Thank you as always to everyone who's enjoying this story with me. After next chapter, I'm going to go back and read it from the start - something I've not done since starting it. I swear, if I find a plot hole...

Thank you to chellekathrynnn, pigs103 (I'll answer here: I promise, all will be revealed in New Moon - perhaps in the prologue...? ;)), Anita Simons, BMBMDooDoo- Doo- Doo- Doo (not quite, but close-ish!), Vera (welcome! Hope you like this one!), Adela (we'll see how much she needs to...), Dark- Severus- Snape, Lizzy B (thank you! I love her too!), souverian, Love. Fiction. 2020, ArtasticSarcastic01, and Ghostwriter71 for your reviews! Any I've not replied to yet, I will asap! P.s, and Guest (you reviewed right in the middle of the last proof-read, which made me laugh!)

Chapter 26

When Carys reached the end of the long winding drive, she found Carlisle waiting for her on the steps. He'd been pacing. He stopped mid-turn to watch her, his hands clasped behind his back, hair disheveled as if he'd been running his hands through it over and over again.

He waited, his jaw clenching and unclenching when she reached her car - still parked by the front of the house - and lifted her suitcase onto the top of the boot. It was only when she adjusted her bag over her shoulder and continued towards him that he sighed in relief and jogged lightly down to meet her.

Tears sprang to Carys' eyes. She'd missed him. So much, it almost hurt now that it hit her all at once, locked her lungs, and stole her breath on a shudder.

She'd thought about it enough when she'd been in California, and more so on the journey to Forks, that she knew she'd be okay without him if it ever came to that, but she'd always miss the way she did when his arms wrapped around her, as they did a moment later. She just had to hope that he could understand where she was coming from - where her annoyance in his actions came from - enough that they could make a go of it. The actions themselves, she could get past, it was the larger issue hidden beneath that she couldn't.

The tension that had thrummed through her, eased a little from the long walk to the house, left her completely on a sigh, and she returned his embrace, turning her head to press her cheek to his shoulder as he tightened his arms about her and buried his face in her hair.

But despite the way she felt - or, rather because of how she felt - she pulled away after a minute, letting her hands slide down over his chest and away.

Carlisle released her just as slowly, and she could see he shared her reasoning. They had to talk, see where the land now lay, and go from there. He was scared. The tension that had left her seemed to have been added to his.

"I wasn't sure if you were stopping or just collecting your car, when you didn't call," he told her, a note to his accent she rarely heard. She reckoned it boded well for their conversation that he was using the accent he'd had when he'd been human. It wasn't dissimilar to the one he usually used around her, just slightly more pronounced. "After I spoke with your mother-"

Carys' eyes widened and her jaw dropped a little. "My mum?" She questioned, frowning. "When did you talk t-? Why did you talk to my mum?" Why would he talk to her mum, but not to her?

Carlisle's brow crinkled in confusion. "A few days after you went home, I-did she really not tell you? You were out running an errand for her, but she invited me-sorry, did she really not tell you?"

"No, she... No, I definitely would've remembered Carlisle's been here..."

Carlisle stared over her shoulder for a second before he chuckled quietly and shook his head. "Wow," he breathed, raising his eyebrows, "your mother's smart, I'll give her that."

Carys bristled. "Smart? Or secretive and infuriating?"

"Infuriating perhaps, but I appreciate her efforts."

"Why exactly is that? Why wouldn't she tell me?" Carys ran a hand over her forehead and placed the other on her waist, gritting her teeth. "God, I'm so tired of people not telling me things. Am I just the only person in the world who doesn't deserve to know anything that's going on?"

Carlisle's smile dropped and his concerned expression returned in the blink of an eye. He pressed his lips together and took a deep breath. "You do deserve that, Carys. I don't know what you're thinking or feeling, but I promise I'm not going to-I want to talk about it. Argue, about it, if needs be... Though, your mum warned me I wouldn't win if we did."

"You wouldn't," she bit out, rubbing at her neck angrily. "Not if I'd made a list of my problems, anyway, but I can get flustered otherwise," she admitted, softening.

"You mean your list isn't-? Well, I've probably shot myself in the foot then, haven't I?" He asked, his hands twitching at his sides as if he wanted to touch her again but wasn't sure of her reaction if he did.

Carys tried to hide just how thrown she was, so she could ask, "Wha'd'you mean?"

"Your mother told me you'd not told her everything, but-and, this was in between telling me how she felt about us, but it was your choice in the end-"

Carys nodded. "Standard."

"Really? Well, I'm going to have to try and-," he whispered to himself. He shook his head and visible collected himself. "Your-Amy told me you didn't think I trusted you... Which is what you told me on the phone that day, and I told her the same thing I told you - that I do trust you. Though, added a bit more," he continued dryly. "She explained that that I was... Placating, not addressing, it seems."

"Well, for one, she had no right to do that, but..." She sighed and rolled her shoulders back. Her mum surely meant well, but it wasn't her fight to get involved in. That didn't stop Carys from wanting to know what had been said in the end. "And? What did she say?"

"Amy told me it wasn't really about what I thought, it was about what you thought, and why. And that if I saw you as my equal - which I absolutely do, Carys," he implored, stopping himself the instant before their hands would have touched. "If I saw you as that, then I had to work out why you feel the way you do, and do it by the time you got back. Otherwise, even if you ended up saying you were letting it go, nothing would change, and neither of us would be entirely happy."

"Wise words. So wise, in fact," she told him, trying to keep the worst of her complaining grumble from her voice as it was directed at her mum, not him, "I was going to say the same. So? Have you?"

He nodded. "I came back and made a list. Of everything I could think of that might make you feel that way."

"So what you're saying is... My mum played us, knowing I couldn't complain because she's about to have a baby?"

"Like a damned fiddle."

Carys closed her eyes for a moment and dropped her head back, taking a deep breath. "So," she confirmed when she opened her eyes and tipped her head up again. "I've been in California. Working out what I want to do. And you've been here, working out...?"

Carlisle grimaced. "What I've done."

"And have you?"

"Well... As I said, I have a list, and I think I understand exactly where you're coming from on the side of trusting you now, so I have to hope I got some of it correct, at least."

"Maybe we should take this to your office then?" Carys asked, pushing her feelings surrounding being blindsided by her mum to the back of her mind. She concentrated on the fact that Carlisle had made an attempt to understand how she felt instead, and it made her feel infinitely better. She didn't want to go into this too annoyed at other factors, she wanted to focus on the fact he might now understand. "Time out until then?"

"That sounds good," Carlisle sighed in relief, though his fearful expression didn't entirely leave him.

"Is Edward here?" Carys asked when they reached the house and Carlisle held the door open for her. The thought that Edward might listen to her whilst they argued, and funnel Carlisle information whether he liked it or not, had been on her mind since Port Angeles. She wouldn't expect Carlisle to ask or encourage him, but she wouldn't put it past Edward to do it anyway.

"No, when Alice saw you were coming today I asked everyone to give us some time to talk of you were ready to. He's with Isabella..."

Carys clapped a hand to her forehead and gasped. "How is she? Shhhit, I should have asked that first! I'm sorry, I've just been so..." She trailed off, crossing her arms as shame rose up within her.

"Better," he assured her softly, stroking her back as they made their way through the empty living room to the stairs, clearly relieved that she allowed the contract. "Much better. She's still healing, but she's happy and that's all we can hope for."

"I'm glad... Emmett, and Jasper texted me a couple of times along the way," she admitted, sliding her hand along the bannister as they climbed the stairs. "Apparently Alice and Edward took Bella to a casino on the way back?"

Carlisle grinned and paused at the top of the stairs. "I think Alice has just as much fun losing large amounts of money as she does winning them."

"That's actually something I need to talk to her about."

"Oh?" If Carlisle had been trying to hide the concern and interest in his voice, he'd failed spectacularly.

Carys smiled a little to ease his mind. "D'you think it'd be okay if she invested my winnings for me? From the bet with Emmett? Or is that a bit wrong?"

The backpack money didn't quite count as something she owed, she'd decided in the first week she was away.

"I tend to think of it as a morally grey area to be honest with you," Carlisle confessed, pausing with his hand on the door to his office. Carys hadn't missed the way his gaze had lingered on his bedroom door as they'd passed.

Carys placed her hands on her waist, and gripped. "But she could?" She mused, "Hypothetically?"

"She could... Though, it would depend on how much you needed? And how quickly. Hypothetically, of course."

"I don't know yet...," Carys admitted softly, touching her hand to her bag and thinking of the list she'd left inside it. "But if our conversation goes the way I think it might, I might need it."

Carlisle's eyes widened again. "I suppose I'll leave that until later... Are you ready?"

Carys squared her shoulders, let out a slow breath, and nodded. "Ready."

"Time in," Carlisle confirmed, turning the handle.


An hour later - after they'd come to the conclusion - amongst others - that Carlisle being worried about telling her what he was was, ultimately, completely fair, but he should have told her about the possibility of her having an ability, and shouldn't have left it to Alice to explain it when Carys was about to find out either - they came to an impasse.

"You knew the Nomads were coming, and you didn't think to tell me!?"

Carlisle winced at her tone, watching her from where he sat on the large chair behind his desk. "We knew they were in the area, and were leaving, it's completely different."

"How is it different, Carlisle? You didn't think I should know that?" Carys argued, having paused her constant pacing in front of the desk in favour of crossing her arms, glaring across at him.

"I thought Alice would tell you."

"Because you left me to sleep in, after inviting me to yours for the sole purpose of meeting Bella?"

"I was trying to-" Carlisle broke off and took a deep breath, leaning over the desk and drawing one of the pieces of paper scattered across it towards him. He unscrewed the lid of his pen and began to write. "I'm going to put this on the 'didn't think about how it would affect you' list."

It had only been after Carys made the same point three times over the space of ten minutes, that Carlisle understood why she made lists as she did, and what she'd meant by flustered. Carlisle didn't have the same issue as Carys, but he had still found arguing over some points frustrating, and that physically writing them down sometimes made them seem better or worse depending on the issue at hand.

At other times, simply choosing which list to put it on made them both address the issue in a different way.

"Mmhmm," Carys agreed,.

Carlisle glanced up at her again. "Well if I'm adding this," he said slowly, pulling a second page towards him, "I'm going to add not telling your family-"

"That was-"

"Or friends," he continued over her protest, "about us. To the 'shouldn't have assumed' list."

"My family's different, I had my reasons for that," Carys countered. Then she sighed and conceded, "But I didn't know if you wanted people in Forks to know, and I should have asked."

"Which is why I didn't put it on the 'didn't trust you wouldn't run for the hills' list, as I did with the fact we didn't tell each other we were more than ready to take the next step in our sexual relationship when we were."

"I still don't think that belongs there. Not when you're going to add the whole not telling me for hours and hours about what happened with Bella and the ballet studio, and not when the ability thing is on there as well."

Carlisle didn't answer as he added the Bella point, along with: shouldn't have thought Carys would leave after the baseball game, and Carys shouldn't dismiss how much I want her at any given moment, to the page.

Carys raised an eyebrow at that last, but ultimately sighed and began to pace again. A few seconds later, she stopped, pointed at the page, and added, "Sending Rosalie rather than telling me over the phone-"

Carlisle lifted the page. "About Bella, yes, we've got that." When she stared down at the list, he added, "Sending Rose is a separate point, and we agreed on the note that she's incredibly underrated, and-" he held the list up further and reviewed Carys' writing. "-the best."

Carys nodded and resumed pacing, but she stopped a second later and huffed, twirling her finger in the air. "Circling back for a sec, I don't think you appreciate just how pissed I am now about you knowing about the Nomads."

"I think I do... But in my defense, what was I supposed to do? Shake you awake after exhausting you for nearly a day and a half-" he had to pause so that he wouldn't laugh when Carys winked at him, and instead warned, "-don't tempt me, woman, not unless you want to finish this list in bed. To let you know vampires were passing through the area, but not to worry?"

The wind went out of Carys' sails, though not because of Carlisle's warning - one that didn't sound quite as bad a proposition as she supposed it should have. "You could have at least checked I knew?" She asked gently.

"I'm sorry," Carlisle sighed, running a hand through his hair.

"Hm."

They lapsed into silence, and Carys began to pace again whilst Carlisle surveyed the lists. "We need a new list," she whispered a minute later, stopping in her tracks.

Carlisle blinked up at her, faintly alarmed. "Why?"

She waved her hands. "A good list. We've only got annoying things, and I'm getting too frustrated to think properly. I don't like feeling like this. This wasn't supposed to be like that."

"You've not shown me your list yet," he reminded her softly.

Carys gathered her hair at her nape and stared at the ceiling for a moment. "That's not an argument list, it's an after one." She strode to the desk and held a hand out for Carlisle's pen as she pulled another sheet of paper from the stack. When he hesitantly handed it over, she labelled it: 'Things we love about each other'.

For the next hour, they concentrated on that list, though when Carys jokingly added: Carlisle's library is the best thing about him, and he responded with: Carys' unmatched ability to lead me to sin, they paused for a mock-argument about the subject - which somehow led them to an actual argument about what was really a sin in the modern age, during which Carys, flustered, argued at one point that it couldn't count as a sin in Carlisle's faith for them to sleep together if Carlisle was technically dead and according to Mark, those rules didn't apply in heaven.

Carlisle's subsequent suggestion that if Carys saw him as dead, it made things a hundred times worse for her didn't win him any points, but her horrified and disgusted expression did give him something to laugh about until she stole his chair.

After they'd ultimately decided that Carlisle was very much alive, but neither one of them thought it would further impact his chances of getting into heaven one day - if, of course, there was such a thing -, Carys felt ready to return to reading over their original lists.

"I think I ask your opinion on most things?" Carlisle asked a while later, looking down at Carys from where he sat on the edge of his desk, tapping the pen on his leg.

"You do," she agreed, looking up from his chair as she pulled off her boots and tugged her legs up to cross them. "It's just when things get tough, you act like I'm just going to leave, and don't bother telling me the things I need to know."

"Hence," he concluded again, "trust."

"You need to know I'm not going anywhere, Carlisle. Well, at least, not unless something goes wrong with us. If you act like that when the going gets tough, it just makes me think you've got one foot out the door the rest of the time as well..."

Sighing, Carlisle glanced over the lists again, though Carys knew he could recall them in an instant. "It's not lost on me that most of these things are mine..."

"I saw what it did to Victoria, and how Carmen reacted when Victoria lost her soulmate," Carys whispered. She wouldn't call him by his name - she was only naming Victoria because it was her pain she'd been a part of. "Carmen called it having her heart ripped out."

Carlisle nodded and turned his attention to the window. "That's how it feels, I'm told. I've only really known one vampire who lost his mate, Marcus."

"The Volturi one?" She asked, knowing the answer already. Carlisle nodded again. "You said he still mourns her, after a really long time."

"It's been centuries, and it remains as painful as the day he lost her." He looked at her then, his eyes filled with a mixture of sadness, fear, and sympathy for the vampire they were speaking about. "All he really wants is death, a relief from the existence he hates without Didyme."

"But he can't?" Carys whispered, leaning forward to take his hand in hers, needing the connection as much as he did. "They won't let him because he's too important to the Volturi?"

Carlisle tangled their fingers together. "Exactly."

"And you'd hold on too, for the family? If anything were to happen to me? Is that why you're scared?"

Carlisle avoided her gaze until she tugged on his hand. She didn't manage to move him at all, but he understood the prompt and met her eye. "If you mean is that why I know one day things could end? Yes... I know we've not spoken much about it, but you want a human life, Carys. I know that. I'm not ignorant of the way you love your family, even if your mother gets to you sometimes, and how much your friends mean to you. I don't want to make you think about giving that up."

"You're right, Carlisle," Carys whispered, lifting his hand to her lips. "I do want a human life. I do want to know my sister, and have friends, and to get to order two meals everywhere we go to make it look like we're both eating."

Carlisle scoffed, his lips tipping up at the sides for a moment, but his expression remained pensive and saddened. "So one day, there will be an end."

"Not necessarily," Carys announced, dropping Carlisle's hand. She avoided him when he tried to grab her, in favour of rounding the desk, grabbing her bag from where she'd left it on top of her coat on the wing-back chair she was sure Carlisle must have owned for centuries and reupholstered, and removed her notebook.

"What's this?" Carlisle asked when she returned to the chair and held it out to him. When her only answer was to shake it at him, he took it, opened it, and began to read as she tucked her legs up again and settled back in his chair.

"My list," Carys explained when he'd flicked to the second page. "A list of everything I can think of so far that I really, really want to do in my life. I got the idea after talking to your cousins, Rosalie, and my parents."

"There's a lot here," Carlisle murmured, turning another page. "Is this why you wanted Alice to invest the money for you?"

"Yeah... I figure if we're still working for a while of it - 'cause I don't want to spend my whole life working, but it's fine for now - then I still want to pay my half where I can. If we really work at it, we should get through a lot of it by the time-"

"You die?" Carlisle choked out, snapping the book closed as his face crumbled.

"No, you morbid idiot!" Carys whined as she stood, swatted at his chest, and wrapped her arms around him. "By the time I'm thirty."

Carlisle's arms rose almost automatically to her waist, tugging her to stand between his legs as he dropped his forehead to hers. "What happens when you're thirty?"

"If we do even three pages of that, then I'll have lived a more interesting life and done more with it than I could dream of - and all before I get to spend eternity with you."

"What are you saying, Carys?"

"I'm saying, that I want to live a human life. A full life as I see it, filled with things I've dreamed of doing l, or I think I'll miss in a hundred years. And then, after that, when I've had seven years with you, my friends, my family, my sister, then... I think I'll be ready to go through the change. If you're open to that." She slid her hands over his shoulders. "If all goes well and we don't drive each other to distraction, I don't think eternity with you sounds so bad... But I hope you don't have a problem with being with an older woman, because I'm pretty set on thirty. There's a lot I plan to do, see, and eat first."

Carlisle recovered from his shock, and a happy smile wreathed his face as he indulged her, "It hadn't escaped my notice that you reserved twenty places for restaurants alone."

"Oh yeah, I'm adding to that," she warned him. "If we're going to be together for eternity, consider it an investment... So, what do you think?"

Carlisle kissed her then, slowly, passionately, to the point that when he lifted his head, it took Carys a good few seconds to recover.

"I think that sounds like the perfect way to start," he told her excitedly, grabbing the notebook and opening it behind Carys' head as she sighed in relief and laid her cheek against his chest.

A couple of minutes later, he asked, "Do you mind if I add something?"


Later, when Carlisle would think back on that day, he would do so in wonder of how easily their argument had been resolved; Of how optimistic they'd been for their immediate future, and how naive they'd been to think that they could live two full lives together.

Each time he returned to London, to stare for hours at the painting she loved so much, he would lay the well worn notebook on his knee and add another point to the list of all that Carys had left undone.

If they'd known what was to come, he'd wonder, would they have done things differently? Would they have been quite so optimistic? So excited to add so much to a list that would never be finished?

Venom would well in his eyes as he wondered, if Carys had known how much she'd lose, or how little time she had before her life ended, would she have returned to Forks at all?

A/N: a couple of you asked about seeing things from Carlisle's point of view, and I was going to keep it a secret, but I'm planning on at least half the epilogue being his POV.

Oh, the things that are coming in New Moon! If this was a love story, that's going to be something slightly different...