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The first thing that Jamie saw when he opened his eyes was Carlisle Cullen. For a few long moments Jamie didn't even realise that he was awake, laying and watching until the man spoke. "Jamie," was all he said, but it was enough.
He didn't move but his eyes strayed to look around the room. He looked because he could see everything with such clearness, such crisp clarity that he didn't feel as if he was actually awake. He could see the paint on the walls, where the individual bristles of the paintbrush had been pulled down with pristine attention, aligning beside one another in perfection. He could see the dust on the bookshelf, the fine hairs of the pages and the cracks in their leather binds. Even beyond the windows, where rain grazed the glass, he watched the water falling with incredible perception to the reflections within it. It was brilliant, unlike anything he had ever seen and as he looked into a world he had never thought long about before, the sharp pines of a tree and the shinning shell of a beetle on its bark, Jamie realised that he had been walking past beauty without a glance all his life.
There was another in the room. With a silent shift they brought Jamie's attention onto them, head turning on the pillow and feeling the cotton on his cheek. Bronze curls nestled above a face of unblemished paleness, slim in the grey light and standing with his shoulders levelled, the boy stared at Jamie with equal attention.
"Jamie," Carlisle said again and he was standing closer, "how are you feeling?"
He turned his head back towards the mellow voice and it took him a long time to find his own sound. "Where...?" he began, feeling the words thrum from his throat to his toes. They were spoken barely above a whisper but deep, deep enough to sound as if they had come from his chest. He didn't remember his voice sounding like that ever before, but it was then that he suddenly realised he had the reach to really remember that there was a before. "Where am I?"
Carlisle was close enough to touch him now, warding away the bronze boy's murmur of concern with a flicker of dark eyes. "You are in Forks, Washington. Do you remember what happened before you woke up?"
Jamie sat up, feeling the softness of the bed beneath him. Carlisle reached out a put a hand on his shoulder, guiding him as he turned and put his bare feet on the floorboards. Jamie let the hand stay on him, making him feel grounded to something and not so likely to fade on the spot. He felt light but his head was incredibly heavy, stooping to look at his hands. He traced where the lines in his palm should be, not feeling the soft pad of his finger, only a coldness like a pebble being dragged across skin.
"Where is Susanna?" he asked without thinking, an instinct of behaviour and circumstances. He continued tracing his palm as if he hadn't even asked it and it wasn't until he looked up at Carlisle again, that the memories he knew he had finally made way for one another.
