Disclaimer: I do not own the Twilight series nor am I making any monetary profit from the publication of this work. Any original characters however are strictly mine and if you would like to use them in a story of your own, please contact me.
A/N: I really do not know French, so if there are mistakes-which I'm sure there are-it's due to simple ignorance of the language and I apologize in advance.
Milieu: Chapitre Une
My name was Heloise before the change. It meant 'sun' in my language. To be a vampire and to be named for the sun was such an ironic thing that for a while, I couldn't stand it.
I was turned when I was only fourteen. On the brink of womanhood, perhaps, according to some-and especially in the age I died in-; or according to others, like my friends and parents, a woman already full-grown, ready to be married off, have children, have a house of her own; ready to leave her old family behind…
I wasn't a plain girl. To be completely true, my looks reminded some of a doll. Small and perfect. Porcelain and adorable. When I was very young, three and four and five, strangers would come to our cottage by the river to visit my maman and they would pick me up and twirl me around and play with my hair. Sometimes it seemed like they came for that reason alone.
'I could fit you in my pocket, non?' the matrons would say; chucking me under my chin and smoothing their hands over my baby-soft cheeks. 'So beautiful,' they would coo, like it was an accomplishment, and maman would look back, proud, satisfied that she had produced an angel-child.
My father was a charpentier, or a wood-worker. He made his living by carving the most fabulous chairs and tables out of oak or maple or chestnut. Our cottage was notorious for smelling like resin and our dirt floor was forever awash in tiny splinters that papa and mon frères would inadvertently carry in from the work-shed. You could never run around our kitchen barefoot without getting a souvenir stuck between the fleshy part of your toes, just under the divide.
Maman lived in fear of visitors stopping by-always unannounced. She believed that while sunny smiles of greeting would be on their faces, in their heads would be the idea clacking around that she was a poor cleaner; that our family was untidy and her boys rebellious for trudging in potpourri de merde.
It was a lost cause to keep our home clean however.
We lived comfortably enough-before the change, I had never thought of living any other way-but land is so dirty, life as un paysan is so dirty that to try and keep up-or think of keeping up-is useless. Everyone I knew more or less lived like us so it was bewildering to mon frères and me why our family should be any different-why anyone should feel like it should be different.
To get an idea of how 'the change' as many call it was so all-encompassing, I shall say that before it happened I wasn't ever a quiet child.
Like my name, Heloise, I was full of brightness and cheer. I never thought about it much-when you're young, philosophy is never a priority-, but looking back now it was obvious that people gravitated to me. I was the star they sailed around. The one with the perpetual humor and smile that could make even the more morose of the world sit up and say, 'I wish I had her joy.'
I was always running, always chatting, always getting into one scrape or another with mon frères et amis. If I was anyplace else expect outside I would feel like I wasn't yet living. It is hard to explain, and you might not understand how if I was such a happy child anything could slow me down, but I would feel like my life hadn't even started if light or sound or the breeze didn't surround me completely. I would feel like my life was on hold. Not even halcyon, but just on hold: like mon dieu had frozen everything still until the time when whomever was watching me decided I could go.
Helping maman with cooking and cleaning-as I had to do-forever made me feel like I was somewhere else, someone else, something strange. I dreaded the day that I would become a woman-when I would become old enough to care for people besides myself. Being a mother seemed like the most boring thing in the world.
But I never bemoaned being a female because with all the enthusiastic playing I did, if I fell down, or got hurt, or…mocked someone I shouldn't have, mon protecteurs were always there to set it right and wipe away my tears. Greater emotion seemed not to be allowed unless you were a female, so I was always happy to have this to fall back on.
Perhaps if I had been an ugly child, maman would have made a bigger effort to make me seem feminine. Since my looks were feminine enough however, it was almost impossible to castigate me for having such a rambunctious attitude towards life.
I was an imp, and messes were my friends, but I never looked out of place in a dress. I could have worn a sack once filled with muddy potatoes, with blood smeared down my face and neck and arms, and bugs in my hair, and I would have looked better than most girls in the village on their most élégante days.
I think back on the few years immediately after I became a vampire as 'the dark days.'
I was completely alone, completely torn away from everything I knew. For the first time in my life I was the outsider, le monstre, and it saddened me to a degree I will never be able to put into words. Something so completely draining, a grief so enormous that it's like your life before, you were living in a haze, and now everything is so much clearer, so much more real, and reality without a guide or confidante is so hard, that it really was like that part of my timeline had gone underground. I couldn't tell anyone.
Well, anyone human, that is. Art bêtes, art animaux of the world, I told everything to.
After I killed them.
After I had sucked all the life from them.
It is a humbling thing when your soul is so evil that every living thing recognizes it. As vampires, we are so evil, that creatures run from us in fear. They run from us because they know we are their death if we meet them. And we cannot control it.
I consoled myself with the thought that as a human, I would have killed these animals anyway.
They would have been hunted still by my village-except with arrows and stones and slings-and they would have fled from death, because that is the cycle of life.
We, as humans, stand on the top of a pyramid, and everything below us is our prey.
So I attempted to comfort myself with this fact; that their rotting bodies would soothe the earth and from that, flowers and trees and grass would grow-which would nourish the bodies of their brothers, fattening them up and making their blood all the stronger for my body.
And my rationalizations sometimes worked. And sometimes they didn't.
It was forever hard to subdue the craving.
I prayed pour dieu for death to hit me.
Then I would remember that I had already died once, and for it to strike a second time would be a lucky, lucky thing.
Why should mon dieu concern himself with Malum Angelus, un ange de mal anyway?
I should no longer be under His jurisdiction. I should be a citizen of enfer already-in mind, if not in truth. The fires should already be licking at my body, the pitchforks from Dante's work should already be stabbing at my flesh. I should already be under a thousand different agonies, each one consecutively harder to take than the first. My body should be ravaged and eaten at by minions of the devil more foul, with souls blacker, than anything I could ever imagine in all the time I've been on this earth.
But I was still breathing.
And I was still here.
And I still could not tell anyone, because to get near anyone would mean their death.
Yes, it sounds melodramatic.
I would have rather been a coward, however, if I could go back, and let Le Diable tear ma famille to fleshy bits with arms and legs dismembered than have taken a stand and mouthed off.
I was so flabbergasted, you see, that anyone would dare threaten ma maman. It seemed so outrageous that anything could scare my father into speechlessness-he was such a big man. Or that anything could stop mon frères cold in their boots.
I've gone back once to see my cottage. It still smells like tree resin.
