Summary: For Rosalie, it's different.
Character(s): Rosalie Hale, Cullens
Notes: Pre-Breaking Dawn. Following quote and title from or inspired by Cage the Elephant's Shake Me Down.
shake me down/not a lot of people left around
Sometimes, when Emmett is distracted, and the house is quiet, and no one will find her, Rosalie lies down and pretends she is asleep. She wills herself into thinking what she sees on the inside of her eyelids are dreams, are something that could have been real if she could only open her eyes to reality. She would be married to her own mortal Emmett, and she would have her curly-haired baby, and everything would be good. No Carlisle, no idiot human girl, no dogs. It's during these moments that she lets herself fade into her memories, lets the pain and confusion of her lovely adolescence wash over her, bathe her in the gold-wrought power that had been her short existence.
It was everything; anything someone could want, perfection in all it's glory. In another life she would have named a daughter Pearl and made her a princess, but that is not how things turned out for her. No fairy tale weddings, no happily-ever-afters, no plaintive calls for a husband she clung to and loved with all the human emotion she could muster. That kind of feeling, that kind of passion - it's human, too real and raw and right to ever feel when one is made of diamond. She misses it, that primal taste in the back of her throat, when she'd caught exactly what she'd wanted in her grasp, sharp and deadly and vengeful.
She remembers anger. Remembers pain and the sting of tears, the sharp ebb and flow of something darker than herself.
She doesn't remember how old she was, not exactly. She use to sit down and just count, dream of the days when she would have what she wanted, but she learned a long time ago that time is variable, vitality is forever and there's no point in caring about the year or month unless it actually affects her. It usually doesn't. But she remembers how it happened. Why. The innocence that was always just off center, the curve of her natural smile in a shined mirror.
The others, they hold on to what defines them, tangible moments in their life that lead them to the day, today. They're good for them at the end of it, a reason, a driving force behind their existence.
But for Rosalie, it's different.
