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Forks Community Hospital is smaller than you expected. A two-story building with its lights dimmed. You know it'll still smell like rain when you step inside. Everywhere in Forks smells like rain. You park beneath the flickering streetlamp, the night folded in mist, and stare at the doors covered in the drizzle of rain.
Your grandmother's room is at the end of a long hallway. You don't register much beyond your nerves—the pale linoleum glares up at you while a vending machine hums in the distance. You pass a handful of nurses whose faces blur together in polite smiles and tired eyes.
You clutch the paper visitor badge you'd gathered from the receptionist as you step inside her room. It's warmer, the way you know she likes it. She's awake, sitting up in bed, her gray hair spread thin against the pillow. Shen she sees you, she smiles, and you momentarily forget the IV line and the monitor at her side.
"You came all this way," she says, voice small but bright.
"Of course, I did." You sit beside her, tracing the ridges of her hand with your thumb. Her skin is soft and fragile, but still warm. Still alive.
She talks for a while—about the garden she misses, the nurses who remind her of someone she once knew, the fog that never quite leaves the town. You listen, nodding in all the right places, but your drifts ever so slightly, anxiety making it hard to focus. The clock ticks too fast; the fluorescent lights seem to flicker out of sync with the rhythm of her voice. You tell yourself you're just tired.
When she finally grows quiet, her eyes start to close. "Go stretch your legs, sweetheart. I'll still be here when you get back."
You slip out into the hall. It's emptier now, the silence loud enough that you can hear the rain brushing the windows. You stop at the nurse's station to ask about how your grandmother is really doing, and that's when you see him.
The doctor stands behind the counter, flipping through a patient chart. He's gorgeous with his blond hair and fair skin. Your eyes linger on the faint gleam of a simple gold ring that shines in the light. It's old, worn thin at the edges, like something rescued from another century.
You purse your lips in disappointment.
He looks up as if he already knew you were standing there.
"Are you visiting Margaret?" he asks, his voice as calming as his presence.
You nod before finding words. "She's my grandmother. How did you know?"
He smiles the kind of smile that feels like a secret shared between strangers. "Same eyes," he says, setting the patient chart down. "She's been in good spirits tonight. I think she was waiting for you."
The name on his coat catches the light: Dr. Carlisle Cullen.
You thank him, meaning to leave it there, but the world doesn't quite resume its usual pace. As you turn back toward the hallway, the echo of that ring glints again in your mind. The image of it floats somewhere between memory and déjà vu. You don't know why it hurts to look at it.
You tell yourself it's nothing. Just the hour. The exhaustion. You had a long flight and came straight here from the airport.
Still, the image lingers like a song you used to know by heart but can't quite hum anymore.
Sleep doesn't come easily.
The couch in your grandmother's room creaks when you shift, the thin blanket smelling faintly of starch and cheap detergent. You close your eyes, but the hospital doesn't aid you in your desire to sleep; footsteps still echo, monitors still pulse, and automatic doors sigh open and closed somewhere down the hall.
You roll onto your side, facing your grandmother. She's already asleep, her breath shallow but peaceful. The blue light from the monitor paints her face the way moonlight might if it was a little brighter. You try to focus on the solid rhythm of her heart, to follow it toward rest, but your mind keeps circling back to the doctor with the golden eyes.
You turn over again. The clock reads 1:47 a.m.
A dream edges at the back of your thoughts, barely formed but insistent. You've been having it for years—sometimes only a flash before waking, sometimes long enough to leave a specific line, or a voice, or a feeling.
Tonight, it returns as soon as you close your eyes.
Moonlight spills across a clearing, and a man's voice says your name like a prayer. His hands never tremble when they touch you, even though his voice holds a shaky wonder.
Then his words, the line you sometimes remember but never forget the way it makes you feel:
"If I cannot be in the heavens with you, I will build a heaven on earth and wait for you to find it."
You wake with your throat tight and your pulse racing. The room is too small. You sit up, rub your face, and sigh. Your eyes find the clock. 2:19 a.m.
Through the window, the forest presses close. The tall silhouettes of trees block the silver night. Mist curls at the edge of the parking lot, white as breath. Something about it pulls at you, like a dream that might finish this time.
Your glance at your grandmother once more, then slip on your coat and ease the hospital door shut behind you.
The hallways are nearly empty now. Only the vending machine's soft clatter breaks the silence. You follow the exit sign, your shoes whispering against the tile, until the night air meets you like an old friend.
The rain has stopped. Everything gleams—wet asphalt, leaves, the hospital windows behind you. You cross the lot, drawn toward the trees, toward the pale fog waiting at their edge.
You can't explain it. You don't even try. Something inside you is already moving ahead, and you don't care to stop it or slow it down.
You tell yourself you'll only be a minute. You only want to shake the dream loose. The gravel path ends behind the maintenance shed, and beyond it, the trees part like a door left ajar. A thin trail winds between them, soft with needles and damp earth.
Every sound feels far away—he hospital, the road, the world you know shrinking behind you until all that's left is your steps synching with your heartbeat.
Somewhere ahead, water trickles. You find the narrow creek spilling over stones, the moon catching in its ripples. You kneel without thinking, dipping your fingers into the cold. It bites, then soothes.
When you look up, the trees seem taller, the sky closer. Light filters through the branches in pale threads, weaving across your coat. The world looks surreal, painted in silver and soft gray.
A breeze slips through, carrying a song that's not wind. It stirs something in you, and you follow it.
The path narrows, curling around a stand of pines. Their trunks glow faintly where vines climbs them—pale buds coiled tight, waiting for something. You brush one with your fingertips, and it opens as if exhaling, white petals catching in the moonlight until they seem to light from within.
Moonflowers.
They shouldn't be blooming here. They shouldn't be blooming now.
You step back, watching as more unfold, one after another, a slow breath spreading through the grove. The air fills with their scent, and you feel as if your lungs clear.
Every part of you knows you've been here before.
You just can't remember when.
The wind moves again, and the forest answers with silence so complete it feels like waiting.
"What are you?" you whisper to no one.
But something inside you already knows the answer. Not what. Who.
A branch creaks somewhere deeper in the trees. The sound should startle you. It doesn't. It feels like the ending of the dream that never finished.
You take another step forward into the glow.
"If I cannot be in the heavens with you..." you whisper to the grove of moonflowers unfolding slowly.
"...I will build a heaven on earth and wait for you to find it."
You turn.
He stands at the edge of the grove, half in the moonlight. The light spills over his face, over the gold of his hair, the glint of the ring on his hand. His eyes meet yours and the world morphs to fit the space between you.
For a heartbeat, your mind refuses to place him. He's too real for a dream, too still for a man. The gold of his hair catches the light the way it did beneath the hospital fluorescents, but here it seems older—untouched by time.
The doctor.
Carlisle.
Your Carlisle, from another time.
He steps closer, slow enough that the air itself seems to bend around him. "I wondered if you'd find it," he says, voice softer than the glow of the flowers. "I wasn't sure if I'd built it right."
You don't know how to answer, so you don't. You only look around—at the trees wrapped in light, at the vines blooming like a living memory—and then back to him.
"I waited," he says, the words almost lost to the air.
You reach for him, hand trembling as you touch his ring, the gold worn thin by years you cannot count.
And then—
Stone corridors. Candlelight. Your hands shaking as you slid the ring into place. A vow spoken in a language you no longer speak.
"I know this," you breathe."
His eyes sparkle, his expression softening under the silver moonlight.
"You do."
The forest listens. The moonflowers shift, opening wider, the glow deepening until it spills like a tide over the ground. It's impossible to tell where the light ends and you begin.
Mist drifts through the grove, coiling around your ankles, catching light from the blossoms. The moon hangs lower now, its reflection trembling in every dew drop on the vines.
He watches you with an expression you don't have a word for—sorrow tempered by wonder, love so old it's forgotten how to be loud. When he finally reaches for you, his hand moves slowly, as if he's afraid you'll vanish the way dreams do when morning comes.
But you don't.
His fingers brush your cheek, tracing the outline of a life he once had. The touch feels like recognition as opposed to discovery. You've both been here before—this grove, this light, this fragile meeting at the edge of what the world allows.
The light in the vines begins to fade, the flowers folding their petals one by one as if bowing. The mist lifts. A faint pink threads the horizon beyond the trees.
You lean against him, the scent of rain and earth clinging to his coat, and close your eyes.
"You did," you say.
He smiles, quiet, a little disbelieving. "Did what?"
"Build it."
You both watch the dawn climb through the branches. The first birds start to str. The moon slips away, leaving the grove washed in soft morning gray.
Somewhere in the distance, the hospital no doubt wakes again. Doors open and machines hum as the world returns to life.
But here, in this forgotten corner of the forest, you stay, existing together as the heaven he built begins its first sunrise.