Chapter Text
I looked over the pile of photos on my desk, my long brown hair falling continually in my face. I’d brush it from my face but what’s the use? My disturbingly sharp eyesight makes the hair a non-issue. I rub my eyes, and wish I could sleep. There are more than a few pictures of my mother asleep- before she changed, that is.
The girl in the photos, with her pinkish skin, and brown hair, so much like my own, but flatter. She smiles in a few of them, the sort of smile someone gives when they think someone isn’t looking.
I see a few photos of my father in there too. Here and there, always straight-faced and stoic and pale as can be. While my mother’s young body curls and gently bends to fit in his arms, his skin has no give, no softness to it. He’s never been anything but hard angles and chiseled flats.
My stomach curdles when I look over the pictures of my mother and my... husband. His deep brown eyes looking happy and bright when next to her. Glancing over to his sleeping form, I can safely say I never saw those happy brown eyes aimed at me. I shiver, and scratch some phantom itch from habit. The sound of my nails dragging against my nearly marble skin almost wakes him up, before he returns to his deep slumber.
Typical, I think as I continue flipping through the scrapbook. My grandfather Charlie looked so happy with his little girl, that beaming smile that fathers are supposed to have, mixed with a sense of uneasiness around their daughters. The small well of hope that he can one day find something to talk about and bond with his child over.
My father never did that. Even before Charlie passed, he always bristled in just that way to let Charlie know he wasn’t welcome. Father hated reminding Mother of her life- her old life. I once heard Father yell at some old friend of Mothers- some man named Mike, bearing flowers for Mother. A few weeks later his picture showed up as missing in the papers. Father looked so pleased, he thought I didn’t notice the contact lenses on Mother.
Rose and Emmett flit through my mind. I remember them being nice, though Rose was hungry. Always hungry. She hated Mother for birthing me. And yet she couldn’t bear to harm a hair on my pretty perfect head. But she thought I didn’t see the images in her mind that came, unbidden by the very thought of my Parents together.
The deep yawning hungry chasm in her mind, that Emmett could never quite fill, always just barely sustaining her, but reminding her of the boy she could never have. And then I came along, with my big brown eyes and my flawless skin and my cheeks, never rosy, but pale like my family.
I spat into the trash bin beside my door, as I left my office. Effortlessly silent as I slipped onto the roof. I pull a pack of cigarettes I’ve been hiding from Jacob, and lit one up, letting the harsh smoke fill my never living lungs. It gives an odd feeling in my mind, an almost serenity, as I blow smoke rings into the brisk night air. The moon shines down, and I make sure I don’t look at myself. I always hated how I was the one who was allowed to go to school on sunny days, how I was always the one sent to prevent outsiders from finding out. From knowing.
The glint from my hand catches my eye, and for a second, I contemplate tearing it off. Rending myself limb from limb and hurling myself into the wind. But I know it won’t work. It never does. My body always reforms and leaves not even a scratch when it’s done. Not even my mind shuts off when I do it. I cannot feel pain, but the unending emptiness inside when it happens is blinding. The silence is deafening. And yet, for just a moment, I can be happy. I cannot hear the dreams of my Husband, the thoughts of my neighbors, the eternal cacophony of the world, every thought and dream and nightmare, forever to be heard in my mind, an echo chamber of wants and needs and fears.
And I can’t even drink myself into oblivion to forget.
As I finish the cigarette, the sun starts to peek it’s rays over the horizon, gently sifting through the trees like slow golden honey, filling the world. I duck down through the skylight and return to my husband’s bedroom, crossing it to my office. It disturbs me how he insisted on my office being attached to the bedroom, almost like he could keep an eye on me. The man falls asleep and he’s dead to the world. But for all he knows, I’m a good little girl, who never dares step outside of the fence he thinks I don’t know about.
Everyone treats me like a child still, though my body has been seventeen for fifty years now. I wake up, expecting to see wrinkles, my hair greying, my body slowly starting to decay. And instead I feel... nothing. The smoke I inhale to try and forget only lasts so long, before I must return to being ‘His’.
I pretend to not hear him as he stumbles downstairs, half blind with sleep. He starts the coffee machine, and I cannot fight the curl of my lip as the bitter black smell from downstairs is picked up. Disgusting.
I pull my hair into a ponytail, because I know it makes me look less like Mother, with her long wild hair, in perfect wavy curls and golden highlights she never held in life. Trying to not stiffen up in disgust, my husband ‘sneaks’ up behind me and wraps his arms around my torso, squeezing tight like he can make me short of breath
“Heya, gorgeous. Whatcha’ doing?” Jacob asks, the smell of eggs and sausage and sickening amounts of bacon on his breath.
“Not much, looking over Mother’s old things.” I say, feeling Jacob cringe as I say Mother.
“C’mon, Ness. Don’t be like that, Bells hates it when you call her that.” He says, nuzzling his lips against my neck, and I feel my toes curl under the desk.
“I know...” I say, all sweet and innocent. “But I just don’t like disrespect that ‘Mom’ brings- you know how Father is. I just...” And I force myself to be the naive seven year old, trapped in an eighteen year old’s body, unknowing, not understanding why she could never hear silence. Not knowing why she was getting a pretty white dress and lacy things and the hungry stares from her once brother now fiancee. She hadn’t understood why everyone ‘cried’ when she spoke the words Auntie Rose and Auntie Alice made her memorize by heart.
Now she understood. Fifty years of matrimony, of highschool, of hiding, of pretending she didn’t notice when they looked at her funny. Of people wondering why she always moved away just as school ended for yet another high school with yet another name, with yet another set of parents. Her brother turned fiancee turned father in the public eye.
“Uh... Ness...” Jacob muttered, looking concerned. I had been so wrapped up in my thoughts, I had failed to realize I had started growling and my grip had tightened so much on my drafting table, that it had snapped under the pressure.
Jacob’s once strong frame had softened over the years, a cushy quiet life had lead to him slowly easing up on the shifting. Though he still looked young for his age, his once washboard abs, had softened into the body of a slightly pudgy 40 year old man. He started to back out, forgetting about the glass door behind him, holding him in the same room as me. He reached for his phone. The one benefit of being a half-blood and a werewolf couple, is Alice couldn’t spy. I let out a deep guttural snarl before picking up the shattered remnants of the drafting table over my head and smashing them against the wall.
Fear flashed in his eyes, true honest fear filling his mind. I felt him start to try and shift, several years out of practice. I nearly launched myself forward, but pulled back. I needed to think. Jacob was nothing but a dog. I made myself calm down and pretend to faint. Let them sort it out. Some rage fit, perhaps. I couldn’t get out yet.
Yet.