Author's Note: Intended as a Supernatural/Twilight Crossover, but the story's details won't reflect that until the narrative does.
The leaves poured tears onto the dirt, wearing upon the ground, making it give under her feet. Sharp branches scraped across dull skin, yanking on her fabric and hair. Nature slowed momentum. Each sinking step tried to wedge her in place. The hollow forest warned all, but she refused to stop.
A boy had led her there—to her salvation, to her tomb. The familiarity of his pale skin spurned her forward, abandoning the pretenses she had hidden behind. She remained without notion, vacant apart from her willingness to follow.
Several miles in, the boy slid between a crack in the trees and his existence ceased. Her stare had fixed to the woman, familiar beyond her pale skin. Her body coiled around the tree and she gazed back, so soft, so open.
"This was the last thing I wanted," Victoria said.
Bella's movements jerked to a stop. Her hands dangled at her sides, her body tilting with each inhalation. She shifted her stare to Victoria's hair, watching the rosy curls twist in the breeze, waiting for more of her poisonous words.
"He was supposed to suffer," Victoria said, sliding along the bark. "I was going to show him what it felt like. He was going to see my hands. My hands buried in your stomach. Plucking your intestines to the rhythm of your screams."
Victoria glided closer, hunched, and her eyes opened wide. Bella didn't move.
"And now it's you," Victoria said. "You're what's left. And there's nothing anymore."
Victoria curled her hand around Bella's neck, noting the pulse under her thumb. Bella swayed a centimeter closer.
"I want to crush your windpipe," Victoria said, bruising the skin under her thumb. "But he won't see it. He'll never see it."
Victoria leaned forward, exhaling against Bella's neck.
"This wasn't what I wanted," Victoria said, her voice soft, almost childlike. "But it's all I have, now."
And Victoria bit down.
...
Bella kneeled in the corpse of their meadow, arranging her supplies. The course grass pressed through her jeans, a dulled reminder. Another pair of feet tread through the forest, but that awareness meant little. She continued the preparation.
"What are you doing?" Alice asked, noting the cans of kerosene.
"Go away, Alice."
Bella picked up one of the cans and twisted the cap off. She poured the fluid over her head, soaking her hair and clothes, listening to the rate of Alice's breaths increase. When she had emptied the first, she grabbed another, repeating the process until the fluid coated her.
"Bella, don't do this," Alice said, her voice cracking.
Bella crouched down and pulled a box of matches out of her duffle bag, along with a lighter. She stood back up, gaze shifting between her hands.
"I couldn't decide."
Alice stepped forward and Bella tensed, her fist clenched around the lighter, her thumb now pressed against the metal wheel. Alice paused.
"I think I hear Jasper calling."
"No, you don't," Alice said. "Jasper isn't here."
"No," Bella said. "He's not."
Alice stared into Bella's eyes.
"You don't have to do this. I know it hurts, but—"
"You don't," Bella said, cutting her off. "You don't know. You can't know."
"Okay, you're right. I don't really know. But what I do know is that this," Alice's voice cracked, "this isn't the answer. He—He wouldn't have wanted this."
"I don't care what he wants."
Bella watched Alice's small frame curl inward, her hands wrapped around her own arms. Bella wondered what Alice saw in her now—head tilted down, hand raised, the skin of her thumb and the metal beneath it pressed to her bottom lip.
"Go away, Alice." Her lip dragged down with the pull of metal. "Jasper is calling you."
Bella laid on the ground, relishing the sharp press of the grass, a bed made of bones. She stared at the pale sky above her and for the first time in weeks, she allowed herself to dream.
And her thumb flicked down.
...