It's late in the morning when he comes back, and Leah's gone.

He slumps on a couch and stares at his hands like a man with his murdered family around him might look at the bloody knife in his pocket. There is nothing perfect about this; nothing exquisitely painful, because pain of this degree is too engulfing to be comprehended.

It's only later that he realizes that Leah's belongings are still there. It's too late. He has already tasted agony.

*(*)*(*)*(*)*(**)

His head is filled with clear, sharp-edged pain when the door swings open.

Leah stands in the doorway, her bag slung over her shoulder. At the sight of her, Edward jerks to his feet, relief crashing over him in waves. It's like seeing land after being tossed around on the sea for years; it's like deliverance.

"Leah, I…" he begins. His feet propel him towards her, unthinking, magnetic. Then he stops.

Leah's face bears none of the expressions he expected; no hatred, no blame. It's just blank, and for a second it feels like falling off a cliff.

Edward's insides go cold, a chilly December wind seeming to leave him frozen. For a second his mind closes up and all that comes through is the lost voice of an orphaned boy: "why aren't you mad at me? Don't you care anymore?"

The voice revolves around his head but no sound comes out of his lips. He's a statue made of self-loathing and insecurity; Leah is the pilgrim that has lost faith.

And then she's coming into the room, tossing her bag aside. She's saying, "You would not believe what Jake said when he set us that paper today," and Edward stares at her, unmoving.

He feels like he's drowning.

*(*)*(*)*(*)*(*)

Things come to a remote semblance of normal and Edward wanders around, barely repressing the urge to scream till his lungs shattered.

Leah no longer meets his eye, especially not after five o'clock when the first beer comes out of the fridge. They still sleep together, and Edward always stares at her turned back at night, the words building a tide behind his throat, crashing against his mind, demanding to be spoken; the apology, the promise to do better.

But in the last minute, he always bites his tongue. A new voice has joined Alice's chorus in his head, that of Leah's. It's not saying how disappointed she's in him; it's saying nothing at all. The silence grows each day, forming a hell that dragged him down, even as he counted Leah's breaths next to him.

And so he drinks.

*(*)*(*)*(*)*(*)

The blow falls, as it always shall.

"You've gotta give it a rest, Cullen."

Familiar haze of numbness clinging at the corners of his mind, Edward feels confused, relaxed and jubilant at the same time. It's a combination that can only be caused by copious amounts of straight tequila and would have him bent over the sink in a matter of hours. He simply doesn't have it in him to give a shit.

He focuses on Leah with difficulty. Her arms are crossed, brow furrowed and he's reminded all of a sudden of his mother and that's not something he can deal with right now, intoxicated or not.

"What?" he stumbles on the monosyllable. Shit. Drunker than he thought.

Her eyes glint of steel. "Come on, Edward. You know what." A pause. Then: "Alice called today."

"Ah, shit." He mumbles to himself.

She walks to the window, stares at the murky dark of the night. It's an awful day to be alive. "They're really counting on you." She says quietly.

Edward swears some more.

"That's it?" She finally whips around and he can see into her eyes; she's fucking furious. "You're blowing your trust fund and lying to your sister, insulting the memory of your father just by existing and all you've got is 'Alice doesn't know jack'? The hell is wrong with you?"

He looks at her stupidly. He recognizes the individual words but the meaning as a whole eludes him.

"Fuck you, Cullen," she barks, pushing roughly past him.

Then, he finally catches up with the world. He's left on an island as the ground washed away in a tide, and he realizes that if she's angry, he's outraged.

"So what you're saying is," he says, his voice hardly recognizable as his own, "that Alice and Emmett and Rose…they're all right, that I'm the one fucking up?"

Her shoulders square, her chin tilts upwards. Amidst his rage, his bitterness, agony swells in him. Those gestures are so familiar it hurts to look at her.

"Of course not." She sneers, waving an arm around his room. "Why should I, when it's so obvious you're living up to your big legacy, living up to your potential, getting stoned before midday. Bang up job, by the way."

He takes a step towards her. He notes, detachedly, that his hands are clenched and that he's shaking. "They shove this on me." He says, his voice laced with ice. "They compensate for losing Dad by making me a clone of him, and they don't even ask me, hey, Edward, bro, d'you mind becoming Dad? It's not like you have anything better to do." His voice cracks, and her eyes harden. "They get rid of their guilt of killing Dad by making me into him."

"You're so fucking pathetic." She snaps, and he staggers backwards involuntarily, eyes widening. "So Emmett nearly killing that chick shocked your father. Maybe it gave him the heart attack. But you sure as fuck don't have the right to blame Emmett, not now. You're-" she whips around, her entire form shuddering.

"What?" he snaps, cruel smile curving his lips. Listening to himself, he can almost believe he isn't terrified.

He can't see her face, but her profile is as strong as ever, back straight like a soldier's, forever and for always Daddy's little bitch.

She exhales, seeming to deflate into herself. Her head bows. "Such a fucking failure." She whispers, so quiet he barely hears her.

The blow is received with grace he didn't believe himself to have. His eyes widen slightly, his heart freezes. Time seems to stop for a second.

"I- I can't watch you do this to yourself." She continues, mumbling brokenly. "You're going to drink yourself to death and there's nothing…"

She doesn't finish her sentence, just looks over her shoulder at him. His mouth forms her name, and she flinches, the single word a slice across her heart. Her expression is one of utter devastation.

That doesn't stop her, though.

"You've got to let me go, Edward."

And she's outside, the door closing softly behind her.

And just like that, the world shatters, crumbles around him, centuries of civilization falling to its knees with him. It's the glorious crescendo of agony; it's just as he knew it would be. She's gone.

*(*)*(*)*(*)*(*)*(*)

Three weeks later, Edward gets into a fight.

It spreads through the bar like a wildfire, all the patrons instantly latching onto the feeling of pure rage he's got humming under his skin. Fists fly; stools shatter. The guy next to him –older than him, heavier than him and definitely bigger than him- crashes his fist against Edward's, and Edward hears the crunch of bone and wonders whether his features will be forever altered. Maybe then, he could escape this accursed existence, the face that, like Dorian Grey's, brought on his ultimate doom.

In hindsight, it's almost comically predictable. The air around him was in a vacuum, leaving him with empty lungs and the scratchy feel of raw destructiveness on his skin. He exists almost solely on alcohol now; showing up at classes when he wanted to, drunk, getting kicked out more often than not.

But that night, it was different. He was sober; or at least, the closest Edward Cullen could have claimed to have ever been.

He'd been coming out of lectures, which all had been filled to the brim with ominous threats of finals and Dean's lists and first uppers. He was no longer surprised at the sway his last name had over academics over the world; he was permanently wasted, late for classes, mockingly brilliant, yet he would forever be the great Carlisle Cullen's son above all.

He despised the superficiality of it.

So he was walking, faster than usual, an unseen force dragging him away from the buildings.

That's when he sees her.

He freezes, and students crash past him. He's in the middle of a waterfall, the moment precarious and shocking as the world crashed around him.

He takes a sharp left. The bar's just a few feet away and feels more than ever like a haven.

*(*)*(*)*(*)*(*)

He gets off with a warning from the Vice Chancellor and when he gets back home, Leah's there.

She doesn't say anything, offers no explanation. She just reaches up, tangles a hand in his hair, and kisses him.

His face is still raw from recently removed stitches and he's still bandaged, but it feels like heaven. He can breathe again, and it's like he can do anything, be anyone. His chest hurts.

He drinks her in, a drowning man offered air. The world seems to right itself for the sharpest of seconds and the clichés they taught you were real; the world was a good place and we could all be happy.

"You fucking asshole," she whispers against his lips as they part for air, each drawing in a deep lungful. He notes that if he looks like he's been to hell and back, she looks equally bad, dark bruise-like circles around her eyes, making her look lovelier than ever. "Take care of yourself. I love you, you know."

So matter-of-fact. He blurts it out, the first thing that he says in a long time that tastes right in his mouth: "Then come back."

He stares at her, the girl who held the world on her fingertips. Watches as her expression closed in upon itself, the shutters draw up. His heart, his almost-healed heart, begins to wither in a descent that was spontaneous because it was so familiar.

She says the single word, no frills to make it better, because she wasn't like that. The tears come freely, but not an extra word to soften the blow. "No."

And then she leaves again.

*(*)*(*)*(*)*(*)*(*)

He stares at his knuckles, red and raw, and tries to remember how that happened. It doesn't work; days, weeks and months have blurred, forming a whirlpool of time, incomprehensible and utterly alien.

He's fairly certain it's September again, maybe the twentieth. He glances at his watch for confirmation and realizes that it has stopped, much like his own life. The arms lie still, unmoving, terrified. The face of the watch tells him nothing.

The frantic swinging from thought to thought halts –such a fucking failure- and once again, he's dragged into the nightmare vortex of blood and the unbearable sterility of air of his memories. The steady beeps, grating on his nerves.

His sister is there, talking, cajoling as he sits on the couch, unmoving. Emmett moves towards him, his brute force much more effective than his sister's tactics. He feels himself shepherded towards a set of familiar double doors. Occasionally, he swims back, dazed, to the surface of his mind.

Alice keeps saying that it's okay, that everyone makes mistakes, that he gave it his all, and he muses, vaguely, that she sounds like his old soccer coach after a humiliating loss. She keeps up this litany and he drowns once more in his thoughts, the ever-present noose of self-loathing tightening around his neck.

*(*)*(*)*(*)*(*)

"I was drunk," he says, and the room goes eerily silent around him.

It's the first time he's spoken in days, his voice rough and gritty around the words. Dimly, he's aware of Alice staring at him, wide-eyed, and Emmett's grip tightening dangerously around the handle of his mug of coffee.

"What do you mean, Edward?" Rose sounds artificial, fake, and he realizes in that moment how very much he hates all of them. The familiar rage of his teenage years bubbles to the surface, but he's too tired to let it simmer through.

"When I was operating." He says, fixing his gaze on the kitchen door, just left of her. "I was drunk."

More silence, which is broken by the harsh noise of glass exploding. Emmett has crushed his mug.

"Impossible." He barks, tone rough.

Edward raises his head to look at him, and his brother flinches. Edward isn't sure what's in his eyes, but it seems to be scaring all of them in equal amounts. He himself can't recognize the bleeding bullet holes on his face anymore when he looked in the mirror.

"I was having a bad day," he says, understating it to make the sting sharper. Rose looks away, out the window. "I was shitfaced, and then they called me in. She's been in an accident."

Images play in front of his eyes, the blood, the urgent voices. More blood. Blood, everywhere. "I could have saved her. I knew I could. I was convinced… it was so simple." He laughs bitterly. "I could have done it with my eyes closed, but not…"

Not when he was drunk. Not when the loneliness and silence had accumulated in him to make a bleeding black hole that was incessantly pulling him down. Not on Leah's birthday.

*(*)*(*)*(*)*(*)

"What do you see, Edward?"

"A piece of paper."

"And on it is…?"

"I know perfectly well what a fucking Rorschach test is. Don't patronize me."

"Good, good. Then perhaps you could tell me…"

"Why? So that you could tell me that I'm a chronic depressive with a touch of Asperger's? Oh, how brilliant of you. Can I go now?"

"Your session's not over yet, Dr. Cullen."

"Don't call me that!"

"And why not?"

"I won't tell you. I might cry, and though you'd enjoy that, I wouldn't."

"Do you remember the last time you were happy?"

"What does that…oh, right, you're trying to make me cry again."

"Think about it, doctor. Think about when you were last sober."

"Yesterday."

"Really? For some reason, I don't believe you."

"Fuckin' tragedy, then."

*(*)*(*)*(*)*(*)*(*)

The idiot of a shrink was right, Edward realizes in the middle of his afternoon coffee (six parts actual coffee, the rest is whiskey he nicked off Emmett's stash)

When was he most sober? When he was with Leah.

When was he the happiest? Leah.

"So now what?" he asks the empty room.

Alice, of course.

*(*)*(*)*(*)(*)*(*)*(*)

Six months into the new way of the world, he buys Leah a watch.

She accepts it, laughing quietly and Edward is struck by the intensity with which he wanted her. The love that simmers under his skin is just waiting for the smallest crack to escape through, which is why he has to be doubly careful.

The agreement he, Leah and Alice reached is a precarious one; Leah would live with them in the intention of preventing Edward from drinking. They would keep it all terribly businesslike, bury all that was between them and figure out an arrangement that worked for the both of them.

For most part, much to his incredulity, it really was working. He was no longer wasted by two pm, and he didn't have the slightest clue how Leah managed. It's like having her around is the cure he has needed his entire life and he can't help but want more. Hope.

He could still hope.

*(*)*(*)*(*)*(*)*(*)

He stops hoping a year after that, when he meets a pretty young nurse named Bella Swan.

She works in his ward, and blushes when he speaks to her. Not terribly professional, but she's kind; you can tell by the look in her eyes.

When he first asks her out for coffee, it seems perfectly natural. She casts her eyes downward and accepts, and his heart sings in a way he thought had been silenced. He sees a future with her; chestnut-eyed children and church on Sundays. A settled, content place to call home.

Alice loves her. So does Esme.

*(*)*(*)*(*)*(*)

Leah never stops hoping. Not even when the wedding bells toll and rings exchange, she never stops.

Edward smiles at her from the altar. Beautiful, he mouths.

Leah's heart truly breaks then. Edward looks perfect; an angel on stained glass. I loved you, she thinks. I saved you, and I never gave up.

Leah leaves the couple to their marital bliss, Dr Edward Cullen and his beautiful bride, Bella. She could burn the houses down, she could smash her fist against mirrors. Instead, she leaves, as she always does.

She looks back just that once. It's allowed. Still love you, she says clearly into the night.

-END

A/N: Apologies for the delay. I get distracted very easily.

I feel like a total asshole, but sadly, this is it. The end. No updates, no sequels, no gooey happy ending. Please try your very best not to hate me.

Reviews = love