Spitefic: The Elephant
Feb. 1st, 2011 02:17 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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twispiteficTitle: The Elephant
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gehayi
Fandom(s): New Moon
Rating:PG-13
Word Count: 2,223
Inspiration:Chapter 23 – The Truth. Sonya Pospisilova's comment here gave me the idea.
Warnings: Talk of suicide and suicidal ideation.
Summary: Her reasons for wanting to become a vampire all come down to one reason, in the end. The elephant in the room.
Author's Notes: According to the Twilight Wiki, Renee's mother was named Marie Higgenbotham. She died in 1999, when Bella was twelve.
***
Bella could see the confusion in Edward's eyes. Thirty? they said. You consider that old? Bella, why don't you want to live a normal life, even for a little while? Why are you so eager to die young?
She'd told him bits of it--her fear of old age and illness, her desire to be graceful rather than her clumsy human self, her desire to be stronger and smarter and just plain better than she was as a human. She didn't know how much detail she could have gone into if he'd asked his questions out loud.
For her reasons all came down to one reason, in the end. The elephant in the room.
Huntington's Disease.
She couldn't remember a time when Grandma Marie hadn't been what her mother politely called "ill." Bella supposed that was accurate--Grandma Marie's body couldn't remember how to walk, and her mind couldn't recall personal memories or how not to behave in public—but she hadn't thought of it as anything but old age until she was about eleven. Her mother had been trying to take care of Grandma Marie...with mixed results. There was only so much you could do for a starving old woman who couldn't swallow properly, who shook and jerked with seizures and muscular spasms, and who had no idea who you were. Complicating matters were Renee's nonexistent short-term memory and her complete inability to plan.
Bella had had to learn to compensate for Renee's memory years before that. But, at eleven-and-a-half, she hadn't been ready to take care of both her mother and grandmother. So she'd done what any little girl would do. She'd picked up the phone and cried for daddy.
Charlie had flown in from California the next day.
It had taken a while before Charlie had found a decent nursing home that was affordable and that was willing to accept his mother-in-law. Few nursing homes would accept someone coming straight from "a home situation"--they wanted diagnoses and hospital referrals. So Grandma Marie went off to the hospital, screaming about how her daughter was trying to poison her and steal her house because she was jealous of how much Charlie loved her.
No one thought it was anything but senility and old age. Not then. But a couple of the doctors thought the symptoms added up to more--and after they ran their tests, they had the name of the disease.
Huntington's.
And, when they heard about Renee's lack of short-term memory and her problem planning anything, they'd suggested very strongly that she be tested--especially because she had a child, and there were some decisions she might have to make.
Bella, trying to reassure Renee, had volunteered to take the test, too. Charlie had thought that was a terrible idea and said so. Bitterly, Renee had snarled that he wasn't at risk--she was. And wouldn't it be better to remove any fear that Bella could possibly have Huntington's? Because she couldn't, of course. She just couldn't.
As it turned out, Renee was in the early stages.
She had an illness that would rob her—was robbing her—of her ability to walk and move and eat and think. She could live—indeed, she probably would live--for twenty to thirty more years in a completely useless body. In the end, she wouldn't even know who she was, let alone who Bella and Charlie were. She might not even know that she existed at all.
And she was only thirty-two.
Bella--who had just turned twelve a few days before the test results came back--didn't have the symptoms of the disease...yet. But she would. That was a given. Nor could she count on having the grace period that Renee had had. Most Huntington's patients started becoming ill in their mid-thirties to mid-forties, but Huntington's was a bastard of a disease. It could ambush her at any time--in her twenties, when she was a teenager, even now.
Charlie had suggested that he take care of Bella from now on, as Renee would have enough to do taking care of herself. Renee had become hysterical, and Bella had said that she'd take care of her mother. After all, she'd been doing it most of her life, hadn't she? It was normal. And she'd needed normalcy then. Fleeing with Charlie would have been an admission that her mother was going to end up just like Grandma Marie...and that she was, too.
She couldn't face that future. Not at twelve.
Five years passed, and Renee's cognitive problems got worse. Her long-term memory started vanishing. For that matter, so did her inhibitions. She wasn't suffering many physical symptoms yet, but somehow that made it worse. Bella did her best to minimize it, describing Renee "harebrained" and "scatterbrained"--as if Renee's mental state was just a harmless and sometimes charming personality quirk. But inside, she felt as if she was watching her mother be erased slowly, day by day, and replaced by a stranger who—sometimes--didn't know who she even was.
And there were her own symptoms, or what might be symptoms. Was she just an incredible klutz or was her lack of coordination a form of chorea? Was she frequently depressed and unable to react to anything because she was in a depressing situation with no way out...or was it the blunted affect that Huntington's patients sometimes suffered from?
She didn't know. Oh, God, she didn't know.
She didn't dare ask the doctors if these things were symptoms. She was afraid of the answer.
She'd fled to Forks--out of cowardice, she knew. Phil was a kind man and he knew about her mother's illness. He'd told her that he figured he had a year or two left to play minor league baseball, so he was going to earn what he could while he could—they would need the money, after all--and then retire, taking care of Renee for however long they had.
He even understood about her leaving. Renee hadn't, and Bella had had to come up with an insane story about how she didn't want to leave her friends in Phoenix to move around with Phil--even though Phil would be on the road while Renee kept the home fires burning elsewhere--so she was going to leave her friends in Phoenix to move to Forks, Washington, instead.
The logic was nonexistent.
Renee hadn't even noticed.
So Bella had moved to Forks, determined to tell no one. Everyone had found out about the Huntington's disease in Phoenix, and she was very tired of that. She was tired of people hovering when she failed at gym. She was tired of having a pen shoot out of her hand and having the teacher notify the school nurse and whatever parent she was living with. She was tired--not only of living on a razor's edge, but of remembering that she did.
She'd been nervous, especially when everyone had noticed her. She hadn't been able to avoid wondering--do they see anything wrong with me? Do they know I'm not normal? Do they even suspect?
And then she'd met Edward Cullen, who seemed to be the solution to all her problems.
Edward was strong. Edward was fast. Edward was graceful. Edward's memory was flawless. There wasn't a single thing that Edward and his family couldn't do. They could learn anything, do anything, go anywhere. All right, they were vampires and they were made of stone, but they were healthy.
Which was why it nearly drove her mad when Edward spoke of her future. She'd told him innumerable times that she wouldn't have a future without him. Unfortunately, he thought she was speaking romantically. She knew that it was nothing more than the truth.
Because, really, what was the point in going to college for four years minimum to learn how to have a career that she loved when Huntington's would prohibit her even getting a job? Employers tended not to hire people with pre-existing conditions; doing so made their insurance premiums skyrocket. What was the point of crushing on or dating a human boy--or even a werewolf boy--when she had so little time to waste? And even if she fell irrevocably in love with a human man, could she really stand to saddle him him with her physically and mentally disabled husk twelve years from now? And how could she have a child when she knew that there was a 50% chance he or she would have Huntington's?
Illness, helplessness, dementia. That was her future without Edward.
And every year brought her a little closer toward to the time when the illness would become inevitable.
She would have rather had a normal human life. But that wasn't possible. Even if she'd won the lottery and been 100% healthy, she'd still have to face the same questions about insurance and love and children.
Because the doctors could have been wrong. After all, Renee's doctor had thought she was perfectly healthy for years.
She didn't understand why Edward would kill himself if she was gone. She knew why she would rather die; vampirism--even with the all-blood diet and the need to hide--was the only option she had. And it wasn't as if suicide was a strange thought. There seemed to be more class in exiting early than in becoming what Grandma Marie had—a spasming, skeletal, mindless creature that alternately moaned and wept. She'd decided at fourteen that she would rather die quickly by her own hand than die by inches for decades.
And there was no possible way that she could explain to him that her being suicidal when he left wasn't the same as his committing suicide if she died. When he left, she'd lost any chance of...well, not life. Vampires weren't alive. But they were healthy, physically and mentally. And that was more treatment than medical science could provide.
But Edward had every possible option and he was willing to throw them away. It was crazy.
Complicating matters was Edward's belief that he was a soulless monster and that turning her would destroy her soul. Which, actually, she understood. She just didn't dare believe it. As far as she could tell, a soul was an intangible quality that made a person unique. That meant that a soul had to be something along the lines of a mind.
Since she was already destined for dementia (which sounded like a title for the kind of movie that used to show up on Mystery Science Theater 3000)...well, she wasn't going to have a mind. And if a soul was pretty much the same thing as a mind, then hers was already lost.
Becoming a vampire was pure gain for her--and Edward couldn't see that.
It would have been easier if she and Edward had been friends. Then maybe they could have talked about Huntington's and her fears and why this was the best possible option, not only for her, but for everyone else. Oh, sure, Charlie wouldn't want her to become a monster. She knew that. But he would have paid for any treatment, and if becoming a vampire could give her some kind of life...would he really object that much?
Sadly, Edward was more focused on romance. The 1900s version of teenaged sex, she supposed. He craved it like she craved health. Truthfully, he wasn't a bad sort—rather stuffy and obsessed with being loved, but she'd seen girls dating guys who were a lot worse. Sure, the sneaking in to watch her sleep had creeped her out for a bit, but--you had to make allowances for Edward's control freak personality. He honestly believed that if he sat there and watched her breathe, nothing could hurt her.
Yeah. Good luck with that.
Of course, he didn't know that she was sick. If she had any say in the matter, he wasn't going to. People got weird about genetic illness. Either they hovered like helicopters or they reacted as if the disease were contagious. Edward tended to hover over her now. He might not react well if he found out that the harm he was trying to prevent was already part of her, and that he could do nothing. Or he might decide that killing her and then himself was the most romantic thing he could do, even though turning her would be infinitely more sensible.
So--to satisfy his craving for romance—she memorized Harlequin Romances and spouted variants on the heroine's speeches. It was easy enough, and it wasn't really a lie. She did like him a lot. They just didn't know each other very well. She wasn't sure wanted to be with him forever, but hey, you had to take the mediocre with the good.
But Edward didn't see vampirism as a good. He saw it as the ultimate harm, the most terrible injury he could possibly inflict on her.
And the more she begged, the less inclined he was to turn her. It didn't matter that the Volturi had been quite clear that Edward had to change her or kill her. It didn't matter that Alice had foreseen her as a vampire. The only thing that mattered was Edward's conviction that the worst thing he could do was turn her. The prize of eternal life and eternal health was right there, so close that she could taste it...and he wouldn't give it to her.
Which left her alone--in a room--with an elephant.
Endnotes: The last line is a quote from a poem by Terry Kettering.
Apologies to anyone who has Huntington's if I've gotten anything wrong. My only knowledge of Huntington's comes from what I've read after seeing Thirteen on House. I'm sure that there are gradations of the illness. In this story, however, Bella was tested early and has been focusing on the worst-case scenario for at least a couple of years.
Author:
gehayiFandom(s): New Moon
Rating:PG-13
Word Count: 2,223
Inspiration:Chapter 23 – The Truth. Sonya Pospisilova's comment here gave me the idea.
Warnings: Talk of suicide and suicidal ideation.
Summary: Her reasons for wanting to become a vampire all come down to one reason, in the end. The elephant in the room.
Author's Notes: According to the Twilight Wiki, Renee's mother was named Marie Higgenbotham. She died in 1999, when Bella was twelve.
***
Bella could see the confusion in Edward's eyes. Thirty? they said. You consider that old? Bella, why don't you want to live a normal life, even for a little while? Why are you so eager to die young?
She'd told him bits of it--her fear of old age and illness, her desire to be graceful rather than her clumsy human self, her desire to be stronger and smarter and just plain better than she was as a human. She didn't know how much detail she could have gone into if he'd asked his questions out loud.
For her reasons all came down to one reason, in the end. The elephant in the room.
Huntington's Disease.
She couldn't remember a time when Grandma Marie hadn't been what her mother politely called "ill." Bella supposed that was accurate--Grandma Marie's body couldn't remember how to walk, and her mind couldn't recall personal memories or how not to behave in public—but she hadn't thought of it as anything but old age until she was about eleven. Her mother had been trying to take care of Grandma Marie...with mixed results. There was only so much you could do for a starving old woman who couldn't swallow properly, who shook and jerked with seizures and muscular spasms, and who had no idea who you were. Complicating matters were Renee's nonexistent short-term memory and her complete inability to plan.
Bella had had to learn to compensate for Renee's memory years before that. But, at eleven-and-a-half, she hadn't been ready to take care of both her mother and grandmother. So she'd done what any little girl would do. She'd picked up the phone and cried for daddy.
Charlie had flown in from California the next day.
It had taken a while before Charlie had found a decent nursing home that was affordable and that was willing to accept his mother-in-law. Few nursing homes would accept someone coming straight from "a home situation"--they wanted diagnoses and hospital referrals. So Grandma Marie went off to the hospital, screaming about how her daughter was trying to poison her and steal her house because she was jealous of how much Charlie loved her.
No one thought it was anything but senility and old age. Not then. But a couple of the doctors thought the symptoms added up to more--and after they ran their tests, they had the name of the disease.
Huntington's.
And, when they heard about Renee's lack of short-term memory and her problem planning anything, they'd suggested very strongly that she be tested--especially because she had a child, and there were some decisions she might have to make.
Bella, trying to reassure Renee, had volunteered to take the test, too. Charlie had thought that was a terrible idea and said so. Bitterly, Renee had snarled that he wasn't at risk--she was. And wouldn't it be better to remove any fear that Bella could possibly have Huntington's? Because she couldn't, of course. She just couldn't.
As it turned out, Renee was in the early stages.
She had an illness that would rob her—was robbing her—of her ability to walk and move and eat and think. She could live—indeed, she probably would live--for twenty to thirty more years in a completely useless body. In the end, she wouldn't even know who she was, let alone who Bella and Charlie were. She might not even know that she existed at all.
And she was only thirty-two.
Bella--who had just turned twelve a few days before the test results came back--didn't have the symptoms of the disease...yet. But she would. That was a given. Nor could she count on having the grace period that Renee had had. Most Huntington's patients started becoming ill in their mid-thirties to mid-forties, but Huntington's was a bastard of a disease. It could ambush her at any time--in her twenties, when she was a teenager, even now.
Charlie had suggested that he take care of Bella from now on, as Renee would have enough to do taking care of herself. Renee had become hysterical, and Bella had said that she'd take care of her mother. After all, she'd been doing it most of her life, hadn't she? It was normal. And she'd needed normalcy then. Fleeing with Charlie would have been an admission that her mother was going to end up just like Grandma Marie...and that she was, too.
She couldn't face that future. Not at twelve.
Five years passed, and Renee's cognitive problems got worse. Her long-term memory started vanishing. For that matter, so did her inhibitions. She wasn't suffering many physical symptoms yet, but somehow that made it worse. Bella did her best to minimize it, describing Renee "harebrained" and "scatterbrained"--as if Renee's mental state was just a harmless and sometimes charming personality quirk. But inside, she felt as if she was watching her mother be erased slowly, day by day, and replaced by a stranger who—sometimes--didn't know who she even was.
And there were her own symptoms, or what might be symptoms. Was she just an incredible klutz or was her lack of coordination a form of chorea? Was she frequently depressed and unable to react to anything because she was in a depressing situation with no way out...or was it the blunted affect that Huntington's patients sometimes suffered from?
She didn't know. Oh, God, she didn't know.
She didn't dare ask the doctors if these things were symptoms. She was afraid of the answer.
She'd fled to Forks--out of cowardice, she knew. Phil was a kind man and he knew about her mother's illness. He'd told her that he figured he had a year or two left to play minor league baseball, so he was going to earn what he could while he could—they would need the money, after all--and then retire, taking care of Renee for however long they had.
He even understood about her leaving. Renee hadn't, and Bella had had to come up with an insane story about how she didn't want to leave her friends in Phoenix to move around with Phil--even though Phil would be on the road while Renee kept the home fires burning elsewhere--so she was going to leave her friends in Phoenix to move to Forks, Washington, instead.
The logic was nonexistent.
Renee hadn't even noticed.
So Bella had moved to Forks, determined to tell no one. Everyone had found out about the Huntington's disease in Phoenix, and she was very tired of that. She was tired of people hovering when she failed at gym. She was tired of having a pen shoot out of her hand and having the teacher notify the school nurse and whatever parent she was living with. She was tired--not only of living on a razor's edge, but of remembering that she did.
She'd been nervous, especially when everyone had noticed her. She hadn't been able to avoid wondering--do they see anything wrong with me? Do they know I'm not normal? Do they even suspect?
And then she'd met Edward Cullen, who seemed to be the solution to all her problems.
Edward was strong. Edward was fast. Edward was graceful. Edward's memory was flawless. There wasn't a single thing that Edward and his family couldn't do. They could learn anything, do anything, go anywhere. All right, they were vampires and they were made of stone, but they were healthy.
Which was why it nearly drove her mad when Edward spoke of her future. She'd told him innumerable times that she wouldn't have a future without him. Unfortunately, he thought she was speaking romantically. She knew that it was nothing more than the truth.
Because, really, what was the point in going to college for four years minimum to learn how to have a career that she loved when Huntington's would prohibit her even getting a job? Employers tended not to hire people with pre-existing conditions; doing so made their insurance premiums skyrocket. What was the point of crushing on or dating a human boy--or even a werewolf boy--when she had so little time to waste? And even if she fell irrevocably in love with a human man, could she really stand to saddle him him with her physically and mentally disabled husk twelve years from now? And how could she have a child when she knew that there was a 50% chance he or she would have Huntington's?
Illness, helplessness, dementia. That was her future without Edward.
And every year brought her a little closer toward to the time when the illness would become inevitable.
She would have rather had a normal human life. But that wasn't possible. Even if she'd won the lottery and been 100% healthy, she'd still have to face the same questions about insurance and love and children.
Because the doctors could have been wrong. After all, Renee's doctor had thought she was perfectly healthy for years.
She didn't understand why Edward would kill himself if she was gone. She knew why she would rather die; vampirism--even with the all-blood diet and the need to hide--was the only option she had. And it wasn't as if suicide was a strange thought. There seemed to be more class in exiting early than in becoming what Grandma Marie had—a spasming, skeletal, mindless creature that alternately moaned and wept. She'd decided at fourteen that she would rather die quickly by her own hand than die by inches for decades.
And there was no possible way that she could explain to him that her being suicidal when he left wasn't the same as his committing suicide if she died. When he left, she'd lost any chance of...well, not life. Vampires weren't alive. But they were healthy, physically and mentally. And that was more treatment than medical science could provide.
But Edward had every possible option and he was willing to throw them away. It was crazy.
Complicating matters was Edward's belief that he was a soulless monster and that turning her would destroy her soul. Which, actually, she understood. She just didn't dare believe it. As far as she could tell, a soul was an intangible quality that made a person unique. That meant that a soul had to be something along the lines of a mind.
Since she was already destined for dementia (which sounded like a title for the kind of movie that used to show up on Mystery Science Theater 3000)...well, she wasn't going to have a mind. And if a soul was pretty much the same thing as a mind, then hers was already lost.
Becoming a vampire was pure gain for her--and Edward couldn't see that.
It would have been easier if she and Edward had been friends. Then maybe they could have talked about Huntington's and her fears and why this was the best possible option, not only for her, but for everyone else. Oh, sure, Charlie wouldn't want her to become a monster. She knew that. But he would have paid for any treatment, and if becoming a vampire could give her some kind of life...would he really object that much?
Sadly, Edward was more focused on romance. The 1900s version of teenaged sex, she supposed. He craved it like she craved health. Truthfully, he wasn't a bad sort—rather stuffy and obsessed with being loved, but she'd seen girls dating guys who were a lot worse. Sure, the sneaking in to watch her sleep had creeped her out for a bit, but--you had to make allowances for Edward's control freak personality. He honestly believed that if he sat there and watched her breathe, nothing could hurt her.
Yeah. Good luck with that.
Of course, he didn't know that she was sick. If she had any say in the matter, he wasn't going to. People got weird about genetic illness. Either they hovered like helicopters or they reacted as if the disease were contagious. Edward tended to hover over her now. He might not react well if he found out that the harm he was trying to prevent was already part of her, and that he could do nothing. Or he might decide that killing her and then himself was the most romantic thing he could do, even though turning her would be infinitely more sensible.
So--to satisfy his craving for romance—she memorized Harlequin Romances and spouted variants on the heroine's speeches. It was easy enough, and it wasn't really a lie. She did like him a lot. They just didn't know each other very well. She wasn't sure wanted to be with him forever, but hey, you had to take the mediocre with the good.
But Edward didn't see vampirism as a good. He saw it as the ultimate harm, the most terrible injury he could possibly inflict on her.
And the more she begged, the less inclined he was to turn her. It didn't matter that the Volturi had been quite clear that Edward had to change her or kill her. It didn't matter that Alice had foreseen her as a vampire. The only thing that mattered was Edward's conviction that the worst thing he could do was turn her. The prize of eternal life and eternal health was right there, so close that she could taste it...and he wouldn't give it to her.
Which left her alone--in a room--with an elephant.
Endnotes: The last line is a quote from a poem by Terry Kettering.
Apologies to anyone who has Huntington's if I've gotten anything wrong. My only knowledge of Huntington's comes from what I've read after seeing Thirteen on House. I'm sure that there are gradations of the illness. In this story, however, Bella was tested early and has been focusing on the worst-case scenario for at least a couple of years.
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