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It’s raining when the plane lands.
Bella Swan traces a drop as it slides down the window, the world below slowly coming into a hazy golden focus.
She is quiet tonight, half-willing the weather to become so adverse they have no choice but to return to Arizona. Half-formed pictures of the life waiting for her sliding through her mind, all quickly dismissed. The reality was Bella had no idea what awaited her, only the cold, only the rain. Only the quiet.
What exactly did one say to a parent they hadn't seen since they were still in pigtails? Charlie was a half remembered pie recipe, misty grey summers and awkward Christmas cards without x’s.
Of course, if she knew then what was truly ahead of her in Forks, maybe Bella would have been more eager to steal every moment she could.
Maybe she would fling herself into her fathers arms, take him to dinner, and call her mom. Maybe she'd step off the plane and straight back onto the return to Phoenix, and never face it at all. But alas, visions were not Bella's gift in this life. So, she simply slipped her arms into the straps of her back pack, weaving her way into the airport terminal.
The carousel is busy, it takes a moment to find her bag among the crowds, and it’s a tall, dirty blonde haired man that finally hoists it off the belt as he spots her approach, a smile all teeth as she mumbles thanks and hurries away before thinking to ask how he knew it was hers. In fact, she finds Charlie standing shyly in the foyer, slides into the cruiser and away from the airport and doesn't think of it all.
At this moment, she is already lost to some warbling swan song.
Bella doubts if anything will feel normal ever again.
Charlie's awkward tour of the house is exactly that - awkward.
“I’ve gotta go to work, they called me last minute for a night shift I…. ah..”
Bella smiles, shrugs half heartedly, “I get it. It's fine.”
“I wanted to be here, first day home and all,” Charlie admits, rubbing the back of his head, "There's food in the fridge. You can cook, d-do you cook?”
“Yeah, I can cook.”
“Good, good, just uh… be careful I guess? Don’t… burn yourself?” Charlie moves jerkily, pulls her into a barely- there one-armed hug like he isn't sure he should, and Bella isn't sure he should either, before swiping his keys and vanishing into the fading daylight.
If this were a kinder story, some strange whim to call him back might have possessed her, to insist they eat a warm meal and embrace with both arms like a father and daughter should. But as we have established, this is not that story. Instead she feels a vague relief at the locking door, abandoning the kitchen to poke through the rest of the house.
Bella doesn't explore for long, content to leave Charlie's things where they are. Still, it is of some curiosity to haunt halls unchanged a lifetime later. Bella shrugs off the memories, gently shuts her bedroom door, and wonders where Renee is at that moment.
It's a few hours later, just as she begins to nod off, that she hears it.
At first Bella thinks she must have fallen asleep, lost in the memories she is trying to reconcile with her new life. She rolls over tiredly, fingers fumbling for her nightstand and the lamp switch when it comes again.
Bella?.... That you?
Bella blinks, sheets pooling as she stands, checking the hallway. The lights downstairs remain off, the key hook by the door empty. Charlie isn't home.
“I'm just tired,” she murmurs to herself, “sleep. Jetlag.”
No sooner has she closed her bedroom door, however does the noise come again;
Help… over here
It's louder this time- from the direction of her window. Bella peers out into the darkness, something cold settling into her veins, wide awake now, hairs on her arms standing up.
The forest behind the house is pitch black, the trees dense and impossibly large in the darkness. Charlie isn't- can't be- back there. It makes no sense-
Quickly!
There. A flailing swipe of a flash light beam, there for seconds and gone- Charlie's desperate call clearer than any sound in the house. Bella never thought herself a brave woman, nor any kind of hero or heroine. But it is not a consideration at all to yank jeans and her coat on, grab a flashlight and fly down the stairs into the backyard.
“Charlie?” she calls, steadily approaching the tree line, flashlight sweeping over foliage and still damp greenery.
This…. Here… now!
“Charlie, where are you?” Bella forces herself forwards, stumbling through, deeper and deeper into the forest until she realises quite suddenly she can't tell the direction she came from anymore.
“Charlie?” she calls again, tugging at her sleeves nervously. There's no footprints, no sign of anything at all. What on earth was she thinking coming out here? It's quiet in the forest at night, the darkness impenetrable, the cold starting to seep into her bones and not even a whisper of a bird. Wasn't that kind of strange?
My kids waitin for me-
Bella runs blindly towards her fathers voice, finally tripping into a small clearing, out of breath and shaking painfully hard.
Sat innocently in the grass, a single radio, damp with the days rain.
Signing off, goodnight guys
A radio.
Tuned into the WPD’s frequency.
Some ancient, terrible fear slides through Bella Swan's veins then, the kind of instinctive terror that human kind has always dreaded.
The moment a young girl on her first day home goes in one moment from daughter to prey.
“Your father needs to keep a closer eye on his equipment. Taking the radio was just so… easy.”
Trembling hands swing the flashlight onto a tall, vaguely familiar face. Dirty blonde hair, sand blasted jacket.
“I’d say this isn't going to hurt but…”
A smile that's all teeth. A cold, cruel laugh. The flashlight falls as the thought of running half forms in her mind-
She isn't fast enough.
She was never going to be fast enough.
Bella Swan was only seventeen, only a girl.
Only a human.
There is a strange rush of air, cold hands pinning her to a pillar of stone.
There is a moment, just one, single moment, where Bella Swan realises she is about to die and wishes absurdly for her father-
Then there is agony.
Then there is nothing.
There's a hole in the earth, and we're walking around the edges
The house is quiet in the morning.
It isn't like it hadn't been when he had arrived home, but it was expected then, late as it was.
Charlie wasn't used to living with another person, hadn't been for a while, but surely there should be some sign of life? The desire to allow his daughter her privacy and the parental need to make sure his only child is still breathing is a strange and troubled inner fight. It's 10am. The kid needs to wake up. Kids need routine.
Right?
Resolved, he steps into the hallway, hand already half raised to knock on her door, only- it’s hanging half open already. Charlie frowns, peering around it into her room. Her suitcase and backpack are right where he had set them down for her last night, closed and untouched. Her bedsheets were tossed to one side, her coat absent from the back of the chair.
Her phone sat, long dead, by her still burning lamp.
He doesn't think. Doesn’t know where his actions come from-
Every door in the house is thrown open, every room searched and searched again. By the time he reaches the kitchen there's a million thoughts racing through his mind, that she’d left, left like Renee did, left him again and would never come home-
The back door hangs open, cool morning air ruffling the paper on the table.
He hadn't even stopped in the kitchen last night- had meant to check if the oven was off but-
Faint steps drift through the mud towards the treeline. He's calling for back up before he's reached the edge, rushing into the forest like his life depended on it, gun in one hand and phone in the other.
The others find him just a couple hours later, along with a handful of what he assumes are volunteers.
“Anything?” he asks desperately, “has anyone seen anything?”
“Swan…”
Charlie glares daggers at his deputies as they take him to one side, voices dropping in a mockery of privacy, “You know what divorcees are like. Renee probably filled her head with crap about you. Are you sure she didn't leave like-”
“Bella isn't like that,” Charlie snarls, squaring up to the officer, “she wouldn't do that, she's not…”
“Scuse my saying, but how would you really know? You ain't seen her since-”
A strong, tanned hand wraps around his fist before it can make contact with his deputy's snot nosed face.
Sam Uley wasn't part of the search, his clothes suggested a mid morning run if anything, but he got between them, a frown creasing between his eyes;
“Let’s take a breath before we do something we're gonna regret,” he says gently, "what's goin on Charlie?"
“Bellas’ gone. Her trail led here and this idiot is suggesting-”
“Bella’s gone?” Sam's voice is sharp, a note of something almost like fear in it, "You're sure?”
Charlie's eye twitched, “If you ask me one more time if I think she ran out like my wife-”
“I’m not looking to get sucker punched, so I won't,” Sam glances back to the forest, “this is mountain lion territory. Y’all should be taking this seriously on that alone!”
The deputies look mutinous at being scolded, but at Charlie's expression turn and call out to resume the search. Charlie moves to follow, but finds himself tugged back towards the house;
“Wait a moment. You look ready to collapse, and your heart giving out won't help Bella.”
Sam Uley guides him back to his kitchen table, pours a shot of whiskey into a mug and slides it over to him, "You're sure she's missing?”
“Missing?” Charlie echoed, “how can she be missing when she hasn't even been here yet? Uley I-”
“I promise, we will find her. She probably just went for a walk and got lost, Phoenix is all open roads right?”
His mumbled agreement seems to reassure Uley, who sits across from him, breathing deeply as if that’d fuckin calm anyone.
“I should have stayed home. I was gonna stay home I just…”
“This isn't your fault. Don't go down that road-”
“What kind of parent sees his kid for the first time in years an just ditches her to go to work? Uley I….” Charlie's eyes flickered, "I just got her back.”
A strong hand drops on his shoulder, a ghost of comfort, “So let's find her.”
They say the first forty eight hours of a person being missing are the most critical.
The chances they will be found alive drop significantly with every hour that passes, statistics dwindling down to naught.
When it hits the seventy second hour, Charlie Swan opens his front door to find Sam Uley holding a bloody yellow raincoat and proof those people said right.
Charlie wonders if the world hadn't descended into hell somewhere between Portland and Forks after all.
You have buried childish qualities, friend make sense of me
When he had married Renee, Charlie had been far too young. Heady with love, sure of the life he wanted, content to stay where he was born and die in the bed his parents made for him.
His daughter had never been like that.
Bella had always taken quietly after her mother, always dreaming of somewhere else. He didn't think she'd ever so much as smiled at a boy, though the books she escaped in doubtless filled her head with fanciful ideas of love.
At least, that had been Bella at nine.
He’d never know what she was like at seventeen.
No one else would know anything beyond that either.
“I never thought I’d come back here.”
Charlie doesn't look up as Renee slips into the small bathroom, his tie twisted between her sun-spotted fingers as she analyses him,
“Never thought I would,” she repeated, “but I always knew our daughter would come back. Even if I hadn't left with Phil… she's too much like you not to enjoy the quiet out here eventually.”
“Funny,” Charlie coughs the words out of a closed up throat, head hanging over the sink, “I was just thinking she was too much like you.”
A flicker of a smile ghosts Renee's face. Up close, she's older than he remembers, fine lines, makeup done by hands that shook, hair dyed in a rush for the service and a shade off her usual, less of the woman he'd married every year that passed.
Charlie searched her face for their daughters instead and saw only his own misery reflected back.
“You have that look in your eyes. What are you searching for this time?”
He straightens, lets her wind his tie around his neck just like she did at their wedding, just as distant as she was then, just… clearer now.
Renee tuts when he doesn't answer, glances at the clock and back at the doorway.
Time to go.
Nausea sweeps through him, and he fights the urge to vomit, to run, to never face any of it at all.
Instead, he follows his ex wife past the door he refuses to re-open, down the stairs, out to the waiting car, a debriefed taxi driver opening the doors for them with a pitiful expression.
They don't talk as they head to the cemetery, they never were good at this part, the emotions.
He wishes they were. He wishes they didn't have to be.
Billy Black, Jacob and Sam Uley are waiting for them when they park, offering cordial politeness to Renee and faces full of understanding to Charlie.
Jacob's eyes are red rimmed, and it breaks Charlie's heart a little. They deserved time, to re-connect, to see what they could be to each other.
The kid seemed to feel the weight of the lost chances as much as anyone.
He turns away before he can think of it all too long.
The procession is long, the entirety of Forks seeming to have shown up for a girl they only half remembered.
That was the thing about small towns though, they protected their own. You hurt one, the whole damn community feels it.
He just wished she could see it.
They walk to a polished coffin, place white lilies and white roses in his hands and watch as he lays them down over where he thinks she would lay if they’d found any of her at all.
The pastor speaks about innocence, about lives cut short, tragedy and a grief that will never leave their souls just as the kid wont.
They turn to Charlie, but his throat is swollen.
Renee sniffs hard and steps up in his place, still clutching one of the white lilies between chipped nail polish covered fingers
“You didn’t know our Bella, not as she was now,” Renee says softly, “you remember her how I like to, I think, pigtails, a cheeky grin and a bad habit of hiding away with her novels and a stash of sweets”
Polite laughter. All of it hollow.
“The truth is, the girl I put on that plane wasn't her anymore. She was smart, strong, beautiful. Almost a woman in her own right, she wanted to be a writer. I never did read anything she wrote but one of her favourite authors was Bronte so it was probably spectacular. Just like she was. Quiet, shy, and utterly wonderful.” Renee dabs at her eyes, lips trembling, “People keep asking me, do you regret putting her on that plane?-”
He can't bare to keep listening. Her words form a soft hum through his consciousness, the answer lost to time and the buzz between his ears. He doesn't want to know, thinks he already does and hates himself for it.
Finally, she steps away, the energy seeping from her bones as her fiancé helps her down. Charlie can say nothing, do nothing, just watch a small string of faceless people breathe words she will never hear.
The coffin gets lowered eventually, the dirt hides all those flowers beneath it, all that love they'd never pass on.
The priest prays, and he thinks he hears quiet words in the old tongue of the Quillietes too, though Jacob's eyes have long since averted to glare into the woods.
One by one people start to drift back to the reception after that, hands brushing his shoulders, words never reaching his ears.
Charlie waits for them to leave, for the sun to start to dip on the horizon.
Stands in front of his baby's grave until it's just them, and he can finally collapse against it.
“I'm sorry I didn't speak at your funeral," he says softly to the carved stone, “I should have. I just… I'm not a man of words. Never have been. Just… not who we are.”
The grave says nothing, the stone cold under his suit jacket.
“I just need… I need to…” Charlie frowns in distaste at his own inability to speak. Words for things he cared about never seemed to come.
Never seemed to be right.
Never made anyone stay.
Not even now.
He sighs, tips his head back and stares at a water colour splattering of orange, red, tangerine and ochre in the sky.
“I wanted to stay that night. I just didn't know how. Cause you're so grown up now and I- hell what do I know about raising you? I wanted to try. I really did.” His throat burns viciously, and he wonders if Bella can hear him somehow, from somewhere, “I miss you kid. I'm… so sorry”
There's no sign. No flash on the horizon or butterflies slipping by.
But he hopes she hears somehow. Needs her to know that he-
“I loved you so much. You were my kid. Nothin changes that.”
It isn't long after that Sam Uley and Billy come back for him, coax him into their truck and to the diner for a solid meal.
Red eyes watch them go, but Charlie doesn't know he is already forgiven.
For him, there is only a still-packed suitcase in a silent room and the quiet devastation of the night.
Times gonna have the final say (we won’t stay the same but we won't forget where we came from)
It seems an impossible thing, to live after unthinkable tragedy.
Everyone wondered if he could do it at first, even himself. Seemed half of Forks showed up at his door each day to press casseroles into his hands and clear the empty bottles of beer out of his kitchen.
It was impossible. But it happened.
Without his even realising it, the beer emptied a little slower, the clutter cleared a little more often. He slowly returned to a desk job, then a traffic warden, then chief once more as his deputy clapped him on the shoulder and claimed to be glad to hand it back after ‘keeping his seat warm’ for three years.
And day by day he learns to live with the guilt, the horror, the pain.
A mountain lion gets shot, the Cullens move away, Seattle catches the killer haunting its streets.
Before Charlie Swan is aware of it happening he's grown old.
These days there's a second watch next to his on the nightstand, warm hands to wrap a blanket around him when he struggles out of bed to the rocking chair on the porch.
Sue had given his last thirty years more than he deserved, and was treating his last months with nothing less than pure dignity and love, even as her own knees creaked and the lines on her face deepened.
Yeah, thirty good years.
So much time. More than he ever wanted or knew what to do with.
Charlie blinked these days and the hours passed, blurred by the drugs they gave him in handfuls, so that it was already sunset was of no surprise.
Strange though, that Sue hadn't called to say she'd be late.
He slowly pushed the blanket back, considering if it was even worth trying to walk on legs more bone and dust than limb.
“Allow me”
A melodic voice, soft and warm like a half remembered lullaby. Cool hands slipping beneath his knees, his face pressed into a blue sweater as he is momentarily lifted, tucked into bed faster than physics should allow.
Those cool hands smooth the duvet around him in the dark house, search for pillows and mugs of tea.
The moonlight offers only a vague outline of a woman, tall and slender, with long, dark hair and the spark of what could be diamonds as she moved.
“Who are you?” he asks, voice thin and rasping “are you…”
Hot tea guided to the nightstand, pale hands that hesitated on the switch for the lamp, “Am I what?"
That voice…
Charlie reaches before the woman can, yanks the pull switch and blinks rapidly as golden light fills the bedroom.
Oh, he thinks, I was right.
“An angel,” he concludes out loud, “my angel."
Because standing next to his sickbed is his seventeen year old daughter, almost exactly as she was the day she died.
Her lips lift, a soft, secretive smile as she sits in the weathered chair Sue usually haunted. The movement is strange, fluid in a way he didn't think people could be.
Her eyes are strange too, shouldn't they be brown? But in the lamplight they almost looked gold.
“I’m not an angel, Charlie.”
But she must be, to sound like a peal of belles, to seem so alien and so familiar at the same time. To be here.
“You’re not my Bella,” he whispers, hands shaking where they clench the sheets, “she died, you see. My kid… My kid died thirty years ago. And she didn’t…”
“I know I look a little strange. I tried contacts but they don't stick,” her voice is apologetic, as if an angel failing to mimic his dead daughter was something sorry could cover.
“It’s really me, dad,” the angel reaches, covering his hand with hers, “it's me. Look- the day I left, I wore a yellow coat, carried a stupid little cactus off the plane and my favorite color was purple.”
Silly facts. Silly, silly details but…
“But how can it be? Am I dead?”
That laugh again, as she shook her head, “No. Not yet. But soon, I think. It's why I could come. You don't know how badly I've wanted to come.”
And Charlie is old, an old man with old wounds.
He decides, for once in his life, to believe that the one thing he wants most could be true.
He looks into his daughter's eyes, into the sheer sincerity in her too perfect face, and he crumbles.
His arms are around her before he can think twice, crying silently into her shoulder, thinking absurdly that it felt like fucking cashmere of all things.
But she hugs back, gently, fiercely yes, but gently, as if afraid he might break, as if his little girl's arms could ever hurt him.
“This is real,” she whispers, “I’m home, dad.”
Oh lord, if you could grant me one thing, let this be real.
Please. Just for one day.
“God I missed you so much,” he chokes, finally pulls back, tries to commit every inch of her face to memory, “you have no idea how sorry I am for that day. I should never have left, I should have made you dinner and asked you questions and-”
“It wasn't your fault,” Bella Swan, his kid, his baby, tells him, still clutching his hands, “Charlie, I need you to know there was nothing you could have done differently. We were outmatched, it wasn't your fault. Nobody could have done anything.”
“What- what does that mean- outmatched?”
There is grief in her eyes as they finally look towards the window, the forest beyond it, “I don't know if I should-”
“Please,” Charlie isn't one to beg, but this mystery had haunted him too long, “tell me what happened to you Bells. How you are… how you look this?”
“Okay,” she whispers, “okay. But it won't be easy to understand. So just… believe me, as much as you can?”
“Always.”
Charlie sits with a heart that breaks over and over as she explains how she was lured into the woods by his own voice, how she saw a man, and then never saw anything with her own eyes again.
“It was quick,” she offers, “that part. Dying didn't hurt for long. I saw him move, a flash maybe and then it was just… dark. For a long time.”
“So you are dead?”
“Yes.” she takes his hand, presses it where her heart should beat.
Her chest is cold. Silent.
“So how-”
“We never found out if he did it on purpose. But.. the man who took my life also gave me another one,” Bella half smiles, "I didn't remember anything at first. The process isn't kind. But I did remember one thing. You.”
Charlie sags in her arms, letting her wrap them around him like when she was a kid, only in the reverse this time, “me?”
“That you were someone who loved me, who would help me? I wanted to go to you more than anything. But it wasn't safe. Someone stopped me, and they took me to people like me. Who could help me.”
“Just tell me kid, please?”
Bella takes a breath she doesn't need and spins stories of vampires, hunting animals and being under the rule of an Italian clan.
“I know it all sounds scary. But like I said, I had a little help- Charlie do you remember the Cullen's?”
No way. No fucking way-
“Don’t tell me they knew. That they took you away-”
“They did it to save me, Charlie, I swear. They saved me. They protected me, taught me. And -”
That's when Charlie, with all his years of serving, realises they aren't alone.
“Get in here kid,” he huffs, “this better be good.”
Edward Cullen hasn't changed a day either. He could be menacing the hospital with his father just as he did thirty years ago. Only now he seems.. softer maybe. Like he'd lost an edge.
He smiles kindly, sits on Charlie's other side, “Hello Chief Swan.”
“Damn Cullen's. You know the Quileute's stopped me hunting your daddy down for answers?”
“Yes. We have an understanding, they agreed discretion was for the best-”
“Don’t you dare,” Charlie grips his daughter's cold hands fiercely, as if Edward might steal her away again, “don’t say that. None of this was for the best.”
“Considering what we were dealing with,” Bella says softly, “it was. But know this, Edward has been the best part of all of it. We're married, Charlie. And we're happy, really, really happy!”
He catches the rings on their fingers then, old, elegant and glittering. Well worn.
So Charlie pushes down the rage, takes a breath, coughs on the effort it takes to prompt them to continue, “Tell me. Tell me everything.”
And at last he gets the whole truth. Of years of travelling, the constant threat of the Volturi yes, but so many happy years.
It's everything he ever wanted for her.
“I'd give anything to change how it happened,” Edward swears, “but the life we share is not one I’d trade for anything. She is my life, and I promise she will always be loved. Always protected. Always understood.”
“That's something,” he concedes, "that's something. God, my Bella - all grown up. You've had a whole life.”
“And I’ll have many more,” she smiles brilliantly, and the love she has for that boy is all over her face like nothing he's ever seen, “that's why I'm here. To tell you, I have forever, I'll do everything I ever wanted and everything I ever could. You were the only thing I ever wanted that Edward couldn't give me.”
Charlie nods, tears flowing freely at last. He understands now. Some secrets are worth keeping, if it meant his kid got a life like that?
How could he ever ask the universe for more?
He reaches to take Edward's hand in one of his, grips it as tight as he can, “Thank you, son. For taking care of her. You better swear on whatever vam- you people believe in that you'll do it as long as she lives, you hear?”
“I swear. Forever, longer if I can. But forever for a start.”
“If you don’t I’m coming back to kick your ass.”
“I’ll hold you to it.”
Outside, the sun has started to rise, and Edward is bowing his head as he slips out the room.
“It's almost time,” Bella leans her head against his shoulder, "I won't leave. Not until it's over.”
Oh.
This is it?
“How did you know?”
“Alice can see the future.”
Charlie snorts, “Course. Shoulda guessed. Sure. Is Sue okay?”
“She’s with Sam and Jacob. She isn't far. She wanted to give us this, if you want me to stay?”
Charlie holds her close, savours the feeling of slowly warming light on his skin, “Thank you for coming back. I love you so much Bella, I miss you so much.”
“I love you too dad. Thank you for trying. In another life, I might have liked it in Forks.”
“Of course you would. Cause you're my kid. Always will be.”
He looks then, just once, as the sunlight lights up her face.
Definitely an angel, he decides. His daughter shines, a halo of light around her as his heart slows, and she lays him back against the pillows.
He closes his eyes as she presses a kiss to his cheek, and just like she promised, slips into the cool and comforting dark.
Bella Swan steps onto the porch, folds the faded blanket onto the rocking chair and locks the door to her human life one last time.
In the dazzling sunlight her husband waits for her, with all his love and all their years ahead.
She steps off the porch.