I don't own Twilight. What I own is my character's behavior, personality, background, and plot of the story.

Thanks to my Beta MadMooey18 for her continuous help, support, and love.

Edward stands in the crowds of black. Everyone is sad. There are people in tears, people with frowns on their faces, but not the most important people. They aren't here. They are in a hospital recovering from an accident that killed their loved one.

They say it was a drunk driver. He lost control of the wheel and drove into the other lane of the road. Edward doesn't understand. His mummy and daddy sometimes drink wine but they never drive after they do that. They never kill people. They never make people dead. How could someone do that? Don't they care about the safety of others?

Edward also doesn't really understand what dead means. Why does a person lay silently like they are sleeping? What if the doctor made a mistake and that person is just sleeping? Do they suddenly wake up in a box under the ground? Do they spend the rest of their life in the dark? How will they get food and water? Will they not get bored from doing nothing for that long? How are they not afraid of the dark? Can't he at least leave a phone with a charger in the coffin?

He knows that he would want one if he ever found himself stuck alone. The mobile phone will have a flashlight and games.

Why do people die? His daddy once told him that you can shock someone's heart with electricity if it stops; it can make it work. Did they try that? If they don't know how, did they at least ask his daddy for help? He would have helped them. He would have saved him.

Before they arrived to the funeral his mommy told him that he couldn't go to the coffin and try to shake Mr. Charlie awake, when he suggested that they should try to shake him. He doesn't understand why that isn't a great idea. They told him that death is like sleeping except that you don't wake up, but what if you actually do but no one has ever tried to wake them?

He is supposed to be sad, and he is kind of sad. Mr. Charlie was always nice to him. He took him and Bella on fishing trips. He helped him catch his first fish. It felt good, until Bella yelled at them to put the baby fish back in the water.

He is mostly sad because he is really worried about her because she is in the hospital. She broke a whole bunch of bones in the accident and couldn't come to the funeral. Bella broke some of her ribs, her arm, and her foot in two places.

Her mummy also broke many bones and couldn't come to the funeral either.

He is really worried about her. Since she found out that her daddy died, she hasn't talked to anyone. Bella is really smart. She read about dying in a story during the summer holiday and looked it up to understand more then. She didn't need to have it be explained to her like him.

She refuses to talk to him, the doctors, or her mummy. She doesn't cry. She cries silently when she thinks no one is looking. He visits her and brings books to read to her. Once he is done reading, he pretends to go to sleep so be can see what she will do.

He originally wanted to catch her doing something like maybe trying to comb her hair or reading a book so he can tell her to stop pretending to stare into space and look at him when he visits, but she cries instead.

He doesn't feel bad about pretending, but he is sorry that he thought she was pretending.

He watches as they lower the box that carries Mr. Charlie into the hole they dug. He feels weird. This whole thing feels weird. He shouldn't be here. His mummy didn't want him to come. He persisted and pestered them until his parents said okay.

He is only doing it because he knows that Bella might want to know the details of what happened. Who will tell her when her own mummy didn't attend? Plus, adults like to pretend that kids are stupid. They wouldn't have told her the important stuff. Like who cried really hard? Who stuck their finger up their nose when they thought no one is looking? Who made a boring speech? Who made a fun speech? Who didn't want to attend? Who acted really weird? Who is an ugly crier? Adults think those details are lame, but they are so important to Edward. He hopes she will find them useful. What else is he supposed to do if he can't tell her stuff like that? He can't be completely useless.

His mummy takes his hand and as she leads him toward their car, he asks, "Can we go visit Bella?". She nods then waits for him to get into the car seat and buckles himself up before closing the car door then walks around to the driver's seat and gets in. Once buckled in, his mum pulls out of the parking lot of the cemetery and heads to the hospital. With the only two people surviving Mr. Charlie in the hospital, it didn't make sense for them to hold a wake, not that Edward knows what a wake is.

Once his mummy reaches the hospital's parking lot and parks the car, he quickly unbuckles himself then gets out of the car. He isn't reckless, so he waits till she gets out too then takes her hand and drags her to Bella's room. He walks as quickly as he can without running. The second time he came to visit Bella he tried to run to her room since he knew where it was; his mummy yelled at him and told him that he needs to hold her hand and not run in a hospital. He learned the lesson. Now he is trying to figure out how fast he can go without his mummy telling him to slow down.

Finally, he reaches Bella's room. He stops and takes a deep breath then knocks on her door and waits to see if he would be told to come in. She doesn't make a sound as usual, so after another minute, he walks in. His mummy leaves him to go to see her mummy after she says hi to Bella then it's just the two of them. He walks in slowly because he doesn't want to scare her. Maybe she hasn't noticed that he came in yet.

"Hey Bella," he mutters as he hoists himself up in the chair. He watches her as his feet dangle in the chair waiting and hoping that maybe she will answer him today. She doesn't and he sighs in disappointment before he catches his hands. The doctor said that we need to make her happier. We need to make her laugh and do the things she enjoys doing. She can't know that like her he is sad.

He claps his hand trying to show excitement and tells her, "You wouldn't believe what I saw today," and then he launches into a speech in which he tells her all of the interesting details of the funeral. He tells her that Mrs. Cope was an ugly crier; her face scrunches in the weirdest ways. He tells her about one of the officers sticking his finger up his nose and how one of the kids in their class saw him and did like the policeman but then wiped his finger on the coat of the lady in front of him.

It has the opposite effect as the expression on Bella's face gets worse; the kind of worse that happens before someone cries. "Oh my God. I didn't mean to make you sad. I am so sorry. I won't repeat those stories again. I will never ever tell stories to you again as a matter of fact. Please don't cry," he pleads with her, getting off the chair and standing beside her looking eye to eye with her.

A tear rolls down her cheeks that he hastily sweeps away. He doesn't want to make her cry. How stupid is he? Are his story skills so bad that he made her cry? She opens her mouth and a noise comes out. He doesn't understand what she says. He thinks that she might have a dry throat so he goes to the other side of the bed where the water pitcher is and gets her a cup of water to drink.

After she drinks she tries to speak and finally, a sound comes out, "My fault," she matters in a hoarse voice.

"Of course not, Bella. Mike has always been disgusting," he tells her dismissively. Edward is too excited and too proud of himself for getting her to speak, to think of what she meant or the bigger picture of her statement.

"Accident ….my fault," she mutters looking at him.

Tears start rolling down her cheeks more freely and he tries to sweep them away but more come and before he knows it his vision gets blurry and he starts crying with her while muttering, "Not your fault," over and over again while shaking his head from side to side. He didn't want to make her cry. He doesn't want to cry. He doesn't even know why he is crying. It makes zero sense. He should be happy that she is speaking to him. He should be able to explain rationally to her why it's not her fault. Crying isn't part of the plan.

"What's going on?" he hears his mummy say in the doorway.

"She thinks it's her fault. Tell her it's not, mummy. The accident isn't her fault, right? Tell her mummy, please," Edward pleads with his mummy to agree with him. It's not fair for the accident to be her fault. Bella is too young to be responsible for someone dying. She did nothing wrong.

"But it is. If, if I wasn't careless and stupid they wouldn't have been fighting. They would have seen the car coming our way, and daddy would be okay. Mummy would be okay. This is all my fault. I am such a bad person," Bella mutters hiccupping throughout her reply as her voice gets more garbled and her shoulders shake more violently.

"Of course it's not, sweetie."

They hear a new voice speak in the doorway. He looks up and realizes that his mummy is pushing Bella's mummy in a wheelchair. His mummy pushes her to Bella's bedside. He doesn't know what happens next as his crying gets too loud and his mummy pulls him out of the room. He tries to protest telling her that he needs to stay with Bella but she tells him that Bella needs to talk to her mummy and they need privacy. He doesn't understand why Bella would need privacy. There aren't any secrets between them. They are best friends for life. Best friends don't need privacy from each other, but his protest is no match to his mummy's persistence as she leads him to his daddy's office,

"What happened?" his daddy asks, rushing towards him the moment they walk through the door. He picks up Edward and places him on one of the chairs then crouches down in front of him.

"I made Bella cry," Edward tells him then cries even harder and he continues, "I was trying to make her laugh but I failed and now she thinks it's her fault that Mr. Charlie died."

His daddy hugs him as his mummy explains in a hushed voice to him what actually happened.

Once his crying starts slowing his daddy pulls away and says, "Son, she lost her dad, of course, she is going to cry. That is normal. What isn't normal is her not crying."

"But I was the one who made her cry. I was telling her something funny and she started crying. I didn't mean to make her cry, I promise. I won't tell her a funny story again if they make her cry, I swear."

His Daddy nods thoughtfully in all the right places then tells him, "Let's make one thing clear, when we are sad we should cry. What you did is the right thing. Our emotions are like shaking a Pepsi bottle, if we don't let the bubbles out when we see them we burst like the bottle, okay?" he asks to which Edward nods in understanding.

"Moreover, when a person is going through something sad, they will cry at really weird times. It doesn't mean that you made them cry. It means that they needed to cry to feel their emotions properly, got it?"

"But I am the one that made her cry, what did I do wrong?" Edward asks, swiping away at his cheeks. He understands what his daddy is saying, but he made her cry. He made her remember that she is sad. He doesn't want her to remember to be sad.

"You didn't do the wrong thing. You did the right thing Edward," his father explains patiently to him.

Edward's frown is the answer his father receives. "You were being her friend, Edward," his father explains.

Edward's frown deepens. "I don't understand."

"Okay, let me give you an example," his father tells him then pauses to think of one then continues, "Imagine the teacher gets angry at you. Would you tell Jimmy about how you felt, or would you tell Bella?"

"Bella," Edward answers in a duh tone.

"Because you trust her," Carlisle states. Edward nods his head.

"That's also why she cried in front of you. She trusts you more than everyone else," Carlisle tells him.

Edward nods his head and is silent for a second before he says, "So it's not my fault that she cried?" His daddy shakes his head.

"And my funny story is a funny story?" he asks.

"Well," his daddy says, looking deep in thought. "You have to tell me the story before I decide if it's funny or not."

Hello lovely people of the internet,

This chapter was slightly hard for me to write for many reasons. It took me many times to figure out how to write it. If you have read my other story, Risk it All, and you find yourself thinking, I have a penchant for writing funerals and starting chapters with funerals, you're not incorrect.

I think funerals are a fascinating place to examine how people think and behave. There is so much performativeness to it, yet so much honesty.

If you think that makes me a weirdo, that's fine. Not the worst label I have been given.

What do you think will happen to Edward and Bella's friendship? How will Bella cope?

You can find me as Aseel Ayelia on Instagram, substack, and Tumblr to read my original writing.

Let me know your predictions in the review section, and until my next update,

Stay Safe