Luminosity

by Alicorn

  The house was a big wooden thing. Esme looked like she was in love with it as soon as we drove up in the rentals we'd gotten in the city. (Rosalie planned to go shopping for cars later on, but rentals were faster to obtain compared to the nice sorts of cars the Cullens liked.)

  While Carlisle prepped a place for me to do my turning and unpacked the necessary equipment to render me comatose, Edward scooped me up and ran me out to the coastline nearby so I could have a look at the view.

  The fjords were beautiful.

  When Edward got Carlisle's mental message that everything was set up, he murmured in my ear, "Whenever you're ready, Bella."

  Was I ready? I leaned on Edward and thought about it. I was pretty sure being a vampire would be excellent. I was afraid of the process.

  Three days, minus the duration of the coma.

  "There's no way to stop it once it's started, right?" I asked. If I could commit, now, to sticking it out, if I'd come through it whether I liked or not, whole and psychologically intact... that was fine. If there was some chance that I could beg and plead until Edward couldn't stand it anymore and undid the progress, then it would be for nothing.

  "No," he told me. "Bella, you can back out now, if you want. I promise I won't let anyone resent you for it. It's entirely up to you. If you want to wait, or change your mind, we can really just go on a tour of Europe with your heart still beating. You don't have to do this."

  "I want to be a vampire," I said. "I'm just not... totally unmoved by the steps I have to take to get there."

  He kissed my hairline. "You don't have to do it," he repeated.

  "I'm going to," I said firmly. And then, with less confidence - "You'll stay."

  "I'll stay," he promised. I looked into his eyes. He would stay, because I'd need him, even though every time I so much as flinched it would hurt him too.

  I knew I had recently been uncertain, because I'd written it down, but how had I not known I'd loved him?

  "I'm ready, then," I said, "as I'll ever be."

  Edward picked me up, held me tight, and brought me back to the house. I ate a square of chocolate - the last time any human food would taste good to me. I let it dissolve on my tongue slowly, and then I went to the room Carlisle had selected as the site of the transformation.

  I kept my eyes closed throughout the entire procedure while Carlisle drugged me into unconsciousness. I knew that once I fell asleep, Edward would plunge a vial of venom into my heart, and more into major pulse points - the more venom there was, the faster the change would be over with. I slipped away into darkness.

  I awoke in flames.

  * * *

  Chapter 13: Newborn

  The pain was nonsensical. For the first moment of consciousness, my brain examined the sensation and rejected it as obviously preposterous: it was not the sort of thing that happened. There could not be that much agony all in one instant. My nerves were obviously sending defective reports which could be safely ignored.

  But the fire was more persistent than that, and apart from the first split second, I was very aware of what was happening.

  It was everywhere - there was no refuge, no cool place to focus my attention and escape. My eyes were cooking in their own fluids, my blood was boiling in my veins, my skin was baking and browning and turning to ash, my bones were dissolving in acid, my lungs were turning every shallow breath I compulsively swallowed into superheated plasma, my organs were twisting and roiling in a bath of magma.

  I tried to jerk my body away. It was purely a reflex action - there was no "away" - but I was in no condition to fight the impulse. Dimly, I recognized that I hadn't moved. My muscles worked. Even in their screaming, melting contribution to my anguish, they would tense and release when commanded. I could twitch my fingers, but not flail myself across the room in a vain attempt to escape the burn.

  Edward.

  He was holding me, as he'd promised - keeping me still. He'd been right after all - the coolness might as well have not been there. There were no bands of reduced scorching where his arms wrapped around my body. But I knew he was with me.

  The pain didn't diminish at all. It would have more than consumed the brainpower I'd had available - before. But the change was well underway, and there was more room in my head...

  There was just a little corner of space left, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I could use to think.

  "Time," I demanded, biting out one syllable before clamping my jaw shut again, and hoping he knew what it meant.

  "You slept through the first thirty hours and fifteen minutes," he whispered in my ear at once. I focused every bit of attention I could on his voice. I wasn't sure if I was hallucinating or not when I thought I could hear more nuance to it - were my ears already improved? They were part of the conflagration with everything else. Ear-shaped furnaces on either side of my head. They could pick up sound anyway - and his voice was tense, miserable, but committed. He hated that I was in pain. That I was awake to hear what he said. But he would stay. "It's a quarter after four in the morning. Thursday. It should all be over at ten p.m. tomorrow if you're on time - you might be faster with all the venom in your system." He spoke through gritted teeth.

  Tomorrow. Over tomorrow.

  But not yet.

  I burned.

  * * *

  It took almost a full hour after my awakening before I truly wanted to die.

  This desire was almost as alien as the pain had been. (Now the pain was familiar, which meant only that I could individually dread each of the thousands of minutes that remained of my torment.) I had never previously wanted death, my flippant remarks to Edward about what he'd do if I begged to die notwithstanding.

  But nothing was worth this. I couldn't do anything in a millenium that would be worth another hour, even if it would then end. I couldn't do anything with the rest of eternity that would be worth the dozens that actually remained.

  At five o'clock in the morning on Thursday, I hoped with every fiber of my wracked and broiling being that he had lied when he'd said he wouldn't kill me, even if I begged.

  I begged.

  Choking on the words, hating the air that I formed into pleas, I asked to be killed.

  "No," said Edward, sounding like he was in as much pain as I. Impossible. "Bella, no. It will be over soon. Tomorrow."

  I hissed. Somewhere along the line I'd acquired vampire sounds, or at least that one. "Please," I screamed.

  "No." I thought I heard him moving; maybe he was hugging me tighter. I couldn't tell. Everything was fire and agony; nothing as trivial as Edward holding me was worth sending a message through my fried and shattered nerves. I didn't want him to hug me unless he was doing it to crush me to bits, to end it, to make it stop...

  I emitted a wordless wail.

  Time passed. I begged for death, intermittently, but Edward always refused. Sometimes his denials were weaker or tireder than others, less resolved, and then I thrashed and cried and sobbed. Maybe if I hurt him enough with my pain he'd want me to stop, want to let me have the only thing I could remember ever wanting.

  There was no such mercy. He didn't wrench my head free of my shoulders, didn't plunge his hand past my ribs to remove my inflamed, still-beating heart. He wouldn't kill me.

  After a few fruitless tries to convince Edward to salve my pain, I started calling for others. Alice, Carlisle, Esme, Jasper, Emmett, Rosalie. I could hear footsteps when they came. I heard each of them say no. Alice added a reassuring description of myself in the future, whole and strong and a vampire. "You're going to be beautiful," she promised before she left. Edward sighed in relief, when she said it. Some pretty vision. Not pretty enough to be worth this.

  But when I called Rosalie, she hesitated for just a moment after I asked.

  Edward roared. Had he been that terrifying when he'd snarled at James? It might simply have been my hearing, more powerful with each passing minute of conflagration, picking up some layer to the sound I'd missed before. But I knew what
it meant. She'd thought about it. She'd considered killing me. Emmett's blessed angel, truly, perhaps to deliver me -

  "Rose!" I screeched, seized with hope, convulsing in Edward's grip. "Rose Rose Rose Rose Rose Rose Rose -"

  "NO!" howled Edward. "Rosalie, get out of this room. I'll tear you to pieces if I hear that thought ever again, I'll do it - go."

  "Roooooooooose," I moaned. But her swift steps were receding. I thought I might have heard her leap out of a window.

  "Bella," said Edward. He was speaking very fast - I could keep up now, though it took most of my spare mental capacity. "Bella, please don't ask any more. I'm begging you. I can't stand it. I'll do anything you want but let you die. I can't do it. Anything else."

  "Can," I fought to utter several different syllables in a row, bereft of the chance Rosalie had almost offered, "can, you, break, my, spine."

  "What?"

  "It... will heal. But I'll - feel - less - till - then," I gasped, and then helplessly I screamed again. "Maybe," I panted.

  There was a still silence for a quarter of a second. (Durations of that length were becoming acutely important to me, and agonizingly distinct.)

  Then there was a tiny sharp pinch at the base of my neck, and everything from my shoulders down went limp and blissfully numb.

  I breathed, still, and I could hear my own heartbeat, but there was no sensory information from anything below the break. Edward's medical knowledge to the rescue - he'd known just what to sever. My neck and head burned still, unimproved, but the loss of torso and limbs was such a dramatic relief that I felt as though I'd been plunged into a tub of ice water.

  "Oh," I sighed.

  "It won't last the rest of the transformation," Edward warned. "And I can't do it again. Once it heals, it has to stay that way, or you might not come through properly."

  "How long?" I asked softly.

  "I don't know. Maybe a few hours."

  A few hours. A few hours in which only my throat and face and scalp and skull would be razed by the venom. But it was something.

  I wished I could sleep. But I would never sleep again.

  I was nearly lucid until my spine healed. I was able to open my roasting eyes and look at Edward's face, drawn and haggard with concern but still beautiful. I could emit complete sentences with only a few extra pauses for difficult, unrelieving breaths.

  "I'm sorry," I huffed, "for asking."

  He bent to kiss my blazing forehead. "I forgive you." He didn't repeat the plea that I not do it again, after the lower part of my body was back. Maybe he knew I wouldn't be able to resist.

  "I love you," I said.

  "I love you," he told me, looking intensely sorrowful. No "too". He'd never appended the word. Once I'd asked him why - I tried to conjure up the answer - it was too difficult. No memories were still clear through the haze of pain. I doubted I could remember my parents' names. I'd written everything down...

  Two hours, thirty-four minutes, and sixteen seconds after the break, my spine welded itself back together and I was plunged back into the unrelieved full-body agony.

  Once again, I screamed.

  * * *

  I could feel my mind becoming more capacious. It was like a fractal pattern, slowly sprouting new nodes. I came to have an ever more nuanced appreciation for each individual lash of fire that flayed my body, and every moment of the experience was indelibly recorded in my crystallizing perfect record of my vampire life. But the little space in the back of my head, which wasn't focused on the pain, also grew.

  Edward talked to me. I clung to his voice like a lifeline. I could still barely feel his arms around me, or the occasional kisses he touched to my skin, and I kept my eyes clenched firmly shut, but I could hear him, better with each elapsing hour. He gave me tips on controlling my thirst once it came. He read off Alice's weather forecast for the next month. He recited books. He promised me, over and over, that I had been right, that I would love being a vampire, that Alice saw it, that her vision was solid as rock, that everything would be fine and that he loved me and that it would be over soon.

  I tried to believe him. Tried to believe that there was some way that, on the other side of the pain, there was something worth it all. Tried to believe that, after I came out of the kiln, I'd have been fired and glazed to such a sheen...

  At eight in the evening on Friday, I felt my toes and fingertips cool ever so faintly. The fire receded languidly, taking its time. But as it pulled back from my extremities, it collected in my heart and my neck. The centers of my pain folded in on themselves until they were worse than ever, and even my newly cool extremities didn't quite compensate. My heartbeat fluttered faster. My throat ached. "It's almost over, Bella," Edward whispered. "Almost over."

  I hadn't even finished changing, and I was already thirsty. Before I might have been boiling - now I was clearly devoid of liquid. My parched throat demanded relief. I knew what Edward had meant when he'd speculated that some vampire must have tried drinking water. Anyone who came out of the transformation alone, confused, far from sweet-smelling humans, would find it the logical thing to try.

  The flames continued to pull inward, up my limbs, millimeter by millimeter. My throat didn't get any worse or better after the initial dry burst, but my heart did, as more and more of the agony drew towards it. Every beat came sooner after the previous one. It was vibrating like a hummingbird's wings.

  The intake of pain sped up as my pulse did. It was as though the doomed organ was trying to escape, to beat its way out of my ribcage, to drill a hole through something and thrum away from me. My limbs were entirely comfortable, but I couldn't pay them any attention as the heat raced towards my frenetically pounding heart. It contracted and constricted, assaulting my last living organ as it thudded in panic.

  By this time I was thrashing, unable to avoid the reflexive attempt to escape the pain in my chest. I keened an awful, shrill noise. Edward held me, and I couldn't get far. But then my heart skipped one beat, and spasmed one final time and released forever - and the pain was gone - and my pointless lunge in a random direction actually broke Edward's grip.

  My limbs automatically arranged themselves beneath me as momentum carried me. I crouched low to the floor, fingertips splayed out to touch the wood. My balance was absolute and certain. My muscles were unprotesting: they would hold me in this pose for a hundred years if I cared to remain still. I noticed that I wasn't breathing, and pulled in a lungful of air. It smelled mostly of Edward, a scent I recognized instantly, although just as promptly I discarded all my earlier analogies to flowers - I knew no flower would smell like that to my newly precise nose. It didn't relieve a lack of oxygen, because I didn't need any such thing, but it conveyed information, and my breaths settled into a natural rhythm to tell me what was in the air around me.

  "Bella?" murmured Edward, his voice tentative but filled with awe.

  I opened my eyes.

  * * *

  I was facing the wall. But it took me a moment to realize that it was a wall I was looking at, because I was captivated instantly by the beauty of the sight. My eyes drank in every detail of the woodgrain with perfect clarity. I could see each splinter, detect every subtle change in the color of the wood, see each divot and patch of wear and uneven stain. It was intensely lovely, and I stared.

  "Bella?" Edward said again.

  As soon as I decided to get up and face him, I was on my feet, looking his way. My body responded to my commands with delicious obedience. It swiftly composed itself as I wished it composed. It didn't pitch me in a wrong direction, or let any part dawdle, or catch on invisible obstacles, or protest at any motion. I noticed as I whirled around that the turn didn't blur my vision at all: the boards in the wall spun past without losing any definition, even when they passed into peripheral vision. My change of posture was so fast that I'd had only a tiny fraction of a second to notice this advantage, but I was more than quick enough to pick up on it anyway.

  Edward was spectacular.


  I had been staring at the wall, thinking it pretty; I'd spent months as a human, looking at Edward, finding him appealing. Insanity. I'd seen only his shadow. With these eyes, he was like some kind of deity, radiant and sculpted. Like nothing I'd ever seen before. I enjoyed a moment's skepticism that even Rosalie, even seen with this new and astonishing sight, would be the aesthetic equal of the vision that was Edward.

  I took another deep breath, tasting the air. Still mostly Edward. There was an unsatisfyingly damp, but alluring, smell under that, which made my throat itch and burn - myself as a human, having left traces? I tried to ignore it, and succeeded at shoving the thirst and the distracting odor into a little-used back nook of my expansive mind. I smelled more pleasant wafts from the direction of the door, heard more breathing than just mine and his. I turned my head twenty degrees to bring the others into my field of vision without losing the stunning sight of Edward. All of the Cullens were there, clustered together, looking at me with anticipation.

  All right, Rosalie was still the most beautiful person in the world, I grumbled inwardly - and then I noticed the light glinting off Alice's teeth, exposed in a self-satisfied grin. The light bounced into my eye in a spectrum of eightcolors, the last dazzlingly novel.

  "No one told me," I said in a voice like the bells Charlie liked to nickname me for, "that we can see in ultraviolet."

  * * *