A/N: Here goes the second chapter! I know you can't exactly call this 'falling in love "quickly and easily"', as it's supposed to have happened between Carlisle and Esme, but what can I say? Quickly and easily is less fun to write!

Thank you again to those who reviewed!

And now enjoy!

The Cliff, Again

"It won't work, you know."

Her eyes narrowed a bit, but otherwise she didn't move. She didn't care that he had found her or what he was saying, the word didn't even make sense to her. All she cared about was this cliff, all her thoughts, her entire being had narrowed down to this one place, and she fought to keep it so. She couldn't let anything interfere, wouldn't. Least of all him, not again.

She balled her hands into tight, hard fists and stared into the darkness at her feet, that seemed to be made of the rushing and howling sound of wind and water. It grew louder and louder in her ears, until it seemed to grow tendrils and wings that reached out to envelop her, soft and inviting and oddly familiar.

But the silence behind her, his silence cut through it all. Amazing, how something that was so frail and infinitesimal against the backdrop of such noise, could be so inescapably present. She tried to ignore, tried to hide in the chaos around her, but somehow, the spell had cracked and then it broke.

She blinked and felt as if the liberating darkness plunged downwards, the same 300 feet that Esme had fallen through herself, leaving behind dusk, brighter than she would have liked it.

"You saved me twice", Esme said quietly, "for the first time I thank you, the second I didn't want, and I beg you don't do it a third time." Her voice was tense, and pleading.

"No", Carlisle said slowly, with that peculiar hint of sadness that she had heard so often already in many of the things he had said to her over the last three days, "there are indeed few things that you need saving from now, Esme." He paused, and she frowned into the depth.

"It won't work", he said again. "Nothing will. Trust me, I know. I tried."

For some reason, she turned around.

He was leaning against a rock that weather and time seemed to have forgotten there on the cliff, watching her with his golden eyes, a regretful expression on his pale face and all that mesmerizing beauty that had stunned her at sixteen and still caught her off guard now, somehow piercing through the mist of her desperation.

"Why?"

He shrugged lightly and smiled. "I guess death does make people unbreakable. Almost."

Another frown, as if she thought his answer didn't make much sense, and she was silent for a few moments.

Odd, how calm she seemed. Carlisle had seen enough newborn vampires to know that this was uncommon. And she had a lot more than bloodlust to battle. But maybe that was the explanation. Maybe the pain she had brought with her from her human life was just that much stronger than her desire to kill.

Maybe she was paralyzed.

Standing not a step away from the edge of the cliff, she looked like a paper statue, unstable and constantly on the verge of being pulled over the ledge by some invisible strings rising up from the shore below, attached to her body like to a kite. Her crimson eyes confused and afraid.

Like she really needed to be saved from everything, everything that had been her world once and everything that was her world now.

Only that wasn't possible anymore.

What ever had he been thinking.

"Why did you try?" The question seemed out of context for a moment, until he had found the lose end of their conversation again, somewhere amidst the regret that was becoming a constant companion.

It surprised him, too.

Most of all, however, he wished she hadn't asked.

After all the accusation and pain he had seen in her eyes over the past days and nights, it somehow was this question that made him wonder if the damage he had done might be too much to fix.

For the first time since she had turned around, he dropped his gaze from her face.

He knew he remained silent for too long. As if he had to think about it. When the answer was the simplest in the world.

"I didn't want to be what I am", he finally said, quietly and evenly, and Esme didn't know him well enough to hear how much it tortured him to say the words out loud. How could he ever justify what he had done?

Well, but that answer was simple, too. It wasn't justifiable, and it was her right not to be appeased.

"Then why", she asked, the calm surface finally crumbling, her voice rising as if she indeed did have to yell to be heard over the howling wind, "why did you make me the same?" She halted herself, visibly struggling to regain some composure. Her hands were balled into fists again, held stiffly at her sides, and she turned a bit, looking out at the horizon – an eerily luminous stretch of anthracite that was rapidly loosing its glow to the descending night – as if she could draw some kind of strength from there.

"Didn't you know –" she began, but broke off again, unable to finish.

He knew what she wanted to say, though. Her son, her newborn child, taken from her only days after he had come into the world, and her despair over the loss.

"I knew", he merely said.

This time, she spun around, eyes blazing. Her hands relaxed for a split second, then they were fists again. "Edward told me you would never turn someone who had a choice", she said, forcefully, and always with that edge of despair that seemed to line everything she said or did or thought.

Carlisle nodded, meeting her eyes again. She was right, every word she said tonight, and had said ever since her new life had begun, was and had been true.

Everything she would say would be true.

"I jumped off this cliff." She pointed behind her, but it looked as though she were reaching out towards the blackening sky, and the twines of the 300-feet-deep darkness.

"That was my choice."

"I know."

Her arm dropped to her side again, suddenly lifeless, as if she couldn't even make a fist anymore. She didn't understand. Just couldn't find a reason that would explain, that would help her consolidate the image that she had of him, had had for such a long time, the way he treated her and those gentle, often sad eyes, and what he had done to her.

Maybe, he thought, Esme, the woman that seemed like an angel to him, was really an avenging angel.
Maybe he had been wrong, and Edward right, and there was no forgiveness. He had changed Esme despite all he had known, and against better judgement, because he had not been able to resist her. Or hadn't bothered to resist. No one had asked him to save her, like Elizabeth Masen had asked for her son to be saved.

But Esme had asked not be saved. Unmistakably. He had ignored it, and here she was, speaking out loud everything he had buried in silence, turned away from, hidden from.

Maybe she was here to remind him that no excuse had ever been good enough, and certainly not his own loneliness.

Esme stared at him mutely for a long while, the wind tearing at her hair, her clothes, her body, as if it were trying to nudge her further towards the ledge and pull her away from it at the same time.

And then, slowly, she closed her eyes, and squeezed them shut, wishing for the rushing and howling noises to wipe out reality again, to infuse her with the darkness that she had been so close to once already, almost been part of.

And she almost forgot about Carlisle's presence.

She thought of Daniel, the little angel she had not been allowed to keep, and did forget about it.

But his words lingered, they stayed with here even in the sounds of the wind and the tumultuous lake. Nothing will.

She didn't know how many times throughout her childhood and adolescence she had heard her mother say how nothing was set in stone. She had believed it, always.

Nothing is set in stone.

Suddenly, everything was.

There is always a way.

Suddenly, there was none. No way out, she would never escape again.

"You doomed me", she whispered, feeling how the wind took the words, carrying them out into the pitch black night that would be her existence now.

Let me know what you think!