This drabble corresponds with the first prompt in the Twilight 25 challenge.
As always, I don't own it.
The Twilight Twenty-Five
Prompt #: 1
Pen name: Saluki168
Pairing: Edward & Bella
Rating: R
Photos for prompts can be found here:
community[dot]livejournal[dot]com/thetwilight25/13912[dot]html
Some people measure time in hours, days, years. Edward measured time in the changes, big and small, that each day brought to Bella. He couldn't regret his decision not to change her, even though he worried that the sadness he glimpsed just under the surface was growing with each year. To him, each year she aged was a gift. But to her, it was just another year she looked older than her husband…another year closer to their inevitable separation.
He remembered Bella finding her first grey hair on her twenty eighth birthday. He had sat on their bed, bewildered as she cried inconsolably, clutching the long strand of hair between her fingers. He tried to comfort her, but she batted his hand away and went to the drug store for hair dye. To him, every grey hair on her head (there was more than one, although he would never tell her) was something to celebrate. Although he hated the way the color made her hair smell and the way it just didn't feel the same when he tangled his hands through it, he stayed quite since it seemed to keep the sadness at bay.
Then, she started finding fine wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. A trip to a high end cosmetics store filled their bathroom counter with bottles of creams and serums "guaranteed to visibly reduce wrinkles". She faithfully applied them each morning and night, desperately hoping to stave off looking yet another year older. Edward finally got it one day at the grocery store when the clerk thought he was her son. On "the way home, Bella begged him once again to change her before she was mistaken for his grandmother and then didn't to speak to him for two days when he once again refused.
Bella never understood how Edward longed for wrinkles and arthritis. She would give anything to stay young, to be with him forever, but he was unrelenting in his opposition to changing her. And, with each year that went by, Bella became more and more despondent. Still, Edward stayed firm. Bella would live a long, full, human life. Her soul would be intact, and when she died it would descend to Heaven. She would be an angel in death, just as she was in life.
He hoped his constant reassurance that she was infinitely beautiful in his eyes would be enough. But she still insisted they make love with the lights off. She hated that while her stomach was no longer flat and her breasts were no longer perky, Edward's body remained that of a seventeen year old boy, lean lines and tight muscles. It didn't matter that Edward loved the softness of her curves or that the taste of her skin still filled him with a heady, intoxicating want. He could see in her eyes that she mourned the loss of the youth she would never get back.
Then, on her thirty-seventh birthday it happened. Bella came out of the shower just as he was walking into the bedroom. Her hair was wet, and he watched as each drop made a lazy path down her long, slender neck, over her delicate collar bone, and between her perfect breasts. Her eyes were wide and brimmed with tears she was barely holding in. Before he could ask what was wrong she threw herself at him and wept. He could only hold her as sobs wracked her body and wait until she was able to speak, but he knew. Her blood had not smelled the same for a few months. He had known something was wrong but was too much of a coward to admit it. Now he prayed that his cowardice didn't take Bella away from him before her time. She was supposed to grow old. She was supposed to die in her sleep, resting peacefully in his arms. There wasn't supposed to be pain or sickness. Venom stung his eyes, and he felt his essence shatter into a million pieces as she whispered four words into his chest.
"I found a lump."
He dropped down to his knees and sobbed. He had failed her yet again, and this time in the most unforgivable of ways. He felt Bella's hands stroke his hair and heard her murmur softly, but he was too bound up in grief to comprehend what she was saying. He was thinking of doctors, chemotherapy, radiation, surgery. He thought about how she would lose her beautiful hair; how her already frail human body would weaken under the power of the medicines she would be given. And then he thought about how she could die.
He couldn't let that happen. In an instant, all of his reasons for refusing to change Bella paled in comparison to the thought of losing her. He stood up slowly, gently trailing his fingers over the curves of her body as he rose from his knees. As he looked into her eyes, so full of love and concern for him even as she struggled with the knowledge that she might have cancer, he knew that letting her go on as a human was no longer an option.
"I'm so sorry, Bella. All these years I thought not changing you was a gift. I didn't realize how wrong I was until this moment."
Bella's breath caught as she absorbed his words. "Are you saying…" she trailed off, not wanting to say the words in case she was wrong. She had hoped and prayed every day for the past twenty years that he would change her and to have that hope taken away again, as she stood in the face of what she knew in her soul was breast cancer, would be too much to bear. Edward reached forward and deftly removed the towel from her body, came to rest with the side of his face pressed tenderly against her chest, and listened to Bella's heart.
"I'm saying one lifetime with you will never be enough; I want forever."
Italicized words taken from Twilight, Chapter 13, page 276