What a question? Had he ever? A better inquiry would be to ask if he’d ever forget. There were many times in his long life, Edward had wished he could be rid of the images of his victims, the ones that had haunted him for years. At the time he had told himself they deserved it, they were monsters too, but… who was he to be judge, jury and executioner? He could never know how many lives he’d saved, but he’d always know how many he had taken. How many throats he’d ripped out, how many bones he’d shattered, the blood he’d gorged himself on in those four years.
It was too high of a number.
Some of them still flashed in his head, and he was reminded as to why he shouldn’t be allowed to forget his actions. It was his penance, to keep them in his memory, lurking and ready to remind him of what he was, and who he could be. Just how vicious the beast that hid beneath the surface was. He’d be reminded, sometimes, just by chance. An off-colour thought when Alice dragged him out for her shopping trips, a greedy look in a man’s eye when he and Emmett had gone to pick up the groceries needed to make them look human. He had wanted to do something, anything, his fingers had twitched with the need.
But the best that could be done would be a tip to the police, if he were able to get anything concrete. If any of his family noticed him paying particular attention to the news in the following days, they never mentioned it. The most he’d get was a warm hug around the shoulders from his mother, and Carlisle’s calming presence nearby.
He sighed. “Yes, I have. Too many times.”
“ IT STAYS WITH YOU… ” Stated more as a fact than posed as a question, the lives she had taken during her rampage were ones that remained imprinted in her mind. Their final moments were there, clear and succinct. Perhaps they would fade at the edges with time. She had an eternity of that to spare with her newfound affliction. The fact she could remember their faces, ones of people who didn’t deserve to have their lives cut short because of her stubborn hunger, but couldn’t place the person who did this to her in her mind’s eye, wasn’t lost on her. And as much as she wants to remember them, remember how she became what she was now, all she could focus on were the people she had destroyed.
People that screamed in agony from her actions, their final words echoing within her skull and bouncing around inside an otherwise quiet mind. It kept her up, not that she needed sleep any longer. She needed nothing more than blood, the craving being one that is prevalent even during their conversation. If not for the Cullen family, she would still be out there, running amuck, and shining light to the existence of something inhuman. They stopped her before she could take another life, tried to mentor her, but it was still hard to fight that nature.
And with how some had taken to her, the difficulty became more pronounced. She had no idea who to talk to, who to even trust outside of the Carlisle and Esme. At times, it extended to Alice, but when she found herself alone with Edward, it somehow felt natural to speak to him without airs. Without fear of judgement, which brought about the question that plagued her. “I can’t push it out. I see it. I hear it. I can even feel it still. The warmth and satisfaction I felt, but now, I also feel this sense of shame. Or maybe it’s guilt. I can’t really tell. It changes from day-to-day, sometimes hour-by-hour. I tell myself it’s what I was made to do. Am I just fighting my nature or am I doing what’s right? I have all these questions, all these thoughts, and they’re all frantic in my head. I don’t know what to do with it now. I don’t know how to just be…”
@inxnimatum ❨ CONTINUED ❩
