Title : Beyond Any Experience
Fandom : Twilight
Characters/Pairings : Edward/Tanya, Edward/Bella.
Summary :  Three trips that Edward made to Alaska.
Notes : Twilight AU (twisted, twisted AU). Companion piece to the J/B fic “Somewhere I Have Never Traveled”, both titles from e.e. cummings.

I said I would never write Edward/Tanya. And then I did. XD I think I have only read approximately um, one E/T fic, so my take on Tanya is probably quite, quite different from fanon!Tanya.

Beyond Any Experience

Love built on beauty,

Soon as beauty, dies.

-         John Donne

~

zero.

It is impossible… to stop. Impossible.

Her blood is like the heart of a flower turned to wine. Freesia, lavender, a liquid garden where he drowns. Ophelia sang snatches of old tunes, and Bella’s blood sings as it flows through him. Siren song.

He can’t even stop drinking to say, Forgive me.

Not that it matters. Not that he’ll ever forgive himself.

He wonders if Romeo’s poison tasted like this. If it tasted like Juliet.

~

one.

Like Carlisle, Tanya is compassionate. It’s why she chose the life she did.

Her mercy, however, is not the mercy of a mother, but of the executioner.

To Tanya, people’s desires are as easy to read as a fanned out hand of cards. Rosalie’s desire to be worshipped, Emmett’s to improve his strength, Esme’s to be a mother, Carlise’s to atone and to serve, Alice’s to experience being human, Jasper’s to be strong for Alice.

But Edward. Edward is like and unlike them. He seems to want for nothing, and it’s the seems that’s the heart of it. It’s not that entirely he’s a monk, pure and self-denying, although some of that is passed down from Carlisle. 

It is not the absence of desire that Tanya finds fascinating about him. It’s his exquisite self-control - his reign on his desires.

“I can make you want me,” is what Tanya says to him. No arrogance, just a simple statement of fact. “Given enough time, that is. And we always have enough time.”

“I am… content, as I am,” he says. Solitary. Unattached. He does not lack anything, he does not grieve in the same way that others do, for what they have lost, for what they never had the chance to have. He has never been driven to find solace in another’s arms, the way his family have, the way Carmen and Eleazar have.   

“Content,” Tanya repeats, dreamily. “Yes, you are. That’s the funny part, isn’t it? But one day,” and her smile becomes blissful, “you won’t be.”

~

two.

“Oh, how beautiful,” she breathes, when he next shows up in Denali in Carlise’s car, shaking, shaking, shaking. “Oh Edward, it is so very, very beautiful.”

She doesn’t need to explain it, he can see how she sees him, echoes bouncing back and forth between their minds.

You’re a black hole of pure wanting, she thinks to him. I’ve seen men kill each for a crust of bread, I’ve seen emperors crumble from a single man’s desire, but I’ve never seen anyone who's wanted so much.

Tanya knows everyone’s desires, but nobody knows hers. This is power. This is how you always have the upper hand.

Edward had that power too. That was why Tanya was drawn to him.

… Up until now, up until this human girl. Her face blooms in Edward’s mind, and through Edward’s mind, it blooms in Tanya’s.

Some things die in silence. Some things - some desires - feed upon silence, and grow in its shade.

The scent of Bella Swan’s blood spirals through Edward like ink in water, staining everything, but it’s the scent of his desire that Tanya finds the sweetest.  

“Always knew you had it in you,” Tanya whispers, and Edward snarls.

She smiles.

~

three.

As soon after the funeral as is appropriate, the Cullens vanish quietly from Forks and materialize in Denali.

“You’re a wreck,” Tanya says tranquilly, and it is nothing less than truth. Edward’s a city in ruins, nothing but cracked stone and jagged shadows.

“Your desire’s changed,” she adds, thoughtful, and adds, as if trying to be comforting, “that’s the way it usually goes. Once you satisfy one desire, another takes its place.”

He moans a little, crumples and curls into himself, and she thinks that she has never seen him so weak, she’s never seen him brought so low. There’s a sort of faintly sweet satisfaction in that, at seeing the sheer power of desire, but it is also a little sad.

“Once upon a time,” she breathes, coming closer to him, “you wanted her. Not only her blood, but her. Now you have had both. Tell me, Edward. Are you content?”

He doesn’t answer, can’t answer, from where he lies crumpled on the floor. Unmoving. And Tanya knows, with that fine, cool, cutting observation of hers, that Carlise’s coven hovers tensely at all times, ready to keep Edward from succeeding in destroying himself.

“Come here, Edward.” There is tenderness in her. As heartless as she seems, she is capable of kindness. She kneels beside him on the floor and whispers, softly as the slither of scales, “I told you before. You’re a black hole of pure wanting, I’ve never seen anyone who's wanted so much, and who wants so many things. You want to remember. You want to forget. And now you want to die.”

His eyes are unseeing. The gold has bled out of them, stained scarlet by a human girl’s blood. She can almost see the red letter that he’s pinned on his chest, like a target. 

“I can give what you want, Edward. La Bella Donna. The poison,” Tanya murmurs, reaching out her arms, pulling him in to her, as if he is a child, “and also its cure.”

~

Tanya has satisfied her desire, to see him fall. She decides, in a moment of kindness, to satisfy his.

She becomes his accomplice; Alice never sees Edward boarding his flight to Italy because it’s Tanya who decides to send him off.

Tanya is compassionate, after all.

end.

Death is the mother of beauty;

Hence from her alone shall fulfillment to our dreams,

And our desires.

- Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”