~3~
 

Pink.

Edward was surrounded by pink. It didn’t become him.

Hospital rooms often became interrogation rooms when he was around, and this one was no different, despite the color. He had a number of questions ready for her when she awoke – all of which he already knew the answers to. This included the one that would fall first from his lips:

//Did you have to kill Harley?//

Anita continued her labored sleep in the large hospital bed as he watched over her. He kept his back on the far wall so he had a view of the door. Her preternatural boyfriends had survived the night, a price she had nearly paid with her life. Her risk was their gain.

Edward clutched the magazine he was pretending to read in his lap, his right hand hovering absently near the butt of his gun hidden in its holster beneath his jacket.

He already knew the answer to his question. Deep inside, he’d already granted her abstinence on the condition that complete truth was offered. He knew it would be. She was nothing if not practical.

This made him appreciative and cautious all at once. She owed him a life, and soon he’d be inviting her into his life to make up of it.

Would she follow him? When he needed her, would she come when he called?

Funny how he never dared to compare the ultimatums he was about to give her to those of her two monsters…

This was different. This was back up. The rest of last nights events were incidental by comparison.

If she lied, or if she refused, so be it. They would draw down on each other at last. Either way, a thrill rippled through him at the thought of the outcome. Anticipation at it’s finest.

Anita’s chest rose and fell with his own as his eyes traveled back to her. She’d be asleep a while longer, too far gone to care about him, his motivations, or anything else in this world. Her breathing filled the silence and proposed an interesting question in, and of, itself.

//Would he have given Harley the same choice he was about to give her had Harley taken her down permanently?//

This echoed in his head over and over, and he tried to subdue it, but this was something only he could answer.

Edwards wasn’t one to turn and look back over his shoulder to the past, even if the past was the night before. But the woods, with its surrounding supernatural glow, took over his senses with its vividness, and he tried to picture Anita’s body slumped and lifeless on the ground. It wasn’t a hard image to conjure, all things considered.

Just the same, his whole body turned cold – the heated thoughts of drawing down on her, obliterated. Her death would have been his failure, yet again. As for he and Harley, they had currently owed each other nothing; all debts paid. Back up only. Even Harley didn’t operate on the same level that he and Anita did, and that was saying something. He had been a childlike psychotic, controllable only when taking orders. Would Edward have drawn down on him, if it had been Anita’s blood between them?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Killing for vengeance wasn’t a common food on Edward’s plate.  Under other circumstances, Harley’s death would be pointless, unnecessary, and a waste of good back up. But, even theoretically, Anita’s death would mean something.

He was being forced to come to grips with that fact more and more these days.

But there was a deeper truth that disturbed him yet. He would grieve for her. This lonesome little thought gnawed at him in its efforts to take up residence beside other useful internal organs inside him, seeking to attach itself.

He couldn’t let that happen. Detachment was the key, even if it required surgical interments.

Even as he put on the Ted face for the nurse whose duties suddenly brought her to Anita’s bedside  - more pink again; he couldn’t escape it – he was distancing himself. Easy as pie.

Not so easy when she woke up and immediately groped out a hand to him, as if she couldn’t touch him soon enough.

Her unwavering trust in him held its irony briefly. And then he took her hand in his.
 

~fin~