I do not own any part of Twilight.
This is the thrid in my True First Sight miniseries. (Also see "True First Sight" and "True First Sight: Carlisle and Esme"
***Edward***
Damn did she hate me. And to be honest, I wasn't much of a fan of hers either. Yeah, she was beautiful, but so what. Beauty was a part of this life, the most deceptive part. All of us were beautiful, and all of us were damned. Who the fuck cared what we looked like?
When Carlisle brought her home I was pissed—and even more so when I realized what he was hoping. He was getting worse at hiding things from me, or maybe I was getting better at seeing through his bullshit, realizing when he was throwing things at me to hide what he was really thinking.
He pitied me. He wanted me to have what he and Esme had. I knew that wasn't going to happen—especially not with this vain beautiful thing. I listened to her mind as the change went on. This was when the truth of a person really came out, their deepest, most honest truths. Esme's was that she loved Carlisle, that she had always, even though she had only met him that once. Rosalie was very different. It was an odd mixture really. There was rage and pain. I saw the men that hurt her, her fiancé. They deserved to die, and I knew she would kill them once her transformation was complete. I decided not to tell Carlisle about this part. He would try to stop her.
The other things I saw were lots of images of her. She liked mirrors. They gave her great pride—way too much pride. There wasn't much more to her than that, at least not much that she had ever discovered about herself. If she didn't know more than this herself, I wasn't interested in trying to figure it out for her. I didn't have that kind of patience.
Then I glimpsed a bit more. It was close to the end of her transformation, a recent epiphany, if she was capable of epiphanies. She had no love in her life. She never had—and she feared she never would. For a second I wondered if maybe there was hope for her yet.
Then she opened her eyes.
There was fear, of course, and then she saw a mirror. She was instantly enraptured with herself, more than she ever had been.
I glanced at Carlisle and walked out. His disappointment and pity followed me.
It always followed me. It drove me absolutely fucking insane.
Rosalie and I tolerated each other, more for Esme's sake. That was one thing I could give the self-centered brat—she grew to care about Esme and Carlisle a great deal. If she recognized them for the people they were, she couldn't be all that bad, just not someone I could love, or tolerate for prolonged periods of time.
And after she moved past her newborn blood thirst, she became as decent as I could expect from someone like us. She never drank human blood and willingly adopted Carlisle's view of our existence. It was overly optimistic, but I couldn't fault her for reaching for it. She even offered her help a few times to humans, though she never told Carlisle. She wasn't as careful as he would want. I kept her secret, and sometimes watched her back, without her knowing of course.
The worst, most reckless, instance was in Tennessee. She shouldn't have been there in the first place, out in the open, only barely concealed in the shadows of trees and the manmade cliffs, blown away hillsides making way for the railroad.
The working conditions were atrocious, especially in a certain area outside a small town named Gatlinburg. Carlisle had been there a few times to help with medical treatment, but he wasn't welcome by the men in charge. He had to sneak in. That pissed off Rosalie. I didn't blame her really. I just didn't trust her to handle this shit right. Humans were an odd bunch, irrational and pigheaded.
I made sure she didn't see me, didn't hear me, and I followed her one day down to where the work was currently the busiest. She went during the day, of course, a brightly shining day. Son of a bitch, she was just as pigheaded as the humans.
I heard the workers before I saw them, the shovels piercing the earth and the pick axes breaking the rock that stood in the way of progress. I kept an ear out for Rosalie's mind, made sure I didn't lose track of her, and climbed up a tree near the edge of the worksite to observe.
The heat seemed to be difficult on the men. Their shirts were soaked, and yet they pushed on. I could feel how tired they were, how they were barely on their feet. They pushed forward though. They had families, and they just made it by, just made enough to feed their children. That was a dominant thought, their children.
There was one man in particular. He was one of the closest to where I was hidden.
He was purposefully focusing on the faces of his family, his wife, his younger son, who wasn't yet old enough to work, and his oldest son, who was working just down the tracks. The man was older than most of the workers, by several years. He had married older than was usual, and now providing for his family was a strain. He didn't have the strength he used to, the strength he had been famous for. It was difficult for him to admit—so he didn't. No one knew how tired he was, every day, every second. It killed him when he didn't have the energy to give to his family, playing with his younger son, helping his older son keep the house in repair, and even making love to his wife wasn't something he could do as often as he wanted. He just prayed she didn't think his attraction was fading. She still aroused him, still made him feel like he could do anything. Some days he still believed he could do anything, but those days were fewer now.
Every raise of his pick axe was a strain, was torture on his body. I didn't really get it. Of course, I had never felt weakness, not that I could remember, but I didn't understand how he could be this driven. Carlisle said I had much to learn about humans. Perhaps he was right, though I would never admit it. I was the freaking telepath. I should know more than anyone. But I supposed knowing what is in a person's mind and what is in his heart are very different things. And the heart was something that completely fucking eluded me sometimes.
I watched the man for awhile, and Rosalie stood there at the edge of the trees trying to figure what she could do. What she really wanted to do was walk out and watch as they all looked up and were stunned by her beauty. She fantasized about that for awhile, and I tried to ignore her. I hated being near her when she really let her imagination go, when she didn't know I was around to hear how vain she really was.
Then I refocused on the man, on the way his mind and body started to slip. His axe fell out of his hands, and he dropped to his knees. He couldn't see or feel anything, only exhaustion.
"Father," a young man called. He started forward.
The man in charge stepped in front of him. "What in the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"My father. He just collapsed. Don't you see him?" This young man's mind was refreshing—clear and certain, and not terribly complex.
"Your father had best get his ass back to work if he wants to keep getting paid."
The young man tried to push forward. "But he's ill."
The man in charge pushed him back, with enough force that would have knocked down anyone else—not this boy. The man didn't show how nervous the size of the boy made him. "I said get the fuck back to work."
"Do as he says," the father ordered as he tried to push himself up. He would not let his own son coddle him. Finally, he pushed himself back up, panting as he did so. He leaned on the pick axe like a crutch.
His son backed away. He hadn't always been the best behaved son, the most obedient, not always the best judgment, but he respected his father, had learned to do as he said. Hard work and hard times had taught him much.
The man in charge approached the father. "I knew it was a mistake to take on an old broken-down piece of shit."
The father looked the man in the eye. His body may have been weak, but that did not affect his resolve, his drive. "I'll meet expectations. Young men have brawn but not much brain."
The man in charge walked away. He couldn't argue. The old man always seemed to offer solutions, ones that worked. He didn't want to lose the man as a worker, but he didn't want him to know that either. He had these men where he wanted them. They were desperate for work, and that gave him power. He could underpay and overwork them, and they were grateful, perfectly willing to kill themselves working for any amount of money, for any penny that helped put food in their families' mouths. The less he spent on labor, the more he could take for himself.
Rosalie almost went after the man, and I would have had to stop her. The sun was bright today. Everyone would see the glitter of her skin, and then we would be royally screwed. Sightings of an angelic creature would be all over the papers. The Volturi would come after us for sure.
She watched the man in charge for hours, waiting for him to do something that would make her feel warranted in hurting him. Thankfully, the man spent a good hour and a half in his tent for lunch—while the workers had ten minutes to eat their scraps.
I watched the father's mind. As if to prove himself, he worked through lunch while the other men sat a few yards away. His son kept looking at him, wishing he could make his father rest.
Then I saw it. Before any of the humans could react or even realize what was happening, I saw the pick axe come apart. He swung it up above his head, and the axe separated from the handle. It flung up, directly above the father's head. I saw the trajectory, exactly the angle at which it was going to strike him, to kill him.
A flash from my left, sparkling and blond.
The fucking bitch. No matter how fast she was, someone would see. And she wasn't the fastest of us, not even close.
What was a flash to the others, I saw clearly. She ran out into the open and grabbed the axe out of the air. Then she was back in the cover of the trees.
I was immediately there to greet her.
"What are you doing here?" she demanded.
I grabbed her arm. "Stopping you from exposing all of us."
She pulled away. "No one saw."
"What in the fuck are you doing?" She was the only female who got me pissed enough to make me curse at her.
"They'll chalk it up to divine intervention or something," she said. "You know how humans are."
"They're not complete idiots."
"Right. Look at them, Edward. They won't even stand up to that oaf."
"They need the work to feed their families. If you weren't such a spoiled princess, you might understand that."
She pointed out toward the partially laid tracks. "Look them. Read their minds. Did any of them see?"
I focused on the men. They were still gaping at the man who should be dead. I looked through each of their minds. There was confusion, and though I wasn't about to admit it to Rosalie, several were mentally murmuring prayers, thankful for divine intervention.
There was one, though, that concerned me, the son. He was staring at his father, mentally trying to rewind the flash he had seen. He was the only one who had been looking directly at his father when Rosalie barreled out. He saw her hair, the way it trailed behind her, the flash of her skin, and even...the shape of her face. I waited for him to process, to come to a conclusion.
"An angel," he murmured.
Fuck. Now I waited for him to start running off to the others around him.
He was quiet, only staring at the place where Rosalie had been.
"What are you staring at? Get back to work." The man in charge had come back out of his tent.
The young man stood and commenced work with the others. He said nothing about the angel he had seen, and I saw in his mind that he wasn't going to. He seemed to think there was something...private about it. The feeling reminded him of the glances he sometimes caught between his parents, the way his father held his mother's hand, as if she was something more, something beyond mere mortal.
"Well?" Rosalie demanded.
I turned and walked away. "Don't pull that shit again." I decided I couldn't tell her about the young man, about how he thought he was in love. She wouldn't be able to keep herself away. She couldn't pass up an opportunity to be adored.
Thankfully, she didn't go back there again. She found some other means to amuse herself—and continued to drive me fucking nuts.
By now, Carlisle had given up any hope that she and I would be together. And his pity continued. At least now it was split between Rosalie and me.
We moved again shortly thereafter, a little further west. Carlisle heard about a reservation that was hit by an epidemic of influenza. For a year, I helped him with this. He liked this particular tribe much. He had worked with them before, thirty years earlier. There were tales told about him, about the great pale man who saved the chief after a battle. Carlisle had successfully removed an arrow from the man's chest. The chief had gone on to live into old age and never stopped telling the story of the great pale man.
I had graduated medical school a few years earlier, and Carlisle wanted me to try working with patients. Open wounds was a bit much for me, but treating influenza was all right. And I knew Carlisle's real reason for bringing me to the reservation with him was to help dispel any idea that he was the same pale man. If there were two of us, we couldn't be so special, so unusual.
The problem with being here was that Rosalie was bored. The population was sparse. She took to long runs, finding towns to walk through on cloudy days. Some days she went as far as a hundred miles. And other days she spent working on an old car she had found. She would spend hours under that heap of metal. It was an odd sight—the princess mechanic.
Carlisle and I were running through the woods, returning from the reservation. As we passed the field in which Rosalie kept her car, I listened for her. Esme worried about her, so I tried to keep tabs on where she was.
I found her mind and stopped.
"Edward?" Carlisle said.
"Go on," I said. "Esme's expecting you."
He paused, then went on without me.
I walked toward the field—and listened to her mind. Her thoughts were different than I had heard from her before. I hadn't realized…
"Rosalie," I said.
She was sitting in the grass about ten feet from the car. She had heard me coming and was now trying to clear her thoughts. She was not successful.
"What do you want?" she said.
I stopped a few feet behind her—and listened.
She glared at me over her shoulder. "Go away."
I didn't move.
"I know what you're doing," she said. "Stop it."
"Why are you working so hard to hide it?"
She turned away. She thought about running, but she knew she would never outrun me.
"Rosalie," I said in as gentle voice as I could. "It's all right to be upset. They—"
"What in the hell do you know?"
I had never heard her cuss before. She had been raised to be refined, pleasing. For the first time I realized how difficult that was sometimes, and I finally understood why she did reckless things, why she focused on the beauty she saw in the mirror. She was trying to forget. Most of us held on to very little of our human lives. Only certain things stay with us. For Esme it was her baby, for Carlisle his faith. Rosalie was holding on to pain.
I saw all of it in her mind—Royce and the other men., the alcohol on their breath, the pain and terror, the theft of her innocence.
When she was first changed, I had felt her anger. I had let her kill the men who attacked her, and I had thought that was what she needed to put it behind her. I was wrong.
I stayed in her mind for several minutes, absorbing the enormity of her pain, how deeply it went. It reminded me of how Emse felt when she thought of her baby, the despair and powerlessness. Rosalie couldn't take back her innocence, and she couldn't kill herself and end the hurt. She was stuck, like going through the transformation every day, with no end.
She couldn't stop thinking about it. That was why she always went somewhere every day, why her car was out in the field so far from the cottage. She was avoiding us, me in particular. She felt like if she shared her pain, it would grow bigger, would consume her. She wasn't sure if that wasn't such a bad idea anymore. She wondered if vampires could go insane.
"They deserved it," I said.
She didn't move.
"You've wondered why I didn't tell Carlisle what you were going to do," I said. "It's because they deserved it." I moved slowly closer. "I would have done it for you. I would have tortured them just as much."
Her voice barely made sound. "You don't care about me."
"You drive me nuts," I said. "But I do care."
She was quiet, staring at the ground, wishing she could cry. Crying used to make her feel better.
I wasn't sure what else to do. I just stood there for awhile.
She stopped trying to control her thoughts. Or rather, she couldn't do it anymore, not today. All she had wanted from Royce was to be loved. She liked being looked at with adoration, but she realized that last night with her friend Vera and her baby Henry and her husband that what she had with Royce wasn't real. She wanted a friend as well as someone who admired her beauty.
Even if she found someone she could love though, she was sure she couldn't have him, not for good. She couldn't be with a man, not after what Royce had done. She couldn't allow a man to touch her like that.
Now I wished I had killed the bastard myself. If anyone tried to hurt a woman I loved like that, I wouldn't be able to stop myself. He would have to die. Thankfully, the only two women I cared about could defend themselves.
And I did care about Rosalie, even when she pissed me off.
She didn't move as I knelt behind her. She trusted me. I liked that. No matter how much we fought, she knew I would never hurt her.
"Rosalie," I said, "you're safe now." I wrapped my arms around her, and she crumpled. I held onto her. "You're safe," I murmured. "We won't let anyone hurt you."
A dry sob escaped her lips.
We stayed there for a long time, all night. I held her—like a caring brother. That was the first time I truly felt like her family. I had never felt that sibling kind of love. I was thankful to her for sharing. I knew we would go back to pissing each other off—it was inevitable—but now there was something for us to hold onto. No matter how much a brother and sister aggravate each other, they're still family.
I continued to watch over her, and she seemed to get better with time. She even started coming to the reservation to help. That took her mind off her memories. Admittedly, part of what helped her was seeing the admiration of her beauty on people's faces. That was just who she was. I could live with it now.
Most days though, she still spent by herself, finding other distractions.
"Where is she?" Esme said one evening. "She's usually back by now." She looked at me. "Is she close?"
Mentally, I reached out. "No," I said. "Wait…she's coming." She was running, faster than I had ever seen her run.
I stood and grabbed Esme, pulled her away from the door.
"What?" she said.
"She's bringing company." What in the hell was she doing?
Carlisle heard her approach and opened the door.
She stopped in front of him. "Please."
Carlisle understood immediately. She wanted him to change the man she had in her arms. "Who is he?"
"I don't know."
Carlisle turned to me. "She found him in the woods," I said, "mauled by a bear."
Carlisle's eye brows pulled together as he turned back to Rosalie. "Who is he? Why do you want him changed?"
Then I saw it, the picture in her head of her Vera's baby, the dark curls and dimples. "He looks like Henry."
"You have to save him," she said to Carlisle. If she had been capable of tears, they would have been streaming down her cheeks.
"Lay him down," Carlisle said.
She did as she was told and knelt next to the young man.
"You don't have to be here—" Carlisle started.
"I'm staying with him."
Carlisle looked down at the man, at the damage. His face was slashed, and his arm looked to be half ripped off. I was surprised she could even see the dimples under all the blood—and I was shocked she had made it so far without killing him herself.
Then the man's eyes fluttered open. He stared up at Rosalie.
"My God, he's conscious," Carlisle said.
While Carlisle prepared, the man continued to look at Rosalie. His mind was clear except one thought. She was an angel—his angel, sent just for him.
Once I was sure Esme was under control, I let her go. We both just stood there and watched. Neither of us approached. There was too much blood.
The man's transformation was like the others I had seen—the pain, the confusion. Except this time, there was a thread of calm in the man's mind. Rosalie's face kept flashing.
And then I saw a flash, just a blur of blond hair and shining skin—a flash I had seen before, through this man's mind. He was the son of the railroad worker.
Holyshit.
I dug further into his mind. He thought of her everyday, of that flash of beauty that had saved his father. He relived that moment, tried to see more, the features of her face, the curve of her figure. His mind was the kind open to instinct, ready to let his heart believe what his logic couldn't grasp.
He was in love with her. He always had been.
As the transformation progressed, and his mind cleared, it became glaringly apparent that he was hers, that he was already devoted to her. I wasn't sure if he was quite conscious of the fact that she was the same person as that flash he had seen. But his heart knew.
And in Rosalie's mind, I saw the same thing. She felt passion that I had never sensed from her before. This man she wanted, like she never thought she would want a man. The blood she had consumed yesterday rushed through her body. I saw flashes of her thoughts, of his thoughts—they were so similar I couldn't quite distinguish. He wanted to taste her lips, the first woman he would kiss, the first woman he would touch. I saw them in bed together, the way he fit inside her perfectly, the smoothness of their skin as it pressed and rubbed…
I tried to block the images. I didn't want to see this, couldn't handle seeing this.
Then I realized—I was jealous.
I wanted what they had, what Carlisle and Esme had. And it was becoming clearer every day that I never would.
I wanted to be with a woman, wanted to touch her, to be touched, to connect. I wanted a woman to love me, enough to welcome me into her.
Perhaps something was wrong with me. I probably could have had Rosalie. If I had showered her with attention, she would have been drawn to me. But I didn't want her, no matter how beautiful.
It seemed so easy for everyone else. They simply found someone whom they could adore, whom they didn't doubt they would love forever. I was ready for that someone, but I never seemed to want anyone I met—not Rosalie, not Carlisle's friends in Alaska.
So who in the hell was I waiting for?