Contest entry for the Thirst Vampfic Contest
Title: Take It Back
Summary: Set several years after Edward left Bella, the knowledge he made a mistake sends him back to Forks to find her. Roughly inspired by Take It Back – Beth Crowley
Disclaimer: The author does not own any publicly recognizable characters herein. No copyright infringement is intended.
Take It Back
When he first left, he was certain he'd made the right decision. Bella was human, and she deserved to live a human life – one free of vampires and other things that went bump in the dark.
And he knew, with time, she would move on.
Even if she hadn't believed him.
After all, what life could he, a damned soul, possibly offer to someone as sweet and innocent as Bella?
Still, he refused to let her live a life that wasn't as safe as possible.
It was why, while his family moved to New York, he headed in a different direction – determined to hunt down the hunter who had once threatened her.
At first, his mission was honorable. But as time passed, it turned into a desperate distraction... And when he found himself curled up in an abandoned attic in Brazil, he forced himself to admit that it had become a horrendous failure.
Time passed, though he, even with his perfect recall, wasn't a hundred percent certain how long.
The only thing he knew was the longer he stayed away, the more certain he was that he had, in fact, made a mistake by leaving Bella.
But, knowing in his heart, it was too late to change his mind; he stayed away.
Eventually, after almost two years, his family came to get him from Brazil, and he returned to Ithaca with them.
…
Late 2013
He'd gotten a lot better at blocking out all the voices in his head... well, all the voices that weren't his own insanity. Bella's voice, telling him he was a fool and berating him in general, was a constant companion, one he was actually grateful stuck around.
In a weird way, her voice in his head kept him from going back to Forks – just to check on her.
Because the reality was, if he went to find her, he knew he'd never have the strength to leave again, whatever her current situation be damned.
And even though he now understood with deadly seriousness exactly as to what a mistake he'd made, for himself, he had to believe it was the right choice for her.
She probably went off to college – became a teacher like she'd talked about dreaming of becoming when he'd been interrogating her in the first days of their relationship. Perhaps she was already married. Did she already have kids?
He was sure, though it hadn't been a subject they'd actually talked about, that she'd assumed she wouldn't make a good parent. But he knew she'd be an excellent mom.
She had so much love to give.
It was why his leaving had been the only real option, even though he regretted it more and more with every passing day.
What kind of life could he have possibly offered her?
Edward pinched the bridge of his nose as one particularly annoying real mental voice was loud enough that he couldn't ignore it.
'Edward needs to get back to normal already. It's been more than eight years since we left.'
He'd always known Rosalie was extremely vain. It had been an obvious fact; even before Carlisle had changed her with the hopes Edward and she would become mates. But it was only after he'd met and fell in love with Bella that her selfishness had become obvious.
Of all his family, most of whom tiptoed around him like he'd have a psychotic break at any moment, only Rosalie didn't seem to get it.
Her continued desire for him to go back to how he used to be was absolutely maddening. It was as if she was incapable of understanding Bella had changed him in an irreversible way. Of course, that was the essence of the problem. After all, when she'd found Emmett, she'd had him turned.
Then again, he'd been dying when she'd found him.
If Edward had been in Rosalie's shoes the first time he'd met Bella... Well, reality said Bella wouldn't have survived such an encounter. But if her blood hadn't been so potent to him, would he have made the same choice as Rosalie?
He didn't have the answer, though.
He suspected it simply proved how different he was from Rosalie.
Edward turned to look at his wall of discs, considering putting something in to try and help with drowning Rosalie's mental voice out. As well as everyone else's because once he acknowledged even one of his family's voices, they all became clearer.
But he knew he wasn't going to touch any of the music. He hadn't listened to so much as a song since he'd left Bella – hadn't touched his piano or any other instrument either.
"Apparently, you gave up on music as easily as you did me."
The voice, not Rosalie's this time, but a figment of his own imagination personified as Bella's voice. There was no doubt in his mind that it was a figment of his imagination, too. If for no other reason than Bella had never been cruel.
"No, that was your job, leaving me crying and alone on the forest floor."
"Shut up," he snarled aloud before locking his lips shut even as he was accosted by the mental concern and exclamations of his family members.
'There he goes, acting crazy again.' Rosalie's sharp, sarcastic mental voice was grating in a way that left him gritting his teeth.
'We can't stop thinking, dude.' Emmett, in some ways more oblivious than even his mate, was – in other ways – extremely astute at times.
'Edward? Who are you telling to shut up? No one's been talking to you.' Carlisle's confusion and concern hurt him, but not as much as Esme's did.
'Poor Edward, I wish he'd talk with us – let us in so we could help with his burden.'
But more so than any of them, it was the two auspiciously missing voices that hurt the most. Both Jasper and Alice had left on December 7th, 2011. He still remembered Alice's last thought to him with vivid clarity.
She had entered his bedroom, something not even Carlisle had dared to do since they'd gotten him from Brazil. As Alice had stood in the room, she'd opened her mouth as if to say something aloud, but instead, she said it all via thought. 'Jasper and I can't do it anymore, Edward. I truly thought I'd be able to stay by you until you came to your senses and decided to go get your happiness back, but you're not going to do it. And we care far too much to stick around and continue to watch you die on the inside a little more with each day that passes.' Then she and Jasper had taken off.
They hadn't come back.
"I'm going to go hunt," he said suddenly, exiting the house from his window so he wouldn't accidentally run into one of his remaining family members.
…
Edward wasn't quite finished hunting when he sensed someone coming up on him. Carlisle's mental voice advising him who it was.
"What do you want, Carlisle?" Edward asked, somewhat belligerently because he could hear Carlisle's thoughts all too well.
"I respected your decision all those years ago, Edward, and I'm not even sure now that the decision was wrong. Everyone I changed: you, Esme, Rosalie, Emmett... all of you, your lives were over. There was no way to keep any of you human and let you live a human life. Meanwhile, Bella very much had an entire life in front of her. And there's little doubt if we had stayed that she'd eventually had to have been changed. But the reality is, just as I'm not sure your choice was wrong, I'm also not sure it was right. And frankly, neither are you.
"I think it's past time you track her down, find out if you made the right choice or not. You're only going to continue to deteriorate mentally until you know." His mental words after, continuing. 'I am not completely unaware you seem to be hearing something other than those of us who live with you.'
"What if I find her, and she's perfectly happy? There's no guarantee I'll be able to make myself leave again. There's no guarantee I'll even be able to stop myself from killing her. It's been more than eight years since I smelled her potent blood last."
"I think you've proved quite efficiently on more than one occasion that you are quite capable of doing anything you put your mind to. So if you go there to check with a plan in mind to come back once you determine she is well, then that is exactly what you will do."
"And if it turns out she hasn't moved on?"
"I suppose you'd have some decisions to make then, wouldn't you? But one way or another, you need to figure it out." 'Our family is already torn apart and drifting farther and farther. You need to make a decision before what's left can't be fixed.'
He flinched. "I think you have more faith in me than you should."
"I simply believe you know enough to understand something must happen. You don't have to see if she's alright if you don't want, but you do need to change something. I trust you will make the best decision you can."
Edward looked away, giving a truncated nod as he did so.
When Edward looked up, Carlisle was no longer there. Edward frowned as he hadn't heard or felt Carlisle leave.
…
He drove into Forks in his black Volvo S80, heading toward Charlie's house, figuring it was the best place for him to start. He hoped he'd be able to get in and out of Forks without attracting too much attention. After all, he still looked like a teenager, but he was supposed to be in his mid -twenties.
As he drove down the street to the Swan residence, something looked and felt wrong.
The house had always been in a state of disrepair, but it was past that. There were trellis vines that had overrun a couple of the windows. The paint was completely gone in places – revealing raw wood which appeared to have suffered significant rot from the continual rain. But the most noticeable red flag were the weeds that had overgrown the drive.
No one lived in the house that had once belonged to Charlie.
Edward frowned and pulled over, anyway. He hadn't truly expected to find Bella, though there had been some foolish hope she would be there, but he had expected to find Charlie. He never thought Charlie would leave the home he'd lived in for decades.
After a moment of thought, Edward pulled out his cellphone, dialing the number for the police department from memory.
The phone rang three times before a voice cheerfully answered. "Fork police department, this is June. How may I direct your call?"
The voice was more mature than he remembered, and no doubt also distorted by being over the phone, but Edward was pretty sure it was June Richardson. He couldn't help but wonder where the old dispatcher, Mary, was.
"I was wondering if I could possibly speak with Chief Swan," he said.
The lack of response on the other end of the phone was long enough that he raised an eyebrow.
"Who's asking?" June's voice was no longer cheerful.
"I'm an old friend of Charlie's –" not technically a lie. Before he'd left Bella, Charlie and he had gotten along quite well. Though he suspected Charlie probably hated him after he left, "– and I wanted to get in contact with him while I'm in the area, but his house looks abandoned."
"Ah... well, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but he had a heart attack about two years ago. He didn't make it."
The words, shocking in a way Edward wasn't prepared for, reverberated in his ears as he looked back toward the house. The curtain in the upstairs of the house fluttered shut as he spotted someone with long dark brown hair.
Without looking away from the house, he ended the call.
As he got out of the car, several scents hit him, none of which were human. Instead, the immediate area smelled heavily of forest – crushed pine and mildew – and under it all was the far lighter scent of lilacs and hydrangeas.
It had been decades, but he recognized the scent of the Quileute shape-shifters all too well. Still, it was the other scent, the lingering smell of a female vampire, that was more shocking.
Edward looked down at his phone, contemplating calling his family, but decided against it.
After all, there was no reason to fear the wolves. There was a treaty which protected him.
He could handle a single vampire.
As he walked over to Charlie's old house, both the scent of the wolves and of the single vampire got stronger, though he heard no thoughts from the house. Still, it didn't seem as abandoned as he'd thought when he drove up.
He forced the door open, actually cringing at how pungent the smell of the wolves was.
Once again, the vampire scent was also prominent. The main floor of the house appeared to be empty, though – with enough dust on most of the furniture that it was apparent no one had been down there in a while.
Slowly, he made his way through the first floor and up the stair;, the scents getting stronger the farther into the house he got.
Upstairs, Bella's old bedroom door was open, but none of her furniture was there. Instead, there was a trundle bed on the floor with a knapsack sitting on it.
Edward stepped over to the bed, picking up the bag. Doing something wholly inhuman, he sniffed the bag, dropping it and stepping back, fast.
The bag belonged to the vampire, of that much he was certain, but it also strongly smelled of wolves.
He was trying not to think it, but the longer in the house, the more he wondered if it was Bella. Though the scent didn't really resemble what she'd smelled like as a human.
If it was Bella, who had turned her?
Edward considered his options for a moment before deciding to head to the one place he thought he might find at least a partial answer.
Once he was back in his car, he drove north on the main street of town, turning right near the northern end of Forks.
He continued until he got to a small parking lot situated on the edge of a large plot of grass.
It would look like an inviting field, except on that field were rows and rows of stones, pillars, and statues. There were even a couple small rock buildings.
Edward closed his eyes and took in a deep breath before getting out of the car.
It wasn't difficult to make his way to the section of the cemetery that had the newer headstones.
After a few minutes of walking through the different plots, he found what he'd come looking for.
There was a double headstone with the names Geoffrey Swan and Helen Swan, both of which had died in 1991, mere weeks apart. Edward knew they'd been Charlie's parents. Still, he barely paid attention to the headstone, nor did he look too closely at the headstone just to the right, which was Charlie's, though he couldn't help but note the death date of December 9, 2011.
Instead, it was the slightly larger headstone to the right of Charlie's that riveted his attention.
Isabella Marie Swan
September 13, 1987 – December 7, 2011
MIA, presumed dead
Friend, Mother, Daughter
Lost But Not Forgotten
Above the text was a picture under a piece of glass of a Bella he barely recognized. Even though it was just her face, she was skinnier and harder than he remembered her to be. In the picture, her hair was cut short.
To the left of the picture was an engraved purple heart.
Edward dropped to his knees in front of her headstone.
Whoever the vampire he'd seen fading from his immediate concern as he realized Bella was truly dead. Suddenly the reason Alice and Jasper left made all too much sense. Alice, his clairvoyant sister, obviously hadn't wanted him to find out his reason for existing had been snuffed out.
It really was too late for him to even try and take back his mistake.
In his heart, he knew if he had stayed, she'd still be alive.
Almost subconsciously, he reached out and fingered the most conspicuous word on the stone, his finger tracing the word Mother.
"Look to the right," a low voice said from behind him.
Edward had been so focused on the grave he hadn't even heard someone come up, but once he made himself known, the smell permeated his brain. It was the same smell that had been at Charlie's house.
Edward looked to the right as the voice said, almost overlooking the small, child-size headstone before the name made him take a harder look.
Sarah Alice Black
January 26, 2007 – February 3, 2007
Too soon from this world
Missed always
"No," Edward barely mouthed the word but knew he was heard when the man behind him spoke.
"She joined the Marines the day after we buried her. Even then, I knew once she left, I'd never see her again. Just as I knew, someday, you'd show back up. Of course, her life had been ruined for a long time before we lost our daughter." 'Vampires mate for life.'
The voice, though no longer the exuberant one of a boy with his first crush, had to belong to Jacob Black. The fact that the girl's last name was Black gave it away even more.
Edward forced the words out. "What do you mean?"
"She died on the inside the day you abandoned her. It would have been less cruel if you'd killed her, drained her completely dry." 'At least then, I'd have an excuse to kill you.' "I tried to break through to Bella. She and I started dating shortly after she graduated high school. I insisted that I was alright with the fact that she could never give me her heart in the way I handed her mine." 'I wasn't, of course. But I thought with enough time...' "No matter what I did, though, I was never enough. She was constantly chasing the next rush: riding motorcycles, cliff diving, hunting, and so much more. It took me a long time to get her to admit that what she was really doing was chasing your ghost – using the adrenal changes in her mind to hallucinate your voice.
"Still, I'd have stayed with her through it all. And maybe if little Alice, Bella always insisted on calling her Alice, had survived, I might have someday broke through to her. It wasn't meant to be, though."
"Why didn't you stop her?"
'You ever try to stop a storm?' "Like I wanted to be the one that found her lying dead somewhere because one of her stunts got her killed! At least halfway around the world, I wasn't going to have to see it."
"She was human. She should have been able to get over me. She should have been able to have a nice normal life."
"You're a fool." 'I'm not even a vampire, and I know mate bonds are permanent and on both sides.'
Edward saw an image of a girl with long dark brown hair and muddy red eyes, dry sobbing in his mind before the image disappeared.
He turned to look at Jake, standing three rows away with his arms crossed over his chest.
"That girl you were just thinking of. Who is she?"
'I'd actually forgotten how Bella told me he could do that.' "Her name's Bree. She helps to protect Forks and La Push. She lost her mate. Luckily he was only a part of her life for a few very short days. I think it's the only thing that keeps her sane. Otherwise, she would have had to be put down."
Then came the images Edward got of some battle on a beach, dozens of bright red eyes, bodies of the dead. He flinched. "What happened?"
Jake narrowed his eyes, and more thoughts and memories flooded Edward's mind.
Amidst everything was a memory of a vampire with more natural burgundy eyes shouting for Victoria to help, as well as a couple memories of different confrontations with Victoria.
Edward flinched again.
"Huh, that's interesting," Jake said. 'You're the one rooting around in my head. If you don't like what you're seeing, then stay the fuck out of it.' "I never was able to kill the red-headed leech. But we took care of her army." 'At a great cost to us.'
"If you hate vampires so much, then why is this Bree still alive?"
"While all the others were fighting, this little shrimp of a vampire surrendered. I'd have killed her, anyway, but Bella convinced me to give her a chance."
"And why haven't you attacked me?" Edward could feel the dark anger rolling off Jake – he didn't need Jasper's gift to know exactly how much Jake hated him.
"Why do you think?" 'For Bella, of course. If she were still alive, she'd never forgive me for killing you.' "Bella wouldn't want you dead. She'd want you to live... to be happy." 'Besides, I have to live knowing that she's gone. You aren't going to get off any easier than me.'
Edward looked back at the headstone, placing his hand against the picture.
…
Seven thousand miles away in a dingy cell, a war-hardened woman leaned heavily against a filthy wall as one of her last companions were shot just outside the cell. She looked away, remaining resolutely silent.