Mid-November.

[ofthefamily]

It's cold in Ithica.

It does not effect Carlisle as he walks from the classroom where he has been teaching night courses in Anatomy and Physiology at the community college back to his car.

(He didn't see the student trying to catch him in the hallway to ask a question about the homework. Carlisle hasn't been all that observant of late.)

Comments

[ofthefamily]

It was his card. Losing hope.

And Star cannot bring him back here by force. Carlisle knows that Esme had to start out with that, and loves her for it. Always.

"Just -- " and Carlisle's voice slips a little in control if not in volume.

What can he even ask for? What would She actually do?

" -- Let him remember. Let him. Look up into the sunlight and see."

[sheisourheart]

It means long nightgowns and tying her hair back with a single, flat ribbon of the same color. Slipping into the sheets of a bed, and knowing it isn't the end of the night. The faintest phantom memories, perhaps only imagined now, of what it was to drop all cares and dream beside one beloved.

Pulling back his side in preparation and waiting for and on him. She doesn't know how much he's been pushed tonight already.

[ofthefamily]

Carlisle tends towards long pajama pants at night when he and Esme have a semblance of a 'bedtime'.

"You are so beautiful," Carlisle whispers, still standing beside their bed they share.

[sheisourheart]

What is to be reminded in those words of another's, that this face above her, that gives her words that causes her to smile softly and hold out a hand to him, might hold a heart losing hope?

"Come lay down with me?"

[ofthefamily]

He can do this, and so he does. Lay there for hours, sometimes with open eyes, sometimes forced shut and closed off.

All the while hands on Esme's back as though she were actually the one who needed soothing here. (But then again, how selfish is that.)

The card might still be in his coat pocket, or on the passenger seat of his car, but for the moment it is forgotten.