The Polar Opposites of Joy and Loss
A/N: Originally an entry in the anonymous Love Lost Contest: .net/u/2458839/Love_Lost_Contest Thanks to my alpha reader, ~shoefreak37, and my beta, ~kblacknightingale. None of this is mine.
Summary: I could see clearly the bite marks on the woman's throat and exposed limbs. Carlisle had altered our existence irrevocably. Canon/AU. Edward/Carlisle. Slash. NC-17.
I looked up from my book when I caught the distinctive flavour of Carlisle's thoughts. Just a flicker.
Home.
There was an urgency to it that caused me to become immediately alert. He wasn't due home for hours, and with the panic and disorder I heard in his mind I could only guess that something disastrous had occurred. Had he been exposed? Or...God forbid...had he succumbed to human blood?
No, it was impossible. Not Carlisle. Never Carlisle.
I focused on his mind. As far as we were from other neighbourhoods, and as attuned to his thoughts as I was, it was simple. I saw a young girl with a broken leg—one I'd seen before in his memories. And I saw the broken body of a woman in the morgue.
What did the one have to do with the other?
I must get her home...if she lives that long...
I leapt from the couch I had been reclining on, and the book thumped indelicately to the floor. Carlisle was moving fast, and if I wasn't mistaken, carried with him a human, almost dead. Why was he bringing a mortally injured human here?
Suddenly his fractured thoughts organised, and he directed them towards me.
Edward. Open the door for me, and go out the back way. I have an injured woman with me, and while she does not bleed profusely, it still may be too much for you. I shall come find you when it is safe.
In an instant I was at the door, and swung it wide. I still could not see him through the trees, though I heard his movements. I stepped back, turning to make for the back door, to escape out into the forest and run until he came for me, but I hesitated. Was I not strong enough now to resist just a little human blood?
Did he not trust me?
And so, I lingered, determined to prove to him that I was strong enough to bear it.
He would say that I was young and foolhardy, no doubt, but I was resolute.
He knew that I remained as soon as he burst through the door. "Please, Edward. Go." And that was all he said before moving quickly up the stairs. I heard the door to one of the two bedrooms click shut.
I assumed it was the one that served as mine, though I never spent any time in it. It was a ruse, unnecessary before now, kept that way only should we ever have humans visit the house.
Well, now we had a human in the house, though why he had brought a dying woman here I could not fathom.
Dying, I knew, because I could hear her failing heartbeat. Woman, because most of the blood she shed was that of very recent childbirth. I could smell it. Why Carlisle thought that would appeal to me I did not understand.
As I pushed closed the front door, I briefly wondered where the child was.
I'd not been around human society enough since my change to know how recently the woman had given birth. For all I knew, Carlisle could have attended it. Women died in childbirth sometimes. It was a fact of life. Why Carlisle thought he could save her by bringing her here, I could not pretend to understand.
I focused on his thoughts, and finally garnered from them what I should have realised the moment I knew the woman was near death.
In moments I was up the stairs and threw open the door to the room that was furnished to reflect Carlisle's tastes. The larger room. With the large and comfortable bed.
The room we used, but never for such a thing as sleep.
It was too late already when I burst into the room. I could see clearly the bite marks on the woman's throat and exposed limbs. Carlisle sat back on his heels, his head bowed, his eyes closed, the fingertips of his right hand brushing gently over his lower lip. He looked up at me as I took all this in, slowly, and his eyes...they were haunted, expectant. His thoughts were on the taste of her blood.
My throat burned.
"What have you done?" I demanded. "Carlisle, what have you done?" I was incredulous, horrified. I knew why he made me, for a companion to end his loneliness, and I knew—I knew it for a fact—that I made him happy. Why this woman?
He reached out to me. "Edward." Before he had risen to his feet I turned and ran, down the stairs and out the back door and into the forest.
~v~
He found me leaning against a tree, the bloodless body of a doe mere feet away where I had let her fall. He said my name to announce his presence as he approached, though I'd heard his movement and his thoughts long before.
"What have you done to us, Carlisle?" I whispered. "Are you tired of my company already?"
He palmed my cheek. "No, Edward. You are everything to me. You know that more surely than anyone could."
I fought the childish urge to reject his touch, instead leaning into it. "Not any longer." I looked up at him, meeting his eyes. "Everything is going to change now. God, Carlisle. Why?"
I couldn't let her die.
I saw again in his mind, the girl with the broken leg. "You know her," I realised. "From years ago."
"Yes."
"Humans die all the time." I squeezed my eyes shut tight against the pain, the loss I already felt. "Why didn't you just let her die?" My arm slipped easily, naturally, around his neck as I pulled him down to me, and our lips met. I kissed him desperately.
I'm sorry. He pulled away slowly, and I whimpered at what I perceived as rejection. Come back to the house. I need you.
I dropped my head into my hands and listened as he at first walked, then ran from me.
~v~
The sky was beginning to grow light when I returned. The house was silent, though I knew Carlisle was upstairs because I could see the woman through his eyes, still laying motionless on our bed. I could read nothing of her thoughts, and she was so still, though her chest rose and fell with even but almost imperceptible breath.
I'm worried, Edward, Carlisle thought. She should be...making some noise.
I remembered screaming, begging for death. He was right. I sighed and slowly climbed the stairs.
Carlisle sat in an armless chair, his elbows on his knees, his chin resting on his interlocked fingers. We had made love on that chair, as he sat upon it and I straddled him, and it had been a challenge, a test of my control not to have it break into matchsticks beneath us. My eyes focused on the indentations on the backrest, the perfect imprint of my clenched fist where I had gripped too hard as I came around his cock.
"Can you hear her, Edward?"
I shook my head. "Nothing."
She fell from a cliff. If her mind is gone...I don't know if the venom can heal that.
I shuddered at the thought of an immortal without consciousness. "What will you do, if..."
I don't know.
Part of me wanted it to happen. Carlisle had altered our existence irrevocably by bringing the woman here, and I wasn't ready for it to change.
One day, perhaps. But not yet. Not so soon. "It's been only hours," I said, before I turned and walked away.
I didn't expect him to follow me, but he did. I stopped at the bottom of the stairs, but did not look at him. I only waited, giving him the chance to say what I already knew he would.
"This has nothing to do with what we have, Edward."
"How can it not?" I snapped, though I hadn't meant to say anything in reply. "If she wakes, it will be different. A woman in the house, Carlisle, it would never be acceptable, don't you see?"
He could not argue. "I love you." He reached out and slipped his hand onto the back of my neck and pulled me to him. "Nothing will ever change that."
I let him kiss me. No matter how much I wished to be angry with him, I could not, not with the way he could make me feel with a single touch. I wouldn't let him pull away from this kiss. With a desperation that spoke of my fear for our future, I clung to him, fitting my body into the so familiar lines of his.
As he held my head in this two hands, I gripped his hips firmly and pressed my own to his in a familiar signal of need to which he had never failed to respond before.
I heard his hesitation, and the reason for it. I tore my lips from his, but never released his body. "She's not there, Carlisle," I hissed into his ear, and he believed me and surrendered to my desire—and his own.
~v~
We made love there in the living room, but that was not unusual. There was an air of finality to the location, however, because we both knew that should the woman wake, there would be no opportunity for the abandon to which we were accustomed.
As we lay in each other's arms on the couch afterwards, I gasped suddenly as an image flickered in my mind.
"What is it?" Carlisle asked me, alarmed, because I had stiffened in his embrace.
"The child," I whispered, as more images came to me. "Her child died. She tried to kill herself. She threw herself from that cliff, Carlisle. She wanted to die."
Then we both heard it, a keening whimper. Carlisle moved faster than I, almost tumbling me to the floor as he leapt to his feet and began to pull on his clothes.
I moved slower than he, already knowing that she was beginning to feel the venom that flowed through her veins. Her pain increased quickly, her comprehension of it grew and by the time I reached the top of the stairs her moans had turned to cries and her cries to screams.
"We are far enough that no one shall hear," Carlisle said as I appeared at the door. "But we must make preparations to move farther away once the change is complete."
He was asking me to make those preparations, because he wanted to sit with her, offering what little comfort he could give while she suffered the greatest physical pain she would ever endure.
I left him to his vigil.
~v~
We had things we would take with us. Books, keepsakes, clothing. The preparations took far too little time and it left my mind too free to grieve for the brief time we had had alone together.
I listened, too, to Carlisle's words and thoughts, and the thoughts of the woman who intermittently screamed and whimpered and begged Carlisle to kill her once and for all. She grieved too, for the child she had lost.
And she remembered Carlisle.
He'd told her, of course, his name, where and when and under what circumstance they had met before. He told her what he was, what he had done to her, what she was becoming.
He told her as he held her hand and stroked her face, the things he once told me.
I had raged at him while I burned.
She did not.
I had not been comforted while it was happening to me.
She was. Soothed by his presence and by his words, she remembered him. She had thought of him often over a decade. Such a long time for a human, and she never let go of the memory of his compassion and kindness. Nor had she ever forgotten how beautiful he was.
My jealousy flared. Here was an infinitely more suitable companion for Carlisle.
The doubts he had had for us in the beginning...he would never have had those doubts if he'd passed me by and waited these few years for her.
~v~
On the second day, when Carlisle had not left the woman's side even for an instant, I ventured up. I stood in the doorway and watched Carlisle soothe her burning flesh with his cold hands. He smiled when he saw me. "Her name is Esme."
"I know."
"Tell me, Edward, please. How is she? How are her thoughts? Is she afraid?" He was desperate to know, and part of that was his desire to take responsibility for his actions if she resented him and what he had done.
So I pulled up another chair beside his—this one free of damage inflicted by our passions—and relayed to him all that I had heard since I had begun to hear her. Then I began to relay her thoughts as she had them, and unwittingly served as interpreter as they had a conversation of sorts.
I tried to control the outward evidence of the way my heart broke as Carlisle grew to know her thoughts and feelings and the love that she was capable of.
~v~
I had no need for sleep or rest, no need to sit. I could stand indefinitely with no fatigue or need to move. I could have perched on one leg for eternity if I'd had no need to feed and could stand the boredom.
And yet I huddled on the floor, hugging my knees to my chest in a posture I'd affected often over these last few sudden days.
It was a very human reaction, and I knew the significance of it, the comfort I sought in curling so tightly into myself.
A human, however, could not maintain the stillness in the pose, nor hold it for hour upon hour as I did without suffering cramps or stiffness.
I suffered none of these things, and so there I sat, hour after hour, listening to her screams and her cries and her pleas for death. It was the third day and Carlisle thought it would be soon.
I hadn't gone back in there, neither had he come out. I heard his every thought. I'd never had the need or desire to block his mind before now, to not listen, and now I couldn't bear to do it.
I had a morbid need to hear all of it. And as I sat in that small darkened room, the one we'd never used and yet labelled mine, I eavesdropped as Carlisle came to realise what I'd seen as I sat with him beside her and acted as translator.
Slowly, it happened, over the course of the second night, a gradual realisation of the way he felt as he watched her change into one of us. And when he knew, really knew, then all of a sudden I wanted, needed, to block the outpouring of guilt and apology and all his perfect memories of us as he realised that it was over.
Suddenly he could see his future, and it was her.
I could no longer see mine.
~v~
I don't know how long I'd been sitting there. The sun was high in the sky, I knew that, midday perhaps, but the heavy curtains remained over the small window. Her heart was beating faster now, the screaming less. Instead, she breathed, her jaw clenched tight against the pain, air hissing past her teeth as she drew and expelled it from her lungs.
He'd been calling to me. Thinking my name, asking me to come. And when I didn't, he called to me out loud.
"I'm here," I whispered into the gloom.
It's close.
"I can't."
Edward, I'm sorry, so very sorry.
I didn't answer him. I watched, through his eyes, felt as he did the texture of her skin under his fingers as he stroked her face and warred with the need to be close to her, to comfort her, and his need to know my feelings. To comfort me.
He acted even as I saw his decision. He leant over her, kissed her forehead—I whimpered—and whispered to her that he would return as soon as he could.
Then he came to me.
I raised my face from where it rested on my knees for the first time in many hours and looked at him as he stood in the doorway. So much emotion showed on his face, echoing what I could see in his mind. He was in turmoil, unable to reconcile the polar opposites of joy and loss.
A shudder ran through me, my body rocked as I fought to control my own emotions. I wanted to reach out for him, to beg and plead with him for things to go back to how they were. But I knew that nothing I could do would change anything.
And I loved him enough to take at least some comfort in his happiness, even if it was not me giving him that happiness.
"I wish I could say something, Edward. Something to ease this upheaval somehow. I cannot think of anything that may help. Only that I am so very sorry. And yet I cannot regret my actions. I would not take them back. And you know that I not only speak of my actions of two days ago when I brought Esme here, but also of my decision to save you as well, and all that led from that. I love you, Edward. I always will, for as long as I live. Nothing will ever change that."
"You're in love with her," I murmured. I sighed, and laid my cheek on my knee, my head turned so that I could still see him.
He came towards me and lowered himself to the floor. "I could not have foreseen it, please know that."
"I know. I... I'm going to miss you."
Alarm crossed his face. "Surely you won't leave us, Edward?" There was panic in his voice, but I could not miss his use of the word 'us'.
I shook my head minutely. "It's not my intention." The thought of not being close to him, of being alone so suddenly caused the place where my heart would have beat were I still human to clench painfully. "I will miss this." I unclasped my fingers from my calf and reached for him, stroking his cheek, using the pad of my thumb to brush his lower lip. I gasped at the unexpected pain it caused me.
He sighed, and his eyes drifted closed. "As will I," he said softly. "Edward, I..." He put his hand over mine and gripped it, as if afraid I would pull away. His eyes opened, heavy lidded and dark. "I regret nothing. Nothing that we have had. I only regret that you are in pain now. I will never forgive myself—"
"What fault is it of yours? None! No, Carlisle. It could never have been forever. It was never that kind of love. You did not entice me or deceive me. Never. Do not take any blame upon yourself."
A sad smile turned his lips and his face softened. "Only you could understand completely," he said. "Truly, I thought we would have many more years as we were. I...I shall miss..." Images, memories flickered through his mind. Pictures of me, smiling, laughing. The feel of my lips on his. The sounds I made on the verge of orgasm. The way he felt when he was buried deep within me.
I groaned as my body reacted.
I pulled him towards me, unable to resist the need to have him touch me after such images. He knew what he did, and yet he did not stop, showing me more, giving me all the significant—and seemingly insignificant—memories of our so short time together. His disbelief as I asked him to kiss me for the first time, and the feeling of my lips under his. His joy when he realised his feelings were returned, the ecstasy we found in each other's bodies the first time we made love.
I spread my knees and, my hands on his hips, pulled him in close to me. There was a despair that flowed between us as we kissed, but it was tinged with hope. Not all was lost. I cannot describe the turmoil and the conflict it created, because of it. Still, dry sobs racked my chest as, my fingers laced tightly into his hair, I pulled him to me, and I growled, moaned, whimpered. My desire grew, my lust, as he showed me what he'd seen only two days previous when he took me on the living room floor, on the thick carpet, the way my back arched as he pushed inside me, how my legs wrapped around his waist, how my body, tight around him, brought him to the edge and over.
I tore at his clothing, unable to wait, incapable of the patience and restraint we usually exercised. I begged him, "Please, inside, I need you inside me."
Yes, he agreed. This time, this one last time.
I cried out in grief, but he kept showing me these images, these memories, and he stood and pulled me to my feet then—carefully—removed my clothing. He showed me what he saw when he sank to his knees at my feet and took me into his mouth. I watched my own face, the pain that was there, but also the need. My dark eyes, the way my lips parted in a gasp as he took me down his throat.
I felt what he did, with my hands in his hair as I began to thrust slowly into his mouth. I felt how erect he was. With him, I looked forward to the moment when he would sink into me and lose himself. And I tasted my own essence, felt my cock pulse inside his mouth when I hit my peak.
He rose to his feet and kissed me, and again I tasted myself. "Make love to me, Carlisle," I begged again. "Please."
He pushed me to lie on the narrow bed. Again, through his thoughts I listened to my cries and moans as he grasped my thighs, and lowering his head began to prepare me with his tongue. The venom flowed copiously when we were aroused, and as I swallowed continuously, he used his tongue to wet and open and prepare me for him.
His need was painful, and yet he lingered over his preparations, long after I was ready for him. "Please, now, I need you," I gasped.
I don't want it to be over, he thought, but he raised his head and moved up and over my body, kneeling between my legs. He made sure I heard everything he thought as he entered me. The tightness, the warmth, and above all, the love and emotion that he felt. It was as if I was both making love and being made love to, all at once, and that stimulation brought me to heights of pleasure again so fast that before I knew it my orgasm was crashing down around me, and my screams drowned out those of the woman in the next room.
He slowed and kissed me as I recovered from my release, but did not stop, using the reprieve to rock slowly against me, inside me, until I was again hard between our bodies. He resumed his thrusts, seeking his own pleasure, knowing that by doing so he was not depriving me of anything, because I saw, heard, felt as he did, I felt the pleasure he did as he lost himself inside me.
When he reached his peak—and I felt him climbing, heard it in his mind—he whispered to me, as he always did, his love, his desire, his gratefulness, and now, his regret and sorrow and loss. And I followed him, his orgasm sending me spiralling into release yet again, and we shook together, slick with my fluids, the pain so terrible it threatened to claw from our chests, and it was over.
I wished I could cry real tears, wished I could cry even venom, because I felt as if I should explode from the finality of it. But we clung together, and together we listened to the rapid beat of Esme's heart as it thundered towards her death, and the new and different life that lay before us all.
A/N: I haven't entirely discounted the idea of some kind of continuation of this fic, so if you are so inclined, put it on alert. Whatever I do, it will be canon (defined as not changing any of the events in the source material), and will likely leapfrog through time, so to speak.