A/N I just wanted to introduce this chapter with a few words. I'm not focusing very much on Edward and Bella here, because I really need to set up the other Cullen kids. Like I said in my introduction to the story, this is a fic about the healing of everyone, not just Bella. In fact, Bella comes to play quite a role in the healing of everyone...
That being said, I hope that I have kept my observations on each of the players of this fic in character. OOC fics tend to annoy me. On the other hand, I hope that nothing I've written has been cliche. If I have to read one more fic about shallow!Rosalie or hyper!Alice I think I might puke....
I've written the most about Rosalie and Jasper in this chapter, mainly because they're described the least in the books, so I felt I had a bit more room to create a background for them in keeping with the (minimal) descriptions of their characters in the Twilight books.
Alice and Emmett were a bit harder... There is something indefinable about these two characters that I found hard to channel into the universe of my story. I hope that in describing their psychological state I have stayed true to their characters as written by SM, but that it also works within the context of my story.
Thank you to everyone who has reviewed! I have to say that they completely make my day, and I hope that everyone will continue (Please?). I am using this forum to improve my writing in general, but also to flesh out themes that I think are either missing or underdeveloped in the Twilight books. I appreciate all constructive criticisms and ideas.
Also, I'm more likely to update faster with more reviews.... :o)
Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight.
Chapter 5: In the Dark
Jasper, Emmett and Edward were all up in their room playing Halo a few weeks later when Emmett threw the controller down in disgust. Jasper had plastered him for the twelfth time a row.
"That's it," he grumbled. "I'm going downstairs for something to eat."
"Don't wake anyone up with your swearing," grinned Jasper.
Emmett snorted and stomped out to the kitchen. A few minutes later he came running back up into the room.
"Hey, Edward," he began, "Bella's downstairs in the living room. I didn't want to scare her or anything, but I thought maybe you should go talk to her … make sure she's okay." He looked chagrined that he couldn't comfort her himself, but his size still intimidated Bella. She was making a heroic effort to be around him … She tried to be so brave…. Everyone knew it….
That was the thing though…. Edward could practically hear her telling herself over and over again, "You're safe … There's nothing to be afraid of … You don't need to be scared … You're safe … There's nothing to be afraid of … You don't need to be scared … You're safe …" It was her mantra, the rhythm of every breath she took, of every move she made.
But it didn't seem to help because she was still so very fragile.
Privately, he thought it was as if she could not fight the instincts ingrained in her through years of abuse. She just didn't have Rosalie's single-minded strength of will. Oh, he knew she was strong. No one can come from an abusive situation and not be strong. But, unlike Rosalie, Bella just couldn't defeat those instincts after only a few weeks.
What really made his stomach queasy was that in a perfect world, Emmett should not have scared her. He pinched the bridge of his nose.
______________________________________________________________________________
Mad World…
______________________________________________________________________________
Edward sighed in frustration, but he was pulled out of his thoughts when Emmett punched his arm and said, "Hello! Come back to earth, bro! Can you go down and see about Bella?"
"Sure," he said and set his controller down.
He walked as softly as he could down the stairs. He knew that she was trying very hard to relax around everyone, but she still jumped slightly if a loud noise startled her.
He could just barely make out her form in the darkness.
She was sitting on the floor with her back against the couch in front of the big bay window, absently stroking Jake's back. Edward silently sat down beside her and gazed out the window with her. The stars were so beautiful in the crisp winter night (so rare in the normally cloudy Forks)…. Venus was showing off against the duller stars….
_________________________________________________________________________________________
'Neath the halo of a streetlamp,
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence…
_________________________________________________________________________________________
After a few minutes he was surprised when he felt her fingers snake across his lap and touch his hand. She tentatively stroked it before grasping it tightly.
He settled back against the couch and held her hand until she went back to bed.
After that evening, not a night went by that he wouldn't find Bella and Jake sitting in front of the big bay window. He always sat with her until she went to bed.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
The craving to be free and independent... The craving to be taken care of and safe... The magic of the sickness is that it meets both these cravings at once…
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Edward wasn't sure why Bella liked to sit and watch the night sky. He wondered if it was because she was afraid of something. A few days later, he asked Alice, "Does Bella have nightmares?"
Her brows puckered as she thought about it, "I'm not sure Edward. You know I sleep like the dead, so I've never noticed whether she had nightmares or not. Why don't you ask Rose? You know she's a much lighter sleeper than me!" Alice laughed, recalling many arguments with Rosalie about Alice's sleep-talking.
"It's not like I can help it!" Alice always shouted indignantly.
"But do you always have to be so loud?" Rosalie would shoot back…
Rosalie said, "I've never heard her say anything in her sleep – or cry or shout … not that she would be likely to do any of those things," Rosalie admitted dryly.
Bella was certainly one of the quietest people any of them had ever met.
"She does move around a lot though…" she trailed off. "She seems fine when she wakes up in the morning, so I guess if she does have nightmares that they don't bother her too much," Rose concluded composedly.
He pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger in response, and thought that was no proof of whether Bella had nightmares or not… He decided to watch her closely that morning.
______________________________________________________________________________
Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday
________________________________________________________________________________
When she came in for breakfast, there were dark circles under her eyes that showed up against her too-pale skin, but no other obvious sign of stress. She actually seemed relaxed for once.
He sighed and started guessing again…
She smiled and waved goodbye as they walked out the door for school. Esme was tutoring Bella at home; she would start school next semester.
______________________________________________________________________________
By not eating you take your stand against a world that is telling you what to do. By not eating you make your body so much smaller, lighter, weaker that in effect it becomes a child's body again, and the world flocks to your rescue…
______________________________________________________________________________
School itself was torture. Although none of them had made the slightest trouble the past few weeks, people generally had preconceived notions of foster kids – especially the foster kids that Carlisle and Esme kept. Carlisle and Esme only took the hard cases.
Home was where they all felt safest. None of them ever said it out loud, but it was an unspoken belief that they would do anything to stay with Carlisle and Esme.
Unfortunately, Edward thought that most schools tended to remember them when they first came to their foster parents – before they figured out that Esme and Carlisle were probably the best thing to ever happen to them.
For instance, Rosalie's temper tantrums were the stuff of legends, although she had been nothing but a model student for a while now.
And as for Jasper… healing had not come as easily for him either. Edward sometimes thought that people tended to forget he lost his parents too. Rosalie was so much more vocal that Jasper's quieter pain tended to go unnoticed. Edward watched him and noticed that Jasper was very tense around people he didn't know very well. He could only guess at the reasons behind his tenseness…
His eyes were so watchful, almost as if he was waiting for that same spark that had ignited the mob in Mexico City to appear at Forks High School. The only time his eyes completely lost that watchful rim was when Alice was around. If anyone could prove to Jasper that not all humans were animals, it would be Alice.
He even sometimes wondered if Jasper's problem was not so much that he distrusted people, but that he felt as if he would let the people he loved down. Edward didn't have to be empathic to know that Jasper almost couldn't function sometimes because of the guilt he felt over what happened to Rosalie.
But Jasper never said anything about it, so no one was ever able to tell him the meaningless (but probably true) platitudes, "You wouldn't have been able to save them if you had been there. You would have been killed too. And then Rosalie would have been left all alone."
Edward sometimes thought that no one said the platitudes, however, because there was the unconscious feeling that Jasper would agree with them. Of course he couldn't have saved them if he had been there… Of course he wasn't strong enough… That was the point, wasn't it? Jasper felt completely helpless to protect those he loved.
And that feeling of helplessness paralyzed him.
But again … Like Rosalie, Jasper never said those magic words … "Help me" … "I need to feel safe" … "I need to feel strong again" … "I am afraid" …
Jasper never said what he thought because the response would be platitudes ... So he moved and lived instead in a silence almost as complete as Bella's…
So Jasper really didn't interact much with the student body … unless of course someone messed with those he loved. Then he fought with a single-minded ferocity that once sent two kids to the hospital for daring to speak harshly to Rosalie.
In a way, Edward thought Jasper was challenging the universe to prove to him he was too weak to protect those he loved the same way Rosalie taunted the world to prove to her she was too weak to protect herself. It was almost as if they both said, "Come on world … I dare you to screw with me again."
As for Emmett… people backed away from him on instinct just because of his sheer size, although Edward could have told them that Jasper was the one to watch in a fight.
That was the thing though.... The scariest thing about Emmett was something that no one else but the Cullens knew. The scary thing about Emmett, was that he probably knew everything about drugs that there was to know. Emmett never told anyone except Jasper and Edward – despite his propensity to say anything that came into his head – but he had actually dealt in drugs before his mom overdosed. When he told Jasper and Edward that, their jaws dropped in silent shock. Emmett laughed uproariously at his brothers' expressions.
"You should see your faces! I bet I just scared ten years off your lives," he howled.
Jasper choked out, "We're waiting for you to say, 'just kidding!'"
Emmett sobered up immediately. "I didn't actually do drugs," he said softly. "I just sold them. My mom went through money as fast as any drug addict could. There wasn't any money to take care of my brothers … I knew the people she hung out with … It really wasn't that hard – making the right contacts … I just made enough money doing it to give my brothers the things they needed … you know, food and clothes," he had concluded bitterly.
Since his mother's death, Emmett had tried heroically to keep in touch with his younger brothers. But with everyone beings shuffled from foster home to foster home several times in the space of a few months, Emmett had lost track of all but his youngest brother.
Being forced to feed someone else's addiction (which went against everything Emmett was) in order to care for his little brothers had taken its toll on him though. Maybe because of that, he tended to get violently angry at the selfishness and pettiness of high school. He was apt to fly off the handle if anyone spoke harshly of their parents … or of their brothers and sisters.
Emmett was also noticeable because his fury, while not as harming as Jasper's calm ferocity, had the same deafeningly volcanic quality as Rosalie's rages.
Edward sighed … Again, he could only guess though.
Emmett would get violently angry over little things or over the kids at school, and it would be days before one of the others would learn that it was because another letter had come back stamped "Could Not Deliver to Addressed."
Like Rosalie… like Jasper… Emmett never voiced out loud, "I need to be needed" or "I need my family" or "I need to protect" ….
Alice, like Jasper, was also an enigma to Edward, maybe because she consciously cultivated a mask to wear …
Alice tried to make people uncomfortable on purpose. She had mischievously perfected the image of the weird, slightly eerie teenager. She was the individualist in a whole family of individualists – and she scared the kids at school because of that.
She enjoyed thumbing her nose at the world, but in a comic way completely different from Jasper and Rosalie's fierce taunts. It came to Edward's mind again, but he thought Alice was the sanest of them all…
And yet … Her strength might become a weakness that could destroy that cheerful contentment. Alice was perfectly, wholly, utterly content to live as a person unto herself. It was almost as if she had trained herself not to need anyone else but herself.
She felt complete as a person alone.
He thought that was why she found it so much fun to flout the social norms at the high school. She truly didn't need the students' affirmation.
The miraculous thing was that she had managed – so far – not to turn brittle in the process. He wondered how long that would last … She cared about her new brothers and sisters – that was true – but sooner or later her desire to need no one but herself might become a shield behind which she would hide a broken girl who didn't (or couldn't) trust anyone.
Edward occasionally thought it might be happening already … and he hated to see her sunny contentment with herself and with the world harden into such a brittle shield.
He thought that because it sometimes seemed as if Jasper's single-minded (however silent) devotion scared Alice slightly. She didn't want to need him because then she would not be as complete unto herself. And suppose he should leave her … like her mom…
"I don't need anyone" …. "I need to be myself" …. "I am afraid" … "I need you" …. Alice needed to tell them what she needed because Edward hadn't been able to work through the layers of her carefully-cultivated Mardi Gras mask…
As for Edward… Why did he come under the heading of a "difficult case"?
He didn't scare people in the same way Emmett, Jasper or Rosalie scared people. Maybe he was more like Alice. He made them … uneasy.
He thought that most kids at school probably wondered if he was bipolar or something because of the way he could watch someone intensely for minutes on end, trying to figure out what they were thinking by reading their eyes, and then retreat deeply into himself to contemplate what he had seen.
And when he retreated he was oblivious to everything around him.
Very few understood that he was just trying to understand…. he just wanted to get past what people said or did to what they really thought behind the masks…
But most people tend to get uncomfortable if one makes direct eye contact for too long.
He had frightened five different foster families in the space of a few months before Esme and Carlisle took him in.
He had rubbed the skin on his nose raw in the weeks that followed, waiting to be told to move on by a diplomatic social worker….
Instead, the months went by and he only saw a golden rim of happiness in their eyes.
He finally got the courage to ask Carlisle one day why he didn't scare them. Breaking a silence almost as complete as Bella's, his voice croaked from disuse as he haltingly got the words out ... shifting from one foot to the other ... staring at everything but Carlisle's eyes.
He never forgot Carlisle's response.
"No, Edward, you don't make me uncomfortable … In fact … You remind me very much of how I used to be when I was a child."
He looked up and saw honey in his eyes. Carlisle paused and cleared his throat.
"In fact, I rather think that if I had had a little boy he would have been much like you," he finished softly.
Over the weeks that followed, Edward's hands rested quietly at his sides. His eyes lost their look of watchful intensity. He talked more often. The skin on his nose healed.
"I need to know if you love me" …. "I need to know if I make you uncomfortable."
All of them held on so closely to what had happened to them.
He thought that they were all afraid to speak or admit that they were afraid…. that they needed something or someone. That they each had their hang-ups … their troubles … their hurts. That they all had their needs … their desires … their nightmares … that only showed through in the symbols of their actions….
It made him wonder what kind of nightmares Bella had … what her muteness was a symbolic action for….
______________________________________________________________________________
Is something like this at the heart of it?
______________________________________________________________________________