A/N: Okay, so here's a story that's been kicking around in the back of my head for a while. It's, um, different. Please don't hurt me. Shoutout to Ravelry UU-landia.

Disclaimer: Stephenie Meyer controls this and any other universe that rhymes with "Schmilight."

Prologue

I can't see. I can't move. I'm less alarmed by this than you'd think. My arms are pinned to my sides. I realize I'm wrapped tightly in some sort of shroud. I try to raise my arms. The fabric is old, decaying. After an initial resistance, it tears easily, like ripping through cobwebs. The scraps of fabric fall away with only a whisper of protest, and despite the fading day, I'm squinting, my eyes unaccustomed to the light. How long have I been asleep?

It's a strangely familiar place. The place is overgrown with briars but still familiar. I can't remember the last time I've been here. It's all Spanish moss and vines and crumbling stonework. When have I been here? Who was I? It was something important. I can almost remember, the memories murky shadows in my subconscious.

You can tell this place used to be majestic. Maybe hundreds of years ago it might have been a center of an advanced civilization. Now, though, it's wild and overgrown. Savage. Still, it's impressive in its own way, beauty in its rawest form.

I stretch my arms above my head and walk in a slow circle, taking in my surroundings as I step over the cloth scraps that once held me prisoner. I'm standing on what must have been a courtyard, tiles of thick granite with grass and weeds now growing through the cracks. Nature always reclaims what we've built with our hands.

I step off the edge of the granite slabs onto the hilltop. The grass beneath my bare feet is damp and soft, and the air smells sweet. The wind kicks up, whipping my long hair across my face, and I reach up to tuck the errant strands behind my ears.

I have the oddest feeling that I've returned home.

… shortly after takeoff from Chicago O'Hare. There were no survivors. Investigators continue to search Lake Michigan for the aircraft's black box recorders. Wintry weather conditions are likely to have been a factor in the crash—

I'm jolted from unconsciousness by NPR. The news report washes over me like an incoming tide, covering me with a general feeling of dread. Even under ideal circumstances, that is, when I coldly comfort myself with the statistically proven safety of air travel with my feet solidly and safely on the earth, I have an almost disabling fear of flying. I've tried everything: books, meditation, hypnotherapy, regular therapy, biofeedback, expensive courses taught by ex-pilots, and the only thing that gets me on a plane is the trusty anti-anxiety medication prescribed by my doctor. It relaxes me enough that I can make it through the jetway on wobbly legs and take my seat, but even so, every second inside the titanium coffin is a kind of agony. I'll sit in my narrow seat, fists clenched, seatbelt secured so tightly that if the plane stopped suddenly, I'd accidentally bisect myself. I'll sit in my tense ball, wondering if this will be my last moment on the earth. Or maybe this. Or the next. And on and on until the wheels touch ground at my final destination. Final destination. Even the term for the endpoint of the journey has a terrifying ring to it.

When I fly, I wonder if Shakespeare was thinking of me when he wrote, "Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once."

I have died many, many deaths.

So whenever there is a plane crash, I obsess over the details. Have I ever flown that route? That carrier? Is there significance in the flight number? Can that have been me? I'll read every article, pore over the AP photos on my computer screen, and slowly break out into a cold, clammy sweat. Sometimes I'll make myself so sick and lightheaded that I'll have to stop what I'm doing and sit with my head between my knees. The blood will rush to my head and pound in my ears. I pick at every crash as if it were a scab, as if somehow by knowing everything about it, I'll be protected from suffering the same fate.

No, it doesn't make sense to me either.

It seems my semi-conscious self at least is more protective of my mental health. My arm, practically of its own volition, swings out and smashes the snooze button before I can hear more details. It also knocks a book off my nightstand, and the ensuing clatter startles me into full wakefulness. I sit up and rub my eyes. For some reason, I feel like extending my arms by my sides, as if I am stretching out wings. The movement feels familiar and important, so I do it again slowly, my fingers swollen from sleep.

My perception still fuzzy, half dozing, I vaguely recall I was listening to something important before I woke up. What was it? I close my eyes and try to remember, and then it comes to me: There was another plane crash. I'd normally feel tempted to fire up my laptop and get on the news sites, but something stops me. I'm immediately distracted by my morning routine. Cereal. Make lunch. Pack your bag.

There'll be time later to Google to the brink of a panic attack.

I sit with a bowl of Cheerios and gaze out at the colorless day. I've been living in Boston a long, long time, and I feel far away from my family and old friends, on the opposite coast of the country. I came here for college, stayed on for grad school, and I guess I never made my way back home.

Being afraid to be on a plane for five hours straight might also have had something to do with it.

I've got friends here, a good life, all things considered, but sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, feeling so strongly the distance between my mom and me like a hollowness in my stomach. I wonder if everyone feels this, like there's an invisible string connecting each of us to the womb where we were made. Maybe you always feel the ghost of your umbilical cord the same way amputees feel the phantom of a missing limb.

My high school friends mostly stayed in state; if they left for college, they came back to Washington to settle down. If they wake up in the middle of the night, their umbilical ghost has to stretch only a few dozen miles, a couple hundred at the most. Mine stretches three thousand.

I put my bowl of cereal down on the kitchen table and draw my feet up to the seat. I lean my face against my knees for a few moments before getting dressed for work. We're having one of those crazy cold snaps, so I pull on tights, long underwear, and flannel-lined khakis. I consider wearing two sweaters but decide that would be overkill. My puffy parka will have to bear the brunt of the cold.

There are still patches of untramped snow as I pick my way through the fens to get to the E line. I have a thermos of canned chicken noodle soup, my sketchpad, and my notebook in my fraying backpack. Boston in February can be pretty desolate. You almost forget what it's like to be warm, what it's like not to have layers of sand and grit on your floor. The snow in the tread of your boots melts into puddles that evaporate and leave amorphous salt shapes that surely hold important messages if only you knew how to interpret them.

February in particular always seems the worst. Even though December has the shortest days, February seems drearier, more bitterly cold. I think of Dar Williams when she sings, "And then the snow, and then the snow came, we were always out shoveling, then we dropped to sleep exhausted, and we wake up, and it's snowing …" I don't know if she ever spent a winter in Boston, but that sounds about right. My knitted gloves do nothing to keep out the chill. The cold air makes my fingers feel like they are being bitten. I suppose the term "frostbite" had to come from somewhere.

I stamp my feet to keep my toes from going numb as I wait for the E train. I gaze down Huntington Avenue, looking for headlights of the little green trolley car. The E train is always late. I dream about moving away from the Green Line on days like today, to somewhere with a legitimate subway line. But then I wouldn't live so close to the Museum of Fine Arts, and I wouldn't be able to stroll home late at night in the summer, the smell of sausages in the air, the lights from a nighttime game at Fenway Park making my neighborhood as bright as day. With my windows open, I can hear the crowd cheering.

The E train finally arrives, already packed and steamy inside. I tap my Charlie Card against the reader and find a small corner to tuck myself into. I've been temping this week at a commercial real estate company. I rewrite contracts, get the coffee orders for meetings, and spend a lot of time staring at the cubicle walls, wishing I had real walls and maybe a window. My skin looks sallow and sickly under the florescent lights.

My ears pop as the elevator zooms up to the sixteenth floor, and I'm reminded of the plane crash. If things are slow today, I'll sit at my borrowed computer and do my usual obsessive examination of news stories. Fate is against me, though, because the office manager is waiting at my cubicle.

"Bella," she says, frowning slightly, "Megan can't come in today—she's got the flu." Megan is the receptionist. "I know you're supposed to cover Karen, but would you mind filling in for Megan today?"

What can I say? I cheerily assent and follow her to the receptionist's desk. The company gets a lot of phone calls. A lot. The computer on Megan's desk is really just a fancy phone, a way to connect with the hundred or so extensions in the office. It's not even connected to the Internet.

The phones ring all day, and I'm sweating bullets trying to connect everyone. I hate asking people to repeat their names and who they're trying to reach, but I've been here only four days so far, and I haven't come close to knowing who everyone is. I barely can grasp what commercial real estate is. Before I know it, it's five o'clock.

It must have started snowing in the afternoon, because there are already several inches on the ground as I make my way home. I take the T to Hynes and walk from there. It's a little farther, but I don't like to cut through the fens after dark. When you're the daughter of Charlie Swan, the chief of police, you are taught to see danger everywhere.

When I get home, I start peeling off layers, stripping down to my long underwear. I make some pasta, changing into my pajamas while the water's on to boil. I know it's Friday, and most people in my demographic are hitting the bars on Lansdowne, but I've always been a bit of a homebody. And tonight I know I need to draw. My fingers tingle, feeling empty without the blue and black Staedtler Mars pencil in them.

I eat my pasta and jar sauce on my couch with the TV on. Cartoon Network is showing The Iron Giant again, and I can't stop watching, even though I itch to flip to the news to find out more about the crash. This movie breaks my heart. I put my bowl and fork into the sink and go back to the couch.

I sit with my sketchpad, drawing the wolves, silly little anthropomorphized creatures I've been drawing for as long as I can remember. I've always been writing and illustrating their adventures with a five-year-old girl, Izzy. Yes, I lack imagination in naming. The wolves were something I'd doodle in margins, and when I expanded the media in which I worked, I'd do them in charcoal, watercolor, acrylics, oils. As my friends back home had kids, I'd send them little books of the wolves.

"These are amazing!" my best friend Angela had said over the phone when I sent her kid a book for his first birthday. "You should get these published!"

Yeah, that. Maybe one day I'll have the guts to submit them for publication, but it seems like such a daunting prospect. I don't think I can handle any more rejection. It's what made me drop out of grad school, the constant scrutiny of the eyes of my teachers and my classmates. I hated having my work tacked onto the boards for twenty pairs of eyes to study and point out where I'd failed.

"You need to develop a thicker skin, Ms. Swan," my advisor had said. I was sitting in his tiny, cramped office, dark and dusty, and my portfolio was laid out on his desk. I was fighting hard not to cry in front of him. Maybe you're just not cut out for this, Bella.

I nodded glumly. "Yes, sir."

"You're going to face much harsher criticism when you're out there," he pointed out.

"I know," I said, looking past his head. If I focused on the dark wood paneling, I could pretend I wasn't really here, that I wasn't on the verge of flunking out. Flunking out! Who knew you could flunk out of art school?

He looked at my cartoony wolves. The buckled watercolor paper had made a distinctly un-paper-like sound as he shuffled through them. The paper sounded like that hollow wobbliness of disposable tin pie plates. I was wondering how paper could sound so much like metal, trying to recreate the sound in my memory.

"Ms. Swan, are you listening?"

"What?" My eyes refocused on his shiny, balding head.

He looked annoyed. "Your instructors have told me that you don't listen to their suggestions. And all you do is draw these wolves. These are fine for a side project, but for your thesis … I just don't know. They don't show enough depth or range. Anyone from the street could have done these. As we made clear, we don't often accept non-art majors into our graduate program, and we have time and time again given you the benefit of the doubt. But given your work here in the last semester, I don't know if you'll be able to finish the program."

"Oh." I felt like the air was getting sucked out of my chest.

I tried to do what I was told. I tried to find new subjects, but even as I attempted to paint a trite still life of a bowl of fruit, my hands had a life of their own. All they wanted to make were the cartoon wolves. And five-year-old Izzy. I dropped out before I could be kicked out, unable to face another rejection.

I couldn't think about art for some time after that, too filled with shame, too embarrassed about my failure. But my hands did what they wanted. At a restaurant, I'd look down at my paper placemat and see a wolf staring up at me. Where had I even found a stub of a pencil? I'd wake up with fingers blackened from charcoal, wolves on the walls. It was a good thing my apartment walls were painted in that glossy stuff that wiped clean. Eventually I gave up trying not to draw, because if I consciously did it, at least I could control where my drawings ended up.

Tonight I draw with newfound vigor, not the usual resignation of putting paper and pencil in front of me so I don't destroy property. Tonight, it's not wolves. I keep drawing trees waving with Spanish moss, a hilltop, a crumbling tower. This place … this place. Why do I know it? Biting my lip, I tap my pencil neurotically against the paper. Taptaptaptaptaptaptap. The tapping pencil is a blur, like the frenzied beating of insect wings. I stare at the black and blue ghost streaks in the air and tap faster, hoping to make the solid thereness of the wood disappear altogether. I lose control, and the pencil flips out of my fingers, clattering onto the wooden floorboards and rolling behind the TV stand.

I drop to my hands and knees, crawling to the stand. I can see the pencil peeping out, and I reach my hand into the crazy bird's nest of RCA cables and extension cords. I feel around the smooth, round cables, the plastic-covered wires, until my fingers close around the hexagonal wood of the pencil. Success.

As I pull the pencil out, I feel whispery resistance against my hand, sticky and dusty all at once. My hand is covered in spider silk when I pull it out from behind the TV stand, clutching my pencil. I wipe the web bits off on my pajama pants, and as I feel an echo of the sensation of pulling apart the spider web, I remember tearing through the shroud in my dream.

My dream.

I dreamed. Last night I dreamed. I have not dreamed in over a decade. The last time I dreamed was the night before my mom walked out on Charlie and me. When she left our house, so ended my dreaming. I know, I know, they say if you don't dream, you eventually go crazy. I must do something like dreaming, something involving REM, because when I wake up, I feel like my brain has reset. But I never dream. I imagine my brain just shuts down with nonsense, like a TV tuned to nothing, a screen filled with snow.

I once stared at the snowy static on the TV for hours, trying to see if images would appear. All I saw were millions of tiny worms squiggling and squirming like maggots. I nearly made myself sick, imagining those TV static maggots burrowing in my brain as I slept.

I settle back into the couch and draw again. Without warning, the power goes out. I can't work on my drawings in the pitch dark. In the dark, without the drawing to distract me, I realize how cold I am. I feel my way to the closet and dig out my old sleeping bag. I slither into it and potato-sack-race hop back to the couch. I sit in my sleeping bag on the couch in the dark and listen to myself breathe.

All is dark and still, even in the city. The falling snow muffles everything. Hush, hush, it says. My nose is quite cold. I imagine a thermal photograph of the room, my body an explosion of oranges and reds, with a humorous yellowish-green spot at the tip of my nose.

My cell phone on the coffee table chirps, breaking the stillness. Angela is calling me. I haven't heard from her in ages. "Hey, stranger," I say.

"Oh, Bella," she says, sounding troubled.

"Is everything all right?" I ask.

"Have you heard the news?"

"The power's out," I say, not understanding.

"Did you hear about the plane crash?" she says. I can feel the cold clamminess return.

"Yeah, I heard something about it this morning. Out near Chicago, yeah?"

"Bella, didn't you hear?"

"What?" Why am I suddenly afraid?

"Do you remember Edward Cullen, from school?"

It's a name I haven't heard spoken aloud in years, and my heart thuds unevenly just having the familiar syllables beat against my eardrum.

"Of course," I say haltingly, wondering what on earth this has to do with anything.

"He was on that plane."

"Wait, what?" I don't understand how her two sentences can possibly fit together. These puzzle pieces are defective.

"He was on the plane, Bella. He's dead."

With a swish and a beep as the appliances in my apartment take a deep breath, the power comes back on, the TV loud and embarrassing like a drunk uncle at a family reunion. I blink at the sudden and painful light, and it's as if my heart has stopped. My ears still ring with the remembered silence, Angela's last words echoing in my mind.

Edward Cullen is dead.