The pain was bewildering.
Exactly that – I was bewildered. I couldn't make sense of what was happening.
My body tried to reject the pain, and I was sucked again and again into a blackness that cut out whole seconds or maybe even minutes of the agony, making it that much harder to keep up with reality.
I tried to separate them.
Non-reality was black, and it didn't hurt so much.
Reality was red, and it felt like I was being sawed in half, hit by a bus, punched by a prize fighter, trampled by bulls, and submerged in acid━ all at the same time.
Reality was feeling my body twist and flip when I couldn't possibly move because of the pain.
Reality was knowing there was something so much more important than all this torture, and not being able to remember what it was.
Reality had come on so fast.
One moment, everything was as it should have been. I was with my husband spending a romantic night in. Somehow, unlikely as it was, it seemed like I was about to get everything I'd been fighting for.
And then one tiny, inconsequential thing had gone wrong.
I'd knocked over the cup of blood , dark blood spilling out and staining the white marble floor. I'd lurched toward the accident reflexively. Something in me had been faster.
Ripping.
Breaking.
Agony.
The darkness had taken over, and then washed away to a wave of torture. I couldn't breathe – I had drowned once before, and this was different; it was too hot in my throat.
Pieces of me shattering, snapping, slicing apart...
More blackness.
Something sharper than knives ripped through and I found my way back to consciousness with an awful scream.
I felt something pinch me and I saw Edward above me, a terrible look on his face. I knew it meant both the baby and I were in danger. Before I could succumb to the peaceful slumber of the morphine I whispered: "Edward."
He brought my hand to his lips and in a half sob replied, "Yes, my love?"
My mind was clouding but I had to get my request out before it was too late. "Please, please…,"a painful cough interrupted, but I forced myself, "Promise me that you'll save the baby!"
His gold eyes peered into mine; they were filled with so much anguish that I had no power to make disappear.
"I will," he vowed.
"I love you," I tried saying before I was swallowed by the cold and peaceful darkness.
How long had passed? Seconds or minutes? The pain was gone. Numb. I couldn't feel. I still couldn't see, either, but I could hear. There was air in my lungs again, scraping in rough bubbles up and down my throat.
I was in our living room in New Hampshire. Edward was sitting on the couch. His neck was bent down and he was singing in a low voice.
I was so happy to be back home. I'd missed him, wherever I'd been. I couldn't quite remember, but it wasn't pleasant.
I went to him wanting a hug and I saw he was holding something in his arms.
He turned to look at me. His eyes were as black as night and bloody tears streamed down his face and on his shirt blooming like poppies on a snowy field.
He had our son in his arms. The baby was blue and its eyes were closed.
"NO!"
My arms shot up forwards. I had to hold him, my little boy.
Before I could, blackness rushed over my eyes more solidly than before. Like a thick blindfold, firm and fast. Covering not just my eyes but also myself with a crushing weight. It was exhausting to push against it. I knew it would be so much easier to give in. To let the blackness push me down, down, down to a place where there was no pain and no weariness and no worry and no fear.
If it had only been for myself, I wouldn't have been able to struggle very long. I was only human, with no more than human strength. I'd been trying to keep up with the supernatural for too long, like Jacob had said so many moons before.
But this wasn't just about me.
If I did the easy thing now, let the black nothingness erase me, I would hurt him.
Edward. Edward. I'd failed and our son was dead. My life and his were now, more than ever, twisted into a single strand. Cut one, and you cut both. If he were gone, I would not be able to live through that. If I were gone, he wouldn't live through it, either. And a world without Edward seemed completely pointless. Edward had to exist.
It was so dark where I was that I couldn't see his face. Nothing seemed real. That made it hard not to give up.
I kept pushing against the oblivion, though, almost a reflex. I wasn't trying to lift it. I was just resisting. Not allowing it to crush me completely. I wasn't Atlas, and oblivion felt as heavy as a planet; I couldn't shoulder it. All I could do was not be entirely obliterated.
It was sort of the pattern to my life – I'd never been strong enough to deal with the things outside my control, to attack the enemies or outrun them. To avoid the pain. Always human and weak, no matter how hard I tried, the only thing I'd ever been able to do was keep going. Endure. Survive.
It had been enough up to this point. It would have to be enough today. I would endure this until help came.
I Edward would be doing everything he could. He would not give up. Neither would I.
I held the blackness of nonexistence at bay by inches.
It wasn't enough, though – that determination. As the time ground on and on and the darkness gained by tiny eighths and sixteenths of my inches, I needed something more to draw strength from.
I couldn't pull even Edward's face into view. Not Alice's or Rosalie's, or Charlie's or Renee's or Carlisle's or Esme's… not Emmet, not Jasper, not Jacob. Nothing. It terrified me, and I wondered if it was too late.
But I had to survive. Edward was depending on me. Alice Rosalie Carlisle Esme Jasper Emmet… I felt myself slipping – there was nothing to hold on to.
Edward Charles.
I had to see him. I had to say goodbye. I had to apologize that I wasn't strong enough to help him live.
And then, though I still couldn't see anything, suddenly I could feel something.
Like phantom limbs, I imagined I could feel my arms again. And in them, something small and hard and very, very warm.
My baby. My little baby.
The warmth meant he was alive. I would've sobbed if I'd had a voice.
I had done it. Against the odds, I had been strong enough to get us out of it alive.
That spot of heat in my phantom arms felt so real. I clutched it closer. It was exactly where my heart should be. Holding tight the image of my son, I knew that I would be able to fight the darkness as long as I needed to.
The warmth beside my heart got more and more real, warmer and warmer. Hotter. The heat was so real it was hard to believe that I was imagining it.
Hotter.
Uncomfortable now. Too hot. Much, much too hot.
Like grabbing the wrong end of a curling iron – my automatic response was to drop the scorching thing in my arms. But there was nothing in my arms. My arms were not curled to my chest. My arms were dead things lying somewhere at my side. The heat was inside me.
The burning grew – rose and peaked and rose again until it surpassed anything I'd ever felt.
I felt the pulse behind the fire raging now in my chest and realized that I'd found my heart again, just in time to wish I never had. To wish that I'd embraced the blackness while I'd still had the chance. I wanted to raise my arms and claw my chest open and rip the heart from it – anything to get rid of this torture. But I couldn't feel my arms, couldn't move one vanished finger.
James, snapping my leg under his foot. That was nothing. That was a soft place to rest on a feather bed. I'd take that now, a hundred times. A hundred snaps. I'd take it and be grateful.
The baby, kicking my ribs apart, breaking his way through me piece by piece. That was nothing. That was floating in a pool of cool water. I'd take it a thousand times. Take it and be grateful. Ask for more.
The fire blazed hotter and I wanted to scream. To beg for someone to kill me now, before I lived one more second in this pain. But I couldn't move my lips. The weight was still there, pressing on me.
I realized it wasn't the darkness holding me down; it was my body. Heavy. Burying me in flames that were chewing their way out from my heart now, spreading with impossible pain through my shoulders and stomach, scalding their way up my throat, licking at my face.
Why couldn't I move? Why couldn't I scream? This wasn't part of the stories.
My mind was unbearably clear – sharpened by the fierce pain – and I saw the answer almost as soon as I could form the questions.
The morphine.
It seemed like a million deaths ago that we'd discussed it – Edward, Carlisle, and I. Edward and Carlisle had hoped that enough painkillers would help fight the pain of the venom. Carlisle had tried with Emmett, but the venom had burned ahead of the medicine, sealing his veins. There hadn't been time for it to spread.
I'd kept my face smooth and nodded and thanked my rarely lucky stars that Edward could not read my mind.
I'd had morphine and venom together in my system before, and the numbness of the medicine was completely irrelevant when the venom seared through my veins. But there'd been no way I was going to mention that fact. Nothing that would make him more unwilling to change me.
I hadn't guessed that the morphine would have this effect – that it would pin me down and gag me. Hold me paralyzed while I burned.
I knew all the stories. I knew that Carlisle had kept quiet enough to avoid discovery while he burned. I knew that, according to Rosalie, it did no good to scream. And I'd hoped that maybe I could be like Carlisle. That I would believe Rosalie's words and keep my mouth shut. Because I knew that every scream that escaped my lips would torment Edward.
Now it seemed like a hideous joke that I was getting my wish fulfilled.
If I couldn't scream, how could I tell them to kill me?
All I wanted was to die. To never have been born. The whole of my existence did not outweigh this pain. Wasn't worth living through it for one more heartbeat.
Let me die,
let me die,
let
me
die.
And, for a never-ending space, that was all there was. Just the fiery torture, and my soundless shrieks, pleading for death to come. Nothing else, not even time. So that made it infinite, with no beginning and no end. One infinite moment of pain.
The only change came when suddenly, impossibly, my pain doubled. Some broken connection had been healed – knitted together by the scorching fingers of the flame.
The endless burn raqed on.
It could have been seconds or days, weeks or years, but, eventually, time came to mean something again.
Three things happened together, grew from each other so that I didn't know which came first: time restarted, the morphine's weight faded, and I got stronger.
I could feel the control of my body come back to me in increments, and they were my first markers of the time passing. I knew it when I was able to twitch my toes and twist my fingers into fists. I knew it, but I did not act on it.
Though the fire did not decrease one tiny degree – in fact, I began to develop a new capacity for experiencing it, a new sensitivity to appreciate, separately, each blistering tongue of flame that licked through my veins – I discovered that I could think around it.
I could remember why I shouldn't scream. I could remember the reason why I'd committed to enduring this unendurable agony. I could remember that, though it felt impossible now, there was something that might be worth the torture.
I started counting my low, slightly uneven breaths while the morphine continued to disappear. A broken clock's pendulum, those breaths pulled me through the burning seconds toward the end.
I could hear people around the house and, by their breath I knew that there were two people in the room with me.
Soon they were replaced by two others. They got close to me.
This happened just as the weights left my body. To anyone watching me, there would be no change. But for me, as I struggled to keep the screams and thrashing locked up inside my body, where they couldn't hurt anyone else, it felt like I'd gone from being tied to the stake as I burned, togripping that stake to hold myself in the fire.
"Bella, my love, I hope that you aren't in any pain and that you can't hear this. I am here with Renesmee…,
Renesmee?
Renesmee.
"And she has come to say 'goodbye'."
Goodbye?
nonononononononononono
"I'm sorry my love, she'll just be away for a short while. It's to keep you both safe."
I felt something on my cheek.
"She's incredible; you have done a marvelous job. There is no need for you to be alone in this anymore. I am here, I will always be here and I will help you through this. love you, Bella, I'm sorry."
A sob left my lips and I promised myself I would hold on until my daughter was out of earreach.
A car door slams.
Goodbyes.
Pebbles crushed under tires.
The voice of an angel, "I'm here, my love. They are gone. You don't need to be brave anymore. Let go, Bella, you can let go."
I opened my eyes to a blurry night and for the first time in many millennia I had a voice again; it was used to utter just one plea: "Kill me!"
The angel took me in his arms but the fire did not falter. He whispered words of encouragement: of my strength and of its love. He promised the pain would end and I would meet my daughter.
"Renesmee?"
"Yes, she's so healthy. You've done such a good job; hold on for a little while and you'll see her."
I closed my eyes and clinged on to his words, they were the only thing keeping me tied to the world; reminding me that there was life after pain.
I continued to get stronger, my thoughts clearer. I could see Edward's face again. Though it was cloudy, all the features I loved were there, the straight nose, chiseled cheekbones and well defined lips. I could feel my hands through his lovely copper hair. My lips on his.
As time passed on I found the strength to keep some of my sobs in, to prepare myself for what I knew was to come – though I still needed assurance, "how long?"
"Not long. You're almost done. It will end. I promised you it would."
On the good-news side of things, the fire started to disappear from my fingertips and toes. It was doing so slowly, but at least it was a new feeling. This had to be it. The pain was on its way out…
The bad news? The fire in my throat wasn't the same as before. I wasn't only on fire, but I was now parched, too. Dry as bone. So thirsty. Burning fire, and burning thirst...
More bad news: The fire inside my heart got hotter.
How could it be possible?
My heartbeat, already too fast, picked up – the fire drove its rhythm to a new frantic pace.
I heard people enter the room.
The fire retreated from my palms, leaving them blissfully pain-free and cool. But it retreated to my heart, which blazed hot as the sun and beat at a furious new speed.
The loudest sound in the room was my frenzied heart, pounding to the rhythm of the fire.
My wrists and ankles were free. The fire was extinguished there. My relief was overshadowed by the excruciating pain in my heart.
"Just a little longer," Edward assured me. "It's almost done."
My heart took off, beating like helicopter blades, the sound almost a single sustained note; it felt like it would grind through my ribs. The fire flared up in the center of my chest, sucking the last remnants of the flames from the rest of my body to fuel the most scorching blaze yet.
I moved my hands to my chest to dig my heart out.
It became a battle inside me – my sprinting heart racing against the attacking fire. Both were losing. The fire was doomed, having consumed everything that was combustible; my heart galloped toward its last beat.
The fire constricted, concentrating inside that one remaining human organ with a final, unbearable surge. The surge was answered by a deep, hollow-sounding thud. My heart stuttered twice, and then thudded quietly again just once more.
There was no sound. No breathing. Not even mine.
For a moment, the absence of pain was all I could comprehend.
And then I opened my eyes and gazed above me in wonder