The Ice Princess
I. When he said, "Let her go," it was hard to know whose shock was greater, Rosalie's or Carlisle's.
Since the moment she'd set her sights on the attentions of Edward Cullen, when the Cullen's had arrived in Rochester, he had made it embarrassingly clear, even when he was immaculately social and polite, he didn't care what she did or who she did it with. He'd dropped being immaculately social and polite the day her red eyes opened, and added to it not caring what she said or thought.
He'd made his opinion of her, and Carlisle's choice to save her, apparent. So having him appear from nowhere, taking her side in the argument of what she wanted to do to her assailants (when he, better than anyone standing there, would have known implicitly down to the exact detail what she intended to do to them) was nothing short of a great shock. To everyone.
She came home first, alone, wrapped in only his coat, without a single drop of blood on her. Edward not too long after. Edward didn't talk about the night in detail. He assented when Carlisle asked if she'd accomplished what she set out to, but he hadn't said anything else. The only other thing he offered after that, suddenly, while Rosalie remained red-eyed and more irritable than ever, swapping sated vengeance for heightened blood withdrawal, was that their house filled with music from her childhood.
She rejected his turnabout pious faking of understanding her plight, not understanding for years to come still, about his still too recent Great Fall From Grace, and how his words to Carlisle that night barely admitted to her then, what the other two couldn't have missed - that he, reliving with the same recurring pristine memory of her last night each time she did, would likely do it if she didn't.
But it didn't and wouldn't have mattered then. She was too busy still. Hating with such scathing, biting icy, passion those, both mortal and immortal, who had brought her to what she was now, what she never could stop being, or be again. Swearing she would never forgive or be like any of them.
And in the turn of decades and centuries, the part about not drinking another drop of blood so long as she lived held true at least.
~||x||~
II. Hunger was never about blood to Rosalie Hale. Always Hale; and never Cullen. Hunger was about a single thing at the bottom of all the faces it would wear - the life, and death, powerful and assuming men had raped and robbed her of in one night.
She'd concede with an annoyed scoff to being spoiled and conceited-it was hard not to be when you were the most beautiful creature anyone alive or dead had ever seen-but beauty was a cruel, double edged sword. Beauty was the reason her once-fiancé had taken all that she had and left her dying in a street. Beauty was, if not the reason, the one of the reasons Carlisle had kept her, changing her, in the hopes of her becoming Edward's mate.
Beauty was the reason every few years every single mirror in the Cullen house would be reduced to sparkling shards, only infuriating her further when they would only ground into smaller and smaller pieces in her untouched skin.
She might have softened, infinitesimally, toward the Cullen's during her first two years, Edward aside, as she learned who they were, especially with Esme's soft touch, and her forgiveness of Carlisle may have started when he gave into her plea to change Emmett, but even he, himself, wasn't a hunger. He was the love of her life, but he was like the water that could bank her. He was never the impetus of the reason she'd had to save him.
Not when he made her think of Vera. Of the life she wanted, that he could never grant her, no matter how much love and acceptance and understanding he could give over time. To be a happy wife, to be a mother surrounded by darling, charming little children. The deepest rift within her soul, broken by that night, that could not be fixed by the endless clothes or sex, compassion or broken mirrors.
Her greatest hunger (and jealousy) lived in the moment she stepped in front of her newest, still human, sister-in-law and let her first brother know if he did anything to hurt the child growing inside Bella, she wouldn't hesitate in taking off his head.
~||x||~
Next: The Big Brother
