A/N: Okay, so this is basically me, being a teenager.

Rating: M for language, violence and all those other lovely themes that make Victoria and Edward what they are.

Chapter One is from when Victoria's still human and Edward needs her blood. Edward is not a sappy stalker, but kind of a twisted bad boy.

Dark Gifts

Are you goin' to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.
Remember me to one who lives there, she once was a true love of mine.
-Simon and Garfunkel -Scarborough fair

Theoretically, their relationship was the most even balance that could exist. They both gave and took in equal amounts.

He gives her an exquisite pattern of bite marks and bruises, deeply interwoven with her need to possess pain to feel alive. He gives her the drug she needs and wants, her fix, her mind-blowing, spine-shuddering high. He gives her an illusion of a rescue and romance even when she's bleeding her soul into his mouth, and that's why, every night, right before she collapses, she imagines a hint of softness in his lips because it's a tad unlike the battle for dominance they call a kiss and her face crumples.

It's that agony he gives her the most, embodied in her scarred, bruised body, and she revels in it, pain is the most ecstatic pleasure she has ever felt. He gives her more and more of it and she drinks it like he drinks her blood.

She gives him life.

Not just literally, but figuratively, because he's feeding off her spirit, her fire and desire, not just her blood. She gives him a way to take that edge off, a way to calm his restless nature, his need to destroy, destroy, destroy. Fucking her is the rough equivalent of setting fire to an entire village, only once he's done, all he wants is more.

She gives him her defiance, by refusing to break, even when she's on her knees, tears and blood combining to make a ghastly flow of tragedy and he's laughing in her face. She gives him a luxury he's never had before, that of holding her eyes as he bites down, seeing the ripple of pain flicker through them. Never before has he met anyone as in love with disaster as she was, and he's loving every minute of it.

She gives him something to ponder on the brighter hours of the day, when he's feeling almost apathetic. He often finds himself wondering how she manages to exude so much light –her hair is nothing short of fire when the sunlight catches it in the right angle- and not explode. He's fascinated with her hair, and he thinks that someday, after he'd killed her, he'd remember the sensation of invincibility it gives him when her hair's between his fingers and the sensation of taming the one element in nature capable of defeating him.

As the counterbalance, they take.

He takes, and takes, and takes, until it's all a blur of blood and violence and sex but once the haze goes away, nothing's left. But she can't find a place to hide, he's taken that, too. He's taken everything she has called her own, her sense of security, her confidence, it was all right there in her blood when he drank it straight off her veins. But he's long gone, and all she's left with is a ghost of what she used to be. The specks of crimson where he took her blood and took her soul mock her, reminding her that everything he took, he will never give back.

He takes her right to feel complete, her ability to not be falling apart, her determination to make everything make sense. He takes every single fucking thing until she's only left with a gaping hole inside of her that only his delicious cruelty can hope to fill. He takes until she's empty enough to not care when her heart breaks, and that's exactly what he wants.

He never imagined he's meet someone fucked up enough to be able to do something quite like this, but her blood's the only thing he can think about and it's driving him off the edge.

She takes his vision, his resolution.

Using people is his second nature -hell, it's his first- but he's being used, he's being hit back at by someone who can beat him at his own game. She knows exactly when to remind him that when she's gone, his drug's gone, too, no more blood, no more ways to take away that energy. Her blood's his addiction and her sex is as good as any. He's even grown fond of her character, sort of, especially the way she drives over when he doesn't and invites him to come and resume their cycle of violent sex, to come and break her down. And when he's not doing exactly that, he paces around the house, shattering thin, smashing them because that's what he does, he breaks and breaks. It's at times like those he wonders if he'll remember her, at least a bit.

Theoretically, they seem like the perfect balance that ever existed. They give and they take, but there's nothing there anyway.

A/N: Chapter two shall not be updated (or won't even exist) unless you REVIEW!