Carlisle:
For one painfully long moment, I stared after Esme. The terror, the agony on her face was but a stinging memory now; she had probably buried herself amidst the nearest herd of deer by now.
With a quiet sigh, I returned my attention to the fragile situation that awaited my attention. Bella, still as white as a sheet, still gasping for breath, stared after Esme too, her eyes wide with shock but sparkling with sadness. She had such compassion for us...and it had very nearly destroyed her.
"Let me by, Edward," I murmured. After staring me down with his dark eyes, Edward reluctantly moved away.
"Here, Carlisle," Alice offered, handing me a towel before I could ask. I shook my head.
"Too much glass in the wound," I explained, setting the towel aside and tearing a strip off the thinner, lighter, more appropriate tablecloth. I fastened it just above Bella's elbow to make a tourniquet, and kept my hand on her arm in case she felt dizzy. She certainly looked it.
"Bella, do you want me to drive me to the hospital, or would you like me to take care of it here?" I asked gently.
"Here, please," she whispered, still clearly shaken.
"I'll get your bag," Alice offered, disappearing into my study.
"Let's take her to the kitchen table," I suggested to Edward. You can leave if you want to, son. I'll keep her safe.
Edward didn't take my offer; instead he lifted Bella into his arms and carried her to the kitchen table himself. I followed at a slower pace; using the time to shoo away the fears that had stuck themselves all over me as the family's control had come dangerously close to breaking.
"How are you doing, Bella?" I asked, with a renewed and far more settled calmness in my voice.
"I'm fine," she replied, her voice only wavering slightly. But this was Bella we were talking about: fine was never that simple.
Edward placed Bella gently, lovingly, into a chair and perched himself on the edge of the table. I pulled up a second chair beside Bella and retrieved a cotton wool bud and a pair of tweezers from my bag. Forcing myself to ignore the intensity with which the two stared at each other, I carefully began plucking the fragments of glass from Bella's wound. How she managed to fit so much of it in there I will never know, but as the pieces became smaller in size but larger in number, buried deeper and deeper in the cut, I decided to break out the anaesthetic.
"Just go, Edward," Bella sighed, the first sound for several minutes outside of her own breathing and pulse.
"I can handle it," Edward replied stiffly. His dark eyes were burning with thirst and determination to resist, and his jaw locked tight. He spared a moment to shoot me a glance, just to let me know that his words were meant for both of us.
"You don't need to be a hero," Bella objected. "Carlisle can fix me up without your help. Get some fresh air."
She's right, Edward, I backed her up as I injected a dose of local anaesthetic to numb the area. Bella winced.
"I'll stay," Edward replied firmly.
"Why are you so masochistic?" Bella muttered.
"Edward, you may as well go find Jasper before he gets too far," I suggested, imagining the shock my more volatile son must have felt when he realised what had happened; what he'd almost done. "I'm sure he's very upset with himself, and I doubt he'll listen to anyone but you right now."
"Yes, go help Jasper," Bella agreed enthusiastically.
"You might as well do something useful," Alice added. I shot her a scolding glance, but Edward had finally decided to listen. He nodded once and disappeared through the kitchen door. Bella turned her gaze to me, and though I wasn't watching her I could feel her eyes track me as I picked up the tweezers again and started removing the smaller pieces of glass. Alice's dancing footsteps followed Edward, and we were alone in the silence.
.o.o.o.
Bella sighed.
"Well, that's everyone. I can clear a room, at least," she said to nobody in particular.
"It's not your fault," I told her, chuckling at the idea that Bella thought it was somehow her fault – and at the fact that Edward was undoubtedly blaming himself. I wondered if he could hear me, if he had noticed this similarity. "It could happen to anyone."
"Could, but it usually happens to me," Bella remarked. I laughed again, then the room became silent but for our breathing, Bella's slightly fast heartbeat and the tinkling of the glass dropping onto the table.
"How can you do this?" Bella finally asked. "Even Alice and Esme…" she trailed off, shaking her head in wonder.
"Years and years of practice," I replied. More like decades and decades, actually… "I barely even notice the scent any more."
"Do you think it would be harder if you took a vacation from the hospital for a long time? And weren't around any blood?"
"Maybe," I replied with a shrug. "I've never felt the need for an extended holiday. I enjoy my work too much." Besides, I felt like adding, when you don't sleep at night, you get as much holiday as you want without disrupting your daily schedule.
Bella's stomach churned as the pile of glass continued to build, but she swallowed hard and ignored her queasiness.
"What is it that you enjoy?" she wondered, keeping her eyes on me.
"Hmm," I thought for a while before answering. "What I enjoy the very most is when my…enhanced abilities…let me save someone who would otherwise have been lost. It's pleasant knowing that, because of what I can do, some people's lives are better because I exist. Even the sense of smell is a useful diagnostic tool at times." I half-smiled, because though cancer was a dangerous and destructive thing, often to more than just the patient, I had a strange advantage over it.
I put the tweezers down again and examined the cut, searching for the glass fragments I might have missed. I rummaged through my bag, and Bella looked away as I drew out a needle and thread. So a family of vampires is just fine, but a couple of stitches and the nausea sets in. What a curious girl this Bella is.
"You try very hard to make up for something that was never your fault," Bella mused as I stitched up her wound. "What I mean is; it's not like you asked for this. You didn't choose this kind of life, and yet you have to work so hard to be good."
"I don't know that I'm making up for anything," I disagreed. "Like everything in life, I just had to decide what to do with what I was given."
"That makes it sound too easy," Bella objected. I ignored the darker thoughts creeping to the edges of my mind, and completed the final stitch.
"There," I said, snipping the thread. "All done." I wiped the stitches with an antiseptic that smelt strong and bitter. Bella tried not to grimace.
"In the beginning though," she pressed as I taped a piece of gauze in place, her eyes chasing me again. "Why did you even think to try a different way that the obvious one?"
I smiled to myself.
"Hasn't Edward already told you this story?"
"Yes," she replied. "But I'm trying to understand what you were thinking…" she dropped off as my smile disappeared. Dark, blurred memories flashed through my head, accompanied by an ice-cold sensation creeping through my veins, slowly incapacitating me, inch by inch. What I was thinking? I was thinking run, hide, and don't let Father find me. Of course, that was not exactly what Bella was after.
"You know my father was a clergyman," I started, rubbing the table down with an alcohol-soaked piece of gauze slightly more vigorously than was necessary. "He had a rather harsh view of the world, which I was already beginning to question before the time that I changed." The screams of innocent people rung in my ears as I put the glass fragments and used gauze into a bowl. I lit a match, and the sudden flare of flames cut the screaming off. Bella jumped.
"Sorry," I apologised. "That ought to do it…" I scanned the table one last time, but it was clean. "So I didn't agree with my father's particular brand of faith. But never, in the nearly four hundred years now since I was born, have I seen anything to make me doubt whether God exists in some form or the other. Not even the reflection in the mirror."
A few days after my change, I had found a full length mirror - cracked and tarnished, falling off its stand - in the abandoned carriage shed which I would temporarily make my home. For a moment, the memory was so crystal clear I felt as if I were standing right there, in place of my old red-eyed self. In my mind, I reached out to touch that terrified, heartbroken face that was reflected back at me, the red eyes of a stranger, a monster, glistening in the cool, dark night.
Blushing awkwardly, Bella examined her dressings and I pretended to search for something in my bag to conceal the sadness in my eyes as I remembered the reflection that had shocked me, wounded me more than my own. The reflection of Esme's terrified face in the pool of blood she had created. The guilt in her eyes as she pushed me away, ignoring help, insisting that she didn't deserve it and at the same time fearing that I would hurt her for her mistake. She had given up long ago on higher beings: things can only get so bad before you know you've been forgotten, she had told me. But something - God? Fate? - drove her to talk to me that night, one of the first full conversations we had shared, and some part of Esme healed.
"I'm sure all this sounds a little bizarre, coming from a vampire," I continued, letting the memories dissolve back into the present. "But I'm hoping that there is still a point to this life, even for us. It's a long shot, I'll admit – we're damned regardless – but I hope, maybe foolishly, that we'll get some measure of credit for trying."
"I don't think that's foolish," Bella mumbled. "And I don't think anyone else would, either."
"Actually, you're the first to agree with me," I told her.
"The rest of them don't feel the same?" she wondered. Of course she was thinking of Edward…thinking of how desperately he wanted to stop her being changed.
"Edward's with me up to a point," I explained. "God and heaven exist…and so does hell. But he doesn't believe there is an afterlife for our kind." I turned and stared out the window over the kitchen sink, absently gazing at the darkness. "You see," I made myself finish; "he thinks we've lost our souls."
"That's the real problem, isn't it?" Bella pressed. "That's why he's being so difficult about me."
I turned back to Bella, speaking slowly as I tried to make her understand the seriousness of Edward's beliefs.
"I look at my…son - his strength, his goodness, the brightness that shines out of him – and it only fuels that hope, that faith, more than ever. How could there not be more for one such as Edward?"
Bella nodded in fervent agreement.
"But if I believed as he does," I continued. "If you believed as he did…could you take away his soul?"
Bella hesitated, stumped. It was an unfair trade, I knew that: she would give her soul to him, but she could never take his. If I had believed what Edward did, I never would have thought about changing Esme. I would never do that to her.
"You see the problem," I concluded. Bella shook her head, and I sighed.
"It's my choice," she insisted.
"It's his too," I said, holding up a hand when she moved to argue. "Whether he is responsible for doing that to you."
"He's not the only one able to do it…" Bella looked over me speculatively, and I laughed to lighten the mood.
"Oh, no," I said. "You're going to have to work this out with him." Then I sighed, and I couldn't keep the smile on my face. "That's the one part I can never be sure of. I think, in most other ways, that I've done the best I could with what I had to work with. But was it right to doom others to this life? I can't decide." My mind again returned to Esme, from whom I had taken the one thing she craved from her human life…but to whom I had given a second chance at love and acceptance and joy. And to Edward, of course…my mind was never far from my son. He was so young and strong and clever and kind…and though he was dying I took him away from what he believed was his only chance at any kind of afterlife.
"It was Edward's mother who made up my mind," I whispered absently. I realised I was staring into the night again, but this time I didn't turn away. It was so peaceful out there…so beautiful.
"His mother?" Bella wondered quietly.
"Yes. Her name was Elizabeth. Elizabeth Masen. His father, Edward Senior, never regained consciousness in the hospital: he died in the first wave of influenza. But Elizabeth was alert until almost the very end. Edward looks a great deal like her; she had that same strange shade of bronze to her hair, and her eyes were exactly the same colour green."
"His eyes were green?" Bella wondered reverently as she edited this into her image of human Edward.
"Yes…" I replied. The room in front of me shifted, and it suddenly became as though someone was acting out a play in front of me. A motion picture of sorts which I had constructed from my memories: it was a little duller in colour than the vividness of this afternoon's events, but otherwise flawless. There were no blurs, no missing details. Even the atmosphere was right.
"Elizabeth worried obsessively over her son," I explained, watching the sickly woman asking every doctor that passed to tell her of Edward. Most of the time, she was ignored. "She hurt her own chances of survival trying to nurse him from her sickbed. I expected that he would go first, he was so much worse off than she was. When the end came for her, it was very quick. It was just after sunset, and I'd arrived to relieve the doctors who'd been working all day. That was a hard time to pretend – there was so much work to be done, and I had no need of rest. How I hated to go back to my house, to hide in the dark and pretend to sleep while so many were dying." In the vision before me, the 1918 version of myself paced in a small room, hearing every tick of the clock. It wasn't so much a memory as a picture that I had created from my memories.
"I went to check Elizabeth and her son first. I'd grown attached – always a dangerous thing, given the fragile nature of humans. I could see at once that she'd taken a bad turn." The scene before me shifted again, and spread around me as though Bella and I had been put in the middle of a film set. Elizabeth's eyes burned with the fever, and her body trembled violently. "The fever was raging out of control, and her body was too weak to fight anymore," I narrated.
"She didn't look weak though, when she glared up at me from her cot," I continued, watching my twentieth century self stop by the bed – and for a moment my image flashed back to a memory, and Elizabeth's determined green eyes pierced mine again.
"'Save him!' she commanded me in the hoarse voice that was all her throat could manage." Her voice ran under mine as I spoke her words. "'I'll do everything in my power,' I promised her, taking her hand." My fingers twitched as I felt her burning skin. "The fever was so high, she probably couldn't even tell how unnaturally cold mine felt: everything felt cold to her skin. 'You must,' she insisted, clutching at my hand with enough strength that I wondered if she wouldn't pull through the crisis after all. Her eyes were hard, like stones – like emeralds. 'You must do everything in your power. What others cannot do, that is what you must do for my Edward.'" Her burning hand vanished, and I felt the same terror as I had all those years ago. "It frightened me. She looked at me with those piercing eyes and, for one instant, I felt certain she knew my secret. Then the fever overwhelmed her, and she never regained consciousness. She died within an hour of making her demand." The strength, the life, drained from those eyes…it was a terrible sight.
"I'd spent decades considering the idea of creating a companion for myself," I explained to Bella, listening instead to Edward Anthony Masen Junior fight for breath against the draining illness. "Just one other creature who would really know me, rather than what I pretended to be." Even among my own kind, I had to pretend. I had to sit back and let them kill people because it was not their fault, what they'd become, and they didn't see the reason in pretending they were anything otherwise. "But I could never justify it to myself – doing what had been done to me." I flexed my fingers to rid them of the constricting, biting ice that was creeping in.
"There Edward lay, dying," I continued, bringing myself back to the hospital wing where Edward struggled for life in the floods of death that surrounded him. "It was clear he only had hours left. Beside him, his mother, her face somehow not yet peaceful, even in death.
"Elizabeth's words echoed in my head. How could she guess what I could do? Could anyone really want that for her son? I looked at Edward. Sick as he was, he was still beautiful. There was something pure and good about his face. The kind of face I would have wanted my son to have.
"After all those years of indecision, I simply acted on a whim. I wheeled his mother to the morgue first, and then I came back for him. No one noticed he was still breathing: there weren't enough hands, enough eyes, to keep track of what half the patients needed. The morgue was empty – of the living, at least. I stole him out the back door, and carried him across the rooftops, back to my home.
"I wasn't sure what had to be done. I settled for recreating the wounds I'd received myself, so many centuries earlier in London. I felt bad about that later: it was more painful and lingering than necessary." I winced when my recalled Edward screamed in my ear, but I don't think Bella noticed.
"I wasn't sorry, though," I continued. "I've never been sorry that I saved Edward." The smell of bleach – and behind that, Esme – interrupted my memories, and I realised Bella was staring at me with wonder and shock and sympathy. I smiled at her, to comfort both of us.
"I suppose I should take you home now," I offered.
"I'll do that," Edward said, walking unusually slowly into the room. His eyes were dark, and there was a bitterness in them he tried to hide.
"Carlisle can take me," Bella objected.
"I'm fine," Edward replied stiffly. "You'll need to change anyway. You'd give Charlie a heart attack the way you look. I'll have Alice get you something." He turned and strode back through the kitchen.
"He's very upset," Bella said, her voice quiet but anxious.
"Yes," I agreed grimly. "Tonight is exactly the kind of thing he fears the most: you being put in danger, because of what we are." I flinched at the memory of the horror in Esme's eyes, how close she had been to Bella…how quickly it would have been over if she had taken a single breath…
"It's not his fault," Bella said.
"It's not yours either," I rebutted. Bella looked away uncertainly, and I offered her my hand to help her up. We returned to the main room, where Esme was mopping the floor where Bella had fallen with bleach.
"Esme, let me do that," Bella offered, blushing again.
"I'm already done," she replied cheerfully. "How do you feel?"
"I'm fine. Carlisle sews faster than any other doctor I've had." Esme and I chuckled, and at that moment Alice and Edward returned. Edward lingered in the corner, darkly expressionless, but Alice danced right up to Bella.
"C'mon," she said. "I'll find you something less macabre to wear."
They disappeared upstairs, and Edward moved over to the door like a ghost. Esme glanced up at me, apology and worry in her eyes. I kissed her head and stroked her hair, and we stood in silence as Bella and Alice came back downstairs.
"Take your things!" Alice cried, scooping up the remaining packages and Bella's camera and putting them in Bella's good arm as she walked warily towards Edward. "You can thank me later, when you've opened them."
"Goodnight, Bella," Esme said quietly.
"Goodnight, Bella," I said, glancing at Edward who was still tense and somehow separated from the rest of us.
.o.o.o.
"I'm so sorry," Esme choked, when the room was empty.
"You didn't do anything dear," I assured her.
"I nearly did," she said, horror in her tone.
"Everyone nearly did," I said calmly. "It's not your fault."
"But it nearly was. I stayed in the room longer than anyone else, I was going to take a breath, I was going to let myself. You should have seen Edward's eyes, Carlisle. He would have killed me before I got to her. I know he would have. I don't want to do that to him."
"Esme, shhh," I crooned, moving to kneel in front of her. She tried to turn her head away from me, but I took her hand in mine and she stopped squirming. "Edward's just upset right now – tonight was frightening for all of us. It'll be fine. You'll see. He'll be back in the morning, Bella will be fine and you'll be able to bake all the apology cakes the oven can handle." Esme cracked a smile, and I stood up, still holding her hand in mine. She didn't let it go.
"Jasper?" she wondered quietly. Alice and Jasper appeared at the top of the stairs, and Jasper haltingly followed his pixie down to the floor.
"I'm sorry," he muttered, looking at me with hollow eyes. "It was wrong of me to be that close, Carlisle. I put so much at risk." He shook his head, and Esme threw her arms around her son.
"Don't blame yourself," she said. "It's not your fault."
"It nearly was," Jasper replied, pushing her away. Esme let her arms drop, and Jasper disappeared. Alice started after him and stopped in the kitchen doorway.
"Sorry," she said to us. "Got to-" she gestured behind herself, and Esme nodded. The room was empty again.
In fact, the whole house was.
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Question from the author: in the coming chapters I use songs, so would you prefer for me to a) give you the title and author so you can just Google it or b) type out the link for you