Dr. Carlisle Cullen

Carlisle is outside after work with two unusual props.

A golf club and a bucket of golf balls.

If someone decides to watch him long enough, they will see Carlisle's proper form deteriorate from perfection to one-handed wild swings that manage to launch the miniscule ball farther than the textbook swings ever would have.

"This is ridiculous."

It was simple. They only had each other, Edward, and to choose a day when Carlisle was off work.

Edward had an errand to run at the hospital and Esme and Carlisle made it to the courthouse first.

"I'm going to go change," Esme whispers to him, kissing Carlisle on the cheek before disappearing, leaving Carlisle abandoned in the front entranceways of the courthouse.

A perfect place to replicate a human's instinctive desire to hyperventilate and pace.

It's been...an adjustment, but an easier one than Carlisle had been expecting. The way Edward and Alice in particular have nearly instantaneously joined at the hip makes Carlisle smile every time he thinks of it -- things had bettered when Rosalie found Emmett, but that time was still difficult.

For the moment, Carlisle has taken some time off from the hospital to stay at home with his family, now larger than planned but not unwelcome. He is flipping through a book errantly from his seat behind his office desk, listening to the quiet hum of everyone moving through the house on this sunny of days.

Carlisle has rounds and paperwork and a routine.

It's needed, lately.

Stethoscope in one pocket, Carlisle is doing his best to avoid overeager nurses as he makes his way through the wards.

Go, Edward, Carlisle had told Edward gently, supplication more than command. I'll make the rest of them safe. You go back to Bella.

He manages to keep the echoes of events long past at bay until Edward runs out of range and Carlisle has a task at hand. Edward had asked him to do this.

He's done worse with far less justification.

It's a flophouse of a bar; few people were anything close to conscious and Lonnie was one of them. The people who do notice the man in a dark jacket and shock white-blond hair walk in with a heavy stide do not seem to care.

"Come with me," Carlisle leans in to Lonnie's space with enough silence beforehand that Lonnie knocks over his pint.

"Fuck no."

Polite smile. "Okay." Carlisle reaches to Lonnie's collarbone, pinching inward on the nerve there to jolt the man off the barstool and out the back door. No one in the bar likes Lonnie enough to care about the altercation, and Carlisle is able to keep his other hand clamped shut over Lonnie's mouth. The back door slams behind them and in the sound of door meeting frame and lock, Carlisle pulls a syringe from up his sleeve. He wordlessly injects Lonnie with a heavy sedative and keeps the hand over Lonnie's mouth until the drug circulates.

Lonnie's body is light when Carlisle manhandles him into the backseat of Edward's car, flooring it to Portland.

The next morning, a local police station will have apprehended a predator wanted in three states.

And Carlisle's son will have remained as he wants to be.

Carlisle gives Esme a beatific smile. "We won't be out too long. I wanted to go and introduce Edward to some of the other doctors that have started in the rotation."

A night out. Please. Anywhere. Want to run to Canada? Pick somewhere.

Carlisle has his jacket on to leave no more than a minute later.

The trail of bodies is indistinct and only a trail at all if you knew what you were looking for. No human did.

When dead-on-arrivals start coming in from the Southside Slopes on a daily basis instead of sporadically, with wounds no one can explain --

Edward, Carlisle thinks carefully to the bronze-haired boy sitting in a second-year anatomy class two floors up from Carlisle's rounds as the newest doctor on call, I have to go pay a housecall.

With clouds descending over Pittsburgh, Carlisle takes a walk.

After Carlisle overhears Edward, the day is spent more or less in quiet. Arguably more so for Carlisle than anyone else, though the family as a whole seems to let the day tick forward unremarked.

Esme had returned from shopping; Carlisle was sitting in the kitchen for some time after. It's the least used room in the house, but the one that most have to travel through in order to get anywhere else.

"Esme," Carlisle calls to the house at large, "Do you have a moment?"

The hospital Carlisle and Edward relocated to -- it feels more like relocating to a hospital than the city itself, for as much as Carlisle spends his time there -- has its own functioning morgue instead of something closer to storage for bodies to be shipped to mortuaries. This ends up being beneficial for Carlisle and Edward since the hospital holds classes there, allowing for brief respites throughout the day.

Carlisle this particular evening is the physician on-call for the morgue. He hates it, but it is only fair. All the other doctors have to.

None of the other doctors have a skin tone that rivals the bodies on the examination tables. He stays at the far end of the morgue and completes paperwork in a perfected script until he hears doors slam against their frames without any urgency. Dead on arrival.

"She was found at the bottom of the bluffs by Cuyahoga," one of the attendants explains as the pair carry the woman in to lay her out on a table.

Carlisle starts a new form for the log. "Any kind of identification on her?"

"The woman who found her recognized her as...Evenson. Esme Evenson." Carlisle's pen scrapes against the page; the attendants both give him curious glances. "You okay, Doc?"

"I'm fine. I can handle things from here." They leave despite the lie. Carlisle unfolds the large shroud around her body It can't be her there has to be a million Esmes in the world --

There she was.

Unique. Even in death. Carlisle did not even know her, but he can imagine hearing her faintest of heartbeats thudding in his ears irregularly.

Wait.

Edward I need you to come here right now please Edward

[ooc: From here.]

"Distract me please?"

Edward's hand to Carlisle's forehead, held there by Carlisle's own hand and his own frustration at the thoughts flying through the house he never planned on hearing, clenches into a hard fist. Esme had her reasons; they weren't even inconsiderate ones.

No matter what anyone tried to do, Carlisle hurt. His compassion was his flaw just as much as it was his talent.

A slow surge of memory. Ohio and the discoveries there; the pride Edward felt daily from Carlisle watching him pursuing a medical degree; the signet ring Carlisle gave Edward that never left him until Esme's joining the family --

Ilium Sacrum Iliac Crest Iliac Fossa

-- Carlisle's breathing falters and remains uneven watching Edward's perfect memory take them back to the house in Columbus. He remembers the events in Edward's mind on his own, but this is different. Better, clearer, because it's both of them. Edward saw Carlisle's every thought then, and now, watching the memory again makes it feel amplified and stronger. Edward's hand drops from Carlisle's grasp when he sees the older vampire lose himself in the memory of their simpler years -- traveling when they pleased, how they pleased, less complex and dangerous.

Edward keeps the memory going. Eighty-seven years taught him more control than Carlisle's had the chance to pursue in the single day that he has been able to hear thoughts. The memory of Edward tugging, fumbling at Carlisle's belt and shirt on the bed in that barely lived-in house consumes Carlisle's senses. Edward's hands on his chest and Edward thinking please Carlisle the way he would never say aloud but now that Carlisle has crossed that barrier nothing is kept from him.

Thank you for making me like you -- loving me -- trusting me to do what's right --

"I..." I always trusted you, Carlisle thinks when he can form a sentence, lost as he is in the cascade of thoughts. He's watching Edward strip and climb over him. He forces Carlisle to stop thinking - apologizing - just go - and it was all fine. Carlisle was loved for the first time in centuries, loved. God damn.

When Carlisle's eyes open he's not even surprised when he finds he has to button his shirt back up and straighten his tie. The blond man and the bronze-haired boy kiss the way they both feel they both missed each other, hands in hair and grasping.

Others in the house heard them, theorized. No one knew for certain and nobody cared. Carlisle and Edward's relationship was their own. Older than all of them - Carlisle kisses Esme with ease when the telepathy subsides.