A Night Without Rest

banner by FrozenSoldier

Am I alive and the rest

Dead, all dead? sweet friends

With the sun they have journeyed west;

For me now night never ends,

A night without rest.

“The Survivor Comes Home” by Robert Graves

London, 1921 – Day 1455

I woke up screaming into my pillow. It’s how I wake up every morning. Never during the night, only in the morning. It was as if the light of day was the worst terror I would ever face. Perhaps it was.

Most people have nightmares at night. Most people are afraid of the dark. I am not most people.

I have nightmares as the sun rises and I’m afraid of the day.

In the night, I can be oblivious to the world around me. In the day, I must face the world.

It all started in Passchendaele. I think. I was part of the British forces, the British Second Army, there. I imagine. I was an officer. So the Germans who captured me said. I was in a trench that was hit by a mortar shell. How else did I get the burns that stretch all the way up my leg? How else did I lose my memory?

That’s right. I don’t even remember what caused my nightmares. I never remember them when I wake up. Never. I want to. Desperately. But I don’t. It’s as though my mind is taunting me, telling me that I have suffered unspeakable horrors and seen things best left unremembered. I want my mind to shut down altogether.

I know that I’m probably far better off not remembering Passchendaele. I know that I was found there, after a battle in November 1917. But there are so many things I want to remember.

My name, for one. The papers I carried in my uniform pocket were partially singed, leaving only Edw- to identify me with. The captain at the POW camp had spent time in England and decided I would be Edward. It seemed logical enough and I agreed. I was returned to the British, at the end of the war, as Edward Jones.

I wonder if I’m married. If I was married, rather. I know that I don’t remember any wife and the German captain told me there wasn’t anything in my possession to say, one way or the other, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a woman out there, missing or mourning her husband. Me. It seems more unfair to her, if she exists, than my current predicament is to me.

And children, do I have children? Am I father who can’t remember the small people I helped give life to? Are there children in England somewhere who wonder if their father will ever come home? Or have they been told their father won’t ever come home?

Perhaps I don’t have either of those; a wife or a child. Perhaps I was all but alone in the world before I was shipped to France.

Save for parents, of course. Everyone has parents. Don’t they? I wish, when I wake up screaming in the morning, that I had a mother there to comfort me and ease my fears. Often, I even feel guilty that there, mostly likely, is a mother out there, mourning me, thinking I am dead but praying daily that I live.

I’ve created parents in my mind, based on things I don’t remember.

That’s the hardest part of all this. I know the concepts of parents, wife, children, and even love. I understand how they work. But they are all taunting me constantly, never letting me grasp on, always flitting away at the very last second.

Here at Hulton Hall, a rest home for injured soldiers; and we all know that we are the lost, hopeless causes, there is a book about a genie who would grant three wishes for anyone chancing to find his lamp and rub it just so.

Dr. Cullen, the physician who looked after me at the field hospital in France when I was first returned to the British, and happened to stay with me through two hospitals in Southampton and Cambridge, respectively, then chanced to move to Hulton Hall at the same time I did, asked us all to list what three wishes we’d most want granted if we found a magical lamp.

The other men wished for their limbs to return, they wished that their wives weren’t disgusted by how disfigured they are, and they wished to be boys again. Those that could wish, anyway, so many here can’t even do that.

My wishes are different.

My first wish is for the nightmares to end.

My second wish is to remember, even just my name but, yet, so much more.

My third wish is, if the genie of legend finds the first two wishes too much to grant, to forget. I want to forget everything. Everything. How to move, how to speak, how to think.

/ANWR\\

“I think you’ve been here too long, Edward.”

My eyes jerked up from my lap, my head moving so quickly that I had to pinch the bridge of my nose to stop the dizziness. I was having tea with Dr. Cullen, something we did every third day without fail, and he’d just told me I’d been there too long.

“I don’t understand,” I said, when I’d recovered the ability to speak properly. “What do you mean?”

“You let me read your journal,” he reminded me gently, knowing that I sometimes forgot things like that in the short term. “I’m concerned that you’ve been here to too long and that you are beginning to give up. If you give up, Edward, and lose hope, you’ll decline steadily until you die.”

Dr. Cullen never held back on what he was thinking. It was one of the things I liked best about him and, perhaps contradictorily, one of the reasons I could not call him Carlisle as he’d asked me time and again to do. That did not mean, though, that I would easily give in to whatever he said.

“What am I supposed to hope for, Dr. Cullen? That my memory might miraculously come back? That I’ll wake up one day and know my name? I can’t hold out for that anymore. I can’t. It would kill me faster than giving up.” When I finished the longest tirade I’d allowed myself since I’d known him, I dropped my eyes again in shame.

I wasn’t surprised when I felt his hand on my shoulder. “Edward,” he told me softly, “I wasn’t saying any of that at all. You know very well that I am forever in awe of how well you are handling everything that you’ve had to go through. I was simply thinking that perhaps you need a holiday.”

I laughed once, hollowly, in surprise. “A holiday?” I repeated skeptically.

He laughed more honestly and walked around to sit next to me on the sofa in his office. “Yes, Edward, a holiday. My wife and I were thinking of going to the Yorkshire Dales for a week or so, perhaps to Scarborough on the coast. We’d like you to come along.”

As if on cue, Esme quietly slipped in and leaned against the ornately carved desk that stood in the center of the room.

I knew his wife well. Esme Cullen was the chief nurse at Hulton Hall and, together, they’d sort of made the place their own even to the point of living there as caretakers of sorts. Esme, I could call her that, had been the one to arrange for me to be switched to a room that didn’t get the morning sun. It didn’t help much, but it helped enough that I was grateful. I’d spent many hours with her even when she wasn’t on duty, playing the piano while she tended to her patients, tidied up, or made dinner. I wasn’t surprised that she was on board with my tagging along on their holiday.

“Aren’t holidays supposed to be about romance and togetherness?” I asked wryly. “Won’t I be in the way?”

“Well, to be fair, you are an adult and perfectly capable of looking after yourself some of the time. Esme and I were thinking that you could have your own room and spend what time you wanted alone. Most of the time, though, we would be more than happy to have you eat or see the sights with us.” Dr. Cullen looked up in surprise, as he just realized what he was saying. “Does that mean you’ll come with us?”

Did it? I didn’t like my own mind at that moment and a holiday on the Yorkshire coast seemed like a way to clear it out a little. “I don’t have any money for a holiday,” I murmured without looking up.

I felt the cushions spring up a little and knew that he’d stood up again. When I heard the creak of the old wood boards in the floor, I knew he was pacing as he liked to do when he was thinking about how best to approach something.

“Would it be possible for you to not worry about that?” he said hesitantly. “I know that I’m asking you to step out of your shell, but can you? Will you?”

The people who ran the hospital, unfortunately not Dr. Cullen and his wife, wanted me out. My injuries were healed and there wasn’t any reason I could set out on my own. That had all been made abundantly clear to me. And it was hard not to be cynical about the motivations that even Dr. Cullen might have. Then again, if I was going to be forced out, why not go as easily as possible.

“I’ll do it. If you and Esme are sure, I’ll go with you.”

Esme flitted to my side instantly. “I’m so happy to hear that, Edward,” she said softly, taking the spot on the sofa that her husband had vacated. “It will be good for you. I promise.”

I had no choice but to believe them.

/ANWR\\

To say I was concerned as the train rattled through the English countryside might be putting it lightly. I’d obviously travelled the same railway route before. I knew that because I recognized old stone churches, sprawling manor houses, and breathtaking vistas from the coastline. The concern I felt came directly from the fact that I remember churches and houses that had no significance whatsoever to me and, yet, I could not remember a single thing of my own life.

Dr. Cullen and Esme noticed my unease right away and tried to help me. They asked me to talk about what I recognized, obviously trying to help spark some long lost memory in my muddled mind. It didn’t work.

No matter how long I discussed the architecture of some medieval abbey or another, I could not remember why I remembered that abbey as something I’d seen before.

I was ready to give up before I even started.

/ANWR\\

On my third night in Scarborough, I sneaked out of the small seaside hotel we were staying in and walked down to the sandy shore, guided only by the moonlight. In a moment of impulsiveness, I left my shoes and socks in my room, wanting to feel the individual grains of sand on my bare feet.

I felt alive as I walked, the earth literally shifting beneath my feet as the wind blew my loose, half-buttoned shirt behind me. I’d never been one for superstitions, not that I remembered, but it felt as though something were changing in the world. Something was different, something would be different.

Perhaps I had only to wait.

Settling myself in the sand, I pulled my knees to my chest and stared out at water.

My mind was drifting, wandering toward sleep when I saw her.

Standing a few hundred yards away, the waves lapped at her feet as she stood in the water and stared up at the starry sky that had so transfixed me just moments earlier. Now, though, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

There was something about her slim figure, the way her long, honey brown colored hair blew behind her in the wind, and the way the light of the moon made her porcelain skin glisten that made my world come completely to rest. I couldn’t take my eyes off her and, to be honest, I didn’t want to.

I only wished I knew why she was suddenly so important to me.

I wanted to know, too, why she looked so very sad and lost. It wasn’t right that someone so delicately pretty should be so sad and lost. So I sat and stared at her.

In the end, she haunted my dreams.

/ANWR\\

The moment the morning sun touched my face, I woke up screaming.

I wasn’t screaming into a pillow, though. I was screaming into my arm and into the sand beneath me.

“Sir! Please, sir, stop screaming, you’re alright. There’s nothing happening, sir. You’re fine.”

For once, it wasn’t an orderly from the hospital, Dr. Cullen, or his wife that comforted me in the moments of my waking nightmare. This voice was soft and concerned, the speaker gently stroking my arm as she tried to calm me.

I’d fallen asleep on the shore, that much was painfully clear. And, when I opened my eyes, I saw her. The woman from last night, the one that had waded in the chilly waters, was crouched over me, shielding me from the concerned onlookers that I could hear whispering about the crazy man cluttering up their shoreline.

“Sir? Is there anyone I can get for you? Do you need help?”

I pushed myself into a sitting position, ignoring the stares of the people behind her, and shook my head. “No. I’m alright, thank you. I’ll just go back to my hotel. I have friends there.”

She stood up first and helped me to my feet, using her right arm to push through the throng of people. “Let’s us through, please,” she demanded more firmly than I would have expected. “This man isn’t well and I need to get him back to his hotel.”

A man stepped forward, brawny enough to carry me if need be. “I can help you with him, Missus,” he offered. “He seems kind of weak.”

Her deep brown eyes sought out mine for an answer to his question. I was lost in them for a moment, as though I knew them and maybe even remembered them. But I shook myself out of it and sighed.

As if she was reading my mind, she glanced at the man and shook her head. “No, thank you, sir. I can manage.”

And manage she did.

Depositing me in Esme’s waiting embrace, the woman I’d been so very sure was no more than an apparition in the moonlight disappeared into the busy streets of Scarborough.

/ANWR\\

For the next three days, I slept during the day. I don’t know why no one had ever suggested it before. I really wish someone had. I didn’t have nightmares if I went to sleep with the sun was overhead and woke up with it nearly the same. But nightmares weren’t the reason for my turning into a nocturnal creature.

She was.

I spent each night on the sand, watching her as she stood ankle deep in the water each night. I don’t know if she saw me. I liked to think that she did, or maybe that she wanted to, but I couldn’t be sure.

/ANWR\\

It was on the third night that I broke my rule and fell asleep on the sand.

I woke up in her arms.

“You were started to thrash about,” she whispered as she held me tightly. “I thought it might help to have someone holding you, that maybe your nightmare wouldn’t be so vivid and terrifying. Am I wrong?”

As I stared up at her, I found myself completely unable to answer her question because I had one of my own and I knew that I could do nothing more until I knew the answer. “What’s your name?”

I watched as her eyes filled with tears and stared as she struggled to blink them back.

“My name is Bella,” she whispered shakily. “Do you know your name?”

It was, perhaps, the most unexpected of questions. Normal people don’t ask strangers if they know their own names. It simply isn’t done. And how was I supposed to answer her?

She, Bella, seemed content enough to let me stay in her arms while I thought through her seemingly simple question.

Though I didn’t know how to tell her that I didn’t know my own name, I decided that, in the interests of being as normal as possible, I would go ahead and tell her what I knew. “My name is Edward Masen.”

Edward Masen.

That was my name. It wasn’t the name I used at the hospital, but it was my name.

It had always been my name, since the day I was born.

And I remembered it.

Why?

As I looked up at Bella, I realized why.

“Bella?” I murmured, reaching up to run my thumb gently along her cheekbone. “My Bella?”

The tears spilled from her eyes, landing on me and mixing with my own. “You remember me?” she asked breathlessly. “You remember you?”

I sat up quickly and wrapped my arms around her just as tightly as she held me. “You’re my wife,” I declared firmly though I was crying. “How could I not remember you? You thought I was dead, didn’t you? That must have been horrible for you. I’m so sorry.”

“Shh, hush now, Edward,” she whispered, pressing her lips to my ear and calming my rising panic. “It’s alright. We’re together now. That’s all that matters right now. Please believe that.”

I’d vowed, the very first time my eyes had focused on Isabella Marie Swan, daughter of Sir Charles Swan, that I would protect her and keep her safe until the day that I died. And I’d failed, failed miserably.

But Bella had always insisted that she could and would protect me just as much as I would for her. So I knew it was easiest, for the moment, to let her take charge.

“I believe it,” I told her honestly before a question came to mind. “How long have you known it was me? And my name is Edward Masen, isn’t it?”

“Yes, my darling, you are Edward Anthony Masen,” she said, smiling through her tears. “I thought it was you that first morning that I found you screaming on the sand. But I was told that you’d been killed at Passchendaele. So when I took you back to your hotel and the nurse took you to the bedroom, I talked to the doctor you’re travelling with. He told me about your injuries and I told him who I was.

“The next day, he verified what I said with my father and contacted me. He said it was best not to push you too hard so I just kept coming to the water every night, hoping that you’d recognize me and say something.”

“I want you to recognize me,” I admitted a little sheepishly. “I felt like I knew you, even after that first night, but I wasn’t sure. I just wanted to be sure of something.”

Leaning up just a little, she gently kissed my lips before pulling back. “I’ll help you be sure of something,” Bella promised solemnly, standing up and offering me her hand. “Whatever you need, Edward, just tell me. Even if you need me to go away for a while. Promise me that?”

I kept tight hold of her hand as I stood up and made my vow, though I knew I would never ask her to go away, even for a moment. “I promise.”

“You’ve been out all night,” she said, gently tugging me toward the boardwalk. “We should get you back to your hotel, shouldn’t we?”

“I’m not actually ill, Bella,” I reminded her quietly. “I limp because of the burns on my leg and the shrapnel in my brain made me forget my life. I won’t catch cold by staying out all night.”

Bella seemed nervous about just how to approach me. With my hand loose enclosed in hers, she led me along the wooden pavement. “I realize that, of course, but I’m sure that the doctor and his wife will be very worried about you if we don’t get you back.”

I wanted to argue with her, I really did. Mostly because I didn’t want stop being with her and just her. I wanted to reconnect with my wife. On the other hand, I didn’t want to argue with her. Arguing with my Bella was never something I wanted to do and, as best as I could remember, we’d rarely done it early in our time together.

I also realized that Dr. Cullen and Esme would be worried about me. And I wasn’t sure how to proceed with my newfound memory. It scared me to try and think of what I might also remember. And even more, what I might have missed over the last four years.

The more I thought about it, the faster I walked, until I was leading Bella.

/ANWR\\

By dinner that day, I’d discovered that I definitely remembered my wife.

I remembered the day we met, a little bit of our wedding, and some of our life together. It was a very broken, mismatched picture in my mind but Dr. Cullen said that I’d likely remember more as time went on and I trusted him completely. For now, though, I was content with simply getting to know her again.

It was hard to do that when she insisted that we talk only about what I’d been through for the last four years. I didn’t want to tell her about my nightmares and all the times I wanted to end my life.

Bella, my beautiful Bella, had already been burdened with far more than she deserved. I couldn’t add to her worries.

I’m afraid that I did.

I was also afraid that she was keeping something from me. It made me irrationally suspicious and I ended up breaking a teacup.

It was then that Esme suggested Bella come back in the morning. They worked together to get a promise from me that I wouldn’t spend the night on the shore. I didn’t plan to keep that promise. Waking this morning in the earliest part of my nightmare after three days of no nightmares had spoiled me. I had every intention of going to the shore and being sure to be back before Esme was any the wiser.

Before I could ‘go to sleep’, Dr. Cullen sat with me and we discussed the day in detail.

He told me that it was to be expected that I would remember bits and pieces at a time. He told me that I might not remember everything. And he reminded me that he’d said things from my past might trigger a memory at any moment. Then, as he always did, he asked me if I had any questions.

I had only one.

I wanted to know if he’d known that Bella would be in Scarborough.

My trust in him was enough that I believed him when he denied it.

He explained, holding nothing back, that she’d recognized me and come to him. Knowing that her father was Sir Charles Swan, governor of Barings Bank in London, he’d sent a telegram asking for verification of her identity. He and Sir Charles had attended Eton together and Sir Charles’ reply was quick. He’d even sent along my identification numbers from the army, half of which remained on the papers I’d carried in the German hospital. Dr. Cullen, of course, had the papers with them and compared them. They matched, as best they could. With that clarified, Dr. Cullen had returned to Bella’s hotel where she showed him a photograph from our wedding. He knew then that I was her husband.

Fearful of setting me back by forcing things on me, he’d advised her to be patient and let me remember on my own time, if she was willing to take the chance that I might never remember at all.

So I went to bed, having realized that world is a very small place indeed, sleeping for three hours before I crept out of the hotel and back to my spot on the beach. This time, though, I settled myself on a bench as I prayed Bella wouldn’t come just to see if I had broken my promise.

/ANWR\\

The little boy, small and sporting an unruly mop of bronze hair, clearly adored Bella.

I felt so many things as I tried to remain invisible on my bench, watching as they played in the sand at sunrise. I’d promised Bella that I would stay in my hotel and now I was watching her as she played with the small boy. Guilt weighed heavily on me, guilt that was mixed with a curiosity that kept me rooted in place.

Who was this boy?

Doing the arithmetic in my head, I quickly figured out that my Bella must have found someone to replace me with very soon after she learned of the fate that wasn’t mine in the end. It was no wonder that she tried so hard not to talk about herself when we met.

I wasn’t jealous, though some deep corner of my mind seemed to think I should be. Maybe it was more that I didn’t want to be jealous. I wanted to know that Bella had found some happiness and peace when she thought that I was dead.

My gasp was likely audible to anyone close by when I realized that it might have been better for my Bella if I’d remained ‘dead’ to her and, in reality, to myself. Surely she, her father, her husband, and her son could have a better, less confusing existence that way.

I decided in that moment that I was leaving Scarborough as soon as I could convince Dr. Cullen and his wife that I felt myself losing control. They, especially Esme, worried so much and I knew it wouldn’t be hard. I could disappear forever, knowing that my Bella had some happiness in her life.

If only I hadn’t spoken to her, given her hope for me.

After a moment’s consideration, my thoughts changed course and decided that I would leave Scarborough on my own by whatever means I could manage. If I left with the Cullens, I had no doubt that they would try to convince me of the error of my ways and bring me to Bella again. If I left without them, they would at least have to search for me, eventually giving up when other patients distracted them.

I would be hurting three people, but it would be better in the end. Or so I prayed.

With that resolved, I collected the meager belongings that I’d had the foresight to bring to the shore and prepared to leave Scarborough. Scotland seemed like as good a place as any to disappear.

One word stopped me as I turned to go.

“Edward?”

/ANWR\\

Bella was walking toward me, the small boy tripping through the sand behind her. “Edward? I thought you were going to stay in your hotel room. Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” I assured her. “It was just the nightmares.”

“You don’t have them at night, do you?” she asked me shyly. “Just in the morning.”

I gestured toward the boy, trying not to be too obvious about it. “Not in front of the child, please.”

Seeming to remember him, she gently ran her fingers through his bronze hair, nudging him to her side. “He’s not just the child, Edward,” she whispered almost shyly. “He’s our child. Yours and mine.”

Forevermore, I would blame it on my head injury, but that possibility had never, not once, crossed my mind. To think that I might have a child, a child that I didn’t even know, was mind-boggling.

I felt my face flush as I realized how horrible it was of me to think that Bella, my Bella, might have forgotten me so quickly and moved on with another man.

“He’s my son?” I murmured, so softly I hardly heard myself speak. My legs had turned to rubber and, before I could stop myself, I was on my knees in the sand.

Bella knelt down, too, so that the three of us were all at the very same level. “He’s your son,” she repeated slowly. She leaned close and kissed the boy on one of his round, pink cheeks. “This is your father.”

A small, pudgy hand was presented very properly to me. “Hello,” the boy said, the only sign of his shyness being the way he kept his eyes fixed on the ground in front of him. “My name is Edward Anthony Masen.”

I enveloped his tiny hand in mine. “It’s nice to meet you, Edward. I’m Edward Anthony Masen, as well.”

He nodded solemnly, raising his green eyes just a little. “What did people call you when you were a lad like me?”

“Edward,” I answered, though I wasn’t completely sure what people had called me when I was a boy. “What shall I call you?”

“Most people, like Grandfather and Mummy, call me Eddie. But I didn’t have a father then, so maybe you ought to call me Edward. If you want.”

My son, it was so strange to say the words, even in my mind, seemed less shy now even though there were tears streaming freely down his mother’s cheeks. They were threatening to spill from my own eyes at any moment.

“I’d very much like that. But, Edward,” I said, suddenly more shy than he was, “I want you to call me whatever you’d like to call me. You don’t have to call me anything but Edward if you’d like that best.”

His eyes snapped up to meet mine. “But none of my friends call their fathers by their names! They all call them Father or Papa or Daddy. Can’t I call you one of them?”

“Which you most like to call him?” Bella asked, mercifully saving me as I started to cry in earnest.

The vision that was my son thought hard about that for a moment and then nodded, having decided which he preferred. “I like Daddy best of all. Can I call you that, Daddy?”

I wasn’t sure if I crushed him to my chest or if he threw himself into my arms, perhaps it was a combination of both, but I was hugging my son more tightly than was probably strictly safe. And I didn’t care. When Bella joined the hug, crying the hardest of all, the world made sense again.

/ANWR\\

“Please, Daddy!” Edward begged me impatiently. “Won’t you please help me fly my new kite?”

Kite flying, even at sunset, required running. That much I knew. The burn scars that stretch from my foot and all the way up to my ribs made running in any sort of normal way impossible. There were other little boys flying kites with their fathers and I did not want to embarrass my son on the very first day I knew him. Still, though, I hated letting him down.

Dr. Cullen and Esme had joined us on the beach after dinner and it was Dr. Cullen who first tried to give me an out, offering to help Edward fly his kite.

“No, thank you, sir,” my small boy told him politely. “If Daddy doesn’t want to fly my kite, I don’t want to either.”

“It isn’t that he doesn’t want to, Eddie,” Bella explained, drumming her fingers nervously on her leg as she sat on the blanket in the sand. “Daddy was hurt during the war.”

Edward didn’t seem to want to listen to anyone but me and it was me that he turned to. “Can’t you run at all, Daddy?”

“I can, but not fast and it looks sort of strange when I do,” I admitted.

Edward shrugged his small shoulders. “I don’t care one bit, Daddy,” he declared proudly. “I just want to fly my kite. But we don’t have to.”

I looked at the red and white diamond shaped kite trailing behind the four year old son I’d known less than twenty-four hours. It wasn’t that I couldn’t run to get the kite started nor was it that I wouldn’t. I was just worried how I’d look compared to all the young, spry fathers running across the sand with their children and their kites.

It was silly, really.

“Let’s fly that kite,” I said, pushing myself up off the blue plaid blanket and to my feet. “Have you flown a kite before, Edward?”

“No, never!” he said, literally bouncing with excitement. “Have you?”

In my peripheral vision, much better on the right than the left since the war, I saw both Dr. Cullen and Bella tense. “When I was a very small boy,” I answered with only the slightest hesitation. “I think I remember how to do it. If I don’t, I’m sure the two of us are smart enough to figure it out, don’t you think?”

“We surely are,” he decided with all the seriousness a four year old could muster.

We spent the next ten minutes tangled in the tail of the kite and the string attached to it as we tried to get it off the ground and into the air. It might have gone better if Edward hadn’t insisted on running excited circles around me every time I almost had the thing straightened out. We were far from the only father and son having the same problem getting started and it made the moment all the more special in my eyes.

“Come on, Daddy!” Edward shouted, having shed his cap and jacket long ago as he ran along beside me. “You’ve almost got it!”

That was just the motivation that the kite and I needed. It fluttered up and into the brilliantly orange sky just as he finished cheering me on.

With only a hint of pain in my badly scarred leg, I dropped to my knees beside him. “Here, Edward. You’ve got to hold onto the reel to control the kite.”

Planting himself in front of me, he put his small hands over mine on the reel. “Don’t let go, Daddy,” he whispered, a little awestruck that it was his kite up there among all the others.

“I won’t,” I vowed, meaning more than he would ever know. “I won’t ever let go, Edward.”

We flew the kite, just Edward and me, until it was dark and he started to yawn. Only then did he consent to go back to his mother on the blanket.

Even in only the light of the moon, I could see that Bella’s eyes, though dry now, were puffy and red. I knew she’d been crying and I prayed they’d been tears of happiness.

“Mummy!” Edward shouted through a yawn. “Did you see us flying the kite?”

“I certainly did, my little man,” she said as she wrapped him in her arms. “Did you have fun?”

“Oh, yes, Mummy, I did have so very much fun,” he answered sleepily. “Is Daddy coming to tuck me in bed for the night, Mummy?”

Over the top of his bronze mop of hair, Bella looked at me and I knew that she’d give whatever answer I wanted him to hear.

“As if I would not come and tuck you in to bed,” I answered for myself, bringing fresh tears to Bella’s eyes.

At least this time, they were tears of happiness.

/ANWR\\

“The diamonds in your tiara looked like starbursts.”

I startled her with my sudden, strange sounding sentence.

“At our wedding,” I reminded her, smiling when she did. “Your grandmother loaned you a tiara and the diamonds looked like starbursts.”

“You remember?” she whispered slowly.

“Some,” I admitted. “I don’t remember the dress you wore or who was there, or even where we were married. I do remember that your cheeks were pink, you only cried after we kissed, and that the diamonds on your tiara looked like starbursts.”

Bella nodded and leaned back against the wrought iron chair.

We were sitting on the balcony of her hotel, a far more opulent one that Dr. Cullen had engaged, watching the sunrise and waiting for Edward to wake up. We’d tried to go to sleep, Bella in bed with Edward and me on long sofa in the room, but it hadn’t worked. I couldn’t be sure about Bella, but I didn’t want to waste one moment that I had with her. I’d already lost four years.

“You cried after we kissed, too,” she murmured, bringing me back to the moment.

The colours of morning over the water were breathtaking as a flock of birds took the sky, their bodies silhouetted in black shadow. Though my eyes were firmly fixed on my Bella, she was made even more beautiful by the new day arriving behind her.

I didn’t remember crying, but I knew she wouldn’t lie to me. “Was I embarrassed when I cried?” I asked instead of worrying about anything else.

“You didn’t seem to notice that there was anyone else there.” My breath caught as she turned my hand over and linked her fingers through mine. “Just like now, it could be a massive thunderstorm and I don’t know that we’d notice.”

“Probably not,” I agreed, wondering idly if I was wrong to think that Bella was nervous about something.

I wasn’t.

“Edward,” she said hesitantly, chewing her bottom lip, “can I ask you about your injuries? I know you don’t really remember how they happened, and maybe you don’t want to, so you can just tell me to stop talking if you want me to. Is that okay?”

“Ask whatever you need. Dr. Cullen said that it wouldn’t hurt to talk about it.”

“He told me that as well. And he told me to watch for you to get frustrated and stop talking if you do.”

I squeezed her hand, mentally preparing myself for whatever questions she might ask. “Go ahead, then, Bella.”

/ANWR\\

I told her everything I could about my injuries.

I told her that my leg didn’t hurt much, unless I tried to keep it perfectly straight and stretched. Even that wasn’t so bad as the exercises that Dr. Cullen had suggested were helping to loosen the tightly, badly scarred skin.

I told her that I had bad headaches sometimes. More rare now, they could still be bad enough that I’d spend three days lying in bed in complete darkness. Even that wasn’t so bad, but I warned her that I usually forgot things, random things, after headaches.

When she said that she didn’t care, that she’d take care of my while I felt ill and that she’d help me remember when I wanted to, I moved on to my nightmares.

I told her bluntly that I hadn’t slept through a night since I woke up in the German hospital after Passchendaele. Ever one to look after me, she gently reminded me that it was mornings I trouble sleeping through. Thanking her for that, I told her that I never remembered my nightmares and that I wasn’t sure I wanted to remember them.

To remember them would be to remember the battle, the screams of dying men, the smell of rotting flesh, and the moment I thought I was going to die. I would forever live in a night without rest.

Bella told me that, should I ever change my mind, she’d help me track down survivors of Passchendaele in the hopes that they could help me remember.

I thanked her and asked her to be sure that she didn’t want to run away screaming from the broken, failing man so very different than the one she’d married.

In answer, she moved closer to me, leaning forward until our noses touched. “Edward Anthony Masen, don’t you ever think that I would run away from you. Maybe you aren’t exactly the same as you were the first day I saw you, but you’re still you. I see that so clearly. I wish you could see it too.”

“Maybe one day I will,” I allowed, feeding off the hope that was so clear in her brown eyes.

“You will,” she whispered, our noses still touching. “Edward? It’s terribly forward of me to ask, but may I kiss you?”

She wanted to kiss me. The very realization brought tears to my eyes. I had only three words to say in reply. “Please kiss me.”

And she did.

I felt alive with her lips on mine.

It was completely inappropriate to be kissing her so passionately on a balcony where anyone walking past could see us but we didn’t care. She was my wife and I was her husband. We hadn’t kissed in more than four years. Let the people say what they may.

I didn’t want to stop. But we had to when our son tripped onto the balcony with a shout of laughter.

“Mummy and Daddy are kissing!” he trilled happily. “We going to be a family, just like all the other families, aren’t we?”

Sitting still as he clambered onto my lap, I kept my hand entwined with Bella’s. “We certainly are going to be a family just like all the other families, Edward Anthony Masen, Junior. Do you like that idea?”

“Very much I do,” he declared, balancing on his knees to kiss his mother’s cheek and then mine. “It’s forever now, isn’t it?”

Bella and I answered in perfect unison. “Forever.”

The End

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