A/N - so the biweekly schedule is not working very well. I'll try to get updates out fairly quickly but biweekly just won't be able to happen. Hopefully monthly, but no promises.

Anyways, I really like how I wrote this chapter so I hope you like reading it! Enjoy:)


I messed up. I really messed up. The biggest rule that I spent so much time following, I broke.

True, I was sick and delirious. I wasn't thinking straight. But everything I had felt was temporary, and it could have been resolved without talking. Why did I have to talk? Everyone in my family heard me.

Now I was no longer sick, and I couldn't pretend it didn't happen. Or maybe I could. I didn't know how to act now.

They knew I could talk. They knew I knew how to talk, and that I just didn't. Would they start to question why I acted the way I did? Did I need to start gradually talking now to play it off as me just improving?

I stayed home from school today, even though I had no more symptoms from whatever illness I had. Grandpa said it was a good idea, so I didn't catch anything else while my immune system was still recovering. I wished I could have gone to school, though. If I were there, I wouldn't have had to deal with the not-so-subtle glances my way everyone was sending, waiting for me to say another word.

I spent the day doing things that didn't require much thought. Like filling in a coloring book, watching tv, and playing with some of the many toys I had. To my family, that's all I did. But really, I did those mindless things to think more in depth about my family. I thought about how they acted, and more importantly, why they acted the way they did.

The why in everything kept coming back to me, especially since recovering from my illness. I wanted to know why they bothered taking care of me if they were just raising me to become a vampire, or alternatively, to just kill me.

If I was just an easier way to get another member of their coven, I didn't need to be healthy as a human. Becoming a vampire would cure me of anything I had, the extra care as a human was unnecessary. It was the same if I was just going to be another meal for them. If none of this mattered in the long run, why do more than the bare minimum?

The only reason I could think of was that they actually cared for me. But that didn't make sense. Nothing they did made sense.

When they diagnosed me with autism, I expected them to kill me or abandon me, but they didn't. They changed how they cared for me to accommodate that. They had no reason to go above and beyond to care for me, and yet they did. I always had enough food, clothes, and entertainment. They enrolled me in school, and made sure I had the help they thought I needed there. And when I got sick, they helped me. I had medicine, water, and plenty of rest. When I accidentally called for mom, she came. I got the help I needed and wanted. It didn't make sense for vampires to do this, so I watched them all. I watched them, and thought about why they did what they did. I thought about why they even bothered. I wasn't liking the conclusion I was coming to.

I sat at a small, colorful table in the corner of the living room that grandma had just gotten for me, since I now had the sight to draw on it. As I sat, I felt eyes on the back of my head continuously glancing at me. Everyone was in the room or at least nearby the room, waiting for me to do something different. Waiting for me to talk. If they kept this up, they were just going to be disappointed. I wasn't going to make a single noise again.

Why did they care so much if I talked? From a parental point of view, I understood. I was five, and still not talking. That's a valid cause of concern. But they shouldn't have cared so much. Why did they act like they cared?

They were always doing more than the bare minimum for me, and I didn't understand it. They were vampires. Monsters. I was here to fulfill something they wanted, whether that was another meal or a coven member. Even those reasons were barely plausible, so it all made even less sense. Why did they even bother taking in a child?

I doubted I was here to just be a meal. They had to have been eating something while I was growing up, they didn't need me to supply their blood. And surely there were better ways to get another member of their coven, right?

The only option that made any sort of sense was that they simply wanted a child. Mom and dad just…wanted to be parents. But they were vampires. Not humans. They couldn't have that parental instinct, could they? It was biologically impossible. Only things that could actually be parents had that instinct. People, and animals. Not monsters.

I put down the crayons I was using and moved to the couch. The tv was off, so I turned it on to the Disney channel. It was some show about a kid being a doctor for a bunch of toys and stuffed animals. I didn't pay much attention to it.

Dad sat next to me, pretending to be invested in the show. Why did he bother with this? Why did he bother with anything? He tried to make me smile or laugh all the time, and brought me random gifts for no reason other than he wanted to. He joined in what he thought I enjoyed, and didn't pressure me to answer questions or talk at all. It was hard not to like him, and I had to resist that thought.

I cast my eyes around the room and saw everyone doing their own thing. Aunt Bella was reading, flipping the pages much faster than a regular human would be able to read through. She slowed down after a second of me looking at her.

Grandpa sat on a different couch, reading a book, too. His was some kind of academic book, though, while Bella's looked more like an older fiction novel. He caught me staring and smiled. I looked away.

In the back of the room, Uncle Jasper and Aunt Alice were sitting on the floor together talking. They were too far away for me to hear what they were saying, but they were smiling and laughing, and looked more human than any of the vampires that had ever killed me did.

Mom stood against the doorway leading to the kitchen, not doing anything specific. She smiled at me when she saw my glance, and I turned back to the tv.

I rarely thought about what everyone's actions meant, but now that I focused on it, I noticed a lot of instances when my family did more than just the bare minimum. They did more than just above the bare minimum, and more than some of my parents in past lives ever did.

Ever since I was a baby, Uncle Edward would play lullabies on the piano whenever I had to sleep. It actually helped, especially in the first year or so of my life when I was much more nervous sleeping around vampires. I was still nervous, but I was able to ignore it much better. Especially with the soft sound of the piano. He must have known that to some extent it helped me. That was why he still continued to do it. But it wasn't necessary, he wasn't even my parent. Just an uncle. Regular uncles cared about their nieces, but he didn't have to. He had no reason to, and yet he did anyway. Or at least appeared to.

Grandma often baked for me, and tried to include me in the process. It was hard to believe someone like her could ever have any bad intentions. I had a hard time believing she even drank blood—she seemed so kind, so gentle. But I knew what she was, and I knew what her kind did. I always took her kindness with a grain of salt.

Everyone took care of Nessie, too, and she wasn't a vampire. She wasn't human, either, which did add some confusion to all this. I didn't know what she was. She must have been taken in by Bella and Edward just like I was with my mom and dad. She didn't seem to question their love and care at all, like I did. Then again, she didn't have many past lives that were ended abruptly by her kind like I did.

Mom headed over to me, grabbed a blanket draped on the other couch, and laid it over me. I didn't even notice I was cold, but she did. She always noticed everything about me, no matter how small a sign there was of it.

The conclusion everything was pointing towards was one I did not like. Everything said that they actually cared for me. That Mom and Dad simply wanted a child and adopted one. This was the most logical conclusion, that they truly cared for me, not that I was part of some larger vampire plot.

If I hadn't lived so many lives, and if I didn't know what vampires were or the dangers they posed, I would never have had any suspicions of my family. I would have been born loving them, and that never would have changed. I would have been a normal child, who talked and made friends and acknowledged other people. I never would have thought I needed to live in fear. All of it was in my head. They didn't deserve it. They were genuinely good people, despite not being people at all.

Would I be able to let go of my apprehension? I had good reason to hold onto it—It was still inevitable that vampires would cause my death—but…these people, these vampires, this…family…they didn't deserve it.

I needed to try and be better now. They didn't know that how I was treating them was to create some kind of barrier between me and them, but they still didn't deserve it. It was unfair of me to do it, and now it was my job to fix it.

It would go against everything I had been telling myself my whole life, but I needed to start talking to them. I needed to not ignore them all the time, and to actually acknowledge them when they spoke to me. Now was the perfect time for me to do this, too. They were already watching and waiting for me to say another word, all I needed to do now was say it.