Edward's gaze fixated on the woman across the room.
His eyes unmoving, unblinking, while his mind raced. Bella Swan was dead, and he had killed her.
It takes two... a voice inside him said, but he ignored it, shoved it back into the darkness. He already had too many voices intruding his mind. Instead, he stared at the woman and she stared back, eyes red.
He would never see Bella's beautiful brown eyes again; after a hundred years, eternity still felt incomprehensible, smoke scaping the grasp from his shadow. Her soft eyes, like calming pools, now stained red with blood, windows to her soullesness.
He mimicked her, for her sake.
Both Renesmee and Charlie had eyes like the ones Bella Swan used to have. But they were like hers, not hers. Edward was tired of things like her. They were mocking, taunting. An illusion, an allusion, nothing but a reminder to her likeness, not unlike a statue... it wasn't Bella. Not Bella Swan.
He blinked, not out of need but out of habit, and she was now in front of him. She was now faster than anything. She was now not one to trip nor fall. She was now graceful and flawless, perfection incarnate like the rest of them.
That's what was kissing him now. That's what he'll soon be making love to - because that's all they did now. Better than talking. Better than thinking. Better than confronting reality. Bella Swan was dead and Bella Cullen had stolen her face.
Cullen ripped their clothes, both more expensive than Bella's truck had been. She didn't hold back and neither did he. He could only mourn at the loss of her warmth, the loss of her taste, the loss of her soft skin, and mourn, most of all, the scent that drew him to her.
He was at peace, or a a cruel facsimile of the concept. A purgatory, for his thoughts and his thoughts alone. The other Cullens gave them space in times like this, so Edward was left to contemplate with no one worrying, no one watching.
Bella Swan now only existed in the memories of everyone that had known her. The times only Bella and he had shared, existed in him alone. To Cullen, her interactions were shaped by a hazy cloud, nothing had been real until she opened her eyes thirsty for blood. Her human life had been nothing but the time spent in a womb before she was born as a vampire.
He didn't know her, and yet she was one of them. For eternity, and after.
Perhaps, until death, had a been a warning. Because, beyond death, only a stranger awaits.
