Hotspots

Mid-October, 2020
Houston, TX

Esme wasn't entirely surprised when the doorbell rang. Ordering things from Amazon was a proclivity of her husband's in his attempts to escape the boredom of his diurnal captivity, and it was nearly a daily occurrence that at least one package arrived. So she dutifully donned a mask and opened the door. But it was not the mail carrier, and there was no box with its familiar lopsided black arrow. Instead it was a UPS driver, with not one box but dozens, flattened and bundled on a large hand cart.

"Are you sure these are for this unit?" she asked.

The delivery man looked at his tablet. "Cullen?"

She nodded. "That's us." She stepped aside as the driver pushed the cart through the door of the second-floor condominium, and leaned the bundles against the couch. He thrust an electronic pad at her, and she scrawled her looping signature. She closed the door behind the driver and turned back to her work, eyeing the bundles every now and again.

They moved frequently. Even though the goal was often seven to ten years, it could sometimes be more like five, especially if Carlisle received one too many recruiter calls and his willingness to stay put in a low-paying rural hospital started to become suspect, or worse, when a member of the family experienced a slip-up. But even at their most frequent, nothing had ever held a candle to 2020. They had already been living in Paris when her husband came home and explained he'd accepted an emergency stationing in Lombardy. Viruses don't make decisions, and this meant that Alice couldn't quite stay a full step ahead of the outbreaks. Carlisle had insisted the family hunker down in their small home in Toulouse while he took shorter and longer stints in the neighboring countries: six weeks in Italy, four in Spain, two in Germany, another six in France.

Then suddenly it wasn't Europe in crisis, but their home country. And even though he'd protested that he was not planning to be home any more frequently, and at least in France, she'd have the children, Esme had insisted that her husband not be on the other side of an ocean alone. So they'd hopped one of their jets and settled into a rented condominium within a few blocks of the sprawling Texas Medical Center. As far as anyone could tell, they actually weren't far from where Jasper had grown up, an area which had once been rolling farmland and now was an asphalt jungle.

She spent the days sketching, planning, and consulting for the three firms who used her expertise. Occasionally she took a zoom call with her children. Meanwhile, her husband worked himself ragged, and no amount of imploring from her or their children could get him to slow his pace. Vampires didn't tire, but she had watched him become increasingly scattered and withdrawn.

It was becoming abundantly clear why the last global pandemic had driven Carlisle Cullen to the brink of insanity.

It was just after dawn, almost eleven hours later, that Carlisle returned. His white coat sat slightly askew on his broad shoulders, and his scrub pants hung loosely from his hips. He looked at the boxes at once.

"Oh. Those were supposed to arrive tomorrow," he said simply.

"I was wondering why no warning. I thought perhaps you were planning to leave me." She helped him out of his coat, calling back to him as she carried it to the washing machine in their kitchen.

He shot her the shy, boyish smile which made her fall desperately in love with him again every time he smiled it.

"No, of course not." He didn't meet her eyes, instead reaching into his bag and retrieving his iPad. "The caseload is improving here and R(t) is down, finally. It's almost 1. And test positivity at the medical center is also way down." He spoke the foreign language of the pandemic, the figures and statistics she had learned to track if only to understand his nearly incoherent mumblings when he came home in the mornings.

"And so you were coming home to tell me we're moving."

He nodded, and thrust his iPad toward her. It was open to an app called Redfin, and it took her just a second longer than it should have to understand what she was looking at. She didn't comprehend the silhouette of the building, with the anachronous addition lopsidedly attached to one side, and the fact that someone had, at some point, painted it a garish salmon pink which was now flaking. So it was only the address which allowed her to finally make the connection, and she gasped.

"Carlisle..." she breathed.

He grinned. "Wisconsin is beginning to crumble under this thing. Iron County is turning into a hotspot, and I won't be too far from Green Bay, either."

Her lips were over his, and her hands were in his hair before he could say anything more. She kissed him frantically and he kissed back, pulling her into his lap and putting his hands at her waist as he laughed.

"How did you—"

"I've had it on alert for years," he said, laughing. "Obviously, the stars aligned, for it to have appeared right when it makes sense to move back. I called the day the listing appeared and offered thirty thousand above asking. You know how I hate overpaying for real estate, but—"

She silenced him with her kisses again.

"Let me see it again?"

He nodded, not removing her from his lap as they pored over the listing photos together. The back garden, where she'd so carefully worked when she'd needed the distraction from newborn thirst, which had once been pristine and full of roses—it was absolutely destroyed, overgrown with ivy and grass. The foundation looked like it would be in need of a good jack. The addition was awful and would need to go. She might add a deck to the back which would match the character of the home.

"Oh," she sighed sadly as she scrolled.

Her husband raised his eyebrows.

"They took down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room." She hated open concept floorplans, especially the lust which caused so many people to destroy the original architecture of these grand old pieces of art in pursuit of them.

Carlisle only laughed. "I am certain that can be remedied, Mrs. Cullen. I'll have the lumber and drywall on its way as soon as we close."

"It will need to be lath to be done right."

He laughed harder. "Whatever you say."

She swiped her finger again. Their bedroom—several coats of paint changed, and carpeted, for some reason, which would have to go. Carlisle's study, where he'd so carefully helped her learn to exercise control—it looked barren and dusty. Edward's bedroom, which was almost unchanged. None of the wall colors fit the period of the home, and the kitchen had been remodeled probably two or three times so that it looked somehow both modern and woefully out of date.

"It will be so different there without Edward," she sighed.

"Oh yes," her husband said, his expression neutral. "Whatever will we do in that house without Edward intruding on our every movement." He pressed his finger to the screen, bringing up their son's former bedroom in fullscreen mode. "We've never been intimate in there," he said mischievously.

"Edward would die."

He kissed her cheek and then continued on with soft, fluttering kisses to her ear, where he placed his lips and whispered, "Edward is in France."

She giggled, turning so that she could rake her hands through his hair again. "Thank you, Carlisle. This is amazing."

He shrugged. "In the midst of this"—he gestured widely as though to encompass all of the last year and the time to come—"I don't know what else I'll be able to give you for our centennial anniversary."

The iPad bounced as she dropped it onto the couch cushions and straddled his lap.

"There's nothing more perfect than going home," she answered. And then she found herself beneath her husband's strong body as he attacked her with his kiss.

~||x||~

A Note on The Series:

Something has bitten me over on tumblr. It started when I couldn't keep Carlisle in the southern U.S. when the pandemic was raging in the midwest, and so I had to move them. Then I needed to see the conversation when he told Esme they were moving. And then someone asked a question, and someone else asked another question and well, now there are at least three, and since it makes sense to be ficcing these two heavily in the year of their 100th anniversary, I guess this is a thing now. I'm not making promises about updates and speed, but I have many, many moments from their lives together that I've always wanted to write. They will dance around the timeline, and I'll place you at the start of each piece. I am terrible at just writing free-form fics, though, so don't be surprised if this starts to get some additional shape.

These follow canon and my headcanon that is in my other fics. Dates and timelines not specified in canon are taken from either my thinking on AskCarlisleCullen or OhMyCarlisle's timelines and thinking on AskEsmeCullen. I seem so far to be hashing out the first drafts on tumblr, so if you want updates early, check them out there. And unlike most of my fics which are pretty tightly conceived, I'm totally open to suggestion on this one. Throw an ask on tumblr or leave a review. I don't make guarantees I'll write it, but it just might make my fingers start to itch. So far, everything has been coming through Esme's voice, but I'm listening for who wants the reins and I expect Carlisle will want them at least some of the time.

Trigger warning: I started with this one because it needs no warning, which allows me to put the warning on the bottom. You know the Cullens' backstories. They are dark. I don't intend to walk away from any of it, wherever it becomes relevant. Rape, suicide, and domestic violence are all on the table here and that's just Esme. I'm sure there will also be some things which won't occur to me until the last minute. I'll try to write a good opening paragraph so that you know whose backstory might be about to get dropped on you, but consider this an "author chooses not to use archive warnings" warning.

I don't love constant author's notes because I like very clean reads. This is in conflict with the fact that I do love reading my readers' thoughts and responding. So take this as a one-time note that there's never a time I don't want to hear from you. I'd love to entertain your thoughts, especially because it might spur something new. This series will be un-betaed, and it's hard to proofread your own writing; I always welcome readers' catching of mistakes.

Yep, somehow, I'm writing Carlesme. It was bound to happen eventually. Happy Reading.