Summary: So, so AU. And a Milliways fic. The things I do for Stephanie. This far background premise to this one was that a minor goddess granted Carlisle telepathy for a day or two. It's definitely Edward/Carlisle, but it also doesn't actually ever gravitate from being Esme/Carlisle and Edward/Bella in very, very early Twilight time-wise either.
Not canon related at all.
When he buries his faces into Carlisle's shoulder he can be a little bitter that Esme didn't show her husband, didn't free her son, didn't understand that a secret acknowledged and still kept created more walls than it dashed, didn't understand that the price of this gift was paltry in the offering on the other side of it.
When his lips ghost from a shoulder, across a neck, down a jaw line by sense of feel alone, unforgotten in decades, to claim lips, who's texture and taste hasn't changed, harshly; sadness that she doesn't understand just how much Carlisle would understand, how much he could take and hold and not break. That it would only be understanding and love that amplified in the exchange of memories clung to for far too long.
How intimate and temporal, how fleeting and everlasting, this window into the soul is. How he'd have paid with most of his dear eternity to have one person understand for four seconds. How even now, in their divided beauty, they have more than he'll ever have with the girl - and she is a girl I in all the ways that can be accounted - who's taken him by siege.
But when Carlisle groans above him, one of his hands tightening at the nap of eternally too long hair and the other popping buttons in its haste to finally finally brush across a forsaken rib cage, Edward can be fiercely, desperately, glad he'll never have had to share this part of Carlisle with anyone ever.