Dear lord, it's been a while. Lol things got hectic for me again, and most of my free writing time was actually taken up pursuing original works. I used to participate in NaNoWriMo, but it would leave me pretty burnt out at the end, and I no longer participate due to a variety of other reasons. I'll try to be better about updating more often.
So, just as a quick point of clarification before we get into things, there was an update to my stories a while back, with no new content added. This happened because I deleted a separate author's note on most of my stories, as it was brought to my attention that it was outside of the guidelines and advised to delete it before I got reported. I doubt it would have been much of an issue, but better safe than sorry. I also want to forewarn you that there's a moment in this chapter that could potentially be a little creepy. Still within rating, I feel, but worth mentioning.
Anyways, enjoy!
The room was in shambles.
Bella didn't know how long she had been at it. Dimly, she was aware that she was screaming. It wasn't even so much that she could hear herself, all her ears were able to pick up right now was a sharp ringing, and the pounding feel of her racing heart. It was more so that she could feel her throat burning, and the small intact logical side of her brain supplying her with the information that she was, in fact, screaming like she was just confronted with brutal, bloody murder.
Like she hadn't already done that before.
Bella's hands were shaking as she picked up the small desk chair that she had scribbled on with markers as a child, and unceremoniously hurled it at the wall with all of the other things that she had shattered today. The chair would break, just as she had been broken. Tony apparently hadn't skimped on her room's furniture, even when she was just a child. All that effort, and only a single leg broke off from the impact with an unsatisfying snap. With a shriek, she snatched it up again and chucked the small chair at another wall, throwing it with all her might. This time it simply bounced off of the corner of the bed and clattered to the floor, completely unscathed. Bella let out a raw scream in frustration at her failure, and aimed a kick at the offending chair.
Of course, being the cursedly clumsy person that she was, her leg got tangled in the spokes of the chair. She crashed down to the ground with a muffled curse, wincing in pain as she landed among the various debris that her efforts the past few minutes had provided. She didn't think that she had landed in any broken glass. She had thrown all of the picture frames towards the other side of the room, and she couldn't remember any other glass being in her ten year old self's bedroom. She screamed again, kicking at the chair still attached to her with her free leg. She couldn't see it from her angle, but there probably wasn't much left of it attached to her after the fall, so it fell away easily enough. Too easily. Bella wished it hadn't been easy, she wanted to be able to kick it more before it fell apart. I wonder if that's what Renee thinks of me. She wondered bitterly, picking up a stray piece of something and throwing it across the room. She pulled herself up into a sitting position, looking over to where what should be the remains of the chair sat in a heap, and her shoulders sagged.
"I can't even break a damn chair properly." She rasped hoarsely, giving the offending object another, more halfhearted kick. There it was, a little more battered for the assault it weathered, but still, for the most part, intact. Did Tony have her furniture made of Adamantium or something? He probably would now, after seeing the mess that she made. She looked around the room, her whole body trembling after the rampage she had gone on.
Not much of a rampage after all though, was it? Aside from the now battered and hobbled chair, all of the damage that she had done was superficial at best. Not the work of anything formidable. This was little more than a toddler's tantrum, with some broken bits and bobs, and things strewn around to make a mess. Not trusting her shaking legs, Bella crawled on her hands and knees over to where she had hurled an offending clock. Even that was still functional, she reflected. It was one of those faced clocks where you actually had to be able to tell time to know it. Charlie had always been a fan of the classics, and had been sure to impress that love onto Bella as well. With that thought in her head, Bella cradled the clock far more gently as she picked it up to look at the time. Hours. She had been at this for hours, and she hadn't done anything more than superficial damage. Renee had always said that she was a weak child. Edward had left her because of it. She had always been nothing but a weak, useless plaything to them, hadn't she? Edward had left her because she was a fragile little human, and Charlie was dead because she was too weak to see what her one time mother was truly capable of.
Weak, useless, and pathetic. That's what Bella Swan actually was, wasn't she? Incapable of standing up for herself as a vampire toyed with her. Unwilling to make a stand against her narcissistic mother until she went crazy and killed her father. Unable to prove that her mother killed her father, or even convince anyone outside of her family that Renee had done it. And then, after all of that? She had just run away from Renee, because she still just couldn't face her. She should have just let Leah kill Renee after it happened. Why couldn't she just let her kill Renee? Or asked Paul to do it, so Leah, Seth, or Jacob wouldn't be implicated when it happened? As at odds as she and Paul usually were, he would have done it, she was sure. If not for the sake of Bella herself, for the sake of Seth and Leah, his pack mates.
With a whimper, Bella retreated further into the corner that she had crawled to. Cradling the clock in her arms, she drew her legs in towards her chest. Not wanting to witness the mess she had made around her, she ducked her head down so that it was resting on her knees. JARVIS, helpful and ever present as ever, dimmed the lights for her without so much as a word. Doubtless he had alerted Tony and Pepper to her toddler tantrum, but she couldn't currently bring herself to care.
She was numb, now, and that was all that mattered.
"We need to do something." Pepper repeated for what felt like the thirtieth time, staring down at the holoscreen in front of her and Tony. It was the security feed from Bella's bedroom. Normally it was locked out for the sake of privacy, but JARVIS had alerted Tony about a potential incident in Bella's room. Not long after Pepper and Tony had left her to her own devices, she had called her friends back in Washington. Tony didn't know exactly what had been said on the other end of the phone, but he imagined it had something to do with the notification that he had just gotten about the old Swan home back in Forks burning to the ground under mysterious circumstances. Well, mysterious to most. Renee had realized too late that her daughter was now out of her vile talons, and had decided to get her revenge on the poor girl the only way that she possibly could.
Evil bitch.
"What do you propose we do, Pep?" Tony asked, unable to take his eyes off of the screen. "I think that you and I both know that if I were the one in her shoes right now, I would be doing so much worse than that."
"That's not exactly saying much, Tony." Pepper hissed, bringing her eyes up to stare at him incredulously for a moment, shaking her head slightly before turning back to once again take in the scene playing out in real time before them.
"It says enough." Tony finally forced his eyes away from the screen, and quietly put his arm around Pepper. "Look, the walls are soundproof, and I think we have the money to replace anything she breaks. Let her rage and scream and throw shit around for a bit. That girl's kept her emotions bottled up for too damn long. As long as she's not hurting herself, I say let her just let it all out for once." Tony waved his hand, and the screen instantly disappeared. Pepper raised her hand instinctively, as if to stop it, and frowned at him again.
"I don't like this, Tony." She muttered, pulling herself out of his arms, and crossing her own with a frown. "This isn't like her. Even as a little kid, she was never like this." Tears shimmered in the corners of her eyes, and the crossed arms turned into something more like her trying to hold herself.
"Emotions are messy, Pep." He replied with a small shrug. "I don't think we should be expecting her to be the same Bella that she was when she was younger. Not now, hell, maybe never again. Not fully at least. It's up to us to keep loving her either way, and to help her at least try to make herself into something whole again." Pepper let out a shaky breath, and Tony carefully pulled her back into his arms.
"And when the hell did you get so wise?" She demanded weakly, more joking than anything as she allowed him to pull her close.
"I will have you know that I have always been a perfect paragon of wisdom." Tony declared with bravado, shooting a cocky grin at his girlfriend. "It's just that the alcohol usually doesn't let it come out right when I try to say it."
"Yeah, right." Pepper played along weakly, shaking her head softly. "You're as wise as an owl." She couldn't help but keep thinking of Bella, though, and the havoc the girl was wreaking on her room. It was a strange thing, to mourn for someone that technically was still there. She wasn't the same, though, and Tony was right. People had ruined their sweet girl's life, and they might not ever get that little girl fully back again because of it.
"It's late, Pep." Tony offered. "Why don't you go get some rest? I'll keep an eye on our girl." Pepper nodded, turning to give the holoscreen one last, lingering look before she left for their bedroom. Tony knocked back his drink, and leaned against the worktable with a sigh. Bella had been at it for hours, at this point. She would rage and rage and rage until her body gave out on her, before collapsing for a while, and then suddenly jumping back up and wreaking havoc on her room once more. It had been luck and good planning on his part that he had already been planning on moving Bella to a better place in the Tower and renovating that room, which was one of the last holdovers from the older version of Stark Tower. His eyes drifted off of the holoscreen for a moment, a picture frame out of the corner of his eye catching his attention. Three young men, barely older than Bella was now, arm in arm. Tony saw the younger version of himself, grinning irreverently at the camera, while Rhodey was rolling his eyes fondly at him. What Tony really wanted to see though, was the third man with them. His reddish brown hair had still kept up some respectability, unlike Tony's, and the small smile and gleam in his warm brown eyes told so much, even as it seemed to have caught him in the middle of shaking his head at Tony and Rhodey. Tony walked closer to it, refilling his glass once more.
"You had to get got by the crazy one, huh Chuck?" Tony sighed again, shaking his head at the picture of the three boys from a lifetime ago. "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, Charlie, and it's pretty damn shitty for you to leave me like this, you know that?" He slumped in on himself, shoulders curved inward as he took a deep, shuddering breath. "I don't know how to take care of our girl, Chief. Dammit, I warned you that giving her to me was a bad idea. I don't know how to help her. Shit, I don't even know where to start." Tony knocked back his drink again, and stared back at the holoscreen. Bella had collapsed again, this time in a different corner of the room.
"I really wish that you were still here, Charlie, because dammit if I don't wish I was in there throwing stuff at the walls with her."
Natasha leaned back in her chair, staring pensively at the computer screen in front of her. She had gotten to know Carlisle Cullen fairly well during his time working with SHIELD. The doctor had been convinced that he could create a synthetic blood substitute that vampires could consume instead of human, or in his coven's case, animal blood. SHIELD had wanted to keep the Cullens close for other reasons though, which the others had not taken all that kindly to, the auburn haired boy Edward especially. Not that Natasha had particularly minded grating on the irritating boy's nerves. The mind reader had easily picked up on most of SHIELD's ulterior motives before they had realized that they even had a mind reader in their midst, and the entire family had packed up and vanished overnight.
Or, at least they thought they had.
SHIELD had found the Cullen family in Forks, Washington mere hours after their arrival. Fury had thought it best if SHIELD had kept their distance after that, though. The Director had not wanted an unnecessary fight, and the Cullens had seemed committed to not harming any humans in their vicinity. It seemed they hadn't had the same qualms about emotional harm that they did for physical, if the psychological damage that the mind reader did to Isabella Swan was any indicator.
The Cullen family had spent some time in Alaska with the Denali clan after leaving Washington, according to the file in front of her. They weren't there anymore, though. In fact, they were a mere hour flight away. Who knew that upstate New York had nearly as much cloud cover as Washington State? More, in a couple of cases. Thoughtfully, Natasha opened up her email.
"Whatcha doin?" Clint asked, popping up behind her from what would have been out of nowhere. He must've gotten in through the vents again.
"You know perfectly well what it is that I am doing, idiot." Natasha didn't even spare him a glance as she started to type out an email.
"Probably." Clint shrugged, unbothered by her hissing. "I'm imagining that you already sent an update to Fury about The Cullens, and now you're trying to get more intel on the situation." She glanced back at him, and his face sobered slightly. "The Cullens broke Vampiric Law by letting the girl know about them, and then they just left her behind. Pretty sure that they'd be done for if we ratted them out to those freak shows in Italy."
"Maybe, but we'd be ratting out Bella in the process if we did." Natasha glowered at her computer. "The World Security Council and the Volturi have an agreement not to interfere with each other, and peace between The Avengers and the Volturi is tenuous at best, and Bella is a civilian. If we tell them about her being a breach of law, they'll demand her to be turned or killed."
"You're right." Clint sobered up. "How are you thinking we should go about this, then?"
"I'm just putting some feelers out for now." She shrugged, going back to crafting her email. "Carlisle was always pretty reasonable, I think I can get some more details about the whole situation from him." She glanced at her partner out of the corner of her eye. "Why the social call? You knew what I would likely be doing, and you hate stuff like this anyways."
"Oh, I just dropped in because I thought you might want to know that your little baby bird has already lost her shit." Clint shrugged. "She got a phone call from Washington, and she went postal afterwards. Wrecked her room, or at least tried to, and is currently curled up in a ball in the corner of the room. In my professional opinion, she's either a half step away from going on another bedroom wreaking spree, or from cutting her own bangs. For her sake, we should hope that it's the room." That…was not ideal.
"When was this?" Natasha demanded, actually turning away from the computer screen this time.
"Like, 20 minutes after she got here." Clint shrugged. Natasha closed her eyes and breathed deeply through her nose.
"Barton, that was hours ago." She glanced at the clock. "Technically speaking, it was yesterday." In the back of her mind, she considered dropping her partner off of a building. A big one, so he'd have plenty of time to catch himself with a well placed arrow, but still a building.
"Hey, cut me some slack. I didn't find out right away"
"I sincerely doubt that." Natasha glanced at the clock again. "What is Stark doing about it?"
"As far as I can tell?" Clint shrugged. "Nothing, at the moment. He seems to be letting the girl get it out of her system. Not the worst tactic in the world, but leaving her fully alone like that? Feels kinda crappy."
"And you said that she's currently in a lull?" Nat asked, thinking hard.
'Honestly, I think she might've worked herself into passing out." Clint admitted. "She was giving rage rooms a run for their money at one point."
"Is there any way you can let me know if she starts getting bad again?"
"It shouldn't be a problem, unless Stark booby traps the vents." Clint nodded, before tilting his head to the side in speculation. "What're you thinking, Nat?"
"Do you remember what I was like for a while after defecting?"
"Hard to forget." Clint snorted. "I thought you were going to kick my teeth in, at one point. I'd hardly say that's relevant to the girl, though. She was having a hard time breaking a chair. It took her three tries."
"You'd be surprised." Nat frowned, closing down her computer. She would finish later.
"You're not…actually planning on kicking her teeth in, right? I may not be the biggest fan of the girl right now, but I think she's probably going through enough."
"I'm not even dignifying that with a response."
Bella had the distinct impression that she wasn't actually real. Logically of course, she knew that she must be. Her senses were skewed, though if they were working at all. The only sensation she had in her hands was a kind of pressure, and the only thing that she could hear was distant ringing and her own pounding heartbeat. Some distant logical part of her knew that her eyes were technically working, that her dismal attempt at wrecking her room was in front of her, but she had no comprehension of sight nor sound. Instead, she counted her heartbeats. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Fast fast fast, her heart was beating fast.
She was lying in the meadow with Edward, staring at him as he gazed at her with love in his eyes. Slowly, his cold, marble hands tangled in her hair. He ran his hand through her hair like it was made from the finest silk, and sighed at the heat coming from her skin. A beam of light graced the meadow, and grazed down their skin.
His face caught the light, and the sparkles danced across her own face, making her blink hard at the light in her eyes. Chuckling, Edward leaned forward to press a kiss to her lips. The sun left, and cold crept in. She let her eyes flutter open, and gasped, suppressing a scream.
Edward was a cold corpse. Not in the way that all Vampires were, though. He was rotting, decrepit, and revolting. Decay spread across every inch of his body, and as Bella leaped to her feet, she felt the cold crawl of it start to spread to her skin, too. Edward followed her as she suddenly stood, hand still in her hair. Flies crawled on his skin, and as he smiled at her, love still in his now cloudy eyes, his teeth were stained rusty with dried blood. Frantically, she tried to shove him off of her, but to no avail. Edward fell back towards the earth, taking Bella with him. They fell for longer than they should have, and when they finally hit something hard, it knocked the wind right out of her. They had fallen further than they had before.
They had fallen right into Charlie's grave.
Spluttering, Bella tried desperately to regain her ability to breathe. She tasted dirt and rot, and in the distance, she smelled smoke. The smoke of her former life, burning down around her. Edward was no longer at her side, but she could still feel his hand in her hair. He had always loved her hair. She had always hated it. Once, in the summer, she wanted to cut it, but Edward had begged and cajoled her into keeping it. Once he had even threatened to let Alice take her on a twelve hour shopping trip if she had done it. She opened her mouth to scream, to call out for help.
All that came from her mouth was dirt.
Bella awoke with a start and a scream, jumping back to her feet like Renee had set her on fire along with Charlie's house. She was in her old room at the tower in New York. She was not in Forks, not in the meadow, and not choking on the dirt of her father's grave. She heaved, but there was nothing in her stomach for her to throw up. She could still feel Edward's rotting hand in her hair. She raked her fingers all across her scalp. Nothing was there. She knew that nothing could possibly be there. She shuddered, still feeling that ghost sensation tugging at the long lengths. Edward had loved the length so much.
Scrabbling, Bella searched frantically among the chaos of her upturned desk. She had to have something, anything that would do. With a small note of triumph that probably sounded more like a rattling rasp, Bella straightened up from the ground, an old pair of kiddie scissors clenched tightly in her hands.
Edward would have his hands in her hair no more.
Bella was almost gleefully cutting off swaths of her hair. Goodbye weird messy curtain of hair, goodbye stress headaches from how thick is was, and most of all, goodbye to Edward's hands, pulling her deep into the earth. She was sure that she looked frightful, but right now, she wasn't entirely sure that she cared. Behind her, she heard her door open. Apparently someone finally decided to check in on her. Honestly, she wished that Tony had waited a little bit longer. A low whistle sounded out as the carnage was surveyed, and Bella couldn't help but feel a little bit bad.
"Well, this is certainly something." A female voice drawled, and Bella whirled to see not Tony, but Natasha. What was she doing in her room?
"What are you doing in my room?" She demanded, because any originality to her thoughts had flown away from the shock.
"You really did a number in here, didn't you?" Natasha asked, ignoring Bella's question. "Or at least, you tried to. You could probably clean this place up in twenty minutes, and barely tell that you've been raging." That stung Bella, as the depths of her utter uselessness hit her once again. Sure, she had thrown things around a bit, but Natasha was right. For the most part, what she had done to the room hadn't been all that impressive.
"Did you want something?" Bella asked tiredly, shoulders slumping as she let her hands fall to her sides, scissors dropping to the ground and slipping under a half upturned table.
"Just curious about our new arrival." Natasha said causally, sauntering further into the room. "You know, the only thing I think you've actually managed to break other than some glass is that chair."
"Thanks for noticing." She rasped, a bit sarcastically. That damn chair had been the focus of hours of throwing around. At once point she wondered if the wall would give way before the chair did. So many times when she wasn't properly looking, she thought that it must have broken, only to open her eyes and see that it was still, for the most part, intact.
"It's really kind of impressive, actually." The redheaded woman mused. "How long you were at this, with how little damage you actually caused."
"Yeah, yeah, I get it." Bella groused, her annoyance spiking. "I'm so useless I can't even mess up a room right." Bella leaned against the wall, closing her eyes.
"You're extremely pathetic." Natasha said coolly. Bella's eyes flew back open as she stood up straight again.
"What?" She demanded, glaring daggers at the older woman.
"You're useless and pathetic. You can't even break a chair properly." Natasha walked over to the other side of the room, where another chair laid on its side. She squared up, and gave the seat a single, calculated kick. With a crashing sound, the chair seemed to crumple in on itself in the span of a blink, leaving nothing but splintered sticks in its wake. Natasha turned back to look at her again. "All you've actually been able to damage here so far is yourself." She gestured vaguely towards Bella's hair. "Like I said, pathetic."
"Don't call me that." Bella demanded.
"Why? I bet it's what you've been calling yourself. It's certainly how you've been acting. You've been faced with the awful things that have happened to you, and you have just let it all pile up on top of you. You've just decided to take it." She walked up to Bella, poking her in the stomach. "You just let yourself get dragged from one shitty thing to another and another, not doing anything except having an impotent temper tantrum and doing some minor cosmetic damage. Why don't you actually do something?" She poked Bella again, this time in the shoulder.
"Get off of me." Bella tried to shove Natasha away, but to no avail.
"Why don't you make me?" Natasha mocked. "But I'll have to warn you, I wont break as easily as your chair did." She shoved Bella then, sending her into the wall with a thud. Red seeped across Bella's vision, and she lunged with a scream. She felt a pressure on her wrist, and then suddenly had the sensation of being airborne before crashing to the ground. She immediately jumped back up and lunged at Natasha again, who dodged her and batted her away as easily as one would a fly. Bella kept running at her, and Natasha kept evading as gracefully as a dance. Bella's fury grew and grew as she kept missing, and she knew Natasha could tell. "Tell me, Bella, how does it feel to be such a failure? You just keep failing, over and over and over. Is it fun for you somehow?"
"Shut up!" Bella sobbed, frantically swinging a punch. "Shut up shut up shut up SHUT UP!"
"Why? I'm only saying what you're thinking, you know. What are you so angry at me, for?"
"I'm not angry at you!"
"Then what are you angry about?" Natasha leaned back, and Bella shoved, making Natasha stumble back.
"I'm angry because it's true!" She screamed, advancing on Natasha. "I am useless, and I am pathetic, and all I do is fail! I fail, and I fail, and I fail. I failed to get Renee caught, I failed to see that Edward was a piece of crap until long after he was gone, I failed to keep the people I love in my life, I failed to save my dad." She swung again at the other woman, but this time it connected where none of the others had, not realizing that Natasha had stopped trying to dodge. She let the blow connect with her side, taking it in stride as Bella, being Bella, lost her balance and fell face first onto the floor. She let herself lay there, sobbing as the floodgates overflowed for her once more. "It's all my fault." She sobbed. "I should have been able to stop her. I should have been able to save them." Natasha was quiet for a moment, before Bella heard rustling as Natasha sat down next to her.
"It's not, though." She told her, voice far gentler than it had been in their previous interaction. "You do not get to claim fault for the horrible things that have been done to you, kid. That's on them, not you. You were a child. You still are a child, legal adult or no.." She put a light hand on Bella's back, and she released a shuddering breath. "Thinking of yourself as useless because of things that you had no control over does nothing but give the people who hurt you more power. You are just a normal, human girl. There was nothing you could have done about any of it."
"But-"
"No buts about it, kid." She patted Bella's back, and as she made to sit up, helped her out. "Thinking of yourself as useless or pathetic when the same thing could have happened to any other person is kind of ridiculous. If someone else came to you saying that, would you think that's true?"
"Well, no." Bella admitted, a tad reluctantly.
"So why would you hold yourself to that?" Natasha nudged Bella with her shoulder in an almost playful way. "It's understandable to feel the way that you've been feeling, Bella. You went through an extreme amount of crap in a very small time frame. It's actually kind of incredible that you're still here, actually. The important thing is to not let the bad consume you, and let it hurt you even further than it already has." Bella was quiet for a few minutes, looking out towards the wall. Eventually, she sighed, bringing her knees up to her chest.
"I don't think I can sort myself out, really." She whispered, glancing at Natasha. "It's all so much right now."
"You have time." Nat said simply. "And you have people who are willing to help you. Tony and Pepper clearly adore you, and they want nothing more than to help you sort yourself out." Bella shifted, facing Natasha more fully.
"Do…Do you think that you could help me, too?" She asked tentatively, her voice small and a little shaky after the gauntlet she had put it through lately. Something hard cracked a bit in Natasha's expression as Bella spoke, and she gave a small nod, giving the younger girl's shoulder a small pat.
"If you would like me to." She offered, and Bella nodded, giving her a slightly watery smile. "Alright then." She said, straightening herself up off the ground and dusting herself off a bit. She offered Bella a hand to help her up off the ground, and gave her what she probably hoped was an encouraging smile. "First thing's first, let's get you the hell out of this room. I have some scissors in my quarters, so I can fix that hair of yours before you take a shower."
"I…I didn't exactly bring any other clothes with me." Bella admitted, following Natasha towards the door.
"You can borrow some of my stuff until we can get you some new clothes. I'm sure that your godfather or Pepper has already ordered you some basics, if nothing else." Natasha pulled open the door and ushered Bella into the hall, only for them to come face to face with Tony charging down the hall at top speed, the iron man suit half on.
"What the fuck are you trying to do to my kid, Romanoff?" He demanded, looking like he wanted to start blasting off repulsors.
"Save the threats, Stark, I come in peace." Natasha responded coolly. "Bella and I are just going up to my place so I can fix her hair, and get her something else to wear." She walked past Tony then without another word, gesturing for Bella to follow her. Bella did, giving Tony a small, tentative, but genuine smile and a little wave as she passed by, following the redhead into the elevator.
Tony stood there blankly for a few minutes after, staring after the two women in shock, before giving himself a full body shake.
"What the hell even just happened?" He wondered out loud, turning around slowly, before cursing and jumping back. "What the shit, Barton? Where did you come from?"
"Looks like things went well, then." Clint grinned, fiddling with one of his mini dart arrows.
"What do you mean?" Tony asked, staring back towards the elevator. "What just happened?"
"Isn't it obvious, Stark?" Clint laughed, walking past him as well. Damn superspies ignoring him in his own tower. "Your goddaughter just got adopted by the Black Widow."
Well, shit.
Whew, this chapter took a lot out of me. Bella wasn't in a great place, and writing those big emotions took a lot out of me. I wanted to be able to do those big, messy emotions justice though. I hope that I managed it okay.
Fun fact: I've spent many years of my life living in upstate New York, and that cloud cover thing is 100% true. It's like a SM Vampire's dream, there.
Anyways, please leave me a review and tell me what you think, if you can. I hope you all have a wonderful day!
