A Transformation in 3 Acts
None of the characters mentioned herein belong to me. They are the property of Stephenie Meyer and affiliates and I make no monetary gain from them. This disclaimer applies to all of the chapters.
Author's Notes;
This story follows the structure of a traditional opera - 3 acts - and examines important points in Esme's newborn experience.
At the beginning and end of each chapter is a quotation from the piece of 17th century literature – Carlisle's time of transformation- which inspired the chapter.
"Hell is empty and all the Devils are here."
The Tempest
William Shakespeare
She feels the fire recede first from her fingertips. She will always remember how suddenly it extinguished but how long it took her to notice. When it initially goes she's reluctant to believe it because it seems like it has been burning for eternity. It takes her a while to notice really because it's been there for so long that she has almost grown to love it. She feels it acutely as it floods away from her fingertips, then up her forearm and then finally into her chest. Her heart burst within her breast at that moment, into a fury of fire which thuds against her ribcage as it singes every sinew of her chest cavity. She is immobile as it thunders, trying to claw its way from her breast bone to burst through her burning skin where surely it will leave her body in a trail of flames.
She hears it trampling against the fire. Hears those beautiful voices that have feigned concern over her hours of burning. The devils who are watching her say words she doesn't understand.
It is finishing Carlisle. We have to be ready.
You know her? What is this about?
She is so still Edward. It must be the morphine.
Please, do not think badly of me. I could not let her...
And then there is nothing. Absolute silence and cold. The first fires of hell are gone and she lies motionless on a cloud. Underneath her fingers there is velvet, she feels it as if for the first time. It is soft against the sensitive pads of her thumb and forefinger. She hears her fingers scratching over the material and it is grating to her ears, shocking her in its audibility. She stops the movements before she order her fingers to do so.
She lets her mouth fall open, surprised that it's so moist. After quenching her thirst with only more fire, she is shocked to find that taste is heightened because she had imagined the fire in her mouth had broken her ability to taste again. She tastes the air around her as her lips part. She tastes the fibers of the velvet and the ash of fire which crackles nearby. Then the two devils; one tastes like metallic piano wire and fresh paper. The other like leather and candles but something else that is delicious, something that petrifies her.
If she could concentrate enough she would realise that you cannot taste these things, or at least you shouldn't be able to, but she is overwhelmed by sensation. She can't discern taste from smell and smell from touch.
Her eyes. She hasn't yet opened her eyes.
They spring open and above her there is a cornice from which hangs a brass chandelier. One of the candles is flickering and one of the edges of the cornice is chipped.
"Esme."
Suddenly the cornice disappears behind the face of a man. One of the devils. It is the most beautiful, most unearthly face she has ever looked upon. For the second time in her life she is rendered breathless by this face. There are planes of ivory pressed against a strong jaw and honey-hued eyes framed by indecently dark lashes. Lips that are almost too angelic and pink are pressed into a concerned frown. She thinks a halo crowns him but no, it is blonde hair that glows almost white. His mouth lifts upwards into a smile that is tentative and unsure, dimpling his impossibly smooth cheeks. She smells him more closely and there is something delectable coming from him, from the very essence of him. It is on his skin, hiding under the smell of clean soap and ink and candles and leather.
And suddenly she is on fire.
This time it is a different burn, right behind her larynx and concentrated only there. Where once it was fire now it is acid that rots her throat. It is spreading up through her gullet and scorching her pallet. It scalds every sinew of muscle and inch of flesh in her throat and when she opens her mouth, she is surprised that it is not fire that spews forth. Instead it is a scream.
She clambers up onto the edge of the couch and away from him, her feet slipping along the velvet as he pulls back from her as if to give her room. She grips the arm of the couch with her fingers but, like warm clay, it folds under them until it splinters into pieces. With fright she withdraws her hands to stare at them. They are the same as they always were. Her finger though are smooth and fine. Her nails, no longer bitten, are long and clear. These, she concludes as if she were merely an observer, are not her hands. Yet they are.
Then they fly to her throat and wrap around the skin there, clutching at the pain as if it is touchable.
"What is this?"
Her words are a snarl as she looks wildly around the room for the source of the smell, the taste, the desire that is pooling in her. The room is not hell as she imagined it, though she had always imagined hell was a personal thing. She never believed the pulpit preaching of brimstone and pits of fire. She pictured a private hell, she has lived a private hell too, so she feels intimately acquainted with what damnation should look like.
In her mind, hell did not look like a simple parlour yet here she is and this is hell.
Across from her there is a fire crackling, and around the walls there are shelves lined with books. Perched against the fire surround, attempting to look deceptively at ease, there is a young man. Then the other man, the beautiful doctor, is nearer her. He is evidently more vexed than his companion, and while both of their eyes watch her carefully, his eyes are dark with concern where the boy's are unreadable.
"What is this Dr Cullen?"
Her recollection comes as a surprise to her and to him as well, for he comes towards her a little more and his eyes widen.
"Am I dead?"
She already knows the answer. She still feels the soft grass under her feet, her toes curling over the rocky edge, the wind as it whips her gown around her legs and ankles. Then the freedom of the fall, arms spread, feet pointed in an echo of the deportment classes from a life before. The wind had whipped her hair too and carried all of her terror away, pulling her into the blackness of the thrashing sea below.
It had been so lovely to die. So silent.
Yet, she asks the question anyway and is surprised by the answer.
"No. I must explai-," he steps forward and the burn is suddenly back.
"What is this?" She screams again, this time leaping from the couch and over-reaching, crashes into the coffee table. She recoils back as quickly as she lands, horrified and confused by her own strength. She crouches there like an animal, prowling. She has never bent her knees like this or snarled like this. Nonetheless it feels inherent to her and so she does it like breathing.
"Carlisle," the boy suddenly says, with the air of having solved a riddle, "She smells blood on you. She needs to feed before you can speak to her."
"I changed my clothing after-"
"It doesn't matter. She can still smell it. I'll be back as quickly as possible."
They look at each other for a moment, as if sharing a secret, then the boy nods and disappears out of the door.
She scurries backward and cowers in the corner, her knees coming all the way up to her chin as she angles herself in as closely as possible, keeping her eyes on him at all times. She doesn't think that he is a threat but nor does she fully trust him.
Even though she knows him...almost intimately.
She has known him in her dream and day dreams. He has been the hero in both her fantasies and nightmares.
She is sure he is a torture of her damnation but what beautiful tortures there are in hell.
He keeps his distance now, staying at the entirely opposite end of the room. His hands are thrust upward in a sign of surrender.
"I'm sorry about the cellar," he says, "It was...necessary."
She doesn't understand what he means so instead she asks again.
"What is this? Where am I?"
Just as he opens his mouth to answer the stench of something overwhelms her. It is both pungent and delicious and she wants to drink it. She wants to drink every last drop and yet it is blood. Something tells her it is blood. It is not the blood she wants but it will do for now. It has similar olfactory notes to whatever was on his skin but it is less desirable, less wholesome yet infinitely more abundant in its stench.
"Blood?" She rasps.
He nods slowly, enough for her to read agony in his face, as the door opens.
The desirable smell is juxtaposed with a bizarre sight; the boy is lugging a large deer over his shoulder. The smell grows stronger, not the blood she wants, but the blood she can have.
"Edward brought a gift for you."
At the smell of blood, still warm and fresh, she feels her body being consumed by desire. He drops the dead animal in the parlour, before the fire, and she is crouching over it before she knows what she is doing. Her lips latch onto the pelt, her teeth easily tear the fur and flesh and fat and she gulps the warm silk down into her gullet.
"We shall leave you while you eat."
But she is already ravenously attacking the dead beast, her shame overridden by her urge to feed.
After she is done she kneels back and drags the sleeve of her gown across her mouth. The beast, which was previously at least three times the size of her, seems shrunken now it is emptied. There is a small scarlet pool just under the neck and she leans forward to lap it from the parquet floor languidly but pulls back as she hears their footsteps outside the door.
She doesn't protect the deer as first instinct might incline her to do. She knows they don't want it and she's flooded with blood anyway, making her stomach slush and her reflexes dull. She just crawls beside it and is suddenly very aware of her appearance.
She is wearing a cotton night gown but it is splotched with blood from her feed and her hands are softly tearing at the hem in her anxiety. Her hair is caked with congealed blood. She feels hugely humiliated.
They open the door anyway, ignorant to her embarrassment.
They don't look at her with pity or shame but she averts her eyes from them because she is afraid that their countenances will soon change when they realise what she has done. The boy scoops up the empty carcass, his nose almost wrinkling in disgust as he throws it across his shoulders, then flows out of the room as if he has just thrown a silk shawl around himself. She watches him go then turns her attention to her throat as she traces her fingers over her gullet.
The fire has receded, and like a rash, just burns dully with prickling intent. She knows it can grow more though, her instincts tell her that. But relief is finally hers. She feels more calm now, at least.
She should be surprised that she thinks as a predator now but she is not. Instinct is intrinsic; instinct to eat, to kill, instinct to survive.
"It will not go away," he says as if reading her mind, "The burning. It takes a very long time to ignore it."
"What do you mean?"
She is shocked by the musicality of her voice. The silkiness of the blood has transformed it from a rasping, guttural screech to a velveteen alto that flows from between her lips.
"I am going to come closer to you," he says and she notices that he has changed clothes and that his hair is wet, the blond now a dark yellow as it is pushed damply back from his face, "You should not be able to smell the blood any more, I hope."
"Please don't," she holds up her hand to stall him, "I don't want to hurt you."
"You cannot hurt me," he reassures her, "You and I are of similar...strength."
He comes nearer where she sits in the centre of the floor.
"You will have so many questions," he says softly, "And I can attempt to answer them all -"
"Do you remember when you tended to me?"
Shock flutters across his face, chased by his disarming smile a moment later. He was obviously not expecting this to be her first question but he seems amused that it is. He folds his arms around his legs, pulling them up to his chin to mimic her pose.
"Yes...very well," he answers.
She tilts her head to the side and tries to pull back the curtain of fog, which hangs like dense velvet, across her memory. She knows him and yet the memory is blurry and undefined, as if she is staring at it through smeared glass. She had fallen from a tree. Her favourite cotton dress, which she had outgrown so suddenly that summer, had been torn as she fell. Her dress had been torn but her leg had snapped, as he eloquently described it, 'quite neatly.'
Her hand slips onto her knee, which still grows sore on cold days, and she realises it does not ache any more even though she had knelt on it and sat like that for a while. His eyes are following her as she does this. He seems amused, his eye brow arching over his left eye quizzically.
"Quite neatly," she repeats in a half-whisper, almost forgetting his presence as the image regains focus and sharpens as those nickelodeons do at the pier. It grows brighter and stronger in her mind and becomes a full image, coloured honey and pale tones. Tinged with cold hands and touches that were forcefully gentle.
"Edward has said your memories are vivid," he says softly, despondently, "But with time they fade."
She delights in that promise and her hope is renewed. She will forget it in time, the brutalising, the threats, the agony at his hands. She will forget her child. Can she bare to forget her child?
A little sob retches from her mouth but she swallows it before it is realised.
Perhaps this is not hell, perhaps it is heaven. But who, in taking their own life, is rewarded heaven?
"Esme," he whispers, turning his face to meet hers, "I hope you will forgive me. I could not let you die, so young...so broken. I remembered you so very vividly."
"I don't understand," she says, "I am not dead?"
"There is no way to explain it without it being unbelievable," he answer solemnly, "I was not as tactful in my approach with my companion, Edward. I wonder, do you think me changed since we last met?"
It was true, as she stared upon his face, that he had changed. Yet she only noticed it in her heightened state. His skin glistened more than it had, and there were tiny fine lines around his eyes when he frowned. But to her human memory he was unchanged, untouched by the decade that had stretched between then and now.
"No," she shakes her head, "You have and you have not changed."
"No, not to your human memories at least. You see me better now because now you are like me."
He looks at her, his eyes soft gold. She wishes to say that she sees him better and still she is dumbfounded by his unearthly beauty.
"And what are you?"
She already knows as she asks. She knows the answer; the lust for blood, the unnecessary breaths, her newly found flight, have already told her what she is. She has known, really, since the moment she awoke. She imagines that this was instinct too.
"An immortal," he confirms, "A vampire."
She simply tilts her head forward once to show she understands.
"You are unchanged," she whispers, "Because you cannot change. I will wake up from this dream soon, won't I?"
"No," he shakes his head, "This is not a dream. I changed you Esme, to be as I am and as Edward is. You are immortal, an immortal who thirsts for blood and will be faced with innumerable challenges. However it can be so much more than that."
He sounds earnest and pleading, as if he is looking for her approval. His eyes search her face, awaiting her answer.
She considers the gravity of what he says as if it is a trifle. In this hell, or heaven, or dream, whatever it may actually be, there is no pain. And he is here. Even if it is not real it is certainly better than before. If this is death, then death is welcome more now than it ever was.
"Will you show me?"
"Yes," he says gently, with the reverence of a vow, "Yes of course."
At that moment the door opens again, and the boy re-enters. He looks very like the doctor, now she has had the time to focus properly. He has the same diamond-dusted marble skin, the same topaz eyes, the same gleaming teeth and lips that are too pink. She looks up at him.
"Esme," the doctor motions towards him, "This is my companion and friend Edward."
"Hello Esme," the boy called Edward tips his head to the side and offers her a wide, genuine grin, "Welcome to our home."
The doctor stands to rise, and his shoulders are pushed back to reveal his full height. Beside his companion he is shorter, but still a tremendous height in comparison to her. He wraps an arm around his companion's neck and they both look down on her.
"Yes, Esme. Welcome to our home. Your home...if you will allow us to be so presumptive."
She thought at first they were devils but how clearly now she sees they are angels. She smiles, her mouth curling beautifully along her jaw. A brave new world.
"O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!"
The Tempest
William Shakespeare