Turbulent was the only way to describe the past few months of Carlisle Cullen's life, hell the past few years.
In two short years his son: had fallen into one of the worst fits of anguish he'd ever seen, fell in love with a human, fell into a deeper state of anguish and almost removed himself from the world completely, patched things up with said human, married said human, had a human-vampire hybrid that set everything Carlisle ever knew into question with said human, human-vampire hybrid then became a threat to one of Carlisle's oldest friends who threatened to kill everyone he held dear over a minuscule misunderstanding.
Yes, turbulent seemed to be the only word appropriate.
Yet, he was still there. They were all still there, unscathed, at least physically. And like the tide after a storm the waves had retreated, leaving behind devastation and a renewed, a more profound, sense of… hope? Perhaps, being? Yes, being was appropriate.
Eleven days had gone by since that shockingly uneventful afternoon in a snowy field. Even long after the black hooded capes had disappeared on the horizon the distress had yet to dissipate fully, he failed to believe it ever would.
No, their lives had surely changed forever. He found the familiar comforts of the family he had forged over the century but amidst it was an looming sense of what could have been. As his friends said their goodbyes he wondered if it was goodbye forever. His extended family had paid memoriam to the member lost and he was extremely aware it should have been him. He wailed his heart out in the solitude of the forest, barely comforted as his wife looked on, a soft hand on his back as he processed years of contention. He talked with his first son for hours on end but all philosophical debates seemed for naught when his life suddenly had an expiration date. He read aloud to his granddaughter and wondered if he had enough time to write down all the things he wished to tell her. He laughed with his children and the fishing weight in his stomach lifted but only for a second.
The despair was like a heavy fog creeping over a small harbor. But his ship was still moored, still afloat. The rocky, turbulent, seas failed to unattach the skiff's tether.
Carlisle stood at the end of the main hallway, able to watch the grand piano without fear of being spotted. With supernatural hearing and scent anyone could know he was there of course, but no one paid him any mind. He watched as Renesmee climbed onto the piano bench, nestling into her father's side. His son. His son was now a father. That just didn't seem right, but at the same time it made complete and utter sense.
Isabella walked into the room, she kissed the top of her daughter's head, and then her husband. Ness and Edward sported the same bashful lopsided smile.
Bella took a seat on the sofa and cracked open a weathered book as her husband and daughter started to play one of Bach's easier compositions.
Carlisle allowed his eyes to slip closed for a few minutes, allowing the familiar tune provide a different sort of comfort than it had during any of its prior performances.
His mental rolodex of various orchestras was interrupted when his wife drifted through the hall. Familiar footsteps as quiet as a mouse. The faint aroma of natural lavender that had always been her, masked by a light spritz of perfume he knew was simply named 'Spice Marine.' A scent he found both appealing and sentimental. Muted notes of bergamot, smoked cumin, cinnamon, with undertones of the sea. It was as if the perfumer had bottled their family. Perhaps that's why she always smelled like home.
Soft arms wrapped around his waist, tender hands resting on his stomach. With a sigh he sunk further into her arms.
"Hi stranger," she whispered into his shoulder blade as he took her hand in his own. "What are you up to?"
"Watching," he whispered as he reluctantly broke the hug to face her.
"Creeper," she chided, but the devotion in her eyes as she peeked around him to catch a glimpse of her second son told him she was just as awed by the sight.
"I can't quite believe it all worked out," he whispered as he began to lead them away from the living room. An arm around her shoulders.
"What was that?" She grinned but he didn't know why.
"I said I'm in awe, it all worked out. What? Oh…"
"Was that an 'Esme I was a fool to ever doubt you?' That's what it sounded like."
"I don't know what you're referring to," Carlisle lied. His false naivety was met with a soft push against his chest. His back landed against the wall. As if muscle memory and not eidetic memory would remind him of the conversation two years prior.
"I believe my exact words were 'she's what he wants, Carlisle. It'll work out, somehow,' and you laughed and doubted me but I was?"
"Right. In a twisted way you were indeed right. It's only taken me eighty years to realize you always are. Happy?" He took her face in both his hands, a light peck of a kiss.
She pulled away with a grin. "Eighty-six years," she breathed. "When did we get so old?"
"You don't look a day over ninety-eight," he leaned back in but she retreated.
They walked arm in arm up the stairs, down the hall, into his office. The door clicked close as Bach turned to ragtime.
They stood in silence for a few moments. Esme opened the curtains, letting in minimal light.
"You did tell him to kill her if he needed to," Carlisle pointed out delicately. The 'Swan Girl Dilemma' was one he didn't care to relive again.
"Of course I did. He's your son," she shrugged as if they were discussing Thursday's Mariner's game, actually she got more passionate about baseball than this very real homicide plan.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"If I told him the sky was blue he'd fight me on it."
"I don't know if that's true," Carlisle defended although he knew very well it was true. He himself had had that precise with Edward, more than once.
"I asked him to comb his hair one time in 1934 and what did he do?"
"Refused to pick up a brush until 1939."
"I asked to wipe off his muddy shoes before coming into the house and what happened?"
"He moved all his things into the front yard and lived outside for a month."
"I asked him not to deal with Charles."
Carlisle didn't respond to that particular grievance.
Esme sighed at his sudden silence, the seventy year old fight was still very much fresh."Without moral judgement you can see it as an example of his stubbornness."
"Yes, I can. However, I don't see how this stubborn streak is my doing."
"You don't?" Esme scoffed. "Mr. Refused to drink blood for three months because he didn't want to be a murderer? The same man who made it through medical school out of sheer will power? You don't think you're a tad stubborn?"
"No," Carlisle snipped, his wife clearly finding his defensiveness comical.
"That was a risky little game."
She simply shrugged as she organized the papers scattered on his desk. He took the stack from her hands and slipped it in his concealed file cabinet. She moved on to rearranging his ink pots. When that was done she walked around the room straightening his art, that was already perfectly hung. In that second it dawned on him he hadn't seen his wife in ten days. Glimpses, or in group settings, sure; but a real conversation alone? No.
If he truly thought about it no one had seen her. They had heard the vacuum, the sound of a hammer against the roof, the whirr of the washing machine but not Esme.
"Es. What have you been up to?"
"Riveting things. I had to fix the scrapes from Alistair jumping up and down. And then Garrett utterly abused my carpet. I need to break out the Sanitaire."
"Or you could take a breather for a few minutes?"
"It's like you don't even know me," she laughed as she dusted the wall of built-in bookshelves.
He did know her. And he knew these patterns were decades old coping techniques that any psychiatrist worth his salt would say were unproductive. It started when she was a child. Raised as a little homemaker to be. Her mother taught her to make things perfect. Then when she was a homemaker everything had to be perfect. An ideal she was made to believe she never lived up to. Her compulsive need for perfection followed her into the state of undead. In the early days she tried to pay her stay by taking care of their little hovel of a home, worried she'd be exiled if she didn't fufill expectations placed on her sex. Over the years she learned this expectation was held only by herself. Learned to appreciate a clean home for the mental clarity it brought, not because it ensured physical protection.
Nevertheless, in certain moments of distress he'd watch as she would slip back into familiar patterns. She meticulously scrubbed the blood out of her clothes after every slip. White button downs pointlessly lost their crimson before they entered a fire. There wasn't a speck of dust in their house from '27 to '31. She did eight loads of laundry while waiting to hear how Edward's visit to Italy went.
And now. She had seemingly cleaned for ten days straight after two very tumultuous years.
She reached for the throw quilt on the couch and his hand grasped hers before she could refold it. "How are you doing?"
"What?" She laughed.
"How are you doing? How are you… coping? We haven't really talked since, you know."
"I'm doing great," she smiled. That close mouthed smile with an unintentional extra blink that told him she was lying.
"Everything is going well?" He asked, doing his absolute best not to slip into his 'clinical' tone. The tone that got him a screamed 'Jesus H. Christ! I'm not some case study, Doctor!' Or worse, a repeat of the 'How does that make you feel?' incident of '78.
"You're doing it again," Esme sang as she pulled the blanket off the couch and refolded it.
"So are you," he sighed as he leaned against his desk.
"Excuse me?" She was giving him an out he refused to take.
"You're ignoring your feelings and refusing to process things properly."
It was a fundamental fact of Esme Anne Cullen he learned over the years: she did not process. Life just kept moving on and on and on and on and so did she. She took Newton's first law, perhaps, a little too seriously.
"Name one thing I haven't fully processed," she said flatly, fluffing the throw pillows with an aggressive chop of her hand.
"Charles," he said before the sentence was fully off her tongue. It wasn't fair, and it wasn't kind but it was true.
"That was low hanging fruit, Eve," Esme sighed.
"Your son. Your mother," the last word was said with particular disdain. He knew the woman for eighteen and a half minutes and that was eighteen too many.
"Edward, in general. Rosalie's change. Your suicide attempt. My suicide attempt. Edward's suicide attempt. Edward leaving. The first time. The second time. The third time. Any of your slips. The time I sported a fake mustache in the '70's."
"Well, that was just traumatic," she smiled, letting him pull her into his arms.
"I want to know you're alright," he confessed, tucking a stray curl behind her ear.
"I'll be fine, my love."
"You're sure? You're not just telling me that?"
"Carlisle, enough. I will be fine."
"I love you."
"'I love you,'" Esme parroted him in an English accent worse than Keanu Reeves' heretic performance as Johnathan Harker.
"I don't sound like that," Carlisle pouted.
"In my mind you do. Like a blonde bloodsucking Colin Firth."
"You and that damn Darcy," he laughed.
"He's dreamy, sue me."
'"You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you,'" he whispered in the best modern English accent he could muster.
"Hm," Esme frowned.
"Not a fan?"
"I'm unsure All your r's disappeared."
"At least I don't say 'cain't," Carlisle teased with a pinch of her waist.
She rolled her eyes. She truly did not sound that Midwestern, ope was a word whether he liked it or not.
"K-aa-nt?" She asked.
"No, that's Immanuel. It's c-æ-n-t," he pretentiously over enunciated. "I know they didn't teach you the alphabet out on the farm but try it."
"You're a cu-" he cut her off with a kiss.
"Well what do you say?" Carlisle asked when she pulled away. "Should I talk like this all the time mate?" He again put on the false modern accent.
"No. I like your real voice much better."
"You've never heard my real accent."
"Doth that please thee?" Esme whispered in his ear.
A reference to the first time she ever distracted him enough he slipped into grammar of days gone by. It just so happened to be during their first night together, which made it all the more horrifying for him and all the more blackmail worthy to her.
"I never should have let you talk me into going to bed with you," he sulked as she left his arms.
"You say that as if you didn't propose five minutes after our first kiss."
"To which you so cruelly said no, leaving me no choice but to entrap you with my masculine wiles." He proceeded to demonstrate said masculine wiles with a dance move he'd learned in one of their trips to South America. Assured he did it incorrectly because instead of falling straight into bed his wife was almost falling over with laughter.
"Oh boy," Esme scoffed at the hip jive combined with a shoulder shimmy that would have been impressive on anyone but her son-of-a-preacher husband.
"Is it working?" He asked, slowly undoing his scarf with the sensuality and method of a burlesque star.
"I don't think there's a single person on this planet that move would work on," she laughed as his tie was the next to be undone, thrown carelessly behind him.
"It's worked on you in the past." The first three buttons of his crisp button up were undone as he crept closer to her.
"I was young and dumb then." A hand on the small of her back, wrapped around to hold her waist. "Easily seduced by a man with a suave tango." She leaned into the quick twirl, her hand meeting his chest when he pulled her back to him.
"And what are you now?" He asked as he slowly dipped her.
"Wise."
"Wise," he repeated, a hand holding her thigh up, as he placed a kiss on her wrist. A second one an inch above it, a third, a fourth.
"Mature."
"Mature." His lips made it to the crook of her elbow.
"All the kids are home," she breathed as he reached the place where her shoulder met her neck.
"It's not a crime to kiss my wife," he muttered against her collarbone.
They were usually cautious, overly cautious. Part of it was courtesy, another fraction was modesty, the largest fraction was the still unresolved 1927 debacle. But he was right, a kiss wasn't illegal. Even if it was, he hadn't broken the law for… eleven… plus seven… sixty-eight days. God owed him a pardoned felony.
Sternum. "It's a crime to kiss your wife there, and you have the public indecency citation to prove it."
"I think I can afford the ticket, officer." A hand slid under a hemline, reaching to unhook a nylon from a garter clip as his lips moved to the collarbone he had neglected.
A small cold hand latched over his. "That was a no, Carlisle," she whispered.
Many other husbands would be mad she stopped, and perhaps he should be, but he was ecstatic. It took them a painful amount of years to get to the point where she felt she could freely say no to his advances.
He reclipped a garter and slowly stood her back up. Arms remained wrapped around her. A grin on his face that erased the worry stored in her brow.
"It's probably a little early to traumatize Isabella," he laughed, an attempt at a silent peace treaty.
Esme wrinkled her nose. "They did desecrate the island."
"Which you offered to let them borrow."
"As a joke! You were there. I said 'yeah, take her to Brazil. That'll go well,'" she mocked her tone of months prior. "And next thing I knew he was making travel plans."
"It's Edward, love," Carlisle laughed, "he doesn't quite understand humor."
"I was even content lying to myself about their time there but they had to go and bring home a souvenir. I suppose I could tear down the house." Esme froze, eyes alight with the prospect of a new project. "There's an idea."
A thunderous crash came from the other side of the house, drawing her from visions of blueprints and window installs.
"What was that?" Esme yelled, all too familiar with the sound of a second floor being demolished.
"Nothing!" Emmett and Alice called in unison.
"Don't worry about it!" Alice yelled from the garage area.
"Carlisle do a mambo, distract her!" Emmett bellowed.
Carlisle sighed, truly nothing in the house was sacred. Although, he was the one who gave a gaggle of teenagers super hearing so that may have been on him.
Esme's forehead fell against his chest, a deep sigh slumping her shoulders.
"You did say you wanted things to go back to normal," he said into her hair.
"We couldn't have just one quiet day before? That was too much to ask?"
"You wouldn't know what to do with yourself if they all behaved."
"Why do I smell gasoline?" Her head shot up.
"You don't!" Emmett shouted.
"Your son," Esme and Carlisle said in unison.
"My son? That one is all you, love." There was a whirr of a power drill to prove his point.
"Ugh," Esme groaned, moving to deal with the disaster.
"Let them deal with it," Carlisle said as he pulled her towards the couch.
"They'll burn the house down."
"Rosalie won't let them destroy her garage," he smiled as he took a seat on the couch. She reluctantly let him pull her down as angry footsteps resonated above them. "Listen, she's almost there."
"Emmett!" Rose's shout rang through the house.
"See." He glanced over to Esme. Her face in her hands, an index rubbing at each temple.
One of his hands ran up and down her spine, the other pulled at hers. "I'm exhausted," she whispered.
"Sleep."
"Very funny."
"I mean it. You need to take a break."
"I have work to do."
"Then do it for me. Your husband can't truly rest when you're scurrying around out there."
"That's cheap psychology," she sighed as she begrudgingly let him pull her down to his chest as he laid back.
"It worked," he muttered.
"Five minutes," she slipped her heels off and tucked her knees up.
"Alright," Carlisle conceded. He knew full and well that once she stopped moving, two years worth of anguish and tribulations would finally catch up to her. They'd be there much longer than five minutes but he let her claim otherwise.
There was another smaller crash from Emmett's crime scene but he held her down. "Rose will handle it."
"Wake me when the sun has consumed the Earth," she sighed, reluctantly closing her eyes.
He kissed the top of her head and pulled the quilt off the back of the couch, needlessly tucking her in. "Sweet dreams.