Alternate Ending

Background information: When I started writing Tangle, the story was very different: like in this version, it focused heavily on Edward's relationship with his family, and especially with his relationship with both Rosalie and Jasper, which this version somewhat touched upon. I started writing Tangle with the utmost certainty that Edward would die. That was a large focus of the original plot, that Edward could never belong to his family once he was changed back to a human, and that he could never belong in Bella's world because of his emotional bonds to his vampiric family. He desperately wants to remain with Jasper and the others for eternity, but he wants at the same time to have the things with Bella he's always dreamed of.

In the original outline of Tangle, Edward doesn't leave. Instead, seeing that Edward needs to be with his family, Bella breaks up with him in the end. She returns the engagement ring he gave her and leaves for University, and when he returns home he finds that his family is gone- they left because they saw that Edward couldn't be happy with Bella as long as they were around, and also because the strain he put on their family with his emotional problems was too much. There was a lot of emphasis on the imagery in Jasper's photography: one of these pictures, the most important one, made it into this version, the one with the dying tree, which in the original version I associated with their family. There was also a plot device by which Edward read Jasper's eight favourite books and I incorporated the themes of those novels into the scenes. The original version was a lot longer than this one, and there are several half-written chapters sitting abandoned on my hard drive. This is the final chapter, which was written pretty much before everything else in the story. Here it is, the alternate ending that assumes everyone has abandoned Edward either to save him or save themselves:

He wandered slowly through the empty house, touching the floors, the sofas, the trim on the walls. He saw his jacket in the closet, but it was the only one there. And in the center of the beautiful, blank room was his piano. This morning he'd seen a painting lying there on top of it. It was gone now. They'd taken everything that wasn't his specifically. His belongings were sitting here and there where he had left them or where they had, in their rush, set them down. Otherwise the house was empty. A white canvas waiting to be painted upon.

He stopped at the entryway to Carlisle's office, saw an object on the desk and moved slowly towards it. It was a portrait, an old one. Black and white faces peered out at him, smiling eternally. He remembered this photo. His was the face in the middle of the three, and on either side Carlisle and Esme were grinning like maniacs. It was one of the few pictures they had ever kept. Rosalie had taken it, on some distant day that Edward could hardly remember...

He could hardly remember anything about his past now. All he knew was his family and Bella. On the back of the photo there was scrawled, "Edward, we'll miss you. Take care. Esme," and next to that Carlisle had written only, "My son." He left the picture in Carlisle's office and continued to wander. He realized that his family had, like he had so long ago when he left Bella, made an agreement to leave nothing behind. And each had broken the rule. In Alice's vast, empty closet was a garment bag, holding, he knew, the gown she had designed herself. He had already seen it in her head before the change. He didn't need to open the great white bag. He knew that Bella's wedding dress was inside.

In Rosalie and Emmett's bedroom, there was a necklace. It was a simple silver chain with a diamond on it, and on a metal band circling it was engraved, "beauty." It was the only gift he had ever given her, Rosalie. And she had given it back. Next to the necklace there was Little Emmett. He smiled, picturing Emmett standing with a moment's indecision, bear in hand, prepared to leave it but not ready to let go. He picked it up and slowly, he made his way to the final room, clutching it to his chest. It smelled like a brother he would never see again.

He stopped outside Jasper's door, breathing heavy and ragged. He pressed one hand to the wood while the other held the limp bear at his side. He stood. And waited. Waited for the door downstairs to open, and to hear his family declare their minds changed. But it never happened, and hesitantly, he wrapped his fingers around the cold brass knob. He shoved the door open to see the room inside.

It was empty.

It was at this point that he realized something which perhaps he would never have been able to come to terms with otherwise. The room was empty, but it told him more than any thing else in the house could.

They weren't coming back.

Edward wasn't sure how he'd ended up in his own bedroom, but he was kneeling at his bedside, kneeling like a man praying to his Lord, or perhaps some lost soul offering himself to some heathen God, a sacrifice to the dead. But he was neither of these things. He told himself that he was just a broken little boy with no one in the world to care for. He remembered so many years ago, before Bella Swan, before Jasper and Alice, Emmett and even Rosalie. He remembered nighttime and darkness and the cries of his victims; the open arms ready to accept him when he returned. And he remembered those months when he left her, curling himself into a ball wherever he went, letting the misery take him, and recalled dimly how his family had always been there. He remembered losing his venom. The fear. The weakness. The feeling that he would never be able to call any of them his family again. And how Bella had kissed those fears away.

He thought he knew loneliness then. He didn't.

On his knees, he cried into the matted fur of Emmett's bear, but there was no one to hear him. No one to call on the phone and say, "I see you there Edward. Come home. Talk to me," even when she knew he wouldn't. There was no one to bury her face in his neck and murmur endearments and comforts. No kind faces saying, "welcome home, son" and there was no one to lie next to him in the dark, all night, beside him always even when he was asleep, when he was dead to the world.

So this was it. Edward Cullen had discovered real loneliness.

He didn't know how many hours he had sat there, but finally he twisted, and his knees came out from under him. His foot flailed out beneath his bed, his other hitting the nightstand as he lowered himself to sit completely upon the ground. Beneath the huge bed, his foot knocked something over. Sniffling a little and setting the teddy lovingly on top of his pillow, he crawled underneath and grabbed what he had kicked out. They were books. Eight books. Jasper's books.

He remembered the whisper, the cool breath on his skin, "They're my favorites,"and Jasper's silence as he read them in the dark and Edward drifted off to sleep.

Weeks passed, and nothing happened. He hung Rosalie's necklace on the hook that held the garment bag Alice had left behind. And the photo he placed next to the piano. He would sit and try to play but he only ever ended up staring at that photo, willing his parents to step out from within it. To come home. They never did, and he never played again, but for one song. The song he had never named or finished, because no person in the world could play a song so sad. He finished writing it. He played it once. Then he shut the lid on the ivory keys, and he closed the photo in with them. Emmett's bear he carried with him as he wandered aimlessly through the house. He was in a complete daze. He didn't eat. He rarely slept. And when he did try to shove food down his throat, he became nauseous, so nauseous, and he wished that Bella were there.

At times, he would just lie on his bed, not knowing what else to do, staring at the place of the vacant rose. He remembered offering the cold, stonelike flower to Bella, recalled crushing it between his fingers. So, too, had he offered his stone heart, and she had taken it with only a moment's notice. He had always felt so guilty that he had nothing better to give her... But when he finally did, when he had declared his beating, human heart to be hers, had readied to empty it into her hands, she had cast it aside. He thought bitterly, just like the useless thing it is.

He knew he was sick. Dying. Sooner, rather than later, he was going to starve to death. He picked up the books Jasper had left behind, thumbing slowly through them, clutching Little Emmett to him, still. He began to read. He was usually so fast a reader, but now every page had new creases, places where Jasper had folded them over so he could open to that part whenever he wanted. Desperately he drank in the words at these parts, wondering what it was his brother had seen in them. He picked up The Fountainhead first, and tossed it aside at the end, not caring where it landed or what became of it.

He went through the little pile of books like a madman, flinching and recoiling from the pages as he read Lolita, finding that he didn't understand half of what has happening in The Scarlet Letter, and that City of Saints and Madmen left him a little bit frightened, making him sleep with the light on, and he acknowledged sadly that The Picture of Dorian Gray was right up Jasper's alley, but that it would never be a part of him.

He picked up the last book, wondering numbly what he would do when he had finished. What would become of him when he had come to the end of his final connection with his family. But by the end of the novel that didn't matter, because all he could do was turn back the pages, reread the hero's finale over and over and over. It was a compulsion he couldn't understand until he had stopped and stared hard at the text for time that ran into itself. He knew what this was. It was the starting of something new, an ending crashing headlong into a beginning. And it was all his.

He wanted a finale of his own. One just like this.

The wind moaned; around him the trees waved frantically, as if pointing him in some direction other than the one he was headed in. He hadn't left the house for weeks, and now he was walking a cold and indifferent 19 miles to LaPush. The rain felt like tears against his skin, though he knew he had no more tears to offer. He would never cry again. The wetness of his cheeks somehow felt strangely right despite all this.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make any sound?

Edward sang, but he felt as if his voice was an invisible arm reaching out to someone who was too far away. Amidst the sound of the blowing wind and the rushing water somewhere nearby, his voice and heartbeat and soft breath was like the patter of children's feet in the sand. Eventually it would wash away, forgotten by time.

"Share each day with me, each night, each morning... Say you love me."

The wind's moan was the only sound he heard.

He stood atop those same cliffs that Bella had. He looked into the waters below and remembered being told "Bella's all into extreme sports these days." He wondered what she had been thinking as she looked down at the exact same thing he was seeing. He knew she can't have felt how he did now as she readied to make the very leap he was about to. Had Bella known she would be saved? Had she even realized there was any danger?

So much of this, Edward discovered sadly, didn't even matter anymore.

In a giant, lonely house outside of Forks, Washington, there were books. They were lying around a king sized bed, a cold, made up bed that hadn't been laid in for over a week. No one had entered the house in that time either. On the bed, opened to one of its final pages was Leo Tolstoy's romantic epic Anna Karenina.

"What did I stop at? That I couldn't find a condition in which life would not be a misery, that we are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?"

To escape from what worries him. That is why reason is given to man.

And here's the epilogue that went with this final chapter:

Carlisle had told Jasper that under no circumstances would anyone see him again. There were days when Carlisle snipped the end of a length of stitching, smiling dimly at his young patient, and he would remember, so long ago, it seemed, though time had passed on a much greater scale before, the terrifying sound of a hospital monitor about to stop– how different it had seemed from every other dying pulse he'd heard, over so much time.

He remembered the sound of Edward's soft breath in the middle of the night, the pattering rain that seemed to surround them and above all, the heartbeat. Their house was quieter now. How many years had they lived without humans? Decades, centuries. How many years had they lived without Edward? It had been three hundred years before Carlisle found his first companion, his son, the child he'd somehow considered to be his more than anyone else's. It felt like Edward had come to him the moment Carlisle had been born again, and like he'd left him directly after.

Carlisle could remember so much of his time with Edward, but all he could hear now was the rain in some new town, miles away from his first real family member.

When Rosalie found the photo, she didn't know whether to keep it, or to leave it in the garbage where it was. She gently touched the creases, marveling at the picture's beauty, thinking that in so many ways it surpassed her own. Edward's smile was knowing, confident... He looked so harsh, and he shone like an angel in the light. She saw the single bloom on the tree behind him and thought, how perfect, because that was Edward.

The single blossom on a lonely tree. Someday the blossom would fade away to become nothing, she supposed, and that tree would stand there for years, hollow and rotten, waiting, perhaps, for a new chance to grow, for a new blossom to protect with its strong branches.

That may have been how nature intended for things to happen, but Rosalie knew that it never would– Their tree was already dying. Every member of their family had left something behind when they'd left Edward; something more substantial than a dress or a teddy bear. It wasn't until so much later that they realized, each and every one of them, that it felt like giving up on the one person you felt you could have saved.

Forks. Washington. United States of America, Earth.

A girl straightens slowly, squinting into the afternoon light that she so rarely sees. When the wind blows she thinks she feels cold hands on her shoulders, and she wonders right then what he's doing, where he is as she's casting her clouded eyes to the heavens. Years later it won't be a girl looking to the sky but a young woman, arms wrapped around her middle as if to hold herself together. Like she's falling apart or something.

A voice calls to her and she turns, turns towards the face which has pulled her all these past years like gravity. He takes note of her arms, the way they tighten against her chest, and he understands. He always knows to leave her to her peace; that sometimes, his arms aren't the ones she needs to feel. They'll never say it out loud, but they both know. She'll watch him as he walks away.

She sees the sun, but she's looking for the moon.

How long had it been?

Time was divided into three categories: Pre-Edward, Post-Edward and simply Edward. Pre-Edward was hazy and dim, and the time of Edward was vivid, bright. Post-Edward was that moment when your eyes are adjusting after coming into the darkness from the light. It was the silence after a crescendo of song, while your ears strain to hear the next chords that you know aren't coming. It was the seconds when you look around you and see the remains of your shattered life scattered about.

It was the end of the world.

He head heard once, the best way to move on is to acknowledge your losses. In 10 years, 20 years, 60 years, to stand by his brother's grave and sob his release from the spell he was under. But he would never do either of these things; he couldn't return to Forks, and there are no tears for a vampire to offer.

Another time he'd heard that the best way to move on was to forget. He tried. Decades passed Post-Edward, and gradually he came to walk down the street and he would find that he was no longer shortening his strides to match the only slighter smaller steps of someone who wasn't even there. He heard music and didn't condescendingly compare it to soft, distant piano chords from the past.

And then he would see flashing green eyes across the room and he would start, expecting– He would see a tall, beautiful boy or over a crowd, a head with hair like bronze.

Like cockroaches crawling up from the ruins of the apocalypse, the memories came back.

How could he forget when time was measured in days since Edward? When every heartbeat and soft breath from a human nearby could have been his mind replaying nights from years and years and years ago. When he would kiss Alice's cheek and notice the earrings hanging from her tiny ears, realizing that they had been Masen family heirlooms once.

How could he forget when time itself could not?

2087. Somewhere the rain is falling on a tombstone, and the words slit into its blackened cement are hardly legible in the dim light. Isabella Marie Black 1987 - 2073, whose favorite words in the English language were 'beautiful, loving, loved'... and who was all of these things.

The grave marker next to it reads, Jacob Black, 1989 - 2076, heart of wolf, always ran with the pack. And below that; loving husband, father and brother.

And only few miles from this place, there are rocks. Rocks along a chilly beach where the wind blows through moss-covered trees. Rocks that you peer at closely in recoil in horror when you understand that they aren't rocks at all. Somewhere amongst these and the sand is a flash of gold and diamond. A band, a circle, a hoop, a song that never ends.

A ring.

It is the final remains of an open wound, one gaping like jaws below red eyes, waiting for blood. It never heals, but it fades a little more every decade as the years forget. It's a wound that never closes, whether you talk about it or you don't...

Because while it's true that people don't always linger in the past, the past always, always lingers on.