Alice reached him after midnight, the rest of them trailing in behind her. They crowded in the doorway, stomping the snow off of their boots. If he had been human, he wouldn't have survived this far up the mountain this time of year. If they had been human, they never would have reached him at all.
The snow was howling outside of the window, scratching on the glass and threatening to break it in with the force of the wind. Not that Edward cared. Not that he cared about anything anymore. He had chosen this place on purpose; the cold temperatures and the lack of running water kept most people away. There was no civilization this far up. But the cold didn't bother him, it never bothered him.
Alice sank to her knees at his feet and she spoke to him slowly, as if she were speaking to a child, "Edward, we have to go back home..."
Her voice caught in her throat and if he weren't so far gone in his own self-pity, his own pain, he might have seen hers. He might have noticed that her dark eyes were a little bit darker. That her voice was thick with it. But he was too weighed down with his own pain and entirely too selfish to see hers.
"I can't," he said finally, he felt like his voice should have been hoarse from lack of use. But it wasn't. It was the same voice that had told Bella he didn't love her anymore. That he was leaving. "It's better... for her."
But what would have been better for her, he thought bitterly, was if she had never come to Forks in the first place. If ihe/i had never come to Forks in the first place. Or maybe, if he had never gone back that first time, when he'd escaped her scent in the mountains with Tanya and her clan. Why had he gone back? Besides the fact that there was something about her that dragged at every dead and withered cell in his damned body. Even now, up so high and thousands of miles away, he knew that he couldn't stay away from her forever. At some point, he'd shamefully crawl back to her but he could only hope he'd have the strength to stay in the shadows and watch her live her life out from afar.
Up here, with snow packed against the door, he had plenty of time to worry the "what if's" around in his head. To think of all the things he could have done differently. Alice saw the future and he saw the future from Alice's thoughts. Both of them intrusively sifting through all the could bes and would bes in Bella's life and maybe that was part of the bigger problem.
He could hear Rosalie sigh, exasperated, from the doorway. He was doing his best to block out all of their thoughts and they were doing their best to shield theirs from him.
His head shot up suddenly. Why were they trying so hard to shield their thoughts from him? Harder than usual…
"Edward, Bella..." Alice stopped. Took an unnecessary breath. "Edward, Bella is gone."
If he'd needed to breathe, his breath would have caught in his throat. If he'd had a heart that beat, it would have missed one. Bella had left Forks? Had she gone back to her mother? Gone back to the sun? Or had more time passed than he'd originally thought? The possibility left him disoriented. The days passed by in quick succession, there was rarely any sunlight this far north. But he would have known if so much time had passed that Bella's lifetime were already a memory. Wouldn't he?
"She left Forks?" He said the words more intensely than he'd meant to but maybe that was because another possibility was beginning to form in his head. Something more insidious.
Alice hung her head, "No, Edward. She's dead."
He was on his feet, then. His eyes wide and his breath, even though he didn't need it, was coming in panicked gasps. "NO!," he grabbed Alice by the shoulders, his stone fingers digging into her hard skin. "NOOOO!" he screamed, again. He would scream and scream and scream if he thought that it would make this hurt just a little bit less.
Behind him, Edward knew that Jasper was carefully regulating the emotions coming off of him in waves. He knew that Rosalie and Emmett were poised at the doorway, ready to take him down if they needed to. But that was all he knew. It felt like his world, everything in it, had been turned upside down. His head was swimming. All he could knew in that moment was that he had to know what happened. He had to know who he was going to spend the rest of his pathetic life hunting down and ending before he found a way to end his own too long life. A world without Bella in it wasn't a world he wanted anyway.
"Tell me," he hissed at Alice, turning dark, half-crazed eyes on her. "Tell me what happened. Who hurt her?"
He wasn't ready to fathom that she would hurt herself. As soon as the thought started to take shape he pushed it away.
"She's... Edward, she's been a mess. I know you asked me not to, but I had to watch out for her. I haven't been back to Forks, but I've been watching. I just didn't think about that one. I didn't think she'd…" Alice paused, searching for the words.
He stood still, still as the stony lump that was once his heart. The heart, that had it been alive and beating, would have been hammering in his chest. Either way, dead or alive, his heart was breaking. It was shattering in ways he hadn't realized it still could break. For so long, he'd thought himself dead and immovable. Unchanging. Like the stone that took years of storms and rain and wind battering it's edges before it finally changed its shape.
"I saw her..." Alice trailed off. She was deciding what to say, how much to say. But her thoughts were moving too quickly for him to catch a whisper of what she wasn't saying. "I saw her make the decision and... I couldn't stop her, Edward. I was too far away and it took less than a minute and she was gone. I can't see her anymore!" Pain shook her voice, made it crack into a million pieces rolling off of her lips.
But he couldn't comprehend that someone else could be hurting just as much as he was right now.
Alice couldn't see Bella anymore, Bella was gone. He sank to his knees, his head in his hands. He choked up a dry sob, he hadn't been able to cry in a century but the emotion, it was still there. He sobbed into his hands, the memory of the relief of crying was like a phantom limb. But he found no relief in this.
"Edward," Jasper said softly, and Edward could feel the calm he was trying to project. He could feel it tugging at his pain, trying to soften it's edges, but he fought it. He wanted this to hurt.
"Fucking stop," he hissed up at Jasper, black eyes burning like coals. "I want to feel this. How?" he rasped, turning his attention back to Alice.
"Edward, I don't think I should…" Alice protested, sagging into the single uncomfortable chair in the derelict hunting cottage he'd chosen for his exile. She knew what he wanted. He wanted her to remember the whole messy thing for him in every detail that she could muster so that he could torture himself with it. "I'm not going to do that."
He was being too selfish to realize how much it would hurt her too. Just as badly as it would hurt him. "I was trying to… do what you'd asked. Not check in too much," Alice said as Jasper stepped up behind her and settled a hand on her shoulder. "But I had to… because it was never fair of you to ask that of me in the first place. She's my best friend, Edward. She was mine too. I loved her too!"
Alice jerked herself out of Jasper's calming grip. In that moment, she didn't want to be calm either. "I didn't realize how bad things had been… for her. Emotionally. I don't know why no one else saw it… around her." Anguish shook Alice's voice, "I don't know why no one idid anything/i. They just left her alone to hurt. And the decisions she's been making… they've been so irrational that by the time I get a snippet, they're already changing…"
Edward groaned into his clasped hands.
But Alice kept going, just like he had asked her to. "She jumped. From so high up… and I saw her go in the water but she never… she never came back up."
"Why are we going back then?" Rosalie huffed. "It doesn't sound like there's anything we can do."
Alice's head shot up with a growl as she narrowed her eyes at the pretty blonde sister she'd never asked for. "You're on incredibly thin ice, Rose. I have put up with your shallow selfishness for an incredibly long time but your thoughtless, callous actions almost lost me my brother when I have already lost my best friend. For just one fucking minute could you shut up?!"
Jasper watched, amused, as Rosalie's mouth opened and closed. Like a fish, he thought. He'd wondered off and on over the years when Alice would finally say to Rosalie's face the things she angrily whispered to him in their bedroom when Rose had finally pushed his sweet mate over the edge.
He watched Rosalie storm out but he knew she wouldn't go far. Whether they liked it or not, they were family. And maybe it was time that Alice said something instead of bottling it all up until she knew that Rosalie and Emmett were far enough away from the house that they wouldn't overhear her frustration when it bubbled over the surface. Emmett flashed an apologetic wince before he pushed out into the snow to follow her. For better or for worse, he would always follow her.
Just like he would always follow Alice.
Like Alice worried that Edward would follow Bella.
Change came slow to them, slower still to Edward it seemed. Maybe because he had been the youngest of all of them when he'd been changed. Jasper had never shared Edward's ideas about morality and souls. Why should it worry him when he would never die to find out how right or how wrong his little brother was? To him, Bella had simply ceased to be.
To Edward, though, she had gone somewhere he would never be able to follow.
"We have to go back to say goodbye," Alice said softly, crouching down beside Edward. Joining him in his pain. Pain that only the two of them truly felt. Bella had meant things to Alice and Edward that she simply couldn't mean to Jasper. Not while the blood beneath her skin forced him to keep his distance and only get to know her through Alice's stories.
"I need to say goodbye," Alice said, firmly.
Edward couldn't speak. Didn't speak.
But he nodded, just once.