Note: I'm trying to keep this in canon as much as possible. I admit that I haven't picked through every book of the Saga with a microscope, so please excuse any factual errors. I only ask for your attention, and I only hope for your enjoyment. -Hugh


-Under Gravestones—

"If we had happy endings, we'd all be under gravestones now."

Rosalie Hale, Eclipse


Take a moment and think of sex. Raw, dirty, uncompromising sex. The kind of sex that feels most at home crushed against a grimy brick wall with traffic sounding in the background. Fast and hard and merciless. It's the sort of sex that requires an imbalance. You take advantage of her, know her, own her. You walk away feeling dirty and revolted, but satisfied in a base way. It's foul and loveless, the very definition of depravity. But it feels disgustingly, undeniably good.

That's what it's like to read a mind.

Thoughts are never pure. They're never simple or elegant. It's all sensation and color, blasts of anxiety and desire and anger. I can crawl inside a mind and feel it all, root out the darkest places and take hold with hands and teeth. Reading someone's mind is more personal and wicked than sex could ever be.

I've made the easy choice this time. I found someone with a mind like stagnant water. I can't hear her thoughts. None of them. I'll never know her deepest secrets, or feel the way her thoughts heat and flicker when I touch her. I'll never know her the way I knew Rosalie Hale.

I am Edward Cullen. You see me as principled—perhaps gentlemanly if you're feeling particularly sentimental. I appreciate the compliment, and I might even use it to feed the veneer of arrogance I like to carry. But you're wrong about me.

My face might appeal to you, but as far as vices go, mine are some of the least attractive. Chief among them is dishonesty. I tell you this now for three reasons: first, because you must be careful about stories told by men who lie, and second because dishonesty figures prominently in the tale I have to tell.

But third, and most importantly of all, is the fact that I've never been completely honest with you. Not until now.

I had expected 1933 to be a good year, but not for any informed reason. My optimism was after the fashion of philosophers, that there's something pleasing about the number three. It's balanced in an organic way, the sum of the numbers that precede it.

As it happened, 1933 was the least balanced year of my existence.

It didn't begin as anything special, but the change of the year is hardly ever special when you're immortal. Time feels different when nothing about you ever changes. The growth of my mind is every bit as stubborn as the stone-solid cells in my perpetually boyish body. I didn't expect change, in part because of the plodding monotony of vampirism, and in part because, at that time, I was stuck in a particularly boggy pit self-satisfaction.

The only thing more arrogant than actually being a superhero is deciding that you're too good to be one. In 1933, I was freshly removed from my life as a savior of humanity. At that point, I knew that hunting criminals had only been a scheme to satisfy my gluttony and my ego simultaneously. But you already know how that story goes.

The important aspect is that two years after my return to Carlisle, I was still relishing the feel of my repentance. Life with Carlisle was, and still is, a prolonged penance, even if our only sin is being what we are.

In 1933, for a reason I might never understand, he decided to inflict the sin of vampirism upon Rosalie Hale.

I'll never forget the first time I saw her. You might admire her beauty now, but then she was a pitiful, bloody creature. The venom hadn't done much when Carlisle brought her into the house. It had only seeped into her body enough to yank ghastly screams from her throat. A tiny peek at the girl's thoughts was all it took. I knew instantly what had happened to her. She was a victim of creatures far worse than I. Thugs, rapists, the sort of disgusting fools that even a vampire would refuse to ingest.

Death would have been a blessing for Rosalie Hale.

I respect Carlisle; at times, I even worship him like a household deity. But like any father-son relationship, we've had our tense moments. This, as you can guess, was one of them.

Imagine the scene. There was Carlisle, standing gravely over the young woman as she writhed and shrieked on the floor. It might seem debased to you that Miss Hale was on the floor, but it really was the safest place for her—there she could fall no farther than she already had.

Carlisle's expression was patient of all things. I suppose waiting is all one can do in the thick of transformation. Yet there was something perverse about Carlisle's posture, for I could not eject from my mind the notion that he had done this to her.

Esme, at least, crouched by her side, laying a cool towel on her brow. We all knew there was no point to it. But Esme always behaved this way—motherly—without real effect. Her reaction was just a ghost from her former life, the persistent haunting of her dead human child.

Esme dabbed the perspiring brow. Carlisle waited. My rage boiled.

"Why?" I spat abruptly. "Why did you change her?"

I didn't wait for Carlisle to reply aloud. Instead, I ripped the answer from his thoughts before he could soften the meaning with careful articulation.

I can't think of a time I've been angrier. Nor can I imagine a moment in which I've hated Carlisle more. He isn't my father, and in that moment, I was ashamed I had ever agreed to be called his son.

"My mate?" I hissed, uncrossing my arms to gesture viciously at the girl on the floor. "You did this… you changed this… this pre-chewed meat so she could be my mate?"

Carlisle's eyes begged for my understanding, but it was an expression he made so frequently that it had lost its effect long ago.

"Foul… disgusting… how dare—"

"Edward!" cried Esme, springing to her feet. "She would have died!"

"Yes! And what a gift that would have been."

Carlisle intended to speak, but I plucked out his thoughts prematurely. "For someone who claims to be so enlightened, I thought you realized that it's uncivilized to present human beings as gifts. You really think I'd like this? I'd rather fuck a werewolf."

You must pardon my attitude. As I have said, I was still on a warpath of self-righteousness at the time. And self-righteousness is never a good position for a seventeen-year-old, undead though I may be. But I've pledged my honesty, so truth I will give you, even if it spoils my charm forever.

I did not linger long in the room with Rosalie. I didn't even stay in the house. I ran from that place faster than I had run from Carlisle the first time. I ran and ran, and with every stride I felt the rage within me morph beautifully to hunger.

Here I must tell you that vampire hunger is misnamed. It's nothing like your human urges. Vampire hunger is deep, metaphysical, a condition of the brain, not the belly. It stirs the neurons like rage, warms the gut like sexual desire. It floods the body with venom—muscles, mouth, eyeballs. When hunger overtakes a vampire, he is less creature than machine, with clockwork gears turning in one direction only, no flexibility, no alternative result.

I could have killed hundreds of humans without a thought.

To this day, I don't truly know why I didn't. Perhaps it was some shred of doubt buried deep in my heart, the faint stirring of a notion that Carlisle didn't deserve such hatred. Somehow I remembered that I was still a person, even though I hadn't been human for decades. I was a person, and so were my prey.

So instead I devoured countless deer, perhaps every deer in all of Rochester. And it was only after the most undignified gluttony that I found calmness again.

For hours, I stood on the bank of the miry Genesee River, watching swirls of toxic chemicals gurgle with the flow. A few miles upstream, photographic developers poured death into the water. There was not a fish alive in that river.

Nor was there a cell alive in Rosalie Hale's body, I realized, drawing my hand across my bloodied mouth in one lazy wipe.

The sun was rising. Planetary motion never ceased, even for vampires. I cursed to myself. Often, I wished for a sort of eternal night, for everything—human, animal, monster—to lie dormant eternally. And then I would just stand, as I was standing then at the river, until my body petrified. Until I could sleep.

What I did not realize was that I was asleep already. I only needed Rosalie Hale to wake me. All I had to do was return home.

And return I did, though I was unready to speak with my father. I leapt in through my bedroom window and settled myself on the divan. There I sat, in limbo, unable to accept what had happened, yet finished with my anger.

I've never been good at waiting, so I decided to listen instead.

She was cool now, her heartbeat creeping to its last sound. Her wounds were gone by then, but the pain was still there. Pain of a different and more severe breed. I touched her thoughts… stroked them… until they were plain before me.

Rosalie Hale was crying. Her whole mind was quivering, sobbing, bruised.

I listened to her thoughts for hours, heaving in superfluous breaths with each shudder of her brain. And all the while her own body remained motionless.

My mind was burrowing within hers, repulsed, fascinated.

I didn't want to stop listening. And in that, I would find my downfall.