*trigger warning for this chapter, because mele has a seriously effed up backstory. it's only a few lines, but read at your own caution.*
the outtakes
mastery
Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything except his own nature.
- Henry Miller
o.o.o
The shaman in her village had said something to her when she was very little, eyes clouded and milky, wizened hands folding over her thin arms as the smoke in the hut swirled dark and spicy around them. The beads around his neck, hanging from the stretch of his ear lobes and the bones pierced through his dark flesh, shook as he spoke, a delicate tingling of sound that still haunted her.
"Mele," he'd croaked, head lolling loosely about his shoulders, white hair a vivid contrast to his skin. "It is you who will find the mastery of the world."
The mastery of the world. Even then, she'd known that the words were spoken with a great weight - known that there was a distinction in the delivery, known that the shaman had been flirting with the other side of the veil and disparaging time in his quest to have this vision. Of course she'd known. She was to be the next shaman, after all, and even though she had not inhaled the herbs to lower the natural protections all living beings had from the other side, she could feel the odd air in the hut, the cool brush along the back of her neck, the quiver of the hands on her shoulders.
But Mele thought that she would have time - all young children thought the world was full of time to grow, to live.
He came the same day, slashing through the village in the night.
("You are different," says he, crouching down in front of her, his ghostly pale skin gleaming in the moonlight. She's never seen skin so light, not even touched by the golden tint of sun. His eyes are red like the blood that he has spilled heedlessly. "You smell delicious. I think I'll keep you - I've always wanted one of your kind for my own, you know."
And Mele, small and scared and crying jaggedly, does not know. One of her kind?
She won't understand until much, much later that her kind did not mean human - it meant the color of her skin.)
He took her away, stole her in the night from the grasp of dead hands. The last thing she sees are the unblinking, flat eyes of the shaman and the beads around his neck that should have one day adorned her own.
(She doesn't think his name. She won't even speak it - not unless she is hissing, spitting, screaming. EzraEzraEzra. Ezra, who makes her his pet. Ezra, who calls himself her master. Ezra, who she loathes with blind fury and will for as long as air fills her lungs.)
He does not stop taking.
Her innocence.
("They didn't have to die," he proclaims, curling lips at her. "But they did because you tried to fight me. You're responsible. You won't try to fight again, will you?")
Her body.
("You are so exotic in everything," he groans, the weight of him over her, cold like ice and rending her flesh -
He laughs when she screams. He is entertained when she claws at the ground, too weak to fight him off because she is human and only newly a woman - but this is not the first time and it will not be the last. This new act is just an extension of all the others, but now it is not his hands that violate her -
"Exotic in all things, except for this," he grunts, dragging her closer. "All women are the same in this way. It's best you learn this, now.")
Her free will.
("Do you understand?"
"Yes," she answers, flinching away as he suddenly stalks closer, the pupils of his eyes dilating wide and deep and dark-
"I did not hear you right, pet. Yes, what?" he coaches.
Mele's mind slips from her grasp, her thoughts blurring together. "Yes, Master," she slurs, influenced by compulsion of his gift.)
And eventually her life.
("It will only burn for a while, and then we can be together forever.")
Mele has found that forever is a very, very long time - and he found that he had greatly underestimated how long his forever would last. Her first act when she wakes from the burning is to close her eyes to protect herself from his influence and then turn her new indestructible rage onto him, ripping him to pieces and relishing in burning his flesh in the place where once stood her village.
And as she stands where the bones of the shaman still remain, she remembers what he said when she was a little girl - before she was torn and ruined and eviscerated from the inside out by a monster who had damned her to the same blood-drunken fate.
It is Mele who will find the mastery of the world.
But no - that could not be right. Not anymore.
Mele had a Master - once and never again.
o.o.o
o.o.o
The first time the vampire finds her, Mele declines her offer with prejudice. She knows what the Volturi are - she knows who the female is mated to and she has no desire to enslave herself. Not again and not by her own free will.
Sulpicia does not take no for an answer and Mele bristles at this, because no means no and Mele is not prone to declining nicely twice. But when Sulpicia returns, it is with an agreement that Mele will not be beholden to the Volturi - she will be free to come and go and do as she pleases so long as she helps the Sulpicia stave the sanity from her mate.
"He could change the world," Sulpicia says pleadingly, hands clasped together. "He could, but only if this happens. Only if his attention is drawn elsewhere - only if he had an heir."
And Mele cannot help but think of the shaman, long dead save for his words that slip through the stream of her conscious. She doubts a man swayed by the grip of insanity - a man who is slaved to control and violence and power - would ever be master of the entire world, but now her curiosity is peaked.
Sulpicia's eyes are bright, honest. "Either way, you shall have no Master, this I swear."
Mele wants to refuse, but some dormant part of her - the thing that died when her heart stopped, her ability to commune with the veil as shamans before her had done - stirs weakly and she finds herself agreeing.
She will try this once and if it does not work as it should, then she will take her leave.
(She will end them all if there is even a hint of the demons that reside in the immortal children.)
o.o.o
o.o.o
The first hybrid is not gifted in spite of Mele's best efforts to transmute the Aro's gift to his progeny - and neither is the second. But she can sense it lurking in the blood and the faint echo of shamanism coating her soul knows that patience will make all the difference.
They have nothing but time. She will watch and wait and know these children from afar.
She watches in the shadows as the third hybrid grows - slower than the first two, closer to the rate of humans. She shakes her head each time she leaves.
Not this one. The next one.
o.o.o
o.o.o
The night that Isabella is born, Mele again hears the shaman's words whisper quietly in the back of her mind.
It is you who will find the mastery of the world.
Mastery, it seems, is in the birthright of this tiny, wiggling infant. Even this small, Mele can sense that Isabella is different from those who she is descended from - perhaps in the same way that the shaman knew Mele was different from the rest of the children in the village.
Destined for something greater.
A child worth protecting.
Isabella is a precocious slip of a girl, in equal turns starkly intelligent and pragmatically insightful. She carries the spirit of a natural born leader and she is so wise - Isabella learns to hide her gift from her parents and from the psychologists that examine her. She learns to protect herself. To play at being normal. To assimilate. But to never lose the quality that Mele had identified upon first sight.
She does not leave Isabella - and if she does, it is not for long, not the way she would occasionally check up on the lives of the other hybrids. This child is special and the three vampires who know of her existence know it.
She would not fail this girl - not the way that Mele was failed.
Isabella grows from girl to young woman and while it is obvious that others feel the same urge to protect her, Mele will not let that stand as if protection would ever be enough. Isabella is destined for greatness, just as Mele had once been. She will not allow there to be an opportunity for Isabella's greatness to be cut down - not like hers had been taken, stolen right along with the heat of her heart pumping blood through her body.
(She relishes in killing those men in Isabella's name. She has not felt a kill so keenly since the death of her own sire and it is because she sees so much of herself in the girl - as well she should, considering how much of Mele's power had been incorporated into the bloodline over the generations.
It is almost like Isabella is her own child.)
Mele trains Isabella herself. The girl will be a protection unto herself. She will accept nothing less than perfection because it is vital that Isabella never be as vulnerable as Mele had been at that age -
She is hard on Isabella because the girl must be strength defined - must be too strong to enslave and too fortified to be weak enough to do the enslaving.
Isabella understands. She rises to the challenge, and then rises higher.
o.o.o
o.o.o
Mele would find the mastery of the world.
Yes. She had done that, in fact. She had found the child that would Master the world - flawlessly, humanely, discreetly. The child that would epitomize the mastery of the world and everything in it. The check and balance to a system that desperately needed it with a sense of judicious morals that was rivaled by none.
She would never have a Master again. No, that could never happen. Mele would never be slave to a single person ever again -
Instead, she would be loyal by her own free will.
A/N: Outtake request! For the record, Mele is not an easy character to write from any angle you tackle her. I will reiterate, however, that Mele is technically a canon character - but I took lots of artistic license with her characterization. And this was supposed to be shorter, but then I figured I might as well try and do the character justice. I know some of you really didn't like Mele and even though I mostly used her for a plot device, I didn't just want to leave it like that. People are complicated.
As always, be brutally honest. I can take it.
~cupcakeriot