New Chapter! Sorry it took longer then 2 weeks…but it's longer and it took a lot of brainpower to come up with this chapter. So I hope you enjoy and REVIEW please! :D
PS: Do you like the cover for this story? I made it myself ^^
5. The Greatest Story Almost Never Told
And pops stayed the same and your moms moved away
How many of our parents seem to make it anyway
We're just fumbling through the grey
Trying to find a heart that's not walking away
-Ships in the Night; Mat Kearney
We stood, locked together, for quite some time. I didn't want to let go of him, and it was apparent that neither did he. Finally after what seemed like years, Charlie pulled us apart and wrapped his pallid arms around the son that…he never told me about.
It was I who pulled them apart, this time.
"How could you do this?"
He stumbled a bit. He was shocked by my sudden turn in emotion. But I was angry. He knew…he must of.
"What?" He looked instantly 10 years older. His eyes looked heavy, his entire expression ragged.
"Why didn't you tell me I had a brother!" Those words sounded weird, even in my head. How could I forget? I should have known I had a brother even if I was young, but then again, why did Charlie never talk about him? Why did it take me 16 years to remember?
"Bella it's complicated." He sat down at the table again and looked up at his son who looked down at him through his greasy black hair, slick as oil.
"Then un-complicate it!"
Charlie sighed and looked at his son, ignoring me for the time being, "Derek, who was it that took you from the project?"
"Christopher Bae," he replied in a very clipped yet mumbled tone. He too, sat down at the table across from the chair that I normally sat at.
Charlie nodded, seemingly upset by the answer.
"You know 'em?"
Charlie shook his head, "No, not personally. But I know that he had a son in the project as well."
"Simon."
"Yes, that was his name."
They continued to talk for quite some time. Never making sense, not once clueing me in on what they were speaking about.
I sat down at the table. Though I didn't understand, I was intrigued. From what I had gathered, Derek was in a project, but he was taken for some reason that I didn't know. He had lived in a group home but then run away with a couple of other kids and they were now all living together in a motel here in Forks. That was all that I understood.
I'd had about enough of their coded words after the first hour ticked by.
"Can you please explain to me what the hell you are talking about?"
Charlie chuckled and looked at me, "Do you want the short version or the long version?"
"The whole one."
"That would be the long one," He said with a smile.
He started from the beginning, the very, very beginning.
Charlie's parents, Helen and Geoffrey, were a mixed racial couple. Geoffrey was ½ Quileute and the other half European, which gave him the pasty skin of a white person. Helen was fully European. They had met when Helen came to La Push almost 80 years ago for a writing convention to learn more about aboriginal people for the book she was writing. Geoffrey was the one to show her around. They immediately connected, and Helen, pressured by love decided to make La Push her permanent residence.
They fell in love, and got married. They had one son together, Charlie.
Quileute's have a rich history, one with legends and stories that I have heard so many times from Jake, but I never knew they were true. The Quileute's, Charlie told me, descended from wolves.
Geoffrey didn't fully possess the gene to shift, but because he was on the council, he knew about the wolves. He assumed, that since Charlie would be ¾ European that he wouldn't have to worry about Charlie phasing, he was right…for the most part.
Charlie possessed the active gene for phasing, but since it was 'watered down' he was never able to shift completely. However, as his father interpreted it, the creator was punishing Geoffrey for marrying a white woman and therefore made Charlie endure painful half shifts. Charlie's genes prohibited him for having the frame that would be needed to shift completely.
Charlie recounted one particular time, when he was 16 and got mad at his father. His body had contorted, sending him to the ground. His whole body screamed at him, his bones were creaking and moving out of place as his body desperately tried to shift into a wolf like his ancestors had. Geoffrey had to lift Charlie off of the ground and take him to the hospital were the technicians sedated him and fixed the mangled mess of bones that had moved out of position.
When Charlie was 19 years old, he met Renee. Renee was fun and exciting and she allowed him to distance himself from his parents. She was flighty in nature, but he loved her and wanted to marry her. He proposed, she agreed and they were married before the age of 20.
On the night of their wedding, while lying in each other's arms, Renee told him that she was an Aves shifter.
Renee was from a tribe called the Heouliet tribe, which resided in Montana. Her people, were similar in history to the Quileute's:
John Deuit was on an expedition to explore the precipitous mountains in the Montana wilderness 300 years ago. They had been trekking the mountainside for a few days when they began to run out of water. The tribesmen, dying and desperate followed a flock of ravens to a stream.
The ravens were not ordinary ravens. They were much bigger, with powerful muscles under metallic blue and black feathers. Their beaks were strong enough to crack concrete and their great legs, strong enough to lift a full-grown man off his feet and lift him into the air. The birds buzzed with energy unlike other average birds, as they feasted on energy from a magic river.
The stream was mighty, and warm, but the men dunk their heads into the fresh water and lapped it up anyway. John Deuit, before taking a drink, went up to the birds and thanked them on behalf of his people for saving their lives.
Raven, the biggest one of them all, praised John for thanking the birds and awarded him with a raven's body so that he and his men could travel down the mountain again, in honor of the bird's selflessness. However, the men must carry around a vile of the water around their necks if they wanted to shift because the energy that the birds needed to gain their almost supernatural powers depended on the water.
The men returned to the village and resumed their normal lives, not once tapping into the magic water and assuming their bird form, until a group of people known as the cold ones, came to their village.
The cold ones, or vampires, decimated the population of Heouliet people. John Deuit, scared by the presence of the cold ones, drank the vile of water that was around his neck, so that he could take to the skies with his family clasped in his talons, but it was cold. He became angry and smashed the vile onto the ground. The heat of his anger warmed the magic water inside of him and he shifted into a bird.
The shift did not reduce the immense heat that was burning inside of him. He flew at the cold one and smashed his head in his beak. The pieces drifted into a fire and ignited in flames. John Deuit, noticing that they burned in fire, picked up the beheaded body and dumped it into the flames.
The rest of the men, who carried the raven's body in their soul, drank the water and picked the vampires up and threw them into the fire. They were easy targets, having never encountered the raven men.
All of the cold ones were defeated, and the men, assuming that the anger was what trigged the phase, thought calming thoughts and phased back and tried to resemble as much as they could of their destroyed village. The carnage was great. Empty, bloodless bodies lay splattered on the ground. Broken huts, destroyed tools…all gone. But they were not defeated.
The men were not supposed to drink the entire vile of magic water. The concentration of magic energy was too great to be burned off. The magic energy stayed in their veins and was passed down through generation to generation.
It was Renee's father who had the raven's blood. You could tell by the tremor in his hands that never seemed to go away. He was an active member of the conspiracy of ravens that tried to protect the tribe from the return of the cold ones. Never did they come, but they were always prepared to get revenge.
Renee noticed the tremor in her hands when she reached 18 years of age. She had been frightened as she grew up with the yearly telling of the cold ones that occurred every year on the anniversary. She had seen the tremor in her father's hands for as long as she could remember, but never thought anything of it. She had never shifted, as the level of anger that was essential had never occurred to her in the years that she possessed the tremor.
After she told all of this to Charlie, he told her what he was.
She was scared about the mix of shifters would do to their children, but Charlie assured her, that everything would be all right.
I was born and then Derek was.
One day, a few days after Derek was born, I had been playing with blocks in my room, trying to build a tall tower. After the 3rd time that the blocks fell over, in a fit of rage I threw the blocks at the wall.
Renee ran up the stairs at the commotion and was shocked to see my hands trembling just as hers did.
To her relief the trembling stopped, but her worry didn't. She told Charlie what had happened and he contacted his old friend, Dr. Davidoff, and asked him if there was anything he could do.
He told him that there was a procedure in a project called The Genesis II Project in Buffalo, which could be done, which would alter our genes. He would be able to fly us out for free to be assessed, and all they would have to pay for would be accommodation. Charlie agreed and they set up the appointment.
Renee wasn't sure about the risks of the procedure. They told her, that if they couldn't properly recode the genes, the original onset of symptoms could be worse, fatal even.
She would never be able to live with herself or Charlie if something went wrong.
On the day of the procedure, after Charlie and Renee said their goodbyes, I freaked out. I threw myself at the doctors, who led them to sedate my brother and me.
They completed the procedure successfully for me, but had altered Derek's genes too drastically. He was like a traditional werewolf, one who was not able to change forms but simply merge with the wolf side of him.
They told my parents that the genes might malfunction so it was essential for Derek to grow up with other pups like himself. 5 years, that's how long he was required to be monitored.
My central-nervous system was like a normal child's and I was able to return to Forks with my family. When Renee and Charlie came to visit me in the hospital, it became apparent that I had amnesia. I did not remember who they were or anything about my childhood. I remembered who I was, the alphabet, how to count to 10, and how to speak, but that was all.
Charlie knew that I would be begging to see Derek once I remembered him. So he decided, for my own good, that he wouldn't remind me until the day that we were to pick Derek up.
When the day came, and Charlie and Renee flew and left me at home with a babysitter, to the clinic only to be told that Derek had been kidnapped that morning. Renee was devastated and left Charlie just like she said she would.
They decided that she would get the majority custody of me, since he had endangered his children and was deemed unfit for full time parenthood.
I grew up in Phoenix with Renee while Charlie stayed alone, waiting for his son to come back to him.
When Charlie finished telling his whole life story, he looked at Derek and he came in where the holes were.
A member of the project named Christopher Bae had taken Derek. He and grown up with Simon and Christopher Bae, and thought of them as his own family, though he knew that they weren't related. Simon was a witch, from Asian descent while Derek's skin was a mixture of tanned undertones with pale accents. Simon was of average size, while Derek was hulking. But still, Derek accepted and protected Simon as his brother and so did Simon.
One day, however, that mutual brotherly love caused the boys to come to harm. Simon was showing off his basketball skills in an old court, when a couple boys came along...
Long story short, Derek and Simon were captured by members of the Genesis project and sent to a group home, the Lyle House, for kids who needed 'special help'. Basically it was a home the Edison group had set up to control young supernaturals. They were given drugs to suppress their powers that the kids didn't even know they had, and were convinced that they were suffering from mental illnesses. Dr. Davidoff was the doctor at the place, but not once did he ever tell Derek about the past that he didn't know or who his parents were.
Shamans, necromancers, witches, werewolves, and half demons once all resided in the house. Eventually, the remaining kids (the ones that had not been killed or convinced they were crazy), escaped the house and tried to find the group that had nearly ruined their lives. They found them, after a perilous journey and killed a few of them, including Dr. Davidoff.
But they knew that they were not completely safe. They had reunited with Christopher Bae, as he had been kidnapped by the Genesis project after the basketball court incident, but not even he could protect them from several other Project members that were looking for them.
At one point, a few months after they escaped, a few Project members found them. One witch, an advanced one that Derek had called Haleema, had an extensive knowledge of witchcraft. She was able to perform spells that Simon had not even heard of, which put them at a major disadvantage.
Fortunately, Derek's girlfriend Chloe, was a necromancer. She managed to raise a nearby decaying man who went to Chloe and scared Haleema and her partners so badly that they ran off. They had just enough time to undue the spell that left them paralyzed for Simon to put a hold spell on them so they could run away.
As they were running, Christopher Bae fell and broke his leg. Derek had to carry Simon away from his father as they did not have enough distance between Haleema and her gang to wait for Christopher as he attempted to continue on with the group. They are still not sure of his fate though Derek feels horrible for making the decision to leave him behind.
Now without an authority figure, the teenagers continued to travel from state to state, using the funds that they had to buy plane tickets, train tickets, and bus fares. Simon's father, before they had to abandon him in Indiana, gave him the name of a place to use as a last resort. The only word that he told him was Forks.
Derek figured out that a place in Washington had a small town named Forks. They weren't sure if it was the place that Simon's father had directed them to, but they decided since they had no other option, to check it out.
They had come here 2 months ago and were staying in a Motel on the outskirts of the town. Simon decided that since it would be suspicious for a few stray kids to wander through the town during school hours, that they should enroll in the local high school. They did under the pretext of different last names, except for Derek. He kept the last name that Christopher Bae had called him since they met. Souza, it was Renee's maiden name.
They were all in grade 11, though Derek had skipped a few grades. Mrs. Mullark was Derek's math teacher. After acing each exam that she threw at Derek, she convinced him to sign up for the tutor program as a way to get extra credit but also make a few extra dollars on the side. Low on money, and rich in knowledge, Derek agreed.
And then I met Derek.
Derek finished his story with a gasp of breath. He had talked consistently for the better part of half an hour.
Nobody said a word for a few minutes after he stopped talking. The click of the clock was the only sound in the room. With each click that passed, the louder it seemed to get.
Now I know this was possibly the worst way to tell the background bits to a story but I thought that this would be the most realistic, natural way for it to happen. Also the easiest ;) Missy~