"Look at these puppies, sweetie. Aren't they precious?" Renee coaxed, bouncing her daughter gently against her hip as they strolled past another aisle of dogs. Five year old Bella hummed in reply, choppy bangs swishing around her face as she popped her mouth open to stick a pink-tinted thumb loosely between her lips.
As they moved further along the line, she splayed her head into her mothers shoulder, eyelids fluttering closed for a moment. Her disinterest didn't show in the way other five-year-old's did; it was what made Bella's character so hard to decipher at such a young age.
When she was unhappy, there wasn't a single wail of protest that escaped her mouth, or even a stomp of her Mary-Jane clad foot. Her anger was the kind that suffered in silence - a trait she had inherited from Charlie among many other things.
"Should we get one of those, Bella?" Renee suggested, pointing blindly towards the next aisle. Bella titled her head towards the direction of her mother's finger, and in that instant, her brown eyes collided against a pair of darker ones. The finger in her mouth in flitted back to her cheek in surprise, a small gasp bubbling at the back of her throat, and Renee followed her line of sight to the golden ball of fur inside one of the cages.
Without missing a beat, Renee steered them towards the end of the lane, were the cautious brown eyes of the Nova Scotia Terrier peered up at them. Bella's own eyes sparked with a certain glow, hand lifting so that her palm pressed to the front of the cage.
"He's a beauty, isn't he?" Renee murmured, slightly rhetorical, and grinning softly at her daughter's subtle delight. "In fact, why don't we call him Beau?"
Warm brown eyes collided once more, and a small smile quirked its way into Bella's face. Shyly, almost as if testing the waters, Beau burrowed his snout into the soft curve of Bella's hand.
And that was the beginning of their friendship.
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Never Say Never • Twilight
FanfictionWhen Bella Swan was five years old, the tiny brunette girl was taken to an animal shelter outside Forks Washington in the hopes that a pet would break her out of her introverted shell. Beau, a Nova Scotia Terrier puppy, was chosen from among the bar...
