A/N: Yay, it's finished! This one took me forever, and I can't say I'm satisfied, but messing about endlessly with the stuff usually doesn't make it better and only gets my brain in knots, so I figured I'd just call it a day.

I apologize for the long delay, in case anyone minded.

Thanks a lot to wmlaw for the review!!

And now enjoy!

...

It will pass

Things will change

But you don't want to hear that

- Song for Catherine, K's Choice -

In Time

She wasn't paying much attention to the sky, or to anything else, for that matter. Night was falling, like someone had tipped a jar of ink into a bowl of grey sea water. It sank quietly, and slowly, erasing and silencing the world as it went.

The colours of the forest, black-brown and dark emerald, light green in places, all turned blurry, as though the mist were washing them out. They leaked out of the shapes they belonged to, tress and moss and shrubs, and mixed, gradually tingeing everything shades of grey, anthracite to charcoal.

That was good enough to look at for her. Indistinct and dismal, colourless and dark.

She didn't feel the dampness anymore, either. Neither that of the grass nor the soil underneath it nor the air.

She even hardly heard him approach. Certainly would have missed it, had she still been human, but the frightening sharpness of her senses made some things impossible to miss.

He all but plopped down on the grass beside her, looking graceful even as he did something so ungraceful. He seemed perfectly at ease, apparently oblivious to her mood, but Esme was certain he was anything but that.

She didn't move, didn't even turn her head, her mind too tired to respond to anything. It was dizzy from twirling in circles for a small eternity, ever more narrowing circles that lead her past the same thoughts and images over and over again, and slowly focussed on the one thing that she was certain of right now: her pain.

She didn't feel like she could just skip out of those circles, and she didn't want to.

Edward had to know that just as well, but he didn't appear to mind, either. His eyes swept the forest for a moment, as though he wanted to see what it was that held her attention.

"How long are you planning to stay out here?" he asked then, his voice so light, it was almost startling in the heaviness of this dusk.

And the question itself confused her, too. She hadn't wasted a thought on that.

"I don't know", she replied after a while, quietly, her voice somewhat subdued, as though the misty air had permeated it, too.

"You could also lock yourself up in your room, you know?" Edward pointed out, sounding almost amused.

Finally, Esme looked at him, partly out of surprise. Your room? Edward smirked, no doubt hearing her reaction. He also heard her response to the suggestion, though. Her refusal. She didn't want to be inside.

She wanted to run away, to take Carlisle at his word, You're free to leave, of course, and scared to leave as well.

So she sat here, at the edge of the forest behind the garden, the edge between leaving and not daring, suspended, both unable and unwilling to move.

"Trust me," Edward said, voice softer, more solemn, "it'll be harder elsewhere."

She leaned her head against the tree that she had been sitting under for … well, she wasn't sure how long. A day, two perhaps.

Although she was neither in need of the shelter nor of support. It felt odd not to grow physically tired anymore, not to be bothered by temperature or the weather.

"Are you speaking from experience?"

He shook his head. "No, I've always been with Carlisle." Esme turned her head away again and smiled, an empty smile, habitual curving of her lips, saying Then how would you know?

"I've seen a great deal of his memories", Edward replied.

Her eyes turned thoughtful. Briefly, she wondered what those memories were like, of what exactly they were that mentioning them would add that sombre tinge to Edward's voice

"Tell me about elsewhere, then."

Maybe his stories would ease the tearing inside her a bit, the constant pulling away from and towards this place, that house.

Maybe she was just being polite.

The ever-blowing wind shook the treetops above them and sent a fine shower earthwards. With a movement so quick that it startled even Esme, Edward caught something in mid-air, his fingers curling around it before she could see what it was. He just held it there for a while, apparently lost in thought, but then it appeared in between his white fingers again as he began to play with it absent-mindedly as he considered her request.

The dark brown scale of a pine cone, wearing a single white dot like a jewel.

"We're not of our nature good creatures, Esme", he began eventually, a lot of the lightness with which he had arrived, gone from his voice. "We're predators. We kill, for survival, and for territory. Not much different from animals, and like it is with them, cruelty is an innate trait in us. There are rare exceptions, but even them I wouldn't call…", he inclined his head, searching for the right expression, "…merciful", he decided.

"That's how it is elsewhere."

He looked at her, and found wide, poppy-red eyes and frozen features. Her thoughts were turbulent, whirling around his words like birds frantically looking for a place to land, something sturdy enough to support and familiar enough to comfort.

Maybe, he thought, Carlisle was right. She was submerged in her pain, encapsulated so unreachably that her own new nature had barely registered with her. She didn't think about the things Carlisle had already told her during her changing, they weren't important to her now. There was no space for them inside of her.

Edward bit his lip, feeling a tinge of regret.

Carlisle hadn't wanted to bother her any more with what she didn't want to, and couldn't, deal with for the time being, and perhaps it would have been a better idea to abide by that decision as well. Well, it usually was.

Only at the moment, Edward found it hard to tell if Carlisle was simply being reasonable, or rather feeling guilty.

But then Esme's thoughts calmed, maybe they had found something solid among the things he had said after all. She met Edward's gaze again.

"How come you're different?" she asked eventually.

He shrugged. "Carlisle," he said, and somehow the single word sounded like a transliteration for a wealth of emotions. And as if it explained everything. Only for Esme, it didn't.

Her companion chuckled.

"He has a gift for doing things that are supposed to be impossible", he told her, and somehow captured her attention a bit more firmly than before, not so much with the words he chose than with the way he said them. With reverence, and a certain softness.

"Like not feeding off human blood", he went on, and then something made his lips curve into a grin, and he lightly shook his head. "Or being a surgeon, out of all things."

They were both silent for a while, Edward apparently lost in thought, Esme wondering why he was here, telling her those things. Trying to find out if they meant anything to her.

"A gift?" she repeated, maybe because that really bewildered her, maybe because she was reminded of Edward's own peculiar ability to hear thoughts, and because that, despite all, was the least frightening puzzle of this existence.

"Carlisle wouldn't call it that", Edward replied. "He'd say it were necessities. Things he needed to do because otherwise he couldn't have lived with himself."

Esme frowned. Why, then, she wondered for the hundredth time, had he changed her, too?

"Not just like that, if that's what you're thinking", Edward said quietly. He would have liked to hear her response to that, to know if it was what she was thinking, but it was almost as if she deliberately didn't dwell on his remark.

"Why are you telling me all this?" she asked instead, sounding weary.

He shrugged. "I thought perhaps I could help." Esme almost smiled, but then it turned into a shaking of her head and she looked away.

"I know", Edward went on, "Carlisle said that too." He sighed and ran a hand through his bronze hair. "Perhaps you're both right, and our stories are too different. You're not struggling with what we are or even how we live, you're grieving." He paused, his eyes dropping and focussing on his pine scale again, thoughtfully. "I suppose I can't give you any advice there after all."

She was quiet for a moment. "Didn't you leave anyone behind?" she asked then.

He shook his head. "Not really. My parents died before I was changed, and most of my friends, too."

"I'm sorry", and she meant it.

Edward pursed his lips and reached over to her, holding out the pine scale. Purely on impulse, Esme took it. She stared at it for a while, remembering the many times that her father had brought her something after a day of working in the forest behind their house. A piece of peculiarly shaped wood, a handful of beechnuts because she liked their shape, or a bit of bark that was fragrant with the smell of forest earth and resin. Whatever he had brought her, it had always been warm from having been carried in his palm, or stowed away in the pocket of his pants.

The scale was cool, like it had never been touched.

Edward suddenly chuckled. "Well, hard to tell if you need to be, isn't it?" He paused thoughtfully. "It's been a long time anyway", he added after a while, and then something seemed to cross his mind. "So … maybe we're not that different after all?" He looked at her, eyebrows raised, as though waiting for an answer, or at least some kind of reaction to his finding.

Esme said nothing. She wouldn't have known what. To her, he was right and wrong at the same time.

"I may have been fighting other demons when I was as young as you are now, but my mother died the night that Carlisle changed me. I missed her too, Esme. But the pain fades with time."

She knew what he was thinking, for once she did. She was old enough, had seen enough to know that it was true, and time healed many wounds. For this one, however, she was certain that even a million eternities could never be enough.

"I believe you", Edward said, and he did. He believed that nothing was worse for a mother than losing her child. "But pain isn't forever. It'll get better, and then, perhaps, you'll see it the way I do. I was dying when I didn't want to, and then I got a second chance."

The fluid movement of her fingers stopped.

"And how would that make sense?" she whispered, voice strained, as though she were fighting to keep it so low only so she wouldn't shout. "I wanted to die. How is this a second chance, what would I want one at?"

She gave him the scale back and locked her arms tightly around her body, as though the coldness in the damp air were registering with her.

"What about happiness?"

Daniel was my happiness."

Even to Edward's ears, the last words almost dissolved in the wind. They sounded as though they were the last of her strength, and as they faded into the darkness of the forest, they pulled her with them, into the black and green-brown shapelessness, or maybe they let the falling night into her head, her entire body. She seemed perfectly absent, her thoughts so far away from this place and time that everything around her disappeared into non-existence.

Edward watched her in silence for a long while, trying to follow her through the maze and the undergrowth, thorns and sharp, bleak wood, that were her mind. It was difficult, though, as if she were always running, fleeing like someone pursued, a flicker of cinnamon, alabaster and black, constantly on the brink of being to far away or too hidden for his eyes to see.

Hard to tell what she was thinking. Maybe she was lost in her emotions, lost in how everything, every moment of every day of timelessness felt to her right now, lost beyond any concrete thought.

So maybe their stories were too different for Edward to be able to help her after all.

Maybe it was true, and she was struggling with a pain that didn't differentiate between human and immortal, didn't change with the overcoming of death or diminish in the face of a new beginning.

And it was nothing Edward knew, or Carlisle.

She couldn't let it go, but she didn't want to, either. Now that she wouldn't have death, she at least wanted that maze of thorns that had invaded and filled every corner of her consciousness, in a way that Edward couldn't comprehend. It was the embodiment of her pain, and she didn't want it to retreat even a fraction, not a single shoot to shrivel up.

Suddenly, her thoughts changed direction and she shook hear head. "I don't want to hear any more. Why are you telling me all of this?", she asked again, sounding as though she were truly tired.

"Because Carlisle wouldn't", Edward replied. "He thinks that you have a right to your pain, and a right to be angry."

She smiled vaguely. "And you don't agree?"

"Of course I do. But I also think that that isn't everything there'll ever be for you." He paused, but when she didn't react, he continued: "This is a new beginning, you know? Whether you like it or not. There wouldn't be anything to go back to, anyway."

She shook her head jerkily, understanding what he meant, and trying to deny it. Only she couldn't. "I know", she said, desperation lacing through her voice. "I know that neither my mortality nor my death would have brought Daniel back. I didn't –"

"Yes", Edward interrupted, "I know. You jumped so everything would end. But was that what you wanted?"

She stared ahead again, into the pitch black forest, the trees invisible to human eyes now, the darkness billowing out from between them in slow bubbles of silence.

"Or was it just the only possibility you thought there was?"

TBC

Thanks a lot for reading, and now go make my day and review!!

In your dreams, in your bed
In everyone and in your head
On the wall, it ain't white
In every letter that you write

In the way people talk
In the shape of stones and rocks
He's your hero, he's your god
He listens to this song and nods

In a voice, in a sound
When you're happy, when you're down
It will pass, things will change
But you don't want to hear that

In the scent of the air
On the clothes that people wear
You feel love, so does he
And he's telling you 'I'm here'
I'm here
He's here

- Song for Catherine, K's Choice -