Pavane for a Dead Girl

I run.

I don't even know where I am.

South and east.

That's what Alice saw.

All that I can see is the trees, whipping past my eyes. Each one crystal clear, every branch, every pine needle, snapping by at nearly the speed of sound. I am like the thunder chasing the lightning. I have to slow down or I will burn a path from here to Idaho that might even be visible from space.

As my steps slacken, the images overtake me.

Oh, Bella.

Curled under quilts that are too thin, that do not keep her warm enough.

Writing there at her desk in the front of the class, cheek resting on one hand, hair spilling down and hiding everything from me.

Crouched in front of her locker. The small sigh. Her forehead on her knees. Angela was so kindly disposed toward her. If she had only lived she might have found a true friend in that retiring girl.

Every stolen moment rolls over me in waves, each memory like a mote of water in the flood.

Flinching away from the volleyball because she doesn't know how to position herself to bump it back.

Her feet like twin doves. My journal on her pillow.

That fragrant, forbidden land that I stole through another's eyes.

In the forest, twined upon the fir tree, under the falling rain.

The pulse of her arteries that will haunt me forever – throat, hollows of collarbones, crooks of elbows and knees, her wrists, her ankles – thrumming and sending her scent, each one a cup calling me to drink.

The yellow handprint of a doomed child fells me at last, and I lie in the loam with my forever-silent chest.

None of that evil has happened, and I vow it never will, not so long as any part of me is not ash.

What a pitiful and pathetic joke. It has happened. And no part of me is ash. Three. Three is all it took to hold me down. Three, and my promise is broken.

Her forehead, smashed inward. All of her thoughts gone forever. Thoughts that I have never known. Now will never know. Swept into darkness by a raven's wing.

I lie where I am, as I had collapsed and lain where they left me, their thoughts and their footsteps receding away.

It swirls around me now, in the stillness under an unfamiliar forest.

Alice was a mess. Past visions roiled with her most recent ones, a black storm filling her mind. I don't even know how she could do what she had to, to hide the magnitude of our kill. Yet she lugged the two sheep, one under each arm, and kept on running, down-slope and into the trees. The only thought I could hear from her was Jasper's name: chanting, calling, pleading through the flashing dark.

Emmett and Rosalie went their own way, holding each other with glances, since their hands, too, were completely occupied with carcasses.

Oh Alice, what've you done? You've sacrificed far more than just Bella to keep your mate safe. And yet, what could you do? And what's to become of us now?

Through his eyes I saw his glance to Rosalie, and hers back to him.

Carlisle's always loved Edward best of all. Him and Esme both.

Glance.

I'll not leave you, Rose. Nothing will ever take me from you.

Glance again. And privately wondering if our family is now to split into two camps, or three.

His cogitations were deliberate and heavy. How Jasper had lied to him, had made him bear false report. I cain't abide that. I jest cain't.

I wonder if Alice has seen the split by now. Three pairs going their separate ways. She and Jasper, Em and Rose, Carlisle and Esme. Does anyone seriously think that I can ever be part of this family again?

Ain't right what you done, brother. That girl ain't never wished a body harm. You think you're the only one been keepin' watch? Me an' Rose – all this time, she ain't breathed a word of Edward stoppin' the van, nor nary a whisper of his journal. Ain't Alice already seen that she never will? You're too suspicious. Carryin' your past around inside, 'til you cain't see what's standin' in front of you.

Glance again.

Rosalie's thoughts, rushing parallel to his as they ran side by side, surprised me.

She was doomed from the time he first smelled her. If not by him then by one of us; if not for her blood then for this – for being an apple of discord. Poor girl, she never had a chance.

Rosalie is wrong. Bella was not doomed from the time I first smelled her. She was doomed from the moment she decided to come to Forks. From the moment we decided to come to Forks.

I roll onto my back and gaze upward. Wherever I am, I have run out from under the clouds. The forest is mixed deciduous here, and the bare branches make a black lace against the bottomless sky. Stars poke through, like little arrows to my eyes, and I cannot help but wonder if Bella's fate wasn't set from the moment these lights aligned against her at her birth.

I hate Jasper! Hate Alice! Enacting this passion play of theirs, of who loves whom the most! What right do they have? And why should Bella have to be sacrificed to something so childish and petty? How can her life be set at such little worth?

I want to kill those two, kill them both. It will never happen. I was no match for three tonight, how can I do anything when the whole family will unite against me?

I close my eyes, and Alice's vision of my fight with Jasper replays in my mind. As I saw when my treacherous siblings were holding me down, he stands just outside the church's door.

Bella is as warm as life in his arms, but her heart is stilled forever. Hearing, smelling, feeling me coming, Jasper has finished her hastily with a second blow to her chest. I hear the silence, see her ruined form, smell her blood, and launch myself forward.

Lying here in quietude, I see the moment more clearly this time. There was never any deadly combat. Just me, tearing Jasper apart. He did not fight back. He accepted death for doing what he felt was necessary to guard the family.

The family won't allow that, now. Alice won't. She didn't save him from me tonight, didn't sacrifice Bella for him like that, only to have me rip him to shreds when I return. And in her presence he won't be able to not fight for his own life either. Her pain is his pain. Her fear is his fear. With her feelings flooding through him he will defend himself against me.

In real life, a real fight, I am no match for him. He is by far the deadliest among us. He fights dirty. And he eviscerates his enemies with their own emotions. I've seen what he did for Maria. Reading his mind to know his next move only lays me wider open to his gift.

Even without the family's help, Jasper is safe now. Alice has assured it.

The shafts of starlight prick at my eyes. In the time since I fell down where I lie, they have traversed barely an arc minute across the spaces between the trees. All these tangled skeins of memory and thought have passed through my head in that tiny span. Such is the speed of our unnatural minds. It only makes our eternity longer.

I imagine the stars in their arcs, whirling around the pole star.

I see the image of Bella's body, hidden in the canvas shroud, whirling around Jasper as he spins to throw her, then sailing so far, so far, out over the black water.

I gulp in air and it shudders out of me again. Over and over without relief. The closest I can come to weeping. No matter what Jasper and Alice have done, all of this is my fault. Mine. One silly moment of ridiculous foolish pride, not wanting my family to hear me leave and then return and then leave again. None of this train wreck would have happened, none of it, if I had only put my journal –

My journal.

Still there. In her room. Under her mattress. That's where she hides it.

Jasper won't leave it in her house to be discovered. He is probably there already, waiting for the chance to steal it.

No!

No! No! No!

It's mine! Her scent upon it – is mine! He has already taken Bella from the world. He has no right to lay hands on this last thing in the world that she has touched!

I am up and running. Back. Back to her house. Jasper had better not be there. Or if he is, he had better yield to me. This thing is mine. This relic of all that I am no more. This weapon with which I killed her. That she held every night like a lover in her arms, saturating it with herself.

I don't see the land I am running over. I only see myself. Decades from now, a century, more. Hoarding over the tattered remains. Leather finally dry and cracked. Pages yellow and disintegrating. Ink barely legible even to my eyes. Her scent gone, long gone. Like that of the boy who died. Did her scent find his? In that better place? Or is there nothing left but the empty wind?

Run back, run back. Back to the scene of the crime. Back to the quiet place that will ache in my thoughts from now on. Take back the cause of it all – too late, too late. Too late for anything but my own grief.

Thank you for reading.