"Who alone suffers, suffers most i' th' mind,

Leaving free things and happy shows behind"

— Shakespeare, King Lear

Dido's Lament- Henry Purcell

baum- Cro

Senza un perché- BowLand

My brain felt foggy, disjointed thoughts barely came together. I couldn't tell what he was trying to say to me. To have hope, or to lose what little I had left?

I didn't even know when Emmett had left.

No. No. No. Felix. Not Emmett.

I closed my eyes tightly, trying to focus. Mind over matter, remember? But my throat felt so dry, my stomach empty. It was like the desert. I had never spent much time there, but it seemed lovely before. Warm and vast, everything a blank constancy without the bustle and rapid changes of other climates. My perspective had thoroughly changed, and I longed for the plush forest and the lively rain again.

I rubbed harshly at my eyes, trying to clear my mind, but it wouldn't come. Clarity was lost, and myself along with it. My thoughts wandered without an anchor, threads fraying as I came undone. I don't know how long I laid there before I felt the urge to stir again, but then the light came.

The sun was shining in a buttery yellow glow through my eyelids, and I stretched out as I woke up- woke up? That didn't seem right- and rolled out of bed. My back felt odd, like it was compressed, but my vision was as sharp as it had ever been. Something didn't feel right, but then his head peeked around the corner of the nondescript room and the world tilted on its axis.

He was there. He was right there in front of me, and it was as if nothing had changed or happened. If anything, this was better than I could have imagined- was I imagining?- because he was smiling his familiar crooked grin and looked so welcoming, so happy to see me. There was none of that coldness in his sparkling green eyes that had been there when I left. That space that had been there the moment I bit Alice.

"'Morning, s-s-sleepy," Edward greeted, and I found that even thinking his name didn't hurt right now. He reached out and encircled an arm around my waist, and I felt the warmth of his skin on mine. But it wasn't the right kind of warm. He felt like he was about the same temperature as me, which couldn't possibly be right. I glanced down at where we were connected, but no, there was still that normal flush under his skin and I could hear the thrumming of his heart.

His heart, and my own.

I couldn't believe it. I could hear a heart beating in my chest, feel the beat against my ribs. And there was blood rushing under my skin. No, this wasn't right at all. This wasn't possible. But I found I couldn't think, because Edward's mouth was on my own, and it didn't even matter that there was no flood of venom in my mouth

If it had been possible- was it possible? I couldn't be sure anymore- I would have fainted. Edward's large hand was spread across my swollen abdomen, his palm pressing into the bare, stretched skin. And just then, there was a kick.

"S-s-someone's hungry!" Edward exclaimed, smiling as if there was nothing wrong in the world. As if this was how everything had always been.

Edward scooped the baby- the baby? Where had that come from?- into his arms, and I was struck by how similar they looked. The baby had a delicate shock of bronze hair and wide, long-lashed green eyes with the same specks of gold flecked in the depths of his iris that Edward had. Maybe, also, there might have been some hints of me in there- no, that was impossible- in the heart-shape of the baby's face and the curve of his small mouth.

"Bella, c-could you grab EJ's b-bottle?" Edward asked, bouncing the baby on his hip as he walked him over to the high-chair, already set up in the plain dining room.

I found I couldn't move. My feet were heavy and cemented to the floor, and besides that, I had no idea where the bottle was. This baby's bottle was somewhere and I was responsible for it.

Luckily, I didn't have to look far. I opened the refrigerator and there was a full bottle, sitting right there next to a carton of orange juice. I found I knew what to do, warming it in a bowl of water so it came to the correct temperature.

By the time I finished, Edward was seated at the table already. He had two bowls of cereal in front of him, and the baby was bouncing on his knee. Edward was handing him pieces, and EJ was smashing them with his chubby fingers. They both laughed.

My face felt warm. I touched my cheek, and looked at my finger experimentally. Tears. I was crying.

"C-come s-s-sit, love," Edward called, apparently not noticing this startling phenomenon. I was on autopilot. I brought the bottle over and handed it Edward, then mechanically sat at the seat that obviously belonged to me.

How could any of this be happening? I marvelled at the sparkling liquid on my finger, brought my other hand to touch my chest where a heart was beating. Then I felt another kick.

"B-baby girl sure s-seems active this morning," Edward commented nonchalantly. How was he not appalled? How was this normal to him? He was focused on the baby, and his own breakfast.

Experimentally, I raised one of the dry balls of cereal to my mouth. EJ was looking up at me expectantly, as if he knew what was about to happen. The crumbs were flaking off on my fingertips, and I could still see each microscopic piece on the ridges of my fingers. My vision was still as acute as ever.

"Bella," Edward said. I turned to him, my hands shaking so hard the morsel of food fell from my fingers. He was looking at me with a gentle rapprochement clear in his eyes, "You n-need to take c-care of yourself."

Then everything faded away into a cold, piercing darkness.

The entire wing of private rooms was completely silent, and Bella stood experimentally for the- no, not Bella. Me. I am Bella.

I blinked rapidly, trying to get my bearings, though I was vigilant as ever. There was a languidity to my thoughts, they came slow and dripping like honeyed molasses, but without any of that accompanying sweetness.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!- that, all by itself, becomes a passion. Death's a sad bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year, to so delicately undo an old wound,

to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Better,

despite the worms talking to the mare's hoof in the field; better,...

better somehow

to drop myself quickly

into an old room.

Better (someone said)

not to be born

and far better

not to be born twice

It was pain. Intense, acute, and the most physical of pains was burning through my throat and feeding into my empty stomach. I forced my head to bow so I could look down at myself. There was no hole, and no pregnancy. My abdomen looked unchanged and as intact as I had been five hundred years ago. But it certainly didn't feel right.

Was I going insane? It wasn't normal to see things. My mind felt foggy, and my feet moved me forward of their own accord before I realised why.

The scent of blood was wafting through the air, thick and heady.

I needed it. I needed it. I needed it.

What was I doing? Why was I resisting? If my hand was on fire and there was a bucket of ice water beside me, would I stop myself from quenching the flames and cooling the skin? That would be logic- the rational and natural thing to do.

But it was an incomplete metaphor. I could hear the panic of beating hearts thumping a terrified rhythm into the walls of stone. There were people attached to that blood- people with lives and loves and a soul to hold on to when everything else was taken away. Could I stop myself from putting my burning hand in a bucket of ice water if someone would die if I did so? Could I burn, for these strangers?

I could burn forever for him.

"In Hegelian tragedy, moral intuition mandates a belief in the inevitable triumph of our ethical institutions, even at the expense of a hero's self-destruction," I said to myself, no longer bothering to whisper. I was aware of my own growing insanity, and found I no longer cared who else in Volterra knew it. "Am I a hero?" I pondered.

That was why I was here, wasn't it. If it wasn't for him, Carlisle could have come in my stead, and likely been in and out after a quick but pleasant visit with old friends. But we needed to protect our secrets, and it was me who Aro wanted, who he had always wanted. He wouldn't physically force me to stay, but this was even better, and more effective.

I felt a little more grounded with the reminder of why I was here, but it didn't curb the fire that threatened to consume me.

I had never known anyone to go as long without feeding as I had. There were others who had stilled into stone- Aro, Marcus, and Caius, for example, and I knew of two Romanians still on the run who shared that ashy pallor and milky eyes. But it wasn't the same. They had stilled into a state of divine meditation, and, as they were doing today, their prey came to them.

I was still as well, but unfed and weak.

I closed my eyes, though it did nothing to stifle the hunger. I couldn't bring myself to stop breathing, even if it meant stopping the delicious scent of fresh blood that was coating my mouth in venom. Every instinct in my body was begging me to keep my strongest and basest instinct of scent activated in this the most dangerous of places.

It was as if I was wading back through the Garden of Love- the one from the William Blake poem. This place had once been a place of safety and comfort for me. How many sunny days had I taken refuge in this very room, flipping through the histories and stories my host had preserved through the years? When I was young, Italy was my Garden of Love, and Volterra was the Chapel.

But now I was old, and I could see everything for what it was. The building was filled with graves, and the patches of green grass that bore sweet flowers that I had once enjoyed were really paved with tombstones. How many pieces of literature had I read that dealt with the loss of innocence? Lord of the Flies, Age of Innocence, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird. I was every protagonist, entering starry-eyed with wonder and leaving as Atlas with the weight of the world on their shoulders.

I mentally read through each piece, finding myself everywhere and allowing myself a glimmer of distraction as my thirst raged on.

Why was I here? I had been thinking long as hard about the theme of the loss of innocence.

It was all I could do to compare him to Simone de Beauvoir's mother as she wrote, "Her love for us was deep and well as exclusive, and the pain it caused us as we submitted to it was a reflection of her own conflicts... With regard to us, she often displayed a cruel unkindness that was more thoughtless than sadistic: her desire was not to cause us unhappiness but to prove her own power to herself."

That was surely why I was here. Whoever's idea it was to keep me here like this- Aro or Caius, perhaps the suggestion came from Jane- they did it for power rather than torture. Something bigger than I could know was at play here.

Even beyond the twentieth century reflection, there was something far older than even myself that I had been contemplating with abject fascination for most of my existence, debating it in hypotheticals with Carlisle, and since meeting him had become a reality I had been deconstructing in the back of my mind.

Grief.

The divine virtue I had been clinging to, aspiring to against my basest nature for centuries was discarded by this reality, just as Confucius himself had been consumed by it when he lost someone he loved, and in the intensity of that grief, he lost his way and the avenue to a robust expression of virtue.

If this was my reality, I doubted I would ever have a robust expression of anything. If the ache of my being was numb now but for that physical burn, then I could only imagine how unfeeling I could become.

Like Marcus, forced to go on. In leaving me here, with a request not to leave until Aro was available to see me, I was forced to go on as well. Forced to exist with the knowledge that he didn't love me, didn't want me anymore, and forced to succumb to these hallucinations of thirst that forced me to see him again.

For some reason, that wasn't as painful as had become normal. I would have thought that seeing him again would be a divine torture, but it was more of a comfort in this cold place than anything else.

My eyes closed to the dark shadows of my room, I saw him again. Edward.

It was a relief, here. It didn't hurt to think his name when he was standing in front of me, somehow more solid and real than the stone tiling beneath my feet.

"Bella," he sighed, a smile hanging crookedly across his mouth.

"Hi, Edward," I said, now welcoming him in.

He looked at me expectantly, as if he was waiting for me to do something. I glanced around, taking in the room we were in.

It was a familiar setting. The library at home, every wall encased in neatly stacked and deliberately ordered books. I reached out and touched the binding of an old medical tome on battleground triage we had picked up at the closing of the Civil War. It felt as real under my fingertip as anything.

"Bella," Edward repeated, this time with a frown and a hint of exasperation in his urgency.

"What's wrong?" I asked. There was no place for quarrelling here. I didn't know how long I had, but I knew I didn't have time for any dispute.

"You look tired," he surmised.

"We don't get tired," I reminded him. His hand slipped forward, cradling my cheek with its warmth as he stood over me. His thumb brushed along the ridge of my cheekbone, sweeping under my eye.

"So tired," he said again.

"Are you?" I asked.

"Am I what?"

"Are you tired?"

"I haven't slept well in years," he admitted.

"You've been a sound sleeper most of the time I've known you," I said with a frown.

He shrugged, seemingly ambivalent. "Maybe for a while. But not anymore. Not now."

I knew what this was now. I was lucid in this hallucination. He was saying what I wanted him to say. This was an admission of love as much as the words themselves. Whatever deluded part of my brain was responsible for this was feeding me words through this Edward.

"Please don't say that," I begged. I couldn't bear to look up at him. My eyes fell instead to his chest, where I could see his heart trembling inside his tender, soft skin.

"Why not?" he asked. He forced me closer to him. I didn't have the will to resist. When he dissipated, my heart would fracture even further, but for now I needed it.

"I don't know," I cried. "Where did you go?"

"I'm right here, Bella."

"Where did you go?" I cried again, falling into his arms. He felt so warm and right. His hand wandered from my cheek to my chin, to pull my face up towards his.

"I'm right here," he repeated, his voice barely a whisper as his breath caressed my face. I opened my mouth to welcome him, waiting for the familiar press of his yielding lips.

A sharp, unexpected rap on the door came. I opened my eyes, and he dissipated in front of me, his body turning to ash and dust and crumbling through my fingers. I fell to my knees and tried to scoop him back together, but nothing was in my hands.

The door swung open, not waiting for my response. Jane was standing in the doorway, Felix behind her. His eyes widened at the sorry sight of me, but Jane didn't seem delighted by it. I wondered about her unique propensity for cruelty, if she had softened with the years. Once, seeing someone like this, essentially begging, would have filled her with unabashed glee.

Her expression was blank, her tone unreadable. "Aro requests your testimony."