A/n Alright here it is, Chapter two. Twilight and all related characters and content belong to Stephenie Meyer. I'm not her.
Thanks to Knittingfynatyc for beta'ing, because I really need it! Without her, you would not be getting to read this story for a few more months.
Thanks to the ladies on Rav and all of my regular fanfic buddies (LJ, envy, KatMom ... ) for encouraging me to explore my dark side.
All I have to say is:
Please don't throw fruits and veggies at me. I wasn't going to continue this but the idea struck me and many of you are REALLY going to take issue with it.
My body tingled before I felt something fall and I went completely cold. Edward took several steps back. His face was a mask of horror. I cocked my head to the side before turning to look at the tree. I could no longer feel it scraping my back. I should have felt it when I moved my head. When I turned, my nose went through the tree. I jumped back a foot a stuck my arm out, it swiped clean through. I felt the slightest resistance and a strange sensation, but that was it. The tree wasn't solid.
"Edward," I panicked and spun to look behind me. He was on his knees sobbing violently. "Edward!" I yelled. "Some thing's wrong." I walked toward him and came to rest on my knees less than a foot away from his huddled form. He looked small and weak. "My arm just went through the tree. Did you see that? It went through the tree."
"I'm sorry," he sobbed. "I am so sorry. I didn't want to … I didn't mean …"
"Edward, what's wrong?" I reached out to comfort him and my hand slid eerily through his shoulder. I could vaguely feel the texture of his bones and joints. They slipped between my fingers like his body was made of some sort of Jell-O with bits of fruit floating in it.
He pulled his hand up and pointed a finger back at the tree. He trembled and the arm he held in the air shook violently. The murmured string of apologies continued. I turned to look where he was pointing. A mass of limbs and brown hair was slumped under the tree. It took a few moments for me to process what I was looking at. The girl looked familiar; - her clothes looked familiar, but something was off. I stood and walked to the tree. When I crouched next to her I felt Edward's horror rip through me. She was me. I was dead.
"You killed me," I whispered.
"I meant to stop. I swear …" He looked up at me and his eyes were red.
"You killed me!" My voice built into a shout. My head had lolled to one side when he dropped me. My neck was drenched in blood, and the sweater I took from his closet was ruined.
"I wasn't trying to kill you, Bella!" Edward sat up. He avoided looking at me or the corpse next to me.
"Really? Because I'm kind of without a body at the moment!" I gestured wildly at the corpse next to me. I caught a glimpse of my hand and noticed that I could see through it.
"I didn't want ..." He balled his hands into tight fists.
"You didn't want what? To deal with someone whose thoughts you couldn't hear? So, you killed me?" I sat next to my body and stared at him.
"It wasn't like that and you know it," his voice turned to ice.
"Really, what exactly was it like because the evidence here isn't making a very good case for you." I shook my head.
"You gave yourself to me," he growled. I flinched before I remembered that I was already dead.
"Yeah, because I didn't anticipate that you'd KILL ME!" I shot back. "I have a family, Edward! I just got here. I just moved in with my father! Do you have any clue what this will do to him? He's going to be crushed, Edward. In killing me, you may very well have killed him, too!" What was Charlie going to do? I hadn't even officially unpacked and I was already gone.
"For the last time, I didn't want to kill you." He bared his teeth menacingly.
"I don't have a body. What are you going to do? Sink your teeth into air?" I quipped.
His red eyes snapped to the side and then he looked at me like it was the first time he'd seen me. He stood swiftly and walked to my body. I shifted and crouched next to myself. Edward looked between my crouched form and the body inches away from me. He shook his head violently and tried to wipe the look of horror off of his face. He mumbled something about insanity before he looked directly at me.
"Bella, how are you in two places at once?"
"I'm not sure." I bit my lip. Psychologically I could feel my teeth sink into the soft skin but I knew that the sensation wasn't real. I desperately tried to reign in my anger. "I kind of hoped that you would answer that question."
"This isn't right. You shouldn't be here. You should be in heaven." He ran his fingers over his face and into his hair. "This isn't normal."
"What about today has been normal?" I rose to my feet and crossed my arms. "I was under the impression from your family that this isn't normal behavior for you …"
"No, it's not, but I've killed before and no one has ever still been," he gestured frantically at me and searched for the right word, " – present after death."
"I still can't believe that you killed me." I shook my head and stared in shock at my dead broken body.
"I'm a killer. Believe it," he moaned and twined his fingers back into his hair. The moonlight shone silver off of his white skin. "We have company. Alice will have seen what happened."
Edward was broken. He stood with his head hanging like a lost child. I wanted to hold him because killing me had hurt him. I was fairly certain that my emotional state would change, but in that moment, he was abusing himself so much more than I ever could.
"You have to know that I didn't want this," his voice broke. He reached a hand out and stroked the cheek of my corpse. It was an intimate gesture that even though it was directed at me, it felt like I was intruding on something between him and the dead girl on the ground.
"So, I guess that this is it," I whispered. I had an odd sense that I was crying. I reached up and felt my face. It felt wet even though I knew that there were no tears there.
"I'm sorry, Bella." Edward's eyes were sad and heartbreaking even with their crimson tint. "I really did feel something for you. I still do. I just wasn't strong enough." I felt like my heart was shattering even though it lay still in my chest several feet away from where I was standing.
"I'm going to leave you now," I choked on a sob and walked away.
I made it about twenty yards before I hit something that felt solid, like a wall. There was nothing there. At least, I couldn't see anything. I experimentally pushed against it and couldn't budge. So, I reached out a hand and felt along it. The invisible wall was a smooth curve. It took a long time but I came back to where I'd started.
I could see Edward the whole time. His family came to get him. Jasper and Alice reached him first. Alice joined him by my body and sobbed. Her small body shook with emotion. I could hear the wail clearly.
"She would have been my sister." Alice smoothed my hair and examined the bloody mess on my neck. She eyed Edward warily like she expected him to shatter into a million pieces at any moment. Jasper crouched between the two and looked like he didn't know which one to comfort.
I walked back to the small group and addressed Edward: "I can't leave."
"What do you mean you can't leave?" His head shot up.
"What are you-" Alice started to speak and Edward held up a hand to silence her.
"I mean that there's a great big invisible wall about twenty yards out and I can't get past it," I explained.
"There's a wall?" He blinked and jumped to his feet. "Can you show it to me?"
"Oh yeah, I'll show it to you." I folded my arms.
"Perhaps you're still somehow tied to your body?" He cocked an eyebrow.
"Edward-" Alice and Jasper both stared at him and tried to get his attention.
"What is he -" Jasper was silenced by Alice's arm on his shoulder before he could say more.
"Follow me." I gestured and he was at my side faster than I could blink. We walked to the spot where I found the wall and I stopped to reach out and touch it. There was nothing there. He cocked an eyebrow at me and I shrugged. "I swear that just a minute ago, I couldn't go past this tree." I pushed my hand into the trunk and watched it disappear. It was a very odd sensation. When I kept my hand in for a few moments, I could feel all of the branches.
"Try walking," he suggested. I walked in a straight line for another twenty yards and was promptly stopped again.
"Here it is again!" I threw my hands in the air and gestured at it. "It's a huge wall and it's in my way." I put a hand on it and suddenly it moved. I took another step forward. It seemed to move step by step away from me. I turned to find Edward still standing around twenty yards away but in a different place. "Don't tell me ..."
"I'm afraid that it might be true," he grimaced.
"I can't go more than twenty yards from you!" I screamed.
"It would appear so ..."
"Oh, that's just rich! You kill me and you trap me! Where is that fair?" I threw my hands in the air. "This can't be happening. I'm still asleep."
"I don't know what's going on either!" He spat. Alice and Jasper rose at the noise and approached Edward slowly. They hung back by about ten feet.
"It's your world that I'm stuck in! You should know something about it!" I seethed.
"This has never happened before," he said through clenched teeth. "I don't know any more than you do. Stop blaming me for this because I don't know what's happening." The couple behind him exchanged a worried glance.
"Well, you're going to find out." I pointed a translucent finger at him.
"How do you know that it's my fault? Maybe it's yours. I've never run into a human like you before."
"You did not just blame me for my own death!"
"Ugh! That's not what I meant and you know it!" He pinched the bridge of his nose.
"That's certainly what it sounded like.-"
"Well, maybe you should pay closer attention. Perhaps if you had none of this would have happened."
"Okay, now that was definitely blaming this situation on me." I narrowed my eyes at him.
"Alice is thinking about how they warned you, and you came with me willingly anyway," he accused. "She also thinks that I'm insane but that's beside the point."
"Just what are you-"
"No, Bella," he cut me off again. "Perhaps if you hadn't been so obsessed and willing to walk right into danger, perhaps if you possessed some semblance of a self preservation instinct -"
"What? Do you think that I meet and chase after vampires on a daily basis?"
"Well, you we sure willing to get close to me in biology." He stalked toward me.
"That was-"
"Stop talking, now," he growled. "It's my turn. The other humans stay away from us. They sense that there's something wrong but not you. - " He came closer. "You didn't even question me."
"Because I trusted you. Because I lo-" I clamped my mouth shut. That was one sentence that I was not going to finish. The rest of his family reached my corpse. Rosalie, Emmett, and Carlisle stopped.
"What was that, Bella?" He cocked his head to the side and came dangerously close to my personal space. Esme approached Edward from behind.
"I said that I trusted you," I murmured. There was no way that I was going to be a silly teenage girl and tell him I loved him without ever really knowing him. It felt true. I could feel the emotion stirring in my chest even without a beating heart. However, that was not something that Edward Cullen needed to know.
"Fine." He looked crestfallen. Had he known what I was going to say? Did he want me to say it? Even dead he turned my life upside down and twisted everything until it was unrecognizable.
"Edward, are you talking to someone?" Esme Cullen took her son's hand.
"Yeah, Bella. She's trapped," he answered. Esme's face fell.
"Rosalie and Emmett will take care of her body. You need to go home," Esme breathed the words out and rubbed Edward's back. He nodded and followed her out of the woods to a black Mercedes. I had no choice but to follow or let the wall drag me along.
"Edward, you have to figure out a way to separate us!" I shouted at him. "This is your fault. You have to fix this!" I positioned myself so that he had to look at me and walked backwards with a surprising amount of grace. "Edward?"
He refused to acknowledge me. I passed my fist through several trees in rage as they went by me. He stared straight ahead and leaned slightly on Esme. She soothed him like he was a small child while they walked. The action ticked me off. He killed me, and she was comforting him.
I floated over the trunk of the car and pretended to sit on it on the drive back to the Cullen house. There had to be a way out of this. I couldn't be hopelessly tied to my murderer. That would be cruel. The fact that I loved him was even worse. How was I going to deal with being stuck with someone whom I simultaneously loved and hated? Nothingness would have been a more appealing option. Had I done something terribly wrong? Was this what hell was actually like? No burning or fire, no lava, no devil with a pitchfork, but Edward Cullen, my gorgeous murderer, within twenty yards at all times.
A/n I'm going to go hide under a garbage bag like I'm at a Gallagher show now ...
Updates will be slow. I make no promises as to how often I'll get them posted.