Thanks as always to addicttwilght2. Standard disclaimers continue to apply.
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Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
~ "Reluctance", Robert Frost
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Chapter Ten: Reluctance
The trauma of her change had wiped her mind so completely that when she'd first awoken, every single social nicety she'd been exposed to since birth had been nonexistent. For the first few hours of her first day of immortality, she had been abrasive, harsh, demanding, and completely ignorant of her rudeness. After that she'd mostly remained silent and watchful, absorbing every tiny piece of information from the very air around her.
It was an active process and sometimes it exhausted her – a mental heaviness so absolute that she would close her eyes for hours at a time, and so feign the foreign human process of sleeping.
Her social map was by no means complete. She still could not separate what she was meant to feel in any given situation from what she actually felt, and so sometimes giggled at sentences the user had not meant to be funny. So she was not sure which emotion should have accosted her when Edward walked out of the kitchen. What she did feel, what she was still feeling, was shock and confusion followed by blind, indignant rage.
The potency of the feelings whipping through her body grounded her long enough for Edward to make it out of the house. Then she stamped her foot impotently – something she hadn't consciously done since she was about four – and swiftly followed him.
Outside the world was a riotous mess of sensation. She might have paused to focus on how she could actually hear the individual leaves of trees stretching towards the sun, or how she could see, with startling clarity, the many-faceted eyes of insects that scurried, terrified, in her wake, if she had not been gripped with such unfathomable and vicious fury.
Edward had disappeared from sight, running silently through the forest, but her new senses detected his clean, woodsy smell due south, and so that was where she went.
As she ran, she contemplated the bilious rage churning in her stomach. Young as she was, she somehow knew that an action as simple as his stepping away and walking calmly from the house should not have engendered such a strong response from her. Even as her peripheral vision flashed red-hot with wrath, she wondered about her motives. Why should his leaving her prompt these feelings? Surely he had done so many times...
An old memory dusted itself off. Edward's voice in her ear, promising he would never leave her again, that she would never be alone. Edward swearing that he couldn't live without her, Edward sobbing against her with the depth of his need for her.
She nearly snarled in frustration. Having these pieces of her former life was worse than knowing nothing at all about it.
How dare he walk away, how dare he not even try to work things out, how dare he... She muttered various obscenities as she ran, her legs pushing faster with the fuel of her ferocity, her voice hissing from her lungs. She didn't bother to duck under low-hanging branches, didn't care at the thorns that whipped against her skin, twined themselves around her legs in a pathetic attempt to trap and ensnare her. She couldn't feel a thing. She realised, in fierce joy, that she was just as strong as he was now.
Breath puffed from her lungs and escaped her mouth in clouds – abruptly she realised that she could just as easily stop breathing, and she promptly did. Still her legs pumped on.
She realised that she was expecting the sharp ache of exhaustion to pierce her thighs, to run a stitch through her side and trip her up, leaving her red-faced and panting. No such thing occurred. Her body moved efficiently, silently, and she felt she was gliding through the forest like a pale white ghost.
No – it was more than that – she was so aware of everything around her, of how the soft earth shaped itself around her feet as she ran, of how her presence struck unease and even terror into every animate creature in the woods, that she felt almost like an outside observer, viewing life through the harsh unforgiving gaze of the undead. Aware of the beauty of the world and also aware of its ridiculous fragility.
A glimpse of copper-coloured hair through the trees. She pulled her mind back to a single sharp point of purpose and ran faster. His body came into full view, the muscles of his back taut as he ran.
"Edward!" she shrieked, and watched as he stumbled – actually stumbled – and turned to face her.
His face was ashen with shock. And no wonder. Anybody would worry at the sight of her – a ferocious shrew with twigs in her hair, ready to tear her husband's throat out.
Husband... the word echoed in her brain, but before she could wonder at it, he was within leaping distance. And leap she did – propelling her body from a boulder in furious forward momentum. Edward was still frozen in astonishment, and she tackled him easily. He crumpled like a piece of wet paper under her assault, the pair of them rolling head-over-heels before coming to a stop.
She pinned him with her body, her hands slamming his to the ground, her legs twined around his. She glared at him.
"What is your problem?"
He looked terrified. "Bella... what...?"
"We were having a perfectly lovely time before you decided to pull that little stunt! What is the matter with you, Edward? Can't you just be happy, for once in your life? Do you have to turn everything into an opportunity for you to show off what a martyr you are? Why didn't you just trust me? Why did you walk away from me?"
Her voice was shaking, she realised, her body convulsing with a foreign grief. The words were not her own. She had no idea where they'd come from.
Now he didn't just look shocked anymore. Now he looked incensed. His entire body vibrated with fury. Suddenly she was not the one pinning her hands to his – his fingers clenched around hers, squeezing so hard that she winced reflexively, though she felt no actual pain.
That one unchecked movement was enough for him. He threw her off easily, was on his feet again before she could blink. He towered over her as she blinked up at him.
"I'm not the one who walked away, Bella!" he roared, his voice raw with pent-up feeling. "I'm not the one who gave up!"
She regarded him icily. "Sure doesn't seem that way to me."
"No fucking wonder, Bella. I'm the only one in this twisted farce who remembers what you were like before!" His fingers pulled at the roots of his hair – his face was demented. Furious, frustrated, raw, and somehow still painfully vulnerable.
Suddenly she felt cold, and she wrapped her arms around herself as she stared at him.
"What was I like?" she enquired curiously.
His face had shut down now. She had no idea how he'd done that – how a man who seemed literally ripped apart with emotion one moment could appear completely blank and uncaring the next.
"It doesn't matter," he said coldly, turning his back on her.
She leapt to her feet and was facing him again before he could take so much as one extra step forward.
"Don't you do that," she said sharply. "Don't you turn away from me, Edward. We're going to talk about this, whether you like it or not."
Despite her put-on bravado, she felt unbelievably confused. One Bella was sitting back and observing their interactions in fascination, as if watching a play she'd never before seen or even heard of. Another was fully cognisant and enraged, spitting words at this man that on the surface appeared to make perfect sense.
His face was bitter as he looked at her. "What do you want from me, Bella?" he asked. His voice was so tired that it creaked at the edges. For once his face carried the weight of all he'd seen and done in his long, long life.
She paused. "I just want to understand." It seemed simple enough to her.
He rubbed at the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger – a gesture so strangely familiar that it made her want to weep with frustration. "That makes two of us," he said blackly.
"What happened to us, Edward?" she whispered. "I'm lost here, I have all these feelings and I just... I don't understand. Aro told me – he told me we were married..."
He turned to face her. He looked very old and very sad.
"We were married, Bella," he whispered, his voice cracking. He reached out and brushed the knuckles of his hand very gently across her cheek. She felt her skin flash live with electricity and shivered, wondering if he felt it too.
"Were we happy?" she asked, uncertain, unwilling to break this spell.
His entire face lifted, his mouth smiling, his eyes soft. "I was happier than I have ever been in my life," he said simply. She noticed his use of I, and wondered, in frustration, what her own feelings had been.
"What happened, Edward? Why are you so angry at me?" she asked sadly.
His shoulders dropped.
"I'm sorry," he said dejectedly. "I don't mean to be angry – I know it's not your fault. It's me, I should have known better. You were so young. You didn't know what you were getting into. You had your whole life ahead of you, and suddenly you were trapped into marriage with me – stifled and shut out and looking at an eternity of this."
He gestured at his own chest dismissively, smiled sadly at her. "I knew I wasn't good enough for you, Bella. I should have been stronger. I essentially blackmailed you into marriage. You were so – you wanted things so desperately to be good between us that I don't think you considered how few choices you were leaving yourself with."
She frowned. This did not sound like her, in any reality.
"Are you covering something up?" she asked bluntly. "Or is this self-flagellation actually justified in your head?"
He looked surprised and then annoyed. One of his eyebrows quirked at her.
"I'm being entirely truthful with you, Bella," he bit, his recounting of all his failings suddenly forgotten. "I loved you, you married me, and then you left."
She couldn't ignore the way his face crumpled at the corners, or how he suddenly couldn't meet her gaze.
"Why did I leave?" she wondered aloud, as if the question were purely academic.
His head snapped up, black eyes finding hers. "Haven't I explained it clearly enough?"
She shook her head. "If I loved you enough to marry you," she said clearly, "then I loved you enough to stay."
His face froze. "Evidentially not." His voice sounded like a dead thing.
"There must have been a reason beyond this," she said defiantly, her brow furrowing as she thought. "Did you – did we fight?"
...get away from me, don't touch me, I can't think when you touch me, just stop it...
She swallowed, and did her best to drown the remnants of her own voice in her head with some ill-timed humour.
"Did I hit you with a frying pan for leaving your dirty socks on the floor?" she asked, her voice teasing. "Did you spend every waking minute playing golf with the boys while the children screamed and the house burned? Did I..."
"Be serious, dammit!" he snarled, his hands once more pulling at the roots of his hair.
His torment sobered her. She touched him lightly on the shoulder, contrite.
"I'm sorry," she said quietly. "I'm just trying to make sense of this."
"Why do you have to dredge all of this back up? Can't you just accept what I'm telling you?"
"No," she said fervently. "Edward, I can't understand how..."
"How what?" His face was imploring.
Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Can't you feel this?" she asked quietly, gesturing at the air between them. "This is... huge, Edward. There has to be a reason why I only feel normal when I'm around you. There has to be a reason, and –"
His large hand grasped hers. "Please stop this," he said desperately. "Bella, you don't understand – I've been through all of this before, seen it all, heard it all, done it all. Please don't drag me back into this, I can't survive it twice."
"What did I do that was so terrible?" she whispered, watching his face. "Surely, if I left, there would have been a reason – one I couldn't have told you. Surely it had something to do with how much I... how much you meant to me. Why didn't you trust that?"
His hand dropped hers as though it were suddenly red-hot.
"I trusted you implicitly, Bella," he growled. She could see the shadow of something black and dangerous lurking behind his swiftly-cracking mask. "I trusted you so much that I believed you when you said you loved me, only me, when you told me you could never want him. When you promised, again and again, that I was all you needed, and then turned around and ran off with another man!"
She felt something catch in her chest. "What did you say?"
"Ask Jacob Black," he retorted coldly, bitterly. "I'm sure he can explain it to you."
Her entire body seized up.
"Jake?" she whispered, her mouth open, her mind humming.
Jake... running with Jake, hiding with Jake, stuck like rats in that crummy motel room, nights on the back of his motorcycle... Jake holding her, protecting her, loving her as much as he was able... Jake talking to Leah on the phone, whispering his devotion, his voice choked with longing... Jake watching over her, Jake fighting for her... Jake...
"Oh god," she managed, and then her entire body was shaking.
Edward's face was a picture of pain buried beneath layers of toxic disgust.
"If you think I'm going to stand here and watch you remember your lover, you have another think coming," he spat bitterly.
She felt bile rise in the back of her throat, corrosive fear bubbling in the pit of his stomach, and then she was standing, reaching for Edward, clutching at his jumper with desperately clawing hands.
"Edward," she managed to sob, "Edward, you don't understand... he saved me, and... I think they killed him, Edward."
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