And The Butterfly
A/N: Don't own it, don't want to. I'm writing this against my will because my muse won't let me work on my novel until I get it done.
Summary: The Volturi don't give second chances.
The pain was tolerable, as such things go. After all, he was no stranger to little Jane's power. When his body, shaken and riddled with the aftershocks, finally shattered into a thousand figurative pieces, and the pain was gone - when the pain was gone he found it left the same taste on his frozen tongue - bitter and violent, violets and blood, blood he had not tasted in a hundred years, blood that he would not taste again. That was half the torment, he supposed; perhaps the tenor of the punishment suited the victim. What could be more horrific than a vegetarian vampire trapped with the phantom taste of human blood stuck, cloying and sweet, in the back of his throat?
He blinked furiously, a rapid-fire pulse faster than beetle-wings. The darkness here was absolute, complete, inviolable. Even his acute sense of eyesight failed miserably in this wretched place.
He assumed he was in Italy, trapped somewhere in the bowels of the Volturi lair. He remembered the blindness, remembered seeing Alec before the world dissolved into a nothingness that pressed in on him from all sides. Such a useful gift, that; very useful indeed if you wanted to transport someone long distances without a fight.
He remembered Bella's screams.
The thought of her tore at the roots of his unbeating heart and he gasped, clamored forward, and gripped the stone floor beneath his fingers. In half a moment he felt the rock shudder and heard the metallic whisper of granite crumbling. Could he pull the place apart, stone by stone, and free himself?
In a distant wall he could not see, something moved and shifted, and a milky shaft of light hesitated at the cracks before flooding the room.
Cell, he saw now. A cell with stone walls and floors and no windows.
Before he could plan the reaction he was on his feet, crouched, ready to spring.
"Where is she?"
His voice was raw, ragged, as sharp as the squeal of the hinges as the door swung open and three tall figures glided into the room.
"Disappointing," said Aro. "I really did think better of you, Edward."
"Where is she?"
"All in good time, dear boy."
"I want to see her. Now. I want to see her alive."
"Hm," said Aro. "Not yet. Your crimes against our kind are very grave, you must understand. You were given a...well, a very strong suggestion, and I am so sorry to see that you hesitated to comply."
He reached out to Aro's mind - nothing. Well, not nothing - a serene, pointed, obvious vision of a moonlit field, blocking all other forms of thought.
"Time," Edward said. "You didn't give me enough time. I was going to change her. I wa-"
"Shh," said the ancient vampire, holding a clawed finger up to his lips. "It's too late for that, I'm afraid. But do not fret. You shall see your cantante again, alive and well, when it is time."
He came forward then, still deadly quick despite the years of decay weighing down on his immortal frame. Edward could not help but flinch as the old vampire looked down at him, steadily observing his eyes.
"Not just yet," he said, with a smile that made every cell in his body tremble.
"Aro -"
The door shut, and all was still.
- - -
Three weeks.
He knew it had been that long because, despite the darkness, he soon became aware of the very minute, impossibly small changes in the temperature of the stone on the western wall. It heated, ever so fractionally, as the sun climbed the blue walls of the sky out there in a world he was quite curtain he would never see again. He timed his days with the rise and fall, the quarter-of-a-degree rise, and the subsequent descent.
Three weeks, and he was so thirsty that he often found himself moaning aloud, the sound of his own torture trapped within the confines of the unforgiving stones.
He tried to think of other things; Paris in the winter, Mozart's conciertos, her smile, her laugh, the fire-bright touch of her skin.
But soon all he could think about was blood. Hers, specifically, if he wished to be honest with himself. Sometimes he thought he caught the phantom scent riding the back of an imagined breeze, and his teeth were slick with venom, his limbs tingling with the horrible rush.
Three weeks.
The door opened and the smell hit him - a current of fire, a twisting, writhing, barbed and pointed thing prying open his mouth and scraping the column of his throat.
"Enjoy," came a voice - cold and dead yet somehow still fraught with humor. Aro.
She held a single candle, and the flame jittered, danced as though on puppet-strings.
"Bella..."
The door shut.
She was bleeding from a hundred slashes - some deep, some shallow, all weeping, pattering drops of scarlet rain on the stone. After all the silence the sound of her blood hitting the ground was a drum beating out an uneven rhythm.
But not louder than her heart, not more noticeable that the smell of her blood. It was too late to hold his breath, though he tried, trapping the air in his lungs, trying to quell the fire raging in his gut, his mouth, his fingers - every inch of skin, every ounce of flesh.
"Edward, they cut me. I'm bleeding."
As if he needed her to tell him. As if he could not...
Could not...
"Don't come any closer," he said. "Stay there. Stay by the..."
He lasted thirty seconds.
The worst part was that she did not scream, did not cry -merely whimpered as he tore through her skin, as the flavor gilded his tongue, soothed the savage burn, sent tingling electric sparks through his body. He held her as he had always wanted to, in the part of his soul that burned fierce and black and evil, evil beyond thought or reason. He held her even as her bones cracked in his hands. His teeth on her neck, her breast, the soft curve of her thigh.
And all while weeping, though his eyes could not remember how.