Third Verse, Different From the First

I sat on top of the biology table and stared stupidly at my fingers.

I had managed to kill every single person in the class in under thirty seconds, before drinking from Bella Swan. Her silent mind didn't allow me to know what she was thinking, but the last few students of whom I broke the necks were completely confused. One wondered if there was a gas leak causing people to faint.

After they were all taken care of, I went back to our table and gave her a predatory smile. Her eyes widened and her heartbeat sped up, but she was frozen as I put my hand on her jaw and leaned into her neck. Her scent crazed me even more; the bloodlust took over and I chomped down. She let out a mouse-like wail, but I hardly heard it as I pulled and gnawed, some part of me thinking that would let the blood out faster.

It didn't, of course, but I drank so fast that I hardly noted the last heartbeat in the room slowing to a halt.

Some of the blood had spurted out because of my chewing, and I followed the scent to lap it up. Off the walls. From the floor. Even cold it was still the most incredible thing I'd ever tasted before today.

Some of the blood had gotten on my hands, and I was about to lick them clean when I heard Alice's thoughts screaming at me. What have you done? Why are you doing this?

I groaned in disbelief, but I went ahead and licked my hands before Alice walked into the classroom.

"Didn't see this coming, did you?" I laughed, hysterical.

"You didn't exactly make a decision," she snapped at me. "When you did, it took less than a minute, and I couldn't get the hall pass till now."

"You're right," I agreed coldly. "I didn't choose this. She -" I nudged the girl with my foot - "she just smelled so - I couldn't resist."

Alice sighed. She and Carlisle were the only vampires to decide alone to stop eating humans, although in her case she had seen our family in her future. So, like me, she knew how - exquisite - human blood could taste. "She does smell pretty good. Well, she did. God, this is a mess, though!"

"I know." It was starting to hit me now, the guilt of having slaughtered an entire classroom full of children so I could get away with drinking one girl with utterly divine blood. "Gas leak?" I suggested, and was rewarded by seeing a vision of an explosion in her head.

"Close the windows," she said, turning on every pipe at every desk. I obeyed and waited for the room to fill up. It took a long ten minutes, during which I leaned against the window I'd closed and broke down sobbing. I hadn't felt like this in a long time, over seventy years since I'd last tasted human blood, but this was worse. I had had all sorts of justifications of what I was doing then, and it took time to realize I was no better than any other blood-drinking monster. But still, I had never acted purely on impulse. There had been reasons to kill the ones I killed, beyond the desire to drink their blood.

"OK," she said. "Let's get ready to jump." She joined me at the window, not having bothered me during my hysteria, but now her hand was in mine. She texted every member of our family - Problem in Ed's bio. Explosion cover story - and then squeezed my hand. "Ready?" she asked.

I sighed, wanting to stay in the classroom, but Alice saw that and sternly said, "We are going to get past this, Edward."

"Fine," I said curtly, and she pulled out a lighter. A Zippo, not a cheap disposable one. She bent down to the floor, where the gas was least massed, and flicked it on. The Zippo would stay lit as she flung it upwards, and as she did so we jumped through the glass window, shattering it milliseconds before the BOOM!

Alice called 911 then - it might have been less dangerous to call earlier, but this was about our family being safe now, not people - and told them that there had been an explosion coming from the science lab at Forks High. I could hear the other members of our family that attended coming around to find us, and I couldn't stand it. I threw my keys at Alice and ran home.

We ended up having to fake my death, since it was on record that I'd been in the classroom before the explosion, and there had been no other survivors. Carlisle aided in the autopsies to make sure there wasn't anything suspicious about them - and also, because there were so many. Twenty-four dead children, and the teacher, because I couldn't resist that damnable Swan girl's blood.

Something changed in me after that, and I didn't understand it. I went to Alaska for a while, hoping that distance would help. The coven there had eaten humans for ages, so they were fairly sympathetic to my guilt. Not that Jasper and Emmett weren't - Emmett had even eaten two women the way I had, faster than blinking - but I felt guilty making Jasper feel guilty, and I just couldn't be stand Carlisle and Esme's looks of concern and sympathy, much less Rosalie's sneers. Even Alice kept having odd thoughts that sent me running.

The Denali sisters, unfortunately, had a fairly predictable response to my predicament. Get rid of the guilt with sex. I turned down Tanya as I always had - the other two wouldn't even ask with her interested - and remembered killing twenty-five humans. I could remember every millisecond of breaking twenty-four necks, and the look in the Swan girl's eyes before I ended her life for good. I wish I'd been able to hear her thoughts - at the time it had been a blessing, but knowing exactly what people were going to miss helped you with the self-flagellation.

I remembered that the Swan girl was the only daughter of our police chief, Charlie Swan, although I didn't know much about him. I realized that was because his thoughts were muddled, a precursor to his daughter's blocked mind, not because he was stupid, which I'd thought when I first encountered him. He had been excited enough about his daughter joining him, though; he was probably devastated. And his ex-wife, her mother, she was probably equally distraught.

I forced myself to think of the parents of every other student, and Banner's widow, but my mind kept returning to brown eyes, wide with fear. Every time that image flashed in my mind I was frozen to the spot. It took three weeks since leaving Forks, a month since the accident, to be able to hunt normally. And even then, her eyes haunted me.

A month later and another coven came to Denali. Laurent stayed, intrigued by our vegetarianism, but the other two left. He was also intrigued by Irina, and Tanya and Kate and I began building a house for the two of them. Laurent told me, when he could pry himself away from Irina, that he'd met my family in Forks and had been fascinated by the idea of living in one place. My eyes hadn't gone completely honeyed, so he thought he was safe talking about how he didn't think he'd be able to stop drinking from humans. I pinned him and said, "Laurent, I've had one slip in the last century. One. And if I find out you've been killing people and hiding it from your mate, I swear to God, I don't care if it'll upset her, I'm going to rip your throat out. Oh, and if you didn't know before, I'm the mindreader they told you about."

I wasn't exactly welcome in Denali after that.

But when I went back to Forks, it all came crashing in on me again. I didn't exactly know what it was, though. I was almost certain I'd worked my way through the guilt, except for Bella Swan. Well, that was almost understandable. I talked to Emmett about it during a hunt that took us to California one sunny day. He thought it was because she was the reason I'd killed everyone else, so naturally I'd feel worse about that. He'd felt pretty rotten over his two - none of us liked being reminded of how strong the call of blood could be.

But Emmett had still only killed two people, not a room full of high school students. I hadn't even wasted time drinking from a single one but the Swan girl. And not a single one of them made me feel as hollow as thinking of her eyes could.

I had been avoiding talking to Carlisle, but he and Jasper approached me one day. "I can't take you anymore, Edward," Jasper said gruffly. "Humans die, you know this. You've got to stop letting it take you over so much."

"It's not the humans," I confessed to them both. "All I see is Bella Swan's face before I killed her. I wanted her so badly, that's why I did it."

"There!" he cried out. "This isn't guilt, Carlisle, you were right."

Carlisle nodded gravely. "You can leave us, Jasper." Jasper did so after giving me another glare.

"I hate hurting him, but I don't know what I can do," I muttered.

"I know, Edward. Jasper and I were brainstorming, and he realized that the way I felt before I created you is the way you feel now."

I stared at him. "That doesn't even make any sense!" But he wasn't thinking of being alone, or watching my parents die. No, he was thinking of setting the leg of a human girl. Esme at sixteen, I realized. I'd known they'd met while she was human, but it wasn't something he thought of often. He was wondering what he would have done if her blood had called to him more strongly.

I barked a laugh. "As if anything would make you fall." He'd been a successful doctor for over two centuries. Medical school had been an incredible challenge for me; I'd had to hold my breath quite a lot.

"Perhaps not, but I wouldn't know," he said quietly. "Something else might have happened to her, though. Her husband could have killed her before I met you. I was very lucky."

I stared at him like he was insane. No, like I was insane. I probably was. He couldn't be implying what I thought he was, could he? "You think I ate my - my Esme?" I couldn't say mate. But just the thought made things slide into place, made the emptiness inside me slightly different to bear.

"We have no way of changing the past, but…" He hesitated. He was thinking of a book in his study.

"What's this book?"

"I found it in Volterra. In the castle. No one seemed to know what was in it, when I asked to keep it. Aro let me have books all the time." He was thinking of our treaty with the werewolves. "I'm going to call Billy Black."

"Why?"

"Because he's the shaman of their tribe now, and I think this book is magic."

"There's no way to bring someone back from the dead," said Billy Black gruffly. He, Harry Clearwater, and Quil Ateara had agreed to meet Carlisle and myself at the treaty line. He was flipping through the book. "At least not after this amount of time. Shame you didn't come to me sooner."

My heart sank. "There's no hope, then."

"Here, this one," he said, pointing, smiling. "This one will send a Cold One back in time. You can prevent her death. But you'll have to actually be able to hold back, this time."

I nodded eagerly. "What do we have to do?"

"First, there will be a new treaty, since obviously you Cold Ones cannot abide as we thought. The rest of you have to leave Forks. Not for twenty years, not for a hundred years, not for a million years. As long as the Lore exists in La Push, you will not ever in Forks."

"And me?"

His grin was even broader. "You have to die."

Carlisle shouted, "No!" but I held my hand up.

"I assume you'll do the other things to make sure this actually works?" I didn't have to ask; he was somewhat amused I was going to have to burn to death, but he would keep his side: the bonfire would be blessed in a manner that my ashes - and essence - would be swung backwards to a time before I smelled Bella Swan for the first time. He didn't really understand the Multiverse theory, but in his mind, no one else would know what had happened but me.

"You won't remember anything," he added. "At least, not the way you normally do."

"More like the way I remember being human?" He nodded.

"Carlisle, help him."

Carlisle gave me a sickened look, and more sickened thoughts, but he did as I asked. They told him what they'd need - most of which could be found in the forest - and he ran off to find it all.

"Will I need to just stand in the bonfire whole?" I asked softly.

Black frowned. "If you don't think you can stand still, your maker will have to rip you apart."

I couldn't do that to Carlisle. "That's all right then."

It was concurrently an eternity and yet hardly any time at all before the stack of wood was ready. There was sage smoldering, which I held in my hands as I walked to the unlit bonfire. The three elders were chanting something. I tried to focus on anything but failed. I felt like a newborn again, every single thing was interesting. As in "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", the onset of my death enhanced all my senses.

Including hearing Billy laughing when I finally caught ablaze.

The fire was quite painful, but at least the fire that ended my life was far faster than the burning that began this life.

A/N: Oh yeah, I needed another multi-chaptered story. Especially one with no real plot to speak of. Anyway. Each chapter is going to show at least one way that Edward could have killed Bella in the first book. Fun fun fun!