Well, this is my first go at posting something on this site. I hope it's all okay, please review if you have time. And no flames, but constructive criticism would be great. ComfyHobo

Disclaimer: I do not own Edward Cullen or Twilight, Stephenie Meyer does.

Edward's POV

As I watched Bella sleep I couldn't help but dwell on the lie I'd told.

"Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars- points of light and reason… and then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn't se the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything."

Technically, the most part was true. But my sky hadn't always been a moonless night.

Bella turned over in her sleep, and I turned back to the days previous to my sun's extinction….

Her POV

I touched the icy marble that was his miraculous skin, and I was home.

I'd always suspected the Cullen's of something inhuman. They way they shied away from everyone else… it was unnatural.

And it was those rare moments that I cherished more than any other part of my existence. But they really were rare, which thus made them even more memorable. Because usually when I walked down the corridor, the crowd parted. Just like when Moses parted the red sea to get the Jews out of Egypt, only with teenagers and a school…

When I bumped into someone in the corridor. Just that brief moment of when my hand grazed his, and I knew he wasn't like the others.

But then anyone could see he wasn't. None of the Cullen's were.

Of all the people in our school, only I conformed less than them. I never spoke to anyone. I never ate, I was too clever, and there was definitely something 'off' about me. Just like the Cullen's. Except everyone knew what was wrong with me. Some of them had seen it.

Unlike the Cullen's. They still kept their secret close to their hearts. Their cold, hard, unbeating hearts. But they were definitely something more than human.

And Edward was something more again. The way he could control people, know about them, charm them round to his way of thinking…

Yes, he was different from the others. And I was the only non-Cullen who knew why.

They were Vampires. Edward was special, though. He could hear people thoughts – I'd felt his presence. He didn't know I knew, but when he was listening to me, I could listen to him. He forced my mind into the open, consequently releasing his thoughts.

So I knew he didn't know what I was. What I could do. And thanks to the Cullen's lack of social life outside themselves, none of them did. Edward had tried reading the truth, but because I knew of his endeavors, I could prevent him from succeeding. I could block a human's thoughts from him.

I drifted into my next lesson, unsure of which lesson that was. I never paid attention. I didn't need to. I already knew everything our one of our previous teachers had known. And it sickened me to know that much about someone I'd never met.

Edward's POV

She dropped her bag to floor across the room from me, giving me a smug look as she sat down, then turned her attention to the note book she always had. I heard her thoughts loud and clear as she concentrated on her latest doodle.

She was drawing a Vampire, a fictional, big collared, fanged, slick black hair, cartoon Vampire. I sat a little straighter in my seat and waited for her to continue.

She penciled in a cartoon teenage girl, just like what she looked like, then a speech bubble above her head.

You will never know what I am if this is the best you've got. Her thoughts accompanied the cartoon version of herself.

I looked over to her. Her long, dark blue hair fell like a curtain across her face, separating me from the truth behind her eyes. A pale hand with skin stretched to the point of splitting over her knuckles drew such curtain back and tucked her hair behind her ear. Then she looked at me. Her eyes twinkling, her lips pulled into a small, self-satisfied smile as she goaded me.

She looked back to the drawing and scribbled in a sun over the Vampire's head. She spun the pencil around and erased her eyes, replacing them with crosses, and drew a tongue lolling out of the side of her mouth. She then brought the rubber to the Vampire, and I expected her to rub his eyes out, too. But she replaced the bloody fangs with a small smile, and dotted all over the Vampire's skin.

She looked at me again, unthinking. I stared right back at her, pulling her simple message to pieces.

She knew what I was. She knew the sun wouldn't hurt me, just alter my skin. And she was telling me that the sun would hurt her. Kill her, maybe.

Dead on.

Her thought interrupted mine and my eyes widened considerably.

How could she hear me?

How can you hear me? She mocked. Like I said, you'll have to try harder than this.

I still couldn't think what else I could do, but I found myself assembling a mental profile of her.

She was in my year, she lived on the outskirts of town with her father – her mother died when she was little – they moved here a few years ago. During the first week she did something extraordinary, at a crime scene – I knew that much - yet no-one permitted themselves to think it. They called her Demonia, but I knew that wasn't her real name; just a nickname born out of what happened. But what did happen?

Isn't that an interesting musing? What happened? What is she? What did she do? What's her name? Change the record.

Well maybe if you gave me some help. I hissed back.

But that would ruin my game.

Game?

'How long does it take to drive Edward Cullen nuts?'

Her voice was acidic, but I knew she didn't mean anything by it, it was what she'd stated: A game.

A game that I'll win.

I jumped to my feet and stormed out of the classroom, ignoring the puzzled eyes of my class mates and teacher.

I ran out to my car and jumped into the driver's seat. I was scared, properly scared.

Because I knew so little about her, yet I did know she was right.

I was losing it. Every day the same, every day I saw her, I wanted to know, I would torture her if we were alone… anything, anything to get her to slip up and spit it out.

~ A few days later ~

I couldn't face school anymore. It wasn't important, I'd already been there, but I knew it would look suspicious. I'd never been ill before.

I was ripping through the forest that surrounded my home at human speed, acting human, trying to feel human. I needed to know how they thought. Not just what they thought, that was too obvious… but how they came to those thoughts. How the world looked from their point of view, what one of them would do to freak out a crowd at a murder scene. But nothing I could think of would make an entire town fear an individual for years. Nothing I came up with was huge enough, evil enough, demonic enough.

I knew it had to be demonic, something from another world, or at least made to be believed to come from another world.

I knew Demonia (I needed to call her something) wasn't a Vampire, although I had considered it. She had a steady heart beat and breathed dependently, like a human. I'd also considered the fact that she'd planted those sounds in my mind, but my family had heard it too, and mine was the only mind who she had ever entered.

Argh! None of this made sense!

Then I heard footsteps. I froze where I stood, looking towards the noises.

I walked forward silently and peered around a tree at Demonia.

Her black attire was more than conspicuous against the natural forest shades. She was climbing a tree, holding onto a rope hanging from one of the branches. She was crying relentlessly; I'd been thinking of her as a demon for so long, it shocked me to see her displaying so much emotion.

I crept towards her, but so she wouldn't notice me, and she pulled herself onto the branch the rope was tied around.

Then she fastened the noose around her neck and looked down.

I ran forward at Vampire speed and launched myself up the tree, onto the branch she was perched on in a second.

She jumped slightly and turned to me.

"What are you doing?" She choked on a sob.

"Come over here, please." I pleaded, more than cautious that if she jumped I most likely wouldn't save her.

"Why? What does it matter to you?" she cried out. "You don't know me; you don't even know my name… I'm sorry I've been playing mind games with you. I know what you are, when you listen to my thoughts I can hear yours, and I can control what thoughts you do and don't hear. That's why you don't know what I am." She looked down towards the floor again, fresh tears staining her face. "And now you never will." She leant forwards and nearly fell.

But I caught her.

"Don't kill yourself." I begged. "Please, think of who would miss you."

She scoffed. "Like who? I have no friends, incase you haven't noticed, everyone hates me, my dad leaves me to my own devices for the most part and you would be glad to not have me tormenting you anymore." She looked me dead in the face.

"Glad? Are you kidding? I would need a new hobby." I tried to steer the conversation away from suicide. "So, what is your name? All I've heard is Demonia, Demonia… but I don't think that's your name. Is it?"

She shook her head. "But it might as well be. It pretty much sums me up." She paused to take a deep breath, steadying herself. "I can't remember what my real name is."

"What about your dad?" I asked softly.

"He just calls me Dem. It might be my real name, I guess, but I think he's forgotten too. That accident did something to us. He doesn't like to talk about what I did… what I can do…"

"Which is?" I pressed, eager to settle my imagination.

She looked into my eyes. "You think I know you well enough to trust you with that?"

"No, but… would you tell me one day?"

She nodded slowly. "I'll show you one day."

By the way she looked at me I knew that was a promise. I smiled to myself as I realized that, maybe, I wasn't going to go crazy after all.

Demonia looked back down to the floor and her fingers gripped tighter around the branch.

"Do you want to climb down now?" I asked her tentatively.

She nodded, not looking at me, raising one hand to the rope around her neck. "Now I think about it, my Dad probably would miss me. And after Mum… died… he'd be all alone." Then she looked at me, smiling weakly. "And you would need a new hobby."

She released herself from the noose and jumped.

If I were human, my heart beat would have sped way up. It was a long way for a human to fall. But she landed perfectly, feline. No crack of broken bones, no wince from the sudden impact of the earth beneath her feet… nothing.

I decided to take the tree down -I'd never been fond of falling- but at a vampiric speed, and was by her side in a fraction of a second.

Dem grinned weakly at me. "I could get used to seeing people do that."

"I couldn't." I replied, thinking of how far she'd jumped. So she really wasn't normal. We walked back to the main part of town, making a deal not to listen in on each others thoughts.

We decided to drop into school, but it had already finished.

"I'm just gunna go home. I need to talk to my dad about something." She said, starting off down the main road.

"See you tomorrow." I called after her. She laughed, nodded, and I knew she wouldn't try again. Not tonight, at least.