A/N: Stephanie Meyer owns all things Twilight. I've borrowed her characters for a bit. I will give them back at the end.

There is a town in Washington called Forks. It's dark, rainy, freezing and gloomy for eight months of the year and those are known as 'summer'. The other four months it's covered in snow.

Regular people live there. There's a vet who'll come to your house and install a cone on your dogs head on a Sunday and a pizza delivery kid who'll call you sir or ma'am because he's known you since birth. There are teenagers there who've known each other since they shared cribs beside one another at the tiny hospital. There is the obligatory nosy neighbour and the gaggle of gossiping women who take their precious babies to the elementary school in a bathrobe and slippers who'll stop to fill you in on what they saw 'in the street' last night. You can get coffee in one of two places, your kitchen or the diner. The grocery store doubles as the DVD rental outlet and the post office will handle your dry cleaning and your tax return. There is one bar and it doesn't serve food. There is one gas station and it's manned night and day by guys who will wash your windshield while they're waiting for the pump to finish filling your car.

People didn't normally move to Forks from other places. People were born in Forks and died in Forks. Sometimes they'd move away for college but most returned. Sometimes they came for jobs or for a change of pace, but most left again as soon as the fascination faded. The population hadn't shifted more than a dozen in either direction in decades.

That was why the Cullen's were such an enigma. They moved to Forks on purpose. Doctor and Missus Cullen and their five children came to Forks and took up residence on the outskirts of the forest. They were very quiet, polite people who kept to themselves and were productive if somewhat illusive citizens.

The good doctor took over from the ailing Doctor Grieves when he retired and bought his teenaged family with him. Missus Cullen was a housewife, as so many in the area were, and was known to be a very caring and motherly sort. She baked pies for stalls and raised money for the children's ward at her husband's hospital.

Their children, all adopted so the resident nosy neighbour had told anyone who would listen, were all young adults with impeccable manners and almost perfect grade point averages. The oldest pair were attending community colleges in Port Angeles, the younger pair were seniors at Forks High and the middle child was taking a gap year between finishing high school and beginning college the following year.

The locals didn't know why a doctor of such reputation would choose their little town but they were very pleased that he had. The family had taken to small town life and the small town had taken to them.

They would need to stay another two decades before being known as locals themselves but they seemed quite willing to do so.

In stark contrast was the Masen family, also of Forks.

The Masens lived in town, two streets over from the High School and one back from the cemetery and this family had lived there for forty years.

The late Mr Masen, Edward Senior, had passed on some fifteen years ago and had left behind a wife Agnes and a twelve year old son, Edward Junior who went by the name Eddie or Ed.

Had Agnes been born fifty years earlier she would have been thought of as robust. Unfortunately Agnes wasn't born fifty years earlier and she was described by her peers as rotund and quite severe.

A lot of ladies would've been horrified to learn that they were seen that way, but not to Agnes Masen. Not a day in her life did she spare a thought for who might think what of her. As her mother before her Agnes spent her life making sure that Edward Senior had his meatloaf on the table at six sharp and that the creases in his trousers could've induced a paper cut. She kept a meticulously clean home, was grateful for his labour and loved their son. Married at the rather respectable age of twenty-eight Agnes set about making a life for the two of them. Edward Senior set about paying for that life. Never a needlessly wanting wife Edward Seniors rise through the ranks of the tax department could have afforded them some luxuries, but Agnes much preferred to cut her cloth from a less expensive bolt. After six years of trying the happy couple finally welcomed a son, who bore his father's name, and Agnes was content. Eddie was not joined by a sibling, though not for lack of trying on his parent's behalf, and when it became clear that they were not likely to be blessed by the stork a second time Agnes knuckled down and made the best of her situation.

She doted on the boy and did her best to be everything that he needed. Mother, friend, confidante and playmate. This removed the need for a young Eddie to step outside his own home for social interaction and fed his parentally instilled view that the world was a scary unfeeling place that he should avoid.

Cosseted and cloistered inside his familial home Eddie was brought up in an unrealistic, germ and affection free environment. Never realising that his peers lived differently Eddie missed or ignored the signs and against all odds thrived sheltered by his parents, and after his father's death exclusively by this mother.

This was not done consciously. Edward Senior and his bride never set out with the view to isolating their only child. They were both so happy to just be together that none of them ever needed anyone or anything else.

When Edward Senior passed away the equilibrium inside the Masen home didn't shift one degree in either direction. Agnes took on the roles Edward Senior had vacated and within days the natural order of the house was restored. Edward Senior had provided well for his family, and with the natural frugality of Agnes, the two remaining Masens had a quite comfortable life without their bread winner.

Rumour and conjecture surrounded Edward Seniors early demise but the truth was simple. He'd died at his desk of a massive boredom induced heart attack. Ed Junior had never fully believed the findings of the county coroner and still held onto the belief that his father – a veteran tax inspector with twenty unfulfilling years service under his belt at the time of his death – had been 'rubbed out' by government officials for some as yet unexplained discrepancy that was still trapped within his bookkeeping. Ed Junior was currently researching his latest theory regarding the untimely demise of his father. His newest exploration had led him to the rather ridiculous conclusion that his father's artificial sweetener, taken with his morning coffee at the office, had been switched out for anthrax. There was no evidence to prove such a conclusion but Ed Junior was never one to rely on fact alone.

Always a serious student and perfectionist the passing of his father left Eddie with many phobias, not the least of which was an irrational fear of blood. He'd never laid eyes on the deceased body of his father, nor had there been any blood present had he seen it, but the phobia presented itself within hours of the announcement of the death.

At first any contact with blood would merely induce a panic attack complete with imaginary constriction of the chest and a false belief that he himself was dying but as time progressed Eddie began to faint if he was even in the presence of the life sustaining substance. This, in and of itself, was quite a prevalent phobia to have amongst the general public and on its own would've presented a man who worked in a library with no real need to change his lifestyle.

But when this phobia began to be coupled with rampant hypochondria, a rather bad case of OCD and a penchant for pedantics it posed quite the social problem for Eddie.

At twenty-seven Eddie was still the bookworm he'd been in high school and he was also just as socially awkward. A natural loner the solitary life of the only archivist in the Port Angeles Municipal Library suited him just fine. He could spend his entire work day never having to come into contact with another human being. Annoyed by the slack borrowing habits of the Google generation and an almost nonexistent budget for classics his days were filled with repairing and restoring the great works of literature that tended to sit idle for decades on the shelves. Frustrated at never being asked to purchase staples like dictionaries, encyclopaedia and nonfiction texts he staged a silent protest of his very own by not bothering to actually order any of the 'drivel' requested by the few patrons who remained loyal to the institution. Eddie considered the long-haired, bare-chested heroes of popular modern fiction to be a waste of the printed word and stubbornly refused to use his appallingly small budget acquiring them. This caused many a row with the head librarian but without anyone else interested in locking themselves away in the back storeroom day in and day out she was loathe to press him too stridently. Losing him as an employee would mean having to draw up a roster for his duties and she knew, without asking, that there would be a mutiny of biblical proportions if the inside staff were forced to do his job.

So Eddie stayed in the storeroom and the patrons went without their cheap and nasty bodice rippers.

His tendency toward OCD was actually a plus as far as his work life went. His system of cataloguing and codification was understood by no one other than Eddie and he liked it that way. He knew where every book was and he knew when he'd put it there.

Being also naturally pedantic was a boon for his career too. It wasn't unusual to find Eddie in his beloved storeroom, ruler in hand, checking that his shelving was symmetrical. Many an hour was spent realigning the spines of periodicals or arranging them by genre then year of publication followed by their relevance to the title on either side. It was a system he'd designed himself and it pleased him that had anyone gone rootling through his shelves they'd never find what they were searching for. To his knowledge nobody had ever tried it.

What didn't suit his choice of employment was the hypochondria. Dust was the bane of his existence and unfortunately for Eddie where there were books there was dust. And moths and silverfish and the smell of soiled paper.

At his insistence a wash basin and an electronic liquid soap dispenser had been installed in the storeroom but he could often be heard cursing the moths as they fluttered about. His aversion to pesticides meant he could not dispense with them en masse and there was no way he'd ever swat them. So the moths, and the silverfish stayed and Eddie got twitchier as the years went on.

Eddie had never had a girlfriend, or known a female other than as a classmate or colleague and he didn't think that was out of the ordinary at all. But, he'd never known a male as a friend either. He'd never confided in anyone other than his mother and he'd never invited anyone to his home or been invited to anyone else's. His truly was a solitary existence. At work he was alone and at home he had his mother.

His world was totally insulated from any other human contact and devoid of any other opinion or input other than his mothers.

He kept abreast of the news by reading the morning paper from cover to cover before he left for work and he used enormous history tomes as light reading at home. If he'd been born in 1901 he'd have fit right in. But in 2013 he was seen as odd, very odd.

Not exactly excluded by his peers he was destined to live on the fringes of what could've been, and should've been, a perfectly normal teenage social life. He was asked to join in and he was invited to games and parties as he got a little older. But Eddie didn't need the company of his peers whilst he had Agnes and so while he always thanked whoever had extended the invitation, he always turned it down. By the time he was a senior his peers had stopped extending the invitations. And, as has been the case his whole life, Eddie didn't notice.

You may be wondering how these two families are connected, and I can assure you that when the Cullen's first moved to Forks the link was tenuous at best. The two families lived six miles apart and that was the only thing they had in common. The town.

But, as these things go, the two families were on a collision course.

Doctor Carlisle Cullen was not at his post inside the Forks Community Hospital when a call came from paramedics that two bodies had been discovered inside the Masen residence.

It was not Doctor Carlisle Cullen who took delivery of the bodies at the morgue that day.

It was not Doctor Carlisle Cullen who pronounced both Edward Masen Junior and Missus Agnes Masen deceased.

Therefore it wasn't Doctor Carlisle Cullen, a vampire in his own right that could've explained to Eddie that he wasn't actually dead.

A/N: Hello beautiful people. Another shortish story for you from the weirdness that is my head.

This is my first crack at a fic that is from nobody in particulars point of view. It's been challenging so far.

Similar vampire rules apply to this as with Fifty-six.

- No mind reading, no empaths, no 'seeing' shit for Alice.

-The Cullen family make up remains true. Carlisle/Esme, Emmett/Rose, Alice/Jasper. Bella is the loan vampire this time. She was changed 14 years ago and at the time of writing she has control over her thirst.

- No Volturi - Loyalists will know they scare me.

- No wolves, ever.

- Jake's days are numbered. So if you are a Jacob fan and cannot handle him being a moron/bad guy/collateral damage then I suggest you move along people. Nothing to see here.

For this Edward think Daniel Gale in the Bad Mothers Handbook. If you don't know it, shame on you :)

Thank you for reading.

Please review.