I never thought that I would fail to save my best friend from certain death – although such a thought would’ve been much more prudent to have pondered over the past few months – especially considering the twisted, warped path fate had so cruelly laid out before us.

I screamed at the top of my lungs futilely as fought desperately to wrench myself free from the pair of icy iron grips that bound me, supposedly for my own safety, from plunging into the inferno that enfulged the building that was her prison.

Certainly it was safer to stop my incessant writhing and fighting and let her die, and thus spare my own life, but I was not so selfish as that. Like her, I was wholly dedicated to allotting myself to others, never once stopping to consider whether or not doing so would result in a profitable gain for my own ends; no, I was noble, dignified, righteous. And because of that, I would not stop until I broke these stony cold bindings, lest they break me first – either way my will would not be destroyed, nor killed, as my best friend had just most definitely been.

I knew that, had Bella Swan had never made that fateful decision to go to Forks – or even I, for that matter – she would not be facing her death now, or would I be undertaking such a mighty struggle to rescue her from Death’s dark abyss. Where I should’ve been – that is, lounging on a sunny beach in Daytona, Florida, with not a care in the world – was a lost cause, a silly dream I relinquished long ago. Therefore, no matter how much I wanted this all to be a sick fantasy, a horrendous nightmare that I’d wake up from screaming and covered in a cold sweat in the middle of the night tucked safely into my own bed, I would not – and could not – bring myself to regret my decisions. Bella was my best friend, my comrade, my peer, the one I shared bits and pieces of my soul with; no one could contest that we were inseparable, as though joined at the hip. And now that same Bella was burning to a crisp inside of the doomed structure laid out before me.

When life – or, if you rather, fate, or destiny, or karma, or whatever of the sort you believe in – presents the opportunity beyond even that of your wildest dreams, it’s not rational to mourn its passing in a funeral pyre, as I suspected Bella was doing this very moment as she burned and that, under normal circumstances, I would have as well. But this wasn’t just about my destiny anymore – it was about Bella’s. The day we first met in Forks, our destinies were forever intertwined and melded together; what happened to her, so it happened to me.

And now that she was dying, so I was dying – as the iron holds on my straining arms loosened their grip and I fell to my knees, I felt numb - nothing at all, save for the soul burning to ashes inside of me…and then fading into nothingness as I died inside.