A/N: I know I apologized last time for taking so long to come up with a new chap … well, it took me really long this time, and I apologize again to anyone who has been waiting! I'll put at least some of the blame on the Latin class I had to take this semester. It was time-consuming.

Anyway, I do hope you'll like the new chap after all this time!

Thanks to everyone who has reviewed so far, and a great many thanks to my friend who betaed this chapter!

… and, you know: comments are love!! Enjoy!

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Mesmerized by your lust for life

Untainted by the years.

~ Julian Davis – I Can Still Remember You ~

Wood and Paintings

She stayed on her small island of almost-leaving until she knew she had to move somehow, or else the rain and the moss and the cold earth would never let her up again.

Her clothes were soaked with water, her skin was, her flesh, even her bones. It was seeping through her into the ground, through her cinnamon hair and the fibers of her body, whatever that was made of now. She was like ancient rock, formed, torn apart, cracked and compressed again, and now water from the sky was flowing through her as if she were part of everything already, of something eternal.

She jumped a little, pieces of scenery tumbling into the blankness of her absent-mindedness, green, black and brown, as she realized that she was part of something eternal. It wasn't just a metaphor anymore.

She frowned and began to move, to stand up. If she didn't, the rain would weigh her down more and more, then, when winter came, she would be locked up in a shell of frozen fabric, and heaped with snow, and by the time spring came, she would be just another rock on the edge of this forest, forever unable to move of her own accord.

Briefly, she imagined herself in this spot, in winter, in spring, in a decade, a century, with the world changing, being transformed into something still unimaginable to her, some utopia or dystopia, she imagined herself being moved someplace else, out of the way of a new building or a street, being thrown into the water and slowly turning into bone-white sand.

Something about this notion didn't please her, and she grimaced.

Well, she was standing upright now. What next?

She stared into the forest, and tried to recall a map that had shown her, or a trip perhaps that had taken her to the other side of it. She tried to remember what was there.

And then she thought that it didn't matter. A town, the sea, a desert, Heaven. It didn't matter because, whatever place there was, she didn't want to go there. She was tired of searching for new places, new beginnings, new lives. It hadn't worked so well last time, had it?

So she turned around and walked across the meadow towards the house, pulling her wet hair back from her face irritably. The rain annoyed her. Incessant tap, tap, tap against her skin, like something stubborn and nagging that just wouldn't leave you alone for the love of God.

She scrunched up her face as water trickled into her eyes. Go away, she thought.

All through the days of her self-chosen exile, the patio door had been open, just wide enough for her to slip through. It was open still.

For a brief moment, her good manners kicked in and pointed meaningfully down at the hem of her dress, dripping, and her bare feet, muddy and wet. She pursed her lips. Go away, too.

What surprised her, was the warmth. She hadn't thought that she would ever be able to feel it again. But she did.

It enveloped her as soon as she had shut the door, like a blanket that had been waiting by the fireplace, waiting to wrap itself fully around her. It smelled of wood – dry wood, stained or varnished, old and saturated with stories, memories, days and nights. It whispered, sometimes it couldn't quite suppress a groan, it giggled.

She listened, transfixed, for a while. She had become so accustomed to the sound of the woods, the stormy sky with its clouds, its rain and its thunder, the wind in the trees, creaking branches, crying or creeping animals, the rustle of the grass, that the quietness, the softness of this house almost overwhelmed her.

The smells, too. No earthy, strong forest ground, resin, rotting plants, clean rain and smoke.
Dry, warm wood, linen and cotton, leather, paper, soap.

And the colors. There was still dark green, still dark brown wood. But it was all calm and steady, not windswept and rain-lashed. It was all smiling at her, looking cozy where it sat.

There was red, too, deep red and yellow, creamy white. Gold and silver, where letters had been minted into the spines of books.

It all sounded, smelled, looked comfortable and warm. She looked about herself somewhat helplessly for a few moments. She didn't quite know what to make of this. Whether to be glad that something – maybe the amiable wood and the yellow – told her she could feel at home here. Or not.

Why not? She frowned. Because.

Because she was some mythical creature. A creature trapped in a cage whose bars were wrought of a memory, cemented in time and perfectly resistant to anything and everything that might break through your ordinary – or even less ordinary – metal.

Because she had nowhere to go anymore. In more senses than one.

She moved, for some reason, and felt the fabric of her dress protest. No, it said, too heavy. Still too heavy? Despite a small lake on the wooden floor?

Esme gathered up the skirt a little and decided that she couldn't stay in these clothes, not even when the danger of catching a cold was pretty low.

So she climbed the stairs and, being with another half-open door, found her room. Her room. How odd, she thought.

She didn't pay much attention to her surroundings while she changed and then raked a brush through her wet, tousled hair. It was the color of cherry wood now, dark with rainwater.

When she had out the brush down again, she listened. First, to the wood. For a few moments, she tried to decipher something, but maybe it was a language she didn't understand. She wondered how old the house was.

Then, to the familiar outdoors sounds. Rain, wind, life.

Then, to the silence. It was nestled in between all the other things like something soft and serene, something white and light as a breeze. It wasn't easy to find among all the whispering, creaking and rushing, but quite all-encompassing all the same.

It peered up at her and seemed to wonder what to do. Unsettle her or comfort her?

Esme didn't await the decision. She didn't much care for either of the options.

Instead, she left her room again, closing the door quietly, as if there was someone there she might otherwise disturb. As far as she could tell, she was alone.

For a handful of moments, she hesitated, unsure what to do now that she was here, not in her room but in no other room, either. In between, again.

That was when she suddenly noticed the cross. Dark wood, hanging on the wall to her right just before the stairs began. How had she missed that before? It was a size that seemed unlikely to be overlooked.

Slowly, she wandered over to stand in front of it. She allowed herself a brief, sweeping examination and tried not to look too closely. Her love of art of any kind soon got the better of her, though.

And it was whispering, too. Between the breaths of old age, she thought she heard words.

Silly wood. Talkative.

She let her eyes follow the lines of the intricate carvings, tripping slightly at each pinpoint hole that a hungry woodworm had left, trying not to slip and tumble into the crevices torn open by time and the loss of moisture.

A little bit against her own will and stubbornness, she began picking her way through the questions of leaving or staying, the images of cliffs and her son, bits of confusion and shards of fear, rummaging for her knowledge about wood carving and ecclesial art that she had had as a human.

"You're not going to ask me why looking at it doesn't hurt you, are you?"

She spun around, too startled to feel irritation for a moment. She wondered how she could have been caught off guard when her senses of late seemed to be sharp enough to hear dead wood breathe.

Somehow, though, that contemplation got lost like sand dwindling away through a crack that had suddenly appeared. In her case, that crack lead to the summer of 1911.

She blinked a couple of times and tried to remember everything she had learned in the last few weeks, her pain, her damnation, the blame, but none of it would stick. It slipped off his perfect face and gentle eyes like silk, pooling at his feet and peering up at her inquiringly. What now? it asked. Where to?

Esme frowned at it and turned around again. She took a deep breath.

"It seems like most of the myths aren't exactly true," she said, glad to find that she didn't sound too flustered.

"None at all that I can think of," Carlisle replied with his quiet, calm voice. He paused for a few moments, watching her study the cross. It was hard to guess how she felt. She looked composed, her fingers lightly interlinked behind her back, her shoulders straight but not exactly tense, damp hair falling past her shoulder blades. Only her eyes, ruby red, had still been restless. She still wanted to flee.

"Are you religious?" she suddenly asked, eyes travelling over the cross again to have something to do.

The question surprised him a bit, although it probably surprised her more. Why am I asking this?

Carlisle thought about it for a moment. Difficult subject. If Edward were there, her question would have triggered hours of discussion.

"I don't know if that's the right word," he eventually replied.

She looked at him over her shoulder. "Then why do you have it?"

He gave her a vague smile, like the flapping of a wing. "Nostalgia, I guess," he said. "My father made it."

Her eyebrows went up, then she looked back at the cross. Really.

"It looks …" she searched for the right word, and eventually settled on the most obvious one, "old."

Carlisle laughed, softly, quietly. She liked his laughter.

"We don't age," he pointed out, and Esme frowned at the item of interest. She tried to guess how old exactly it was.

"Come on," Carlilse said into her calculations. She got lost somewhere between architectural epochs and their features and glanced at him, question in her eyes. "I'll show you – if you want." He waited for just a moment, then he turned and went into the room behind him, leaving the door open so she could decide whether or not to follow.

Esme hesitated for a moment, wondering vaguely how he intended to show her the age of two pieces of wood, if that was what he was referring to, but somehow she couldn't find a reason to refuse. So she followed. Into a study, as it turned out.

More wood, more books. Countless books, in fact. Some had glossy covers, others were bound in leather, letters minted into the material and accentuated in black, gold or silver, some seemed to bear no title at all. There seemed to be a confusion of topics, novels and textbooks about everything. Some titles were written in languages she didn't know.

And paintings. As soon as she laid eyes on them, she couldn't look away anymore. They were so different, different sizes, different styles, different colors. Some where lively, as if only frozen in mid-movement for a brief moment, others were dark like stormy nights, or variations of one shade, all sepia, all grey.

She frowned. Tried to find out why they would have been thrown together like this, what was common to them, how they harmonized. Because that they did, in a way.

"The one in the middle," Carlisle said softly. A rather large painting, light browns and oranges and yellows. Like the beginnings of a sunset.

"17th century London," he explained, then pointed at a building in the left half of the picture. "Look at that little tower. I remember someone coming to my parents' house complaining about how the workers who built that tower were always blocking the alley with their carts. It was just a couple of weeks before they were finished, though.

I probably remember that because it was the day I was changed. It's pretty much my last human memory." He pursed his lips and seemed lost in thought for a brief moment. "You'd think there would have been other things more worthy to be remembered."

Esme felt confused. She started doing calculations again. 1920, 1820, 1720, 1620. My gosh. What was he telling her?

"Why did your father build a cross?" She almost frowned at the question herself. What?

There was something to the small smile he gave her, glancing at her before he answered, that told her he knew exactly what she was thinking. That made her almost frown again.
"He was a pastor," Carlisle explained, and then the smile vanished. "And a vampire hunter. Who believed in the myths."

"A vampire hunter?" Esme repeated. She hadn't expected that. Again, a smile. Completely different this time. No hint of amusement. It sat on his lips and fought not to slip off, while it tried to find out whether it was a little bitter or just sad.

Sad, Esme helped out. Bitter didn't fit him.

"Many of those things – the myths that people only dismiss as superstition today – were a lot realer then than they are now," Carlisle explained. "And this one – ours – at least, is somewhat true after all."

His forehead creased as he stared at the small tower he had pointed out to her before. "My father had many innocent people killed. I contemplated searching him out after I was changed. So he'd kill me, too. Until I realized that he couldn't have. Holy water and a peg of wood …," he hesitated, a rare trace of sarcasm in his voice. "That only works on humans. And I probably … I surely would have killed him first."

"You don't kill humans," Esme put in, a strange little shiver shaking the rushed words. They were a hidden question – Why should you have? – as well as a demand. If she had to be in this existence, she wanted it to be true that she didn't have to be evil.

For a moment, there was silence. A hard-to-interpret smile fluttered about Carlisle's lips, trembling almost as much as Esme's words. All the things she didn't know yet. All the tests she'd yet have to master.

"No," he agreed at length. "But I had to learn how not to do that first." He inclined his head to one side slightly, looking both a little troubled and amused. "I doubt that my father was still alive by the time I had myself under control."

Rightly, she had a feeling like they were touching on something deep and far reaching, a dark lake lapping at her bare feet, wanting to be fathomed by her and making it very clear that she would have to do that eventually, whether she wanted or not.

For now, she'd had enough of cold water, though. And instead released a question that had been urging to be asked since he had told her about the origin of the cross on the landing outside: "When were you born?"

"I don't know exactly. The 1620s."

"My God!" It escaped her in a gasp, faster than she could react. "The entire world has changed since then." We don't age, she heard him say again in her mind. Immortal. Yes, but.

Carlisle shrugged her words away gently. "Several times. It's not so hard to adjust for us."

She looked at him, still caught somewhere between disbelief, confusion and an odd kind of fear she couldn't quite place.

"How old were you when –," she asked, to disperse those feelings, and still half elsewhere while she spoke, stumbled over a lack of right words.

Carlisle helped her out with a smile and simply said: "Twenty-three."

She considered that for a moment. "Were you married?"

He gave her a funny look, something between amusement and surprise at the question. I know, she thought. I'm not sure why I'm asking all of this, either. She decided to explain herself instead of telling him that: "Twenty-three wasn't as young then as it is now, was it?"

Carlisle smiled. "Not young at all," he agreed, and then answered her question: "I was engaged."

"Did you love her?" Another one of those. This time, he didn't look at her funnily, though. He looked thoughtful, and serious. "I hope so." Then his gaze slipped off her like water off a glass sculpture. "And I hope she didn't love me." Esme frowned, but before she could say anything, he continued: "All I remember about her is that she had blue eyes." – "What color were your eyes?" - "I don't remember." She looks at him disturbed about the idea of forgetting practically everything. "If you ever forget the color of your eyes, though, you can ask me."

She slowly nodded, as if the color of her eyes mattered to her at all.

"But not about the other things," she said quietly. "Not about Daniel." Her eyes were almost frightened. Pained again.

"No," Carlisle replied. "But you won't forget him."

Her eyes narrowed, close to tears if she had any. "How do you know?" Her voice was quiet and frail, like a small bird caught in the snow.

Carlisle slowly shook his head. "You won't."

And why did he sound so confident? He didn't know her. Or her memories.

She took a deep breath. And decided to hope that he was right. After all, what else could she do?

"How was it?" she asked after another moment. "London at that time?"

Carlisle pursed his lips. "You should have Edward tell you that," he replied. "He knows it all as well as I do by now, and he's a far better storyteller than I am." He smiled at her. "But I'll try."

He began talking, with his velvety voice, and with the name of Queen Elizabeth dropping from his lips and being breathed in by the painted London, Esme could feel a classroom set itself up around herself. She could hear the shuffling feet, the breathless giggles and the hush-hushes. She smelled the whiff of cool air that the children had brought in with them from their break, the chalk on her fingertips and the leaves of just-about outdated books.

She could hear her own voice, punctuated with the click-clack of her writing on the blackboard, softened by the chalk-dust that rippled from her elegant letters and settled on the spoken words. 1666, the Great Fire of London, she told her pupils. 1789 to 99, the French Revolution. Do you remember who was king of France when it began? The 1660s, the Restoration. Who was Oliver Cromwell?

She touched her fingers to the hilly blacks, browns and dark reds in the corner of one painting.

What did Isaac Newton do? What happened in 1776? And do you know what the American Civil War was about?

"Esme?"

She tumbled from the classroom into the study and looked at him. For a moment, she tried to find all of it – all of the huge chunk of history, from the beginnings of the 17th century right up to now, heartbeat after the World War – in his eyes.

But couldn't find it, because he was smiling. The smile pushed everything else away, left no room for wars and revolutions.

"What?" she asked reflexively.

"What are you thinking about? You're not listening at all, are you?" He said with all of the smile in his voice, as if her distraction pleased him.

She was quiet for a moment, then she answered: "I used to teach history." She looked back at the paintings. "This is odd," she said quietly, then suddenly she pressed her fingertips so hard against the street corner they were still touching as if she wanted to tear through the canvas and get drawn into the story behind it, the time and place.

She frowned. "How do you do this?" she asked, desperate. Once more, she pressed against the hard paint and realized she wasn't trying to be pulled in, she was trying to pull out the pain that had been there in the last three centuries with their wars, the dying and the hundreds of kinds of losses, and absorb it so she would know that her pain wasn't the only in the world.

But it didn't work. The stories stayed in the pictures, dead like the people who had lived them, suffused with oil paint and quietness. It was all dead to her.

Not to Carlisle. He must have seen it all with those compassionate eyes of his, felt it all, and remember it as clearly as if it were happening now, just beyond this room.

What with these precise memories that an immortal mind seemed to keep.

She frowned and pushed the thought away, not even knowing why exactly she felt she needed to do so.

"You get used to it", Carlisle answered her question, making her blink a few times. To what? she wondered, and tried to backtrack her thoughts to the point where she must have asked him something. Oh, she thought. That. She believed it better to shove that away, too.

It was all a little staggering to her. The dates, the idea of watching things pass by like someone in a theatre audience, unaffected by the play and time just another prop on the stage.

"What is this?" she asked, to distract herself, pointing at an image she couldn't place.

They moved from one painting to the next for another little while, and Esme didn't really notice becoming comfortable in this quiet room, in front of this wall of history, in Carlisle's presence, otherwise she would have fought the feeling.

Her hair dried, curling itself gently, back into the familiar caramel waves, and the wood-whisper-laced warmth seeped into her like the rainy coldness had before, replacing it bit by bit. She forgot all about the forest and its edge.

After a while, Edward came wandering in and just listened for a few minutes, before he began commenting on Carlisle's stories as if he had been there, too. It would have been a lie to say they weren't both getting a little silly eventually.

"I've been trying to convince Carlisle to write a book," Edward explained to Esme at one point. "17th century to the present, from a contemporary witness. We could uncover all the misconceptions and mistakes in the common history books."

Esme, still half facing the history mosaic, turned to look at Carlisle. He had gone to sit behind his desk a couple of minutes into the good-natured banter with Edward, who was leaning casually against one of the floor to ceiling bookshelves, arms crossed in front of his chest.

"Are there?" she asked the doctor. "Things that were different from how we believe?"

Carlisle smiled, throwing Edward a look that could have been anything from admonishment to amusement. Probably both and something in between as well.

"I don't know", he replied. "I mostly was at only one place at a time as well, rarely any place of political importance."

Edward shrugged. "I still think it would be a bestseller."

Despite herself, despite everything, Esme had to laugh. It felt strange, so she stopped again quickly.

It made Carlisle glance at her, though, and she could for nothing fathom the look he gave her. It, too, was short, and he was looking at Edward again before she knew it.

"That book would have to be one work of fiction indeed," he said with a smirk. "Made-up witnessed and manufactured evidence. Unless, of course, you want Aro down our throats."

Edward grimaced. "No," he said, "not necessarily." He seemed lost in thought for a moment, then he began to laugh. Esme almost frowned, until she remembered his strange talent.

She quickly turned around to face the pictures again. Layers of paint, colors, mixing, clashing and harmonizing, lying tranquilly next to each other or tumbling all over one another, and somehow creating things recognizable to the eye. A canvas and paint.

So much less complicated than mind-reading. And just as disturbing, as it had turned out.

They looked back at her, challenge glinting in their eyes. So? they asked. What do you think? Quite a collection, aren't we?

Yes, Esme thought. Quite a collection. Quite a collection of things that had made up her history lessons at school. Wars and dark times and breathing pauses.

A three-century tightrope populated with all of that. And on one side, this place. An autumn day, 1921, Ashland, a room full of books and paintings, whispering wood and rain.

On the other side, London, before myths were myths, before the name Wisconsin signified anything, before wars spanned the world. Tower builders that caused dismay and a blue-eyed girl.

Yes, it all disturbed her quite a bit. Took away, a little bit, the breath she didn't need anymore.

So she turned away from the paintings as well. Where to?

Carlisle and Edward were still talking, but she didn't catch the words. If Edward was paying attention to her jumbled thoughts, he didn't show it. He seemed to be describing something that required a lot of gesturing. Carlisle watched him with amused eyes, then he began to laugh.

It drew Esme in completely, all of a sudden.

After three hundred years of this world, she thought, how could he still be smiling all the time?

TBC