eight
a day for burning
"The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."
C. S. Lewis
o.o.o
Time means nothing in the burning hours. Nothing.
It is pain like nothing she has felt before. Harrowing as it eats into her bone marrow, hollowing her out from the inside; agony that scalds at her neurons, boiling like acid over synapse and axon; stinging wildfire aching from the top of her head to the tip of her toes. She is charred alive, raked over fire-hot coals - singed, scorched, seared, and stabbed in an endless series of prolonged moments of undiluted hellfire torment.
It is purgatory - and she is under conflagration for her sins, whatever they might have been.
The combustion of her body is beyond her imagination and she rattles in the inferno, waiting and waiting to shrivel under the blaze but it never happens and it never ends.
It never ends.
She wishes for death.
o.o.o
o.o.o
In the burning there is a voice slipping cool and familiar through her mind, a balm to the aching sear. Sometimes, the voice talks to her - calls her love and tells her that it's almost over and that she's been very brave and that she is adored and that he will be there for her when she wakes up. She lives in half-coherent anticipation for the voice, longing for those too-brief moments where the voice is more important than the fire.
But other times, the voice is directed at someone else and even as she listens, she does not benefit from hearing it - the voice is not speaking to her, so it does not abate the blaze.
"Why doesn't she scream?" it asks one time and she feels herself stall in confusion, even in the utter grasp of the fire. Because isn't she screaming? She feels like she is. Perhaps her screams are internal - why does that feel like something that would happen to her? Did she have a habit of internalizing? Oh, yes, she did. She knows that. She kept everything in so nothing could come out - instinctive because there was something hungry in her that would always taketaketaketake, just like these flames she is writhing in -
"Every change is different," replies another voice, this one smoother and more calm. Clinical. "Hers will be especially…unique."
She hadn't noticed that the familiar voice - love - had a tone that wasn't reassuring - rather the familiar voice is rough with agony, with worry. She doesn't know how to fix that, only that she wants that voice to always be happy.
"I don't think she can hear me."
I can, she wants to say, but the fire has roasted the sound right out of her throat.
"I can't…feel her, anymore," the voice says, defeated and forlorn. "Her mind is locked away. Not even touch can…"
The flames roar, consuming her all over again.
o.o.o
o.o.o
At some point, she becomes aware of the beat of her heart - it pounds with unrelenting strength, pumping the fire through her veins so that she can broil under the fiery attention. But it seems as if noticing her heartbeat has made the fire hotter and the steadiness of her pulse begins to falter, then race.
Her heart is trying to thunder out of her chest - to escape the heat, she's sure - and the fire chases its hasty retreat, the smolder creeping from her extremities and into her chest. Her heart can't escape the supernova flames, the nuclear fusion branding her with that white-hot fire. The beats between her heart come nonexistent - pounding too fast, too hard, shaking her body until she feels the crackle of her spine as it bows - and finally a scream is ripped out of her silent throat.
As soon as it starts, as intense as it was, it stops. Her heart is still as her lungs expand breathlessly. The fire ends abruptly, leaving a sense of coolness it its wake and, for a moment, she wonders if she hadn't imagined it all.
And then - her heart beats. Once. A slow throb, before it stills once again.
Maybe that had been it - the last stand of her heart in the wage of a war with fire that never was.
Except that time has no meaning and so when it happens again - when her heart throbs with a single, strong pulse - she knows. The burning is over. She had somehow managed to escape, to live with her heart still warming her chest and rushing lifeblood through her veins.
o.o.o
o.o.o
As she wakes with the same immediate sense of awareness that has colored every morning of her life, Bella concludes that vampire bites really suck. She'd seen Edward's memories of his change, of course, but something about the pain just didn't translate so well in memory - she'd known what to expect academically, but feeling it was another matter entirely. When she opens her eyes, she half-expects to see her charred skin curling away from her bones, to be surrounded by ashes, and the undeniable, haunting scent of burning human flesh.
Instead, Bella opens her eyes to one of the lovely guest rooms in the Cullen household as the early sun filters through the half-opened lavender curtains over the window. She's laying on a chaise couch, covered with a white cashmere blanket, and decidedly not nursing third-degree burns even though her memory would beg to argue. She stares down the length of her body for a moment, gathering her wits about her -
And then something to her right shifts, and her head snaps to follow her gaze even as some part of her mind registers mate.
Edward is standing utterly still in the middle of the room, his expression completely dumbfounded, as if he can't believe what he's seeing. Bella considers this. She supposes that the last time they'd seen each other had left her as quite the sight, as she has fuzzy recollections of becoming James' personal ragdoll-and-snack and she's sure that it wasn't a pretty picture. But she's fine now - except for this persistent ache in her jaw and a bit of dryness to her throat - so she doesn't quite understand why Edward is all the way over there and why he appears so perplexed and -
Bella sits up, blanket falling over her lap as she slaps her hand against the smooth skin of her neck - well, mostly smooth. There is a slight rise over her jugular vein, a faint scar she knows will be in two perfect crescent-shaped patterns. "He bit me," she says unnecessarily.
Edward risks a slow nod. He's not looking at her, exactly. His head is cocked like he's listening for something and his eyes are riveted on her chest. She looks down too, momentarily appreciative for the cerulean silk collared nightdress keeping her modesty, and then frowning when she doesn't see whatever it is that has caught Edward's attention.
Suddenly, Edward flinches.
"What? What is it?" she demands, rising from the couch with a graceful movement. She doesn't even think about it - there is no lapse in wanting to move and actually moving.
His mouth opens and closes a few times. "Your…heart," he finally mumbles, heavy brows knit tightly together in some cross between confusion and frustration.
Bella shifts her weight to one foot, idly scratching an itch on the back of her leg with her toe. "What about my heart? It's fine."
"It's beating," Edward tells her.
She arches her brows. "Yeah, I know. Otherwise, we wouldn't be talking, would we?"
"You were bitten and your heart is beating," he reiterates.
She doesn't get it at first. It doesn't exactly compute - what did it matter if she was bitten if she's still alive? Obviously, Edward had done something to save her. She faintly recalls a copper taste and warmth flooding her stomach - and actually, she thinks harder about the last time she was awake, frowning at how inaccessible those memories are -
And then everything comes back and Bella gasps, pressing her hand over her chest as she sinks to the floor. "Oh, my God," she whispers, waiting and waiting and waiting for long moments until - there. There it is. The singular beat of her heart, strong and steady and so slow it almost doesn't count, except that it does because she was bitten and her heart should be beating at all.
She looks up at Edward as they wait for the next beat. Her lungs rise and fall at a regular rate and she still blinks as often as before - but the beats of her heart are separated by almost a full minute. "What's happening to me?" she breathes, regretting voicing her thought the moment Edward's expression collapses into absolute alarm.
"Carlisle!" he calls as he blurs with vampire-speed to open the door to the room before coming back to Bella, crouched behind her with his hands on her shoulders as they wait for his sire to arrive.
Yes, she laments, knees tucked beneath her chin as she presses palms to her chest, tracking the rise and fall of her chest and the metronome of her heartbeat, mind reeling. Carlisle will know what to do.
o.o.o
o.o.o
Except - except Carlisle doesn't know what to do. His frank amazement at her condition colors his every word as he does a brief examination. Her skin has taken on the vampire quality of smoothness and better - not perfect - durability, but it doesn't react under the sun with more than a subtle glow; her temperature is higher than average by a few degrees; her sight and hearing have improved; as far as this preliminary exam can conclude, she doesn't have any considerable vampire-level strength or speed. It takes Carlisle a while to figure out how to withdraw blood, but after a swipe of a surgical scalpel over the tender vein in her elbow, he is able to collect a vial for testing; the weird part is when Carlisle turns to bandage her arm and they both stare down at the slow-healing of puckering skin in astonishment.
He asks about her thirst and she shrugs - because while the ache in her jaw, in her teeth, doesn't fade after eating human food and drinking water with no desire to purge the content so her stomach and she doesn't feel an all-consuming urge to go hunt Bambi in the forest.
In some ways, for Bella, it is like waking up for the first time. She feels good, even with the question of her abnormal response to vampire venom. Like her body had finally caught up to her mind in terms of development; she doesn't feel like a newborn in the way that anyone was expecting and she doesn't know what it means. But aside from these mild changes in her physiology, Bella is still Bella.
It is both disturbing and a comfort.
"I'll find answers, Bella," he promises as he departs from the guest room, leaving she and Edward to stare at each other silently, pensively. The rest of the family is downstairs, giving them a wide berth and much-appreciated privacy in these moments, but she can still hear them - tiny echoes in the house that indicate activity, things that she might not have been able to hear before without actively straining her ears.
What does any of this mean?
There are not explanations - yet.
But there are other queries that can be clarified, something proactive that can be done while they wait for Carlisle to cook up a theory that makes sense for this senseless situation they are in. Bella stretches her hand out, palm-up and plaintive, and Edward meets her touch.
The results of her transformation are not the only odd thing about what happened after she was bitten - Edward's infallible memory counts exactly eleven hours, sixteen minutes, and eight seconds since vampire venom was released into her veins. It had taken less than a day for her body to absorb the venom. Because she was a hybrid? Probably. There was nothing else to compare it to; no other hybrid had been bitten, there were no records to consult, and everything from this point on would be pure conjecture. At the very least, they would have to be patient: either Carlisle would come to some conclusion, or Bella would be seized by the return of the transformation. Until then, they would all be in limbo and out of their elements.
Bella shakes her head, redirecting her thoughts, prioritizing for answers that she can have. What happened, exactly? Show me.
Edward does.
He skims over the strategizing with Jasper and the Quileute pack - because she clearly remembers that - and skips right to his gut-wrenching moment of vivid realization when he'd come back to the treaty line, heralded by Alice's wild future-flashing thoughts and the slick sense of victory in James' mind that had been replaced by a sudden sense of deflation that Edward couldn't pin-point the source of. He'd seen James bite her and hadn't hesitated, speeding past Alice's horror-struck form and ripping James away from Bella with little care to his strength. His heedless actions had finished what James had started and Bella had slumped to the forest floor with her neck ripped clean open, a grotesque fraying of tendon and blood that made his still heart turn to ice.
Edward still maintained that guilt - he'd as good as damned her to this fate.
It was going to happen one way or another, she says soothingly.
Edward bows his head, moving onto the next moments that were, as he remembered them, the end of her human life - and the beginning of her immortal life.
Upon realizing that his actions had done more damage that James had done alone, Edward had abandoned James in favor of Bella - and he'd cradled her limp, rapidly cooling form as Sam Uley and Paul Lahote had torn James asunder. It was Jasper who had burned James' body and who had spurred Alice and Edward into action - Jasper knew more about turning humans than even Carlisle and he'd been confident that enough venom had gotten into her blood to turn her if they could just stop the bleeding. Alice's visions had been going haywire, from interference with the wolves and the uncertainty of Bella's future. Edward had been hopeless.
There was so much blood.
Bella had been dying - and they only had the knowledge that the venom would work if she had enough blood to make it pass through her system. Even Bella had known that. She'd been the one to point it out, bleary and straddling the line of consciousness, tucked into the safe-haven of Edward's mind as she faded in and out.
I'm sorry I don't have enough blood, she'd thought obliquely - and Edward had latched onto that with the desperation of a man losing his entire world. He'd barked orders to anyone who would listen - "bring back any small game you can find, quickly!" - and clamped his hand over the wound in her neck. And then he'd held the open throats of rabbits and squirrels over Bella's mouth until she'd swallowed, her esophagus moving beneath his fingers as she drank and drank and drank.
The vampires had never seen or heard anything like it - and even Edward acknowledged that there was something disturbing about the scene, something primeval that had been absent from the bite that saved him from the Spanish Influenza. Was this how the first vampire was created? He'd been too far-gone to care, though, because with the more blood Bella drank, the warmer she became, the stronger her heart beat. The wound on her neck closed, aided by the venom or perhaps something more - it didn't matter. Edward had only felt his desperation slacken when Jasper had sensed the venom starting the change. He'd slipped his hands beneath Bella's body, cradled her against his chest, and had run back home to meet Rosalie at the house to continue the triage work until Carlisle could arrive.
Bella aches for her mate - for having to carry those crystal-clear moments of her near-death. I'm sorry, she directs toward him, clenching her fingers tightly around his - more tightly than she ever had before.
You're alive, Edward says firmly. That is all that matters.
His conviction is a comfort and Bella breathes easier. She's different now, strange even by vampire standards, a mystery that will need to be unraveled - but she is alive.
What else? She inquires, gently rifling through the loose-ends that were left in the wake of the baseball game.
Alice and Jasper ran interference with the wolves; the last he'd heard, Sam Uley had spoken on their behalf to the Tribal Elders and waived Bella's impromptu transformation. It hadn't been a Cullen to bite her, after all. The treaty still stood without issue and the two beta wolves, Jared and Paul, were crowing over their victory in killing James.
Victoria was still on the loose, disappeared to God knows where and neither Alice nor anyone else had seen hide or hair of her. Laurent had been talked into visiting the coven in Denali by Esme, who could be very persuasive when she put her mind to it; she had arrived back home after acting as escort only hours before Bella woke up.
Emmett, being the most human-friendly of them, had been sent to deliver the news of Bella's transformation to Charlie; Rosalie was at the Swan house now, gathering items from Bella's room and giving Charlie has much comfort as she was able. According to Rose and Emmett, Charlie was just glad that Bella was alive - but she wouldn't be able to see her father, not yet. Not until they knew she didn't have the newborn bloodlust lurking somewhere within her.
So many things up in the air, so many things that would need to be resolved and so many things that had been resolved already.
It wasn't supposed to happen like this. She was supposed to be seventeen forever - not stuck at fifteen like Alice.
Bella closes her eyes, leaning her forehead against Edward's firm chest as his arms slip around her - cold from his ambient body temperature, but she's warm enough to withstand it without discomfort. Her high temperature, her new constant, it makes her feel like the hellfire of the venom had never burned out of her body - like she was still smoldering in the flames, even if the pain didn't touch her, even if the fire didn't burn anymore.
Her heart beats - a singular pulse.
o.o.o
o.o.o
That is the day that burned.
A/N: Next chapter is the regularly-scheduled month-long spiel. I thought long and hard about how best to approach this part of the story and I thought an interlude chapter would suit it best. So, there it is.
As always, be brutally honest. I can take it.
~cupcakeriot