These Our Actors

Rosalie

Beauty never slumbers;
All is in her name;
But the rose remembers
The dust from which it came.

AUTUMN CHANT, Edna St. Vincent Millay

March 2005
Denali National Park, Alaska

I was never supposed to be needed.

Well. Not really. Certainly there were always those who looked at me and thought what they felt was need. But I was - I am - a work of art. You may call that vanity. I call it truth: I am a work of art, beautiful to look upon, but no more necessary to life than a painting, or a statue, or an exquisite jewel. I was made to be loved, praised, adored, coveted, perhaps even worshiped. But I was not made to be needed.

So, really, is it any surprise that when my moment came, when for once in my life another person was depending on me for her very survival, I turned out to be a complete and utter failure?

She lay in the bed before me, small and frail and deathly pale, her breathing shallow and her limbs utterly still. She'd survived, but I could not yet say if she would live. I had known her such a short time, but I'd seen her living, seen her blurting uncomfortable truths and babbling away about the things she loved, watched her hands flying and her eyes shining in excitement as she spoke. If you had asked me to describe the ideal addition to our family, I don't think I ever would have described her: some geeky, awkward, hopelessly naïve teenage girl who dyed her hair red and thought it made her interesting, who thoughtlessly quoted poetry at any given opportunity, who made terrible jokes that only she and Alice really understood. I would never have described a girl who could not see her own beauty, could not understand why she was loved, could only ever see herself as a burden. If pressed, I think I would have described someone much more like myself. In retrospect, if that had been the girl who had stolen Alice's heart, I think I would have loathed her.

In any event, there she was, Bella Swan, the little sister I'd given up wanting long before she came. Just hours before, I had nearly been torn in two trying to protect her - my wounds still ached, though they'd already mended - only to watch in horror as she cut herself and bled to lure my would-be murderer away. She'd done something to him. Something impossible. And it had cost her: in that moment, she had fallen to the ground, seizing and foaming at the mouth. She had been warned not to use the powers that had seemed sure to kill her, and she'd done it anyway.

For me.

She'd sacrificed herself for me.

I'd raced to her side as soon as I could. I'd plunged my teeth into that pale, soft flesh, again and again, trying to get as much of my venom in her as I could, fighting against the call of her blood. She'd grown still, and quiet, and her wounds had started to mend, but she was too still, too quiet. She should have been screaming her throat raw, ranting and babbling, incoherent from pain. Instead, she just lay there, even as we regrouped, even as we took her and her father to safety, even as we tucked her into bed. If I hadn't known any better, I would have said she was sleeping. The very scent of her blood was shifting, and I could practically see her body changing, moment by moment, but her mind...

I feared her mind was gone. It was the only explanation that made any sense. There was nothing left of her to respond to the pain, and so she just lay there. Maybe she would lay there forever.

There was nothing I could do about that.

All I could do, really, was stay with her. Talk to her. Read to her. She liked that - when she'd been in the hospital after her last seizure, I'd brought her Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and she'd been almost like a child, shyly asking me to read aloud and do the voices. I'd been powerless to resist. I didn't have Harry Potter here. I wasn't sure there was any fiction here she'd like. But I'd found an old volume of poetry, and I supposed it would have to do.