"Edward, NO!" The bleeding pain in her voice cut through him, sharp as glass, soft as a feather.

He was in Hell. He was sure of it. He had never suspected that waking dreams could come to the damned, but if these phenomena were another means of proving the cursedness of his existence, he would accept it with whatever grace he could muster.

For the thousandth time that day, that minute, that second, he tried to assure himself that leaving had been the best thing, the only thing he could do to keep her safe. To ensure her survival outside of the nightmare world his kind existed in.

Bella. Oh, Bella. She was his crime. This eternity without her would be his penance. No matter how far or how fast he ran, he would never escape the agony in her voice, the sight of her eyes as he lied to her, told her that he did not love her, and broke her, left her.

Even now, it brought him to his knees, his body collapsing under the weight of his deception. There was no forgiveness for the magnitude of his sin. It would haunt him the rest of his unsleeping life, staining the very essence of his consciousness. That was the price of his arrogance, his greed; the blasphemous assumption that he could lay hands on a mere human girl, that he could take her heart in some sort of perverted facsimile of love.

To love her was wrong – he knew it – but the temptation was too strong; and, accursed creature that he was, he was weak; and he loved her still.

He wished he could die.

It was a beautiful day deep in the rugged terrain of British Columbia, but Edward Cullen may as well have been blind. The only thing he could see was the memory of a pair of deep brown eyes, clouded with tears and confusion, and a heart shaped face, crumpling in defeat.

Five years had passed since he had last seen Bella in the woods, empty years that spread out in an eternity in the agony of helpless, hopeless longing, the strength of which he could never change. Longing for love, longing for wholeness, longing for her – it was as if he had become those things. But he could do nothing. She was mortal, and, as such, she was lost to him.

He had tried to find her once. His resolve to stay way had crumbled only a few miles away from where he had left her – just out of the range of her screaming sobs – when he fell to the earth himself, gasping, and numb with pain. He could not do it. In the relatively brief time they spent together she had changed him, become a part of him, his heart, so elementally it was if her blood truly did course through his empty veins. It was impossible to imagine his life, no matter how dangerous, no matter what the risk, without her.

But he was afraid. He was afraid she would reject him, that she would see him for the fearfully, frightfully arrogant creature that he was; see right through his flimsy shroud of self assuredness and complacency, and send him packing. It was no less than he deserved, but the awful prospect of living an eternity knowing that Bella, the only bright point in his poisoned existence, hated him, wanted nothing to do with him, paralyzed him with dread.

In the end, it was Alice who drove him to go back. Alice, little all seeing Alice, whom he had finally deceived while she was in Alaska trying to comfort Jasper as he struggled with his shame and weakness, his part in the whole mess, had called him in a panic one day, weeping, and speaking so fast he could barely understand her.

"Edward, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to look -"

"Damn it, Alice, I told you –" the rage and the shame choked him: he had forbidden it, he could not bear to be reminded of the height of his folly.

"FUCK what you told me Edward!" she shouted in between gasping breaths. "Bella's GONE! I saw her leave her house and now she's gone."

"So she left," he scoffed, feigning disinterest, "So what?"

"You don't get it, you idiot! She DISAPPEARD! I can't see her no matter how hard I look." Alice burst into a fresh round of tears.

Edward felt his silent heart plummet.

"What do you mean, Alice?" he hissed through clenched teeth; the plastic of his phone groaning in protest as he clutched it with nervous fingers; he wanted nothing more than to shout in frustration. What happened to her?

"I don't know Edward," Alice moaned, her voice suddenly so very small. "There was nothing. No accident. No threat. She was there, and then suddenly she wasn't – it's like she just blinked out."

It made no sense. There was no danger anymore – Edward knew that he had seen to that. By removing himself from the fragile equation of Bella's human existence, he believed had eliminated the threat he saw that those of his kind posed to her. He had thought that she would be safe, that the only dangers she would face were limited to those of a mortal life. He had not anticipated this uncertainty, the invisible unknown that had apparently engulfed the life of the young woman he had given his heart.

Edward began to realize then, listening to Alice's choking sobs, the entirety of his mistake. He had been a fool to think that by removing himself from her life he could in anyway change the shape of her destiny.

But by that time, she was gone, and no one in Forks, not even her father, knew where she went.

And so Edward found himself once again creeping into Bella's bedroom window like a thief in the night, trying to find some clue, some small indication that Alice could not see, that would help him find her –find what happened to her. It was ironic, he realized, in an incredibly sick way, that instead of begging Bella for her forgiveness, he was now begging fate, destiny and the God he no longer believed in for her survival; for some scrap of evidence that she still lived.

Her room was just the same, and yet strangely dead. All of the pictures, all of the mementos of the girl she had been were still on the wall. The bed was still covered in its plain, homely spread. In the corner, the dinosaur computer still lurked, wheezing out a faint miasma of old electronics. The only things missing were her clothes, her grandmother's quilt, and of course, Bella herself.

Of her, there was no sign, only the faint floral tang of her scent, diluted now, faded with time, and something else: the salt of her tears. Defeated, Edward sank to the floor, pressing his head on the cool fabric of her bed. The memories rolled over him: of him watching her sleep, of him holding her, of him pressing her soft body beneath his on the bed, kissing her throat as she arched and clung to him. Those memories were bitter aloe to his aching wounds now - there could be no reconciliation, no resolution, not without her.

His only other option now was to ask her father, to pry into his waking mind and find the reason for the rupture between them, to explain the sudden departure of the quiet and thoughtful person that Edward knew to be Bella Swan.

Charlie had not told him directly. Instead, he had simply opted to throw Edward down the porch stairs, cursing him for the loss of his daughter. And Edward had been so shocked by the barrage of images flooding at him out of Charlie's mind – of Bella crying, Bella catatonic, Bella listless, thin and pale, and not the vibrant, beautiful living girl who had captured his heart – that he had let him. Lying in a heap on the sidewalk outside the home that he had spent some of the happiest days of his long life in, with Charlie breathing over him like a raging bull, the jumble of his accusatory thoughts bowling over him with all of the subtlety of a battering ram, Edward finally began to realize the enormity his mistake.

Bella's shouted words, "FUCK YOU, DAD!" echoed unspoken in the air around them, their venom lacing Charlie's angry thought tirade with frightening clarity, chilling Edward's already frozen body.

"She's gone you son of a bitch!" Charlie roared at him. "Don't you think this wasn't your fault!"

Edward scrambled to his feet, the weight of Charlie's accusations, both in word and thought, causing him to sway drunkenly, his mouth opening and closing wordlessly like a fish.

He could hear the final conversation between father and daughter clear as day, and saw in Charlie's mind that he truly did not know where his daughter had gone. All the older man knew was that he awoke one morning to an empty house, and to cryptic note that did nothing to assuage his deepest fears. Lost, their minds seemed to say in unison. Bella was lost to them. After all the hurt and shame that had been heaped upon her, she had broken; and in disappearing, had retreated into an unknown seclusion. Looking up at Charlie, his face red, a vein pulsing angrily in his forehead, Edward was filled with a new sense of remorse.

I caused this, too.

"You are right, sir," he rasped, his voice sounding strangely dead to his own ears, "It was my fault, and I am sorry for it."

You can never believe how sorry I am.

"I don't want your 'sorry'," Charlie spat. "I want you to get the fuck off my property and stay the hell out of my town!"

Edward was only too ready to comply. With Bella gone, Forks was now the epicenter of his pain. There was nothing else to stem the ruthless tide of his sorrow, his regret. He had hoped he could find her, and if she wouldn't forgive him, he only wanted to be near her, unseen, revolving around her like a satellite, reassuring himself that as long as her heart beat, he could love her from afar, and be satisfied. Now that she had vanished, he was adrift, lost himself in the vast sea of his newly purposeless life.

And so now he lay, face down on the damp forest floor in the mountains just outside of Blackcomb, letting the grief and regret of the past five years wash over him, knowing that the pain he felt was no less than he deserved.

Edward, eat. Carlisle's voice, calm and patient, gently cut through his earthy reverie. We'll be leaving soon.

Edward groaned.

In an effort to drag him out of his endless cycle of misery and self-accusation, Carlisle had enlisted Edward's help in exploring new options for their rather sizable financial investments. Some of this included branching out into philanthropy, since, as Carlisle earnestly stated, that beyond being tax-deductible, "it was the right thing to do."

Edward had no desire to debate the semantics with him – or do anything else for that matter, but the vast well of patience and understanding that Carlisle had shown him throughout this entire ordeal, was extraordinary, even for him, and so Edward acquiesced, because his sense of honor demanded it, no matter how much his wounded psyche protested.

He could not have Carlisle be beholden to something that could only ever be considered his fault.

His body protesting, well, his mind really, Edward heaved himself up off the forest floor and flung himself down the hillside toward the nearest heartbeat his inhuman ears could hear.

It would be a long flight to Anchorage.

I'm just a cricket, riding on a tumbleweed. Why is it so quiet in here?