EPOV
The binding tethers loosened and the cataclysmic obliteration of what once held her, ravaged on. It acquired hostages in order to barter for her return, but was met with silence. The breaths that came were taken with spite, regrettably purged and pathetically shunned as everyone and no one, save one, grieved her loss.
She died before I could tell her how brave she was.
How insurmountably reckless and foolish.
How without fail she was right about everything she relayed in her letter.
How could you leave me with a letter?
How could you leave me at all?
You took her with you! Our future. My hope. Everything.
I would hold onto the words she graced me. They immutably transfigured me into a ever more enlightened being.
You said I wouldn't lose you.
Keep breathing.
How in the wake of her death, my enlightenment meant nothing.
I can't go through it again.
Be stronger.
You're not allowed to die.
Before she died, she ensnared my soul and traveled with it to a place I was unable to reach.
Only for the time being.
It's beautiful.
Edward.
A small voice. It was familiar, but it wasn't enough.
My grief played tricks in the surrounding dark. The syphon drew me in and released the mocking lights to fizzle and fade. It permitted me to see only her face, and extinguished everything else. It suspended me in a sorrow so profound, the hulls and caverns of hell pitifully wept for me.
Edward.
A little more forceful.
Tragic outlines of the surrounding world blurred and blended.
I was no longer a part of it.
She wasn't consuming me.
Keep breathing.
Edward.
My eyes sprang open to the sound of a beep.
I was slammed in all directions with fluctuation of ambient noises I wasn't entirely aware of until that second. The rush of people, the tight arms forcing me upright, Alice and the sound of my name.
In a twist of a second, the sounds again floated into exodus.
The sound of another beep.
And another.
Stronger.
"Edward!"
A breath.
"Listen."
-ER-
I waited.
I paced.
I recited prayers I'd heard in other people's thoughts.
Then mentality drafted a few of my own, which I whispered to her.
I never left.
Hours fluctuated into unrelenting days. People with masks, fitted with clipboards materialized and internalized thoughts like "permeant" and "vegetable" before they evaporated. They drew vials of red, and injected various other colors. All flashed looks of remorse, some of which were too practiced to be consoling.
As of the last several hours, their thoughts shifted to words like "waiting game" and "possibility."
I was never more thankful I wasn't free to live life without what we'd been vested with. I would have listened to doctors when they told me flat out she was likely to not speak again. That her motor functions would be compromised. That she would have trouble with the simplest of tasks and would require constant care in their foreseeable future.
This was all under the assumption she woke up at all.
I gripped her warm fingers and ignored the well-intentioned, though misinformed medical staff. Instead, I wedged myself in the comforting space between the one-sided conversations I had with Bella and the clear free flowing future roaring from Alice's nearly overrun mind.
When she awoke in the morning, I would imagine the only silent sentiment circulating in the ward would be "unexplainable."
"Just a little over twelve hours," she reminded as the vision of Bella's eyes opening sprang to life then faded. She hugged me around the shoulders. "I'm going to get get some sleep. You should do the same."
"I've been waiting for this moment longer than I've been alive." I didn't fully recognize my coarse voice. "Twelve hours is a drop."
She stood up, shifting the chair backwards. "Nothing's going to change between now and then, Edward."
"Yes it will." My finger repeated the familiar trek up Bella's lifeline.
In that time, she would breathe an innumerable amount of times.
The minutes would switch placidly while the stars pressed their searing prints into the night sky.
The beat of heart heart would thunder under my palm.
Within the breaths and under those stars, I would continue to consume her.
She would continue to exist.
Alice stroked my hair kindly. "I'll see you in the morning."
I continued to stare at Bella's artificially highlighted features in wonderment without glancing at Alice.
"See you, then."
Her astute, resigned smile was implied as her steps echoed and quieted to silence.
I'd been waiting lifetimes for a pardon for my actions, while she'd been waiting the same amount of time, for me to pardon hers.
To grant her forgiveness. To let myself trust her once again.
I listened to the monitor which rang out the passing of time, using her heartbeat as a metronome. Measuring the sound against every other sound in existence. It was nearly unparalleled.
"She's a prodigy," I continued whispering to her from an earlier conversation left unfinished. I spoke of our daughter. She was as staunchly defiant as her mother. Brave, yet sophisticated beyond her years.
"Her laugh is my new favorite sound."
Bella remained ever still as the night ticked by and I stoked her hand.
"I wanted to be there with you."
In the span of time it took me to visit the park and relinquish the idea of murdering the wretch, Alice and Bella had deduced it was in fact, part of Bella's destiny to do exactly that. Alice foresaw the expanse of all of our futures evaporating on the night of our house party.
Bella's decision to murder him would be the initial domino. Her leaving the knife behind in his room, and him subsequently discovering her car around the corner would be the other two.
Alice and Bella had solidified all the occurrences and their fallout with very little time.
Pieces of their conversation occasionally inched out and played within Alice's thoughts as she attempted to sit a alongside me during the longer stretches of time where I'd become a statue at Bella's bedside.
"It may not be your responsibility to save Jacob." Alice rushed out as Bella nodded.
"It's my responsibility to protect her." Her voice was fierce. "He has to learn. His soul has to learn."
She sat for a few beats. "It's so awful it has to be this way."
In the past, she attempted to keep me away by letting me believe a lie. She would have let me believe anything.
"That's why I lied to Peter. It's why I let him believe I didn't love him."
"It's the real reason I went to James. It was only when I became pregnant I could see...I never went to give myself to him...I went to keep them all safe."
It was difficult to be angered in hindsight, as she was justified in doing so. I would have killed him had he come after them and I'd been present. Even if she begged me not to, and explained the requirements and she knew it.
Her ability to know my actions before I did was on a whole other level from Alice. She didn't need to see my future. Thorough knowledge of what my past was composed of, allowed her an alternate level intuitiveness.
"I understand why I couldn't, It doesn't mean I have to like it."
My whispered sentiment applied to so many things I was just beginning to grasp. The reasoning for her decisions found a home in me. With each revelation, I found myself further daunted.
Another slip of her rushed consult with Alice passed through my head as I honed in on Bella's breathing.
"He would have found me and I wouldn't...have to have said a word."
"He would have never known what had happened. He wouldn't have to know how horribly things went wrong."
Bella didn't think it fair to chose me when I would have no knowledge of of the past. Her former self agreed with her.
They compared it to coveting me and holding my soul hostage. It's something Bella quickly deduced as a much more deplorable sin, as opposed to the ones she believed she committed.
I would carry it with me always, the loss and sadness which surrounded it, but if she didn't tell me, I would never know where the feelings came from. With no way to know way to know what really happened. Just like anyone else who walked the earth with emotional hangups and baggage they never pinpointed a cause for.
All souls on missions they don't know they're on.
However, Bella always would. Her gift wouldn't let her forget. She believed she was doing my soul a kindness. She didn't understand I would see them in a different light.
Even though she was able to show me what occurred, without the footnotes, I could only assume the meaning.
Since I viewed them as a punishment, they behaved as such. They showed me a colossal failure on my part. Viewing them objectively, like a gift they way they were intended was all that was necessary.
Alice's "I told you so" was a resounding interlude on repeat several times a day.
It was all part of the insecurity which held me stagnant. Which made everything seem damning rather than enlightening.
Her letting me believe she didn't love me, only happened because I let it. As only she could, my lifetimes of confusion about her love were manipulated to coerce me to believe her. She played on an insecurity she knew was so deeply rooted, I would believe every word.
Doubting her love was a mistake I made again in this life, but one I refused to repeat.
"Even if you swore you hated me, you could spend your every second spewing nothing, but spite, and I wouldn't believe a word. No matter how many lifetimes pass us by, I will never stop consuming you."
I diverted to less heavier sentiments, as I knew I would relay my feelings to her countless times while she lay awake in the near feature. Awake and recovered in more ways than just physically.
"When she wakes up, she won't be the person she was when you left," Alice admitted, as staffers checked Bella's chart.
I grew confused. "I thought she was going to come through this unscathed?"
"Of course she is, but she's also going to have the expanse of her gift back."
"How is that..."
The words formed in her mind, while my lips picked them up.
She died.
I shook my head and stroked her cheek as I recalled the memory from two mornings ago.
"You would uncover a loophole."
While the world held its breath and waited for the sound of final judgement, she snuck away and rediscovered a home in her readily available body, though she was slightly heavier from the trip. There was no question as to the determination her soul possessed or the lengths it would overcome to reside exactly where she willed it.
I didn't realize what I was actually waiting for until I saw it come to fruition in Alice's head. Even though speaking to Bella restored the broken fragments of the gift she bestowed to me, the entirety of it remained lost. I'd been waiting to speak to the part of her which would know me forever.
The part of her which consistently chose me.
I nodded off sometime between dawn and when I felt fingers stroking the top of my head. The room woke as I did. The life which bloomed within the small space, brought with it colors which were only known to that moment in time.
In turning my head, beauty of the grandest kind unprecedented and regally noble, overtook me by way of chocolate eyes.
She spoke a half a dozen words to me, without opening her mouth. All of which I reciprocated in as much silence. It was mesmerizing to see the infinite knowledge swirl rapidly, how profoundly she recognized me. It was the way she looked at me in every life the first time she saw me and knew we were fated to walk an immovable path together.
With a look of emphatic love and ultimate obsession.
"She wakes and returns to the side of the forever faithful."
Her delicate smile transformed to include amusement. "You can't fight fate."
Imbibing her joy, I basked in the presence of her lucidity. "As you've so proven."
Her fingers stretch carefully, as I reached for them. He eyes glanced around a took note of her surroundings
"Not without occurring some damage." She touched her head and winced, but only sighed as it was a minor inconvenience rather than a detriment.
"You've just defied laws of medical science according to the PhD I spoke with yesterday."
"It wouldn't be the first time."
Her smile bloomed widely as her eyes closed, but faded abruptly. "She was an orphan."
She lingered for several more minutes in the past, unencumbered by anything other than her own wishes to stay. "She imagined they were her parents, that Victoria was her mother. She was deeply saddened when he was found dead two months later."
I briefly wondered whose world was being torn apart because they'd been asked to identify his body. What they knew of his actions, how they would judge him or weep for him. They were endeavors I was extraordinarily grateful I was not forced to undertake for Bella and our daughter.
She reopened her eyes, a pang of regret lingered.
"I grappled with the moral implications for hours on end. I gave him multiple opportunities." she admitted quietly. "He couldn't stop."
"He killed you. Twice." I confirmed as way of absolving and informing her. She acknowledged my information as the implication settled in. It did little to daunt her.
"Temporarily." She was delighted by kissing death, razing the notion and appearing from the ashes.
I was silent and steady as I looked her over. Wondering if her mental faculties were indeed all Alice said they would be.
Bella's hand went to my face and let the backs of her fingers stray across my cheek, as her eyes delved into mine looking for a salvation. "Am I forgiven?"
The half-lives she'd lived, waiting idly by while I could catch up to where I could be with her once again are something which would never sit right with me. It wasn't something I would wish her to be lost to again. "Without a thought."
"I missed you." Her breathless words floated across expanse of time and stilled themselves inside. We continued to stare at one another only her eyes were weighted with the knowledge of events which came to pass for the two of us. A tiny worry tugged at her lip and then wilted away. "Now you know."
I took her hands and fused them with mine. "Everything."
The same sanctifying smile returned to her lips, as she took in a nearby breath. The natural order of her essence was restored and an ecstatic iridescence emanated from her. She understood with one word, that what had transpired was all in the past.