A/N: Bella dies in the Newborn Battle. Or: the one where Seth Clearwater is a fourteen-year-old with massive trauma.
Context: I started working on this in April to get my brain into Eclipse mode for Between Who You Are and Who You Should Be (specifically, for the chapter we posted a few days ago, so how is that for long-term rumination) and it languished as a two-parter until today. Since it's time to start being moody about a chapter a million months into the future, I am letting go of this. Poof. Nonsense drabble begone!
I
He sees her death through a kaleidoscope of minds, so synchronised in their instantaneous terror that the fragments of memory, measured in split seconds and heartbeats, will later fuse in a jagged mosaic, roughened and frayed at the edges.
Not even the momentary respite of shuttered eyelids can shield him from the memory of her final harrowing moment, her wide brown eyes bulging from the force of two bone-white hands clamped around her fragile jugular.
In silence, Edward's animalistic screams resonate in his eardrums like claws raking over steel.
II
The last vestiges of childhood melt away in the aftermath of his newly awarded blood stripes, recognition of a trauma far greater than any he has experienced in his fourteen years of life.
He is fourteen when he stands on the doorstep of the two-storey house on K Street, holding the weight of the world in his left hand and the white-knuckled hand of his surrogate older brother in his right.
Jacob, superior in his two chronological years and eight months of protectorship, resolutely takes the lead, knocking twice on the wooden door that separates them from what little innocence is left in this too-small town.
The buzzing in his ears builds when his father's best friend opens the door, beckoning them inside with an uneasy expression that has long since taken up permanent residence on his face; it roars when Jacob assists the man to sit at the living room table, stumbling through a sequence of words that no sixteen-year-old boy should ever have to say.
He almost mistakes the crescendo of grief raging inside his head with the guttural sounds of agony erupting from the man who has already buried a fragment of his heart, a man who asks questions that he will never be in the position to answer.
Her cooling corpse rests in the county morgue for reasons somewhere between foolish idealism and stubborn delusion; for years, he will wonder which is worse.
III
He will think about her for years beyond her memorial service, well after her father has passed and those who had loved her have moved on.
The house on K Street will sell for a fraction of its worth; the smiling couple unloading moving boxes from a rust-coloured truck will never know of the fish painstakingly descaled under the towering fir in the yard, the holidays spent clustered around a wooden table salvaged from an estate sale.
The name Charlie will never escape their mouths with a fond sigh; Bella Swan will be nothing more than a name printed in eight-point poynter, an obituary sandwiched between classifieds and birth announcements.
He will keep her hand-woven bracelet wrapped around his wrist; her name will remain mixed in with the legends, part eulogy, part cautionary, a testament to a grief that he refuses to forget.
Her heart stopped at eighteen.
The memory remains.