A/N: Warning, it's a long one.

I fell to the ground, crying out yet again as the icy pavement hit my head, though I had only enough strength for a whimper. I don't think they heard me; they were all laughing, one had begun singing the wedding march.

"You'll have to get a new wife, Roy!" one shouted, slurring his words.

"You mean a new bride," another corrected, sloppily. "If she was his wife, he coulda done that in his own home."

I heard him laugh then, Royce King, my betrothed, my prince. "You think I need another one? I'll 'ave to learn a bit more patience first, eh?"

Their laughter was raucous, harsh against my torn, bleeding ears, but they were leaving me now to die. I was dying, I knew that. There was surely no way that my body could sustain that amount of pain and still survive. How was my mind still thinking? How was I still registering the horror?

They had all attacked me. There were five of them, and they all had to have their fill of me. All of them. Royce had been the first, claiming me as his, his fiancée, his beloved. I was still pleading then, still begging. He winded me in order to stop me crying out, punching me hard in the stomach so I would not protest as he pulled my skirts up around my hips. He didn't hurt me as badly as some of the others, but I knew that wasn't due to a residual gentleness or any sense of love for me. It was because the competition—to cause me the most pain—only began with the second. John, his name was, John from Atlanta. He slapped me when I begged with him to have mercy, and I screamed. The competition began then, with its initial aim to make me scream. When I couldn't scream anymore, it was merely a competition to hurt me as much as they possibly could. They kicked me and slapped me and grabbed me roughly, they pushed me against a brick wall, forced me to the floor, held me up against them when I was too weak to push away. There was one who tried to scratch my eyes, but he only ripped my eyelids and broke my nose. The one after him decided to bite me, my neck, my already bleeding lips, my hands, my breasts, anywhere he could. I think he won the competition, but they were all too excited by their stolen lust to care anymore. Their panting, their filthy cheers and breathy cries of pleasure fell around me like hailstones, stinging me over and over again. He was the last.

Now I was lying on the cold, hard, unforgiving ground, staining the pavement with my blood and the wretched tears that would make my ripped eyelids smart no matter what I did to prevent them. There was pain in every part of my ravaged body, though some stabbed through more violently. Between my legs felt as though I had indeed been stabbed. How could anyone claim that this was an act of love, that I would enjoy it when it was my turn? If it felt like this, how could it be anything but torture?

Snow began to fall. White, pure and innocent; I felt disgusted to be sharing the same bloodied street with it. The cold I welcomed, hoping it might numb me, but it didn't. If anything, it seemed to sharpen the aches and aggravate the throbbing wounds. Too much of my skin was now open to the elements; my beautiful, expensive dress was only shredded tatters of cloth now. It was too late for any sense of plundered dignity, but the cold was hurting me. Wherever the snow settled lightly on my wounds, I would want to flinch again, but I had no energy to even attempt any sort of movement. My breathing was slowing, I could feel, but each time icy air swirled into my lungs, a sharp pang of agony would rip through my chest. I wished I could stop myself breathing, but it was so much easier to keep going, to inhale and exhale, to live. Why did life choose now to be easier than death?

Let me die, let me die...

If I lived, what would there be to look forward to? No man would have me; I was sullied and dirtied, and I could not be beautiful now. I would not take Royce, never. He most probably would not take me either, not now that he had taken me already. I would never again be loved by any, admired, wanted. No one would want me now. My parents would be revolted by me: a useless repulsive daughter.

I thanked God that I was dying. My left eye, almost intact, gently shut. My right remained vulnerable to the thickening snow as the remains of my eyelid flapped ineffectively. The wedding would have to have been inside... My thoughts were beginning to drift. Did that mean I would soon drift, too? Please, let it be quick. Let it be now. Why must it take so long?

Suddenly, there was a man there. Another. Please, God, not another. No, I recognised this one. Dr Cullen, from the local hospital. He had been there when Vera had her baby. He had escorted me out when I visited her. He attended one or two of the local balls with his wife and sometimes with her brother. He was supposed to be a miracle worker, a fabulous doctor. My father had sung his praises, but I thought that was to arrange a match between myself and the brother, even though he appeared to be younger than me. They irritated me, all three of them. They were so beautiful that they stole the attention that should have been focussed on me. The brother, Edward Masen, and the doctor were the only men I could call beautiful. Even Royce was merely handsome. The word beautiful in connection with a man seemed like it should be derogatory, but it wasn't when applied to them. I wished it was.

The doctor, the miracle worker, knelt down beside me and began his work. He had his bag with him; he opened it to find some bandages or some other medical equipment. No, no, he couldn't try to save my life. My life was worthless; I didn't want it any more. And it hurt when he touched me; his hands were so cold, and the bandages chafed my wounds. I wanted to tell him to leave me, or to kill me, but I couldn't even choke out the word "no!" I strived even harder to slow my breathing further. Would that count as suicide? I couldn't bring myself to care.

Then suddenly I was flying. Was I dead? Was my wish being granted? I must be, to be travelling so fast; it wasn't humanly possible. I couldn't see anything from the speed; only death could have wings so quick. But fresh horror flooded me as I realised that the pain hadn't stopped. No, it was worse, the wind was whipping against me, the snow seemed solid as I crashed through it, and my limbs flailed about, tearing my skin and muscles further apart. Surely death was supposed to relieve pain; was I going to hell? Was this my punishment for... for what? I was probably vain, I had definitely been jealous, but were these crimes of any young girl enough to condemn me to hell? I longed to cry out in fear.

The next thing to assault me was warmth. Against my frigid skin it felt like a fire, and yet it was relief of the most potent kind. I gasped in release as the cold was lost, and I found the strength to take in my surroundings. I was not flying anymore, and I was not dead. I wasn't sure how I knew; perhaps it was instinctive. Perhaps I recognised that in the afterlife, I would not be lying on a hard surface in what looked like a dining room. I was fast losing the coherency of thought to note even the colours of the walls, but still I realised I was in a dining room.

Dr Cullen was there again, though I wasn't lucid enough to realise that he must have carried me so quickly through the streets of Rochester. I did realise that he was still trying to patch up my wounds, to strap up my chest where it hurt so much to breathe. I did not realise that he was doing so at a speed I would have deemed impossible. I did not realise that his movements were becoming ever more frantic. The only realisation that managed to climb into my foggy brain was that I was truly dying now, exhausted by even the effort to register the doctor and the dining room, and in mere seconds I would be gone. I thanked God then that he was letting me go.

A murmur broke through my grateful prayers.

"I am so sorry."

The words didn't quite connect. They were meaningless sounds, lost in the greater scheme of my happy ever after. I was dead, or as close as I could be, and his words were merely echoes of a life already lost. The pain was dulling, fading like a gentle wave of water washing away footprints in the sand, and I was more grateful for this than I had ever been for anything. Death was my happy ending.

And then my world was ripped away from me.

Sharp, stabbing, tearing, my neck, my right wrist, my right ankle, my left ankle, my left wrist, quickly, in succession, pain, no, how could he do this to me? This doctor, why was he hurting me? Hurting me more, so much more, oh, oh, it hurt. Some part of my newly clarifying mind, made cogent through the pain, heard that I was screaming, and some part of my mind wondered how my throat wasn't too raw to make a noise at all. Within seconds, though, every part of me was given over to pain. Burning, fire, flames, heat, boiling, scorching, kill me. I was in too much agony to even contemplate giving voice to my demand, but the words were the only two that made sense for an eternity of torture. Kill me kill me kill me kill me kill me.

Why was I not dead? My mind was looping back to a lifetime ago on the frozen street between Vera's house and mine: There was surely no way that my body could sustain that amount of pain and still survive. How was my mind still thinking? How was I still registering the horror? Yet I was still thinking, still remembering. Truly alive, then? I did not want to be alive.

"I'm sorry, so sorry..."

It was when the doctor's words finally managed to pierce my suffering that I realised I was still screaming, and the words I now could manage to scream were 'kill me'. I was thrashing wildly, and though each movement ripped at my body still further, how could I be unmoving? The desire to claw away my burning flesh, to scrape away the fire from my skin, kept me writhing. I tore my hand from the doctor's time and time again before I even grasped that he was trying to comfort me.

The pattern repeated for an interminable period of anguish, until I finally gained the strength, or the control, to stop screaming for seconds at a time, to give Dr Cullen a chance to explain.

"Miss Hale, I am truly sorry, but I have to tell you what's happening. There's no easy way to put this, but you are becoming a vampire. I am a vampire, along with my wife, Esme, and Edward, who you know as Esme's brother. That is why we are so pale, as you may have noticed. I'm sorry," he apologised. I must have screamed again. "You are changing because I bit you, in order to save your life. The pain is the venom, altering your body. It won't last, I promise. As vampires, we are immortal. We also have excessive speed and strength, but we do suffer from a thirst for blood. Esme, Edward and I abstain from the blood of humans, and I hope you will too, but I will not force you. We live on animal blood, and I won't lie, it is not as satisfying, but—"

My screams now were not solely from the pain. Was this doctor a madman? How could he be a vampire, how could I be becoming a vampire? Vampires were from myths, from stories to frighten children, the sort of tale that my mother had sniffed at and called sensationalist. No, this was ridiculous. Surely this was some level of Hell that I had sunk to, for whatever reason; I didn't much care why at that moment.

Dr Cullen carried on talking, and though I didn't attempt to listen, I heard. I think some part of me must have wanted to hear the sound of a voice, even if it was the voice of a lunatic. "Most of our kind live alone or in pairs. We are not as social as humans, as a general rule. It is also almost impossibly hard to remain near humans until you have learned to control your thirst, and that may take anything from a year to decades. We cannot sleep, or eat, or cry, or bear children. Your hair won't grow again. We can go out in the sunlight as it does not harm us, but it does mark us for what we are; our skin sparkles in direct sunlight."

He was reeling through a list of information as though from a textbook, and the more he spoke, the more I found myself believing in this madness. There were too many details for this to be the musings of a madman. The pain distracted me too much to let me concentrate on whether or not it was the truth.

"I'm sorry."

Those words were my constant companion; his apology sank into my brain and stayed there, fermenting and rotting and gathering mould. More than his blunt explanations, his guilt showed me that what he had done was wrong, and that he was subjecting me to a terrible fate. Though my cries had been wordless for a time, I began to scream out again:

"Kill me!"

This time, I added, "please!"

He said sorry yet again, and then for the first time told me why. "I can't kill you. I've sworn never to kill. I'm a doctor, you know that. I can't kill you, and when the pain has stopped, you may see this differently. You have a choice, when you wake up. You can leave us, if you so wish, and live whatever life you choose. You can feed on humans or animals. Or you can stay with us, with Esme, Edward and I, though that means you will have to choose to feed on animals. Of course, we would forgive any mistakes; we know just how hard it is to abstain. It might help you to understand that we choose to live this way as a matter of morals, of conscience. We don't want to murder innocents..."

I didn't give any thought to this supposed decision at all. No matter if vampires weren't social creatures, I was a social butterfly. I thrived on people surrounding me. I could not be alone.

Time had no meaning in this perpetual avalanche of pain, so I didn't know how long it had been when I heard two new people enter the room.

"Carlisle!"

"Esme... Edward..."

The wife and her brother. I had never spoken to either of them, not a single word, but I spoke to them now.

"Please! Please! Just kill me, kill me now!"

I felt as much as heard one of them rush closer, but she, Esme, Mrs Cullen, only ran her hand—cold like her husband's—over my arm. Petting me. Comforting me?

"I'm so sorry, dear, but I can't do that."

The words were familiar, the voice different. Softer. I warmed to this strange woman's voice more than to the doctor's, and part of me recognised that this was a change that would remain a fundamental feature of my personality for a long time to come. Men and women, I now believed, were entirely different species. More different than a vampire and a human ever could be.

"Her name is Rosalie, isn't it?"

"Yes, Rosalie Hale."

"Rosalie, dear," said Esme. "I know it hurts, I remember, but we're here for you, and it will all be over soon."

"Another one, Carlisle?"

This voice I had never heard, but I could place it simply by elimination. This was Edward, the other vampire, if this folly was to be believed, or just the other man.

"She had been attacked," Dr Cullen, Carlisle told him. He sounded... like he cared. But he had caused me so much pain... and then I heard his words.

I hadn't thought about the attack, barely at all since I had collapsed to the ground a lifetime ago on the cold pavement. Now, it all came flooding back to me and my memory was enough to stop me screaming. The horror was too much to be screamed. It was worse than this pain, surely, even if I couldn't comprehend that at the moment. Nothing could have been worse than when Royce, my Royce...

The images, sounds, sensations pelted me again, mixing and blending with my agony. And yet I had stopped my unearthly shrieks, for a while. For one thing, how could I equate my suffering of tonight to a mere scream? That would be degrading the torture I had suffered at my fiancé's hands. And for another, I knew now that it did no good to scream. No one stopped hurting you if you screamed. Not Roy, not his friends, not the doctor... And after a little, I could concentrate enough to hear a conversation.

"What were you thinking, Carlisle?" This was Edward. "Rosalie Hale?"

He was talking about me, and all of a sudden I hated this boy. He said my name like it was dirty, like he hated me already. He must know about me from the society columns of the local papers, but he had never met me, never spoken to me. How dare he judge me, this boy? This man? What right did any man have to judge me, after what had happened?

"I couldn't let her die," Dr Cullen said, and his voice was quiet. I wondered briefly how I could focus enough to register that detail. I was clinging to the voices, I knew, the proof that there were others in the world, that I wasn't suffering alone for eternity. "It was too much—too horrible, too much waste."

Horrible wasn't the word. Waste? No, not that either. There would have been no point to my life had I survived. There would have been nothing to waste.

"I know," Edward said, dismissively. So uncaring, such a man. He had no idea...

"It was too much waste," the doctor whispered. And yet I could hear. Why could I hear? "I couldn't leave her."

"Of course you couldn't," Esme said, still holding my hand, beside me. Not much time had passed while I was lost in my nightmares, then.

"People die all the time," Edward said. Was there no one he would save, then, if they were dying? For a moment, I forgot that I didn't want to live, and resented Edward because he didn't want me to live either. "Don't you think she's just a little recognisable, though? The Kings will have to put up a huge search—not that anyone suspects the fiend."

He wasn't speaking any more, he was growling. My emotions were going wild, I knew, because suddenly I felt a huge surge of gratitude to this insolent vampire-boy. He knew it was Royce and he was angry. No, fierce. He sounded like an animal, like a vampire, and I found it easy to feel exactly the same way. The rage and the vengeance burst through the damn of fear and horror, completely taking over and I knew at that moment that I desperately wanted to kill Royce King. No, I wanted to kill him and all his friends, the evil creatures who attacked me.

I thought I heard a murmur, "She wants to kill him," but it was probably only my turbulent mind, repeating what I already knew.

"What are we going to do with her?" Edward said disgustedly, and I forgot I had ever felt the same way as him. There he was, judging me again, this man.

I heard a deep sigh, and I could hear that it was the doctor, on the other side of the room. I could hear where he was standing? "That's up to her, of course. She may want to go her own way."

My own way? Alone? With no one to ever talk to, to smile at, who would smile at me? I couldn't exactly define why I needed people so much, but I did. I needed their love, their acceptance, their admiration. I needed someone to want me in some way. I could not survive without people. I could not leave. I resigned myself in that very instant to living with the doctor and his wife, and even with Edward, though I hated him already. There was no way I would leave them, at least not until I found someone better.

It was just as I was deciding this that I began to feel the tips of my fingers to be fingers again, rather than mere vessels for pain. They still hurt beyond belief, but they were recognisable as parts of my body. The pain was dulling. Anticipation and joy swept through me like a hurricane, obliterating the remaining anger and fear of abandonment, at least for now. I waited eagerly to regain control, to be myself again, a living creature rather than a charred husk. I could hear my own heartbeat, now, thumping out a regular rhythm, and I used it to count down, to measure time gone by, to claw myself forwards into the future.

Then my heart stopped beating.

Oh God.

Was I truly dead?

I remembered now all the thoughts that had plagued me earlier, all the fervent wishes to die because my life had no purpose. Now, I wasn't so sure. I was curious, tremendously curious as to this whole notion of vampirism. I was fascinated by these people who claimed to be mythical creatures. There was a purpose there, albeit a vague, unimportant one: to find out the truth. And then there was the other aim: to kill Royce King. I didn't yet know if I could kill a man in cold blood, or even in hot, impassioned blood, but the draw was inescapable.

Hence I didn't want to die. Not yet. Not quite yet.

A/N: Anyone who has an idea for a name for this story, please tell me. Back when it was a oneshot, Understanding worked, but I'm not sure now...