by Alicorn
"Bella!" exclaimed Rosalie once I'd sat down. "I ordered everything you need. The hospital here didn't have it all but it wasn't hard to get and it's on its way and you can get started on Friday or Saturday. The whole thing will take a few weeks. I made Alice look and she said you don't need to worry about any complications, but I printed out a pamphlet for you of everything anyway, here." She shoved it across the table at me. "Will you be able to keep the meds hidden from your father? You have to go on the Pill first and then there's some injections you need to self-administer and I don't think he really needs to know what's going on. And we're going to need to do some blood tests - well," Rosalie winced, "Carlisle should probably do the blood tests, to be really safe, but I will be able to handle most everything else. Like the ultrasounds. Those I can do."
She was very excited about this. "Friday, sounds good," I said. "Charlie doesn't go through my stuff. I don't think he'll find anything - Alice?" I asked, turning to the littlest vampire.
"Looks clear," Alice said after a moment. Rosalie sat back, smug, and closed her eyes. Alice added, "I don't see anycomplications but that doesn't mean you won't get side effects - you won't need to miss school or anything, and probably no humans will be able to tell anything's wrong if you're careful."
"And a good thing the going is to be so smooth, too," murmured Edward mirthfully. "Jessica has just expressed the opinion that she thinks we're going to have at least six children."
I choked on my soda. "Jessica," I said, after recovering the ability to breathe and dabbing my face with a napkin, "has exceeded all expectations as a fountain of exaggerated gossip. I'll need to buy her a very nice birthday present."
"I think she's partly motivated by the desire to get Mike Newton to stop fixating on you," Edward said. His tone was light, but I thought I heard his teeth grinding a little. "I couldn't help but pick up her memory of the conversation where you tried to set them up - that was what you had in mind, wasn't it? She doesn't seem to have quite noticed that you were doing it on purpose, but it was clear enough to me from the words you used."
"Yes," I admitted. "That was the idea. How's it working?"
"As well as I suppose could be expected. She's still hoping he'll make the first move, though."
"Of course," I sighed. "Well, the original point was to deflect Mike - mind, he might be cute with Jessica, but that wasn't the important part. And Jessica's handling that just as well without taking him off my hands directly, I suppose. Making it known that I'm off the market."
"So I'm a little confused," Emmett said. "Are you and Edward actually "an item"," (he made exaggerted air quotes to accompany the phrase), "or are you just telling everybody that because it's part of your plan? Which is a cool plan, by the way. Think we should go to Scandinavia or something? They say Finnish is hard to learn. Bet I'm fluent first, Rose." He jostled Rosalie with his elbow and she smirked.
"You're good at languages because you have the mind of a child, Emmett," Alice said, so brightly that it took me a split second to notice that this was not quite a compliment. Emmett took a little longer, but just a little, and then he tossed the pasta salad that was his prop for the day at Alice's face. She wasn't even looking in his direction when she picked up her tray to shield herself from the projectile.
"Scandinavia might work," I said. "We can go look at fjords."
"Hey, answer my other question," protested Emmett. Alice produced a napkin and smeared off the mayonnaise that had coated her tray, then wiped the pasta salad bits back onto their original plate.
I huffed. "It's important to the plan that, by the time I have to tell everyone we've eloped, it seem characteristic of us," I said. "That's why I told Jessica the way I did."
Emmett considered this for a second, then realized that it wasn't an answer to his original inquiry either. "Hey..."
Edward's arm, still around my shoulders, squeezed me protectively. "You don't need to make up your mind now," he murmured to me, and he shot Emmett a look. The giant vampire - the more I looked at Emmett, the odder it was that he could pass for a high-schooler; did people think he'd repeated grades or what? - grumbled but didn't push it.
It was good of Edward to deflect his brother - even though Edward must have been dying to know my answer too. It couldn't be comfortable for him - none of this could. I wished, suddenly, that I could read minds - his in particular - to sift through the knots in his head that caused those overcomplicated faces he made. He wanted me alive, he wanted me human; he wanted me to love him, he wanted me not to be put on the spot about it; he wanted to follow Alice's instructions to go slow, but he was having plenty of fun participating in our showy exhibition of public affection... On some oddly timed impulse, he lifted his hand from my arm and stroked my hair. I could barely feel the cold of his fingertips against my scalp. He was very gentle, very careful - how hard was it for him to touch me without hurting me? Was fine motor control lost with the acquisition of super-strength? It didn't seem like it, but he was so timid...
"You're not squeamish about needles, are you, Bella?" Rosalie asked suddenly.
"Uh - I'm a little squeamish about blood, but not needles per se. I should be able to handle the injections, I think, and I can close my eyes while Carlisle does the blood tests. I think. I'm not sure." I hesitated, then said, "If I'm wrong, then I might want Jasper to help -"
"No," said Edward at once. I looked up at him expectantly.
"That wouldn't be a good idea," said Alice softly. Jasper was scowling, and he took an angry swig from his water bottle. Like he was an alcoholic, and he kept drinking his surrogate liquor, knowing with every taste that it wasn't what he wanted...
"Oh," I said. Okay. No broken human skin near Jasper. That must have been why Rosalie hadn't suggested he be the next to go to medical school...
I resolved, again, for the thousandth time, that I must never slip up as a vampire. Never.Not once. Maybe there were good reasons that even Alice and Emmett hadn't acquired degrees in medicine. Only Carlisle's perfect record, Rosalie's bloodless murders, Edward's unbroken control... those were the only histories that preceded the ability to tolerate proximity to blood, and there were so many ways humans could be made to bleed.
"How do you manage as well as you do?" I asked, trying to make my voice gentle and the question general, to avoid hurting Jasper. "People must get paper cuts, fall down and scrape their knees open, pick at hangnails a little too much - if nothing else, a good fraction of the girls are going to be having periods at any given time." The last bit made Emmett snigger; Rosalie rolled her eyes, but there was a flash of envy on her face. I regretted mentioning in front of her that every human female in the school had something she desperately wanted, and had lost.
"Alice and I can give some advance warning, before the smell hits," Edward murmured to me. "Alice can often get information far enough ahead of time that we can make sure not to be hungry on the wrong days. Not always," he said wryly. I remembered: his eyes had been pure black the day I'd first arrived. "We don't come to school in hunting mode. And we can get away with suddenly leaving class, sometimes - our grades are all perfect in spite of our skipping school on sunny days, and so we get a certain amount of leeway." He coughed - this had to be solely for effect, to signal what a gentleman he was, but he did it anyway - and continued: "The last item you mentioned isn't as much of a problem as you might imagine. That blood is... "dead", in a way. It's only a little worse than normal."
That seemed a little convenient, but since Jasper didn't seem to have a history of devouring high schoolers during their time of the month - or any other time - I took his word for it. And I decided to ask Alice or Esme privately, later, if there were any particular products that would do a better or worse job of making me unlikely to be the latest slip-up in the remaining months I needed to spend dealing with that issue.
"So," Emmett said cheerfully. "Squeamish about blood, Bella? How do you deal with..."
Rosalie kicked him, and I made a face. "Doesn't seem to be your day to get
your questions answered, Emmett," I muttered.
"Seems not," he said, agreeably enough. "It's funny, though, you want to be a vampire so bad and you're scared of blood."
"It's the smell I don't care for," I said. "Like rust, and salt - I don't imagine it smells like that to any vampires, even ones who used to hate blood."
"I wonder if that would help, though," mused Alice. "I see you near humans without even looking like you want to eat them, with bright red newborn eyes - and I heard you guessing about it yesterday, and that makes some sense, but even Carlisle avoided humans early on. What if blood still doesn't seem appetizing to you, later?"
"Well," I said, "when I'm a vampire, I will definitely tell you all about how my thoughts on blood change, Alice."
She got what I meant, and scrunched up her face. "Nope, I'm wrong," she said. "You describe it like you sense it normally, for a vampire."
"That's weird," I muttered. "Not weird that I'd react normally - weird that you can see things like that. I mean, now that we already know, I'm not likely to bother taking a minute to describe it to you later, am I? But you saw it anyway."
"Being psychic would be so much less useful if no one could use the information," Alice said, opening her eyes. "Maybe I'm just seeing what would happen conditional on my not telling anyone. I don't see you having that conversation with me anymore, since the possibility that I didn't tell anyone no longer exists."
"But you must often look at things having already firmly decided to share what you see," I began, and then the bell rang. I ate my banana on the way to Biology, having been distracted enough by the conversation to barely pick at my lunch.
* * *
Chapter 9: Witches and Werewolves
I wondered, during Biology as the teacher nattered on interminably about cell walls, how much it was going to hurt the Bella-and-Edward-are-Together Show that I'd changed lab partners. Angela and Mike at least knew I'd done it deliberately. I didn't know what they thought my motives really were - Mike at least had seen the way Edward had first looked at me.
And it would be just like Mike to jump to conclusions about that, decide I was in an abusive relationship, and think I must needhim available to turn to... I hoped Jessica would distract him enough. If Mike had anysense - or, if he lacked sense in certain possible ways - he wouldn't be thrown off by a sappy public image: there was no actual reason it couldn't coexist with dreadful mistreatment behind the scenes.
It wouldn't just be annoying to me if Mike got too nosy - he could get himself killed or have to be vamped, if he found anything out. (Although... just what surveillance mechanisms did the Volturi have, anyway? Did they have an Alice-equivalent among their guard, or something less effective? If someone bugged the Cullens' house while they were all out, saw some things, figured others out - could they go to the grave never telling, without being hunted down?)
I crossed my fingers. I didn't think this would accomplish anything, but it was a way to put my hope out in the world without writing anything down, and I knew what it meant whereas Alice would likely be puzzled. Although perhaps, I reflected, I should warn the vampires anyway - but Mike hadn't shown signs of being insufferable about it, let alone dangerously inquisitive. Yet. I'd make Wednesday my sit-with-the-humans day and check in... or I could let Edward, just him, know, and get him to spy...
I made a face, tilting my head forward first so my hair would get in the way of Angela or anyone else noticing. Edward had such aconvenient power. It was just outrageously tempting to ask him to use it when I wasn't even sure of its necessity. Alice had been right - show me a mystery and I would poke, poke, poke at it until I figured it out or I wasdead. I bit my lip: I would not ask Edward to invade Mike's privacy based on vague concerns that I could probably check up on without needing any telepathy at all. I valuedmy privacy so much - it would be the absolute height of conceit to assume Mike's was less important.
On that subject, it was about time for me to pin Alice in place long enough to see about getting myself some notebooky privacy, too. I'd visit that afternoon and try to catch her then - but after that, homework, definitely homework. Negative academic attention - from teachers or from Charlie - was the last thing I needed.
I supported my chin with my hand, let jargon about cell anatomy wash over me, and wondered what fjords looked like up close.
* * *
I did get Alice to conduct a quick experiment with me as soon as I got to their house. Although vampires could see in the dark, she didn't have the ability to move her vantage point quite as she pleased. She tended not to see things as though she were peering out from under beds or behind picture frames. It was more like she was standing, at her normal height with her normal visual acuity (except for uncertainty-induced blurriness), in whatever place she looked at.
It wasn't impossible that she would be able to see what I typed if I put my keyboard under something opaque and turned off my monitor, but it almost certainly wouldn't happen by accident, and she promised not to try for those visions outside of dire emergencies. (I made her specify, in this promise, that "dire emergencies" were those where she could see likely futures in which the situation was explained to me and I agreed that she had to look at the writing. I wasn't sure enough about Alice's judgment, this early on in our acquaintance, that I was prepared to leave it entirely up to her.) So I could type in privacy, and if I draped a thick blanket over myself and pressed my nose right up against the backlit screen, I could re-read later in privacy, too.
The notebooks were not as easy to address. I touch-typed, but if I tried to write longhand without being able to see, I wound up with illegible scribbles that meandered all over the page. And if I ducked under a blanket that was thin enough to admit lamplight, it would also be thin enough that a vampire could see through it pretty effectively. They had a better-than-human ability to separate out the noise of an intermediate layer of material from the objects behind it. A vampire would have no trouble telling what was going on behind a screen door, even a painted one with a distracting picture on the near side, as long as there were enough intact little perforations. A human would see the screen and stop there and ignore anything spotted through the holes.
So I decided to continue writing anything private in confusing personal code, and use my computer more, when it was available. This plan had the weak point of relying on my shifty, wobbly memory to fill in the gaps that the shorthand inevitably left, but it was only for a few months - after that, I expected to need no notebooks at all.
After I'd had this discussion with Alice, I set up at the kitchen table and did homework, only half-concentrating on the worksheets and the index cards for my presentation in Government. Edward sat with me. He was good about not doing anything to distract me; he only watched. No one could hold still like a vampire. But he still had that property, whatever it was, that made my eyes slide towards him; whenever he shifted position to better have a look at what I was doing, my ears perked up to listen.
He was sitting close enough that I could smell his breath - it didn't smell like a human's breath at all. It didn't smell wet in the same way - it was almost floral. That was peculiar- it had to be the venom I was smelling, but why would it smell like lilacs? Or not lilacs - I wasn't sure what flower to compare it to. Something nice, anyway. But why? It wasn't as though vampires needed to attract prey. They just needed to catch someone alone, somewhere inconspicuous, and once they did that, the result was already overdetermined by their power and speed. Vampires were certainly ridiculously overengineered, and I couldn't wait to play with all the new abilities...
With effort, I wrenched my attention back to the rectangle of cardstock I was trying to transfer notes to. The executive branch, it said already in my awful handwriting. I made a small grumbling noise and completed the sentence. Perfect recall was going to be mine in a few short months. And I was learning pointless things I wouldn't remember in two weeks, let alone a hundred years, because I was seventeen and that meant I had to go to high schoo
l and spit back the right information in the right format at the right time.
"Don't they assign you any homework?" I asked, pulling out a new index card.
"I can do it at night," he said. The unspoken reason was so I don't have to lose any time with you. I was learning to read Edward's face and tone fairly well, at least when his feelings were expressed one at a time, not in a tangle.
"I can't be that interesting to watch. I am me and I'm bored out of my skull," I muttered, writing a note on the new index card.
"You're the one who wanted to do homework," he said lightly. "I'm not bored, though, Bella."
What had put me on Edward's list of possible soulmates? I took another card and almost wrote that question on it instead of the presentation note that belonged there. I stuck my tongue out at the card, wrote the correct note on it, and then pretended not to know what to write on the next one. What was it about me? He couldn't have known instantly, or he would have acted differently when he'd first seen me. So it probably had nothing to do with my looks. That was comforting, on some level.
I'd thought it correlated with the potential for extra vampire powers, which correlated with actually being turned, to explain how many vampires seemed to pair off without eating their mates first. Or possibly beauty, which was another selection criterion. I didn't think of myself as pretty, and didn't trust my parents' evaluations to the contrary a bit. But even if Edward's feelings could be explained away by magic, Mike's and Eric's couldn't, and it was pushing it to speculate that they'd only been interested because I was new. So maybe I was pretty.
I wrote the next note, pulled out another card, and sighed. I was probably decent-looking enough to make a pretty vampire, at least - I was looking forward to that for so many reasons, and that was a trivial one, but it still existed.
I wrote a note. I grabbed a new card. I hated Government. I normally felt neutral about it - the material was undertaken laboriously slowly, but at least it was new to me, and the teacher was reasonably competent. But why did it have to assign me a presentation when I wanted so badly to have time to think? I supposed the teacher had no way of knowing - and shouldn't have had any way of knowing - when these times were.