Coming into Milliways.

[ofthefamily]

They never gave him a shirt again after Carlisle bandaged up the injured man that had been brought into his cell.

And then the door shifted, the voices growing louder.

Which leads to a blond man, pale with black eyes, standing just inside the door to the bar at the end of the universe.

Carlisle is only holding still because he hasn't figured out which way to run yet.

Comments

[river_meimei]

The infirmary is Carlisle's to Edward; to River, now and always, it's Simon's.

She slips off the table in a quick, fluid motion. To a vampire this might be slow and clumsy, but by human standards it's the sort of grace that can only come unthinkingly. She hesitates a moment with her feet on the floorboards, waiting not for balance but for her bearings -- River's world will never look quite like anyone else's -- before she follows Edward.

[themidnightson]

...behind the east gate. Volterra.

Edward is already in the infirmary by the time she gets there. Rummaging for things he probably won't need and looking over advanced supplies Carlisle commented on and he'd vaguely listened about.

His hands aren't shaking, but perhaps everything that can be unseen is shaken. Straining still to listen to the most important, singular voice, in this world.

That boy was put here to mock me.

"Sit." It's far gentler than he feels, when she is there.

[river_meimei]

"I'm okay," River says softly. It's almost gentle.

She boosts herself up onto a counter near the door, though. By luck or design, the drawers she's blocking are ones containing surgical instruments Edward won't want anyway.

[themidnightson]

He has to be sure, for Carlisle's sake. Yes. That. When was that last time he?

But it's in looking down at her face, even as he reached out and touched her jaw with infinite softness, pressing the skin as though to press a bubble, checking for displacement or dislocation, that he said,

"You are." For a given definition.

She was still what she was last time.

[river_meimei]

River doesn't move away from the touch. Edward is gentle and careful; besides that, River learned to live with pain years ago.

"It's in the linear threads." This longer sentence is a little indistinct, but nothing too bad. River doesn't appear to notice, or at least to care. "Gonna be. Too."

It's not herself she's talking about now.

[themidnightson]

"I-" Can't leave him here, can't leave him there.

He's staring at his fingers, even though he can see her dark eyes in his peripheral vision, his face in her mind, with the endless sea of other things there hiding.

"It isn't broken." He can't leave him there, downstairs. Can't go home while he's here. Can't fathom the idea of sending him....sending him back to Them. He knows their ghosts too well. "But it'll be bruised for a while."

He turned back to the other counter as he was speaking, without looking to her, to anything but a cup, "I'm sorry." Not for the bruise, and for the bruise, for Carlisle choosing her and it not being Carlisle.

The cup is filled with a medicinal rinse and he grabs a basin, bringing both back. He holds the cup out for her, but she doesn't need instructions. He's well aware of that.

[river_meimei]

"Got no cause."

The rinse stings; River's fingers shift slightly against the counter's smooth edge, but she doesn't otherwise react.

[themidnightson]

Edward set the cup and basin aside, picking up a small stack of gauze even as the scent of blood, diluted in alcohol, suffused more of the room. It was one of the furthest things from his mind even as he walked back, saying, "Open."

Short words, but never quite clipped or commanding. They were a list, somewhere in the foreground of a massive attention sink.

"He's--" there's a small shake of his head. "--from a very different time and place."

He says it to tell her, to tell himself. It still doesn't matter.

[river_meimei]

River spits out the rinse into the basin. The liquid is a thin green, but in the basin it's the diffuse muddy color that blood brings.

"Right now," she says, ignoring the gauze in his hands.

Her eyes slip from Edward to the air around and beyond him, but they always return to his face. In her mind are memories, and heartache and comprehension, and alarm.

"It's necessitated." Bleak, and urgent. (And a bit muffled, thanks to the jaw.) "In the transitional fabric. Call it a continuum."

[themidnightson]

"Just think it. Open," he said it, again, just slightly more pointed, his head tilted as he aimed a piece of gauze at her. At least he'd never need a light.

As though the instruction wasn't a means to a lack of acknowledgment.

[river_meimei]

River obeys, for the moment in silence, but her eyes fix on Edward's face again and stay, this time.

She can't think loudly, in clear deliberate sentences, like most people. The most she can do is shift her own attention a little. But she can't shield anything either, and her thoughts are all there in the forefront, amidst the other layers of thought and distraction and equations and memory.

Roland's voice, all smoke and gravel and control, and the rare pain in it; the shape of timelines, intertwining and weaving forwards; the violence of change, the warnings of splitting, of what it means and what it does; of good futures and the pain that predicates them; of worlds where that isn't true, and worlds where it is--

[themidnightson]

Edward's touch is deft and adept, even for decades of no use. The blood isn't coming as strongly, and she could use one or two stitches, but its not so serious he'd want to require them of her the way Carlisle might.

Especially given her own resources.

He cleans it, making sure. More details he won't ever forget, ever share. The cells are quiet, as the jailer and prisoner stare at each other, while River's 'conscience' reprimands.

"I wouldn't exist. None of this would." If he made the choice he wants to and can't. The one he's already made, back centuries before Carlisle even made him. He simply has to figure out how to hold it in his head and not swear.

He wants it to matter, but maybe the problem is that it does too much.

[river_meimei]

River's mouth is full of gauze right now. She can't say, neither would he.

She can't say, maybe his mind would split too.

(She can't say, I'm sorry.)

But Edward is like the other Academy children in this way: she doesn't have to.

[themidnightson]

It's a useless word. One of the most, especially now. It's one of the things they've all worked out. Still it's as annoying to (not) hear it as it is comforting. He has no filters to keep any of it from her, there's never been a world to need them or another to hear him.



It took decades. He doesn't say that, can't say it, can't help thinking it. It took decades to mend the things they had done, to earn shreds of faith that he, and then Esme and the others, wouldn't vanish and turn. Decades to heal what those decades did even centuries after they'd passed.


He has to put his....Carlisle back into his hell. Willingly. Purposefully.

He doesn't know how much that will require of him. Whether he can.

Especially after the last few weeks events with Carlisle.

And there is no other option but to do it.



Edward staunched the bleeding a little more, before pulling his fingers and gauze out. "The cut isn't too deep."

[river_meimei]

River knows. She understands; she comprehends.

And there's not really anything more to say.

(Which doesn't mean Edward can't hear it anyway.)

She nods a little, silently.

[themidnightson]

There isn't anything to say. Even as they are. If not saying anything at all, too, while the basin is dumped and the gauze thrown away. Edward washed his hands, even if the scent of her blood lingered.

Antiseptic and alcohol, sterile rooms that never quite were.

He's still listening to the broken thoughts a floor away.

"I should-" leave it alone, leave him alone, leave all possible damage alone. But he won't. He can't. It's already happened, happening. And where he wants to be is not located in this room.

He simply nodded his head toward the door, drying his hands. He didn't question whether she would be okay -- she'd seen worse. She'd find better help shortly.

[river_meimei]

Something always lingers in a room like this, no matter how much you sterilize.

"Walk the bounds," River say softly. Finishing his sentence, or declaring her own intentions, or both; it's hard to say, from the tone. But words don't matter overmuch in this conversation.

One last look at Edward, and then she drops off the counter, turning towards the door.

She'll be around for a while.