Wow! The first Twilight story I've ever written that wasn't making fun of it. And it came out pretty well! Quick backstory: I was having a terrible night trying to sleep, and it was all HER fault. The character of Miriam Grey kept popping up every time I started to drift off. I knew she wanted me to write a story, so I did. I tossed around a whole bunch of ideas for which fiction I should used and Twilight seemed the best. I used Carlisle's character; he's the one I don't hate as much. I tried to represent him the best I could, but I only read the first two books and Ann Rice-like qualities kept creeping in, so I apologize.

This is a one-shot. As to when this takes place... I'm not sure. I think from the ending it's Pre-Twilight. Otherwise it's AU, like I originally planned. Well, technically I didn't plan anything... but maybe now that this is finished I can get some SLEEP. Maybe now Miriam will leave me alone, thank you!

Signed, sonorahugagi

Disclaimer: I don't own Twilight, and I'm glad I don't. Let Stephanie Meyer keep her crappy writing, I'll just take the storyline, thank you. However I DO own Miriam Grey. Nobody touch her, or I'll hunt you down!

Miriam Grey

Doctor Carlisle Cullen had been a doctor for over 300 years. You could say he'd just about definitely seen it all when it came to people and their injuries. Things still surprised him on occasion, but only in the sense of some mortals: "Oh! Haven't seen that one in awhile!"

Yet in this century, everything was changing. Because humans evolved like the medicine science he was so fond of: once they made that one discovery, hit that small stride, there was an explosion and the whole human race was changed. Take the 1940s, for example; the discovery of penicillin accompanied changes in governments, thoughts, personal interest; people began campaigning actively for world peace, suffrage for all peoples, and the betterment of the whole human race. The second half of the 20th century held some of his best memories, he couldn't deny that.

He couldn't say exactly when he noticed, truly noticed, that the 21st century was different entirely.

But he did remember when he realized he hadn't seen as much as he thought.

It all began with the car crash.

The man had been 35-ish, from West Virginia. He had no name because no one could find his wallet. He'd been driving nearly non-stop since leaving the West Virginia border and had seemed very skittish and nervous about something, a young woman working at a gas station had reported, the last to see the man alive. The young woman insisted that he'd drove up with a girl, but could not confirm it because when he sped off there was no one in the passenger seat, and she hadn't seen the girl get out of the car. There were no backseats. Carlisle had checked this himself when he arrived to help them extract the body; no backseat, and no evidence anyone else had been in the car. The girl wasn't on the security cameras either. The woman admitted she could have been wrong.

It was the busier highway that day just outside Forks, and even though the car had gone off into the trees, a lane was closed and the cars were barely getting by. It was raining lightly, and the sun was setting. The body had just been coaxed from the wreckage, a mangled heap. The autopsy was going to be tough, he could already tell. He waited for the boys to load the body into the ambulance before trailing back to his car to follow behind.

That was when he saw her.

It wasn't for more than a few seconds and it wasn't more than a glimpse, but it stunned him to a stop.

The first thought was that she was a garden statue, life-like and unanimated. Yet that was silly; she was standing on the other side of the highway peering between the cars, that was all. The second thought was how strange she appeared against a canopy of trees behind and cars in front, like a girl lost in time. She couldn't be more than 18. A blue and white checkered blouse was half-buttoned with a thin white t-shirt underneath. Jean cut-offs and worn white sneakers were the only other clothing in the light mist. Her skin was a light cream, almost like his own but not as white. All this he took in in a second. It was her eyes, her hair, that captivated him... the same exact color of gray. Someone must have taken charcoal and mixed it with as much gray as they could before painting her with it, it was so smooth on this human statue. But she wasn't a statue; a moment after he saw her those eerie gray eyes moved and met his. Her lips pulled back into a smile. A large truck passed between them, and when it had passed she was gone.

Carlisle had returned to his car, started it, and was half-way down the road before the thought even struck him of how odd that had been. There one second, gone the next. She wasn't a vampire... something about the skin tone, he could tell. But he couldn't recall a heartbeat, or any sound from the girl at all. Nothing except her strange appearance and those eyes... it had been years since he'd looked upon anyone with a look like that... but something told him whole-heartedly that the girl was human and had hitched a ride in the truck, which would explain a great deal of things.

He tried to rid the mystery girl from his mind over the course of the evening, trying to sort out the papers for the autopsy, but for some reason she popped up at the strangest moments. To make the matter worse, he thought he saw her. Leaning against a tree outside the hospital, arms crossed and one foot crossed over the other, staring with that disturbing statue-like appearance. Carlisle had been in the middle of a sentence to a young nurse when he glanced up and happened to see her. She flashed the same smile and he glanced back at the nurse to make sure he hadn't stopped talking, only to look back and find she was gone again.

Who was this? Why did she seem to be stalking him? No matter how much thought he put into it, he could make no connections to himself and the girl. He had never seen anyone like her, to be truthful, except maybe the Volturi... only she was far too young and not a vampire. So what was she? It hit him when he prepared to make the first incision in the autopsy. The lady at the gas station had spoken of a girl in the man's car... yet she mysteriously disappeared and wasn't caught on the security cameras. Another mysterious young girl appears at the scene of the accident, and again at the hospital where the man's body is being kept. They were all connected. He was sure of it. But again... what did that make the girl? And what was the man to her?

"You think far too much, Doctor."

He stiffened, the scalpel still poised above the body. A light, soft female voice was speaking in his ear... yet he was the only one in the room. Carlisle put the scalpel carefully back on the counter. Who is this?

"Come outside... I'll tell you face to face, I prefer that."

He obeyed without a fuss, making up a quick excuse to a nurse startled to see him leaving, his mind carefully kept blank. Whoever was in his head did not need to know his thoughts, if they didn't already. Taking the back door outside, the cool breeze known for Forks brushed his skin lightly. A large storm was coming... there was plenty of moisture in the air. His eyes snapped to a tree just in front of him. The girl was leaning against it in the same manner she did out front, only the smile was still on her face. She beckoned with a finger and turned to walk deeper into the forest. Carlisle followed silently.

"You know, you're a hard man to talk to when you never come out of that building." She complained, her voice floating over her shoulder. It reminded him of Alice's voice... but he was captivated, again, by the girl's color of gray in her hair. It was almost colorless, and astonishingly smooth up close... in fact, the more he looked, the more everything about her seemed to blur and smooth together so she appeared more like a charcoal painting than a real person. So who was this girl?

They had stopped walking. The girl was gripping the backs of her arms lightly, staring up at the moon shining faintly through the clouds. It was full, ironically. Carlisle didn't take his eyes off her.

"I'm not in your head anymore, so just chillax." The last word rolled off her tongue in some sort of manner that seemed funny, because she giggled and repeated it. Twice. "I didn't want to do that in the first place, but you people are always so... stuck indoors. What is with that? No one likes nature anymore..." There was a brief pause and Carlisle struggled with forming precise speech, but when he opened his mouth to just blurt the human saying, she cut across him. "So what are you exactly? You aren't human... you saw me on the side of the road. No one's supposed to see me. I'm real good at that." The girl flashed another smile when she turned to face him but her expression was serious.

Any sort of words he'd been struggling with died on his lips when their eyes connected for the third time. He was absolutely certain that this girl wasn't a vampire, or a human, or a shape shifter... but neither was she anything beyond ordinary. She could have passed for any other teenager in the world if not for her hair color, and those eyes... those eyes were ten times more ancient than the body they possessed in one instant, and young, wide-eyed innocence the next. The subtle signals of both ordinary and extraordinary he was receiving made him dizzy, and a little sick to his stomach... things he hadn't felt in centuries, not since being turned.

"I don't know what you're--" Such a subtle change in her face, only a vampire could have noticed, but it made the rehearsed speech vanish from memory. "... Vampire."

A smile swept across her face, brightening her whole form. "Ah. Of course... should've guessed. Perception ten times faster than normal people. I haven't met a vampire in a long while, no wonder..." She chuckled and let the sentence hang unfinished, turning her gaze back towards the sky. The signals lessened somewhat. It gave him the opportunity to collect his thoughts and he gladly took it.

"You know what I am, so what are you?" Carlisle finally said in a calm voice. He struggled with maintaining his normally calm composure when she glanced at him again, chuckling quietly.

"I'm afraid the question that should be asked is who I am, rather than what I am. Because what I am is rather apparent, don't you think? A girl standing with a doctor in a forest behind a hospital." Her lips broadened into a grin at the slight confusion on his face. "Have you ever seen that V for Vendetta movie? I admire V, I really do... his logic is impeccable. I half-expected you to use that logic yourself, Dr. Cullen, but since you didn't... care to try again?"

"Who are you?" He muttered, feeling a slight flush of blood rush to his face.

"Miriam Grey." A hand extended, palm down, like the queens of old did when their subjects kissed the rings on their fingers, for him to shake. He stared at it, for who knows how long, before she finally cleared her throat and dropped her hand.

"That's not really your name."

She stared at him squarely again, and the dizziness returned; but this time he refused to meet her eye and continued to stare at her hand. How could there be definition but no lines to hold it in place? Rain on paint, that's what it was, that's why everything on her was blurry. The garden statue popped back into his mind; a freshly painted garden statue left out in the rain.

"So what if it isn't? It's what I go by. I could have been born 'that stupid mistake child' as my name, but that doesn't have to be what I go by. And it is Miriam Grey, by the way." Her sentences were jarring against each other as if he'd stumbled across some great secret. It startled him. She didn't seem like the type... but then again, he barely knew her.

"How old are you?" It slipped before Carlisle could stop it, something unusual and startled him as much as it seemed to draw her back into the composure she usually held.

"18. And this is the part where you say how long have you been 18? And I say, awhile." She giggled. "But you wouldn't really get that unless you were an outside observer, so I'll just stick to the simple answer that yes, I'm 18. Your original estimate was right." She whistled low after a pause. "I'm sorry, I think that went right over your head."

"What are you?" He said loudly, angrily, dizzy as he glared up into her eyes. He wasn't going to take any of these riddles anymore!

Miriam ignored the question, like he'd never spoken. Glancing at her shirt suddenly, she reached into a breast pocket and pulled out a tattered old wallet. Carlisle could smell the blood on it; still fresh. He knew what it was.

"I think this belongs to your mystery man." She said quietly, and held it out for him to take. He flipped it open and found a bloody driver's license: John Paul, 34, born the 31st of November. He glanced up sharply.

"Where did you get this?"

She lifted a shoulder in a slender shrug. "I took it after he crashed. John... well, John could never handle the messages from anyone very well. He had psychic abilities, see, never knew it either... the ghosts liked to torment him when he was little. I tried to tell him the messages weren't all that bad, but he couldn't handle it. Couldn't handle mine either." Miriam glanced up, walking closer to peer over his hand at the license. Carlisle listened intently; there was no sound coming from her at all. Not even the sound of breathing when she talked. "He went crazy... drove half the country to get rid of me. Ended up seeing a ghost in the road, really seeing, for the first time and crashed. Ironic, isn't it?"

Carlisle glanced up at the girl with a growing horror, but she just shook her head and closed the wallet. "It was only a crash, that's all. He fell asleep at the wheel. That's all they need to know."

"Why were you so persistent?" He managed to choke out, fear growing more from how he was reacting than what she was telling him. These raw emotions... he hadn't felt anything like this in some time. Miriam Grey made things different somehow... amplified emotions dulled by time, by the venom that changed him.

She shrugged again. "I sometimes like to give... messages to people. Random little things most of the time, I don't know where they come from... but sometimes they're more than that." Miriam turned her gaze to the ground for the first time, strands of gray hair falling over her shoulder. "Sometimes I have to give them to people... and sometimes they have to act on them. And sometimes they need encouragement to act on them. That's what happened to John Paul." She took a breath (though he heard nothing except the sound she made herself) and sighed, walking back to her spot and looking up. The moon was completely hidden behind clouds now. "Though now I'm thinking maybe it wasn't meant for John. Maybe he was only supposed to be the carrier to get me to find the real person."

Carlisle studied her silently, struggling with several different thoughts and the onslaught of emotions. "Do you think that's me?"

Laughter erupted. "You? No, no... I was merely curious, is all. I was studying the cars when we first met to find a connection with any of the people. You just saw me. I thought that was strange." She flashed a smile and glanced at the sky. "But if you do see anyone that might fit the message, tell me please. Because I can't move on until the message is given."

Several different questions joined the thousands that had appeared after first meeting Miriam Grey. What was she, what was with the messages, what about moving on, how could she really be 18, was she a different species of Earth, was she even from Earth, above all, what in the world was she?! But the only one he could voice was the simplest one of them all: "What's the message?"

She didn't appear to hear him at first. An unsettling silence descended on the area where they stood. Miriam continued to gaze at the sky, her expression blank. She had become the garden statue again. Just when Carlisle had decided to try and voice the question again, she spoke. "Save the Lilly. Destroy the Orchid. That's all there is to it." She lowered her head slowly before turning to him. "That's the message. 'Save the Lilly. Destroy the Orchid. That's all there is to it.' Don't ask me what it means, I don't know." She paused and walked over, lifting a finger to tilt his chin up. Their eyes connected; and this time, he clearly saw the time that has passed since her eyes first opened. "You be careful, Doctor Carlisle Cullen. Hard times are coming for you and your family." Her lips pulled back into a smile, exposing rows of perfect teeth -- no fangs. "That's my message for you. And now if you'll excuse me... I must be off, not much time left really, probably shouldn't have hung around so long. Gotta pass on that message, eh? I'll see you around."

Before he'd gotten a complete hold on what she said, she was back several feet away from him; she flashed a smile and her features once again blurred and smoothed together. And then Miriam Grey was gone, and he was all alone in the forest.

He chose not to think about anything that had happened. Carlisle made his way back to the hospital and into the autopsy room. He completed it in five minutes using full speed, and dropped the wallet on the evidence table, labeling it 'found in stomach'. No one questioned him -- who was going to? Doctor Carlisle Cullen was the best doctor this hospital had!

Time wore away most of the shock, and the questions, as it always did and will for as long as he survived.

But he always looked out for a carrier for the message. And he always looked for the Lilly and the Orchid.

Because the 21st century was different. And he was afraid... afraid that the girl who calls herself Miriam Grey would come back. Because the garden statue, with all its beauty, was above all the strangest thing he'd ever seen. And he didn't want to see it again.