First and foremost, I'm so sorry that this chapter took nearly two weeks. I got so depressed at some other fanfiction I was reading that it was hard to rustle up my own muse... does that happen to anyone else?
Again, I will answer your reviews and your PMs as soon as I can, I wanted to get the chapter out first. Writer's guilt owns me. However, I have read every message that I've gotten and I love you all; your questions are incisive and I'm rubbing my hands in evil mastermind glee as you unwittingly stumble across my clues (or the opposite). nicnicd, amymorgan, and the girls at /l_l made me smile as I tried to fend off my writer's block and quested to retrieve my muse. The usual suspects keep me sane, special thanks to le moulin, love pollution, just recycling and stella luna sky.
The biggest inspiration of all this week was my shortlisted nominations for Best Undiscovered Erotica and Most Original Storyline at the Indie Twific Awards! Many thanks to hmonster4 and gustariana, and to everyone who has and -- hopefully will continue -- voting for Ars Moriendi! I'm SO excited, humbled, and honored! Please help spread the word about Ars Moriendi to your Twific-lovin' friends. :)
My one-shot Lavender is up this week for voting at the Age of Edward contest, as well. So much to read and to see, I'm all a-dither.
I own nothing.
This chapter contains a mild scene of unintentionally violent sexuality. As both a survivor of rape and a writer of a story with sensitive themes, I urge everyone to comply with requests for warnings and maintain that the safety of your readers is worth far more than a complaint of a "spoiler." I could never claim to know what is a trigger for anyone else; I only know my own -- and I like to be given that warning and that choice back. http(colon-slash-slash)www(dot)petitiononline(dot)com(slash)rapeless(slash)petition(dot)html
The doorbell sounded loudly once, then almost immediately again.
Esme blew hair out of her face as she scooped Mary Alice into her arms, fighting against being hit with enraged little fists all the way to the door.
The twins had only just begun walking, and Mary Alice spent nearly all of her time toddling at top speed after a terrified Jasper, who had grown quite complacent with being able to simply walk away from Mary Alice when she crawled on him too much, and no longer had that luxury.
He was not adjusting well.
Edward was different; he walked only with a purpose, and seemed uncommonly steady on his feet for an eighteen-month old, as though he'd been practicing in secret until he felt he was sufficiently accomplished in his gait to show the world.
Charlie stood on the other side of the heavy door, dressed in full uniform but hair and eyes disheveled, holding Bella at arms' length like a bomb as she raged, pound-for-pound a Force Five Gale to match Mary Alice.
"Charlie," said Esme in surprise, well aware that Renee took nearly sole care of little Bella while Charlie worked long hours as the town's deputy, trying hard to earn his brass and provide better. "What's wrong?"
"Can you take Bella?" he asked simply, dark eyes apologetic. "I'm sorry to drop a fourth baby in your lap, but… just for a little while…"
Esme had never seen the calm cop look quite so disconnected, and poor Bella was a sorry sight: her fine, downy baby hair in a thick knot at the back of her head, romper suit straps tangled around her shoulders, one little frilly sock missing and face screwed up and red. Her bottom looked heavy and it didn't take Esme long to deduce the poor girl's diaper was wet.
"Where's Renee?" She asked, although she already knew.
- - - - -
All day I thought of Edward as I had known him, soft and warm, and compared him against the Dream Edward that visited me in the night and touched me with fingers made of glass. It was so different than the way he'd felt the last night of his life, and I wondered why my subconscious had to remind me, even in the respite of sleep, that he was dead.
It wasn't bad. It wasn't uncomfortably cold, though I had a tingling chill in the pit of my stomach as I slept, and his plasticine fingers didn't feel hard and unyielding, just smoother and less receptive than his calloused beautiful boyish hands…
Edward had always seemed to derive as much of his own pleasure from touching me as I got in receiving his loving touch. He almost never let me touch him – the first time had been the Homecoming dance, the night he gave me his ring, and I think the sight of his ring sparkling on my hand as I moved it over his smooth skin did him in more than my actions – but for all of his reluctance he grew to love touching me, usually finding his own orgasm in watching me reach mine.
It seemed the same last night in Dream Edward. When Edward was alive it was a slow climb and steady burn, as much in my heart as anywhere else, but last night… he shattered me, and I fell against the bed in a million pieces in a way I never thought possible outside of the pages of tattered Harlequin novels, and his new smoothcool fingers felt so good, so confident, inside me…
I lay back against the pillows and closed my hands against the empty darkness, imagining Edward, a beautiful amalgam of him as I had loved and he who had beautifully broken me last night, all warm soft hands and flame-tipped hair with loving eyes and legs like a comet's trail streaking across my sky, brilliancy and beauty, and now he's faded below the horizon leaving me alone and blind in blackness.
But I couldn't think of that now, as my fingers pretended to be him, and I could hold him close for just a few minutes and feel as though his light still gave me love, life, meaning.
I thought about his eyes the first time Edward learned what I felt like inside, and the smell of him on my sheets. I tried to find the soft sponged place inside that Dream Edward found so perfectly, insistently, deliciously…
I sighed and felt myself tightening around my fingers and imagined Edward's enamored sigh of my name –
- - - - -
"Bell-La," you murmur, moving towards where She writhes on the bed, ignoring the flames licking your bones in favor of the frighteningly sweet possibility of licking Her. Her unmistakable scent has wrapped its arms around you in a cloyingly luscious embrace, pulling you with flavorful tentacles towards the juncture between Her legs where Her small sweet fingers are playing, sliding back and forth and shining and your tongue wets your lips to ready them to steal that softness from her because it's yours and you need it and you slowly sink onto her bed and crawl over her thinpale legs:
A predator stalking his prey.
- - - - -
"Oh, Miss Bella," Esme sighed, fastening Bella's romper suit back on properly after cleaning up the now-smiling baby. "You are such a pretty girl. Don't break hearts like your mommy, okay? Because I have a feeling it'll be my little boy's if you do."
"Eddur?" Bella asked as if she'd understood, eagerly looking around for her friend.
Esme laughed and picked up Charlie's little girl, balancing her against a hip. "Let's go find him."
Nary two steps out of the room, Jasper came sailing down the hall, shouting for help, as Mary Alice ran full tilt behind him, hands outstretched and grabbing at his shoulders and whiteblond hair.
"No, Marialice!" he yelled, pushing her pinching hands away. "No touch! Please?" Then he looked up at Esme and baby Bella, eyes round. He pointed at Bella, who had never interested him much, as she was just so small, and besides, if he got too close to the brunette little thing, Edward got angry and scratched at him. Bella wasn't worth the trouble. "Why she here?"
"Mary Alice, you stop touching Jasper," Esme chided gently, patting a restraining hand against the soft back of her bright yellow coveralls. "Bella is here to play with us for a while," she explained gently.
"Play?" Bella chirped, tugging on Esme's long hair with her chubby fist. "Play Eddur?"
"Yes, yes, yes. Let's go find Edward."
Esme found Edward in the family room, just where she'd left him this morning, sitting quietly on the floor with his ganglypale legs tucked under him, blithely flipping through the pages of a Goldenbook as though he knew the words. Esme wondered sometimes just how much Edward did know. His bright green eyes seemed to hold an ancient soul.
"Eddur!" cried Bella, squirming in Esme's arms.
Edward looked up and a beatific smile broke across his cherubic face, framed in tendrils of titian hair. "Bullah," he sighed.
Esme stifled a giggle. Her eighteen-month-old was swooning.
She set Bella down carefully on the carpet before the pale little monster wriggled her way right out of Esme's arms, and Bella crawled quickly her where Edward sat and crowed at him, almost knocking him down as she used him as an anchor to pull herself to a seated position.
Bella garbled something soft at Edward, earning a smile and another sigh of 'Bullah' just as a loud crash and the harmonic wails of Mary Alice and Jasper rang out from the little redhead's bedroom and Esme turned her back on the quieter pair to rush down the hall.
- - - - -
She is so soft and tender below you, still moving to Her own song, not noticing the shiver of cold on Her skin that is your breath for being too caught up in the shudders of Her muscles as your presence pervades Her conscious subconscious and unconscious mind, filling Her with your scent and taste and touch topped off with her lover's face, opening Her wider to you in want.
"Ed-werd," she mewls, a soft pricking cry like a kitten, and it hits you like a lightning bolt in the center of your insatiable stomach –
Ed-werd is what she calls her lover, the man who spilled against her sheets and whose face she sees in her mind as She feeds her fingers your nourishment, your sustenance, yours yours Yours.
Anger wells up in the base of your roiling need even as you settle Just So over Her body so She can feel you and not Ed-werd, she can feel how
you
want
her
and through the electric current of your shimmer passes the heavy thick syrupsweet never-ending want for Her body to meet with yours into Her soft white skin and Her
big brown eyes
open wide and her pupils are blown so dark and wide and wet and bright with darkness and black and pleasure and pain and want and need and nighttime that you fall into them and tangle against her helixes and synapses firing shoot through your mind until you can almost think and you murmur her name against her neck – Bell-La, Bella – as your tongue slides lavishly down her long white neck, your shining pearlescent venom leaving a trail that shines in the moonlight pouring in like cream through her window.
You watch purring in delight as your venom sinks sweetly into her skin and her blood rises to the white surface in a long pinkpurplebrown bruise, soft and wounded and slow to heal.
You can see your reflection in the dark of her eyes, brightwhite like a lie, candlelight hair swirling around your head Her lips are so pink and open and Her fingers are wet as they brush against your cheek and you turn your head quickly to catch them in your cold mouth, making Her gasp, releasing against her thigh in a long shuddering suck that's so close to the place it should be, and She tastes like summer stone fruits and you twist her fragile fingers around your tongue stealing every drop, not noticing as one small bone cracks in your fervor and swells pulsing with warm blood and She cries out in a single sob, tensing in a way you don't like, and the base of your belly flip-flops in a new way that worries you, like you've turned inside-out and hung out to dry, and you pull back to see Her purple fingertip sticky with your cold venom and there's an urge you've never know and you gently, so gently, cup the back of Her head in your hand and lay Her back to her pillows, other hand smoothing up and down the softrounded smoothwhite length of her belly, one finger circling twice the tiny little hollow –
"Bell-La," you say softly, taking her mangled hand between your own, sliding it across your lips softly, breathing more death into Her tiny blue string veins, your milkgreen eyes wide and staring right into the alive brown staring emptyfull space of hers, something changing, growing inside you and you're frightened.
- - - - -
I opened my eyes when my finger hurt terribly and I felt the bone shatter around something liquid and suddenly I was staring into Dream Edward's green eyes, not nearly so empty as last night but drenched in icyhot fear as he looked tremulously back at me, holding my head and my belly and his glass lips gliding over my injured hand – how had that happened? Why would I dream myself into even more pain? – in soft apology as he sang me my name.
I touched his face gently and noticed its hollow lightness, the cold of his heartless state soothing the ache of my bones and he closed his eyes and he smiled and my heart broke because it was just the same smile I remembered, beautiful white teeth.
"Edward," I sighed, still loving how he touched me as his fingertips spread circles over my stomach, feeling me all over, and his face changed and hardened like stone, melting and reforming into something alien and ghostly and with the darksharp remnants of carved out hollow pieces and his white teeth gleamed in the moonlight shining in through my window and I was frightened as he set his hardsoft mouth against my neck again and growled, low and purring in his chest, male and predator and primal and my name spilling from deep in his chest, bella bella bella.
His mouth pulled at me as he slid down my body, hands sliding over my skin reading my Braille and playing my chords, fingers grasping and touching and finding new places and seeming to reach inside me from all angles and feel my organs, tightening my lungs with frosty chill and clenching somewhere deep inside below my stomach and holding my heart in his hands like he always had and always would, turning it all around.
"Oh, Edward," I whispered, watching as his face lowered to the curve of my stomach and his lips brushed lower and lower towards the curve of my lowest bones and the wisp of brown curl that Edward liked even though it embarrassed me and Alice asked me twice to let her wax it off with molten sugar and Dream Edward's back rippled and strengthened and arched like a cat as he took in the smell of me, hands running up and over my wide hipbones and the long stretch of the sides of my thighs. "Edward, I miss you."
He looked up at me then from between my legs, mouth razing iced air over my pink skin and making me burn, but his green eyes were lost and sorry and he didn't speak in words, didn't say he missed me, didn't tell me he knew who I was, couldn't tell me where his heart now lay.
- - - - -
Bella giggled and threw her little hands all over Edward's shoulders, not knowing that she hit him a little too hard, chanting "Eddur Eddur Eddur" like it was the only word she knew – she did know six others – and he laughed, catching her hands like pattycake.
Bella picked up his discarded Goldenbook, studying the illustration of Big Bird and Snuffleupagus on the front before throwing it down in Edward's lap, big round brown eyes smiling pleadingly to him, sticky hands turning pages in his lap.
And Edward 'read' to her, garbled nonsense to Esme's ears when she walked past their quiet room carrying tearstained Jasper after having locked Mary Alice away in her crib for a much-needed nap. She stopped for just a moment, wishing she had time to unearth her camera from Carlisle's crowded desk to take a picture as Bella's small head rested against Edward's shoulder, his arm around her shoulders as she happily babbled over his words and pointed, cooing, to the pictures in his book.
Bella's belief that Edward's half-words told her the story of those pictures was absolutely tangible.
Bella's belief in Edward, unwavering.
- - - - -
Her sweetseeping scent is even stronger here, where you need to be, where you're staring transfixed at the way Her skin and muscles move as though you've never seen anything real before and this is the first moment of your life.
Ed-werd rings out in a soft purr up above you and suddenly there's a small warm weight on your head and you dart up and away only to see her hand reaching out and you realize that smallfluttering heaviness was her broken hand, running through the flame of your hair, and now She looks so sad that Her scent is fading away like water and that can't be okay, She can't be water and falling and darkness because
she
is light
and you can't let Her fade, not before you can taste her incandescence and use it to relight your own burn, you have to get out of this darkness and She is the key.
Your face lowers and you inhale greedily, stealing her scent with her essence, and you luxuriate so fully in the silksoft tang of her citrus and salt and blue and red and white white white and pollen and stamen and orchid and kisses and then your mouth descends, longsticky tongue smoothing and stealing and tasting and she makes a beautiful noise and the corners of your lips turn up and you feel something new.
Something Light.
Something inside your ribs feels like it's bubbling up, filling with air and sun and strawberry and kittens and pink chiffon and sparkling like a single multifaceted diamond, throwing prismatic rainbow over everything your suddenly opened eyes see.
That warm weight finds your head again but you're not afraid this time, knowing the gentle touch of her hand as her fingers slide through your hair and press your mouth closer to the source of Her sweetness, nourishing you and nurturing you and letting you take Her away.
- - - - -
Once Esme returned Jasper to Rosalie, who every day looked a bit worse for wear in trying to support herself and her son all alone, shunned by her family and the scourge of the conservative town, but who today had regained just an ounce of her formerly radiant sparkle when she told Esme that a new mechanic had started at the garage near the Rez where she had found work, a boy from Alaska with curly brown hair and dimples, a boy who didn't leer at her when he smiled, Ernest or Emmett or something like that, she darted to Alice's small yellow bedroom to check on her sweet little girl, who still napped peacefully – the only time those little hands weren't grabbing and those little legs were still! – in her white crib.
Edward and Bella were still quiet, but Esme didn't worry. Edward was always quiet, and Bella was safe with Edward.
Esme headed into the brand new kitchen that she and Carlisle just added onto the house, looking out over the unfinished wood porch that she already imagined her babies sunning themselves on in the summer and envisioned long autumn evenings with Carlisle, sitting tangled on a polished porch swing, drinking red California wine and talking under the stars.
She smiled at the bric-a-brac board above the stove, decorated with little tidbits she'd found at the dustymusty antiques bazaar in Port Angeles: little white milkmaids with blue pinafores and tulip hats, Mickey and Minnie Mouse holding hands, great gray majestic ibises. She set a pot of chicken soup to boil and heard a thump from the living room, and so set to check on her precious Edward and Charlie's Bella.
She looked to the fading light out the window and frowned, wondering just when someone would return for the little girl.
She stared in wonder at the sight before her when she reached the entryway to the ivory room.
Bella stood on wobbly legs, holding the edge of the coffee table for dear life, her pudgy little knuckles bright white with effort. Her big brown eyes were wide and trained on Edward's face where he stood, a few feet away, arms out and encouraging, soft smile on his round angel's face.
He clucked at her, finishing a pep talk in baby's babble with a sweet, "Bullah… yes."
Bella shook her head and swayed on her feet. "No," she whimpered, clutching harder to the table.
Edward nodded, gesturing towards himself with fat toddler arms, cooing in a voice no girl could resist. "Yes."
Bella's brow furrowed in concentration and her lips pouted out like a duckling's bill. Edward grinned at her, steady on his feet, singing soft songs under his breath.
Esme held her breath, knowing that the way Bella's knees bowed out, she wasn't anywhere close to ready to walk.
"Bullah."
Bella took a deep little breath, let go of the table, and though she knew she would fail, for Edward, she took a step forward and tried.
- - - - -
Sunlight streamed in through my window and I groaned, wondering when I had fallen asleep and why my hand hurt so badly and why I was nauseous again after not having cried the day before. I rolled onto my stomach and felt it roiling, overflowing yet empty and the only thing I could feel was angry at Edward, or Dream Edward, or dead Edward, or beautiful living Edward on the last night of his life not living up to his promise.
I can't take this experience from you and disappear into the night.
I could never live with myself.
"And you didn't have to," I mumbled, gritting my teeth against the bile and feeling the vertebrae down low near my hips popping and grinding against their disks like slowsliding tectonic plates, and I was their earthquake.
I turned a throbbing head towards my nightstand and beyond it, the window, wishing the curtains might shut themselves and block out the light, and I could have sworn that I saw the streaming misty trailing tail of my Dream Edward slipping out into the abyss of bluewhite bright.
On my nightstand in a small pink wooden frame stared a faded photograph of my father and a little brunette baby girl I assumed to be me and a brown-haired woman whose face I didn't know. I reached out to take the photograph when I caught sight of my hand, the fingers black and swollen and needing to be splinted.
Circulation was cut off on the fourth finger of my left hand by a silver and diamond ring that I knew to be Edward's. I sighed, my dolorous head dropping dolefully down to the pillows again, sore hand stroking the white spot he left on my sheets, relishing perverse and masochistic in the way the tiny fibers of the cheap cotton sheets scraped against the blackpurple blue of my broken fingers.
just a little,
edward.
please.
Now it caused me physical pain, too.