Sorry for not updating sooner; as I've told the readers of all my other stories, my life has been really hectic since I started grad school. I'm on winter break right now, but this chapter was hard to write, so I appreciate your patience.
Chapter 2: Living Dead Girl
3 hours ago, just before the explosion
"We're not leaving you."
"There's nothing you can do here, Elle! Just go! You've done enough for me already, both of you." A faint moan reached their ears, causing Bella to glance down at where Niki was beginning to stir, then across the plaza at Micah and D.L., who had just made it outside and were running toward them. "Get them out of here. Go!"
Still Elle and her mate hesitated. Running away at such a crucial moment felt disloyal and cowardly...but Bella wasn't wrong in saying there was nothing they could do to help. Even if they had been willing to kill Peter, it wasn't an option anymore; at these levels, the radiation coming off him would burn their highly flammable bodies to ash if they tried to touch him. Bella was the only one who stood any chance of averting disaster now, and while Elle and Edward wanted to stay and see how it all turned out, the impulse they both felt to get each other out of danger overrode everything else. Edward lifted the semi-conscious Niki Sanders off the pavement, and the two vampires sprang into motion; in less than a second, they were on the other side of the plaza.
"Here." Edward stopped in front of D.L. and thrust Niki into her husband's arms. "Take her and Micah and find shelter. Hurry!" He doubted there was any shelter that would protect them if Bella's efforts failed, but there was nothing he could do about that. He and Elle couldn't carry all three of them, and even if they could, he wasn't sure they would be able to escape in time. In any case, D.L. had the power of intangibility, so perhaps he could somehow use that to protect his family.
Racing back to Elle's side, Edward urged her to get going again; unwilling to leave him behind, she had stopped when he did. Together, they scaled the outer wall of Linderman's corporate headquarters - there were so many buildings in Manhattan that they could get almost anywhere on the island via the rooftops, and running at full speed was a lot easier with no cars or pedestrians in the way. They darted across the tops of skyscrapers, dropped hundreds of feet onto shorter structures, and leapt over alleys until there were no more roofs to jump to, just the black water of the Hudson River swirling below.
He grabbed her hand as they plunged toward the river, earning a confused look from the blonde - she hadn't spent much time in water even after her conversion improved her control over her powers so that getting wet no longer caused her to shock herself and was by no means an expert swimmer, but she thought it would be easier with both hands free. Edward had no intention of swimming, though; as soon as they hit the water, he dragged her to the bottom of the river. With their chances of outrunning the blast uncertain, he had determined that they would be safer underwater, at least from burning. For them, anything else was survivable.
They waited on the muddy riverbed for five minutes, ten minutes, thirty minutes, peering anxiously up through the murky water, but the blinding flash of a massive nuclear explosion overhead never came.
Can we go back up now? Elle asked a little over an hour later. I'm pretty sure if the city was gonna blow up, it would've happened by now. Also, not breathing sucks, and I don't even want to think about what all the muck in this river's doing to my hair.
Edward nodded and followed her back to the surface. After leaving the river, they returned to Kirby Plaza, only to find that Bella and Peter were long gone. They subsequently checked Peter's apartment, the Petrelli mansion, and their own house, but there was no sign of their friends anywhere. Their scents had been freshest in Kirby Plaza, so the vampires went back and did a thorough search for any clues as to where they might have gone from there. They didn't find much - there were no scent trails leading away from the plaza, nor any sign of what had occurred there except for Sylar's ashes.
"Where the hell could they have gone? Why can't we pick up their scent? And why won't they answer their damn phones?!" Elle glared at her new cell phone - her old one had quit working after spending over an hour at the bottom of the Hudson, but luckily the Cullens always kept backups handy - as if it was to blame for the unanswered calls.
"Maybe they can't. The last we saw of Bella, she was dead on her feet; the effort involved in holding back the explosion must have exhausted her, so Peter probably took her to a hospital. He would have had to turn his phone off if he wanted to stay with her."
"So how are we supposed to find out which hospital they went to?"
"Carlisle can get that information - he is Bella's doctor after all."
###
The head of the Cullen family arrived in New York with Charlie Swan the following evening; since he possessed both a stellar reputation in the medical field and a certain degree of familiarity with Bella, he had no trouble getting himself invited to consult on her case.
"It doesn't look good," he reported after his initial discussion with her other doctors. "The first test results have come in, and they showed no neural activity."
"English, please," Elle demanded. "I don't speak doctor."
Carlisle sighed and broke the news as gently as he could without sugarcoating the facts. "No neural activity means little or no brain function...which could mean brain death."
"Brain dead?" Elle echoed in a voice that sounded strangely hollow to her own ears. She wanted to say more, to insist that Carlisle must have made a mistake, but her tongue seemed to have gone numb. Luckily, someone else did the talking for her.
"He can't be certain of that yet," Edward said reassuringly. "Bella's coma might be the result of something temporary - swelling in her brain, for example - that will resolve itself in time."
"That's true," Carlisle agreed, "and no official determination will be made for at least seventy-two hours. All the same-"
Edward broke in before Carlisle could continue; he understood why his father hated to give people false hope only to have it crushed later, but he didn't think Elle really needed to hear about the other patients Carlisle had encountered over his decades-long career who had arrived in the same condition as Bella and never recovered. "We'll just have to hope for the best until then. Now, what about Peter?"
Edward's attempt to steer the conversation away from doom and gloom backfired spectacularly - although it shouldn't have been possible, Carlisle somehow managed to look even grimmer. "Peter wasn't at the hospital, and no one who was on duty when Bella was first brought in remembered seeing him then either. He's gone."
"You mean 'gone' in the permanent sense? But he was supposed to be able to heal," Elle protested, albeit without much conviction. Being at the epicenter of an explosion of that magnitude - let alone being the source of it - would almost certainly have atomized a human body; they had known all along that it would take nothing less than a miracle for Peter to come back from that.
"Yes, but even his powers have limits. Do you honestly think anything short of death could have kept him away from Bella right now?"
Elle couldn't argue with that. Peter would never desert Bella, therefore, if he wasn't at the hospital with her, he must be dead. And she never even knew how he felt about her... They saved the city, and this is what they get for it? "This sucks!" Spinning on her heel, she stalked out.
From the next room, Edward and Carlisle heard the crackle of electricity and the sound of glass breaking as she vented her anger and sadness on the fine china Esme had given her and Edward when they moved to New York. He started to go after her, but Carlisle held him back. "This is Elle's first experience with the consequences of getting attached to mortals, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Then she must be allowed to process it in her own way. Remember, Edward, you and I have both lived a very long time, so we've grown accustomed to the transience of human life, but she has not."
"You're right, as always. I'll give her space."
Turning away, Edward's gaze fell on a book Bella had left on the living room window seat, and he crossed the room to pick it up; it felt wrong to leave it there, lying open as if she was going to walk in at any moment and start reading it again. As he put it back on the shelf, he glanced at the title printed on its spine: Romeo and Juliet, her favorite of all Shakespeare's works. It seemed cruelly ironic that she had been so fond of romantic tragedies, and in the end, her own life had become one.
###
Days passed, then a week, and as Carlisle had expected, Bella never regained consciousness. The doctors, unable to find any injury, disease, or congenital abnormality in her brain to account for her condition, were baffled. Specialists were called in to examine her, but none of them could come up with an explanation either - she was perfectly healthy, apart from the fact that she wouldn't wake up and was totally dependent on her respirator and feeding tubes to keep her body functioning.
This dragged on for just over two months before her parents put a stop to it; having lost hope that anyone could find a way to help their daughter, they didn't want her treated like a science experiment. That was when they started talking seriously about turning off her life support, but they quickly hit an impasse. Although neither of them wanted Bella to go on wasting away in her half-dead state, they couldn't bring themselves to let her go.
Unbeknownst to Charlie and Renée, Elle had her own ideas about what to do for Bella - one last treatment no human doctor could prescribe - if only she could convince Carlisle. He was reluctant to try it because, while he had personally witnessed vampire venom curing lethal diseases and repairing catastrophic injuries, he had never seen or heard of it being used to revive a brain dead patient, so he couldn't guarantee the result. For all they knew, he argued, they might only succeed in creating the world's first comatose vampire, and what would become of her then? As a human, she could at least die naturally, peacefully, and her suffering would end, but to allow her to linger on forever as she was now...
"Of course we won't leave her an immortal vegetable," Elle said impatiently when Edward explained Carlisle's objections. "If changing her doesn't fix her, I'll put her out of her misery myself."
"That's what he's afraid of. In her current state, she's beyond feeling pain, but Carlisle is afraid that even if the venom can't awaken her, it might restore just enough of her senses that...that if she had to die a vampire's death, she would feel it."
Elle said nothing for a long moment as she imagined how that would feel, to be aware of her body burning but powerless to escape the flames, or even to scream so that the friends who thought they were doing her a favor would know they were hurting her... Then she gave her head a resolute shake, forcefully dispelling the horrific image. "But you don't know that for sure, do you?"
###
In the end, it was Alice who settled the matter; she had come to New York to help her sister search for Peter, then stayed to provide emotional support once Angela finally accepted that her son was gone, but she had kept tabs on Bella's situation too. "I can't see what will happen if one of us bites Bella," she told Carlisle, and he could tell by her clenched fists exactly how much that frustrated her, "but I do know it'll happen whether you're on board or not. If you say no, Elle will do it herself."
"Even knowing the potential consequences?"
"The key word there is 'potential' - she doesn't believe the worst-case scenario is very likely. She also doesn't have your uncompromising morality; she grew up without any friends, so she's very attached to the few she has, and she's just selfish enough to do whatever it takes to hold on to them...which leaves Edward caught in the middle."
That was something Carlisle hadn't considered, because even though Elle hadn't been ready to join his coven immediately after her transformation and therefore hadn't accepted his authority as coven leader, he had never found himself in direct opposition to her. He'd certainly never imagined a situation where Edward would be forced to choose between them - even when he had decided to live apart from the family with her for a while, it was with the understanding that the separation was temporary, and there had been no conflict. It wasn't as if the entire coven always stayed together anyway; everyone needed some alone time now and then.
"I don't know what he'll do if it comes down to a choice between you and her," Alice continued in a near-whisper. "He's trying not to think about it, hoping you'll resolve this disagreement peaceably. It's an impossible decision - you and Elle are the two people he loves most in the world, and he can't go either way without feeling like he's betraying one of you."
"Then I have no choice," the older vampire said wearily. "I won't put my son in that position. Besides, she may be right; perhaps I am being overly pessimistic."
"So you'll do it?"
Carlisle sighed, wondering if this would turn out to be the best or worst decision of his very long life. "Yes, I will attempt to make Bella Swan one of us."
Alice happily clapped her hands together, then her expression quickly grew somber again as she turned toward the bed holding the girl whose fate they had just been debating. It was after hours in the hospital, but of course Carlisle was able to get in to check on his patient whenever he wanted.
"Then we need to act fast, because she doesn't have much time left. Look at this." Carefully turning Bella onto her side, Alice undid the top tie on the back of her hospital gown and pulled the thin material aside, revealing the red, irritated skin covering Bella's bony shoulder blades - pressure ulcers, or bedsores, caused by the resulting friction from all the times she had been moved from her bed to a stretcher so they could cart her away for yet another useless test. "In a few days, these sores will get infected with MRSA. Her doctors will try to treat it, only we all know Bella has the worst luck of anyone on the planet, so the drugs won't take, and the infection will cause necrosis in the surrounding tissue that will spread to her organs. She'll die in two weeks, unless her parents end it sooner when they realize how bad the infection is."
"And do you have a plan to extract her from this hospital before it reaches that point?" Carlisle suspected she did; this was clearly the outcome she had hoped for, and he knew her penchant for meticulous preparations.
She flashed him a brilliant, slightly devious smile. "You know it. Just taking her would be complicated with all this security, so I need you to talk her parents into transferring her to a private long-term care facility I've fabricated."
"You've already laid the groundwork? How did you know I would agree when I didn't know myself until five minutes ago?"
Alice shrugged. "There are some things I don't need a vision to tell me. I knew that when it came down to it, you wouldn't be able to let her die if there was any chance at all of saving her."
The next chapter will also focus on Bella, and then we'll catch up with Peter in chapter 4.