Okay I legit did not mean to leave ya'll hanging for so long. I promise to infinity and beyond that I am not leaving this unfinished. I just have time blindness. And a knack for letting real life kick my trash.

The song for this chapter is Run Away to Mars by Talk.

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Disclaimer: I'm only doing this for a friend. I don't get anything from it but her undying appreciation. I certainly don't get to have fun with Emmett and the boys in my head.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Run Away to Mars
EPOV

Bella knowing our secret was a weight lifted off my shoulders and I felt like I could finally take a full breath.

Her curiosity was insatiable after we'd crossed the awkwardness of talking about her potential change. She asked question after question, trying to gain a complete understanding of not only our kind, but each of our experiences. As Rosalie recounted the story of her life and brutal death in gruesome detail, Bella listened in an empathetic horror, her hand in Rosalie's, offering her comfort when she became overwhelmed by some of the details. She held her, loving her the way that Esme often did when Rosalie became overwhelmed by the closure she hadn't really gotten.

Bella was a strange mix of friend and motherly love that should have seemed awkward and unnatural but all I could think as I watched their interaction was how right she was for us.

Not just Carlisle and his broken, lonely soul.

But our whole family.

Esme's role within our little circle was that of an older sister. Even she and Carlisle shared a close relationship that resounded strongly as brother and sister, despite his being our proverbial father. She offered advice and comfort in equal measure with teasing and joking.

Bella easily danced between sassy, shit giving friend and that elusive maternal role that promised unconditional love and support.

It killed me to think that Carlisle was so ready to give this up, to deny her, thus denying not only himself but the rest of us as well from the warmth and acceptance that was wholly Bella.

She was the piece of the puzzle that we'd been living without in a package that none of us had expected.

Carlisle is in for so much shit when he finds out she knows, Jasper thought as he watched Bella turn red with, what was I gleaned from his thoughts, righteous anger on Rosalie's behalf.

"She's going to eat him up and spit him back out," I said quietly next to him.

"And he'll love every minute of it," Emmett added gleefully and I chuckled. Bella turned her eyes to us curiously but I just shook my head at her. She narrowed her eyes at me before turning back to Rosalie.

"Personally, I think she should make him sweat for a bit," Emmett said. "Make some jokes that have him wondering if she's figured it out. Pull some stunts that will turn his hair gray."

"His hair can't turn gray. He's a vampire, you moron," Jasper argued, punching his arm.

"Not literally but mentally, she could make even Carlisle lose years off his life." I snickered.

"I would pay good money to see her mess with him. He's been too cavalier about her," I complained.

"Betcha Bella would accept those terms," Jasper drawled with a wicked smile.

"If you boys don't stop muttering to yourselves over there, I will come over and beat your asses myself," Bella said from her seat, squished onto the recliner with Rose who had finished her story. Emmett held out his arms and she stood and curled herself into his lap, his tree trunk arms wrapped securely around her. Alice slid into Rose's vacated spot. I watched the visions coming at her half-heartedly, none of them important enough to give my full attention to.

"Edward was offering to pay you to mess with Carlisle before he knows that you've discovered our dirty secret," Jasper teased.

"You want me to screw with his head," Bella asked, her nose scrunched in distaste. I laughed at her reticence to give Carlisle the same treatment we got on a daily basis.

"Emmett suggested that it could be fun and a mellow payback for Carlisle keeping it from you so that you had no choice but to find out from someone else."

Yeah, the smelly wolves that insisted on a treaty that they'd unknowingly broken.

Though perhaps it didn't extend to members of the tribe who couldn't shift. I didn't think the terms had been that exact. It didn't soothe my ire at all to know that if we did anything that went against the agreed upon stipulations, they wouldn't hesitate to tear us limb from limb.

Well, if they still had wolves. As far as I knew, there hadn't been a shifted wolf in decades. Definitely not since we came back.

"What kind of 'messing' would I be doing exactly," she asked, interest flashing in her brown eyes. I bit back a smile. Always so coy.

"Nothing too extreme. Maybe just some thinly veiled comments and questions, like the ones you asked us earlier."

"I think it'd be hilarious if you convinced him to eat food for you," Emmett suggested. We all shuddered.

"I don't know if that counts. Carlisle would eat glass for her," Jasper argued.

"It's not a bad idea. Especially if she got him to eat something particularly vile."

"Would that… hurt him?"

"No, it's just disgusting and uncomfortable. We can't digest anything but blood, so anything we eat, we have to… force back up," I said in blatant disgust.

"So vampires are a bunch of bulimics," she said flatly and we all laughed. Only Bella would describe it as such.

"How do you think we manage to stay so beautiful," Emmett asked, preening.

"I assumed some sort of virgin or goat sacrifice and black magic was involved in your case, Em," she replied sweetly. He narrowed his eyes at her playfully.

"Goats are revolting but a nice grizzly bear would do nicely." Her nose wrinkled again.

"I don't think I can talk about what you guys eat. Apparently my aversion to blood is not limited to the human kind."

"Fine. No more bodily fluid talk. What do you say, Swan? Want to give Carlisle a little taste of the medicine you give us all the time," Jasper tempted. She sat back in her seat, considering it, her thoughts written all over her face even as her mental voice gave me nothing but the familiar comforting and equally frustrating silence it usually did.

"Okay fine. But everything has to be run by me and I won't do anything that will potentially damage my relationship with him, his relationship with any of you -except Edward, of course -or our relationship with each other."

"Deal," Emmett proclaimed, giving her a wolfish grin and showing off his teeth. "And on that note, I'm going to take my Rosie home. Today was hard for her. I'm thinking a hot bubble bath and back rub is in order." He gazed into Rosalie's face and she smiled softly at him, her eyes and thoughts still dark with her re-lived trauma.

"Wow, Emmett, that makes it so much harder to hate you," Bella said simply. He rolled his eyes.

"You love me, Snack Pack." He stood, carrying Rosalie in his arms but reached down to ruffle her hair as he passed on his way to the door. I listened to him carry Rose to his Jeep and tear away from the house and take off for home.

"This has been a day… week… year," Bella huffed out on a huge sigh.

"Do you feel better knowing," Alice asked, climbing off the recliner she'd been squished against Bella on and climbing between Jasper and I on the couch, cuddling close to him. Visions assaulted me through her thoughts but I tuned them out.

"Yes and no. I'm still wrapping my head around it. But I also get why Carlisle never told me. I mean, if he'd tried, I'd have assumed that I finally found a flaw of his outside his awful communication skills. I'd have thought he was crazy. Like committed to a sanatorium and eating his own hair crazy."

"The man was changed into a vampire and refused to eat people so he made a life eating animals instead," I said flatly. "He's crazy." She chuckled, rubbing her finger across the worn fabric of the recliner arm.

"Is it… is it because I'm human? Is that the reason why he's so hesitant to… I don't know… progress? Jump in with me?"

"I wish I could say it had nothing to do with it," I muttered. Her face fell.

"He's not opposed to your mortality, Bella," Jasper quickly reassured her. "He just feels like a relationship with him would be cheating you out of life experiences and also putting you in danger."

"Because I'm such a naive child," she retorted cynically.

"To be fair, we're all children to Carlisle," Alice replied. "He's so much older than any of us. And with the exception of Esme, he's developmentally older than the rest of us by at least a few years."

"I must seem like an infant to him," Bella whined, burying her face in her hands.

"Definitely not," Jasper and I said together, smiling at our like mindedness.

"He just has a warped sense of life and death. But if anyone can take Carlisle's preconceived notions and turn his world on its head, it's you, Isabella Swan," Alice assured her. Bella peeked an eye out to look at us before nodding.

"I guess Carlisle isn't the only one who's going to have to work on their communication skills," she muttered. I opened my mouth to reply but the sound of Charlie's police cruiser tearing down the street and into the driveway stopped me short. I focused on his thoughts but they were quick to appear and disappear.

He opened the front door and flew into the room, calling Bella's name. As soon as he came in and saw us in there and her in the recliner, he fell next to her seat and wrapped her in his arms.

"Dad, what's wrong?" I still failed to read his thoughts as anything more than gists of feelings and ideas. I looked over at Alice and Jasper. He was clenching her hand and his pant leg tightly while she had assumed a far off look in her eyes, already focusing on the future. Her visions swam around my head, most of them broken and nonsensical but a snippet continued to float in and out of the others, details changing but always the same spotlight.

Bella, dead, covered in blood and staring at us from the ground with glazed, lifeless eyes.

Rage and fear filled me, coursing through my body like dual forces of fire and ice.

"It's okay. Everything's fine. Just a long day at work," Charlie said gruffly but I could feel the terror and desperation in his thoughts. His thoughts seemed both protective but lost. A hard undertone ran underneath all of his thoughts that I could read if I focused all of my efforts into understanding it.

It isn't safe here. I have to keep her safe. I need to send her away from me. Where can she go?

I thought out a concise plan for this conversation and Alice picked up on it immediately, trading alternative words and phrases out to find the best outcome.

"Seriously," she exclaimed loudly, pulling her phone from her pocket and fiddling with the screen like she was reacting to a notification. Bella and Charlie looked over at us.

"Is it the security cameras again," I asked, loud enough to be sure Charlie heard me.

"Yes. I swear a leaf falls and the sensors get tripped. It's great for security and peace of mind if it was ever a real threat. They're just so sensitive," she said in exasperation.

"What is happening," Bella asked in confusion, suspicion edging the words as she looked between Alice and myself.

"Carlisle had this state of the art security system put in around the property and the motion detector sensors send alerts and live video feeds to our phones."

"I didn't know Carlisle was worried about security all the way out there," Charlie said quietly and I could already sense a hint of a plan forming in his head, the way Alice and I had been pushing for.

"He wasn't but we've had some kids coming out to try and vandalize the property on dares and stuff. So he thought it was better safe than sorry."

"Why didn't he mention anything? I would have had patrols focusing out there more."

"He didn't want to bug you. It hasn't been anything that bad and mostly we've caught and talked to the perpetrators. But he was worried that if it escalated, he'd need to identify the culprits. And honestly, Esme was watching some true crime documentaries and didn't feel comfortable living so far from town without some precautions in place," I assured him. The plan that had been forming in his thoughts was starting to become clearer and the corner of Alice's mouth twitched as new visions of Bella and our family began to fly at her.

Bella was staring at us like we'd grown extra heads or eyeballs. She knew now that we didn't have a security problem and that there was nothing we couldn't take care of ourselves. I shook my head ever so slightly at her as she opened her mouth to question our story. She looked between us and then followed my gaze as I slowly and deliberately moved it to Charlie. As she took in every tense line of his body, understanding began to dawn on her.

"It's true," she finally said and Charlie looked back at her. "I watched a documentary with Esme about a girl who lived in the middle of nowhere in Texas and someone broke into their house at night and murdered everyone except her because he only injured her and she just had to lay there and pretend to be dead for hours. Turns out that he didn't even know them. He was passing through after starting a killing spree on his way to the border. It really freaked her out. I told her nothing like that would ever happen in Forks but she said that girl probably thought the same thing until it did. I guess we don't live in a world where that kind of thing is totally impossible anymore."

I wanted to applaud the masterful way she delivered the story. She didn't ask him what had him so on edge but she clearly was brushing against those fears as he ideas resolved into a concrete plan that Alice watched in her head, and I in her thoughts.

"Maybe you and Esme should find something a little lighter to watch next time, Bells," Charlie said with a forced smile. "Anyway, I just wanted to make sure you got home okay. I still have a few things to take care of. Don't worry about me for dinner; you can just make whatever or order a pizza or something." He got up and headed back out the door, climbing into his cruiser and heading deeper into town.

Towards the hospital.

"Now are you two freakshows going to tell me what the hell is going on," Bella demanded.