* * * * *
I saw Dr. Cullen in the hospital the next day and he was once more perfectly composed; indeed, he seemed happier than at any time before, but when I speculated to one of the sisters that it was because he had found love, Matron scolded me for gossiping and I was made to wash out all the bedpans. I secretly wondered how he could love an insane woman when the hospital was so full of beautiful and sane nurses, but I had seen how beautiful she was and guessed that they had been childhood sweethearts.
It was some time before I was able to speak to Dr. Cullen. “How is Mrs Evenson?” I asked as we stood together at the bed of a patient who could no longer hear us.
“You will never mention the events you witnessed to anyone, will you Sister Shorley?” He replied.
“No, of course not.”
“Well, then. She is fully recovered and will very soon be in full command of her senses. And when that time comes, I think there will be an announcement of a romantic nature.” He smiled conspiratorially at me and it was all I could do not to swoon.
“But – surely she is married to Mr Evenson?”
“Indeed. But Mrs Evenson has returned to Columbus, where she and Mr Evenson lived together.”
“I thought you said he was a cruel man? Why would she travel so far? Is it to–” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word divorce.
Dr. Cullen looked deeply regretful, as well he might in the circumstances. “Sadly, Sister Shorley, Mr Evenson does not have long to live.”
The Return
What might have happened if Bella hadn’t jumped off the cliff in New Moon?
“Marry me, Bella.”
I twisted my fingers out of his and, needing an excuse not to be holding his hand, pulled my hair up into a ponytail, combing my fingers through it as I tried to think of an answer. He knew me well enough to recognise the deflection technique. He waited, patiently.
“No. I like things just as they are.”
He grinned his big, beaming smile, the one that could warm my soul from twenty yards away. “I like them too. A lot. But let’s make it official.”
“Jacob--” How could I tell him? I bit my lip, wondering whether I should use Renee and Charlie as an excuse again. I knew what he’d say. We weren’t kids anymore. I was twenty-one, he was nineteen, we’d been together a while now, and Renee would understand. Charlie would more than understand. He’d be thrilled. “I’m worried,” I said, playing for time.
We had reached the tiny white adobe shack we called our home. Privately I thought it was barely big enough to qualify as a house at all; it had a family room with a little kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom in the back. But it was next door to Billy’s place and Jacob was prodigiously proud of it. Not because he had built it himself or anything, but because it was ours and anything that reminded him that we were a couple made him happy. I was just glad it was too small even for the two of us, or Jacob would have been insisting on starting a family rather than just pestering me about marriage.
Jacob switched off the engine and vaulted quickly to the back of the car to grab the sacks of groceries. I lagged behind, knowing he would try to continue our conversation, wanting to be out of earshot.
“Worried about what?” he asked when I was unloading vegetables into the fridge and unable to escape.
“I keep thinking about Sam and Emily, and about... well, all the rest of the pack, to be honest. About imprinting.”
He sighed in frustration. “That old chestnut.”
Old chestnut? I’d never even mentioned it before. I was actually feeling rather pleased with myself for coming up with such a fantastic new excuse for not wanting to marry Jacob. If I hadn’t commented on it before, who had? It must have been the pack. They must have all been thinking how strange it was that Jacob was the only one of their number who hadn’t imprinted, and yet was in a relationship. Knowing Leah, she had directly pointed out to Jacob that when the woman he did imprint on came along, I was going to get hurt.
Laughable, really, the idea that I could be hurt by Jacob falling in love with someone else. I had already taken all the hurt possible and there were no more nerve endings to destroy, no more pain receptors to trigger. Any pain I might feel at watching Jacob imprint on some stranger would be nothing more than a mild diversion, barely even a reminder of that festering wound I had kept tightly bound for the last four years. In fact, I’d probably be happy for him. He deserved better than the strange half-person I was.
I loved Jacob – what’s not to love? – but the truth I had avoided telling him for the years we had been together, the real reason I could never marry him, was that my love for him paled into insignificance beside the fierceness of my love for the man whose name I couldn’t even bring myself to think. If that man ever came back, I needed to not be married to someone else. I still had the tiniest, most pathetic, glimmer of hope.
Sometimes I lost myself in memories of those glorious, dazzling months with–him–which were at the apex of my life. Other times I closed down in fear and anguish because, despite all my efforts, I could no longer remember what his face looked like, or the sound of his voice.
I found myself standing in the middle of the kitchen, a package of meat in my hand. Jacob probably thought I was dithering about whether to put it in the freezer or cook it for dinner. I’d let him think that. It would hurt him too much to know I still thought about…
“Look, it’s true I haven’t imprinted on you, but I seriously don’t think there’s anyone out there I am going to imprint on now. Why haven’t I met her yet? And just because I haven’t imprinted, doesn’t mean I love you any less. So come on Bella, just agree to marry me already.”
I might finally have given up right then. It had been years, and he had asked and asked, and waved away my excuses time after time. I was almost ready to accept my fate and comfort myself with the fact that Jacob was a good man who would look after me. But something happened to stop me telling Jacob I would marry him.
I saw Jacob suddenly stiffen, his shoulders square up, a furious look cross his brow.
“What is it?”
“Vampire,” he said, casting a frantic look towards me.
“On the reservation?” I was scared, and yet excited at the same time. The very word made my heart pound and I wasn’t sure why. The vampire I loved, and his family, respected the treaty line, but it had meant nothing to Victoria and her army. They had come onto the reservation looking for me. The pack had dealt with them, but those who were left blamed me for the losses.
“No,” Jacob said, at the same time as the door opened and Seth stepped in, closely followed by his older girlfriend Liliah, who was never far away from him. He looked directly at me. He was smiling. Jacob was wrinkling his nose in disgust. Evidently the vampire smell came from Seth.
“I ran into an old friend of yours,” Seth laughed. I could have hugged him for not bothering to waste time with formal greetings. “He said he just came to check on Bella.” I grabbed at the counter to steady myself, unable to quite believe that I was awake.
Jacob was trembling, and gritting his teeth to remain in control. “You told him she was fine, and he left?”
Seth wasn’t afraid of Jacob. He glanced at me, then back at him. “You call that fine? Come on Jacob, you know she hasn’t been fine since Sam found her in the woods.”
“She was getting better.”
“After nearly four years?”
I had to say something. “Where is he now, Sam?”
“At the treaty line. He said he just wants to see you. He wants to know you’re happy. Then he’ll leave again to join his family. He’s a nice guy.” I wondered whether that last part was for Jacob.
I mustered my strength and walked to the door. “I’m going to see him, Jacob.”
I don’t know whether I expected him to try to stop me, or to argue with me, but I didn’t expect him to give in, step meekly aside, and accept the end of our three-year relationship with resignation and
a gracious to the victor the spoils attitude. He nodded, unsmiling, unhappy. I frowned in confusion.
“I tried,” he explained, with a shrug. “But I’m not stupid.”
I thanked him with a farewell kiss, and left that house for the last time, feeling as though I was walking on air.
Morning Mist
The penultimate chapter of Midnight Sun – Twilight from Edward’s point of view.
She looked so fragile, so delicate, lying in the high bed in the white room with bright fluorescent lights highlighting every bruise and scratch, and casting shadows of the many tubes and monitor wires across her precious face. Her broken body perfectly matched my broken spirit, because whichever way I tried to frame it, she was lying there, damaged and all but destroyed, because of me.
I wasn’t naïve enough to think she would never have come to any harm if she hadn’t met me–I had seen her stumble over her own feet often enough–but she would certainly not have almost died in her childhood ballet studio at the hands of a cold predator who thirsted for her blood. Someone not unlike me. I shuddered, remembering the sweet, luscious taste of her blood. Even laced with James’s foul poison it had been more delectable than I had imagined anything ever could be.
I shook my head to try to force the memory away, remembering instead that I loved Bella even more than I loved her blood. At first I had wondered whether I was drawn to her because of that alluring and mesmerizing scent. Or maybe it was because she was the one person whose thoughts were closed to me, a mystery I longed to solve. Or it might have been all the good qualities I had seen in her as I grew to know her over the weeks. Her self-sacrificing generosity, her unaffected humility, her simple artistic intelligence, her natural beauty, or even her endearing clumsiness or her unexpected and unpredictable reactions.
It was all of those things. I loved the whole package. She was the focal point, the very purpose, of this endless half-life of mine. But now, because of me, she lay in a hospital bed.
I had tried to stop my mind thinking about the taste of her blood, but now it continued, unbidden, along a path that was even worse. It provided for me the obvious remedy to the danger I had exposed the innocent and perfect Isabella Swan to.
I had long ago discounted the selfish answer to my dilemma; the one where I almost killed her, put her through tortuous pain for three days and stole her soul. But the other answer caused my stomach to twist in pain and the overriding horror to flare. I didn’t frame the words. I couldn’t bear to acknowledge even to myself that it would take little more to tip the balance, to bring me to a point where I did have to think about leaving. To face that impossible pain, for her sake.
To my relief the dark turn of my mind was interrupted by a whirling maelstrom of intersecting thoughts, the most strident of which was the repeated shriek, “Bella, Bella, Bella!” The door to the room burst open and a blonde woman in a fringed hippy skirt and lemon yellow t-shirt flew to Bella’s bedside and exclaimed over her as she stroked her hair and kissed her head. “Bella, my baby!My poor Bella!”
Renee’s mind was as unique, in its way, as Charlie’s slightly obscured and muted thoughts, or Bella’s mysterious silence. It might have been just her fear for Bella, but her mind rushed over a thousand things at once, taking in and analysing every little detail. I was glad I didn’t spend a lot of time in her company; it would probably be exhausting.
“She’s going to be fine,” I said, standing up, stretching a little, just as a human would do after sitting at a hospital bedside for five hours.
She whirled round, noticing me for the first time. I saw that she already knew that Bella was going to be fine. She had talked to a doctor. But she was still desperately upset to see her little girl (she used the words in her mind, but didn’t picture Bella as anything close to a child) in that condition.
As she looked at me, I saw myself reflected in Renee’s mind, and heard her crazily random analysis. This must be the boy. I can see why she likes him. He’s dishy, but so pale! Is that what living without sun does to you? Will Bella end up looking like that? His sister looked like that too. Sickeningly stunning, admittedly, but so pale.
“You must be Edward,” she said. I kept my hands in my pockets, hoping that she was too busy stroking her daughter’s brow to want to shake my hand.
“I’m pleased to meet you Mrs Dwyer.” I nodded politely. “I only wish it were in better circumstances.”
“Thank you for staying with her,” she said, but her thoughts were elsewhere. There’s something funny about his eyes. I bet he’s been crying. That’s so cute. And he’s not really looking at me, he’s looking past me to Bella, but he’s not just looking at her, he’s drinking her with his eyes as though he just can’t get enough. He’s in love with her. Am I OK with this? Some guy in love with my Bella. Yes. I like him.
In her mind my face was suddenly smiling and friendly. In reality I wasn’t smiling. Not yet.
“Your sister told me what happened, Edward.” And yet, whatever Alice had told her, I couldn’t pick it out of her mind. She wasn’t thinking about it. Her thoughts were still racing, but our fabricated explanation of Bella’s injuries wasn’t among them. I picked through surreal images of baseball, kittens and organic vegetable boxes, but couldn’t find anything relating to Bella falling through a window.
“She did?” I said, prompting.
“I think I’m to blame.” She really did. Crushing remorse mixed with thoughts about her shoes being too tight. I saw that she slipped them off and kicked them under Bella’s bed. Her toenails were painted different colours. I wondered whether she would kick off the guilt as quickly.
“How so?”
Renee sighed. “I can see how you feel about Bella. And reading between the lines of her emails I think it’s clear how she feels about you. But you know, I lectured her so much when she was a child about the horrors of getting stuck in a small godforsaken town–Forks, in fact–by falling for some guy you hardly know when you’re just a teenager. I told her again and again not to make the same mistakes I made. And I think on that date you had, she must have realised that she was getting too attached to you, and so she ran. Charlie phoned me, he told me how she’d behaved and what she said, and it was so clear that she was terrified that she was just repeating the mistake I’d warned her about.”
I nodded slowly. I liked that explanation.
“When she wakes up,” Renee said, her mind slowing its whirlwind path for just a moment as she focussed at last, “I’ll tell her it wasn’t such a mistake.”
“Thank you,” I said. I really liked Bella’s mother, quite apart from the gratitude I owed her for giving birth to and raising the star around which my planet revolved.
“You want something to eat?”
“I don’t think I could eat anything,” I smiled.
She returned my smile. “Well, I rushed straight here from Sky Harbor and I’m starving. I’m going down to the cafeteria. I don’t need to ask you to stay with Bella for me, do I.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I assured her.
“I’ll come right back as soon as I’ve eaten, assuming I don’t get lost again. I suppose I could always get Rosalie to help me again. I like her.”
I was surprised and it must have shown when I said “Rosalie?”
“Yes. I met your family in the lobby, and Alice was explaining about the hotel and the window, but what I wanted to know is why Bella came to Phoenix in the first place. So Rosalie offered to show me to Bella’s room and on the way she told me all about Bella running out on your date and wanting to be in her own home to sort things out in her head.”
I listened and heard Rosalie’s smug, “You’re welcome”. She was just outside the door, listening, but doubtless would be back in the waiting room two seconds from now. Renee already had her hand on the door handle.
“Back soon,” Renee said as she left, blowing a kiss to her sleeping daughter.
I was pleased she was gone, partly because the surreal wh
irlwind of her thoughts was most disconcerting, but also because I wanted to be alone with Bella, to touch her and stroke her again, as her mother had done. I wished–not for anything like the first time–that I could hear her thoughts. I needed to know whether she was in pain, whether she was dreaming, how conscious she was. I leaned my head closer, resting my chin on her pillow, as though proximity to her hidden mind could help.
Moments later her eyelids flickered, then opened. Her beautiful brown eyes looked up in consternation and I saw her hand twitch towards the oxygen tube under her nose. I reached out and took that warm and wonderful hand. “No you don’t.”
Her head rolled to one side as her eyes sought my face. “Edward?” Her eyes met mine. “Oh Edward, I’m so sorry!”
It was one of those unexpected reactions I loved. What did she have to be sorry for? “Shhhh. Everything’s alright now.” And it really was. For now.
Jack and Sam (Stargate SG-1 fan fiction)
General Jack O’Neill and Colonel Samantha Carter formed half of SG-1 for almost eight years. Viewers knew, through alternate universes, mind-reading devices, time loops and trips back to ancient Egypt, that they were deeply in love with each other. However, their military status meant that a relationship was forbidden.
Towards the end of season 8, Sam called off her engagement to Pete Shanahan because she recognised that she was truly in love with Jack, and not just fixating on him as a safe and unattainable figure. Jack, likewise, accepted the advice of a girlfriend who recognised that his heart was elsewhere, and decided to retire partly in order to give himself a chance to be with Sam.
When the viewers last saw General Jack O’Neill and Colonel Samantha Carter together they were fishing on the pond behind Jack’s house, and Daniel Jackson and Teal’C, the other two members of SG-1, had just arrived to join them. This is particularly funny because throughout all eight seasons Jack had been inviting the members of his team to come fishing with him and for various reasons they never had. So it was a wonderfully fitting conclusion to an era, but viewers were left wondering whether they ever did actually get together.
The writers have said that they did, and left clues in the following two seasons and in Stargate Atlantis to this effect, but viewers were denied the satisfaction of seeing it on the screen. So here’s the next best thing. I’ve written the scene at the lake from a point a couple of hours after the closing credits of Stargate SG-1 have run.
After Teal’C and Daniel had left, Sam reeled in her line, and carefully unhooked the bait.
“Stay a while,” O’Neill invited her, his gaze still focussed on the lake in front of them.
“Sure.” They sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes.
“Why are there no fish in your pond?” Sam asked him.
He frowned. “I like fishing,” he said. “But I’m more of a meat kind of guy.”
“You could throw them back.”
“Nah.”
He was his own person, Sam thought, with his own logic. Shrewd, and far more intelligent than he let on, but unique.
“Sir, you know there’s something I want to tell you. I’ve wanted to tell you this for quite some time.”
“I know.”
“You know? What, you know I want to tell you something, or you know what it is?”
“Both.”
She hesitated for a moment, then decided she’d waited long enough and it couldn’t wait a second longer. “The thing is, Sir--”
“Carter, I retired. Sorta. I’m no longer your commanding officer. You don’t have to call me Sir.”
“Well Sir, technically you’re still my superior officer, and—”
“Carter, if we’re going to have any kind of relationship you’re going to have to learn to call me Jack.”
Relationship? She felt her heartbeat speed up more than it ever had when she was a prisoner on a Goa’uld ship.
“And you’re going to have to call me Sam,” she responded when she had assimilated this exciting new development.
“Hmm. Sam.” He tested the word thoughtfully. “Samantha.”
“Jack,” She tried carefully. “What I’ve been trying to tell you, for a long time, is--”
He held up a finger for silence, put down his fishing pole, and turned to look at her in that inscrutable way she loved so very much. “You don’t need to tell me.”
“I think I do.”
“No, you don’t. Because I know. Because I know you, and I know me, and you’ve risked your life to save mine more times than I can count. And before you tell me I’ve done the same, you’re right, I have, and for the same reason.”
Carter decided to forget that they had both risked their lives to save other people too. It would spoil the moment.
“I don’t want you to tell me,” Jack said slowly, “Because I would like it a whole lot better if you would show me.”
She understood. In the same moment that he reached for her, she pulled him into her arms and met his kiss entirely, gratefully, finally.
“Stay a while,” he said again when they reluctantly parted slightly.
“I ship out to Area 51 in three weeks,” she said.
“Three weeks would be good,” he replied. “Stay for three weeks. Or forever.”
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