In the year 2020, Vampires took control of society and ordered all humans placed in vampire custody. The people who were not captured formed a Resistance movement, headed by the Human Council, who began to plan the Insurgence.

I am, of course, indebted to Stephenie Meyer for this world we all play in, and these characters we all adore. Additionally, I am indebted to hitntr01, who has graciously allowed me to use certain concepts from her wonderful story "In Need of Rescue", which constitute much of the background of my own story. These include: the language Vampiri, the Rules, the machines used to draw blood from humans, Manners Training, and the plot theme of Edward working as a guard at a facility holding humans. Thank you, hitntr01.

Chapter 23 – "Lovely Home"; Garrett meets my doll

(Bella's POV)

**Author's note - yeah, in this chapter, Bella acts a bit like a brat. She is a teenager, after all.**

Now that Manners Training was over, Carlisle tells me that the DeNali clan is due for a return visit. I had met the DeNali coven once before, as they had been at the house the night that Carlisle brought me home. Good, I'll show them my nice new manners.

Eleazar and Carmen, Garrett and Kate, and Tanya arrive in late September. They are on their way back north to their home in Alaska after all their travels, including their most recent trip to Volterra Italy.

As they arrive, Carmen hugs Esme and comments on Esme's lovely home.

Uh-oh, she said "lovely home." Carlisle has me standing by his side, and my eyes go wide. I'm trying not to laugh, but I can't help it, that phrase has a different meaning to me. Carlisle glances down, and I suppress a laugh and try to make a face at Emmett.

Eventually I manage to peel myself away as Carlisle sighs and releases me to run to Emmett. I mouth to him, "Tell me a joke, anything, I don't care how bad it is, I need something to laugh at."

He actually does a Knock-Knock joke. I'm gonna throttle him.

I burst out laughing, completely inappropriate to the stale joke, but I really need to laugh. I'm not shielding how I feel, so Jasper picks it up my giddiness and starts projecting it to the group. Everyone is smiling, and Jasper is gazing at me with a puzzled look on his face.

I try to explain. "She said 'lovely home'. And this is a lovely home, of course, but she said 'lovely home'!" Emmett looked puzzled; the others are listening.

"You see, there's this vampress. She was turned rather young. She was in a field on the family property when she saw one of her cousins being attacked, so she rushed to help him carrying a scythe. It didn't end well for her, and soon she was dying. Her family raced to the field, with her mother and aunts crying hysterically over her body as she bled from her wounds.

It turns out that all the ruckus caught a local vampire's attention. Now he just happened to be her grandfather, a few 'great's' back, so he came and grabbed her, carried her into the forest, and changed her. She's lived with him ever since.

At the time Grandpa was changed, he had already been married and had children while he was human. The vampress was only 17, so she had yet to find and experience true love. And in grandpa's opinion, that was not a good thing for a young lady. He was determined to find her vampire true love.

But our vampress wasn't as interested. As a human, she had run with the boys and shocked the neighbors by climbing trees among other outdoor activities, wearing trousers under her skirts. As a vampire, Grandpa was having trouble turning her into a proper young lady.

Every day he put a bow in her hair and made sure she had on a nice skirt. And as soon as she got out of the house, she put slacks on under her skirt and carried on as usual. And every night she came home with her hair bow askew and her skirt crumpled from the pants she had been wearing under it.

But Grandpa was determined to find her true love. 'Love is an essential part of a young lady's life,' he liked to tell her. 'I want you to experience love in this life, as you died too young to experience it as a human.'

'I've got you to boss me around, old man,' she would retort. 'I don't need some guy running after me with his tongue hanging out. Anyways, I don't see anyone lined up for the job.'

But Grandpa was determined. So he started inviting suitors to the house. Now, she always seemed to get wind of when someone was there. She would always show up at the house when Grandpa had brought a suitor, hair bow askew, dragging a freshly severed deer head across the floor. The gentleman caller would invariably murmur something about 'lovely home', and quickly take his leave.

But this one time, there weren't any deer to be found. There had, however, been this rogue grizzly bear causing problems in the area for the local humans. So on this occasion she came dragging in the head and upper forearm of this grizzly bear…and the potential suitor ran out the door without saying 'lovely home.'

Grandpa looked stern, but was heard mumbling under his breath 'pussy city boy'."

"So when Carmen said 'lovely home' to Esme just now, I couldn't help but look around, wondering where's the deer head? " And with that I dissolved in laughter. Even Jasper was snickering quietly.

This was the start of a nice visit.

Carlisle had been interested to hear about my "college" experience. I wouldn't give up the names of my friends from the Dartmouth campus, after all, the house wasn't filled with just friendlies, and there were mind-reading cops in Forks. The fewer names were used, the better.

I knew that Carlisle and Edward had been discussing teaching me how to read, before I revealed the resistance's return to oral traditions in order to preserve and pass on human knowledge. Now that the Cullens knew I was able to read and had taken college courses, they wanted to see what I needed to do to continue working on the Master's in History. I gave them my reading list, and they ordered the books that weren't already in Carlisle's library.

I would read the books and discuss them with the family. I preferred to talk to Carlisle, when he was home, but since he worked long hours as a doctor, Edward and Jasper became my tutors. I would show them the drafts of my papers, they would write comments, and then I would get the cousins to send them off to the college professors.

Eleazar was as interested in the human return to oral traditions as Carlisle was. He had spent some time in Volterra, as had Carlisle. But he was a human sympathizer, who only drank animal blood. Eleazar's coven may have just returned from Volterra, but the mind-reader confirmed that Eleazar was not a regular visitor. He had been summoned by the Volturi, mainly to check for gifts in humans. I was quite sure that he wouldn't have another summons before the Insurgency, so I was willing to talk to him.

I told him how free humans living in the wilderness had memorized various works of literature, religion, science and history, so as to be able to carry them with us safely from place to place. This worked for two reasons. First we couldn't carry libraries of books with us through the wilderness from campsite to campsite. More importantly, since we weren't supposed to be able to read, any human found carrying books risked immediate death. If we were only captured instead of killed, there was a chance for either escape or rescue by an ally.

Eleazar and Carlisle talked about times when most of the population had not been literate, and how some teachings of the church were done using stained glass windows. When commoners needed to send letters, they had to pay someone to write for them, and then the recipient probably had to pay someone else to read the letter to them. I loved listening to their stories; I always liked hearing the details of how people had lived throughout human history. How we had lived before living meant compulsory imprisonment or an existence spent on the run in the Wilderness between the ccupied cities.

That afternoon, Carlisle and Eleazar left to go hunting after I had finished eating lunch. It was one of the lunches Carlisle like to make, consisting of a tuna salad sandwich, an orange, and a small waldorf salad. That lunch had more fruit than I probably would have gotten in a year on the Human Containment Facility. I had argued unsuccessfully for a sandwich made of smashed taco chips topped with a generous sprinkling from a few Pixie sticks, but Carlisle had just rolled his eyes and grabbed the tuna from the cupboard.

When Carlisle and Eleazar left I climbed up on the kitchen counter and started rummaging through the cabinets, looking for the sweets. Where did Carlisle hide them? I turned around to find a smirking Jasper leaning against the kitchen door, so I jumped down and flounced off into the living room.

In the living room, Tanya was sitting by the window, looking at fashion magazines with Alice and Rosalie. Emmett was watching sports with Edward, and Esme was playing cards with Carmen. Garrett was sitting alone, staring absently at a marble chess board, twirling a chess piece in his hand.

Knowing that Garret was an ally, I decided to show him my doll. Many allies didn't have the details of our daily lives in confinement, and the story of my doll carried a lot of information about life on the camps as well as my mother's quiet resistance methods of resistance while in custody.

"Would you like to see my doll?" I asked.

He put down the chess piece he had been fiddling with and said, "Of course."

I pulled her out of her bag and unwrapped the dishtowel I keep her wrapped in.

"My mother made her for me," I began. "She made her from a scrap of her wedding dress. Making these dolls had been a tradition in our family. The belt is from her flower girl's bouquet, and the button eyes are buttons from my grandmother's boots. A piece of my mother's wedding is veil is inside, within the quilting material used as stuffing. That's why she doesn't bend, and why she kind of 'crinkles' when you handle her."

Almost on cue, I heard Rosalie making a snide remark in a low voice in Vampiri. "Esme found that doll for her at the grocery store. She started that story the day Esme gave it to her."

The mind reader relayed the crack to me, and I looked at Garrett. His eyes had shot over my shoulder to Rosalie, and now were back on me, but his smile had changed. He leaned forward, though, still appearing interested.

So I mouthed the rest of the story to him.

"My mother made this for me before the Event of 2020, shortly after she was married, when she first learned she was pregnant. She left it behind when she was taken from her home during the Gathering. I wasn't her first child; I was her second.

She told me about the doll she left behind, though. She told me many things in the semi-dark, windowless concrete cell block we lived in. All the adults talked about their pasts. They went into great details about the lives: their families, their holidays, their school years, and their weddings. They wanted us to know there was a world beyond these walls, and they wanted to keep from forgetting themselves. Without books or anything from the outside, their memories were all they had.

My mother had learned sign language in school. She made it her mission to teach the children the alphabet using sign language. When the guards decided to stop her, she knelt on the floor before them; her head bowed, and said 'I am teaching them a game that they can play quietly, lord.' The guards were never quite sure if this might be breaking the rules, but in the end they let her do it. After all, we didn't have books to read. What was the harm of a children's game?

She told me many things. She describe in great detail the route the bus had taken from her house to the Human Containment Facility, so that once I got out, I could find my way home. She made sure I understood numbers, tracing them on my leg so I could learn their shapes. She told me the freeway numbers, and what to do once I got to town. I had been able to recite the directions, where to turn right and turn left, in order to get to our house. I had that house number memorized as a small child. She wanted me to understand that just because I was born and grew up in this cinderblock hell hole, that didn't make it my home. There was another place waiting for me beyond its walls.

So when I did get out, I returned to our family home. I found the house just as she described it. One of her wedding gifts from her father had been a new roof, so the house was in surprisingly good shape. But the doll was not on the rocking chair. I started to panic, but then searched the room. Some of the rooms were in disarray. Although the small house wasn't nice enough for a vampire to take over, all the houses had been searched to find anything of interest. The doll had been knocked under the dresser.

So I found my doll, over a decade after my mother had made her for me. Then an ally planted her in that store in Forks so Esme would find her and bring her to me."

Garrett's eyes had been glued to my lips during my story. Jasper moved behind him, so I ducked my head and stopped talking. I looked up, smiled at Garrett, and said out loud, "Thank you for listening."

Jasper led me away from Garrett, over to our usual spot by the fireplace. I guess the feelings coming off of Garrett troubled him.

"What did you tell him?" Jasper asked.

"I just told him the story of my doll," I replied.

"Why didn't you say it loud enough for the rest of us to hear?" he questioned.

"Because, just like the first time I told the story, a vampress made a snarky rude remark, questioning whether I was telling the truth. No one countered her or asked me to continue. And I don't give second chances with my true stories," I said firmly.

"Well, I would like to hear it," said Jasper.

"Not now," I answer quietly. "You're only interested because I told Garrett." I went over to sit with Edward and Emmett and bet one of my shiny new dimes on the results of the game they were watching.

Eleazar and Carlisle came back from their hunt a few hours later. While the others were playing one of the Monopoly games I had brought from the basement, Carlisle and Jasper pulled me aside. "Is something bothering you, sweetheart?" asked Carlisle.

"No more than the usual," I replied.

Carlisle thought on that. "I understand you told Garrett a story about your doll that upset him greatly. Will you tell me that story?"

"I started that story twice, and was cut off each time by a vampress, so I'm not interested in continuing," I answered.

"Honey, Garrett was a guest; I'm kind of curious why you would tell him something you wouldn't tell us," queried Carlisle.

"If Garret was upset, it was because he's a good man. In my mind, he is an ally because of his work with the Intuits in Denali. It's been a while since I had a chance to talk to an ally. I was describing life on the living death camps. Most of you seem shocked when you hear details about it. I don't know why you would; what did you think it was like there? You and Edward don't need to be told, you both work on them. You know the details of our existence there, you don't need to know the exact details of my incarceration," I reply.

Carlisle bowed his head, thinking. "If something is troubling you, I want you to feel you can come to me. You said a vampress made a remark? Did you mean Rosalie or Alice, or one of the visitors?"

"I don't use the name of a vampire unless they explicitly give me their permission. The two vampresses who visit are your daughters, have lived with you for years, and will continue to live with you long after my death. They don't speak in human to me in part because they are obeying the rules. If a vampire doesn't want to break the rules by speaking to me in human, I respect that choice. They think that could be a source of trouble to your family because of the police. I don't mean to create trouble in or for your coven," I tell him.

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