Nightfall (A Carlisle Cullen / Esme Cullen fanfic, 18+)

CHAPTER TWELVE: ESME

I could barely move now, the pain raging inside me was so bad. It shouldn't have taken me by surprise - I'd had weeks of this gnawing aggravation growing inside my abdomen. But part of me knew I'd drowned out its roaring because... Why had I ignored the pain?

I was aware now that I had not only disregarded the sickness that grew stronger each day, but had encouraged it, even wanted it - this terrible festering malignancy in my stomach. Through the fog of the fever that both burned and froze me, I could suddenly see clearly - the hazy confusion dissipated for a moment, and I knew that I was dying.

"This is what you deserve," said a spiteful whisper in the back of my mind. "Everyone you loved is dead or gone. Best thing would be to follow them."

The voice had whispered to me often since my daughter died. It lurked in the shadows of my mind, hoping to catch me in a vulnerable moment - sometimes dormant for long enough that I started to think maybe I would get better, would get through this. But then it would shock me with the image of my daughter's grave, or scream at me when I'd tried to find peace in sleep. Lately, it had been so insistent, so incessant, that I'd started to accept its venom for truth.

And then I'd seen the angel.

In the moment I saw him, I knew absolutely, and with no hint of self-pity that I truly was dying. His face - pale but perfect in the morning's cloudy shade had been so much sweeter than I'd remembered. I'd thought him handsome in my memories - now I knew that 'handsome' couldn't encompass what he was - utterly, impossibly perfect. There was no other face, no image that I could compare him against.

I'd seen him once before, I remembered - seen him in another moment when I'd been in terrible pain, and I'd spent the years since trying to convince myself that he wasn't imagined. But to see him again today, as death raked her vicious claws along the abscess in my gut, had all but confirmed it - I truly had gone mad. I had imagined him after all. The inconceivably gorgeous doctor with sorrow and sweetness in his eyes was a figment of my fevered mind, an omen of my coming doom.

He was the angel of death. And he'd come to collect me.

My stomach throbbed again, an awful lurching pain that made me double over. I bit my lip hard enough to draw blood, but didn't make a noise - I didn't want my Father hearing me, calling Dr Smith back to witness these final moments.

This was it. Death. The end. And foggily, dimly, though the renewed stupor of the fever, I thought that perhaps that wasn't so bad after all.

If my daughter would be there - if the angel was the one to take me... perhaps it wouldn't be so bad at all.