Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns all.
Rated M for several reasons.
Chapter Twenty Four The Preacher's Son
EsPOV
Edward is going through one of his 'needy' periods so Bella has dragged him off into the Canadian wilderness for a day or two and Em is out of town attending to some family business so, as the woman on watch so to speak, I persuaded Rose to come and help me out in the garden, I think she found it surprisingly enjoyable.
She is much more comfortable around me now and though we've never talked about my story since, she was sincere in her thanks for my choosing to share it.
I'd like to tell her about Carlisle, I think how we came to be might give her the confidence to move forward with Em, but I don't want to push and ruin the amazing progress she's already made. One day though, I'd like her to be as happy as I am.
And of course I want my 'big brother' to be happy too.
So I was more than pleased when she asked me how Carlisle and I met.
I imagine she is curious about him, though the rest of us have come to spend more and more time with her he has been conspicuous by his absence for the most part.
...
Like everyone else I did not find it easy to wake a vampire and as I had been brought up in a good Christian household, I found the things I wanted and was capable of doing were anathema to me. It was a strange time. Alice and Jasper were my salvation, policing my every move so that I did not do something I would abhor and helping me through the echoing chasm that was the hole my baby's death had left in me.
I did make mistakes. Can you call a human needlessly slaughtered a mistake? Jasper says that because of what we are, how incredibly alien we are to what we were, how hard we try to be better, that we can. But I am still not sure. Because unlike Edward I still believe that I have a soul and if I have a soul then I am still capable of committing a sin.
So I tried, and I still do, to be good. And it does get easier as time goes on. For most of us.
Jasper was an incredible Doctor and because we had no need for money in order to survive he was able to take his skills and use them on the poor, the people most in need and least likely to be helped. So we travelled, a lot. Staying for a while in small communities like the one I grew up in, helping people where we could, a 'Hail Mary' for our inner beasts. I quickly became his nurse and midwife, something about my past making me oblivious to any blood involved in nature's regeneration process. A gift from God for all my efforts perhaps.
As the world changed around us we changed too, putting down slightly longer roots, using lawyers to establish identities that we could have continuity under. We stayed longer in each place and we were able to travel 'legitimately' to other countries.
We were in a small town in Maine when I met Carlisle Cullen, the Preacher's Son.
He was incredibly beautiful for a human, tall and strong with a crown of golden blonde hair and eyes of the most vibrant blue. And such a good man. I was immediately drawn to him, not that we ever did more than share shy smiles when we met. I used to follow him, on sunny days, watching from the shadows as the light turned his golden countenance into a halo.
...
She snickers and I laugh with her.
"Alright." I admit. "I was smitten and possibly the first ever female stalker, but he was gorgeous, inside and out. You would have been too."
...
His father was our Preacher and not exactly the most godly of men in my humble opinion, he was a little too concerned with his place in the community than my puritan streak was comfortable with, but his son more than made up for his shortcomings and was universally adored.
There was something of a competition going on amongst the unmarried women of the parish.
He seemed sweetly oblivious but nevertheless my dead heart would clench every time I perceived that he favoured someone. If he danced with someone overlong at a party, or if he spent too long helping out on a particular father's farm.
I was in my own form of happy hell.
I was alone at our house, tending my garden when he arrived unexpectedly, an injured child cradled in his strong arms.
"Is Doctor Whitlock here?" He called urgently as he emerged from the trees.
"No." I cleaned my hands on my skirt and hurried forward. "He and Alice are visiting friends. What's the problem, can I help?"
"Please Esme." He asks, rushing toward me and laying the boy, Danny Ives I note, down on the grass. "He fell from a tree in the yard, I think he hit his head."
I check his pulse and loosen his clothing, deliberately ignoring the blood oozing from his head. He's blue, too blue and I can hear the air struggling to get past the obstruction in his airway. Hastily I snatch him up, squeezing around his body as Jasper taught me and a hard lump of candy shoots out from his throat like a ball from a cannon. Air rushes in immediately and Danny hitches in a breath, and another, and another.
"Oh thank god." I whisper, laying him back on the grass and his chest starts to rise and fall steadily.
"Amen." Carlisle murmurs and our eyes meet over Danny's prone form.
...
"It's like a Georgette Heyer novel." Rose giggles, not unkindly.
"I know."
...
And then he smiled and I was done for.
So I muttered something about fetching water and escaped into the house to gather my scattered thoughts.
Outside I could hear Danny coming round and Carlisle explaining what happened, and in the distance Danny's heavily pregnant Mother hurrying through the trees toward us as fast as she could.
I glanced out of the window, preparing to go back out, which is when I realised how brightly the sun was shining.
And how much I was enjoying its warmth as I planted my new bulbs.
I could not go back out there and I did not how much damage I had already done.
"Carlisle?" I called instead. "Could you bring him in here, into the shade?"
He did so immediately bringing the boy into Jasper's consulting room and setting him on the examination couch.
Mrs Ives burst through the door a moment later.
Jasper's room is incredibly dark with thick nets so that he can treat patients when the sun is shining, thankfully.
I was a nervous ball of tension as I bustled around seeing to everyone, Danny's father and Mrs Ives's sister had also arrived, and I dared not look at Carlisle.
What had I done?
Mentally I was already preparing a list of the tasks I would have to perform in order for us to make a quick exit, Emmett would be so disappointed, he loved it there..
And I have never been as appreciative of Alice's gift as I was when she and Jasper pushed through the door a moment later . . . .
"I am so sorry." I kept apologising, pacing the parlour like a caged lion as the others discussed what to do.
"Esme, please." Alice finally sighed. "Sit down."
I obeyed and took up twisting my hands together instead. I was not so much dismayed at my stupidity as infuriated that it would mean I would have to leave Carlisle.
"I didn't sense any shock in him." Jasper insisted. "He 'felt' perfectly fine."
"I had a vision." Alice confessed. "As soon as he decided to bring the child here."
"What?" I almost demand.
"I don't know where we were or how far in the future it was but Carlisle was one of us."
"Oh lord." I groaned, dropping my head into my hands. "What have I done?"
"It isn't set in stone Esme." She pointed out.
In the end we decided not to leave straight away, Alice insisted that she had no visions that indicated that Carlisle was planning to tell anyone what he must have seen.
So the following morning I dressed in my finest and borrowed the car to go to church. Alice refused to tell me if she saw anything.
He smiled at me as I took my seat, a little more intimate than our usual shy exchanges, but that was the only change.
What was unusual was that he sought me out at the end of the service and walked me to the car. I did not need Jasper's gift to feel the waves of jealousy crashing against my back.
He thanked me for saving Danny's live, offered up a few bits of small talk and then told me he found me incredibly beautiful before flushing a delicate and very attractive shade pink and hurrying away. I did not need the car to get home, I could have floated.
And when I arrived I made it quite clear that we had to leave. Right there and then.
...
"There's an awful lot of running away goes on in this family." Rose snorts with mild disgust.
"Love is terrifying." I point out. "Especially when the object of your affections is at risk from your very existence. It takes an incredibly strong person, I think, to fall in love with a human and be determined to find a way to make it work for both of them."
...
We Whitlocks are a family in every sense of the word, even without the blood bond, so of course they rallied to my decision and though I felt like I was losing something else that was an integral part of me we were gone before the sun rose again.
The 'Platts' travelled for a while before settling in a new community in Colorado.
And life went on.
Emmett even started his own mining operation.
It was six months later as I was shopping in town that a familiar scent reached me.
Carlisle.
I should have left but instead I found myself stalking him again.
I quickly learned that he was passing through on his way to live with relatives in California, intending to stay for a while and find work. I longed to ask him why, to offer him a room at our place instead of the rat infested dungeon that he had rented. But of course I didn't, what I did do however, was decide that though I would regret it after I would follow him while he was here and store up as much of him as possible for the future.
I didn't tell the others though I am sure Alice must have seen something.
He struggled to find work, just as everyone else did but eventually he found something in the mines.
...
"Please tell me you didn't?" Rose laughs.
"Of course I didn't." I giggle. "What sort of obsessed stalker do you take me for? Besides, they wouldn't let women work in the mines in those days."
...
He seemed so down, or perhaps that was just the exhaustion and poor diet.
I started leaving him food parcels in his room while he was underground, wrapped carefully to keep the rats out, it used to take the poor man forever to break into them.
And I used to shamelessly listen to his prayers before he went to bed each night. For his family, his co-workers and theirs, and for me, the beautiful angel who sparkled in the sun.
It filled my heart with love and simultaneously broke it but I couldn't stay away.
I was becoming something of a masochist where that man was concerned.
The community was no stranger to mining accidents and the work that Jasper was able to do for the poor miners who wouldn't normally have been able to afford aftercare was incredible. To see them walk again from simple rehabilitation when once they would have been confined to a chair . . . .
So the day I felt the earth shake and knew there was a mine collapse is they day I almost died again.
I knew as I ran that it wouldn't be Emmett's, unconcerned about profits his mine was the safest in the valley. No, it was the mine Carlisle worked in I was concerned about.
Alice, Emmett and Jasper found me digging and pitched in without question, nevertheless it was hours before we found the trapped miners, only one of them clinging tenaciously to life.
I accepted that night that some things are just meant to be.
Jasper bit Carlisle, because I couldn't, and three days later he woke to his new life.
...
"Wow." Rose breathes, enthralled.
...
We moved north to British Columbia, somewhere wild and remote for a newborn to adjust.
Jasper had always suspected that we carry over our strongest traits as humans into our new lives, some of them manifesting as gifts. And Carlisle's compassion and goodness as a human had clearly come with him. He was for more controlled and calm than most newborns and my heart swelled with pride for him.
With me he was once again shy, occasionally reaching out to touch my hand and tell me quietly that I was his beautiful angel.
Jasper was highly entertained and more than a little touched when Carlisle formally asked him for permission to 'court' me.
Far from anywhere we walked and talked for hours, learning about each other and falling more and more deeply in love. As a vampire I will never forget anything, even the most mundane images, but nothing resonates in my mind like the memory of a sunlit, sparkling Carlisle offering me a flower he had picked.
When he first pressed a chaste kiss to my forehead I thought I would die and go to heaven.
When he first kissed me on the lips, I literally did.
And when I told him about my first husband he slaughtered a few trees and then held me in his arms for three solid days, telling me how much he loved me and how much he wanted to be the man to eradicate that pain from my life.
After an appropriate amount of time he asked Jasper for my hand in marriage.
Our wedding was of course small and devoid of all the people we had loved in our human lives, but we were there, and our new family were there, and it was magical.
I could not help but be nervous on our wedding night.
But I had no need to be.
Carlisle was a passionate man but an intensely loving one. It was perfect, we were perfect.
And my happy ever after had begun.
...
"What aren't you telling me?" She asks quietly.
"Please, Rose, don't focus on the negatives."
She raises an eyebrow and my heart goes out to her. Emmett and Bella are not the only Whitlocks who would quite like to kill Dick, if it ever comes to pass there will be a queue.
"Carlisle has completed me and my life in a way that I had never thought possible. I love him with every fibre of my being. And he is, without a doubt the best of us. But when we moved south again after his first year it became clear that despite that he was going to find it hard to resist human blood."
She swallows.
"It has been many years since he has killed but he still finds it hard. There is so much he wants to be able to do, practise medicine like Jasper for example, but he cannot, yet. He will, one day, his strength and goodness will win through."