1927, Charleston -- March
Philadelphia was left behind in seconds, and still he waits. Another week. Two.
He can feel tenuous nature of his nine years of restraint drawing taut, but temptation stays many feet away. He does not have interact with people now. There is no school to visit, that needs to be seen walking to and from and studying for. There is no house to avoid, no longer necessary is that location to be seen leaving from or arriving as though a normal man with a normal life and normal companions.
The thirst drove his every thought and still he waited. If he was going to do this, it had to be the right way. No casual choice or blundering mistakes. The pursuit in question called itself Jonithan Parmer. By day a devout, strict parish teacher of small children, whose thoughts were rare pure and kindly to even his charges.
By night a shadow in alley's watching the length of a woman's arm, the swing of a earrings, the way a woman would lean into a car to solicit a charge. All the while this Jonithan detailed how hell had more room for them than God's Gift the Earth. He could not help thinking Carlisle's church, which abandoned him, bred more monsters than the moralities it twisted away.
Skulking and thinking were not enough. Nothing, days of nothing but rambling, and thirst, until just when Edward had been on the brink of abandoning, he'd bashed one these women over the head with a broken lamp found in his alley hiding spot.
The glass in his fingers still, and blood, blood red and think and screaming and drip, drip, dripping-pulsing, carving the first jagged marks into her barely-alive-but-unconscious body, when Edward had appeared.
Quieter than falling snow
faster than a thought
slamming the man off of her
They rolled, and Edward come up holding the man's body like a rag doll as he sputtered in confused rage, flooded with fear, unable to gasp a breath. The man found Edward's eyes -- he saw them, his own eyes, alabaster skin surrounding them, black and hungry, both depthless and sucking void -- in the flicker of a half second before Edward buried his teeth into the man's throat.
He couldn't have hated Carlisle more than then.
When his entire body ache and sung with the hot, spicy blood which poured into his mouth. A river down his throat as he drank deeper, denying the man the right to shake or struggle, even as he tried to fight a marble statue clutching his body. When every impulse, every understanding of his body grew each longer second he drank.
He was wrong. The terms held back and stifled were so mundane and regular and beyond what Carlisle had done, what Carlisle had kept from him. When he could suddenly hear those dying breaths clearer. When his ability to consider was washed away by the frenzy of needed, at the same second as the cacophony of his mind suddenly roared to life.
Over the very edge into instinct alone, where control had never been tested to be formed, as he experienced the first waves of a pandemonium that made the first riotous experience with thoughts, and the near decade of learning to live with them, nothing compared to the onslaught that beat into him from everywhere, the body in his hands snapped like a collection of twigs wrapped in silk.
It was dropped when his hands had gone to his ears with a snarl.
An impulse not even enacted once since the very first time.
They continued to come, expanding, multiplying.
Beating into him. Louder and faster and further.
More of them than ever before, from farther out than he'd ever been able to reach and search. More thoughts and images, clarity of understanding and depth of the lines between present thought and memory, the way they saw and how they incorporated and translated their own thoughts. Frenzy and bedlam locked in a struggle that saw him raise, trying to walk forward and staggering, nearly falling under the turmoil.
"Hey, buddy-"
Edward's face had snapped up, with a hiss at the intrusion, bright red eyes seeing clearly even in the darkness. (There a woman was pouring wine into glasses.) A man, warmth, his heart beating so loudly, breath hitched for the hiss. (What do you mean you won't marry me?) He took an even step forward, a plethora of thoughts displacing and congregating with his one, that he was still thirsty. (A dog with floppy ears, that felt like felt.) So much more thirsty for having drunk. (Just another candy mother.) The body wasn't even drained. The body--
"--are you o--What the?"
Edward's shoulders locked, trying to fight frenzy and a million impeding minds, as he was suddenly in a foot from the man at the front of the alley, reaching out for him. (Tell me a story. A true one. Tell me about your childhood.) His hand shook just short of touching. He hadn't meant to cross that distance, only to consider it, to understand he'd have to kill his witness. What was he thinking? Why. Why couldn't he think. Why was it so god damn loud. He hadn't seen anything. (Blue. A blanket laying on a bed, viewed through the dark, through memory of seeing it every single day for years.) He--he wasn't thinking--there were no bodies in his head.
Even if body was a generous term for the pulp his hands had created.
"Leave," croaked from between his lips. A hard, harsh request. (She's my dearest bosom friend.) A betrayal of his own want. An impossibility when his fingers curled around the man's lapel. He smelled so good. Faintly different, earthier. (Work and sleep. Work and sleep. Every night it’s the same.) He leaned forward breathing in, as a million voices went about their business, burying themselves like ants inside his ears, irritating every thoughts and action he tried to take. (Music from a radio being sung along with by three different people. All of them bad. All of them so happy.) Fear rolled from the man in front of him and disgust and preservation.
Edward held on to him still, staring into those eyes. (Purple scarf and grey shoes. The black ones have too noticeable holes in them.) His own black fading, but it was too dark here, too dark for the man to tell anything. (There was a letter being written, on crème paper with a blue ink ball pen.) This wasn't supposed to be about others. Not innocent people. Not. He shoved the man suddenly, bodily with only the hand at his lapel, with the too much force. (God. If you're listening. I could use some help tonight.) Pain spiked and his heart beat blared even louder into the frenzy that rocked both Edward's body and his mind.
Shoved that human body, another of glass and satin and air and water, toward the open space.
"Go." Edward pleaded in an firm order. He'd had the best teacher for that fool's language.
His body, capable of perfect stillness for years, shook with will it took to stay there.
"Look I don't know what's--"
The man started and Edward's eyes, reddening more and more in the passing minutes, widened.
For self-preserving creatures, this one was startlingly oblivious to anything. But if he wanted to (Edward took another step closer; a woman somewhere was reading Shakespeare) offer himself up (another, just a few more steps and; a child was laughing at her grandfather) on the altar of that stupi-- No. No. This wasn't. He had. Wanted. Hadn't been. He had to--
The alley was suddenly empty.