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{land}
Edward stops wishing that he could sleep to dream, because now he knows that his mind would be haunted with nightmares.
Her voice ringing clear across the ice, rebounding against snow-caked boulders, and the amused quirk of a smile under blood-red eyes.
“Wait.”
He shudders.
*
The desert sand is hot against his feet and it sizzles from ice meeting fire.
“This isn’t healthy.”
He knows Alice means his quiet refuge, his self-imposed exile, but he looks to the ground and murmurs something about not being burned. She rolls her eyes and lowers her sunglasses, sitting beside him on a beaten up lawn chair with the arms torn off and the color paled by sunlight. She studies her glittering hands, pretending to pick at her perfect nails and sighs.
“I know you miss her.”
He grinds his teeth.
Of course he misses her. The air tastes bitter and the rain burns without her, and even the hot desert air doesn’t replace her warmth. He hadn’t even gotten used to her room-temperature skin before-
At least in the spoils of Arizona he has an excuse to stay indoors.
*
This, of course, is ten years later, after, post, ex-
The unthinkable.
“Daddy, when is Mommy coming home?”
His fingers land with a sour mixture of notes on the piano keys, gathering her petite shoulders in his arms instead of empty notes.
“Someday.”
Edward dreads the day that answer won’t be enough to satisfy the poor girl.
*
He reads her letters on the precipice of a mountain, the scent of pine and herbivores and a coming storm bringing a piece of her back to him, a torn off bit of their past.
It begins-
My love,
I think of you every second of eternity, you and Renesmee. You can’t imagine how much I wish I could speak to you, hold you. I miss you all and I hope someday they’ll let me return to you.
And it ends, always.
He tries to imagine her with scarlet eyes and an ebony cloak, tries to reconcile it with the pretty girl he fell in love with here amongst the rain clouds and green.
The two go to war inside his skull until the pain jabs against his temples, ripping him apart from the inside.
*
He doesn’t bother to stock the Victorian house with furnishings and appliances. He’s become accustomed to the grain of mahogany beneath his fingertips, pressing his ear to the floorboards and listening to the house breathe.
He’d bought it when his head was still filled to the brim with visions of Dartmouth and watching the leaves turn from the back picture window. He’d hinged his hopes on restoring it with her; it seemed like she had an affinity for old fixer-uppers, himself included.
But now the pipes rust and the rain leaks through the roof like a sieve, unchecked.
It’s almost as if he’s a grumpy old man who lives in his bathrobe and scares away the neighborhood children. Shuffling from room to room. A widower waiting for death to be kind, just this once. But instead he has curses for the Volturi, the thoughts of the newlyweds next door and an eternity of time to contemplate every single one of his mistakes.
His daughter visits and pities him, takes him out hunting like a human might take her senile father out for dinner. He offers her a smile and assurances, but she eyes him wearily and promises to stop in later.
He waits for his wife. He waits and he waits and he listens to his neighbors as time passes. They bear a child, chastise him for stealing cookies, wish him well at graduation, shake with grief as he’s sent to war. Birthdays come and pass. There are more children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and he listens in fascination as two heartbeats fade to one in their sleep.
This is the life they should have had, together.
{sea}
Nessie would call herself an orphan if she didn’t think it would get back to her parents. But it’s true in some form; she was raised by her aunts and her uncles, her every whim attended to by her grandparents.
Her father worshipped her, but in his eyes she always saw stone, just the slowest trickle of life over a pebbly basin. He could never want her more than the mother she never truly knew.
It’s enough to distance them.
*
A tugboat charmingly named Diphtheria takes her across the Pacific Ocean, her hands buried deep inside her wool-mottled pockets. She wears an old jacket of her grandfather’s, plaid and worn, because it smells like the world she left behind, and she wears the shiny engagement ring on her finger because it reminds of where she’s going. Just… not quite yet.
The port village in China is molded around the docks and that night she sleeps on the damp, wood planks, under the stars so far from home.
*
Russia is cold. She doesn’t have much more to say on the matter.
*
She reaches southern India right around Monsoon season.
The rivers rise, swallowing the shores, and she waits out the worst of it in a hostel with white-washed walls and arched doorways. Her room is dark except for the grey light from outside, and it’s beside the sputtering windows that she thumbs through the pictures she brought with her. They’re mostly of her family, Jacob with the pack, the grandmother she never knew, but she lingers on the one of her parents, wiping away stray raindrops with her thumb. They look so… whole. Complete. It’s difficult to live with the knowledge that they hadn’t needed her, wanted her at first. She’d made a mess of everything without even trying.
She catches a boat across the Arabian Sea in the morning.
*
In the back of her mind she wishes she’d taken the other way around. Texas, to Mexico to South America, because she can imagine the shockedsurprisedexcited expression on Zafrina’s face if she’d visited her and it leaves her with an ache.
They’d been friends since she was tall enough to reach her knees, probably a little before then, and sometimes she feels the need to have a bear hug from someone besides Emmett.
*
Saudi Arabia turns to Iraq, then Turkey. By the next week she’s reached Europe and she dawdles in Greece, only half wanting to reach Italy. She knows what awaits her there and she’s hesitant to leave the cliff-side vacation home for which her grandparents lent her the key.
Her last night there, she tastes the sun set, listens to the smell of a gyro dance across her tongue, breathes in the sound of the sea lapping against the beach.
She almost always does things backwards.
{air}
Bella wishes that if she had one more chance she’d use it to go back in time and bite her tongue. That if she said I regret it, that it wouldn’t be a lie. Because the truth of the matter is, she’s glad she did what she did. If she thinks back, something she tries to avoid for obvious reasons, she can still recall the puff of air she’d exhaled just before-
“Wait.”
She avoided Edward’s horror-struck gaze as she licked her lips out of habit, stepping into the wide chasm between the Volturi’s side and theirs.
“Yes, dear?” She’d tried not to shiver at his voice, the glide of his silent feet.
“What if I make a deal with you? I go with you, you leave everyone else here alone. Unharmed.”
Aro’s face had been delighted then, and she’d swallowed back bile she didn’t know she could still taste.
“And you’d come back to Volterra with us?”
Her assenting nod had been weak.
“My-my Bella. Aren’t you the sainted mother.”
Unharmed.
Sacrificing had always been the easiest part of tragedy.
*
The girl is young, probably thirteen or fourteen, and when Demetri wraps one beefy hand around the back of her neck, she trembles. Of course it had to be a little girl. When Bella looks to Aro she realizes he didn’t choose her by chance.
This is how they’ll break her of her humanity.
“Go on.” He nudges her, like a parent urging their child to offer a carrot to the horse at a petting zoo. Only that metaphor is backwards.
Bella’s black eyes blink blankly as someone faceless raises a blade to the girl’s throat. Her whimper dissolves into an unheard gurgle.
Later, as Bella wipes the back of her mouth with her hand and resists the urge to lap up the excess off her own skin, her first thought is what would Edward think?
She’s never felt weaker.
*
She flexes her shield around her, building up its hide like the soles of her feet in summer.
“More.”
Bella growls.
“I’m fucking trying, alright?”
Jane smirks to herself, as if the girl is pleased that Bella’s tongue has grown sharper over time, like she’s becoming one of them. It gives her the added incentive to push harder, and Jane yelps as the now-physical shield slams her against the wall.
Bella laughs.
“Maybe you should be more careful what you wish for.”
*
Time passes.
The guard grows in number and in power. Some are executed when they outlive their usefulness and others rise in status, Bella without even trying. She puts down a small rebellion quietly at the Volterra gates; helps quash another brewing vampire war, this time in the African savannah; resolves a territorial dispute in China that leaves seven dead and adds two to their ranks. Her cloak stains darker, intensifies closer to black.
Powerful, they say.
The most pronounced gift they’ve seen since Jane and Alec, they say.
Cracked, they say.
The sun pirouettes the world as she watches apathetically, the need in her chest not expanding nor receding, merely consuming everything else inside of her.
Gold and diamonds still glint traitorously on her ring finger, catching her eye at the most inopportune moments. She has periods of what-ifing, times that no matter how hard she presses her head between her hands, she can’t squeeze out the thought that maybe everything could have been okay. Maybe if she’d had faith that her family would still be alive without her interference…
Her choked sob shakes the chandelier and she holds tighter.
*
“Bella, darling.”
Her head jerks up in synchronicity with her book snapping shut.
“Yes, master?”
Aro’s eyes linger on the tiny tee light burning steady in the alcove in her room – he used to say it seemed as if she had an affinity for keeping death and danger close.
“It appears that you have something of a visitor.”
*
She’s beautiful, of course. Her hair has thrived under the steady gaze of the sun and the honey color of it shines the light back out, a halo in the dim winter of the dark room.
“Mom.”
Renesmee’s arms are soft around her, barely holding her, and Bella sobs once into her neck.
“My baby.”
*
“There are conditions of course.”
Aro taps his spider fingers against the ancient desk, his eyes unpleased and narrowed.
“You, my dear.” He stabs a finger at Nessie. “Should never have come here. Quite unorthodox.”
“Please except my apologies.”
Her words are repentant but her tone holds a shimmer of barely disguised mocking.
Aro laughs.
“You are your father’s daughter.”
Bella’s dead heart lurches at the mention of him, but her face remains carefully neutral from decades of practice. She coughs.
“I suppose we should get back to business. Would you two be willing to strike a deal?”
The look exchanged between the two women is skeptical.
“I’ll let you leave for a visit, Bella.” He pauses, stoking their impatience. “But your daughter must remain here while you’re gone. Please forgive me, my darling, if I don’t trust you to return unless I retain something of yours. For safe keeping.”
Nessie nods before Bella has the opportunity to object.
“Excellent.”
*
Bella’s a rope of tense muscles and stagnant breaths as she watches the ‘buckle your seatbelts’ sign flicker, then extinguish. The window beside her is snapped shut, blinking back the sunlight that would expose her, and she’d booked an empty seat beside her. But still. The cabin is vibrating with seventy heartbeats quivering and thrumming and… this was a bad idea.
Her arm rest cracks.
“What can I get you ma’am?”
Her glare is murderous, a gigantic orange cone of get the fuck away from me. She should have just pretended she was asleep.
The flight attendant’s heart stutters along with her voice, and she pushes the cart further down the aisle. Problem solved.
But the woman leaves a trail of doubt and anticipation behind her. Suddenly Bella wonders if she’s spent too long with animals for Edward tell her anything but heel. Can he possibly still love her like this? Her self-control might have been historical, legendary even, but nearly a century of being force-fed humans and she’s reduced to a tigress snapping at antelope. She’s not his savior anymore.
(Not that she ever really was.)
*
He’s living in a partially consumed gingerbread house. The roof is concave, the sidewalk fractured, the gutters fallen and protruding like curious antennae, the shutters clinging to windows like miss-applied false eyelashes.
Her brain is defaulting to hysterical ramblings in her panic and suddenly everything seems hilarious, but she barely lets out one choked laughsob before-
Edward. And all she can think is you’ve really let yourself go, before: “Oh god.”
His arms wrap tight around her middle and her fingers thread through his hair and their lips tremble with blasphemous prayers.
IloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyou, is all she can manage to say articulately before he crushes his lips against hers. He scoops her up and this would be their Hollywood happy ending if they had the privilege to have an ending at all.
They get no rolling credits. They get no fade to black.
{earthquake}
Questions come after.
“How?”
Bella hitches her leg over his thigh, their bare legs wound together, and adjusts herself on the basement’s concrete. The interesting thing is, they’d started on the first floor, and he stares upward. If nothing else, this house has lovely rubble.
“Renesmee is with the Volturi.” Edward tenses. “Only until I-“
His arms around her relax, but his stomach seizes up and he has to resist the odd instinct to choke on her unspoken words. He spits them back up instead.
“Go back.”
Bella nods slowly and her hair shuffles against his chest.
“It’s okay.” He hugs her tight against him, embossing his assurances in the marble of her skin. “It’s okay.”
Maybe if he says it enough, it’ll start to be true.
{tsunami}
“It was a pleasure having you stay with us. We’d be honored to have you come again.”
Aro smiles like a concierge at a Midwestern hotel and her face hardens.
“Maybe sometime. Same terms?”
His expression falls a little, his hands coming to clasp onto one another at the waist of his robe.
“Well I was hoping I could have you both here beneath the same roof, but I suppose…” he trails off, and she knows better to think he’d done so absentmindedly. “Speaking of family, I do wish you’ll bring your own children for a visit, if indeed you end up procreating. Quite an interesting genealogy they will have, don’t you agree? Part wolf, part man, part vampire. Fascinating.”
His eyes gleam like she supposes a mad scientist’s might if faced with the prospect of examining Frankenstein, and she shudders.
“Don’t count on it,” she snarls as she hefts her bag onto her shoulder, and Aro grins condescendingly.
“Ah, youth.”
{tornado}
If they were normal, if they had tears and white bread on the top shelf and plaster casts and blank prescription pads, she would slip out while he was sleeping. Maybe she’d write a note in cursive and leave it tacked to his pillow. But he doesn’t, so this is much harder. An amputation without anesthesia.
Without promises. Because she still can’t bring herself to lie to his face.
“I’ll come back with you.”
“You can’t; they would never let a bond between guards be stronger than to them.”
“Maybe they will.”
“Or maybe they’ll just kill you on the spot.”
This is more than being wedged between boulders; this time they’re the rock and the hard place.
“Say you’ll come back.”
“I can’t promise-“
“Say it anyway.”
Her hand on his cheek reminds her of his sunken eyes and her feverish fingers, a swollen belly and bruised skin. Only then she’d been the believer.
“I’ll come back.”
He kisses her palm and she’s horrified to see that he believes her.
The plane ride back is different.