The Twilight Twenty-Five
Prompt #: Six
Pen name: TRDancer
Pairing: Edward/Tanya
Rating: T

Photos for prompts can be found here:
community[dot]livejournal[dot]com/thetwilight25/13912[dot]html

Sarabi: Your son's awake.
Mufasa: Before sunrise, he's your son.
--Lion King

Edward had a lot of books.

Tanya hated books.

They were one of those couples that are proof that opposites attract.

"How about this house?" Tanya asked, gesturing to a double page spread of a large white house in a catalogue. Edward leaned over her shoulder, cocking his head. He reached out and turned the page, scanning the rooms available for the house.

"Nope," he determined, leaning away and going back to his book.

Tanya pouted. "Why not?"

"No room for a study."

She sighed. "Right."

The room was silent except for the turning of the pages of two very different books for almost five minutes before Tanya disrupted Edward's reading again.

"How about this one? It has a nice large room you can set up bookcases in."

Edward once again leaned over to look and shook his head after barely scanning the page. "I'm not paying that much money."

"We're going to live in this house for the rest of our lives, Edward!"

He shrugged. "We'll spend the rest of our lives paying off the mortgage, too. And then we'll leave the debt to our children."

Tanya sighed. She knew how he felt about debts being left to children—he'd only just managed to pay off the debt his own father had left for him.

They both went back to flipping pages. Eventually, Tanya ran out of pages to flip and slammed the large catalogue shut, sending a cloud of dust into the air.

"I give up," she said, sitting back and crossing her arms.

"Since when does Tanya Masen give up?" Edward teased.

"Since right now."

Gently closing his book and setting it on the table next to him, Edward sat up straight and caught a piece of Tanya's strawberry blonde hair with his finger. "Come on, honey. Why don't we get something nice and small?"

She frowned. "What happened to 'I need a separate room for this and this and this'," she mocked in a falsetto.

"I do not sound anything like that," Edward said indignantly.

"Yes, you do."

"No."

"Yes."

"No."

"I think I would know, Eddie. I'm the one who listens to it 24/7."

At that, Edward stood up and glared down at Tanya teasingly. "Don't call me Eddie, whore."

"Don't call me a whore, Eddie."

"I'll call you what I want. Get back in the kitchen, slut."

"Fine. You find us a house." Tanya stomped out of the room, leaving Edward staring after her. He sighed and sat down in the chair she had just vacated, opening the catalogue and starting to flip through it.

It took him a good fifteen minutes to go through the book. He found nothing of interest, like he'd expected, so he picked up the newspaper and started going through the classifieds.

There were absolutely no housing listings.

"What the hell," Edward muttered to himself.

After a moment of considering if there were any other options, he got up and walked into the tiny kitchen, where Tanya was flipping through a recipe book. "Where's your laptop?" he asked.

"Upstairs," Tanya said without looking up at him. "What do you want for supper?"

"Food," he told her, just like he did every time she asked.

"Figures," she mumbled, rolling up the recipe book and smacking his ass with it as he passed her on his way out of the kitchen. He grinned at her and wasn't disappointed when she glared back at him.

It was a unique relationship, that was for sure.

Upstairs, Edward clumsily opened Tanya's notebook computer and tapped around on it, using only his index fingers to type in his search query on Google. It took him five minutes just to remember how to scroll, but he eventually managed it and found an appropriate webpage.

"No, no, no," he muttered as he scrolled through the images of rundown houses. "Maybe..." he uttered as he clicked on a link, then quickly backtracked after seeing a full size picture of a nice yellow stain on the bathroom floor.

He might not have been the King of Clean to Tanya's queen, but he had his limits.

The doorbell rang. Edward ignored it.

The sound of footsteps on the stairs echoed through the apartment. Edward ignored it.

Tanya came into the room carrying a large pizza box. Edward set the computer aside and headed toward her with arms spread wide.

"How did you guess?" he asked, his voice dripping with feigned surprise as he relieved her of the pizza box.

"Just a slight suspicion," Tanya said, rolling her eyes. She knew Edward never ever turned down delivery pizza.

And he knew the difference between delivery and Delissio.

She had tested that one.

Tanya forced Edward to stop devouring his slice long enough to drag him into the bedroom, where they both settled on the bed, the pizza box between them and the laptop on Tanya's lap.

"Found anything?" she inquired, scrolling through the listings on the page easily and clicking onto the next one.

"Nersh," Edward said through a mouthful of pizza.

Tanya smacked him. "English."

"Nope," he repeated after swallowing.

She frowned and clicked on a link to a nice house with a plain gray exterior. She twirled a piece of her hair around her finger as she navigated through all the pictures of the interior of the house.

Kitchen, bathroom, living room, bathroom, bedroom, master bedroom, family room, bedroom...

Tanya gasped.

"I found it," she declared, turning the computer toward Edward, who squinted and attempted to bring it closer to him. Tanya smacked his fingers away. "You're greasy."

"Go look in a mirr—holy hell!" he exclaimed as he caught sight of the picture on the screen. "Is that real?"

The picture in question was of a study filled to the roof with books. Unlike the modern style the rest of the pictures portrayed the house as having, this room seemed to be something out of a Disney movie, complete with the tacky moving ladder and tainted only with a couple of storage boxes piled in a corner.

"I sure hope so, because I want you to have it," Tanya said.

"Wait, hag lady wants me to have something? Stop the presses!"

Tanya blushed. "Shut up, Edward. I didn't marry you because I hate you."

"I thought you did."

"I said shut up."

"It's pretty," Edward said, staring at the screen.

"Kinda like me, hey?"

"No," Edward contradicted.

Tanya's hand flew dramatically to her heart. "Are you calling your wife ugly?!"

"No, I'm calling her gorgeous."

One month later, there was a new picture of the study posted online—but this one eliminated the ratty storage boxes and added a man and a woman smiling broadly at the camera.

The couple in question proceeded to have a fight about their hair via the comments beneath the picture.

Zee is cool. So's Lindzee. So's Brittany.