by Alicorn
It was part of Edward; he wasn't going to stop being from 1901 no matter how much I rolled my eyes. If I pushed him into breaking or giving up a superstition or a cultural more from his origins, he might bend, he'd absolutely forgive me - but I didn't want to abuse his willingness to make me happy like that. It would be immature, it would be wrong, to traipse about running on every whim and every desire except the desire to make Edward happy simply because he'd settle for anything I threw his way.
And so, I reflected, as I shut Alice's door behind me, I'd be patient.
As patient as a newborn vampire could be.
* * *
Even a vampire has a little trouble reaching a zipper right in the middle of her back. But eventually I got dressed without making up my mind to request Alice's help, and so she didn't appear. I turned around in front of the full length mirror that Alice had set up in her room since I'd last visited it. The dress fit perfectly, and I liked the look of me in it, although I could have easily tolerated waiting a few days to admire myself if it hadn't been for Alice. I liked the look of practically everything. Colors were more vivid, textures were not only tangible but visible, sounds from miles away could catch my ear with distinct edges and timbres, everything bore its own smell -
The clothes I'd changed from when I'd put on the ruined blue silk were still in Alice's room, and unlike Esme's clothes, they weren't ripped. (Such a track record I had with garments already. It was lucky that Alice would consider it an immense personal favor to her if I asked her to pick me up a few things.) However, they still bore my old human scent. I put the wedding dress back on its mannequin and picked them up.
Bella-the-human smelled unbearably appetizing. My thirst flared to life as I moved the outfit through the air, wafting it towards my nose. All my control over myself was poised to snap; it held only because the desire had no direction. There was no Bella-the-human present to spring at, to tear open, to desiccate of life.
I had smelled only traces of humans. My own clothes and the dissipating presence of whoever had delivered my dress. In neither case had there been an enticing heartbeat, a telltale sound of needful breath, or anywhere near the intensity of fragrance a live, present human would put out. I wasn't sure what I would do if I met one - what I could do.
I didn't think I could get all the way to Ukraine without meeting one. If nothing else, Alice had implied that the service would be conducted by a human. I didn't think the Cullens had any vampire friends there with the authority to officiate weddings that they'd just conveniently neglected to mention.
I could hear Alice relating the story now, to some inquisitive future addition to the family: "Oh, we're all married. Except Edward and Bella. She ate the justice of the peace, and we had to run."
I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth. I brought my shirt up to my face. I took a deep breath.
What do I want?
Blood. That wasn't even difficult to acknowledge. I'd known to expect it, and it manifested itself with a desperate intensity that overrode any discomfort with the notion.
But not just blood. I wanted other things. I wanted to make it through my wedding without slaughtering any defenseless Ukrainians. I wanted to avoid attracting the Volturi with conspicuous mistakes. I wanted things unrelated to blood - to be with Edward, to see the world, to learn things, to find a way to activate wolves and turn vampires as a life-preservation measure on a large scale without getting anyone killed or pissed off.
I didn't want to want blood.
The problem was balance. My obedient, responsive vampire body didn't care all that much what I wanted to want. That wasn't the sort of impulse that called for my arm to extend or my foot to twist; no physical act would manage it. My muscles would seize what Iwanted seized, even if I hated the fact that I wanted it - unless I could contradict that first want with another, stronger, object-level preference.
I breathed again. So luscious - and worse for Edward, far worse - and he'd resisted, hadn't swallowed the succulent blood from my dying body even given every opportunity. What had hewanted, more than that taste? More than the relief from that aching burn in his throat, fueled with every breath he took while I was near?
That I be alive, and happy, and not still and empty on the ground, of course. Once he knew me, once he loved me. But not at first. What had held him back when first we'd crossed paths? Why, after sitting through the most agonizing biology class of his life, had Edward not offered to escort me to my next class, led me astray, taken me out to the woods, and drained every drop?
Perhaps I ought to inquire.
I put on my tantalizing clothes, infused with insistently ambrosial Essence of Bella, and went to locate my fiancé.
* * *
Edward was still in the front hall; I could hear him talking to Alice before I'd gone down enough stairs to see either of them. He was confirming some detail about his own wedding outfit, using unfamiliar words that must have been technical tuxedo-related terms.
They heard my footsteps, although I walked very softly. "Bella!" exclaimed Alice, once my toes touched the first floor. "Do you like your dress?"
"It's perfect, Alice," I assured her. "Is there anything else I need to do in that vein?"
She shook her head. "Everything's all set. There's not going to be cake and only a few flowers that I can get last-minute from a place in Ukraine. It can't look for the pictures like you planned this ahead of time, and we can't eat a cake."
"You mentioned a cake, earlier," I recalled, with some difficulty. "When you first asked to plan things..."
"It was possible then that you'd have gotten married, or taken pictures to make it look like you did, while still human, and you could have eaten a cake," Alice explained. "Now you can't. Well, you could swallow pieces of cake, but you wouldn't like it. So we're skipping that." She sighed. "It would have been fun to go shopping for a cake, though..."
"Actually, speaking of shopping," I said. "My clothes all still smell like... me. I can live with that... but I'd rather not have to do it twenty-four hours a day. And it looks like I'm going to be destroying them pretty fast, so I'd feel bad about borrowing more from Esme. I was wondering if you'd mind going into town and getting me some things."
Alice was already nodding by the time I was halfway through the third sentence. Her grin was entirely too manic. I continued: "Normal clothes. That blue dress was pretty, but if I'm going to destroy things I'd rather destroy jeans and stuff, you know?" She pouted at me, and I rolled my eyes. "Why do you like putting me into such fancy clothes, anyway? You don't go around in evening gowns all the time yourself."
"I mostly just like buying them," she admitted sheepishly.
"Start a charity where you donate prom dresses to deserving high schoolers, or something," I proposed. "But I want pants and shirts and whatnot - you know what I wear." She was still pouting. "They can be nice pants and shirts and whatnot," I conceded, laughing a little, "if youreally want. But I don't expect to attend a cocktail party any time soon."
"Okay, fiiiine," she grumbled, but there was a glint in her eye. "I'll be back in a few hours." And with that she was out the door.
I turned to Edward.
"Let's go look at the fjords," I said. He nodded in assent, and we ran to the shore.
* * *
Fjords were more beautiful when they weren't stark, inaccessible features of the landscape.
I was outrageously distractable, really. Having intended only to go to a private location to ask Edward potentially awkward questions, the first thing I did when confronted with a sheer cliff as a vampire was to swan-dive off of it, whooping with laughter all the way down.
I landed in the water, where I quit breathing. Inhaling water wouldn't do me harm, but it would mean I'd have to cough it up before I could breathe air normally again. I was less buoyant than I remembered being as a human; however, it was easy to stay at the surface of the water as I preferred just by kicking. I stroked easily over to the cliff and climbed up it, grabbing eve
ry handhold surely and scooping out my own when I felt like it. The rock came away easily when I clawed at it. It felt a little like packed brown sugar - stiff, but readily yielding to pressure from my hands.
I reached the top in about six seconds. Edward was smiling indulgently at me. I swung myself up over the side and, soaking wet, lay down on the cliff edge in the sunshine to dry off. I looked up at him. "Oh, right," I said. "I wanted to ask you something."
"What's that?" he asked, sitting down beside me and picking up my right hand.
"How did you avoid killing me, the first day we met?" I asked.
Edward's hands tightened around mine, and he didn't seem to like the question much. "Why do you want to talk about that?"
"I have to know how to handle being around humans. You're the only one who's encountered a singer without killing - and that's having tasted human blood before - so your control is probably what I should be trying to emulate. I'll talk to Rosalie, too, since she was a newborn when she killed those people without eating any, so that's something. And Carlisle. But I wanted to start with you."
He nodded slowly, appreciating the sense of the request, and closed his eyes. "I didn't get a whiff until you walked in front of the vent in the classroom," he remembered. "For the first half second or so I was just... reeling. It was like nothing else. And then you looked at me. That saved you - that I suddenly had to remember that you were a person - and I could see my face reflected in your eyes. I looked like a monster. A monster I didn't want to be, that I was anyway."
Edward paused, reflecting. "You mentioned that in a vampire mind, there is room for emotions to expand, but that as long as you catch them before they do, they aren't very hard to deal with. When I first realized what you smelled like, my thoughts were too full of murder too quickly for me to control them, or do the sane thing and hold my breath. The only reason I didn't attack you instantly was because I was trying to come up with a way to do it without extending the collateral damage outside the students and the teacher in the one classroom. I was trying to choose a route to go by while I killed them all that wouldn't let anyone see me coming with enough time to scream. The need to destroy evidence is deeply ingrained - I'd been following that rule for long enough, consistently enough, that it managed to stick. The more people I killed, the harder that would be to do.
"Someone closed a folder, on the opposite side of me, and I got one breath of air that wasn't full of your scent," he continued. He seemed to be shedding some of his discomfort with the story as I looked up at him, undisturbed, undamaged. "It gave me a second in which I could think clearly. I didn't want to disappoint Carlisle, to kill a room full of children, to destroy everything my family stood for, to undo a lifetime's worth of denial just because a stranger with horribly desirable blood had wandered into an unlikely town. I stopped breathing. It was the scent that was the problem - I could remember it, and perfectly, but I didn't have to add to the temptation."
I asked, "Was that all? Getting ahold of yourself for a moment so you could hold your breath?"
He shook his head. "I fought my way through that hour by focusing on everything but imagining how you'd taste. I - This part is hard to talk about."
"Tell me," I insisted.
"I hated you," he admitted, sounding like he was confessing sins to a priest. "I can barely imagine, now, but I did - if I hated you, it was at least something to think about that didn't bring me closer to killing you. I imagine Rosalie will tell you something different. But she only killed, didn't drink, and hatred helped her draw that line. I didn't want you dead, exactly. I only hated what you caused in me. I thought I hated you, but really, what I hated was myself."
I nodded, accepting - I knew he loved me in this moment; if he'd hated me for something I hadn't even done before we'd spoken a word, it didn't hurt me very much.
"I was impatient for the hour to end," Edward continued. "At this point I was imagining I'd get you by yourself, at least not kill so many - but Mike Newton was aware of you, he would have paid attention if I'd led you off somewhere. So I made up my mind to wait two hours, cut my last class - hid in my car. I was planning to go to your house after school; I knew your father wouldn't be home until later."
Right, I had a father - I really should get to the computer soon, send him and Renée e-mails, maybe tell Gianna my news...
"When you weren't right there, and I could breathe air that didn't smell like you," Edward continued, "I was saner, I could think more clearly. I thought perhaps I could just avoid you without fleeing, that I shouldn't have to rearrange my life, or disappoint Carlisle and hurt Esme. I'm still not sure if it was lucky or unlucky that Alice saw nothing. She was focused very carefully on Jasper that day, on his short term choices. He'd had a hard moment at lunch. And so when I'd been certain I'd kill you, she didn't see the aftermath.
"I tried to change out of the biology class," he went on. Even telling this story, about how he'd almost excised himself from my life and cut off the universe of wonder I now inhabited, his voice was beautiful. "It turned out not to be possible - and then you walked in. That office is very small, kept very warm - I couldn't not smell you, if I inhaled. I used the last of my air to excuse myself and bolted. The others were already in the car; once I had Alice's attention she saw one of two futures. You dead, or me, driving north, alone.
"I went north. Close to where the Denali family lives. I didn't actually visit them, although Tanya found me and we talked very briefly before I went back to Forks."
"Why did you go back?" I asked.
He was silent for a few seconds. Then, slowly, he said, "We have perfect recall - not eidetic memories. We can call up what we noticed in the past, flawlessly - things that pass without notice are lost."
"Why do you think you went back?"
He considered, no doubt sifting through all the thoughts he'd noted at the time. "I think I wanted to prove myself to my family," he murmured, "and to be the kind of person who wouldn't need to run."
I interlaced my fingers with his. "If that's what you wanted, nice work," I said, gently. He still looked like the topic wasn't one he preferred, but his example was valuable, and if I didn't learn to handle myself, lives were in danger. Maybe not next week. If I had to, I could ask a Cullen to call in some old favor from a Denali, ask them to fly in and perform my ceremony far away from any humans. Posing, for photographic purposes, without Charlie prone to recognizing the face on the "minister". But eventually, I'd have to be near humans, have to not sink my teeth into their throats.
"Mm," he said, noncommittally. "Anyway - when I went to biology after coming back, and you'd changed seats, and when I heard the thoughts of the people you'd told about how I looked at you - I panicked. I could barely form sentences to ask the teacher about it. I think I attributed it to curiosity at the time, although I know better now. I had wanted to talk to you. It drove me up the wall that I couldn't hear what you were thinking, that I had to guess.
"I think I loved you already, then. I couldn't stand the idea that I might have mishandled things badly enough that you would hate me. That youwould take steps to avoid me. Disappointing Carlisle and Esme would be terrible, but they would forgive me, I knew that - you, I had no idea. You could have disappeared entirely and never thought about me again and I couldn't bear the possibility when it confronted me like it did. I was rationalizing my reaction to that. I imagined you to be a suitable proxy for the average newcomer to Forks, that if you found me off-putting I wasn't doing my acting work properly. But if you'd been anyone else, some other singer, I think I'd have welcomed the avoidance.
"Alice realized you were significant in more ways than the scent of your blood, that afternoon. I think you might have seen us arguing in the parking lot after school. She knew you'd be her friend, her sister - she loved you already. She was certain that there was no way I'd be able to stay away from you. If you left somewhere, I'd follow. If I tried to leave myself, I'd always return. And of course she knew I loved you - that was int
eresting, hearing it from Alice before I was aware of it myself. But she also knew that even if I couldn't stay away, I could be rejected. The word she used to describe you was "prickly"."
"Prickly?" I giggled.
"That's what she said. That there were thousands of futures where I ruined everything with some small mistake - a lie, an interruption, a secret just a little too tantalizing, an advance just a moment too soon. She said there was just barely a chance that you would tolerate me." He related this with a faint humor. "If I toed the lines she laid out. I tried, very hard. I don't think I got it exactly right, but I guess I was within tolerances." He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed my ring. "Albeit at one time Alice's visions went so wild that I begged her to intercede with you on my behalf."
I remembered that, in broad strokes; I couldn't call any specifics to mind. "And the rest is history," I said, knowing there would be notes in my computer.
"More or less," he acknowledged.
* * *
We talked for a few more hours, and then I decided it was time to try moose. Edward hunted with me, this time, and he had much better table manners: not a spot of blood anywhere on him. He'd even managed to keep it off his face, or maybe he'd used a swatch of fur as a napkin or something. I was just as spattered, and my clothes nearly as torn, as I had been with the wolf. I looked down at myself in exasperation.
"How do you do it?" I asked. I felt a little sloshy with blood; moose were very big. I'd drained mine, but I most definitely didn't want seconds.
"Practice," he said. "You'll get better at it over time. There's no special trick to it."