Twilight Fan Fiction / Twilight Fan Fiction ❯ I Know My Duty ❯ Drive ( Chapter 56 )

Twilight and its three and two half sequels are the creation of Stephenie Meyer. This story is fanfiction based on characters, settings and concepts from Twilight, its first three sequels and the first half of Midnight Sun, all of which are the creation of Stephenie Meyer. No party other than the submitting author may alter this work in any way other than font size and other reasonable accommodations to formatting.

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"He didn't look back, his eyes on the road. The speedometer read a hundred and five miles an hour." —Bella, Twilight

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My teeth rattled as we hit another pothole. I was down a molar from my fight with Rolfe outside Anwar and I wasn't used to it yet. Going back for it hadn't seemed less unwise than borderline suicidal. Maybe one day I'd feel the gap in my jaw and remember it as a small price for my freedom.

If it had been the only thing, I'd feel that way now.

It would have made more sense to rent a car, but in Forks, anything with a shiny new coat of paint would stand out—or at least that had been the state of things when we'd left. I wasn't sure now. In that much time, a town that size could have had a boom or disappear entirely. That had happened with a lot of small towns in the Southwest as water rationing became an issue. Las Vegas and its environs had overtaxed the aquifer, and states all down the Colorado River had been suing each other on behalf of their resident farms and agro-businesses for how much water they could divert for irrigation—because agriculture was drinking the river dry. Solar power and magnetized cargo transport had been the great demand-driven innovations of the past decade. Perhaps water reclamation would be next.

The refueling station had had a map console. The town was still there, at least, as was the access road to Carlisle's house. Technically.

Bella had insisted on driving, saying something about needing more practice and something else about safety. I couldn't remember why I'd agreed.

"Remember your Volvo?" Bella asked.

"Keep your eyes on the road," I said, trying to keep from crushing the handhold. We were barely doing forty, but it felt like the Indy 500.

We'd bought a used car. We didn't have much left from our raid on the ship, but we wouldn't get far in a stolen vehicle, not with the way tracking systems had proliferated. A dealer willing to sell a car for cash to two young people was going to have a markup, but there were some advantages to being able to read thoughts. I hadn't had much chance to update my automotive knowledge in the past twenty years, but the dealer had, and he knew which cars were lemons and which still had a few miles left in them.

Well, the engine did. The shocks...

It had been four years since I'd been behind the wheel of a car, five times that since I'd driven regularly. Bella had only driven a few times since becoming a vampire. I'd been a bit concerned about that. All the extra information could be distracting.

"That old thing would have been shaken to pieces on this piece of junk," she said, nodding at the potholes on the highway. "And remember your Aston Martin? No way."

I'd liked to go fast. We'd all liked to go fast. It was one of the few times we could be in actual danger. A serious car crash could injure a vampire, even kill if the tank caught fire (which was probably one reason why Aro preferred trains). Having skill at high-speed driving actually made a difference.

The past several winters had been bad. The rise in average global temperatures had increased evaporation over the ocean—as if Washington needed more cloud cover. That had brought more snowfall and overall precipitation. The warming had placed Washington right along the freezeline, where the temperature shimmied above and below 0°C many times each winter. The water would sink into tiny cracks in the road, then expand when it froze, giving it room to sink a little further when it melted. And it had happened right when the federal government had cut the budget for road repair.

"Do you remember?" she asked again.

"I remember when Emmett discovered drag racing. They'd just completed one stretch of I-44." It had been like driving on silk.

I wondered if they'd redo the highway. It didn't get much traffic, but now that the U.S. had entered China's civil war, manufacturing had stepped up. The current President was promising that there would be minimal troop involvement and that the U.S.'s role would be providing advice and materiel, but that was what they'd said about Vietnam and Iraq. The phrase "land war in Asia" had come up on the radio more than once. I was surprised that movie was still in the lexicon but then I hadn't much cared for The Wizard of Oz either.

"You know," I said, hearing my voice jump as we hit another pothole, "a lot of people forget this, but the interstate highway system was originally built for defense purposes. Eisenhower saw the autobahn in Germany and got inspired."

"Huh," she said.

"Yeah," I answered.

Well it was falling apart now. Our trip from Missouri had taken days longer than it should have, even if it was still faster than if we'd tried to travel on foot. The National System of Interstate and Defense Highways had been authorized in 1956, though parts of it weren't completed until many years later. Now the whole thing was crumbling. After the wars and economic crises of the early years of the century, few people wanted Congress to spend money on something so mundane as road maintenance and bridge replacement. Never mind that it was a resource that a huge portion of the population used and from which everyone benefitted. Though the numbers were hard to back up, the Interstate Highway System had paid for itself many times over in faster interstate trade.

There had been a few disasters. A bridge in Illinois. But mostly there had been car accidents and slowed traffic. Once people had been inconvenienced enough by the problem, they'd paid attention. Rebuilding infrastructure was slated to be a major issue in the next presidential campaign. At least then politicians could make promises they didn't intend to keep about something that actually mattered rather than about hot button social issues.

I sometimes wondered why anyone cared about those things. I'd been a fish out of water since the day I saw my first Flapper. That was when it had really hit me: these girls who didn't care about the things my mother and her contemporaries had studied to the wire. Times had changed and I was still me, not even the person I would have been if I'd aged physically. Of course, that was when I'd been living on my own. I told myself that what humans did wasn't my business. I drew a line, put the criminals whom I made my food on one side and everyone else on the other, but I didn't think either of them was the same kind of thing that I was.

Homosexuals living openly, interracial marriage, women who didn't have pregnancy as a disincentive to sex, none of it would have shocked me if I'd become a nomad. But I'd gone back to live in a coven. Carlisle had a constant interest in the world around him. He saw the liberalization of society as part of the flow of history toward justice. Overall, at least. And he kept himself—and his family—well within the stream, though whether we were truly part of it had been a subject of debate between him and me.

Aro had constantly monitored the collective currents of the human will, and Carlisle had been on the ground, working with people hand-to-hand and face-to-face. Both my masters had kept me from floating away.

I was going to see Carlisle. Soon. That hadn't really hit me before.

"Take this turnoff," I said.

"Are you pointing?" she asked. "Because I'm not looking at your hands."

"Yes, the one on the right," I finished.

Her lips flattened out. I wondered if she remembered the roads around here. Some of the routes had been moved. If we turned right, we wouldn't pass through the town. Her appearance had changed to the point where people who hadn't known her well would not recognize her, but mine had not.

I knew she'd want to see her father. We'd need a better plan than the one we'd used for Renée. I wouldn't be able to stop her from doing what she pleased but I might be able to convince her to stay safe.

I sat up in my chair as the ways grew nearer. I ...I'd thought I'd been ready for this after the Ozarks. My chest felt hollow, which I recognized as a reflex from my human days: I was expecting my heart to pound.

It was raining. Of course it was. But the road was still lined with trees on both sides. It hardly looked different.

"When was the last time you drove this way?" Bella asked. "Do you remember?"

I shook my head. I probably did remember, but I didn't want to answer just now.

Bella slowed down, and I saw her dark eyes flick toward me as we rounded the bend. We'd both need to hunt soon. And... and it would be in a place I knew.

It came into view, white like a ghost.

For some reason, it was stranger to see a house that was still intact than a ruin with cedars growing up through the floorboards. That had been so different that I hadn't had to think of it as the same place where I'd lived with my family.

"Pull over here," I said quietly. Bella looked at me and drew the car to a stop on the gravel. The rain had shifted to heavy mist, but it could have been an ice storm and I'd still have popped the lock on the passenger door and gotten out.

The Forks house looked exactly the same.

There was moss growing up one side and some of the roof shingles needed replacing. The wood around the doorframe was probably no more than a few years old. It was the same.

Even before she'd taken up architecture, Esme had loved this house and hadn't wanted to sell it. After our first stint here in the twentieth century, she'd hired a caretaker from Port Angeles to check on it a few times a year, fix any leaks in the roof and the like. But when we'd moved back, she'd pulled down half the place and redesigned it anyway. Rose had complained about the sawdust in her hair for weeks.

She'd probably done the same thing this time. If I peered through the windows, I might see some warping in the hardwood floors, but there would be no broken windows or obvious signs of unlivability.

The lawn was overgrown, even her garden, but in time the perennials would come up. She'd deliberately left them in the earth.

I hadn't noticed her getting out of the car, but I heard the driver's side door slam before Bella appeared beside me. "How do you feel?" she asked.

I nodded. "I'm all right," I said. I was going to find Carlisle and soon. One day, after enough time had passed, we'd all live in this house again. We'd left before face-scanning cameras had become common, so we had one more good stretch of years that we could spend here without breaking the law. After that, who knew?

"Can we go in?" she asked. "There a key under the mat or something?"

I started shaking my head. Now that I was here I ...I didn't want to. There wouldn't be anything to see but dust and perhaps the odd covered bit of furniture that hadn't been important enough to take to Ithaca. "Right," I said. "Messages." I exhaled, suddenly wanting air to stretch my lungs.

"Oh, clues!" Bella blinked, as if she were surprised I'd mention it. Odd. There was no other reason for us to risk coming here. "Uh, mailbox?" she asked. "The few times I was here I never noticed where you kept it."

No matter how many billing systems went paperless, snailmail always seemed to land on its feet. "There were two," I said. Esme had spared the wall-mounted metal box beside the door when we'd taken pity on the mail carrier and set up a street box, but it had served its purpose as a place for keeping household notes. "You check the one by the front door; I'll hit the end of the driveway." Bella gave a thin smile and turned to the house.

The mailbox had been replaced, probably no more than four years earlier. A simple affair made of weather-resistant plastic had replaced the box that Emmet had carved himself with the Cullen seal. Wood weathered, I reminded myself. It was only time doing what time did. I checked the box. Empty, as expected. They would have forwarded any mail, carefully.

"Anything?"

She shook her head, looking disappointed. I could empathize. I'd gotten my hopes up too. "This could be a good sign," I said. "Why bother leaving us word if all is well in Denali?"

She gave a thin smile. "But we're here," she said. "Why don't you tell me what you remember about this place?"

I smiled back even though something nagged at me. I knew we shouldn't linger. If Aro did want us back—and it wasn't vanity for me to think that he'd want his head newborn wrangler and best interrogator back—then he'd definitely send a team to look for us here. I couldn't hear any vampire voices but my ability had a maximum range of a few miles, but something about the silence itched. At the same time, I didn't want to move, the way someone with a broken bone that's finally been set and dressed and cast does not want to move. I didn't really understand it; I definitely didn't feel safe.

So I told Bella stories about Carlisle and Rosalie and Jasper, Emmett and Esme. Who'd argued about putting the piano too close to the library. Who'd wanted a bigger entertainment system. Bella listened and smiled, though her eyes still seemed tight. When the rain threatened, instead of looking for the spare key (we'd kept it under a two-ton decorative boulder when I'd lived here; it had been Emmett's turn to pick the hiding place), I drew Bella toward the back of the property.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"You'll see," I answered. "Well, if it's still there."

There had been the remains of a cottage on this site. Esme had been toying with the idea of a rebuild but had never gotten around to it between paying gigs.

I was almost tripping over it before I realized we were here. Three of the exterior walls were still standing, stones gently gray against the dim light that made it through the clouds and trees. Even then, it seemed to blend back against the natural rock face behind it. Vines and moss, brown and wiry with the winter, had worked their way into every crevice, mostly wild forest plants, but I also saw what might have been honeysuckle. Even ruined, the place would have been idyllic in the summer.

I stepped into the building's footprint, gently pulling Bella along with me. If I looked carefully, I could pick the remains of the old roof timbers out of the half-frozen leaf litter. It was more Black Forest than Pacific Northwest. In my mother and father's day, "cottage" had referred to a house that could be run with no more than three servants. This was much closer to the original idea.

Bella shot me a devious eye. "Are you hoping I'll like these ruins as much as the Ozark ones?"

"Bella!"

"What? I didn't say I was complaining. So who was Esme going to rope into decorating this place? Maybe Rose or Emmett or..."

"Decorate? It would have to be renovated first," I said. Some of the original rafters were still here.

We sat under what was left of the roof as the rain poured down. "Let's imagine what this place would look like if it were rebuilt," she said, pointing to a far wall. "Bookshelves. Lots of them." She leaned her head back. "I miss books on paper. Not the kind they had in Volterra, novels. Old ones and classics and trashy ones with the detailed pictures on the cover."

"Oh of some poor man with his shirt half off as a fair maiden swoons in his arms?"

"Or of a dragon," she said, "or a spaceship, or anything Aro would have thought should have been pulped and turned into decorative dog collars for the accounting humans."

"Bella you have to be more—" I stopped.

"I have to what?" she asked with a leer.

I sighed. "You don't have to be more careful," I said.

"We're not there anymore," she said as if she wanted me to repeat it.

"There won't be a there at all if the worst happens," I answered. We had to get the word to Demetri. He'd believe it if it came from me, and Aro would believe it if it came from him. Thinking of the spy made me feel anxious again.

I was glad that I'd get to see Carlisle and Esme and Rose and Emmett and Jasper soon, but for some reason ...I was probably paranoid. I had a feeling that something awful was going to happen, so bad it made my head hurt. I tried to shake it off. Bella was here, Bella was smiling...

She had no idea. That had to be it. She had no idea what it was like to be a vampire who faked being human every day, wearing lies on her skin. The worst part was pretending to be a teenager, having to take orders from adults who didn't have a third of my education as they droned out the same lesson that I'd heard eight times. Sure, sometimes the historical perspective changed—I'd probably heard five different explanations of the causes of the American Civil War—but I could read that in an article in two minutes; I didn't need a whole year of history classes. Bella had spent the past twenty years as the principal combat instructor to the vampire world's elite shock troops. She wasn't going to handle pretending to be a student that well.

Or maybe she would. She sometimes talked about how she didn't like that she'd never finished high school. Maybe sitting through a few years of classes was something she could tolerate.

"Tell me what you remember about this place," she said. "What happened when you first moved into the house? You were living in Alaska right before that, right?"

I smiled and started in on the story of how Rose had thought she and Emmet could "christen" every room so to speak. Esme had put a stop to that. But Rose had been upset that someone—probably Tanya—had stolen one of her favorite lingerie teddies from her bag. She'd made herself another one. No, Esme had made it for her. No, that wasn't right either...

Bella was stroking my hair as I lay with my head in her lap.

"You're so good to me, my love," I said. I couldn't remember exactly why I was saying it, but why not? It was good to tell people that their efforts were appreciated.

"I know," she said, but she sounded sad.

"We should stay for a while," she said.

Of course. Of course. I nodded. I looked around. Something by the far wall... "Bella," I said, motioning her toward me. I pointed to a spot next to what had been the windowpane, where the wall was stone. "Those scratch marks," I said, levering myself to a sitting position.

She sat up beside me. "Vampire," she said.

I got up and walked toward the wall, touching the marks with my hand. Someone strong had made these marks in the rock with nothing but their fingers. Someone had been here. But the marks looked old. It could have been made years ago. I looked around the room. I finally realized what they reminded me of: The cell in Volterra, the one with the solid steel door.

"There was a fight here," Bella said. She pointed up to the partial rafter. "One of my newborns could have done that."

"So could termites," I offered. "Probably Jasper and Emmett had a practice fight in here. Esme would get upset if they got too rough in the house."

"Maybe," she said. "But there was a fight here once, or at least nearby." She licked her lips. "You remember that letter you got Aro to let me write?"

It took me a minute, "Letting the wolves know about ...was it an army?" I asked.

The truth was that I hadn't thought much about it. The wolves weren't my family; everyone I cared about had left the area long before Victoria could make good on her threats. Demetri and Jane had taken a team to eliminate the problem. Or had it been Demetri and Rolfe? It didn't matter. Seattle newspapers had run stories about the dozens of missing people, and...

"I feel like I'm missing something," I said.

Bella almost smiled. That was odd. I was thinking about a newborn army that my family's enemy—specifically Bella's enemy, I now remembered—had built to destroy us. Why would she smile?

"Maybe if we wait here a while, it will come to you," she suggested.

"Maybe," I said.

But I had a nagging feeling that we should not stay too long.

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In Twilight, Edward says that vampires' tastes and personalities are frozen at the point of turning. Here, I've taken that to mean that it takes an almost traumatic event to do something like fall in love or change loyalties. We see one such event from Edward's perspective in Midnight Sun. Bella almost undergoes one at the end of Part I.

But you have to wonder, how would a white teenager who got frozen at seventeen during WWI feel about race and the Civil Rights movement?

We tend to assume that the past was always more racist than the present, but things actually jump around a lot and vary over space as well as time. The association of dark skin with slavery has a lot to do with our current ideas about race, and we can trace a big chunk of that no further back than the Renaissance. (Think of Shakespeare's treatment of black characters in Othello and Titus Andronicus.) Victorian-age American Northerners often prided themselves of not being racist like the supposedly ignorant Southerners, even though we'd consider both groups to be racist by today's standards.

Edward was an at-least-middle-class guy living in Chicago in 1918. His upbringing would have been heavily influenced by the Victorian age (which technically ended in 1904 but arguably continued until WWI). Chicago was a northern city and, for a time, unusually progressive on issues of race. School segregation was outlawed in 1874. However, Chicago would have had only a very small black population, well under 5%, for most of Edward's human life. The very beginning of the Great Migration would have taken place just as he was thinking about becoming a soldier. For almost any case in human history, when different groups of people compete for the same jobs or other resources, they tend not to like each other. A lot of Chicago's racism would have gotten started when blacks from the South came there for manufacturing jobs and found themselves elbow-to-elbow with European immigrants and longstanding Chicago workers, predominantly after Edward's time.

From this, I'm guessing that Edward-at-seventeen would have told that racism was bad but would have actually been mildly racist by our standards. He might have been subject to the Victorian obsession with putting things in categories, but for the most part, he'd have thought of racism as something that Southerners did.

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