Mad Dashes of Hope (Twilight, Esme/Carlisle)
Title: Mad Dashes of Hope
Rating: PG
Genre: Romance
Fandom: Twilight
Character/Pairing: Esme/Carlisle
Summary: After her death, Esme finds her place in the world. (Pre-series)
Disclaimer: Twilight © Stephenie Meyer. No copyright infringement intended.
Notes: Written for the weekly summer challenge- images- over at the_circlet. Based on this image. (A girl with long, red hair, and a tattoo of spiraling flowers on her shoulder and upper back area, sitting on a cliff with her long, grey silk covering half of the rocks, and below her a black forest with white clouds and a white bird, and a little ways off, a sea.)
*
After the fall, it was easier to live life. Ironic since she was now dead.
It felt surreal, those first couple of weeks. She thought she had died, and gone to Heaven, but no, Carlisle set her straight- she had died, but he had brought her back to life.
At first she was angry. She didn't want this, who was he to meddle in her life like this? But then the anger had ebbed away and was replaced with something else, a foreign emotion to Esme. It was weeks before she could figure out what it was.
Somehow, the anger she had was replaced for a warm affection for Dr. Carlisle Cullen.
*
After the fall and the searing pain of transforming into a vampire, Esme had decided to look on the bright side of life. Fate had given her a second chance, albeit maybe not in the way she ever thought possible, but what was done was now done.
Unlike throwing herself off the cliff, there was no turning back from this.
*
The hardest thing to get used to was not having the need to sleep anymore. Esme found herself staring at eternity of long nights ahead of her.
She had asked Carlisle what he did when the rest of the mortal population was sleeping. He replied that he often took the night shift at the hospital, or if he couldn't for fear of arousing suspicion, he took to reading and re-reading his books in the library, or practicing fencing with Edward, or writing in a journal she noticed him carrying around, a leather bound book that looked to have blank white pages.
The trick, he had told her, was to take up a hobby. Or find something to do that was time consuming and rendered you unaware of time passing.
*
She didn't know why she came here. It was more an impulse of her feet than a true desire to revisit the crumbling catastrophe her life had become and what led her to her new life.
It was a bit dark out, light filtering through the earth, but wasn't quite dawn yet. The clouds were grey and overcast, the woods below shrouded in an eerie fog. For a minute, she was afraid she'd trip and fall into her death below in the wilderness before she caught herself and remembered she couldn't die anymore (well not in normal ways).
Sitting on the topmost cliff, her legs dangled over the edge, her black dress billowing over the jagged rock, was how Carlisle found her one random October morning.
He didn't say anything or reveal himself for quite some time, but she felt him approach and gaze at her back.
“It's a stunning view, isn't it?” she said, feeling the need to fill the silence between them.
“Yes, it is.” He approached her slowly, almost cautiously, and she got a foreboding sense of doom in this place, just a wiggle of nervousness that something bad was about to happen. “Edward and I were thinking of packing up and leaving.” It was a question, and she wondered why she wasn't included in that equation.
“Oh.”
He came to sit beside her, his hand almost touching hers, but not quite. “Yeah, it gets to be dangerous if we stick around for too long, and we've already been here for a while.”
She nodded her head mutely, not knowing what to say. Though Carlisle saved her life, and she felt gratitude and love for him, she couldn't ask to tag along with him as well.
She was about to say something along the lines of 'Thank you,' and 'Hope we cross paths again,' to show him that she understood and didn't expect to pack up and move with them. (It would be asking for too much.) But her turned to her, staring intently into her own eyes, and instead of saying all the things she felt she must, she just gave him an inquisitive look.
“Esme, do you wish that I didn't save you?”
The question caught her off guard. Where had that come from? “No. Honestly, it's not something I never thought possible, but when I...killed myself, I was in a bad place. I gave up on everything, my whole life. I guess you could say the death of my baby clouded my eyes to everything else, and death was the only solution. But..that was then. This is my second chance, second chance at life, and sure it's not perfect, and we have to hide our true selves, but it's not death, and most people who kill themselves never get this second chance.”
And she felt brave enough to lay her hand atop his.
He looked down then, and smiled, just a quiet twitch of lips. “So, where do you think we should move?”
And though they were sitting right in the thick of something beautiful, and at the same time, sinister, surrounded by only muted monochrome colors, and early birds flying high overhead, Esme saw what she didn't see when she jumped in what seemed a millennium ago: color in her world.
Even more A/Ns: So the minute I saw this picture I was like ESME! I so totally need to write about her. And then I made the cliff that she jumped off in the book be the cliff that is in this picture (is that even a cliff? *doesn't see it very well*). I don't know if that is believable or if it even works, but well, just couldn't get the idea out of my head.
Rating: PG
Genre: Romance
Fandom: Twilight
Character/Pairing: Esme/Carlisle
Summary: After her death, Esme finds her place in the world. (Pre-series)
Disclaimer: Twilight © Stephenie Meyer. No copyright infringement intended.
Notes: Written for the weekly summer challenge- images- over at the_circlet. Based on this image. (A girl with long, red hair, and a tattoo of spiraling flowers on her shoulder and upper back area, sitting on a cliff with her long, grey silk covering half of the rocks, and below her a black forest with white clouds and a white bird, and a little ways off, a sea.)
*
After the fall, it was easier to live life. Ironic since she was now dead.
It felt surreal, those first couple of weeks. She thought she had died, and gone to Heaven, but no, Carlisle set her straight- she had died, but he had brought her back to life.
At first she was angry. She didn't want this, who was he to meddle in her life like this? But then the anger had ebbed away and was replaced with something else, a foreign emotion to Esme. It was weeks before she could figure out what it was.
Somehow, the anger she had was replaced for a warm affection for Dr. Carlisle Cullen.
*
After the fall and the searing pain of transforming into a vampire, Esme had decided to look on the bright side of life. Fate had given her a second chance, albeit maybe not in the way she ever thought possible, but what was done was now done.
Unlike throwing herself off the cliff, there was no turning back from this.
*
The hardest thing to get used to was not having the need to sleep anymore. Esme found herself staring at eternity of long nights ahead of her.
She had asked Carlisle what he did when the rest of the mortal population was sleeping. He replied that he often took the night shift at the hospital, or if he couldn't for fear of arousing suspicion, he took to reading and re-reading his books in the library, or practicing fencing with Edward, or writing in a journal she noticed him carrying around, a leather bound book that looked to have blank white pages.
The trick, he had told her, was to take up a hobby. Or find something to do that was time consuming and rendered you unaware of time passing.
*
She didn't know why she came here. It was more an impulse of her feet than a true desire to revisit the crumbling catastrophe her life had become and what led her to her new life.
It was a bit dark out, light filtering through the earth, but wasn't quite dawn yet. The clouds were grey and overcast, the woods below shrouded in an eerie fog. For a minute, she was afraid she'd trip and fall into her death below in the wilderness before she caught herself and remembered she couldn't die anymore (well not in normal ways).
Sitting on the topmost cliff, her legs dangled over the edge, her black dress billowing over the jagged rock, was how Carlisle found her one random October morning.
He didn't say anything or reveal himself for quite some time, but she felt him approach and gaze at her back.
“It's a stunning view, isn't it?” she said, feeling the need to fill the silence between them.
“Yes, it is.” He approached her slowly, almost cautiously, and she got a foreboding sense of doom in this place, just a wiggle of nervousness that something bad was about to happen. “Edward and I were thinking of packing up and leaving.” It was a question, and she wondered why she wasn't included in that equation.
“Oh.”
He came to sit beside her, his hand almost touching hers, but not quite. “Yeah, it gets to be dangerous if we stick around for too long, and we've already been here for a while.”
She nodded her head mutely, not knowing what to say. Though Carlisle saved her life, and she felt gratitude and love for him, she couldn't ask to tag along with him as well.
She was about to say something along the lines of 'Thank you,' and 'Hope we cross paths again,' to show him that she understood and didn't expect to pack up and move with them. (It would be asking for too much.) But her turned to her, staring intently into her own eyes, and instead of saying all the things she felt she must, she just gave him an inquisitive look.
“Esme, do you wish that I didn't save you?”
The question caught her off guard. Where had that come from? “No. Honestly, it's not something I never thought possible, but when I...killed myself, I was in a bad place. I gave up on everything, my whole life. I guess you could say the death of my baby clouded my eyes to everything else, and death was the only solution. But..that was then. This is my second chance, second chance at life, and sure it's not perfect, and we have to hide our true selves, but it's not death, and most people who kill themselves never get this second chance.”
And she felt brave enough to lay her hand atop his.
He looked down then, and smiled, just a quiet twitch of lips. “So, where do you think we should move?”
And though they were sitting right in the thick of something beautiful, and at the same time, sinister, surrounded by only muted monochrome colors, and early birds flying high overhead, Esme saw what she didn't see when she jumped in what seemed a millennium ago: color in her world.
Even more A/Ns: So the minute I saw this picture I was like ESME! I so totally need to write about her. And then I made the cliff that she jumped off in the book be the cliff that is in this picture (is that even a cliff? *doesn't see it very well*). I don't know if that is believable or if it even works, but well, just couldn't get the idea out of my head.