DISCLAIMER: I do not own nor do I claim any rights to Twilight & its characters.

A/N: Story traffic is addictive. It's like writer's crack, honestly. Just thought you should know.

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Chapter 5: Waking

Bella:

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was my angel.

He's beautiful.

What happened to me?

I remember pain. Lots of pain.

But there was something else, something that made the pain all right.

There was love.

I don't know where the love had come from, but for a moment it had been so overwhelming that the pain didn't matter. Nothing mattered but that love. Even when I couldn't feel it anymore, I could handle the pain because I had this love waiting for me. And that was worth it.

My throat itched.

Why couldn't I focus? I felt like I had about a million things going on in my head.

Oh my god.

The angel.

The field.

The guy who ripped out my throat

I'm… dead?

"Hey, there."

Wow. His voice was perfect. It was husky and warm and I could almost feel it humming through me. I wanted to tell my angel so.

"I think—" My hand flew to my neck and my eyes widened. What was that?

My voice was perfect. It was melodic and lilting, kind of throaty and very sexy.

That's not how I sound. Don't get me wrong, I have a fine voice if no one asks me to sing. But this voice was pure phone-sex, something my old voice never came close too. Even when that's what I was going for.

Wait a second. I rubbed my fingers up and down the column of my throat. That's not my skin. It was flawless, soft, and strong. What the hell was going on?

I pushed my self into a sitting position so quickly that my head should have been spinning. But I felt fine. More than fine.

I tried to take stock of myself. I felt good. I mean… I felt really good. But more overwhelming than the strength and power that I felt, was the lack of any discomfort. Not only had I been in, from what I could remember, a pretty serious amount of pain, but I couldn't remember a time when there hadn't been something wrong with me. There has always been some sort of tightness, ache, or stretch that drew, at the least, a minimal amount of attention to itself. There was none of that. Nothing was out of order. I felt… I felt brand new.

The minute I stopped self-reflecting and began to investigate my surroundings, I was inundated by stimuli. I started having a panic attack. The light was too bright, the shadows too dark, and there was way too much in between the two. The edges of everything seemed way too sharp, as if I was wearing someone else's prescription glasses, but at the same time, every thing seemed slightly off, like I was looking through a screen door. As the film over the room moved and blinked, I realized it was dust motes. For a moment I was fascinated. I could see the currents of wind in the room, and how they pushed the dust around, how they made it flicker—it was like a daytime version of Starry Night.

Then a gunshot snapped me out of my reverie. I huddled in the bed searching, panicked, for the shooter. My angel was immediately next to me, his hands hovering over my shoulders like he wanted to touch me, but couldn't.

"It's just the TV downstairs, some cop show."

I'm sorry, downstairs? That didn't sound like any TV I had every heard. The gun had sounded like I'd been the one pulling the trigger. But even as I thought this, I heard the dialogue between some rough and tumble cops filter up to me. I could recognize the high quality of the speakers playing the show, but I could also hear every crackle and pop of distortion.

Then I realized I had been hyperventilating for several minutes, but I wasn't light headed. I slowed my breathing back to regular speed. Then I slowed my breathing to deep, deliberate breaths. Then I just stopped.

Nothing happened.

I really am dead.

Am I a ghost? Because I never thought heaven would host marathons of CSI.

I didn't want to be a ghost. Hanging around, seeing everything, but feeling nothing? I didn't have any unfinished business, I had told my parents I loved them enough. I couldn't be a ghost. I wouldn't be. I had to touch something, to prove that I could. I had to make sure.

I shot my hands out, grabbed my angel's hair and slammed my forehead against his.

Ow. That kind of hurt.

I gasped, drawing in breath and my angel's scent. Wow. He smelled… heavenly.

Wait. That had hurt! I pulled my head back.

"I'm not a ghost!" I said.

My angel looked amused.

"No." He said slowly. "No, you're not."

"Am I dead?"

He didn't look so amused then.

"No…" This was said even more slowly. So slowly that to my apparently bionic ears it sounded like 'yes'.

I must have looked skeptical because my angel was quick to speak.

"I'm sorry, let me introduce myself. I'm Jasper."

I'm not sure why, but it felt like a weird scenario to be making introductions.

"Bella." I said.

"Mmm, that fits better." I heard him say, way too quickly and quietly. I shouldn't have been able to hear him at all. But I could.

"Beg pardon?" I said.

He looked startled. "Oh yeah. You heard that. I'm not really used to anyone outside the family being able to..." He trailed off.

"What the hell is going on?" I immediately regretted my word choice. If this was some kind of entrance test to heaven, I wasn't doing so great.

"Well…" He hesitated. I saw him warring with himself, deciding what to tell me. As he opened his mouth to speak, I heard a male voice shout from downstairs:

"Jasper, NO!"

My angel—Jasper—spoke anyway.

"Bella, you're a vampire."

.

Jasper:

"Jasper, NO!"

Edward had heard what I was going to say before I said it. He tried to stop me from just blurting it out, but I couldn't keep Bella in the dark. Bella. It felt so much better than Isabella. This girl in front of me; she was a Bella.

And a vampire.

And I had to tell her.

"Bella, you're a vampire." For a moment, she felt nothing. Then, her emotions shot through the whole spectrum, from anger to disbelief and everything in between before finally settling on the one I expected least.

Humor.

She started laughing and it was so contagious that I had to join in. I don't know what I had expected, but this wasn't it. Suddenly, the laughter stopped and the humor left her, replaced instead with an all encompassing fear. Bella's eyes were wide and she was staring at the door to the room. I followed her gaze.

Edward.

"Get out." I growled. He didn't move. "Leave."

Edward looked at Bella and took two steps forward.

"Don't." I warned.

Edward looked at me.

"I—I can't read her." He said, and he turned and left.

That was interesting. I probably would have wanted to speak to him about it if I hadn't been so fucking pissed at him.

We'll talk later, I thought to Edward.

I didn't relax until I heard the front door open and close. Bella relaxed, too, before she realized what had calmed her down.

"I heard the front door. From all the way… here. Where ever I am now. How can I do that? Are there other people in the house? Where am I?"

Her newly multi-layered vampire consciousness was throwing more information at her than she could process. She still thought like a human although her brain worked like a vampire's. It would take a while for her to operate like the rest of us, absorbing and concentrating all of the information into a single usable flow.

"Your hearing, among other things, improves when you are a vampire. And then yes, and my house, to answer your questions in order."

She nodded for a second and seemed to soak the truth of her new state in. Then she peeked up at me.

"Hearing among other things? What other things?"

I steeled myself and gestured to the mirror. She walked over and stared at herself. Her fingertips trailed over her nose, her lips, the tips of her teeth, her ears, her hair. She touched the collar of the lace shirt she still wore. Everyone had been afraid to move her lest they increase her suffering, so she was wearing the same clothes she had chosen for the first day of school three days ago. Her shirt was stiff with the dark brown-red of old blood. Her hands trailed back up her neck and rested, cupping her face. She stared at her red eyes for a painful amount of time. I felt the urge to go to her, hold her, and explain that everything would be okay.

"I'm a monster." She said.

"Oh, no. Bella."

I walked toward her with my hand outstretched, but when I grazed her shoulder, she flinched and shrugged me off.

"Who else is here?" She asked. "You said there were other people here?"

I sat down on the edge of the bed and patted the spot next to me.

"I don't bite." I said, and instantly regretted it.

"You don't, but I do." She sat next to me.

"Bella, what do you think I am?" She looked up at me.

"Aren't you…" she let her words trail off.

"Bella, I'm a vampire, too." I said. She turned to look more fully at me.

"But—your eyes…?"

"I don't drink human blood. Your eyes will be like mine soon, too, as long as you only drink animal blood."

Before I could say anything else, Bella had thrown her arms around my neck and was squeezing with all of her newborn strength.

"I knew, knew, knew you couldn't be an evil vampire. I just knew it."

She didn't know anything. The path that had led me here, led me to my self-imposed vegetarianism, was littered with mistakes and slip-ups.

Bella pulled away and I felt disappointed. The first time I had touched her, her warmth had saturated my skin. She would never be warm again. We took that from her.

"Hey." Bella pouted. "You distracted me. I asked who else was here."

"Well," I said, "there's my father and mother, Carlisle and Esme, my sister Rosalie and my other brother, Emmett."

"Your other brother? So the…vampire who was just here… the one who attacked me…is your brother?" Bella started pushing away from me, backing towards the headboard of the bed.

"Edward… slipped. He's a veg—he doesn't drink human blood. Normally. I don't know what happened. None of us do. But what he did, to you, I promise: that isn't him."

My words weren't having any effect. Bella was withdrawing inside herself. Normally I would let her cope and process all this new information her own way, but it was too soon for her to try and figure out anything out by herself. I had to explain certain things before her thirst overwhelmed her rational side. I needed Bella here with me, for now.

I projected peace and contentment at Bella. She smiled as she soaked up the emotions, then quickly frowned and sat straight up.

"What is that?" She asked. "What's going on?"

"What's what?" I knew it was a little third grade, but her question had startled me.

"Jasper." She looked at me knowingly.

"Oh, yeah. That. Well," I tried to figure out how to explain my power, something I hadn't had to do in decades, "That's kind of this ability I have?" My voice rose at the end, so it sounded like a question. Bella pounced on it.

"Is it? You don't sound too sure there, buddy."

"It is." I would have flushed if I could. "I can project and read emotions."

Bella looked contrite, and I could almost see her trying to remember what she had been feeling since she woke up.

"Wait. When I was, well, changing? Was that you? The…um…" Bella looked at her hands.

"The love?" I supplied. Bella nodded. "Yeah, that was me."

"So it wasn't… real?"

Now I looked at my hands. "I mean, what you felt was real. I was just trying to, I dunno, help with the transition?" Again, my voice betrayed me. "I…what I mean is—"

"Jasper, would Bella like to join us downstairs?" Carlisle spoke quietly from downstairs, directing his question at me so Bella wouldn't freak.

I looked at Bella with raised eyebrows.

She looked terrified. I had never seen a vampire so self-conscious before in my life. I felt protective of her. I knew what it was like being the newest vampire in a coven, having the pressure to learn more quickly, to have better self-control.

I reached out my hand toward her.

"I'll be with you the whole time." I said.

She looked at me, nodded, and took my hand. As we walked downstairs, even though I knew it was impossible, I could have sworn her hand felt warm in mine.