First of all, love and many thanks to my pre-readers this week: anaismark, silver sniper of night, What'sMyNomDePlume, kidmomx4 and, as always, addicttwilight2.
I am terribly, terribly nervous about posting this, because your reaction to the next few chapters – which incidentally are probably also going to be the last few chapters – will really tell me whether or not I've done my job properly. Eep.
Bit of an A/N to follow, apologies...
First of all, though it doesn't really come into play yet, I'd like to mention that in my little world Bella's pregnancy was very different from the pregnancy as portrayed in BD. I always found it unrealistic that a woman's body could carry a foetus so obviously alien to full term, so my Bella's pregnancy will be more 'normal'. Again this will be more important a bit later on.
Secondly, my Bella's shield functions a little differently than that of canon Bella. If I'm remembering correctly, in canon, the shield never impeded objects – that's to say, someone outside the shield could still physically touch someone within it. As you'll see, I've changed it a little.
Thirdly, the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot is alluded to therein – the lines I've used are obviously not mine. Neither is the line "the image blazing and the edges gilded", which is a quote from "Love", by Eavan Boland. Not mine, not mine, not mine. Equally so, Twilight itself is still not mine.
Think I've covered about everything... thanks to all who're still reading. Here we go...
-x-x-x-x-
There are no futures to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
"If I Could Tell You", W.H. Auden
-x-x-x-x-
Please, please, please work. Please, please, please be good enough, please let me be good enough, please make him understand, please, I'll do anything, don't let me lose him now...
For the first time ever, the voice of her thoughts murmured quietly in his head, and the shock of that was so overwhelming that he sucked in a gasp of air. For a minute, he was reeling, the world in complete confusion around him, his wife biting her lip, furrowing her brow, squeezing his hand so hard it nearly hurt.
Then the full extent of what she was doing hit him, and he sucked in another shallow breath. Bella's eyes shot open, and when they met his they were somehow both black with despair and fierce with love.
His family, still static behind him, faded away. His surroundings, his memories, his independent thoughts – everything vanished. In those minutes, sitting there, he imagined that the room had two chairs and nothing else. His mind had trained a floodlight on Bella and he could do nothing else but sit, watch and listen, and wait for the overwhelming question to be finally answered.
Then the images started reeling through his brain as they reeled through hers. He concentrated fiercely, shutting his eyes so as not to miss a single thing.
She was remembering their honeymoon. Everything was light and happy, their little hotel room full of joy as she revelled in her husband, in their marriage. He closed his eyes as memories of sunny days and starry nights flowed through him – his smiling face everywhere she looked, bright rays of sunshine lancing through the white canopy cocooned around their bed, igniting them both with warmth, making them shine. They'd stayed indoors during the day and ventured out at night, when the heat from the sidewalks of the Champs-Élysées blew into their faces long after the sun had set.
He swallowed, hard, as Bella lingered wistfully on the memory of their evening return to Forks from Paris. The sudden shock of surprise, sleepiness and the ennui of travel fading away as his mother gleefully revealed the cottage that was to be their marital home. The way Bella had shrieked when he'd whisked her into his arms to carry her over the threshold – the way their family had tactfully disappeared.
Afterwards, she'd wrapped a sheet around herself and opened the patio door to discover a tiny garden, and he smiled wistfully as a series of sensory images were recalled in quick succession – the inverted moon in the tiny pond, the musical chirp of crickets, the single strawberry she'd snatched straight from the plant somehow both sweet and tart on her tongue, then on his as he tasted it from her mouth.
He wanted nothing more than to sink into these memories and never resurface, and he knew that Bella did, too – but they both knew that there lingered over that remembered time a sense of foreboding as she contrasted what she'd felt then with what she knew to be true now. Bella observed, quietly and bitterly, that the knowledge she had regained tainted everything – her past, her present, her future.
She took a deep breath, and the previously smooth track of her mental thoughts turned bumpy and uneven. It was times like these that made him wonder whether he, too, was an empath, because he could feel the sick sense of dread surfacing in her stomach as surely as if it was his own.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
An irrational rage gripped him. He clenched his fists, battling to keep the words he longed to let fly to himself – battling not to scream at her about how T.S. Eliot had known nothing about the true scope of human misery, not to shake and shake her until the truth fell out.
She opened her eyes then, and he saw his own face from her thoughts – the hard line of his mouth, the subtle quiver of his jaw. He didn't bother to open his eyes, though he knew she wished he would.
In short, Edward... I am afraid. Oh, I am afraid.
Through all of this, the river of please, please ran steadily, sometimes bubbling over, sometimes barely trickling, but always, always there, permeating her every thought. He was doing his best to ignore it. It wasn't that he didn't care – rather that he couldn't concentrate on anything else while his wife begged like that.
"Just tell me." His voice was tight and barely recognisable, even to himself. "Just do it, Bella. Quick and clean, like... like ripping off a Band-Aid."
He couldn't focus on what this was doing to her, couldn't focus on his own quiet acknowledgement that in this moment, his wife was the bravest woman he'd ever met, because things were happening quickly now. She took a deep breath, set her shoulders, and began.
Bella, waving goodbye from the door of their little home as he jogged across the lawn to join his parents and siblings, all gathered for a prolonged hunting trip. Bella jokingly shielding her eyes as the late afternoon sun threw shimmers off their family's skin. Bella smiling wistfully, her hand pressed to her lips as she remembered his kiss goodbye.
Briefly, his wife struggled for words. During that split second when his mind was once more his own, he thought there was something familiar about that image, something tangible and beloved that was failing to come to him. He could see that scene – his own, true memory of his wife's farewell – in his mind's eye, the image blazing and the edges gilded, but he couldn't figured out why out of all the times he'd kissed her goodbye, that was so important...
And then it came to him. That brief embrace, that kiss before hunting, bon appétit and see you soon and I'll miss you all in one, had been the last moment of normalcy in their marriage – the last touch that Bella had either initiated or willingly accepted, the last true smile he had seen on her lips.
Bella seemed to be waiting for him now, and finally, he met her eyes. They were black and fearful and full of pain, and he could feel the silent warnings they were screaming at him. He nodded his head the tiniest amount, bracing himself.
Bella, leaving their home, having dinner with her father. Bella going grocery shopping, meandering through the aisles, and stopping, very suddenly, in front of a whole rack of feminine hygiene products.
Bella's blood turning to ice. Bella counting rapidly in her head, under her breath. Bella picking up a small yellow box, paying for it. The long journey home, could it be? Could I be pregnant?
Bella taking the test, waiting anxiously for the three minutes to be up. And then the slow warmth as it rose through her veins, the bubbling joy infused with disbelief. The feeling, as she spanned both hands over her flat abdomen, of possession – and possessiveness.
Bella dialling his cell, moaning in frustration when it went straight to voicemail... Bella grabbing for her keys, determined to find him, to tell him, hoping that the decision would be enough for Alice to see that she was coming...
Bella finding a note half-concealed under the welcome mat. Angela's handwriting, but shakier than usual – tearstains blotting the words she'd used to tell her friend that she and Ben had broken up.
Bella, sighing, but immediately dropping her purse, shrugging into her coat, locking the door of their home behind her.
Bella taking a short-cut through the woods behind their cottage, halfway to the Webbers', and...
A large thud, Esme shrieking in shock.
He was Bella, in the forest, and he was surrounded by black cloaks and red eyes and white claws, and god, they were everywhere, everywhere he looked he saw more and more, bathed in moonlight, coming out from behind the trees like the demons they were...
He couldn't breathe – he couldn't think.
"Stop!" he yelled, pressing his hands over his ears childishly – as if that could stem the flow of her invading thoughts. "Stop it!"
And quite suddenly – silence. Complete and total silence.
He opened his eyes, cautiously lowered his hands. Dimly he realised that he'd flown across the room, his back hitting the opposite wall with such force that piece of plaster had fallen off in chunks.
Some of the shock was wearing off now, and he suddenly realised that the frenzied snarls echoing through the space were emanating from his own chest.
Abruptly he quieted himself and straightened up from where he'd been crouched in the corner, ignoring the screaming protest of muscles longing to lock his body down tight and keep it safe. He could almost feel the ghost of a living heart; he imagined it pounding furiously in his chest as his dead glands flooded his body with adrenaline.
"Edward..."
Bella was standing now, her eyes imploring, her hand reaching towards him. He cringed against the wall as though she'd personally beaten him around the head with the revelation – and he supposed, in a way, she had.
He was shivering, his teeth chattering, his every nerve ending crackling with anxiety, his body bowing under the weight of that knowledge, and he didn't think, he couldn't, he...
"Ms. Swan." Carlisle's voice was steely. "Please allow me get to my son."
Abruptly a veil lifted and he was flooded with their thoughts, all of them, Jasper's struggle to calm him, Carlisle and Esme's terror, their anguish at seeing what he'd been reduced to these past few minutes, Alice's never-ending frustration, and...
He was crouching again, shaking harder than ever. His eyes skittered around the room, landed on his wife.
"Make it stop," he pleaded with her. "Stop it, please make it stop."
And suddenly, mercifully, all was silence again, and now he could pull his thoughts together enough to realise that his father's hand was outstretched towards him, the muscles and tendons flexing, fingers moving, but not actually making contact.
Carlisle uttered a word that Edward had never heard him use in all their years as father and son, and, standing, caught hold of the nearest object – a small coffee table – and sent it soaring, straight through the nearest window.
His father turned wild eyes towards Bella, and what he might have said then could have ruined everything, had Rosalie not intervened.
Darting across the room, she placed a placating hand on Carlisle's shoulder, which was now shaking almost as much as Edward's. "Dad. Have a little faith," she said, and that was the first time she'd ever in any way referred to Carlisle as her father.
Carlisle crossed his arms, his jaw tense.
"It seems as though your shield is more powerful than any of us could have imagined, Isabella," he bit out. She made no reply.
In the prolonged silence, Edward found space in his brain. Neatly, over the course of a few minutes, he managed to compartmentalise the information she'd just given him – if not completely, then just enough to allow him to stand, and speak, and appear normal.
With care, he managed not to look at anybody or anything in particular, but he addressed his wife.
"I don't think I can delay hunting any longer. Bella, I would be very grateful if you would join me."
He tried to force himself to look into Carlisle's eyes, but failed and instead addressed his left ear. "I promise that I – that we will explain all of this to you with time," he said softly, trying not to choke on words, trying not to ask aloud how he could possibly explain when he didn't understand himself. "I ask for your continued patience."
He couldn't be sure, since he was currently studying the sun-bleached Monet print on the wall as though it held the very answer to life itself, but he thought he saw Rosalie and Emmett usher the rest of the family out of the room, leaving he and Bella alone.
He turned his back to her and walked away. He knew she'd follow.
-x-x-x-x-
They'd been running for what felt to her like forever, though her cursedly intelligent brain refused to let her away with over-reaching statements like that. She knew that they'd left their little town behind some thirteen hours ago and had since covered over four thousand kilometres, cutting an almost-silent path across the midland states, open Montana skies giving way to a blurry Chicago skyline on the horizon. She had no idea where they were going, but that didn't matter – she was content to follow as he led.
They swept through endless rolling fields, keeping off the main routes, sometimes racing down tiny pathways that were the very epitome of the road not taken, sometimes effortlessly finding their way through sections of forest thick and dense with twisted undergrowth. Always they kept just far enough away from the cities, moving faster than the human eye could see – for though Edward was undoubtedly still the fastest vampire Bella had ever met, she herself was still fuelled by her own human blood and could easily keep pace with him.
Somewhere between Sioux Falls and Cedar Rapids she had shortened the length of her strides infinitesimally, waiting to see if Edward would do likewise, determined that if he matched her decreased speed she would ask him to stop and talk.
He'd continued, the set of his shoulders firm, his face never changing one inch, his jaw set and strong, and she'd sighed a little and kept going.
They were moving so quickly and taking such isolated trails that Bella had retracted her shield, hoping that they would somehow manage to avoid close contact with humans – for her sake as well as Edward's. At one point, however, they came upon a section of wood that was so tightly packed with vegetation that they were forced to reduce their speed just enough so they could zigzag comfortably around the trees. Consequently, they meandered just a little too close to a little farmhouse, whose lights were just tiny pinpricks, even to Bella's eyes.
Edward stumbled then, just enough that she noticed, affronted as he was by human thought. Her reaction was immediate. Cutting off her own sense of smell, she threw her newfound power over him with such force that he stopped dead for the first time since they'd left the house, unable to move past the invisible buffer protecting him from every obstacle in his path.
He turned to glare at her then, and she shrank back from his ferocity.
"Stop trying to protect me, Bella," he ground out. Duly chastened, she retreated and they flew onwards once again.
They were nearing Chicago now, passing nearer and nearer to human habitation. She was a little worried about what might happen if they reached the city without having slaked their bloodlust, and cleared her throat several times, wanting to say as much to Edward. Each time she tried, she shut her mouth just before the words came out, and each time Prufrock's lament rang hollowly in her head like the tolling of funeral bells. This is not what I meant at all, she thought sadly, watching her husband as he ran as though the hounds of hell were on his heels.
Still, she reflected, he'd asked for her company, asked that she come with him and run beside him, and that had to count for something... he hadn't sent her away... but that was little comfort, he still didn't know everything...
A low-hanging branch affronted itself in her path so suddenly that she almost ran straight into it. Blinking as one roused from a trance, she realised that they'd veered off the almost-straight line they'd cut through the country – that they were once again flying through a forest like a pair of white ghosts.
Edward hissed beside her, and with no further preamble he sprang from the packed earth with such grace that her breath caught in her throat. He grabbed onto the low-lying limb of a tree and suddenly he was gone, out of her field of vision.
She stopped and waited. Barely twenty seconds later, two bodies fell to earth.
She had to admire Edward's efficiency. The cat had not even the chance to squeal. Edward's teeth sank swiftly and powerfully through the mass of corded muscle at its throat, and he drank.
She stood as though turned to stone, and as she watched him she felt the stirrings of her own hunger. That he was here with her, that he was willingly allowing her to watch as he engaged in this most carnal of acts stirred something unfamiliar within her, something vital and wild. If she'd had a heart, it would have been pattering a frantic rhythm against her breastbone.
Then she realised that the feelings witnessing such an act evoked within her were absolutely pointless. She could see Edward's face, see his eyes as he fed, and she could see that he took absolutely no pleasure in the act, that he gained no real relief.
He finished, stood, turned, and without a word he shot into the trees like a bullet from a gun. She sighed and followed.
-x-x-x-x-
Her newborn thirst had been harder to satisfy than she'd anticipated, but still she'd gained more succour from the experience than her husband had. If nothing else, the work of tracking, chasing, killing and finally burying her prey served to calm her somewhat, her mind and hands working fluidly towards a common goal. There was nothing particularly complicated about her task and for that she was uncommonly grateful.
Standing from the mound of newly-dug earth, she dusted herself off briskly and looked around for Edward.
He was leaning against a dead oak tree a few metres to her left. His back was to her, his left shoulder propping the rest of his body up, and he was absolutely still. As she watched, a few slimy, diseased leaves dropped from the branch directly above him and landed neatly in his thatch of hair. He made no move to wipe them away.
As though he knew she had finished and was watching him, he called out to her in a deceptively calm voice.
"Have you had enough?"
She murmured a quiet yes.
"Good." He had not moved one jot, but somehow the lines of his body seemed to solidify, as though he were bracing himself against something. "We have some things to discuss, I think."
"You think?" she asked sarcastically. When he didn't respond, she allowed a thread of thought to peek through the shield around her mind, envisaging it flying across the space between them.
Please talk to me.
With that he whirled around, and she gasped. Though he had gorged himself on the blood of animals, his eyes were still black with an entirely different hunger.
"I'll talk to you, Bella," he said, and his voice was both angry and pleading, "but like this. You and me, speaking. A conversation. I can't... I can't..."
He broke off and lowered his gaze, his entire body shuddering. He paced a few feet towards her, then a few feet back. Finally he seemed to summon up the courage and came to rest right in front of her, close enough to touch.
"For the first time since I met you, I do not wish to know your thoughts," he admitted quietly, as though ashamed. "In fact... I can't, Bella, I can't hear about it like that. I'm sorry."
She wanted so much to reach across the space between him and touch his hand – to tell him that he was the bravest man she'd ever met, other than Jacob – but she sensed that anything like that might just break him apart.
"It's okay," she said quietly, and tried her best to inject her voice with warmth. Anything to support him, to make it easier for him. Anything for him.
He took a deep breath and looked her straight in the eye.
"You were pregnant."
She licked her lips, her hand rising to ghost along her stomach. "Yes."
"With my baby." He said it as a statement, and not a question, but still she felt the implicit sting.
"Yes."
She could hear his breath rattling through his chest –could almost feel the effort it must have taken him to utter every word.
"And they – the Volturi – they came..."
She kept eye contact, willing him to understand, to know... "Yes."
His fists were clenched, knuckles straining white. "Why?" he asked, and his voice was shaking now.
Her thumb stroked over the place on her skin where her wedding band had once sat.
"They said we'd had enough time." Her voice was dead, emotionless. She was fighting with all her might to not get sucked back into that moment, that sense of helplessness, of danger all around.
All the power had gone out of his voice. "They were going to kill you," he whispered. She jerked her head upwards, somehow surprised, despite herself, that he was still here, still trying to figure this out.
"No," she admitted. "No, I was too interesting for that. They were going to take me. To Volterra. Just leave the door of our home wide open, swinging in the wind – maybe spill some of my blood around to be sure you wouldn't follow. And Aro wasted no time in telling me that if you turned up asking for execution again, he'd make sure I had a front-row seat."
He was watching her as though transfixed to the forest floor. He looked so much as if he was carved by stone then that she was almost surprised when his lips moved.
"How did you get out of there?" he asked, a strange sense of fascination colouring his voice.
She licked her lips. "I told them I was pregnant."
Edward stared at her as though she'd suddenly grown another head. "But – but that would've –"
"Would have made them want me even more." She finished the phrase for him, then shrugged her shoulders. "It did. It was stupid of me... I panicked."
His brow was furrowed. "So then – after that – how did you..."
She interrupted – something she'd vowed she wouldn't do, but the story was crawling under her skin now, and she thought she'd rip her flesh from her bones if she had to go one more minute without telling it.
"Edward," she said firmly, meeting his eyes with all the force, all the love she could muster. "Edward – I told them it was Jacob's."
-x-x-x-x-
Thanks for reading – please review.