Esme and Rosalie's POV-sometime after Rosalie tells Edward Bella is dead and before Bella saves Edward
Esme
I'd once before felt like this. It was one of the few memories I had left from my human days and one of the last. I had stood at the top of that cliff and looked out as the wind lifted my hair lightly. Below there was only emptiness. An emptiness like the one that twisted through my stomach and reached out to fill the rest of me until it wriggled its fingers in eager delight and clasped my heart.
There was nothing to live for, nothing to strive for. My past was gone; I had fled from it and cast it aside. And now my future was gone too. The little one who had given me the courage to wrench myself from my husband and strike out on my own was gone, swept away with the prairie wind. My little savior had abandoned me to live out this wretched existence. I stared into the emptiness and stepped forward. I glanced back once toward the place where my future had been buried. I swallowed and turned back and leapt into the emptiness that had already consumed my insides.
That emptiness was uncurling inside me once again. But this time there was no greater emptiness to swallow it. Once more I could not see how I could live on without one to whom I had given so much, but this time there was no way to end the pain. There were not even tears and sobs to carry me into exhausted sleep. There was no sleep to escape to.
I understood how hollow Edward felt, the anguish that tore him apart and I could not condemn his attempt to end his existence, not when that same hopelessness was what had called me to the edge of that cliff.
But why my dear Edward? I loved Carlisle as a husband, but Edward was the son that I would have liked my son to have been had he lived. Edward was as much my son as if he had been born of my own womb, but without Charles' taint. Edward would never again play that beautiful song he had written just for me. He would not lift his lips in that crooked smile as he listened to my gentle scolding or chuckle at one of my passing thoughts. How briefly had my Edward been so complete. For decades I had watched him and hoped that one day he would find the happiness that the rest of us had, that he would find himself completed in a way that made him understand how incomplete he had been before. And then he had found Bella. It seemed as if all my wishes for him were to come true until they were suddenly torn away when he insisted we leave Bella. Yet even then I had hoped that he would change his mind, seek his happiness.
But there was nothing now. All my wishes had ignited before me and as I closed my eyes, I could see the flames that consumed them. Anguish pressed upon my chest and I felt my unnecessary breath forced back inside me. When I stopped breathing the weight only became heavier and I curled up, hugging my knees to me.
This time, there was no escape from the emptiness.
Rosalie
In my long distant childhood, my older brother had once told me that if you dumped salt on a slug, it would die. Consumed by curiosity and the desire to see what would happen, I waited. One evening I heard my sister scream as she approached the house; there was a slug on the walkway. Without thinking I flew to the kitchen and grabbed a container of salt. I ran back outside and poured the salt over the slug, watching in fascination as it writhed.
"What have you done?" cried my brother. "Why did you kill it like that?"
I looked back at the slug, and its twitching suddenly horrified me. What had I done? Why had I poured the salt over him when I knew that it would kill him? I ran back inside and filled a bowl with water and returned to pour it over the slug. But it was too late.
I now felt the same horror I had then at destroying something. Except now I had destroyed one I loved. Why? Was there a destructive urge within me? A force that sought to destroy in order to create some kind of satisfaction within me? Was I cruel?
Yes I was. I had called Edward to tell him of Bella's death in order to satisfy my desire for everything to be normal again. And a small part of me had wanted to see just how much he loved Bella. But now, like with the slug, I could only watch in horror as death came upon him.
Over one hundred years ago Edward had told me that I was shallow. Even then I had known that Edward loved pretty things, but he had not loved me more than as a sister. I had been angered by the rejection and I had set out to prove that I was not stupid or completely self-centered. I did not pause to ask him what he meant by shallow and I now I would never know. But in the end, though I had striven to prove him wrong, he was right, no matter what he had meant by shallow. My shallowness didn't necessarily come from stupidity or selfishness or vanity. It came from my inablitity to understand was precious until I had lost or destroyed it.
I stared at myself in the mirror, for the first time hating the Rosalie that stared back.
I couldn't stand the sight of myself. I pressed my hand against the mirror that Emmett had given me for our first wedding gift and watched it shatter. As the sound of shattering glass fell away, a strange, grating sound filled the room. It was a few moments before I realized that it was me; it was the sound of my tearing sobs, unsoftened by tears. I sank upon the floor among the shards of everything I had destroyed and sobbed: for myself, for the slug, for the mirror, and for Edward.
