Meaningful Artifacts [Edward/Jacob]

five.

Edward's not someone who spends a lot of time painstakingly raking over every detail of his life. There's too much ground to cover and so much of it isn't worth going back and looking at, especially not his long spanning, overly brooding teen years. That was a couple of decades that he could live without analyzing. So, when he's sitting at his desk, staring into a cup of water, mind replaying a particular minute or two, he's genuinely taken aback by it. 

He'd been sitting at his desk earlier, mind focused on a specific shipment of artifacts that would be coming in the next day, signaling the beginning of his work at this museum when the alarm had gone off. He'd sauntered out into the hall and was almost run over by some janitor pushing a mop bucket. 

"Oh, sorry, Dear. Didn't realize anyone was even in this office. My name's Margaret, but everyone calls me Marge." she informs him.

"Uh, Edward Cullen." he responds, before promptly rushing down the hall and into the chaos. 

Nothing about it seemed particularly important. He'd sifted through panicking visitors to get over to a security guard.

"What's going on?"

"There's been some kind of attack upstairs," the man vaguely describes, pointing towards a seemingly random hallway.

A minute or two later, Angela frantically runs over to get the same vague details before rushing off down that hall. He thinks it'll sort itself out. He'll just stay in the lobby until more information comes buzzing out of one of the walkie-talkies. 

What he's not expecting is the crackly speaker carrying Angela's voice to request him down at Room 19. He looks over at the guard, who gives a shrug, before heading down.

That's not the part he's fixating on, though. It's Jacob barreling down the hall, almost toppling Edward over as he dodges a couple of EMTs. He's in such a hurry that when Edward speaks, his eyes stay glued to the floor. He mutters his apologies to the tiles. 

Edward'd thought they'd squashed whatever was going on between them a long time ago. Maybe not fully, but he'd thought that they'd at least come to some kind of an understanding. Maybe it was wishful thinking on Edward's part. Bella had chosen him. However ill-advised that was, she'd chosen Edward. It's what she wanted and Jacob, no matter how upset he was at the time, wanted what would make her happy. He'd put some distance between them and that felt like a sign that things were good. They'd be okay once the tension wore off and Jacob found someone else. 

However, that didn't seem to be the case. A year ago, this would've irritated Edward. He would've been aggravated by the man's inability to just move on. However, a lot has happened since then. Enough for a divorce, enough for that intense love to wane into tolerance at the most. Bella and Edward aren't what they were and for some reason, in his head, that somehow changes what he and Jacob should be as well. 

Maybe Edward just wanted someone who could relate, maybe he just wanted someone who got as fired up as he did, or maybe he just wanted something a bit more tangible to signify that he was done. 

Something that wasn't a subtraction, but an addition.

He pushes the thoughts away and goes back to staring at the files in front of him. An old machine gun used in one of the later WWI battles had just been snatched from a display that no one was privy to except for staff. Weber had called the cops, but she clearly didn't trust them to find it. She'd handed off a copy of the information for him to look over and his first thought was an auction. Maybe they'd be bold enough to hold it for a bit and then auction it off to another museum. It wasn't a one-of-a-kind weapon, but there weren't a lot of them manufactured in Britain during WWI. In that regard, it was rare and highly valuable to the museum.