There is nothing explicit in this story but it does follow the basic Twilight plot to some extent so please forgive me this chapter. Port Angeles is what it is.

I was invited to Port Angeles today. Actually I had to invite myself along for the day to advance. I just outright refused the first try of the day. Port Angeles was not a day I wanted to live on repeat.

I took a few repeat 'nobody would remember I ditched' sick days and learned, "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables, "Gravity" by John Mayer, "Say Something' by A Great Big World; basically I learned a few wistful, sad songs filled with longing. After I was done feeling sorry for myself I learned Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" and I just did what needed to be done. I invited myself along to Port Angeles.

Some songs I know don't exist here but I have an exceptional music memory. With blank sheet music and messing around, I can usually figure out how to cover my old favourite songs. They probably aren't perfect but they are at least inspired by the originals.

The next day nothing special was required to happen so without effort the day passed and suddenly it was shopping day.

Port Angeles was just some thugs Bella thought were kind of scary and were acting kind of intimidating I thought. It'd be fine. Nothing really happens. I'd be fine. It'd be fine. Fine.

Jessica and Angela tried on a lot of dresses. I tried on this woolly hat with kitten ears. It was too small. "There go my dreams of being a furry," I laughed. Jess and Angela looked really pretty in all of the dresses they tried on. I enjoyed the accessories. It occurred to me that if becoming a vampire heals all wounds then they are probably limited to stick-on earrings. The thought makes me laugh. "Jess, are you really going to wear those heels? I'd faceplant continuously trying to wear those." I admitted with a grin.

She strutted around pleased with the heels. I applauded her. It was getting late though, so I explained about the bookstore and they cheerfully waved me off.

A new book in my purse and the sun just going down, I left the bookstore. I knew the restaurant we were supposed to meet at but I didn't know where it was. When I noticed the man looking at me it was obvious he was not planning anything good. He gave me the shivers, kind of made my skin crawl. I changed direction and then there was another guy. Eventually there were four guys herding me until there was nowhere to go. They smelled like beer and sweat and kept calling out rude and suggestive invitations. They started pushing me, circling around me, looming over me. I'm short. "Stop it! You're being horrible. What would your mothers think of you?"

I know that's not what Bella said. Then I tripped and this one guy smiled down over me, a nasty smile and then Edward was there. He put himself between them and me and told me to get in the car.

I'd tell you it all made no impact on me but I'd be lying. I am not so oblivious that I couldn't figure out what was threatened. Sitting in Edward's car, a line from one of songs I learned recently went through my head. "...and I'm feeling so small." I couldn't look at Edward. Nothing really horrible had happened. I toe-ed off my shoes and curled up in the seat. I'd have to do this again if I messed up the dialogue but I couldn't remember any of the dialogue at the moment.

Edward was talking to me but I don't know what he said.

"Edward?" I interrupted quietly. "I thought boys were supposed to grow out of that sort of stuff after high school. Like when in sixth grade the boys thought it would be fun to corner Julia pushing her and barking like dogs. The teacher came and told them to clear out. They picked on her for most of the year. Why would anyone ever think that sort of stuff was fun?"

"Those men weren't just sixth grade bullies Bella. The things they were thinking."

His dialogue was off too I noticed.

"I mean you could tell just from the look on their faces," He corrected.

"I don't really want to know what they were thinking," I answered. I was worried about having to retry today, tomorrow.

"I want to go back and,"

"No! And slow down before you cause an accident! Think Big Red truck speed. Slow and steady wins the race. Beep beep chugga chugga big red car and all that."

"Did you just quote the Wiggles?"

At this point I started giggling and couldn't stop.

"Breath Bella. Bella!"

He pulled the car over. He had his worried face on. I hate his worried face. It means bad things are going to happen to me for days and days and days.

With shuddering breaths I forced my breathing slower and calmer. "Sorry Edward."

"What are you apologising for? You don't need to apologise for anything."

"I'm sorry I'm me. You deserve better."

"You're being absurd."

He ended up driving me home. I forgot about Jessica and Angela and so did he.

Shopping in Port Angeles try number two. I wasn't able to be as friendly with the girls and foreknowledge made me a little too anxious in other ways. I tripped earlier. The one with the nasty smile pinned me and ripped the buttons off my shirt. Edward threw him off me and put me in his car.

"Do, your seat belt up!"

My hands weren't working very fast but finally I managed to get the buckle to clip in.

"Are you hurt?"

I shook my head no, staring into the middle space. My left hand flicked through fingering to a Canon in D, my grandmother's favourite song. It just made him stare at me with his worried face on. I pulled the ripped shirt closed and curled into myself a little. Looking down I could see four parallel scratch marks across my breast. I pressed my shirt into them to soak up the slight drops of blood.

Edward growled soft and low. His eyes were flat black.

"Are you o…okay?" I finally managed to stutter. He was holding his breath. I rolled down my window and took a long slow breath of fresh air. I reached out a shaking hand and rested it on his arm. "You're okay. You're alright. A little fresh air helps sometimes." I leaned my head towards the window and sighed.

Edward rolled down his own window and took a shaky breath. In a little while when we were both calmer I searched through my purse for a little cash and I slipped the money onto the console. "The K-mart is still open. Please, just a top. I'd get it myself but I can't go in like this."

"What would you like?" He asked carefully keeping his eyes averted. He wasn't breathing.

"A hoodie, something warm, too large, in a neutral colour."

He didn't speak again but we were soon in the lot of the store. He retrieved a first aid kit from the trunk and passed it to me.

He was quickly back. The ripped shirt had blood on it. I wriggled out of the top under the cover of the hoodie. Edward stared at the back tire of the Volvo with laser focus. I tossed my old top in the trash and whispered an awkward, "Thank you."

"It was nothing," he answered. "I wish I'd gotten there sooner."

"I should get back to Jessica and Angela. We were shopping together. They're probably worried and I don't want them going out there looking for me or something and, and running into… I need to get back. Please."

His only answer was a quiet, "Okay."

It was very uncomfortable in the too silent car. The fingers of my left hand flicked restlessly again.

"Why do you do that with your hand?" Edward asked when we were almost at the restaurant.

"Nervous habit," I admitted. "It's violin fingering. A song plays in my head and it gives me something to focus on other than, other than other things."

"What song?"

"At the moment, Ave Maria."

With one hand, he flipped through some CD's, pulled one out and put it on the CD player flipping to track seven. An instrumental Ave Maria started playing.

I closed my eyes and stopped trying to hide the fingering instead letting myself play an invisible violin complete with bow. I wonder if Edward was listening to my heart beat calm. Though we pulled in and parked, he didn't turn the engine off until the song was done. I think the odd pantomime calmed him too. It seemed to.

I rode home with Jessica and Angela. I know in the book Edward took Bella to dinner. I think tonight between the blood in an enclosed space, the torn shirt and the man he'd literally thrown off me Edward was a little off. I know he'd hurt but not killed that creep. The day would reset anyway but I did hope Edward was strong enough not to go hunting scum.

The next several days I managed the barest outline of the day by which I mean shopping, attack, rescue, dinner, home. The dialogue required me to ask a lot of specific leading questions that Edward would instinctively refuse to answer unless I went about things exactly the right way.

I messed up the attack again. I twisted my ankle trying to hurry away and that same smiling creep had me pinned against a wall in an alley. It got rough. The Creeps hands went where they didn't belong, I was pinched and bruised and other stuff. Edward's car didn't fit in the alley. He had to come get me. Edward threw him. The creep was pretty badly hurt.

I'm pretty sure Edward was going to rip him to pieces. I called in a desperate whisper, "Edward."

He got me out of there.

We peeled out of there with the pedal to the floor. He was rigid with fury. I knew I had to pull him back. I can't sing but music is at the core of any calm I've ever been able to manufacture myself. In a hoarse spoken whisper with my left hand flicking fingering, I recited '"When the night has come, And the land is dark, And the moon is the only light we'll see, No, I won't be afraid." My voice kept cracking on the words but surely 'Stand By Me' exists here too.

I pointed to the music store when we blew past it at 150 miles per hour. "There. Please." He 'Tokyo drifted' into the parking lot, brakes squealing and tires smoking. My hands were shaking too badly to open the door. Edward opened the door and helped me limp to the music store. I'm not sure why he didn't even question my senseless request. His eyes were flat black. When his hands weren't helping me with all the gentleness of handling a baby bird, they were fisted tightly. His jaw was clenched shut, his shoulders locked. He wasn't breathing. I pointed to a violin mounted high above my reach. He wordlessly passed it to me.

I tuned it and played a furious, brittle, "Hot Cross Buns."

"I hate that song," I snarled, holding the violin limply, almost defeated.

"Try something else," He whispered. It wasn't that he remembered other nights but he did seem to understand I was searching for my lost centre.

I played "Flight of the Bumblebee." I stumbled over a lot of the notes. It sounded discordant and screechy. "I hate that song too, but that was a train wreck," I admitted.

The music store doubled as some sort of music academy. We were ushered into a practice room.

"Maybe try something you don't hate," Edward whispered.

I tried a few bars of, "A Canon in D," my grandmother's favourite song. "It sounds wrong for one instrument," I protested. There was a piano in the room. "Can you play chopsticks?" I asked. "Everyone can play chopsticks. I have a love-hate relationship with it."

He obediently sat at the piano and played chopsticks, the two fingered version that everyone knows and loves and hates. I set the violin to my chin and played, "A Canon in D," weaving it into chopsticks. He switched from playing chopsticks to the same song I was playing. A slight smile graced my lips. I wove "Twinkle, twinkle little star," into the Canon, he wove in "Clair De Lune." My heartbeat and breathing were calming. His eyes were lightening.

I wove in "Bohemian Rhapsody." He grinned a little and picked it up too. It's a seven minute song. I'd already played today. I didn't have the calluses for more. I returned the violin to the shopkeeper and bought some strings because I felt like I owed the store for my sanity.

Feeling fragile still, I tugged Edward into a hole in the wall donut store a few doors down and ordered a green tea. "Do you want anything?" I asked though I knew he wouldn't. We sat in a booth in the corner. The shop was nearly empty.

Edward suffered through my silent tears. When he glanced up looking back to the music store as if to ask why we had stopped when it had seemed to be helping and tea clearly wasn't I showed him the fingertips of my left hand. They were raw and red. He ran his ice cold fingertips across the abused calluses. I held my left hand in his because it felt soothing. He flinched initially but allowed it. I don't think a human had ever looked for comfort holding his hand.

"I didn't know you played violin," Edward commented gently. He had better sense than to speak about the alley unless I did first.

"It's a secret. No one knows I play. Not the Chief. Not Renee."

"Why is it a secret and why do you call your parents by their names?" he asked. I think he'd decided that talking about anything else but the alley was best until I calmed more.

I know Bella in the books called her parents by their names. "I call Charlie, Dad sometimes. Renee doesn't want to be old enough to have had a kid. She doesn't want to acknowledge the ties to Charlie. She'd rather I was her friend. Being Renee makes her happy. Being Mom scares her." It was the Bella truth as I understood it. The Lexi truth was they didn't feel like my parents. "Nan liked being Nan." That was a Bella truth and a Lexi truth spoken of two completely different Nans.

Oddly enough I think we both, Bella and I only knew one of our Nans the other being out of the picture. Renee's parents disowned her when she got pregnant at sixteen. My father's parents lived in rural Japan. I'd never met them.

I had talked with Renee and Charlie about anything and everything every van day, every first biology day. That added up to years. Most of Bella's home time had the freedom of being unscripted so we could talk about whatever. Nan Swan, had been important to this world's Bella. I think a grandmother was only mentioned once in the second book. Or did Julia say the book Nan, nightmare Nan was the Higginbottom one? It could be that not every world detail matches, I thought uneasily. That didn't bode well for my ability to not end up messing things up gruesomely.

"Nan's favourite song was a Canon in D. I started playing after she died. Violin is for me not for anybody else." I put a finger to my lips, mime for "Shh, don't tell." I don't know Bella's Nan's favourite song. I'd ask Charlie later.

He nodded to acknowledge the secret I think. "When did she die?"

I don't know when Bella's Nan died. I know it wasn't very long ago, a few years at the most. "I don't want to talk about it." My stomach chose this moment to complain which was a convenient change of topic I suppose.

"You're hungry," he observed.

"It will have to wait. I'm having trouble with hot water with leaves in it. Nothing else is going to stay down right now."

"You're shivering," he observed.

"I'm freezing but so are you," I answered. I knew why he was cold but I didn't want to talk about vampires tonight.

"I just have cold hands," he protested, shrugging off his coat and standing to drape it around my shoulders. "What happened to your coat?" he asked, sounding concerned and disapproving.

"I think it got stuffed in Jessica's car after they finished dress shopping. I should call them and let them know I'm okay." There was a pay phone just out front of the donut shop. This world was technologically a little behind the one I died in. I put a quarter in and dialled Jessica's home number. Few people had cell phones yet. It was late. "Hi Jess?"

She freaked out over the phone. They'd both gone home some time ago and were worried about me. I confessed to still being in Port Angeles and left the explanation at having gotten lost. Edward offered to drive me home. Jess offered to call off the search parties.

Edward then pulled a cell phone out of his pocket. "I, that is, you don't need quarters," he awkwardly fumbled. "Did you need to call your dad?"

"NO! Uh that is, if Jess called him she'll call him back and if not, he kind of is the police chief. I don't want to set off that bomb quite yet or at all. I was hoping I could sort of sneak into bed. He's working the late shift. If he doesn't know something went south already he doesn't ever need to know." I was limping and covered in rather telling bruises but the thought of talking about this all with Charlie right now was horrible. I started to shake again. Trying pleadingly to stare down a vampire was pretty stupid. It kind of prevents one from remembering to breathe.

Edward broke eye contact and I gave a shuddering gasp. He pulled up my sleeve to reveal a hand print shaped bruise around my wrist. "He'll ask," he warned softly as if trying his best not to spook me.

"But not tonight," I answered desperately. For me tomorrow wouldn't come so why make this day harder than it had to be.

"Okay," he conceded. He fumbled through his trunk for his first aid kit. Sat in his car which he turned to idle so he could blast me with heat, the parking lot lights shone down on us. His gentle cold hands wrapped my purple ankle in a tensor bandage.

"Thank you," I said to Edward. "For choosing to help me rather than bother with the creep, for putting up with the mad symphony of freak out, for tea and quiet at that hole in the wall donut shop, for lending me your jacket when you're freezing too, for driving me home. I'm sure this wasn't what you planned for your evening."

His eyes went soft. "You're not a burden Bella."

Port Angeles day went on for a long while. It only went particularly horribly two times more.

Once I woke up in the Cullen house turning; Edward was kneeling beside me looking destroyed, apologising and explaining that he'd had no choice. I don't remember what the man did that day as it involved getting knocked out but I could guess easily enough. I astonished the vampires. They weren't aware anyone would ever be able to speak while turning but resets when a day attempt got into triple digits was far worse than this.

"Naah, …m'okay. Bbbeen, there done dead, sssnot sso baad. In..creedibl, recylllllb ll .g,g,..irl." He looked destroyed. It was hard to form sentences while burning. "Ed..ard bessss..t ff.. , t-morrow be okay…prom sss you."

I don't like when Edward's sad.

The last really bad time I won't detail the injuries or the experience but it was bad. It was more than I could handle with even pretended calm. Some of the trauma stuck beyond the day reset. I've been murdered by Edward hundreds of times and crushed by vans hundreds of times and the trauma never stuck. I should be terrified of Edward, of parking lots, of ice. I'm not but I don't like dark alleys and there is one smile I never want to see again.

I completely checked out and I can only remember flashes of what happened. Edward's eyes were coal black, a reaction I'd come to think of as the vampire equivalent of all the blood in his system going to battle stations. I remember him growling. Birds, squirrels, a stray cat scattered in front of him. I remember being in a bridal hold. He laid me in the back seat of his car. I know that when he put me down I started making a sort of pathetic keening shuddering whine and scrambled into a ball in the wheel well behind the driver's seat.

We drove, I think. I remember grabbing his coattail and him reaching down with his left hand to take that hand. I don't know what happened exactly but when I was next able to register reality I was blanketed with a heavy artificial calm and Rosalie was squatting next to the car talking at me. I don't know what she was saying but her voice was soft, missing the cutting tone she normally spoke in. There was blood. It didn't seem to bother her. Edward was in the front seat frozen still glaring and growling at Jasper who was trying unsuccessfully to talk to him, Edward's hand still held mine. I think I heard Jasper say Carlisle something?

"Keeps happening," I whispered. If Rosalie had been human she wouldn't have heard me. As it was, all the vampires went silent and turned to me. "I want it to stop. Creepy McCreep Face can spend eternity with psychiatrists asking him why. I don't even want to know."

"Creepy McCreep Face can go to hell," Rosalie affirmed viciously.

I'm sure I heard Jasper pleading with Edward to learn what happened to the guy. He was still asking when Carlisle got there. A lot more talking happened. I think at some point Carlisle tried talking to me. No one had been able to get anything out of Edward. With some prompting from Jasper and Rosalie, Carlisle speaking with exaggerated calm, in a slow, firm and direct voice asked. "Bella, what happened to Creepy McCreep Face?"

It was the intentional absurdity of the wording that finally allowed the question to register. "Edward put him in the blue dumpster at the bottom of the stairs leading to Pier Two." The heavy artificial calm evaporated and the day reset. I'm guessing Jasper ran off to deal with things. I don't know if dropping the artificial calm so quickly stopped my heart or just made me pass out. It doesn't matter.

I think the horror of Port Angeles on repeat was making it hard to stay calm enough to clear the day. The man was a rapist and a murder a point which, on occasion, Edward had blurted out. That man didn't know me. I was a stranger. He was also just an ordinary man. It made him an evil too real to ignore.