Once, he'd thought that maybe he would be the hero. That maybe he icould/i be the hero. That he could protect her from every stumble, every fall. That he could be right, something more, something better. Once, Edward had thought that he could be a man, something more than the monster.
Every mile closer to Forks, he realized how wrong he was. How completely and totally oblivious he'd been. He'd thought he was saving her but all he was doing was pushing her towards that metaphorical and literal edge.
Every mile closer to Forks, he realized that he had been right the first time. When he'd asked her, iwhat if I'm the bad guy?/i And she'd laughed him off, she had refused to see that in him.
Bella had refused to see the monster, even on his darkest days. And where had that gotten her? He'd brought out the very worst in her. He'd made so many mistakes where she was concerned and he was only just beginning to see it now that it was too late to do anything about it. He'd dismissed her feelings as shallower than his own because she was mortal. He'd refused to see her as an equal in their relationship because she was human. He was just beginning to grasp the edges of that realization as he sat in his pain.
They were close, now. Rosalie behind the steering wheel, Alice riding shotgun. He knew that they had left Emmett and Jasper in the backseat with him for a reason. To stop him, in case he decided to run. To run to the Volturi. To end this, just like she had.
Alice had seen it, she said. She had seen Rosalie calling Edward, telling him that he could come back now. That Bella was gone. She had seen Edward going to the Volturi, stepping out into the sunlight and letting them clean up the mess. That vision was the cause of the current tension between Alice and the blonde in the front seat.
Alice had been able to prevent at least one of her visions from coming true but she worried for how long. Edward was persistent. Once he'd made up his mind he was unyielding. How long until he slipped away from them and found a way to die? How much longer could she prevent what was feeling more and more inevitable?
And he had to admit, the idea was extremely appealing. More appealing with every passing second, every mile closer to Forks.
He'd searched Alice's mind over and over again. He didn't care anymore what an invasion of privacy it was. There was something there that she was trying to hide from him and he wanted to know what it was. But Alice had buried it under memories of Bella… happy and alive. Maybe because she knew that that would be too much for him for now, he wouldn't poke at those memories too hard because they hurt too much. The pain was nearly blinding.
Edward didn't understand Alice's almost obsessive need to go back. To drag him back with her. Bella had been his only tether, and if she were gone, there was nothing left. If Bella were dead, and there was nothing he could do to protect her or save her, there was no reason to go back.
Not even Carlisle could bring back the dead.
He searched Alice's mind, again. Hoping he could find a chink in her armor. Just like Alice's need to return to Forks, he was almost obsessive in his own need to figure out what she was keeping away from him.
There was a part of him that wanted to watch it all play out, but Alice refused to show him. He knew that the knowing wouldn't bring her back. But he needed it, craved it. He wanted to use it's sharpness to open up his own wounds. He couldn't explain it, just like he couldn't explain why her scent had appealed to him so much more than anything he had ever experienced.
It felt like they had been driving for months, but with Rosalie and Alice behind the wheel it had only taken them a day and a half to cross the country. The Forks county line was passing by them in a blur.
If Edward's heart could beat, it would be thumping in his chest. He wondered if they were too late for the funeral, if all that was left was so much turned up ground and a headstone. He couldn't explain it, but he needed to see her body, just one more time. He needed to know that she was really and truly gone… he needed to follow her into the dark.
His fingers were already dialing her phone number before he could explain it to himself. iWhat would it help?/i He thought, and then, iWhat would it hurt?/i
He snapped his phone shut before he had to listen to Bella's voice on the Swan's voicemail. If Charlie hadn't answered maybe it was because he was still at the funeral...
"Edward?" Of course Alice had seen his decision the minute he had made it. But he was quick, quicker than Jasper and Emmett, reaching out for him. His movements were fluid, sure. He leapt from the moving car and landed on his feet in the middle of the narrow road that would carry him all the back into Forks.
There was still time. He couldn't fix this, he couldn't make it right. But he could be there for her, one last time.
He didn't belong there, skirting through the forlorn scrub of pines bordering the cemetery. They were lowering the casket into the hard, wet ground. Edward twisted away, staring at the tree line. If the pain of knowing that she was dead had been bad, the pain of watching them put her in the ground was unbearable.
He could make out Charlie, Jacob and Billy Black. There were few mourners and he recognized only a couple of them. The sparse crowd looked as though they were mostly Charlie's friends; Fishing buddies from La Push, gathered around to lay his daughter in the ground.
Anger bubbled up inside of Edward... where was Mike Newton now? Angela Weber and all of Forks High School. It was unfathomable that Bella had not touched each and every one of their lives the way she had changed his. The way she had changed him so irrevocably. What he'd thought was stone, changing imperceptibly slowly over centuries of wear and tear, had turned to clay in Bella's hands.
She'd wet her hands and pressed her shape into his heart and there it would stay until he was nothing more than dust.
He didn't belong here, standing just out of Charlie's line of sight, mourning her from a distance. He didn't belong here, with all of the maybes and the what ifs. Guilt was clawing up his throat, regret was threatening to bring his feet out from under him. What if he had never left? Could all of this have been prevented, would she be here beside him right now? If he had never left?
Had he been so selfish and blind that he'd really never realized Bella had the capacity inside of her to hurt herself… had he really thought that Charlie and her absent mother were enough to tether her there? How had he been so naïve as to trust Renee, who was so selfish that she'd forced her child to raise her like a parent, and Charlie, who had been content to mold up here in the dampness alone... never fighting for anything in his life... how could he have entrusted them to care for Bella in the way she'd needed someone to care for her?
He remembered Alice's words now... why had no one noticed? Why had no one seen her spiraling?
It felt as though years had passed before the last of the mourners were black shadows on the edge of the parking lot. And longer before the landscaping crew had finished heaping dirt into the hole that held his entire existence.
When they were gone, when he was alone, Edward trudged through the wet grass. If he had wanted to breathe, he wouldn't have been able to. If he were human, he would have been sobbing. But he had lost that ability centuries ago and he hadn't missed it, until now. Now, he threw himself down into the fresh dirt. The pain, it was too much. It was going to kill him, drive him insane. One or the other and neither was looking that bad to him. He longed to be breakable enough to die from heartache, it would have been a blessing. The heart that couldn't beat, the body as unyielding as stone: more and more, it was becoming a curse.
Now all he could do was lay there and trace his fingers over her name engraved into the stone. He would hook his fingers around the familiar letters and try to remember that crawling into the ground wouldn't bring her back. But through the pain that was clouding everything, he couldn't think of anything better than lying down there with her for all eternity.
He wondered if his kind could starve. Wither up and die after long enough.
He hoped so.
Hoped so with everything left inside of him.
His cold, stone hard fingers found the letters of her name and dug into their chiseled granite lines.
Edward's eyes snapped open, his fingertips pressed into letters that were wholly unfamiliar, not at all what he was expecting. He was staring up at a headstone that read Harry Clearwater. Beloved father, it said, beloved husband. His fingertips, still dangling off of the H, froze.
The gravestone, the one that he had knelt in front of in supplication, it wasn't hers. His stone cold fingers swept over the name, carved out of stone like it was carved out of his own skin. He blinked once, then twice. Edward didn't know what he expected, maybe that he was delusional. That the pain had brought him over the edge and now he was seeing things that weren't there. Couldn't be there.
Alice had seen Bella die and she hadn't seen anything else. He knew that she had been watching, he wasn't stupid enough to believe that this wasn't hurting her almost as much as it was killing him.
Harry Clearwater, the name was wholly unfamiliar.
Edward was on his feet, darting through the open cemetery, from grave to grave. She had to be here, otherwise, why would Charlie have been here? Standing off to one side, looking for all the world that everything had come crashing down on top of him.
He checked them all again, the human facade slid off of his shoulders and he was nothing more than what he was. Moving too fast to be human, he double checked each of them.
There was nothing there, or at least, Bella wasn't there. For once in his long life, Edward was disjointed, confused. The Earth had tilted on its axis and left him there, struggling to find his balance.
Fleeing, he cut through the woods. It was like slipping on a familiar pair of gloves and finding the grooves where his fingers had worn indents into the leather. Finding the footholds, racing through the trees that were wet and alive, it was familiar. Comforting, when nothing else was. Edward pulled himself up short right before the big wood and glass front door. Their house had set, empty and untouched, for months.
Carlisle would know. He was the proverbial father figure, always right. Carlisle always knew the best course of action. Or maybe, Alice. Maybe Alice had seen something, anything.
He wouldn't allow the glimmer of hope to flourish, to take root deep inside of him and spread it's limbs. He tried to swallow it back but he couldn't stop that imperceptible ember of hope that had lit up inside of him, lied to him and told him that maybe she wasn't dead. Alice's visions had been inaccurate before. Not often, but nothing was certain.
"Carlisle!" He was barely through the front door, struggling to keep himself composed, struggling just to keep himself standing. "Alice!"
He never heard a footstep, but they were all there. Emmett was bristling, ready for a fight, any fight. But he always was.
"She's not dead," he said. If he had been human, maybe he would be out of breath. Maybe his voice would crack. But he wasn't and it didn't. "The funeral, it was for Harry Clearwater. She's not dead."
Alice sank down to sit on the stairs in one fluid movement. She moved like a ballet dancer, or maybe like a ghost. He never knew which one best described her. "This doesn't make any sense," she said. She massaged her temples with the tips of her fingers and let her eyes go glassy and unfocused like they did when she was lost in her own head, coaxing out a vision to set them all straight again.
"I saw it, I knew that Edward didn't want us to check in on her. To have any sort of interaction with her at all. But... I loved Bella too. I wanted to make sure she was okay."
He ducked his head, he couldn't meet her eyes. Or Esme's. Alice had been hurting, almost as much as he had been hurting. But he hadn't cared about that, then. Hadn't cared that they had loved her too, just like he had loved her. Still loved her. He couldn't put Bella in the past tense, not yet. She was still far too much alive to him to do that. To bear doing that.
"But I watched, when I could. And..." she trailed off. It was almost imperceptible, but Jasper leaned in closer and closed the gap between their bodies in one quick motion. So slight, that maybe someone else wouldn't have noticed it. "And, I should have seen it coming, but I didn't look all that often. I was trying… I didn't look often, but I saw her standing on this cliff and there was a river down below her, rushing with currents from a storm. I didn't know where she was, I had never seen anything like that in Forks."
She slipped then and he wasn't sure if it was intentional or accidental. But she finally let him see what he'd been begging to see since that night in the snow. It took all of his efforts to hold himself up, to stay on his feet. He wanted to brace himself against the wall, sink down to his knees. If he could sleep, he would be dreaming about it. Having nightmares that woke him up screaming her name. Bella murmuring the words "You wanted me to be human," before she plunged off the side of the cliff.
"And then, she just jumped. She jumped and I saw her fall and fall and fall. She went down underneath the water, and I could see her for a few seconds, caught up in the current. And then she was gone. I kept watching, waiting for her to come up but she didn't. She never came up."
He could pick out their thoughts, broken and disjointed, because in that moment, everything was broken and disjointed. Esme was thinking about him, her son, as always. Wondering what this brief slip of hope would do to him. If he allowed himself to believe her alive, would the pain of losing her all over again destroy him.
And he knew it would.
Alice, so certain that Bella was gone but she wanted to doubt herself. Rosalie… he didn't linger on her thoughts too long because if he did he worried that he might rip her limb from limb. Carlisle, the only father that he could remember. He sought out his father's eyes because he needed to know what they held. Carlisle's expression was sad and his thoughts were sadder. It was devastating watching his son crumble in the way that Edward was falling to pieces. But there, there was also a flicker of hope that Bella had survived her leap. After all, Carlisle's thoughts said, where else would she have been buried? Forks had but one small cemetery and Edward had checked it thoroughly. There was a chance...
"I think," Carlisle said softly, stepping forward. "I think that there is a ichance/i that we don't have the whole picture yet. I think that we owe it to Edward and Bella to get the whole picture before we make any further decisions. Maybe Bella has been admitted for psychiatric help if she was as depressed as Alice saw... I can make some calls tomorrow."
"Thank you," Edward breathed, barely noticing as Esme wrapped her arms around him and pulled him gently to the couch.
He was tense and wound up as Esme tugged him against her shoulder and worked her fingers through his hair as she soothed him like a mother. He tried to let her comfort him but there was no comfort in not knowing where Bella was or if she was safe. Not knowing if she were dead or alive. Not knowing...