Twilight belongs to Stephenie Meyer.
Thank you to all reviewers.
LAST TIME: Turning off the car, I sat in the driver's seat as the night grew steadily darker, trying unsuccessfully not to think.
Carlisle came home just after midnight, and found me sitting in the car. He didn't say anything, and seemed to be avoiding thoughts about the man from the woods. Opening the passenger door, he slid into the seat and sat there with me. Neither of us moved, we simply sat until the night faded into dawn.
Finally breaking the silence, Carlisle's words were soft, carefully worded in an attempt to not set me off.
"The hospital gave me the day off work." He kept his steady gaze on my face, but I did not turn to face him, preferring to simply stare out the windscreen as I had been all night. Realizing I wasn't going to respond, he sighed, and launched into a speech that he must have prepared before he got home, because I hadn't heard him think about it.
"Edward, I am not disappointed in you. You did very well to keep your thirst in check. You act far more mature than you are, and I need to remember that you are only three years old. I am proud of you for realizing that the bloodlust would be too much for you, and staying in the car. It takes a great deal more to admit your shortcomings than it does to state your strengths. I must admit I was prepared to save you from yourself if you had tried to attack the injured man, but I didn't need to. You did far more than I had any right to expect and you need to realize this. The man is fine, and he is truly grateful to us for saving him."
Taking my eyes from the windscreen, I turned to face him. "You aren't disappointed in me?" I whispered, voicing my fear that he would resent me for my cowardice.
"Edward, once again, I could never be disappointed in you."
"Carlisle," I said, and he eyed me warily. Yes?
I paused, and tried to frame the question. "Could you show me what you did to stop the bleeding?"
His face broke into a wide grin, relieving the tension as he launched into an explanation of the circulatory system.
I'd thought good and hard about Carlisle's medical skills when I had arrived home. The idea of saving people, despite being designed to kill intrigued me, and ideas began to form. I knew that I would never be able to be a doctor, perpetually looking like a seventeen year-old, but I liked the idea of knowing that I could save someone if I wanted to.
Carlisle and I discussed medicine for the rest of the day, eventually moving into the house so he could show me some pictures in one of his medical textbooks.
For a second time, I felt a connection with Carlisle, one that ran deeper than the fact that we both abstained from human blood. I felt . . . proud to think that Carlisle, so like a father to me, had stuck with what he believed in for hundreds of years, despite people trying to convince him otherwise. His strength was far more than simply not killing humans; he also tried to atone for the sins of our kind by saving humans. No one forced him to do this, but it was a choice he had made alone, and in that decision he segregated himself from everyone else in the universe. Never before had there been someone with as much care and compassion as Carlisle Cullen, the vegetarian vampire doctor.