"So," Garrett asked as we slipped into the outskirts of the Brazilian town and began running into the jungle, "Tell me."

This had been a common opening comment for some time. When we had first started talking, it had been "Tell me about your past" or "Tell me about your family" or your history or yourself. Eventually, it just became easier for him to ask me to speak, and I obliged, in whatever way I felt the most comfortable.

"I honestly don't know, Garret," I said. Our Portuguese was improving.

Time spent with Garrett was unlike sharing time with any other immortal I had met. When interacting with humans, Rosalie was haughty and superior, Emmett was boisterous, Jasper was aloof, Carlisle and Esme were kind, and Alice was whatever she needed to be in the moment. But Garrett was charming, personable, even likeable. The aura of predator that most humans detected around us without ever really voicing it to themselves was there, but it was quickly passed over by his guileless charisma. It kept me an afterthought, and, more accurately, it kept me apart from them.

When we were alone, he was direct in a way that I had never experienced outside of Alice, but his thoughts were always as clear and as concise as his words. It was really refreshing.

"I'm not sure where to begin right now," I elaborated quietly as we began to range out. We had to be careful this far south. Vampires in this area were fiercely territorial, but avoiding them was mostly easy, given my ability.

"Begin with the broad strokes," he suggested. "Today, what makes you happy?"

I flinched, something vampires almost never do.

"You make it sound as though that is such a simple and uncomplicated thing to be," I said.

Slowly, I stopped running. He came up beside me. I looked to the moon.

"I have never really been happy," I admitted. "I thought I was, once."

"With her," he affirmed.

I felt my hackles go up.

"I'm still not…" I faltered.

Garrett waved a hand.

"I am not pressing," he explained, "just clarifying."

I nodded, relaxing.

"And you weren't," he said.

"No," I responded. "It turned out that I was only less miserable."

"And there's a difference?" he inquired, beginning to walk at mortal speeds.

"Yes," I said, walking beside him. "It is the emotional difference between subtracting a negative number instead of adding a positive one."

He nodded, "But the effects are the same, are they not?"

I frowned, "Not so much. I'm not wholly convinced that you can ever add more than what is there. You will never be convinced that you are happier than you actually are at your best moment, and even so, the effects are temporary and frequently short lived."

He nodded, "Like blood."

My step lost some of its smooth cadence for several steps.

"I suppose so," I said, considering.

He gathered himself in, and I saw his mind as it jumped back into old papers he had read long ago.

Are you familiar with the work of one Bruce K. Anderson? he thought.

"Yes," I said aloud. "Or, at least, I am familiar with the Rat Park experiments."

It was an interesting take on behavior. In his experiments, he placed rats in cages, giving them two sources of water, one of which was laced with morphine. When left with only the bottles of water, the rats tended to prefer the morphine infused water. However, when the experiment was reproduced, only with more rats, a larger cage, and a variety of objects to play and interact with, the number of rats who took the morphine decreased dramatically.

The study concluded that addiction was not limited to simply drug addiction, he continued, and that a majority of serious addictive behavior has nothing to do with so-called substance abuse.

I frowned, "So, you seem to be suggesting that my issue is environmental."

He laughed, though quietly.

"I am suggesting that your behavior," he said, "is the result of an addiction. You yourself have stated that you are not happy, that you do things that lessen your pain, that the results are temporary and do nothing to solve the problem that caused the behavior in the first place. That sounds quite a bit like an addiction to me, does it not?"

I snorted and rolled my eyes.

"Such a cavalier way to discuss murder," I commented.

He smiled, "Such a cavalier person to cause it."

I swallowed, "Touché."

We walked a short way further before I asked, "So, what would you suggest that I do about it?"

He shrugged, "I am hardly an addiction professional. I was studying psychology at the time and came across his work then."

I smiled wryly, "I only ask your opinion, Garrett. I have no expectation that it will be the most sound advice that I have ever heard."

He grinned, "God forbid!"

He pressed his fingers to his lips, thinking it through.

Firstly, I would become introspective, he thought. If the cause is unknown or unresolved, it would be impossible to move away from the behavior. Secondly, I would stop the addicting habit, which, in some respects, would likely help the cause come to light. And thirdly, I would remember what is most important.

"Which is?" I coaxed.

He stopped and put a hand to my shoulder.

"You are not your addiction," he said. "It is not some defect of your morality or some disease to be cured. Self degradation will not solve the problem, and simply understanding it will not rid you of it. The path you walk requires change, which takes work, and choice."

I shuddered.

"I don't always have a choice," I said quietly.

That is sacrilege, he thought, and meant it as deeply as anything he had ever thought. To believe that one is without choice is to act in bad faith, and to be a victim of the world, at the mercy of its circumstance.

I couldn't decide if I felt more humbled or humiliated.

"You think I'm a coward," I all but whispered.

He reached for me, one hand grabbing me by the shoulder, twisting me to face him, his other hand sliding to the nape of my neck, forcing my gaze to his as he looked me deep in the eyes. The unbridled intimacy would have rocked me back if I could have so easily escaped his grasp.

"Yes," he said easily, but without a breath of judgment or depreciation. "You are afraid. There is little use in being shamed by it. Shame is a deadly tool and should only be implemented in the hands of someone who knows how to use it."

Something within me quivered like a struck tuning fork. It was me, wanting to go in two directions at once in equal measure, vibrating back and forth as the forces fought, balanced.

"I do not wish to believe you," I said.

He smiled sadly and did not let me go.

I know, he thought.

"It is impossible to live without choice," he went on. "But even choosing not to choose is a choice, and a hard one to live with. It feels safer, less risky, but it is much, much harder overall, much more painful."

Something in my chest felt like it was fragmenting, coming apart and splintering through my torso in the worst and most painful way possible.

I didn't want to believe him, just as I hadn't wanted to believe her.

Bella. My Bella, yet mine no longer.

"It was my fault," I said.

The fragment was my heart breaking. It didn't stop with just itself; my being, all of me broke with it.

I collapsed to the ground, my knee cracking against the stoney earth. Garrett was there, but his physical contact seemed to be all moral support and not physical, little did I care.

"If…" I broke off, fighting to get the words through viced teeth. "If what… if what you say is true, and I do have a choice, then what I did…"

He let me get the words out, without rushing me or adding to them or denying them. In some ways, it was better that he didn't. In some ways, it was worse.

"You mean that I chose to kill her," I said. "That I chose to try to."

He looked at me.

I said nor thought no such thing, he thought. You are continuing a line of logic, but an honest one.

"No!" I denied. "I did not want to kill her."

"Then why did you try?" he asked.

I frowned.

"I…" I hesitated. "I don't know."

Something came back to me then, something I had once said to Bella, that she didn't try to see herself clearly. At that time, we had been discussing the Spring Formal, and why she didn't want to go. She had been afraid of what that meant, and had gone out of her way to not know the answer.

"And here I am," I whispered, "doing the same thing."

Garrett understood that I was commenting about my own thoughts, but did not require explanation, though seemed to welcome anything that I might add.

"I am scared to accept that I made the choice to try and kill her," I admitted.

"Do you know why?" he asked.

I felt the shame start to press against me.

"Because," I stumbled, not wanting the words to come out, "I am already monstrous enough as it is. Adding conscious malicious murder of the woman I have love most in this world seems… cruel."

"To her," he asked, "or to you?"

"Both," I chuckled humorlessly.

"You are deep in a prison of your own making," he said, "beginning to walk again."

I snorted, "I was not responsible for becoming a vampire."

He shook his head, "You are not trapped because you are a vampire. You are trapped because you're afraid."

It was hard to argue with that.

"Free will," he said, "only truly works if you have the ability to choose. Choosing, having the facilities to compare between your choices, is governed by all that you are and all that you've experienced and all that you believe."

He looked at me, though still walked forward as smoothly and perfectly as if he had his eyes on the uneven jungle ground before him.

"But when you are afraid," he went on, "when fear circumvents logic and reason, you cannot see all that there is, all the choices that might be. All you see is that which you fear, and the one choice you believe you can make to avoid what you fear."

I shook my head and ran my hands up my face and through my hair, trying to brush away my crawling skin at the idea and sense-memory of feeling so trapped.

"That doesn't sound like much of a choice," I said, shivering.

He shrugged very humanly.

"It is still a choice," he said, "and an uncomplicated one. It is easy to make the choice in the moment, but the consequences tend to be harder to stomach and can be truly devastating afterward."

I tried not to remember Bella's words, her accusation of me attempting to murder her, all the more painful because it had been true.

"I tried to kill her," I whispered.

He stopped and looked at me once again.

"For every choice," he said, "there are consequences, good and bad alike."

I nodded, "What I did ended things with Bella. The one opportunity that I had to be happy, and I… I…"

He smacked me across the face.

Had I been human, the blow might have seriously hurt me. As a vampire, it was merely quite surprising.

"That," he said, continuing his interruption, "is your prison talking, your pain and your fear. Like most things, being happy is a choice and a skill. It is hard, far more complicated than staying stuck. To become unstuck is simple, which is not the same as easy."

I shook off the remnants of the blow, "I don't know how."

He all but laughed, a decidedly humorless sound.

"Of course not," he said. "No creature on this Earth would, given the choice, choose to be malicious if they could so easily be virtuous. Why do you think so many are the former and not the latter?"

He had a point, and I knew it.

He put a hand on my arm, "So often we treat these skills as innate abilities. They are not, and yet we act as though we are somehow defective for not having them. Doing so makes as much sense as chiding a child for their lack of knowledge as it pertains to astrophysics."

"Of course," I whispered, as though it should have been obvious.

He smiled, "Sometimes it requires someone to state the obvious before it can become obvious."

I nodded, "So, what do I do? How do I learn?"

"You change," he said. "As I said, simple, but not easy."

I stared at him, "How?"

He gestured outward, "If something exists that you have never encountered, something that conflicts with all that you know, how do you believe in it?"

I understood this one, though, I supposed, never in this exact context.

"Faith," I said. "I need to have faith."

"And practice," he affirmed. "Let's begin with something simple. Did you love Bella?"

"Of course!" shot from my lips before I could consider the words.

He looked at me but said nothing. I stopped and thought.

"I believed that I did," I said, reconsidering. "Was I wrong?"

He shrugged, "Were you?"

"I wanted her to be happy," I said.

"More than what you wanted?" he asked.

The sound of disbelief that coughed its way out of my throat disturbed a few rodents who were passing by in the night.

"No," I said. "I was unconscionably selfish. I wanted her so cravenly that I was willing to risk her life and future happiness to do so."

He waited.

"I cared for her," I said, "but what I wanted mattered more."

"Did you love her then?" he asked.

"No," I admitted, awed, shaking my head.

He clapped my shoulder, "See? Simple, but that one was easy."

It hadn't felt easy. Some part of me wanted to spit and deny and rail against the words.

"I don't want it to be true," I said. "I want to have loved her."

He nodded, "Why?"

"Because," I said, "I already believe that I am a monster. Being capable of love was a redeeming factor that I believed was denied me. Take that away, and I'm forced back to monstrosity."

He grinned broadly, At last!

"What?" I asked, confused.

"You admitted it!" he cried, loudly enough that he might have been heard by vampires beyond my range to notice them.

"Admitted what?" I demanded, keeping my voice low so that he might emulate it.

He pointed a finger directly into my face, "That it is a belief, not a fact."

"What is?" I said, louder but not loudly.

"That your vampirism makes you a monster!" he pronounced ardently.

I froze.

"What?" escaped from my lips.

"You are but the monster you believe yourself to be," he said. "But not one in truth. And a belief… can be changed."

I felt like I had just fallen off the edge of the world. I felt like gravity had gained a sense of whimsy and decided to reverse itself, solely as expressed upon me. I felt like a weight I never knew I carried had been pulled away from my flesh, painfully taking flesh with it. It hurt! By God it hurt!

I landed and curled in upon myself. I felt as though my heart had been ripped out in pieces, too many to count and each in a different direction. I felt mortal pain, pain that should mean my death.

Garrett held me, keeping me from writhing in the dirt and the dark. I didn't feel alone, but I knew not how to take comfort in his presence.

This felt worse, somehow. If I was not a monster, how much of my existence had been so needlessly wasted?! How many lives had been so needlessly sacrificed!? All that I had done, all that I had lost, had been for nothing!

"Bella," I whispered.

Blood ran down my face, as are vampire tears. I cried for her, but more, I cried for myself. For my fear, my foolishness, my innocence of how little I truly understood the world. I was so deeply humbled and earnestly repentant.

"This," he said, "is the end of the beginning. Here, you must put aside what has come before. Let go of what hooked into you, what kept you trapped, what made you insane."

I found his eyes, his crimson vampire eyes. They were beautiful, if only for the fact that they didn't inspire tremendous guilt in me. Those eyes did not mean monster to me. The two were not mutually inclusive.

"What things?" I asked.

He helped me up.

"You are not a monster," he said. "You are capable of being happy. Your happiness was never dependent on Bella Swan. You can do this. And you are worthy of love."

They were Carlisle's words. He had said them to me, many times. He had told me I wasn't a monster and that I was worthy of love. I had agreed, but I hadn't believed. Now, the words reached me, as they never had before.

I turned. I heard it, the Jaguar. It was not far, curious at the unmistakable smell of blood. I brushed Garrett aside, ready.

I bounded to the trees, silent as anything that could combat the pull of the earth with my ease. I drew myself closer, and just as the predator realized that something was wrong, I lounged with a speed no mortal creature could contest.

I killed her quickly, as painless as I could, breaking the neck. I drank her in, taking her into me. I reached the moment that I had, so many times before, when my body would reject the reviled substance. This time, I willed myself to the task, refusing the half measure the deed had been to me until that moment. I swallowed the blood, and I was sated.