Author's Note: Sorry for the delay, I was hospitalized with a kidney infection. I'm okay! Second last chapter. Be prepared, not everyone is going to like what happens here. I hope that I've left enough clues as I've written so it won't be a complete shock. This story has been a wonderful experience to write and it kills me that I'm down to the last chapter after this. I'll have to write lots of naughty outtakes. Thanks to jkane180 for the beta (best beta ever!), and wordslinger and katinki for pre-reading. Katinki provides honest advice, and she's sweeter than she gives herself credit for. Wordslinger leaves the strangest notes on my doc ever, including shit like "People won't know what that means. I do, but I'm a motherfucking genius."
A special thank you to the students of prof Anne Jamison's pop culture course for making me feel like a real author! Thanks for interviewing me, Jesse!
I'm totally about to quote one of the most over quoted Shakepeare quotes ever. Sorry. I have to do it.
To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
-Shakespeare, Hamlet Act III, Scene I
-({})-
With perfect clarity comes perfect regret.
My mind reclaimed memories at lightning speed, or perhaps more aptly, let go of the false ones, shedding lie after lie, revealing a tender and raw truth underneath. This was a most intricate repression. Like peeling an onion, I watched in terrible awe as each subsequent layer of the gossamer skin was pulled back, giving way to more falsehood. Growing impatient and terrorized, I gouged through the delicate skins, desperately seeking the core, to know if the skins would reveal an entirely different vegetable altogether.
"Edward," I murmured against his warm skin. His temperature was so foreign to me now; not cool at all, but simply perfect. It was a miracle to kiss his sweet skin.
"Bella...I want you. It's not just want, I need you."
He turned me around to face the tree, and I pressed my palms against the bark. I could feel every rough ridge of loosened wood against my strange skin. If I wanted to, I could rub my hands down the trunk of the old tree and sluice off its skin. It was five-hundred or so years old, but I had the power to pull it from the earth.
"I want you," I growled. "Edward, I need you too."
"You spoke in your dreams. You cried out as you imagined me fucking you. Oh, God, Bella..." he whimpered against the back of my neck. "I'm so sorry, love. I'm so sorry I denied you."
"You did it for my own good," I recited. We'd had this conversation, both in the real world and in my dreamscape too many times before. I had grown tired of this argument. "It doesn't matter anymore."
"Of course it does, Bella. Today's a good day. Today you're finally my wife, and I want to bind you to me in every way possible."
"Doesn't that require some sort of form and a notary stamp?" I smirked. He chuckled against the back of my neck, and it felt like heaven. I wanted to remember the feeling. I wanted to hold on to this memory.
"Bella..." his voice broke under an emotion I didn't quite understand. He pulled the skirt of my dress up and held my hips firmly, bucking into my behind with a force I'd never felt him use before. A groan tore through him, sending ripples of mad lust through my body. The dull electrical stream that replaced my blood flow seemed to settle into my pussy. Despite being dead and empty, I liquefied there.
"Fuck me, Edward. I need to feel you inside of me."
"Do you remember what it felt like, love, in your dream?" His fingers cupped my backside and slapped my skin gently. I bent forward and wrapped my arms around the tree, quivering at the sound of another snarl coming from Edward. God, oh my fucking God, he sounded like a beast, an animal that had rattled at its cage all its life and was finally set free. "Do you remember?" he repeated.
The final skin was pulled back from the onion, revealing a bloody heart, still beating.
"I remember everything," I gasped, falling forward.
I did. I really did.
-({})-
Excerpt from Chapter 43, Event Horizon:
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.
-({})-
I blinked several times, frozen in the knowledge that the memory was false.
"Edward," I gasped, feeling his cock against my pussy.
"Shhh, I'm going to go slow," he said tenderly, cupping my abdomen with his hand.
"Don't you fucking dare!" I reached behind and fisted the base of his cock, pulling at him several times as he bucked in my hand. I strained to gain some height by standing on my toes and guided him into my entrance.
"Your...panties," he stammered.
"Rip them."
He snarled and growled and shredded my clothes, not just my underwear, biting into my dress at the collar and salivating venom down my neck. With my back bared to him, he started kissing and biting my skin roughly. So rough. I wanted him to be rougher. I wanted him to fuck me deeply and violently, to give me a memory I'd take with me always.
"Now, Edward, please!"
"We have all of the rest of forever, love." he gasped, trying to hold me against his mouth. "Please, let me worship you properly."
"No. Now, Edward. We don't have much time."
"We do, Bella, I swear..."
A sound pushed through my dead lungs that sounded like a primal scream. In a single motion, graceful as a diving bird, I spun and mounted him, pushing his body into the earth. I fucked him hard and fast, using a relentless pace, swallowing him into me and pushing him out of me, still screaming.
His face registered shock and a voracious lust, his lip raised in a snarl, baring his sharp teeth.
"This is not tender," I told him.
"Don't stop..." He arched into me, and I jack-hammered down, our thighs pounding and creating a thunderous sonic boom from the sheer speed and force.
"I'll always remember."
-({})-
Something was being torn from my throat; a plastic snake coiling out over my tongue. It was clearly an obstruction, but I felt like I had lost a limb after its removal.
My lips were dry and cracked, and I licked at them, gasping and shuddering, feeling hot and cold and despondent, all at once. It was so dark, but it wasn't until I started trying to blink that I realized my eyes were closed. Painfully, my heavy lids opened, shutting immediately thereafter. Blinding light burned my retinas.
"She's waking up." There were voices, not quite whispering in urgent tones. I couldn't tell one from another. The voices buzzed like bees flying about me, softly and then suddenly loudly, only to recede into whisper. Perhaps I still had to acclimate to my heightened, supernatural senses.
Again, I struggled to open my eyes slowly. They felt like they were gummed together with glue. I rubbed at them with my fists, feeling the gentle tug and burn of IV tubes feeding into my hand.
How could they have a needle strong enough to pierce vampire skin? I must be in some sort of vampire hospital.
I wiggled my fingers, pleading silently to be freed. Piece by piece, doctors and nurses unhooked me from various monitors and machines. When I was freed from all bindings except a single saline drip, the bed was propped up, and so was I.
I was tethered and helpless before, but now I was a balloon loose in the wind. Nothing could ground me. Desperately, my eyes fleeted from person to person.
What was I doing here? Something must have gone terribly wrong. Maybe the transformation didn't take properly. I certainly didn't feel normal. Of course, I no longer had a bench mark with which to measure normal.
Nothing was familiar...
Everything was empty...
Vampires are hollow...
I could feel the entropy, my organs shrivelling up from lack of purpose. I was hard on the outside but utter waste on the inside.
"Can you speak, Isabella?"
I opened my mouth and gasped in some air, holding it for a moment in my lungs. Upon exhaling, I rasped out the word, "Yes."
"Do you know your name?" a doctor asked. I noticed his thick eyebrows sticking out from under his surgical cap. I concentrated on his eyebrows, grounding myself in place.
"Isabella Swan," I said automatically.
"Where are you, Isabella?"
"Um..." Where was I? I wasn't in Tacoma, because that wasn't real. I wasn't in Toronto because Renee sent me back to Forks. I should be with Edward. Why wasn't I with Edward?
"Forks?" I whispered fearfully. It wasn't an answer, it was another question.
"Where's Forks?" The doctor wasn't speaking to me; he was asking one of the nurses. She whispered something. I couldn't hear it. I should have been able to hear everything, since I was a vampire now.
"My throat is burning," I warned the humans.
"Yes, the tube will cause some irritation," Bushy Eyebrows explained.
"No. I'm thirsty. You're in danger."
"We just unplugged your IV from most of the drips, but you're still receiving water with a little sodium and sugar."
"I don't understand; why am I hooked up to an IV? Did something go wrong during the transformation? Are you friends of Carlisle's?" I tried to calm the note of hysteria in my voice. Being a vampire was all so new to me. It was hard to control my emotions.
"Calm, down, Isabella."
"Call me 'Bella,'" I pleaded. "Why do my eyes hurt so much?"
"There's no need to panic, Bella. Your eyes hurt because you've been sleeping for a long time."
"Asleep? I've been asleep?" Despite myself, I thought of Neo from the Matrix, as he was unplugged from the great machine. If the dream is a beautiful lie, and reality a horrific truth, isn't the lie preferable?
Neo made a mistake. There is truth to the idiom that ignorance is bliss.
"Plug me back in," I keened. There were no tears in my eyes, but I was sobbing.
"Mrs. Flanagan..."
The word cut off and echoed; a chorus of a thousand knives gutting me would have been less painful.
"No! I'm not Bella Flanagan, I'm Bella Swan!"
"Bella..." the nurse said softly.
"I know, she was hospitalized here with me, Flanagan was, and she died. I'm sorry, I really am, but I'm not her."
"She's imagining Swan again."
-({})-
Chapter 43, Event Horizon: Flanagan's POV
Dr. Shapiro dismissed Group early, all except for Swan and me.
"You're fucking nuts," I raged at the tiny girl, glaring at her while she chewed at her lip, "but he accuses me of having a mental breakdown. Seriously, all I'm doing is repressing shit. I mean, I was fucking raped. Boo-hoo, yeah, I get it. I should get the fuck over it, already."
"Isabella," Dr. Shapiro snapped.
"But Swan over here sees vampires and werewolves and shit."
"Can I get you some water?" Swan asked in her sad little voice. As always, she was the perfect martyr. I glared at her without replying.
What the fuck did Edward and Jacob see in her in the first place? She was so utterly plain and boring. I fucking hated her.
I wanted to be her.
"Stop staring at me!" I screamed, and to my astonishment, she curled herself into my lap and kissed my hair.
"Isabella," Dr. Shapiro said sharply. "Whom are you speaking to?"
I ignored him. "It didn't happen to me," I explained to Bella. "Shit like that doesn't happen to me."
"I know, Isabella. I've felt that way before too…" She started crying, and she was crying for both of us since I wasn't able to.
"Do you remember now?"
"Don't mess with me, Swan. Don't mindfuck the mindfucker. You don't have any hope of winning."
But fuck me, I was wrong. I was wrong because Swan had the fucking audacity to disappear completely in that moment. I was alone. I had been alone all along.
Author's Note: Remember Flanagan? Yeah, she was in the story for a reason. One long ass chapter left and I promise it will be a good one, so don't lose hope! What are your thoughts on this turn of events? Expected? Slap in the face? Sharpening your pitchforks?
If we're still friends, I'm so thrilled to announce that BBS received a nomination in one of my favourite Awards: the Golden Lemons! Best Dirty Talk, and there's a link on my profile, aptly under the caption "Golden Showers" if you feel inclined to vote. I have author friends in the running too, including, but not limited to, Katinki and Mac214
Speaking of Mac214, the two of us are planning on writing a highly pervy and funny collab involving cake and porn. If you're interested in reading this story, make sure you have one or both of us on your author alert.
Fic rec: Twinned by Conversed, originally promoted on our podcast blog, Twificpimps. It's under my faves. Best. Jasper. Ever.
So, I passed a kidney stone this week, so please buzz me gently. I can take it.