(no subject)

[themidnightson]

He walks for a long time, in what might as well just be a very large circle. He stops places, but mostly he walks. It's been ages (almost two weeks) since he was running an extended distance. There is nowhere to go. There is nothing to find. This is home.

It's making him stir crazy, along with the symphony of voices and memories.









Eventually, he returns to the house.

Comments

[ofthefamily]

That's alright.

Carlisle almost adds Remorse is human but it's clamped down and away before Edward picks it up.

The two men stand there, hands against one another in the closest they've been for the better part of a decade.

Edward?

[themidnightson]

It's soft; but Edward still lets out a thin forced breath. He's not sure he wants to hear being asked to stop again. He'd managed to keep those useless words all inside until he was shocked by Carlisle's sudden....gesture.

[ofthefamily]

Carlisle's hands drop from Edward's face and he takes another half-step inward, wrapping his arms around Edward's shoulders to hold him there.

"Thank you for your apology, and for coming back."

It can only get easier from here.

[themidnightson]

It still doesn't make sense. It doesn't. Any of it.

But a little bit more doesn't have to, doesn't matter about not being coherently consistent, when Carlisle is surrounding him. When he can lower his hands and rest his chin on Carlisle's shoulders, before rolling his face down against it, while nodding to his words, so as not to be staring at the wall behind him.

Nowhere close to free from the heavy weight of all his choices, but able to see a glimmer of that fact he has time and a place and Carlisle regardless of deserving. Here, and hearing him, hearing each other, for better or worse.

[ofthefamily]

At some point Esme comes home, saying something to the house at large about a concert that night.

Carlisle will probably say no unless Esme presses.

Stepping back, Carlisle's smile actually succeeds in looking firm and well-placed. "Ready to get back to it?"

[themidnightson]

Edward straightened the cuffs of his shirt, only lingering a briefly longer second on the right, before his hands ended up in his pockets and he was looking at the room around them.

He hasn't tried sitting through anything since that piano recital. But if Esme really did want to go, and she seemed interested enough...

"I'll go get more boxes."