(A/N - I do not own The Twilight Saga or the characters in any way; all rights are reserved to Stephanie Meyer)

New Light

Edward's P.O.V

It had been after I had changed Bella did I see my father in a new light. It had been after I let her sweet blood flood my mouth did I understand Carlisle a little better. Only when I saw my soul mate living through the last few breaths of life, did I see Carlisle more clearly than I had ever allowed myself to before.

I felt disgusted with myself, disgusted with the way I had treated Carlisle whenever he decided to change someone – Esme, Rosalie, Emmett – through all those changes, I had despised what he chose to do, but now when I think that I chose to do the same for Bella, I realised his intentions were right all along.

Especially the night he changed Esme.

I was so unreasonably angry with him that night. My words were unfeeling and cold towards the one man who had vowed to save me and care for me. I shouted at him as he carried the writhing woman in his arms and placed her on the kitchen table, her broken, bloody body curling and releasing through waves of excruciating pain. I could see him wince every time I allowed my words to hurt him.

He tried to tell me, he tried to explain through my anger why he decided to change her. I remember he told me she was too young to die, she hadn't really had a chance to live her life, but his thoughts, yes, his thoughts betrayed him. They were partially true, of course, these were Carlisle's thoughts, but despite his best efforts to hide his true reasoning from me, they slipped out in little drips.

Carlisle loved her. Carlisle Cullen, the vampire, loved the broken human girl he held the hand of as she gritted her teeth in agony. I thought he was selfish; he was selfish for stealing her right to die, for giving her a life full of bloodlust and uncertainty. However, I didn't realise at the time how selfish I would become, too. How what he did in desperation was also done in love for a woman he truly never forgot nor let go of.

For me, a chance to love had slipped away from me when Carlisle's teeth sunk into my neck in the disease ridden Hospital in Chicago.

Carlisle was different. He sat there for three days, unmoving, hardly breathing, as Esme went through the transformation of mortal to immortal, his hands inside of her curled fingers the whole time, his lips moving slightly in words of comfort every time a moan left Esme's tight lips.

It was me, who in the end, landed myself in the same position as my father; my hand in Bella's, my voice low and soft as I comforted her through the pain.

Esme wasn't just someone Carlisle hadn't forgotten about. Esme was his soul mate. And although my words were unforgiving, Carlisle didn't reprimand me because he knew too, although his thoughts were muddled, that what he did to Esme that night was undoubtedly selfish of him. Like the true gentleman he is, he admitted what he did was selfish, he told me in confidence as Esme slipped into unconsciousness, his words low and tired, sad in a way I would never truly understand, but as the days went on, my anger – however much I hated it – began to dissolve, and I began to truly see the love he held for the human woman whose life had been a series of terrible and disastrous events.

And I remembered now profoundly, more than ever before, the last words we had on the topic of Esme's change.

"Do you love her, Carlisle?"

He looked at me with his darkening eyes, the years painted on his face as he answered me with the honesty of a child. "I've never stopped loving her."

As I watch Bella and our daughter today, I realise I've seen Carlisle in a new light, for he is not as different as me. What we did, we did for love, nothing more, nothing less, it was just a feeling, a word, that has ultimately changed our lives for the better.

A/N – A small one shot for you. Edward in my eyes, I believe, would have probably had this thought after everything he went through in Breaking Dawn. Edward is presented in Eclipse as being against the turning of Rosalie and I think this would have been his attitude to Esme's change and any others until fate forced him into the same position as Carlisle.

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Thanks, Katie1995 :)