Notes: Relatively close to canon, for once, even if I go off on other tangents. It even mentions Edbella. (What's the world coming to?) Mentions of het, but no romance. More a... brief character study? I don't know. See for yourself.
Only Happy When It Rains
Sometimes, he'll walk out into the rain without clothes, just to feel the cold patter of raindrops on his skin; and sometimes, it will even put a smile on his face. Those are so rare, now. He's not sure when he stopped smiling.
To him, everything seems almost the same as before – and then the tree he leans against falls over, and he's reminded all over again.
The others in his coven – he can't delude himself, knowing what they all think, and sometimes that knowledge is so loud he can't hear himself – the others had far more challenging lives than he did. He had healthy middle class parents – until the pandemic – a safe, warm home, even if he argued with his father, and he had piano lessons and mathematics and history lessons and classmates. Jasper killed. Alice was locked up. Rosalie was raped and murdered. Emmet was chased to the woods. Esme killed herself. Carlisle hunted and was hunted.
When he thinks about it – even taking the pandemic into consideration – he wonders whether Carlisle's misunderstanding of mercy was the result of his mother's pleas only: whether there really was anything worth saving in him. After, he'd had Carlisle to himself for three years, and he hadn't know how to react when Esme, or at least her vampiric incarnation, was set on the long road and pain and hope anew. He has nothing to justify his killing spree – he was jealous. Then, Carlisle turned Rosalie. Everything had changed, then. Edward wasn't sure whether it was kindness or cruelty – Carlisle, in the deep recesses of his mind, had always thought it was a selfish thing to do, but tried to tell himself that he deserved some modicum of happiness.
His "family" often forgets that he's a hundred years old. Jasper never does; neither does Carlisle. Edward has always had a heavy mind, and Jasper sometimes discuss it with Carlisle. Neither of them tries to hide it. He knows they just care. In the beginning, Carlisle had called it his "charming teenage wiles", until he started researching anti-depressives. (He'd never found any that worked.)
And now there was Bella. Sweet, naïve Bella. She wanted to be turned, not realising that eternity was an illusion, and that they had been reduced to spectators in the life they had once been a part of. This was one of the few subjects in he was in complete agreement with Rosalie – what they were was unnatural, and they would have given anything to be human again.
Bella wanted eternity.
Bella wanted eternal happiness, and Edward had already found out that there was no such thing. He would give her anything. Anything but that. Stories are no good unless they come to an end. When you have all the time in the world, the little moments float into each other until it's a mass of grey.
Sometimes, he walks out into the rain just to feel the cold, wanting to believe that he's the constant, and that the world around him has changed instead.
Sometimes, he feels like the rain.