Summary: Edward sees too much and, below the roiling possessiveness and fiery temper and half formed prayers to a deity he'll never believe is real, is too denigratingly selfless at his core. Icon Drabble Challenge Fic.
Complications
Edward sees too much and, below the roiling possessiveness and fiery temper and half formed prayers to a deity he'll never believe is real, is too denigratingly selfless at his core.
He can't miss that Bella loves Jacob Black, almost from the moment he returns, and he spends more weeks than either will know contemplating whether his existence (which does not exist without her) and his family's (who fell apart entirely in his absence) matter beside the glimmer of a chance that Bella could have a normal life, children, college, grow old and die; that he caused this love with his ignorance, his actions.
When Alice says she won't pick Jacob, could be happy but only potentially, not positively, not eternally the way they are, and never as more than a shadow of what she could be, he isn't grateful it means he'll win or that he will be alive another day or year or century-
Jacob Black might fighting to keep Bella's heart from stopping, to make her understand that she loves him (too), but Edward knows that Isabella Swan defies all fates ascribed to her by anyone else and beyond all sanity that he would waste away willingly in the shadow of her smile, no matter what the cost of her happiness or choice was.