wreck of the day, Bella, Carlisle, Edward!

[ISABELLA SWAN]

Apparently even “walking disaster” didn’t begin to cover the appropriate description for Bella Swan’s brand of clumsy. With so many outside forces continually conspiring against her, the danger magnet she was, it was only ironically appropriate that she tended to be an equal danger to herself. Of course, it was never wise for her to attempt to function on little sleep, or with a head full of confusing thoughts and heavy worries, all of which she was battling at the moment.

Charlie still wasn’t home yet, and while Bella knew where he was, she couldn’t help but feel anxious about his absence. With the number of vampires arriving in Port Angeles and the surrounding areas increasing by the day, she felt as though her fears for her father were more than justified. It was too close to home, and the attention they were attracting was much too suspicious. For those that knew about vampires and werewolves and the mythical world they existed in, the sudden spike in mysterious disappearances and odd, unexplained murders was true cause for concern. Of course, to someone who didn’t know, these happenings only added up to urban danger and fairly gruesome news headlines, something that seemed to fall under the responsibility of a certain Chief of Police, much to Bella’s dismay. She knew her father was currently meeting with the heads of police for other towns and cities in the area, discussing what little information they’d been able to recover on any of the most recent cases, but even Bella hadn’t expected it to run this late.

The moon hung high over the trees, complimenting the desk lamp Bella had on, adding light to her otherwise darkened bedroom where she was attempting to do homework. Attempting being the key word, as she was doing more thinking on topics that had nothing to do with school than anything else. Bella couldn’t keep her mind from drifting back to the last time Charlie had unknowingly gotten involved in the world of mythical creatures, before Bella had really known that her best friend was a werewolf, and before any of the Cullens had returned to Forks. Naturally, her thoughts shifted again and her tired eyes followed her line of thought, squinting through her bedroom window toward the woods. She wondered who might be outside at that very moment. Probably a wolf or two, most likely Jacob included, who she knew wasted too many hours when he should have been catching up on sleep to keep himself going by running around her home. She was grateful of the bit of protection that provided Charlie, but she still wished Jake would take himself into account, as she worried more for him than she did her own safety. Was Edward out there too, now that he was back in Forks? It was certainly possible, although Bella found it hard to be entirely sure. The idea of both of her protectors watching the house made Bella feel a bit guilty for taking up their time, but also another sort of anxious. She didn’t particularly want them to meet again, especially not when things were so uncertain between Bella and either of them…

Bella was battling her heavy eyelids by the time she heard the familiar sound of Charlie’s cruiser pulling into the driveway, and still entirely groggy, she fought with her sluggish limbs to make it out of her room and downstairs to ask him what he had learned, too impatient to wait until morning despite the late hour. Much as always though, it would have been better for her to keep off her feet, as nearing the bottom of the stairs, Bella lost her footing, falling without any grace whatsoever, down the last few steps. That in itself wouldn’t have been entirely unusual, or anything to grow too concerned about, except foolishly she had reached out with one arm, in a vain attempt to keep her balance. She could feel now how the awkward angle of trying to gain a grasp on the stair above her, now several steps above her, had done something to her arm, and while she was used to pain in many forms, she couldn’t stop a bit of a groan from escaping her lips when she finally rose to her feet again, clutching her arm in an attempt to ward off any additional pain in the area of her shoulder, although it was already throbbing.

Charlie rushed to her aid at the sound, better equipped now at handling Bella’s often clumsy accidents, although the concern he had for his daughter was displayed clearly across his features. It had been a while since Bella had been brought into the emergency room at Forks General Hospital, a few weeks at the very least, but it seemed her streak of health had finally ended. With little argument from the tired girl, the pain really was a bit worrying, Charlie led her to the cruiser, still in her sweatpants and an older t-shirt, and drove the all too frequented route.

Bella could already feel her cheeks flaming with embarrassment as they pulled up to the hospital entrance, the only thing saving her from being completely and utterly mortified at the moment being the fact that Charlie hadn’t turned on the flashers or siren as though this was any real emergency. The color in her cheeks only grew more pronounced as the staff greeted her with familiarity, a nurse who already knew her name and her history and penchant for physical disaster escorting her through to an open room, while Charlie stayed behind in the waiting room to fill out necessary paperwork. Bella only nodded, cringing a little as she did so, still clutching her arm in an attempt to keep it still, as the nurse assured her that the doctor would be in to see her soon. And even though Bella knew that the Cullens had returned, and that Carlisle had resumed work at the hospital, the idea never crossed her mind that he was the physician she was currently waiting for.

[CARLISLE CULLEN]

Charades was definitely not a favorite game of Doctor Carlisle Cullen, but somehow he wound up playing a convoluted form of the game every day for the better part of the last two centuries. This was one point of contention between Carlisle and his ancient friends in the Volturi, how he played the martyr and hid his true nature. But, as he had argued many times before, Carlisle found the lives he saved and the guilt he found some small absolution from made up for any discomforts that he intentionally put to himself. In his current round of charades he needed to pretend to sleep, having been working for well over the required hours and being on call. So he lay in wait, listening to the sounds of the hospital around him.

Every second seemed to freeze in place, tormenting him as they slid so slowly by. Of course it was easier to ‘sleep’ in Forks, there were significantly less trauma injuries to be dealt with here as opposed to any other city. It had been two hours, seventeen minutes, and just a hair under nine seconds when his pager blared to life on the table next to the bed he occupied. The device had barely begun its call before the sound had been shut off and the device was in his hand. In less than another second he had whipped on his lab coat and opened the door. Of course out of the shadows that dwelt in the on-call room Carlisle had to confine himself to a ‘normal’ human speed.

As soon as he stepped off of the elevator and in to the emergency room he was handed the patients chart by one of the ER nurses. Carlisle perused the chart as he walked towards the room where his patient waited. If he were human, and gave his entire mind to reading the chart, he would have stopped dead in his tracks at the patient name: Isabella Swan. His first reaction was to think of the scenarios that could have led to Bella’s visit here. But Carlisle kept the worries firmly in hand incase Edward were within the vicinity, his son would feed on those thoughts from his father and lead to Edward blaming himself all the more. In the span of less than a second that all of these thoughts flew through his mind Carlisle also finished reading the chart. Bella had simply fallen down the stairs and her father, Police Chief Swan, had brought her in. When you hear hoof beats think horses not zebras; even if, where Bella is concerned, horses were the less likely choice.

Carlisle nodded his head towards Forks’ Chief of Police, who still labored at filling out forms for his daughter’s latest trip to the hospital, before entering Trauma Room Three. Everything that he needed was already in the room but Carlisle’s attention was on the girl with the dislocated shoulder, not the instruments of healing. Carlisle walked closer to the injured girl and smiled down at her. “Hello, Bella,” he said in a low whisper, “I would say it is good to see you but I will leave that until after I fix your shoulder.”

Carlisle rolled up the left sleeve of Bella’s sleep ensemble, careful beyond words. It was good to see the girl that was so aptly described as a ‘magnet for danger’ but one thought continued to surface: how horrified Alice would be at what Bella wore to bed. Feeling carefully with expert fingers Carlisle traced the muscles and ligaments in Bella’s shoulder, almost immediately he could tell that the assessment of a dislocated shoulder was correct. “Well Bella it seems you dislocated your shoulder,” Carlisle whispered to her, unwilling to let a nurse hear him giving a diagnosis before consulting an X-Ray, “I will have to follow protocol and get you an X-Ray. But I can give you some morphine before that. Of course to give you morphine I will need your right hand for the IV, you will have to let go of your left arm and probably turn your head. I would hate to have you pass out.”

Carlisle took Bella’s right arm away from its death grip on her left and held it still. As he held her arm it trembled, whether from pain or fear of needles and blood Carlisle could not be certain. He held the arm that shook as gently as he could, almost as if he were handling spun glass. A swipe of disinfectant and a local anesthetic came first then, with a short wait, Carlisle was ready to insert the IV. He found the vein, with both long hours of medical training and his ability to smell her blood that was less tempting, to him, than human food. It was easy to see the appeal her blood held for Edward while her appeal kept him from partaking of her blood, but as Carlisle had never tasted human blood it held no draw for him. The needle slid deftly under her skin and bit in to her vein. He spilled not one drop of her precious life blood but quickly settled a bandage over the needle, both to keep it in place and to keep the sight from unsettling Bella. “There, we will wait a little before taking you down to X-Ray,” Carlisle said as he turned on the morphine drip.