Spared the singularly adolescent fate of becoming a cautionary tale, Bella Swan clung with white knuckles to her lover's elbow as her life was threatened for the second or third time that day, she forgot. A part of her worried the stress would prematurely age her — grey hair, a permanent furrow betwixt the brows and a dowager's hump, geriatric at eighteen.
"Edward," she whimpered, her trepidatious fingers gluing to his skin.
"Don't fear, love," he said, a whimsical hook in the corner of his mouth like a caught trout, cheek-to-cheek with Bella so she felt the baby hair dappling his cold-cream skin. "We haven't broken the law."
It wasn't the law she feared, and she expressed this by pressing her clumsy, clammy body against him, the blood distending her swan's neck, her slender-but-not-athletic ankles.
"If I may be so rude — that is not for you to decide," the leader of the Volturi said, a watery apologetic note smearing his voice. He spoke as if aware he made a fool of himself in the hyperbolic governmental robes of a circus performer and was begging Bella to join the shared hallucination of his polystyrene courtroom.
"Will you offer immortality to your beloved, Edward?"
A bronze forelock fell into Edward's eyes but he didn't brush it back. "You're asking me to destroy Bella's soul and everything wholesome in my existence," he said. Bella blushed, ridden with guilt and pleasure for possessing this death-and-roses boy who whispered violet prose to her in the darkness of her bedroom and made her feel a secret throb of specialness.
"Spoken like the true son of Carlisle," Aro equivocated. "Of course, I could simply envenomate the girl myself..."
His eyes, the pink of kittens' tongues, met Bella's. Although his demeanour was clownish, nothing like the sun lit his gaze — she felt it everywhere, all the places touched by the corpse hand of winter.
"Would you like that, Isabella?" The question was innocuous, but something lurked just outside Bella's comprehension, something immodest and dark.
Prompted by his words, she imagined herself in the man's thanatoid embrace, finally sloughed from gawky girlhood, her bare, vernal thigh dense against his erection. A sleek vampiric concubine unmoored in twin states of lust.
How different from the fate Edward prescribed her, his dream of a twilight bride — a liver-spotted lizard whose wedding vows gurgled with pneumonia, sighing 'I do' in his lilied ear as she expired. Her ashes on his bookshelf, self-flagellation for his future romances.
Sometimes, Edward's butterfly kisses were as heavy as death sentences.
"Honestly, I don't know," Bella said, as the fire in her cheeks chewed its way to her eyes.
Aro's expression didn't change, although his shadowspun assembly stilled, coalescing into the spikes of an Iron maiden. "Then perhaps I have something to offer you," he continued. "And perhaps you have something I very much desire. Perhaps we can broker a deal."
"No," Edward hissed. Behind him, Alice gasped.
"Would you like to make a deal with me, Isabella?" The palatal Italian accent coupled with her more sophisticated given name, a swill of wine swimming from his teeth to the base of his throat, inoculated her with erotic tension.
"Maybe," she said. Her voice was small, even to her ears. "The terms?"
"Immortality, of course — upon my word I shall not kill you."
Although tremulous, she was propelled by curiosity above obligation. "And?"
"Precisely that which your lover desires, because he cannot have your mind. We are not so different." His teeth clamped in a spurious grin, a wet, carmine gash in his tatterdemalion glamour so she couldn't forget he was a time-hardened executioner, a devourer, the very conceit of death and darkness.
"Your virginity, my dear."
Author's note: this was written purely for my entertainment (hence the silliness/purple prose). It's going to be about 3 or 4 parts long, but I'm very open to advice or suggestions, and as always, reviews are a delight! :)