Carlisle POV

Esme and I are supposed to be having a romantic dinner for two. Believe me, when you have as many first children, then teenagers as we do, it's easier said then done. Someone always has a doctors appointment, or a football game, or a play or any number of other things that crop up on large family.

When our children were small, it was even worse. Babysitters for foster children must go through a full background check and fingerprinting process before then can watch the kids. With Esme and I's parents being across the country or having passed on, as well as us having no brothers or sisters, it was difficult to find the right person willing to not only watch between 3 and 8 kids, but handle the behavioral challenges that ours came with.

The past several years have been much easier, since all of our kids can now watch themselves, but old habits die hard. If we hadn't been going to visit Felix today, I doubt we would have been having this date. It's not that I don't love my wife, and want to do all of the romantic things for her, but things have been at a standstill since Jasper joined us. He was a perfect storm of mental, physical, and emotional issues, and it made it hard to plan things around him, since it was hard to predict what he might need at any given moment.

Felix was able to give us hope today, which is more then I've had for a few days now. We all want Jasper to stay. Deep down, Jasper wants to stay. There's nothing preventing him from being a permanent part of our family. Easy, right?

Except it never is. Jasper wants us, but he doesn't trust Esme or me, and I know that he doesn't love us. He does trust his siblings, and I know that he loves Alice, but I just don't know that that's enough to make him stay. Jasper's has it in him to fight, but his first instinct will always be to run, to get away from us and the frightening intimacy we represent.

Alice was convinced that he wasn't going anywhere. Her faith in Jasper was absolute, charming, and completely misplaced. She was looking at things from a child's point of view, as if wanting him to stay badly enough would to make it happen. No matter how many times I told her that things sometimes didn't happen, no matter how badly you wanted them, she just gave me a secretive smile and shook her head, telling me that Jasper would stay, she was sure of it. I wasn't sure what to say in the face of such unshakable trust, so I ended up saying nothing at all. My silence didn't stop my worrying, but I was afraid of making things worse with my only girl. Rose was mine, yes, but she had never been a little girl in all the years that I had known her. She had come to me with the baggage and dignity of a woman, and I felt that it was important to treat her as such.

Rose herself was sure that we would lose Jasper on his 18th birthday. If we were lucky, he would tell us goodbye. But that was Rose for you. She loved Jasper as fiercely as Alice did, even if it was in a different way, and there's nothing more frightening to Rosalie Hale Cullen then love. She craves it, but, like Jasper, she also feels that she has to push it away. Love is a dangerous thing, because life has taught her how easy it is to lose it. Since people had never stuck around for her in the past, she assumed that Jasper wouldn't either.

Edward, too, thinks we won't be able to hold on to Jasper. He talks to Jasper a lot when they're upstairs practicing the piano, which gives me an in to my foster son's rather convoluted thoughts. I don't press Edward for information, and I'm sure that there are things he's still holding back, but he does tell me a few things. Namely, that, while Jasper hasn't come straight out and said anything, he's hinted pretty strongly that he won't be around much longer. His continued insistence that learn his piano piece perfectly by his 18th birthday is worrying to say the least.

Emmett, like Alice, thinks that Jasper will stay. There's no real reason for it, other then he loves our family, and he can't imagine life without us. Therefore, he can't imagine how anyone would choose to be without us. Plus, to Emmett, Jasper is part of the family, no questions asked. Family stuck together.

So we had two children thinking Jasper would stay, two children thinking he would go, and neither one of the adults knowing what to think at all.

And then there was Jasper. An enigma shrouded in mystery if one ever existed. I love him fiercely, but do I understand him at all? Not really. I can sometimes guess which actions he'll take, but not the emotional motivations behind those actions. He's once of the most self-contained children I've ever dealt with.

Esme excused herself from the room, giving me a few additional moments with Felix. He gave me a tired smile. "Do you regret taking this one, Carlisle?"

Not for a single second. As difficult as Jasper could be, he was ours. I just wished I knew how to tell him that. "Not at all."

"Try telling him that. That you don't regret taking him on, and that he always has a place with you, no matter what other choices he makes in life. I think knowing that he has your family to act as a crash pad would go a long way towards calming some of his fears."

"But not towards making him stay."

"It could help. It could also completely scare him off. At this point, Carlisle, I don't know that there's much you can do to completely prevent him from running. The best you can hope for may be to give him a spot to come back to." Felix lightly touched my hand, a comforting gesture that wasn't unappreciated. "Now, would you like to make an appointment for anyone but Alice?"

I had to keep positive. "No, not just yet. Let's see what happens with Jasper, and go from there."

"You're the boss. Tell Jasper that I'm looking forward to seeing him on Thursday."

Thursday was just two days before his birthday. I wanted to beg Felix to perform a miracle and make him stay, but I couldn't. When Jasper had his sessions, Felix was only there to help and advocate for him, not to push our family agenda. "I'll let him know. Thank you, Felix."

Esme was on the phone when I got out, making her patented Mom face. We had agreed not to baby the kids by checking in on them. They needed some independence, and we needed a break from them. I shook my finger, even as I felt a wild surge of love for her. Esme was born to be a mother, and there was no way for her to turn it off. She shook her head back at me, and my stomach clenched. Something was wrong.

I wrapped an arm around her and listened in; trying to figure out what the problem was from her half the conversation. "How are you holding up, Baby?"

She had to be talking to Alice, which gave me hope. My baby was a sensitive girl, and sometimes made a huge deal out of relatively minor problems. Usually all she needed was a little reassurance and we would be good to go.

Her next words ruined that fantasy. "I wouldn't be so sure about that. He isn't doing any suffering right now, and his brain probably shut down right at the beginning, so he didn't suffer during the seizure either. To him, it was just like he fell asleep."

Alice wasn't having the problem at all. It was Jasper, and he could be in real trouble. He had needed us, and we hadn't been there. I fumbled around in my pocket, looking for my keys. If traffic was good, we could be home in a half hour. "Not at all. But how are you? I know it must have been scary for you to see."

Esme was calm, which helped me relax a little. If things had been bad, she would already be moving towards the car. Instead she held her ground, focusing on Alice. "Do you need me to come home, or do you and your sister have it all under control?"

Of course they needed us to come home! The girls, especially Rosalie, were strong and capable, but this was the sort of thing that required an adult. They needed me to….to….I guessed there was nothing that I could do that they couldn't, but they had to need my emotional support. Right?

"You girls were perfect. Your father and I couldn't have done any better ourselves. Do you need to talk to him?"

As much as I wanted to talk to Alice, to pump her for as much information on what had happened as possible, I was curious to see what she would do. She had matured so much since Jasper had arrived, and this seemed to be another sign of it.

Alice must have been alright, because Esme hung up the phone. Since I couldn't ask Alice, I tried to get information out of her instead. "Is Jasper alright?"

. "He had a seizure, but it wasn't a bad one and it sounds like the girls have everything under control. They handled it like champions." Her voice was bursting with pride in her daughters.

I was proud of them, too. A grand mal seizure has the ability to terrify most adults, but the girls seemed to have kept their heads and done very well. "Do they need us to come home?" It didn't seem like they did, but I had to be sure.

"No, they want us to have a good night. They've really grown up, Carlisle, and their handling this like adults." She sounded equal parts surprised and sad. As proud as we both were, it's a little hard to realize that your kids don't need you to get them out of every little crisis.

"This is what we wanted, Babe. They've grown into strong, capable women. It means we did a good job." That didn't mean I wouldn't cry a little bit tonight, but I could see that it was something to celebrate.

"We did, didn't we? Do you remember what they were like when we brought them home? We actually did it, with all of them."

That was pretty amazing. Considering the problems they had started out with, it was a shock to look back and see how far all of us had come, even Jasper.

"Was there ever any doubt? Come on, we still have dinner to get to." I took her hand, feeling the way it fit perfectly into mine, even after all of this time.

I would have expected that dinner would be a bust, with both of us being far too worried about Jasper to enjoy each other's company. After all, our hearts said he was our son, even if his blood and last name didn't.

But, despite some initial nerves, we were able to relax. We had two competent girls at home who would ensure that Jasper got everything he needed. If they needed help, we were only a phone call away.

"I've been thinking about where we should go on our trip this year. If Jasper is still with us, we'll let him pick a spot, within reason, of course, but we should start thinking about other options."

I had tried to bring this exact thing up at least three times, but she had always refused to discuss it. Jasper and Jasper only would make the decision about where we would go; because there was no way that he wasn't staying. Period. Done. End of discussion.

But that might not be the case, and she was finally accepting that fact. It hurt, yes, but pretending that it couldn't happen, then waking up one morning and finding him gone would be far more painful. I smiled at her. "Where would you like to go?"

"I don't have any place in particular in mind, but I thought that we should make an approved list, before it devolves into a fight like it did last year."

Last year had been Emmett's turn to choose, and he had been convinced that it would be the best idea ever for us to take an RV trip to go see the Grand Canyon. 2 adults, four teenagers, one RV, all trapped together for at least a week and a half each way. To everyone except Emmett, it had sounded like a living hell.

For once, Rosalie and Edward were in complete agreement about something, namely that neither one of them was going. It's a shame they don't get along better, because the two of them are more alike then they care to thin about. Both like their space, and they're both homebodies. While I would have trusted either one of them to stay home without us (though certainly not together. If no one had died by the time we came home, it would be a success. If they were both alive and the house was still standing, a total miracle), leaving 1/3 of the family behind kind of defeated the purpose of a family vacation.

Alice had stood by Emmett, though I don't think that she actually wanted to go. It was more that she was eager to please and had a general 'make the best of it' approach to life that made me very jealous of her sometimes. Neither Esme nor I thought it seemed like a good idea, but we had to be delicate. No one wanted to make it seem like we were choosing sides, which was exactly how it would be taken if we flat out refused. So we tried some gently nudging in the right direction. Emmett had still refused to change his mind, right up until I pulled out my final stop. I promised that he would be allowed to try skydiving, something he had been begging for for months.

Exchanging the RV for jumping out of an airplane had been a lucky fix, and this year I was going to make sure we didn't have the same issue. If Jasper was the one making the decision, I knew that he would appreciate some guidelines. For him, I would have been willing to go anywhere in the world, if he would only say the word. We had enough money to do those things, and what was the point of having the cash if you didn't spend it with your kids? This might be the last year that we were all under one roof, and I wanted to savor every moment of it.

Surely Jasper had things he wanted to see in life. Was it Mr. Rushmore? Washington, DC? Hawaii? Maybe it was somewhere more exotic. The pyramids? Stonehenge? Maybe even a cruise. Though I couldn't quite see Jasper cutting loose in the Bahamas, I was pretty sure he would be enchanted by the Northern Lights in Alaska. If I just came out and asked Jasper, he wouldn't be able to give me an answer. But if I gave him five or six choices and gently let him know that he had to pick one, he would do it.

It wasn't the fastest or easiest way of learning things about Jasper, but it was the most honest. Every once in a while he would just give a tidbit of information up, but more often you had to dig and dig deeply.

It sounded obnoxious, and sometimes it was, but everything worth having is worth working for. I loved Jasper's mystery, and his fierceness, and his refusal to give up all of his secrets even now. He was a tough little thing, even if he didn't realize it yet.

Or maybe he did. After all, it had taken courage, and determination, and extreme toughness to agree to come into our family after what had happened in his last one. Had I been in his position, I would have chosen a group home over another foster family. But Jasper had chosen us. That meant that he wanted a family, which meant that he did desire on some level to remain with us.

"What do you think we should offer? Some landmarks around here, maybe one or two international trips? We can do a rush job on a passport for him if we need to."

"How about DC, Chicago, and New York? He might like somewhere like Ireland or Wales. I think he would really love the art there." Esme smiled a little. "I don't know if he'll like the thought of being on an airplane, though. I don't think he's ever flown before."

He had, but he had been on a life flight, his brain swollen and his body wracked with seizures. Not exactly something he would have wanted to remember, even if he had been in any shape to. "We can ask him. Maybe he would like to see somewhere in California. I don't know if he would prefer a car ride instead."

Again, I didn't know. The car gets crowded when we're all in it, but Jasper never seems to mind that. His main fear is strangers and, while he may not be willing to accept us as a forever family yet, he did know that we would keep him safe and not harm him. If that was what he wanted, I would do anything to make it happen, but I was secretly hoping he would tolerate the plane.

"Do you think it would be better if we you talked to him alone, or if we did it together?" He's more tolerant these days, but my relationship with Jasper is still damaged from the trial.

"Together would be best. We need to present a united front." She smiled at me. "But that's enough about the kids. They have it under control at home, and this is our first date night in forever."

She giggled. "And what would you like to talk about, Dr. Cullen?"

"I think that you and I should take a vacation this year for just the two of us. We don't have any little ones in the house, and we deserve some time away."

This was something I had been thinking about for a while, and I wanted to see how she would react to it. Don't get my wrong, I love my children and would gladly lay my life down for any one of them, including Mr. Jasper, but Esme was my wife. When the others were gone, it would still be us, enjoying each other.

Her eyes lit up at the thought, but I could tell that she was a little unsure. "But what about the kids?"

"The kids are almost adults. I think they're all capable of caring for themselves. This will be good practice for when they're out on their own."

"Do you think it's a good idea with Jasper's health the way it is?" Then she smiled. "But Rose stepped up wonderfully today, and she could do it again if she needed to. Where would we go?"

My heart sang. I had been afraid that she would refuse because she was too worried about the kids. It's hard for a mother to let go, especially when she's only had one of her babies for a few months. "What about a trip to Canada? We could rent a cabin and have some alone time…." I wiggled my eyebrows at her, making sure that she knew exactly what I was thinking about.

Her smile told me that she did. "It would be nice not to have Alice barging in because she needs something, or have to get up to break up a fight between Rose and Edward. Not to mention Emmett's setting things on fire. Actually, I think this vacation is way overdue."

When she put it like that, an adults only vacation sounded better and better. I has forgotten Emmett's propensity for lighting things on fire, but it did always make for an interesting trip. It wasn't that he did anything on purpose, but he was scatterbrained and tended to forgot he had turned on the stove or put something in the microwave. Life with Emmett required a lot of fire extinguishers. But I wouldn't trade my goofy, loving, enthusiastic son for anything in the world. The only thing bigger then his body was his heart.

"A week if probably plenty of time away, especially if we still want to have a family vacation. I think the kids are ready."

At least I hoped so. Everyone in the family was secure with us except for Jasper, and I was hoping that this would help with that. He was used to people leaving him, but they very seldom came back. If we left and returned exactly when we were supposed to, it would further cement in his mind that we were different from the others, and that he could trust us in a way that he couldn't trust them. Hopefully. There was always the chance that he would flip out and spend the weeks following our trip punishing us in every way imaginable, but I was optimistic. Jasper had his problems, but he was usually very passive rather then aggressive.

Even though we were both worried about Jasper, we managed to enjoy our meal and even dessert. If there was a true emergency, Rose would have called. She was a smart girl, and incredibly resourceful. If she would learn to work with others and not come on quite so strong, she would probably take over the world one day. She had adopted Jasper like he was her own twin, and she wouldn't let anything happen to him.

Our phone rang as we were paying the bill. I quickly checked the caller ID and relaxed a bit when I saw that it was only Emmett. I held the phone to my ear. "What's up, Bear?"

"Can I spend the night at Matt's house? He and I already did our homework together, and his Mom is going to be there all night long. I promise I won't get into any trouble."

"Let me ask your mother." I shifted the phone to talk to Esme. "Emmett wants to spend the night at Matt's house."

Her eyes narrowed. "Is Matt the one who broke his leg cliff diving out at the Rez?"

"No, that was Mark. Matt's one of his more mature friends. No drinking or especially stupid behavior." As much as I love my son, he does tend to get himself in trouble at the drop of a hat.

"I'd really prefer that he come home tonight. He'll get there before we can, and he can help the girls with Jasper."

I hated to tell him that. Yes, families stick together and help each other out, but it hardly seemed fair to tell Emmett he couldn't hang out with his friends because Jasper was having a medical crisis. The two of them were getting along so well and I didn't want to cause resentment. "Emmett, not tonight."

"But I've been really good." His disappointment was obvious.

"I know you have." It was true. Since his last suspension from school, he had really been making the effort to do better. No trouble, passing grades, less tormenting his brother. "But I need you to help hold down the fort at home. Jasper had a seizure and the girls might need you."

His demeanor changed in an instant. "He did? How come you didn't call me as soon as it happened? I would have done home to help out."

This was what I loved about Emmett, and what none of the teachers who were so eager to tell me what was wrong with him could see. His own desire to have a sleepover was gone now, replaced by worry for his brother. He didn't resent being asked to help out the way I had feared he would. "Thank you, Emmett. I promise, next time you can spend the night."

"Yeah, sure. Do you need me to go home right now? Is Rose there or is Alice all by herself?"

"Rose is there, and she has things under control. You don't need to rush, but try and cut things a little short." Again, I hated to ask it of him, and I made a mental note to try and do something to make this up to him.

"Don't worry, I've got this under control. You and Mom have fun and don't be too gross together." He hung up the phone before I could say anything else.

Esme gave me a worried look. "How did he take it?"

"Fine. He didn't argue at all once he heard that it was for his brother." I had to smile to myself. "He's a great kid."

"They're all great kids. How did we get so lucky as to have five kids and have every one of them turn fantastic?"

I noticed that should counted Jasper not only as one of her kids, but as one of the fantastic ones. There's nothing like a mother's love to overlook all of your little flaws. "We're just lucky, I guess."

"Are you ready to head on home? I need to give them all hugs."

"Of course." I stood up and pulled her chair out for her. "My Lady?"

She took my arm. "I love you."

"Love you, too."