So QuillAnnie suggested this idea to me and asked me to write it back in July 2014. So all credit for the idea is completely and utterly hers. Apologies to her that it's taken me so long to write it.
Prologue
"Carlisle," her voice was quiet, soft, and her heartbeat was fast, terrified. He looked round slowly at the human he'd fallen deeply in love with despite his best intentions, "I'm pregnant."
"Carlisle," her voice was the same as it had been all those years ago except there was now a bell like quality and there was now no heartbeat accompanying it. He knew something terrible had happened before he even looked at her face, "Bella's missing."
Those two times were the only times Carlisle was sure that his heart wasn't as still as it was meant to be and that he actually needed to breathe as his breath stopped in his lungs.
The first time: he wasn't scared of being a parent, he and Esme already had one son (adopted) called Edward - a musical boy who loved cars and literature. No, it terrified him because Vampires, what he was, weren't meant to have children. That was something he knew he gave up all those years ago when he had been turned, something Esme knew he'd never be able to give her and, despite her desire to have her own child, she had loved him enough to stay with him anyway something he was grateful for every single day. She loved him despite that and the fact that he was a vampire, she hadn't run for the hills, she hadn't cringed away from him, she had simply looked at him with a look almost akin to pity and wrapped her arms around him tightly.
That second one? The daughter, the child that he thought he would never have, that he thought wasn't even possible, was gone, taken by some unknown person to some unknown place with a trail didn't exist. She was physically only five years old. They didn't know if they'd ever see her again - that one sentence changed everything.
Both those sentence changed everything really: about their lives, their family, even what scared them.