Here we are; on our way to Italy. As I said before, this chapter is the one where I think the story really starts to get better. I think when I got to this point in my writing I had a better feel for Edward. Anyway, this has all been done before. I own nothing.
Songs for this Chapter; Paint it Black. Originally recorded by the Rolling Stones, but I like U2's version for this. Sing for Absolution, by Muse and My Immortal, by Evanescence. That one reminds me more of Bella, but it fits this story.
"Man," I cried, "how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!"
"Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley
Paint it Black by the Rolling Stones. (Jagger/Richards) I see a red door and I want it painted blackNo colors anymore I want them to turn blackI see the girls walk by dressed in their
summer clothesI have to turn my head until my darkness goesI see a line of cars and they're all painted blackWith flowers and my love both never to come backI see people turn their heads and quickly look awayLike a new born baby it just happens every dayI look inside myself and see my heart is blackI see my red door and it has been painted blackMaybe then I'll fade away and not have to face the factsIt's not easy facing up when your whole world is blackNo more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue
I could not foresee this thing happening to youIf I look hard enough into the setting sunMy love will laugh with me before the morning comesI wanna see it painted, painted black
Black as night, black as coalI wanna see the sun blotted out from the skyI wanna see it painted, painted, painted, painted black
Chapter 10-Damned
"He's at the funeral," the hostile, accusing young man had said.
The sound of his voice as he said those words rang in my ears like the echoes of fatal gunfire. So much louder than the shrill screaming of the plane's engine that vibrated the chair beneath me as we gained altitude; a reverberating, deafening horror.
The sound of death.
The end of the world.
Rosalie had broken the news that shattered what was left of me on the phone just hours ago.
"She's dead, Edward."
The most heartbreaking phrase imaginable, and yet her words didn't haunt me the same way his did. His words were the ones that made it real; made it true: made it final.
Bella was dead.
Dead by her own hand by all accounts, but I had killed her.
"Bella…threw herself off a cliff two days ago; Alice saw it, but it was too late to do anything," Rosalie had said. She was so calm that I initially thought she was lying in another evil, thoughtless effort to get me to come home.
"Alice saw it, but it was too late to do anything,"
"Stop trying to see her future, Alice," I'd said the night my family agreed to leave Forks after that horrible party.
Alice had listened to me; she wasn't watching out for Bella, so the vision had come to her at the last moment.
By the time she'd seen, it had been too late.
"It's too late," Bella's voice said in my mind.
"We've done enough damage," I'd said to Alice in the same breath after the party. Those words were mocking in my head.
Mocking because I'd done the real damage; irreparable damage the day I'd lied to her in the forest. The last day; the day I'd always believed would be the worst day of my pathetic, eternal half-life.
Until now.
"You-don't-want-me?" Bella had asked, her face cold and blank with shock as we stood in the forest.
"No," I replied.
The voices in my head replayed fragments of conversations like highlight reels and sound bites of every mistake I'd made in the last 6 months.
Bella's dead.
"Did you say something, sir?" someone with a thick accent asked from somewhere beside me, pulling me out of my repetitive memories. I was baffled by the question; had I spoken out loud?
"Sir," the soft female voice said again. "Are you okay?"
I slowly registered a gentle shake as a warm hand jostled my shoulder. I heard someone gasp a second later. I looked up and saw a tiny black haired Portuguese flight attendant staring down at me with large worried eyes. She was unconsciously rubbing the hand that had touched me up and down her forearm. I realized that the gasp had been her reaction to my icy body temperature. I could hear a faint buzzing in her mind but I was unable to focus on her thoughts; I didn't want to hear how repulsed she was by me anyway.
"What?" I asked vacantly before the woman could speak again.
"Should we try to find out if there's a doctor on board?" another female voice, American this time, asked. I registered the second woman's thoughts easily, because she was mentally shouting. We definitely need to get a doctor... this kid looks like he's got one foot in the grave.
Ah, the irony. I didn't need a doctor to keep me alive. I couldn't die, and I really wanted to die.
"That won't be necessary," I said a second later in a flat voice.
"Are you sure?" the little flight attendant asked without meeting my black thirsty eyes.
"I'm fine," I answered with a little more animation this time. I was an expert liar.
"I'm just really tired and I'd like to sleep." I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and tried to feign the physical tiredness that would never relieve me.
How I longed to be human and sleep; to dream of my Bella; my angel, my world; the only reason for anything!
If I were human, none of this would be happening. And even if something like it had happened and I wanted to kill myself, I could have done so without the assistance I was seeking to find in Italy. If I were merely human, I wouldn't be here.
Even the most flawed mortal couldn't possibly make as many mistakes in their entire lifetime as I had in the last few months. Every single choice that I had made since Bella's last birthday had been a mistake.
"This isn't going to be your last birthday, Bella," I'd said angrily outside my house the night of her party.
Another mistake, because it had been her last birthday; I was wrong about everything.
"Edward you are seriously underestimating Bella's feelings for you and her ability to make her own choices! She not just going to get over this and move on like you think she will!... you're making a mistake!" Alice had said, trying to reason with me the night I'd decided to leave.
But I didn't listen.
"Don't do this," Bella pleaded in my mind as I replayed our conversation in the forest. I could see her pale, agonized face pasted in front of my closed thirsty eyes. I didn't realize it then, but she was begging for her life that day; the life I was taking from her when I left. In an effort to save her, I had killed her.
"Either you'll kill her yourself or she'll be one of us someday,"Alice said the day I'd saved Bella from the van.
I had killed her.
I hadn't killed her in a fit of bloodlust with my thirst or with incautious use of my physical strength like I'd always feared. What I'd done was so much worse. I broke her heart and her spirit. I killed her with lies.
"You promised," she accused me in the forest as she reminded me of the day in Phoenix when I'd promised to stay with her. Another vow I'd broken. I was a lying bastard; a monstrous hypocrite.
I was a hypocrite because I'd expected her to keep her promise to me even after I had broken all of mine.
"Don't do anything reckless or stupid," I'd demanded that last day. She'd nodded in agreement and I felt relief because I was certain she'd keep her word. Unlike me, Bella was good to the core.
I never would've believed she'd do something like this because of that promise. A fragment of another conversation I'd had with her echoed in my memory.
"I don't like double standards." She'd said angrily in a fit of temper in the school cafeteria the first time we'd had lunch together.
Was this why she'd had no qualms about breaking her word to me? Was it because I had broken all of my promises; because of a lying monster?
I was suddenly irrationally and unjustly furious with her. What the hell was she thinking to take her life because of a worthless piece of vermin? Wasn't it bad enough that she'd wanted to give up everything to be with me when we were together? Did she have to kill herself because she thought a vampire didn't want her? Why in God's name did she have to be so damned determined to take herself away from everyone who loved her? How could she do this to herself? To Charlie!
Oh God, poor Charlie! She was all he had.
He's at the funeral.
I was immeasurably grateful to Rosalie for telling me the truth. I knew she'd done it for her own selfish reasons in a futile effort to get me to come home, but I appreciated it anyway. Before she'd called me I'd known I wasn't going to be able to continue to resist the desperate, aching need I had to go back to Forks. Things would have been so much worse for Charlie If I had found out from him when I returned. At least he hadn't been forced to look into the face of the fiend responsible for taking his precious daughter away from him.
The rest of my family planned to keep Bella's death a secret to prevent me from making this journey. They knew I would seek out the means to end my life when I heard. And if I hadn't gotten the call from my sister, I would probably be on my way to Seattle right now instead of Italy.
If only I had given in a couple of days ago! None of this would be happening if I had just gone home 48 hours earlier.
The pain hit me in full force all over again, and I had to bite down on my cold stone hand to keep from screaming. I pierced the skin of my knuckle, barely registering the burn of the venom that penetrated through the holes my teeth dug into my flesh.
She was gone. I would never hold her again, see the blush on her cheeks or hear the sound of her voice or her laugh; I would never get to look into her beautiful brown eyes and see the loving warmth that glowed inside her. Her life was over; taken by her tragic love for a monster.
"…what if taking yourself away from her is the greatest thing you'll deprive her of; the one thing she can't live without," Carlisle had argued with me the last time I'd seen him; the last time I would ever see him.
Carlisle; my father; the man I respected and trusted beyond anyone else in the world. Carlisle always made the right choices. I should've listened to him that night. I should've listened to Alice; heeded her warnings. "She's not just going to get over this, Edward! I've seen what it will do to her!"
And, I should have listened to my better instincts. I remembered the horrible sense of dread I'd felt in the forest that made me ask her to promise to take care of herself and the inner voice that kept begging me to go home. All the signs that I'd encountered; the songs, ("Though I'd die to know you love me, I'm all alone."), the little girl named Bella, Brooke Robertson-the girl with Bella's birthday who was one of Victoria's victims; Samantha and Matthew the nomad mates, and Krista, the girl I'd saved in Rio the way I'd rescued Bella from Lonnie in Port Angeles.
Fate, or God had given me countless chances to right the wrong I'd done, but I'd missed every single one of them because of my own foolish pride. It almost seemed as if some higher power had been giving me the chance to redeem myself. I knew now that even if Carlisle was right about God, I was damned for ignoring every chance I'd had to save my love.
I had failed her in every way.
My Bella was in a box in the ground; cold and still. She wasn't going to have the life I'd tried to give her when I left. She would never grow old, never go to college or have beautiful brown-eyed babies with a human man.
I realized the biggest mistake I'd ever made was trying to give her what I wanted her to have as opposed to what she'd needed.
So, worst of all, I had failed to listen to Bella herself.
"I'd rather die than be with anyone but you." "I'd rather die."
Die.
My body shook with grief at the finality of her words.
I was reminded then of the conversation we'd had watching Romeo and Juliet the afternoon before her horrible birthday party.
"Well, I wasn't going to live without you," I'd said as we sat on the couch watching Romeo kill himself after finding his bride cold and still. ... "so I was thinking maybe I would go to Italy and do something to provoke the Volturi. ...anyway, you don't irritate the Volturi...not unless you want to die, or whatever it is that we do."
Whatever it is that we do.
I wondered idly what my death would be like. Would I simply cease to be after my dismembered corpse burned to ash? If I still had a soul, would I go to some kind of vampire hell? There could be no heaven for me, after all. Even if I'd once had a sliver of hope that a vampire had a chance at redemption, salvation was lost to me now. I had destroyed the most beautiful, amazing creature in the universe. What I had done to Bella was an unforgivable sin.
Carlisle and Bella would not have agreed with me. They both believed that all could be forgiven, and that God granted absolution to anyone who asked for it, including vampires. Neither of them would approve of what I was going to do in Volterra.
"You must never, never, never think of anything like that again; no matter what might ever happen to me you are not allowed to hurt yourself!" Bella had exclaimed vehemently after I'd told her of the decision I'd made to go to Italy and end my life if she had died in Phoenix.
"What would you do if the situation were reversed?" I asked her in reply.
"That's not the same thing." she replied.
The hypothetical conversation was real now; things had changed.
"That changes things," Bella had said when I told her I didn't want her to come with me when I left Forks.
Everything had changed.
"Bella…threw herself off a cliff two days ago."
Rosalie's words echoed in my fractured mind again; Spontaneously, I thought of my mother and I had a sudden profound revelation.
Esme had also jumped off a cliff in an attempt to end her life, but unlike Bella she'd been unsuccessful because Carlisle had saved her. The reason for her actions was her love and her grief for the loss of her precious baby son. He was the most important thing in her life, and his death made it impossible for her to go on living. Most human memories fade, but Esme had held on to the mental pictures she had of her son for nearly a century now.
"I had a difficult human life with few attachments to others, so I never really understood the power of love until I had my son," Esme had once told me many years later when she'd finally had the strength to talk about him. "And, when he was gone, I knew I could never go back to my life as I knew it; I couldn't survive without him. He was the best part of my life."
I fully grasped how Esme felt in that moment, and more importantly, I understood my Bella better than I ever had before.
"You're the best part of my life," Bella had said to me in the forest that day.
"I'd rather die than be with anyone but you."
How often had I admired and appreciated Esme's ability to love others unconditionally with such fervor and devotion? She was so kind and gentle, giving to others without a thought for herself.
Bella was just the same. She'd taken care of her parents without a thought for herself, always putting the needs of the people she loved most ahead of her own. She was so wise beyond her years, selfless, and brave and beautiful inside and out.
I had known all those things about her, and yet I'd been too myopic to apply that same knowledge to her feelings for me. I was so stupid!
She'd willingly risked her life time and again to be with me, embraced me and my family with an open heart and mind because of her capacity to love. Her love for me was stronger than anything else in her world, including her instinct to survive. She'd been prepared to give up everything for me, and I had trivialized and dismissed her sacrifices as youthful inexperience. I'd thought I was doing the noble thing by leaving; proving how much I loved her by letting her go, but I could grasp now that I was only seeing things from my perspective when I'd made the fatal choice.
A choice that would kill us both.
She'd told me once that I couldn't know how she felt about me because I couldn't read her thoughts and I finally realized she was right.
The mind reading abilities I possessed had made me unobservant and obtuse. I had no skill whatsoever in assessing the thoughts and feelings of others without the advantage of my talents and so I had underestimated the intensity of her love. I'd thought her chronological age meant that she couldn't possibly love me as I loved her.
I was wrong.
Dead wrong.
The torturous grief in my chest made me groan and the shaking in my body intensified. My reaction was obvious enough that the flight attendant who'd approached me earlier returned to reassess my condition. My eyes were still closed but I could smell her and hear her footsteps.
"Sir," I heard her say in thickly accented English moments later.
"I am fine, senora," I answered quietly, opening my eyes slowly as if I were emerging from sleep. I didn't really know why I was bothering to pretend for the woman, but I guess the alternative would be her finding a doctor who would examine me, check my pulse and my body temperature and pronounce me dead before I had a chance to really die. "I just had a bad dream."
"We will be landing in Lisbon in just a few minutes," she said quietly. "I could have a doctor waiting for you at the airport if you wish."
"No thank you," I replied flatly. "I have another flight to catch as soon as we land."
"Are you going to Rome?" she asked me.
"Yes," I answered simply, too far gone to try to read the reason for her question in her thoughts.
"That flight has been delayed," she said apologetically. "There was a mechanical issue that needed to be resolved, so you will have time to…"
"How long?" I interrupted her, repressing the urge to scream. I would go mad if I had to wait too much longer to die, and I really didn't want to lose control and wind up draining the lifeblood out of all the passengers on a plane in a fit of insanity.
"About 30 minutes," she replied, raising her eyebrows in surprise at my sudden animation. "Are you in a great hurry?"
"Yes," I answered. "I am planning to see someone who can cure my…illness, and I am anxious to reach my final destination."
"Well, if there is anything I can get you while you wait, please let me know," she replied, looking relieved. She was under the impression that I was planning to seek medical attention.
I felt the plane begin its descent a second later, and I hoped for the sake of the people in Lisbon that the flight to Rome wasn't delayed more than a half hour.
In order to tolerate the extra time I was going to have to wait to get to Rome, I spent that extra half hour in the airport with my memories of Bella. I still had the little duffle bag of keepsakes I'd carried with me ever since I left Forks. I opened it for what would probably be the last time as I sat in a one of the padded chairs near my flight's gate and pulled out the beige leather jacket she'd worn a few times. I held it to my face and inhaled the remnants of her scent that clung to its silk lining. The fragrance made my throat burn and swell with grief, but there was no trace of the craving for her blood in my mouth. It had taken her death for me to overcome it, but I was cured.
"Oh Bella," I whispered, my voice muffled by the jacket as I buried my face in its lining. I was vaguely aware of people walking past me, but I didn't care who saw me here. There was no room inside my shattered heart or mind for anything but my grief. After a few moments, I laid the jacket across my lap and pulled out one of her notes. It was a short one from over the summer.
Edward,
Charlie forgot his lunch so I'm running to the station to take it to him. Be back soon, go on inside. I love you. –B.
I love you.
She'd only just had the cast removed from her leg a few days before that, and she'd already resumed all of her household chores, including taking care of Charlie. She was so strong, recovering much faster than Carlisle had expected her to, tolerating the pain and physical therapy without complaint. In fact, the only time I could remember her showing any signs of stress during her stay in the hospital had been when I'd suggested that she move to Jacksonville so I couldn't hurt her.
I marveled again at my own stupidity.
The last 6 months must've been nearly as hellish for her as they had for me; otherwise she would have managed to recover from my lies and abandonment.
I was sure she'd tried her hardest in those 6 months to hang on, to survive for her parent's sake, but it had proven to be too much.
What had triggered her choice after that amount of time? Had she been holding on to some kind of hope that I would return? Or, had someone else hurt her? The idea of that happening was absurd. No one else would have ever been stupid enough to let her go the way that I had. So, why now?
"Flight 913 from Lisbon to Rome is now boarding," a male voice said over the PA system, first in English, then in French, Spanish and Portuguese. I returned the note to the duffle bag, but I held tightly to the jacket, savoring her scent as I boarded the last flight of my life; the last journey of a condemned man.
I spent that last short flight remembering every detail Carlisle had ever told me about Aro, Marcus and Caius, and the history of Volterra. I hoped that I would be able to recall some detail from the memories I'd borrowed from Carlisle that would help me plead and win my case for execution. I knew that entering the city would be easy enough, but being granted entrance to the castle might prove to be much more difficult. Carlisle had said there were permanent members of the guard stationed throughout the city, so surely one of them would stop and question me. When I explained that I was Carlisle's son, surely Aro would want to meet me.
Carlisle.
Carlisle was my maker, my father. He had been my only constant companion. With the exception of the time period I'd spent killing fiends, I had never been away from him, and even then, he had always kept track of me.
My choice was going to devastate my family, but no one would suffer more than my father. Not Esme, though she loved me as she did her own son, or Emmett, or even Alice, who would have the misfortune of seeing what I was going to do in her visions. She would probably try to find a way to stop me, but I couldn't see how she would manage it. Carlisle would beg her to try even if there was no hope.
My loss would be painful for all of them, but they still had each other. They all still had their mates. And I knew that all of them would have at least seriously considered death if they'd lost their true loves the way I had. Jasper, at least would have made the same choice I was making. I'd seen that in his mind before. He would not go on without Alice. And, Rosalie, who didn't care for her immortal life anyway, would die without Emmett.
They would understand.
I arrived in Rome just after midnight, and I decided to run to Volterra rather than rent a car or take a bus. It was dark enough for me avoid detection. Breaking the rules would have been an easy way to get the Volturi to kill me, but I knew the innocent humans witnesses to any kind of supernatural display would become their next meal, and I didn't want to hurt anyone else if I could help it. It would be better if I arrived in the darkness, inconspicuous.
I reached the gates of the city a short while later, and less than a half second after I approached the entrance, I was surrounded by three figures in flowing cloaks the color of midnight.
It was time to plead my case.
To ask for death.
AN: Well? Please tell me what you think. I have gotten very few reviews for this story, and I'd like to hear it, even if you want to critique me. Thanks for reading.