A/N: Charlie POV. A little something I wrote a while back for something else that didn't work out. This is my pride people... R&R :P
A father's pain.
Her screams pierced my already fearful ears once more. This was not the thing I wanted to hear, not at all. For weeks, months even, every night it was the same thing, the screaming would start. No matter how much better she seemed in the day, no matter how much I prayed. The screams would always come. For her. For me.
I tried to make things better for her, I tried to make her comfortable, to not mention him or their family, I tried to hard to keep her happy but no matter what, promptly at night her terror filled screams would fill my ears, even when I tried to block them from my mind, they could never be ignored. Her pain was more than anything I could imagine. More than anything I could have expected. No longer the beautiful and bright young woman did I see within her, now I saw only him and with him game pain and sorrow.
My Isabella was hurt far more than I had thought that night she went missing, the night that Sam Uley brought her to my worried arms again to hold. I had hoped she would only have been upset from being left in the forest alone by him, but no. it was far worse that she felt pain not that he had left her there, that he had left all together. He left my baby alone in those woods without a thought, and yet she could not seem to get him out of her mind, away from her being. She was not my Bella anymore.
She was a shadow of the girl I had only just come to know fully, the girl I had always loved. As a father I was meant to protect her from things like this, from the monsters in the closet and it was by that same title I had failed her, not only by not finding her sooner but by letting that demon into our home, the boy who had done this to my baby.
Edward Cullen. I would kill him. If he ever set foot near my little girl again, I would kill him. He had done this to her, to us. He was the very reason that she walked with only half herself, that she held no light, no hope and no future. He was the reason she cried. And screamed.
Another shriek caused my heart to sink.
What was I to do? I had tried to cheer her, to help her but every single thing I have done has been in vain, she hurts and there is nothing I can do about it. My Bella. It is enough to drive anyone mad from guilt, from sorrow.
Sometimes I feel like crying myself, letting it all out in one big moment of gusto. Every moment Bella hurts, I hurt, she came to me expecting me to protect her, to look after her until she could look after herself and I had failed her. Cullen had taken her independence in his cold hand and shattered any semblance of a human being she had inside of her until she was nothing but an empty shell of a person. No one in the eyes of the world, and yet so filled with all the sorrows of it.
I would kill him.
My heart, I doubt I could take much more to it, the way she screams I can feel the tremors within me, the terror of her nightmares and the pain of her days. I can practically see each piece of her heart that has been ripped wide open, I can feel it, every bleeding, torn out hole of her fragile and so trusting heart squeezed with the terror of the night and the pain of living the day. The day without him.
She thinks I don't see, she thinks I don't care, but I can see what that boy did to her, I can see how her shoulders hunch, how her color fades and how her entire world has no orbital pull. I love her enough to see that much. My poor baby Bella.
Each morning I wonder if it will be different, if she will come down stairs and I will see the beautiful girl who came here to me not too long before. And each morning I am sadly disappointed to face the same broken-hearted woman from weeks past. I wish there were someway for this to be easier on her, that there were some way for me to help her, that god would take pity on her heart and send her someone better, someone who would heal rather than hurt.
Wishful thinking.
There is only one thing I can think to do, her mother may be stronger with her than I, and her mother would know what to do. Not me, not the deadbeat dad she refused to acknowledge until the time came when she thought her mother had out grown her. She thinks I don't care. I have always cared.
The times I wished I could be there for her, the times I wished she would come to me and just stay. She could never see, and I could never tell her. I couldn't burden her with my feeling as well as her own, especially now with this weight upon her shoulders, this burden on her heart.
The best I could do was not good enough. Is not good enough because each morning I wake to her screams, her pain and I can not help her god damn it! I wish I could but I just can't I'm not strong enough to help her. I am not her mother and I am not the monster who did this to her, I am just the guy stuck behind to pick up the pieces.
Her screams hurt me each time they are uttered, each time I am forced to go into her room and to check upon her, each time I see the tear stains on her face. I love her but I can't do this. She needs her mother more than me, she needs someone to help her, and someone who has the power to help her, since nothing I can do helps her. I'm as useless as the next guy.
And maybe that makes me worse than Him.