Spitefic: Duologue with a Monster
Title: Duologue with a Monster
Author: afterandalasia
Fandom: Twilight
Rating: PG
Characters: Edward Cullen
Genre: Drama
Word Count: 3,200
Inspiration (Warnings): Chapter One of Midnight Sun. I've seen a lot of fanfiction which makes Bella more relateable... so help me, I started wondering whether it was possible to do the same for Edward. This is the result. There is also a strong suggestion of mental health issues underlying this, as a sort of alternate character interpretation. The violence is much less than in Midnight Sun, but is present.
Summary: Another look at the first moment in which Edward meets Bella, and how he viewed himself at that time.
About three things I am absolutely positive.
First, I am a monster.
Second, there is a part of me - and I know how potent that part is - that knows how easily it can kill, and thirsts to do so again.
And third, I have fallen unconditionally and irrevocably in love - with a human who does not deserve this.
There is a monster that lives behind my eyes. It fills my mouth with its venom and makes my body ache for the blood which I know is long gone from me. It can hear the thoughts that flit through other peoples' heads, and makes them surround me like a ghostly double of the crowds of people that walk the same world as do I. Sometimes I hear the jealousy in the heads of my family, that I can so easily hear the inner workings of a person's mind. I would ask them to listen to two symphonies and try to pick out the first violin, but I do not wish to pain them with disillusionment.
Sometimes I fear these words and thoughts will drown out my own, and I am not sure of who I am beneath them.
During the hours of the day, I often yearned for those of the evening, when there were not scores or hundreds of voices vying for the attention of my mind. It was a mercy, I suppose, that I need not sleep and could enjoy the relative quiet. My siblings spoke without worry as we sat in cafeteria, whilst I regarded my hands and tried to latch upon a thought that is mine alone.
Jasper's hunger cut through the susurrations of the crowd like a scream, and I clenched my fists so tightly that I would have crushed anything between them had I not learnt long ago the risks of my touch. I followed his thoughts and his gaze to the wake of scent that had passed us, then to its owner: another student at the school, who hopefully will pass through life unaware that this event ever occurred.
Jasper closed his eyes, but I could see that it does not help; all that it does is break off one of his senses, one that might possibly give him something to work on in his mind to keep the thirst at bay. I could feel it swelling in his head, filling up his thoughts like, no doubt, the venom filling up his mouth, and I saw him swallow back a mouthful of it. His body, used for so long to being allowed one reaction, struggled now to change. I felt my tongue becoming wet with venom in turn, Jasper’s hunger rolling across me like waves even as he restrained his powers to stop it from affecting the others, and wondered how it was that I so desperately hated the time when it was just Carlisle, Esme, Rosalie and myself - the three others with so little yearning for blood that it made it at least easier.
Behind his eyes, visions played anyway, and I saw them as clearly as must he have done. What it would be like to seduce her away and lower his lips to her throat, to feel her blood run over his lips.
I cannot say what it is that stirs the monsters within us all to raise their heads, only that Jasper had less experience at silencing his. Alice's hand tightened on her husband's; I kicked him beneath the table to remind him of who we are to this town: high school students, albeit unusual ones. A handful of students noticed the movement, and thought it ordinary; I was grateful for even that fragment of normality, another instant when our charade could go on and I did not have to deliver bad news to my family.
"It helps if you think of them as people," said Alice sharply, and I knew that she addressed the creature behind Jasper's eyes. We had long since sworn to remind each other of what our humanity must think: once we were more coy with our words, but by now all of us had become more terse with each other. “Her name is Whitney. She has a baby sister that she adores. Her mother invited Esme to that garden party. Remember?”
She spoke as if it were a question, but I knew that it was an order. She was the only one who can truly control Jasper: he is older than any of us save for Carlisle, and we know it. An army man even before he was turned, and a soldier more thereafter. Perhaps Emmett’s strength would be enough to restrain him, but I would not want to wager the lives of others on that, and it would be impossible to hide in any case. Jasper, though, scowled and withdrew within himself, and we all knew that it meant we were to let him sit in his own silence and to try to modulate our own emotions instead. Let him drink in calm instead of blood.
The flicker of the word Cullen caught my attention; to our surname, at least, I tried to keep myself attuned. I glanced round as if looking in Alice’s wake as she flitted away, and at the same time took in every inch of the cafeteria in that one look. An advantage of our kind to which I would have long since grown accustomed were it not for the hundred views from human eyes that overlapped my own, fuzzy and pixelated in comparison. I fixed my gaze on the newcomer, the recurrent strain that has been bobbing through heads all day long: a novelty, an outsider. Whether their abstract interest was more or less depersonalising than would be, say, Jasper’s thoughts on her, I could not say. With regards to Jessica Stanley’s (a normal girl’s, a thousand peoples’) thoughts that the girl was attractive, but not so much so as to breach the social circle that circumscribed my family, I could not help a flicker of amusement. Appearance had nothing to do with it. Necessity had rather more.
The populace of Forks had, if not grown used to us, then certainly showed a minimum of suspicion towards our behaviours. We were eccentric, with our strange accents and close-knit ways, but in a day that does not think vampires are real we would almost struggle to draw suspicion upon ourselves. Especially with the myths that the Volturi have so lovingly created to mask the signs that might truly give us away. This newcomer, though, I as yet had no sense of; whether she might have too curious a mind, or one too unusual, whether she too would simply write us off as strange and not wish to have too much to do with us or whether there might be some danger in her thoughts. I hoped that she would, like many others, declare us stuck-up and leave us to our own devices. It is safer that way, safer for there to be no humans near us when the monsters start to scream.
For a brief instant, my eyes caught hers. I expect the train of her thoughts to follow, that tumbling consciousness of teenaged humanity or which I have heard tiresomely much and which I yet envy so greatly for its normality. And yet, the unthinkable happens.
There is silence.
In the first instance I rejected the very thought: there are none who are silent in their minds, even in dreams, even in unconsciousness. Even the static of a body living but now longer inhabited, a life no longer retrievable, was not there. It was as if I found myself attempting to listen to a wall, a table, a tree. And that is impossible.
For a full three-quarters of a second I held her gaze, until she coloured and looks away. The flush of blood in her cheeks stirred the monster below, as it imagined bursting capillaries, cutting through the layers of flesh to veins and arteries beneath and drinking deep, but my fascination held it back by spilling across my mind. Her expressions were still readable to me: curiosity, warm rather than wary, shifting to surprise. But more precision that that was beyond me without the words of her mind as guidance. For ninety years I had been used to the double-train of thoughts and words together, until what had at first seemed strange had become a normality, something that I could no longer pretend was not real. Hearing silence from a person was like removing the white noise of everyday life, and it unsettled me.
In the ensuing moments, I felt my thoughts reaching in multiple directions, trying to draw things together all at once and struggling even with the extra space, the extra power, that exists in a vampire’s brain. I heard Jessica saying scornfully that no girl was good enough for me, and the monster laughed at the fleeting remembrances of how easy it would have been to drink and drink again from the girls that have attempted over the years to so much as speak to me. Like the lure of the angler fish, and even now that I had no desire to draw people to me so, I could not cease the effect. Thus I was left, time after time, pushing people away to maintain the safe distance for which they had no thoughts.
From the corner of my eye I now regarded the girl, even as the beast bayed for blood and felt stabs of anger at the leash I kept it on, even as the myriad words of high school students ebbed and flowed against my mind with a thousand thought-fragments tugged me around and begged me to put effort into their completion. Deeper into my thoughts, further into the fields of my mind that so swarmed with the fog of others’ thoughts; I had the strangest urge to protect her, from the small evils that always flutter deep in human minds, from the hunger of my siblings and most of all Jasper, from the monster deep in my own chest even as what might have still been called my heart called for her protection. I did not understand. Perhaps it was her fragile appearance - but then again, all humans are fragile before my eyes - perhaps the frustrating individuality which her mental silence gave her. Even a normal human will in their life encounter thousands of people: transform that life to immortality, and weariness sets in. Finally, someone different had appeared amid the humans whom I walked amongst and yet was forced to separate myself from, and I could not tear my thoughts from her.
To my siblings, I feigned a lack of interest, folding the newcomer into the same category that I placed all of the other students of the school. Too much interest could, after all, be fatal: not that it was ever our intention, but all that it took was one thought too many for an interest to spiral into obsession in our minds, and then the human that had become an individual became a target for the beasts. As if they read our minds as easily as I read those of humans; another reason for me to detest the power that grew into me.
We directed our attentions to our various classes; although I had been through high school innumerable times, and college barely any fewer, there was at least inspiration for my thoughts to be found in the classes which we sat repeatedly. Biology, sadly, was not one of the most interesting for me - it was for their very nature, their very subjectivity, that I found myself preferring social sciences, humanities, arts, where there was always a new point of view, and always a new thought to be entertained or argument to be considered. Biology had fewer such spheres of interest, although I had to admit that the development of population genetics some forty years before had still shown that the sciences could be flexible enough to recapture me.
Others of the class entered; routine, familiarity. I doubted that anything would intrude further upon the structure of life which I had formed for myself, but once again I was to find myself incorrect in such an assumption.
The newcomer entered the room, I allowed myself a moment of sympathy for her in that the only remaining empty chair was next to the one person in the room who could not afford to become friendly with her, and then the fan past which she moved caught her scent.
Out of habit, I was still breathing, and the smell of her skin struck me with more strength than ever a physical blow could have done. Every cell in my body, every venom-hardened cell, yearned for the scent that lingered in my lungs no matter how forcefully I exhaled in an attempt to clear it. It could not have been long, a couple of seconds perhaps. But in every tenth, every hundredth, every thousandth of every second her scent might as well have reached me anew for how it struck me.
The predator roared. It saw its prey, a prey with a scent unlike anything which it had found in the ninety years of its existence. The world shrank into a microcosm of nothing more than the two of them, where one might consume and destroy the other, and in turn that destruction washed over me as my consciousness dissolved beneath the wordless, angry, hungry cry.
My mouth flooded with venom, my throat suddenly as dry as the stone it resembled and as hot as fire, and one drop, just one drop would be perfect enough to tear the world apart to reach. My teeth, my nails, my hands, were not the claws and fangs that might be imagined, but still they were enough, enough to tear her into a million pieces so that I might savour each piece in turn and spread the glory of the taste across an eternity.
But then I looked into her silent eyes, and saw the monster she had called to life once again. Beneath the face that I had come to call my own, behind the eyes that had become golden with the animal blood I forced across my lips, I saw the hunger written as hatred on my face, hatred that she lived and kept that blood within her, that she might make such fire rise in my throat and make my muscles tense in readiness to pounce and destroy what humanity I might have once had just by her mere existence.
As I looked into her eyes, their brown depths, the infinitesimal curve to each millimetre of her skin, the perfect unique imperfections of her face, again I felt the urge to protect her from the darknesses of the world, to lay the world down right and good in front of her, to save her. And in exactly the same moment, reflected in her eyes, I see the very monster that is making her life dangerous to live.
Torn in two, I froze, feeling the world stutter forwards in fractions of a second divided into iterations of unspeakable pain and desire bound together. Then things blurred, fractured, shattering into pieces that I struggled to remember: her sitting beside me, the class, watching the way that strands of her hair moved across her face, seeing the pulse in her throat. Somewhere along the line I held my breath, and then it became easier, though still the lingering traces of her scent in my lungs thrashed and struggled against the years of control that I had fought for.
Once, I had been a human. I clung to the memories, the only ones in my head that were not pin-sharp, like trying to pin down shadows whilst the sun is faded behind the clouds. Over and over I walked among humans and tried to separate myself from them, their minds an open book to me, not clouded as were their words in a layer of deception. Ninety years of knowing humans means that one stray thought is almost always enough. And here before me sat, somewhere beneath the wreathes of her beautiful scent, her glorious blood, the one person in the world whose mind I could not read.
The one person who still held something to discover.
The monster in my head laughs at humans, laughs at what is ninety years gone. Why should I envy them, it asked? For their equality, their contentedness? Why, when I could be so much better, so much more? I could have whatever I wanted, it said; if I want this girl whose mind I cannot read, it is easy. Simply destroy the world, and she will have no choice.
It did not understand that what held me in such fascination, why I knew that the want it felt and that which I did were so different. It was too much, too soon, and for now I was merely captivated by that which I could not understand.
Biology ended, and I fled, albeit at human speed and on a human scale. No humans ever entered the family car, no matter the envious looks it gained, and in the clearer air I was able to empty my lungs and retain some sort of clear thought once again. Somewhere within me was a human need, a human urge to understand and to know a little, what little there is to know. The monster wanted to take, take, take, and there was so much room in my mind for that desire to grow and outgrow itself, the modesty of my normal interest outstripped by it.
The monster whispered with my memories. How easy it is to crush a human skull between my fingers, break a human spine in a single blow, tear a human throat open to reveal the glorious bloodiness beneath.
Alice’s words reverberated in my head, and I forced myself to apply them to the girl. Bella Swan, they had called her. That would make her Charlie Swan’s daughter, the police chief’s daughter. She clearly had friends; already they thought of her often. It was a struggle, and I leant my forehead against the leather of the steering wheel as the thoughts wrapped back. I had a father, I had a mother, I had siblings who loved me and trusted me, and would not want to face the fallout I would create were I to fall from the point on the path which I had reached.
It helps if you think of them as human, she had said.
It helps if we remember to be human, I told myself instead. Without hearing her thoughts, it might even be that I would be the closest to human around her that I had been in decades. And yet she drew the monster from its cave, and the monster was so much stronger than what had been human.
The sound of footsteps outside made my head snap up, and I saw my siblings approaching, fast but not excessively so. Troubled expressions flitted across their faces, suppressed too fast for humans to read but not beyond my abilities, and then they were in the car and surrounding me, the second-hand scent of the school filling the car. My throat flushed with fire once again, and I clenched my teeth to prevent myself from crushing the steering wheel beneath my touch.
They spoke, and I tried to answer. And all the while the monster screamed inside my head.
Author: afterandalasia
Fandom: Twilight
Rating: PG
Characters: Edward Cullen
Genre: Drama
Word Count: 3,200
Inspiration (Warnings): Chapter One of Midnight Sun. I've seen a lot of fanfiction which makes Bella more relateable... so help me, I started wondering whether it was possible to do the same for Edward. This is the result. There is also a strong suggestion of mental health issues underlying this, as a sort of alternate character interpretation. The violence is much less than in Midnight Sun, but is present.
Summary: Another look at the first moment in which Edward meets Bella, and how he viewed himself at that time.
About three things I am absolutely positive.
First, I am a monster.
Second, there is a part of me - and I know how potent that part is - that knows how easily it can kill, and thirsts to do so again.
And third, I have fallen unconditionally and irrevocably in love - with a human who does not deserve this.
There is a monster that lives behind my eyes. It fills my mouth with its venom and makes my body ache for the blood which I know is long gone from me. It can hear the thoughts that flit through other peoples' heads, and makes them surround me like a ghostly double of the crowds of people that walk the same world as do I. Sometimes I hear the jealousy in the heads of my family, that I can so easily hear the inner workings of a person's mind. I would ask them to listen to two symphonies and try to pick out the first violin, but I do not wish to pain them with disillusionment.
Sometimes I fear these words and thoughts will drown out my own, and I am not sure of who I am beneath them.
During the hours of the day, I often yearned for those of the evening, when there were not scores or hundreds of voices vying for the attention of my mind. It was a mercy, I suppose, that I need not sleep and could enjoy the relative quiet. My siblings spoke without worry as we sat in cafeteria, whilst I regarded my hands and tried to latch upon a thought that is mine alone.
Jasper's hunger cut through the susurrations of the crowd like a scream, and I clenched my fists so tightly that I would have crushed anything between them had I not learnt long ago the risks of my touch. I followed his thoughts and his gaze to the wake of scent that had passed us, then to its owner: another student at the school, who hopefully will pass through life unaware that this event ever occurred.
Jasper closed his eyes, but I could see that it does not help; all that it does is break off one of his senses, one that might possibly give him something to work on in his mind to keep the thirst at bay. I could feel it swelling in his head, filling up his thoughts like, no doubt, the venom filling up his mouth, and I saw him swallow back a mouthful of it. His body, used for so long to being allowed one reaction, struggled now to change. I felt my tongue becoming wet with venom in turn, Jasper’s hunger rolling across me like waves even as he restrained his powers to stop it from affecting the others, and wondered how it was that I so desperately hated the time when it was just Carlisle, Esme, Rosalie and myself - the three others with so little yearning for blood that it made it at least easier.
Behind his eyes, visions played anyway, and I saw them as clearly as must he have done. What it would be like to seduce her away and lower his lips to her throat, to feel her blood run over his lips.
I cannot say what it is that stirs the monsters within us all to raise their heads, only that Jasper had less experience at silencing his. Alice's hand tightened on her husband's; I kicked him beneath the table to remind him of who we are to this town: high school students, albeit unusual ones. A handful of students noticed the movement, and thought it ordinary; I was grateful for even that fragment of normality, another instant when our charade could go on and I did not have to deliver bad news to my family.
"It helps if you think of them as people," said Alice sharply, and I knew that she addressed the creature behind Jasper's eyes. We had long since sworn to remind each other of what our humanity must think: once we were more coy with our words, but by now all of us had become more terse with each other. “Her name is Whitney. She has a baby sister that she adores. Her mother invited Esme to that garden party. Remember?”
She spoke as if it were a question, but I knew that it was an order. She was the only one who can truly control Jasper: he is older than any of us save for Carlisle, and we know it. An army man even before he was turned, and a soldier more thereafter. Perhaps Emmett’s strength would be enough to restrain him, but I would not want to wager the lives of others on that, and it would be impossible to hide in any case. Jasper, though, scowled and withdrew within himself, and we all knew that it meant we were to let him sit in his own silence and to try to modulate our own emotions instead. Let him drink in calm instead of blood.
The flicker of the word Cullen caught my attention; to our surname, at least, I tried to keep myself attuned. I glanced round as if looking in Alice’s wake as she flitted away, and at the same time took in every inch of the cafeteria in that one look. An advantage of our kind to which I would have long since grown accustomed were it not for the hundred views from human eyes that overlapped my own, fuzzy and pixelated in comparison. I fixed my gaze on the newcomer, the recurrent strain that has been bobbing through heads all day long: a novelty, an outsider. Whether their abstract interest was more or less depersonalising than would be, say, Jasper’s thoughts on her, I could not say. With regards to Jessica Stanley’s (a normal girl’s, a thousand peoples’) thoughts that the girl was attractive, but not so much so as to breach the social circle that circumscribed my family, I could not help a flicker of amusement. Appearance had nothing to do with it. Necessity had rather more.
The populace of Forks had, if not grown used to us, then certainly showed a minimum of suspicion towards our behaviours. We were eccentric, with our strange accents and close-knit ways, but in a day that does not think vampires are real we would almost struggle to draw suspicion upon ourselves. Especially with the myths that the Volturi have so lovingly created to mask the signs that might truly give us away. This newcomer, though, I as yet had no sense of; whether she might have too curious a mind, or one too unusual, whether she too would simply write us off as strange and not wish to have too much to do with us or whether there might be some danger in her thoughts. I hoped that she would, like many others, declare us stuck-up and leave us to our own devices. It is safer that way, safer for there to be no humans near us when the monsters start to scream.
For a brief instant, my eyes caught hers. I expect the train of her thoughts to follow, that tumbling consciousness of teenaged humanity or which I have heard tiresomely much and which I yet envy so greatly for its normality. And yet, the unthinkable happens.
There is silence.
In the first instance I rejected the very thought: there are none who are silent in their minds, even in dreams, even in unconsciousness. Even the static of a body living but now longer inhabited, a life no longer retrievable, was not there. It was as if I found myself attempting to listen to a wall, a table, a tree. And that is impossible.
For a full three-quarters of a second I held her gaze, until she coloured and looks away. The flush of blood in her cheeks stirred the monster below, as it imagined bursting capillaries, cutting through the layers of flesh to veins and arteries beneath and drinking deep, but my fascination held it back by spilling across my mind. Her expressions were still readable to me: curiosity, warm rather than wary, shifting to surprise. But more precision that that was beyond me without the words of her mind as guidance. For ninety years I had been used to the double-train of thoughts and words together, until what had at first seemed strange had become a normality, something that I could no longer pretend was not real. Hearing silence from a person was like removing the white noise of everyday life, and it unsettled me.
In the ensuing moments, I felt my thoughts reaching in multiple directions, trying to draw things together all at once and struggling even with the extra space, the extra power, that exists in a vampire’s brain. I heard Jessica saying scornfully that no girl was good enough for me, and the monster laughed at the fleeting remembrances of how easy it would have been to drink and drink again from the girls that have attempted over the years to so much as speak to me. Like the lure of the angler fish, and even now that I had no desire to draw people to me so, I could not cease the effect. Thus I was left, time after time, pushing people away to maintain the safe distance for which they had no thoughts.
From the corner of my eye I now regarded the girl, even as the beast bayed for blood and felt stabs of anger at the leash I kept it on, even as the myriad words of high school students ebbed and flowed against my mind with a thousand thought-fragments tugged me around and begged me to put effort into their completion. Deeper into my thoughts, further into the fields of my mind that so swarmed with the fog of others’ thoughts; I had the strangest urge to protect her, from the small evils that always flutter deep in human minds, from the hunger of my siblings and most of all Jasper, from the monster deep in my own chest even as what might have still been called my heart called for her protection. I did not understand. Perhaps it was her fragile appearance - but then again, all humans are fragile before my eyes - perhaps the frustrating individuality which her mental silence gave her. Even a normal human will in their life encounter thousands of people: transform that life to immortality, and weariness sets in. Finally, someone different had appeared amid the humans whom I walked amongst and yet was forced to separate myself from, and I could not tear my thoughts from her.
To my siblings, I feigned a lack of interest, folding the newcomer into the same category that I placed all of the other students of the school. Too much interest could, after all, be fatal: not that it was ever our intention, but all that it took was one thought too many for an interest to spiral into obsession in our minds, and then the human that had become an individual became a target for the beasts. As if they read our minds as easily as I read those of humans; another reason for me to detest the power that grew into me.
We directed our attentions to our various classes; although I had been through high school innumerable times, and college barely any fewer, there was at least inspiration for my thoughts to be found in the classes which we sat repeatedly. Biology, sadly, was not one of the most interesting for me - it was for their very nature, their very subjectivity, that I found myself preferring social sciences, humanities, arts, where there was always a new point of view, and always a new thought to be entertained or argument to be considered. Biology had fewer such spheres of interest, although I had to admit that the development of population genetics some forty years before had still shown that the sciences could be flexible enough to recapture me.
Others of the class entered; routine, familiarity. I doubted that anything would intrude further upon the structure of life which I had formed for myself, but once again I was to find myself incorrect in such an assumption.
The newcomer entered the room, I allowed myself a moment of sympathy for her in that the only remaining empty chair was next to the one person in the room who could not afford to become friendly with her, and then the fan past which she moved caught her scent.
Out of habit, I was still breathing, and the smell of her skin struck me with more strength than ever a physical blow could have done. Every cell in my body, every venom-hardened cell, yearned for the scent that lingered in my lungs no matter how forcefully I exhaled in an attempt to clear it. It could not have been long, a couple of seconds perhaps. But in every tenth, every hundredth, every thousandth of every second her scent might as well have reached me anew for how it struck me.
The predator roared. It saw its prey, a prey with a scent unlike anything which it had found in the ninety years of its existence. The world shrank into a microcosm of nothing more than the two of them, where one might consume and destroy the other, and in turn that destruction washed over me as my consciousness dissolved beneath the wordless, angry, hungry cry.
My mouth flooded with venom, my throat suddenly as dry as the stone it resembled and as hot as fire, and one drop, just one drop would be perfect enough to tear the world apart to reach. My teeth, my nails, my hands, were not the claws and fangs that might be imagined, but still they were enough, enough to tear her into a million pieces so that I might savour each piece in turn and spread the glory of the taste across an eternity.
But then I looked into her silent eyes, and saw the monster she had called to life once again. Beneath the face that I had come to call my own, behind the eyes that had become golden with the animal blood I forced across my lips, I saw the hunger written as hatred on my face, hatred that she lived and kept that blood within her, that she might make such fire rise in my throat and make my muscles tense in readiness to pounce and destroy what humanity I might have once had just by her mere existence.
As I looked into her eyes, their brown depths, the infinitesimal curve to each millimetre of her skin, the perfect unique imperfections of her face, again I felt the urge to protect her from the darknesses of the world, to lay the world down right and good in front of her, to save her. And in exactly the same moment, reflected in her eyes, I see the very monster that is making her life dangerous to live.
Torn in two, I froze, feeling the world stutter forwards in fractions of a second divided into iterations of unspeakable pain and desire bound together. Then things blurred, fractured, shattering into pieces that I struggled to remember: her sitting beside me, the class, watching the way that strands of her hair moved across her face, seeing the pulse in her throat. Somewhere along the line I held my breath, and then it became easier, though still the lingering traces of her scent in my lungs thrashed and struggled against the years of control that I had fought for.
Once, I had been a human. I clung to the memories, the only ones in my head that were not pin-sharp, like trying to pin down shadows whilst the sun is faded behind the clouds. Over and over I walked among humans and tried to separate myself from them, their minds an open book to me, not clouded as were their words in a layer of deception. Ninety years of knowing humans means that one stray thought is almost always enough. And here before me sat, somewhere beneath the wreathes of her beautiful scent, her glorious blood, the one person in the world whose mind I could not read.
The one person who still held something to discover.
The monster in my head laughs at humans, laughs at what is ninety years gone. Why should I envy them, it asked? For their equality, their contentedness? Why, when I could be so much better, so much more? I could have whatever I wanted, it said; if I want this girl whose mind I cannot read, it is easy. Simply destroy the world, and she will have no choice.
It did not understand that what held me in such fascination, why I knew that the want it felt and that which I did were so different. It was too much, too soon, and for now I was merely captivated by that which I could not understand.
Biology ended, and I fled, albeit at human speed and on a human scale. No humans ever entered the family car, no matter the envious looks it gained, and in the clearer air I was able to empty my lungs and retain some sort of clear thought once again. Somewhere within me was a human need, a human urge to understand and to know a little, what little there is to know. The monster wanted to take, take, take, and there was so much room in my mind for that desire to grow and outgrow itself, the modesty of my normal interest outstripped by it.
The monster whispered with my memories. How easy it is to crush a human skull between my fingers, break a human spine in a single blow, tear a human throat open to reveal the glorious bloodiness beneath.
Alice’s words reverberated in my head, and I forced myself to apply them to the girl. Bella Swan, they had called her. That would make her Charlie Swan’s daughter, the police chief’s daughter. She clearly had friends; already they thought of her often. It was a struggle, and I leant my forehead against the leather of the steering wheel as the thoughts wrapped back. I had a father, I had a mother, I had siblings who loved me and trusted me, and would not want to face the fallout I would create were I to fall from the point on the path which I had reached.
It helps if you think of them as human, she had said.
It helps if we remember to be human, I told myself instead. Without hearing her thoughts, it might even be that I would be the closest to human around her that I had been in decades. And yet she drew the monster from its cave, and the monster was so much stronger than what had been human.
The sound of footsteps outside made my head snap up, and I saw my siblings approaching, fast but not excessively so. Troubled expressions flitted across their faces, suppressed too fast for humans to read but not beyond my abilities, and then they were in the car and surrounding me, the second-hand scent of the school filling the car. My throat flushed with fire once again, and I clenched my teeth to prevent myself from crushing the steering wheel beneath my touch.
They spoke, and I tried to answer. And all the while the monster screamed inside my head.