ofthefamily | Carlisle and Edward.

Carlisle and Edward.

A couple of days have passed since the incident in Milliways. Rosalie is furious at the recklessness of everyone involved, while Emmett is more aggravated that he wasn't called upon to help, though voicing that opinion gets him smacked in the back of the head by Esme.

Carlisle has been quiet in the meantime, but he comes home from a shift after the children are home from school and waits until dusk to ask Edward to come for a run with him.

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"They would still exist."

He didn't make Alice or Jasper. He gave them a family, but he didn't make them. They would still be somewhere, elsewhere, even in the hypothesis.

It's sometimes easy for him to forget. Alice and Jasper don't feel any differently usually from those of the family Carlisle did turn.

"Tell me I fought." Tell me I didn't just give up.

"You were there." It's faintly reproving.

It isn't a story. He can say this now, because it was.

Once upon a time -- days ago -- it was a story of life before him, before all of them, before all of this, to be told with all the other stories of bygone eras. And then, with the click of a door handle the perspective skewed entirely.

Carlisle already knows this all. Carlisle was there.

"You wanted to, but I stopped you."

"You say 'I was there' like I recognize everything that happened." Like my entire comprehension of what happened has not changed.

Carlisle wonders idly whatever happened to Gerard and falls silent for a long moment.

"I had a family watching over me before I learned I wanted one. The years I spent before you alone but not understanding why that even bothered me -- it's a lot to process."

It is.

It really is.

Because Carlisle can't deal with too much more silence:

"You didn't think to plant any subliminal messages in my head, did you?"

"Because it's worked so well the last few decades."

He'd have started with never call me boy.

"I was much younger then."

Which leads Carlisle to another question. Tangential, but:

"Was it...helpful, do you think? To see me so young?"

"To me?" The lingering question look references the implied to them?.

Carlisle just shrugs. To let Edward take the question where he wants to lead it.

Edward prefer the here and now. Where Carlisle was sane, and only expelling the expected amount of vitriol as befit the current situation. Not a century's worth of it.

"You were far more-" there's an uncertain to the term coming. "-open."

"Angry, you mean to say?"

"No." Open isn't right, but angry is too topically obvious. "Ebullient, maybe." For being both the anger and the rebellion to throw it everywhere.

"Less tightly control in how you spoke or thought."

Everything except in how he moved.

In how much he'd give up.

There's an odd shift of facial features.

"Also, proximity without awareness."

He almost frowns for many things.

"Being around humans? I imagine I ran off at the mouth quite a bit."

At Edward's second commentary, Carlisle's eyes narrow questioningly.

He's not quite up to clarifying he meant at Jasper, Alice and himself. Or more specifically, Jasper and himself. Since Jasper looked the part of Volterra.

A note that had struck home.

To the second; "In nearly a century I'd never known what it would be like if you didn't know I was listening."

Besides the like minute and half of panic in his birth.

That is enough to give Carlisle pause.

I am sorry for that, Edward.

"No damage done."

Or at least, in the most honest of answers, they'd come through far, far worse than this before.

"I should try and speak with Melaka and River as well," Carlisle offers aloud more to himself than Edward.

Is it wrong that this doesn't effect how I feel about going there?

"No more than your meeting my earlier self didn't effect mine?" Edward parodied the question, even though his opinion on the place was still in debate by the events.

It was already not one of the most positive ones. Resigned, but not positively.

"I'm sure they both expect you will at some point."

Carlisle is most curious about Mel's reaction to everything. What with the Slayer business.

With a note of finality, Carlisle shoves his hands in his pockets. "How would you feel if I had run into you from when you were traveling on your own? Does the comparison make any sense?"

"It already made sense without that."

There's a flick of annoyance in it.

Especially since there was no way he'd run into Carlisle then. And what Edward had of either Alice or Carlisle's experiences with himself were what they gave him.

If Carlisle's memory was evolving in a retrospect capacity of the situation around it's preconceived notions, it was at the very least still his own, still his known self, something he could look at and redefine.

A grunt at Edward's tone. "I was asking because eventually I'm going to have a similar conversation with both Jasper and Alice. I need to make sure I make sense."

Because comparing a half century of forced incarceration with a five year psychopathic killing spree worked so well on that front.

Edward didn't breathe or move.

He studied the lines in tree bark far from him.

"You'll do fine."

"That's what everyone keeps saying," Carlisle reports dryly.

"That was the point."

Maintaining the status quo.

It'll all happen too, once he calms.

The future is already back to what it should.

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ofthefamily - 2009-11-18 17:03 (UTC) - Expand

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themidnightson - 2009-11-18 23:25 (UTC) - Expand

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