AN: SM owns characters. Some places do exist; all other coincidences are just that.
Chapter 1 - Changes
BPOV
"BOUNCE!!!"
"Sync?!?!? Oh my God, how have you been? Is it really you? What have you been up to? I miss you. Are you coming to visit soon? Oh please tell me you're coming to visit. Wait… Renee, how's Renee? Oh my God, please tell me she's doing alright, Sync, talk to me."
::sigh:: One story at a time, I'd rather not repeat myself too much.
"Breathe honey, slow down." I said chuckling. "I can only answer one question at a time. Now what do you want me to answer first?" Alice took an audible deep breath; I could almost hear the wheels turning so I just waited.
"How have you been my dear? I've missed you"
"I've missed you too Alice, more than you know. Actually that's kinda part of why I'm calling. I've missed you, I've missed Rose, I've missed Boston, and I've just missed everything. I'd kinda like things to be like old times again."
"Do you mean you're coming to visit?" Alice squealed out excitedly. Here goes nothin'.
"Actually, I'm moving ba…."
"YIPEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" O-M-G, wait did I really just say that in my head? Wow, I need to get out more. Anyway, I REALLY need to get her to stop before my ears start to bleed.
"ALICE, A-L-I-C-E!!! BOUNCE!!!"
"Oh, oh, sorry, B, this is amazing, what do you mean you're moving back, when, how, why? Have you called Rose yet? Tell me everything."
"HAHAHA, OK, another deep breath Alice dear. Have you have any coffee today? Never mind. I don't want to know the answer to that. OK, so here's the short story I'm not needed here anymore so I was getting homesick for the old days, I put in a couple applications at the hospitals up there and I did a couple phone interviews. I got a call this morning that apparently while they were calling in my references yesterday they heard everything they wanted to hear and offered me the position. I accepted. And No, I haven't called Rose yet, she's next on my list."
"Oh my God Bells, that's fantastic. Wait, WHO? Who offered you the job?" I could practically hear Alice bouncing in place on the other line, crossing her fingers and squishing her little face into the cutest little contorted image I've ever seen on a full-grown adult, well as full-grown as you can get being Alice.
"Tufts/NEMC"
"YIPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE"
OK, this time I just pulled the phone away from my ear and let her use every last breath she held in her very large lungs. Surprisingly large lungs for such a tiny human being if you asked me, but that's besides the point. After a few seconds she stopped and I put the phone back to my ear.
"You ok Hun?"
"Holy lightheadedness Batman"
And I was done for. That line was my undoing. I laughed so hard I actually fell on my ass, right in front of the hospital. I rolled over slightly so I wouldn't hurt my already bruised tailbone on my shoes and in the process whapped my head into the bench. There was a low-pitch resounding 'Bong' and lemme tell you, it hurt. But I was still laughing, and also now crying. The perfect blond head and piercing blue eyes of Dr. Cullen now came walking over and moved my hair around in the spot I was holding inspecting for injuries I was pretty sure were minor. With my track record though, who knew. I couldn't stop the tears or the hysterical laugher that was now causing me to hiccup and yip. I looked up and Dr. Cullen was just shaking his head at me.
"Breathe Bella. Deep breaths, come on, do them with me. In, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. In, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6."
I wasn't hiccupping anymore. I could hear my name faintly from the phone in my hand. I raised the phone up to my ear.
"Alice, I'll call you back in a little bit."
"OK, I'm on my way to go pick Rose up for dinner"
"Perfect, I'll call you back and explain everything on speaker. Love, bye." And hung up the phone.
"Well Bella, looks like you'll have a bit of a knot on your head but no bleeding. Did you sprain your ankle when you fell?"
"No Dr. Cullen, I was trying not to sit on my shoe and re-bruise my tail-bone after last week's fiasco."
"Bella, how many times do I have to tell you to call me Carlisle? Oh Dear, What am I going to do with you, or rather, what am I going to do without you?"
::gasp::
Nobody knew yet, I had sent in my applications over the last few weeks and I'd gotten the call this morning. I'd had my resignation letter in my bag since that first application went out ready for the date to be filled in and handed over. I had done just that only minutes ago. But Dr. C, I mean Carlisle, was just walking into the hospital. Today was the only day during the week that I didn't work with him, how could he have known? He must have seen my confusion because he looks at me and offers me a hand up to help me onto the bench.
"Bella dear, you've work beside me since the day you arrived here five years ago. I've never had an ER nurse who was as eager to learn, quick on her feet and who anticipated not only what I was going to do next but what might be going on with the patient. I won't lie and say that I wasn't sad to get the call yesterday asking about you as a nurse, your skills and work ethic." Bells of recognition were going off all over the place. "But I also can't begin to think that working in a small hospital in Forks is challenging enough for you. You are our ER nurse. You went and got your flight-nurse certification on your own after that patient 4 years ago didn't make because we didn't have the resources and you didn't want to ever have to wait for another crew to be found if the chopper was ready and waiting. Every time we have a patient with a disease or issue you haven't seen much you scour the medical journals until you know almost as much about the possible treatment options as I do. Fact of the matter is, if you stayed here, you'd continue to get broken bones, lacerations, heart attacks and the random car or hunting accident for the rest of your career. You're much too good at what you do to sit around and twiddle your thumbs." I could only stare at this man in shock, I hadn't really thought about it like that. We'd never talked about any of this. He'd told me I was doing well, or congratulations for a job well done. I had more freedom than Jessica or Lauren, but I'd never expected this. Really what it came down to was that I was just getting stir-crazy now that my parents didn't need me anymore. I needed to be active, I needed to have my hands on something, and I needed to be busy. And the knitting Grandma Swan had started me on when I moved back sure wasn't doing the trick anymore now that every kid in forks had a full supply of baby blanket from yours truly.
"Bella, you're not the kind of person or nurse who can sit by and let life just float by, you need things to do to keep your mind active and alert." Wait, didn't I just say, I mean, think that?! "So when my old friend at NEMC called me and asked me unofficially if I had worked with you and what I could tell them… Well, in short, I told them if they didn't offer you the position it would be negligence to all of their future patients."
I just sat there in total awe. I'm pretty sure my mouth had fallen to the floor and I had not blinked in minutes. I was absolutely floored.
"Wow"
"I seemed to have surprised you a bit my dear" He actually chuckled at me. I didn't know what was more surprising. The chuckling or what he said.
"Um, well. Yeah."
"I hope nothing I've said is offensive or embarrassing."
"Um, not in the way you might think. I, um… well I… I guess I just… what I'm trying to say is..." Bella, just take a big fucking breath and spit this out, geez. "Thank you, I guess I just never realized that anyone cared or noticed or anything."
Carlisle turned to face me completely and put his hands on my shoulders.
"Bella, we do notice, and what's more important the patients notice. They feel safe with you to not only take care of them, but to know their history inside and out and to keep us docs on our toes. That's something really special. That's something that can't be trained. And it's really hard not to notice when the kids come in and they don't want their moms or dads, they want you Bella. Or Mrs. Tate last month who fell and broke her hip, she didn't call the paramedics, she called you at home. She trusted you to help her and keep her safe and get her the help she needed without causing extra pain. Honestly, I think your ability to connect with patients is why Lauren and Jessica have been so difficult to deal with for so long, but that's another story. Anyway, you will be missed greatly, but it's time for this town to let you spread your wings and fly. And I can honestly say that Boston and everything it has to offer might be just the ticket for you."
"Thank you Carlisle, I really appreciate everything you've done for me over the last five years. I can't even begin to repay you."
"That's where you're wrong. All you have to do is go out there and be yourself. That will be all the repayment I could ever ask of you."
"Thank you Carlisle"
"No, Thank you."
Then he got up off the bench and walked right into the front entrance to the hospital leaving me to think about what he said. I guess that explains why I didn't have to go in for a face-to-face interview. I'd heard of things like that happening in really rare cases. Carlisle said that he talked to an old friend so they must have trusted each others' medical judgment, but now I feel like I have HUGE expectations to live up to. I don't know how I'm going to do this. But I had to. It didn't matter, Renee didn't need me anymore, Charlie didn't need me. There was nothing holding me here and I would much rather be in Boston.
I took another couple deep breaths and thought about what needed to be done. I'd handed in my resignation to the department head at the end of my shift today. She gave me a huge hug and said good luck. So I've got two weeks left here. OK, Then it's off to Boston. My new position as ER nurse doesn't start for 3 weeks so I have a week to get there and settle in. I needed to find a place to live. I knew from living there in college that you couldn't look really far in advance for apartments, but 3 weeks to find an apartment or condo while still living here for the majority. Oh God. I needed to call Alice and Rose and see what they thought. I didn't have much to take with me. A couple suitcases worth of clothes and probably half a dozen boxes that I could ship up but finding a place to live was going to be huge. I didn't remember enough about the downtown area to be able to find a decent place to live. We always tried to live near campus which was out further on the T. The hospital was practically downtown.
OK, I won't panic. I reached for my phone and dialed Alice again.
"Hey Bells, I just picked up Rose we're driving to go pick up dinner but I can't driving a talk, new law, so here's Rose. "
There was some shuffling.
"Hey there Sync"
"Hey there yourself, Kanga" our old nicknames didn't come out often, mostly when we were feeling pretty nostalgic, but this was one of those times.
"HAHA, I never will get sick of hearing that one. I love it, gotta pay homage to the crazy-ups right?"
"Ha, something like that. So did Alice fill you in so far?"
"Well, she told me that you miss us and you're moving back. Oh and that you got a job at our hospital already, bu…"
"WAIT, WHAT? Your hospital?"
"HAHA, Hun, calm yourself. She said you got a job at Tufts/NEMC, right?"
"Yeah, that's right"
"Baby, we both work there already. Alice works in ICU, I work in the NICU. You're joining our big happy family."
"Wow" Hmm, I feel like I've said that word a lot today, maybe I should get one of those thesaurus one-a-day calendars.
"So are you going to fill us in on details? The why, when, and hows of the situation?"
"Well, the short version of why is I'm just not needed here like I used to be. And as I told Alice, I miss the two of you, and Boston and the way things were. When is… actually, Rose, am I on speakerphone?"
"No, gimme a second." There was a bit of shuffling then a click "OK, now you're on speaker"
"Hey Bella, I'm here now too, so what were you getting ready to say?"
"Rose asked when and how I was moving, That's the part I really wanted to talk to you guys about since you've been living there for so long and have more resources than I could ever try to remember. The thing is, I'll be up there in 2 weeks and my job starts in 3."
"HOLY FUCKSHIT!!!…"
"ALICE" ::Smack::
"Ow, what was that for?"
"If you don't watch the road right this minute, you're going to pull over, I'll take your keys and you won't get to see Bella when she gets here."
"::gasp:: You wouldn't dare!"
"I would, now, I talk, you drive!"
::giggle:: Oh how I miss these girls. I've needed this. I've needed this for a long long time. And now I'm just two weeks away from having my two bests back. I don't see how things could get much better than this.
"Bells, you still there?"
"Yeah, I'm here. So the part I need you guys to help with. I don't wanna end up with a crappy apartment like we did our sophomore year. I mean hell. I don't know if I wanna go with an apartment, townhouse, condo or what so I need to get on top of the search and I need help, but I still have two more weeks here and I'll only have a week of freedom when I get there so I need to find a good real estate agent in the area who I can work with and I didn't know if you guys could help me figure out areas to look and to avoid like the plague. I want to spend as little time as possible in the hotel. So do you guys have ideas about agents and areas to live in?"
There was a few seconds worth of silence where all I could do was bite my lip in anticipation.
"Bells hun, we can definitely round up a good agent for you in the next couple days so you can start looking. No problem in the least. Have you already gotten a hotel or flight out here or were going to drive or I dunno, what plans have you made hun?"
"Nothing yet, I'm walking home from the hospital now and just handed in my two-weeks. So I was going to try and put together a plan of action but wanted to talk to you guys first. I'm not going to bring my truck. It won't make the cross-country drive and I won't really need a car in the city anyway. So I figure I'll hold off for a while and if I need one I can go out and get one. So I was planning on getting a flight out there two Saturdays from tomorrow, I've got a couple suitcases worth of clothes and I'll have a handful of boxes I figure I can have shipped out and store somewhere."
"Bella, I want you to send me your flight info and then you're going to stay with Emmett and me till you find a place. You're not wasting your money on a hotel when I live right on the T and I've got a spare room that goes empty all the time."
"Rose, are you sure? I don't want to put you guys out, I mean Em has only met me once and…"
"And Em loved you, He went around for weeks talking about his new little sister and how he had to protect you from the skeez-balls."
"Bella, you'd better do this, she's not going to take no for an answer. Plus it'll give you more time to find the right place for you instead of settling on something cause it was available and you were freaking about time. You know how you get."
"Alright alright. Thank you Rose, I'll email you both my flight itinerary as soon as I've got it. I love you two, I'll see you soon. Enjoy dinner."
"Love you too babe, Oh and Bells, ship those boxes to my place whenever you get them packed. We'll stash em here till your ready for them."
"OK, thanks girls, see you in two weeks"
"Bye." And now the journey begins, home to book a flight and pack up my life.