Night 50: F31-F40 Hallway
A ring. Like she did with the Exsphere earlier, Rita attempted to bring up the interface that would allow her to examine the gem's properties in better detail, but it was no use. All she had to go off of was the Head Doctor's explanation, and whether that could be trusted or not remained to be seen
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One was that it was night, and that she had missed the last two shifts ... and the second was that the doctor was talking about something on the intercom ... something about a surprise?
Instantly the teenager shot up and grabbed her flashlight, peering around the room. Where would a surprise be if there was one? She glanced under her pillow for a moment before moving over to her desk and began scouring the shelves, opening and closing the ones she had checked, her fingers running over every bottom and every top until she found exactly what she was looking for.
The moment her fingers touched the smooth ring, Bella pulled it out, glancing down at the strange thing before sliding it onto her finger and watching it gleam from the light of her flashlight.
Not bad, really. But she knew better.
Five minutes later the teenager realized she was wasting time and had to meet Edward half way between the rooms. "Shit," she cursed under her breath, quickly moving out of the room.
"I'll be back," she called to Claire over her shoulder as she left, her hand raising to quickly wave before vanishing completely.
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Bella burst into the room, moving towards her bed to peek under the mattress for the blade. "Where is it ..." she muttered under her breath, peering around for a few moments before moving to her closet.
Shoving the clothes aside, she bent down low, looking for the shining shard - but a spasm of pain shot through her back, and she drew in a breath, biting on her bottom lip quickly to silence the pain. A few moments later she was back to her normal self, and seconds after that she found the shard of glass on the floor of the closet. Reaching out with careful hands, her free hand moved to grab onto a spare shirt, and she wrapped it around the part she normally held onto, giving herself a handle. "There."
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She was not.
He almost did grab her and drag her the other way, but he remembered her palms and at least if she took him to it he could break it. How idiotic - how ridiculous did she have to be, thinking she could use a shard of glass for a weapon? Even he wouldn't do it, and his hands could heal in a minimal amount of time from that sort of injury. Actually, he would have grabbed her either way if he hadn't noticed her shutter. Give him a few years to watch her, and he knew her motions, knew how her body moved. When it was normal, or when it was... not.
He was angry about the weapon, but that could wait.
"You're hurt somewhere else, aren't you? Not just your hands." So he couldn't really blame her for the dishonesty being a two way road, but he had promised he was going to stop hiding injuries from her - at this point, they were an inevitable outcome, anyway. But she was doing the same to him, and she didn't even have the excuse of being inhuman. "Where is it?"
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A lie, but still.
"I'd have to take off my shirt to show you," she said with a soft hint of amusement. She doubted he wanted her to take it off, though, so she had a feeling she wasn't going to have to show him, either way. "One's on my shoulder blade ... and the other is just a scratch on the front of my opposite shoulder. Really, it's no big deal. I've had worse."
Edward didn't need to know that one of them was caused by a shard of glass being thrown, but if he were to ask she would tell him. Bella didn't like keeping secrets from him, just as she hoped he didn't like keeping secrets from her.
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Well. So much for that.
"If you turn around, may I lift the shirt up?" he asked, setting the pillowcase on top of her desk. He tried to keep his tone inflectionless; a doctor's inquiry, voiced only with disinterest. Of course, he very much was the opposite of disinterested, but he only wanted to examine the wound. Edward was very forcefully not thinking of their last kiss and how he metaphorically had his hands tied behind his back during the day. Even during the night, it seemed. He was almost afraid to touch her at all - funny, because now it would be so much harder to harm her.
"Let me... ah. Put those medical degrees to use. Unless it will make you uncomfortable." That was... embarrassing. Usually he was putting all his effort into making her keep her clothes on, not taking them off for him -
- despite what he wanted, he did have manners -
Thinking about the signs of infection were a good way of setting his thoughts to where they should be. "I just want to see if there's any indication the wound may be getting infected. I don't have a medical kit, but I know where we might be able to find one."
Disinterested.
Right.
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At the mention of a medical kit, the teenager perked up, remembering. "Oh, I have a health kit, remember?" Again, he probably didn't want to. "From ... well, you know, no need to ... dwell on things that make you want to lock me in closets and throw away the key."
Moving towards the desk that the vampire had just put his bag down on, Bella tried to remember where she had last seen the kit. Moving through the drawers quickly, by the time she found the hiding place of the kit, she knew.
However, it was ... jammed.
"Oh, come on," she grumbled under her voice, tugging at the handle rather forcefully. "It was fine before -"
When it suddenly flew open, causing her to wobble back unexpectantly. Righting herself, Bella's cheeks flushed a bright pink and she moved back over towards the drawer to grab the pack.
... However, within seconds of her cheeks turning pink, they became a dark red of surprise.
There, in the dim light of her flashlight, she could see it. Something all too familiar shimmering at the bottom of the drawer she knew to have been only to containing the pack hours before. Frozen in place for a few seconds, Bella almost didn't believe what she was seeing ... but seconds later she was moving a slow hand down towards the ring - her ring - and with her thumb and index finger, picked it up carefully, holding it up slowly so Edward could see.
She stared down at it in shock, her heart pounding. After a few seconds of enthrallment, Bella looked up at Edward and back down at the ring. "It. This ... wasn't here before ..." her voice took a lower tone, hardly even a whisper. "Was ... someone in my ... room?"
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He was about to move to help her open the drawer when it flew open - if he hadn't taken a step to the left, her head would've smacked into his chest. Although that whole display had been adorable - enough to coax a small smile from the vampire, at least - his eyes widened when he saw what she presented in her hand. A very familiar circle of gold. Untarnished. Unaltered. The gemstones set into the ring were still glittering cheerily up at him.
The vampire flinched away; the image of his rotten corpse of a mother from his first night flashed behind his eyes, foul enough to make him shutter. Then he was cold, or felt like it - the implication that someone might have been here. Edward didn't say anything before he was pacing like a mad hound; by the bed he lifted her sheets to his nose and inhaled, along with the pillow; he spread his fingers flat against the desk, bringing his face close to the wood; he even touched the other girl's bed, though not for long.
Nothing. And though he hadn't heard anything malevolent from Claire - outside of the name Sylar and what disgust she felt at its mention - he was immediately wary. "It's just you and Claire. Did she go through these drawers earlier? It makes no sense for her to have your ring, but she is the only other person outside of myself to come in the room from what I can tell."
Of course, he wanted to think perhaps Bella had only failed to notice it earlier, but believing something that simple was naive at best. He had to be on the alert; perhaps he should watch that blonde girl more closely. "A nurse, maybe. They come in to bring dinner, right? That doesn't make sense, either..."
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However, seconds later the vampire was practically running around her room, and she moved quickly into the corner next to her dresser, trying to stay out of the way. Her eyes lingered back down to her ring, thinking. Why would it suddenly appear in her desk? Perhaps it had been better if she lied to Edward and said she had seen it there before but thought she had been dreaming. If was strange that it would appear now, if at all. When she entered Landel's, they told her the life she knew she had lived was a lie, but ... if so, then why would the ring be there?
... Unless she was married to someone else in her "real life", and the same ring had been used.
The thought made her face pale even more, and she leaned back against the wall, not even wanting to think about who she was married to.
At that moment she was all too glad that Edward couldn't read her mind. He wouldn't like the mental image she was seeing.
"It's not Claire," Bella whispered softly, still lost in her thoughts for a moment before coming to reality. "I know it's not Claire. She's was new here as I was when I first was taken here. She was here the whole time I was, and there was no way she would have even known about my ring, or what it looked like. It's vintage, for Pete's sake! ... Or rather, antique ... there's no way she would have known that this was my ring, nuh uh, no way."
Edward was clearly worrying too much about the ring appearing, so she held it in her palm, closing her fingers over it gently, as if it were as fragile as an egg. "Anyway, it doesn't matter. I have it back, and that's all that matters, right?"
Bella was quiet for a moment, her eyes cast down to the floor, and when she finally spoke, her voice was once again a soft whisper. "Do you ... want me to wear it again?" she asked in reference to the jump she had seen. Was he mad at her for something she had done? Perhaps because she had gone out without him again.
... But could he be so mad as to call off their engagement as a punishment?
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"I don't think it's her either," he admitted truthfully, threading his fingers through his hair in a worried frenzy. No, she definitely seemed innocuous enough, and Bella's judge of character was better than his when telepathy wasn't involved. They probably had some sort of... female bond, too. Surely that would have helped?
He looked up to watch Bella at her silence, noting the careful way she held the thing in her hands. Edward knew she had never had any real desire to wear it in the first place, so he paused when she brought up her question.
Truth, right?
"Ah... truthfully? Yes, I would," the vampire said, averting his eyes from her face. "I like seeing it on your finger, but... not if you don't want it there. You don't have to wear it for me."
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Of course her roommate and her fiance would meet each other. Whether it be stalking (his fault) or pure chance (hers) she didn't know yet, so she eagerly awaited his answer to her question.
... And even more so than the answer, she wanted to know what they had spoken about. Her?
However, at Edward's next comment, Bella's face instantly lit up - for a second. Moments later she was back to being neutral ... an almost teasing smile crossing her lips as she moved over to him. "Of course I want to wear it. I asked you for the ring in the meadow for a reason, you know. I had promised myself I was ..." a hesitation, and her cheeks turned a slight pink. She turned her face to the side, embarrassed to tell him this secret. "... I promised myself that I was never going to take the ring off again, because it truly linked us together for everyone to see, but it was taken so it was out of my hands. But now that it's back ..."
With the ring still in her hand, Bella lifted her palm towards Edward with a determined look on her face. "I'm only going to ask this once because you know how embarrassed I am right now, but ... do you want to do the honors? ... Again?"
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And that train of thought crashed into a solid wall, burned for a moment, then exploded into a rather large assortment of fragments. Maybe he was having hearing problems. He'd turned rather human, so obtaining a few human ailments wouldn't be too out of the blue.
Edward was fairly sure she might have gone insane, too.
As much as he wanted to tease her - where was his Bella and who had cloned her? - he couldn't. Not for something like this, something he'd wanted to hear for a long time, since he realized she was exactly what he had always been waiting for. He dropped his hand from his hair, staring down at her with... what he was quite sure was the stupidest grin he'd ever held before.
"Nothing would make me happier," he said - completely truthfully - plucking his mother's ring from her palm and slipping it onto her left hand. Then he lifted it to his mouth and kissed it.
"I hope it stays put this time."
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However, at Edward's doofus grin, the teenager couldn't help but blush a bright red color, letting out a huff of defeat. She had known it was going to make him happy, but this ... he was like a child.
The feel of the cool metal slipping onto her finger, oddly enough, sent a calm feeling washing over her. It was as light as she remembered it to be ... light and perfect, almost like it was made to become a part of her. Shuddering slightly at the feel of his lips against her hand, Bella smiled up at Edward for a moment before allowing an amused grin to cross her lips as well. "And here I was thinking you were going to make a remark about me asking to put it on. I had a rebuttal all ready and everything - was going to call you Smugward. Maybe next time."
But honestly, she loved seeing Edward happy. It made her feel invincible.
... And she'd rather he be happy now, considering once he saw the stab wound on her back - if he recognized it as a stab wound, anyway, - he probably wasn't going to be very happy anymore.
... Unless he forgot.
With her hand still in his, Bella carefully moved her hand so their palms were aligned, and she entwined her fingers with his own, reforming that constant link between them once more. "I promise to take better care of it this time."
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No, he hadn't forgotten. She wasn't about to be that lucky.
"If it survives tonight, I think it will be able to survive anything." He snapped the box open, rather surprised to see how well-stocked it was: gauze, bandages, elastic... even instructions on how to mend basic injuries. He supposed that would have been necessary to training nurses, but it seemed a rather small treasure in a den of garbage. "Now, if you'll turn around and remove your shirt, we can get this over with. I want to see the one on your shoulder blade first."
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So she could tease him too. Who knew?
However, at the mention of her injuries once again, the teenager admitted defeat in ever trying to get away from his cautious side. She honestly knew better than to doubt his memory, what with it being photographic and all, but sometimes she hoped. Oh, how she hoped.
That being said, Bella turned and gave Edward a solid glare, watching him. "Fine. But you turn around too. No peeking."
Not that she minded. At all.
Once she knew he had done as she had asked, the teenager carefully removed her shirt (he said take it off, after all.), wincing when she pulled the piece of clothing over her head, stretching her arm. She only hoped that Edward was still turned around and that he didn't see her flinch.
With her shirt off and her back turned towards the vampire, Bella pulled her shirt close to the front of her chest and turned her head to look at the now bandaged stab wound on her back, sighing. There was a red splotch, but she knew that the wound was closed. Either way, the stain was from last night, so she hoped he wouldn't freak out about it.
Turning her head back towards the wall, she sighed. "Just ... promise me you won't freak out, okay? And if you do, none of that internal torture nonsense. I'd much rather you talk to me then to no one at all."
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Or so he was telling himself. He didn't have a choice - it was either human blood from an indirect source, or the living, breathing, beating actual source. His eyes were still red as a physical representation of the choice he'd made - the vial of blood in his bag even more so.
Deep breath. He smelled her immediately. Old blood and new, gauze, bandages. The fire in his throat roared up, angry and raw, but he ignored it. Now that he had become accustomed to human blood, all of it was particularly... strong.
"No internal torture. I may be able to do that," he said, then turned around, staring at the raw, red wound in her back. Maybe not. At least he held in his initial flare of rage, but all of what she called "internal torture" was still bubbling beneath the surface, along with all the thoughts associated with it. If he'd been with her, it wouldn't have happened - it'd be his wound, and that was all right.
Detachment, he heard in Carlisle's voice, reminding him of the training his pseudo-father had tried to instill in him. It'd never worked - not completely - but it helped. Carlisle could still be invested in his patients, but Edward hadn't had the control for that back then. He still didn't, really. Carlisle would always excel him in that.
He set his hands on her shoulders, eyeing the wound - it was clean, sharp; some sort of stab-like wound, but not enough force in it to be that. Not a knife, either. Too jagged and uneven for that. "I need to touch it, but it's going to hurt. Is that all right? I promise I wouldn't do it if it weren't necessary."
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