Disclaimer: I own the rights to my mind and body and soul, but no Twilight books or associated spin-offs (like the tragic movie with Cedric Diggory in it. He's hot, but it ain't gonna work)
Right. On with the Rosalie-centric oneshot :D Had the song King of Nails stuck in my head when I was writing this, and you guys don't know how lucky you are I didn't call it Queen of Hales or something equally as corny as a result…wait.
it hales in paradise
gare de lyon
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When the rain falls and the sun shines and Rosalie is all alone, she steps into that sunlight, raises her arms and tilts her head back to feel the cool beads of water spattering down on her cooler skin.
It isn't the same as when she was human, when she and Vera would play in the rain until they were achingly cold, despite the sunshine hitting their skin, but it's almost as good, and she has learnt to accept that almost is sometimes all you can have.
Sometimes Alice comes with her, and it's when they're most sisterly, when their hair darkens with water and they hold hands and spin around and around and there's no one to see their skin break into glittering facets, and she feels almost human. Sometimes she lets herself trek home like that, washing away the mysterious siltiness of the rain only when the day is over, relishing the sweet muskiness of her clothes (almost enough to block out the fragrance of her own skin), and Alice's company. She knows that Alice doesn't understand it when Rosalie asks her to come with her, nor why she misses dancing in the rain and sun at all, but Alice is as fey as she is kind-hearted, and knows that Rosalie will ask her as soon as she herself resolves to, anyway.
Edward and Jasper sometimes notice, when she returns, but although they can't help but be brushed by her euphoria, however briefly, they have long ago stopped caring, if they ever did. Even after seventy years though, she hasn't lost the decorum taught her by her mother, and so she tries to wait, to recall the feeling only in the night, when the emotions that flicker through her are hers alone and the others are out hunting, in the time when they once slept, once dreamed.
She misses being able to dream, which is strange, because when she was alive, everything she had ever wanted was given to her, and it's not as though she was a particularly imaginative girl anyway, but even if it isn't something she really should miss, she does. It's one of the reasons everyone thinks that she hated Bella. Which isn't true. She doesn't care that Edward adores her (not anymore), but that the girl is so willing to throw away the things Rosalie would trade her soul for makes her rock up tight when Bella is there, and everyone feels the discord. You don't understand, She wants to tell her, What it feels like to want to give in to the monster in you all the time.
She wants to try to dissuade her sometimes, but she knows that what she wants (to dream again, to never hunger for human blood, to be able to stand in the sunlight without a touch of dread) is not the same as what Bella does; despite the similarities that sometimes make her think she is looking at herself, there are always these differences between them.
Rosalie was once a girl like Bella, pretty and naïve and achingly vulnerable, unaware that there are some things you will never be able to love until you have lost them, blindly faithful to her own view of things, docile to the point of akinesis, and when she looks at Bella and sees herself she is worried; Rosalie sometimes hates who she has become.
Has, in fact, tried to kill herself, more times than she can count.
She watches Bella unblinkingly and the girl shifts a little in her seat, uncomfortable under the scrutiny (and Rosalie was never shy) and the rain sounds like the rustle of a silky dress beyond the wide white house, and she remembers when the girl jumped off a cliff and it makes her wish they'd stayed in the North forever, or at least, another thirty years, by which time Bella would have been happily married to the dog-boy and Edward would have been able to fight back his impulses more strongly, and life would have remained a beautiful golden place for the girl they think she hates.
Then Edward or Alice will come into the room (still hesitant about leaving them alone together) and the centre of the girl's universe shifts, and she is forced to face the fact that, in Bella's eyes, what she has, what Rosalie wants, will never be enough. But sometimes almost is all you're meant to have.
Sometimes though, it isn't.
When the glow of immortality settled in her, Rosalie wandered through the world, always seeking sun showers (because she had little else to do), and it was in just such weather, when the whole wet world gleamed and her skin, wet and hard, reflected a million tiny rainbows, she found the hiker, nearly dead.
At first, coming across his mangled body, she was afraid that she would break, would press her lips to his cooling skin and steal his lifeforce, and she determined to pass him by. But he saw her, and his eyes met hers, and were so filled with pain and passion and life, the way she used to be, that it made her ache in a different way, and it was then that she resolved to save him.
She had lost everyone by then, had endured on alone, and this boy, this man with the eyes still bright and focused, unable to speak with his jaw shattered, made something inside of her stir, and so she picked him up, as gently as she could, and rushed through the wilderness to the person who could save him.
Because she remembers thinking, even as she whispered to him, urgently, what she was, the way that she could save him, He will know how to live.
He tells her, once, that he thought she was an angel flying him to heaven, until he saw that her shirt was stained by his blood, and it occurred to him that angels were stain-free. Which suits them, in her opinion. Somewhere she still has the clothes she wore that day, and the stains have faded with time and sun and rain, but, still, they smell like the sun and the rain, and the moment when she began to breathe because she wanted to.
When the sun showers pass, when the clouds seal the sky over again, and the rain continues to pour down as if the whole sky is falling, she lies down on the silty earth until the light goes grey along with her hair (from the rain), and it doesn't matter that she hasn't needed to breathe in seventy years, and it doesn't matter anymore that Edward believes he is the only one prone to despair, and it doesn't matter anymore that Bella is losing the things she will miss more than she thinks she will, and it doesn't matter anymore that Alice doesn't understand her, because the rain is sliding impassively over her body like water over stone and her clothes are sticking to her like a second skin and all that matters is to find the boy with the soul bright eyes who took her to heaven, and share this with him.
And when she does, when they're alone, she curves into him, pressing her body all down the length of his so that he bears the shape of her like a watermark, imprinted by her.
"You've got me all wet Rose," he grumbles, and his arms come up around her and Rosalie breathes deeply, air rushing through the lungs she doesn't need, and says
"Isn't it wonderful?" and is glad to be alive.
/ Thanks for reading /