Thank you to everyone who read and reviewed the honeymoon chapter of this story! I'm glad you enjoyed reading it. I had intended on just having this be a one shot but since ya'll liked it I think I might do a few more chapters of the book from Edward's POV here and there. I don't plan on doing the whole book, just the parts that I really wanted to see through Edward's eyes. Feel free to let me know what you think but, primarily, I just hope you enjoy reading them. ;)

I own nothing relating to Twilight or any of its components.

If ever there was a time in my long, long existence that I wished for the sweet oblivion of sleep it was now. Actually, wished wasn't a strong enough word. My mind flipped through the synonyms in my head that might better apply to what I felt, yielding results like yearn, need, aspire, hope or want. None of them could describe the desperation in my heart to let my consciousness cease to be for just a little while. If only I could just fade off, fade to black long enough for everything to be okay. I would go to sleep and when I awoke my beautiful Bella, my love, would be all right. She would be smiling that smile at me with her warm, chocolate eyes and she would flush pink at the sight of my open affection for her and there would be no question that everything was as it should be.

But none of those things were going to happen.

I knew I had been thorough, there was no way that I was going to agree to turning Bella into a vampire without being thorough, but having never turned someone before I couldn't be sure that I had done it correctly and Bella's utter stillness gave me no indication of my failure or success, leaving me to sit in torment by her side with nothing to do but wonder.

According to Carlisle, the act of turning a person into a vampire, of making them into a creature like us, was actually quite simple. As long as the heart is still beating to pump venom through the system a vampire must merely ensure that enough venom has been delivered to change the body completely. It acts not unlike an infection. Once introduced, it takes over until the human body can no longer fight to stay alive in its original state and the transformation is complete. A blinding, all encompassing pain ensues while the metamorphosis takes place and then a newborn vampire is made.

But there were so many variables that I couldn't have anticipated!

Bella's body had been so ravaged by carrying Renesmee that even breathing had become a chore. The strain that it had put on her, especially her heart, was enormous. When I heard that snap, when I saw the blood coming too much and too quickly I had tried to be as fast as I could but it was like being trapped under water. Suddenly I couldn't reach her fast enough, couldn't be strong enough or cunning enough or prepared enough. I followed the plan, I delivered my daughter and injected the venom and the morphine, but I had never felt so powerless or so helpless in my life.

Her heart was beating, which Carlisle continued to assure me was a good sign, but her utter stillness was unlike anything we had ever seen. My family all tried to keep their thoughts to themselves, but it was impossible to be entirely silent around me and I could hear their confusion and concern echoing my own. Why was she so still? I could smell the morphine in her system and I ached to believe that her pain was minimal due to its presence, but there was no way at all to be sure.

It didn't matter to me in the least that she would never open her eyes again to reveal the warm brown depths that I'd grown accustomed to falling into or that her skin would never flush again, giving me the only window into her thoughts that I had ever possessed. I didn't remotely care that when she awoke her eyes would glow a fiery scarlet that belied her desire for blood and that a thirst of indescribable intensity would burn in her throat, begging her to sate it with the life force of a living thing. All I cared about was that she survive. I would take her any way she was, just so long as I could have my wife.

A tiny coo echoed downstairs and warmth stole temporarily through my worry. My daughter.

I took Bella's still hand in my own, stopping to note its ever growing coolness for just a moment as I brought it to my lips, and then I kissed her fingers as I allowed myself the smallest of smiles. I had a daughter and this goddess before me had given her to me.

I'd been so young when I turned that having children had been but a distant idea, something that I might do if I survived the war I was so anxious to fight. Having a wife and family had always been something that I had wanted, but that was something people did later. Then I became a vampire and I saw how fiercely our kind loved once they found their mate. I knew I wouldn't be able to have children, but I thought that I might find a mate to share my existence with after my youthful bloodlust and rebellions were over. But my mate continued to allude me and I found myself alone in a houseful of happy couples until the day that this beautiful, shy, clumsy girl stumbled into an 11th grade biology class that I'd taken more times than I cared to recall.

My life was more full, more complete, more rich than I ever knew it capable of being. Bella had opened doors to me that I hadn't even known existed, let alone knew how to open. Because of Bella I now knew what if felt like to be in love, to be jealous and heartbroken but to be overjoyed and exultant as well. Because of Bella I now knew what it felt like to press my lips to someone else's, what it felt like to twine my fingers through the fingers of another. The brush of a cheek, the tickle of breath on my neck, the tingle of fingers in my hair, the intensity of becoming one physically with the person you are one with spiritually. I knew what all of these sensations were now, but 24 hours ago I had no idea that there could be more in light of all of these blessings. Now, as I listened simultaneously to the labored beating of my beloved's dying heart and the happy squeals of our perfect baby downstairs in my sister's arms I knew that my wildest imaginings could never have come close to the reality of my life.

I loved Bella utterly, completely and with my whole heart. My love for her had not and could not change but now there was a new person in my life and my love for her was so deep and total that it was hard to conceptualize. I loved every hair on her head, ever glimmer in her eye. I loved how she grabbed my finger and how she looked at me with eyes that were so wise for her mere hours of life. I loved that I could look at her and see both Bella and myself, a perfect reflection of the love that we had for each other and all that it could create in this world.

Bella's hand in mine grew cooler still and I was pulled from my momentary reverie back to the present. It was a tiny change, imperceptible to a human, but one that I could sense easily. Her human body was dying, her core temperature dropping infinitesimally with each second that the venom did its job. I could feel her flesh yielding less to the touch of mine, see small changes to her features as they smoothed out and began to take on an etherealness that human's found both so beautiful and so strange about us. It went against everything I had fought for to watch her die, to witness her losing her mortal life with each passing moment and it tore me apart. I hated myself for my part in it, I hated myself for being unable to prevent it and, most of all, I hated myself for the tiny part of me that was happy. She would be immortal and I would never have to lose her. I could be with her, hunt with her…love her, with all of myself. No holding back. Part of me reveled in the thought of it, and made me loathe myself with a fervor I'd never known.

I heard Carlisle rise from his position on the couch downstairs and his footsteps as he began to ascend the stairs to check on Bella's progress. He'd done so every hour since he'd arrived back home, too late to aid me in the chaotic moments of Renesmee's birth and Bella's near death, but shortly after enough to make me feel more at ease that I had done everything I could do. I refused to allow myself to hope that I could deserve a happy ending like the one that he saw for us, though Carlisle's optimism was difficult to refute. Yet I hung on his every reassurance with each passing moment like a drowning man holds fast to a life vest as he's being tossed about in an angry sea. With Bella's continued silence, his reassurances were all I had to cling to.

Just before his footsteps reached the threshold of the room where Bella lay a curious thing happened. The morphine, its scent growing fainter and fainter as the minutes ticked by, disappeared from my detection entirely. I felt my nostrils flare as I inhaled deeply, trying to pick up even the smallest trace of the drug in Bella's system but to no avail. I stared at her face and waited. With no more pain medication and the venom still working its way through every cell in her body she had to be in pain, yet she was as motionless as the stone she was slowly becoming.

Carlisle reached out and put his fingers against her wrist to feel her threading pulse. It too had taken on a more labored tenor.

"Still no change?"

I refused to drag my eyes away from her face as I responded. "None."

That's odd. She's so quiet and yet….

Carlisle leaned in and smelled Bella's neck where her carotid artery lay and I knew that he had also noticed the lack of morphine in her system.

"There's no scent of the morphine left."

"I know." My concern began to grow. I was certain now that she was in pain and every fiber in me throbbed with the agony that I knew she felt. I had burned once myself and it was a feeling that no immortal ever forgets. Knowing that she was feeling any of it, knowing that it was because of me, threw me into a desperate state. The idea of her pain was unthinkable to me.

"Bella? Can you hear me?"

This is fascinating. From a medical standpoint, the absence of morphine should indicate the absence of any narcotic effect on her pain and yet she is as reposed as ever. She should be screaming. Her pain has to be unbearable.

Carlisle's thoughts ratcheted up my anxiety to an almost intolerable level. "Bella? Bella, love? Can you open your eyes? Can you squeeze my hand?"

Nothing. Carlisle continued to posit scenario after scenario in his mind, completely unaware in his contemplations that I was hanging on every word. Each theory that came to his mind was more discouraging than the last and it wasn't long until I felt myself beginning to come unhinged. I'd done this to her. I had put her in the mortal danger that now made her survival a looming question mark above all of our heads.

How long had I fought to protect Bella? I'd fought so hard to keep her safe I'd even been willing to suffer the unthinkable reality of life without her, so convinced was I that my absence would keep her safe. But then it became evident that my absence in her life, and her in mine, was more perilous than if we were to just succumb to our need for each other and be together. Yet still there were concerns, questions of her safety that made me hold back and use my judgment time and time again. Her one condition, the one that flew in the face of every effort I'd made to keep her unharmed, had turned out to be the one instinct of mine that had been dead on. Allowing ourselves the pleasure of knowing marital intimacy had, in fact, been the very thing that now dangled her existence like a thread between the merciless shears of the fates. With each passing moment I was becoming less and less convinced that those fickle entities weren't going to snatch my love away from me after all.

And to add to my self-loathing, I couldn't stop the fleeting images that went through my mind, unbidden, of the time we spent making love on the island. The way her hair looked splayed across my chest, the way the moonlight looked against her unclad form pressed up against my own. The way she felt. I would find myself in the middle of a fantasy and then remember that her current suffering was the direct result of those beautiful moments and I would want to scream in anguish.

"Maybe…Carlisle, maybe I was too late." My voice broke, mirroring the way my heart felt at the idea that my eternity may, in fact, not include Bella at all. As a human, I would have at least gotten another 50 or 60 years. But was I now gazing at her last moments? Was I, in turn, gazing at my own?

"Listen to her heart Edward. It's stronger than even Emmett's was. I've never heard anything so vital. She'll be perfect."

I refused the sigh of relief that his words threatened to produce. "And her-her spine?" One of the theories that had wandered idly through Carlisle's mind over the last few moments was that her spinal chord could have fused incorrectly, making her absence of pain not a result of the morphine but of a lack of sensation. The horror this thought brought up inside me was unparalleled. To give her eternity trapped in a body that could not move? What could she have ever done to deserve such a hell?

"Her injuries weren't so much worse than Esme's. The venom will heal her as it did Esme."

Or at least I can assume.

His words were confident, but his thoughts were not. The worry was beginning to become unbearable. "But she's so still. I must have done something wrong."

Carlisle put his hand on my shoulder in a gesture of reassurance and this time I could tell that he truly felt the confidence of his words. "Or something right, Edward. Son, you did everything I could have and more. I'm not sure I would have had the persistence, the faith it took to save her. Stop berating yourself. Bella is going to be fine."

I wanted to believe him, to find solace in his words but until I could talk to her myself, until her eyes fluttered open and she was able to tell me what she felt for herself I would burn with terror at the torment I knew she must be enduring.

All because of me. I'd almost killed and now inflicted unspeakable pain on the only woman I'd ever, or would ever, love because I was too selfish to just leave her to live a normal human life.

I could barely speak above a whisper, such was the constricted feeling in my throat. "She must be in agony."

Carlisle's grip tightened. "We don't know that. She had so much morphine in her system. We don't know the effect that will have on her experience."

It was true. I'd given her enough morphine that had she not been on a path with death already it certainly would have done the job. I lowered my lips to the crease of her elbow, smelling deeply one last time before pressing a light kiss there and detecting no trace of the morphine. I was also losing the scent of her blood, the aroma that had both drawn me too her and repelled me from her. Slowly, so slowly, it was being replaced in her ever hardening body with venom and its scent was lavender and earth and rain. It was everything her blood had been, but in a way that no longer sang to my thirst. Now, her scent sang only to my heart. It was entirely new and yet it was still entirely Bella. I'd never smelled it before and yet I would know it anywhere as her.

A flutter of hope went through me but I beat it back. I didn't deserve the happy ending I desired. There was no way it could be mine.

"Look blondie, you have all of two seconds to hand her over or I'm going outside and lifting my leg all over your dream car."

The brazen threat downstairs was met with an involuntary guffaw from Emmett, a growl from Rosalie, a giggle from Renesmee and a scowl from me.

The Dog.

I hadn't left Bella's side since her transformation had begun but I had been kept apprised of the goings on in the family from their thoughts, their updates and their incredibly loud arguments. A father for one day and I was already being forced to deal with the idea of a soul mate for my daughter due to the mystical imprinting process the Quileute wolves underwent.

I know your reluctance to leave her son, but should you intervene here? As Nessie's father?

I shook my head. There was no threat to Nessie, I'd heard the thoughts of all the parties involved and love for my child was the only mitigating factor. "No, I'm staying right here. They'll sort it out."

Carlisle and I talked a few more moments, keeping the conversation entirely to the imprinted wolf and the surrogate mother Rosalie had become. How could so much be happening simultaneously while my wife's life hung in the balance? My world had stopped. How could anyone else's still be turning?

Carlisle turned to leave the room.

I'll send Alice up when she comes back. I know you are anxious for an update.

I smiled slightly, grateful that he knew me so well that I hadn't even had to ask. Alone again I stared at the changes that were now beginning to appear more obvious. The smoothing and hardening of her features was giving her face an almost entirely different appearance now. She was still Bella, but another version of herself. I know she never believed me when I cavalierly told her the changes to her physical form would be of no concern to me but I'd truly meant it. Of course I'd always considered her impossibly beautiful, but I'd fallen in love with the girl, not the face. Only after I'd gotten to know her a bit, to see how unique and singularly special she was had I noticed the exquisite package she came wrapped up in. But that was all it was. A package. An outer wrapping on Christmas morning that contained the most wonderful gift anyone could ever have.

The house is all set. You should SEE the closet Edward. She is going to be the best dressed newborn anyone has ever seen!

Alice's footfalls came to a stop directly behind me, her enthusiasm bubbling all around her. I wished I could share it, but my concern hadn't ebbed since Carlisle's departure and the only chance I had for any peace of mind was for the visions I could see in hers. " How much longer?"

Her thoughts focused on Bella and I could see her, alive and vital and impossibly beautiful, in her mind's eye. "It won't be long now, see how clear she's becoming? I can see her so much better now."

Because I could see her too I felt instantly, yet cautiously, better and I couldn't resist teasing her a moment at her inability to see the wolves or Renesmee. Alice's gift was so special and so important to us that I couldn't resist taking her down a peg now and again. Isn't that what brothers were for anyway?

All joking out of the way, I wanted to see Bella again; to see her whole and all right in my arms. "Focus Alice."

"Right. Bella's almost too easy to see now."

I saw a little cottage in the woods, the one I'd seen in its planning stages before we left for the honeymoon. Esme had put a home together for us as she had with Emmett and Rosalie and it was going to be absolutely perfect. One could say it was years of practice at reading people and learning their preferences but I knew it to be Esme's nurturing gift that made her able to provide just the right thing to make someone feel at home and comforted.

Alice's vision widened and I saw myself walking with her and Bella through the woods up to the threshold of the cottage. Alice flitted away when we reached it and Bella unlocked the door only to look up at me with surprise when I scooped her up and carried her inside. The look she gave me then, one of total trust, unconditional love and if I was not mistaken, smoldering passion made me feel like the wind had been knocked out of me. She would be able to look at me like that so soon after her change?

I couldn't keep the sigh from escaping my lips. If Alice had seen it like this, than it was more than possible that she was going to be okay. "She's really going to be fine."

Alice's tone was almost admonishing over my lack of faith. "Of course she is."

The idea that she was going to be okay was so intoxicating, so exciting that I no longer had the patience for anything else. I had to know when the torment would end and I could have my wife back. "Could you concentrate for me? On the clock-give me an estimate."

She sighed as if put out but I could hear the amusement in her voice. "So impatient. Fine. Give me a sec-"

I saw a scene in her head of Bella opening her blood red and bewildered eyes to gaze about the room, and the muted sound of a baseball game could be heard in the background. The announcer made mention of the bottom of the seventh inning and my spirits soared. This was the same game that was currently going into the second inning on the television downstairs! Could it really be true that a mere five innings stood between this moment and the first moment of the rest of my life? "Thank you Alice."

I was now barely aware of Alice's presence, even when she commented that Bella would be dazzling as if she hadn't always been in the first place. All of my awareness was concentrated on that game downstairs and each second of it seemed three times as long now than it ever would have.

Swing and a miss. Mariners have to take advantage of the man on second if they intend on stretching their lead from two runs to three.

I'd always liked baseball. The finesse of the game and the strategic, almost chess-like, game play had always been enjoyable for me to take in during idle times. Emmett liked all sports and would often watch games with me while Jasper might catch a game or two as would Carlisle. It was really the only one that I watched with any regularity and I found it quite relaxing. Now, however, was not one of those times and I felt quite certain that I was never going to look at baseball in the same way again.

Bella's heart began to speed ever so slightly and anticipation began to billow through me like a thin stream of silky smoke. It was starting to happen. I grasped her hand tighter. Her flesh held it's own against mine.

And that's the fourth foul for Cliff Lee. He better be careful or he's gonna find himself looking up at a hit pretty soon here.

Impatience raged inside me and I found myself, ever so briefly, wanting to tear the pitcher's arms off. How hard could it be to throw a strike and end yet another inning? He had one job to do!

Top of the seventh and it's still a 2-0 ballgame.

Without warning Bella's heart flew into a frenzy. I wanted to scream for Carlisle, to come out of my skin with anticipation and worry and excitement and fear. I knew it had to hurt, that these last moments of her life had to be frightening and painful but I also knew that it was all about to be over soon and I wanted nothing more than to comfort my wife when she awoke in a few moments, disoriented by her new life.

I forced my voice to stay calm. "Carlisle."

I heard him rise from the couch and take the steps quickly, Alice following closely at his heels.

"Listen." They gathered around Bella and stayed silent for a moment, everyone taking in the frantic beating of her heart. I was reminded of hummingbird wings in flight by its sound. It was almost time.

"Ah, it's almost over."

Carlisle's words confirmed what I already knew and I stood, still grasping her hand in mine, and stared at her face while Carlisle and Alice made plans to get everyone into position.

Full count. The Rangers need one more strike to round out the top of the seventh.

There was a flurry of activity around me and then we all went deathly still as Bella's fingers twitched in mine. My eyes widened as I waited for her to move again but she lay perfectly still. "Bella? Bella love?"

The thought flitted through my mind ever so briefly that maybe she had been conscious the entire time and merely holding herself in check as to not worry me. It would be just like her, to suffer in silence so others felt more comfortable. I abandoned the idea immediately however. No one could withstand that much agony in silence. Could they?

My thoughts were once again interrupted by the impossible tempo of her heart nearly doubling its frenzied staccato and, with it, her back arched up off of the table. Now I knew she was fighting a battle against the pain and my hysteria leapt back in full force. It was only moments away from being over but I still desperately willed it over with my thoughts. Please! Please let her suffering end!

And here's the seventh inning stretch with the Mariners fighting hard keep the lead here at Safeco field…

Her body fell back onto the table, the sound louder and harder than it would have been had human flesh and bone been making contact with the surface and not the hardened shell she had now completely become.

Take me out to the ball game, take me out to the crowd…

Excitement and terror warred inside of me and I barely registered the arrival of the rest of my family, except for Rosalie and Renesmee. I was terrified for her pain, with each millisecond that it continued I felt as if I would lose all control over myself and begin screaming like a mad man in my utter inability to make it stop. Simultaneously I was excited and anxious for her to awaken to her new life. We were moments away from being a family. Forever.

Let me root, root, root for the home team….

Her heart thudded once.

For its one, two, three strikes you're out-

It thudded again.

At the old ball game!

And then there was silence. We all stood calmly, every gaze in the room intent on Bella lying on the table. For just a moment I feared the worst. Her mortal body had died and all that was lying before me was its shell. She wasn't going to wake up, the visions had been wrong. I had lost her.

Then she opened her eyes.