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**This story is not anti-Twilight. Whatever my views of that franchise may be, this story will never become anti-Twilight. I promise.

I expected to hate Forks. I always had before, every damn dreary month I had to spend there instead of in the sun and clear air of Phoenix. When I said goodbye to my mom, I could see the indecision behind her eyes. She was about three seconds from telling me she couldn't let me go be miserable in Forks, that she and Phil and I could figure something out that was better for everyone.

I gave her two. Then, just as she was opening her mouth, I hugged her and said, "I love you, Mom. Call me if you need anything."

"Mm-mm," she said, and I could feel her shaking her head against my shoulder. "You call me if you need anything, sweetie. I'll call you just to chat. That's the way it goes. You need to get out of there, you know I'll understand."

How could she not understand? She was the one who fled the dank old town with little baby Bella seventeen years ago. If anyone knew how the smallness of the place got under your skin, it was her.

"I'll call you if I change my mind," I lied.

In 1919, it was early spring. Too early to be fresh and wild-smelling and sweet outside, too late to be glittering and austere. Edward Masen stared through a glass window that did not protect him from the gray-tinged cold outside, but what did this matter? It was long since the cold had ceased to endanger him. Now it just felt like what it was: an absence of warmth.

"Edward?"

Edward turned to the sound and, as usual, overestimated the amount of power required to move his head a few inches. He ended up whipping his head around so fast he startled Carlisle. His...his sire.

"Yes, sir?" Edward said politely, because politeness was all he could manage without wanting to rip the golden doctor's head off.

"Are you hungry, Edward?"

"Yes, sir," said Edward. What other answer could Carlisle conceivably expect? The burning never ceased. Never would cease. Even now, hearing the doctor allude to it, it erupted in a solar flare of suffering that made his mouth, so wet with venom, feel dry and parched.

"Why do we not go in search of a meal? I scented a herd of reindeer, and I'm sure there are wolves following." Perhaps if he eats, he will feel better, thought the older vampire. He still didn't know that Edward could hear his every thought. Even though he felt a little guilty at not warning the older man that his thoughts were not as private as he assumed, Edward didn't bother to tell him; after all, he hadn't bothered to ask Edward's permission to turn him into a monster.

"Yes, sir," said Edward. He tried to stand up and walk out of the room like a normal person: one foot in front of the other, without breaking a floor tile or denting a doorknob or splintering a moulding. Carlisle smiled sadly and glided away, smoothly and quickly but not too quickly, just like a real human.

Cruel.

In his anger at the impossible awfulness of vampire existence, Edward stepped down a little harder than he meant to and heard a square of ceramic crumble under his heel.

"Damn," he muttered.

"Did you say something, Edward?" asked Carlisle, popping his head around the door, a concerned look pasted on his face and anxious thoughts fluttering through his mind. As ever.

"No, sir," said Edward politely, grinding the tile to powder beneath his boot.

Charlie's house was exactly as I remembered it, except that I remembered it being bigger. It was small and tidy and closed-up and silent—like Charlie, in a way. And like me. After all, even though we saw each other so rarely, I was basically Charlie Swan with ovaries. Although if I grew up to be Chief of Police in a two horse town like this, I would probably have to kill myself.

Charlie even bought me a truck from his old friend Billy Black. It was an ancient Chevy that went from zero to sixty in about ten minutes. Weirdly, I loved the car right away. I couldn't handle the lush, dripping, haunted greenness of everything in Forks, but the Thing—my instant nickname for it—was just like me, sort of backward and cumbersome despite its small size. Even Forks seemed more doable from behind the Thing's spotlessly-clean windshield. I could tell Charlie had cleaned it in his slow, methodical way.

Even if the car had been more of a piece of crap, I still would have loved it. It didn't have a working tape-deck, but Charlie bought me an old battery-powered boombox and bolted it to the vast dashboard. I thought that was a nice touch.

"You'll have to provide your own CD's," he said sheepishly. "I don't know what music you listen to. But at least it's better than nothing, right?" His eyebrows quirked up when he said this, and for a second I saw through the terse, bumbling awkwardness we shared, and I realized that Charlie genuinely wanted me to be happy here. And then I felt guilty that I wasn't even giving Forks a chance. Who knew, maybe things would be different this time around. Maybe I could be happy. After all, I already loved my Thing. And hey, it was a new school year. I would be an upperclassman, the New Girl from the Big City. Maybe I would make new friends, maybe I would meet a cute boy and fall in love and kiss in the rain and do all the things that happen in movies but never seem to happen to me.

Maybe a lot of things.

"This is great, Dad," I said. "I really love it. It's perfect."

I prepared with great care for my first day of school. I have to admit, I was never very fashionable, but I tried my best. Anyway, Forks was so far behind the rest of the world that what was unfashionable for me was probably still miles ahead of this drippy town. So I put on my favorite pair of jeans—fitted but not pasted to my bony legs—and a sweater my mom bought me as a going-away gift. It was a soft, silky merino pullover in exactly the shade of electric blue that made my brown eyes pop. And it was clingy enough that I almost—almost!—looked like I had enough boob to fill out a C-cup.

I wish.

I stood and stared at myself in the full-length mirror in my room and tried to figure out if there was anything I could do to improve my appearance. I should be clear about this: I wasn't ugly. Not even plain, exactly. In the right context, I could even be pretty. I had really shiny dark brown hair, although I was unhappy with it while it grew out of a bob I'd given it at the urging of my best friend Alyssa, back in Phoenix. The bob looked cute. It made me look almost gamine, instead of just gawky. But I was growing it out as a practical measure: short hair just doesn't keep you as warm.

My eyes were nice, too: big and dark brown. But that was precisely where my assets stopped. Big brown eyes are pretty, but something is lost when you pair them with a long nose and a dinky little asymmetrical mouth and a pointy chin and sticking-out ears and stabby elbows and gangly knees. Like I said, I wasn't unattractive. I was just insignificant. Even my own eyes had a tendency to slide right off of my reflection and seek out something more interesting to rest upon.

"Okay," I muttered to myself. "Enough navel-gazing, Bella."

Oh, did I mention I talk to myself? I know, what a catch.

To bolster my self-esteem, I grabbed one of my favorite CDs on my way out the door. The Killers kept me company all the way to school. By the time I got there, I was dancing in my seat to Andy, You're a Star. I almost even felt like a star myself.

In 1919, Carlisle Cullen and Edward Masen celebrated their first Christmas together.

"I know it's not the same when you can't eat it," said Carlisle gently, looking over at the dining room table spread with rich-smelling holiday fare, "but I've gotten used to the scents of the season. Perhaps you will feel more cheerful if you have the trappings of humanity about you."

Edward said nothing, because he did not like to answer back to the man who kept him from murdering whole towns in one go. But he gritted his teeth together, hating their sharpness and the taste of venom that had long ago replaced the taste of saliva. He used to drink water and small beer and the occasional Coca-Cola, and eat bread and Christmas ham and cakes and pies and...

Well, what did it matter? There was nothing on his mind now but thirst. The happy, optimistic Edward Masen was gone, and all that was left was this monstrous thing who couldn't even write his own name without snapping the pen by accident after stabbing a hole through the paper. His body was too strong, dense with this alien strength. He could see a full mile on a clear day, but he couldn't play checkers as he used to, or put a record on the Victrola. He could run at an astonishing velocity, faster than the fastest horse or even a steam engine, but he couldn't perform the steps of a foxtrot without bringing the house down around his ears. Carlisle assured him that he would grow used to the vampire strength and speed, that his hands would remember control, and that it would happen sooner than he thought. But that was no comfort. Edward didn't want to learn to ape his former self. He wanted to be Edward Masen, living human, or he wanted to be dead.

"I have a present for you, Edward," said Carlisle tentatively. Oh, I do hope he likes it. It could make all the difference... "Just yonder, in the parlor." Wordlessly Edward followed his sire into the room that still bore the marks of his latest failed attempt to read a book.

Right away, he saw it: an upright piano made of burnished glowing wood, with a deep stack of sheet music resting on the cover. Edward had let slip that in his former life he had learned to plink out a few tunes to amuse his mother during the long, lonely evenings of the war.

"Thank you," he said stiffly. Then, just to keep Carlisle from staring at him with that dreadful look on his face, he walked over and perched carefully on the seat. He misjudged the distance a bit and heard a bench-leg crackle, but nothing broke. That had to be a good sign. Was his control improving already?

"If you practice at this, it will help you to regain dexterity," said Carlisle. "I learned to rein in my strength by whittling, but the principle is the same. It will teach you to move with ease and forethought. You will feel normal again before you know it."

"Yes," said Edward as he touched one finger to the keys. It let out a ringing F-sharp, a grander and more fully-developed F-sharp than any Edward had ever heard as a human: he could hear the reverberations, rich against the mellow wood of the piano. Perhaps these new vampire ears would enable him to hear music the way he'd always wished to hear it, deep in his bones.

He pulled the top sheet of music from the stack on the piano and arranged it, ripping it in only one or two places. Then, fumbling against his unnatural strength, he began to play Let the Rest of the World Go By.

You might be wondering why in god's name I of all people am publishing a Bella/Edward fic. On purpose! I don't know what to say to that, so I guess I'll just take a moment to explain where all this came from.

I wanted to like Edward, I honestly did. The one thing that Smeyer really nailed on the dick was the feeling of longing and urgency that accompanies growing up. She perfectly describes how it feels to have an overwhelming crush on a hot guy at school, at the age of seventeen. I mean, nothing feels like that. Nothing.

And for a while, that was all that mattered to me: Bella loved Edward, and Smeyer wrote about those feelings so compellingly that for a while, I did too. And then he ruined everything by opening his big dumb mouth: "I liked music from the fifties, but not after the sixties." Edward. What is this. Explain yourself. How can you like music up to but not past the fifties? You can jam out to "Hound Dog" but not "Here Comes the Sun"? What kind of alien would rather hear "You Are My Sunshine" than "Shine On You Crazy Diamond"? I mean, sure, "Mack the Knife" is a great song, but it's no "Stairway to Heaven".

She dressed him in nonstop beige. She made him prissy and house-breaky and creepy and possessive. And she made him hate Sixties music. For god's sake, Smeyer, no one on the planet hates the Beatles. And if they say otherwise, they are lying or a monster.

At this point, I just want closure. I'm trying to make Edward lovable again. And less beige. I'll even go so far as to spruce up Bella a little bit, maybe make her less whiny and a little more fabulous. But Edward will get the full treatment. He won't be a stalker anymore. He will learn to wear sexy button-downs with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and colors. He'll be more charming, he'll actually have fun sometimes, he'll flirt with pretty girls over chocolate malts in the Fifties and French cinema in the Seventies and basement concerts in the Nineties, but he'll never fall in love until he finds her, The One, the girl who is nerdy enough to like not just entry-level Shakespeare but also Boccaccio and Chaucer. He'll have depth and quirks and flaws instead of just perfect glowing liquid topaz golden mustard orbs.

All the most obvious plot-holes will get some spackle, a light sanding and a fresh coat of paint. I will be tracking all major changes and explaining my reasons behind them in A/Ns at the end of each chapter in which something was changed. That is part of the closure I was talking about before; explaining why certain things about the books bother me is how I am coming to terms with the books and their affect on me. The BPoV plot will be identical to the book, chapter for chapter, up until I have to change things in order to maintain the plot continuity that Smeyer herself found so easy to jettison. The EPoV, though based on the limited backstory given in the books, is all me. I don't own these characters, and I took care not to copy Smeyer's phrasing, but some of it may have crept in anyway. This story is in no way an attempt to plagiarize Smeyer's work. If you feel I am doing so, please PM me with examples, because they are definitely accidental and I will fix them. If you feel like this story is pointless and has nothing of value to offer—christ, what are you, new?

Enjoy.