Author's Note: Thanks to Jkane180 for making sure my commas are where they should be. Wordslinger also pre-read for me; in case you haven't figured it out, wordslinger is my Sonja. She created her and a non-bounty loving version of her can be found in her fic Distortion (which I beta!)
"Therapy... Therapist... The rapist..." Oh, look at what I just did!
"Yes, Bella, very clever."
"Not really. Angelina Jolie said it in 'Girl, Interrupted.'"
Carlisle scribbled a note on his pad and asked, "What's that?"
Muttering under my breath, I took on a salad-tossing-seventeenth-century-pansy-assed-vampire-with-a-soul lilt and mocked him. "What's that?" emerged from my lips as a whisper; a sad little parody of a man who did nothing to deserve my ire.
Really, I wished we could do this shit in my room and just drop the fucking pretence. This thing, this therapeutic torture he was inflicting upon me, was a complete freakshow. He could ask his questions until the farmer-fucking cows came home, but no amount of self-discovery would fix me. Edward always suspected my mind worked on a different frequency than that of a normal person. Like usual, smarty-pants was correct. Yeah, the memories were surfacing fast and furiously now, but having no reliable compass with which to guide me to sanity, I didn't know if my mind was following a logical course, or if I was a ship, lost in an ocean of crazy.
"Well, it was supposed to be a movie starring Winona Ryder, you know, before she got all klepto or whatever; but it turned out that the star was really Angelina. Her character was like a well-adjusted Sonja, without the paper towel fetish or werewolf imprint."
"You realize the word I asked you to associate was 'couch' and you jumped to 'rape' as the conclusive pairing?"
My logic was terribly weak. "Well, yeah... But this is a stupid exercise."
"Bella, until you make a real effort to act like yourself, things aren't going to get any better for you."
So I started to chew on my lip because it seemed like the canon thing to do, and as it turned out, I was indeed canon Bella Swan.
"It's not like, this big thing—" I paused to make air quotations, "—or anything. I'm not obsessed with rape, if that's what you're thinking. I mean, I've never been raped. It didn't happen to me at all."
"Who did it happen to?"
"Flanagan. I remember..."
"You remember it happening?"
"Well, yeah, but, I remember her talking about it too. Somehow, the actual event feels like a memory, like it happened to both of us."
"Displaced trauma; perhaps Flanagan's tragedy was easier to come to terms with than your own."
"You think I'd rather have been brutally raped than attacked by Jasper?
"Charlie's coming today." Carlisle's voice was calm as he threw me that curve ball of a tangent.
"I'm not leaving; Charlie can't make me leave, and you didn't answer my question."
Carlisle looked positively weary. He stood, adjusting his coat, and making a big show of acting human and nonchalant. "I've never lied to you, Bella," he qualified, for no reason I could think of, and sat down beside me on the couch. "I believe Flanagan's tragedy was easier for you to deal with than your own, yes."
I snorted. "Jizz-bin doesn't scare me. The worst he could do is kill me, and I'm not afraid to die."
"Is your life worth so little?"
"My life is absolutely worthless," I laughed because the answer was just so obvious. "I'm nothing. I don't even exist, according to Alice."
"When did Alice say that?"
"In the woods. Everything always happens in the woods."
"What did she say?"
-({})-
"Bella?" I forced my lids apart and was back with Alice. "Where did you go? You were gone."
"I- I was somewhere else."
"That concerns me. If you disappear then...perhaps we're all wrong."
I nodded. "I know." I touched her face. "You don't exist, Alice. I'm so sorry."
She scowled at me. "Don't be an idiot! Of course I do. It's you, Bella. You don't exist."
-({})-
"It's very queer, that Alice would say such a thing." Carlisle mused.
"Yeah, but Edward said she lied. I mean, obviously I exist, right?"
"What do you think?"
"Yes?"
Carlisle sighed. "Are you asking me or telling me?"
"Telling you?" For some reason, I thought of the scene from 'Back to the Future' when Michael J. Fox watched himself disappear since he changed the course of space and time. Well, where the fuck was my plutonium powered DeLorean because that shit was cool?
"Do you think I'll disappear? Do you think I went back in time and fucked things up?" Now I really sounded like a fucking crazy person.
"No. You exist. I think that Alice was speaking metaphorically."
"Her metaphor is a bleeding axe wound of stupidity," I said, if only to prove that the use of metaphorical language in casual conversation should be a privilege, not a right.
"I think she was trying to make a point, Bella. Your personality was so obscured that—"
"No! She said it during a flashback. My mind had left us completely."
"Where did it go? Where did you go to make Alice say such a thing?"
-({})-
I choked as a tube was shoved down my throat, churning up the contents of my stomach. The pain was vile and I had vertigo. No longer on my feet, the moon transformed into an overhead light and I was on my back, tied to a stretcher. My eyes rolled back into my head.
"Stay awake, Bella!"
I couldn't. My eyes would not open.
"How much did she have?" a male voice inquired blandly.
"60 mg, at least. It shouldn't be lethal. What concerns me is how did she access an entire bottle?"
The tube was retracted in the same moment I was pushed forward towards a bed pan. My lips parted and vomit spewed from me. I didn't even feel it.
"Who gave it to you, honey?"
"I fucked a White Coat for it."
-({})-
Group therapy was merciless. It was hard enough for me to come up with sufficiently plausible lies to explain the trauma I suffered in the woods. Flanagan and I had come up with the story that Jasper raped me, and Ed—he...found out and left me. Shit, I had allowed myself to think his name, to remember his face and his hair; all that was mine, which I would never touch again.
If I had the will to laugh though, I would. Flanagan played it all like a game. In fact, to the casual observer, therapy at Southlake would appear like game of baseball hosted by the Mad Hatter. Shapiro would pitch the questions, and Flanagan would offer answers so very far off-base that they were positively foul.
That was, until the day that Flanagan remembered what happened to her. Shapiro dismissed group after her first revelation, suggesting that I stay with her for a bit.
Flanagan was muttering to herself about werewolves and vampires. She lifted her sweater and studied her butchered stomach.
"Can I get you some water?"
She cocked her head in the direction of my voice but didn't reply.
The chairs in the room were still arranged in a circle. All were empty now but one. Was the irony lost on her, I wondered, that she was seated alone in a healing circle?
"Stop staring at me!" Her voice produced a sharp reverberation which jarred me out of my reverie.
"Oh, was I?" Carefully, I sat down beside her, and my chair squeaked, filling the room with a deafening echo. Everything was quiet now, and it seemed strange, like the secrets revealed should still be reverberating off the walls. In fact, I dragged my chair across the linoleum again to produce that terrible squeal.
"It didn't happen to me."
Was I supposed to agree with her or help feed her fantasy? Her blue eyes were desperate and tear-filled. What was the correct response?
"I know, Isabella. I've felt that way before too…"
"Shit like that doesn't happen to me," she insisted. I wanted to cry for her; for both of us.
"Do you remember now?"
"Don't mess with me, Swan. Don't mindfuck the mindfucker. You don't have any hope of winning."
"It's not a game," I told her because it really wasn't.
-({})-
Carlisle was waiting for an explanation from me. I shook my head, as if I could dislodge these memories that were stuck in my brain, torturing me on replay.
"Without Edward, without eternity, my life is pretty much null and void. Sure, I could trudge through and suffer another sixty years of misery. What does it matter? If Edward doesn't want me forever, then I'm already dead.
"You asked me if Flanagan's rape was preferable to Jasper killing me? No. Jasper could have killed me that day, and my suffering would have been over. What terrorized me beyond reason, the moment I registered what that fucker wanted, was the fear of him failing. Don't you see, Carlisle? Jasper only had the power to end my life. I knew that Edward would pull some stupid-assed shit in the name of my salvation. He had intimated at it after my confrontation with James; that he would only be with me so long as it was the best thing for me. He was scared for my crummy, little life! The obvious thing to do would be to make me less fucking vulnerable, to turn me into marble..."
"Bella—"
"Don't even interrupt me, fuckwit. Yeah, I know, he was looking out for my soul. Well, I don't believe in God, so if I have a soul, it belongs to Edward. He can fucking have it, because if there's a God, I hate him. I hate him for creating me and putting me in a world where Edward and I can't be together. I hate him for making me in his likeness by giving me a soul that Edward is hell-bent on protecting.
"So I did what I could; I bargained with my blood for my life. I asked Jasper to take only a little and let me change, but dude had no control over his appetite. It was gluttonous and disgusting, really. I mean, for all of his supposed talents and charms, he seems like a limp-dicked-asshat to me. He's supposed to be charismatic, but his Freddy Krueger-like complexion, Jason-like demeanour and Leatherface-like want of blood, are certainly not representative of a southern gentleman and military mastermind. Sure, he's almost killed me twice now but not because of any kind of brilliant strategic thinking. I'm just easy fucking prey. I'm like the stupid cunt in the horror movie who investigates the mysterious sounds coming from the basement. If it wasn't for this fucking horseshoe up my ass, I'd be dead ten times past Tuesday.
"And Alice, for that matter, I mean, what the fuck? How could she not have seen this shit coming? What good is having a psychic among us if she's a crazier fucker than me? For all of my failures, how is it that I'm the only one who has cut through the bullshit and recognized the gruesome twosome for what they are: useless, ignorant and insane whores.
"Bella, relax." Carlisle tried to make his voice monotonous and soothing. "These thoughts are not natural for you. You're taking on her persona still. It's important to remember Flanagan so that you can find yourself again."
I listened, but didn't really hear him. "Jasper's trying to turn me into lunch meant that Edward will leave. Edward would leave. Edward is going to leave me!"
Panic gripped me and my universe imploded. Darkness; it was so very dark in the black hole of my mind. I couldn't let Flanagan go completely. It was too dark without her.
I felt ensnared, pushed and pulled by a gravitational singularity; ambivalent forces were at work in my mind. I was moving at regular intervals but never reaching my destination.
Author's Note: Big love to all readers and reviewers. BBS is nominated for a Gigglesnort Award for best Bella, and, um, I believe voting is open for a couple of more days if you are so inclined to vote. I love the messages I get that say "I voted!" because no one actually specifies they voted for me. You guys are tricky bitches, aren't you?
Katinki the twisted and I have extended the submission deadline for the Monster-in-law contest. Won't you write something wicked for us? We're holding Renward and Underthebedward hostage until you do!
We're planning a couple of episodes of Fic Pushin' called Straight to the Vein. Have you checked out the podcast blog yet? There's a link on my profile.
Finally, OMFG, have you read "Get me to You" by Chicklette? That story has made my top ten list. She breaks every rule of grammar they taught me in school and I still love the shit out of it. Read it. You'll thank me. Pinkie Swears.
Okay, so I'm putting my pretty iPhone in my pocket. All I need are a few buzzes to take me home. I could go all night, baby.