Twilight // what to do while you're waiting (Edward/Carlisle, PG)
Title: what to do while you're waiting
Author: cherryroad
Fandom: Twilight
Pairing/Characters: Edward/Carlisle.
Rating: PG.
Summary: "Perhaps he wasn't such a bad idea, after all. It's good to have someone to speak less than nice to you every once in a while, even if it's someone who has no idea what he's talking about."
Word Count: ~5000.
Notes: For twilightprompts, prompt #03 of the sixth list, tourniquet. Follow-up to stay (if there's nowhere else to go), second in a potential series of five installments. Unbetaed, but spellchecked. Constructive criticism is, as always, welcome.
They have to change their residence a few months later, when spring rolls around and the city hall decides to restore the cabin to its intended use. They run for half a day, until they find an abandoned cottage in the middle of Nowherewoods, Wisconsin, and Edward stays reading a newspaper while Carlisle checks the area for wild animals and places where they can hunt without being discovered, forests still untouched by human hands. The sound lowers as he moves around, Edward notices, but he keeps listening to him. It's constant information - Good bear population at some more height and A decent amount of deer and what looks like an appetite for wolves, like Carlisle finds them appealing to hunt. He grins at that while he folds a paper boat out of one of the pages from the Economy section; it's a bit of a surprise to know Carlisle enjoys something that may hurt a living creature; something that is hardly self-controlled.
When he's bored of reading about families he doesn't know and stocks he hasn't bought and politics that don't quite affect him, he leaves the newspaper on the small table near the front door and takes a look around. The staircase leading to the bedrooms upstairs has some loose timbers, so he sets on fixing them whenever he finds the tools for it. He doesn't have much to do, anyhow; Carlisle doesn't think he's fit to be around human blood yet, and he hasn't even looked for a job since he left the hospital where he treated him; he doesn't want to leave him alone for too many hours at a time.
He picks one of the bedrooms upstairs, because that's what he used to do whenever he rented a house for the holidays with his family, and he leaves his small bag of luggage on the trunk sitting at the foot of the bed. It's not luxurious, but he can't see why he would use a bed anytime soon, so he settles for that. He has to buy a piano, he finds, and some books to keep practicing. Carlisle got a modest one for him two months ago, but he accidentally broke half of the keys; lost control for a moment, and the music stopped sounding right.
The view from the window basically consists in the path leading to the front door, a medium-size, badly-handled lawn, and a circle of trees surrounding everything from a rather close distance; so close that more than one of the branches hits the roof when the wind blows. He lies on the bed instead and tries to hear something that isn't his own thoughts. A feminine scream of frustration hits him and he startles, hits his head on the board, and laughs at himself.
"Edward?" he hears then, clear in his ears, not in his brain, and he kind of runs downstairs.
"So, how's the area?", he asks, and Carlisle shakes his head and says,
"You know already."
Edward shrugs and smirks.
*
He can't even have a conversation anymore. He encounters a pair of actual occasional hunters in the forest one morning, looking for rabbits to serve for dinner, and Carlisle talks to them about the best place to find them, and how's life in town, and they tell him that everything's all right enough except for the medical practice; the only physician is in the nearest hospital recovering miraculously from the influenza, and Carlisle asks them if they'd be interested in him taking over the practice while their usual physician is gone.
When he's back in the cottage, he finds Edward stretched on the carpet, his head on one of the low armchairs and an old book in his lap. He turns his head to the door when Carlisle comes in.
"So I'm finally old enough to be left alone?"
Carlisle frowns and shakes his head, and answers easily, like he always does when Edward knows more than he has bothered to tell him.
"Don't you have anything better to do than follow my mind around?"
"Not really, no", Edward says, and Carlisle is beginning to regret the moment he caved in to Edward's whim of having a race without remembering that Edward was younger, stronger, newer as a vampire, much more competitive, and less used to control his own speed than him. He's been an arrogant child ever since.
"Why don't you do something productive, at the very least? What have you been doing these past months when I was out?" Edward chuckles.
"Breaking into the school and playing at their disgraceful instruments."
"Why don't you enroll in music school? There's one a couple of towns from here. You may not learn anything useful, but -" He stops. Edward's raising an eyebrow. "I'm sorry, no, you're not ready yet."
Edward turns back to his book and shrugs. He mutters, "At least we're moving forward", takes off his shirt, stretches some more, and begins reading a passage of Henry V out loud. Carlisle can't help but glance at his chest before going upstairs to get himself ready for introducing himself in town. Maybe not an arrogant child, then, he thinks: maybe an arrogant adult.
"I heard that", Edward says without looking up, without even smirking, and Carlisle snorts.
"Let's leave it at teenager with a recurrent tendency to act like a petulant child, shall we?"
Edward looks up now, to where Carlisle is standing on the stairs, looking right back at him, and shrugs, and states that it's a move forward, as well, but he should stop the habit of getting his hopes up like that.
"I will when you stop letting my hopes down", Carlisle answers to that, and hears Edward chuckle behind him.
Perhaps he wasn't such a bad idea, after all. It's good to have someone to speak less than nice to you every once in a while, even if it's someone who has no idea what he's talking about.
*
Two months go by before the physician in the town where Carlisle's working dies, and he's offered the position as a permanent job. Edward hates having to hear about it from his mouth before he knows - he has gotten used to knowing things before being told, and he wonders where exactly he slipped and stopped listening to Carlisle's thoughts. Maybe it happened when that blonde girl he met, and by meeting he means hearing for the first time, two weeks ago began having lurid thoughts about his forty-year-old teacher.
In any case, it is quite unfortunate that she chose that precise moment to be interesting, because Carlisle is obviously glad that he doesn't know, and it's much more fun to have him guess how much Edward has picked up from his mind and tease him into giving him extra information, not that there has ever been anything juicy there.
"I'm putting this up for a vote", Carlisle says, and Edward can't help but laugh.
"Are you serious?"
"As much as I'd like not to be, yes, I am serious. If you plan on keeping me company - even if it's just for your own comfort - you should have a say in what we do and where we move and other things that affect the both of us."
Edward blinks. His father was never particularly communicative with him, and her mother stopped varying his treatment of him when he turned eight years old, so this is quite the novelty; he has always had things decided for himself; so it takes a few silent seconds for Carlisle's suggestion to dawn in.
"I can't read your thoughts, you know", Carlisle asks, sort of impatiently, which is rather amusing for a person - he has settled on calling him a person, it's what flies easiest to his mind - who literally has forever, and cannot age, as far as he knows. His expression softens quickly, however; he seems unable to keep himself negative towards anyone other than himself for any longer than a second and a half.
Carlisle sits down now, on the chair opposite the armchair where Edward's sitting, and fidgets with his fingers over his lap. His mind sounds sort of silent.
"How long is permanently, exactly?" he asks at last.
"I'd say until people become suspicious of my not having aged in about a decade, or something bad happens. I'm hoping for the first, though." The second's your way-out ticket, he thinks, doesn't say, and Edward smiles gratefully.
"Do you want to stay here?"
Carlisle takes a while to answer, both out loud and in his head. He weights the advantages and disadvantages of staying, and finally he seems to put a stop to the disarray in his head and says,
"Yes. Yes, I'd like to."
So they move in to Ashland, and the only thing left to figure out is how and when to introduce Edward to the town; after a rush of thoughts in Carlisle's head that lasts about three days, they settle for the son of an old - and he emphasizes on the word, repeats it over and over in his head - mentor of Carlisle's who seems to be in need of a 'change of airs'.
"You look just like the type", Carlisle says laughing, and it sounds so good-natured that it takes Edward about a week to realize that he was mocking him.
*
The first thing that Carlisle does upon accepting the job is finding someone; a young man recently back from medical school, it turns out; to cover for him whenever he's indisposed; whenever he cannot walk out at risk of exposure; and Edward begins to help him with paperwork and remembering names and other easy things that allow him to get a bit into the life of the town and stop being sulky and moody because he 'needs some society to survive', as he puts it, and Carlisle can't really pretend not to understand that; he's the one who converted a human, a human on the verge of death, but a human nonetheless for the sake of a desperate woman and his own desire to have someone to talk to; and the job is now taking so many hours away from Edward that he can't even manage to keep him company.
He spends a whole night with Edward in the practice, trying to put some order in the old doctor's patients' files, and he finds that Edward has a bit of a sharp tongue when he's in the mood for that, and also a bit of a self-depreciating issue. The rest of the time, the conversation flows well, for the most part, and the silence isn't particularly uncomfortable.
They're looking at an eighty-year-old woman's file when Edward frowns and looks at him intently, like analyzing him. Carlisle thinks What's wrong?, and Edward shrugs.
"I just realized you were born in the seventeenth century."
"So?"
"People died of the common cold back then, didn't they?"
"Where are you going with this?" Carlisle asks, and Edward shrugs again.
"I don't -", he begins, but he stops and begins a new sentence. "How long would you have lived if you hadn't been - bitten?"
Carlisle thinks, Honestly?, and then, when Edward nods, he says,
"I haven't got the slightest idea. Maybe I would have caught the common cold and died a month later, or I would have lived to ninety years old. It's a really hard thing to tell."
"Would you prefer that to this?"
He tries to remember anyone else ever asking that question to him, and his memory comes back blank. Solitary vampires don't bother with talk, and the few covens that he has encountered over the years have always supposed that this was not the fate he chose, and that he has to deal with it and there is no need to remind him.
Now, however, he is as torn as to not know whether to say yes or no, so he decides on maybe.
"Were you ever married?" Edward asks then, and Carlisle wonders when this got so personal. Edward answers to his thought, "I figured it's about time we get to know each other a bit more", and Carlisle realizes that he's actually become much more mature than he was a few months ago. There's a part of him that thinks this is the sobering effect of slowly losing all the remains of his human blood, and there's also a part that shuts him up to avoid the constant feeling of guilt.
"No, I was never married. I have never been married."
"Would you ever marry?"
"I think the question lays on whether I could or not. Which I would answer with a no. Who am I going to marry, anyhow?"
Edward chuckles, mutters,
"A pretty vampire girl, I don't know", and Carlisle laughs, but looks away when Edward tries again to analyze him with his eyes. He doesn't really understand this part; he seems consumed by the interest and keeps staring at his face, like there's something there that he hasn't seen, and the atmosphere turns even more serious than it has already turned. "You've been alone for three centuries", Edward says at last, whispers, really low, pensive, like he's talking more to himself than to Carlisle, "and..." He's mumbling now, and then he speaks up again. "Why have you never converted a woman?"
"I would never do something like that to a person I loved", he answers, and regrets it immediately. "I would never do it to anyone - you were one in a billion, Edward. You should have seen the look in your mother's face; it was like she knew what I was, and what I could do. I don't regret it, but I don't feel proud of it either."
"I know", Edward says then, in the most adult voice that Carlisle has ever heard from him, and there's a silence until Edward finds another patient to mock, but it's slightly awkward from there.
*
Edward hears that they're building a small hospital in town from one of Carlisle's patients. He goes back to the cottage while Carlisle is held up by some people asking him about timetables and more drugs and how they should go about avoiding the upcoming summer, and Edward doesn't tell him about it until he leaves his suitcase on the floor, next to the front door, and sits down on the couch.
"Did you know they're building a hospital?"
"I'd heard they were converting an old house into one, yes."
"What are you going to do when it's done?" Carlisle frowns, like asking without actually speaking or thinking the question, and Edward adds, "I've heard it's almost ready for work."
Carlisle blinks, thinks Really?, and then smiles. Edward tries to figure out why he's happy about it, whether he's planning on leaving already and hasn't told him yet, or he already has a spot there, or he has decided to switch professions and build a farm and get a job at the local market, and comes up empty.
"Why are you happy?", he finally asks. Carlisle shrugs and says,
"It's almost summer. The sun is going to be shining and we can't risk exposure. I'm sure you must have picked that up from my head if I haven't told you willingly myself, or there might have been a scandal or two in town." Edward gestures for him to go on. "The thing is, I can't convince a whole town that I can work twenty-four hours a day, and they need me during the daylight, so I might have had to abandon the practice, or give more responsibilities to Frank, and I honestly don't think he's ready for that. In a hospital I can just work nights, and no-one will question that. It's a lucky event, Edward."
He thinks an addendum - Unless you were dying to get out of here, which would make it unfortunate - but Edward isn't dying to get out of here, so everything is okay, or as okay as their situation may be.
"By the way, I talked to the carpenter at the practice and he said there's a guy downtown who's getting rid of a couple of guitars and a piano, in case you're interested."
"Thanks", Edward says after the initial surprise, and by the time the sun rises the next morning, he has every music sheet he has ever collected aligned over the floor of his bedroom.
He has to admit that, once he gets the piano and begins to play, he's ecstatic to have one of his favorite pastimes back.
*
A week before the new hospital opens for good, Edward brings the piano into the practice and plays for the few people in the waiting room, and for himself, and by proximity he plays for Carlisle, or at least Carlisle catches the notes every time; the wooden walls don't even bother to keep the sound away.
He sees the smile on Edward's face every time a new patient comes in, every time someone compliments him, and he imagines it when he can't see it. Sometimes, this business of loneliness can make anyone forget who they are, that they even are in themselves, and Carlisle is glad Edward can have that back through his music. Everyone is kind and incredibly nice to him, praising his technique and the music he chooses and how it feels like a better day now that they've heard him play that he keeps the piano in the practice all week, and doesn't even stop by the cottage too much.
They keep each other company at night, and Edward helps Carlisle figure out some of the diagnosis, decide what to do with a patient or another, and plays piano whenever Carlisle asks him to. He can play as well, or he used to be able to; but the years have softened the ability, and he wouldn't be able to make anything sound properly now.
He's thinking this their last night at the practice, which they have already sold to a family that will convert it into a house, once Carlisle has a permanent position as a night doctor at the hospital, and he's getting through some of the files, deciding which ones he will take to his new office, while Edward plays some of his moderately happy melodies, when Edward suddenly changes the pace and the music becomes slow, sad, sort of macabre, even. It takes Carlisle a minute to do so, but then he asks, he says,
"What is that?", and Edward answers easily.
"That's a piece by - me." Carlisle looks at him as he turns around. "I composed it on the piano at the school. I was sort of depressed at that moment, I suppose."
"Are you depressed now?", Carlisle asks, worried.
"Not really", Edward replies, "but this makes me feel something, and I felt like feeling something deep for once", he finishes and quickly adds: "Does it bother you?"
Carlisle takes a second to shake his head and say,
"No. No, not at all. Go on."
Edward goes on, and it takes Carlisle about sixty seconds to decide that he has done enough work and sit down beside him on the improvised stool Edward made out of two broken chairs from the storage room.
"I didn't know you composed", Carlisle says, nothing far from the truth, and looks at the way Edward's hands move over the board like they're floating, or flying, and the way his skin looks older, experienced, used, as he bends his wrists and his knuckles to reach the keys. Edward stops playing after a few notes, when there is a proper pause, and answers,
"I don't, not really. I just experiment, and sometimes experiments become something that I like hearing. I think everyone who has ever learned to play a musical instrument has composed an experiment or two."
"I never did", Carlisle answers, and Edward frowns.
"You can play?"
Carlisle thinks about it first, in a sort of incoherent bunch of sentences that seem to go unheard by Edward if the waiting expression in his face is anything to go by, and then says,
"I used to. My father taught me to play the organ when I was a child, so that I could play at church, and one of the places I lived in about - fifty years ago, I believe -"; he laughs, it's such a long time, and it feels so short at the same time; "had a piano, and I tried to remember what I knew, but it wasn't much, so I bought some books and tried to play normally, but gave up after about a month. I was never very good, not even at the organ."
To Carlisle's surprise, Edward stands up and tells him to play. He shakes his head.
"No. I can't do that. I don't want any dead genius to rise from his grave to get back at me for ruining his work."
"Come on. I've been playing for you and your elderly patients all week. I deserve some sort of compensation."
"You find comedy a reward?", Carlisle asks, unsure, and then Edward answers,
"Sure, why not?" but Carlisle distinctly refuses and urges him to take a seat again. He's not even unsure himself - he looks at the keys, and he realizes he hardly remembers which note is which key, and what sounds they're supposed to make, and he never paid much attention to either the organ or the piano, books bought or not, and he doesn't have much of an interest in either. There are people who are much better than him that he can listen to, after all.
Edward sits down and picks up the piece where he left off, and Carlisle walks around him, looks at the concentrated expression in his face, at the tensing muscles in his forearms, and ends up discovering himself staring at his hands again, realizing just how long he has been alone, and how much he wants those hands to touch him, and how wrong it is to think something like that of a teenager.
He's lived too long to think of this - of a man feeling attracted to, or loving, particularly loving, other men - as a sin, too long to have much of a prejudice against almost anything at all, and too long of anything that happens as unnatural; he is a vampire, of all things; exists without blood or sleep or food; and if there is a God, and for some reason he still believes there must be, even though the world keeps trying to prove him wrong, it must be His will that he is a vampire, and it must be His will to have a person love another.
Edward's not that young, Carlisle thinks, glad that he's far too into the music to listen to him, or he would have turned around and run away by now, he's sure. He's just barely of age, but his body has been affected by the venom and he looks like a fully grown man, even if just recently so; but Carlisle looks twenty-three, just the age he was converted, and he avoids thinking anymore about the issue, which isn't hard when Edward begins playing a particularly complicated part of the piece and his hands look strong and decided and Carlisle stays standing up and stares at them until Edward calls his attention and moves his hands away from the piano.
Carlisle blinks, shakes his head, says,
"Sorry, I got a little distracted", and then Edward chuckles and states,
"I didn't know you had a thing for hands", and he doesn't answer, but he can't help think Not hands, your hands, and he knows Edward is listening, and he makes up an excuse to go back now to the cottage, at four o'clock in the morning, and tells Edward to close the shop for him.
The last thing he wants to do is deal with what he fears must be a terrified American teenager who hasn't lived nearly as long as he has.
*
For over a week, Carlisle is never in the cottage when Edward is there, and his head seems to be such a shambles that Edward can't pick anything out of that chaos of information about the hospital, the new patients from other towns, the other doctors and nurses and hospital personnel, the instruments that he has never used and policies he hasn't had to abide by and symptoms and diagnosis and the constant avoidance of the hands issue that surfaces every now and then for so short a time that Edward doesn't even realize it's there until it's already gone.
Edward is really amazed at how well Carlisle can keep his mind busy and off matters that he's afraid of.
To be honest. Edward has no idea what to think himself. The first day, he finds it amusing, and laughs every time a lingering worry passes through Carlisle's mind when he's paying attention to it. The second day, he keeps himself off the issue, wandering about town and saying hello to people and looking out for maybe something he can do now that Carlisle can't just hire him as a completely inexperienced assistant. The third day, he mainly just wants to talk to Carlisle, to figure out what exactly happened that night and how to go about it.
Then he spends five days reading tragedies and feeling lonely and wanting to talk to Carlisle, period, which in turns has Edward grateful that Carlisle doesn't show up and have another reason to call him a petulant child, not that he doesn't feel like one at the moment.
The ninth day, he kind of snaps. He walks to the hospital, trying not to make people think he's running from someone or planning a crime or just moving too fast for the human being that he's supposed to be, and the nurse doesn't know him, so he gives her a false name and waits to be called into Carlisle's office. The night is uneventful, so he only has to wait about twenty minutes for Carlisle to get rid of a squealing little girl with a wound on her knee and an elderly man who thinks that he's dying when he's not, and then he goes in and closes the door behind him.
"Mr. - Goldman, hel-", Carlisle begins to say, but stops as he lifts up his head and sees Edward sitting down on the chair before his desk. "Edward, I'm working."
"Don't worry, I talked to everyone outside the door and no-one is in a life-or-death condition."
Carlisle takes a second to get a grasp at the situation, and finally manages to look at Edward in the eye.
"What are you doing here?", he asks.
"I - I don't know", Edward says, and he's sure he must look confused, but he is, because he really doesn't know. He just wanted to see Carlisle, feel like he hadn't been abandoned. "Didn't you convert me because you felt alone?", he replies at last, and Carlisle looks taken aback, and seems to find the answer lingering in Edward's question.
Edward blocks Carlisle's thoughts out. He doesn't want an advantage over this.
"Go back to the cottage", Carlisle says, as professionally as if he were telling him that he has an incurable illness. "We'll talk in the morning, all right?"
Edward laughs like he doesn't believe him, but nods and goes away nonetheless. He spends the rest of the night composing an angry piece, really composing rather than playing around, and plays it over and over until he hears the door open downstairs and then steps going upstairs.
"I'm really sorry if I scared you", Carlisle says, and looks at Edward's hands for a fleeting moment before turning his eye away, and says that he's sorry again.
Edward stands up, because it's only polite, and walks up to him, and he plans on just standing in front of Carlisle and telling him that there's nothing to worry about, that he shouldn't feel bad about that, that everything is all right; but then he finds himself staring into his eyes, and his nose, and his lips, and what is worse, he finds himself unable to stop his hands from cupping Carlisle's face or his head from leaning in or his mouth from closing the space between them and kissing him.
He feels like a very young person taking charge where he's not supposed to, but he can't say it feels bad or wrong or particularly weird; just a little out of place.
Carlisle stays still at first, too still for really anyone to be, but then he loosens and leans back against the wall behind him and moves his lips against Edward's like he's all right with this, like it doesn't matter that actually neither of them has ever kissed, much less done anything else with anyone; like it doesn't matter that there are three centuries between their ages; and then Edward slips his tongue in Carlisle's mouth and Edward enjoys this too much to dedicate any more time to think it's wrong or to freak out about it.
The kiss is slow and exploring, like they're giving each other a way out should any of them want to take it, and it stays that way as Carlisle takes Edward's hands away from his face and Edward lets them rest on the small of his back, brushing the waistband of his pants, and then Carlisle moans softly, and Edward smirks against his mouth, and all the handle-with-care pretensions are gone.
Author: cherryroad
Fandom: Twilight
Pairing/Characters: Edward/Carlisle.
Rating: PG.
Summary: "Perhaps he wasn't such a bad idea, after all. It's good to have someone to speak less than nice to you every once in a while, even if it's someone who has no idea what he's talking about."
Word Count: ~5000.
Notes: For twilightprompts, prompt #03 of the sixth list, tourniquet. Follow-up to stay (if there's nowhere else to go), second in a potential series of five installments. Unbetaed, but spellchecked. Constructive criticism is, as always, welcome.
They have to change their residence a few months later, when spring rolls around and the city hall decides to restore the cabin to its intended use. They run for half a day, until they find an abandoned cottage in the middle of Nowherewoods, Wisconsin, and Edward stays reading a newspaper while Carlisle checks the area for wild animals and places where they can hunt without being discovered, forests still untouched by human hands. The sound lowers as he moves around, Edward notices, but he keeps listening to him. It's constant information - Good bear population at some more height and A decent amount of deer and what looks like an appetite for wolves, like Carlisle finds them appealing to hunt. He grins at that while he folds a paper boat out of one of the pages from the Economy section; it's a bit of a surprise to know Carlisle enjoys something that may hurt a living creature; something that is hardly self-controlled.
When he's bored of reading about families he doesn't know and stocks he hasn't bought and politics that don't quite affect him, he leaves the newspaper on the small table near the front door and takes a look around. The staircase leading to the bedrooms upstairs has some loose timbers, so he sets on fixing them whenever he finds the tools for it. He doesn't have much to do, anyhow; Carlisle doesn't think he's fit to be around human blood yet, and he hasn't even looked for a job since he left the hospital where he treated him; he doesn't want to leave him alone for too many hours at a time.
He picks one of the bedrooms upstairs, because that's what he used to do whenever he rented a house for the holidays with his family, and he leaves his small bag of luggage on the trunk sitting at the foot of the bed. It's not luxurious, but he can't see why he would use a bed anytime soon, so he settles for that. He has to buy a piano, he finds, and some books to keep practicing. Carlisle got a modest one for him two months ago, but he accidentally broke half of the keys; lost control for a moment, and the music stopped sounding right.
The view from the window basically consists in the path leading to the front door, a medium-size, badly-handled lawn, and a circle of trees surrounding everything from a rather close distance; so close that more than one of the branches hits the roof when the wind blows. He lies on the bed instead and tries to hear something that isn't his own thoughts. A feminine scream of frustration hits him and he startles, hits his head on the board, and laughs at himself.
"Edward?" he hears then, clear in his ears, not in his brain, and he kind of runs downstairs.
"So, how's the area?", he asks, and Carlisle shakes his head and says,
"You know already."
Edward shrugs and smirks.
*
He can't even have a conversation anymore. He encounters a pair of actual occasional hunters in the forest one morning, looking for rabbits to serve for dinner, and Carlisle talks to them about the best place to find them, and how's life in town, and they tell him that everything's all right enough except for the medical practice; the only physician is in the nearest hospital recovering miraculously from the influenza, and Carlisle asks them if they'd be interested in him taking over the practice while their usual physician is gone.
When he's back in the cottage, he finds Edward stretched on the carpet, his head on one of the low armchairs and an old book in his lap. He turns his head to the door when Carlisle comes in.
"So I'm finally old enough to be left alone?"
Carlisle frowns and shakes his head, and answers easily, like he always does when Edward knows more than he has bothered to tell him.
"Don't you have anything better to do than follow my mind around?"
"Not really, no", Edward says, and Carlisle is beginning to regret the moment he caved in to Edward's whim of having a race without remembering that Edward was younger, stronger, newer as a vampire, much more competitive, and less used to control his own speed than him. He's been an arrogant child ever since.
"Why don't you do something productive, at the very least? What have you been doing these past months when I was out?" Edward chuckles.
"Breaking into the school and playing at their disgraceful instruments."
"Why don't you enroll in music school? There's one a couple of towns from here. You may not learn anything useful, but -" He stops. Edward's raising an eyebrow. "I'm sorry, no, you're not ready yet."
Edward turns back to his book and shrugs. He mutters, "At least we're moving forward", takes off his shirt, stretches some more, and begins reading a passage of Henry V out loud. Carlisle can't help but glance at his chest before going upstairs to get himself ready for introducing himself in town. Maybe not an arrogant child, then, he thinks: maybe an arrogant adult.
"I heard that", Edward says without looking up, without even smirking, and Carlisle snorts.
"Let's leave it at teenager with a recurrent tendency to act like a petulant child, shall we?"
Edward looks up now, to where Carlisle is standing on the stairs, looking right back at him, and shrugs, and states that it's a move forward, as well, but he should stop the habit of getting his hopes up like that.
"I will when you stop letting my hopes down", Carlisle answers to that, and hears Edward chuckle behind him.
Perhaps he wasn't such a bad idea, after all. It's good to have someone to speak less than nice to you every once in a while, even if it's someone who has no idea what he's talking about.
*
Two months go by before the physician in the town where Carlisle's working dies, and he's offered the position as a permanent job. Edward hates having to hear about it from his mouth before he knows - he has gotten used to knowing things before being told, and he wonders where exactly he slipped and stopped listening to Carlisle's thoughts. Maybe it happened when that blonde girl he met, and by meeting he means hearing for the first time, two weeks ago began having lurid thoughts about his forty-year-old teacher.
In any case, it is quite unfortunate that she chose that precise moment to be interesting, because Carlisle is obviously glad that he doesn't know, and it's much more fun to have him guess how much Edward has picked up from his mind and tease him into giving him extra information, not that there has ever been anything juicy there.
"I'm putting this up for a vote", Carlisle says, and Edward can't help but laugh.
"Are you serious?"
"As much as I'd like not to be, yes, I am serious. If you plan on keeping me company - even if it's just for your own comfort - you should have a say in what we do and where we move and other things that affect the both of us."
Edward blinks. His father was never particularly communicative with him, and her mother stopped varying his treatment of him when he turned eight years old, so this is quite the novelty; he has always had things decided for himself; so it takes a few silent seconds for Carlisle's suggestion to dawn in.
"I can't read your thoughts, you know", Carlisle asks, sort of impatiently, which is rather amusing for a person - he has settled on calling him a person, it's what flies easiest to his mind - who literally has forever, and cannot age, as far as he knows. His expression softens quickly, however; he seems unable to keep himself negative towards anyone other than himself for any longer than a second and a half.
Carlisle sits down now, on the chair opposite the armchair where Edward's sitting, and fidgets with his fingers over his lap. His mind sounds sort of silent.
"How long is permanently, exactly?" he asks at last.
"I'd say until people become suspicious of my not having aged in about a decade, or something bad happens. I'm hoping for the first, though." The second's your way-out ticket, he thinks, doesn't say, and Edward smiles gratefully.
"Do you want to stay here?"
Carlisle takes a while to answer, both out loud and in his head. He weights the advantages and disadvantages of staying, and finally he seems to put a stop to the disarray in his head and says,
"Yes. Yes, I'd like to."
So they move in to Ashland, and the only thing left to figure out is how and when to introduce Edward to the town; after a rush of thoughts in Carlisle's head that lasts about three days, they settle for the son of an old - and he emphasizes on the word, repeats it over and over in his head - mentor of Carlisle's who seems to be in need of a 'change of airs'.
"You look just like the type", Carlisle says laughing, and it sounds so good-natured that it takes Edward about a week to realize that he was mocking him.
*
The first thing that Carlisle does upon accepting the job is finding someone; a young man recently back from medical school, it turns out; to cover for him whenever he's indisposed; whenever he cannot walk out at risk of exposure; and Edward begins to help him with paperwork and remembering names and other easy things that allow him to get a bit into the life of the town and stop being sulky and moody because he 'needs some society to survive', as he puts it, and Carlisle can't really pretend not to understand that; he's the one who converted a human, a human on the verge of death, but a human nonetheless for the sake of a desperate woman and his own desire to have someone to talk to; and the job is now taking so many hours away from Edward that he can't even manage to keep him company.
He spends a whole night with Edward in the practice, trying to put some order in the old doctor's patients' files, and he finds that Edward has a bit of a sharp tongue when he's in the mood for that, and also a bit of a self-depreciating issue. The rest of the time, the conversation flows well, for the most part, and the silence isn't particularly uncomfortable.
They're looking at an eighty-year-old woman's file when Edward frowns and looks at him intently, like analyzing him. Carlisle thinks What's wrong?, and Edward shrugs.
"I just realized you were born in the seventeenth century."
"So?"
"People died of the common cold back then, didn't they?"
"Where are you going with this?" Carlisle asks, and Edward shrugs again.
"I don't -", he begins, but he stops and begins a new sentence. "How long would you have lived if you hadn't been - bitten?"
Carlisle thinks, Honestly?, and then, when Edward nods, he says,
"I haven't got the slightest idea. Maybe I would have caught the common cold and died a month later, or I would have lived to ninety years old. It's a really hard thing to tell."
"Would you prefer that to this?"
He tries to remember anyone else ever asking that question to him, and his memory comes back blank. Solitary vampires don't bother with talk, and the few covens that he has encountered over the years have always supposed that this was not the fate he chose, and that he has to deal with it and there is no need to remind him.
Now, however, he is as torn as to not know whether to say yes or no, so he decides on maybe.
"Were you ever married?" Edward asks then, and Carlisle wonders when this got so personal. Edward answers to his thought, "I figured it's about time we get to know each other a bit more", and Carlisle realizes that he's actually become much more mature than he was a few months ago. There's a part of him that thinks this is the sobering effect of slowly losing all the remains of his human blood, and there's also a part that shuts him up to avoid the constant feeling of guilt.
"No, I was never married. I have never been married."
"Would you ever marry?"
"I think the question lays on whether I could or not. Which I would answer with a no. Who am I going to marry, anyhow?"
Edward chuckles, mutters,
"A pretty vampire girl, I don't know", and Carlisle laughs, but looks away when Edward tries again to analyze him with his eyes. He doesn't really understand this part; he seems consumed by the interest and keeps staring at his face, like there's something there that he hasn't seen, and the atmosphere turns even more serious than it has already turned. "You've been alone for three centuries", Edward says at last, whispers, really low, pensive, like he's talking more to himself than to Carlisle, "and..." He's mumbling now, and then he speaks up again. "Why have you never converted a woman?"
"I would never do something like that to a person I loved", he answers, and regrets it immediately. "I would never do it to anyone - you were one in a billion, Edward. You should have seen the look in your mother's face; it was like she knew what I was, and what I could do. I don't regret it, but I don't feel proud of it either."
"I know", Edward says then, in the most adult voice that Carlisle has ever heard from him, and there's a silence until Edward finds another patient to mock, but it's slightly awkward from there.
*
Edward hears that they're building a small hospital in town from one of Carlisle's patients. He goes back to the cottage while Carlisle is held up by some people asking him about timetables and more drugs and how they should go about avoiding the upcoming summer, and Edward doesn't tell him about it until he leaves his suitcase on the floor, next to the front door, and sits down on the couch.
"Did you know they're building a hospital?"
"I'd heard they were converting an old house into one, yes."
"What are you going to do when it's done?" Carlisle frowns, like asking without actually speaking or thinking the question, and Edward adds, "I've heard it's almost ready for work."
Carlisle blinks, thinks Really?, and then smiles. Edward tries to figure out why he's happy about it, whether he's planning on leaving already and hasn't told him yet, or he already has a spot there, or he has decided to switch professions and build a farm and get a job at the local market, and comes up empty.
"Why are you happy?", he finally asks. Carlisle shrugs and says,
"It's almost summer. The sun is going to be shining and we can't risk exposure. I'm sure you must have picked that up from my head if I haven't told you willingly myself, or there might have been a scandal or two in town." Edward gestures for him to go on. "The thing is, I can't convince a whole town that I can work twenty-four hours a day, and they need me during the daylight, so I might have had to abandon the practice, or give more responsibilities to Frank, and I honestly don't think he's ready for that. In a hospital I can just work nights, and no-one will question that. It's a lucky event, Edward."
He thinks an addendum - Unless you were dying to get out of here, which would make it unfortunate - but Edward isn't dying to get out of here, so everything is okay, or as okay as their situation may be.
"By the way, I talked to the carpenter at the practice and he said there's a guy downtown who's getting rid of a couple of guitars and a piano, in case you're interested."
"Thanks", Edward says after the initial surprise, and by the time the sun rises the next morning, he has every music sheet he has ever collected aligned over the floor of his bedroom.
He has to admit that, once he gets the piano and begins to play, he's ecstatic to have one of his favorite pastimes back.
*
A week before the new hospital opens for good, Edward brings the piano into the practice and plays for the few people in the waiting room, and for himself, and by proximity he plays for Carlisle, or at least Carlisle catches the notes every time; the wooden walls don't even bother to keep the sound away.
He sees the smile on Edward's face every time a new patient comes in, every time someone compliments him, and he imagines it when he can't see it. Sometimes, this business of loneliness can make anyone forget who they are, that they even are in themselves, and Carlisle is glad Edward can have that back through his music. Everyone is kind and incredibly nice to him, praising his technique and the music he chooses and how it feels like a better day now that they've heard him play that he keeps the piano in the practice all week, and doesn't even stop by the cottage too much.
They keep each other company at night, and Edward helps Carlisle figure out some of the diagnosis, decide what to do with a patient or another, and plays piano whenever Carlisle asks him to. He can play as well, or he used to be able to; but the years have softened the ability, and he wouldn't be able to make anything sound properly now.
He's thinking this their last night at the practice, which they have already sold to a family that will convert it into a house, once Carlisle has a permanent position as a night doctor at the hospital, and he's getting through some of the files, deciding which ones he will take to his new office, while Edward plays some of his moderately happy melodies, when Edward suddenly changes the pace and the music becomes slow, sad, sort of macabre, even. It takes Carlisle a minute to do so, but then he asks, he says,
"What is that?", and Edward answers easily.
"That's a piece by - me." Carlisle looks at him as he turns around. "I composed it on the piano at the school. I was sort of depressed at that moment, I suppose."
"Are you depressed now?", Carlisle asks, worried.
"Not really", Edward replies, "but this makes me feel something, and I felt like feeling something deep for once", he finishes and quickly adds: "Does it bother you?"
Carlisle takes a second to shake his head and say,
"No. No, not at all. Go on."
Edward goes on, and it takes Carlisle about sixty seconds to decide that he has done enough work and sit down beside him on the improvised stool Edward made out of two broken chairs from the storage room.
"I didn't know you composed", Carlisle says, nothing far from the truth, and looks at the way Edward's hands move over the board like they're floating, or flying, and the way his skin looks older, experienced, used, as he bends his wrists and his knuckles to reach the keys. Edward stops playing after a few notes, when there is a proper pause, and answers,
"I don't, not really. I just experiment, and sometimes experiments become something that I like hearing. I think everyone who has ever learned to play a musical instrument has composed an experiment or two."
"I never did", Carlisle answers, and Edward frowns.
"You can play?"
Carlisle thinks about it first, in a sort of incoherent bunch of sentences that seem to go unheard by Edward if the waiting expression in his face is anything to go by, and then says,
"I used to. My father taught me to play the organ when I was a child, so that I could play at church, and one of the places I lived in about - fifty years ago, I believe -"; he laughs, it's such a long time, and it feels so short at the same time; "had a piano, and I tried to remember what I knew, but it wasn't much, so I bought some books and tried to play normally, but gave up after about a month. I was never very good, not even at the organ."
To Carlisle's surprise, Edward stands up and tells him to play. He shakes his head.
"No. I can't do that. I don't want any dead genius to rise from his grave to get back at me for ruining his work."
"Come on. I've been playing for you and your elderly patients all week. I deserve some sort of compensation."
"You find comedy a reward?", Carlisle asks, unsure, and then Edward answers,
"Sure, why not?" but Carlisle distinctly refuses and urges him to take a seat again. He's not even unsure himself - he looks at the keys, and he realizes he hardly remembers which note is which key, and what sounds they're supposed to make, and he never paid much attention to either the organ or the piano, books bought or not, and he doesn't have much of an interest in either. There are people who are much better than him that he can listen to, after all.
Edward sits down and picks up the piece where he left off, and Carlisle walks around him, looks at the concentrated expression in his face, at the tensing muscles in his forearms, and ends up discovering himself staring at his hands again, realizing just how long he has been alone, and how much he wants those hands to touch him, and how wrong it is to think something like that of a teenager.
He's lived too long to think of this - of a man feeling attracted to, or loving, particularly loving, other men - as a sin, too long to have much of a prejudice against almost anything at all, and too long of anything that happens as unnatural; he is a vampire, of all things; exists without blood or sleep or food; and if there is a God, and for some reason he still believes there must be, even though the world keeps trying to prove him wrong, it must be His will that he is a vampire, and it must be His will to have a person love another.
Edward's not that young, Carlisle thinks, glad that he's far too into the music to listen to him, or he would have turned around and run away by now, he's sure. He's just barely of age, but his body has been affected by the venom and he looks like a fully grown man, even if just recently so; but Carlisle looks twenty-three, just the age he was converted, and he avoids thinking anymore about the issue, which isn't hard when Edward begins playing a particularly complicated part of the piece and his hands look strong and decided and Carlisle stays standing up and stares at them until Edward calls his attention and moves his hands away from the piano.
Carlisle blinks, shakes his head, says,
"Sorry, I got a little distracted", and then Edward chuckles and states,
"I didn't know you had a thing for hands", and he doesn't answer, but he can't help think Not hands, your hands, and he knows Edward is listening, and he makes up an excuse to go back now to the cottage, at four o'clock in the morning, and tells Edward to close the shop for him.
The last thing he wants to do is deal with what he fears must be a terrified American teenager who hasn't lived nearly as long as he has.
*
For over a week, Carlisle is never in the cottage when Edward is there, and his head seems to be such a shambles that Edward can't pick anything out of that chaos of information about the hospital, the new patients from other towns, the other doctors and nurses and hospital personnel, the instruments that he has never used and policies he hasn't had to abide by and symptoms and diagnosis and the constant avoidance of the hands issue that surfaces every now and then for so short a time that Edward doesn't even realize it's there until it's already gone.
Edward is really amazed at how well Carlisle can keep his mind busy and off matters that he's afraid of.
To be honest. Edward has no idea what to think himself. The first day, he finds it amusing, and laughs every time a lingering worry passes through Carlisle's mind when he's paying attention to it. The second day, he keeps himself off the issue, wandering about town and saying hello to people and looking out for maybe something he can do now that Carlisle can't just hire him as a completely inexperienced assistant. The third day, he mainly just wants to talk to Carlisle, to figure out what exactly happened that night and how to go about it.
Then he spends five days reading tragedies and feeling lonely and wanting to talk to Carlisle, period, which in turns has Edward grateful that Carlisle doesn't show up and have another reason to call him a petulant child, not that he doesn't feel like one at the moment.
The ninth day, he kind of snaps. He walks to the hospital, trying not to make people think he's running from someone or planning a crime or just moving too fast for the human being that he's supposed to be, and the nurse doesn't know him, so he gives her a false name and waits to be called into Carlisle's office. The night is uneventful, so he only has to wait about twenty minutes for Carlisle to get rid of a squealing little girl with a wound on her knee and an elderly man who thinks that he's dying when he's not, and then he goes in and closes the door behind him.
"Mr. - Goldman, hel-", Carlisle begins to say, but stops as he lifts up his head and sees Edward sitting down on the chair before his desk. "Edward, I'm working."
"Don't worry, I talked to everyone outside the door and no-one is in a life-or-death condition."
Carlisle takes a second to get a grasp at the situation, and finally manages to look at Edward in the eye.
"What are you doing here?", he asks.
"I - I don't know", Edward says, and he's sure he must look confused, but he is, because he really doesn't know. He just wanted to see Carlisle, feel like he hadn't been abandoned. "Didn't you convert me because you felt alone?", he replies at last, and Carlisle looks taken aback, and seems to find the answer lingering in Edward's question.
Edward blocks Carlisle's thoughts out. He doesn't want an advantage over this.
"Go back to the cottage", Carlisle says, as professionally as if he were telling him that he has an incurable illness. "We'll talk in the morning, all right?"
Edward laughs like he doesn't believe him, but nods and goes away nonetheless. He spends the rest of the night composing an angry piece, really composing rather than playing around, and plays it over and over until he hears the door open downstairs and then steps going upstairs.
"I'm really sorry if I scared you", Carlisle says, and looks at Edward's hands for a fleeting moment before turning his eye away, and says that he's sorry again.
Edward stands up, because it's only polite, and walks up to him, and he plans on just standing in front of Carlisle and telling him that there's nothing to worry about, that he shouldn't feel bad about that, that everything is all right; but then he finds himself staring into his eyes, and his nose, and his lips, and what is worse, he finds himself unable to stop his hands from cupping Carlisle's face or his head from leaning in or his mouth from closing the space between them and kissing him.
He feels like a very young person taking charge where he's not supposed to, but he can't say it feels bad or wrong or particularly weird; just a little out of place.
Carlisle stays still at first, too still for really anyone to be, but then he loosens and leans back against the wall behind him and moves his lips against Edward's like he's all right with this, like it doesn't matter that actually neither of them has ever kissed, much less done anything else with anyone; like it doesn't matter that there are three centuries between their ages; and then Edward slips his tongue in Carlisle's mouth and Edward enjoys this too much to dedicate any more time to think it's wrong or to freak out about it.
The kiss is slow and exploring, like they're giving each other a way out should any of them want to take it, and it stays that way as Carlisle takes Edward's hands away from his face and Edward lets them rest on the small of his back, brushing the waistband of his pants, and then Carlisle moans softly, and Edward smirks against his mouth, and all the handle-with-care pretensions are gone.