"Thank you, Jack. And, thank you, Ruby, but I can manage," Edward said, "but you're welcome to come with me. I have no secrets. That was Benjamin's house. It was the house where Angus grew up until I took custody. He and Michael went over there awhile ago. Not sure what they're looking for exactly. But it isn't a sixty second walk--just across the yard. Come along, then."
He walked out the back door, motioning to her. They walked across the yard to the house and in the front door. Edward saw the filth and disarray and how destroyed the house had become.
"Heathens," Edward sighed. "Clearly why untreated werewolves don't live in houses. I doubt they're in the kitchen since Benjamin and Eileen probably never cooked in their lives. I would guess they're upstairs."
He went up the stairs and saw Michael standing at the end of the hall in front of the window. Michael saw them and didn't say a word. He just pointed at the bedroom.
"I should have known. I should have guessed this was coming," Edward said sadly and quietly to Ruby. "No wonder Michael signaled. This is one piece of family history that has stabbed at my own heart since he was just a tiny tot, and here it is again. After I took Angus from them, their other children were tended by round the clock nannies until they were sent off to boarding schools and then, later, Hogwarts. Their summers were spent at their auntie and uncles--except for Angus. Angus always wanted to come home to me every single chance he got. When he was tiny, he used to have very regular nightmares unless he slept with his grandmother and me. It was always the same thing--'Why don't they like me, Papa?' And, here it is again."
He walked down the hall and looked in at how Angus's childhood bedroom here in this house had been so deliberately destroyed with all attempts to obliterate any memory of Angus. And sitting on the floor, just staring into space, was Angus.
Edward walked over and sat down on the floor beside him and put his arms around him.
"I'll tell you again," he told Angus, "as I told you then. This was never about you. It wasn't your fault. You were completely wonderful right from your very first breath. They didn't deserve you, either of them."
"Look at all this hate," Angus said.
"You're misreading what you see," Edward said. "It isn't hate. Not really. It's jealousy. Your father was just insanely jealous of you, and he had been from about the time you were two or three years old, and the older you got, the more jealous he became."
"Nah," Angus rejected the idea.
"No, its true. He wanted you to be just like him because he hated me, and he hated everything I had become and everything I believed in and valued. And with every passing day that he avoided you, you spent those days with me, and you became more like me, and less like him. And so he was flat out jealous of you until, yes, years later, it did turn to hate, I suppose. but he created that beast himself. It was never about anything you were or weren't."
"They never thought I was worthy," he said softly.
"Well, they misread things. It was they who were never worthy of you. You were always my truly wonderful, truly loved little boy, and you are still the very beat of my heart. Let them go, Angus. He's gone, and it looks, by all I see, that she's gone too. Let them go once and for all. Your life has never, ever been with them. Your life is in the here and now, with all the people who truly love you. I know this is tough. The next couple days till this is all settled will be rough, but we'll make it through. And then it will get a good deal easier. Come on. Get up. Let's get out of here. You might have to help me. The floor is a lot farther down now in my seventies than it was in my forties."
Angus stood up and offered his good hand to Edward who used it to pull himself up to his feet. He kissed Angus on the top of his head, as he had done at least a million times before.
"Go say hello to Ruby," he told Angus quietly. "She loves you, and so do I." Angus turned and saw her and went over to her and wrapped his good arm around her and kissed her and hugged her.
"Hello," he managed. He wasn't sure he would have even had that word in his head except that Edward put it there. But he knew she would trust that there might be parts of him that could speak even if his words could not.
by 
