Title: A Rosewood Requiem
Characters/Pairing: Marcus/Esme
Rating: T
Author's Note: I realize that Marcus/Esme fall firmly into the crack!pairing category, but for some reason, I wanted to give them a chance.
Esme enters Marcus' life as an afterthought, a footnote tentatively appended to an elegantly absurd epistle from Carlisle. Adoration does not mar the stark little announcement with its sticky, clutching fingers; propriety's even teeth keep that uncivil sentiment from intruding.
"It is such a comfort to hear that our dear friend has found himself a partner," Aro declares to no-one in particular, translucent fingertips tracing sensuous arabesques in the blue air, as though news of an infant affection calls to mind the days of gold that preceded these bronze hours.
"And what a pair they must be, if Carlisle has the time to compose dry letters immediately after the wedding," Caius says, uninterested. Perhaps he notes the shrieking, slipping undertone of rectitude winding through lilting language, but Marcus only reluctantly attributes that sort of perspicacity to his wolf-eyed brother.
The speculation begins then, as his vivid companions conjecture upon the nature of their aberrant acquaintance's wife, cool observations flaying Carlisle's character and leaving it pinned like an insect behind glass.
"Is it not startling that our Doctor Cullen has found someone so like himself that she is willing to share his habits?" Aro muses, idly wondering what sort of gift such a woman could possess.
"Not at all. These mortals have an overabundance of malleable minds amongst their numbers."
Marcus allows the banter to skim his skin, irrelevant wings and words, and imagines that Carlisle has discovered a mate that is all softness and apple cheeks, a syrupy, wounded creature who had glanced up from the hell that her mortal life had bequeathed, confusing a martyred doctor for her messiah.
[+]
A congratulatory letter leaves Volterra soon after, written in a spidery hand that is nothing like Aro's copperplate or Caius' scrawled calligraphy. The phrases themselves are gracious, a guarded ballet of sincerity and formality, sealed with a crest and the toll of Latin.
He owes Didyme that much, Marcus decides. Her smile had been sunlight when someone tumbled into love's uncertain freefall.
[+]
The decades bleed together, an incautious wash of watercolour, and Marcus cannot quite name the date when he is forced to endure the hours-long plane trip, a nightmare of recycled air and strained proximity, to America.
As the cold climbs into his shoes and bones, he allows his gift to show him the sentiments of the Cullen clan and their compatriots, only because there is little else to do and now is not the time for remembrance. It is not a game, for no frivolity tints Marcus' judgment, but a method of forgetting the chemical aftertaste of Aro's saccharine voice and the lithium flare of Caius' temper. Bonds are examined between surgical fingers, then ignored or pondered, as he sees fit.
Little startles him nowadays.
The witnesses are devoted, their affection looped around a half-human child like ribbons strewn with demented enthusiasm; the cinnamon-haired creature does not return the sentiment. Marcus does not condemn, for the selfishness of a girl is of little import. He notes love lurking between mates, warmth between friends, banality amidst golden idols who cling to one another, wishing to forget that the chambers of their hearts are bloodless.
The arrival of the angle-haired girl, whose vision tumbles and rolls from future to present like a crystal sphere, is cacophony and confusion. Cries of delight coax tension away, and bonds shift themselves into a shimmering weave around the newcomer. As threads of colour and light dance into a tentative tapestry, Marcus' eyes catch a frayed tie, the eerie shade of marsh-light, that indicates love between an immortal and someone who is gone, with the granite finality that permits no resurrection.
He sees small hands and wide eyes, the innocence that accompanies a newborn mortal whose little life has been purchased with the currency of suffering. A child, bearing an infant's bleary softness, holds the heart of Carlisle's mate.
Hours later, he spots the resemblance between himself and the lovely Mrs. Cullen, the grisly, groaning agony of love swallowed by the grave.
[+]
Only fifty years after a battle that should have concluded in a glorious conflagration of ashes and stone, injustice triumphant, the Cullens visit Italy to make their peace with the ancients. It is an unwise, haphazard plan, Marcus thinks. Distrust dogs the echoes of polite conversation upon padding feet, and the guards are wary. Friendship is not their terrain, and diplomacy belongs to their masters; it is only a matter of time before someone fumbles, smearing crimson upon glacial repute.
Carlisle is drawn to Aro's company with magnetic precision; honey-edged days are spent in discussion of literature and circuitous reasoning as two men who play the pantomime of eager-eyed students construct a pristine world of academic speculation. With something akin to casual cruelty, Esme is left to the thorny companionship of the wives.
Marcus' mild fondness for the butterfly-hued wraiths that are his sisters does little to distract him from the certain knowledge that no intimate innocence will convince Sulpicia to sheathe her claws, that Athenodora is accustomed to minds as bullying and brilliant as her own. In an uncommon display of mercy, he offers to show the tremulous, bronze creature the archaic beauty of Volterra, and cannot help but be charmed by the spun-sugar of her smile.
[+]
Esme is nothing more than pretty, her luminous curls dripping down her spine like weeping wax, softened by lucent irises, candles wrought in amber. She delights in architecture, the petrified tarantella of arrogance in marble, and dislikes the avant-garde. Her clothes are sensible, seemly things in shades of softness; her shoes lack heels.
Marcus knows that she considers herself a mother, and inquires about her children, because he assumes that such a topic is acceptable, welcome even. It takes him only moments to realize that the woman by his side adores strangers; Rosalie's favourite colour is a mystery to her, Jasper's struggles foreign terrain to be negotiated only with Alice cast in the role of diplomat, and Emmett's antics a source of confusion.
She tosses love about, as though it were a coin, a scrap of metal flung into the Trevi Fountain in exchange for the past, and the hole in her heart follows her like a child's shade.
[+]
"Has Carlisle told you nothing of Volterra?" Marcus says, noting the sweetly simple surprise upon Esme's features when he shows her the minutiae of his dust-filmed realm. It is simple to please her; a leather-bound book will do, a rendering of landscapes in oil steals her breath.
"Very little," she murmurs, fiddling fingers betraying a sudden ugliness within her thoughts. "I do not think he liked it here." The words slip from her petal-stained mouth, a dove's coo and a confession.
He allows the silence to swallow them. There is familiarity to be found in calm, and he is reluctant to forsake it.
Someone has taught his companion that there is nothing decorous about stillness, and she is the first to fill the hollows with her silk-screen voice.
"Carlisle does—does not seem to enjoy being anywhere."
Marcus has seen the penitent acknowledge blasphemy with greater ease.
"And you?" As he speaks, he recalls the marsh-light bond, tattered and mournfully frayed, which twines about Esme and a long-dead boy.
The inquiry does not pry; it slips through the glimmering guilt of her poise like water, drawing something like the debris of a story to the surface. Secrets are not easily drowned; they seep through clenched teeth and splintered ribs until the stain cannot be concealed behind splayed fingers.
Her speech is all clipped phrases and sparse words, but the images it paints are of brutal, breaking pain, marrow-deep and monstrous. There are memories of fists across her face and speckled bruises left in drifts upon her thighs, resurrection in the form of an infant. A yawning wound in the narrative engulfs the circumstances of her passage to immortality, but Carlisle's appearance is washed in gold.
Marcus hears only the ghastly echo of choice being flayed away, again and again; the cool fog of sympathy laps at his reserve.
Her tale complete, Esme glances up, the flotsam of remembrance caught in her eyes like a moth in amber. She is expecting reassurance, praise for her courage perhaps, or a butterfly-fickle lie about the future's promise.
Marcus offers understanding, and he is unsurprised when she loops eager fingers around the parchment of his hands.
[+]
The first kiss is not unexpected, because Esme is deliciously, delicately transparent. Timid, snow-fine shyness stains the corners of her frosty lips, but something akin to passion turns ice to mist.
She smiles, though nervous hands leave splayed prints upon a stone sill.
Marcus remembers caresses that did not taste of reassembled dreamscapes and silk-stitched agony. This, whatever it may be, is no betrayal of Didyme, he decides. There are differences between finding one's soul caught underneath the skin of a night-haired girl, and turning to a fellow sufferer for chilly condolence.
"What will you say?" he asks, and a leonine crest turns his words into odd, onerous omens.
"Nothing."
Torment has taught Esme well.
[+]
Betrayal, of the fastidious propriety and starched sanctity that Carlisle embraces, is gentle, lapping and silvery as the night tide. Marcus cares for tenderness, and Esme craves it; they are best suited for languorous touch and wistful stillness. Even as he promises himself not to grow attached to this visitor, who wears hope smeared around her eyes like kohl, he knows that forgetting the texture of dripping-honey curls against his skin is an impossible task.
In place of feigning detachment, he takes it upon himself to coax away Esme's modesty, to draw the ugliness of drowning gasps from her arched throat. Grief can only be escaped temporarily, spooked by something that resembles fondness, and he intends to relish the moments before the past's shadow presses its cruel fingers against his chest.
Occasionally, he reminds himself that it is only seemly to examine the bond between them; his cashmere gentleness should be merely mirrored in the still chambers of her heart, never exceeded.
Esme gives love away as though it was a party favour, and Marcus knows what colours he will see blossoming in treacherous strokes upon her side of their tangled ties.
He does not look and holds his silence, drowning her lips with his murderous mouth.
[+]
The spidery shroud of secrecy is rent aside by Sulpicia and Athenodora, who grasp everything with the invasive intuition of adolescent girls. When Marcus is alone, dusty-fingered and mist-eyed, they approach him, fair braids and summer-spangled dresses granting the delusion of affectionate sisterhood.
"I hope you know what it is that you are doing," Sulpicia says, pragmatic and cautionary. "Carlisle will not enjoy relinquishing his most exemplary disciple."
"I do not love her," Marcus says, and that petty proclamation proffers certainty. His passive, passionless ways are infamous; only adulation's inferno can draw madness from the hollow between weathered ribs.
Athenodora slips feathery fingers onto his shoulder. "Perhaps, but she is a comfort to you. That carries some worth, yes?"
Something shatters inside him, the last crystal bead of idealism crushed underfoot. For a moment, fateful and fleeting as midsummer, he is willing to toss away the memory of a love transcendent in its sincerity for the mere peace of shared existence.
That weakness is repugnant as burning bone and he flinches from the possibility.
"No," he declines, and his sisters' breath of relief is audible. Later that night, as his own ghosts resettle at his side, he is certain that Aro and Caius will be grinning at the news.
[+]
"Will you ask me to stay?"
The question is asked in the final hours of an over-long visit, when the palazzo is littered with candles and flowers, the misplaced accoutrements of static celebration.
"No."
Marcus justifies nothing, because there is no elegance in telling Esme that her hair is not a labyrinth of ebony ringlets, that her smiles do not set him alight, that his hell is not hers.
She returns to Carlisle, to her perfectly proper family with no protest and another silvered scar where her pulse ought to be, leaving him to wonder how many years will pass until the Cullens' glorious name is dragged through ash.
Author's Note: The most common complaints about this story that I can foresee receiving are about Esme's character. I have never written about her in any detail before, so it's more than possible that my characterization is lacking. Please let me know what you think :)
In this story, I made a reference to the Trevi Fountain, found in Rome. As the story goes, if you throw a coin into it, you will without a doubt return to Rome some day. Just a little bit of trivia for you ;)