Broken Treasure

IC Time: May 29, 2007
Location: Cullen front lawn
Synopsis: Esme fixes one of Kyler's treasures and Kyler helps with Esme's garden
Submitted by: Esme


It's a muggy, yet cloudy, May evening. There's no smell of rain in the air today, but it's awfully humid out. This, however, doesn't bother Esme Cullen, who's in the front garden, attired in a pale pink sundress with matching heels, gardening equipment nearby as she tends to her flowers, planting, pruning, trimming, weeding and the like.

It's the sort of day where people really ought to be indoors, enjoying a nice glass of lemonade. Then again, are vampires even bothered by the humidity? Either way, Kyler isn't so much bothered by the humidity, as proved by his appearance at the Cullen's. He isn't so brazen as to come wandering out into the open, though. Instead, he approaches from the forest, and stands for the moment half-hidden in the brush. The pda Carlisle had given him is clutched to his chest, but his eyes are on Esme as she works in the garden. He's got the usual slightly vacant but curious look that usually means he's going to get into trouble, eventually. Yet here he is, pointedly /not/ doing anything to harrass Esme. Go figure.

Esme sniffs at the air, catching just a hint of something that shouldn't be there. "You might as well come out," she states, with just the hint of a chuckle as she continues to prune her roses and azalea’s. "I won't bite, and, presuming you have no human's with

Kyler grins self-consciously as Esme speaks up. Being invited onto the property makes him a little less hesitant to leave the tree cover, but he doesn't stray too far. He edges toward the garden, and his eyes drop to the plants, then back to Esme. "Nope. No humans here," he assures her. After a bit of silence, he edges even closer to the garden, and sniffs at the air a bit. "Whatcha doing?" he asks, finally.

Esme nods and beckons that the annoying vampire should come closer. "Good, than I won't have to throw you out by your ears," she gives with a crooked little grin. "I'm tending to my garden," she motions to the flora that occupy a space in the front. "What brings you by the house?"

Kyler blinks a little, then slowly grins. An expression he actually recognizes! He comes a bit closer, but not too close. Instead, he just crouches at the other end of the garden. He was actually watching her, and rather helpfully, he reaches out to copy her. One can only hope that he actually picks a weed to pull and not a flower. "My treasure broke," he admits, glancing up at Esme then down again with fleeting guilty look. "I said it would break, and it did. I thought maybe Mr. Carlisle person would fix it, and he /did/ invite me," he hastens to add, just in case she thinks he's trespassing or something.

Esme nods as she sees Kyler actually pulling a weed, and not one of her flowers. "Hmm?" she questions, tilting her head to the side as she casts Kyler a slight glance, though she keeps her hands busy with her flowers. "Which treasure? Do you have it with you?" she questions with an upraised brow. "Of course he did, you're a friend of Jasper's, and Jasper has good taste when it comes to his friends. You're welcome here, so long as you behave yourself and don't bring anymore humans onto the property."

Kyler grins faintly as Esme encourages him, and continues pulling weeds. Or whatever. He's at least /attempting/ to copy Esme, to some extent, which should lessen the likelihood of his pulling any flowers. "This computer book thingy. It's supposed to keep track of things, but mostly it just blinks and beeps a lot," he explains. He pauses briefly in his helpful attack on the weeds to hold out the pda to show Esme. Although he's quite careful to cradle it gently, he doesn't have much regard for the dirt on his hands getting on it. It's already slightly scuffed, but not exactly damaged. He's just managed to hit the off button. "I can't promise to behave," he points out, "When there's all sorts of arbitrary rules, like not eating properly. But I won't bring any more humans," he promises. At least he's honest?

Esme holds out her hand to take the PDA. "May I? I'm no expert on technology, but I've spent enough time around my family," she gives with a laugh and shake of her head. "Okay, we can start with no humans on the property. You don't know how this coven functions, and it's got to be something very different than you've ever seen before, so that's a start," she offers, her words accompanied by a smile, a real smile, not a fake one, not even a growly one, but an honest to goodness smile.

Kyler blinks, not quite sure what to think of that smile. He regards her thoughtfully for a moment, and then, rather cautiously, he returns the smile with a shy one of his own. Not the manic forced grin that he generally wears, but a cautiously genuine one. "I dunno. Everyone always has crazy rules. I don't keep track very well." He initially pulls the pda closer to himself, reluctant to hand it over, lest it should disappear forever. On the other hand, it /is/ broken. And Jasper keeps saying that Esme is nice… So finally, he just takes in a lungful of air and hands it over, quickly before he can change his mind. But he watches with just a touch of suspicion, ready to snatch it back if she should try to keep it.

Esme nods a thanks as she takes the PDA into her hands and begins examining the peice of technology. "I don't know that what we have is exactly rules, I suppose they are," she gives with a slight shrug. "We just never think of it that way, we live in a fashion that's comfortable to us, it rubs some of our kind the wrong way, but we like it this way," is noted as she gently hits the 'on' button, and the item powers up. "Ahh, here we go," she gives before she moves closer to the younger vampire. "Next time it should 'not work', push this button first," she points to the appropriate button before holding the item out to Kyler.

Kyler eyes Esme skeptically. "They always say that, you know. But whatever you call it, it's rules. And if you break the rules, you're out by your ears," he echoes her earlier statement, then just shrugs. "But I don't care. If I'm out by my ears, I'll just go on to the next place. Except I'd miss Jasper an awful lot." And then the pda lights up and all unpleasant thoughts are forgotten as his face lights up. He gives a happy little noise, and takes it back, nodding distractedly as she points to the button to push. "You fixed it!" he announces, as though that weren't obvious. "Thank you!" He beams, then adds, in a slightly lowered tone, "That's one of the rules, you know. You say 'thank you' when someone helps you." Who knows where he picked /that/ one up. But before he can catch her reaction, he's busy tapping at the pda, toying rather randomly with it. No doubt there's going to be a lot of nonsense entered in before he's through, but he doesn't seem to care. He just giggles as the screen flashes and changes in time with his clicks.

Esme chuckles lightly. "I suppose you're right, but, you are Jasper's friend, and I suspect he might miss you as well if you moved on. I'll play nice if you play nice, how about that?" she suggests with a slight smile. "And you're welcome, just remember, next time it 'breaks', push that button and see if it works. If it doesn't than you come back here and ask for help, if it does, you're set."

Kyler grins self-consciously. "Yeah. I didn't really think he would…" He looks down at the pda, using it as an excuse to look disinterested. "He thought I'd moved, and he was all worried. It was really silly. I've taken care of myself for awhile, so I suppose I can take care of myself awhile longer." After a moment, he glances up at Esme, thoughtfully. "Did you like your present?" he asks, suddenly, with a touch of anxiety flavoring his smile.
Esme listens to Kyler while still tending to the garden. "I'm sure he was glad when he saw that you hadn't left," is given with a slight nod of her head, before she tucks her hair over her shoulder. At Kyler's question she stops for a moment, thinking, before she nods. "Yes, I did, thank you very much," she gives, her tone sincere as seh speaks."

Kyler peers at Esme from the corner of his eye, trying to pretend like he's watching the pda instead of her as she thinks over his question. Only when she answers does he look up, with an even brighter grin. "Good! Sparklies are wonderful things. You should come see my tree sometime," he offers, impulsively. "Jasper's helping me decorate. We put up colored paper and everything." His grin turns a bit more bashful as he adds, "Jasper gave me the biggest tree ever. He said it was okay because it's a Cullen place and he's a Cullen. But then Rose-person said it wasn't his to give. But /I/ think she's just a big whiner."

Esme nods slight. "Sparklies are nice, I've always been fond of things that sparkle," she states with a little chuckle. "Hmm, I bet your place looks quite nice, Jasper's quite good at decorating, probably has something to do with the company he tends to keep," hse notes, meaning Alice, of course. "And as for Rosalie, she often knows what she's talking about, she's very wise, like Jasper. Take what she says as you will, though, I choose to listen to her wisdom, though."

Kyler shrugs a little. "It's way better than my old one. Jasper brings the best stuff the put up. He's going to built a lookout tower, too. Then we'll be like pirates." His grin fades slightly, as he looks at Esme. "Well, maybe. But she was just being a bit grouch when I met her." He pauses, and in what is only a seeming non sequitur, he states, "I'm /not/ stealing Jasper. He's still a Cullen. He's even going to start going home and at night and stuff. Just so you know."

Esme chuckles. "Hmm, Jasper as a pirate, that would be amusing, I have to admit," she gives lightly before her face turns slightly sullen. "I hope he does come home soon, we miss him, a lot," which is, really, to say that Esme misses her son, a lot. "I hope he knows that he's missed here. And you'll have to forgive Rose. Some of us haven't seen him since…" she trails off, not finishing her sentence.

Kyler blinks and looks up at Esme as she turns sullen. Slowly, he edges back a little bit. "Well. Like I said, I'm not stealing him," he says, uncertainly. He's just baffled as to why no matter how much he says this, no one really believes him. It /could/ be because he has a tendency to hiss and yell 'Mine' when certain Cullen’s come to visit. Certain Cullen’s being Emmett. "And yeah, he's gonna come back, I guess. That's what he said, anyhow."
Esme shakes her head. "I know you're not. Jasper makes his own choices, and if he doesn't want to be here, he doesn't have to be. It just… it hurts some of us, that he doesn't want to be with us anymore," she offers as she viciously pulls a weed out from the ground, the weed stood no chance.

Kyler sighs a little, staring at the pulled weeds, troubled. "I don't think it's that he doesn't want to be with you," he offers, trying to be helpful. "But you were being awfully scary before," he points out, inching a little further away to put some more space between them before she decides to do him like one of the weeds. "Maybe he's scared of you?" he hesitatingly suggests.

Esme clenches her hands into little fists but doesn't do anything else for a few good moments. "No one is scared of me. I'm the least scary vampire you'll ever meet," she gives, slowly unballing her hands and pulling out more weeds, they really don't stand a chance against her, even when she's not ripping them out vehemently.

Kyler stares at Esme, looks down at those little fists, then back up at her. He is silent for a very long time, not certain which rules apply in this situation. Honesty or politeness? Hrm. What a quandry. In the end, however, he just shrugs a little. "Well, maybe," he grants, quietly. "But you seem kind of scary to /me/." He inches a bit further back, taking him out of the garden entirely, with plenty of space to take off for the forest, if she should blow up at his contradiction. Because he does really believe that's a possibility. "Um…but thanks for fixing the computer book thingy. I'll try /really/ hard not to break it again." And once again, he's just on the edge of fleeing, torn between the knowledge that running away would be rude and thus breaking the rules and the very intense desire to be anywhere but here.

Esme takes a few /deep/ breaths before she appears to visibly calm down. "It wasn't broken, you just had to push that button," she gives in a gentle voice, for all that she is infuriated, with herself, right now. "I don't mean to seem scary, it's not something I'm in the habit of doing. I suppose right now I just miss having my family all together, under one roof, and I don't know if it's my own fault that Jasper's gone, or if it's something he's done of his own accord…" she shrugs, being much nicer as she pulls out the weeds.

Kyler doesn't exactly relax, but he doesn't dash off for the cover of the forest, which is a good sign. He watches her for long moments, and as she manages to be calm, he relaxes marginally. "It's not your fault," he offers, trying to be helpful. "It's…" He trails off, striking what he was about to say and instead just frowning a little. "Well. He just wants to keep me company, that's all. I messed it all up for him…" He perks, giving an uncertain, tentative smile, hoping that he can maybe get rid of all that scary tension. "But if I can come here, maybe he won't go away so much. And I'll try /really/ really hard to be good, I promise." After a short silence, he adds, a touch more anxiously, "But I can't promise for Henry. He never listens to me."

Esme nods. "Carlisle has invited you here, as you said, it's not my place to say otherwise," is given, her voice dropping from a slightly higher pitch back to it's normal volume. "You're welcome here, you're also Jasper's friend, and you'll continue to be welcome here for as long as you're a friend of my sons," she states, before she nods her head, pulling out another weed.

Kyler sighs a little, and shrugs. "Yeah, but…it's your home." He shifts from foot to foot, uncomfortably, but eventually gets a grand idea. He shoves the pda in his pocket, and hops forward, going at the weeds with a vengeance. See, because she obviously doesn't want these little plants here, so if he kills them, she'll /have/ to like him, won't she? As he pulls them, however, he comments, "You know, life is simpler when you live in the forest. If you like a person, you invite them to your tree and maybe give them a treasure. If you don't, then you throw eggs at them. And maybe you like them later and you give them an even better treasure to make up for the eggs, but it's much easier than saying you want someone in your tree when you really don't," he babbles.

Esme nods. "I share this home, though, with seven others, and one vote does not over rule the others. And if it means Jasper comes home, you're welcome here. You're really not as bad as I initially though, anyway," is pointed out, a quiet form of a compliment. As she watches Kyler rip out the weeds she chuckles lightly. "Please be careful, if you pull too hard you could damage the plants I want," she's not admonishing, she's simply commenting.

Kyler looks up, and gives Esme a crooked grin, his hand frozen halfway through the act of murdering another weed. "Well. I almost never am. Unless happen to be a weasel." With exaggerated care, he pulls the weed from the ground, his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth as he attempts to finesse the roots from the ground, with limited success. Mostly, he just succeeds in breaking off the tops. "Jasper says I can't eat weasels anymore, anyhow, if I'm gonna be his friend," he comments, distractedly. "So no worries, right?"

Esme snickers as she watches Kyler pull the weed out, with exaggerated care, if you ask her. "Really? Jasper's got you to go vegetarian?" she questions, quirking a brow. "All the more reason, I suppose that you should be able to come around, maybe the rest of the family can be as good an influence on you as my son has been."

Kyler shrugs a shoulder as he gets a broken weed stem in his hands instead of a root, peering at it with a puzzled look. "No. We eat deer. And sometimes grizzlies. They don't taste as good as humans, but Jasper seems to think there's something wrong with eating humans." He's rather literal, sometimes. As he explains, he tries to go for another weed, seemingly unaware of how silly he looks, being so careful with an unwanted plant. "You know, who decided that deer don't have feelings, too?" he comments, thoughtfully. "Or grizzlies, for that matter." He successfully pulls the weed, and holds it up by the roots with a grin. Which gives him another thought that brings a bigger smile. "Or plants. Plants might have feelings. It's not like they have mouths to tell us about it."

Esme nods. "There's nothing saying that they don't. Animal's probably do, actually, but… I don't know. It's a little more moral, I suppose. Instead of eatting human's, we eat animals," the woman shrugs. "We have to survive on something, and, when we were humans we were all taught that killing is wrong, so we don't kill other humans, now as vampire's we think it's perfectly alright, or, most do, but… I don't know. It just doesn't seem morally right to me."

Kyler considers this for a time, until something that Esme says causes him to look up, suddenly curious. He watches her for the time, with the slightly suspicious look of a person who thinks someone else is making a joke at their expense. After a moment, however, it just melts into curiosity melded with mild confusion. "You remember being human?"

Esme holds her hand up, her fingers held apart just a bit. "A little, a small bit, actually. I remember flashes, important moments in my human life," is given with a faint nod of her head. "Some things stood out, like my husband, not my human husband, Carlisle," she's quick to amend, making note of her vampiric husband.

Kyler settles on the ground, leaning forward slightly with fascination. For the moment, he forgets entirely that he's afraid of her. "Wow… Tell me what it was like?" he requests, then ammends with a sudden confused smile, "I mean, if it's okay. You don't have to, if it's secret or something…"

Esme hmms. "It's no secret. Seeing my human life is very… it's like seeing things through a fog, nothing is very clear, I think it's because our senses are so much better now then they were as humans," she gives with a shrug. "My first memory of being a human, I'd broken my leg, falling out of a tree. Carlisle was my doctor," she gives, a smile coming to her lips at the memory, obviously one she's fond of.

Kyler brightens as she starts to tell the story, forgetting all of the unpleasantness as he listens. His eyebrows shoot up as she describes how she met the man who would become her husband. "You broke your leg falling out of a /tree/? That msut have been bigger than even my tree is…" he comments, with some wonder.
<Public> Amaya says, "Okay, I know I should /know/ this already, but how does one check mail?"

Esme chuckles and shakes her head. "Probably smaller. Well, I bet it's pretty big now, that was nearly a hundred years ago. Human's are very fragile. They break easier than we do," is stated with a nod of her head. "It wasn't hard, I don't think. Carlisle probably remembers it better than I do, actually. He was a vampire at the time."

Kyler blinks, uncertainly, then gives a silly little grin. "Oh. Right. I forgot." But if he was embarrassed by his slip up, he forgets it in the next moment, focused as he is on Esme's story. "So he fixed your leg instead of eating you? That was awfully nice of him… Is that how you became friends?" he asks. He would probably go and ask Carlisle, except now he's all interested and Esme is /right here/.

Esme nods. "Mmmhmm, he fixed my leg, took good care of me, actually, and then I went back home, to my parents. I didn't see him again for ten years, never forgot him, though," she offers nodding her head. "The next memory I have is what actually lead me to where I am today," she responds.

Kyler nods slowly, "Wow. He's a nice guy, Mr. Person is." He brightens a little, as he realizes that she's got more to tell. Eagerly, he shifts so that he can inch toward her, settling down a bit closer to hear the rest. "When you were born?" he hazards a guess. "Or just before?"

Esme nods. "He is. I have to admit that I fell in love with him the moment I saw him," she gives, her face growing serious at the next topic. "In the ten years between when I saw Carlisle, I was married, like a proper woman of the time, it wasn't pleasant, at any rate. I had just given birth to my first child, a son, he died a few days later and he was all I had in the world at that moment. I guess I decided to jump off a cliff. Carlisle found me in the morgue, and then, a few days later…" she shrugs, "I was a newborn vampire."

Kyler stares at Esme, his interested expression slowly giving way to one of vague sorrow. "Poor Esme-lady…" He's silent for awhile, his gaze growing distant. It's a blank look that some borderline mentally handicapped persons get when they're on the edge of an epiphany. But then it's over, and he dismisses it with a shakes of his head and a vacant smile. "It's good that Carlisle found you, though. It would be awfully sad for Jasper if he hadn't."

Esme smiles brightly. "I'm glad he did, he is, honestly, the best thing that's ever happened, in my over a hundred years of existance," she points out with a chuckle. "And Jasper would have never of known me if Carlisle hadn't found me, so it wouldn't of been sad at all, actually…"

Kyler grins a little. "It would have been sad for /me/, then," he corrects, with a laugh. "If Jasper didn't know you, then he might not be here, and I might not have met him. And I'm pretty glad I met him. So thank you for existing." That last seems to be less a joke and more in earnest, in spite of his usual grin. "Maybe I'll tell you stories someday. Mine aren't nearly so nice, though," he comments, "But my treasure is fixed now, so I gotta go." He hops to his feet, impulsively, but then hesitates. Just as impulsively, he jumps forward to give her a hug, unless she dodges. If she doesn't dodge, he'll take off for the forest, disappearing with a rustle of the bushes without so much as a goodbye.

Esme doesn't dodge, but is in a slight state of shock for a fraction of a second, before she gently pats Kyler on the back. "Make sure you come back, and bring that son of mine with you!" she calls after him before she chuckles and goes back to pulling the weeds out of her garden, not that there's many left to remove.

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