we're not the same dear; you've changed in the moonlight (bella/edward, carlisle) pg
Title: we're not the same dear; you've changed in the moonlight
Fandom: Twilight
Pairing/Characters: Bella/Edward, Carlisle
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1309
Spoilers: Speculation for the events of Breaking Dawn, but no actual spoilers.
Summary: It’s not quite that everything is louder, turned up in volume and bass, but that she can hear everything. Bella slowly comes into consciousness near the end of her change and gets a feel for her new life.
The fire swells like waves, surges from the tips of her toes then recedes into her chest, an ocean of hell bottled tight inside her skin. She should be melting, a still-rational part of her brain argues, something about 100 degrees and boiling points and she knows she’s way past that now. But there’s a lull and she doesn’t breathe, afraid moving at all might remind the pain she’s still there, still alive. At least in some sense of the word. Bella takes the moment of reprieve to feel, to experience anything other than the sweltering heat. The sheets beneath her are cool to the touch, damp with her sweat and icy from the bodies that have lain beside her, keeping her company. She can’t recall faces or names, just thoughts and emotions.
Lips. Second-hand regret. I wish I’d told him, one last time.
It’s not fair. You know it’ll all turn out okay. A woman’s small arms wrapped around her, skinny but strong.
Envy. A cool finger traced along her collarbone. I don’t blame you for judging me.
Fire and ice clash together in her memories, eventually one melting the other and then vice vera. All she could see was jagged edges and broken glass piercing her skin, darkness suffocating her but never quite closing in, a sharp pitch that could have been her voice.
She swallows now, a thirst she doesn’t recognize edging on offensive but she’s still too paralyzed to act on it.
The air is stale and the room is dark; she can tell even though her eyes are still sewn shut because her eyelids are opaque and impenetrable, no light seeping through. Bella listens for the crackle of flames but she’s met with silence. No, not silence. Deafening noise, disguised at first as the roaring blank of quiet. It’s not quite that everything is louder, turned up in volume and bass, but that she can hear everything.
There’s a bird, a worm-eater judging from the scratch of its feet on the branch, outside the window in the forest. Someone large, probably Emmett, is adjusting in his seat in front of the TV… sounds like the news. A boy died in Seattle. Hit and run. No suspects.
She frowns in discomfort, shifting her shoulders, temporarily forgetting for a moment about the fear that the pain will return. With the movement she hears her bracelet jingle like it’s clear as day, even though it’s muffled by the blankets. She can make out the distinction between the wooden charm and the diamond one, traces the tinkle of each chink as they knock into one another.
She wonders if it’s nature’s final joke that she can hear her own heartbeat only after she no longer has one to listen to.
It’s then that she hears the voices. Soft to human ears, whispering outside of the bedroom door, but she can make out each of the words. Edward and Carlisle. As if volume would shield her from them.
“… just a few hours at most.”
“I’m worried. What if something went wrong? I’ve never done this before, what if there’s something abnormal about my venom?”
“Relax, Edward. You’ll see, in time. All things will be as they are meant to be.”
“If that were true, none of us would be here right now.”
“Don’t say such things in duress. She’ll think you regret this, and there couldn’t be anything more terrifying to her.”
“Do you think… will I be able to read her mind now that she’s one of us?”
The thought appears random at first, but she can trace the process that led to it, and apparently so can Carlisle.
“Is that what you really wish to know? Or whether she’ll be able to read yours?”
There’s a pause. The bird outside lands lightly on the grass, pecking fruitlessly into the ground.
“What would make you say that?”
“These abilities we have. They’re all predictable, somewhat, once you see the end result. You haven’t considered the possibility? You must know that her mind’s impenetrability to your gift might play a role.”
“I considered that, yes.”
“You should be prepared. None of us really know what to expect.”
“Except Alice, you mean.”
“Even she can’t see everything. We all have our limits.”
“It’s easy to forget that, sometimes.”
As she listens to his voice it strikes her, not for the first time, how old-fashioned his way of speaking is compared to her own. Almost like she’d seen in period movies with ruffled shirts and Great War headlines and horses and buggies. She wonders if a hundred years from now if others would listen to her and think the same thing. It seems impossible, but she knows it’s a fact, just like she knows that everyone she had loved would die and turn to ashes and to her it would seem like no time had passed at all.
She feels safe enough to shift more substantially, flexing her fingers into the sheets and curling her toes. She feels… different. Stronger, maybe. Harder, definitely. Her skin doesn’t feel cold, like she’d expected; now she feels no temperature at all in fact. No, she feels more solid than anything. Impenetrable. She’s here to stay.
“I believe you have a wife waiting for you.”
“Bella?”
Her eyes remain shut to his voice, even though there’s a addicted part of her that still seeks out his face, his skin pressed flush to hers. But the newness of it all is still flooding her, rushing in through her ears and her nose and her marble skin, and she’s still waiting patiently for sight to return to her. Bella has a flash suddenly, of kittens wet from the womb with their eyelids fused shut, blind to the world that awaits them, and she wonders if it’s fate’s way of preparing one for the shock of existence. The solitary reality of one soul in one body and every woman for herself. But that’s not right, not quite. She’s a wife now, and a sister, and she isn’t anymore alone now than she was when the venom first thrummed in her aorta and darkness fell solid and torturous. She is one with a family, even if she alone is one with herself.
The pressure on the bed shifts slightly as a body sits bedside her. Feeling momentarily helpless, she soaks in the feeling of Edward’s fingers along her forehead, her cheek, her jaw line. The touch no longer chills her, leaving goose bumps as tiny footprints of where his skin had met hers. Her lips part, and though she feels thirsty the skin doesn’t crack and bleed like she’d expected it to after three days without water. No, she’s done with breaking apart.
“Bella, are you awake?”
It occurs to her that he can no longer tell by listening to the rhythm of her heart or the pace of her breath. She wonders if he will miss that; that extra insight into her shrouded mind. There are so many things like that that worry her, make her pause. Will he miss her human smell? Will she find him just as enticing now that she isn’t technically his dinner on the evolutionary food chain? It’s what causes her to hesitate, to second-guess and concentrate on the darkness, even though she knows now that it’s in her power to open them. Who knows when the next time she’ll see the serenity of her eyelids again? Now that she doesn’t need to blink or sleep, they might become another foreign land, like her house back in Forks or the high school or Angela’s house. Memories fade, but she won’t.
So Bella opens her blood red eyes to the new world because this isn’t an ending, nor a beginning; this is time. And time waits for no woman, even the immortal ones.