It Takes Time.
Story that started off as a one shot and just grew. I always had an issue with Esme's portrayal as 'just' a loving wife and mother. I wanted to explore a little more where she might be coming from.
Esme folded the sheets together, inhaling the scent of lemon that surrounded them. The fabric detergent change has been a sensible one she concluded. She picked up the remaining pile and placed them back inside the cupboard. Whilst they had never been used, few stayed with the Cullens, it was best to be prepared.
She smiled softly to herself as she looked around the guest room. It was perfect, comfortable, it's pale yellow bedspread and curtains giving the room a calming presence.
Her children gently mocked her incessant need to have the house prepared for humans, she knew. She also was aware of the impossibility of any living, breathing houseguests. She loved her family far too dearly to put them in that kind of discomfort for long.
But still… she wanted to be prepared. It was an occupation in a home where it was hard to be occupied. Though they would argue otherwise, she knew, the others did not need mothering. When you are never cold, tired or hormonal you hardly needed a shoulder to cry on she had concluded. It hurt.
Sometimes, when she was especially low she wondered why, if there was a God, as her husband believed, he would have created beings that didn't need each other to survive. Certainly it was preferable, for conversation, company and sex but, not necessary. They were not like humans, fragile and breakable.
She wondered if her family thought like this, she suspected they did not. She suspected they felt it though, the individualism that caused them to clasp each other ever closer. Why they grasped at their partners with consuming lust and lost themselves for days.
Carlisle would have known it, she concluded, having spent so much time on his own, before Edward. In her heart of hearts she still doubted his motives for changing him. Perhaps he felt that if he had a companion he was more human. It seemed strange for someone, who held such confidence in an afterlife to feel the need to 'save' someone. Edward understood this beyond the others, she saw. Perhaps it was the mind reading, the way he knew peoples desires, their fears. Even hers.
To love someone truly was to put their desires above your own. To submit to their wishes, forgetting the cost. She felt this in her bones as she held her family together, coping with tempers and hurt feelings. If this preserved their humanity, it was no bad thing.
None of them save Carlisle and Edward, of course, knew what she had been before. She doubted any of them would have imagined it, their loving foster mother, racked with pain at what she had become, looking for answers wherever she could.
It took time to form, to create the character she wanted to be, the person she would become.
The wife, the mother, she became them.
She became a vampire before she was a Cullen.
That was her story.
I am considering continuing into a semi long fic if people would be interested in reading it. Please Review and let me know.