Author's Note: THis might be a little on the short side, but I wanted to let you know that I have an idea for the sequel. You could learn more about the sequel from the end of this chapter, where there's a little present from someone you don't know yet. Hell, I don't know them yet. Let's see what happens. Feedback is appreciated. Chapters will come faster now that I have inspiration and ideas. Sorry for the wait by the way.
“Esme? You need some help with that?” the girl called from the door. Esme turned and smiled at her adoptive daughter from her place on her knees in the midst of the sea of vividly colorful roses and lilies and other graceful flowers.
The girl joined her, not acknowledging Esme’s filthy clothing, nor did she show hesitation in dirtying her black leggings and maroon muscle shirt.
The two female vampires worked alongside each other for a few moments, before Esme glanced at the girl. She was seemingly entirely focused on patting the soil around her lone rose in a square of daffodils, but Esme could see her sharp white teeth digging into her bottom lip and her jaw clenched tightly.
“Are you alright, sweetheart?” Esme asked, obviously concerned for the young vampire. The girl turned to the kindly woman. She never stopped maneuvering her hands around the stem of the flower in a rhythmic sequence.
“I’m fine, Mom. Don’t worry about me,” she brushed off her mother’s attempt at getting her to open up. Esme sighed but let the matter drop. If her daughter wanted to talk, she’d come to her on her own time.
For the rest of the day, mother and daughter enjoyed themselves while planting a meadow of lovely plants that smelled of love and determination. They joked around and even drew the girl’s brother out of the house to join them in the sunlight that caused their skin to glitter like diamonds.
That night, as Esme was finishing up her last bed of tulips, she glanced up at the girl’s window, before grasping at her chest in a panic.
The girl was clutching her head in her head, her mouth twisted into a tortured and soundless scream. Her eyes … There were no words for the torment so clear in the girl’s topaz eyes. And then Esme nearly broke inside at what the girl did next.
The girl fingered the lone rose she had planted that day. With a horrified look towards the girl’s bed of flowers, Esme saw that one plant had been uprooted from the ground. Turning back to her daughter, Esme would have had a heart attack had she been human.
The girl was tearing the rose to shreds, all with a feral shine to her eyes.
That girl was Bella.
Esme knew, from that day ten years ago, Bella was not alright. The pain had been hidden from everyone else, but late at night, she’d coped with losing her other half with questionable actions, such as puncturing the wall with her fingernails or ripping the mattress in half with her bare hands. Carlisle had once walked in on the girl sitting in the corner of her bedroom, rocking back and forth, head in hands, muttering to herself about “Emma’s Edward, Emma’s Edward”. It had hurt her family so badly.
But now, when their sister and daughter’s pain was so evident in those impassive golden orbs, it did more than hurt them.
It broke them.
Carlisle was a mess. He wore sweatpants daily, which was a sign of no hope. His hair was almost as rumpled as Edward’s had once been. He did nothing but monitor Bella, making sure the pain just didn’t kill her altogether. But no, it seemed Aro had figured a way to keep her in just enough pain to hurt more than she had ever hurt, but not enough to put her out of her misery.
Jasper and Garrett were even worse. Carlisle had barred Garrett from sitting with her, as it had given him the vampire equivalent of a panic attack. He stalked noiselessly through the rooms like a ghost, staring at nothing. Jasper composed himself so he would be allowed to sit with Bella. He laid his head on the edge of the table beside her, gripping her hand close to his chest, almost as though he feared she would disappear into the agonizing abyss if he let her go.
What was worrying was that he hadn’t moved from this position in half a year. Alice had been feeding him manually with bags of blood. It wasn’t helping, and his eyes turned black and his body began to shrink down, as through mutilating itself.
Rosalie usually sat beside Emmett, but when she wasn’t by her husband’s side, she was sitting on the roof, claiming it made her feel ‘less overwhelmed’. No one was too concerned. Rose had always had odd ways of coping with trauma.
Alice, on the other hand, spent days and nights sitting in front of a window, searching. Searching for the future, for the reassurance that everything would be alright. Sometimes she’d get a glimpse of that damn pink liquid, but just as her sight cleared from the fog, the vision would slip away from her. Everyone steered clear of her for days after those slips. Alice nearly bit Esme’s head off for trying to give her a hug.
Esme continued work in the garden; though she poured everything she had into those goddamned flowers. It left her with no room for emotion, which was what Esme had been aiming for.
It was a Thursday that held nothing but grey storm clouds looming above the trees when that unmistakable stench wafted through the house to every single vampire’s noses.
The smell of dog.
Jacob was pounding at the front door of the house, his face hard, but desperate. Surprisingly enough, Rosalie slid off Emmett’s lifeless body, swinging the door open with an expressionless look on her face. “Welcome to Casa Cullen, dog,” Rose growled flatly, gesturing with her hand to the living room. Jacob appreciated her humor, but was disturbed by the fact that the house was quiet and empty looking, not to mention the somber air that poured out the front door the moment Rosalie had opened it.
Jacob made his way to the living room, the blond vampire following him slowly, her shoulders slumped, her eyes weak and tired. Jacob entered the room, and immediately his own eyes were fixated on his best friend and her brother.
“What. The. Hell. Happened?” Jacob snarled, but it wasn’t out of anger at the vampires. Well, not the entire Cullen family. Just Ginger and his fucking slut.
“When Edward left Bella for Emma, he sealed what vampires call Hora Tenebris, which translates roughly to “darkest hour”. The pain he caused her and then Emmett by seeing her in such pain sent them into this coma. The coma causes scars and bruises to form on their body permanently, but they won’t feel them until the person who brought this agony to them awakes them from the coma. But the Volturi heard of my children’s current comatose state, and has had two of his most powerful guards use their gifts to put Bella in unbearable pain, with no way for it to be let out until we figure out how to lower the barrier that is keeping her pain in,” Carlisle explained wearily, his eyes the darkest obsidian color anyone had ever seen the doctor’s eyes before. Jacob stared at him for a split second, before turning towards Emmett, and then, towards Bella.
He slowly stumbled to the auburn-haired girl on the table, where Jasper was still clutching at Bella’s hand, desperate to have some reassurance that his little sister was going to be okay, at least physically. No doubt, by the end of this ordeal, if there was an end, Bella would be mentally and emotionally scarred for the rest of her life. Possibly Emmett as well.
He leaned over the table to peer into Bella’s tortured eyes and his fists clenched. Her liquid-like orbs were in such agony, such horrible anguish. But she seemed to stare right through him; she couldn’t see or hear anyone or anything around her. This … this was going to break her. What the vampires couldn’t see her, Jacob did. He saw years to come of reassuring the girl that she wasn’t alone, that no one would abandon her in her pain, because she couldn’t see that she was here, in a room full of people who loved her. No, she believed she was alone, she believed they had all left her in her darkest hour. And suddenly, the name of this godforsaken coma had a whole new meaning. It did not mean that the pain was the worst the vampire would feel. No, it meant that the vampire would feel as though it was their darkest hour, where no one cared that they were hurting. And that would be enough to destroy Bella.
Unknown
When he had first discovered the cure, he wasn’t sure what to do. It wasn’t something he could give to someone, and it wasn’t like he could just tell someone what to do to fix it. It was so much more complicated than that, and that’s why so few ever recovered from the devastating curse.
Yes, a curse. A downside to a vampire’s life. The same way the Volturi had gifts so unusual and powerful to discipline the race of immortals, this curse had been developed by the early vampires to make sure their descendants knew they weren’t invincible and made of stone; they could be hurt and broken, the same way as humans.
He knew a certain couple affected by the curse: the infamous Edward and Bella Cullen. They had been the only vampire-human relationship, and when the roles had been reversed, Edward regressed into a child, the curse had found its way into Bella’s life, marking her as the victim.
In the beginning, their biggest problem might have been Edward’s reversion to a human child. That was no longer a concern. The biggest concern was now the girl, Bella, who would not awaken for a long time. Wars would rage because of her, her mate desperate for a cure once he discovered her comatose state, and lives would be lost. This would happen the same as it had before, and he would watch with both amusement and worry.
The human child that Edward had become infatuated with, Emma, she would become the face of the enemy. She would, he knew, become Bella’s undoing. And it was certain that the war that was quite obviously inevitable would take the Cullens by surprise, leaving them at a major and fatal disadvantage.
And the worst part of it all was that he could do nothing about it.