What You Are
Chapter 14: My Malignancy
Guilt, by and large, wasn't something useful.
It was only one of those staggeringly pointless emotions. One of the silly little ones that settled into the back of the mind. She hated it.
Guilt...
Only idiots foolishly believed in it. Guilt was for a person who thought they had some measure of control, some form of agency. It was a paper thin, little white lie, that crumpled and shredded into tiny little bits. Words, or rather excuses, tattered and no longer understood. Guilt, like all worthless emotions of its kind, didn't hold up under scrutiny.
A good person would always atone for their sins, so guilt was too often cast aside. A terrible person might not ever come to understand it, and so had no use for it. Rosalie, under careful study of her own sense of being, had concluded that long ago. Guilt was neither for the depressed, nor those in mourning, leaving it quickly by the wayside to fester and flounder.
Flipping a coin would produce more proactive results, even if the chance was split down the middle.
So why then, as she spent her time away in hiding, did clarity begin to shine through the darkness of her otherwise angry, vicious existence? She wasn't soothed, eased, or calmed by the ways she'd acted. If anything, she was disgusted by it. Somehow hoping she would have to pay for her crimes, it was pathetic. Insane really, that she wanted to pay for it in ways that her aggressors never did. Yet, she was a different creature by nature.
She feared getting hurt, avoided it at all cost.
Bella wanted to get hurt, welcomed it wholeheartedly.
In that, they were two very different people. Two fundamentally different entities. They would question the very fabric of their own existences through the other woman. So long as Bella continued to breath, Rosalie knew she'd have a vice for her madness. So long as Rosalie remained the more dominant of the two of them, Bella would be forced to either fully accept, or fully deny the advances given to her.
Rosalie was a woman too after all, and that complicated the dating game.
Both of them knew that Edward, though a man who could get away with more than his fair share of trouble, couldn't have gotten away with sexually dominating a woman in the way Rosalie had. He instantly would become the villain, and instantly he would have been called out. Inevitably, his sins would have been dragged from the shadows.
Rosalie, as a woman, has some measure of protection. Some stupid ideology that women, by and large, couldn't truly hurt another woman. That lie kept her from facing any outcry. People would think it a mockery, really, and that in and of itself was a shame.
In the end, Bella found it to be a game, she didn't take it seriously.
And Rosalie, she was too apathetic to truly care.
Anyway Rosalie looked at it, the situation was like a tumor.
There was no escape.