stay right here, rocketeer
chapter four

Two custodians were hanging a gargantuan banner across the gym entrance that read "KEEP ON DANCING 'TIL THE WORLD ENDS: Forks High Sadie Hawkins Dance" in an obnoxious, completely-in-your-face font. It was eight in the morning and the school was already bursting with uncontained excitement. A girls' choice school dance and a Britney Spears song as the theme? Oh man, that is just too much to handle, someone call the cops.

"Anything exciting?" Rosalie asked me, gesturing to the students hanging out in the parking lot. She especially liked girls' choice dances because they turn teenage boys into anxiety attacks waiting to happen. She gets some sick pleasure out of their discomfort, I guess.

"Jennifer Fitz is going to ask Willie Hamner," I commentated, giving a Forks High gossip 411. "And Cathy Gaskins and just dying to ask Jeremy Bruce."

"What about Jessica Stanley chick? Is she gonna ask you?" Emmett nudged me with his elbow, accompanied by his signature eyebrow waggle.

I spotted Jessica was standing with her circle of friends, all drinking overpriced coffee in paper cups.

"She was, but then she realized I would only reject her."

"What a smart cookie," Alice added.

"But she is planning on asking Mike Newton," I said. "Oh, but Mike Newton seems to sense it because he is praying Jessica won't ask him since he really wants to go the dance with…"

A certain brunette with a white scarf and purple rain boots walk over to join the circle.

Rosalie and Alice gave each other knowing looks. I had this confusing feeling growing in my gut. It was uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and I didn't like it, not one bit. Jasper leaned over and whispered, "It's called jealousy. You envy Mike Newton."

Now, that's simply outrageous. Of course I'm not jealous of Newton Schmewton. But when I saw him give Bella a hug (and the physical contact didn't make him gag or scream or anything), the sickly feeling in my gut magnified and I had to admit, maybe I was just slightly jealous of the kid.

"But don't let Alice know," I muttered back to Jasper. "She'll have a field day."

By first period, I had learned that both Eric Yorkie and Tyler Crowley were also planning on asking Bella to the dance. Sadly, their names weren't as entertaining to deride as Schmewton.

"Hi Edward."

I turned around at my locker and pretended I was surprised at seeing Bella there, when in reality, I smelled her approaching eons ago. "Hey Bella."

She looked like she was about to ask me something—as one would presume since she did intentionally go out of her way to come to my locker—but she stopped short. "Did…did you get contacts?"

"What?"

"Did you get colored contacts or something? Because your eyes used to be golden and now they're black."

Well shit, I just realized I hadn't gone hunting in a while. Being around Bella kind of takes away my appetite, for extended periods of time. And leave it to her to notice subtle differences like my eye color. That sphinx.

"Um, no. My eyes change colors sometimes," I answered and quickly turned back around. Shutting my locker and uttering some incomprehensible goodbye, I bolted to catch up with Alice.

Bella remained in her spot, staring inquisitively at the back of my retreating head. I never did find out what she wanted to ask in the first place.

"You know, if you keep dropping hints like that, she'll figure it out eventually," Alice said with indignation. "The girl isn't stupid."

Ah, but I am.

Basically, I was faced with not one but two dilemmas, simultaneously. One, I needed to know just what Bella Swan is, because I'm Edward freaking Cullen and I have to know everything and a mystery unsolved will surely drive me to insanity. Second, I had to constantly watch my guard because Bella is trying to deduce me just like I'm trying to deduce her.

It's a game we're playing; figure the other person out before they can figure you out. And so far, I was losing terribly.

It was the last period of the day again, or as I refer to it, Biology Funtime with Bella. She had opened the main door into the science building and the comparatively light scent indicated I had about fifteen seconds before she opens the door to the classroom. I counted down in my mind.

Why won't Bella ask me? When the door opened, however, I was shocked to see Bella walk in with none other than Mike Newton hot on her tail. It caused that serpent of envy to rise in me again, no matter how hard I tried to deny its existence.

She hadn't asked him yet, I reassured myself. That must mean she isn't attracted to Newton Schmewton.

Their conversation dallied for a while longer at Newton's desk.

"So Bella, I was thinking…maybe…you want to go to the dance with me?" Please say yes, please say yes.

"…I thought it was a girls' choice." Zing! I almost laughed. She definitely deserved a high five for that (if the circumstances were to allow me to high five her without combusting, of course.)

Mike started sputtering after Bella's rejection, "I know. I just thought, you know, putting it out there…" Crap crap crap crap crap.

"Didn't Jessica already ask you?"

"I told her I would think about it."

"Well I think you should tell her yes, because she really wants to go with you. She really likes you Mike."

"She does?" I guess Jessica is okay. Not as pretty as Bella, but…

"Yeah. So you shouldn't keep her waiting."

"Alright."

Luckily the bell rang and Bella hurried to her seat by me. I was suffocating in her presence, yet I was strangely content.

"That was harsh," I mumbled to her.

"What?" she whispered back.

"I think you broke Schmewton's heart."

She rolled her eyes at me, obviously not wanting to talk about it. Mr. Banner had begun his lesson and silenced the class. Bella turned her attention to the front of the room.

I took my phone out of my pocket and created a new message. I'm serious. The poor guy is devastated.

Bella glanced at the phone in my lap. I pointed to it and mouthed, 'Check your phone.'

Slightly weary, she retrieved her phone from her backpack and read the text with the phone on her lap, hidden from the teacher.

how did you get my number?

I smiled at her while I texted my reply, I have my ways.

i am thoroughly creeped out.

But what's going between you and Mike?

nothing. jessica is like in love with him and i'm not gonna be a terrible friend and steal her date. besides, i don't even like him more than a friend.

He likes you. A lot.

wait, how would you know?

I hesitated. See, it was so easy to make little slips like this in front of Bella. I might as well just write 'Hi, I'm a mindreading vampire' on my forehead. Um, it's kind of obvious.

he just likes me because i'm the new girl. in a few weeks, i'll be just another average girl.

Average. Right. Whatever you say, Bella.

why are you asking this anyway?

Good question. Why was I texting her in class while sitting beside her? I combed my brain for a believable excuse. I just never took you for a heartbreaker, that's all.

i'm not a heartbreaker.

So you lead all the boys on for shits and giggles?

i don't lead boys on!

I know at least two other guys are going to ask you to the dance by the end of the day.

She didn't reply right away. I risked a glance in her direction and she was looking at me in a perplexed, equivocal way. Finally, I heard the clicking of keys as she typed back a response under the table. like who?

Now, why did she take all that time to mull over my response before asking "like who?" Who did she want to ask her? Did she like somebody? I flared up again and this time, I don't think it had anything to do with the smell. Well who do you want it to be?

no one. it's a girls' choice.

Then who are you going to ask?

Once again, she didn't reply for a long time. The silence only acted as confirmation to my previous theory. She most certainly did like someone. I suddenly felt like I was in middle school again and we were playing the never-ending "who do you like" game.

Bella stalled answering for a long time until my phone finally lit up a few minutes later. 1 NEW MESSAGE.

I took a breath, preparing myself for whatever information was to come.

Whoever is in this text, well, his life just might be in danger. Fair warning.

My finger hovered over the READ button. I mean, who could it be? Bella hasn't even talked to most of the guys at Forks High, just Mike and Eric. She already rejected Mike and she never gave Eric the time of day. In fact, the only male she seemed to have possibly flirted with, in the tiniest way, was…

…me.

(I hate it when Alice is right.)

I pressed down on the button. Could it really be me, though? God, it sucked not being able to read her mind. The screen took just a second to load but it was forever to me. The anticipation was almost heavier than Bella's atrociously delightful odor.

What if it really was me? What if she liked me? It would never work, of course, with me being a vampire and her being a whatever-she-is. Her scent repels me like the other side of the magnet and she's given me more glares than smiles. I'm no relationship guru, but those signs don't add up to a healthy couple, right? We can't be together. And, I mean, I don't even like her. That much.

I stared at the tiny pixels. Come on, come on, who is she going to ask to the dance?

your mom.

Bella let out a giggle at her own joke. I cracked a weak smile, too. If only she knew how worked up she got me.

The rest of the period was spent in full productivity, with Bella and I texting each other about varying topics from favorite birds to our stance on social security. I felt that with each interaction with Bella, she was warming up to me and I was adapting to the physical pain of being with her. She was quirky, opinionated, and witty. She was absolutely fascinating. With each tidbit of personal information she shared, I quickly tried to assemble it into the jigsaw puzzle that is Bella Swan. And because I couldn't access her thoughts, I was obsessed with finding out every little detail of her life. Her thoughts were the only one deprived from me so I yearned for those the most.

Mr. Banner had to exit the room to photocopy some papers and the class burst into conversations. Bella and I put our phones away and spoke face to face. My Bella-adapting skills must be improving since half an hour into class and I was hardly affected by her scent anymore.

"Oh, I have your jacket in my truck. Should I give it back to you after school today?" she said.

If she wore my jacket, does that mean by relation, my jacket will now also be hazardous to touch? I decided not to risk it. "No rush. You can keep it if you want."

"Are you really so rich that you can just give away random articles of clothing?"

I laughed. "No, it's just…" I didn't know how to explain it without telling her that, to me, she stinks worse than an onion in a gym sock in the middle of July. "…I want you to keep it."

"Okay…" She rolled up the sleeves of her jacket and adjusted her scarf.

"So do you own a scarf in every color of the rainbow?" I asked. She had worn a scarf every day for about a week now. I was starting to think it was a Bella thing.

But then her eyes dulled and the freckles by her eyes darkened until they were pitch-black. She positioned her hair so it acted like a wall between the two of us and pulled her white scarf even tighter. The light, friendly atmosphere was gone in an instant and Bella was back to glaring at me like I was her arch enemy. She hadn't gotten this upset since that first day when I pointed out her necklace.

Oh, wow.

I can't believe I didn't realize this until now. Ever since she returned to school from her week of absence, she has worn a scarf every day to school. She didn't just wear scarves because she was cold or because she was trying to start a trend. She wore scarves to cover the pendant.

The fact that she took all the effort to conceal the necklace was evidence enough that that pendant was of great worth to her. I had a feeling it had nothing to do with its monetary value either. There was some secrecy about that pendant that was somehow tied in with Bella's "magic", which was somehow tied in with Carlisle's fixation on that old book.

I had all the pieces. I just could not for the life of me assemble the pieces together.

I paused before the closed door of Carlisle's study. "Come in," he called, hearing my footsteps, and I entered.

"Hello Carlisle," I said. "I wanted to ask you a question."

He nodded curtly for me to continue. His bright yellow eyes gazed at me expectantly, his blonde hair styled the way it has for centuries. This man was my savior, my friend, and my father. I have confided everything in him. Now, I just begged for him to confide in me.

"Have you ever seen this before?" I asked and held up the paper I was holding behind my back. It was a sketch I made of the pendant Bella wore. I drew it from memory of the first day I met her. No colored pencil accurately showed the color of the gem, but the rough drawing was close enough.

Carlisle's reaction to it was unmistakable. His eyes widened and he involuntarily drew in a breath. In his mind, I saw another sketch of the same pendant, only inside a giant, old book, presumably the one with the golden border. It was nearly an exact replica, my drawing and the one in the book.

"You have," I noted. "What is it, Carlisle?"

How do you know about this? Where have you possibly seen this?

I shook my head. I wanted my questions answered before I answered his. "What is it, Carlisle?" I repeated.

He hesitated. His mind once again shifted into a ramble of that Gaelic language I didn't understand and seemingly irrelevant images flashed through his mind. He was torn; he didn't want to inform me, yet he coveted to know what I knew about the pendant's whereabouts.

"Is it valuable? Because I know where it is right now," I said. My intentions were to tempt Carlisle into revealing the truth. And it worked.

He stood up from his desk and walked out the room. I followed. "I think the whole family better hear this," he said.

Alice was already waiting for us at the dining room table and soon everyone else joined.

"When I was first turned into a vampire, I spent a lot of my earlier years desperately searching for some way I could kill myself and the monster I had become. When that proved impossible, I turned to an alternative perhaps even more impossible than the first: I searched for the Danann Stone. The Danann Stone is this mythological gem that is powerful enough to turn a vampire back into a human."

"Like in The Little Vampire?" Emmett asked.

"That movie was based on the myth of the Danann Stone, yes," Carlisle said. "In fact, according to the myth, you really are supposed to hold it up to a full moon and then you will return to your human state. However, the stone will also disintegrate after use."

"Are there more than one stone?" I asked.

"No, there is only one stone, but vampires who found it have taken bits and pieces of the larger gem. The whole Danann Stone in itself is supposedly very massive."

"Well where is it?" Jasper asked.

"After all my research, I tracked the Danann Stone back to Celtic islands of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, and the isle of Man. The Tuatha Dé Danann were an ancient race of magical beings who used to inhabit the islands before the humans conquered their land. Some people believe that an omnipotent Danann Stone was the source of all their magic, which they kept in the heart of their land. Once the humans settled into those lands, the Tuatha Dé Danann race disappeared. The only thing of theirs that remain is the mythical Danann Stone.

"I wasted countless years in Scotland trying to find documents that would somehow direct me to the location of the Danann Stone. And in my frenzy, I discovered one book that proved of somewhat significant information. It was a Celtic mythology text and inside was this drawing," Carlisle said as he pointed to my drawing.

Everyone poured over my sketch. Isn't that Bella's necklace? Alice asked me.

I nodded but warned her with my eyes not to say anything about it yet.

"According to the myths," Carlisle continued, "the Tuatha Dé Danann people consisted of elves, leprechauns, mermaids, fairies, witches, nymphs, satyrs—even vampires and werewolves. All of these fairytale creatures originated with the Tuatha Dé Danann. After the humans arrived, the fairies led all the Danann people into what was called an Otherworld. This Otherworld was protected by magic so no mortal could enter. Because vampires were known to try to steal the Danann Stone, the vampires were not allowed entrance to the Otherworld, which is why we live in the mortal world today."

"So what you're saying is other creatures exist?" I asked.

Carlisle sighed. "If they do, they are hidden in the Otherworld with the Danann Stone. Because no matter how hard I tried, I failed to locate it."

"But I still don't understand what my drawing has anything to do with this," I pointed out.

Carlisle looked around the table, making eye contact with every single one of us. He paused for an extra moment on me. This was the climatic point of the story, the pivotal point, the Eureka moment which everything ties together.

"As I said before, all the creatures needed the Danann Stone to have magic, which would restrict them to their homeland. So to be able to travel into mainland Europe while still keeping power, the fairies constructed necklaces made of gold which had an amulet that held a small portion of the greater Danann Stone. It was a portable source of magic.

"I once found a nomadic clan of Scottish vampires who also was hunting for the lost Otherworld. I joined them for a few months. The leader also had knowledge of these rumored stone pendants. He claimed that he knew of a vampire who found a fairy, stole her necklace, held it up to the full moon and became human. Of course, I'm not sure how credible that story is."

"How come you never told us?" Esme asked.

"It's not good to dwell on pipe dreams," Carlisle said with a frown. "It gives false hope to vampires that there is a way out from this cursed life. But it's only myths and fables, that's all. The Danann Stone is not real. The Tuatha Dé Danann were simply the earliest fairytales, made of nothing more than imagination."

"But you're wrong," I stated. All eyes turned to me. "How can none of it be real if I have personally seen one of these?" I pointed to my drawing.

"Where have you seen it?" Carlisle implored with urgency. He may have fooled the others, but I knew he hadn't gotten over the fantasy of the Danann Stone. Three hundred years and he still hasn't let go of the dream of being human again.

"She wore one around her neck," I said. "And if I'm not mistaken, she's worn it every single day."

"Who?" they all asked.

"Bella."

Everyone's eyes widened, especially Carlisle's. Bella? She had a Danann Stone amulet? That's not possible. It doesn't exist.

"What if it all exists, though? What if everything you just said was true? What if Bella is of the Tuatha Dé Danann?"

Everyone was silent. And though they tried terribly hard to not think about it, they were all imagining themselves holding Bella's amulet up the moon and becoming human, returning to the life they had no choice but to leave behind. Who was I kidding? I was thinking about it too. The child Esme never got to keep, the perfect life Rosalie never got to live, the war Jasper never got to win, the bright future Emmett never got to see, the memories Alice never got to remember, and the footsteps Carlisle never got to follow, all flashed for my eyes to see. They tried hard, so terribly hard, to not get their hopes up, but in vain.

Oh, to be human again.

"You have to admit, it makes sense," I added. "Her blood smells nowhere near what normal human blood smells like, she is the only being we have ever encountered who is resistant to our powers, she used magic to save herself from the van, and she wears a pendant with the Danann Stone on it."

"But she doesn't have wings," Emmett pointed out.

"Or does she?" I replied. "Maybe she hides her wings under her jacket."

Alice crossed her arms. "Well, clearly there is only one way to find out for sure whether or not Bella is a fairy. Edward needs to take Bella to the dance."

"What."

"Think about it," she reasoned. "It's impossible to tell if Bella has any wings under her layers of clothing, but at the dance, she'll be wearing a dress—a skin tight, beautiful dress, preferably one with no back."

"She is a fairy, there is no need for silly tests," I complained.

"Oh but it will be so fun!" Rosalie exclaimed. "And this will be the first dance we've ever attended where Edward has a date!"

"Ouch, Rose," I said bitterly.

"I agree with Alice," Jasper said (surprise surprise), "If Edward is right about Bella, then he must also be right about Bella seeming to know about us. If she isn't human, we need to know if she poses as any threat to us." Aaaaaaand Edward and Bella make a cute couple. Jasper smiled at me. I punched his arm.

"Come on guys," I pleaded. "Please, Carlisle, tell them this isn't necessary."

Actually—

I stood up and threw my arms in defeat. "FINE! I'll ask her, but she won't agree. She glares at me like I committed some horrible deed against her. And she's got the entire school's male population following her around like puppies. It's not going to work."

Alice shook her head disapprovingly. Edward, Edward, Edward, when will you learn? "Just dazzle her."

post script: ohmyjesus, what is this insanity. bella is a magical creature? carlisle gave a lot of info this chapter (hopefully not too confusing) so i would love to hear what you think bella is. also note that i use 'fairy' as a general term for all mythological creatures. it does not mean bella is a fairy. or maybe she really is a fairy, and i'm just messing with you O_o

i feel like my edward gets more and more ooc every chapter. i apologize. also, the little vampire was not actually based on the legend of the danann stone. the danann stone doesn't exist, i made it up. but the tuatha de danann is like legit celtic folklore. (i'm a celtophile, fyi.)

anywho, thanks for reading. review and give this sarcastic, colloquial edward some love.