No Way to Rush a Miracle
This is the study piece I wrote up to detail Carlisle's realization of his feelings for Esme. Here I have also written a lot of what Carlisle saw during Esme's transformation, as well as his development of feelings for her from the day he changed her to the present time.
I've always had the idea in my head that Carlisle would have taken more time to put a name to his feelings than Esme would. I say this piece takes place somewhere between Chapters 15 and 18 of Stained Glass Soul.
There was something about her that drew him in like a moth to a candle flame.
Carlisle hated to use such a comparison, because he was not a moth, and Esme was certainly not a candle flame. He would have never surrendered himself to the level of fluttering mindlessly around her in a circle until she had burned him to ashes. But there was something dark about her, something intensely frightening about being with her that suggested he could have been in danger.
Esme was not dangerous. Even as a newborn vampire, he thought she was almost unnaturally tame. She may have thought her behavior during the first few days had been feral to say the least, but she had no idea. She was nothing like some of the other newborns he had seen. Even in her struggle, even with the animalistic sounds that poured forth from her lips, she was working so hard to hold herself back. He could feel the tension in her slight body as he held her; he was not doing all of the work himself.
She should not have made any apologies for being a burden to him, yet she did this incessantly. Esme was sorry, not because Carlisle had changed her, but because he had selected her to change. What she did not realize was that he would never have chosen any other person to offer this life.
At this point he still had no assumptions for what she might one day become. He had no plan, no clever course of action, no carefully detailed map for her future, be it with or without him. He had been embarrassingly brash in his decisions that night he found her. No normal doctor, no normal man for that matter would have stolen a woman's body from the morgue and raced home with her in his arms, and placed her in a bed, and tried to revive her for hours only to find that there was but one cure to her inevitable death.
No normal man would have bitten her to keep her alive.
She had just been like a little fire on the sheets – so uncontainable even if she was only lying there, still as a paper doll. She had looked so inconceivably small to him. So helpless, so child-like – even more than she had as his patient ten years back. He looked upon her, clearly, under the sunset on the evening he decided her fate, with no council but himself and his rioting conscience to come to this conclusion. It had bothered him that she looked like such a lost cause. Like she was not his property. Like he had stolen her and taken her home and placed her in his bed, even though she had not belonged to him.
This had been exactly what he had done.
Doctor Cullen thought himself a terrible man because of what he did, what he knew he would do. The cascading torment of a sin brewing in his stomach – it was unavoidable at that point. He knew this too well. There comes a moment where the soul knows it will sin, and it simply accepts the stain it will receive. But it never thinks of the consequences. Not until after the deed has been done. And by then it would be too late.
So he helplessly watched Esme's weak young body writhe and whimper through her agony. He watched her, and he was numb. Lost. Disgusted with himself.
But, Lord, beneath it all he was almost...thrilled. Excited. Impressed with his brashness.
For once he had allowed himself to act upon impulse, and it was overwhelmingly electrifying.
He watched her shrieking under the sting of his venom like an infant might have watched a flock of butterflies. With wonder. With still, unmoving, widely opened eyes.
Her hair spiraling out in dark, syrupy curls. Her lips, already full enough, plumpening further like strawberry pillows. Her velvety skin being drained of its flush, the freckles and bruises and blemishes vanishing one by one like tiny shadows of stars fading from a fierce white sky...until he could hold his hand to her cheek and their flesh was the same.
His breath softened as the scent of her blood grew less and less potent, and the scent of his venom changed her, heightened her natural aroma and made it rich, sweet, intoxicating. Foreign. New.
It hit him like the sharp head of an arrow to his belly.
He was watching creation.
It made no sense for him to feel so pleased as he watched this woman suffer. It was like he knew she had a purpose. Even then, he knew he had needed to bring her into his life.
And, shameful as it was, he found such gratification knowing that he now, in a way, owned her. That he himself, Carlisle Cullen, had created her.
There was something indecent and even more thrilling in that he had created a female vampire.
It fascinated him when she opened her eyes and she saw him for the first time with her new eyes. She was afraid, and she was choking back venom because of her thirst. She had thought she had gone mad, and he assured her that she had not. She was uncontrollable but he had controlled her. He had taught her to control herself.
Over time – and such a short time it was, looking back on it – Esme had found a balance in her new life. She had accepted her fate and did not think of her future as bleak. Her eyes were softest scarlet when she looked to him. No longer bloody daggers. No longer staring into his heart with a ruthlessly silent, "How dare you?"
She...trusted him.
And now he had this woman – this strange, intriguing little creature under his care. For the first month or so it was miraculous to hear her light footsteps in the hall, knowing these footsteps belonged to a female. He sometimes had to rest his hand from writing as he listened to her walking about. The sounds she made echoed gently inside of his chest, and when they stopped he realized he was still smiling.
Smiling because of...
Esme.
She was so oblivious to her own innocent seductiveness, and that was endlessly endearing to say the least.
She exhibited such shyness, such insecurity, such dependence, and she always wore her heart on her sleeve. Yet she was still so mysterious in way that plagued him to no end. She was still so much like the sixteen-year-old he had treated a decade ago.
It shamed Carlisle to say that he had not thought anything much about her back then. She had eyes for him, as they all did. So sadly accustomed was he to the sighs and stares that he had long since stopped making note of them altogether. Esme Platt had not been a patient of very special circumstance that caught his attention in any way other than the torment of a somewhat more potent blood-lust. There was pure serendipity in place of a defining revelation. He was charmed by her, but not affected...at least not on that night.
He thought of her often at first, for reasons he did not quite understand. During those days, he dismissed it as the ever-present wish for company. Esme had brightened that solitary stormy night he'd spent in rural Ohio. Carlisle was thankful for this, just as Esme may have been thankful for his stopping by to heal her.
The thoughts of her faded into the distance, just as they did with everyone else. They had to. He had to let go and move on.
It shamed Carlisle to say that seeing Esme's mangled body and face mutilated by bruises in the morgue a decade later had perhaps only shocked his pity, and nothing more. No, nothing more.
But now... Oh, now.
Now she was nothing but perplexing and lovely and delightfully infuriating. A riddle of flashing ruby eyes and foreign pheromones. He had known so many women, both vampire and human throughout his years, but none were this...captivating without reason.
Now he chose to engulf himself in that memory of first meeting the girl. He swallowed and savored every detail of that stormy evening with a magnifying glass of constrained emotion. Every word she had said to him (which had been few) meant something different each time he deigned to ponder it. Now he vigilantly noted those sighs and stares she had been kind enough to give to him. He made a list that was returned to with frequency. He was mildly obsessed with that teenage Esme. Sometimes she would show up in his house, in the form of a treacherously matured woman, and he was reminded of how he had injected such bland beauty into her once homely perfection.
Her eyes had once been the most innocent cedar, a dewy sparkle in the mild light. Her hair had been curled about her brow in fawn-colored ringlets, highlighted by the farmland sun. The tender pout of her ripe cherry lips was trembling. Her skin was like daisy petals; a cascade of freckles for her sunburned cheeks, the tip of her nose glowing a modest pink from crying.
She had been exactly what he had suspected – a child caught in the twisted bridge between youth and womanhood.
And how frustrating it was that she could not remember this one night in Columbus as he did. She had not a wink of significance to recall from the incident. It was natural that she should lose many of her human memories, and perhaps he should have been flattered that she had remembered him at all. But Carlisle could not help the disappointment he felt when he discovered just how little Esme did remember of their first meeting.
But, Lord, she still retained that very spark of innocent youth – that starry-eyed wonder from the throes of her adolescence.
Her eyes were curious by default, always searching, receptive. Her emotions were channeled with crystal clarity through her thoroughly expressive gaze, yet there was a darkness to her eyes that harbored so many secrets.
The sweet perfume of her scent cloistered itself inside his lungs and made him ache. It was fleeting and slightly timid, but so very jarring once he found it. He grasped onto it with needy fingers, but it slipped away from him and left him in the throes of gentlest pain. It was quiet but searing, warm and mysterious, quick to mystify and sometimes quick to scurry away. Just like her.
He had not expected to embrace this...attraction to her at all. His reason for changing her was one of pity and a brash accident – the tender lightning-bolt type of impulse that flares the mind into rushing without judgment – but in the end, perhaps, he had thought the choice over too much.
It was all happenstance that Esme had ended up under the same roof as he, and even more was the joy he felt when she showed no interest in leaving him even after the most difficult weeks had passed. As a newborn, Edward had been so different from Esme during those first weeks – unpredictable, indecisive. Even after the acceptance of his position, Carlisle still felt a tension surrounding his son, like he had been forced to remain in his company, like the boy chose only to stay out of pity for his sire.
But Esme made the choice without making it at all. She wanted to stay with Carlisle. She wanted that. His company. Him.
And it was precisely that – her obvious unshakable devotion to him that inspired a mirrored reaction in his own heart.
By God, he would cling to this woman like a dreamer to a net full of struggling stars.
It positively stung to let her out of his sight.
He was fascinated by her peculiar habits – twirling locks of her hair around her finger, obsessively rearranging curtains or mantle-pieces for well over five minutes, wringing her hands whenever she was asked a simple question, the way she always seemed to be afraid of taking up space. She always situated herself in a way that pulled her limbs in, often hugging herself around her middle, pressing her legs together so tightly that one could see the strain there.
Whenever he smiled at her, she smiled back unfailingly. It was an instantaneous reflex, yet there was something almost like pain behind it. And that was what concerned him.
She possessed absolutely no pride. Esme was completely selfless in every sense of the word. She had a florid capacity to love unconditionally, but she had no outlet for it all. Was it so absurd to suggest that Edward and he would become willing targets?
She deserved a family – and not just a family, but more than that. She deserved to be loved, for she so clearly loved everyone around her. And for that, Carlisle found her achingly attractive, in an ironically innocent way. It was so easy to see that she did not think herself anything special, but that was what attracted him even more.
And an attraction it was, as much as he had tried to deny it. Carlisle tried to deny himself so many things, and with God's help he was nearly always successful in that denial. But this particular attraction had attacked him, and for once he could not deny it.
How had he let this happen?
His only answer was this: Perhaps God was not helping him in this denial.
For the first time in over two centuries, Carlisle thought of how he might love a woman. More specifically, how he might love Esme.
Would Esme still think herself worthless if he had offered her his heart? If he spoiled her, and worshipped her, and took care of her, and forced his love on her every day for the rest of eternity?
There was a compelling concept.
His tortured heart had its share of seemingly endless suffering. Now it had unwittingly collided with the heart of another – an uncontrollable yet tender emulsion.
He always wanted to be closer to her. Because every time he touched her, whether it was accidental or intentional, he felt like he was drinking straight sunshine.
He wanted her because she mystified him. She was so disastrously simple, but he could see the complexities buried deep within, stirring in her eyes.
It was the way she thought so little of herself, the way she was lacking in faith and self-confidence, the way she was so clearly suppressing her passions out of shyness. She was so deliciously dependent, and some part of him selfishly wished to be the one she came running to in all her moments of terror and sorrow.
Some part of him wanted to lift her tiny body into his arms and slowly kiss every precious feature of her lovely face. Some part of him wanted to twist his fingers in her flowing, caramel locks of hair, to touch her frosted lily cheeks, to feel her delicate hands pressed between his trustingly.
Some part of him wanted her to still be his patient. Because if he had her on his examination table, there was no way she could creep away from him. He could stare at her, prod at her, pick her apart until she was no longer a mystery to him, until he had diagnosed her for what she was.
Some part of him wanted to pluck the moon from its place in the sky, too. But some things we want cannot be ours.
Carlisle wanted Esme for reasons he could not name, for purposes he may have known but which remained so frighteningly foreign to him.
Only her. Perhaps that was all he wanted. Perhaps it was even all he needed.
Then he was reminded that he already had her.
She was right there in the next room, humming idly or pacing about, or doing any of the enchantingly odd things she sometimes did. If he wanted, bless his soul, he could walk right in and watch every move she made. He could be her constant witness, her spectral stalker.
Because this Esme, she practically belonged to him.
Yet he had to consistently reassure himself that she would not leave him. She would not disappear. She would not shimmer away into a vapor that he could only hope to grasp.
Esme was not some struggling star in a dreamer's net.
She could no longer die.
He had given her this chance, and by some miracle she had accepted it. Whether this stubborn little seed of affection would one day blossom into true love, he could not yet know.
Because Carlisle knew as well as God Himself that there was no way to rush a miracle.
