"Marty? Are you okay?" Edward asked.
Marty looked at Edward quizzically, like he knew him but couldn't quite place him. Or maybe he was dazed. His thoughts were so jumbled that Edward couldn't quite get a read on him.
"We go to school together. Music club, you remember?"
"Yeah, yeah, I remember!" Marty responded, even though he had no clue.
"How do you feel?"
"I guess I'm okay." Marty limped slightly but he supposed he'd walk it off. The ground was hard. The body that had jumped onto it had been soft. Ouch.
"Let me drive you home." It wasn't an offer, but a command, and Marty accepted it with fatigue. He was home, his friend was okay, he could rest.
As Edward drove off with Marty, he left Rosalie behind to hide the debris until one of the other Cullens could collect it with a truck.
"That's a nice car you lost," Edward remarked.
"Don't worry, I think it's insured," Marty responded. In his head, Edward saw a flicker of Doc (the same old man in the UFO) saying it should be destroyed.
"It was a nice car. Did you do any mods on it?"
Marty tensed as he said, "Nope, it's, uh, all stock." Mentality, he echoed his first reaction to seeing the car: Doc, you made a time machine out of a Delorean?
Edward nodded as if he believed the spoken words. So what he thought he'd glimpsed in the jumble a few minutes earlier really was the case.
"I'm considering a car like that myself," Edward lied. Well, it wasn't totally a lie. "Does premium gas make a difference or should I save my money? What does the user manual recommend?"
"Uhh...I'm pretty sure it says 89." Marty had filled the tank in three different centuries and only had offered a choice of octane.
"And that's enough?" Edward prompted him.
As Marty bullshat, Edward saw a vision of terrorists and plutonium. Bingo.
"Was the car yours?"
"No, it was Doc's." And with that truth, a vision of Doc's lab. Edward couldn't tell where it was, but he expected that further scanning would reveal the answer. Or he could just consult the phone book like a normal person.
As they pulled up to Marty's house, Edward saw a flash of comparison in the teenager's mind. This house didn't contain the family that Marty had grown up with, but an altered version, with the same DNA but different personalities and dynamics. Marty didn't seem to miss the parents who'd raised him.
Meanwhile, Edward missed the parents who did.
