1921, Cleveland.

[ofthefamily]

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

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[themidnightson]

Which isn't exactly true, because dozens if not hundreds of people in both his and Esme's condition had passed through under his hands and skills without evoking the same response, but she was listening.

Which was not the time to be impertinent, even if he was right.

There's the movement of his chest as though he were sighing but no sound or breathe was forced. He reoriented the pen correctly in his fingers, and started writing.

Her husband mistreated her.
She ran away to protect herself.
Except it didn't get better.Edward handed over the paper with a silent frown. He didn't mention that that it was the child she'd left for, not herself, or that the child had been the last straw. It's face, clear and empty, in his mind. The harrowing emptiness in her then, in memories that might or might not one day leave her, but would length and gray and grow thin, and would be pristine for him forever

[ofthefamily]

Carlisle's staring at the paper instead of Edward.

Except it didn't get better.

The blond hisses at the paper in his hand, his mind flashing back to the man in the bay window in Columbus. Husband. Heathen.

Someone should notify the next of kin of Esme's passing, the recesses of Carlisle's mind offers to the forefront with a kind of insistence he normally defeats easily.

[themidnightson]

"The hospital would have started that all before--" there's a small, tip of his head back to where she is. There isn't a body now for anyone to claim or identify. But she was already considered dead. By the people who brought her in, paperwork started in her name.

She was just a missing dead body to that world.

And to this one she was the newest reason to move. For the second time.

[ofthefamily]

That wasn't Carlisle's meaning.

He could run to Columbus in less than two hours; the most deranged errand Carlisle would ever feel happy to run in his near-three hundred years.

Can't leave her now with you we don't know how she will be. She's so young. Nearly ten years older than Edward when he was turned, but younger still. Carlisle sighs, trying to calm himself, coming down off a high.

He has a scalpel he could use.

[themidnightson]

He can't say he's disagrees with the notion.

Edward has every smashed memory of those times she thought of (which could be missing many more, he knew) with brutish action against her. As though for moments like it was happening to him, from the first person.

A hell that, in the heat of the moment, would have been welcome over the searing venom.

But Carlisle doing it? He does disapprove of. The vehement suddenness of his anger birthing a wary expression, and quiet tone. There is a harder sigh this time. "I wouldn't stop you, but you'd regret it."

[ofthefamily]

I'll try to not kill him. Final.

Carlisle has a doctor's smile back on his face when he moves to Esme's side again in the next room.

"Esme, there's a choice you have to make now," he starts, swallowing hard. "I changed you. I will help you in the way that we live, if you want. You can stay with Edward and I for as long as you want to.

"If you do not want to stay with me, I will show you the nearest empty hunting grounds and you will never see me again. I can't follow you if you pursue that. But that is is your choice."

[mamavamp]

This whole situations still feels so surreal to Esme that she's not sure she can make that decision.

"I'll stay."

All she knows for certain is that if this is real, she doesn't want to be alone.

[themidnightson]

Edward didn't follow him in but, instead walked out of the other room a second way, headed to where stacks of boxes stayed in a closet since arriving here. He took out four and started on the room with the closet, thinking a little too hard the woman in the other room, the inevitable as it was viewed in Carlisle's thoughts, and how the face of his future had just upended and changed around without being asked once.