Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight or any of its characters, or the excerpts from Eclipse and Breaking Dawn that I borrowed/cannibalized. I will freely admit that about a 1/3 of this chapter is from Breaking Dawn, but I couldn't say what I needed any better than Stephanie Meyer did.

Chapter 3

Soon after prom, it was finals time. Of course I studied my butt off, but I didn't think I did very well; which was why it was such a surprise when I passed with flying colours. I asked Alice about it, but she refused to comment. I love my vampires, but did I really need that much help? Plus, if I'd known they were going to get my grades changed anyway, I wouldn't have worked so hard; maybe spent more time on the rules and regulations I would have to abide by, should I choose their way of life.

And so, graduation and the obligatory 'momma's not here' breakdown passed and it was time to remind Charlie about my moving away to Dartmouth. New Hampshire was, hopefully, far enough away that, should I choose to become a vampire, I could fake illnesses to get out of coming home for the holidays, but Charlie had still not fully grasped the fact that going to Dartmouth also meant a 3000 mile move away from him.

Although he took it better than I expected, he made me promise to keep in touch. As I set his dinner on the table on my way out the door to the Cullens, he stopped me.

Flashback

I put Charlie's dinner on the table next to his elbow and headed for the door.

"Er, Bella? Could you wait just a second?"

"Did I forget something?" I asked, eyeing his plate.

"No, no. I just . . . want to ask a favor." Charlie frowned and looked at the floor. "Have a seat - this won't take long."

I sat across from him, a little confused. I tried to focus. "What do you need, Dad?"

"Here's the gist of it, Bella." Charlie flushed. "Maybe I'm just feeling . . .worried . . . about college or something. But I have this . . . hunch. I feel like . . . I'm going to lose you soon."

"Don't be silly, Dad," I mumbled guiltily. "You want me to go to school, don't you?"

"Just promise me one thing."

I was hesitant, ready to rescind. "Okay . . ."

"Will you tell me before you do anything major? I just don't want to wake up one day and realize that I don't know you."

"Dad . . . ," I moaned.

"I'm serious. Just please tell me if you're planning something that might mean we can't see each other for a while. Just give your old man a chance to hug you goodbye."

Cringing mentally, I held up my hand. "This is silly. But, if it makes you happy, . . . I promise."

"Thanks, Bella," he said. "I love you, kid."

End Flashback

There was no way he really knew what he was saying, but that conversation really hit home for me. I had to make a decision, and soon.

For me, the hardest part of making a decision is weighing the pros and cons. When I make a decision, I stick with it, but the choosing was agony. Or so I thought at the time. The real agony was yet to come.

I always wonder if my vampires could have known by listening to his heart beat. I'm sure that Alice could have seen it if she looked for it. But for all my supernatural help, no one predicted Charlie's heart attack.

I awoke in the middle of the night to find him in the hallway, just lying where he fell. I think he had been trying to get to me, but he never made it.

Of course, an ambulance was just a formality. There was nothing they could do; he was gone before they arrived. Carlisle got himself assigned to the case, checked for traces of other vampires or something; anything that meant that I could not have helped him, but we both knew in our hearts that if I had just woken earlier, if I had just not gone to sleep yet, maybe he would still be alive.

Those next few days were one huge hell. As soon as the news spread, every town resident and his dog had to come and give me his condolences. Although some I knew were his close friends, even then I could hardly concentrate on their faces, let alone their names. I was plied with so much food that I would never eat and got so many cards and flowers and money that there was hardly room in the house for me anymore. Really, though, that was just an excuse. I did not want to stay in the house where Charlie had died.

And hence, I was an orphan. Luckily I was already 18 or things could have gotten messy. Charlie had left me everything he had, so even if I stayed human, I would be alright for money, but the hole that was left was something that could not fill. I had lost my daddy.

At the end of a week, after Charlie's funeral, I locked the house and left for what turned out to be the last time. I marched into the Cullen's living room and called a family meeting.

"OK, now, I don't want to do it here or now, but once we all get our affairs in order, I want to do this. I want to become like you."

"Are you sure, dear?" said Esme, ever the caring mother; thinking nothing of her desire to have another daughter, but only what was best for me.

"Aside from the fact that I have nothing left, you yourselves said that it was a risk for me to choose to remain human because of the Volturi. If they found out, I'd be dead or changed anyway, so I'd like to do it on my own terms."

It was Carlisle who spoke this time. "You seem to have thought this out logically, but what does your heart tell you?"

I paused for a moment, trying to put my feelings into words. "I can't lose another family member, and you guys are all the family I have left." With that I burst into tears, and found myself comforted, to my surprise, by Emmett.

"Shh, shh. It's OK. We're here for you. We're here." He just sat with me on his lap, whispering to calm me down. I felt a wave of calm come over me, but stopped Jasper.

"Jasper, I still need to be awake."

He nodded and I felt the calm that suppressed my emotions lift. I nodded my thanks.

Alice saw that my outbreak was over and so perked up again, in a way that only Alice can. "So we're going to have a new sister?" I laughed, and although I knew I looked terrible, everyone seemed so happy. I knew that these people would be my family from now until forever and that thought cheered me to no end. I nodded vigorously and everyone laughed along with us. The joy in the room was overwhelming.

So from then I lived at their house. Emmett and Jasper had gone back to Charlie's to get all my things and we set everything up in what had always, unofficially, been my room. Every night was a sleepover with Alice and Rosalie, and sometimes Esme even joined in. Every day was either a chance to play a practical joke on Emmett, or was vampire lessons. We all decided that it was best that I not be turned in Forks and that I would defer my place at Dartmouth for a year or two.

I had discovered, in one of my vampire lessons with Carlisle, that he had never changed a healthy person. Worried that by being an exception, I would break some rule that he had with himself, I asked why he had agreed to change me.

He considered for a moment. "One reason is Alice's vision." I had not heard exactly what this vision contained, so I was eager to hear more. I think Carlisle sensed that and so continued. "She saw you becoming a vampire, as you know, and that you would stay with us and be one of our family. She saw that if that happened, you would become highly educated, not to mention useful to the family. When she told me, I considered refusing to change you because you have your whole life ahead of you and would be leaving family behind. With that decision, the vision changed. She saw three options. The first was that you would become severely depressed and make an attempt on your own life." I was horrified at the thought, but quickly realized that if my father had died and the Cullens had abandoned me, I may well have. "The second was that another vampire would turn you, we would most likely not see you for a very long time. The third was that in attempting to turn you, the other vampire would accidentally kill you." I was horrified at either of the last two options. "But the reason that swayed me the most is that I love you. I couldn't want for a better daughter. Except for the two I already have." He smiled warmly at me.

All I could say was, "Thank you so much Carlisle."

We spoke much more about my impending transformation and in the end it was decided that we would got to Denali, Alaska, to make the change. They had vegetarian friends there and it was isolated enough that should I attempt to go on a murderous rampage, most likely, someone could catch me before I did any harm. So we packed the mansion and left.

Denali was cold. We got a house near Tanya, Kate, Irena, Eleazar and Carmen. Although, at first I was intimidated by them, we soon became my friends. I was glad that I would have such wonderful people around me when I changed.

Soon the day was upon us. I felt that I was as ready as I would ever be, and so, I lay down on the chaise lounge that was graciously provided, and prepared to die

Carlisle injected me with as much morphine as he thought was safe and whispered in my ear, "I'm sorry", before biting down on my jugular vein.

The pain was bewildering.

Exactly that—I was bewildered. I couldn't understand, couldn't make sense of what was happening.

My body tried to reject the pain, and I was sucked again and again into a blackness that cut out whole seconds or maybe even minutes of the agony, making it that much harder to keep up with reality.

I tried to separate them.

Non-reality was black, and it didn't hurt so much.

Reality was red, and it felt like I was being sawed in half, hit by a bus, punched by a prize fighter, trampled by bulls, and submerged in acid, all at the same time.

Reality was feeling my body twist and flip when I couldn't possibly move because of the pain.

Reality was knowing there was something so much more important than all this torture, and not being able to remember what it was.

The warmth beside my heart got more and more real, warmer and warmer. Hotter. The heat was so real it was hard to believe that I was imagining it.

Hotter.

Uncomfortable now. Too hot. Much, much too hot.

Like grabbing the wrong end of a curling iron—my automatic response was to drop the scorching thing in my arms. But there was nothing in my arms. My arms were not curled to my chest. My arms were dead things lying somewhere at my side. The heat was inside me.

The burning grew—rose and peaked and rose again until it surpassed anything I'd ever felt.

I felt the pulse behind the fire raging now in my chest and realized that I'd found my heart again, just in time to wish I never had. To wish that I'd embraced the blackness while I'd still had the chance. I wanted to raise my arms and claw my chest open and rip the heart from it—anything to get rid of this torture. But I couldn't feel my arms, couldn't move one vanished finger.

The fire blazed hotter and I wanted to scream. To beg for someone to kill me now, before I lived one more second in this pain. But I couldn't move my lips. The weight was still there, pressing on me.

I realized it wasn't the darkness holding me down; it was my body. So heavy. Burying me in the flames that were chewing their way out from my heart now, spreading with impossible pain through my shoulders and stomach, scalding their way up my throat, licking at my face.

Why couldn't I move? Why couldn't I scream? This wasn't part of the stories.

My mind was unbearably clear—sharpened by the fierce pain—and I saw the answer almost as soon as I could form the questions.

The morphine.

It seemed like a million deaths ago that we'd discussed it—Carlisle and I.

Carlisle had hoped that enough painkillers would help fight the pain of the venom. Carlisle had tried with Emmett, but the venom had burned ahead of the medicine, sealing his veins. There hadn't been time for it to spread.

Because I'd had morphine and venom together in my system before, and I knew the truth. I knew the numbness of the medicine was completely irrelevant while the venom seared through my veins. But there'd been no way I was going to mention that fact. Nothing that would make him more unwilling to change me.

I hadn't guessed that the morphine would have this effect—that it would pin me down and gag me. Hold me paralyzed while I burned.

I knew all the stories. I knew that Carlisle had kept quiet enough to avoid discovery while he burned. I knew that, according to Rosalie, it did no good to scream. And I'd hoped that maybe I could be like Carlisle. That I would believe Rosalie's words and keep my mouth shut.

Now it seemed like a hideous joke that I was getting my wish fulfilled.

If I couldn't scream, how could I tell them to kill me?

All I wanted was to die. To never have been born. The whole of my existence did not outweigh this pain. Wasn't worth living through it for one more heartbeat.

Let me die, let me die, let me die.

And, for a never-ending space, that was all there was. Just the fiery torture, and my soundless shrieks, pleading for death to come. Nothing else, not even time. So that made it infinite, with no beginning and no end. One infinite moment of pain.

The only change came when suddenly, impossibly, my pain was doubled. The lower half of my body, deadened since before the morphine, was suddenly on fire, too. Some broken connection had been healed—knitted together by the scorching fingers of the flame.

The endless burn raged on.

It could have been seconds or days, weeks or years, but, eventually, time came to mean something again.

Three things happened together, grew from each other so that I didn't know which came first: time restarted, the morphine's weight faded, and I got stronger.

I could feel the control of my body come back to me in increments, and those increments were my first markers of the time passing. I knew it when I was able to twitch my toes and twist my fingers into fists. I knew it, but I did not act on it.

Though the fire did not decrease one tiny degree—in fact, I began to develop a new capacity for experiencing it, a new sensitivity to appreciate, separately, each blistering tongue of flame that licked through my veins—I discovered that I could think around it.

I could remember why I shouldn't scream. I could remember the reason why I'd committed to enduring this unendurable agony. I could remember that, though it felt impossible now, there was something that might be worth the torture.

This happened just in time for me to hold on when the weights left my body. To anyone watching me, there would be no change. But for me, as I struggled to keep the screams and thrashing locked up inside my body, where they couldn't hurt anyone else, it felt like I'd gone from being tied to the stake as I burned, to gripping that stake to hold myself in the fire.

I had just enough strength to lie there unmoving while I was charred alive.

My hearing got clearer and clearer, and I could count the frantic, pounding beats of my heart to mark the time.

I could count the shallow breaths that gasped through my teeth.

I could count the low, even breaths that came from somewhere close beside me. These moved slowest, so I concentrated on them. They meant the most time passing. More even than a clock's pendulum, those breaths pulled me through the burning seconds toward the end.

I continued to get stronger, my thoughts clearer. When new noises came, I could listen.

There were light footsteps, the whisper of air stirred by an opening door. The footsteps got closer, and I felt pressure against the inside of my wrist. I couldn't feel the coolness of the fingers. The fire blistered away every memory of cool.

Through all this, the racking fire went right on burning me. But there was so much space in my head now. Room to ponder their conversation, room to remember what had happened, room to look ahead to the future, with still endless room left over to suffer in.

Ten thousand, nine hundred forty-three breaths later, a different set of footsteps whispered into the room. Lighter. More… rhythmic.

Strange that I could distinguish the minute differences between footsteps that I'd never been able to hear at all before today.

"How much longer?" Carlisle asked.

"It won't be long now," Alice told him.

"She's going to be dazzling."

Carlisle didn't answer, but Alice's words gave me hope that maybe I didn't resemble the charcoal briquette I felt like. It seemed as if I must be just a pile of charred bones by now. Every cell in my body had been razed to ash.

I heard Alice breeze out of the room. I heard the swish of the fabric she moved, rubbing against itself. I heard the quiet buzz of the light hanging from the ceiling. I heard the faint wind brushing against the outside of the house. I could hear everything.

Downstairs, someone was watching a ball game. The Mariners were winning by two runs.

I was now Bella Cullen.

AN: So I feel kinda bad for killing off three people: Charlie, Renee and Phil, in as many chapters. I hope y'all can understand why it was necessary. I mean, when I'm writing from the point of view of Bella, I can't ignore the personality that Stephanie Meyer gave her. Bella would leave Charlie all alone for no one less than Edward, and as much as we love Alice, we all know it's true, right?