1926, Philadelphia -- Winter
His own words pave the way, opening wider doors that had only ever been left to shiver, cracked but unexplored. He wonders, with it in garish light, about how he hadn't seen all of it there, as it evoked stray commentary from Carlisle of years back.
("With all the thoughts you have to listen to, maybe...
...words aren't the best route for you to explain yourself.")
As if on cue with being understood the music, which had flooded the house in unending torrent for more than six months, has gone silent.
There's relief, as well as guilt, in the revelation. In the fact a usurping unsettled sensation of more than half a decade is coming to fruition. Maybe it's not about them at all. (Even Edward is smart enough to know that will never be entirely true.) But his walks wind more blatantly among people after that night, and his eyes follow their fluttering hands, the beat of their hearts, even the very way they tilt their chins.
Even damned, he has never fallen.
He's never made that mistake.
Nor felt the want, or desperation, to make another.
Edward crossed his legs one way. Then half an hour later shifts, and recrosses them when a waitress refills his cup of coffee. The liquid pouring into the cup, his eyes ran along her arm, shoulder, her pulse neck, the apple of her cheek, until settling on her face. She was prattling about the morning rush and thinking about her daughter.
He was ignoring her words and her thoughts, as much as one could ignore a blaring radio without volume control or power switch, and dissecting Carlisle's decision about human lives.
She -- Sandra Miller -- was innocent. If not in definition, then by the act of living an unremarkable, normal life. Her small world would be less without her. A child's would. Without quite feeling the purpose of his own point, he sees the merit in Carlisle's choice. But the world is not made of only saints and angels and common people getting by on subsidized paychecks and inflated hope.
When Esme and Carlisle ask him to come hunting he turns them down.
This is not all that new, given his distance and independence.
His thirst ramps by the day, eyes darkening slowly and more purposefully than any time since traveling the ocean between continents, but he can't bring himself to find even the slightest interest in running out of the city. To hunt down an animal, he has already monotonously done so to before, who will sustain him only just enough to keep living. Who keeps him securely where is and has been and always will be if he leaves the city.
He has seen and felt what they become when they are following the dictates of their true nature. Sharper, faster, cleaner, more concise and precise. Each of them in a state that defied the word grace, and yet was fashioned only through their lens of regret and remorse, desperation and self-serving want or need. Cloaks he neither had nor planned to don.
Edward turned over and over the notion that it was not impossible to envision a road carefully walked between both dictates -- that of embracing his true nature and that of Carlisle's ideal protection of the innocents. Even as he was certain Carlisle would not approve of the idea that shaping more with each passing hour on each passing endless day.
("With all the thoughts you have to listen to, maybe...
...words aren't the best route for you to explain yourself.")
As if on cue with being understood the music, which had flooded the house in unending torrent for more than six months, has gone silent.
There's relief, as well as guilt, in the revelation. In the fact a usurping unsettled sensation of more than half a decade is coming to fruition. Maybe it's not about them at all. (Even Edward is smart enough to know that will never be entirely true.) But his walks wind more blatantly among people after that night, and his eyes follow their fluttering hands, the beat of their hearts, even the very way they tilt their chins.
Even damned, he has never fallen.
He's never made that mistake.
Nor felt the want, or desperation, to make another.
Edward crossed his legs one way. Then half an hour later shifts, and recrosses them when a waitress refills his cup of coffee. The liquid pouring into the cup, his eyes ran along her arm, shoulder, her pulse neck, the apple of her cheek, until settling on her face. She was prattling about the morning rush and thinking about her daughter.
He was ignoring her words and her thoughts, as much as one could ignore a blaring radio without volume control or power switch, and dissecting Carlisle's decision about human lives.
She -- Sandra Miller -- was innocent. If not in definition, then by the act of living an unremarkable, normal life. Her small world would be less without her. A child's would. Without quite feeling the purpose of his own point, he sees the merit in Carlisle's choice. But the world is not made of only saints and angels and common people getting by on subsidized paychecks and inflated hope.
When Esme and Carlisle ask him to come hunting he turns them down.
This is not all that new, given his distance and independence.
His thirst ramps by the day, eyes darkening slowly and more purposefully than any time since traveling the ocean between continents, but he can't bring himself to find even the slightest interest in running out of the city. To hunt down an animal, he has already monotonously done so to before, who will sustain him only just enough to keep living. Who keeps him securely where is and has been and always will be if he leaves the city.
He has seen and felt what they become when they are following the dictates of their true nature. Sharper, faster, cleaner, more concise and precise. Each of them in a state that defied the word grace, and yet was fashioned only through their lens of regret and remorse, desperation and self-serving want or need. Cloaks he neither had nor planned to don.
Edward turned over and over the notion that it was not impossible to envision a road carefully walked between both dictates -- that of embracing his true nature and that of Carlisle's ideal protection of the innocents. Even as he was certain Carlisle would not approve of the idea that shaping more with each passing hour on each passing endless day.