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My name is Clara Elizabeth Jezebel Hale. I am named after two of the most notorious Queens ever to have existed and a woman that used to be known as my caretaker. I have been loved, I have been hated, and I have been dragged through hell and back immeasurable amounts of times.

This time, I don’t think I’m coming back.

Carlisle hasn’t left my side. I think he’s worried that I’ll try to run off and kill myself like Edward did, but I’m not dramatic or silly. The only thing wrong with me right now is the boy lying in the hospital bed with a ring around his finger - my mother's promise ring, settled around his little finger, lying limp against the bed.

And as much as my life might rely on him, I have no plans to end it.

-

Zach woke up at 2:39 a.m. on April 30.

“Where’s Clara?” were the first words out of his mouth.

I screamed and cried and hugged him harder that I was told that I ought to. The entire family was there, and for once, by God, I thought that everything was going to be okay. Being a mind reader, Edward herded everyone out of the door only moments after they said hello, leaving the two of us alone.

“I love you,” I repeated over and over. “I love you, I love you, I love you, Oh God, I love you so much.”

He smiled back weakly, tears slowly running down his cheeks. “I love you more.”

I cried and cried. He was alive. He was alive and in my arms.

I crawled up in the hospital bed with him. He wrapped his arms around me as much as he could without ripping an IV as I gingerly tried not to break him while getting as close as inhumanly possible.

I would’ve talked to him about… Well, everything, really, but he was so tired from just the bare minimum of excitement that had been caused in the last hour and a half, that he told me he didn’t have much left in him, and all he really wanted to do…

“I just want to know you’re here.” He said simply.

I lay there, just as I had lain there so many other nights, but this one… I knew he was alive, and I knew that he was completely better, with no kind of strings attached. I knew that he was always going to be with me, and that finally, after two months of crying and aching, I had him back.

It had been worth it.

“What it was like…” I whispered a long while after, thinking he was asleep, as ran my fingers across his arm.

I watched my fingers as they ran across his sleeve.

A moment later, there was a choked whisper. “It was hell.”

I sat up slightly. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

He shook his head. “I wasn’t sleeping. I was thinking.” His voice was raspy from the nonuse of two months. “I can’t sleep while you’re here; I’ve been without you for too long.”

The tears, for once, were 'happy tears', something explained to me earlier by Alice, and I was grinning like an idiot. He was HERE. WITH ME. Finally.

"Hey, um, Clare?" He said, wincing as he adjusted himself away from me. "I don't mean to sound all blunt and whatnot, but I hurt and that's basically all I can be, so..." He paused, and I held my breath.

'It's over.' 'I can't see you anymore.' 'It was your fault I'm like this.'

All of those words got caught and tangled in my head as I struggled to keep smiling. Please don't let it be, please don't let it be... Oh, God, maybe he'd reconsidered because of the dream...

"Are you still in love with me? Enough to marry me?"

The air came back in a woosh. "YES! More than you could EVER know!" I said, a tiny bit overzealous and lacking the romance it was supposed to have.

He looked relieved and pulled me close. "Thank God."

I kissed his lips, and his hands, and his neck, and his cheeks. I had him back. It was unbelieveable.

"Thank you for your ring," he murmered into my forehead, his lips curving into a smile.

I swallowed, overjoyed that I could talk to him... Listen to him... Anything, as long as it was with him. “So... what were you thinking about? While you were... Well, not sleeping, I guess?”

"You mostly. And home… And….”

He stopped midsentence, a bewildered look on his face, and swallowed. “And…”

Under my hands, his heart rate quickened. The look on his face grew to panic.

“Zach?!” I put my hands on his face. His body rocketed with spasms of pain, racking through my entire body as well as his, his eyes rolling back in his head.

“CARLISLE!” I screamed.

And that was it. I passed out.

Zachary Creullen had a severe heart attack from internal injuries that hadn’t been completely healed at 4:34 a.m. on April 30.

Four days later, after nonstop surgeries and treatments and CAT scans, May 4, 2008 at 5:32 in the afternoon, he was pronounced brain dead.

Only machines are keeping him alive.

I can’t be anywhere near him for extended amounts of time because so many doctors are swarming him.

And as strange as it is to write it, I’m not in pain when I’m in his ICU room, and that hurts more than anything in the world.

I haven’t slept in five days, and couldn’t if I wanted to.

Edward comes in every day and holds me close, as if that would help. Emmett whispers prayers in broken Italian on my behalf, although he thinks I don’t hear them. Alice sits in during hours I’m supposed to be sleeping. Jasper tries to get me to talk. Rosalie showed up one day and begged me to come home. Esme is always hovering around, talking nonstop. Bella shows up every now and then, surprising since we don’t talk, and tells me stories about her own life.

None of it helps, but none of it has really hit me either.

Dhart left when they pronounced him brain dead, shaking and vomiting uncontrollably.

Everyone stares at me, all the time, like I'm supposed to die - cry, scream, hurt myself.

But heartache and the feeling of not knowing where your heart has gone anyway is some of the worst pain in the universe.

I don't know what's happening.

I think I might turn into a statue. A hard, cold, horrified statue.

I have no purpose anymore.

"How many vampires hearts sink when werewolves are killed?"...