Disclaimer: Owning Twilight would be like owning an aggressive pit bull because it would only end up biting me in the ass.
So, Edward's mother "pleads for her son's life", eh? Everyone in this world knows that any mother worth her salt would be demanding that a doctor save her son's life, damn it, or she'll rip them to shreds.
And then I thought, what the hell was Carlisle thinking?
--
Twenty years after Bella settles in, a startlingly short amount of time and still longer than she'd expected, she realizes that there is a topic not up for discussion in the Cullen household.
Ever.
And that is why Carlisle changed them. Sure, she's heard the stories about forgiveness and compassion and giving immortal life. But Bella is older now and Bella knows better.
She knows that giving immortal life means stealing eternal life and that just as cruelty can be kindness, kindness can be cruelty.
But, she can see Alice smiling gently in her head and murmuring, every normal family has a few secrets, right?
-
Saplings grow tall and strong before his eyes, day after month after year and he's honing his craft. His punishment and his salvation.
He sleeps in trees to remind himself of what he is and who he is and how long he will stay that way.
"Forever," she snarls at him on her deathbed, sticky with sweat and gaunt with illness, "It will literally be an eternity before I forgive you if you don't save my son."
A doctor hears threats every day. He watches people disintegrate and curse him while they're at it. There are, of course, those who are grateful.
He can't remember those individually anymore, decaying as one into this endless cesspool of disease, but he can remember feeling thankful for them.
He feels respect for this one.
"I'm sorry," he insists, "There is only so much I can do."
"Don't lie to me, you bastard," she struggles to clench her fists and looks him in the eyes, "There is power in your blood and that I is why I fear you. I feel it. I know you can save him."
He turns his head to the bed next to hers where there lies a remarkably sick boy struggling through the hell of an epidemic and failing. Not even a man yet.
And he can't even do what she wants him to do to a man, much less a boy.
Her hair is thin and feels like flour. Her face is pale with sorrow.
"Or," her faint fierce voice challenges him, "Are you afraid?"
From those words until he watches Edward wake up and try to weep and then spend a week straight punching concrete and cars and his newly stone-plated torso to try to feel anything other than the insatiable emptiness, he believes that she's right.
That he's just afraid of saving people with what he really is. But it turns out that he's right; he's afraid of infecting them.
And having faced that fear, having become disillusioned to what he hoped he was wrong about all along, he feels no triumph.
-
He catches a glimpse of her shoulders first, encased in white cotton and gently rounded, molded into some ideal that he'd discarded long ago when he'd detached himself from dreams of spreading himself bare over a woman.
She reminds him of the lingering taste of that desire and it is then that he feels a burst of life behind the cage of his ribs, spread like fingers to protect the rest of his insides from the sudden light surpassing and engulfing the craving clawing at his throat.
She is pearlescent and she is the moon dropped from the sky and morphed into woman and she is mighty with her frail, feminine shoulders. If he was a werewolf, he would howl for her.
But, watching her step from the damp heavy canopy of trees and into the breathy sunshine, he knows that he is only a vampire and so he can only do what he does best:
He thirsts.
-
He is fortunate that she chooses to throw herself from that hopeless summit. It saves him from mourning her death in a few decades and it saves him from feeling guilt from finally breaking and taking her in the night long before that inevitable death.
Love, apparently, is something that strips away morals and every verse of the Bible he's recited late at night when he can do nothing but beg for sleep.
He wants to wrap her in fine furs and stroke the fragile skin from the tip of her eyebrow to her slant of her hairline and he wants to spread himself bare over her sweet face, her sweet eyes.
And so when he picks up her mysteriously still-breathing body from the bottom of the cliff, underneath the potent desperation is a damning relief.
He knows that if he were still a young man, he would take this as a sign from God.
But his eyes are dusty with the death of innocents and the fever of helplessness. Edward will not blame him when he returns home, cradling this woman in his arms.
This could be a sign from God that he is doing the right thing, but he is old enough to tell the difference from a miracle and self-justification.
Edward will see him as a savior. As just and noble and a shepherd.
But it has been a long time since Edward could truly read his thoughts and even longer since Carlisle felt willing to share them.
-
In Rosalie, he sees nothing but his own body lying on the cobblestone street, ravaged with the disease stilling the flow of his veins and the ascension of his soul.
He is so powerful in that moment when he recognizes someone as ruined as himself that he is powerless to stop from titling her neck for better access.
He notes her smeared lipstick and her bruised thighs and the ugliness that cloaks her.
And when he gives her back her splendor, the luster that she depends upon to keep control, he reasons that what he offers is perhaps not so evil.
-
When Rosalie kicks down the front door with a brown-haired man struggling for breath, he opens his palms to receive the boy.
-
No one can find the words to tell Bella that perfection is a lie.
