author's note: Sooo maybe I have been thinking about these characters a lot recently and decided to re-write the sequel into something more interesting and direct. Also, a lot more bloody.
So Rebecca returns to Forks, finishes high school and explains to nobody where she was in the time that she was missing.
Her father, by a strike of fate or irony, passed away from a sudden stroke while she was gone and so the house she once grew up in stands empty, for her to do with what she likes.
Instead of burning it to the ground as is her right she sells the house and moves into a small flavorless condo in town. It doesn't fit, but it doesn't need to.
She makes equally flavorless plans for college in the fall, but dreams of yellow plains and blood-colored skies every night.
The Cullens come to her when the troubles with Victoria becomes increasingly dangerous, too much for them to handle alone – because somehow, they know about what happened – know about all of it, thanks to Alice.
Because even though she doesn't want to – never wanted this, she is again considered an object, but this time she is a weapon. Dust grows in her hands not only in dreams now.
Victoria has gathered an army big enough, not only to threaten the Cullen family, but also large enough to take out a large portion of the human population in the state.
Rebecca responds to a crisis in the same way she always has – it is in her warrior blood, the old blood, to engage in battles and win them. She is still young though, a new life and an old one warring for dominance within her.
She just wants to try to move on – but life just won't let her.
The coming battle is more brutal, more bloody than she could have imagined at the beginning.
The town of forks is no longer the same – humans hide like rabbits in their warrens, because vampires have been attacking in broad daylight and the police can do nothing, because they are already dead and nobody knows just what the fuck is happening. Nobody outside the town knows yet what has happened, and the Cullens try to keep it that way – while in the surrounding forests, battles are fought day and night.
The werewolves do the best they can, but the newborn vampires are too many in numbers – there is no rest for anybody, as they just keep coming, keep clawing and tearing at flesh – and Victoria keeps sending more of them.
Carlisle has tried to reason with her, has tried to convince her to stop before its too late – before the humans see too much and understand the flipside of the world they thought was so safe. But there is no negotiation possible, no way to bring back the dead she so craves to still this hunger. She kills two members of the Cullen family instead, to make a point.
Jasper and Esme are now gone, gone, gone.
They tore them apart like famished wolves in the middle of the day with the sun beating down – shimmering bodies cracked open against the asphalt, broken apart into so many pieces that there is no hope of ever putting them back together.
Rebecca moves from battle to battle, like an unseen cancer which strikes suddenly, painfully. But it is dangerous – she is a mortal and frail to flesh made of stone and steel. She takes a few bad hits to her arms and chest that knocks the wind out of her - almost shatters three ribs. She uses every trick she knows to stay alive, every technique she has ever learned from cruel slave masters, standing over her in the hot sun ancient years ago.
Carlisle tries in his own way, to watch her, to protect her – but she does not want this, does not want his protection or his friendship. It is too late for that now, too late when he could have stopped her from becoming this thing she now is.
He could have saved her in time, if he hadn't been a coward.
But she has not been bitten, not been spoiled.
It is a half-relief, half-pain when members of the Volturi arrive.
They are much-needed, as the battle seems neverending – even after just a week of bloodshed on both sides. They are all exhausted, and Carlilse still won't speak to anyone – not after Esme.
She does not look him in the eye when she sees him in the crowd of cloaked figures. Yet, she hears his voice, hears him speak and has to steady herself against a nearby tree. There is a curl of awful longing, a hitch in her lungs to look at him.
He is a monster, and for once, that knowledge is a comfort. He is the monster who can put an end to this.
"He wishes to speak to you, alone."
They have taken over the police station, barricaded the windows and now use it as a sort of makeshift headquarters. There is still blood left on the floors that nobody has had time to clean up. Rebecca claws at a new bandage around her arm, and shrugs one shoulder, pretending not to care about the conversation at all.
"And if I don't want to?"
Carlisle dips his head and looks away, sighing. She does not know what he has told him, but it must be bad enough if he won't say it.
It should bother her more, but somehow it doesn't – there is no energy left to feel it.
He is there of course, waiting in another room.
The air is silent between them as she waits for him to speak. She hears his intake of breath, and starts backwards even before he takes a step closer to her.
It is the first time she lifts her eyes to look at him – to look at his face properly. It is the same chalky white as ever, his features unchanged – the intense red eyes the same. But they are not fixated on her reactions, on her face – instead they are surprisingly sedate, looking at the bandage on her arm with an almost detached quality. His clothes impossibly neat and tailored, as always.
"You've been injured." he says in greeting and she looks down – the bandage is slightly pinkish-red. She fingers the bandage and he sits down in a chair, making it squeak as he does.
"Yes, I know."
"Why sacrifice so much for them?"
"Because I don't have anywhere else-"
He looks livid then – arising from that detached manner and becoming slightly unleashed, his eyes widening as he sprints towards her – abruptly stopping himself from doing something irreversible. She doesn't bat an eyelash at this behavior, at being so close to death. Instead he cowers back and laughs, a little madly, his voice low and coarse. Rebecca just stares at him, calm.
"Nothing else, of course, of course..." he laughs to himself, repeating it over and over. Then he changes his tune, his voice becoming more and more a prayer, a soft plea. But his eyes are still vicious, poisonous.
"But you must retreat now. You must..." he swallows, and looks at her directly, and she realizes that he is worried, so terribly worried about her.
This ancient vampire, so dangerous, so untrustworthy and powerful. He is holding most of it in, keeping the sharpest of his madness at bay. A man with a thousand lies, and she can never be quite sure. Even this could be a performance, and she would never know.
"I can't do that." she says and he looks away, looks crushed and lost – like she has turned him away and gone cold for a second time.
And that's when she does it – she touches him.
She lays her warm hand on his cold cheek, and his whole body freezes. Like he can't believe that she is touching him, can't believe that this is real. He breathes like a caged animal, even though he hasn't needed to breathe for a long, long time.
He keeps very still as she strokes her hand against his cheek – touching some of his soft, dark hair between her fingers, feeling how soft it is.
The air in the room feels suddenly charged, buzzing with a hunger that is not just from him.
But just like that, she drops her hand as if burned – and it is over. She bows her head and looks away, tired and sad.
He looks at her for a long moment before rising from the chair, and walking out the door as silently as he came in.
The days pass, and the battle gets more manageable and swift with the Volturi on their side.
"European vermin" she hears a human-shaped werewolf mutter under his breath, and it makes her smile.
But there are moments – breathless days when, after a long day of fighting she spots him across a wide plain, in the same patch of woods, on the other side of a lake, surrounded by his guards. And then he will sometimes look back at her over the distance and his face will change. It always changes when he looks at her for the first time, every time, every day.
But sometimes, even if you prepare all that you can, surprises can still end you.
Rebecca had not anticipated that the newborns had been following her movements so closely – they had stayed out of the forests until now – but since there are only now half as many werewolves left, they have become bold and reckless.
They have wisened up enough to know about her power, so none of them come close enough to her now.
All it takes is a well-aimed gun pointed right at her, two bullets hitting her in quick succession – one in her leg and one in her abdomen.
She stumbles and falls – more from the shock than the pain, at first.
Six of them surround her from all sides, standing around her in a circle – waiting for her to die. She scoffs and clutches her hands to her stomach, feeling herself grow faint already. She is lying there on the forest floor, smirking up at them all because she thinks, despite everything, that it is not a pair of vampire fangs that end her – but a completely ordinary human weapon.
But battles always have surprises in store.
She hears an abrupt scream somewhere and then suddenly one of the vampires in the circle is yanked back by his head and thrown a great distance away like he weighs nothing. A billowing black cape falls to the ground, and in the time that it falls many things happen around her.
He is not supposed to be there – Aro is supposed to be shrewd and protected by his guard, never directly engaging, always scheming but never lifting his own claws to strike.
And yet here he is, surrounded by several newborn fact that he came is more shocking than the bullets burying into her flesh. He shakes them, throws them left and right like mutts not worthy his time. But she can tell that he struggles – they are stronger than him. Strong enough that they tear at first his clothes, than his limbs – cracks appearing on his skin like the cracks on fine china dropped to the floor. Blood between the cracks appears, glistening and red and he screams.
But then he laughs, broken and horrifying. And he does things to them, these newborns, that has Rebecca wanting to close her eyes but she can't.
She fears that if she closes them, she will not see him again.
When he is through with them all, when he is done – he looks more frightening than ever. The cracks in his skin is still there – some of them big enough that it makes it look as if he is just made of blood, wearing a tattered costume of white marble. There is one crack running along the seam of one eye, enlargening it in an almost grotesque way. His dark hair is wild and tousled, and his clothes are impossibly torn.
He looks like the monster that always lives inside of him, at last.
Rebecca lies unconscious, her body pale and limp. Even though it hurts to blink, to even move – Aro lifts her up in his arms and carries her to someone who can still save her life.
Carlisle doesn't recognize at first who it is that comes to the house. His face – his body is so disfigured, bloody and torn. But the silky, soft voice is unmistakable – the unnerving, fixating gaze still the same.
To refuse him is never an option, especially not now – not this.
He trails blood all over the floor – some of his blood even on the woman in his arms, traces of it on her cheek, her lips.
"I'll need to be at the hospital to treat her – I'll need equipment I do not have here. Aro, you have to consider the reality – we do not have much time-"
For once, Aro has nothing clever or threatening to say. He merely nods, and asks what needs to be done.
Since it is too dangerous to carry her, they take one of the many cars in the Cullen's garage and lay her out in the backseat. Carlisle slips into the passenger side while Aro drives – something else that Carlisle has never seen him do.
He is about as good at is as one can imagine – that is to say, not very much.
Blood gets all over the steering wheel as he drives,clutching it with fingers showing more bone and flesh than actual skin. Many a times does he glance back into the rearview mirror – keeping an eye on the woman bleeding out on the leather seats. Carlisle doesn't have to tell him where the hospital is, as he already seems to know the way.
The center of the town is completely deserted as they drive through it, and yet Aro drives as if the hounds of hell are after them. Maybe they are.
The hospital is deserted too – a nurse lies dead behind the front desk, but that's it. Some chairs have been knocked over, and many of the windows broken, the plastic curtains billowing in the wind. The phone behind the desk keeps ringing, but nobody is picking it up.
Carlisle preforms the surgery alone in the emergency wing, since he is more than capable of the task. She has lost a lot of blood, her red hair matted with dirt – he works with vampire speed, as there are no nurses around to witness it. Even as blood spills onto the floor, he hardly even notices.
As he stands there with this strange girl's life in his hands, he keeps thinking about the vampire sitting just outside the room that will kill him if he fails.
As long as he has known him, Aro has never ever been somewhere without his guard around him at all times. He has never been on his own, for any reason. He still expects them to come charging in, but they don't. For some reason, Aro has been looking out for this woman on his own. Risking his own life.
The vampire sitting in a yellow plastic chair in the next room is the same monster he has always known, but turned inside out. Both figuratively and literary. This human woman lying on his operating table, somehow did that to him. He didn't think – didn't ever consider that someone could do that to him.
Aro is, and always will be a sociopath. A dangerous creature with too many dead voices ringing in his ears, the hefty price he has paid for using his talents. Love was never possible for someone like that – maybe a poor, perverted mimicry of it, but nothing more.
When she awakens, it is to the light of dusk outside the window. A recent rainfall has formed droplets of water on the glass.
She moves a little and winces immediately – not a direct pain, but something pulling alarmingly in her abdomen, and she remembers. She is lying on a hospital bed, tucked in with a thin blanket covering her form.
Her head is foggy, and her whole body feels drained.
A monster is watching her in a dark corner of the room – and she really isn't sure if it is a hallucination or not. She has had them before, after all. Carefully, gently, she shifts in bed so she is tilted towards it, so she can watch it until she falls asleep again.