All the usual- I don't own any characters or rights to Twilight. The storyline is mine however.
E's
PS. I can also be found on Twittah my_e_addiction It's also where I link to PPSS and get the incredibly sexy pics that get me going.
PPS. Thank you so much to my enigmatic and incredibly intelligent beta Dellaterra (who knows things about grammar I've never heard of O.o ) for agreeing to help me with this nonsense and trying to understand my ramblings.
Your love and reviews mean more to me than you can understand. Enjoy
She's freezing again. I can hear her shivering. Why would she stay in this God-awful place? Not that it matters to me. I don't get cold. And the lack of sun is convenient for the most part. But that doesn't really matter either. I've only been seen by a handful of people here anyway. I'm trying to keep it to a minimum. Fewer casualties that way. I guess that doesn't matter either. None of it does. Nothing makes a damn bit of difference to me except her. I don't even know what I was doing here years ago. It was best that she left.
I missed her in a way I couldn't understand when her mother took her away from the damp, from the green, from the overwhelming sadness. At first it was as if I were a child who had his favorite toy taken away for no reason. My attachment to her was instantaneous. I had followed the mother around for months. Her blood was thick with estrogen, and that must have been what first made me take notice. I should have known then that something was off. In my ninety-some odd years, no other pregnancy had caught my attention. It was something about her. Once the girl was born it was apparent that while her mother held a lingering echo of the fragrant blood, it was truly the babe that had intoxicated me.
I was civilized from the beginning though. There were several years when things went a bit awry, but we all have our off days. Since I cannot die, mine happened to last a few decades. But for the most part, I held an awesome control over my thirst, my body, my mind. It was an incredible sense of power that was only slightly less delicious than the power of holding someone else's life in my cold, dead hands. But to deny myself everything I deeply craved, to put myself in constant contact with it and resist, made me feel like a skilled master in total control of my world.
She was beautiful and sweet with gray-blue eyes. I knew from experience that those eyes would change but to what I wasn't sure. A light, clear green like her mother's, perhaps, or a muddy brown like her father's. Her hair was dark from birth and her skin was alabaster and perfect. Unfortunately I wasn't able to see it very often. Her September birth left little time before the weather changed to drifting snow and sleet. Despite the mother's lack of maternal instinct, she at least knew enough to cover the child in fleecy clothing. It was easier to see her when she began sleeping through the night. I didn't have to leave every few hours. I adored sitting in the handmade rocking chair. I could feel where the varnish was worn off the arms of the chair, and I could almost see the memories ingrained in the wood. The old chair creaked at night when her father would rock her but remained silent under my weight as I did not move.
Night after night I sat and inhaled deeply, relishing the silence. Most infants were quiet. Their minds were not filled with anything other than their immediate senses, their wants and needs. My beautiful girl hardly ever cried, as if she already knew that she would have to start caring for herself sooner rather than later. In the night her quiet breaths filled the room with the sweet scent of her mother's milk. She shifted minutely, but with every move, her tiny, delicate body called for me to stay.
The torture was truly never enough. Her scent filling the room, engulfing my senses. Knowing she was so close, so vulnerable while I resisted the temptation. The sick thrill of being so close to what I wanted but never touching her flesh, gave me a high unlike any other. My cockiness had led me astray before. I should have recognized it for what it was. But I wanted more than just her breath, her scent, the quick thumping of her heart. One night I stood by her crib and placed my finger on her fat, pink cheeks, stroking at the flush from the warm blood below. She gasped and reached out, grasping onto my finger with strength only infants knew. Although she remained asleep, the intensity of that touch, that moment, was so strong my mind shut off to everything else in the world. For once, I couldn't hear her parents' gentle, dreamy thoughts down the hall. Both neighboring homes were silent as well. It was a peace I had never experienced since coming into this life. The voices, the thoughts, the cacophony inside my skull were quieted instantly.
It was the one thing I had no control over. Since my birth into this other life I had learned to discipline myself and focus on certain thoughts or to ignore them as if they were background noise. But this, this was not organized chaos, or even thickly muffled whispers. This was silence and it was incredible. Her skin was alluring, her scent was sweet and intoxicating, but the silence was a precious gift from the God that had created my angel.
If her touch alone could do this to me, for me, how would one small taste of her blood affect me?