A/N: The ninth one, enjoy. Requested by scribblscrabbl. This one's probably the most twisted.
Title: you lie to yourself so much it hurts
Pairing: Edward/James
Prompt: someone finds salvation in everyone and another only pain
Words: 276 words
Disclaimer: The Twilight series and its characters belong to Stephanie Meyer; I only borrow them for this non-profit work. I get practically NOTHING out of doing this except my own enjoyment and hopefully that of others.
. you lie to yourself so much it hurts .
Some people say that you find salvation in the strangest places. Edward thought that this was one of them, at first.
There was a cocky, over-confident way that James stood, but there was the underlying pain that Edward could see in those bright red eyes of his. He was lying, he lied a lot lately, about James' mind; there was much more too it then just a simple "looking for a challenge out of life" attitude that he gave off.
Always more.
They'd never faced down; they would never get a chance too now. But Edward can imagine how it would have gone, could see the suppressed passion, rage, amusement, everything. With Bella, he could never be any of those things; not unless she became one of them, and he couldn't bring himself to do that. It was painful.
However, he would be lying to himself (and he didn't think that he was capable of doing that; he wasn't that good at lying, but also, he wasn't mentally unstable, so that wasn't a possible reason or cause either) if he said that the loss of the tracker was regrettable.
Edward just had to push it down far enough so that no one noticed, it wouldn't do to raise questions about what was going on in his mind. He wouldn't want to alert Alice or Jasper; even Esme would be able to catch on after a while.
So that's what he continued to do, lying, denying the pain that he felt. He might have helped James to find salvation, but in doing so, he'd only found pain.
Pain that he'd fallen in love so deeply and so quickly with someone he had barely known.
FIN.