Title: When Compassion Dies

Pairing: Esme/Carlisle

Summary: Pre-Twilight story of Esme starting with her conversion and continuing until Twilight starts.

A/N: Hey. I'm a bit rusty because my writing has been on hold for awhile. But this story basically wrote up itself when I needed to de-stress so I felt as though I should share it.

Chapter One: Look Before You Fall

The tops of the cliffs are slippery and I try not to think about my fear of heights. It is peaceful up here, the smell of the sea, the sounds of the waves, it lulls me. I wish it could comfort me. I wish I could close my eyes and when they opened again, everything would be right. I try it now, for a few seconds. But I only hear my father's voice, telling me to stop living in my little fantasy world. I open my eyes and look to the horizon. "I'm coming baby." I whisper to the breeze before letting my body fall forward, my weight dragging me down to almost certain death. The wind feels comforting as it rushes past me and I am glad that I am left with at least one pleasant sensation before my body hits the hard ocean below. I can feel the bones breaking, the pain exploding behind my eyes. I have succeeded; the water is filling my mouth.

But arms wrap around me, painfully crushing the ribs I had already decimated. "Call an ambulance." I hear. I black out mercifully for a period of time and am disappointed when I come to. I am still alive, still apart from my son. And now I am on a gurney and these meddlesome doctors are going to save me.

"Too much damage, it's useless. Just take her to the morgue; we're too backed up for people who don't want to live." I hear after being painfully poked several times, but too weak to cry out.

Morgue, my heart rejoices, they are going to let me die. I manage to open my eyes without too much pain to see the dimly lit ceiling of the morgue. I recognize it only because just a day ago I was signing away what was left of my son to a funeral home. I am dying, I know it. But there is someone else in the room with me and I wonder who it is. Perhaps a doctor to make me comfortable when I die. The person moves into my eye line and I spasm with reaction. I know him. He set a broken bone that I had, nine, ten years ago. But it's impossible, he hasn't aged. He moves over me to meet me eyes. He has the most beautiful golden eyes I have ever seen, filled with compassion. I feel something inside of my broken body that I have never felt before.

And now I am regretting my decision to die. Because I want him. I have never wanted a man before like this. He leans to whisper in my ear.

"I am going to help you. But it is going to hurt." His voice is musical and I am suddenly back on target.

This beautiful doctor is going to give me my death. I will be reunited with my baby boy. I try to nod, but my muscles seem not to be working. He bends down from me ear to my neck and presses a light kiss to my skin. I feel his teeth break my skin and before I can straighten out what exactly is happening, I am overcome with more excoriating pain.

When I was a little girl, people never asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. It was always assumed I would be like every other woman. I would marry, have children, keep house. It was expected of me. I trained intensively with dolls and then graduated onto real babies. I never had the normal rebellious teenage stage. I never wanted anything other than to be a mother. Yes I loved to build and design, but I loved comforting a child more. I was eager to grow up and marry, if only to have children.

My parents agreed with the first man who ever asked for my hand. A mistake. I didn't love him, but I had managed to convince myself that I could learn to. I was just a girl then, pretending to be a woman. That all changed on my wedding night, and on the nights thereafter. When he wasn't forcing himself on me, he was beating me. I remained silent, fearful that I deserved this abuse, that it was my fault. Love seemed to be a foreign concept, an imaginary situation created by others to deceive.

I escaped into my drawings, my design. The creativity flowed easily onto paper as fantastical designs began slowly revealing themselves to me in my mind's eye. It was where I could escape from the horrors of my marriage. Until the day I found out I was pregnant. It was no longer my own body crumpled and lifeless that I saw when he hurt me, but that also of a child, my child. He couldn't keep on hitting me, it would kill either me and the baby, and I wasn't going to let him do that. My belly was growing slowly, but life was in there. And I knew love.

I ran, the first time in my life I had ever been disobedient.

It was easy to beg for help in a new town, only miles away from my real home. An older couple took me in after I lied to them and told them my husband had been killed. I think they saw the truth in my eyes, the way I flinched slightly when somebody moved too fast next to me. The way sobs had a way of escaping unwarranted from deep in my soul at night.

As I grew heavy with child, I worked as much as I could at the local store, trying to save enough money for my baby and my future. I could be independent. It was a dirty word for woman in that age. My whole life I had been taught that I would need a man to be successful. But I was not looking for success, only that elusive happiness.

I loved the child inside me completely, but it wasn't enough. The doctors said he wasn't ready to be born. He came anyway. The first few days, I was convinced that he would deny their assumptions and survive. He died anyway. My heart died with him and after burying him in a small coffin in a pretty little cemetery, I went up to the cliffs. All I wanted was to be a mother.

It hurts, dying. I writhe in pain, despite the arms that are supporting me. I am being transported somewhere, but I can't think through the burning. It hurts more than the landing of my jump did. I scream and hear someone talking. But their voice is lost on me as I twist in agony. Something must be wrong, dying can't be this painful. Mercifully, I black out.

My baby boy was beautiful. Long, dark eyelashes, sweet light eyes. I cuddled his small body close to my chest. He is having trouble nursing, but the nurses told me I must make him. He needs the nourishment and a mother's milk is the best. He would not latch and I hummed sweet lullabies hoping to coax him. Finally he managed it. It was painful at first, but once the milk started flowing, I went numb. He stopped way too soon and they took him away from me. It was lonely on the hospital bed and my breasts were aching for him to nurse again. It never happened.

There is a piano playing somewhere. It is a truly beautiful sound and it comforts me when I can hear it over my agony. Sometimes I hear voices as well, both males. I wonder what is taking so long, why death is eluding me. I spasm as the burning ricochets through me and I can hear the piano again sweetly playing my death song.

They released me from the hospital two days after I had given birth. They never released my son. I went to visit him every day, to encourage him to nurse, to survive. Emergency fluids had to be supplied intravenously and when I held my baby I had to be always vigilant of the tubes. I held him close to me and hummed a lullaby I knew from my childhood. He went still in my arms when the song was finished and my tears fell silently on his still body. A nurse turned to ask me something, her face falling when she saw my precious baby boy, dead in my arms. They took him away, cleaned him up, and sent him to the morgue. Wait for me, I called to the air, hoping to catch his soul as it began its journey to Heaven.

The pain is different now, slightly more tolerable. I wonder if death is next. It has been much too long already. I am eager to leave this place, eager to be with my son. The face of the beautiful doctor spasms into my mind and I concentrate on his face as pain vibrates through me.

I can now distinguish the voices and the piano that sometimes plays is clearer and nearer. The burning feels different as if it is all coming to an end.

"How long?"

"Not much longer, what can you hear?"

"Not much Carlisle."

"I found her husband. He already found a new wife after she left. He's beating the new girl too."

"Should I play another piece? She seems in less pain when I do."

This short conversation confuses me. How did they know that my husband beat me? It is a secret I have never told anyone. Suddenly, my heart speeds up and I jump in the strongest surge of pain yet. My heart is pounding, pounding, pounding and then it stops. But I do not.

I am not dead.

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