes and one of his many baseball caps crumpled from how much he'd been wringing it.

Yet, now Bella found herself on the fifth… or was it sixth day? However long it'd been since getting back, and still she couldn't eat.

All the same her stomach growled, and she looked out the window to their little yard, tasteful rusted cobblestones and a small pool hidden beneath the shade of a few palm trees. Thin things neighboured by small ferns poking out of white crockery that, without squinting, she could pick out the spider-web cracks in their surface.

Those pots were twenty feet away.

She could hear her mom muttering worriedly in her room upstairs through walls and shut doors. Could hear the beating of her heart when she was outside the house, and the quiet drumming of her neighbour's as it twitched, jerkily, the man already two heart-attacks deep and on his way to a third.

The other day Bella had smelled blood. Normally something that would make her retch, dizzy with nausea and stumbling away from the sight and stench of liquid metal. Like copper left in the ocean, rank with the brine and scales of its passersby. She had smelled blood from two rooms away, buried beneath her blanket and wondering when her sense of taste and texture would return to her and she wouldn't have to keep behaving like a picky toddler with every meal.

Ambrosia.

It was the only word she could use to describe it, something so innately familiar yet so horribly different that it left her reeling. For a few moments she couldn't tell what it was, the scent so rich and delectable that she poked her head from the covers and sniffed at the air, wearing a heavy frown as she wondered what was being cooked. Excitement had coursed through her, Bella's heart stuttering as she got up and stumbled from her room, down the stairs, only to see her mom nursing a paper cut.

Only then did recognition hit her, and she fled back to the safety of her blanket and the dark beneath.

"What the hell?" she asked herself, still staring at the pottery. A heavy blink worked its way across her face and she rubbed her eyes, swallowing once before looking away. She rested her forehead on the heel of her palm, a sharp breath sucked through her teeth and another weary blink working over her, eyes screwed shut and the hammering in her ears - thump, thump, th-th-thump - of her neighbour's heart pounding away.

Six days and still she couldn't hold down a meal. Two weeks since the accident and a hurried flight home.

It's just a stomach bug. Nothing crazy, Bella told herself, ignoring the fact that she'd been off her pain meds since a few days ago and, if not for the hunger, had never felt better in her entire life. For the first time in memory, in… ever, she was surefooted. Not a gymnast by any means, but she hadn't tripped down the stairs the entirety of her time back home, even half-starved.

"God, I hope they don't need to put me on a tube."

Flinging her head back, she sighed.

Reading right now didn't feel right, no matter how well it would pass the time. She couldn't seem to pay attention to the words past the churning in her gut, and all she had right now was daytime TV and her own thoughts to keep her company.

Renée was working, and Phil was touring with his team.

So that left her alone, dreadfully so, having to wonder if she was going insane because she was prescribed opioids and maybe, just maybe there was some kind of hallucinatory side effect? Days after she'd stopped taking them?

"God."

Tired of working herself towards a panic attack, Bella decided it was best to sleep, trudging her way upstairs and slamming her bedroom door shut behind her. She crawled under the covers and pulled them just beneath her nose, a shiver running down her spine as she wormed into the mattress and tried to pretend that she couldn't hear her own heart thundering alongside that of her neighbour's, a steady rhythm that made her teeth ache and her gut churn all the worse.

-::-

Another few days and Renée was ready to drag Bella to the hospital for the second time in a month. It was only because Bella had begun to hide the fact that she couldn't eat from her mother, squirreling food down as fast as she could before disappearing to her room and trying her best not to vomit all over the carpet, that she hadn't been tossed into the back of her mom's car and shuttled off to a building that reeked of iodine.

It was in the night, hand pressed to her mouth and a cold sweat trickling down her spine that she shuffled to the downstairs bathroom, quiet as a mouse and listening intently to the soft whisper of her mother's sleeping breaths.

Something had happened to her in that hospital in Tokyo, and as Bella retched into the toilet, nearly whole lumps of coagulated beef pushed from her bobbing throat, she wondered if she was the victim of some radioactive science experiment gone wrong. Like a superhero origin story, she'd maybe find herself crawling along the walls on bare hands and feet, spraying webs from her wrists and leaping over rooftops. She certainly felt like it, knowing deep down that something was terribly, terribly wrong with her.

The thought of going to the hospital was terrifying and settled deep in her veins the moment she crushed a pen, a sturdy thing, between two of her thin fingers without even realizing. She should have cut herself on the warped metal but it only slid over her skin, the slightest pinch when the sharpest point had pricked the tip of her finger and… damnit, she didn't even know if she'd been cut or not because there was a drop of blood staining the crooked metal edge but no wound. Nothing, not even the slightest blemish.

Instead she coughed up that night's dinner into a hollow of cheap porcelain as quietly as she could, praying desperately that whatever this was it would just stop, please god just stop. The sounds of her sickness echoed in her ears, not nearly loud enough to drown out the occasional snort and shuffle from upstairs, and how can I hear her? Am I losing my mind?

Her fingers gripped the rim of the toilet, back heaving and sour filth scattered from her lips. Somehow it tasted better coming up, and that made her shudder even more, forehead pressing against the porcelain without any care for how disgusting it was. Sweat slick palms trailed over the toilet until they came round to hug her belly, and Bella kneeled there with her cheek on the toilet and grime on her lips.

After a few shaky breaths she pushed herself up and moved over to the sink to clean her face, running the tap at a trickle to avoid waking her mom. Staring into the mirror, her gut clenched as she saw how ragged she was. Bags beneath her eyes and a paleness to her features so unlike her usual blanched skin that for a second she thought she was looking into the eyes of a dead girl. A figure plastered on a milk carton, not before their disappearance but long after.

Nearly midnight, and she was downstairs retching until her teeth stung, and still she could hear every heartbeat loud and small, in or around her house.

"You're fine. You're fine," she told herself, staring into the mirror and trying not to flinch from her own gaze, haggard and weary. "This is just… just some weird side effect of the surgery. Super kidneys or something-" she nearly barked out a laugh, shaking her head at herself. "Friggin' super kidneys."

Do I have blood poisoning or what? Did the surgery go wrong? Do I need to go on dialysis?

One of her mom's friends had gone on dialysis. It looked awful, frightening in a way that made her toes crinkle, reflexively flinching inward, shoulders hunkered as if to protect herself from her imagined fear.

Then she smelled it again.

Blood. Sweet and fragrant and who knew how far away. It could be down the block. It could be right outside her window. It could be all in her head.

She hoped it was.

There was something about whatever was happening to her that made Bella wish she was going insane. That this was a fever dream in her catatonic, comatose mind, and she was still in a hospital on the other side of the world with eyes flickering beneath their lids and her brain sparking so quickly the nearby machines would fry.

Was she?

Was she actually not even at home, and this was some maddened, extended nightmare she was suffering under?

A small giggle worked its way from her lips, and she nearly cried out in fear as the scent grew stronger and something in her shifted.

It felt like lines of warm water running from her eye, branching down, up against the pull of gravity and extending towards her brow and cheeks. In the span of a few seconds her eye changed, the white of her sclera melting away to an inky black that barely reflected the fluorescent lights shining over the bathroom mirror. Pupil and iris twisted in on themselves, a hideous red - crimson, neon - shining out from the centre of her blackened eye. Veins scratched out from her pupil in that same violent scarlet and burst along the lines where it had felt like a running stream. They branched out like liquid lightning across her cheek and up to her brow, turning the left side of her face into a scarlet horror show.

Bella pulled away from her reflection, fingers scratching at the skin beneath her eye, tugging it down so she could see the curl of jellied flesh as it swept back into her skull. Black as night, hideous, monstrous, it felt as if it was another part of her - something else trapped inside - staring back and begging to be let out. Into the void she looked, and from within some bestial thing in the back of her mind screamed.

It was slavering, hunting and sniffing at the air and drooling at the scent of blood it stole from the warm summer breeze.

Scrambling, she pulled away from the mirror and flicked off the light, her heart pounding and breaths coming far too quick as she trudged out of the bathroom and pushed out the back door, all but throwing herself onto the patio. Her hand was pressed to her chest, fisted in the fabric of her t-shirt and clutching desperately at the rough cotton. It tore beneath her grip, ripping apart as easily as soaked paper. She wrung her hands out, feebly trying to shake away the scraps of cloth trapped beneath her fingernails.

Tugging on her hair, her breaths came quicker, nails scraping against her collar bone and cutting thin furrows in the flesh above. "What the hell is going on with me?" Bella gasped, low and pained, still cognizant enough to keep her voice quiet - to not wake her mother and have her come marching down the stairs with her lips pursed in worry, only to see her daughter clawing at her own flesh and staring at the multi-coloured fence of their backyard with one black eye, lined with veins she did not have a short while ago.

Her fingers came up to run beneath her eye once more, fluttering over the raised skin. It was what she imagined a bodybuilder's veins would feel like, protruding much too far. But these things blasted out from around her eye like an explosion, stark red even through the flesh above and somehow connected to the cracks around her pupil.

Bella didn't know what this was, what was happening to her, and through the quiver in her shoulders and the jitter of her leg, one heel pattering against the stone sporadically, she realized she was feeling real, proper dread.

Beneath her fingers, the ones brushing across her collar, she could feel damp blood spreading - warm and heady across her skin. She pulled away, expecting pain, only to find herself still unmarred. Not a mark nor a scratch across her chest, and as she looked down at herself she could see her body heaving as she struggled to breathe.

"What the fuck?"

She wasn't much for cursing, but with her mind running a frantic pace and her hands fumbling uselessly at her bloodied sternum no other words came to mind. With twitching fingers she brought one nail up to the back of her wrist and dug it into her skin, dragging it back and opening a line across her arm that would normally make her shiver with pain, but frantic as she was she only clenched her teeth. Just as soon as blood began to well at the cut it was forced away, dripping down to reveal a reddish streak and untouched flesh.

Clapping her hand against her mouth, Bella heaved, her bloodied arm clamped down beneath the other and pressed tight against her shoulder. The hand that wasn't containing her muted scream was opening and closing reflexively, knuckles bending, popping, as she fought against the sudden rush of confusion, of panic churning through her veins like a poison.

Bella gnawed at the inside of her lip, rodent-like, as she began to rock back and forth, tears streaming down her face and hands clamped against her shoulders as her world unraveled around her. Her fingers clenched and unclenched reflexively, burrowing holes through the fabric beneath and digging into her skin, so tight that they would leave bruises if it wasn't for whatever the hell was going on.

I'm really losing my mind, aren't I? This has to be a dream, this has to be-

Something in her back exploded, a loud rip as what felt like a tail jutted from the base of her spine and burrowed into the brick behind her. It cracked, shattered, and the sound of it echoed into the quiet suburban night. A click, quiet muttering, and she could hear Renée crawling out of bed, her feet landing on the carpet with a muted thud.

It was then that she began to panic, one hand reaching back and struggling with the scaled appendage that had torn from her back, moulded to the skin it sprouted from as if it was a part of her.

Oh god, was it?

The limb began to flail, smashing into the bricks and writhing as she turned around to try and wrestle with it, grappling with this softly shining length of reddened scales, a hellish snake that was made of her and fighting against her attempts to hold it down. It bucked beneath her, scraping her arms against the rough stone and yet not a single lick of pain made itself known. Instead she all but pulverized the fired clay, one hand grappling for purchase and pulling jagged lines through it, her bare hands kneading it like a crumbling dough.

The screen door opened to reveal Bella grappling with herself, wrestling this strange new thing that sprouted out of her spine and calling, begging for her mother to leave. To get away before she hurt her.

Renée only gawped, unable to tear her eyes away from her daughter as she threw herself around the patio, shaking and crying and pleading with her to "Please, get away from me!"

"Bella!"

She snapped into action, Renée reaching over to try and help her only to get thrown into the wall, a shocked gasp forced out of her throat as the back of her head cracked against the faux stone.

"Mom, please! You have to get away-" came her stuttered pleas, cheeks stained in tears and a single, ferocious crimson eye locked onto her mother. Everything in Bella screamed for her to run, to get away from her mother not because she'd just thrown her like a doll, but because she knew she could do so much worse.

Something tickled in the back of her throat, coiled in her belly as she smelled blood on the air, heard the steady - erratic thrum of her mother's heart as she repeatedly stuck out her arm only to retreat, yanking it back at the last second as Bella writhed on the ground.

She smelled like food.

Like a pot roast, simmering and drenched in its own juices. Cooked with pepper, sharp spices, and something indiscernibly sweet beneath it all, a sweetness that clawed at her senses, her nose and tongue sparking like a live wire and dredging up something terrible deep inside her.

"I've got you sweetie, c'mon- please, just- breathe, just breathe, I've got you, just breathe- please Bella-"

"You don't understand, you don't understand. You have to go, you have to hide, oh god-" she retched, more of that night's dinner dribbling from her lips and pattering across the bricks. "There's something wrong with me, they did something to me, mom. They did something to me in that hospital!"

"-c'mon, shush. I'm right here," Renée continued to stammer furiously, before deciding to throw herself on top of Bella and try to hold her down herself.

She stilled horribly as she was suddenly drowned in that self-same scent that had already begun to drive her mad, her strings cut and pupils dilated as it immersed her completely. Warm arms wrapped around her back, and something else coiled around Bella and the body that held her. It shifted like a python, pressing itself tighter against the two of them and holding them close. Too close.

Pained muttering poured out from her, a confusing rush of no's and yet more begging, slowly becoming indecipherable as she burrowed into the aroma that suffused her every sense. Quickly, far too quickly, it became all she had ever known, all she could ever know. Her lids grew heavy, joints popping as she unwound, hands reaching out to grasp at it, to drag it closer - closer - so close she could taste it.

A keening whine echoed deep in her chest, fingers flexing as she pried at the body on top of her, pulling its neck towards her mouth.

God, she wanted it so bad. Wanted to eat, and hadn't it been so long? So, so long since she'd eaten? She'd been good, hadn't she? Hiding from her mom, making sure she couldn't worry. She'd stop worrying now that Bella could eat, now that she could finally feel full for the first time in weeks.

You'll be so relieved.

A hideous scream broke the quiet over their street for but a second, a wail that was immediately silenced, guttural and bubbling, a choking noise that curled in the thing's throat.

Bella moaned in pure, absolute ecstasy as she tore away at the sweet roast, the drippings coating her chin and soaking her neck. She pulled and pried at the ribs, snapping them so she could suck the tender meat from their glossy surface, drinking of the marrow within and nearly sobbing at how delicious it was. Bittersweet. The finest of chocolates. She swam in her feast, burying her head in the meal, ripping at it like the starved girl she was, lost in the desert for so long with nothing to eat but the grit of sand. No longer did her stomach curdle, no longer did she gag around thin bites of rancid meat.

Chewing, cracking, the occasional snap as gristle was shorn from bone droned across the backyard of the Higginbotham residence. Buried within it all was a blood-soaked girl, frail of figure and wearing the half-chewed ropes of her mother's intestines. A length of sausage to her, fried and salted to perfection, every bite bursting with its juices.

So lost she was that it was only once nothing remained but a hideous, heaving mass of mashed viscera, a miniature river of blood trailing behind her and mingling with the pristine pool water, that Bella looked down and saw what she had wrought.

It began with unsteady blinks, a contented burp pushed out from between her lips, foggy gaze wavering on the blotchy, crimson mess beneath her. Her hands gripped something unsteadily, the thing cracking beneath her grasp, and she frowned as she squinted at it.

Slowly the world came into focus, the hammer-beat of her heart no longer thrumming in her ears. The rich scent of so much food, so much food, god please I need it- now muted, her hunger sated and her belly full. She brought whatever it was in her hand up to her face, shaking her head as she saw what looked to be… bone?

Behind her, something struck the ground, and she turned to see a scaled limb - burnished red and thick as her leg as it slinked back into her spine with a quiet pop.

Her breath caught, her heart stopped, and Bella shifted her knees in the wet, felt warmth beneath her. She looked, and she screamed.

Out the yard, to the street, her bare feet pounded on the pavement as she ran, ran, ran, ran- exploding into the darkness like a shot from a gun. She crashed into a mailbox, hardly stumbling as she kept sprinting, running, escaping, getting as far away as she could from two eyes in an empty face, jaw missing, teeth cracked, skin flayed-

Two eyes she knew.

She stumbled, face grinding against the asphalt, knees scraped, before she leered back up, tilted, sprinting with blood soaked feet towards anywhere that wasn't, isn't here.

Bless you, Truck-kun.