A/N: I'm sorry, Alex. This one is for you.
Inspired by James Blunt's Fall At Your Feet and Anne Rice's Violin.
SURRENDER MY SOUL
How I wish I could walk through the doors of my mind;
Hold memory close at hand,
Help me understand the years.
How I wish I could choose between Heaven and Hell.
How I wish I would save my soul.
I'm so cold from fear
-James Blunt-Tears and rain
Twelve-year-old Sarah Cheney knew there was a 'type' that came in to her mother's flower shop. Old, romantic gentlemen, wanting to surprise their wives, young businesslike girls wanting to add that vivid vibrance to their homes that only a bunch of hydrangeas could give.
So the stranger that walked into their humble shop on the 13th of September surprised her. Surprised her because for one, she had never seen him before. In a small community like Forks, Washington, everyone had a tendency to know each other. She knew she would have remembered if she had seen some one as flawlessly sculpted as this man. Despite the dark, bruise-like circles under his dark eyes, even her twelve years of life were sufficient for her to know that the perfect planes of his face and the lean, muscular build of his body were almost unbelievably perfect.
For another thing, he scared her.
Scared her, because the very air around him seemed to be tainted with a dark, poetic grief, making his eyes look hollow and his expression one of the most exquisite misery.
She nervously asked for his order, and his black eyes focused on her with a strange intensity that seemed too far away to burn her as much as they did.
"A dozen calla lilies." His voice flowed with a melodic beauty that terrified her and tugged at her heartstrings at the same time.
She nodded, and suddenly, amidst her confusion, remembered something. She began, tentatively, "Mummy left behind a special order for a dozen calla lilies for someone named Edward Cullen."
He nodded, a quick smile curving his mouth yet not for an instant wiping away the grief on his features. "That's me."
She scurried towards the flowers in question, and retrieved them. "Here you go." She placed them on the counter. "That'll be…….."
Her voice trailed off when he placed the exact amount on the counter. She took in a deep breath, and picked up the notes from the mahogany surface. "Have a good day, sir."
But he had already gone out, the bronze-haired enigma who seemed to beckon from her young imagination's very embodiment of a darkly troubled charmer.
She later found out that the very personification of romance that had been any young girl's painting of the secretive and alluring dreamer that hailed from the edge of the abyss had once been the husband of a certain late Bella Swan-Cullen.
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The flowers remained fresh and dewy as he made his way through the silent graveyard. The inhabitants stared at him through their cold headstones, judging eyes that he could not ignore any more than the haunting memory of those brown trusting eyes open wide in shock and betrayed surprise.
The dew on the grass clung to his expensive shoes and was slowly making his whole shoe sodden, but he hardly noticed. After he reached the very furthest corner, he presented the fragrant flowers.
"I always said that I could appreciate the bouquet."
The memories that were indestructible, no matter how much he tried to destroy them, stirred and began surfacing as sounds of laughter and an all-too-familiar, agonizingly delectable scent began to dance around him, lurking behind the shadows yet undeniably present.
"Maybe I appreciate my old bouquet again someday, right?"
No answer. She never answered him anymore. It had taken the very jaws of Death to show her how unworthy he was.
So now, he was the one with the never-ending flow of words.
"Alice and Jasper told me that they were getting married again." He shook his head. "They adopted twin girls they salvaged from a flood in Sri Lanka. They have the strange names Jazz can't even hope of pronouncing, so they call them HK and JJ." He rolled his eyes at Alice's strange sense of christening. "And Angela and Ben's kid looks great, she gave me your flowers today."
He was babbling. All he knew was he had to do something to prevent that stifling silence, the very essence of nothingness that threatened to hold him in a chokehold and never let him go.
So the words flowed. Nothing of the old, characteristic grace accompanied them.
"Aro really seems to be cracking up." He sighed as he remembered his new master. He had begun serving the Volturi after she had left him in hopes of eventual anger and Death.
Even if he died, he doubted whether he would join her.
It had been a long time since he had proved himself unworthy of even the most fleeting joy, even the brief ecstasy that darted into one's life and made one's memories bittersweet.
He closed his eyes and the tears that did not exist flowed down his marble cheeks as he remembered that night.
"I wish you hadn't tried to surprise me." He told her, even though it was too late, even though it didn't matter.
"I promise to wear a seatbelt, Bella." He whispered, brokenly, because he was broken, cracked without hope, and he had killed the only person who could mend him.
It had all been because of his reckless driving. He had always believed that he didn't have to concentrate on where he was going because he could hear every one's thoughts.
Not every one's.
He remembered the look on those doe eyes as his precious silver Volvo rammed into her. Trusting, yet stunned.
"Please say something to me, Bella." He waited, his eyes still closed, silently pleading, urging. "I need to hear your voice again. Tell me anything. Tell me that you hate me. Just…………..say something."
Silence.
Already, those fleeting moments of happiness might not have existed at all.
"I need to know you were real, Bella." His voice broke. "I need to know………"
A soft breeze tousled his already-untidy hair, and he opened the black bottomless pools that he had for eyes.
"Happy birthday, Bella."
Her name was embossed in platinum, and the marker white. Combined with the lilies he had placed, it gave the impression of her in her wedding dress. His face twisted with unadulterated pain as the image of sheer beauty smiled, then faded away before him.
He touched the marble, but he felt no coldness because his body temperature matched the temperature of the unfeeling rock. His heart, which he had once believed to be made of the same substance as Bella's headstone, seemed so completely shattered that he wondered why he called himself immortal. "I love you, Isabella Marie Swan."
His black eyes clashed with the white stone, and he knew that this would be his existence from now on-limited to black and white.
He needed no more colors. Black and white said it all.
After he walked away from the cemetery, he found Alice and Jasper waiting for him.
"Hello, brother." Jasper was, uncharacteristically, the first to break the silence. His slight Southern accent made a welcome note in Edward's silence-deafened ears.
Edward nodded.
"We thought you might need some company." Alice said, her honey-gold eyes sincere.
He couldn't look at his sister anymore, so he looked up at the sky.
A lone hawk glided, its wings outstretched, towards the burning horizon. Reds, golds, purples, pinks, blues, all molded into one sky of dazzling colors.
"Twilight." Edward whispered. "Twilight again."
He felt a slim arm slip around his waist, and looked down at Alice's trusting eyes. "It's beautiful."
He nodded, looking up again. "It is."
He had no idea that so many colors existed.
Maybe next year, she would speak to him again.
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A/N: I have no idea where this came from. Please review, even though it's depressing.