Shahrazád's Ghosts


Chapter 27: Isabella Part IV


Isabella took another bite of toast and scrolled through another series of texts from her husband. His latest research project was ending this week and he would be freed up to join her in Scotland again. She sent him back a of responses, some sweet, some silly, and let him know she hoped he would come Friday instead of Sunday.

It was barely six in the morning, but she had woken up when she heard Mikie crying. Mikie managed to go back to sleep, but Isabella was up and sleep would not return, even if she begged it to. When she was young, she had always felt the odd duck out. As the only one who slept, every morning she'd wake and find out all she'd missed during the long hours of interrupting rest. She often wondered, why sleep was one of the human traits she had inherited. As she aged, she gave up fighting it and questioning it and learned to enjoy the reprieve it gave her.

Most of the household was hidden away and scattered across the various rooms and halls and hideaways of the castle. They may not sleep, but they did rest, and sometimes they all needed a break from the company of the others. She found Jasper and Emmett in the drawing room. Jasper knew better than to try talking to her until she'd had time to wake up. He gave her a gentle nod and returned to his computer screen. Emmett, on the other hand, pounced on her like a kid on Christmas morning.

"Izzy! You are finally awake!" He boomed in delight, and wrapped her in a hug, as if he had been waiting only for her all night long. It was possible he had been. He tossed aside his video game console and followed after her, prattling idly and grinning like a Cheshire cat. It took Jasper's reproof from the other room to peel Emmett off her, albeit temporarily, until she could find her coffee and set her thoughts in order. Emmett whined and grumbled, but complied. She let a wave of gratefulness swell within her so Jasper would silently catch her appreciation.

Isabella set down the crust of her toast and was about to clean up her plate when she caught Emmett excitedly peering out the window.

"There they are! Together! I told you, Jazz, didn't I tell you? He went to find her, and they've been out there all night. Whad'ya think kept them out there all night, huh?" Emmett spouted out; his dimpled grin so wide it was obvious what he thought had happened out there.

"Good Lord, Emmett. Come away from the window and stop peering at them like a hooligan," Jasper chided. "No wonder they took themselves as far from your prying and meddling as they did. No doubt, you'd have listened from the threshold and tried to give advice through the wall."

"If it'd help, yah! Wait, they are stopping! No! Come on! I've been waiting all night for this! Don't make me wait more! Come inside, you little lovebirds!"

Jasper stood then, entirely abandoning his reproach for Emmett's voyeurism, and he joined Emmett at the window. By Jasper's deep frown, Isabella did not think it was curiosity that propelled him forward.

"Something's wrong," Jasper said.

"Yeah, it is. I'm dying here to find out if my man Peter scored his lady. They are so close…. And yet so far."

"No. Something's happened. They are too far for a clear read of their emotions, but I can get enough to know Darling is upset. That's not a strong enough word. Distraught might be a better one."

"That can't be right," Emmett said.

The pair stood by the window, both watching so intently that Isabella allowed her own curiosity to get the better of her and she joined them. They both gave way so she could stand in front of them and get a clearer view across the kitchen garden. She could barely see them. The pair stood motionless outside the gate, each staring intently at the other.

Then Darling collapsed onto the ground with knees hiding her face. Peter knelt beside her, one hand placed on her shaking shoulder, and they did not move from there until Isabella's feet began to grow tired and she wondered if they really should leave the pair in peace and move away from the window.

It was Michael who jarred them back into the present. He threw open the door with his eyes wide.

"What is it?" Jasper asked, concern evident in his face.

"She dropped her shield," Michael said. His usual expression of cheerful intensity had been replaced with a drawn, disquieted grimace. "They are coming. She wants to see Izzy."

"Me?" Isabella asked. She took two steps away from the window and into the center of the room. "Why would she want to see me?"

"She wants to talk about your mother," was all Michael would answer.

Her mother... the one subject she most wanted... and least wanted... to discuss. But why would this upset Darling so?

Isabella watched the door, listening as she heard first the gate and then the kitchen door open and shut. Darling blurred into the room and then stopped only a foot away from Isabella. Then she froze, motionless and silent before her, her dark amber eyes staring deeply into Isabella's as if she could find the answer to some long-buried secret there.

It was jarring to see the woman who had been dressed as a queen the day before now so very casual. No billowing sleeves followed the movements of her arms and swished around her ankles. No gems glittered from her face. With her hair pulled up in a messy bun, she looked so many years younger and more terrestrial than she had yet seemed.

Darling's entrance had been so unpredictable that it prompted Emmett and Jasper to take up defensive positions on either side of Isabella. Her failure to come any closer did not decrease their wariness and both watched her as carefully as if she were a ticking time bomb, about to explode. Yet, Isabella did not think Darling meant to attack her. Despite her frantic movements, Isabella could see the way her eyes carried the scattered fear of a prey animal before a predator. Yet Isabella could not fathom what the Volturi-trained shield could possibly fear from her?

"Ummm, hi?" Isabella managed to say. She fidgeted under the weight of that stare and shifted from one foot to the other.

"Where were you born?" Darling asked, in such a rush of air it almost sounded as if she were afraid she would not be able to find the answer fast enough.

"In Chad," Isabella answered. "In Barzakh."

"In the blue room. The one with the rocking chair," Peter supplied. He had followed after Darling and came to stand a few steps behind the vampire queen. He ran his hand anxiously through the tousled hair on his head and appeared torn between reassuring Emmett and Jasper and calming Darling.

Isabella cringed at the more detailed description he had gleaned from her thoughts. She had wished, more times than she could count, that her memory did not go that far back and did not include the days surrounding her birth, but they did. The vampire side of her would not permit her to forget much of anything.

"It's true, then," Darling whispered, more to herself than to Isabella. The next moment, Isabella felt herself enveloped in flannel-covered arms as Darling pulled her into a fierce and confounding embrace. Then, a violent sob broke through Darling's frame, and she pulled Isabella even tighter into her embrace. Isabella gawked in surprised and turned to both her uncles and then Peter, with her eyes she begged them to explain just what was going on.

"Oh, Margaret, my Margaret! You lived! I can hardly dare believe it! Oh, my Margaret, forgive me! Forgive me! I only wanted you to have a home… for your mother to have a home… we could not stay there, not with him. I came back as soon as I could, and it was too late, and I thought Edward had… I saw the smoke and I tried to find you and you were not there and your mother was not there and the blood, there was so much blood and so many flames, and I could not find you. I tried. I searched and you were gone. You were both gone. It was my fault. I thought it was my fault. I wanted to save you and I left you to your deaths and I wanted to kill him. Oh, by the blood that used to flow through my body, I wanted to kill him like I had never wanted to kill him before, but he was already dead. Then I wanted to die. There was no number of deaths that would bring you and your mother back. And by the stars above, it should have been me. It should have been me that died and it wasn't and I have never been so sorry as when I saw the smoke and I could never forgive myself."

Isabella's mouth fell open as the woman continued to weep and chatter and cling to her as if she were a mother tarsier clinging to her young. Awkwardly, Isabella cleared her throat.

"Ummm, my name isn't Margaret."

"Why, you are Margaret, of course," Darling said, as if it should be the most obvious truth in the world. She pulled away far enough to stare at Isabella again and she drew her hand along Isabella's cheek in such a fond expression of affection that Isabella was nearly repulsed by it. She shook her head in confusion.

"My name is Isabella Cullen."

Darling's eyes flashed in a sudden burst of anger as she made the connection. "Isabella? Who named my baby after her? After them?" She released Isabella and turned on Emmett and Jasper.

Jasper took a step back and lifted his hands placatingly, a wave of calm rushing across everyone in the room. "Darling, she was named in honor of the first of you – the human girl Edward stole from Forks so many years ago."

"That woman has been honored enough, I think," Darling hissed out. "The entire temple, the shrine center room, every single clone… they were all to honor her. How dare you name my baby after her! Isabella Swan died quickly and easily. You should have honored Jane."

"Who was Jane?" Jasper asked.

"Her mother," Darling answered and tilted her head in Isabella's direction.

"You knew my mother?" Isabella finally asked, hope welling into her heart. "No one knew anything about her. I mean, Kassim told me about their mother, but no one even knew the name of mine. I always wondered and wished I knew more."

Darling returned her attention to Isabella. "Yes. I knew your mother, but it is not a pretty story. Peter knows so many pretty stories, but none of my stories are like his."

"Please, will you tell me?"

She considered this for a long time, obviously torn over it. Then, she nodded. "I owe you so much more, at least this I can give you."

Oooooo


Dawn was eventually replaced by dusk. When the shadows of twilight crept back across the grassy moor, Darling and Peter disappeared again. No one blamed them for seeking solitude. For the entire day, Darling had remained in the center of the drawing room, the pages of her life opened wide for everyone to read. To the surprise of all, Darling had not merely told her story. Instead, she sought out Kassim with single-minded focus and placed her hand on his. Despite Peter's protests and assurances that he could mediate and be the one displayed, she refused. She allowed herself to be cracked open like a sarcophagus and then she let all the secrets of her existence be unwrapped through Khalid's visual stories.

For years, after the dig at Barzakh, Isabella wondered if ignorance would have been preferable. If the past had stayed buried in the sand, if she had never known exactly what had occurred there, maybe she could have been shielded from some of the bitter sting of the truth. Each layer of sediment, each pelvis and femur, each unearthed artifact told a story. They told stories that not even Kassim's mother had known. They painted pictures that not even Alice's visions could see. Each tale was only a small portion of a greater whole that not even the original Master of Barzakh, the Desert Jinni himself, had known in its entirety. Drug up from the muted layers of years and earth and soluble memories, previously unspoken stories shouted out in the bone-white glare of the desert sun.

Yet, for all the prickly, jarring, uncomfortable truths displayed in specimen boxes around the room, Isabella found comfort in having so many stories laid out clearly, side-by-side, labeled and categorized and analyzed under the lens of unapologetic light.

Darling was right. Her stories were not pretty, but they were true. And for the first time in her hundreds of years of life, they were shared.

Darling began her tale with her own introduction, her own chosen words, before Khalid took over.

"My first name was Bella. I did not choose that name. I did not choose to live. We all started the same. We were all named after our genetic prototype, and we were created to die. Our lives were unimportant. It was only our deaths that mattered.

"My second name was Decoy. Buffy, the guardian of the Bellas then, she chose me and set me apart from the Others. I was created to be a human shield between her and our creator. She did not want to die and so she gave me the chance to live. My destined end was still death, however postponed it might have been.

"My third name was Wendy Moira Angela Darling. I chose to be called 'Darling' because I wished to be cherished. Once I tasted life, I decided I would rather live than die and I have been living on borrowed time ever since.

"In exchange for each day I kept living, I chose someone else to die in my place. Jane, Badiyah, and all the others died so that I could live and I let them die for me. Now, I am still here and I do not regret my chance to live."

It was a solemn, melancholy household that gathered in the drawing room that night. The fire cast orange flickers along the carpet and the walls and all present spoke in whispers, as if the truths they spoke about could be softened if they kept their voices low.

Michael had taken Bell and Mikie away for most of the day and into the next.

"I do not want to know anymore than I already do," he said. "And there are stories I do not think Mikie needs to hear right now."

No one argued for the young family to stay. They understood.

"Here we are, almost two and a half centuries after the bastard's death. He's dead and gone. He doesn't have to deal with the aftermath, but we do," Rosalie said.

"At least we know, now," Isabella said. "We got our questions answered."

"Some of us are smart enough not to ask some questions," Emmett said.

"And some of us should have been brave enough to ask more questions, way back when ago" Rosalie argued. "You doin' ok, Izzy?"

Isabella shrugged. "I mean, we all knew it had to be bad, right? I now know my mother had a name and a face and that's more than I ever dreamed I'd have."

What she didn't say, what none of them wanted to admit to, was how sweeter ignorance had tasted on the tongue. Sometimes the hard-to-swallow truths went down like salmonella and upturned all lingering more palatable pieces of possibilities.

Alice was particularly dejected. She gave mournful glances around the room and gave brief, regurgitated utterings about her failures and regrets.

"The prophet… You knew," Darling hissed through clenched teeth when she saw Alice. "You knew about us… you knew what he was doing… and you did nothing."

None of Alice's explanations or apologies made a dent in Darling's antipathy. Darling could ignore Alice's misplaced attempts to dictate her clothing choices, but she could not ignore Alice's hand in Isabella's disappearance or Alice's lack of ignorance in Edward's actions.

She moved to circle around Alice, fury rolling off her in waves, but Jasper placed himself between them. A cascade of lethargy fell over both and Jasper raised up both his hands to keep them apart.

Now, Jasper kept his mate tucked into his arms and washed her with waves of peacefulness that everyone around them could feel. It didn't erase the melancholy gloom from her face, but it did loosen the tension in her shoulders enough for her to slump against his chest.

After the raging torrents of questions had fizzled into glowing embers of cautious musings, it was Darling's turn to ask questions. She had taken Isabella aside and took in the sight of her again, from her head to her toes. Darling so delicately traced the silvered bronze of a lock of her hair that Isabella had to look away.

"And your life, it has been good?" Darling asked.

Isabella paused to consider her question. She had spent so much time considering what it would have been like if her own mother lived or if the twins' mother had raised her, but she had never once thought of the possibility of someone else involved. What would her life have been like if she had been raised by Darling instead of the Cullens? It was a strange, unsettling thought.

Had her life been good?

She thought over the centuries she had lived, her eccentric, eclectic, devoted family - the people she had loved, the children she had raised, and the struggles she had faced. Would she have exchanged it for anything else? Would she have preferred not to live?

Of course, she would have rather her birth occurred like Mikie's had - with parents who loved each other and loved their child and no one died in the process - but, that's not how it had happened. Her mother hadn't had a choice. But Darling had. And Darling chose to stay… to make sure Isabella lived.

Isabella had told herself that her mother had just been strong enough to do it on her own. But she hadn't. Darling kept Isabella alive so that Alice could find her. Isabella should have been dead. Instead, she lived. After so many years struggling to come to peace with her origins, she finally realized the truth that she had so long evaded: Isabella wanted to live. She shared that with Darling and understood just how much they both fought to hold onto the privilege of living, despite being born in a place of constant death.

"Yeah. My life has been good," was all Isabella could muster in response. And it had. It really, truly had.

"I'm glad," Darling said, her gold eyes no longer cold but filled with genuine, alien warmth. "Can you… I want to know… can you tell me about it?"

"Yeah, I can," Isabella said. She nodded to Khalid, who took Darling's hand in his.

"He'll show you. I owe you that much."

Khalid sat on the floor, his back supported against the leg of the couch. Kassim lay across from him, stretched out in front of the fire. He didn't speak at all, but Isabella knew he was troubled. Rarely, on one of those few days that Kassim spoke for himself, rather than through his brother, Kassim had admitted to her what a burden his gift sometimes was.

"With an accidental brush of a finger, the bump of a foot, I know all the greatest joys and sorrows of anyone I meet. I steal memories and place them in a reservoir of secrets that only grows deeper as the years pass. I can never give memories back or empty that reservoir. Once I grasp a memory, it stays with me, forever."

While Darling had unburdened herself to such an extent that she walked from the castle with visibly lighter steps, Kassim now carried the weight of what she had cast off.

Isabella wondered if Darling had been so open with them in another attempt to push them all away or to shock them into repulsion. While Kassim gleaned her memories, Darling kept her eyes only on Peter. She drank in each flickering, shifting reaction to the stories he gathered simultaneously with Kassim. Had it all been another attempt to prove that she would be rejected, once her secrets were known? By the way she self-consciously watched Peter throughout the remainder of the day and the way she walked on egg shells around the twins, Isabella thought it might be the case. Darling expected revulsion and it was not only her gift that worked to shield her.

"We are all three of us alive because of her," Khalid observed.

It was Carlisle's turn to speak, now, and he clung to the mantlepiece of the fire, a fierce burst of inspiration exuding from how he turned to face the room.

"You are right, Khalid, and that is what I am trying to wrap my mind around. You three are alive… you four, if we are to include Darling, not to mention Michael, Bell, and Peter. I consider that it is nothing short of a miracle that Darling managed to survive as she did. Yes, we have learned much that we only suspected, but did not know for sure. Yes, we have learned even more of the depths of darkness that Edward succumbed to. However, it is not the depths that Edward fell to that confounds me.

"Now, what I am in awe of is the how what was birthed in evil has now been turned for good. What great light can overcome such darkness? Each of us has failed in more ways than even we know, but that is where we can see the hand of the Divine. How else can we understand it? How is it that, despite her blindness, Alice managed to arrive at just the precise moment needed to discover Izzy and bring her to us? How did Darling stumble upon Jane at just the moment needed to preserve her life and the life of Izzy within her? How was that Jane survived until Darling found her? How was it that Badiyah managed to escape and survive long enough to bear Khalid and Kassim? Without Isabella going to Barzakh, how would we known about her brothers? Without Khalid and Kassim, how would we have met Michael and Bell? Even now, I have to believe that Darling's arrival is not based on chance or happenstance, but on the invisible forces working to ensure that good is the final outcome. It is too much to believe it is all pure chance.

"I don't mean to negate the evil that Edward did, but I mean to point out how life was able to overcome, despite everything. Perhaps, this is the opportunity for each one of us to let go of the past and finally forgive – Edward and ourselves – so we can move into our futures unencumbered."

The quiet weight that fell across the room buried them in its solemn lethargy, that is, until Rosalie's snorted laugh interrupted it like a car horn.

"Nah," she said. "I think Darling had the right idea. I say let's resurrect Edward so we can make him suffer like he deserves. A thousand and one times over."

Oooooo


Author's Notes: This chapter extensively refers to past chapters instead of re-stating them. If you need to review, re-read Shahrazád's Ghosts chapter 11 (Darling part 1), and The Remnants chapter 11 (Darling).