Edward's Diary

Yes

Dear Diary,

        I can never forget the time when I was going through it: the change. It had felt like nothing else, like a sword slicing through my skin again and again till it had drained and pierced me from head to toe. A fire had raged in my blood, in my head and under my skin, and it had been depressing to know that it only seemed to accelerate. Screaming did no good. More than anything, it tired you out. And that was not effective, because if your hands went lose, you could not grip anything to soothe the effect of the pain, and then it felt more than deadly. 

        Katherine was doing exactly that: I could hear her in the library upstairs. It had been about thirty six hours since it had started, and there were some more to pass. Carlisle was giving her morphine in doses that had to be unhealthy, but the venom was burning it off too quickly for it to actually do anything. Mark had went ballistic when Katherine finally started screaming, but had calmed down once he accepted that doing something else was not possible. Now, he was sticking to her side, trying to somehow make her listen to him through the pain. I knew it would be insignificant: she was in too much agony to notice anything else right now. 

        I watched the blood color the water red as it mixed with the latter and ran down the drain. I felt proud of myself, really. If this had happened a few years ago, I was sure I would not have been able to control myself. Today, I had not only helped Carlisle deliver Katherine’s children, but had also sewed her up while Carlisle had worked on the little ones. After changing my blood soaked shirt, and taking a quick bath, I started for the basement. We were keeping the babies away from Katherine’s screaming for now.  

        Everyone in the family was there when I entered, hovering over the little musketeers. I saw Bella and Esme with the eldest (Ed, who had been the first to come out) while Leah and Rosalie were fawning over the middle one (Edd). Seth, Jacob and Nessie were crooning to the little girl (Eddy, and cue eye roll), who had been, for the time being, kept in the incubator. It turns out, Carlisle’s theory had been right. He had predicted that one of the babies might not get enough nutrition inside Katherine’s little frame, so it could be a little weak. 

        Katherine’s little girl was more human than her brothers. In just a matter of two days, where her brothers had grown to the sizes of three months old, she looked like a little newborn, just over a few weeks. She couldn’t yet open her eyes entirely, but I could tell they were her mothers’. She had also had trouble breathing, so Carlisle had set her up inside an incubator to provide her with a strong support system. Don’t tell anyone I said this, but she looked like a small, hairless kitten, really.

“Hey,” I walked up to Bella, where she was cradling Ed, singing to him softly.

“Hi,” she whispered.  

Ed, who had been staring intently at Bella all this time, now turned his gaze to me, and whimpered. 

        That was another thing I was amazed at: the bond between a child and its parents. Katherine’s kids were not big weepers, but even they knew that none of the people coddling them right now were their parents. Every time someone came in, they became anxious. Granted, they’d not taken a dislike to any of us in particular, but they’d also not accepted us wholly. The only time when they’d ever been really calm since being born had been when Mark had come in to see them. 

        He’d balked at the sight of his daughter until Carlisle had assured him that there was no real danger to her. He had then turned his attention to his two sons, who had watched him wide eyed and with intense fascination the entire time he had sang to them. They had recognized his voice from when they had heard him in the womb, and they had naturally known that this man, Mark, was special.