Title: Regardless
Author: Sare Liz
Disclaimer: Does not belong to me.
Continuity: Outtake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (Daily Vampire Mating Ritual)
Beta: Colleen P, bless her.
Author's Note: This one is one of Bella's journal entries that Edward got for Christmas.
'Do you know how beautiful you are to me? I bet you don't. Given what I know of you, I bet you're completely oblivious. Sure, I can almost hear you saying to me, I'm a vampire. I can seduce anyone. It comes with the package. Okay, maybe you wouldn't put it quite like that. But I know you'd just put it off to something about you being a vampire. And who knows? Maybe you're right. But I can't help but think, given everything you've told me already about it, that you're just a little biased. Then again, so am I; in the opposite direction. (Was that a correct use of the semicolon? I'm never quite sure. I guess I could look it up, but I really don't feel like it. Maybe later. Or maybe I'll just wait until you get around to actually reading all these little scribblings of mine, and I'm sure you'll tell me at that point.)
'Back to your beauty. You are, you know. Not many men (straight men?) can pull of being beautiful, but you are. You are not handsome, you are stunningly beautiful, entrancingly beautiful, I-stop-traffic-and-have-paparazzi-following-me-around-just-on-a-hunch beautiful, and I can't help but think that it's not all vampire. Maybe some of it. Maybe you started out a handsome young man, and then you started to blossom into a surprisingly attractive young man, and when you cleaned up nice and put a suit on you were just beautiful and your parents were so proud of you they didn't know what to do with themselves and the neighborhood girls were all tongue-tied and stupid around you and the neighborhood boys were a little jealous and annoyed, except for maybe your best friend who knew you when you were covered in mud and not so clean and tidy and beautiful. But I bet it's true. I bet even then you were just beautiful. Just beautiful. And it was in those moments when you took a little extra effort that all of your natural beauty could just shine through. And maybe being a vampire just makes that easier - now you don't have to clean up nice and put on a suit. Now you can wander around in gym shorts and a tee shirt and look like some sort of teen rock star in a high school movie. Now you can come in from the rain looking like a sex dream. (Yes, every time I see you remotely wet I just want to lick all the water off. All of it. Everywhere. Okay, maybe not your hair. But I want my hands in that hair, like, stat. Anyway. Returning to the point. Where was I? Oh, yes.) Now you can come in from a hunt, or laying all night in bed with me, or having really raucous and rambunctious sex with me and you still look absolutely, perfectly, stunningly beautiful.
'It's true though, even if you weren't, I'd love you. It's not like my love is based on the fact that you look like a Greek god carved from some sort of delightful living marble. That's just a bonus, and it's a bonus I'm not planning on ignoring, hence this journal entry. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, my Edward is Beautiful. (It's a very important adjective, so it gets some extra capitalization.)
'I love your jaw. Have I mentioned that before? I don't think I have. But I do. It's so sharp and strong and I love nibbling at it, all around the back curve, underneath and behind. I love it when you lift your jaw and sort of crane your neck upwards because then your jaw juts out - I mean, not weirdly or anything, but it's like... that's the moment when your jaw achieves perfect definition, and that's inevitably the point where I get a little overwhelmed because your jaw is so long and broad and my tongue is so little, and yet I sort of want to lick it all at once. A physical impossibility that I'm faced with more often than you might realize with various part of your delightful blush-worthy anatomy.
'Shall I mention some of those other parts? Your fingers. Hah! I bet you didn't think I'd say that, did you? Okay, maybe you did. But maybe you didn't? Anyway, I love your hands. They are long and lean and elegant. You do such beautiful things with them. They are the hands that hold me, love me, protect me, provide for me. They are the hands that make music, the hands that bring down game, the hands that make dinner for my family, that take the hand of a Quileute young man and make a friend of him.
'But now I've just lost myself in fantasy, imagining your long, lean limbs; the arms that cradle me and hold me softly, the legs that entwine around mine, that run so swiftly while you carry me... and it's one thing to think of your bare arms, but thinking of your bare legs inevitably leads me to thinking of you entirely bare, bared to me, bearing me, riding me and being ridden. You and your exquisitely beautiful body bring me to such an erotic, ecstatic place that I don't have words for how you fill me and fulfill me. Every word, every adjective falls utterly short for the pure joy you are in my life. You are the personification, the incarnation, the embodiment of all that is good in my world. You are the first for me, and everything else, even what is second is a very distant second. Even if (when?) we have children, and I imagine they'll be a much closer second, it simply isn't possible for me to love something more profoundly than I love you.
'I utterly adore you. Did you know that? It's not an exaggeration. There's no need to exaggerate when the bare truth is profound enough on its own. And even when you make me mad, which... okay, it happens. I won't deny it. And I know there are moments when I make you mad, or annoy you, because you do occasionally lose your patience with me, too. But even then, I promise you and you can bank on this promise, even then I adore you. If I didn't, our misunderstanding wouldn't piss me off in the least. I'd drop it because it would be of no consequence because you would be of no consequence, but that's not the case. That's never the case. I argue, I'm mad, because I love you and I expect better - of both of us, let's be clear. Even when I lose my temper I sort of know deep down that it's not just you, even if it sort of seems that way in the moment. It's impossible for an argument to be all one person. I get that. Well, okay, I get that now. I'm learning, too. But even when I'm not feeling in that precise moment all warm and fuzzy about you because I'm too busy wishing you'd pull your head out of your ass (where it does occasionally get lodged, let's not pretend otherwise), even then I love you more than I ever thought a person could love another person. I love you, Edward.
'You're beautiful, did you know? You're beautiful on the inside. So few people get to know that. It's not something you share much with others, and I understand why. It's the little 'v' thing and the big 'V' thing and that's all very isolating. I wonder if there will ever be a time when the big 'V's will no longer be in the picture and the little 'v's will be living openly amongst the rest of us. No? Well, they do say society is changing faster and faster. What was impossible two generations ago is de riguer today and who knows what will happen in just five years, in 2011, to say nothing about twenty, forty, and sixty years from now. Sixty years is three generations, a drop in the bucket to some, and yet such change that will happen. Mark my words. It's going to blow your mind, sweetheart. Just you wait. Want to make a bet? I bet you that in two hundred years, by the year 2206, vampires will be known in the world - maybe widely known and accepted, maybe not, but known. Let's hope for the family's sake that it's a positive thing. I don't think Carlisle could survive a life completely underground, without being able to practice medicine. Then again, I suppose there are always subcultures he could be helpful in. Anyway, I have no idea what to hold up as collateral for this bet. I'll think about that. But that's my bet. Want to take it?
'Ooo, I got off track again. Your beauty. Let's return to it. I can hear you groan from here, so just stop it. You're beautiful on the inside, did you know? It's true. You'll have to trust me on this one, and trust that I'm not lying to you. I'm still such a terrible liar anyway, you can always tell when I'm faking it. But it's true. You're sweet and kind, and it's so clear to me that I'm the center of your world. You are considerate and loving and you try so hard to meet my needs even when I'm making it difficult for you. You're so incredibly sensitive, and I love that about you. I love that you feel so deeply. It's something that's hard for me to do, and I love that it comes so easily to you. Having read your journals was so painful in a way because I watched as this beautiful, sensitive man that I adore became more and more deeply hurt by a world that seemed to have no valid place for him until his beauty and sensitivity hardened into something alien, something icy and cynical, something with impenetrable armor plating to which hope itself seemed antithetical and alien. I'm so glad that I found whatever crack there was in that armor. I couldn't have born it if somehow all of this had been one-sided. It would have been the end of me, and having never experienced love or infatuation before, I think I would have given up on it altogether at that point, and it would have been easy because nothing could have compared to you, even cold, even cut off, even cynical and hardened by the pain and suffering of the world.
'I'd love you, regardless.'
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