Vulcan Twilight: Chapter 03 - The Woman with Sad Eyes
"Ya gotta be kidding me - a fucking alien? You're willing to protect the Predator till it wakes up," Emmett said in exasperation. "Well, thumbs up to you."
Edward rolled his eyes at his 'brother's' silly reference to a deadly fictional movie character that he found to be a gross exaggeration of the current situation. But could he really blame him? Despite his continual reassurances that their alien house-guest meant the family no harm, he had based this fact on a strong feeling of intuition from whatever telepathic connection he and the alien seemed to have established. And therein lay the root of the problem. How does a mind-reader like him explain his conclusions to a person who has never had the experience wielding his type of psychic ability?
"I don't like it. It smells weird. It'll get into our clothes and in our hair. Plus, I'd rather not be around if there's a chance that it is the Predator," Rosalie stated, crossing her arms with a sour face. As a vampire, she didn't relish the idea of being torn to pieces, much less by some unknown creature.
"This is ridiculous. I can't believe you guys think he poses a threat we can't handle. We're not exactly human here," Edward laughed. "I'm sure Carlisle can help us shed some scientific light on the subject in question." He quirked an eyebrow. "Or better yet, when our guest wakes up, why don't we just ask him."
"Based on what I've gathered so far, the creature's not as fragile as the average human. When I stitched a few of its wounds shut, for example, the skin and muscle tissue was so dense, that it's comparable to a human trying to patch together fifteen pieces of upholstery leather with a needle and thread. Unless I can study it further with equipment I don't have, such as an x-ray or MRI, I can't draw any further comparisons. I'd also rather not move it in the comatose state its in," Carlisle explained.
"Edward's right."
Everyone turned expectantly toward Alice who stood at the guest room's threshold with a small, but cryptic smile. She looked past confused faces toward the unconscious creature that lay partially hidden under a thick pile of blankets.
"He won't hurt us. When he wakes up, he's gonna need our help."
Since there was nothing left to do but wait, the Cullens returned to their routine of emulating a typically normal (human) American family. The 'children' continued to attend Forks High School, Esme volunteered her time at the Forks Memorial Library, while Dr. Cullen was rapidly establishing an exemplary reputation working at the Forks Community Hospital.
"He's bound to be the senior resident doctor in record time," Head Nurse Dorothy Harmon whispered to her fellow colleagues and some of the nurses. "My husband tells me Dr. Cullen's credentials are off the scale. He even thought it was a prank at first, not that he's really complaining."
"I think we're lucky to have him around," a fellow nurse commented.
"Which hospital did he come from again?"
"UCLA Medical Center in California," the Head Nurse replied. To her satisfaction, everyone around her reacted with open-mouths and gasps of admiration. "I did the same thing. I couldn't believe it either. So I did some digging. But after the third call, I gave up. I didn't want those other hospitals marching over here and stealing him back!"
"He should be a supermodel, not a doctor."
"Why's he so pale?"
"Have you seen his eyes? You'd think he was part lion."
"Yeah, and his hands...they're ice cold..."
"Dr. Cullen suffers from a very rare disease that gives his eyes that vivid hazel color. Also, his pale complexion in the sunlight causes a violent reaction equal to someone allergic to peanuts," Dorothy began.
"That's horrible," several nurses exclaimed, reacting in sympathy to what they were told.
"In addition," the Head Nurse continued, "the disease causes problems to his Pituitary gland, giving his body an abnormally low temperature. He stays healthy by being on a specialized diet and complex medication. He's had the disease since birth and he's dedicated his life trying to find a cure. Did you know that he married a woman with the same disease? His entire family's afflicted with it. Such a kind and generous soul, adopting children who's families couldn't afford to care for them anymore. I can't imagine how hard it must have been for him to get to this point in his life."
"Sssh! Here he comes."
"Morning, ladies," Dr. Cullen greeted with an easy smile, inwardly chuckling at how every female in the building that laid eyes on him hardly contained a blush. He addressed a young nurse to his right.
"Mary Anne, here's Elsie's chart. Tell Stephen it's all set."
The young brunette smiled widely and hurried off to do her task with bubbly excitement.
"Dorothy, the paperwork John requested," Dr. Cullen said, presenting the woman with a thick, expandable folder which she stared at in amazement.
"So soon? It wasn't an emergency, you didn't have to - "
"It's alright. Truth be told, I don't mind doing research or administration work, either. But don't go spreading that around, okay?" Dr. Cullen said with a radiant grin.
Head Nurse Harmon watched with an expression of awe plastered to her face as Dr. Cullen retreated down the corridor, his long, white work coat fluttering gently behind him.
"We hired Superman..." Dorothy expressed breathlessly, clutching the expandable folder she held in her arms with reverence.
Dorothy's best friend, Kathy Oakes, a physical therapist, sidled next to her and whispered mischievously in her ear, "I'd fly to Krypton with him any day. I won't even pack!"
Several days had passed and the Cullens' strange guest remained unconscious in a comatose-like state, mostly unmoving, except for the occasional jerk of its eyes, and the nearly imperceptible rise and fall of its chest.
Carlisle gave their guest a quick physical checkup every so often, and remarked on how rapidly some of its bruises were fading, and the positive improvement to a few of its more serious injuries. The most notable feature of the alien's comatose state was its heart rate - which was beating at more than triple the speed of an average human's when they first found it - had now drastically reduced its speed to less than half that! He even debated whether or not he should attach their guest to an IV line, but did so anyway after Edward's prompting. His 'son's' bizarre mental connection to their strange guest was rather disturbing, and the rest of the family shared his trepidation, but like him, chose not to comment.
Being vampires, Carlisle was confident that his family could handle any form of physical attack should their alien guest prove hostile upon awakening. It was the possibility of a psychic attack that had him worried. (His experiences with the Volturi were incidents he drew upon.) Edward's hypersensitivity to their strange guest was already a good example. With a simple grip of its wrist, the alien creature had somehow 'invaded' Edward's consciousness and was actively giving instructions - though Edward vehemently insisted that he was in no way possessed by it.
Despite his misgivings, Dr. Cullen, ever the champion of the living, decided that until the creature proved to be an absolute threat, only then would he entertain thoughts of killing it.
The alien was dreaming. Or more accurately, having nightmares.
They began after first period.
Edward forced himself to concentrate in class while being bombarded with flurries of images and emotions. Some instances were manageable, but others, like the one he was having right now, made him grit his teeth and slump low in his chair, as he closed his eyes from the overwhelming disorientation. Luckily, for today's Math class, he sat at the very back row.
Projected against his eyelids was the face of a woman. She was beautiful, despite her age - he guessed maybe mid-to-late sixties - with gray streaks in her dark hair. Her hair was tightly wrapped in place with a scarf around her head, and she wore an oddly angular shaped dress that covered her entire body from neck to heel, and made from cloth woven in an intricate pattern of different neutral-colored thread. A necklace of flat, polished square stones that matched her dress hung at the base of her throat.
The woman's face held Edward's attention. It was filled with fear, then with great sadness...and finally, love. She was bathed in circling steams of white light, and all around her the world was crumbling.
And then she was falling...
What bothered Edward the most was the resignation in the unknown woman's soft brown eyes. It was a look he was entirely familiar with. They were the eyes that belonged to someone who knew, without a doubt, that they were about to die. The same look in the eyes of his victims before he claimed their blood.
"Are you alright, Mr. Cullen?" Barry Grisham, the math teacher, called out, concerned with the brief grimace of pain he saw on the student's face. He was told of the boy's special circumstances and was instructed to send him straight to administration if something was amiss. "Do you feel ill?"
Every student in the classroom immediately turned to Edward Cullen, who lurched to sit straight in his chair, and looked very uncomfortable now that he was the center of attention.
"Sorry...I just got a bit dizzy. I'm fine now," Edward replied with an uneasy smile, refusing to make eye contact with anything but the floor.
"If you're not feeling well you have my permission to go to the administration office."
"Actually, if you don't mind, I'd like to stay till the end of class. I promise I'll go straight to the office, right after."
Appearing satisfied by his answer, Mr. Grisham returned to his lecture. The minute he felt no one looking, Edward slowly slumped back down in his seat trying to ignore the tumult of anger and grief that had settled in his chest.
Since the day their alien guest had arrived, Edward repeatedly found Alice sitting alone in the guest room of their home after school, huddled in the leather high-back chair pushed close to the bed. Her head rested on her knees as she silently observed the unconsciousness alien creature.
"I can relate, y'know. What it feels like to wake up...having absolutely no clue where you are and what happened...not knowing where to go from there," Alice said softly. "I had no one to help me when I became a newborn. And, if it wasn't for my gift..." She left the rest to silence.
"Well, you didn't," Edward uttered with conviction, "and I'm glad you and Jasper are here with us." He squeezed her arm affectionately and sat himself beside her on the leather chair's armrest. That's when he noticed that her thoughts were suddenly fuzzy. Was she deliberately preventing him from reading her?
"I'm not showing you what I saw," Alice replied with a side-glance. "It's incomplete. Only he can finish it." She hugged her knees closer and pouted. "I wish he'd wake up."
"Soon...I think," Edward answered slowly, his brows furrowed in concentration. "...there are things I have to do first before he does..."
"What was that?" Alice asked. He'd mumbled his last sentence absently and she wanted to clarify what she had heard. Things he had to do? What kinds of things? "Can I help?"
"Uh...sure. Soon as I figure out what they are..." Edward muttered, scratching his head.
It was a pleasant, breezy Saturday afternoon. He was listening to Miles Davis and skimming through his first edition of Anna Karenina, when Edward felt a push from the back of his mind.
He got up in a flash, dressed himself in rugged outerwear and went to find Alice. He had promised her that she could assist him with whatever the alien 'compelled' him to do.
Alice sat on Jasper's lap in the living room, the pair were laughing as they critiqued the fashion photography in one of Rosalie's copies of Vogue. As soon as she saw Edward materialize at the foot of the stairs, she and Jasper were beside him. He then tilted his head in her mate's direction, noting that the pair of them were similarly dressed in sturdy, outdoor clothing. Alice reacted with a shy smile and a small shrug. Sighing, Edward retrieved his jacket and the three of them headed swiftly on foot into the forests that surrounded their home.
"What are we looking for?" Jasper asked Edward. He ran beside Alice, the pair of them following their 'older brother' to an unknown location.
"I'll know when we get there," Edward answered as he ran full tilt through the trees, not even remotely out of breath.
After fifteen minutes of traveling in a northwesterly direction away from their home, Edward abruptly stopped beneath five Spruce trees of various heights. On the ground were branches and pieces of bark with roughened, jagged edges that suggested they had recently broken off. Moss had not yet formed on the lighter-colored areas of exposed wood.
"This is where he fell..." Alice stated quietly, marveling at the telltale signs on the trees themselves, her mind recreating the pace of the fall that miraculously failed to kill their alien guest.
"Fell from where?" Jasper declared in astonishment, looking up toward the mangled treetops. "If the alien somehow fell from the sky, he should be mincemeat."
"Far worse than that, he should've been porridge," Edward agreed, then started sifting through the debris on the forest floor. "We're looking for something...odd. You'll know the items when you see them."
The vampire trio carefully poked and prodded the area of forest floor, searching for anything out of place in the dirt and leaves.
"I found something!" Jasper said excitedly, and presented his companions with a 7x7 inch gray metallic box with smoothed edges. It was as heavy as a fifteen pound blue-ribbon watermelon and one side was etched with carvings: columns of lines decorated with beautiful swirls, notches and dots. When he tried to open the metal box, the lid startlingly didn't budge. "I might break it if I try to force it open. Is this it?"
"No, but we're hanging onto that anyway. Keep looking," Edward instructed.
After about ten minutes, Alice yelled out, and in her hands she held a Blackberry-sized device that was badly damaged, the lid fused shut.
"Good, but there's something else..."
"There's more?" Alice remarked in surprise when Edward resumed his search through the foliage. She winced when he started tossing away large rocks and uprooting tree stumps. "Um, maybe what you're looking for isn't on the ground?"
At her suggestion, Edward's frustrated face perked up, and he leapt toward the tallest of the five Spruce trees, climbing to the very top in less than a minute. From there, he jumped to another Spruce beside it like a squirrel, and after tearing away a few branches to pry something loose, climbed back down.
In his right hand, Edward held a belt woven from sturdy fibers with three holsters: the first one hid a small, cellphone-like device that chirped when the lid was flipped open; the second was empty, a perfect fit for the damaged gadget that Alice found; and the third, securely held what was shaped suspiciously like a futuristic firearm.
"This is the last of them," Edward said, and passed the belt over to Alice's curious mate, a seasoned soldier.
Jasper carefully removed the alien's weapon from the belt's holster and examined it. It was similar in weight to a modern handgun, admirably well-balanced, and despite the lack of a rubber or roughened grip, it felt comfortably secure in his hand. That about summed up the comparisons he could make between this weapon and what he knew of any pistol.
The most significant aberration to this alien handgun was the overall design. It was crafted almost entirely of a metal similar to polished chrome which was way too flashy, in Jasper's opinion, for any weapon. Two cylinders in the barrel were decorated with rings of red and blue, but the flow of its curved and angular planes aesthetically reduced it to a toy. A rectangular button just below the frame, incorporated into the upper front part of the grip, seemed to serve as the trigger, along with a small, round thumb-button just above it. There appeared to be no place to insert a magazine for ammunition. There was also a slider on the frame that clicked left to right, which activated and deactivated a small arc of lights like a small gauge. Was it a kind of safety lever? Or was the safety, instead, the small round thumb-button?
There was only one way to know for sure.
Edward and Alice watched as Jasper tested the feel of the weapon in his hand. He adjusted the slider to the far left - one green node lit - took a firm stance, targeted a nearby boulder and with both hands wrapped around the smooth grip, gently pressed the trigger.
An impressive projectile of bright blue light erupted from the weapon's barrel and struck the boulder instantly, their vampiric vision catching a faint blue afterglow that briefly enveloped it.
"That was totally Sci-fi," Edward responded in awe.
The trio exchanged looks of stunned excitement before Jasper resumed his experimentation. That single demonstration of the weapon alone confirmed their guest's extraterrestrial authenticity.
"I'm gonna try one more thing," Jasper said and pushed the slider on the weapon to the far right, illuminating the entire gauge of tiny green lights with the exception of the fifth node which was colored red. (His experienced intuition cautioned him to avoid anything too drastic for the moment.) He then pressed the small, round thumb-button on the grip, which unexpectedly flipped the decorated cylinders in the barrel from a blue to a red tip.
This should be interesting, Jasper thought to himself, earning an eager glance from Edward.
The three of them weren't disappointed.
This time, when Jasper gently pressed the trigger, a menacing bright red projectile of light erupted from the weapon's barrel, instantly disintegrating the targeted boulder to nothing but a dusty haze.
"Holy shit!"
Both Edward and Jasper were in shock, with Alice just as flabbergasted beside them, a hand covering her open mouth.
"Yup, playtime's over," Jasper announced. He flipped the weapon's tip back to blue, returned the slider on the frame to the far left and carefully secured the ray gun back into its belt holster.
"Think we should hide that from Emmett?" Edward said with a conspiratorial grin.
"Absolutely. Best to let the alien show us how to safely use it first," Jasper chuckled back. "Knowing Emmett, he'll be tempted to level the forest just for fun."
to be continued
Author's Note:
I present to my readers the photos that started this insanity! (Just go to my ffnet profile and click on the direct link under 'Story Picture Scrapbooks') Most significant is 'Scruffy Spock' - the single pic that spawned this crazy joyride of a fic. ^_^ Enjoy!
Mwjen - I'm just as interested to see how Spock handles the predicament he'll soon find himself in. Being in the company of mythical vampires living on 21st Century Earth in a possibly different dimension...that's kind of a lot to take in. LOL