Not So Fragile

Summary: What happens if Renesmee falls in love with Mike? Mike would be 24 and is a graduate student and Renesmee would look 17 but really be 7. The Cullens run into Mike when they go to college in Pittsburgh and Renesmee thinks she's in love…with Mike. Nessie wants to take martial arts but her parents won't let her because they think she might accidently hurt someone.

1.

For as long as I knew, I had always been the odd one out. I had brown eyes, and yes, I had to sleep, and although the taste disgusted me, yes, I could digest human food. About now I bet most of you are thinking I am crazy: that's one anorexic bitch, I bet you're thinking. You're thinking, you hate sleep; I bet you'll end up in the high security ward of the nearest mental hospital. Nice joke, but I'm no Alice. Good thing Alice can't read minds like Edward can…wait a minute; you can hear me, right? I guess I might as well tell you. I'm not exactly human. Or, I should say, I am not fully human. I am half human, half vampire. Hopefully, sometime in the near future mom and dad will turn me into a full vampire so I can fully experience this life. I know what you're probably thinking, and no, I'm not a murderer. Along with the rest of my family, I feed off on animals. Just like my father, mountain lion is my favorite. Yes, I am that strong.

I probably look to young to attend college, but during my short life my parents tutored me and high school would be no more than a distraction, and I wanted to really learn. A lot of people would say that seventeen is a tad bit too young for the college lifestyle, but I wonder how they would react if they ever found out that a seven-year-old was attending college. That's right, my name is Renesmee Carlie Cullen, and I am seven years old and fully matured. I appear to be somewhere in between seventeen and nineteen, and mentally I have matured way beyond even that. Like I said, high school would be the death of me. Not really, but it would masquerade as a demon, bore me to death, and drive me to the Volturi, a group of caped vampires that have wanted to kill me since the day I was born. Ok, well, since they found out about me, which wasn't that many days later.

"Are you ready, Nessie?" Edward, my father, asks. I groan, sitting up in bed. I really wish I didn't have to sleep. I wish I could stay up all night and party like crazy drama queens with the rest of my family. I open my eyes and glance at the man who could be my brother out of my left eye. Let me tell you, it is extremely weird when your father appears to be the same age as yourself.

"Almost," I say, gracefully stepping out of bed and prancing into my bathroom to wash my face with my glassy, orange face soap. My pale, ghostly white face and my long, bouncy bronze locks stare back at me. My hair is ruffled from six hours of sleep (no, I'm not sleep-deprived, I just don't need as much sleep as mere humans do), but I recognize the hidden beauty in my face with a grain of salt. I don't really give a thought to my beauty – I was born with it, but it doesn't make me who I am. I don't know what makes me who I am yet – that is still left to discover. I turn the faucet off and dash to the off-white sofa the outfit Alice had laid out the night before was sitting on. I walked back to the bathroom and put on the black, faded skinny jeans and the off-white, vintage lace blouse, the silk, sleeveless black vest, and the black pearl choker necklace.

I hopped into the car Edward and Bella bought me six months ago for my "sixteenth birthday party." Yeah, I was really only six and a half, but Alice loves throwing parties, and besides, I looked sixteen.

I arrived at the college campus and smiled. It wasn't every day that a girl's first first day of school was college. But that's just me, I guess. Of course, I could have started earlier, but…

Oh yeah, that's right, I couldn't have, because I grew too quickly. But even if I didn't, I still wouldn't have been able to go to school. It takes a while to adjust to losing the only person that really mattered in your life. The hole in my chest never really faded, but it never was as deep as it was if it had happened later on in my life. We connected instantly, though, even that first day I entered the world, so it doesn't make it that much easier that I was four years old instead of six years old when he left this world. Oh, that's right, I meant, when he died. I was never in love with him like my mother explained (later, once it was too late) he was supposed to be (later, as in now, but now he's gone, never to walk across this earth again), but he was like a big brother to me, a protector (even though I didn't really need one…most of the time), a play mate. More importantly, he was the thread that united the vampires and werewolves, but that's a completely different story.

Yes, he was a werewolf. His name was Jacob Black, and, as a werewolf, his role was to protect humans from vampires. So, it was really inevitable that one tragic, fated night when he was fighting a vampire that was about to kill an innocent, thirty-year old hiker, the vampire succeeded in killing Jacob, and then (I assume) went along to finish his meal. I cried for weeks after hearing about it, but eventually, I got over Jacob. I wasn't going to sit around and mope for something that never was and now never could be. I was ready to get on with my life.

I walked up to the William Pitt Union to sign up for Freshman Orientation and to, all in good time, sign up for my classes. I didn't really know what I wanted to major in, especially since I could never really get a permanent job (no one hires seventeen year olds, at least, no one worth working for). Seventeen year olds could be novelists, though. I could major in Literature, or even Fiction Writing. Once I was scheduled for my classes, I waited. I attended my classes. Weeks went by. Nothing exciting really happened. I was a loner, although I did not try to be. People shied away from me. I know, I know, they could see the monster hidden behind my brown eyes; they could see the demon behind my innocent bronze curls. Except they couldn't, and like the Wallflowers said in their song, "The Bleeders", I was "Only sad and lonely and no one is impressed."

Of course, I had my family. I always had my family. They weren't attending the University of Pittsburgh with me, though, because most of them (except for my mother), already had about five college degrees. Bella only had one, and it was from Dartmouth. They thought it would be too weird for me to attend the same school as my mother and father, though I knew that sometime in the distant future the seven of us would cycle through high school together.

Alice, of course, would have foreseen me meeting him. At the time, however, I had no clue he was anyone different, except for the fact that he was a black belt in Taekwondo and I shouldn't have been taking karate. Shotokan karate, at that, the most intense, harsh-disciplined form of the art. His name was Mike Newton, but I didn't know that that name should have made me shy away from him. What with his bulky, tornado like black hair, and his tall, sculpted karate muscles? And his eyes, of every feature of his, that was the most unusual: his eyes were a weird jade color, not quite emerald and not quite blue. There was a hint of gray mixed in with the blue and green sparks in Mike's eyes.

"Why are you taking karate?" Alice asked. That was before she knew about Mike, of course.

"Don't worry, I'm faking it," I said. "I just wanted to make friends….I figured, join a club." I was tired of being a loner. But that wasn't the real reason. The real reason I was that I wanted to learn how to fight, and no one would teach me. So I would learn elsewhere.

That was the beginning. Looking back, I can't believe no one caught me before I fell. Oh yeah, I should have known. But I'm not perfect – I'm only half vampire. If only that even meant anything in the eyes of a not-so-fragile human….

To Be Continued…