Work Text:
Are you happy when you wake up?
No.
1.
It started eight years ago with, of all things, Rosalie's arms filled with lilacs.
Wild things, unmanaged for years, frothing shades of purple and pressing droplets of water into the pale pink material of Rose's shirt.
Bella had been sitting beside Alice on the piano bench, laughing as the girl taunted Edward with her unskilled smashing of the keys. Somewhere in the center of a jangling second amidst the foul melody, Rosalie- one of the eldest Cullen siblings- strode in having just returned from her second semester of college and wasted no time with greetings before paying a visit to the garden.
Rose needed only to clear her throat for the human girl to jump up, attention in full redirection. Bella stumbled up the two steps to the living room and moved to take the flowers, blue-sleeved arms looping clumsily around the stems and Rose's misted arms. The heavy, crushed floral scent cloying the air between them as Bella pulled gently on the flowers to no relinquishment on Rose's part. Only a smile, and the race of blood to the poor human's cheeks.
"That's alright," Rose said beneath her amusement. "Find me a couple of vases, please."
Two minutes later, the earthy shatter of clay and Bella's breathless, stuttering apologies filled the house like butterfly wings beating gently on the wretched aftermath of a wrecking ball. Bella Swan and her constant battle with gravity often seemed doubly threatened in the rare presence of Rose.
"It- it slipped? I'm sorry-"
"It's only a vase, sweet girl. I can make another. I could make a dozen more tonight. It's nothing to do with you."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Sweet girl," Edward mouthed at Alice with an incredulously raised brow.
Alice only smiled and slammed her fists down one after the other up the black keys all for the pained grimace of her dear brother.
"Are you happy when you wake up?" Rose asks, eyes busy elsewhere. She traces a finger along the edge of the book she swiped from Bella's suitcase. Behind her, the sea breeze twirls a few umbrellas. It whips up the ends of her hair, tangling it about her bare shoulders.
"No."
"It takes time, I remember."
Bella reaches across the small table over her teacup, fingers just barely brushing Rose's cool arm. "I'm happy now."
"I didn't ask," Rose says, gaze rising, hinting humor where it shouldn't belong. "I want to know about your mornings. What goes through your mind."
"Well," Bella starts, holding up her hand to list on her fingers, "in order, I think of shimmer and of rot, and then I think of you."
"Oh, is that all?"
"No." A small smile crosses her face as she watches Rose lean forward on her elbows to avoid the shifting sun. She feels the words break from her. "Marry me."
"No," Rose says around the corners of her sharp grin. "I have a tennis lesson."
2.
Los Angeles seemed one of the last places on earth a coven of vampires should find themselves, but Carlisle, ever the good doctor made a promise to a young starlet many years before when he was treating her illness through the peak of her stardom.
"My, you haven't aged a day," the delirious woman muttered as he held her hand and smiled at her through the last of it.
Five stories below, the doctor's oldest daughter sat beneath the thick shade of a palm tree at the chipped bottom of an emptied swimming pool wondering just what was so special about The Mist and why it should hold Bella's eyes captive for another afternoon.
Alice insisted Bella come with them for a spontaneous last splash before packing up for college next month. She resisted at first, citing a dislike for crowded beaches and 'glamorized tourist-traps.' She'd been steadfast in her decision until one evening over homemade ice cream, Esme slipped in that Rose would be joining them in California after her internship finished up. Seconds later, Bella was in full compliance with Alice's extensive and indecipherable itinerary. As a music fan, I've actually always wanted to see Fountain and Fairfax...
The oleander bushes had taken over the back patio, fat white flowers dripping off their dark stems, spidering like vines over the lip of the bone-dry swimming pool. She could hear Bella's heart kick up as she brought the book closer to her face in disbelief.
"Bella," Rose huffed, finally and a bit unfairly.
The girl jumped, thin paperback flying out of her hands and landing several feet behind her in the deep end among the dried-up flower petals and strips of ultramarine pool paint.
"Too scary?" Rose teased.
Bella smiled sheepishly, half-hidden behind her hair. "You're bored."
"Not nearly as much as I could be, don't worry."
Alice may have been known for her oracle-like certainties, but Rosalie's future would always be her own.
Rose extended her hand that day, chancing her tenuous friendship with Bella. One second passed. The warm air pressed down into that pool, twenty thousand gallons dropped upon their heads. The murky-sick shock of putting yourself out there, suspended at the tips of Rose's glittering fingers. Two seconds. Bella stuck her worn paperback into her bag and set her hand in Rose's, smiling secrets into the collar of her cotton shirt as she was pulled gently to her feet.
"Do you want to go for a walk?" she asked, blazing courage. The sun had just begun its slow descent behind a few buildings.
Pretending to think it over, Rose hummed quietly. "I'd like that."
"Would you?"
Rose reached over and tucked a strand of brown hair behind her ear, smiling to herself as Bella's face flew through all the shades of pink at once. "Yes."
"Are you bored often?"
"I'm immortal."
Hours later, if one were following them (and several were, but they will go unnamed), they could be seen along the ocean's edge, shoes in their hands, comfortably uncomfortable in a slightly strained conversation until, of course, Bella Swan tripped over a nickel-sized seashell and crashed into Rose's arms.
The rest was none of Alice's business. At least that's what Rose hissed into the wind before blurring three miles up the coastline to get a little privacy, hyper-aware of the jump of Bella's heart and the tightness of her fingers around her shoulders as they flew.
Marry me.
No. I have a tennis lesson.
Bella relents and leans back in the sun-warmed chair. She sips her tea, wondering. Rose seems curious this morning despite her show of disinterest. She doesn't doubt the woman spent the early morning hours considering her questions. "Are you happy…when the sun rises?
"Not particularly."
"And now?" Bella ventures.
Rose glares at the sliver of sunlight bending through the prisms of her elbow. She jerks it beneath the faint shade of their umbrella and looks upward, accusatory. It was supposed to be cloudy today. After a moment, she levels her gaze. "I try to be. I would marry you, but your serve is pitiful. You look so scared with a racket in your hand."
"Rose."
"Yes, Bella?" she says, amused. Playing along.
Feeling oddly serious, Bella sets aside her teacup. "I never remember anything when I wake up. My life feels so up in the air until it all comes back to me. That's what it's like, I think. For humans."
3.
It might have ended too, swiftly as anything, if not for lilacs.
Busy with pretending, Rose spent the next three years after that summer in Los Angeles working her way up the ranks in a small architectural firm based in Seattle. A steady string of correspondence kept her connected to Bella at a frequency she'd rarely bothered with anyone else.
On paper, Rose nearly learned more about her in one letter than the month and a half they all spent in California together. There was something almost alarming about it- the girl who could barely manage to hold her end of the conversation mailing Rose envelopes stuffed with sheets and sheets of paper filled with anything and everything that would fit beneath a stamp.
At first, she talked mostly about school, her campus, the professors, her friends from her study group with such a personal command of the English language, Rose had to check the return address a few times to make sure it was the right girl. Not that she ever doubted her intelligence. She just never expected to be shown the color of Bella's mind between the margins of jaggedly-torn notebook paper.
As the semesters passed, Bella replied to the offered anecdotes from Rose's human life with letters about her own childhood and her life before returning to Forks to live with her father. Rose noticed with a bit of concern that those particular letters seemed to float on top of an insecure kind of humor especially when the topic of her mother was glossed over.
The people I meet always tell me I was born middle-aged, I'm so responsible. But I think I had to be. Who else was going to keep my mother alive, right?
Not wanting to overstep, Rose included her phone number at the end of her next letter, just in case Bella ever felt like talking. Knowing the girl's disfavor for speaking at length, Rose wasn't expecting it to come to anything.
So when the phone rang four days later, she assumed it was Alice.
It was a touch awkward at first and full of long pauses sparked with nervous laughter, but Rose liked to consider herself graceful enough for the both of them. And she was until she no longer needed to be.
They spoke often after that, so much so, Rose could often hear Bella's friends teasing her on the other end of the line and speculating about Bella's secret girl. As satisfied with themselves as they seemed all those miles away, Rose didn't exactly hate the sound of that. Both their schedules were so hectic, they often missed each other by a few days when visiting home, and as time wore on, Rose felt herself growing quietly eager to meet this Bella she had come to know so well.
In the middle of Bella's fifth semester at Dartmouth, she rolled over on her mattress, crinkling her scattered notes and nearly choking herself with the phone cord before she simply blurted out: I was wondering if you wanted to come and see me during fall break.
"Ah," Rose said, holding her smile at bay. "That explains the plane ticket Emmett slipped into my mailbox this morning."
"How did he-" Bella sighed. "Alice?"
"Alice."
A few weeks later, after Rose landed in New Hampshire, Bella was waiting for her at the crowded mouth of the escalators, distinguishable from the rest of the crowd because instead of the customary paper name sign, she was holding up a beat-up copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
For the first time in years, Rose had to sternly remind herself not to vault over the kindly old couple in matching turkey sweaters and sweep the woman up in a dramatic, property-destroying embrace.
Instead, she settled for the human world's sluggish pace and crept her way over, a smile on her face, a friend in her eyes. When she reached her, she took the book from Bella's hands. "Very funny."
Bella, who seemed to have actually grown a few inches taller since they last met, beamed at her almost mischievously for a moment before throwing her arms around Rose's shoulders with such force, Rose could feel the air squeezed from her poor human lungs.
"Did you knock the wind out of yourself?"
"Mm-hm. It's like hugging the Venus de Milo," Bella croaked into Rose's scarf.
"I have arms."
"Then use them."
Rose laughed then and returned the hug, breathing in her faint vanilla scent, pleased that after all that time away, Bella still smelled like spring in Forks.
"I don't sleep, remember?" Rose teased as Bella tried to give up her bedroom in her small but enviably cozy apartment.
Bella rolled her eyes, looking a bit like Alice for a moment before placing Rose's single suitcase beside the small couch. "I was attempting hospitality, Rose. You're my first guest here."
"When did you move in?"
"Shush." Bella collected some loose notepaper off of the low coffee table and carried them over to her desk in the corner. "I thought about showing you the city, but Jasper told me you've actually graduated from here. Twice."
"I've told you before."
"The bored immortal. Yes, I remember. Hand me that, would you?" she said, gesturing to a purple bomber jacket on the back of the couch. It didn't seem like Bella's style, and when Rose picked it up, she caught the distinct scent of lilac. "Sorry, it's a little messy in here."
Standing among Bella's things- her textbooks and raincoats, her knitting poking out from behind a throw pillow, the leafy plants lining the windowsills- Rose felt her chest tighten inexplicably. Before she could pick apart the feeling, she blurred across the tiny living room and took Bella in her arms again.
Bella laughed softly, surprised. "I thought three years would have felt like a blink to you."
"You were wrong."
Rose felt her head come to rest against her shoulder. "I missed you, too."
Bella's friends were, in a word, shocked to meet her. Halfway through their stumbling greetings, Rose shot Bella a questioning look to which Bella just laughed and looped an arm around Rose's waist, pulling her into her side in the crowded little bar.
"They thought I was making you up," she murmured close in her ear.
As they moved toward a table in the back, the frontman of the band set up in the corner mumbled something about a break that even Rose had trouble deciphering. But she didn't miss the tall woman lifting the guitar from her neck and bounding off of the short stage, bright red hair shining independently of the dim bar bulbs.
The guitarist hooked an arm around Bella's neck and kissed her on the cheek. "Hey, Bells," she said, smiling wide and sweeping her arm toward Rose. "Who's this?"
Rose frowned. Lilac.
It took twenty-six minutes for a slightly flushed Bella to find her in the alley, away from the noise, snowflakes catching on her hair.
"Hey," she said, hands in her pockets. "I didn't think there'd be so many people here tonight. I guess I never considered what that's like for you."
"I'm not tempted to eat your friends if that's what you think."
"No. I just know you." Bella moved a little closer and leaned one shoulder against the red bricks. "Where'd you go?"
"Your friends are…"
"Really dorky?"
Rose smiled at that. "I've done the whole college thing a dozen times and yet…I always seem to forget there are other people in my classes."
"You don't make friends?"
"Not usually. It's…inefficient. After a certain point, school is less of an experience and more of a tedious task with a meaningless degree at the end of it."
"Do you ever think of taking a break?"
"It's better for me to have something to do. Otherwise, it just feels like nothing's real. Or nothing matters," Rose said. She glanced over at Bella, shivering in her thin sweater. "You see how that could be dangerous for someone like me?"
"Yeah. But that's not why you're out here all alone, is it?"
Rose shook her head then, and let out a breath colder than the wintery air. "You never wrote about Victoria."
"I guess I haven't. We haven't been friends for long." Bella slid her hand from her pocket and found Rose's cold fingers in the darkness of the chilly alleyway.
Rose kept her eyes up. Level. "She seems to like you."
"She spilled her drink on me."
"What?"
"That's how we met. Like this turquoise fruity thing all down the back of my favorite shirt- you know, the one Em got me from Silverwood- and when I turned around, she looked scared. That was the only time in my life I think I ever saw anyone look afraid of me. And when she saw that I wasn't mad, she gave me her jacket."
"That was nice of her," Rose said quietly, letting Bella swing their hands a bit.
"But there was a problem."
"A problem?"
"Yes. I was walking home in this girl's jacket, and out of nowhere, I couldn't wear it anymore. I had to get it off of me."
"Why?"
"Because of the smell, her perfume or something. It reminded me of my friend who I missed way too much to be putting myself through that." Bella wrapped a hand around Rose's arm above her elbow then, eyes soft. "I know you said you don't make friends, but have you ever felt that way before? Like you want to see someone so badly, every little piece of them hurts?"
"Stephen King," Rose said after a moment.
"What?" Bella asked, nose red from the cold. But her eyes were always so warm.
"I can't go anywhere without seeing someone reading Stephen King. Or one of the movies plastered all over the city, and I think of you, terrified in that pool. It ruins my week," she said, shaking her head at the absurdity of it. "Lilacs are the worst."
"You love lilacs."
"So do you," Rose said, snowflakes unmelting on her eyelashes. "I can't do it again. Three years without…I…I want-" She stopped short as Bella's fingertips gently brushed against her cheek, trailing warmth where there was none.
Eyes shining and sincere, Bella moved a little closer. "Would you think less of me if I told you I've been in love with you since I was eighteen?"
"No," Rose said, covering Bella's hand with her own. "But please don't kiss me for the first time in an alley outside a bar."
"Okay," Bella said, a laugh threaded through the word. "Let's go back inside. I'm freezing."
My life feels so up in the air until it all comes back to me. That's what it's like, I think. For humans.
Rose rests her chin on her laced fingers. "Lie and say you'll never forget me."
"Will it make you smile?"
"No. Don't ever lie to me. Please."
Bella glances past her companion, toward the cliffs and the foaming waves that slam into the rocks. "You're terrible at tennis. Everyone says so."
"Even Esme?"
"Yes.
"Damn," Rosalie says. She smiles, shines without the aid of the sun. She's never needed it.
"Marry me." Bella bends her head closer.
Rose flips the page of her book. "I'll think about it."
4.
Two dozen candles. Bella practically sighed them out rather than blowing. "I'm older than Carlisle," she announced, glum-faced and surly beneath her party hat.
Esme laughed as she plucked the colorful candles out of the strawberry cake. She gave Bella's shoulder a reassuring squeeze. "You'll get through it."
"I have gifts!" Alice sang from the tree branch outside the kitchen, arms hugged around a stack of pristinely wrapped green packages twice as tall as Alice herself. "You will like some of them this time, I promise. And don't even think about giving Rose rescue-me puppy eyes like last year."
"Alright, alright. Thank you, Alice."
"You're welcome!" Alice beamed before dropping the gifts to the ground with a solid thud.
Almost in a daze, Bella stumbled out of the house and into the cover of the wilted garden with pink band-aids on each of her fingers (thanks to Alice's industrial wrapping technique) and a new pair of pink striped socks peeking out from the gap between her cuffed jeans and her shoes.
"Promise me I'll never turn twenty-five," she said to the fall-dormant lilacs.
"Hm. No."
"So this is where you've been," Bella said, circling the wall of dying greenery only to find Rose lounging gracefully on a low oak branch, her back against the rough trunk, orangey-green leaves all around her.
"I make her go easy on you, you know."
"I couldn't tell." Bella held up her bandaged hands. "Em had to drag Jasper away. There's got to be a better way to do this. Every year he almost eats me."
"Alice's suggestion box is a paper shredder. We've all found that out in our own ways over the years." Rose twisted a leaf between her fingers for a moment before a smile lit up across her face. "I have something for you."
"Please, I can't take any more."
In a rush of cool air, Rose appeared beside her with a book wrapped in a single layer of translucent white tissue paper. "Happy birthday."
Bella pressed the paper down to make out the title and smiled to herself as The Mist came through the thin film. "Thank you."
"It's signed," Rose said, feigning disinterest as she walked back up to the house.
Later that night in their apartment in Seattle, Rose settled on the couch beside her, needlessly cozy in a set of Bella's flannel pajamas. "I don't get tired, but my family exhausts me sometimes. They don't really listen to me."
"They…have a lot of love to give."
Rose laughed a little and pressed a lazy kiss against her lips, smiling as Bella's book fell to the ground, forgotten. "Happy birthday."
A low groan rumbled from Bella's chest at the reminder. Her head flopped back against the cushion. "I'm so old."
Rose scoffed. "You're not old."
"You're nineteen. This is getting a little weird from the outside."
"Mm." Rose kissed her once more, intent on seeing the last of that frown. "There is no outside."
"If you say so."
"I almost forgot," Rose said, sitting up. "I have something else for you, but I think you've probably had enough for one day."
"If it's from you, I don't mind. You know that."
"Even so." Rose pulled the blanket from the back of the couch and spread it over them. "I'll give it to you tomorrow."
Marry me.
I'll think about it.
Bella huffs to disguise her amusement. "I said yes the first time you asked. I was kind."
"You were adorable," Rose says. Her eyes flick up, playful. "And eager."
"I love you," Bella says plainly, "it only made sense."
"I love you, too."
"Then what's the problem?"
Rose sighs theatrically. "Well," she says, "I'd like to enjoy the rest of my honeymoon first." She touches the netting of her racket waiting patiently on the table next. "My wife promised me a game. Don't tell anyone but I make it a point to almost let her win."
"She sounds ridiculous."
"She is."
A well-researched cloud drifts over the sun. Rose stands then and offers her hand as graceful today as she might've been sixty years ago. She's eager to play, it seems she loves the sport. Bella might never have guessed.
They leave the small cafe together and start down the path to the tennis courts, arms linked. Rose's hair billows, free in the weak sunshine and salty air. It tickles Bella's cheeks as they walk.
Rose hugs her arm closer. "What are your nights like?"
"Better," Bella says, squeezing her right back, "with you around."
"Mine too." Rose presses her lips to Bella's cheek, her cool breath tingling her skin. In her ear the vampire whispers, "I loved your vows. I'll marry you again just to hear them."
Bella laughs, ticklish suddenly. Rose is cheating. That isn't how their little game is supposed to go. "Rose, you've gone soft."
Rose shrugs and kisses her again. "Sweet girl, there are much worse things."