Disclaimer: I don't own "Doctor Who" or "Twilight", and the essential details of the original concept of this fic came from a video posted on YouTube by heroesdwtw- which has unfortunately now been taken off YouTube- and is used with their permission

Feedback: Much appreciated

AN: Hope this chapter goes down well; after all of the personal development Bella's gone through in this series, this felt like the right call to make where she and Edward were concerned, but I hope I found the balance between giving her a chance to make her points and keeping her in character.

New Dawn

Later that night, as I sat impatiently on the edge of my bed, fully dressed and keeping quiet, I wasn't entirely surprised to find that Alice had taken on the responsibility of bringing me back to the Cullens' house.

"Edward?" I asked, acknowledging the need to face the biggest issue in front of me right now.

"He'll meet you up at the house," Alice explained, as I carefully climbed out of my window to settle into position on her back. "He has… a few things to say to you."

"Good," I nodded. "I have things to say to him too."

I tried not to pay too much attention to Alice's smile before she started running towards the house; evidently, even if I was already planning to leave the Doctor, whatever the Doctor had been talking about when he described that 'Rogue element' stuff meant that Alice still found it hard to see my future. After the few moments of rapid acceleration through the woods had come to an end, I carefully climbed off her back and rested against a tree for a moment before looking up at the house to see the Doctor and Edward standing in front of it, a slight edge to Edward's posture that made it clear he wasn't entirely comfortable with my friend's presence.

"Bella-" he began.

"Just a moment," I said, holding up a hand to stop him before I looked at the Doctor. "How's things?"

"Well, I've drawn up a list of the key details I'd need the Volturi to agree with before I can sell this with UNIT, but I'm obviously still waiting for a chance to discuss them with Carlisle and the rest," the Doctor replied. "Once that's done, I'll see if Alistair can help me straighten things out with UNIT, and we'll work out the key response points from there."

"Sounds… good," I nodded tentatively, already making a note on my next move once Edward and I had finished this conversation; if the Brigadier still had influence in UNIT in this time, then at least I'd have a contact in the government who would probably trust me. "In the meantime, Edward and I… we have a few things to talk about."

As Edward shot me a brief smile, I was relieved when the Doctor simply nodded at me; he might suspect what I was about to say, but he trusted me to deal with things myself, rather than Edward trying to take control of the situation immediately.

Moments like that were what made it clear I was about to make the right choice; I might be ready to move on from life with the Doctor, but I wasn't going to move on from the life lessons he'd taught me during our travels.

I just had to remember that Edward wasn't going to physically harm me no matter how angry I might make him…

As the Doctor and Alice walked into the Cullens' house, I followed Edward's unspoken assumption and climbed onto his back, allowing him to take us to the meadow in a matter of seconds. As I climbed off, he smiled at me, even as there was an uncomfortable expression on his face.

"So…" I looked uncertainly at the vampire who had once defined my world. "What have you been doing with yourself since you left?"

"Tracking," he said awkwardly. "Apparently I'm not very good at it."

"Tracking what?" I asked.

"I…" Edward took a deep breath, his tone picking up as he looked at me. "I owe you an apology; I owe you much more than an apology, but you have to know that I had no idea what kind of mess I was leaving behind-"

"So I'm the mess you left behind, is that right?" I cut in.

"No!" Edward responded, with what could have been genuine despair if I didn't remember how he'd spoken to me before. "I never thought that Victoria would come back; I didn't see that she had that kind of response in her, that she even had such a tie to him."

"She was too confident to imagine he'd lose, so she never thought about what she'd do if he did?" I asked, recalling some of the more arrogant adversaries I'd encountered with the Doctor; it had been several months from my perspective since she'd been a concern, but a psychotic vampire out for my blood wasn't something I was going to forget.

"That mistake doesn't excuse what I left you to face," Edward said grimly. "When I heard that you had to put your life in the hands of werewolves, immature, volatile, the worst thing out there besides Victoria herself, and then there was everything I've seen about that Doctor-"

"No," I slammed my hand against the nearest tree, staring resolutely at Edward. "I get that you maybe know more about Jacob's tribe than I do, but don't assume that you can just… pigeon-hole the Doctor like that; you don't know anything about him!"

"He's dangerous-"

"But that doesn't mean he's bad," I cut him off. "The Doctor might get in trouble, but he always did his best to get everyone involved out of it as well."

"I… see," my ex-boyfriend said, looking uncertainly at me for a moment before he sighed in resignation. "But I shouldn't have left you to face dangers like that; I feel sick to imagine-"

"Stop it," I said, suddenly faced with a nagging suspicion of what he was about to say to me and concerned about how far he was going to take this speech. "You can't just go through life thinking you're damned and hating yourself as though every bad thing that happens to you is automatically your fault or your punishment or what you deserve because you think you're such a monster; you're never going to get anywhere with a world-view like that!"

"Really?" Edward looked uncertainly at me.

"This is…" I said, relieved at how easy it was to put my former feelings to the side as I addressed my ex, refusing to let him make this conversation all about his own guilt. "Edward, my point is that you taking responsibility for every bad thing that happens in my life is putting too much on both of us; committing suicide because you think you didn't save me is not a good way to deal with it! Even if I was dead, that would have been my choice, not your fault, and you shouldn't shoulder the blame for it when you have your whole family to consider."

"Do you think I asked the Volturi to kill me because I felt guilty?" Edward looked at me, his expression almost angry. "I went there because I thought you were dead-"

"What?" I cut him off, suddenly struck with a worrying feeling about how this conversation was going to unfold if that had been his key motive. "But you… why would me being dead make you do-?"

"Isabella Marie Swan," Edward said, looking at me with a soft voice and fierce eyes, "even if I'd had no hand in your death, I would still have gone to Italy. Obviously I should have been more careful- I should have tried to talk to Alice directly, rather than accept it second-hand from Rosalie-"

"That doesn't excuse what you did!" I protested, cutting Edward off with a frustrated glare. "This is just… Edward, you can't just… you left me, remember?"

"Don't you remember anything I told you before?"

"I remember everything you told me, particularly what you said to me when we last spoke," I told him firmly, fighting down the urge to break down; I'd been through too much with the Doctor to let an old relationship affect me this much.

"Bella, you seem to be under a misapprehension," Edward said, walking forward to brush the tip of a cool finger against my lip, a grim smile on his face. "I thought I'd explained it clearly before, Bella; I can't live in a world where you don't exist."

"What?" I said, the pieces falling into place as I studied Edward, cursing the way things had turned out even as I wished I'd backed off when he first stepped forward.

"I'm a good liar, Bella," he said sincerely. "That you believed me so quickly was… excruciating… but when I was telling you goodbye… I knew you weren't going to let it go, and I knew… even if it felt like it would kill me to do it, if I couldn't convince you that I didn't love you anymore, it would just take you that much longer to get on with your life. I hoped that, if you thought I'd moved on, so would you."

"You lied," I said simply, lost in my own thoughts at this revelation.

Edward had lied to me.

The most emotionally devastating experience of my life… and it was a lie.

"You bastard."

"I deserve that," Edward smiled. "But-"

"There are no 'buts'," I cut him off, enjoying the brief shock on his face as he realised how I was glaring at him; he didn't get off that easily after everything else I'd been through. "You broke my heart, reduced me to an emotional wreck, and left me so devastated by what you left behind that I had to leave the entire damn planet so that I could be sure I'd get away from all memory of you-"

"What?" Edward looked at me in shock.

"I already told you that the Doctor wasn't human; what kind of alien would invent a time machine that left them stuck on Earth?" I pointed out, waving a hand to cut off Edward's attempt to ask more questions. "That doesn't matter now; what is important is that you put me through all that just because you decided that you knew what was best for both of us, and then you decided to go off and kill yourself because I was dead when you made the decision to leave me?"

"I already told you, I can't-"

"We talked about that when you were here, remember; you refused to change me even when it meant I was left petrified at the idea of getting older while you stayed as you are, and now you go and tell me that your big plan was always to kill yourself once I wasn't there?" I asked, wishing that he was something other than a vampire so I could hit him like he deserved. "I get that you have all these self-loathing issues and you want to 'protect' me from what you are, but this is why things between us were never going to work out; you couldn't accept yourself, so how could we have had any kind of real life together even if I was a vampire?"

"And if I was human?"

"If you were human none of this would have been an issue in the first place, but don't you dare think that we're in this mess just because you're a vampire!" I countered resolutely. "We're here because you decided that you knew what was best for both of us and did it without asking me for my input; that is not what people do in a relationship!"

"I have to protect you-"

"And that is why I don't want us to get back together," I cut him off with a solemn expression; this part was never going to be easy, but it would be best to get it out of the way before things got any worse for Edward.

"What?" the vampire said, looking at me with a confused expression that almost seemed wrong on his face after I'd spent so long picturing him as confident and assertive. "Bella, I-"

"I had a lot of time to think while I was with the Doctor, and I realised… well, to be blunt, I realised that I didn't like what I was becoming when I was with you," I explained grimly. "I'm not saying it was your fault, but I was just… hanging on your every word, defining myself based on your opinion of me, spent months feeling like I was worthless because you decided to break up with me in the most devastating way possible and told yourself it was for my own good without consulting me-"

"I was trying to keep you safe-!"

"And that's the problem," I cut him off. "I'm not going to deny that you're older than me, but that doesn't mean you're always right about everything. I spent months travelling with the Doctor and he's always been willing to listen to my input when we're dealing with something new rather than arbitrarily decide that he knows best just because he's over a thousand years old."

"He is?" Edward looked at me in surprise.

"His species… has a very long life-span, but that's not important to what we're talking about right now," I cut him off, not wanting to explain regeneration on top of everything else we had to face right now. "I'm not going to deny that your intentions were good, even if you went about it the wrong way, but saying 'I love you' isn't an automatic excuse that justifies everything you did."

"Bella," Edward protested, looking weaker than I'd ever seen him, "you were the most important thing-"

"And that doesn't justify anything," I countered, forcing down the part of me that still wanted everything I'd had before the night of my eighteenth birthday. "When I was with the Doctor, I witnessed a woman try to sell him out to save the man she loved from the most dangerous alien race in the universe, and she didn't even get what she was after; they ended up taking the man and the Doctor prisoner anyway."

"What does that-?"

"It has everything to do with us; how is that woman trying to sell out the Doctor to save her lover any different from me being willing to hurt Charlie just to be with you? I've been using so many literary examples to justify us staying together, but in the end… Edward, we're not good for each other; we're just… we needed each other too much."

"And that's a bad thing?"

"You were trying to commit suicide because you thought I was dead; that's not something people do in a stable relationship," I countered solemnly.

"That was because I love you-"

"Love isn't any more of an excuse than 'I was just following orders'," I said firmly. "We can't depend on someone so much that we'd go that far because… because the worst happens; that's not healthy for anyone."

"Even if I love you more than I've ever loved anyone?"

"But I don't love you any more," I said, keeping my eyes fixed on Edward's as he looked back at me. I saw him shake as he took in those words, staring at me with a look of utter desolation, but I refused to let that sorrow break my resolve; I had moved on from the permanently teenaged vampire, and staying with Edward because I was worried about what he'd do wouldn't help either of us. "Edward, when we were together… all that mattered was that we were together, no matter who we ended up hurting in the process. Maybe the fact that we were willing to go through all that stuff for each other was romantic, but looking back, we were too invested in each other to think about how what we were doing affected everyone else. I hurt Charlie when James attacked, you hurt me and then tried to kill yourself…"

"We had good reasons-!"

"And when does the fact that we can justify our actions stop being enough?" I cut him off. "Edward, I'm willing to see if we can just be friends, but right now… we spent so much time hurting each other when we were dating, getting back together would just be a mistake."

"If this is because you think you're dreaming-"

"It's not that," I looked at Edward with a slight smile; if this had happened before I'd met the Doctor, I probably would have believed I was dreaming when he told me he wanted me back. "Believe me, spending time with the Doctor did wonders for my self-esteem issues; you can't exactly think you're useless when you've saved the universe from a deranged monk who thought erasing your best friend from existence was a good idea-"

"Excuse me?" Edward looked at me in confusion, thoughts of our relationship forgotten in the face of his own bemusement at that turn of conversation.

"OK, the specific details aren't important; just accept that I've dealt with some very unique circumstances and had quite a few brilliant people assuring me I'm extraordinary just because I'm me, and leave it at that," I waved a dismissive hand before I looked at him more solemnly. "Actually, that's the problem; they helped me realise what I can be… but they also helped me realise that what we had didn't work. I had to face some hard truths about myself while I was out there, Edward, and they helped me see that you weren't who I thought you were either. I had this whole idealised image in my head of you as this brilliant intellectual immortal who fought his worse instincts and dazzled me with his everything… and then I saw what else could be out there, and…"

"Is it the Doc-?"

"NO!" I cut him off, disturbed at the mere idea that the Doctor and I had that kind of relationship, looking reassuringly at him. "I'm not… there isn't anyone else, Edward; I'm just not… you're not what I want in a relationship right now. I'm sorry if that hurts you, but I'm not going to make myself feel anything; you just… you need to learn how to cope with your feelings in a slightly more mature way before you get into something like that again."

"I… understand," Edward said, nodding grimly at me, clenching his fists and looking up at the sky as though wishing there was something for him to hit.

"We can… still be friends?" I said awkwardly. "I mean, you're not a bad guy; it's just… I'm not…"

"You don't… love me any more," Edward said, sounding like getting those words out was the equivalent of driving multiple stakes through his heart if that method of eliminating a vampire had actually worked.

"No," I confirmed.

It had taken travelling back and forth through the history of the universe with the most remarkable man I'd ever met, but where Edward had never been able to convince me I was worthy even when we were dating, I had finally gained a better sense of my own self-worth.

I'd miss what I'd had with Edward before my eighteenth birthday, but I wasn't going to let that loss define the rest of my life; if the Doctor could cope with the loss of his planet and everyone on it, I could cope with giving up on that.

I'd need to warn the Cullens to keep an eye on Edward so that he wouldn't… do anything stupid… but I had to hope that he could reach a similar point to what I'd come to now. I was willing to try and keep the Cullens as a part of my lives, and I already had plans for once I'd graduated if the Doctor would offer me recommendations, but unless something changed, Edward and I couldn't get back together.

I've made my decision and my new life is waiting for me; it's all on Edward what he does with that decision.