27. Charlie
I was in the house.
Right now, Rosalie and my Mother were having an argument about whether it was safe for me to see Charlie.
Personally, I didn't think there was much danger. Carlisle had said that he was acting similar to how Mum had when she was a new born. This had fascinated him.
If you were more controlled when you were told what would happen first, there would be so much more control for newborns, and that meant that there would be less executions.
Apart from this being wonderful because people wouldn't be dying needlessly, it would give the Volturi less power.
The reason (according to Carlisle at least, and he was right about most things) that the Volturi had become so unstoppable was because they had power.
When he stayed there, he had noticed that every time there was an execution (or a murder, depending how you saw it) the guards would get just a bit more scared of them, treading just a little bit more lightly.
After years of people assuming that they had all the power, they finally had.
That was part of the problem.
Not many people realized how much strength the Volturi had. They had only been warned of their brutality and amazing supremacy, and each time the legend had been it had become slightly over-emphasized.
Nobody could know what they were really like, because if they ever got the chance to find out there was no chance of survival for them.
So when people thought that they had immense power, they immediately thought that it was hopeless to fight. For a few centuries this was how it had been, people not fighting because they had been told it was useless to even try to.
But now it had become reality because that was how people thought it was.
Maybe now things would be different.
I had gathered from Carlisle that them getting rid of newborns was why the Volturi were feared so much. Because newborns were so strong and fast, they were near impossible to destroy, meaning that not only did people feel scared at their obvious power, they in a way almost relied on them to get rid of the danger of losing secrecy.
It was quite clear that Volturi were beginning to crumble along with their castle.
However, even though Carlisle seemed to be with almost as much control as Mum had had, Rosalie was completely against me seeing him.
"It's too dangerous. He's only a few days old!" Rosalie said defiantly. Her eyebrows were concave, and they contrasted with her otherwise angry face.
"He's her grandfather, and he has as much self control as me. And he already knew her, I didn't. So he's much more used to her and-
"It's not safe! Of course you had self-control! She was your daughter," said Rose, sounding quiet mad now, and waving her hands in the air for emphasis.
Emmett, sensing where this was heading, walked swiftly over to her and put his arms around her waist, whispering 'calm down' in her ear.
"Why don't you care about her safety!" hissed Rose, ignoring her husband, "like you said, she is your daughter, not mine! So why a I the one who feels like this?"
Mum flinched, as if Rosalie's words were causing her physical pain.
Dad was in the corner, and before now he had ignored this conversation, but when he heard what Rose said, his brow furrowed deeply, making him look angry.
Was he angry at Rose? Or was he worried about her upsetting Mum?
I still had no idea about whether he was angry at Mum. Well, the word angry didn't really fit in the situation.
I don't think there is a single word to describe the way that they were. They couldn't be angry at each other, because their love was much, much stronger than that. And Anger sounded too dramatic, yet in a way, anger wasn't serious enough.
If I didn't know my parents, and I had just happened to hear that fight, I would say t hat they despised each other, put it was obvious to that they didn't. Maybe it was because of my heightened vampire abilities, but I was able to notice the way that they weren't trying to fight at all.
It pained them to shout each other; it was quite easy to see. Whenever Dad would say a spiteful retort, he would flinch as if it was aimed at him as well.
I don't know how I could bare it.
EDWARD'S POV
Whenever you love someone enough, your pain becomes their pain, this I had learnt. And once that happens, life becomes impossible.
How can you hurt the person you love?
You are just hurting yourself even more.
Right now I felt like I didn't want to look at her. Yet I was also fighting the urge to look away.
Why did I blame her? It was only her natural instinct as a mother to defend her child no matter what, and her immortality would only have strengthened that yearning to protect.
When she was human, weak and so irresistibly fragile, she had been so ridiculously in love with the thing that was taking her life; she had protected it even though she knew that she was probably confirming her death by doing so. She had loved the child inside her so much.
To think of a strengthened version of that incredibly intense devotion strengthened, it was no wonder she had defended her.
That thought made me wonder.
Why was she the one protecting her from me? I would never forgive myself for trying to kill my own daughter. It was so odd to think about, yet really it made some sense.
On one hand, I didn't know how I could have ever wanted to
And I had always told myself that the only reason I had wanted to kill her was to save the reason for my existence, my wife, but the hate had been so strong, equal only to the immense feeling when I first smelt Bella's scent.
I thought the most intense feeling was hatred. But now I saw that the only thing that could make me feel that way was love.
I had loved my daughter too much.
I knew myself well enough now that I realized that I would have immediately tried to defy that love, because it was wrong. How could I love a thing that was killing the woman I loved?
Now the question was could I ever resent my daughter for something that was her nature? I'm don't really think I could. I just needed to realise that.
Because of this knowledge, I suddenly had the strange impulse to do something I hadn't done in what seemed like years; laugh. I looked up to see if anyone had noticed.
Alice and Jasper were standing close together; Jasper's arms were around Alice's shoulders, his head slightly resting on hers. Alice looked slightly frustrated, her eyebrows were deep set, and this made the rest of her face – which was smiling – seem off. Jasper however, seemed calm. His eyes were closed, his mouth just slightly curved upwards.
Rosalie was standing nose-to-nose with Bella. Her eyes were narrowed, a spark of something like disgust in her eye. Her upper lip was curved up in something that looked like a forced smile, and her teeth were gritted together.
She looked absolutely furious.
Bella's expression was hard to explain. There were so many words to describe how she looked. Angry. Sad. Frustrated. Hurt. Desperate. None of them seemed to fit.
I tried to look at her face, to see how she as feeling, but I was lost in her eyes.
They had the look in them of someone who had died. They were blank on the outside, completely cold, unloving. You would think that she would have lived a thousand years, lost a million loves, or been without a trusted friend on for years and years, but she was only twenty-two. Not one of these things could be true.
If I didn't know her, I would say that she was hard faced, serious. But I did know her so I knew that this was how she looked when she was sad; lonely.
Because of me.
I needed to find some way to make it up with her. But how?
RENESMEE'S POV
I looked into my father's eyes.
In less than a second, the bitter, harsh, cold look had completely vanished from his face. It had been replaced by hope.
Hope for what? For the future, for me, for my mother? I didn't know. I did know however, that at that time there could be nothing wrong with hope. It meant that this wouldn't be the end, even if we lost the fight, because there would still be that tiny flicker of life; that hope.
That's the most fundamental characteristic about hope; it never dies.
