Everyone who reads and reviews, I cannot tell you how much we both appreciate it. Your thoughts are funny, deep and always entertaining. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And as for Derdriu OFaolain-you know she's amazing. If there's ever a point where you're reading this and think, "Man, I really like this part"- 99% chance, she wrote it.

A Matter of Life and Death

Chapter Four

Bella stared into the rat cage beside her desk. It was hardly a productive thing to do, but she suddenly felt too exhausted to pore over assays and flip through data. Her mind wanted to flop lazily inside her skull, like a coat shrugged off at the end of a long day.

Jake was sleeping in the center of the cage, next to one of his brothers. Impatient, Bella dragged a fingernail along the bars as a sort of alarm to wake him. His beady eyes popped open at the sound, but he didn't move to check her finger for a treat. Instead, he watched her for a moment or two and then fell back asleep, his delicate furry sides sinking in and out with each breath.

Bella fell back against her desk chair and sighed. Her rats were all healthy, as youthful as ever, not a gray hair in sight, but they hardly ever scurried about anymore. Jake didn't climb up on the bars, or hunt for escape routes, or take energized laps around the cedar chips. She wondered why he had lost interest in all the things he had done before.

She let her clammy palm fall over her eyes and focused on breathing. Nothing seemed to be going well since she had met Edward. Her brain instantly grabbed hold of this thought and sneakily insisted that she blame him for her minor emotional crisis. "Goddamn you, Death," she muttered, balling her hand into a fist on the bridge of her nose.

"Well, God can't really damn me," said a deep voice, practically startling her into a heap on the floor. "Since he isn't really my boss, and I've got eternal tenure anyway."

Edward had materialized at the top of the supply cabinet and had raised a flippant eyebrow at her.

"You're going to give me a heart attack!" she exclaimed, her fingers unconsciously trying to smooth her hair into some sort of order.

He snickered. "I don't give people heart attacks. I just come to sweep them into my dustpan after the fact."

"You're terrible."

"I'm a lot of things. Tragic poets find me beautiful."

Bella mused that it wasn't just tragic poets who found him beautiful. She found her thoughts slipping to the sheen of his hair, the slim shadow of his stature. She hadn't quite intended to let herself slip this close to infatuation, and she was suddenly both annoyed and embarrassed, as if he could somehow read her mind.

Bella followed the whim of her irritation and swiveled her chair away from him. She noisily flapped open a binder and began turning pages, feigning absolute concentration. From the other side of the room, she heard Edward kick his legs back and forth against the supply cabinet doors, the heels of his black shoes thudding loudly on the wood.

"Cut it out, will you?" she snapped. "I'm trying to work."

The noise instantly stopped, and Bella sighed, hoping he had gone. But then a hand appeared on her shoulder. She jumped in her seat, cursing herself for her ridiculous excitability.

"Are you alright?" he asked, his voice uncharacteristically soft.

"I'm fine." Her curt tone did not manage to banish his hand. Instead, his other hand fell to her empty shoulder, as if he sought to balance her this way.

"I'm an expert when it comes to people who aren't fine," he announced proudly. "I'm not buying it." His hands had begun massaging her shoulders, thumbs moving in firm circles on her back. She shuddered, despite herself.

"Why are you here?" she demanded, craning her neck to have a look at him. Despite the movement of his hands, his eyes were on the opposite wall.

"I couldn't tell you," he said, almost dreamily. "Guess I just wandered in."

"Death doesn't wander."

His hands left her as he shrugged, and she instantly regretted the loss of them. From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of his index finger skimming the side of her uninteresting rat cage. "Let me take you somewhere," he said, forcefully spinning her chair so that she was facing him.

She suppressed a groan. "Another lesson? I thought you'd already lectured me in all of your circle-of-life drivel." She hazarded a look at his too-appealing eyes, and noticed that he appeared a little tired. It wasn't as though he could fall prey to dark circles or red eyes, but he looked tired nonetheless. She wondered how it was possible that Death could experience fatigue.

"Nope!" His hands were back on her shoulders. "Just a little fun." Before he had finished his sentence, Bella's stomach dropped with vertigo, and they were in the middle of a clothing store.

She batted his hands off her shoulders and spun, trying to figure out where they were. Was it Kansas? France? Outer space?

Edward was smiling gleefully as she teetered around, trying to get her bearings. Eventually, she snatched a shirt from a sales rack and tried to read the label. "Are we in Russia?" she said, hooking the clothes hanger back into place.

He shoved his hands into his pockets. "Kazakhstan, actually." After pivoting with superhuman grace, he began perusing a rack of women's jackets. When a minute or two had gone by, he held an extravagant fur-lined coat up to her and considered the match. Almost instantly, he shook his head and then threw it onto the floor in disgust.

"What are you doing?" she asked, her voice pooling with apprehension.

"You're going to need a jacket," he said absently, while tossing aside a multitude of other options.

The floor was already heaped with his discarded attempts. Bella looked at the cash register, over which a stern-faced man was glaring at them. The store was uncomfortably small, and Edward was making an incredible mess of everything he touched. She tried to give the store owner an apologetic look. If she spoke Kazakh, she would have informed the man that her friend was mentally disturbed, and then try to drag Edward away. Instead, she settled for stooping and trying to pick up the chaos.

"Aha!" declared Edward, grabbing her shoulder before she could even pick up a single jacket. "I've found it." He waved an elegant, belted black coat in front of her.

"Do you expect me to pay for this?" she asked, realizing that his job didn't earn him any money.

"Psh. Of course not." With no shame at all, he took the coat off the hanger, yanked the tag off, and held it open for her.

"Oh Jesus," she said. "What the hell are you doing."

The shop owner had seen them and had started shouting in his native language. He was already charging toward them from around the cash register.

"Come on, come on!" He was still all smiles. "Put it on."

In desperation, she slid her arms through the coat, and Edward took her hand. Within a half second they were somewhere outdoors on a pile of craggy rocks.

"You just robbed that man!"

Edward laughed. "Don't worry, Bella. He's going to die in two days anyway."

She crossed her arms, narrowed her eyes, and all but raised her fists to prove just how she felt about his attitude. She would have worked hard to maintain her snit for at least another five minutes, but she was abruptly made aware of her surroundings. The pile of rocks wasn't an average pile of rocks—it was a pile of rocks on the center of a tiny island… in the middle of the ocean.

The frigid breeze picked up and pulled her hair across her face, nipping the tip of her nose until it was pink. She ignored her discomfort, however, since she was enraptured by the expanse of ocean on all sides, the smell of salt and seaweed. "Wow…"

Edward folded his arms triumphantly. "I said you'd need a jacket."

"Oh my… This is…"

"The ocean, yes. Specifically that big Pacific one. We're just off the coast of British Columbia." His gaze shifted, and he was suddenly smiling widely. He pointed to a spot over her shoulder. "I see one! Look just there."

She spun in time to see the tail fins of a humpback whale flap against the water. This was most unusual indeed. Death had taken her whale watching. Bella took her whale-centered astonishment and applied it to Edward. "Have you brought me here to see whales?"

It took Edward a moment to speak, during which he seemed a little stunned by her appearance. Her hair was flying frantically around her face, her cheeks red from the cold. She wondered if the wind had given her a Medusa-like countenance and unwillingly let a little self-consciousness flutter in her chest.

"Well, yes, I have. I thought you'd like whales. You like animals." He scratched his chin, almost looking bashful. "And I figured you'd like old things too. Obsession with immortality and all. Whales live a pretty long time, you know, like 80 years."

"Wait… do you take whale souls too?"

He laughed, pointing at pod of orcas that had appeared in the distance. "Nah. Just boring old humans. The idea of animals having souls seems silly to me anyway."

She frowned and gave him a feisty glare. "It's not silly. Animals definitely have souls."

"You think?" He seemed to ponder the likelihood of it. "Maybe there's a special whale reaper. Like a big lumbering blue whale with a scythe in its mouth."

"You're just mocking me now."

He pinched her side. "Never."

Suddenly, she was on a sandy beach, right next to a palm tree. "I swear to god I'm going to puke if you keep pulling this beam-me-up-Scotty trick."

"Sorry," he said, kicking the sand a little. "You felt cold."

When her vertigo had faded, she pulled off the stolen jacket and let herself drop to the sand. She had to admit the view was spectacular, and there wasn't another human around. For all she knew, everyone that had formerly populated the beach had died under tragic circumstances, and Edward was utilizing the vacancy. She looked up at him. "Why are you taking me on trips around the world?"

He sighed and plopped right down next to her, the pale sand sticking to his all-black attire. "Because I want to."

"That's a total cop out of an answer."

"I'm Death." His voice loaded itself with haughtiness. "I can cop out of whatever I'd like."

"You're lonely, aren't you?"

"Jeez, how many times do I have to tell you, woman? I'm Death."

Bella rolled her eyes. "You are lonely!"

He scowled. "I am not."

All she did was laugh at him, fully enjoying the childish face he put on. "All right. Fine. I'm lonely. My existence is tragic and sulky and dark. It comes with the occupation, you see."

"But you meet tons of people. You meet everyone!"

"That's the thing about dead people. They make horrible conversationalists. It's always 'why me?' 'why now?' 'take my wife instead.' It gets old."

"Well, if dead people aren't your cup of tea, why don't you just quit your job? Then you wouldn't have to be lonely." Her hand found its way to his all on its own. "Consider my serum an early retirement package."

A smile appeared on his face, but it managed to convey more sadness than a frown. "We're always going back to that damned serum, aren't we?"

"Well, that's why you're always hanging around, right?"

His thumb began tracing slow patterns on the back of her hand. "Not exactly."

Bella's gaze darted to his, but Edward's eyes snuck away from her scrutiny. He turned his head away, feigning fascination with a nearby palm tree. "I can't quit anyway. I was created for this lovely job, and if you make my clientele disappear, higher management will probably just repurpose me. Knowing my bosses, they'll turn me into a celestial file clerk."

"Oh." She wondered if filing paperwork for all of eternity would be better than collecting souls. Perhaps Edward could do with a little corporate relocation. "I didn't realize you were born into this line of work."

"Ah yes. Born is a bit of a loose term, but I've been around for as long as people have been dying. You should've seen those cavemen. Smelly, grunt-y folk. Unpleasant to say the least."

"You're really that old?"

His lips quirked back into that sad smile of his. "This is my point, Bella. If you don't let people die, they're all going to turn out like me."

"Oh dear," she said, laughing a little. "I wouldn't want that. One of you is enough."

"So you admit that you still want one of me, then?"

She stared at him blankly for a moment, trying to decide how she should answer that question. Unfortunately, she began speaking before she had quite worked that out. "I, well… I guess I don't not want you… I mean, I do want you around, as a person, except you're not really a person, are you? But I don't want death around, you know, like lower case 'd' death."

"Mmhmm," he drawled, edging toward her in the sand. "You have eloquently and thoroughly explained yourself. In other words, you want me, but you don't want me." As an afterthought, he muttered, "Women."

"I guess I'm lonely, too," she blurted. "And you're the only person I've had a decent conversation with in a long time. Lord, you're the only man to have set foot in my apartment since I moved to the city."

His face betrayed a look of triumphant satisfaction at that last confession. "So you'll destroy your serum?"

"No."

He had clearly expected this answer, but that didn't stop him from looking a little crestfallen. "Please?"

"Nope."

Suddenly, he disappeared from her side and materialized barely an inch away from her face. She toppled backward in surprise, looking up to see him hovering over her, grinning deviously. "Will you pretty please destroy your serum?" He reached out and tickled her side, and she burst out into wild giggles.

"No," she gasped between laughs. "I will not."

After a while, Edward decided that as much as he loved tickling her, she needed to breathe. He sat back up and examined the sand all over his clothing, realizing that he had been acting rather ridiculous all day. Even stranger, he had no plans to stop his ridiculous behavior.

"You're never going to change my mind," she announced once she had found her breath again. "No matter how many ways you try to cheat."

"You just wait. I'll win eventually. No cheating required."

"Oh really? And how do you figure that?"

Edward took each of her hands and faced her, both of them sitting cross-legged in the sand. He leaned toward her and raised an eyebrow. "I wonder how many hours of me you can take before you'll give in."

Bella's mouth dropped open, in part because her imagination interpreted his words in a variety of creative ways. But before she could form a single word, she was sitting on the floor of her lab.

"Until next time," said Edward, giving her a sly salute. And just like that, he vanished.

Edward and Bella had reached a shaky impasse, which, for all the arguments it caused, still didn't deter their budding friendship. The truth of the matter was that they were both rather lonely individuals. Death, not in its personification as Edward but in its capacity as an as-yet inextricable part of existence, was at the root of their entire interaction, and as tragedy tended to do, bonded them in a strange way that didn't let them fully realize nor completely deny their kindred connection.

And so they settled into a strange sort of routine, consisting mostly of Edward bothering Bella, her protesting everything about him (most of all his proclivity to teleporting her unannounced), and both of them, despite trying very hard to pretend otherwise, rather enjoying every moment of it.

Such it was today—Bella was busy in her lab, still tinkering and toying with her serums and Jake and his buddies, despite Edward's protests. Once it was apparent that his complaints—which ranged all the way from "but there's no point in working on it since I'm going to stop you anyway" to "but you're too hot to care about science"—were falling on deaf ears, he took to irritating her in other ways.

He had noticed that despite her bravado, she still jumped a little every time he teleported, whether she was joining the ride or not. So instead, as Bella continued to work, both on her experiment and at ignoring him, he began teleporting into various places in the room; to the top of the file cabinet, underneath her chair, right behind her, then in front of her when she'd turn around to check. To this repertoire, he added his other rather disconcerting ability, his pyro-production, happily setting afire various objects in the lab—her ficus, a lab coat or three, the water in a half-filled beaker. It was on the last feat that he caught her attention, and she looked on curiously as the two opposites existed alongside each other, the top of the beaker filled with flames, the bottom with still water.

"How do you do that?" she muttered, her scientific curiosity outweighing her need to feign annoyance with him.

"I'll show mine if you show me yours," he said, with an all too lascivious grin that was disconcerting to Bella for how attractive she found it.

"It's not exactly a fair trade of knowledge."

"Come again?"

"I am creating the elixir of life, ending suffering and tragedy. You share the skill of a Neanderthal and a couple of rocks. In fact," she said, reaching over to a Bunsen burner and igniting it, "oh, look at that." She adopted a dimwitted, grunting tone and said, "Fire good. Man make. Edward not special."

If Edward could have held himself in check, he wouldn't have laughed. But she smiled when he did and coupled with the freedom of laughter, it was too good to resist. There was something about her, and in particular her fantastic stubbornness, that endeared her to him, perhaps more than he could ever know. He enjoyed every moment of breaking down Bella Swan bit by bit, even if it meant he got knocked down a couple of pegs, too.

"That's the problem with you, Edward," she said flippantly, returning to her work but continuing to speak distractedly. "You have this insane ego that oversells your actual abilities. You're not doing anything that special."

"On the contrary," he said, suddenly serious, "it is rather special. Hold out your palm."

In a demonstration of how far they'd come, Bella extended her hand readily, even if it was accompanied by a suspicious glance. But Edward was in one of his rare somber moods and simply walked to her. When he was right in front of her, he pressed his hand underneath hers, and snapped with his free one. A flame erupted, right in Bella's palm, and she gasped as it didn't burn her, though it seemingly emanated from her flesh.

"Don't worry," Edward said softly. "It won't hurt you." But he needn't have said that—Bella already knew it wouldn't. Despite his ultimate intentions to ruin her life's work and his rather haphazard tendency to put her in life-threatening situations, he had not once harmed even one hair on her head.

Edward took the opportunity to study her face at this close proximity, seeing the wonder along with the reflected flame in her eyes. He joked about it, but she really was captivating. Everything from the fading freckles on the tip of her nose to the way her lip changed color when she bit it, from a berry pink to a passionate red, was so animated, so alive. For those few moments, they were like that beaker, opposites and opposers, water and fire, Death and this lovely, lively girl standing with each other, coexisting.

He almost didn't want to speak, in fear of interrupting whatever the silence might have been saying, but for once, he had a point and he wanted to make it. Reaching for the nearest empty beaker, he closed it over the flame in her palm, like a cage for the fire. He pressed it slightly into her skin, making it airtight as he spoke. "Life is like fire, Bella. It has to consume to exist, has to rely on something else to feed it. That's why it can only exist for a finite amount of time." The flame began to shrink, desperately sucking at the limited air it was afforded. "If you let it go forever, it'll devour whatever it relies on."

Both their eyes watched as the flame, once so grand in its red rays and orange anger, withered away into nothingness, leaving not a trace that it ever existed.

Edward spoke from the heart, his words as much of a realization to himself as an entreaty to her. "The opposite of life is not death, Bella. Life, everything in your world, is defined by death. When you make death cease to exist, then life also ceases to exist."

She took the beaker and placed it on the counter, speaking in a quiet non-sequitur. "Were you the one who took my parents?"

Edward had anticipated this question since she had told him her story. In fact, he was almost surprised it took so long. "I was." Even now, through the blessing and curse of infallible memory, he could remember Charles and Renee Swan.

"What—were you—do you—did you—?" she spluttered softly, unable to even comprehend how to ask the question.

"They thought only of you, Bella," he said quietly, watching her with heavy eyes. "Only how much they loved you, how they were sad to leave you, but your dad—I remember it so well. He knew with absolutely certainty. He knew you'd be okay. That you'd grow up into a fine young woman."

Out of courtesy, he made no mention of the soft sniffles emanating from her lowered head. But when he saw the tears form little stalactites on the end of her chin, he couldn't help but use his thumb to brush them away. His touch caused her to move; more specifically, to launch herself into his arms. He was shocked into stillness for a few moments, before he wrapped his arms around her, tucking her small frame under his chin, as if he could blanket and absorb all the hurt.

Perhaps it was strange that she was hugging him, that she was seeking solace in the very embodiment of what had caused her such grief. But at that moment, he was closer to her parents, and therefore her long buried heart, than anyone had been. They were not Death and the girl he'd stolen the most precious things from. They were simply existing, trapped by their own circumstances, lifting the shroud of their seclusion. They were just Edward and Bella.

"Of course," Edward murmured, "if only they could see what a little hellion you'd become…" Her soft giggle buoyed him. A few moments of silence crept between them before she spoke.

"Don't you ever get sick of…" Bella trailed off as she searched for her words.

"Being all powerful? Rocking this black suit? Looking so unfairly handsome all the time?" Edward supplied, wanting to lighten the deathly serious mood.

"No," she replied. "Don't you ever get sick of being yourself?" It was meant to be a deep, serious question, but Edward was no longer in the mood for that.

"Well, no one has ever called me 'the life of the party'."

He could practically feel her rolling her eyes. "And that. Don't you ever get sick of the puns?"

"Well, I do crack quite a few," Edward conceded. Bella was about to be surprised by his agreement when he continued. "You might even say I've done it to death. Ow!" he exclaimed when she pinched him. It didn't hurt, not really, but the sensation of her hand digging into his side caused quite a jolt, not entirely unpleasant.

More moments of silence passed and when Bella spoke, her hushed tone barely stirred the stillness in the room. "I understand what you're saying, Edward. But I'm still not going to stop."

Just as quietly, he replied, "I understand, too. But I'm not going to stop stopping you, either."

They continued to hug for a while longer, knowing perhaps, that in their state of stalemate, there was nothing better to do.

I thought this chapter was a bit of a turning point. You agree? Disagree? Think I'm delusional?