I would like to get down on my knees and kiss the ground that all you wonderful people walk on. Metaphorically, of course. The reviews were lovely and a great source of motivation, thanks.
Disclaimer: Twilight belongs to Stephenie Meyer. I'm just like the drag queen that imitates her for your entertainment.
Chapter Three:
Where Matters of Life and Death are Debated
Upon opening the door to the room, Carlisle's heart fell. The boy, whose heroism was already spreading like wildfire through the news stations, seemed so weak as he lay on the hospital bed. Carlisle looked down at the charts in his hands and frowned in disappointment. The bullets had, at such a close range, blasted through the boy's chest, shattering four ribs. Luckily, it had just barely missed his heart, but unluckily, one of the bits of bone had pierced the boy's left lung. They had done what they could to help for now, but he didn't have much longer.
The doctors of the hospital were caught between moving on with surgery or waiting to see if he regained any strength. If they went into surgery now, it was almost guaranteed that the boy would die, but who knew how much longer they could wait. So, until then, they just kept him as comfortable of they could, and prayed he'd make it through.
A quickening of breath and the heart monitor's sharp rise in rhythm caused Carlisle to run to the boy's side. "B-Bella?" he gasped in his dry and raspy voice. "Come back to me…" His eyes flew open and searched the room wildly for something that wasn't there, no matter how frantically he wished. His vivid green eyes finally fell on Carlisle, a look of puzzlement joining the pain and loss already written across his face.
"It's good to see you awake," Carlisle greeted kindly. "We couldn't find your wallet, but this was in your hand when the paramedics got you." He held up a glinting bracelet and the boy's eyes immediately focused on it, seeming to gain more life and consciousness from the mere sight of it. The boy's hand had been weakly clutching the bed sheets, but with effort he turned it palm-up. Carlisle got the meaning and curled the length of chain into his open hand. "Would you mind telling me your name?" he asked.
"Edward Masen," the boy muttered, all of a sudden distracted by something, the bracelet which he had found so important before was now forgotten and a far off look blossomed on his face.
"Do you live around here, Edward?"
"No, I don't," he shortly replied before his attention was once again on the bracelet, which he tightened his fist around. Carlisle wondered if he had given him too much morphine for the pain and it was doing something to Edward's thought process.
"Well," Carlisle tried, "I must tell you that you have become quite the hero. In fact-" He looked down at the boy in the hospital bed, expecting to see the same preoccupied expression as he looked at the chain in his clenched fist, but instead saw Edward studying him with surprising sharpness. He seemed to take in the golden eyes, pale skin, and incredible features with familiarity. Like he'd seen them somewhere before.
The sense of knowing in those green eyes threw Carlisle's doctor chatter off and instantly set his barriers up. He headed toward the door, saying over his shoulder, "I should be going now, Edward, but Doctor White will be here soon to tell you about your condition."
He was almost clean out the door when a voice stopped him. "Wait," it pleaded with desperately determined hope. Edward coughed weakly at the effort but soon resumed in a hoarse tone. "Am I dying?"
The simplicity of the question, and the feeling that the poor boy already knew the answer to it, urged Carlisle to nod hesitantly. "There's a strong chance. If we wait too long for surgery, your lungs can give out, but if we rush you to it, you probably won't be strong enough to make it through. For the meantime, we have given you a high dose of morphine to take the edge off the pain."
Edward nodded with acceptance. "Is there anything you can do?"
Carlisle strode toward the bed and took the boy's free hand in is own, giving it a reassuring squeeze. "We can only wait until the proper decision is apparent." But it might be too late, he almost added but Carlisle held his tongue.
"No," Edward corrected, his voice still strained but his eyes blazing like emeralds. "Is there anything you can do? And I mean only you. You're different; like B- like no other doctor here. You can help me in a way Doctor White is incapable of." The speech seemed to have drained Edward, for his hand grew limp and he collapsed back in his bed, cringing with the pain from his chest.
Carlisle stared in amazement. He knew. But how? In Carlisle's childhood, where goblins and fairies were everyday beliefs, it would have been normal for him to suspect, but now, in the age of technology and denial, a modern youth couldn't possibly figure it out. Someone couldn't have told them- "Edward, who is Bella?" Carlisle asked, thinking back to what Edward had almost said: You're different; like Bella.
Edward met his gaze levelly and answered, "Someone I'm not going to give up on this easily." He didn't elaborate any further, but when the doctor's silence stretched on for over a minute Edward told him, "It is wrong of me to demand something this big and important out of you, but, literally, my life depends on it."
"But you could survive this," Carlisle cried compassionately. "Why would you give up your human life when there's still a chance?"
Edward gestured to the numerous machines around him and raised a weary eyebrow. "Look, I've seen enough movies to know that if you have this many tubes in you, you're gonna die." He then broke out into a series of hacking coughs, unintentionally underlining his point. "I need to live, doc. And it's just not because I'm afraid of death. I have to find her; it's like there's this string tied around my heart and connected to hers. The further away she is, the more my heart hurts, and if she goes too far, the string might break. If that happens…let's just say I don't think my heart could handle the pain that goes with the thought that she doesn't want me. The most I can do is tell her how I feel, but I can't do that if I'm dead. Please, doc." His voice gave out at the end, wavering with exhaustion and effort before breaking during his final plea. He didn't have much longer, and the decision was all in Carlisle's capable, but resisting hands.
With all that he stood for, he wouldn't intentionally turn someone if they still had a chance to live. But Edward's possibility was fading fast; his heart beat was erratic, speeding then slowing with frightening irregularity, his breathing was becoming more labored and painful, and, from the way Edward clutched his bandaged chest, he guessed that even the morphine couldn't fight off the pain. He wouldn't be alive much longer.
Hoping he'd change his mind, Carlisle asked, "Are you positive? You know about the pain of the transformation?"
"Pain," Edward repeated. "No, I didn't know, but I don't mind. What is the process of it exactly?" he asked in only a mere whisper, his breathing becoming louder than his speech. "Do you just bite me? Do we have to wait for a full moon? Or do we have to do that morbid sharing of the blood?"
"I bite you," Carlisle said, disconcerted that Edward's face only showed easy acceptance, not fear, "and inject venom into your bloodstream."
"That sounds efficient." He cleared his throat to try and get rid of the rasp of his voice and was surprised to find a rush of blood filling his mouth. Not even his critical state of health could stop him from seeing the humor in that outcome. Not even a vampire, he thought, and I'm already drinking blood.
"Do you mind if I ask you a question, Edward?"
Edward gave a grim smile and wheezed, "I see no reason why the man who's killing me can't ask a question. Shoot." Carlisle realized that joking was Edward's way to try and relieve the stress of the situation, and he rewarded the optimism with a smile of his own.
"How exactly did you discover the secret?" That little piece of missing information had been hanging at the edge of the doctor's mind, incessantly murmuring suspicions about the girl Edward had spoken about.
"Oh," Edward brushed off as nonchalantly as someone who could only speak as loud as a mouse could. "My father has acquaintances over on an Indian Reservation, La Push, I believe, and they would tell him their tribal stories about the flood and their 'Cold Ones.' I didn't think of it immediately when I saw her, but she is just how they had described. It was easy to add two and two together after that."
Carlisle nodded his head and, after seeing that he had no more ways to stall, sighed. "Well, if you are ready, I suppose this is it." He tentatively took the Edward's wrist and lowered his head. Just as he was about to take the first bite, Edward stopped him.
"Wait," he whispered. "I want to thank you, doc. You won't regret it, I promise." The ringing sincerity in his ragged voice touched Carlisle's motionless heart. No, he thought while taking the first bite, I have a feeling that I won't. By the time he had injected venom in his other wrist, ankles and neck, Edward's irregular breathing turned to screams of torture as the explosive hurt that he had been gallantly handling tripled.
Doctor Carlisle Cullen stumbled backwards into a chair, resting his pale forehead on his one hand and pulling his phone out of his pocket with the other. He listened to the ringing with apprehension, looking at the struggling boy in the hospital bed. Carlisle heard a sweet voice on the other end of the line and gathered what emotional strength was left in his body. "Esme," he said. "You and the family ought to get here as soon as possible."
000
"Eddie?" Elizabeth hesitated, re-tucking a strand of auburn hair behind her ear and looking over at her husband with worry more than apparent in her green eyes. "I don't want to be one of those mothers that fret over their child constantly, but do you think he is okay? I just have this feeling," her hand unconsciously rested at her heart for a moment, perhaps wondering why it felt like something was missing, "that our Edward isn't."
Eddie ripped his eyes away from the road and faked ease. "Darling, I'm sure he is. You know boys today; always forgetting things. He probably just lost his cell phone." It was a bad excuse, they both knew Edward never forgot where anything was, but it was better to lie than to acquaint their selves with the dark shadow of dread that was spilling over into their thoughts.
They hadn't heard from Edward for three days. Elizabeth had been growing more and more worried as time passed, trying her best to keep a positive face and failing miserably when it came to deceiving her husband. He and their son were the only people who could read the unstoppable Elizabeth Masen's façade. She wanted to be strong, but her son, her dear sweet boy, could, as her heart was so certain of, be in trouble. Besides her husband, Edward was her most treasured and wonderful person she knew and she didn't know what would happen if what she feared were to come true.
The drive to their home seemed longer than she remembered; the roads stretching on for miles when it was only a few yards, the clock's infernal ability to not move any faster, and, worst of all, how the simple length of her driveway was unbearable. Before the car even slowed, Elizabeth jumped out and ran to the front door, desperately wishing that the house wasn't as empty as it looked.
"Edward?" she called from the door, noticing that her husband was right behind her, an equal expression of hope on his face. "Honey? We're back!" The false cheerfulness faded from her voice. "Edward? Please be here." She darted into the kitchen, searching for any sign that he was home. But it all looked exactly like they left it, no food left out, no dirty dishes, just that horrible feeling of not being lived in for a long weekend.
A loud crash came from the study, startling Elizabeth. She ran in, hoping to see her son on the computer or sitting in that ridiculously studious way of his with a book in hands, but only saw Eddie, sprawled out on the ground and readjusting his glasses. "Eddie, are you okay, sweetheart?" She kneeled on his side and brushed away his thick black hair from his forehead, checking for any signs of pain.
"Oh, I'm fine, Lizzie. I just seemed to have tripped over something…" he scrambled to his knees and pulled something out of the tangled mess that was his feet. "What the Hell…?" Eddie turned to face his wife with puzzlement on his face. "Why is the telephone line disconnected?"
While her husband reconnected it with confused mutterings, something in Elizabeth's mind clicked into place. She felt like a ghost as she left the study and climbed the steps to Edward's room. Her hand rose mechanically to open his door, feeling a shudder run down her spine at the ominous creak.
His room looked like someone had left it in a hurry. The drawers of his dresser were open, his closet door hit the wall with a bang caused by a gust of wind from the open windows, and his desk was wiped clean of all the things he normally kept there, like his keys, watch, wallet, phone, ipod, and whatever book he was currently reading at the time. His bed though, looked like no one had slept in it in days.
Wishing her suspicion was wrong, but testing it anyhow, she fell to her knees and lifted the skirts of Edward's bed, looking into the darkness underneath and seeing that the suitcase he kept under there was gone.
With a strangled exclamation of disbelief, Elizabeth flew out of the room, not even able to call her husband's name through the haze of panic that was taking grip. She had made it as far as the kitchen before the phone rang, shrill and startling. Elizabeth leapt for it, fumbling with the receiver before breathlessly asking, "Edward? Is that you?"
On the other side there was the sound of someone deciding between hanging up or continuing on. After what must have been a strenuous mental debate, a throat, decidedly rough and very un-Edward like, was cleared. "Uh, Mrs. Masen?"
Elizabeth felt a tear of disappointment run down her cheek. It wasn't her boy. "Yes? Who is this?"
"Well…my name is Ronald Farren. I'm police chief of the NYPD, and I have news for you." There would have been an awkward pause in which Ronald would look around his office and try and find any kind of words to form in a coherent sentence that would, while showing the gratitude of the city, display to her their deep and undisputable sadness toward her loss. To his relief though, she interrupted.
"Have you found my boy, Officer Farren? Have you found Edward?"
Okay, maybe he wasn't that relieved. Ronald shifted uncomfortably in his seat and tried to tune out the hope in her voice. "Mrs. Masen…I'm afraid there has been an…accident with your son…There was an attempted bank robbery and the man had a gun. He was going to shoot a little boy, but your son jumped in front of him… He died a hero…"
Eddie heard the clatter of the phone being dropped to the floor and ran just in time to catch his wife as she collapsed into sobs. He didn't even need to ask, he just buried his face in her hair and held on to her shaking form as tight as he could, letting the tears that were stinging his eyes run freely.
Officer Farren hung up his phone with a sigh. After a moment, he closed the file that had been compiled on the incident and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes with his rough hands. He had had to tell many people many unfortunate things in his position, but this kid had been a hero, and it hammered his work-scarred heart just a bit more. Ronald opened his eyes to see the man still sitting on the other side of his desk, his hands calmly folded on his lap and a somber expression on his face. "Are you sure," Ronald asked wearily, "that you did everything you could?"
The man stood up, an odd feeling that Ronald couldn't place making his way to his eyes. Officer Farren had been a New York cop for decades, and he always prided himself on figuring people out, but, no matter how much he strained his mind, this man in the white coat was a puzzle to Ronald.
"Yes," the doctor said as he pulled on a winter jacket and looped a scarf around his pale neck, "I did everything within my power. Goodbye Officer."
Ronald watched Doctor Cullen leave his office, making his secretary's jaw drop in the middle of her typing, and rush out the door like he was in a hurry for something. Ronald didn't want to be suspicious; the doctor was a good man and probably didn't want to be away from the hospital for too long a time. But something just tugged at the edge of Officer Farren's gut, something he always listened to with the same certainty that told him there were twenty four hours in a day and seven days in the week.
He shook the thought from his head, feeling ashamed of himself. There's nothing odd about Doctor Cullen. Nothing odd at all.
000
Closing the door to the room that was set up for the boy, Alice pranced down the staircase to the living room, where she heard Jasper's low and even breathing. He was sitting on the edge of a chair and resting his chin on his fist with obvious contemplation. At Alice's entrance, he raised his head in greeting and looked once again into the explosion of city beyond the window. Jasper's brow was furrowed, his eyes sharply focused on something he couldn't even see, and a frown appeared on his marble like face. He was tasting the atmosphere around him, and not liking something he felt.
Alice moved quickly across the room and took a seat in her husband's lap, gently tracing a scar that ran along the side of his face with a finger before looking into his eyes and tilting her head to the side in a questioning manner. What's wrong, the gesture asked. Is there anything I can do to help, her feather light touch said.
He only shook his head in response, not answering her question, but telling her that he didn't yet know how to phrase his answer. A cry sounded from the floor above, making the silent pair look toward the ceiling simultaneously before meeting eyes once more. Alice cocked a perfect eyebrow, Jasper sighed.
Pausing a moment to collect his thoughts, Jasper said, "He doesn't think of the pain as anyone in the process of changing does. They feel fear, regret, sometimes revulsion, but the boy is…welcoming it." He met his wife's gaze with confusion. "How can that be? He keeps going through the same loop of emotions, like he's reminding himself of something. First, it seems as though he diligently will plan, then he allows himself to hope, and then there is this overwhelming feeling of love." Now it was his turn to tilt his head, asking her if she knew anything about it.
Alice shrugged. "I just see him searching. Not any one area, but hundreds of different cities and places. He's looking for something. Or someone…" She trailed off, diving into her own thoughts about this boy, Edward's, future while Jasper pondered over his motivations and purpose. Both were getting nowhere fast, circling around the obvious with a dismissed wave of a mental hand, and were interrupted by the ding of the private elevator.
There was the silence that consisted of Esme running down the stairs and to the front of the opening in a split second before she urgently grabbed her husband's hand. "Carlisle," she said as breathlessly as someone who didn't need to breathe could manage, "the change is coming to an end."
They both ran upstairs, leaving Alice and Jasper to their private world of what-ifs and whys.
000
First, there was the noise. It blossomed within Edward, filling every cavity of his being with screaming and beeping and shuffling. Every sound was noticeable and had a name; here there was a sneeze, there was a pigeon ending its flight on the building across from theirs, and over in the distance a judge banged his gavel with all the strength he had in his bony arm, trying take command over a court that had dissolved into nothing more than a bickering bunch of children.
There was also the words he felt he shouldn't be hearing. They were private things, not the kind that would normally be said aloud, and Edward was surprised to learn a man somewhere on the street must have been muttering about his guilt over committing homicide and the fact that no one even paid attention shocked him. Yes, it was New York, but there was indifference, and then there was callous idiocy.
All of these different noises should have crowded his head and given it over to a very painful headache, but Edward was surprised to find that he could handle it naturally, with enough room for him to think on his own with ease.
Second, there was the thirst. He opened his eyes and sat upright so fast he thought that he had left some of his organs on the bed, but no, again there was that natural feeling that this is the way things ought to be. Edward was about to go off and explore what that wonderful aroma was when two bodies collided roughly with both of his sides.
The one on the right was a particularly bulky man with curly hair and forearms that would rival Popeye's, while the one on the left was a surprisingly pretty blonde with a tilt of regal-ness to her chin. If Edward wasn't so preoccupied with the burning in his throat, he might have thought how odd it was that he could hear them talk even though they never opened their mouths.
Anger at his restrainers rose in Edward's body like a wave, and he growled loudly at the two figures, trying to move his arms and finding that they were locked in position on either side of his head as he was forced to lie down on the bed once more. Hands found his snarling mouth and opened it with ease, forcing something in Edward's mouth. Sweet, hot liquid poured out, giving the fiery monster what it wanted and letting it subside into satisfaction. It didn't taste as good as the other things had smelled, but Edward was thankful for it.
Now that the hunger was somewhat in control, Edward settled. The two people holding him slowly let go, letting him sit up at the end of the bed but keeping a close guard in case he lost control.
Focusing his mind from the distracting blast of color and interesting new depth everything around him had, Edward looked at the four people in front of him. Along with his guards, there was a lovely woman with a kind smile and long, caramel colored hair and the doctor, looking at Edward with welcome. He could hear two more people (or, due to the lack of heartbeat, creatures), downstairs, talking about him in two different threads that had no regard for what the other said and continued on in their own train of thought like they didn't even hear the other person.
Turning his gaze to the only familiar face in the room, Edward looked at the doctor with blazing eyes that burned with the schemes of eternity Edward had planned, and asked, amid the roar of people, "So, Carlisle, I'm a vampire now?" The voice was much too smooth and velvet-like to belong to him, but it seemed to fit how Edward felt now; strong and sleek and filled with power.
The doctor's golden eyes flickered for a moment before understanding with rapid clarity how Edward had learned a name never given to him. He gave a brief nod and answered with a simple yes that could be heard by none other than the young boy. Edward smiled a beaming white and utterly content smile before plunging into the next step, listening to what Carlisle and the others said without any voice. "Good," he said.
Next up, we hear from Bella again…