Couldn't resist this plot bunny … I think the unwritten rule of fanfic is that if you can't find the story you want to read, you gotta write it yourself. (On that note, if there already is a story like this - point me at it! I want to read it!)

What if – Alice showed up a bit later in the story? This is Pre-Bella. At least for now.

Not mine. Don't own them.

Forks, WA

Carlisle was in a good mood. It is said that moving house is the second most stressful experience for humans, and he thought it applied to vampires as well. In fact, considering that vampires didn't really attend a lot of funerals, it could possibly qualify as the most stressful. Change was stressful – human or not.

Esme always tried to look at moving as an new and challenging interior design project, but he could tell that constantly leaving her creations behind was hard on her, particularly the gardens. The sad fact was that a properly landscaped garden often took five or more years to mature. Rosalie, too, seemed to find moving stressful. New places meant new unpredictability, more elements out of her control, and like every other type of pressure, she reacted badly to it. Snappy and irritable and always on edge. Thankfully, his two sons were less affected. Edward moved in his own little bubble – often setting up his rooms exactly the same in each place. Emmett was so gregariously happy that his surroundings seemed more like a prop to him than anything else. One place or another – it was like baseball or soccer. As long as he was playing, he was happy. Emmett's moving stress was Rosalie.

As for himself, he also did not like uprooting. After almost three hundred years, moving every decade or less, he could see the appeal of the Volturi's approach – crafting a home to suit oneself perfectly. Anchoring oneself in a certain place. Building a life. A true home. To sit under the giant oaks that you planted as seedlings. But, he always told himself with a sigh, there were dangers with that as well – a certain stagnation of thought and development. As long as he chose to mingle with the human population, adaptability was paramount. In short, even if he didn't like it, he accepted that moving was probably a good exercise for all of them.

They'd been in Forks a month now and things were settling down. The kids had started high school with minimal fuss. The teachers didn't seem too excruciatingly boring or nosey, no one had started any fights (Rosalie) or ended them (Emmett). Esme had taken advantage of a string of cloudy days to investigate the shops, and had come home with some new plant hybrids that were supposed to do particularly well in the Forks' overcast environment. Even Edward (Edward!) had mentioned that the local coffee shop had some half decent live music, and had heard a rumour there was a famous musician somewhere under all this greenery and cloud who would play occasionally. As for him, the hospital had welcomed him with open arms. It was nice to find a place where people still associated nosiness with rudeness. No one had commented on his strange paleness even if they had noticed it. Even more unusual, there was a refreshing lack of ego to the hospital staff. If anything the aging doctors were glad of a young, brilliant newcomer with the energy they imagined they used to have. If Carlisle had to sit through a few more 'in the good old days' stories, it was a small price to pay, and certainly better than the petty backstabbing and snipping that frequently occurred in larger hospitals.

Yes, Carlisle thought, pulling up to his parking space, it was a good day.

His peaceful state of mind was broken by the large number of emergency vehicles flashing lights in the parking lot. Forks only had two ambulances, but there were four currently, which meant two had been summoned from nearby towns. A large traffic accident, he summarized, striding through the main doors a bit quicker than usual.

"Dr. Cullen, thank god you're here." The head nurse, Lotti, who wore her greying hair like a muffin on top of her head, greeted him. Lotti was experienced, but the little emergency room wasn't meant to hold the four gurney's and the dozen or so people milling around on top of the usual small town emergencies. The noise level itself was distracting. For a second he was pulled back to the ER stint he had done in Chicago during the nineties. Now that was stress. He forced himself to focus on the present.

"What's going on?"

"Car accident – a van transporting mental health patients from Spokane down to Seattle got sideswiped by a semi. Truck driver is over there – seems mostly okay, just shaken but someone needs to check him out. Dr. E and Dr. Franks are busy with two patients who were bleeding out when they got here, and no one's had a chance to evaluate anyone else." She ran out of breath and just looked at him.

"Well," Carlisle said, "then I guess that's where I'll start."

He rarely raised his voice, never barked orders at people – yet as soon as he stepped into a room he was a force of calm authority that people just instinctively responded to. Already the emergency room seemed quieter, more organized.

The first person he checked was clearly a guard. Sitting up, head held stiffly. Whip-lash most likely, Carlisle deduced after a few pointed questions. Could wait. Next up was an older woman, a patient at the mental health institute he surmised, based on her clothing and the ceaseless rocking. The patients' charts had been in the van and had been transferred with them in the ambulance. Parkinson's her chart said. Possible dementia. Examining her briefly he could find little more than a few scratches from broken glass.

The next two were similar, some significant bruising from seatbelts and a cracked rib that would have to be watched, but nothing too pressing. He moved onto the fourth.

'She's nothing more than a child,' was his first thought. Indeed, she was tiny. Appearing even smaller curled up as she was into a tight ball. He glanced at her chart. Mary Brandon. She was 13 - older than he had thought from his quick glance. He started his check. The obvious injury was to her right arm – twisted and bent it was definitely broken – potentially a spiral fracture. No response to his voice. There was blood dripping down her face, although she gave no indication that she was aware of it. He checked her pupils – her eyes, the pale ice-blue of a husky's, stared unblinkingly but the pupils dilated and contracted. He reached out with a hand to push the short dark hair out of the way, fingers searching for the injury. He found it, high on her forehead, just below her hairline. Would probably need stitches. Also a CAT scan to check for a concussion just to be safe.

"Mary? Can you hear me?"

No response. Frustrated, he turned back to her chart. Hard to diagnose anything when she was so drugged up. His eyebrows rose as he noted the long list of anti-psychotic drugs she was on. It looked like she was being treated for everything from schizophrenia to depression to ADD, and on top of that a dose of tranquilizers that he'd hesitate to give to a fully grown man. Her chart looked suspiciously like someone had simply thrown everything on the shelf at her. Carlisle hated that sort of doctoring. He flipped back a few more pages looking for her parental information – ward of the state was all that was listed. Had been since she was six years old and admitted with childhood schizophrenia. Well, he thought, convenient.

Without conscious thought, his free hand drifted back down to the girl's fingers, lightly brushing them, seeking to give whatever comfort he could. He was surprised to feel a response, a slight twitch. He glanced down to find her ice-blue eyes struggling to focus on him.

"Hey there," he said in his most reassuring voice, crouching down to her eyelevel. "It's alright, you're safe. There was accident, but you're safe now." He held her undamaged fingers lightly in one hand, the other hand reaching again to smooth her hair back. Her eyes blinked once and he was surprised by what he saw in them. Recognition.

Her lips moved, and it took Carlisle's vampire hearing to make out the words exhaled on the softest of breaths.

"It's you."

Carlisle had never heard such a mixture of hope and relief as in those two words.

He picked up her chart and signed his name as her physician.

"You seem distracted." Esme ran her fingers through Carlisle's hair as she leaned over his shoulder, glancing at the computer screen. Carlisle caught her fingers with his and spun around to better see her wife. God she was beautiful. Intellectually he knew their looks never changed and so he should be accustomed to them – but to him she was like a sunrise – glorious every time he looked at her.

She smiled as if he knew what she was thinking. "Actions speak louder than words," she murmured. In response he pulled her onto her lap, almost tipping the chair over and sending them both rolling across the room.

"These new-fangled chairs," Carlisle muttered in a decent impression of Dr. Franks, as he rolled them back towards the computer. Fingers stroking his wife's side until she wiggled in his lap. "I apologize my Esme, I didn't mean to ignore you."

Esme turned to face him, catching his chin in her fingers, giving his face a gentle squeeze. "Don't be silly – I'm not a plant that requires your attention," she smiled to take the sting out of her words, "I was just wondering if I could help. What is it?"

With a sigh, Carlisle turned back to the computer screen, debating telling Esme. He loved her incredibility ability to give, her generosity of herself. He hated to take advantage of it, and even more he hated when she got hurt.

"It's this girl at the hospital," he began. "I can't explain it, but it's like … well it's like she's somehow connected to me."

"Is she sick?"

Carlisle hesitated, then nodded. "Very. They think it's schizophrenia. It's definitely something. She's 13 – she's got no one. But when she looked at me, it was like she knew me. Like I was someone to her."

"Poor girl. Maybe you've treated her before, when she was really little. That's why she seems familiar."

Carlisle shook his head. "I thought of that. But her name – I've never had a patient that matched that name, not in the last 13 years. It's possible I saw her so briefly I never knew her name – but it seems like … well that I should know her well."

"Maybe you treated a relative then? What's her name?"

"Alice. No wait. Mary Alice Brandon." Carlisle frowned at his unusual mistake.

"Alice." Esme said. "Such a pretty name. A lost Alice, who fell down a hole and then couldn't get back home."

Carlisle squeezed her hand, but this time it was Esme who was staring distractedly out into the distance, and Carlisle knew that in her small, brave way, she had already taken this little girl into her heart.

"We have to help her, Carlisle. We have to try."

The Spokane patients were being prepared to continue on to Seattle. The less seriously injured were going by van. One of the patients had bled out on the operating table and died, the other had survived the operation and was being transferred to Seattle General's ICU. The Fork's hospital just wasn't equipped to deal with such significant injuries.

"I'm not releasing her." Carlisle said simply to Dr. Franks.

Dr Franks, the senior doctor on staff was a bear of a man, who in his younger days had been a feared competitor on the Lumberjack circuit. He sighed, running his hand through what was left of his greying hair.

"We're not a psychiatric hospital. We don't have the expertise. What you are suggesting, you know as well as I do that taking a psych patient off their meds is no small matter. It often takes months, if not years to find a balance in medications. We could be undoing a lot of hard work."

Carlisle snorted – an odd sound from the usually preternaturally refined man and Dr. Franks' eyebrows slid together. "Assuming," Carlisle continued, "that they've found a balance – which since she is currently on over 30 different types of medication I highly doubt – she's had a concussion. Its near impossible to determine what if any damage has occurred when she's so drugged up – furthermore, she has a bad break in her right arm, and its irresponsible to administer painkillers to someone who is already on such a drug cocktail."

"Have you spoken to her regular doctors?"

"Yes," Carlisle said shortly. "They couldn't remember the reasoning for half of the drugs she's on– and the other half were prescribed to address the side effects of the first half. Do you know how rare childhood schizophrenia is? How it's almost impossible to diagnose in a child as young as six because the brain just isn't developed enough? And furthermore," Carlisle flipped a few pages back in her chart for show – he had it memorized after all – "her original symptoms aren't anywhere near conclusive, even for an adult."

Dr. Franks eyed him curiously.

"How do you know so much about a rare disorder?"

Carlisle suddenly remembered that he was supposed to be a young surgeon. He thought fast, but not fast enough. "Dr. Phil?" He offered, grimacing as the words left his mouth.

"The good doctor hmmm?" Dr. Franks chuckled. "Well … lets just keep that one between you and me and stick with DSM."

Dr Franks took her chart, weighing it in his giant hands. It was ridiculously thick for a thirteen year old girl. "Situation Normal All Fucked Up," he muttered quietly. "I don't envy those guys their jobs. The human brain – well – lets just say I'm happy being an old fashioned sawbones man."

He handed the chart back to Carlisle.

"All right Doogie," Carlisle winced at the nickname that had become increasingly popular over the last two decades, "she's yours. While I don't anticipate anyone's going to be screaming over getting this poor child back, let me know if anyone starts pressuring you. You've got two weeks. Let's hope you can help her."

AN: So is this anyone else's cup of tea?