In which Bella Swan accepts that while she probably is crazy she should also probably pretend she isn't if only for her own wellbeing, Hallucinatory Edward Cullen offers some terrible and generally useless advice and later a great speech from a science fiction film that is somehow still rousing despite being entirely out of context, and the context of Bella's situation remains hopelessly unclear to all parties.

A pale, Rambo sort of a girl, stares out into the barren desert sunset. It is the kind of sunset that drips, like a bloodied yolk cracked open and dripping slowly downwards off the counter and out of sight, leaving a black stained white in its wake flecked every now and then with starlight that is only visible when every other single light goes out.

She has no shoes, she tore through them a while ago and she hasn't managed to find any that fit and those that do she can't manage to get on her feet without ripping them in half. She's chopped off most of her hair, thick brown hair that had probably been one of her better features, and what's left is a ragged haphazard job that leaves little to the imagination when it comes to her mental state. She's streaked in dirt, grime, and too much dried blood to mention, there's a red bloodstained strip of cloth she's tied around her forehead, and her eyes have yet to settle on any color that fits their mercurial mood.

She has vague memories of reading Wuthering Heights or else Jane Eyre, these are noticeably fuzzy and faded at the edges, and sometimes she wonders if that's for the best because she can't imagine that girl being where this girl is today. But, then again, that girl did manage to survive quite a bit, so perhaps she would do just as well.

This is Bella Swan, immortal, time travelling, somewhat depressed, probably half insane, soldiering, vampire; staring into the sunset, and thinking for the first time in a very long time, longer than she can really remember, that the world truly is beautiful.

("We will not go quietly into the night…")

The civil war has ended decades ago, the Southern Vampiric wars, spurred on by the wild lawless west, still trudge on despite the railway, the telegraph, and all those little signs that point to the end of a great era.

Vampires are always behind the times, in one way or another, although only the most extraordinary of them recognize this. After all, they're only human, but more so, why should they act any differently than their peers?

This is how it begins, the demon witch general Maria's right hand, the man who rode into the desert on a horse with no name but in the process lost his own, is scouting for recruits. He's looking for tall, fast, strong, probably masculine, and if he's lucky gifted. The last batch had outlived their usefulness and as other more strategic covens crowd in from all sides and push them further and further south a new crop is more than necessary.

(That Maria believes in arms, in ammunition alone, rather than strategy explains quite a bit of the situation. But the Warmaker, once Jasper, isn't quite self-reliant enough to think that yet, after all, he's dutifully trained himself into the habit of not thinking at all.)

He's picked out three he might take, weighing them this way and that dispassionately inside of his head.

One is a farm boy, someone used to labor, who already has muscles built in and the frame to support that. He knows how to work, how to take orders, and how to face the reality that sometimes there is no reward for your labor. Sometimes you get unlucky.

Another is a soldiering hopeful, a bit too young to see the horrors of actual human combat in Europe, but with a twinkle in his eye each time he thinks of glory. There's a certain authoritarian worshipping naiveté to the boy which is more than necessary for newly born cannon fodder; that sort of devotion can be easily twisted and manipulated to serve a dark haired Hispanic demon goddess. (The boy reminds him nothing of Peter.)

Finally, there is the town drunk, in his early twenties which is why he catches Jasper's attention, and likely to be unmissed. The self-destructive types, sometimes, are the best of all. After all, they know they're living in hell, they're just along for the ride.

He doesn't choose any of them.

He doesn't choose a man between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, he doesn't choose someone stupid enough to believe or smart enough to keep his mouth firmly shut, and even though he thinks he might come for them later in the end he doesn't.

Instead he sees her, alone in the desert, staring up at the moon with a lost and tender expression on her face, thin, pale, pretty if she wasn't so worn down by the world. And wafting off her is a deep melancholy that he can't remember ever having felt before, something wet and cloying, but beneath that is a river of compassion that seems never ending.

And she looks at him, her eyes widen, and there's startled silent recognition like sparks flying up in the dark.

(It's only later that he notices how odd her clothing is, her blue shortened trousers, her brightly dyed sweater, and her laced, half cloth, patterned shoes and thinks that he just managed to stumble on something more than half strange.

He doesn't realize the half of it.)

It's probably a Saturday, it feels sort of like a Saturday, on the edge of being the lord's day but not quite there yet, still cramming to make itself anything but the lord's day. Not that vampires keep track of things like days of the week, or years, or decades…

Bella Swan, the newly turned, jittery, vampire, who is trying to get into the groove of things but is… By, getting into the groove of things, she means vacillating somewhere between terror and complete and utter apathy.

Well, the apathy is fading, it's hard to hold onto it when you want to. Apathy, Bella reasons, is sort of like a cat. If you want it, if you need it, it will just give you this contemptuous look from the high ground with narrowed yellow eyes. If you don't need it, if you're busy doing something important like finishing high school and trying to be a normal human being, it smothers your face.

In its place is this jittery anxiety, a deep burning need, that she would probably relate to being a junky if she had ever in her life been even drunk let alone high as a kite. Only, the joy of being a vampire is that you never get off, you will always have the monkey on your back.

Well, unless they kill you, which is looking increasingly likely.

Because let's face it, recruit number seventeen might be decently fast, but she's also clumsy as hell, and not to mention a little too in control, not quite chug-a-lugging the Kool-Aid fast enough for her increasingly impatient lords and masters.

If Bella Swan doesn't think fast, it's going to be her severed limbs on the next funeral pyre.

Which is why she is as close to being by herself as she's ever going to be, channeling her inner cat lady enough that all of her other newly turned vampire junky friends just watch with raised eyebrows and snicker (when they're not clutching their abdomens and biting at each other like starving dogs), pacing back and forth, and talking to her fickle and rather unreliable friend Hallucination Edward.

She doesn't remember the time travelling part of all this.

She doesn't remember a lot of her recent human past… future (which gets a little confusing so she tries diligently to keep her internal tenses straight.)

She remembers Edward, she remembers quite a bit about Edward, not so much how he looked, or what exactly her composed song sounded like, or even his voice sounded like but she remembers… She remembers the idea of Edward, how all-consuming he was, lethally beautiful almost.

A lot of her dwindling human RAM is devoted to Edward; perhaps that's fitting, in the beginning she found it devastatingly important, now she tends to find it obnoxious. Why is it that every time she wants to remember that speech from Independence Day she just ends up with Edward's beautiful, beautiful, eyes?

(We will not go quietly into the night… Something, something… Edward…)

Then of course she remembers Phoenix, James, that apparently left quite the impression. She even remembers the cover story of falling down the stairs and through a window; this was also quite impressive in retrospect.

She remembers the birthday party…

Which she still really prefers not to think about, even if it is the beginning of the end. Who would know that such ill omens could be so terribly, awfully, pink?

She remembers the rest of the Cullens, Charlie, Jacob, Renee and Phil, sometimes some of the kids from school, the rest of the wolves who never liked her much, more Edward…

And then everything just kind of goes blank for a little while, there's stuff there, but there's… It's sort of like Bella Swan just shut off, went into sleep mode for a while, ran on fumes until one day…

Well, she doesn't know, but apparently that one day resulted in her being thrown back in time and of course facing certain doom.

Because that's what Bella Swan does; she gets in really bad situations without any reason why.

As Edward once famously said, maybe Bella, your number is already up.

"I did not mean it like this," Hallucination Edward, oh so helpfully, chimes in.

Her hallucination of Edward is also something like a cat, when you look for him he's almost impossible to find, requiring near death to make his appearance. And even then, it's this unwilling, lecturing, 'I told you so' sort of a thing. When you're trying to avoid him, there he is, whispering in your ear saying, "Are you sure you think this is a good idea, Bella?"

Edward, her rather vivid hallucination of Edward, is currently leaning against a cactus, looking hopelessly out of place in her desert hell (as much as Jasper looks in place inside of it). He's slightly fuzzy, shadows cast over his features so she can't quite make him out, but the general shape of him is there. He's pale, his hair is that strange bronze color, his eyes a light gold color that hers are… not, and he looks goddamn beautiful as always.

He's also wearing tweed in the middle of a desert during high noon, leaning on a cactus, dutifully ignoring the needles jabbing into him.

"Oh, sorry, Edward, how was I to know what I was and wasn't to take at face value?" She used to be much kinder, nicer, to this imaginary Edward of hers. After all, he was the only thing she had left of him so of course she would…

Strange, how dying and or time travel changes your view on things.

He grimaces, looking ashamed, and she wonders if that means that the real Edward (out there somewhere in some new high school) is ashamed or else if she is somehow ashamed for him. If subconsciously she wants Edward to be ashamed.

Funny, she never thought that when human, Edward in a way wasn't a thing capable of shame in her eyes, after all, to do that he would have to be less than perfection.

"That's not what I… Regardless, you can't give up now."

She could, she almost had in Forks, he practically told her to. She remembers that clearly enough, along with the tacked on, "Don't do anything stupid, it will hurt Charlie."

"No, Bella, you will not give up!"

"I don't know if it's about me giving up, Edward." She sighs, trying to think back to when her opinion ever seemed to matter in any of this. It didn't with James, it didn't with Laurent, it didn't with the truck, it didn't with Victoria, it didn't with goddamn Edward, and it didn't…. It didn't with Jasper.

(Jasper, someone she'd once thought was a friend, was going to kill her. Just like he'd always meant to, perhaps there was some divine irony in that.)

"Maybe it's time." She looks over at her new friends, all older than her, thinks of that gnawing pit she's been trying to ignore in her stomach (and she knows what will fill it, she knows even if she doesn't want to think it), and she looks up at the midday sky and thinks that this might not be such a bad way to go.

It completes some sort of a circle, after all.

"Or maybe I'm just crazy." She was, after all, talking to a hallucination of her vampire boyfriend. The inexplicable time travel, suddenly blinking and finding herself in the desert, staring at the black sky, and then over at a blood-stained version of someone she had once thought was her brother…

Or perhaps even earlier, perhaps with Edward, after all why would she ever have thought vampires were real in the first place?

"You're not crazy."

She stares at Edward, rather flatly, and says, "Thank you, Edward, that means a lot coming from you."

It gets uncomfortably awkward after that, not that it ever isn't, see Bella isn't quite distracted enough by her bloodlust and hasn't quite embraced the prospect of her own insanity enough, to ever truly be comfortable talking to someone who isn't there.

(Someone who always managed to be everywhere but where she needed him to be, every single time.)

She sighs, casting her eyes again towards the others, observing each of them. There's around twenty of them that are fresh blood, a dozen or so that have been around longer, or at least give the impression that they're more used to their new lives. Most are men, young men, most older than her but not too many past thirty. Not many of them are particularly beautiful, not like Edward, or even Jasper for that matter.

(She'd had the sudden epiphany, on waking up after three days of burning out from the inside, of screaming and being thrown in a pit with red eyed howling beings who used to be men, that it was the opposite of what she'd always thought.

You weren't beautiful because you were a vampire, you were a vampire because you were beautiful. All of the Cullens, well, except for Carlisle, had been changed with deliberation, or if not deliberation, then not for any real ulterior motive. Just… companionship. And however cynical it seemed, however much even now that Bella railed against the idea, she wondered if Edward had been a little plainer then would Carlisle have been quite as tempted to change him in the first place?

Regardless, when it comes to these people, it seemed that physical appeal was the last thing on everyone's minds.)

Although, the fact that they're clutching at themselves, tearing at their own marble impenetrable skin with fingernails, rocking back and forth whispering half-forgotten prayers, while those who have been around longer leer and smirk and kick at the newborns all while laughing… Well, it would make even Edward hideous to look at.

There is such… cruelty in this place, sometimes it's hard to fathom.

Regardless, Bella is among the youngest, she is one of a few women, after the first days under the eyes of a watchful overseer she proves to be the weakest (but not the slowest, thank god not the slowest, at least she has something). They have yet to say anything to them, but Bella is under no delusions, she isn't anywhere closer to being immortal here than she was in Forks.

And Jasper, whoever he is now in this place, does not seem to have time for people who are weak.

She grimaces, sighs, and glances back over at Edward as he stares out into the desert with a look that is either entirely vacant or one of ineffably deep contemplation, "Well, Edward, if you don't want me to die or give up, then what exactly do you have in mind?"

Edward jolts in surprise, blinking at her, and it's really hard to remember he's not actually a person because his expression of bafflement is just so real. Then the look disappears and instead one calculating takes its place as he too surveys the others.

He hesitates, and muses quietly, "Jasper's past was not a kind one, and I do not know all the details, I only knew… The relevant ones I suppose."

"You mean I only knew," Bella interrupts, almost feeling exasperated, and it's almost sad how she's had to point this out before, "I only know the things you told me."

And that hadn't been much.

Edward, for all that he loved and trusted his family, had always had his favorites and edged closer to some than others. Carlisle, he all but worshipped, and Bella heard quite a bit about Carlisle's past three hundred years ago in England and his eventual enlightenment to vegetarianism. Esme, too, he adored, and would often reminisce about when Carlisle had saved and turned her and when she'd become like a mother to him. Emmet was the older brother he must have always wanted when he was human, and Bella could vaguely remember many conversations about the antics he and Edward would get into and the pranks he'd play on Rose. Alice, well, Alice was Edward's sister in all but blood, an unintentional voyeur just like him, and because of that she'd always had a special place in his heart.

He'd never understood Rosalie, and he didn't approve of her either, not that Rose had ever made any move to approve of Bella. But then, Bella supposed she never would understand Rosalie Cullen now, that time had long since passed and now she would always wonder if it was the petty jealousy Edward said or something deeper that Bella had never bothered to guess at.

But more than Rose, even, Edward barely talked about Jasper and where he had come from. A dark, violent, place he'd said to her once. Jasper was troubled, he'd explain, Jasper is newer to this diet, Jasper has killed many people, Jasper has killed so many people that living without blood even after decades seemed almost impossible, Jasper is dangerous, of all of us Jasper is the one most likely to end you without even meaning it.

Jasper was once a soldier in the Civil War and then he'd been a soldier in the great vampire wars that plagued the southern United States and northern Mexico.

He'd left at some point, grown a conscious through his gift of empathy, met Alice, and they'd joined the Cullens after being guided by Alice's visions.

And that was all Bella really knew of him.

Because he'd been quiet, and so distant, even when she'd sat next to him in that hotel room in Phoenix waiting for the guillotine to fall once again he'd been… Next to Alice he was almost like a shadow of a man, an afterimage, and though he could feel everything from her Bella never knew what to make of him.

(Edward had told her, once, that after the car crash in the parking lot, where Edward had saved her life and broken his cover, that Jasper had insisted they get rid of her.

And the way Edward spoke, the fear in his eyes as he spoke of the fight, Bella knew that Jasper wouldn't have hesitated and only the fact that Bella was so quiet and so unimportant, and Edward so determined to see her alive, had kept her alive for as long as it had.)

Only now, all these stray facts lumped together, in the face of the man's past, hardly seemed worth anything at all.

"Right," Edward agrees dismissively, as if it's ultimately unimportant that everything he knows is just what she knows (when Edward would have known more, should have told her more), "Regardless, do not count on him to be your friend here, Bella."

The first time she'd seen him, after waking up and stumbling blind into the world with new garnet colored eyes, there'd been nothing in him, just blank dark eyes without pity or remorse or any other hint of human feeling.

No, he wasn't her friend here.

"He will eliminate you without the slightest bit of hesitation if he believes you are an imposition. These people, you, Bella, are cannon fodder, newborn meat shields to throw at larger more experienced enemies…" Edward's eyes widen as he stares at the camp, "Notice our friends over there, tell me, how old do you think they are?"

"Twenties?"

"No, no, how long have they been a vampire," Edward states before answering himself, "None more than two years."

"None?"

Edward narrows his eyes and amends while pointing to one of the better dressed and better behaved men, a boy that was once perhaps nineteen or eighteen, who is attempting to make small talk with one of the men on the ground and isn't doing a very good job of it, "Well, the blonde, the one with the idiot smile that he probably imagines is quite charming, he is older. Him I'd say closer to a decade, certainly over five. Jasper, it goes without saying, has been here for some time. But there is no one else."

Edward sighs and then explains, and as he does so Bella wonders how she knows all of this, where did she pick this up and put it together, because these are words that Edward never would have told her, "Newborns have a singular advantage over the aged vampire, they survive still on their own blood, they are thus ruthlessly strong and fast, faster than they ever will be again after this. They're also, in their own way, easy enough to control, quick to anger, but filled with lust and greed and more demon than human, this makes it easy to crudely but effectively direct them towards what target you want without them questioning why they should be risking their necks for your glory."

Edward held up a finger and amended darkly, "However, that blood supply only lasts around a year or so, then the strength and speed begin to wane. More, they begin to slow down, remember how to think, and the last thing these people want is for you to think for yourselves."

And it clicked together, horribly, that thought that had been in the back of her head (that she'd known all too well), "They cull them, that's why there's so many of us that are new… They cull them."

"You have to make yourself indispensable, Bella," Edward said moving towards her and gripping her shoulders, staring into her eyes, practically pleading with her to find some miracle that will keep her alive.

"But I… I'm useless, Edward," she stammered out, and all of those human feelings came rushing back, of the worthlessness, the hopelessness, of feeling herself imploding and fading out of existence because there was no point to her even being alive.

"No, no you are not useless! Never think that!" He closed his eyes shut tight for a moment, looking like a small child wishing the bad things away, and then they opened blazing, "Look at you, Bella! Look at them! You aren't like them, you feel things still, you're hungry but you don't care! You're thinking about the future, planning, you feel pain and sorrow and all those human things they thought the venom would stamp out of you!"

He cups her face tenderly, the way he did so long ago, in a time that doesn't even seem to exist anymore (and it's so very bittersweet it's almost heartbreaking), "Show them, Bella, that you are more than cattle, that you can think, you can plan successfully. Show them that you don't need to be fast or strong, you don't need to be the best on the field, because that does not matter to you. Prove that you are the best at what you do, and you'll live past the year."

He whispers then, placing his forehead against hers, "Do not go quietly into the night, my Bella, please, remember to fight for your existence."

Later, when she wordlessly walks back to join the others, she walks straight to the smiling charismatic young man and asks politely, and calmly, if he has a knife.

He blinks, then blinks again, giving her a rather puzzled and doubtful look, "A knife?"

"You look like you might have one," she replies, as there's a hint of boy scout in this one somewhere, that motto of always being prepared practically branded in his skull. (Then again, if it's kept him alive in the slaughter house, then he might be on the right track.)

This next smile is almost embarrassed, but there's something behind it, something more than a little interested in her, as he passes her the knife.

She takes it without a word and hacks off her hair unevenly, quickly, leaving most of it at only chin length with a few chunks longer than most.

Just as wordlessly, she hands it back to him.

"Why did you do that?" He asks, "Your hair was very beautiful, and I hope you realize it's not going to grow back."

She spares him a rather wry look, then asks, "What's your name?"

"Peter," he responds promptly enough.

"Peter," Bella explains with a hint more patience than she should probably be feeling at the moment, "What exactly is it we're doing here?"

Next to them a man in his thirties, bearded, eyes blazing sneers at her and tries to rip at her with ragged glittering fingernails, screaming some profanity or another with spit streaming from his mouth, both she and Peter dutifully ignore him.

"Well," he pauses then with that charming smile says, "Surely you remember the explanation."

"You're sending us to war," Bella responds for him when it's clear he's not going to play the rhetorical question game with her, "To fight other vampires who are probably just as strong if not stronger than us and have probably been around a little longer."

He seems mildly offended, more mock offended than anything though, as there is still that charming smile on his lips, "Now, that's just not fair, you're young, very young, you will all be much stronger than them I guarantee…"

"And I know I'm not the strongest even if I'm not the slowest," Bella interrupted a little more forcefully, "There's a lot of ways a person can die, you know. You can be hit by a truck, you can meet a serial killer in an alley or a dance hall, you can be put on a vengeful woman's death list, you can be murdered over a secret you barely understand, and you can even be eaten by a vampire… But somehow, thinking to myself of all the ways I could die, I thought that tripping, getting hair in my face, and then getting my head chopped off and being thrown onto a pyre would probably be the saddest and most unfulfilling..."

He's staring at her as if she is the most utterly absurd thing he's ever seen in his life (and is it strange that she can almost recall Edward looking at her like that on occasion). So, all Bella does is awkwardly shrug, and explain, "Well, I figured, I'd rather be ugly than dead."

Peter laughs.

Peter and the Warmaker aren't friends, or so Peter says to himself, they are acquaintances of contrived circumstances.

That said, in some ways the Warmaker is the closest friend Peter has ever had, because when you walk through hell, when you live it every hour of every day with someone, and when there seems to be no one else there (and when this man holds your life in the palm of his pale hands), it makes all other friendships seem like brittle and casual things.

That doesn't change the fact that Peter doesn't understand him, doesn't ever truly know what the man is thinking, and that most of their interactions come from Peter babbling away and praying to god that this man likes him as much as Peter believes that he likes him (because why else is he still here if Jasper hadn't begged on his knees to Maria for Peter to become his lieutenant in this never-ending war they find themselves in?)

Sometimes Peter wonders what the man was like when he was human, when he had a human name and a human smile, and then he finds himself wondering if a man like this was ever a human to start with. Of course, he was, Maria turned him personally and Peter has been told that, knows that (knows it by the way Jasper bows to that witch and keeps her war going when it all should have fallen apart ages ago by now), but all the same…

Certainly, Peter is the closest thing that the Warmaker has had to a friend in a very long time.

And that's what really matters.

"Ah, the lovely smell of bloodshed on the wind," Peter says with a smile as he sits himself next to the Warmaker.

The man doesn't glance at him, doesn't acknowledge his presence at all, instead he stares with those piercing crimson eyes at their new troops (all just been put through the paces, learning to tear each other's arms off and fit them back on again), dissecting them for all their worth and no doubt dividing them into groups and subgroups in the eternal battle that rages inside his head.

The Warmaker is very good at making war, one wonders if he was ever as good at anything else.

"Of course, you can almost taste the ashes of the Alamo as well…" Peter says, to which he earns a sidelong and rather unamused glance from the Warmaker, before the man looks back at his troops without even a word.

The troops, yes… Normally they didn't get so many in so close a succession, turning them only a few weeks apart. It makes things difficult, too many newborns at a time and it's like trying to herd cats. The Warmaker hates doing that, he's never gotten the chance or even dared to say it out loud, but Peter secretly believes that he'd much rather have quantity than quality.

Spend a few years scouting, do so over multiple cities, turn those that have real potential and aren't just easy grabs, spend years training them and developing strategies for the sieges, and then taking the land and being able to defend it.

Of course, he's never going to get his way. Maria is impatient, she wants soldiers and she wants them now, she wants them strong and unquestioning and so very stupid, and she wants a fresh supply whenever the latest batch go and get themselves martyred to whatever dark god vampires worship.

(Of course, she also wants a harem of beautiful young men to worship her, which… Well, Peter tries his best not think about that, and thanks the gods every day that Maria does not find him appealing.)

And the Warmaker always does what Maria wants. Peter often thinks that he must find it unbearably frustrating, but of course, that might just be Peter projecting.

"So, tell me, general, north or south, and when?"

Texas, the lawless beautiful Texas they had known and preyed upon, was fading. It was no longer the wild land that it once was, Peter blamed the trains, the telegraph, the east creeping ever westward where once only the adventurous and the Indians dared to live.

It was getting harder to make towns disappear on mass these days, blaming it on Indians, fire, disease, or famine.

No, these days it was Mexico, still embroiled in its new revolution, which seemed to be the new promised land. Eyes that had once envied the north were turning south, and if they didn't beat them to the gun, well, Peter wasn't exactly hopeful.

"South," the Warmaker replied in his usual terse, short, tone.

There was always a southern drawl to the Warmaker's voice, an unmistakable Texan accent, but he lacked any true southern charm. The man was cold, practically carved from ice, and every word efficient and leaving one shivering. Despite being an empath he really was the least personable person Peter knew, even for a vampire.

Peter nods, "Yes, I thought so, not much prospect in the north these days, is there?"

Nomads, of course, still wandered up there according to hearsay, but they were a different breed altogether. They did not concern themselves with wars over territory.

"And when?" Peter asks again.

"Soon," cold red eyes flick over the newest starved recruits, "They're getting impatient, and hungry, they need to learn to earn their food before they start thinking it's owed to them."

Most of them do end up thinking that though, by the time six months roll around they think themselves old hat, like they should be earning commission in some department store in the east. Funny, so few of them realize that they're slated for death before they're even a year into the afterlife.

That's when Peter's eyes catch on the girl again.

She's a pretty thing, pale, small, thin, almost like a china doll. Not at all what Peter had expected the Warmaker to bring back with him when he went to round up fresh blood. Her eyes are large and almost doe like, a certain innocence in them, even while they blaze red as rubies. She has small pale hands that seem like small birds. And even with half of her hair missing, curling about her face now at odd angles, she's still pretty.

If Peter had been human, if he wasn't contaminated by war and death and endless violence, he supposed he might have been very taken by her. As it is she just looks strange, almost alarming, with the juxtaposition of her appearance to the reality of the situation she finds herself in.

She looks across at him in alarm, eyes going wide (again like a deer's), and for a moment they stare at each other in perfect silence.

And in her eyes, he reads, "I know what you are, I know what you have planned for me, I know that my chances are small, and I hope to god I'll persevere anyway."

And she must read something in his eyes, because she turns then, looking down into her lap as she… Mixes a drink together? No, pours what smells like alcohol (although it's a little hard to tell at this distance with the rancid smell of venom still in the air) into a bottle and stuffs a rag inside, then does the same with another bottle, and then places these into a pile with a whole assortment of other strange human items (gunpowder, leather strips, matches, a few knives) that she must have clobbered together at some point when Peter wasn't looking.

"Now that one, is odd," Peter remarks, and the Warmaker looks up and follows his gaze to the girl, and for a moment he stares at her too, looking puzzled for longer than Peter has ever seen him hold any expression at all.

Finally, he says, "Yes, yes, she is very… unusual,"

"Barely acts like the others," Peter remarks again, "I think she knows, you know, what happens when her strength starts to fade on her. She's very aware of her precarious position here."

"Is she?"

"Sure," Peter says with an easy smile, "Told me so herself, right after she cut off all her hair."

"She's weak," the Warmaker states blandly, no doubt thinking of earlier in the day when the girl had had her arms ripped off no less than five times (she hadn't complained though, hadn't said a word, just stitched them back onto her body while biting her tongue), "She will lose her head in a straight fight."

"But she's smart," Peter says, "She's acting like me… No, she's acting like you, like she's not hungry at all. All of this stuff she's piling together, she knows the fight is coming, and I think she's planning on winning. She wants to live, general."

A flicker of something passes through the Warmaker's eyes, a haunted almost nostalgically human expression, "No, she only thinks she should…"

"Still," Peter says with a sly expression growing on his face, "I wager she's going to survive this coming battle."

The Warmaker's scathing glance says all it needs to about what he thinks of those odds.

"I'm serious," Peter says, "I believe in brain over brawn, she's going to live, and I think she's going to do it in a way that makes us really pay attention. Because if she's smart, which I think she is, she knows that you're the one she has to impress if she's going to make it."

"She'll live or she won't," the man says quietly, "Nothing more, nothing less, and nothing worth speculating over."

And Peter's smile fades as he wonders if the man ever said that to himself about Peter, but he doesn't have to wonder, he knows. He and Peter are friends, almost friends, because Peter lived. If Peter had been in danger, had been faced with death, then the man would not have lifted a finger.

He won't lift a finger for this girl either.

And the terrifying thing is, what would have horrified him when he was human, was that Peter won't either.

It comes to her in fragments as they march south, clutter she's collected from the bodies of corpses brought to quench their thirst clanking together on the makeshift pack she's created, drawing forth growling and glares from everyone with her (which Bella does her best to ignore completely.)

Or rather, it comes from Edward, walking quietly beside her in worn and wrinkled clothing, his sudden tiredness reflecting her own.

"Good morning," he starts without preamble, staring towards the sunrise and not even looking at her face, "In less than an hour, aircrafts from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind."

And though she can barely remember the film, can't even really understand why she wants to remember it so badly, it still brings a slow and uncontainable smile to her face as Edward continues.

"Mankind. That word should have a new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests."

And for a moment it doesn't seem to matter that she is not fighting for humanity, or anything of true meaning, but has instead been drafted into this war that she doesn't understand in a place she should not even exist in.

"Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom… Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution… but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: 'We will not go quietly into the night!' We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive!"

The light glitters on his face as it does hers, small rainbows sparkling as the light passes through his translucent skin, and he's almost blinding but all the more beautiful for it. Perhaps more beautiful than she's ever seen him before.

And he smiles at her, with a look she had willed herself to forget it was so painful, that tender love filled smile, "Today we celebrate our Independence Day!"

Author's Note: Yes, as you can tell, it's time for spring cleaning of half-finished first chapters of things. So, will this get updated anytime soon, ideally not as I want to get done with substantial things first, but I may come back to this every once in a while. And as you can see, many mysteries still abound and there's a lot of character development still to go.

At any rate, thanks for reading, reviews are much appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Twilight