A/N: Thank you to all who reviewed.
Based on The Musings of a Juvenile Delinquent by my brother.
CHAPTER ELEVEN- The diminished flame
Goodbye, my almost lover
Goodbye, my hopeless dream
I'm trying not to think about you
Can't you just let me be?
So long, my luckless romance
My back is turned on you
I should've known you'd bring me heartache
Almost lovers always do
-A fine frenzy-Almost Lover
Hope. How it breaks us all.
How it shatters us to so many pieces we can't ever hope of counting, let alone piecing back together. Shards of ourselves, and we can only stare at them from within the abyss of agony that we cannot ever climb out of.
A lone man throws his head back from the sheer ecstasy of the soul-shredding feeling of incompleteness, and the crescent moon stares on in empathy.
"James Blunt?" Her voice is shrill with disbelief. "You're meaning to tell me that you expect me, Nightwish-worshipper of the millennium, to listen to some guy with a frickin' falsetto?"
He grins like a Cheshire cat, so dazzlingly that the moon hides behind a cloud, knowing that the need of light was no longer felt. "Case in point, yeah."
She flips the CD case around to check the list of tracks, but he knows she's really trying to hide her smile."Hmm."
"There's a song called Tears and Rain." He whispers, and she looks up, startled by his close proximity, and licks her lips and he nearly groans out loud imagining what they'll taste like, what it would be like to see those huge, silvery, elusive eyes when he straddles her and claims her for his own. He clenches his fists in a desperate effort to control himself, but the images keep raging in his mind.
She steps ever so slightly away from him, a gentle smile on the lips he fantasizes about each moment of his existence."As long as it's not Zac Efron, I suppose I'm game."
He smiles like an idiot because he can't help being content in her presence.
If the Moon Goddess had been complete, if she had not been obscured by the ugly, curling hands of the grey clouds, she would have shed some light on the unusual hair of the dreamer, setting it afire in a flash of bronze, yet she can only watch silently at the vision of perfection. He is like the conception of an angel in grief by a sculptor of old, the painted portrait of a Byronic charmer.
It was nothing but hope that had led him here, each night, to dare to dream under the stars. It was nothing but hope that had broken him today, broken him again, and would keep breaking him evermore.
He had been born to suffer. He had died to suffer more.
Suffer, because there is nothing that quite compares to the exquisite anticipation of hope that lingers with us even after the greatest downfall, gives our actions a certain degree of meaning. Now………………
He was beyond that fine line that hope could help. He was truly without that spark of hope that had been alighted when he was born, rekindled when he met Bella Swan and had developed into a raging fire when he had fallen in love with Leah Clearwater.
And he knew that once a fire takes hold, it burns everything it can, and eventually, consumes itself.
He just wishes that he hadn't hoped that this particular fire would pass away, all so long ago. It was so tiring to hear that tortured spirit of his weep like a little boy, crying out in pain.
"I wish life could work out the way they do in movies." She sighs, and he looks at her with half-concealed concern."That the hero would only see the heroine and all the girls around her just fade away into an inconsequential, J-Lo's- comforting-best-friend type of background."
"And I suppose the antagonists will squint and speak in thick, unintelligible accents." He suggests, a slow smile curving his lips.
"And wear sunglasses." She says, decidedly. "Preferably matched with bald heads and Hugo Boss suits."
"And perpetually talk through a microscopic Bluetooth."
She nods, satisfied with the mental image of an unspeakably evil, rich antagonist. "And his name will be Al."
He salutes. "Death to Al."
They break out laughing.
The clouds broke out in rain unexpectedly, the gods crying in his stead. He opens his eyes and they are a shade of liquid onyx, seductively beautiful in the empty, haunted depths.
He climbs into a silver Volvo two very different girls admired at two different points, in two entirely different ways.
As he slides into the soft leather interior, a resilient part of his soul struggled to the surface. "I didn't choose her over you, Leah." He whispers into the night.
But no one hears him anyway, because she hasn't come, nor will she ever return. All he has is the rain, and his own, bittersweet memories.
He doesn't bother to lower the sunroof of the car as he whizzes through the night at 102 km/ph.
A/N: So, first things first.
To all of those who think that this chapter is just pointless Edward-bashing: you're probably right. I just needed to get all the angst off my system.
Second: I won't be updating frequently, seeing how I'm performing along with the rest of the school orchestra in a major event and therefore have practices four days a week.
Third: I've written the way Edward feels when he first starts talking to Leah, only as a different fic. It's on my profile, and is called Surrender my Soul. Feel free to check it out (and review, of course) (:
Fourth: PLEEASE REVIEW!!!!!!!!!!!