Disclaimer: Nope, I don't own Twilight, but, perhaps, I could make a certain deal for its ownership…
The Final Wish
"Let me guess," Edward growled as helplessness filled him. He turned toward James with a look similar to an animal backed into a corner and ready to tear apart the person who trapped them there. "She was in a car accident?"
James clapped his hands sarcastically. "Well, I'd thought you'd have caught on earlier than this. There were a total of three breakdowns, one sabotage, and two fatal crashes. I thought that this time, I ought to shoot for a theme."
"That's what my life is, then?" Edward managed to yell in a subdued voice, hoping to draw no attention, as he followed the horrified thoughts of the staff and that wonderfully awful smell of such familiar blood. "A game for you to screw up and peddle off as a drive safe commercial for later?"
"No," the devil soothed as he tagged along beside Edward at a graceful lope, "I would never think of this as a game Edward. If you must know, I was trying to enforce a lesson in you. Something like: 'The future is inevitable, and anything you do to try and change it will only lead down the same, dismal path.'" He smiled winningly and turned to Edward with a proud smirk on his face, "Quite catchy, isn't it?"
Considering that he had nothing to say to that, Edward remained silent. Near the room where she must have been, he pulled aside a nurse who appeared to be running away to find a place suitable for throwing up. "Tell me what happened," Edward's velvet voice was as monotone as it could be and his eyes wide with the disbelief of what he saw through other people's eyes.
"Doctor Cullen?" Nurse Grace hesitated. "What's wrong with you?" She hadn't meant to say it so bluntly, but he looked as though he had seen a ghost; if it was possible, he was paler than ever and the closer they got to the hospital room where the patient was, the odder his expression became. He looked like a man who couldn't decide between continuing forward or fleeing away, knowing that one was just as bad as the other.
All Doctor Cullen did was look at her with that haunted expression and Grace manually went into the list of problems, hoping beyond hope that with more knowledge he'd lose that look. "Isabella Swan was driving when she hit something. We don't know what it was; it must have been big though, by the size of the dent in the front of her car. She wasn't wearing a seat belt and came crashing through the windshield. She's severally cut and bruised, has broken several bones, and her spine is broken. We think that a nerve was snapped and she will not be able to walk again." Doctor Cullen's jaw clenched, a strangled sound came from his chest and the nurse was suspicious as to whether he had blinked at all while she spoke. "She's not going to make it…" Grace blurted out before backing away from the doctor with pity; she'd seen the way he had looked at that girl, like they were in love.
A solid oak door with a covered window loomed in Edward's sight, seeming to fill the world. He couldn't find it in him to turn the knob, and he definitely couldn't turn away, so there he stood, undecided. Through it, he could hear the frantic orders of Doctor Henderson as she tried to stop the motionless figure on the bed from losing anymore blood. James moved from Edward's side and, with menacing slowness, opened the door.
As if propelled by feet that weren't his own, Edward glided forward into the crowded room, consumed with the desperate feeling of knowing that anything he did will amount to nothing of importance. At hearing him enter, the busy staff took one look at his painfully terrified face as he collapsed down in the chair in the corner and looked hurriedly away again. They had never seen smooth, calm Doctor Cullen in that amount of pain before and, somehow, that made everything even worse.
No one noticed the man in the dark suit that followed the doctor and leaned on the wall beside him, looking at the hopeless scene play out in before him with as much pride as Michelangelo must have had as he stared up to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. "You," he quietly said, catching Edward's attention so raptly that all the dreadful sounds that accompanied trying to save someone's life disappeared into a far away and muted distance, "could make this all go away Eddie." James gestured with a wave of his arm to the dying Bella, unconscious and as broken as a thrown away glass doll. "You only need to make a wish."
That simple phrase split and multiplied around his ears. And in none of the different repetitions did that sound like a trustworthy option.
Breathing seemed impossible, his mind rushed, and Edward knew that he had to get out of that slowly closing room. Without a word, he bolted through the open door, just controlling the urge to go his full speed, and into the parking lot, where there was fresh air and, hopefully, time to clear his rampant thoughts.
He felt surrounded by death; it hid behind every corner and lurked underneath false chances of happiness, waiting hungrily for the next catastrophe Edward would inevitably cause while it licked its blood red lips with agonizing patience. It was the creature always on the edge of his vision now, reaching out for the one thing that truly mattered, the light in the darkness his life had become, his Bella. "No," he rasped, not even aware that he was speaking out loud. His thoughts seemed too loud to stay in his mind; his head needed relief from their screaming reverberations. "It can't take her. I need her, and if it has its way, I'll have no other choice than to follow dutifully." But what can I do until then? the vestige of Practical Edward asked. "Nothing. I'll do nothing more that can harm her."
"No, Eddie," a surprisingly cold voice said from behind him, "you have to do something; it's in the contract." Edward turned around to see James, standing as regally as any monarch ever deserved to, like he was before hordes of obeying and eager to please demons in the fires of Hell instead of a dingy parking lot in Forks. "You can't afford to do nothing."
"You think I can't stop wishing?" Edward challenged. "Watch. I quit, I'm done. The contract is annulled, void, finished, useless, whatever phrase you want to put on it." Edward stood his ground and eyed Satan firmly; knowing full and well that he had rebelled against the lines James wanted him to hopelessly mouth. It was the equivalent to jumping off the stage in the middle of a performance and walking out the door. Another wish, the final scene, was being put on hold as the actor realized he no longer wished to be a puppet whose strings were being pulled along by a demonic puppeteer.
In the stony silence, a change occurred, power shifted. Though it was impossible to gain access to the devil's mind, one could see a flicker, however brief it may be, of alarm on his face. His smile disappeared. It seemed that manipulation, a powerful thing in his arsenal for swaying alliances and motives, couldn't stand a chance against Edward's steely resolve. He would have to try a different approach.
"Eddie," he started in a warning tone, walking up to him and placing a pale hand on Edward's shoulder, "you forgot one…little…thing." In a lighting fast movement, more swiftly than Edward could follow, James threw him up into the air and sent him sailing to the other side of the parking lot. Edward landed with a crack, leaving a dent in the asphalt, and was shocked to feel immense pain blossom from the arm he'd landed on. Before he could get to his feet, James was there again, pulling him up by the shirt and dragging him only inches from his furious face. "The show must go on!" he yelled before throwing Edward once more to a far point of the parking lot.
This time the stinging discomfort focused on his ribs, causing Edward to emit a grunt from the pain. Again, James was there in a moment, holding him close to his face, which seemed to stretch across his bones now, anger turning it unfamiliar and strange. His eyes blazed like fire and he snarled, "Do you think that you are immune to corruption and bribery, Eddie? Everyone has a lever that, when pulled, will make them do anything. For some, it's greed, for others there's pride, but for you, Eddie," he drew out a pause as he tossed Edward up high into the air, where things melted and changed until he was landing on the recognizable tile of the hospital room, "it's Bella."
In the room, empty as every single staff member remembered they had somewhere more important to be instantaneously before they arrived, James stood at her bedside, a glowering expression of open malice on his face. That dazzling, pearl-white smile seemed like it had never existed on this new sneering face. "Look at her; so vulnerable, so easy to hurt." For no medical reason, Bella gasped in sudden pain, her heart rate accelerating from the shock. Edward got to his feet and leaned over Bella on the other side of the bed.
"What did you do to her?" Edward demanded, ready to kill him.
But James just stood by her like a silent sentinel; his face clouded with threatening indifference, the triumph of one who has the upper hand was only tinged about the set of his mouth and the raised chin. "Think of this as…motivation, Eddie. I have come to the conclusion that you seeing her in pain," again the unconscious Bella writhed, "forces you to make a decision. Make the wish, or she can die, just like that." Bella screamed louder, waking abruptly from the painless dreamland her mind had runaway to and jolted into this new body, filled with scorching fire and worrying numbness.
She heard a loud and dangerous growl before a blur jumped over her to a man she had never seen before. Bella was about to cry a warning, but the man moved with unnatural speed, seeming to catch the blur and throw it into the ground. In the place where the blur had hit the floor hard enough to make the tile fly out of place, she saw Edward, glaring at the black-haired man like he would want nothing more than to see him burst into flames. Bella tried to say his name, to ask him what is happening, but her throat felt like it was lined with knives, making speech incapable.
"Make a wish," the man commanded Edward, "or I will snap her like a twig." At once, Bella felt something consume her, plunging her body to state where everything stung and boiled and hurt oh so badly she didn't think she could make it no, the pain was too much and if she had to last longer her brain just might explode with that terrible pressure-
"No!" yelled Edward, getting to his unsteady feet. "Let her be…please, leave her out of this…" He looked over to where Bella was no longer screaming, sighing with obvious relief. Edward stared at James, then, hoping to ease the red fire his eyes had turned into, said, "What will happen if I want her to be healed? Would she walk out of here and get ran over? Look at what has already happened from my meddling in her life! I don't have the right to make decisions for her any longer when it will only result in her dying. I can't make another wish…"
As soon as those words came out of his mouth, Bella was screaming again, louder than she had been earlier. With cruel understanding, Edward realized that the cracking sounds that were now filling the room were her bones breaking and crushing beyond repair. Slashes appeared in her scarred skin, new blood mingling with the dried that crusted around her body. All the while James stood there, watching it with satisfaction.
For Edward, the world spun and bent. He was half-mad with confusion, self-hatred, and anger. Edward clutched at his heart with desperation on his features; it felt like it was burning along with Bella. Indecision crippled his mind as he couldn't kill her by making a wish and he couldn't kill her by standing by and doing nothing. His jaw clenched, his knuckles cracked, and the words came rising from his chest with some inner certainty, some hope, of rightness. He pulled in a breath and finally said, "I wish that Bella knew about all these events; what I am, who you are, what she means to me and the lengths I have taken for her."
The shrieking subsided to a whimper, there was a snap, and James was no longer in the room.
Amid the terrible agony, Bella suddenly felt deft and certain hands feel her pulse and check the limbs she could no longer move. They felt like reassuring ice on her flaming body, making it easier to deal with the pain. Bella opened her eyes to see this person was, and wasn't in the least bit surprised when she saw Edward's face above hers, contorted with concentration.
At the familiar and loving sight of him, there seemed to be a spark in her mind. It didn't last long, but it illuminated blank spots and questions in her mind. It wasn't like reading a book or watching a movie, but more like experiencing it in a way; some feelings and thoughts danced across her mind. It even showed her some things Edward didn't know; things he would have quite liked to, but it wasn't time, not yet…
Though it had colored all the events and conversations she now knew, the most important, and best, thing was saved for last: the overwhelming, unconditional, awe-inspiring, absolute love that Edward felt towards Bella, something that she returned fully and without even a thought of hesitation.
Now, everything seemed so clear, so obvious, that Bella felt like hitting herself on the head, if it wasn't for the inability to move her arms, that is. With effort that is only matched by single handedly moving an apartment building with your bare hands, Bella opened up her blood-soaked and broken jaw. The moment she did, more blood came dribbling out from between her lips. Edward noticed the movement and looked up to her eyes, cupping the side of her face in his hand.
How silly we had been, Bella thought, both in love with one another, and neither able to say it. She recognized the extra shimmer in his eye now, how lovingly he held her. It had been right in front her all along and she had never noticed the little things that meant so much. Remembering what she needed to say, Bella moved her mouth experimentally, wincing at the pain, and said, "Nan ghee." Seeing how this amounted to absolutely nothing, she tried again. In a slurred, unsteady voice, she said, "Edward, change me."
His eyes widened and his hand held her face a little more tightly, picturing the pain she'd be in with dread. Edward saw the complete earnestness in her blood-shot, chocolate brown eyes, and let it process through his mind, trying to poke holes in it so he could turn it down, but it remained ironclad. If she were to even survive as she was, she would be a vegetable, unable to move at all. Sense interfered with Edward's protective heart and nodded his head. He gave an uncertain smile and Bella returned it double fold.
Kissing her blood covered neck, Edward bit down and prayed for the best.
000
Nurse Grace was the first one to come out of the devil-induced distraction. She had been at her desk, asking herself how she could have gone so long without properly organizing her pens, when she remembered that Miss Swan was going unattended. She ran as fast as her stout legs could take her, bursting open the door… and screeched to a halt.
Doctor Cullen was sitting beside Miss Swan on a small chair, holding her scratched and delicate hands in his large pale ones. He had his eyes closed and was speaking in a quick, low voice; blending together apologies with promises with pledges. His face had lost some of the haunted look, but it was pinched and tight with worry. Every time Miss Swan would let out a whimper or groan of pain, he would bring her hands to his lips and kiss them gently. It seemed that knowing he was there calmed the girl and she would ease until the next wave of pain. At first, Grace thought that he didn't notice her entrance but, without opening his eyes, he broke from his rapid talking and said, "Hello, Nurse Grace."
"Oh, uh, hi, Doctor Cullen," her mouth automatically started. "How is she?"
His eyes opened, displaying golden eyes that were darker than Grace remembered, and looked down at Miss Swan. His face seemed crowded with different expressions, each screaming for dominance; there was sorrow, anxiety, concern, undeniable love, and, Grace didn't know which was more puzzling, the guilt or the relief. "She's not doing too well. She won't make it." The words were monotone, his face now stoic with pain, but Grace felt as though something was wrong about his words. It was like a well-known role played by a very talented actor, not the open and half-mad face of a man that saw no escape.
Grace pushed these thoughts to the back of her mind and felt deep compassion towards the young man. "If there's anything I can do, Doctor Cullen, just give the word."
He finally met her eyes, seeming to find something suddenly interesting about her features, and attempted at a smile. It was nothing more than a slight twitch of his lips, but she looked at it with a warm heart. "Thank you Grace." She turned to leave to the door but he called her name. "Grace? I don't think I'll be in employment here anymore. After this… it would never be the same. Would you mind spreading the word?" Grace nodded with understanding, leaving the room when he once again closed his eyes. The poor boy, she thought to herself, losing someone he is obviously so in love with.
In the next two days, Doctor Cullen didn't leave that room. Grace, the only member of the staff that came within a ten foot radius of it, would bring up trays of food at all the proper times on her rounds, but each time she came with a new one, she would find the last untouched. He didn't sleep and he never let go of her hands in all the times she visited. The more time that passed, the more pain Miss Swan seemed to be in, and the darker his face grew with a kind of wild desperation. Doctor Cullen didn't talk now, he didn't need to; the silence was screaming with his pleas of her safety. Grace knew that if Miss Swan were to die, he would go insane.
In the evening of the second day, Grace came with Doctor Cullen's dinner. She would have taken the unmoved lunch from the table and left if it weren't for the heavy look on his young face. The purple bags underneath his eyes were darker than ever and it seemed unfair that someone as full of potential as him should be shot down by such sorrow. Hesitantly, Grace asked, "You should head home, Doctor Cullen, for some sleep." At seeing the look on his face, she quickly added, "Just for an hour or so. I can watch her while you are gone; I won't leave her for a second, I promise."
Edward surveyed her. Her mind seemed innocent enough, she only worried for his well being, but on some deep, instinctual level she seemed to suspect something. He really didn't want to leave Bella, but he did need to gather supplies, like her clothes, books, and other personal items. Edward could stop by his house for luggage, get her belongings, and then come back here. She had only said an hour… "That's a good idea, Grace."
She watched as he bent down, kissed the girl's cheek, and murmured something in her ear before walking out the door, not even disguising the nervous glances he kept throwing over his shoulder.
When he was gone, Nurse Grace took the chair that he left, surprised by the icy coldness of it, and looked at Isabella. She seemed worse than she was before, not able to contain the cries of pain without her love's comforting presence. Grace reassured her as best as she could, but hoped Edward would return soon.
000
Upon entering his house, Edward could hear the jazz melody floating through the air to the entrance hall. As with occasions where you have no idea on how to proceed, Edward went on to the living room anyways.
"Hello, James," he said as casually as he could muster, which was, with the years of faking emotions under his belt, very casual. "I hope you are here to shed some light on the many mysteries you have left in your wake. Either that, or you've just come to steal my record."
James was sitting in the chair, his feet propped up by the mound of suitcases that made up Edward's luggage. "Intentionally the former, but I find myself more and more tempted by the latter. Hello there, Eddie. How fares the sweet Bella?" In no way did this question contain any cruelty; he seemed genuinely concerned about her well being.
"She is in the final stages of her transformation as we speak. I see that you have anticipated my arrival for the luggage. Would you mind if we ask the question on the road? I have to get Bella's things."
James dragged his feet to the ground with gracefulness that one would never think available while in the act of dragging oneself and opened the top for Edward to inspect. It was filled with books and, after Edward went through them, clothes with photographs and little trinkets in the other two bags. "There is no need for that," announced James smoothly. "I thought this would give us more time to talk of the general important things that should be spoken of. Fire away."
Edward pulled out a question that had been swimming in his skeptic mind. "Why is this wish turning out, sort of, right? What I mean is that, usually by now, everything would be falling apart, but her progress is perfectly normal."
"Skip," James said shortly as he restacked the trunks for a more ambitious footstool.
"But-"
"Skip."
"Okay. Uh," he now found himself unable to stop from asking something that had been plaguing his mind in the long hours of Bella's transformation, "Will things be fine now? Am I just lulling myself into some pretentious wonderland where I think everything will end stupendously when it's really going down the tubes?"
James leaned back and thought for a few moments before answering, "Skip."
Edward was getting angry now. "Look, you said you'd answer the questions, not pick and choose-"
"It is an extended part of your first question," explained James with a tiresome note in his voice, "so it will be held off until the end of this little session. Now, why don't you start with small questions and work your way up?"
Edward started pacing, his default action for when his mind was otherwise occupied, in a slow circle about the room. "Well, how about this: what hit Bella's car as she was coming to see me? They said there was no animal body, not even blood."
James smiled smugly. "That, my dear Eddie, was none other than Sam Uley in his wolf form. He, uh," a devious glint formed in his face as his voice remained innocent, "found himself momentarily deaf for a few seconds, so he hadn't heard the car approach. He broke two ribs and fractured his skull, but by the speed that those guys heal, he is as right as rain now." He looked over at Edward, who was trying desperately, and failing, to keep a straight face. "I knew that'd make you feel better."
Satisfied with at least one answered question, Edward picked another one. "Why haven't Bella's parents been notified? There has been no word from them this whole time even though half the town knows all about it." He couldn't keep some bitterness out of his voice at that last bit; Nurse Grace may be a sweet old soul, but her mind for gossip rivaled even those of Mrs. Stanley.
Growing bored with footstool, which was already grander than the most hopeful of footstools made of luggage had ever dreamed to be, James made his way across the room and went through the drawers of the desk, which were heaped with anything from illegal birth certificates to land deeds to letters. "With the bad luck of most parents," he said as he observed an example of Esme's wonderful penmanship, "they have been mysteriously inconvenienced while their daughter was in need. Charlie somehow felt it necessary to go on a week long fishing trip with no way to contact him and Renee was traveling with her husband Phil and forgot her cell phone at home. Of course, they will both come home to find the awful truth, rush to the hospital, where Nurse Grace will feel as though she must insist that they ought to have a closed casket funeral because their daughter was so severely damaged in the crash that it would be better to think of her as she was. Nurse Grace, or course, will think that the large body bag filled with sand in the morgue is actually the body of Miss Swan when she puts it in the coffin."
He went along with rifling through the drawers, but Edward had frozen in place, staring at James with amazement and gratitude he couldn't even express. In a dazed voice, he asked, "Why did you pick me?"
Looking up from the papers for a moment, James sighed. "I have already told you this, Eddie. I took an interest in you and wanted nothing more than to help. Maybe now, out of that mind-clouding anger you felt toward me will give way to see the logic behind all this. It was rather an elegant plan, if I do say so myself." He looked off into space for a moment, going over it all in his mind, and smiled wryly. "Granted, nobody really learned a lesson and there are no character traits that have, for better or worse, changed in the slightest, but it was more elegant than most moral and educational plans are."
James's rambling justification, if it could even be called that, went right over Edward's head and he felt the need to ask once more. "But that doesn't answer my question. Why give this to me, not Mike Newton or someone else?"
"Perhaps I thought I should give a pessimistic vampire the life he always should have had, maybe I wanted to do something good for once, or quite possibly I just wanted to ensure that Mike Newton is now, almost certainly, going to marry Jessica Stanley, have a whole lot of brats that will make them miserable, and go through the rest of his life with a substance abuse problem so that he will one day be mine. Who knows except me, and I'd like to keep my own counsel, thank you very much."
Edward tried to wrap his head around it. Sadly, a vampire cannot think as the devil can, so he gave up and sat down on the sofa. "So… you were out to help me from the start?"
"Yes," James congratulated, like a teacher who was particularly proud of a student who just got a difficult equation correct.
Brow wrinkling, Edward then said, "But you now have my soul, damning me to an eternity of Hell."
Putting down a paper that showed the cost of maintenance for a lavish estate in Europe, James wandered over to the bookshelves and browsed through them while speaking in a low and musing voice. "That is all a matter of opinion, Eddie. When we made the deal, you did not believe that you had a soul, so do I really have the right to take what you thought didn't exist? I think it would be unfair to take advantage of an ignorant skeptic, something I rarely do," he smiled over his shoulder at Edward with pure deviousness, "much. What it really comes down to, like so many other things, is belief. To my count, you have three options: one, you think that you can't lose what you never had, two, you realize that you had a soul all along but squandered it away to me, or three, you believe that you never truly had your soul before you had Bella and that goes outside the contract. Or," he shrugged, "some other romantic garbage of that sort. It's never really up to me where you end up, it's when you believe that you're going to Hell that you truly do."
"I don't know how to thank you, James," Edward marveled.
"Good. Don't. I have a reputation to uphold, and a vampire making grand gestures of gratitude can ruin it faster than you think. However," he eyed the record player, "an original jazz record would be just enough to even the playing field, don't you think? I have the CD, but it's just not the same."
Still dazed by the overload of information and the easy price of a record that he had a duplicate of, Edward could only faintly say, "Take it, of course."
Looking like a kid on Christmas, James slipped the record in the case and, how Edward will never know, tucked it in his jacket; leaving no bump or any sign at all that he had a large flat object at all. He looked to Edward with something like friendship in his eyes, but, maybe that's an exaggeration; it could have just as easily been the result of an upset stomach. "By my watch," he held up an expensive looking golden timepiece that had intricate writing instead of numbers and a total of nine hands, "Bella's change is due to be over in only a few minutes. I suggest you run."
When Edward had gone, speeding out carrying all three suitcases in his arms and only leaving behind the squeal of tires moving at an incredible speed, James smiled. As the Prince of Lies, his ability to weave senseless stories even fooled him at times, but no, James didn't think he had lied this time.
Whistling a tuneless song, James brushed the unseen dust from his impeccable suit, straightened his tie, and snapped his fingers, disappearing from Forks to his next destination, feeling rather proud of himself.
They deserved all the sickening happiness that was on their way.
000
"We're almost there, love," Edward whispered almost soundlessly in Bella's ear. For pretending to be a dead person on a gurney who, while being carted to the morgue, has to resist the urge to drain the passing nurses of all their blood, Bella was doing surprisingly well. She was so still that she even looked dead, with her pale skin and nonexistent heartbeat. It made it easier to keep his expression, which would have made anyone cry at seeing how desolate and heartbroken he looked, on his face.
When he had gotten back to the hospital, he'd hidden the bags in the morgue, which was unoccupied due to Forks's low death toll, and, as he checked to make sure the door was locked, Edward urged Bella to change quickly from the hospital gown into suitable clothes.
She looked over at his back while she finished buttoning her blouse, amazed by everything around her; the colors, the sounds, the movements, and, most of all, Edward, who was more beautiful now than she had ever thought possible. "Where are we going to go?" she asked, not believing that the clear, bell-like voice was actually hers.
Edward turned to face her and took one of her hands in his, content to just stay there forever with her. "To my family in Seattle, then probably we will all go to one of our other homes."
"Your family?" Bella bit her lips, remembering what little he had said about his adopted family from before. "Do you think they will…like me?" Fidgeting with the edge of her sleeve she worried about how they would see her, an outsider who they had never met before.
He cradled her face and brought it closely to his, their foreheads touching, and looked into her eyes. "They will love because I love you, Bella."
The senses of sight and smell and touch seemed to blend together in his mere presence for Bella, but now, at this closeness, she felt positively…dazzled. How did she deserve someone this amazing, she wondered. "I love you too, Edward. I always have and always will." Slowly, she leaned in to capture his lips with her own, and, as he eagerly kissed back, she was sure her head would explode from the pleasure of it.
The lovers wrapped their arms around each other and both reveled in the feeling of fire ad ice, being utterly consumed by their want and need for the other. Their love shined around them, so strong it was practically tangible, giving everything a new light and understanding. They were in love, and they had forever to make the most of it.
And in that little morgue, a happy ending was born.
