Okay, I honestly have no idea where this came from.

I was finished with this story, totally content to end it on a sad note, a little bit of a cliffy even! But then...I started writing. So writing and writing and hey, this sorta fits in with that BW I should be done with, doesn't it? And of course I couldn't just let it go, could I? I did a little editing to make it flow better with the other chapters, but it still sticks out a little (sorry 'bout that). But here it is, and though I have no idea where I'm going with this, I hope you all don't mind.

This is purely for fun, no infringement intended, and so on and so forth.

Enjoy!

"Leah Clearwater, you certainly have made a life for yourself here, haven't you?"

The world stopped turning.

She felt it with her entire being, and the abrupt standstill almost knocked her to her knees. No. No, no, no…

Standing frozen outside the door to her apartment, her hand started to shake as it held her key poised at the doorknob. No one had called her that in years. She had taken so many precautions, gone to such measures to make sure that name died along with the angry young woman who it had belonged to when she left them both in Washington. She had worked her hardest to forget her, but now she was back, carried on the lips of an all too familiar voice.

"I hope you don't think me too forward, but I would appreciate it if you were so kind as to invite me in."

She didn't realize she had been holding her breath until she found herself gasping for oxygen, dizzy with an intense dread at his words, his very presence. Her keys were deafening as they fell from her grasp, gnashing against one another as they handed in a heap at her feet on the worn concrete walkway. The world was still not moving, and she felt gravity pulling her down. Placing both hands flat against her door, she held on for dear life as her legs began to buckle.

This couldn't be happening.

"Leah…" he murmured, swooping in and snatching up her keychain in the blink of an eye. "I know this may come as a shock, but it really would be for the best if this could exchange could take place out of range of prying eyes.

He placed a hand on her shoulder and she shuttered, but nodded. He was right. Taking her keys back, she found the appropriate one and fit it into the lock, twisting it slowly as the latch sprang free. She turned the knob and he pushed it open, but stayed where she was standing until a gentle nudge from him encouraged her to step over the threshold. They entered, and he silently shut the door behind them and locked it once more.

"Well…this is a very nice place you have here." He announced, breaking the silence with awkward formality as he looked around at the clean but chaotic space surrounding them.

She looked at him, meeting his eyes for the first time, and replied with more than a hint of bitterness. "You should know, you paid for it Dr. Cullen."

He chuckled a bit. It made her shiver. "Touché. But I only wrote the check, Esme picked it out. She is much better at this sort of thing than I am."

She should smile and be grateful, she should offer him a seat and ask him how he's been, she should do something, anything befitting of a proper hostess, but she simply couldn't bring herself to it. He facilitated all of this, and here she was, resenting his trespass with emotions she never let see the light of day. She felt the tears welling and she cursed them with everything left in her, but it did nothing to stop their formation. She didn't trust herself to speak, but she had to get it out there. "You…but that's…you didn't come halfway across the country to admire your investment though, did you?"

His pale face was grave. "I'm sorry Leah-"

"Kate!" She screamed, flinging her heavily-laden bag off of her arm and hurling it against the wall in one fluid, furious motion. "My name is Kate now!"

His eyes followed the canvas tote's path, and he seemed torn between comforting her and going to retrieve it. The bag would be easier to fix, to simply pick back up and put to rights, but the girl was another story. In the end, he chose neither, and they continued to stand at arm's distance from one another in the living area of her tiny Charleston apartment. He sighed deeply. "Of course, of course. I'm sorry, I should have known that. Alice was the one who…the documentation…anyway, I apologize. Kate."

"Can we please just get this over with?"

"Of course. We had an agreement when we got you settled here, and I think we both know what me being here entails. I would never come here and disturb you if it were not of the utmost importance. I know how badly you want to separate yourself from Forks and everything that happened to you there, but-"

"Seth?" She cut him off, her voice hoarse with unshed tears. He promised, it would be as though she never existed. Her medical records completely wiped, her birth certificate destroyed, and after they got her settled, no communication with any of the Cullens. They would keep their mouths shut and she would do the same. Unless…of course there was an unless. Unless there was an emergency. She knew that was why he was here, and she felt physically ill with what she feared he might say.

"Your mother."

She collapsed. Her already shaking legs completely gave out from underneath her and she buckled, her entire body hit the carpeted floor hard. She lay her clammy cheek against the old gray shag and tried to breathe. It was a conscious effort, inhale exhale and repeat, her lungs burning with every attempt. Dr. Cullen dropped to his knees beside her, and she felt his cold fingers press against her neck and check her pulse. She wanted to flinch, to pull away from him and lock herself in her room until she woke up in bed from this terrible nightmare.

Because it had to be some sort of sick, warped dream. This couldn't be real, Dr. Carlisle Cullen could not be inside Kate Harold's apartment, telling her that Sue Clearwater was…she didn't want to think about how that sentence might end. Because she shouldn't have to, not here, not in this life, not in the one where they had nothing to do with each other. She had to wake up, to get out of this horrible place…but she couldn't.

Physically, she could not bring herself to exert the effort to do anything other than breathe, even just to cry. One breathe after another, in…out…wake up, wake up, wake up!

Once he had checked her vitals and must have felt assured that she wasn't about to go into a coma, Dr. Cullen began to speak. His voice though, usually so low and steady and even reassuring (once she got used to it), sounded like it was coming from somewhere far away and underwater. His words were distant and garbled, but she knew they were important, so she struggled to understand.

"Le-Kate. I'm so sorry this ever had to happen, especially under these circumstances. I've debated for months about whether to find you or not, with the hopes that in the meantime her health would improve…but her symptoms have only worsened. I hate having to disrupt your life here, I truly do respect the new start you've made and cannot imagine how hard it's been on you. I know dragging all this bad blood back up again is going to be painful, but I think we would both regret it even more if I never told you, no matter what you choose to do with the information."

She knew that. She might hate it and have tried to block it from her memory with all she had, but she knew that deep down in whatever substituted for a vampire's heart, Dr. Cullen was a good 'person.' She knew he was trying to help, but she only wished he didn't have to. She wished again to wake up, and squeezed her eyes shut tightly. Counting to ten, she opened them slowly…only to find the scene before her unchanged. A man with expensive clothes and golden eyes still knelt on the floor of her living room. It might have been comical, the outlandishness of it all, had it been anyone other than the two of them. But it couldn't be, and she swallowed the thick knot in her throat and tried to speak, finding her voice unable to rise any louder than a whisper.

"What…what happened to her?"

"She had a stroke." He paused a moment to let the words sink in. She gasped, and when she resumed breathing it was quite labored. Her already racing pulse accelerated, so he proceeded with caution, choosing his words carefully. "It was…serious of course, but given her age and health history, such things are not unheard of. Given proper treatment, I wouldn't have expected it to be life-threatening."

She interrupted him, "So you're saying it's not… life-threatening I mean."

It wasn't, it shouldn't have been. I expected her to make a full recovery, but she hasn't been making the kind of progress I would like to see in someone with her condition."

She lifted her head slightly. "Her condition?"

He seemed to regret his words. "Your mother…she hasn't been the same since you left. You could call it depression, but that is a fairly broad term and she has never allowed me to properly evaluate her. All of the changes in the last years, losing Harry, and then you…it's been a bit too much for her. Obviously, bed rest is needed after one has a stroke, but I would have like to have seen her up and moving around some time ago. She refuses all of her rehabilitation treatments; speech, physical therapy and the like, and stays in bed day after day. Seth, Charlie, Emily, no one can change her mind, no matter what they try to do to coax her out. Her recovery is suffering greatly from it, and I believe she had begun to have small seizures, though she-"

"Stop it!" She sat bolt upright, covering both her ears with her hands like a child. "Shut up, I don't want to hear anymore! I can't, don't you understand?"

"Kate…"

"I get it, okay! It's all my fault! I killed my father, and now I'm killing my mother…I get it…I ruin people. Don't you think I know that? Don't you think that's why I left?"

And he wanted to hold her. He really did, because despite her tall frame, she looks just like a little girl curled up on the carpet there. A daughter unlike any of his adopted children, one in desperate need of a father to take her into his arms and tell her that everything will be alright and she is safe and nothing bad is going to happen to her ever again.

But he doesn't, because they would both know he is lying.

And she's been lied to enough.

"I'll go." She whispered, dropping her hands from her head to wrap her arms around herself. She stared blindly at the carpet, and he could see her jaw tremble when she spoke. "But at night, and only to see her."

The words have an unspoken meaning which hangs heavily in the air between the two of them, and he nodded his head silently in agreement.

No one else can know she's there.

He can never find out.

That day, Kate gave Leah permission to break a promise, and Jacob...well, he wasn't given a choice.

Leah and Carlisle...weird to write, but I kinda love it.

You?