WOW! A huge welcome to the 40+ new alerts since last update - let me know who rec'd this story so I can thank them. I hope to hear everyone's thoughts on this chapter, it was unusually tough to write.

If you like this story, it is eligible for the Indie Twific Awards [www(dot)theindietwificawards(dot)com] and The Bellies [www(dot)thecatt(dot)net(slash)tw(slash)Default(dot)aspx] as a "Best Alternate Universe" story (not all-human, since Edward is, well, not a human anymore). I also have a one-shot that I think may be my favorite piece of all time entered in the Age of Edward contest; .net/s/5110837/1/Lavender. Thanks to everyone who may have nominated Ars Moriendi for either award or who has read and reviewed Lavender! (Or Tiny Bones, or reviews this chapter of Ars Moriendi, to be fair.)

Love and thanks to nicnicd and contreplongee; your words of encouragement carried me through a rough week. As always, stella luna sky, doitforyou, le moulin, and windtrails own my heart.

id ego eximius

Shelves of knickknack porcelain statues: little white milkmaids with blue pinafores and tulip hats, Mickey and Minnie Mouse holding hands, great gray majestic ibises.

Lemon curd simmering on the stove, rich with yellow egg yolks and smelling like somewhere far-off and exotic, where maybe Nana Elizabeth danced with Grandpa Poppie when they were young and beautiful, and maybe she wore a brown grass skirt over her gingham sunsuit and he wore a tropical print shirt.

Trains pass through even more often on Fridays, flowing down the thirty-eight railroad crossings, the whistles singing to each other in a strange tribal language that I don't speak. I like the freighters with wheezing long whistles best.

"How are you holding up, Bella?"

I jumped, startled from the reverie I didn't deserve as I stirred lemon curd, too sunshine yellow, in Esme's pastel kitchen, trying to busy my hands and calm my mind and provide what little I could for the family that would never be mine, trying to prolong the day they would forget about me without Edward there to remind them.

Rosalie sidled up beside me, putting her arm around my shoulders, and I was surprised. After we had all turned thirteen and Edward almost broke Jasper's nose when it transpired he'd seen what Alice (barely) hid beneath her skirts, and Edward made it abundantly clear that his ideas about propriety and responsibility did not extend towards the lifestyle of Jasper's unmarried mother – neigh the inception of his existence at all, though after their apologies he again tolerated the blond boy – Rosalie had shied from us both, assuming as so many did that my thoughts mirrored Edward's like a smaller magnet.

I allowed myself the maternal comfort of her arm. And I was honest.

"Not well."

Rosalie sighed sadly and brushed some mousy hair back from my face. I had always liked her, despite what she thought, though she intimidated me – being a girl in Forks, I had been raised with that Rosalie Hale as my cautionary tale against beauty and brazenness and boys. But I was young, not like that biddy Mrs. Cope or, to be fair, quick-tempered Edward, and I didn't think what happened to Rosalie to be her fault.

She couldn't help being beautiful any more than I could help being plain.

"I am sorry, Bella," she said, pulling back to study my face. "Edward and I had our differences, but I know he sure as shit loved you."

* * *

At sixteen, Edward very nearly gave Bella a heart attack.

A mere four months before the blood clot in his brain unexpectedly burst and claimed his life, the pair received the surprise of their lives one bluegreen Saturday evening when Edward burst unexpectedly into Bella's room.

"Bella!" he cried, all boyish excitement, as her white door flew so far inside that the knob reverberated off the wall. "Why didn't you answer your – "

And he stopped stock-still.

Bella scrunched beneath her blankets, brown eyes as wide as saucers and staring at Edward, her mouth a perfectly round ring of regret.

A brightly crimson blush crept in red vines down from Bella's widow's peak over her forehead, apple-cheeks, and chin; past her neck and down into her shoulders, which peeked out from above the lacy hem of her comforter.

Her shoulders…

Edward swallowed, his jeans straining.

"Bella…" he asked hoarsely, voice ratting bones, "Are you bare beneath your sheets?"

Bella's eyes filled with tears.

* * *

You're hiding in your half-blown sanctuary beneath the creaky porch of the largest house and your hands are moving fast out of necessity, sucking in her diluted essence in unsatisfying slurps as she moves and lives and just won't fucking go to sleep above you, her delicious drastic scent mingling with last night's blonde blueberry tart and her heart pounding sad and slow and lush every time either female voice utters the same unimportant inconsequential sound, two mirror syllables that sully the tongue you wish to be sucking the venom from your stealthily sticky fingertips –

"Ed-werd" is a noise you meticulously try to learn, rolling the ugly sound against your lips, so you can make her heart pound more sweet constriction into her pink places because she has to sleep sometime.

* * *

Edward's legs unglued and he flew to her bedside. He perched birdlike on its edge, daring to look upon her. "Bella?" he asked, his hand creeping above the comforter towards the curve of her thigh. "Are you bare?"

Bella buried herself further beneath the baby blue blanket, tears brimming over and nose bubbling. "Please don't break up with me!" she begged, desperate. "Please, Edward, I'm so sorry; please, please don't break up with me!"

Edward's brow knit in confusion as his hand settled against the warmth of Bella's leg. "Wh – " he stuttered. "Wh-why would… I – Bella, I – what?"

Bella's face disappeared behind her hands. Her voice came out as a whisper. "You think it's wrong."

Edward's eyes flashed. "How could you think I find anything about your body to be wrong?"

Bella pulled the comforter over her head.

"Come out," Edward said, shaking her thigh, voice stronger than his resolve.

The blanket shook its head.

"Bella, come out," Edward repeated, taking his hand away.

The comforter scrunched further in on itself.

Edward huffed and pinched the bridge of his nose. Then, with hands he hoped she would never know were shaking, he slowly pulled the comforter down.

* * *

I talked to Rosalie all afternoon as the sunshine yellow curd thickened and I pounded out cold-pastry crusts and baked unnecessary pies, thank-you gifts for the pitying acquaintances who showered the Cullens in casseroles (the image made Rosalie laugh) that none of us had any interest in eating.

Edward was gone – and all the tuna-pea crisp in the world wouldn't change that.

Rosalie sat at the table, watching me work and get covered in white flour like a little kitchen ghost, a curious look in her long-lashed eyes.

"Bella?" she asked finally, when all chit-chat had been had and six pies had been baked and I thought I'd successfully hid my tears for a third time, "Can I ask you a tough question?"

I wasn't ready for tough questions. I wasn't ready to think about the way Edward's face looked empty and waxen in his coffin the afternoon before in the fading light and I couldn't yet face the fact that he would never have hit his head had he not been sneaking back inside his own empty bedroom after a tryst in mine the night he died; I wasn't ready to wash his last orgasm from my sheets, all I had left of him.

"Yes."

Rosalie's voice was smaller than I could have imagined coming from the brash Aphrodite. "Why did Edward hate me?"

* * *

Just to her chin.

Then he gently slid one hand over the soft swell of her cheek, patting her as though she were something precious.

One red-rimmed brown eye opened.

"Please come out," Edward cooed, three words of song that would never again share their melody.

Outside Bella's whitewashed windowframe, the poseidon sky bent in on itself and collapsed in wet rain, rumbling with the vibration of thunder as white lightning split the air into equal pushing halves of hot and cold.

Bella whimpered once as the other eye opened. She clutched the comforter to her neck as she sat up, and Edward swallowed at the sight of her pale naked arms and shoulders and one wingéd side of her fragile clavicle. "I'm sorry, Edward," she whispered. "I know you don't think – I mean, I'll under – " she swallowed, her voice wet and heavy. "I'll understand if you're ashamed of me. I was just… so… curious, Edward, and I want you so badly, and I'm so sorry…"

"Bella." Edward's voice cut like a knife as his pale hands found hers at the top of the comforter. "Please don't be sorry. I'm not ashamed of you, I could never be ashamed of you." His tone lowered and smoothed like oil, greasing the words to slide together sinfully. "I wish you'd come out, Bella, and let me see you. I'm curious, too, you know."

* * *

I paused, neither quite unable nor unwilling to answer, but knowing my own weakness: admitting Edward's imperfection.

Especially now.

I looked through the weeping pane of glass into the Cullens' lush green backyard, over the porch that was twice the sight of my first kiss; the air held a strange frozen shimmer despite the late May heat, like the clouds just decided they were sick of floating in the sky and wanted to succumb to gravity with the rest of us.

"Edward didn't hate you," I said, uncomfortable but truthful. "He loved you, Rosalie. He just…" I paused. "Edward had really strong ideas about… about the right way to do things. Y-your life didn't… didn't mesh well. With his ideas, I mean. I – "

Rosalie stood up fast from her seat and crossed the room in two long supermodel strides, suddenly hugging me close.

I still couldn't cry, even as I whispered the words I thought I would never say: "I disagreed with him."

Rosalie kissed my forehead then, and my heart panged because the last person to kiss my brow had been Edward, just before he left, his lips pressing against the tip of my hairline – just where the morticians had covered his bruise for the coffin.

* * *

Bella's brow furrowed. "But you always say no! And you won't touch me, ever, Edward, and it makes me feel so bad… and Rosalie – "

"I never realized that made you feel bad, Bella," Edward apologized softly, squeezing her hands and guiding her to lower the coverlet an inch. "I can't touch you, Bella. It's not that I won't. I just can't."

"Why not?"

Lightning lit the tiny bedroom and shadows played across Edward's tortured face as he stared at their joined hands, just above Bella's small tight breasts, and he guided the comforter and her fingers an inch lower again. "If I start, I won't stop, Bella, I know I won't, I'm not strong enough to treat you the way you deserve unless it's this way... but that doesn't mean I don't want you, Bella… I do; I want you so badly it hurts me."

* * *

I lay in my bed later that night, spent but unable to sob or to sleep, face buried deep in my messy sheets, running through the complication that had always been Edward's attitudes and being strangely certain that

he

was

gone.

I knew of course that he was dead; I didn't suffer that delusion I'd read about of feeling that the lost beloved was only hiding or sleeping or would be returning soon –

If my Edward had seen me so desolate, he would have given up the world to be at my side, he always had. He missed school on days that I felt sick, gave up vacations to stay with me when I'd broken my ankle or my ribs, jumped in front of a van to shield me from harm, crushing his femur and giving up his own cross-country career – his ticket out of Forks – what had seemed, at the time, to be his best shot at a future.

At his funeral, I had looked into the crowd for his reassuring grin twice when my fear of crowds got the better of me and I swayed on my sleep-deprived feet –

And that grin was not there.

Because

Edward

was

gone.

Tonight more than ever, though, I could feel his absence, the lack of his light. I knew he was imperfect in the eyes of others – today's talk with Rosalie only served to further impress his faults: stubbornness, righteousness, spontaneous bouts of vanity – but he was perfect in my eyes because he was the center of my world; he had made it so since the first moment I opened my eyes.

His voice was my buoy and his eyes my anchor; I always ran in the pull of his tides and crashed like a wave into his arms. I never bothered to think so much about what I would be as Bella Swan because that girl would end and I could become Bella Cullen: I would be Edward's wife and the mother Edward's children.

I suddenly had to find a self outside of him, and that terrified me. Rosalie had assured me that it got easier and easier as time passed and that I had my whole life ahead of me, that Edward was not all I had to be, but when I asked her if she remembered the look on his face the night of our last Homecoming, when he gave me his ring, she only looked puzzled.

Jasper gave Alice his ring that night, too; the photograph in a silver frame on my nightstand was taken by his mother. That Rosalie could have already forgotten that night when I never would; late that night after the town was asleep, we'd lain on the cold morningdew grass and I had gotten to touch Edward for the first time, his ring heavy on my hand making me weightless…

Now, he was gone and the world felt colder; I shivered and pulled the blankets tighter around myself.

* * *

When She finally left the big white house and descended down the rickety porch steps, the sun was covered in year-old newspapers, smudged with grease from being used as draining papers for doughnuts. Light hung iridescent through the transparencies, hitting the spaghetti clouds' backsides, everything lit in half-tone: john paul george ringo, everything stuck in another timeless time, the smell of the rain thick and heavy like fog with the scent of glaciers melting and falling into the sea with a crash and minerals and smoke turning white moths black.

Even though She was awake and you knew it would hurt you couldn't help it, you darted out for just a moment, licking the bone of ankle, instantly drunk on her and falling back into the darkness with a gasp, barely registering her movement as she stumbled and fell down the last two steps.

She lay dazed on the sweating green grass for a moment and you rumbled with hope that she had broken –

If she were dead, you could steal her, and never have to give her back.

But she rose, tripsy but upright on her narrow white feet, and staggered off to the little blue house you knew to be her own, and you desperately wanted to follow, but the burn of the sun and the burn of her awareness had scorched you black already and you retreated beneath the mouldering wood, licking your wounds.

But now the sky is jet black and tumbling with hot and cold air; thunder and rain and you're soaked and hard and ready and outside her window, watching her, knowing her sweet brandywine taste from just the smallest taste against unknowing pornographic skin, waiting for her to sleep so you can take her.

* * *

"But you don't have to stop!" Bella cried, scooting forward to stare into Edward's eyes. "Edward, it would be okay! We love each other. It would be wonderful to be able to – express it, in those ways." She scooted closer still, and the comforter fell forgotten to her waist. Edward's eyes locked on hers; Bella had not yet noticed anything amiss. "Please, Edward," Bella begged. "Please show me how you love me."

A v-shape creased between Edward's eyebrows. "Bella…" his eyes fluttered shut and Bella watched his Adam's apple bob. "I am trying to show you how much I love you in the best way I can imagine. I'm not going to let you end up like Rosalie."

Bella's eyes flashed. "Us making love would not be anything like what happened to her."

The cupid mouth pursed. "So you say. Whatever really happened that night, she was dating Royce King, and she ended up alone and pregnant and has to be a mechanic in Forks, Washington, for the rest of her life. I'm not going to risk that happening to you."

Bella stroked Edward's smooth cheek gently with the backs of two fingers. "I wouldn't be alone, even if all the rest happened. We would just be starting our family early. Besides, it worked out for the best; she loves Jasper, and she has Emmett now." She smiled decadently. "Though I could never replace you."

Edward smiled sadly. "You can't know that it'd be okay, Bella. Anything could happen."

Bella's hand curled into a fist. "Don't even say that, Edward." Her swollen eyes filled with panicked tears. "How could you even joke about leaving me? You can't leave me. Not ever."

Edward gathered Bella close and she pressed her face into the crook of his neck, inhaling his sweet grass stain smell and breathing in rhythm to his slow-thudding heartbeat, pushing gently in soft tides against her skin.

Edward swallowed and rubbed his hand slowly down the bare expanse of Bella's white back, fingertips tracing the angelwings of her scapulae, counting her vertebrae in fearful reverence. Bella had forgotten her nudity, but Edward thought he never would.

"Bella." His voice came out as an embarrassingly boyish croak; he cleared his throat once and tried again. "Bella… m-m-may I look at you?"

* * *

Your face is pressed against the glass as rain pelts your back in long wet lashes that sting with wind and charcoal tanned leather.

She's moving silently around her room, touching the frames of small square photographs, face impassive, top half bare and bottom half hidden by a gray garment that makes you growl with dislike. You want to see it. You want to see it and you're not sure why, because she's not pretty, but she belongs to you and she's acting like she doesn't know it.

Your hand acts of its own accord and it's through the glass, still as stone and waiting, burnishing black and you're roiling in pain and you want to withdraw your hand but you just can't, her scent so close against the suction of your fingertips is delicious and tipsy and the longer you wait and endure the burn the more bearable it becomes.

You squirm in excitement at the idea of acclimation, of taking her awake and aware. She's a garish thing but your mouth is watering anyway and that's not something you could dare to pass up.

She crosses her room to the closet and runs a hand over the line of soft pale drab fabrics; you're jealous of their strands and imagine her hands stroking you, down your torso and across a hip to the part of you that hungers most, her fingers swirling over the end and dancing across the length, up and down and up.

Her arms stretch above her head and it's obvious naked that despite her small size she has a little bitty potbelly, a small bulge of white tummy just above the wild triangle of hair; she has the navel of a woman with a toned stomach, but below the threefold button her stomach swells, a smooth puffiness that would not be noticed when not casting an ooid shadow on the rusted bryophytes that grew shyly beneath, the helixes tangled, pressing against her skin, hiding revealing white wrinkles, silhouetted ridges, the flush pink bulb and crest.

you

want

her.

You want this one without her clothes, her alabaster upturned breasts small and set high, unsullied iridescent opals in the strange filtered light of the corn tassel moon.

You want her spread open like an orchid, and curled tight around your wispy body with legs twined around your waist and arms pushing you closer deeper

hunger.

You want her rolled over so you don't have to look at her face and your hands can find her little pink nipples and suck their sustenance; you want to snatch her from her bed and sling her around your neck and run with her across the treetops of the hum and take her hard against the trees in the clearing where you can keep her away from the world for hours and hours and days…

You want her in your mouth and under your hips and running her hands over your every inch and

you

want

her.

You swallow in half-deluded need and your other hand slips through the windowpane.

* * *

Bella turned magenta from her tresses to her toes, the evening flashing before her eyes like the storm outside.

"Please, Bella?" Edward whispered, keeping his eyes carefully trained on her flushed face. "You can see me, too. I just need – please, Bella. Please."

Bella swallowed. Edward's eyes were wild and timid and so green they burned.

"I can see you, too?"

Edward nodded fast. "Yes," he breathed, voice shaky – uncharacteristic of the confident and charming young man, now confronted full in the face with his girlfriend's womanhood – and hands on Bella's palms again. "What do you want, Bella? What do you need?"

Bella's pink tongue poked out from between her lips to wet them nervously before her small white teeth found purchase on her upper lip, awkward and scraping. Slowly, she moved back against the pillows and languished like Cleopatra, an Egyptian queen, flaws forgotten under Edward's gaze and nonexistent in his eyes.

She pushed the comforter down to free her skinny white legs.

"You."

Edward's breath caught in his chest, heart hammering hard and fast. Bella was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen – where she looked in the mirror and saw awkward pudge, Edward saw the soft curve of the stomach that would one day swell with his baby, and it was amazing; where Bella saw two-cup-sizes-too-small, Edward saw the perfect size to fit beneath his palms and dark cherry nipples that almost made him cry; where Bella was terribly embarrassed by the tangled mess of dark curls at the apex of her thighs, Edward thought the dark froth made her real and womanly and mysterious, like a wood nymph, magical and seductive.

Because he loved her, Edward thought Bella was beautiful.

"Show me," Edward whispered. "Bella, show me what you were doing under your blankets."

The blush returned. "Why?"

For the first time in Bella's memory, Edward's cheeks flushed with embarrassed color and he looked away. "I imagine it all the time," he whispered. "I'm sorry, Bella, I just can't help it, you're so – and I want you so – "

"You do?" Bella asked, all gentle innocence, even as her wanton hands slid purposefully over the cage of her ribs.

Edward nodded, transfixed. He ran a hand through his auburnbronze hair making it stand erect like a mane.

Edward held his breath as Bella gentle teased small circles on her pointed nipples with four fingertips. "What do you imagine me doing, Edward?"

Her voice was a low purr, she now the lioness and Edward the lamb quaking in her wake.

"I thi – I think – " he stuttered, and Bella ran one dainty foot along his shin.

"Take off your clothes while you tell me, Edward," she sighed. One hand had fled her breasts and rested lightly over her navel, and Edward craved more.

* * *

You're crippled with pain and your limbs only bent boughs in your broken glass figurine self, crushed in the corner of Her bedroom, drowning in the sea of her exotic pepperberry freesia sweet sex perfume and it's worth the pain as your invisible organs wrench and turn outside-in inside-out and you're retching in pain at the same moment that her fragrance makes you cum and it's the most awkward sensation you've ever known.

She's lying in her bed, tauntingly still, but awake, her cherry nipples hidden beneath a dark blue tee-shirt, but you can see their outlines clearly and they're calling to you and you want so badly to go to her but it hurts and you can't and your shuddering pain sends out wave after wave of cold air rippling through the room; she shivers softly and pulls the blankets more tightly around herself, movement stirring up more of her breathtaking scent and you double over again, watching her intently from the corner of her bedroom…

* * *

A tortoiseshell button fell free from Edward's shirt in his haste to obey.

Bella owned his soul.

He was finally as naked as she by the time her thin fingers combed through the wirebrush seaweed curls and his pink head wept three opal tears in joy.

Feminine fingertips found fresh female flesh and Bella mewled softly, a tiny private noise: "Now, tell me, Edward, please, please tell me what you imagine."

Edward had been a beautiful teenage boy, all unblemished milk skin and peekaboo manly muscles and not quite yet grown into his long bones; his hands were pianists' hands and his legs runners' legs and his cock a Casanova implement and all three played together, quadriceps twitching on either side of the hand running strokes over sensitive skin.

"I imagine you sprawled across my sheets while I lick every inch of you," Edward whispered, embarrassed, and Bella moaned, one finger sliding softly inside and Edward was so mesmerized he forgot how to live for a moment as he stared at the point of disappearance.

"What else?"

"I want to be inside you, Bella, fuck, I want to be inside you," Edward panted, hand moving fast and too idiosyncratically to be effective for anyone else, scrambling to regain the momentum he'd lost in watching Bella's shining finger, "God, you're beautiful; you're all I think about, Bella, but I love you and I can't – you're too good for me, you're too good for me to think about how I do…"

He was rambling and wild, hands jerking and pulling and slapping hard, eyes vacant and brimming and wet and green and his cheeks flushed pink and he was gone, lost in his id and the pleasure he always denied and his sight was too short to reach past his own shimmering space –

"Edward, look at me," Bella whimpered, hooking her finger inside her.

He looked at her, chest rising and falling and fingers lost beneath the veil of crinkled curls and lids heavy over her innocent brown eyes, and he spilled white over his hand and ricochet on his chest and her leg and baby blue sheets.

Bella smiled sweetly and sighed short through her nose. Edward collapsed with his head tickling her knee, face close to watch her finish, seeping sweet scent onto her fingers.

She held them out for him and he got shy, blushing and shaking his head; Bella gently traced his bottom lip with her wet.

"I love you," she said softly. "There is nothing you could think that would make you bad for me."

Edward just turned his face into her knee and nuzzled, hiding his embarrassed tears. His tongue tremulously tasted her gift on his lip, and he struggled to keep from growing hard again, from burying his face between Bella's legs – so close, so close – to keep his thoughts of his angel as pure as he felt she deserved.

"I love you, too."

* * *

I rolled over, turning the pillow and holding it against me, cuddling it close.

I hadn't slept in days.

I had never felt so alone.

I glanced to the window as lightning struck, blinding me with gold, and then, in the rollicking aftershock of thunder, noticing the bright fuchsia sky of sunrise, the red round soleil burned bright into my retinas and making my eyes shut…

In the light of day, I drifted off to unwelcome sleep.