Memoirs of Her Scent

by

Amaterasu Kinesi

(EDITED — Oct. 8, 2014)

Chapter Nine

Unrelenting

…

An eerie and absolute silence preceded my words. Meanwhile, Edward and I stared each other down, waiting for the other to break the tense silence. Then, suddenly, laughter was heard all around us. It erupted so abruptly from Edward's mouth that it made him look unhinged, encompassing the previously muted darkness.

Were it agreeable with his actions and were it not for the fact that there was no real emotion behind the gesture, I would have deemed Edward's laughter maniacal. The sounds that were leaving his throat with each chortle and filling the silence between us was anything but humorous in nature. In fact, his laughter was demoralizing and empty, devoid of any emotion. The epitome of a void.

"How exactly did you happen across that elucidation, brother?" asks Edward.

Something substantial but incognizant flared within me at his words and tone, Edward was mocking me. Hearing his condescending tone sent a rush of something foreign that burned my insides without mercy, reminding me of just how cold my entire being had become after my change.

A guttural hiss thundered from my throat, a warning. In that instant, I wanted nothing more than to snap my teeth across Edward's throat and annihilate him. Actually, I also wanted my venom to contaminate the streams of flowing red that animated Edward's body and ensured his continued immortality, which had been forcibly taken from the elixir of life that belonged to lesser existences and provided him with his, until it completely consumed him. Indeed, this violent desire was something I could see and envision myself following through to the end.

"Do it," he challenged, seeing the bloodlust in my mind. Edward's voice, determined eyes, coiled body language, and overacting emotions were telling me just how much he would not mind losing his immortality to me, right here and now.

"No." I shake my head. Disgusted, I let go of Edward's throat and take a step away from him, it is as if I believe that just being near him would eventually end up in my bursting into flames.

"Is this your cowardice showing?" he taunts and I almost grin.

"If I abide to your suicidal wish, I would only be aiding you to abscond this world and unnecessarily leave behind a devastated Bella to always mourn for a selfish bastard that didn't deserve her," I justify. "I can't have that. Not on my behalf. And Bella doesn't deserve that."

"How would you know what she deserves?" Edward demands, massaging his 'bruised' throat.

I can feel her pain and the hurt that your words caused her. That's how. Instead of speaking my answer, I find myself thinking it, not able to bear saying the words out loud without my voice faltering. It is unbearable, what she feels. Stronger than any pain I have experienced before, emotional or otherwise. I continue to think and accompanied the thoughts with images, watching for Edward's reaction. Not even during my time in the war did I come across such immobilizing pain like Bella's. The betrayal–

"Enough!" Edward cries, a tortured cry for clemency.

"The betrayal Bella feels… the whole that you just ripped through her heart…" I went on, my voice hushed but assertive. "That's irreparable, Edward. She effin' trusted you–"

"I said, enough!" he bemoaned again.

"She gave herself to you without reservations and this is how you're going to repay her?" I could no longer hold my tongue, even if I had wanted to. It was as if I were in some sort of forsaken trance. Each word I spoke was meant to atone for the tears that, if I listened close enough, I could still hear sliding down Bella's smooth cheeks and falling into the soil –my words were paying back for each of them, I would make sure of that. "By crushing her trust in you when things got just a little too dark for your taste?"

"Shut up!" Edward hissed, teeth bared, and coming at my throat, pinning me to a tree that immediately turned to splinters under the forcefulness of the action.

Now I was the one gasping for unneeded breath.

How ironic, Edward. The truth seeker can't stand to hear the truth, my mind spat.

Edward growled, a warning.

You may crush my throat and silence my voice, but you can never silence my thoughts, brother. Another growl, followed closely by my own agonized and guttural growl as Edward broke my arm.

"There are ways to silence thought, brother," Edward spat and the grimaced, the echoes of pain that resonated through my thoughts echoing in his mind as well.

"But… never –for long," I groan.

"Point made." Glaring, Edward pushes me away and releases his grip on me with a hiss, trying to escape my presence and thoughts without much luck as I follow close behind. My arm promptly healing and my throat uncrushed, I tread on behind him, easily keeping up. Coming to this realization himself, Edward stopped trying to evade me and instead started pacing before me, nose flaring as he breathed and trying to regain control. With each lethal movement, I could feel the swirl of emotions underlying his frustrations.

"Edward…"

"Jasper…" He stopped his pacing, turning to face me. "I –I had to do it. Can't you understand that?" The look in Edward's eyes pleaded with me for some small measure of understanding, his own plead flowed from his body and to mine, a threaded agglomeration of screaming emotions that ventured to mix with my own turmoil.

Anger.

Pity.

Aggravation.

Sorrow.

Confusion.

Resentment.

Disappointment.

Devastation.

"No," I finally say, voice strained. "I cannot understand. It does not make sense to me, what you are doing, leaving Bella when she is at her most vulnerable."

"She is vulnerable because of me! If I hadn't exposed Bella to you–" Edward rants, looking as aggravated as he does apologetic. I shrug, showing that I had not taken offense. "To our family… to the dark side of the world she never knew coexisted with her own. If I had not fallen for her to begin with…" Edward trailed off and I stared at him, speechless in the face of his dramatics. "Who did I think I was, trying to get to know Bella and hoping to eclipse our worlds into one? Even during an eclipse, the sun and the moon may join as one, for a couple of precious hours, but then, the minutes are up and they must separate once again, to avoid throwing the world into calamity."

Edward kept pacing back and forth, deteriorating the ground beneath his feet. "The sun and the moon were never meant to be together," he pronounced with conviction, "even though they share the same sky. They are the leading roles of a perpetual dance of tragedy. Always meant to dance around each other and see a glimpse of the other, without ever really seeing eye-to-eye or touching…"

The look on Edward's face as he finished his verbal spewing was that of a lost and devastated man, desperately trying to find his way back home and finding no one to offer him a lead as to which way was north. I felt his desperation as my own. It was as if I had run, headfirst, right into a concrete wall without bracing myself for the impact and the knowledge that there had been a wall all along had escaped my notice.

"Edward… I think you should ignore all reason and go back to her," I suggested weakly, feeling troubled by the look of despair in his black eyes. "It's not fair to Bella, you leaving her because of what happened with me. Especially without explaining your reasons."

Edward's guilt washed over me like a torrential of tidal waves as I spoke, and the force with which it surged off of his overwrought body like a helical thread that threatened to sway me further into the pits of his overpowering agglomeration of emotions. Trying to stem off the surge of Edward's emotions, I detached myself as best I could without giving my demon free range and tried to remain levelheaded.

"It's not fair to Isabella that I put her in danger, merely because I've decided to act against all reason. I shouldn't have fallen in love with her in the first place," he countered stubbornly.

"It wasn't your decision to make, Edward." I shook my head, feeling exhausted by our conversation and its unforeseeable destination.

"She's in danger as it is, being with me. I can't expose her to all of us like that. It is like you said Jasper, she trusts me too blindly. Can she not see that I am a monster?"

You? I laughed bitterly and without any real humor. A Monster, you? Edward, really?

"Do not patronize me," Edward cautioned, his gaze piercing and searching for any hidden meaning within my thoughts.

"I am not," I said irritably. "I am only stating a fact." Look, if Bella did not see me as a monster, even after the way I almost attacked her, I argued mentally, how could she ever be open to the possibility that you, the one she is madly in love with, is a monster? If anything, brother, you are merely unhinged!

My mental voice possessed a stronger edge than I had intended, one that I could not quite control, or understand and its possible source troubled me. However, I pushed the alarming and elusive elucidation aside and opted for reexamining its origin at a later date, if at all.

"That's…" Edward started to argue.

"Bella will not understand your reasoning, Edward," I interrupt. "Not when she understands you well enough to know that you are someone that is constantly at war with his nature." Fisting his bronze hair, Edward pulled at it almost savagely and shook his head, stubbornly choosing not to listen to reason. "We all fight our nature, Edward, and she sees that. She sees the very struggle that has united us as a family for so long for what it is, a war that we conquer as many times as we lose it." As I spoke and stated these facts, I knew, somewhere deep within, that they were true. "Therefore, in Bella's eyes, we couldn't possibly be of any harm to her –even when we've lost the fight and shown her how much of a threat we actually are." Bella would agree, for I was sure those were her very thoughts. "Your girl is that compassionate. Therefore, knowing her as you claim to know her, Edward, it really shouldn't take you reading her mind, not that you could, to understand that about Bella and what goes on inside her head."

Edward's body tensed at my last words and then, suddenly, he was crouching on all four and readying himself to attack me. Steeling myself for his attack, I exuded nonchalance from every pore on my body and cleared my mind of thought.

"You… you can't possibly understand this situation, even with all that sensibility…" he finally managed to hiss, choosing not to attack me for now.

"You are right, Edward. Why don't you explain it to me," I spat, dexterously crouching my body into a fighting stance that was similar to Edward's and came to me naturally, a second nature that I'd honed during the vampire wars and continued to perfect. "In the end, my opinion will remain the same, were your girl is concerned. You need to go back to Bella and make things right."

"You are the one that made a mess of this, so why don't you go back and make it, as you put it, right," Edward challenged vehemently, making me flinch.

"You know what?" I answer calmly, straightening myself to my full height. "Maybe I will, Edward… Great suggestion. First thing you've said that actually makes sense tonight." Satisfied by the shock overtaking Edward's features, I continue, "Why don't you go ahead, flee and hide and while you're at it, before you get on with your coward's way, do tell Alice."

"You can't possibly be serious…" he mutters.

"That is, if your decision continues to be that of fleeing, then I do hope that you won't let Alice wait up for me." Edward's eyes flash dangerously at the suggestion, but he remains quiet otherwise. "If this is something that we all find agreeable, then, when I am able I will surely join my mate at later time." As I have my say, Edward's face gives away nothing. However, his emotions are another story. I've rendered him speechless with incredulity. "Oh, and Edward?"

"Yes?" he answers wearily.

"Please, tell her…" I request, "Tell Alice, I love her still."

With those final words, I turn my back on a seething and stunned Edward and begin to run toward Bella's general direction. Using Bella's scent as my point of reference, which still lingers with the dampness, I am eager that it will lead me to her and surreptitiously follow the memory of her scent.

"I shall do that…" I hear Edward whisper stiffly, promise made, as I venture further away from where we'd been arguing and lose myself within the foliage of trees, allowing my final thanks to be carried back to him in the wind. "…I'm sorry…"

I'm still not sure about whether or not Edward really did say those words, for they could have been wishful thinking on my part; however, for my sanity, I like believing he did.

A sweet and pungent smell, similar to that of a wet dog, stopped me hot on my tracks as I neared Bella's vicinity, bombarding my sensitive sense of smell with its unexpected assault. Then, I heard the quick thumping of paws running over moist soil echoing in my ears, the sound practically muted. Something was approaching, and fast.

My eyes followed Bella as she, in her desperation, deliriously and blindly continued to search for Edward in this unfamiliar territory. Something like hollowness took over me as I watched Bella stumble and fall, time and again, trying to decide how best to approach her. She looked so torn. So devastated by her loss and betrayal that I couldn't find any traces of that wide-eyed innocence I'd seen on her face the day we'd been introduced to each other.

"Edward… Edward, where are you?" I listened to her whimper, over and over again, while my rationality crumpled with each whimper she let escape and the saltiness of her tears coated my taste buds.

Just as I breached a decision, voices that seemed to come from all directions shattered the silence of voids. Simultaneous shouts broke out all around us, all echoes of Bella's name, followed by that disgusting smell of wet dog, which seemed to permeate and follow a certain perimeter. A branch broke off somewhere to my left and then a tall shadowed figure followed, filling the air with the now familiar scent of wet dog.

So he was the source… I noted curiously.

Overriding instinct before it could take over, I moved away from the scene just as I heard Bella reply to the cries of her search party and alerting them to her position. Bella's response was hollow and sorrowful, her very own tears drowning out the usual musicality her voice had to offer, while she waited for someone to rescue her.

Patiently, I waited along with Bella, listening intently to everything that happened outside my immediate perimeter of sight and remained alert in case I needed to protect her. Though I wanted to talk to Bella, I still had enough common sense to know that talking to her now would be a mistake and probably make approaching her later on difficult. Therefore, I decided to wait and talk to Miss Swan when she was on her own again.

At the moment, as it was, Bella's worried father, Chief Swan, and the wolf that had rescued her moments ago and brought her to her house were surrounding her. As it was, I wasn't too optimistic on the possibilities of my being able to walk up to Bella, while in the presence of these two males, and calmly request to have a conversation with her. Since it would have been difficult otherwise, I decided I could wait. Or so I kept telling myself as my patience wore thin.

Until, thankfully, Bella managed to shrug off all of her father's questions about what was wrong and everyone else's inquisitive gazes and headed for her house and, I hoped, up to her bedroom. Impatiently, I waited some more, until the wolf scampered it off and reminded myself to be generous enough to allow Bella some time to collect herself, or to completely fall apart.

From the many times I had heard Edward mention how he always managed to enter Bella's bedroom undetected through her window, I knew just what to do myself. Bounding up the trunk of the tree near her window at lightning speed, I set my sights and aimed for that very window.

Darkness.

Where it not for my eyes being able to see just as clearly at night as I did during daylight, that is all I probably would have been able to see as I entered Bella's bedroom. Absolute darkness. As it was, my eyes fell upon the huddled up form of a disheveled Isabella, frantically searching for something on the floor while on all four.

Whatever it was Bella had been looking for, she did not find it.

"Bella," I whispered quietly, without intending to.

Bella's body tensed momentarily at the sound of my voice, before she decided to face me and clumsily stood. As she stood before me, blindly gazing in my direction, Bella's tumultuous emotions reached out to me and in them, I uncovered the heartbreaking longing she was attempting to burry deep within her and failing. Swallowing thickly, I found myself unable to look away from Bella as I saw the over flooding tears swimming in her eyes, unrestrained and cascading imperiously down the planes of her smooth white skin.

Sensations that I had never felt before smothered over my entire body at the sight of her sorrow, causing a confusion of sentiments within me. I just wanted to comfort Bella and make her pain go away, any way I could. Yet, somehow, I felt that my particular gift would not be enough to dominate such strong emotions of devastation, this time around.

I too, wanted to cry.

No, I wanted to curse the skies! Knowing how the heavens had embraced my very own grief before, someone who did not deserve its sympathy, I felt it was unfair that such a small person like Bella had to cry her woes on her own. Why would the skies allow for Bella's body to shake with grief the way it was doing and not even match her mood?

Bella deserved much more than nature's indifference, of that I was sure.

"Ed –Edward?" Bella stammered within a whisper, hopeful.

Her hopefulness gnawed at my insides, making my monstrosity apparent as guilt engulfed me. Cursing, I berated myself for not thinking this through from all angles. Meanwhile, my lifeless heart sank, knowing that when she noticed it was I and not Edward standing before her, Bella's pain would undoubtedly double and turn to lashing fury.

"Is that… is that you?" It was as if she dared not hope. And Bella was right in her skepticism, she should not have hoped. As I languidly and reluctantly stepped forth, I sucked in a breath and held it, hating myself for being the instigator of her false hope.

I'm sorry, Bella, it is only I, Jasper, the cause of your pain… My mouth hushed as the thought burst into my mind unheeded. I only wish to help.

Bracing myself, I waited for what would follow; Bella would scream at me, her eyes full of hate, I was sure, and ask me to leave. All so that she would not have to glimpse my monstrous face, the face that had shattered Bella's perfect spell, and had sent everything in her world spiraling out of control. However, nothing happened. After all, Bella wasn't a mind reader, the last time I'd checked.

"Bella, I am sorry…" I managed to whisper, at last.