A/N: Something. I have a nervous habit of smacking an A/N on every chapter. Don't mind me.
Chapter 13: Humanity
I just stood there, staring. I still wasn't really able to comprehend what had just happened. I'd acted out of instinct, hadn't meant to kill him - but he was dead, and I didn't even feel sick. Did he deserve it? No. No way. He'd wanted to rape me, but that didn't mean I had the right to kill him. Or did it? The Volturi were holding back, so there was no authority to keep me in check. Theoretically, I could and would do whatever I wanted.
In reality, the situation was different. First, I would be distancing myself from the others. Second, every murder would take its toll on me. Now, when I concentrated on it, I felt guilty, but still not enough. After ten, hundred or thousand, I probably wouldn't even care, or I'd just find it fun. The desire to just give in and stop worrying crossed my mind for a second, but I wasn't depraved enough yet to listen.
I was stalling. If I didn't hurry, someone would find me. My hoodie was black, so I could make it to a laundromat or such without getting spotted. That left my face. Licking it from my lips sent another spike of fear through me - would this get normal? - but I managed to get it off my lips and wipe the rest of my face off with my clean sleeve. Trying desperately not to puke up the blood I'd just paid some of myself for, I managed to pick up the man's body and stuff it in a trashcan. Then, with a twinge of fear, I remembered that it wasn't that easy.
Charlie'd had two homicide cases back in the day, before he flat-out refused to take on more, and from that I'd learned some nightmarish childhood lessons after I read his notes when he'd gone to sleep. Dental imprints could be used to identify a corpse, as could fingerprints, if they were on record. Of course, someone would clearly know the subject too, so the face could give me problems, too. Grinding my teeth and half-closing my eyes, I lifted the man's bloodless body out of the trashcan and smashed his jaw with a quick punch before smashing it against the wall with all the force I could muster. Then, my stomach heaving and churning, I dragged his hands hard across the pavement, ruining the fingerprints.
Dumping the body back into the trashcan and wiping the blood and bone off on the inside of my hoodie, I hurried out of the alley. I vaguely felt someone's eyes on me as I went down the street to find a late-night laundromat, but I was too shaken to give it much thought.
Sitting there on the filthy bench in the nearest place I could find, wearing only a baggy brown t-shirt and a pair of already dirty jeans, fitting in perfectly by just staring at the floor, it all felt like a dream. I'd killed a man in cold blood, then coolly cleaned up the scene by destroying the means of identification, only struggled a bit with myself, and then just went over to wash my bloodied clothes. It had been self-defense in some way, of course, but it had still been utterly monstrous.
No, it hadn't. It'd just been inhuman. There was still such a long way to go to become an immortal monster like the Volturi were. As long as I didn't stoop to their level, I could keep on doing whatever it took to stop being afraid of myself. Then I could rejoin my family. I was sure they were alive. They probably knew I was alive, or they'd be searching for me. As I couldn't sense any of them, and no one had chased after me when I left, they'd probably figured out that I'd wanted to be alone. I was broken out of my thoughts by something tugging on my shirt hem.
Looking up, I saw that it was a boy of about seven, holding the hand of a slightly younger girl, probably his sister. "Wanna play, missy? We're booooooored." He grinned widely, and then made a grotesque grimace, as if to express his boredom. "No thanks. I'm busy." I managed to appear less cold by squeezing in a forced smile along with the dismissal. "Oh." The boy looked disappointed, but turned around and left with his little sister trailing after him. Wasn't he scared? He'd just seen my eyes, hadn't he? I'd studied warning colors in Biology back in Forks, and such a small kid would quite definitely be scared by someone with red or yellow eyes. That meant they had to be back to normal, but the fact didn't interest me at all. So many things had happened since Aro's curse that some small thing like this wasn't surprising at all. It was probably because I'd fed recently.
So that was what he was doing. I understood now. I had nearly fallen into his trap, although I'd resolved not to fall to his level. Needing blood just to look human? Fine then, I'd do that. It was probably just meant as a scare or reverse psychology, though. Carlisle or Edward would have fallen in easily as a result of their strong pacifist beliefs, so it wasn't a far stretch that I would. He was trying to disarm us and catch us off guard by scaring us into starving. No way in hell was I going to give in to him. I'd keep on fighting, even though it meant figuring out his plans at every turn.
Back at the hotel, I was spread out in the small bed, with the wall mirror pushed up close so I could study my own face. My eyes were brown again, like they'd been before, just with more of some kind of gleam to them. I smiled as I realized it made me look outright alluring, even though I looked downright thuggish with my black hoodie and hair down in my face, chain-smoking out of fear that someone might be watching me after the murder. A human wouldn't just stare into the mirror for hours without moving, but would do something, even if it was just smoking. Then again, a human wouldn't wear heavy clothes in a heated room. I hadn't really noticed until now, as there was no body heat to make me uncomfortable. But I really didn't care.
As dawn kept closer, I locked myself in the bathroom to avoid the sun and spent the hours leading up to sunrise thinking about normal things. Things a twenty-year-old young woman should be thinking of. Friends, like Angela, Jessica and even Alice. Family, like Rosalie, Renesmee and Carlisle. People I loved, like Edward and Jacob. Everything, everything but worrying about if anyone found the man you'd killed and stuffed into a trashcan after cleaning up the identifying marks like some kind of serial killer.