AN: Whoa. Never thought I'd be doing this. Well, I had this odd little idea that wouldn't go away, so here it is! Please please review; I won't know I'm doing or how it is without your feedback. This will be a multichapter fic. It's completely AU.
Prologue
He likes to sit when he's alone and toy with the piano.
He doesn't like to make music, per se, but he likes to pretend. He likes to roll the velvety keys under his fingers and close his eyes and inhale the day, the moment, the window, the weather.
He likes to listen to the tuneless tinkling, the lovely discordant notes going high and low and low and high without rhyme or reason.
He likes to sit there and live.
His name is Edward Cullen and his mother worries because he's a little bit strange.
He knows she does. Esme is as billowing and transparent as autumn and she watches him more than she does the others. More than Emmett, lounging and large and careless, the boy-man who's in shameless love with his girlfriend.
More than Alice, elfin and quick and uncanny, carving out tiny little niches and saying bright, bewildering, enchanting things to strangers on the street.
More than Carlisle, his father, golden and serene and quietly, unassumingly brilliant.
She watches him, he knows, because though they are a family of slightly peculiar people, they're all peculiar in that charming, odd way happy people are, and his peculiarity is more of the pensive dreamer sort.
His name is Edward Cullen, and his mother also worries because he's a little bit sad.
He has a theory that there are other worlds out there.
Not in the sterilized, soap-opera style of little green men in cold, whirling silver discs or living on red, dusty planets—he's either too skeptical for that, or not enough. He believes, actually, that there are just—Beings.
He's not quite sure what differentiates a Being from a fresh-from-the-press human, only that there's something of the Strange in these Beings. There's an Aura about them, an aura of freshness, of something more than simply peculiar.
He believes this—and what's more, he's determined to prove it. He has a journal, stuffed with errant theories and wonderings and empty data tables which he hopes will one day be full. This is, of course, another reason that Esme—she prefers it to Mom or Mother—looks at him with that line at the inner edge of her eyebrow…
He sighs.
It's not that he blames her, of course. It's quite natural. After all, Emmett and Alice might be strange, whispers might linger in their wakes, but neither of them had had extraterrestrial—if you could call it that; personally he hates the word—obsessions…and maintained them at the age of seventeen. Neither of them stared out of windows for nearly an hour, trying to detect even the slightest hint of unearthliness in the dirt-dull passerby…
But he does, and he thinks to himself with a slightly grim smile that one day, when an alternate life form is discovered, his efforts will be vindicated. What was it that Swift had said about genius and a confederacy of dunces? Surely that applied to all of his schoolmates who insist on giving him a very wide berth…not to mention the ones who snicker as he goes by…
He shakes himself and comes away from the window. Futile to think of that now. He checks his watch and, discovering that it's just about time for breakfast, makes his way into the dining room. The rest are already there; there's Carlisle, talking quietly to Esme quite as if Emmett wasn't recounting some loud, lewd limerick for a tolerantly smiling Alice's benefit. He slips into his empty place and reaches for the cereal.
At once, Esme is looking at him, a question—oh, God, a favor in her large hazel eyes.
He resists the urge to groan aloud; Esme's "favors" are always connected to long hours spent cleaning the houses and cars of elderly shut ins or making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches till his hands hurt for the people who live under the bridge.
It isn't that he minds doing that, per se…but he has plans for today, has counted on being able to flesh out a couple of his theories...
But Esme has that light of neighborly charity in her eyes, and God help the person who tries to stop her.
"Edward," she says in her soft, piano voice, while he grits his teeth and prepares for another long venture in Loving Thy Neighbor. "Edward, dear, do you think you could do me a favor?"
The magic word is said, the pin is out of the grenade. Emmett stops mid-guffaw and turns to him with the beginnings of a smirk on his face. Alice watches him try to look enthusiastic with a mixture of laughter and sympathy in her wide, wide eyes.
Really. If Esme weren't so damn nice, the whole situation would be so much easier.
"S-sure, Esme," he says, the picture of filial resignation. Carlisle, looking up from his toast, hides a smile.
"What is it?"
She smiles that wide, warm oh, thank you so much smile that none of them can resist and continues quietly:
"Well, I saw that nice policeman in the post office the other day, and he told me that his daughter has come to town and is having problems in trigonometry. Edward, you're so good at trig, and you like it so, I couldn't help but volunteer you as a tutor…is that alright? It would only be for an hour every Saturday. If you'd rather not, of course I can tell him that…"
Of course he'd rather not. That goes without saying. Teaching some stranger how to navigate her way through the terrors of sine and cosine is hardly his idea of an hour well spent. But to tell Esme that is entirely out of the question.
So much for a day of peaceful, scientific solitude.
He sighs.
"That sounds fine. When does this start?"
The thank you smile gets wider and warmer as she murmurs "thank you, sweetheart" and informs him that the policeman had said, if it was alright, that he'd like to start next week.
He sighs again—a more resigned one now—and says that that will be fine. His mother looks at him like he's discovering the cure for cancer.
"You're a good boy, Edward."
He shrugs. He knows he is—theoretically, anyway. They're all good; it runs in the family.
Abruptly, Emmett changes the subject.
"Mom, Rose is coming to dinner, that okay?"
Rose is Emmett's lovely, haughty, golden girlfriend. She's tall and striking and there's something about her which smacks of a queen—but all that being said, he can't say he's terribly impressed with his brother's taste. Rose—an affectionate shortening of Rosalie, which he thinks is rather a stupid name—is simply one of those girls for whom the word prickly is tailor made.
He thinks he can detect a hint of his own distaste on Alice's fine features, but it passes and she only looks alert and chirping, a bird ready for the next flight.
He suspects that, when it comes to things like this, Alice is an immeasurably better sport than he is.
Carlisle gives the reply; the question would have been better directed toward him anyway. Esme loves company, the more the merrier, and the happiness of her oldest son in the company of his thorny betrothed delights her beyond imagining.
"Of course. It's always a pleasure to see Rose. Has she found a decent apartment?"
Rosalie is attending the state college a few hours away and searching for decent living quarters. Edward suspects that both she and Emmett have ulterior, sexual motives in this clamor for, as Rose phrases it, "an independent space"…but it's only conjecture and his mind prefers not to dwell on the utterly scarring images such conjecture conjures.
"Nah, still looking," shrugs Emmett, leaning back with a big, faraway grin on his open, handsome face. "She'll find it, though. Rose knows how to get what she wants." And he chuckles almost proudly, as if this were some endearing or even laudable achievement on her part.
He—Edward—just rolls his eyes. His brother has always been one of unusual tastes.
He's out for a trip to the library when it happens.
He's carefully combing through said library's rather meagre stock of decent books on life in space, looking for one which he hasn't read over and over, when he hears a thump and a muffled expletive from the other side of the shelves.
Mildly curious and not averse to a silent chuckle at a stranger's expense, he pushes some of the books aside and peeks through the chink.
And abruptly he's having trouble breathing correctly because his heart is slamming persistently against his throat.
On the other side of the shelves is a girl—perhaps seventeen. She's all softened angles and long brown hair as she nurses a bumped elbow; from his rather unusual vantage point, he can see the wide, annoyed brown eyes and pointed chin.
She's as typical as bread and butter, but his mind is buzzing and his hands are scrabbling eagerly for a notebook because he's quite certain he's just stumbled upon a Being.