It's childishly encompassing, boastingly innocent. He can't think of time when he'd ever say something like that, the words or the way, but then he can't think of being a child. Children said things like that, didn't they?

Things crowd his head -- you can't keep that forever and he's gone now? Words that are smaller than the depth of what washes through him, things to turn his concern to, even when he is, personally, more relaxed for the lack of the first cacophony, the wall placed between them removed.

Instead Edward, resigned to the confusion and the care of him, pulled Carlisle back to him. To hold him close and hug him. Carlisle would the person to feel raked over the coals by the chance encounters of that place. How often it continued to amass things.

How could he not flip the image of that little boy against his mind over and over, the word son slipping from lips, not his, in memories, not his, both avaricious and rejecting.

To that mind an angel and a demon in such a small face.