Chaos Eclipse: Part Three

The third and final installment of the Twilight/Beautiful Creatures/NCAA 2017 fanfic requested by Meg.

This was fun! Hooray!

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            It was Edward's hardest basketball game ever, and, in a way, it was also the most fun.

            He had no idea what the crowd, or what the people watching the game at home on TV, were seeing, but he guessed it wasn’t anything like what was actually happening. They’d be stampeding or screaming or…calling their congressman, maybe? Did people still do that?

            No time to think about that; he needed to concentrate. Lena matched him in speed, somehow, seemingly everywhere at once all the time. It took all of his hunting skill to keep up with her, shadowing her so that she couldn’t get near the basket or pass to her open teammates. By midway through the first half, he realized he was playing a game within a game. Cut off from his teammates, focused entirely on the Caster, he gave everything he had to make sure that her blatant cheating didn’t cause a blowout.

            He was used to going up against other vampires and their weird powers, as well as the occasional werewolf, but he always had the benefit of his telepathy. Lena was blocking him somehow. Like Bella, she was inscrutable. Unlike Bella, she was clearly enjoying herself. She faked him out more times than he cared to admit, dribbled circles around him, stepped in just the right way so that he collided with her, causing him to both fall and foul. And colliding with her hurt. His skin was supposedly diamond hard, but smacking into Lena felt like being hit by a freight train.

            And even when she wasn’t out-thinking him or out-playing him, she used her magic to frustrate him in other ways. There were ten Lenas on the court, each with their own ball. There was one Lena, but she had wings and did loop-de-loops in the air before perching deftly on the top of the backboard.

            Even with all that, it was nice not to have to hold back, whether out of fairness or for the look of the thing. It was exhilarating, even to the point of what drunkenness must feel like, to throw off the mask and push himself to the limit. He leaped to the rafters, ran as fast as he could, sank a three-pointer from the opposite court.

            It was also fun because it was a challenge, and a different sort of one than keeping his powers reigned in all the time. This must be what his other teammates felt like when they went up against a bigger and better team. This must be what the coach meant when he talked about how adversity made you stronger, because you had to reach inside yourself and find the will to continue onward.

            He was playing the best basketball of his unnaturally long life, and even though Lena kept laughing at him and mocking him in her southern twang, Edward couldn’t help but smile a little.

            A few minutes into the second half, he thought that he had the Caster girl figured out. He noticed the pattern to her movements, the tiny microseconds where her attention was divided between weaving spells and sinking shots, and he pressed the advantage.

            He was feeling quite confident until it started torrentially down-pouring indoors. Edward took a header on the slick court, cracked his skull on the boards, and slid out-of-bounds, taking the ball with him.

*

            There was a long, fuzzy moment of black spots and disorientation. He came around to see the assistant coach and the team physician kneeling beside him.

            “What’s your name, son?” said the physician.

            He blinked. “What?”

            The assistant coach and the physician looked at one another. “I’m trying to assess you for brain injury. What’s your name?”

            “E-edythe?”

            “Okay,” said the assistant coach, “take him out.”

            “No, no, wait,” said Edward, hopping to his feet. “I’m Edward Cullen. I’m from Forks, WA. The president is…” not Woodrow Wilson…don’t say Woodrow Wilson, “that Donald Trump guy, but I kind of wish it was anyone else.”

            While he talked, the physician stood, took Edward by the temples, and peered into his eyes.

            “How do you feel, Cullen?”

            Edward glanced back at the court. Lena quirked a grin at him and tossed him a wave. “Good, good. I’d like to get back out there, if that’s okay.”

            “You’re sure?” said the assistant coach.

            “Sure, I’m sure.”

            “All right,” said the physician. “I’ll let you back in there, but the second. Cullen, look at me. The second you get dizzy or start to feel sick, call a timeout and get out of there, you got it?”

            “Yeah,” he said. On the court, Lena was sticking her tongue out at him.

            “Yeah. I get it.”

*

            Zags lost 71-65, but what a game!

            At least, that’s what Edward kept picking up from the minds around him. His fellow players were disappointed of course, but the game had been so close right until the end that, while everyone was down, no one felt like they had done a bad job at playing.

            Amusingly, it wasn’t even Lena who beat them. Edward had gotten her locked down in a corner right at the end of the game, but that didn’t stop Justin Jackson from turning a three point lead into a five point lead with ten seconds to go. Only someone with superhuman strength and speed could make up the difference with so little time left on the clock, and, while Edward could have done it, he knew it would be wrong.

            So the Zags lost 71-65. But what a game.

            He commiserated with his teammates, assured the coaching staff and the physician that he was really all right, really, and hit the showers. Long, long after the crowds had left the arena, Edward shouldered his gear bag and headed back to where his teammates would be staying.

            He bumped into Lena right outside the back door. She held out her hand.

            “Good game, Eddy.”

            He shook it. Her hand felt small and fragile in his, but he knew the girl behind the hand was anything but. “Don’t call me ‘Eddy,’” he said. “But, thanks. Good game to you, too.”

            She released his hand and brushed a stray hair out of her face. “So, what are you doing right now?”

            “Crashing, I guess.” He leaned in and said, in a lower voice, “or, pretending to.”

            Lena laughed. “Well, listen, if you’re just going to lie in bed and pretend to be asleep anyway, do you want to come hang out? There’s this good coffee place down in…”

            “I don’t drink…coffee,” he said, smiling despite himself.

            “Right, no, I guess you wouldn’t. Well, we could just hang around. Talk, you know?” she moved in closer—uncomfortably close, now. Edward could smell the sweet aroma of her blood. “See what happens?”

            He stepped back. “I appreciate it. I mean, I had fun, even though we lost, but…I just got out of this kind of messed up relationship and I…”

            She laughed again. “I’m not talking about a relationship, Mr. Cullen. I’m talking about sex.”

            “Sex?”

            “Yes!” she said. “You look so shocked. Jesus Christ, what are you, Mormon?”

            “No, no,” Edward replied, holding up his hands as if to ward off her accusation. “Of course not. I just assumed that maybe you…I mean, you’re a literal magical girl…I figured you had a boyfriend.”

            She shook her head. “Not in this continuity. Thanks, mom.”

            “Oh. Well. Uh. Sorry.”

            “It’s fine, it’s fine.” She took him lightly by the hand. “So. How about it? You share, I share, we see what happens?”

             Edward looked up at the moon, breathed in, breathed out. He realized that, for the first time, he couldn’t quite remember what Bella looked like.

            “Sure,” he said at last. “There’s just…this is embarrassing, but there’s just one more thing.”

            “What’s that?”

            “Well, I’m super strong and nigh invulnerable, and—”

            Lena smirked again. “Floorboards in there tell a different story, buddy.”

            “Ha ha. Shut up. Anyway, you’re a Caster, whatever that is, but you’re also just a human right? I’ve hurt way more people in my life than I’d care to admit. I don’t want to hurt you, too.”

            “Oh, emo kid, you wish,” said Lena. “I’ve got plenty of ways to protect myself. Besides, you’re not the biggest badass out here right now, or have you forgotten already.”

            Edward ran a hand through his hair. “I might have. Probably the brain damage.”

            “Ha! Well, listen. I can’t kiss unprotected mortals without causing them to experience painful shocks and, if I ever have sex with one, I might just shoot so much electricity into them that I give them spontaneous heart failure.”

            “You say that like you’re boasting,” said Edward.

            “Maybe a little.” She looped her arm around his. “Come on, corpse boy. Let’s see if you can ride the lightning.”

END

New Darkness: Part Two

In which the fan-fiction on Meg's behalf continues...

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            Edward had played baseball for almost as long as the game had existed. Okay, that was an exaggeration, but still, he’d played a lot of baseball. Unfortunately, the baseball tryouts weren’t until spring, and Edward couldn’t imagine playing the game with anyone other than his family.

            He didn’t quite know why he tried out for basketball. If pressed, he would have said that he was in the standing in the front of McCarthey Athletic Center, checking out posters put up by the various intramurals groups and sports teams and…before he knew it he was in line to sign up for the tryouts.

            The coaches were more than a little dubious, and he guessed he didn’t blame them. The problem with being superhumanly strong is that the physical world leaves very little for your body to work hard against. I mean, unless you were Emmett and you threw trees and rocks around for fun. Compared to the other players, he was on the shortish side, on the scrawnyish side, and—due to being a sophomore and admitting that he had never played basketball before—was more than a bit on the inexperienced side.

            His vampiric powers, even consciously dialed back to almost nothing, gave him at least the appearance of natural skill, however. He was fast, agile, and never seemed to get tired. The coaches also seemed to appreciate that he did all the drills, came to all of the practices, didn’t give anyone any lip, and was pretty good about working with his teammates.

            He knew that he could be even better than this. His telepathy would always put him one step ahead of his opponents. His was literally so fast that he could do easy layups while the other players on the court seemed to literally be standing still. But that was no fun. Like baseball with the family, playing basketball was more about doing things with people. Of sharing a common interest. Of working to a common goal. You didn’t just do that by being an unstoppable, godlike, ballhog.

            Edward wasn’t sure that his teammates liked him either, and it took all of his willpower for him not to use his mental abilities to check. But soon, he started receiving friendly slaps after a good play (although he was always worried that someone was going to break their hand on his flawless chest), and good-natured ribbing in the locker room. This latter was a new sensation, and it was difficult for him to adjust to it. Edward knew they weren’t actually making fun of him, but the old, protective rage proved to be a beast that was hard to kill. He tried to smile, to laugh it off, hoping that his return barbs weren’t too envenomed and that they didn’t drive too deep.

            The season started and Edward, despite being a seemingly respectable member of the team, sat on the bench. He seethed inside, but less so than he would have back in Forks. He wanted to play, but he was competent enough at math to know that the team had a lot of players, and they could only play five of them at a time.

            The coaches finally started putting him in at the end of games, when Gonzaga’s victory was almost assured. He showboated a bit more than he promised himself he would, but there was something about the energy on the court, the surging scream of the crowd, that got his venom pumping much more than mere bloodlust ever could. In his first two outings he left the other teams flatfooted and sank a half-dozen seemingly impossible shots.

            Gonzaga decided to have him start shortly thereafter.

#

            Edward had dialed it back as much as he could when he started playing regularly. He had come to respect and really enjoy the camaraderie of his teammates, and he wants to make sure they had a chance to shine as well. So he passed the ball, set up shots so his teammates could score, screened the other team, and even fouled and got fouled a time or two, crashing theatrically to the boards, acting, what he hoped, was the part of a fragile, moderately injured human.

            Back in Forks, his family had started watching the game, sending IMs and emails from their Apple products whenever Gonzaga won. They were all convinced that he was the lynchpin of the team, and Edward could not convince them otherwise, no matter how strongly he argued the point. He guessed that they were just proud of him that he was doing so well—and Jasper was impressed he hadn’t eaten that Israeli player from UCONN yet.

            All of that led them up to this night—the big game in the Final Four against the Tar Heels. Only one of them would advance. Edward, of course, hoped that it would be the Bulldogs. There was no way of knowing, though, especially considering that the Huskies’ women’s team (lady Huskies? Edward wasn’t sure) just had their more than 100 game winning streak broken. Freakish, but anything could happen.

            He did not, however, realize that anything included a slender, dark-haired girl wearing street clothes walking out with four of the Tar Heels. About the only thing that looked even remotely athletic on her were the broken-in Converse on her feet. She played idly with a necklace that was obviously homemade and strung with junk—something that would no doubt cause someone an eye injury over the course of the game.

            The girl squared off with Edward as the first half began. He looked around frantically—at the refs, at the coaches, at the other players—but no one else seemed to notice or care how out of place she was.

            “Hey,” she said, speaking in the low, honeyed drawl of the Deep South. “Get your head in the game, Cullen.”

            “But…you…” he said.  “How?”

            “I’m a Caster, you filthy blood incubus,” said the girl, breaking into a radiant smile. “And all these guys think I’m Isaiah Hicks. You don’t, though, because you’ve got powers and you’re cheating.”

            The whistle blew. Edward moved to cover the girl, listening to the omnipresent roar of the crowd, the high-pitched squealing of sneakers on wax. All of a sudden, the ball was in the girl’s hands.

            “Well, I’m Lena Duchannes, bitchbag, and if you can cheat, so can I.” 

Beautiful Twilight: Part One

This is a fan-fiction post for my friend Meg, who recently posted on her Facebook wall:

The NCAA Final Four is the Carolinas vs. the Pacific Northwest. How bad is it if I'm imagining a Beautiful Creatures / Twilight crossover with college basketball? #thisiswhymybracketbursts

One of my other friends responded, "this sounds like fan-fiction in the making," to which Meg replied, "Geoff Bottone! We need you!"

There was a lot of back-and-forth on her wall regarding this potential fan-fiction, including what it would be like and, of course, how slashy it would be. I participated in the discussion, laughed it off, and went about my day.

But then, like most writers, I had an idea.

This idea was hampered by the fact that I have never read Twilight or Beautiful Creatures. That said, I've read a lot of critical evaluations of Twilight (mostly from the ever-loving Mervin), so I at least know what the plot is. I had to Google Beautiful Creatures and discovered that it was that book that got turned into that movie about that girl who is a witch who will be claimed by good or evil.

And, I figured, maybe that was enough. Besides, fan-fiction writers don't give a shit about canon--Ron's a Death Eater! Harry is goff as fuck! Uh. Magenta-haired self-inserts! Kirk/Spock!--so maybe I didn't have to, either.

So, here is my non-canonical, unapproved fan-fiction involving Edward Cullen, Lena Duchannes, and the 2017 NCAA Final Four. Part One.

This one's for you, Meggles. Hope you like it!

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            Edward did a double-take when a young woman came sauntering out onto the court with the other team. Of course, being a vampire, his double-take wasn’t even noticeable by the humans on his team, on the other team, courtside, or in the stands. It was a brief flicker of movement, eldritch in its beauty, which could have only been caught by a high-speed camera.

            The young woman, human-appearing but definitely not fully human, smirked at him. Whether this was a coincidence, or whether she had actually seen how she had rattled him, was unknown to him.

            Also, just like Bella, he couldn’t read her mind.

            Bella.

            Why the hell did everything still remind him of Bella?

#

            The last couple of years had been the longest of Edward’s already unnaturally long life.

            It turned out that Bella hadn’t really been in love with him at all—more than anything else, what she really loved was being a vampire. Once she had all the venom she ever wanted coursing through her veins, she became increasingly withdrawn. Their house, and here he smirked at the pun, became a mausoleum. She spent more and more time out in the wilderness alone.

            He was so used to knowing what other people were thinking that the complete isolation from Bella drove him almost completely mad. He didn’t know what she was thinking, and he couldn’t make her tell him what she was thinking. Every day was like a tug-of-war, with Bella ultimately snapping at him over some trifle or storming off into the woods.

            One day, she just didn’t come back.

            He tried to fill the hole left by her departure with other things. Long drives up to Alaska, spending time with his family, trying to rebuild a shattered home for his daughter, that sort of thing. He didn’t realize until it was too late that Renesmee was already lost to him. Bella had been poisoning his daughter’s mind from the start, and Jacob, her betrothed—and really, how messed up was that—continued to feed her piles of anti-vampire propaganda that the werewolves had been clinging to for years. Yes, sometimes we kill and eat people, but you werewolves freak out and hurt the ones you love. No hypocrisy there.

            Once Renesmee had left to go on a motorcycle tour with Jacob, Edward was left alone in his house with only his own thoughts and his memories for company. After the initial, months-long bout of self-pity (which might have been accurately portrayed with a sequence of blank pages with just the month names written on them, like chapter headings), he began to realize that he needed a change in his life.

            A really big change.

#

            He left the quiet fastness of Forks and enrolled in college again—this time at Gonzaga. He decided not to go in for another sciences or medical degree, instead pursuing something that he realized had become lost to him—the Humanities.

            He played piano for one of the campus bands, took courses on painting and sculpture, tried to wrap his head around post-modernism and post-post modernism, and tried very, very hard not to use his powers. He refused to take it for granted that all the answers that life provided were in the heads of other people. Humans didn’t have that ability. Humans had to deal with uncertainty and mystery—something he had long ago forgotten about until Bella reminded him.

            So, when he got a C+ on his all-night essay on Nietzsche and the Overman, a critique, comparing and contrasting using passages from Crime and Punishment, he went back to his dorm room knowing that he had at least come by his middling grade honestly, instead of yanking all the good ideas from the smug philosophy major two seats in front of him.

            College was hard this time. There were a lot more people at Gonzaga than he was used to, and their overactive, late-teen brains were a wild static of chatter. He had been able to filter out most of the noise with effort, but that just left him feeling more lonely and isolated than ever. Not knowing what people were thinking made interacting with them extremely difficult. He often wondered if he had made a good impression on anyone, or if they all thought he was a cold, unfeeling creep.

            Edward was feeling particularly low at the beginning of his second year at Gonzanga. He was about to throw in the towel and go home, but something changed all that.

            And the change was this: on a whim, he decided to try out for the basketball team.