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Renesmee has been playing the piano.
She plays beautifully, all Edward in her long, quick fingers and determined frown, and she sits there for hours, unaware that Bella has been stood for as long as she’s been sat, watching.
Renesmee looks like a doll; it still surprises Bella sometimes. She’d known how other vampiric beauty is, she is that kind of other now, but no one reminds her more than Renesmee. She looks like a doll: all gorgeous, soft hair that cascades in waves, pink cheeks, wide, unblinking eyes, pristine skirt gathering around her knees. It’s the only way Bella can think to describe her that even comes close and, one day, Bella worries that Aro will return, this time for Renesmee, for his collection.
Bella remembers herself at- At that stage, at eleven-twelve-thirteen, and can’t find herself in the perfect features staring back at her. She’d been skinny and pale, that’s true, but she’d worn baggy jeans and Renee’s attempt at hand knit jumpers, dungarees and shirts from concerts with Renee, with bruises and scabbed knees and tangled hair.
Renesmee had changed into the demure blue skirt and matching blouse she currently wears before sitting at the piano and she’s remained pristine ever since, unruffled even as she jumps over the piano, laughing as she tries, and sits at the dining table in the cottage for dinner.
Bella‘s made steak and potatoes for her, pulling out a dinner-with-Charlie classic, and she sits with her as she eats. Charlie never was one for talking and that had suited Bella fine when it had been the two of them sitting together every evening, but now Bella finds herself searching desperately for something to say, but the conversation doesn’t come, doesn’t seem to want to come.
It’s not helped by the fact that there’s no school for Renesmee to come home from, just the woods with Jacob or the house with the others, and Bella has tried not to follow Renesmee as she runs wild, tries to give her space, though three months ago they celebrated her first birthday and Bella can’t reconcile the event with the girl sitting opposite her. This child roams the woods and wears the Barbour jackets her aunt Alice picks out; she plays Beethoven when she’s sad and she’s read the old textbooks of Bella’s Charlie dropped off and understands them better now than Bella ever did.
She’s-
She’s one and she’s more of an adult than Bella can understand. She’s also not, though. She’s thirteen, but, again, she’s not; she and Jake speak in their own language to each other all day and Bella can’t always remember that he’s her best friend and he’d die for Renesmee and that Renesmee thinks of Jake as a brother. She sees them and she remembers the day she awoke in this new life, this new body, free of the damage her baby had done to her, and the absence she’d felt the second her eyes had opened, the fury she’d felt seeing her baby but seeing this toddler in the arms of Rose, Nessie in Jacob’s arms, not her Renesmee.
When they do talk as Renesmee eats, it’s about seeing Charlie, about the math equation Carlisle has talked her through, about the trip Alice has planned to go shopping, because Renesmee’s clothes still only last her a month, tops, before she’s grown out of everything, but Alice and Esme dress her, not Bella.
She loves seeing the results of these trips, the way Renesmee laughs when they put on a fashion show after getting home, but she’s not the one dressing her, making her smile, and Bella would choose to take her but she wouldn’t know where to even begin.
Alice is the one curating Renesmee’s style, taking photograph after photograph, but the albums show someone who doesn’t take after Bella. The girl sitting opposite Bella is the product of all the Cullens but Bella, and she doesn’t know what to do about it.
Renesmee smiles at her when Bella fetches her a glass of water and Bella grins back, but as she does she sees the braids Rose put in for her, the look Jasper gives when he’s trying to assess whether she’s at risk of ripping someone’s arm off and her hand reaching out, concern bleeding into Bella from her daughter’s thoughts and this is still not how it should be.
Renesmee’s question rings out in Bella’s mind, and she hates herself for causing the cautious look on her daughter’s face.
Bella watched Renee like this, concerned and quiet, and she’s never wanted this for her and Renesmee. It’s not the same, she knows, because her daughter will never have to worry about their bills, the groceries, the obsessions that used to take Renee over for months before she abandoned them, but there’s still a pair of large brown eyes fixed on her. Bella stands over the table and brushes Renesmee’s hair from her face, kissing her forehead, “Everything’s perfect; eat up before the wolves descend.”
Telling her to eat earns Bella a grimace, but it answers her question.
Edward joins them before Renesmee has finished - she’s pushing the potatoes around her plate, avoiding the vegetables entirely - and they sit together, his hand finding Bella’s knee under the table and squeezing gently. He and Renesmee talk about the piece she’d been playing all afternoon, they’d worked on it last night, and he teases her about needing a second player, although Bella’s not sure that’s quite true.
Edward lets her off of the rest of her dinner and Renesmee flashes him a smile, the one that Bella can see reflected back on Edward’s face, and her hand brushes against his cheek despite the fact that she never has to actually show him what she’s thinking.
Bella’s still sat there, posture still perfect, chair not having moved a millimetre; it takes Edward’s laugh to remind her and she lets him pull her to her feet and then she finds herself in his arms, because apparently her face says more than she knows.
She stands and watches as he does the dishes, humming to himself, and he’s humming the same piece Renesmee was playing, the piece they’ve been laughing about, and Bella wants to know it too, though it’s only this week’s pick and next week they could have mastered something else and she’d still be stood there.
The wolves descend — she’d not been joking about that, the pack descends through the woods with a shared howl — and Renesmee flings herself down the stairs, soaring gracefully through the air and out of the door to where Jake, Seth, and the others wait and her laughter carries into the cottage even as she disappears.
Time passes Bella by now, days are only twilight or dawn, but she checks the clock to see that Renesmee will be late for bed again tonight, though it’s more likely Jake will carry her back here as she sleeps, or he’ll tuck Renesmee into bed in the room Esme decorated for her up at the house. It’s seven, though winter means dusk has been and gone.
Through the trees, despite the distance, Bella can make out the lights of the house, the routines Carlisle and Esme, Rosalie and Emmett, Alice and Jasper wander through, and she knows that if she went up to the garage Rose would be there, Carlisle and Esme in his study, Jasper near the mountains.
She and Edward, though. He picks a CD and it’s Debussy, because of course it is, and he offers his hand and she can close her eyes and do this now, and then the trees are all around them and she’s laughing because she can beat him, still faster, still that much stronger, but he carries her anyway.
Their meadow is dead this time of year - Christmas is around the corner, she remembers - but they’re there anyway, her jeans suffering the grass, his shirt damp, though they notice none of it, and all the nights blur together because this is where she belongs, for as long as they stay in Forks, anyway.
Not that they can stay, not for much longer; Renesmee deserves a town she’d be free to see not from a distance, where eyes won’t be on Bella and Edward for any reason other than the fact they’re new in town.
Renesmee, Bella thinks for a moment, deserves someone who really knows what they’re doing, knows her, and that’s not Bella. Whatever she’d missed in those three days, even after a year, feels insurmountable right now, like the child she watched run from their home this evening was formed, in that time, into some sculpture she doesn’t quite understand.
Edward never hears any of this, she doesn’t want him to.
Half the time, Bella can’t rationalise her feelings well enough to express any of it and the other half, she feels guilty.
She’d wanted this, died for it, but it leaves a bitter taste in her mouth sometimes, and she imagines Isle Esme, if they’d never left, or college and classes and-
And.
Bella had chosen this. She had. She’d wanted it so badly, and she still does. It’s just- Just- She’d never envisaged it quite like this.
It’s good though, she tells herself, as she lies with Edward in what is, in springtime, a daze of colour and sound. The absence of life, however - the missing flowers; small, buzzing insects she’d seen up close, the way Edward always has, for the first time last March - doesn’t detract from what is currently lying before her.
They stay there until Bella hears a distant howl - Jake, surely - and she lets Edward carry her back to the cottage, her arms around his neck, his arm under her knees, despite the fact that she’s still just as fast as him. She hides her face in his shoulder and his shirt smells like him, the soft cotton scraping against her cheekbone. She has this, him, Edward, committed to memory by now, has since day one, but it’s still enough to make her feel a familiar pang and butterflies, for her to want him.
Renesmee is already in bed when they get there, and Jake is sat on their couch, feet on their coffee table, smirking. It’s easy, then, to laugh and tease him, and send him home, and she lets Edward go up first, to tuck Renesmee in properly, smoothing her blankets like she knows he will. She hesitates when it’s her turn.
She ends up watching Renesmee breathe, laid next to her and waiting for the rise and fall of her chest, the soft exhales and the way she hides her face in her pillow, her hair tangling over her cheek. Bella doesn’t watch her dreams anymore, though, not the way she once did; it feels too personal, like she’s gaining too much of an insight into the person her child has become and Bella wants to know her, but wants to know Renesmee by time and choice.
Sometimes, Bella thinks back to the tent they’d put Renesmee to bed in, the night before Aro and the guard had arrived, and she thinks that, maybe, that was the last time she knew Renesmee instinctively, like sending Renesmee away with Jake had broken the thread tying them together. Sometimes, Bella thinks she should put such things out of her head, stop fixating on a moment she wouldn’t change. Sometimes, earlier, even, Bella thinks maybe she's never known Renesmee at all; she missed something irreplaceable and it's taken her all this time to realise it.
Renesmee kicks in her sleep, and this is the moment Bella stands, leaving Renesmee tucked up as she’d been before Bella had made space for herself in the twin bed.
She leaves the door open when she goes, though, because Renesmee sometimes has nightmares and, whilst Edward is always forewarned, Bella has to hear her cry to know.