seems that i have been held in some dreaming state WHO: bella & open to all WHERE: the library WHEN: 19 july, evening WHAT: bella wants to help investigate the notes, but to be honest, she doesn't even know where to start. so, she ends up at the library and has a look around. WARNINGS: nothing really
If Bella were to summarise everything she was feeling lately, even that would take a few novels worth of pages to get down. Waking up in a strange place with strange people she had never met before would have been one thing-- doing so without Edward was another. She had no idea where she was, how she got there, or where her family was. All she could do day and night was think about what they were doing without her.
She thought about poor Edward, going mad trying to find her, willing to rip apart the world just to get to her. She thought about Jacob, whose love for her had yet to wane but had become something so much greater that he too must have been going mad.
And she thought about Renesmee, her sweet, perfect daughter, perhaps being too wise to believe Bella had left them willingly, yet still too young to know why.
She thought about everyone else, of course. Charlie calling her phone over and over and leaving frantic voice messages, her harebrained mother becoming panic stricken and unable to accept that Bella could have just vanished like that. She knew her parents would assume the worst. They usually did.
But mostly she thought about Edward, Jacob, and Renesmee. They had and always would remain the most important people in her life, and it hurt to imagine what they were doing without her.
So she tried not to think about them, for now she had bigger problems facing her. The first issue was the lack of wildlife, which meant a lack of food. In the beginning weeks, she had tried to force herself to remain indoors, to avoid going out for fear of attacking someone. She was no longer a newborn, but the urges were still bound to come in waves, and they came with a vengeance.
Thankfully, an impromptu and desperate trip to a small shop had solved the problem for her. Well, mostly. It was a sort of fake, bottle blood that tasted empty and horrible, but it abated her hunger for now. It was better than nothing.
Her second problem was not, she supposed, necessarily one that belonged to her. The notes that had been appearing around town, first appearing to select people, had only been something she heard about through the little network. She had offered to help, but even the offer felt hollow because she wasn’t quite sure what she could have done. It only made sense that they didn’t readily need her.
Still, she was restless. She needed something to distract her from the barrage of worry that overwhelmed her everyday as she thought about her family. Bella removed herself from the Sleepy Hollow and took walks around the town, trying not to make a display of her vampire speed as she forced herself to walk at a relatively more natural but brisk pace. She scanned every wall, every post, everything that might have ended up with a note on it, but it seemed they had all been collected already.
Then there was talk of a missing girl, and Bella felt her heart ache. Not for the girl, not really, but for the thought that it could have been Renesmee, had she woken up here too. In a way, it reminded her how lucky she was that she had come alone to such a horrible place. Even so, she wanted to help find the girl, wanted to do something good. Who knew? Maybe when she got back home, she could tell Renesmee and Edward what she did, and they would be glad she didn’t wallow in self-pity like she so badly wanted to.
Bella had taken first to Sonheim Square, sniffing the air as she walked along just in case she could find something unusual about it. As it happened, there was a lot that was unusual about Marrowood-- smell included. She walked along the hospital, the residential homes, the night club, and even the lake and still nothing stuck out to her that was even remotely helpful.
It was such a jumble of strange yet familiarness that she had a difficult time separating what was and what was not normal for this place. She felt strangely disconnected to everything, like she was walking in a dream. God, she wasn’t even sure if that was the right word for it. She hadn’t dreamt in a long time now.
She made her way to the library, cracking open the door slowly so that the rush of smells didn’t attack her senses too much. As strange as it sounded, libraries had more in the way of scent than she thought. All that paper and every fingertip that had pressed over them, it all felt more like palpable memories left behind.
After entering fully, Bella approached the front desk and walked cautiously to the woman behind the counter. Almost immediately she could tell that the woman was one of the vacant townspeople; her scent was off, and Bella wasn’t too sure there was any blood flowing through her. It made her scowl slightly as she looked around, hoping to find someone else.
“Hello?” she said, making sure she didn’t look at the front desk woman directly. “Is anyone here?” She raised her voice just slightly, but when she didn’t receive an immediate answer, Bella decided to have a look around. Maybe in the wake of the librarian girl going missing, the others who worked there had taken the day off. In the meantime, maybe she could offer something in the way of help.
She came across a table none too far away from the front desk, and as Bella’s eyes trailed over and examined each and every item, she realised the mess must have belonged to someone investigating the notes. She moved closer and looked down at the open books and the pages of notes strewn about.
An ice cold cup of coffee sat untouched, a dark ring having formed around the inside near the top. A record player sat nearby, the needle having been removed from the vinyl. It was almost surreal, to be looking down at someone else’s work, and the feeling made her uncomfortable. But she didn’t walk away from it. Instead, she reached down and lifted one of the pages of the open book lightly, examining the photo of the forest on it.
Whatever or whoever was leaving the notes must have had something to do with the forest, and she wondered briefly if the others who were investigating the subject already knew that. But if the thing had anything to do with the missing girl, and the forest was something that held significance, Bella couldn’t imagine that anything good would come of it. After all, they had said not to go wandering into the forest...they must have said that for good reason, right?