Chapter Four - I Don't Hate You
*Genevieve*
"I never wanted to have a party," Bella says, watching as Carlisle carefully removes the glass that had been embedded in her arm.
"It's not your fault," Carlisle reassures her, his eyes focused on the tiny glass particles, "Jasper hasn't been away from human blood as long as the rest of us."
"How do you both do it?" she asks, looking at Carlisle and then at me.
"Years and years of practice," Carlisle says, looking up and meeting her gaze. I stay silent, leaning against the wall and watching as Carlisle begins to carefully and expertly stitch the cut closed.
"Did you ever think of... just doing it the easy way?" she asked, keeping her gaze on him, not watching the small needle sew her skin back together.
"At times," I confess, causing her eyes to fly over to me in shock. "But I find myself thinking about my family... and how they would feel if they heard that I had- in a way- failed. I think about how I couldn't be able to face them, look them in the eyes the same way again. And that stops me, every single time that I think about 'doing it the easy way'."
Carlisle let's what I say sink in for a minute before speaking up. "No, I knew who I wanted to be. I wanted to help people. Bring me happiness. Even if I am damned regardless."
Bella looked surprised at his wording, "Damned? Like- like hell?"
Carlisle paused, meeting her gaze and silently answering her question.
Bella just shook her head in complete disbelief, a little incredulous scoff escaping her. "Carlisle you couldn't be damned. You couldn't. It's impossible."
He smiled softly as he wrapped her arm. "Thank you, Bella. You've always been very gracious about us. By all other accounts though, we are dammed. But I hope, maybe foolishly, that we'll get some measure of credit for trying."
The room falls silent as Bella flutters her gaze from Carlisle to her freshly bandaged wrist. "Do they all think like this?"
"Eddie boy doesn't believe that there's an afterlife for 'our kind', if that's what you're wondering," I say, causing her attention to turn towards me with a curious gaze.
"He thinks that this is our 'afterlife'. In exchange for this limited immortality, we've 'lost our souls'," I continue, stepping forward with a sour expression on my face. "A little dramatic if you ask me... but to each their own I suppose."
She slowly pieces together what Carlisle and I had said with something else and looks back up, a sudden realization hitting her. "So that's it. That's why he won't change me?"
Carlisle bit his lip as he sighed, shaking his head as he stood back.
"Image the situation in reverse," I step forward towards her as Carlisle throws the bloody bandages into the bowl and steps back, his eyes watching Bella as she pondered what I had said. I continue forward and reach out towards the matches, striking a one on the side of its box and gazing at it for a second before throwing it into the bowl. Watching as it caught on the small puddle of alcohol that Carlisle had poured onto the bottom of the bowl, the bandages going up in a burst of vibrant red and orange flames only a few seconds later. "If you believed as Edward does, could you take away his soul?"
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After a few minutes, Carlisle had packed up and thoroughly cleaned and disinfected his suturing kit, tucking it back into his hospital bag and underneath his desk. The bowl of bloody wraps and bandages had turned into nothing but a small pile of ashes, the flame extinguishing itself as it let out a faint trail of smoke before eventually dying out.
As soon as he had finished and his stuff was put away, he had stepped up and offered to go downstairs to clean up the blood that had dripped onto the floor, leaving Bella and I alone in the office.
"Genevieve... why do you hate me?" Bella asks, her eyes fluttering from my eyes to her arm, which I was in the middle of carefully cleaning.
I pause momentarily before continuing to carefully wipe her arm of blood, being sure that keep away from the stitches that Carlisle had finished only a few minutes prior. An uncomfortable aura had fallen onto the room, with neither of us talking about the question that had echoed in both our minds.
"It's not that I hate you..." I say quietly. "I mean... do I like you? No. But I don't know if I would go as far as to say that I hate you, per se."
"You avoid me any chance you get... and the times that we are forced together by Edward or the rest of your family, we never talk." Bella says, "I just want to know what I did to make you hate me so much."
I fall silent for a moment, looking down at the water and watching it turn from crystal clear to a murky red when the bloody washcloth was put in. put in. "I fell in love with a man once. A man, who could give me anything that I wished for. A family. A happy healthy relationship. Stability. Security..."
"Theodore?"
"No, this was before I even met Theo. You remember Emeric... right?" I look towards her, dropping my hands and sitting down on the small rolly chair that Carlisle had. "From your little nosy exploration into mine and Theo's room?"
Bella blushed but nodded her head. "Yeah... you two were engaged when you were turned."
"He was rich... like filthy rich. My parents were so excited that I had captured the attention of the most eligible bachelor of the decade. So much so that, for the first time in a long time, they were... they cared. They didn't normally do that- care. I mean, they cared, sure. But they weren't like parents today. They didn't show their affection in public, they were- by definition- the perfect high-society couple. Behind closed doors, they were parents. They smiled at my successes and cried alongside me at my losses. They did the best that they could at the time, which was more than I could ask for." I sighed once more as I looked over at her, my golden eyes meeting her inquisitive chocolate-brown eyes. "Once I turned... I left France... I couldn't stand being near them."
"But they're your parents..." Bella says, shaking her head at the idea.
"They may have been my parents... but I was a monster... one that was dammed to walk the Earth for... for forever really. Watching as families grew up and grew old, as parents died and children mourned. As societies continued to rage war against each other for whatever stupid and idiotic reasons they could come up with. I was permanently stuck in time. Forced to watch as the world continued to spin and time continued to pass, just leaving me behind. I eventually went back to Paris... no one even knows that I did... though I think Theo had some suspicion and he told Rose."
"What happened?"
"I sat by my parent's beds as they died... I'd like to think that they knew that I was there... that they didn't die alone without finding some convoluted sense of peace. The last thing that my parents mumbled about before they died was talking about me and my brother... my mother died with a smile on her face as she welcomed death with open arms. She turned her head towards my father and let out a weak chuckle... 'Souriez Antonie... car nous pouvons revoir nos enfants. Sébastien et Geneviève...'"
"What does that mean?"
"'Smile Antonie... for we get to see our children again... Sébastien and Geneviève...'" I took in a breath as I looked up at the ceiling, "they died a few minutes later."
We both fell silent as we processed the words that I had just said, the sound of the cookoo clock ticking filling the room as we both looked in different directions.
"They seemed like nice people... your parents, I mean," Bella said quietly, looking over at me with a small smile.
"They had their troubles... as all couples do. But they were together until they died," I replied, sighing as I looked down at my ring, the diamond sparkling under the lights. "I pushed their beds together before they died... my dad reached his hand out and..."
I sniffled, scrunching up my nose before shaking my head, "he reached out and held my mom's hand. He had this faint ghost of a smile come across his face. It was like he accepted what was happening and didn't fight it anymore. He had found peace in dying alongside the last person that he loved."
We fell silent once more, a peaceful silence coming over us both as we thought about everything- our minds in two different places. "You know what the most interesting part is?"
Bella looked over at me, her eyes shining with interest as she shook her head. "No. What?"
"The doctors and nurses said that my father had a chance of survival... a slim one, but still, it was a chance. They would've had to separate him and Mom though... try and lessen the transmission of bacteria between them or whatever. He said no. He turned down the chance to get better and stayed by my mother's side- by his wife's side until the end. I guess the lines 'for better for worse... in sickness and in health... till death do us part' really make sense now."
"'Ma femme est malade et mourante. Mes enfants sont déjà morts. Pour quoi de plus ai-je à vivre sans elle? Je peux vous le dire tout de suite: rien. Elle est tout ce qu'il me reste, alors laisse-moi mourir aux côtés de ma femme en paix.'" I whisper out, the words permanently engrained into my mind. "'My wife is sick and dying. My children are already dead. What more do I have to live for without her? I can tell you right now: nothing. She's all I have left, so let me die by my wife's side in peace.' Those were his last words... he was stubborn until the moment he died. He went out of this Earth with the thought that without his family, he had nothing to live for. After he lost my brother and I, my mother was all he had. My mother was dying... he was unwilling to live out his family... so he died alongside her."
"So you hate me because of your parents? Because of what they went through?"
"I hate that you're so willing to throw away your life... your friends and family, for something that you don't even know if you want. That you don't fully understand- that you can never truly understand- until it's too late. You can only cheat death so many times Isabella... you got lucky with James... his mind was too clouded by the idea of being in a proper chase to kill you. Trust me, if he really wanted you dead, you would be dead. He wouldn't have wasted time toying with you, Edward, and I at that ballet studio."
"Thanks for that... the whole saving me thing," Bella said sheepishly, rubbing her hands on her dress as she looked up at me through her lashes. "I never actually thanked you for helping."
I waved her off as I smirked slightly. "Please... Edward was the one that had to apologize... which he did... with a little encouragement at the end."
I stand back up, pushing the chair back into its corner of the room, and begin to walk back out towards the deck, knowing that the rest of the family, excluding Carlisle, who was still cleaning up the blood downstairs, would be waiting.
"And, Isabella," I say, turning my head to look at her, my hand on the door ready to walk outside. "Don't rush into it. Think it through. Can you really live without Edward? Could you see yourself with someone else, living in a nice house, with a nice family around you?"
"I want this, Genevieve," Bella says, almost desperate to show how much it means to her. "I couldn't imagine a world without Edward in it. I don't think that I could survive if something like that happened."
"See, if Edward hadn't been living in Forks, you would've gone on and married some nice man and had a few kids that Charlie would've spoiled to death... you wouldn't even think about the possibility that the 'ancient myth of vampires' being 'real', would be true. You only changed your tune when Edward came into your life..." I sigh and look over at her, "had none of us been here when you arrived, you would've gone on to live a normal human life... with your normal human friends and family."
"I don't want 'normal', I want Edward. This entire party is just another reminder of how I'm aging..." she says, slouching over on the table.
I chuckle and shake my head, "Isabella, you're talking to someone who's almost 300 years old. Trust me. You're not old. When you turn 21, go out with your little friends and have a shot of whiskey, buy a lotto ticket, hop on a plane, and gamble away all your cash at some cheesy casino in Vegas. Do whatever it is that you 'young folk' do when you become adults. I'm sure that Edward would be more than happy to see you out and living your life. You still have plenty of time to decide if you truly do want this. But for now, you still have too much life to live."
"You don't understand! I'm just going to continue to age while Edward- along with everyone else in your family- stays the same! I don't want to be a grandmother dating a man who looks young enough to be my grandson. I want to love Edward as myself- as who I met him as, not as someone different..."
"There's a difference between liking someone- being in love with them, and being dependent on them," I look from her to the photos that Esme had hung up around the room, each frame holding different pictures of the family that she had taken throughout the years. "I know that you and my brother are close, I think that that's pretty obvious. But, I know that you need to have a life that doesn't revolve around 'Edward this' and 'Edward that'. Stop focusing on the negative, it doesn't matter if you're a year older than him or if you're 10 years older than him, that shouldn't determine the amount of love that you say you have for him. Trust me when I say this, he doesn't care about your age. So, go out and make some friends-"
"I have friends," Bella says defensively, her eyes narrowing slightly.
"Then go and see them. You don't have to spend every minute of every day by Edward's side and vice-versa. You deserve to have a social life, to have some actual human interaction," I retort. "If you're truly serious about changing, then, at some point, you're going to have to let go of every person that you care about, that you even remotely interacted with... and after a few years, you're going to look back and wish that you could've hung out more, talked more, whatever."
"I'm ready," Bella says seriously.
"You say that... but could you imagine living without your friends? Without Charlie? Jacob? Your mom?"
"... yes," she whispers, nodding her head slowly after a few short seconds.
"I hate that you answered that so quickly," I sigh and shake my head, looking back towards the door and watching as the trees gently swayed in the wind. The serene and peaceful view offered a stark contrast to the harsh, but honest conversation that was taking place inside. "You're too enthralled by the idea of being... of changing, that you're not being logical. Your world revolves too much around Edward. You're too willing to throw your life away... and for your sake, I hope that doesn't happen anytime soon. You deserve more time."
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-T