Secrets and Lies

"Go away, Edward! Just leave me alone!"

I have hurt her.

She looked so small, even on the narrow hospital bed, huddled where she had made her retreat, the blanket drawn up over her head. Hiding from me. Stifling her breath. But not to my hearing. Every soft, strangled hitch bore it in upon me.

I have hurt her.

My visit to her was necessary. The consequences of exposure ... But now I only feel mean-spirited, and a bully.

There is nothing I can do. I cannot even speak to her. Covering my nose and mouth as I did, just to draw breath. She must think I am a lunatic. And still my thighs and shoulders twitched incessantly, each spasm an aborted leap, as the beat of her heart, the blood of her cheeks, flooded my mind. Red delicious apple of my eye. Even as I walk away from her room, I cannot stop myself from questing her scent, her taste, from amidst the antiseptic and rot of this place. The cage of my hands barely masked her at all.

I cannot even speak to her, and with that thought, comes the next: I want to. I want to speak to her. I want to know all her secrets. And I want to tell her mine.

"She's a teenage girl, Carlisle. She's going to say something. It's just a matter of when ... and where ... and to whom."

Rosalie! What is she doing here? I told her I would take care of this! She doesn't trust me. In her eyes, I am a boy, still. Forever. Even though I am older than she.

Rosalie and Carlisle are in his office. Their voices are pitched too softly, even for vampire hearing, from where I am on the medical floor; but their thoughts are crystal-clear as they speak.

The image of Bella's face is in Carlisle's mind. I feel a constriction in my chest. She has seen him, truly seen him. The look of transfixed wonder in her eyes is one that we know, even if she has not yet recognized it herself.

Poor child, he thinks.

I cannot race to his office. Even at human running speed, it would cause comment. That is the last thing that I need or want, right now. I must walk ... Walk! ... At unhurried human pace, my insides churning, my face locked in a bland mask.

Rosalie is furious with Bella, and with me. Though Jasper is the one whose mind sees patterns instantly, assembling strategies and outcomes like magic puzzle pieces, she, too, has a share of insight where it concerns her. As the weeks have passed, Rosalie has become embroiled with her own picture of what my obsession with this human girl is doing to our family. I have seen the shape of it, in hazy outline, as she has guarded my passages through the hallways at school. Now it stands forth, sharp and solid behind her thoughts. Our family as an arctic cliff, Bella as a wedge, driving deep fault lines through the face. Alice and I on one side, she and Emmett on the other, Jasper riven in two, Carlisle and Esme powerless to hold it all together.

Carlisle's face betrays him and Bella both. A glacier splits and falls into the sea.

"She's seen you, hasn't she?" Rosalie demands. "When you were examining her!"

God forgive me, he thinks.

"We're never going to get another chance like this again, Carlisle."

I cannot believe what she is suggesting. In earnest. To Carlisle. This is going too far. It's not necessary. And it will only force the split that she dreads. But she believes that my actions have already done that.

Carlisle's mind recoils, from Rosalie's intention, but also from his own memories. He has seen how the three princes of Volterra deal with lawbreakers. If our family should become conspicuous, for any reason ... there will be visitors.

"It will be clean," Rosalie reasons, "for everyone - her, her father, EDWARD."

I must keep this wretched snail's pace down an endless corridor, ferrying a heart that does not move at all.

"I know how to do this, Carlisle. It's an expected risk with head injury. She won't even have to suffer. I can see to that."

Rosalie's plan forms at light speed in her mind. Slipping into Bella's room undetected will be too easy. Bella is young, and stable, and independent in the room. Haven't I already heard the nurses' thoughts, shunting her to the side in their attention? No one will bother going into Bella's room tonight except for the prescribed neurochecks, which are now spaced at four-hour intervals.

Or unless she rings. But there will be none of that.

Thirty more steps to Carlisle's door...

A syringe loaded with high-dose heparin, drawn from the pulmonary embolism patient's I.V. bag in CCU. Push it into Bella's line, then just a little shake, too fast for human vision to detect. The internal whiplash will splash Bella's brain against the inside of her cranium. The dura mater, meningeal membranes and cerebrospinal fluid were never made to cushion against the accelerations that a vampire's hands can deliver. Even without the heparin to sabotage natural clotting, Bella has no chance.

I feel sick. Carlisle can't permit this. He just can't!

The thought of her in that bed, never knowing what had been done to her, very likely never even waking up ... No external marks to betray us, just the ever-expanding pool of blood inside. Perhaps, if a nurse should chance to look in on her early, the damage may be detected in time that she might live. But she will never speak.

Through Rosalie's eyes, I see the mask of horror and sorrow that is Carlisle's face.

The door at last!

And still, I cannot throw it open, cannot scream, cannot hurl Rosalie bodily through the wall. I have to knock, and enter normally. I close the door behind me, and finally my teeth are bared.

"Don't you dare!" In our hyper-fast sotto voce, it sounds so ludicrous.

Rosalie rounds on me. "You think I like doing this, Edward? Cleaning up your mess? Her fate was solving everything, saving us all, even you, dammit! How long do you really think you can hold off? It will only be worse for you, the longer you wait." She gathers all of her ghosts in one basket: exposure, our family broken by irrevocable quarrel, an image of me with a dead Bella in my arms, hating myself forever, even as I lick the last of her blood from my lips.

The last one pierces me. I wouldn't do that. Would I? Could I? Still? Yes. I can. I almost did. Right there in her room. A dozen times before our brief conversation was through. Is there really no end to this except in her death?

It will only be worse for you, the longer you wait.

Rosalie's expression swings from resentful sympathy back to pure resentment. "Why did you have to interfere? Now I have to do something hateful, because none of the men around here has the stones!"

Except for Jasper, perhaps. But Alice would never forgive him. No, he won't do this either.

"She's not going to say anything!" I'm pleading. Pleading. With Rosalie, for God's sake!

Carlisle jumps on my words. "What do you mean, son?"

Rosalie jumps, too. "You talked to her about this? Christ, Edward, have you lost your mind? Are you stupid?"

"What did she say?" Carlisle asks.

"What did YOU say?" is the question that Rosalie finds much more important.

I am stupid, but not stupid enough to disclose Bella's and my conversation. I revert to snarling and threatening.

"Don't you touch her, Rose! No one! No one touches her!" She's mine.

"Will you listen to yourself?"

I hear myself all too clearly. I am like a lion hoarding its kill.

I have seen the entire scene in the ER as it replayed in Carlisle's mind. It is the only card I have. I pray that it is a trump, and not a feeble straw.

"Her father is your friend, Carlisle. He trusts you. She trusts you. She trusts all of us." Oh, no! Why did I add that last? I am stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Rosalie is rolling her eyes. "You see? You see? I rest my case."

But Carlisle won't have it. Faces are passing through his mind. Human faces. Men, women, children. Old and young. Hale and infirm. Centuries of them. All doomed to die, some day or other. An ageless, pale, patrician face, with transparent skin and long, black hair, mocking and pitying him for his "attachments." And still, year after year, he has placed his hands upon their bodies. Easing. Mending. Giving them a few more moments in the sun. Receiving in return meaning for his own.

And most recently, making some of them into beings like himself.

"We shall not decide this in haste," he says at last.

"Edward already has, can't you see that? In haste."

"All the more reason, Rosalie, that we must deliberate." And he looks at me meaningfully. "As a family."

Rosalie glares, and throws her thoughts at me like daggers. I'm never going to forgive you for this. Never. There's no way this can end well, now. And she thrusts all of her fears into my face, because she knows that I can see them in her mind. Just go ask Alice. I dare you to. You stupid, selfish little boy!

She is right, of course. I cannot help but hang my head. If my body could do so, I would be crying. Thank God that I cannot. It would be the last straw.

Carlisle can't hear what has just transpired between Rosalie and me, but he sees my response. He moves to put his arm around me.

"Edward, go home. Wait for me." He glances at Rosalie. "All of you. We shall resolve this. I promise you. We shall find a way, a way that we all can bear." As we must, he thinks sadly. "Do you hear me, Edward?"

"Yes."

"Go now, both of you. Make peace with one another. I shall finish my shift; you shall all go to school tomorrow, just as always. We meet to form a plan in the afternoon."

"What if that's too late?"

"Sufficient unto the day, Rose. I have made provisions that any testament of hers can be easily dismissed."

Keeping the girl here for "observation." Hacking her radiology results. These are the provisions that flow through Carlisle's mind. Concussion, post-traumatic confusional state, retrograde amnesia: he has an arsenal of diagnoses prepared, and is already arranging her medical record to back them up. He does not relish the thought of brow-beating Bella into believing that true memories are false ... but he certainly will do that if it becomes necessary.

So will I.

For now, all that he says is, "Let us not borrow trouble."

Horse shit, Rosalie thinks. "You coming?"

"Yes." I do not meet her eyes.

Carlisle's pager goes off.

"Be careful, Edward," he says. What does he think I am going to do now? But a foreign body ingestion in the ER is going bad. He has to go, and so do we.