Fic : The Still Hour

seeyouupside

peskywhistpaw

The Still Hour

And with my own eyes, I saw the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a glass,

And when the boys asked her, “Sibyl, what do you want?”

She said, “I want to die.”

- Petronius

She remembers humanity the way other people remember their childhoods, hazy and far off and golden, self-contained as a garden.

This is not her first memory, but it is the strongest, the lifeline she clung to the night she died : a clearing at night, and an impossibly huge russet wolf, padding slowly towards her with black eyes that say, simply, I know you.

I know you better than you know yourself.

~

It has been a long, long time.

You think you know time. You think of little points along the timeline ready and waiting to be knocked off at leisure. These are the limits of the human condition.

To Bella, it is quite, quite different. Time is not a straight line, nor is it a circle. It unfolds and enshrouds, it swallows and lets go. It has the power to give random events meaning, but it has no power over her. She exists in all times, and therefore, it is as if she does not exist at all.

In this present moment, she moves like a ghost or a shadow or the flicker of a candle through the ruined cities of a broken world.

She know this : there was a war, started by someone weak and human and wielding a video camera who saw the wrong thing at the wrong time - or the right thing at the right time - and spread the video like a disease. The original tape became classified evidence, sealed in a windowless vault somewhere in the States. 

The Volturi stepped in for clean up, but not soon enough. It started with a few smaller religious sects, spread to the ordinary people, reached the government. The humans finally believed, finally rose up, reeking of garlic, dripping holy water, waving stakes uselessly. The government’s fire power was rather more effective. They, who had been the ultimate hunters, became the hunted.

(She won’t make any lion and lamb puns here. It is not the time, nor the place, and the few who could properly appreciate the joke are dead.)

After the initial raids, there were talks of certain places like Italy and a handful of smaller European countries harbouring these “monsters”, these soulless beings who committed crimes against humanity.  Then the whole net of alliances, back door deals, petty vendettas, and sheer paranoia that connected nation to nation became so entangled that it slowly collapsed inward and destroyed itself. Destroyed everything.

Chekhov’s gun : If a gun is hanging on a mantelpiece in the first act, it will be fired in the third. The same is true for nuclear weapons. 

Of her family, only she is left. There are probably others like her, scattered in shadows, but it’s safest if she doesn’t know.  

Now, of all the survivors, she is the only one who remembers. The only one who moves through the rubble and the misery and the perpetual, sullen blazes of thousands of small fires, and knows that the fallen stone towers were once skyscrapers that held banks, lawyer’s offices, fancy boutiques, food courts. She is the only one who can shape the strange and ancient-sounding syllables of this city : Seattle.

She glides through the brokenness, where everything is stark and stony. Black slices of shadows, and cool, hard shards of moonlight.

This is a land of twilight. The end of the world has not quite arrived, but meanwhile, humanity is putting on an excellent dress rehearsal.

~

The gangs of street children have their own peculiar forest of confused legends. Stories about shortcuts through twisted underground parking lots, snow that is a purer colour than grey and doesn’t burn your skin when it touches you, secret caches of weapons and rations, huge mechanical monsters (half-beast and half-machine) whose shoulders scream and scrape against the sides of narrow alleyways, old run down theatres where you can take shelter for the night, feverish dreams of feasts that appear in a mysterious hidden hallway of the abandoned Children’s Museum, but only on the night of the full moon.

And ghost stories, of course. They have plenty of ghost stories.

These children are mostly orphans, and their mother is the war. Loss is all that they know, the faces of their families are ragged and torn away from their memories. It is no wonder that their favourite story is that of the Lady.

The Lady is mercilessly beautiful. Her skin is bone white and her hair is mahogany, not the grey of ashes and dust and sand that coats everyone else. She moves in perfect silence. If you have the good luck to see her, then it is already too late.

And no one knows how this part of the rumour begins, but : they say that she gleams like a diamond (they have never seen a diamond, they can only imagine) in the sunlight (they have never seen true sunlight, never seen rays of the sun that aren’t obscured by clouds of dust).

They say she is a survivor of that first and ancient war, and then they say that is impossible, for no one could live that long.

The children trade stories of how her icy arms will wrap around you and never let go, about how she’ll suck your blood and leave you dry and empty as a cicada’s shell.

Strangely enough, there is always longing in their voices, mixed in with the fear.

~

If she had kept up with her literary studies (survival, unfortunately, has a somewhat higher priority these days), she would have called it dramatic irony. Everyone was so intent on protecting her, and she wound up outliving them all.

Their family did fine at first, heeded by Alice’s warnings, cushioned by their wealth and their many illegal connections that allowed them to remain inconspicuous and unheeded as they moved through the human world.

People began piercing it together, someone drew connections between mass murders in Seattle and a small town in Italy that was known previously for the fineness of its police service.

(There was an influx of travelers to Volterra, chiefly nomads traveling alone or in pairs, always under the cover of night. They were dispatched of cleanly and efficiently. They should have known better than to seek asylum, when their existence itself was evidence.)

The Inquisition started. Bills were passed. The gates of the human world which the Cullens had once passed through easily suddenly came crashing down.

They were some of the last to be caught, along with the Denali clan, for they were civilized, they were compassionate, they moved and acted like humans. They almost escaped. Look at our eyes. For god’s sake, look at our eyes.

Monsters, the government said, simply, shuddering at these abominations that wore the crystallized skins of humans, as if to mock them, as if to horrify and grieve their victims even further. Nothing but soulless monsters.

~

The children have other stories, too. This is why Bella crouches backstage of what was once the Paramount Theatre, listening to the children trade tales and loots as they wrap themselves in the faded purple curtains that they’ve managed to tear from the rafters.

There’s a huge monster, the children say, big as a bear, that roams the streets during the new moon. Howling. Just howling. The howling reaches all the way up to the night sky, to break the stars in half.

A huge monster. A huge, red-brown wolf.

~

Emmett was the first to go. It was the third raid; the Yukon was hit hard. They didn’t go to Alaska, in case they drew attention to Tanya’s coven. Not that it mattered. Not that it saved anyone.

Emmett, huge and wonderful and terrifying, who laughed louder and fought harder than anyone else, whose heart was so vast. Emmett said that he would die to protect his family; Rosalie never forgave him for living up to his promise.

After the fourth raid, in which they miraculously escaped, again, thanks to Alice’s quick thinking, Rosalie went after a few of the government agents herself.

(Edward never told them what he saw in Rosalie’s mind, the fierce, shining edges of her intention - to never come back. Everyone knew anyway.)

It was Alice next. Alice, who saw everything else, could not see her own death. The government had her history; they drew her out with vague threats clouding over the last living vestiges of her human family.

It’s a trap, Jasper had said, flatly.

It’s a trap I have to walk into, was all Alice said.

(They went together. Jasper would never have lived long after Alice, anyway.)

After that, a long stretch hiding in an abandoned school in Switzerland.

After that, Edward.

(She doesn’t talk about that. Not that there’s anyone to talk to about it.)

Esme followed a little after; she tried so hard to stay alive for Carlisle and for Bella, but she had been forced to say goodbye to so many of her children already. Under enough blows, stone shatters like glass.

(Sometimes, in her mind, Esme’s face bleeds into her mother’s. Charlie and Renee, for their part, thought that their daughter died when she was nineteen.

They were the lucky ones.)

Carlisle’s death is the most recent. Bella had dragged what was left of him to an old abandoned church. They grey light turned to rose, blue, gold as it came through the stained glass windows, and Carlise’s icy skin was suddenly warmed to colour. What’s even more colourful is the fire that she burns his scattered parts in, at his request. She finds it ironic that part of the tinder she uses is a wrecked crucifix.

She feels ashamed that she can’t remember the final words that one is supposed to say over the dead; instead, she settles for poetry.

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness…

… Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth…

The only odd note is that the child in the poem is a girl child. And Bella realises, staring at the smoke that pours towards the heavens that Carlisle persisted in believing in, even then the world got shot to hell, that it sounds like she is praying, and mourning, for herself. 

~

The hunger, by now, is unbearable. It has been weeks since she last fed and it becomes harder and harder to concentrate, to remain hidden. Trying not to feed is like fighting gravity.

So she sits, knees curled up to her chest, on the roof of one of the few buildings that’s still standing, the Rainier Tower, and it is here, gazing at the wreckage which has become the world, that she tries to conjure the memories of a past life, as if it can safeguard her against her hunger. As if remembering she was once human is enough to save her.  

There was -

A wolf, she tells herself.

Yes, that’s right. A huge, red-brown wolf, just like the children say.

There was -

the smell of motor oil, the hiss of a soda can’s tab opening

“… A lifetime of servitude.”

- a garage. And in the garage -

hands, a rich russet, huge hands cradling her own, paler ones.

- there was warmth.

This is the hardest to believe, this is the one that pulls a tearless sob from the cavern of her chest : that once upon a time, the marble mausoleum of her body could’ve been touched and burned and filled with warmth.  

Everything else has passed from her, everything else has gone, except two memories. The first is the one she had in the very beginning : a clearing at night, and an impossibly huge russet wolf.

I know you.

The second one is this :

Edward, dying, rasping, Live.

At any cost, you must live.

He was always saying he was selfish, and it is only now, when he is gone and when she loves him and when she rages at him and when she cannot forget him and she lives and she lives and she lives that she finally is forced to believe him.

She grasps at another memory, as if reaching down and trying to pick up a coin from the bottom of a very deep well, when you can only catch the faintest of golden gleams. 

There was a wolf. There was a garage. There was warmth.

There was a sagging bed. A wounded boy. Her own heart splitting in two.

(The hunger is the demon riding on her back - )

Love you  - and then the blurred syllables of a name that she can’t remember. 

(The hunger smiles at her, with such heartbreaking beauty - )

Love you more.

(The hunger wears Edward’s face.)

She scrambles to remember, to hold onto to her memories, to her human memories - the bed, the boy, her wounds, their love - but it’s not enough. It’s not enough.

(That’s it, dear one, Edward says, gently.)

She goes hunting.

~

She too has a subtle gift; it’s the only reason why she is the last to survive in a world where detection means death. Her mind is not only locked and closed, it is unseen, as is the rest of her, as if the sheer force of her own modesty renders her invisible.

It takes some conscious effort on her part, some concentration, but when she is focused enough, she can walk through the streets and almost touch the humans without being heard or seen; they are so wired down with fear and misery that one more brush with death barely registers in their minds.

The only one that this does not work on is the children; they see things with such stark clarity. It is also partly why she is drawn to them, against her better judgment, and why she listens to their stories. It makes her yearn for things, for ordinary, human things, for never being able to hold a child in her arms.

Of course, there are many different kinds of hunger. 

Animals, especially wild game, are in short supply these days, but there are always children who believe in ghost stories hanging around the Paramount Theatre.

No, she doesn’t expect to be forgiven.

Neither does she really expect to go to Hell.

Hell is here, after all. 

~

She followed the stories of the huge “mutant” wolf all the way to the city once known as Seattle, which is why she sits here now. She has lived a long time, and knows that everything that can happen eventually does. Very little surprises her.

Once upon a time she walked away from him, and now, she sits and waits. She is capable of waiting for forever, so it makes little difference whether it is months or years until she finally sees the huge, familiar silhouette loping through the Seattle Woodland Park Zoo.

Their scents hit each other at the same time.

She registers : pine and cedar, rain and moss, sweetgrass and sage. The smell of a place that she once called home.

He registers : vampire.

This will be her last memory : a clearing at night, and an impossibly huge russet wolf knifing towards her, black eyes that are as inhuman as her own.

Bella knows: humanity is something that you shed like a skin, once you’ve lived long enough. And if this wolf is the same wolf she remembers, he has lived far more than “long enough”.

Wolf feet pounding against the forest floor like thunder drums, a snarl like the sky being torn open, and one huge, fierce, wonderful leap -  

“Jacob,” she says.

So that’s his name.

Hunger - no, Life - wears Edward’s face, and Death wears Jacob’s. Both of them are so terribly beautiful.

Love you, Jacob.

And it is just enough.

end.

After the first death, there is no other.