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Renesmee Carlie Cullen is a year old mentally but physically she looks about four or five; she can't say because she never met other children.
She laughs at Uncle Emmet's jokes, plays dress-up with Aunt Alice and Aunt Rose, plays with Jacob, reads Tyson with Momma and learns to play to the piano with her Daddy, reads chapter books with Uncle Jasper, cooks with Grandma and writes calligraphy with Grandpa.
Because she has to and everyone expects her to.
No one really knows that she doesn't like Uncle Emmet's jokes. She hates dress-up. She loathes reading Tyson. She hates playing with Uncle Jacob because he keeps saying, 'the leeches' and she's part-leech. Also, he calls her Nessie and she hates that. She doesn't like the piano and she abhors chapters books. She can't stand cooking and she can't understand why she has to do calligraphy.
She begs to go to kindergarten like everyone else her age but it's always the same:
"You are too special."
"You'll attract attention."
"You age very fast."
But still she tries. After all, what kind of five year old (one, actually) wants to read chapter books, paint like a professional and play the piano?
Renesmee wants to finger-paint. She wants to play pretend. She wants to read picture books. She wants to have play dates with other children, not with old vampires and half-naked werewolves. She wants to fall and tumble and get back up. But she can't.
Because she has to do what everyone expects her to do.
Renesmee Cullen (don't you just hate that name?) is now physically fifteen. Mentally, she's five.
Her family shower her with extravagant and showy gifts. She wishes they don't. Most people need it more than her. Besides, who gives their fifteen (five, actually) year old daughter a diamond set? She wanted a camera but she didn't get that.
She starts highschool. At first, she's thrilled. She'll make friends! But no. Her family attends school with her and say,
"Nessie, the secret is important."
She grits her teeth and lies about her age and background to humans and she doesn't like it one bit.
"Besides, why do you want to be friends with humans?" Bella wrinkles her nose.
I am not you, she wants to say.
She manages to say hello to a few kids who are in her class, they talk to her once and turn away. Later, she learns it's because of the glares Jacob is giving them.
She also smiles at a few cute boys at her school but Jacob growls and she frowns. Can't she date either? How will she find love? Or will she be forever alone?
"Nessie," says Jacob, playing with her hair. She turns away from him but not before seeing the hurt and anger in his eyes.
She gazes at the humans and wishes she was like them. They laugh, tease, make friends and live.
Her thoughts scare her. She thinks rude and sarcastic things of her family. Her mother's stupid dependance on her father. Her mother is shallow and weak. Her father takes advantage of that. Alice is stupidly optimistic. Rosalie is pig-headed. Emmett acts even younger than her mental age. Jacob keeps coming to her like a lost puppy. What is he even still doing here?
Jasper gives her symphathetic looks and buys her paint.
So she paints and hides her thoughts.
Because that's what everyone expects her to do.
Ren, not Nessie, Cullen is physically seventeen. Mentally, she's seven. No one calls her Ren. She's always Nessie.
It's her parents wedding. Again. And she smiles, converses and dances with everyone present even though she feels like uttering a few sarcastic comments but she refrains.
Because everyone expects her to.
Her mother tells the story of how she met Daddy. Again. And she wants to roll her eyes. Yes, their love is perfect and everything but do they have to act like the only couple who knows love? And isn't giving up your family for your first love sort of bad? She bet no one would let her do that.
Who tells their seventeen (seven, actually) year old daughter about their dominating and anti-feminist love?
Her parents whisk away to a honeymoon. Again. Jacob is out patrolling. Her family leaves to hunt.
So she strips her branded and over-priced clothes, dresses in a regular black shirt and jeans. She plays her punk music loud and paints.
She paints about a girl who is free. Who can do whatever she want without an empath, telepath, psychic, a shield and a wolf guarding her. She paints about places she hears and yearns to travel alone. Doesn't her family know about personal space? She has to do everything with them or with Jacob and the half-naked pack.
"My Nessie." Jacob gave her funny looks during the wedding. She had looked beautiful, as everyone expected but she felt uncomfortable about Jacob looking at her. He was like an uncle to her.
Before the clock strikes midnight, she hides her paintings, for no one knows her passion but Jasper, dresses in the designer clothes again and puts on classical music.
Because she has to do what everyone expects her to do.
Ren breaks the neck of the deer and bursts into tears. No one is hunting with her. She is physically nineteen and mentally, she's nine. And she's getting married. To Jacob.
Jacob confessed his imprint for her and she feels disgusted and violated. Did he ever hear of child-grooming? How was he even allowed near her before?
Her aunts, uncles, grandparents pat her head. Her father just shakes his. Her mother firmly holds her and gently tells her story of how she broke his heart when she chose her father and blah, blah blah.
Ren stops herself from asking, "What would he have done if I was his child?" She refrains from telling her mother to stop feeling guilty and giving her to Jacob to escape that guilt.
Who let their ninteen (nine!) year old daughter get married to a man who was in love with the mother first?
"I don't love him," she says to her mother.
Bella laughs at her rebellious daughter. "It's just a phase. You're his imprintee and you will fall back in love with him."
And I am supposed to a perfect partner. Submissive, angelic, never questioning him, always at his whims. But she wasn't Bella or Emily.
She couldn't do that.
Ren should be going to college and starting out her life but no, she's getting married and will be a housewife just like Emily. She gazes at Emily and wonders how she does it. Does she like cooking and cleaning and looking after her wolves? Ren bets she hates what Sam did to her. And then he threathened to throw himself under a bus or jump off a cliff so poor Emily had no choice but to accept him. Ren hates the wolves.
Ren can't do it. She just can't. Not now. So she asks for time.
"Time?" her father repeats.
"Just two years. I want to go to college." I have dreams and ambitions unlike my anti-feminist mother, she thinks but doesn't say.
"You can go after the wedding."
"I want to go now." She pouts.
"All right," he agrees, ignoring a dirty look from Bella. "I think Brown is good for you, Nessie. I and Bella, of course, will go with you to your college."
She wants to cry. Who went to college with their parents for classmates? She wanted a life experience. Now, she'll just get to see her parents making out like there's no tomorrow.
Her entire family interrupts with different suggestions. Harvard. Yale. Stanford. Jasper remains quiet.
She doesn't say anything about wanting to go to a college of her own choice. Royal Academy of Arts. She doesn't say she applied secretly and got accepted because she doesn't want her parents to go with her. If she said that, they wouldn't agree. She had tried once. They all were too over-protective.
So she forgets her dreams and happily (or maybe not for Jasper gives her a pitying look) gets into the programme her mother would have done if she wasn't an anti-feminist.
Because that's what everyone expects her to do.
"The ceremony would take place here." Alice announces as soon as she comes home from college.
Ren nods, physically she's twenty-one. Mentally, she's eleven. "I am excited." Not. She doesn't want to think about her wedding. She wants to go out for a drink but her parents never let her. Just because they've never been drunk, they don't let her.
"I say we put Nessie's hair down. It's so long, "suggests Rosalie.
"No," Bella disagrees. "She's wearing the same gown I wore for my wedding so it's fair she has her hair up too."
Ren freezes. Bella's human wedding gown? Wow, was she her mother's gift to Jacob? Was Ren some replacement or rebound gift?
Sorry, you couldn't have me, take my daughter should be tattooed to her mother's forhead.
They all talk and gush about the wedding. Roses and violets. Orchestra. (please, what century are they in?) A large cake even though the guests are vampires. Oops, Ren forgot the pack. She just hopes they don't show up half-dressed.
"I have got the perfect red and black lingerie for you," says Alice with a wink.
Her mother, aunt and grandma snicker. Who talked about this sort of stuff with a twenty-one (eleven!) year old girl?
Ren mentally shudders. Lingerie.
"And you are going to Isle Esme," says Bella. "That's where I went too."
I DON'T WANT TO GO THERE. I AM NOT YOU, Ren wants to scream but doesn't. Bella had basically decided Ren as a replacement for Jacob.
One thing was for sure: Ren wasn't putting out. At least not till a month. She would give Jacob blue balls. She won't go down without a fight.
"Anyway, the flower girl is Claire."
Ren makes a face. Claire was thirteen and very, very like Emily. They didn't try to fight their imprints.
"Let's add fressia to the flowers. It was there during my wedding," says Bella.
"Great idea!"
Nobody asks what she wants. She wants sunflowers and daisies. She wants to get married barefoot on the sand. She doesn't want anyone to give her away because she is not a possession. She wants to wear a simply white dress and smile at a man she doesn't know from birth and who was also in love with her mother.
But she remains quiet.
Because she has to do what everyone expects her to do.
Ren smokes a cigarette and thinks. Tomorrow's her wedding. She's in an club with no one from her family or the pack with her. She's alone. Physically, she's twenty-two and she would stop aging now. Mentally, she's twelve.
She puffs out the smoke. It's the first cigarette she's ever head and she likes it. She likes the way it makes her forget she has to marry Jacob tomorrow. She forgets about everyone rushing around preparing a wedding for their twenty-two (twelve!) year old Renesmee.
She orders a shot and drums her fingers on the bar. Her engagement ring glints in the light and she resists the urge to throw it away. She has thought about running away but it seems impossible. Her family could easily track her down. Jacob could sniff her out. She can't run away but she wants to.
She thinks that maybe she can wait until Jacob ages and dies. That could be years. She didn't inherit patience from her parents. Maybe because they didn't have it. She remembers overhearing her father say that Bella threw herself on him during the honeymoon. She shakes her head. Her mother didn't have any sense of dignity.
"May I buy a drink?" asks a brown-haired guy. He's handome, she vaguely notices.
Ren flashes her hand. "I am getting married."
"All the more reason to celebrate."
Something clicks into her mind. What if she didn't lose her virginty to Jacob? She could lose it now. That should be an amazing experience. She doubted it'd be amazing with Jacob.
"All right," she says to the guy who smiles. He's really cute, she thinks.
She watches the humans laugh, dance, tease, kiss and live.
Renesmee lives too. She just lives a life that is already being lived for her.
Ren is hyperventilating. She's in an empty room, waiting for her father to walk her down the aisle. What father wanted to walk down his twenty-two (twelve!) daughter down the aisle?
She stares at the reflection. She's wearing her mother's dress, hair, even shoes. Funnily, she's even wearing her mother's suffering expression. She twirls once and tries to smile but she can't.
The door swings open and she turns to see Jasper, not Daddy, enter. His expression is urgent.
"Answer me honestly: Do you want this?" he asks in a clear voice, looking at her with concern.
She doesn't have to think about it before she shakes her head. But what good can come now?
Jasper nods. "I thought so. Go."
"Really?" She's free? It was that easy?
"I'll handle everything. Go far away from here." He looks at her meaningfully. "I know you were about to run away from the airport before the honeymoon with the . . .dog."
"Yes, that was the plan," she admits. Jasper hands a pair of care keys.
"I don't need a bank account or the family's money. I want to struggle like everyone else but I need enough for just a plane ticket."
He hands her a stack of dollars. "Only enough for a ticket."
Her jaw drops and tears form in her eyes. She throws her arms around Jasper. "I will live."
He smiles. "You better. I didn't go through playing with Alice's vision holes and Edward's mind reading for nothing. Go. I'll handle everything."
Ren smiles. She's travelling alone and no one would ever find her. Her heart pangs a bit but she ignores it.
She dyed her hair, got a tattoo and pierced her ears. She works as a bartender and meets interesting people everyday. She doesn't wear designer clothes but regular clothes. She plays loud punk music. She paints and sells her paintings. She earns enough to keep her satisfied. She makes a friend everyday.
And right now, in the midst of the dance floor, where's she's dancing and singing along so wonderfully that her boyfriend gazes at her with adoration, she's decided she loves life. And yes, boyfriend. He's an artist. Like her or so they say.
Her eyes fall to a sign.
What is free will? The power of choice.
What is freedom? The right to act. Without hindrance or restraint.
What is alive? The want to continue existing.
What is chaos? The framework of freedom and alive.
What is love? It is freedom from suffering.
Yes. She has it all now and she is living.
A/N: Like it? Hate it? Please review! This is my first story and I appreciate any comments.