themidnightson | (no subject)

High school boys are creatures unto themselves.

Like jackals all laughing in a line, waiting to take the next snap. It's disgusting and yet he can't keep himself from standing nearby, listening and watching, and figuring out when he's going to intercept the space they're in. The midway point of a desperate drama where he's watching them all take turns with the chance, like she's just a toy for them to pass about.

Eric Yorkie was waiting by her car, posed so she couldn't pass him without the run in he planned.

He'd thought her excuse to his rival exactly that, an excuse. But, unlike Newton, he took his rejection gracefully, without trying to make her say what she obviously felt no need to. Which was right when he passed them in the parking lot headed toward his own car, on his normal route to getting it for his siblings. He hadn't meant to laugh, but there was something so brilliant in the way Bella has sighed when Eric walked away from her.

Of course. She took it as an insult. It seemed.

It was wrong, what he did next, blocking her car. He was waiting for his siblings but that wasn't the point of it. It was watching her when Tyler knocked on her window. It was hearing the absurdly obtuse anger in her voice when she said his name, citing him as the reasons he was stuck. It was watching the shock on her face and the panic in Tyler's when the same scene repeated itself for yet the third time.

For the look of dawning horror on her face when Tyler mentioned it was fine because they still had prom.

The expression, with her eyes wide and her mouth open, even though the foggy window of her car had sent him into hysterics.

It wasn't even funny. He was sure it wasn't. It was horrifying and manipulative and like someone blind and deaf feeling in the dark the way none of them actually heard her refusal for being just that. She gaped like a fish in her indulgent anger, as his laughter shook the car and his siblings piled in grumbling. It takes him seconds to stop laughing, even when Rosalie is snapping, and he can't stop chuckling even as the car winds its way toward their only true freedom.

The epiphany, with its giddy illusion, isn't the hard part.

"Do I get to talk to Bella now?

"No."

"Not fair! What am I waiting for?"

"I haven't decided anything, Alice."

"Whatever, Edward."

"What is the point of getting to know her? If I'm just going to kill her?"

"You have a point."

James Joyce once said--

that by an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the educated man to record these moments with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.

The epiphany is never the hard part.

It's figuring out what to do now that he can't pretend he doesn't know.

It's happens right before he's going to head out hunting.

He's sitting on the living room couch finishing the last three questions in his Spanish homework. Trying to make it look realistic, even though Mrs. Goss knows he can speak with a fluency far exceeding her own. Everyone else is busy when the footsteps ghost their way to him, the weight shifting the couch.

"I knew you-"

"Don't," Edward snapped, things happening in hundredths milliseconds. His pencil was left on the sheet of all too thin paper. He half-sighed, not looking to her, his hand resting on her knee. "Please."

Alice's hand slid in-between his and her jeans, fingers curling up around his hand. Her head leaned on his shoulder, pivoting as gold eyes sought gold eyes. The concern in her expression only out measured by the quiet presenient joy, even though they can both see what's going to happen next.

It's going to be okay. You'll see.