Ides
She has dreamed of the meadow. The light of the day. The chill of the grass. The witness of the trees. She and Edward, dancing together between earth and sky.
Between warm and cold, living and dead. Yin and Yang in the circle of the Tao.
Until he lay beneath her, and they knew one another. And the doves flew up between sunlight and shadow..
She keeps her eyes shut, grasps and clings at the dream as it dissipates like mist, the images thinning and fragmenting, until nothing is left but an ache in her throat and a hollow in her chest.
She can't hold it. It's gone. Even the memory of it evanesces, leaving only the echo of loss. She doesn't want to open her eyes to the dark of her room. She knows he is not here this night. Only the dream. The one she cannot hold.
A great fear grips her. Why can't she hold the dream? Where does it go? What does it mean, this … fade to black?
First light comes at last, and pulls her up from the sleepless bed. Her days and nights are running, deep into March.
The Mad Moon.
She thinks of where she was, this time last year. The journal. The scrapbook. La Push. The fall. Their house.
Time is running out. The final milestones have rushed toward her, and streamed out behind. Half way, already, between lion and lamb, only the day in the meadow remains to be met.
She rises and goes to the closet, to her large suitcase, where the loom and the cloth stay secret and safe. She brings it back to the bed, and carefully unfurls it. It is beautiful. To her tired eyes, in the flicker between nightlight and dim dawn, its totems and beings seem to move and shimmer. Did I weave that? Did I do that with my own hands? She rubs her eyes, and carefully rolls it back up around the sticks. It is, indeed, almost done. Only the final border to do. And then tie off the fringes into tassels. Then it will be done.
She crawls back into the bed with the cloth on its loom, holds it to her, pulls the covers over herself. This carpet, its baptism, will either carry the Cullens to her, resurrected, and she will be changed; or it will carry her to the Cullens, in death. The bend in the road. The Great Divide.
She buries herself in the quilts. Opens her mouth wide so her heaving breath won't make noise coming in and going out.
Mom
Dad
Uncle Billy
Jacob
Even the misty, dripping, dark little one-horse town. Jessica, and Angela, and Lauren. Mike and Eric. Tyler who, in another timeline, would have been her one death. Fourteen months ago.
All her roads have led to this.
It's not my fault.
I was intended.
Intended.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Grandma … Gran …
...
It is two weeks now, since last he visited. She wonders what that means.
Notes:
Bella's dream faded to black.
But it might still exist in the in-between ... fanfiction dot net / s/7644880/1/Morning-Dove