the outtakes
mother
When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.
- Sophia Loren
o.o.o
Rosalie encountered her litmus test shortly after her hundredth year of life.
She desperately wanted to be a mother - to hold a child to her breast, to nourish and nurture, to be called mommy - and she felt the absence of this possibility so keenly that her arms ached, empty and cold. It wasn't a slight to Emmett, who she loved more than life itself, more than the moon loved the stars, and she no longer held any resentment to Carlisle for saving her life. But she felt incomplete, unfinished.
Bitter with it until an impossible near-human girl had waltzed into her life with more secrets than years to her life - and then devastated with it when that same girl showed her the unfettered truth of what Rosalie's deepest desire would cost.
She couldn't do that. She couldn't ask Emmett to do that; she couldn't allow herself to do that. It wasn't right. And in the same way that Rosalie had tenaciously persevered from a single drop of human blood passing her lips, so too did she persist in her refusal to use some poor human woman as a bargaining chip for new life.
It was wrong. Sick. And to think that clear-headed Bella had come from such a long line of that kind of unmentionable violation and destruction -
No. No, Rosalie wouldn't do it. She could damn well remain incomplete - from her cells to her very soul - for the rest of her very long life as long as she could respect the sanctity of life. All life, regardless of what a sacrifice might gift her in return. Not even a child to call her own was worth the barter of her morality.
Of course, Rosalie hadn't counted on Bella or the possibilities Bella might bring into their lives. None of them had.
o.o.o
o.o.o
In the beginning, Rosalie had been so suspicious, just waiting for the girl to open her mouth and purge the secret of the vampire world from her bosom - and when that didn't happen, her hostility had been traded for a grudging respect. And respect had turned into fondness. In Bella, she found a kindred spirit. They were both so headstrong - though in different ways.
Bella changed the world.
And in doing so, she'd changed Rosalie's world. Altered it for the better.
It was horrifyingly obvious that while Rosalie had answered to the litmus test with resistance, not all vampires would feel the same. And as soon as word spread in their world, even as their kind infiltrated human governments and sub-cultures, it was perhaps inevitable that vampires would succeed in what Rosalie refused to do. They knew it was possible now - male vampires would father children.
Hybrids were born - was born the right word? - in the traditional way, new life traded for old, women gurgling on their own blood as their children were whisked away -
Rosalie didn't like to think about it.
It was too familiar.
o.o.o
o.o.o
She made herself useful to this fraction of the cause - put her medical degree to good work and became the nurse and Carlisle's elbow, and then the nurse at Bella's. A discrete clinic for the human women birthing hybrids, a rule enforced sternly by new Volturi law, became Rosalie's to run, to organize and maintain; and a representative agency for the human women, for surrogate and adoption agreements, seen to by Carmen and Esme. The entire coven was involved in some small way, some more than others.
If Bella was a doctor to dhampirs - the new word for hybrids - then Rosalie was the midwife to their mothers.
It was easier to deal with - easier to see - as time went on. Less violent. There was a serum now, a single injection directly to the site of a wound that would mimic the healing properties of venom. Rosalie personally saw to more caesarean surgeries than she could count.
Better this way, but still hard.
Rosalie was still incomplete.
o.o.o
o.o.o
They couldn't save everyone. Sometimes, they were simply too late; sometimes, there were unseen complications as Carlisle and Bella continued to encounter variations they hadn't seen before; sometimes, the women still died. Other times, it so happened that the mother was too far away, on the other side of the globe or otherwise unable to make it to the clinic. It wasn't a perfect system. Some slipped through the cracks.
And then - then there were the times when those cracks were gigantic fault lines carved deep into the earth, quaking and crumbling apart because it was too unforeseen, too difficult to contend.
Alice is the one to see it.
The tragedy of it is this: the young girl had been mated with a vampire and had been intending to change after the birth, but her vampire had gotten involved in a territory dispute of some sort and by the time it became known to the Volturi radar, the girl had already progressed to the final trimester, was already giving birth all by herself.
Her life was already forfeit the second her vampire died.
The Volturi bring the child to the clinic in Chicago, delivering the remainder of the tragedy as per directions directly from Sulpicia, who oversaw the global order of such matters -
Rosalie stays away for the first several days. The situation is unprecedented. Never before - not since the agency and the clinic were established - had there ever been a dhampir orphan. It was all so regulated, so monitored, that such a thing just simply didn't happen.
But then - cracks. Yes, there were always fault lines.
Rosalie stays away. It's better for her heart if she does.
o.o.o
o.o.o
"Rosie," Emmett murmurs, wide palms settling onto her shoulders, the breadth of his muscular chest pressed against the knobs of her spine. Supportive. Holding her together. She's always been so fragile for him, soft to Emmett where she is untouchable to everyone and everything else.
She closes her eyes. The baby is crying. It is the middle of the night and even though Esme and Carlisle's condo is a floor below theirs, she can still hear the baby wailing -
"Sweetheart, just go and see him," says her mate, soft but unyielding.
Rosalie bows her head, lip pulled tight between her teeth, statue-still as her hearing catches the break of Esme's voice as she tries - futility - to hush the baby. Nothing she does is working. And if the baby doesn't quiet soon, then even Rosalie's niece and nephew - children of five years - would begin to hear the unsettling sound of infant unrest.
She stands, gathering courage from all of her cornerstones -
Downstairs, Esme opens the door before the emergency door even snaps shut at Emmett's back, her expression distraught. Esme's search for motherhood had been filled by the coven and she had no desire to take the child for herself, but with Bella and Edward's hands full with their twins and the fact that Esme was the only other one who had any experience at all with babies, it had only made sense that she would be the child's caregiver until arrangements could be made. But it is clear that Esme is at the ends of her tether - if a baby is not tired or hungry or in need of changing or is colicky, then what could the problem be? If Esme has tried everything, then what else could she do?
"May I?" she breathes, feet like stone in the middle of the hallway, noise rushing through her ears.
She has no idea why Esme's immediate nod seems like permission to more than just hold the baby.
Rosalie ghosts forward, eyes locked on the dusting of honey-hued curls sitting atop the baby's head. She holds her arms out -
Blue eyes, as vivid as the Caribbean sky, as vivid as Emmett's had been when he was human.
Rosalie's lungs feel tight as she adjusts her grip, cradling the baby with as much pressure as she would hold a feather between two fingers -
With some effort, she drags her eyes away from the baby to look up at Esme. Her surrogate mother looks fit to cry and although Rosalie isn't gifted - she can't taste emotions or read minds - she knows that Esme's tears are from joy. Not relief that the baby had stopped crying, but happiness that it had been Rosalie to soothe it.
Because it meant only one thing. An inevitability, truly.
Venom burns in the corners of her eyes, her shoulders shaking as Emmett wraps himself around her, as the baby quiets himself in her arms, staring up at Rosalie with wide, bright blue eyes and hair as blonde as hers - the baby looked so much like the both of them, as if it were predestined -
No. Not the baby - his name was Emerson.
"I think he likes you," Emmett intones lowly. He holds a single finger over Emerson's face, dwarfing the baby with his sheer size, the movement of his smiling cheek pressing against the side of Rosalie's face when a tiny pale hand squeezes at Emmett's knuckle.
Her heart feels so full it could burst.
Emerson nuzzles deeper into her arms, eyes drooping now that he has been calmed by Rosalie's touch -
By his mother's touch.
Rosalie feels complete.
A/N: Another outtake request and on we go…
As always, be brutally honest. I can take it.
~cupcakeriot