He hit the keys he knew was second nature to him, over and over, never stopping.
The mutt had lost it, he thought bitterly, the mutt had finally lost it, and now he lay to waste, waiting for the death he knew he'd never get.
She had asked him, he remembered, not to go to the Volturi. With her final breath, she worried for him. She worried about his well being, while she lay bleeding on the forest ground.
His pale fingers stopped their melody, fumbling on the keys. He took it back to the beginning.
The funeral had been beautiful. A glossy, red wood coffin that seemed to glow. He had seen his reflection in it, he recalled. He hadn't remembered the priest's words. They were a murmer in his ear, miles away. He was sitting in the front pews, alongside a grief stricken Renee, and a solemn Phil. Charlie had sat across from them, with the rest of the police force. Students from school had attended, girls who barely knew her sobbing as though they lost their best friends, saying words at the podium he knew they didn't mean.
He was asked if he would like to say a few words. He refused. He knew words couldn't describe what he felt, couldn't describe her. He couldn't possibly convey to these people, half of whom hardly knew her, what she meant to him. That she was the reason he continued his cursed exitense, why he refused the cold temptation of her blood, when he could so easily take it. She was what he had been looking for, he realized, what he'd been searching for for one hundred years. He had found her, and then he let her slip away.
He could have saved her. He could have bitten her, turned her. It was what she had wanted. But no, he hesitated. That fraction of a moment's hesitation cost her her life, mortal or immortal. It was his fault she was dead. Really dead. Yet here he sit, people pitying him, when they should be pitying her, her life taken from her so cruelly by someone she loved. Or Charlie, who had finally gotten his daughter back, only to have her taken again. Or Renee, who hadn't seen her for months, having to be told by her husband that her little girl had been mauled by a bear.
A bear. A bear is what had attacked her, he told himself, looking savagly at Jacob Black, sitting in the last bench, next to his Quilette pack. Don't, her voice whispered in his ear, don't, not in front of Charlie.
This was what she felt when he left. His voice warning her, telling her not to do anything stupid, a small reminder that he had been real. He relished it, he realized. He'd never hear the voice again, the sweet, beautiful voice that was like music to his ears.
His fingers ran up and down the keys, faster this time, shaking his head. Don't think about it, don't think about it...
When it was over, Carlisle had tol him they were moving. California, he had said. Less people staring at you. He didn't go. He stayed behind, playing her lullaby over and over, not stopping when the piano went out of tune, not stopping to say goodbye to the people who had been his family for years. Not stopping when the growing hunger ate away at him. Why other, he thought, he wouldn't die. He'd starve long enough so that the next insect to pass him would have an unlucky suprise. He wouldn't die.
He wouldn't die.
But she did.
He let out a roar of grief, pounding on the keys, his mind groggy with hunger.
After the funeral, people had gone up to him, offered their condolences, mostly her female classmates. Why, he wanted to ask, I'm the one who put her in danger. It's my fault she's dead. Everything's my fault.
They had driven home. They had packed. He didn't. He stayed behind with his piano, playing the lullaby she had loved. He depended on it like he used to depend on his 'camping trips'. It was what kept him tame. It's what kept him from losing his mind. It's what kept the mosnter inside him from coming out. Because that's what he was. A monster. Nothing could change that. Not her. Not his family. Nothing.
Only she could sedate it, never tame, and now that monster had been her downfall.
He played it from the top once more, the sweet melody echoing off the long to be forgotten ceiling, the one shrivel of humanity Edward Cullen had left to hang on to fading with the notes.
A/N Awwww sad! Feeling especially morbid today, as it would seem.