Authors Note:

So first off! Huuuge thank you for the out-pouring of reviews on the last chapter.  Both sites went well over the 100 review finish line.  So here is your reward (with disclaimers).

Warning! This may make no sense! The problem with writing EPOV, and why I won’t do it often (ever again?) is that he knows WAY more than Bella does at this point. And the engimaticness of his feelings/understanding of what the HELL is going on is a key point for the plot. After the story’s finished, I might do more of these, but I doubt before then.

You aren’t supposed to understand what’s going on, with the plot. All will be revealed as the story goes on. Also I apologize for grammar mistakes. This is un-beta’d and un pre-read.

All in all this is an unofficial part of the story. So read at your own risk.  I wrote this for myself to help aide with my own understanding of Edward. But you guys gave me such wonderful reviews and I am loathe to renig on a promise. So here it is.

(I know for f.f readers I said I’d be making it as a separate story, but the lack of word count made it hard for me to justify.)

—
I know everything about Isabella Swan.

I know every grade she’s ever gotten, every sparring partner she’s ever beaten, every bone she’s ever broken.

I know how she tastes.  I’ve been drinking her blood for a year now. In my pent-house in Volterra there is a vault where I keep every donation she’s given. When Esme comes over for our nightly chats, we sip it.

I didn’t always drink it with such civility.

The first time I drank Isabella’s Swan’s blood I was in the outskirts of Chicago, by a gravestone.

My gravestone.

I don’t know why I returned there after wandering the earth. It wasn’t homesickness. Chicago hadn’t been home since I died there among the feverish dying bodies, and unsanitary funeral pyres. If anything Forks was home, but that was long gone too.

I think I was following a flock of birds, for food. I tracked them across the plains, the abandoned farms, the canyons carved by acid rain. There weren’t many mountain lions left to hunt, but no matter what I had done I wasn’t going to kill a human.

I had too many human deaths to my name. Two-thousand-three-hundred of those in the last hundred years.  Yet I hadn’t had crimson eyes since the days before Carlisle died.

Needless to say, I had been following birds and squirrels for a while.

It was coincidence that the birds landed in Chicago.

It wasn’t coincidence that Esme (dressed still in her poofy 1950s housewife garb, with the sticks in her hair and wild eyes) found me there, nursing the broken-necked goose.

It wasn’t coincidence that she brought me into her icy arms, and said chocked with laughter and tears she couldn’t shed,  “You’ve got to eat better.”

No, that was love.

Something I hadn’t felt in a long time.

Something I didn’t deserve. Not from her of all people.

As I extricated myself out of her arms, I asked, “Why are you here?”

For an answer she popped open the cork of a vial that held Isabella’s blood. “Drink,” she said.

 

With the first sip I was unconscious from pleasure. Vampires aren’t supposed to ever lose awareness, but I did. It was easily the highlight of my too-long existence.

Esme knew I would do anything for the blood. Even return to the citadel that held my sins, my demons—Volterra.

But if I would do anything for blood, than I would do everything to make up for my mistakes.

Isabella’s Swan’s blood has other benefits than being unbearably delicious. Benefits that allowed us to begin sowing the seeds of our revolution in earnest. After drinking Bella’s blood, my mind became as inscrutable to Aro as hers is to mine.

I would have been content to merely plot for eternity, but then Esme had one of her bouts of womanly intuition, as she calls them. In truth, she is a Seer of the highest caliber, but if Aro believes her a piddling old woman all the better.

No one suspects a widowed housewife of revolution. Not one who makes scrap-books and still decorates the table with seasonal place-settings even when there’s no food and the seasons are mutilated by global warming.

One night in August, we sat at a table at my pent-house in Volterra. A hundred years Esme kept it for me, so nothing was touched by decay. Vampire engineering—my engineering—was beyond impeccable, so the twisted, vacant silver tower was still structurally sound.

Our hands looked so pale, clasped there together against the black, polished ebony of the table. The room was silent, only the muted ticking of the grand-father clock.

Edward, she thought. I’ve had a vision. She held up the thin-stemmed wine glass filled with Isabella’s blood. About your singer.

“Finally trust my control?” I asked.

Esme had kept the information from me out of fear that if I knew the source of the blood I would seek it out and drain it dry. There was also the matter of each of us having as little information as possible, in case we were ever compromised.

She fiddled with the lacy tea-cozy she always placed underneath her wineglass. Unlike me she respected the sanctity of wood varnish.

And then she showed me the vision.

The vision I am fulfilling now, as I watch Isabella walk towards me, to the stage.

But I know more than the vision.

I know everything.

Thankfully, Aro still sees me as something of a son. He was thrilled with my return, even more thrilled with my newly crimson eyes. So leaving Volterra to come to Chicago to observe Isabella wasn’t a problem.

Once there, I was struck by how little had changed since the take-over. The humans were still kept corralled in their playpens of broken streets and graffitied walls.

Much sickens me about what the world has become. But nothing physically repulsed me more than what had been done to my old home. I can’t help but remember the days when I patrolled the streets for the scum of the earth, before Carlisle found me. I tried so hard then to protect the innocent.

And now?

Now similar scum rule Chicago. Rule the world.

But not for long.

Not if Isabella follows my plans.

Which she will.

As I said, I know her.

I’ve followed her, seen her reflection in of every mind that thinks they know her.

I know that her first word was da-da. Or at least that is what her father remembers it as being. This is the image he holds in his head, Isabella’s small hand reaching out for his own, as he watches her come up to the stage to sacrifice herself for a girl he thinks she’s never even met before. (This is one of his moments of greater clarity. Most of the time he spends counting steps, trying to think of something, anything, except for his dead wife’s face. He was worse than useless in my quest to understand my singer.)

I know of every illegal escape she’s made from the city-walls to meet with that boy. The one who thinks he knows her.

He doesn’t, of course.

There is cruelty in Isabella that he will never understand. He is so preoccupied with the curve of her chest, or the few times she smiles, that he doesn’t think to ask himself why she really tried to kill herself. In truth, he doesn’t want to know.

But his ignorance is to be expected. He’s young, strapping and gay. Back when there were boy scouts he likely would have been one. He wears his badge of ignorance proudly, anyway.

But for all his naïveté, he knows things I don’t. He’s felt the friction of her hand sliding into his, the brush of finger-tip on finger-tip. He knows how her lips pull over her teeth when she smiles. Whether or not she has dimples. He’s heard the melodic line of her laugh.

My dirty little secret will always be that I almost everything I’ve seen or heard about Isabella Swan, I’ve heard through the boy.

I doubt she will ever laugh with me.

I shouldn’t want to.

Her smile is irrelevant.

But even though I have seen the sea swallow the shore in waves as tall as mountains, peered into the cracks of the earth and seen the magma core festering below, as the volcanoes spewed ash and fire into the sky, the fact that I haven’t seen her smile makes me feel as if I haven’t seen anything at all.

As I watch her on the stage, looking so painfully terrified, and yet so brave, I can’t help but yearn to see her smile through my own eyes and not the boy’s.

When she turns to look at me, I am surprised with my own composure. I shouldn’t be. I’ve had centuries of practice with it. Living on the outskirts of reality, in ignorance about the exact nature of my own sins.

She is nothing but a means to an end.

I don’t feel bad thinking of her as such. We all must make sacrifices to the greater good. And I have miles to go before I will have given enough to make up for what I did.

But I have knowledge now. I have lots of things I thought I had lost forever.

A plan being perhaps the most notable.

But with the girl standing in front of me, grasping the hand of the even littler girl, Emily was it, (in the end she’s irrelevant), I have something else, too.

Hope.

Of course being the sexy, awful bastard that I am—Tanya’s words on my return and subsequent refusal of her advances—I want more.

Not just her blood. Although as I step closer to her I have a hard time reigning in my fantasies of her broken neck, blood decanted by my teeth. I have never been this close to her before. All my spying took place from a palatable distance.

I want her thoughts.

But fate has a black sense of humor, or at least irony. Because just as I can’t have her blood; I can’t have those either.

I know her through the eyes of others. I’ve assembled scraps of memories, mosaics of lies, truths and shades between them.

But I’ve never been introduced to her. I’ve never met her really.

“Announce it,” I say.

I am deluded if I think just hearing her name will sate the hunger in me, but it’s a start. What I really need her to say is my name, but that can wait.

“Announce your name.”

She looks up at me with anger and fear.

I want—

No.

But her name. I can have that for now. What harm is there in a name?

I have read her files so many times, seen the construction of syllables an etymology.  Swan, a bird long extinct. Bella, a diminutive of Isabella, but also the adjective in Italian meaning, beautiful. O che bella giornata. What a beautiful day.

Her lips purse, forming the words.

She says it.

“I’m I-Isabella Swan.”

And I know immediately I was wrong.

There is great harm in a name.

From the side I hear the other boy, Rosalie’s brother, snicker. His thoughts are bloody dreams of glory that I prefer not to indulge in, despite his charming smile. I wonder if Isabella knows that her most daunting opponent stands beside her.

My penchant for stories and myths has cost me greatly, but even now I compare Jasper to the pied piper. His charisma is his pipe.

Sometimes, I wish I didn’t have to see all of Esme’s visions.

“I am Isabella Swan and I volunteer for the 100th Morphing Games,” the force of her yell jars my sensitive hearing. But somehow I am grateful even for that. I like her scream, I realize. Perhaps like is the wrong word, it is more that her scream is so much of her. She is so vivid, when she yells. The color of her soul brightens and flickers in front of me.

And then of course. I know.

Little, foolish girl, what have you done?

Feelings that I can’t afford to have, creep into my chest.

She can’t stop looking at me either. Like a child seeing the sky for the first time, she is all coltish wonder and girlish innocence.

It does things to a man to be stared at like that.

But I am not a man.

I am a monster.

And Isabella Swan will pay the price for it.

I’ll be taking her to the river of bones, and encouraging her to journey to Hell without lyre or bargain. But, in the end I will not be able to force her to abide by my plan. I can already tell this will be hard. She brings out force and violence in me.

If I look deeper I would hazard to say that around her I feel almost afraid.  Esme would say I am afraid of losing her. Perhaps in part. But I think mostly I am afraid of how she makes me feel.

Once the ceremony is over and the goodbyes begin, I move to the shadows. I have lost focus, here, being so close to her. Analyzing my reaction to the girl, I wonder if perhaps other parts of Esme’s vision were accurate as well.

But no, I realize as she asks for her family and the boy, Isabella cannot be anything to me but a tool, something to be wielded in the coming battle.

With this thought, it is surprisingly easy to watch Isabella in pain.

I had thought it would be harder to watch a young girl being forced to say goodbye to her loved ones.

But then again, only one of them actually loves her.

Not her father, who is gone, continually lost in memory. Even as he holds out his hand for her to squeeze he isn’t seeing her face, but her mother’s. Isabella doesn’t know it, but that was the dress her mother wore the day Charlie proposed.

Certainly not her brother. He hates her. Not just because she blinded him, although that’s his excuse. In truth, it’s because he just wanted a friend after their mother died. And she didn’t want to be his friend. She didn’t know how.

He remembers that vividly. He wishes he could say goodbye, could forgive her, but he can’t, even now. Because he’s sure that his sister will never love him.  (you don’t blind someone you love, is his mantra.) And if he can’t have her love, then he’ll take her guilt.

But he’ll always hate that he’s sure she doesn’t love him.

And nothing hurts worse when she tries to pretend that she does.

The blond woman, Prim, might love Isabella. She is a mind full of light and goodness like I haven’t felt since Carlisle.

The boy loves her though. For certain. He’s never told her, but he does.

I don’t like the boy.

The thought that her pain mirrors his makes it much easier to withstand.

As he wraps her in his arms, I realize I hate him.  It’s odd. I have been so consumed with hate for ideas, first for the newborns, then the Volturi, it’s a strange feeling to have my loathing be so focused.

No matter.

She will be free of him soon enough.

In exactly– “One minute,” I say.

He glares at me and I offer him a fraction of my own feeling in return.

I am pleased when he backs down. This is as it should be. He may have bits of Isabella I will never get, but I know Isabella’s sins.

I know why her brother glares at her. I know why his eye is clouded.

I know she did it.

I understand her cruelty.  Because the same thing resides in my still-heart. (I have no soul to house such things as a personality.)

Unlike the boy scout, she doesn’t back-down when I stare at her.

My eyes narrow. Careful little one. Stare to long at the abyss and it will stare back. Bravery or no.

Her defiance makes her beautiful, even though the dress she wears is far too small and her nose more than slightly crooked. (A fight with a schoolmate in year five.)

But for a moment as she stares at me, it is not at all coltish.

It says, “Test me. Forge me anew.”

If the little woman-child knew what her eyes asked then I would oblige.

But she doesn’t.

I probably will test her anyway. Her brand of defiance and fear makes my blood sing.

It makes me want to play beautiful, terrible games with her, against her.

Play them and win.

I am a monster after all.

But when the little chubby girl gives her the pin, I remember.

Isabella is a spoke in the wheel.

(I don’t call her Bella, it would make her even more bound to me.)

She belongs not to me, but to the revolution.

I can never have her.

And maybe this is why I hate the boy.

Because he could have had her.

In some ways-

(As I tear him away from her all he thinks about is the kiss they shared on the beach, replayed in lurid and embellished detail)

-he did.