Returning home.

[ofthefamily]

It's quiet in the Cullen household when Carlisle returns home, mind reeling from his conversation in the bar.

Edward, are you home?

Beyond that call, Carlisle draws a mental curtain over his thoughts. It won't last for long, but it has to last long enough.

Comments

[ofthefamily]

He's still here and real and he can't seem to shake how wrong it still feels. Carlisle swallows hard when Edward reaches for him, knowing he should say something but there is absolutely nothing that comes to mind.

"I shouldn't have -- I should've just left."

[themidnightson]

"You wouldn't." He'd stay until the last second.

And Edward, bereft of that life and all but the lasting purposeful attachment to it over being a monster, still tried to rack grayed and frayed human memories. Wisps of humanity. Even human adults struggled to remember the briefest of childhood interactions.

Was it him? Has it been? A decade before even.

But there was so little in the brackish lack.

"It isn't as though you harmed him. You made him laugh and fed him chocolates and talked to him." Things Carlisle might have done with any hospital bound child, or child of coworker -- and yet the depth of why was different.

[ofthefamily]

A sad smile.

("I am going to be as tall as the mountains. So I can look over the whole world and the oceans and everything and not miss things.")

Carlisle fingers the wrapped chocolate still in his pocket.

[themidnightson]

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.

[ofthefamily]

Thank you.

Carlisle is just...standing there. Edward's arms are around him still and Carlisle is focusing on this Edward here. The one that he traveled with, the one who stayed (and came back) and stayed again.

Thank you.

[themidnightson]

Thank you.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for being home. Thank you for being with him. Thank you for understanding. Thank you for asking. Thank you for letting him tell. Thank you for not pushing. Thank you for not brushing it off. Thank you for not brushing him off.

Thank you for not being six. Thank you for being seventeen, and one hundred and four. Thank you for making it through those three nights. Thank you for making it through those five years. Thank you for being the first domino. Thank you for opening wide the world. Thank you for staying. Thank you for not running away. Thank you for coming back once you did. Thank you for never leaving again.

Thank you for being seen. Thank you for seeing. Thank you for being the face and mind he expects. Thank you for caring and care-taking. Thank you for the touch. Thank you for the hug. Thank you for not belittling or bisecting. Thank you for accepting the unacceptable, unchangeable, regardless of understanding, again.

Thank you for dying.

Thank you for living.

Edward let out a breath, too thin and insubstantial to be a sigh. "Always."

[ofthefamily]

That does it. Something clicks over and Carlisle steps back of his own volition this time.

"I'm going out for a run, I think. I want to feel a bit more normal before Jasper gets home."

Feeble, but plausible.

[themidnightson]

Edward nodded, letting his hands fall to his sides again, against a cavernous plethora of silent thoughts when Carlisle both moved and spoke.

It takes a second before; "He'd appreciate that, if he knew."

[ofthefamily]

"I can't imagine this'll stay quiet for long."

Alice.




Exhale. "I should..." he trails off.

[themidnightson]

"It'll be fine," Edward said, one corner of his quirking. "I will be."

[ofthefamily]

"Yes. Good. Alright."

Carlisle stuttersteps for a moment, but turns and heads back into the house from the garage.

The chocolate sits on his desk for quite some time.