Matrices and Music

ljv

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"Mathematics and music, the most sharply contrasted fields of scientific activity which can be found, and yet related, supporting each other, as if to show forth the secret connection which ties together all the activities of our mind, and which leads us to surmise that the manifestations of the artist's genius are but the unconscious expressions of a mysteriously acting rationality."

–19th centuryGerman physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz,

oOoOoOo

She had always been good with numbers. It was an ability she had hid for most of her life. It was late in her preteen years that she realized being stupid was a virtue and having knowledge was a vice. Girls were not supposed to be smarter than boys. It was unattractive. No matter how hard she tried though, she had trouble hiding herself.

It was in a kind teacher's eyes, "Rosalie, all the work is right, but the answer could not be more wrong. Are you doing this on purpose?"

Rosalie would never admit how easy the numbers came to her; never admit that they played across the page just as easily as words or music. She would never admit the anticipation of a challenge and the joy of overcoming it.

"I thought my answer was right." She furrowed her forehead and gave a smile too pretty to be denied. "How could I have gotten it wrong? Can I do it again?"

The teacher relented; almost happily. This time when Rosalie handed her work back in, it was nothing more than scribbles of broken numbers and lazy calculations like a piece of music written in sharps and a perverted melody. The teacher never asked Rosalie to justify her work again.

Rosalie liked logic. The way a single object paired with another single object made two objects that could no longer really be classified as single. She liked how she was 'one' and then was accepted into a family of 'three' to make an even 'four'. The complexities of such logic were simple but nonetheless beautiful.

She enjoyed the geometries of lines; how two parallels would never meet, but run racing each other to the end of eternity. Edward was a line driven straight as an arrow. Rosalie was a line stubborn as the sun. Both ran on the same parallels; neither willing to stop before the other.

Edward told her once he killed men he considered evil.

Rosalie told him she killed men she knew were evil.

And he retorted, "Are you going to kill yourself next then?"

She offered him a pretty smile. "I'll be sure to get around to you first."

Carlisle introduced her to calculus. It was the only thing outside of beautiful cars that she and Edward could really agree upon. She learned the mathematics of sound; how certain notes carried a certain wavelength. Frequency determined pitch; the faster the wave the higher the note.

"What is he playing?"

Esme shifted, listening. "Not sure. Nothing, I think."

Rosalie furrowed her forehead. "It sounds horrible."

Esme nodded. "He does that to clear his head, or at least he does that when he is troubled."

A shiver ran down Rosalie's spine at a particularly nasty cord. A sensation she had not felt since she had become a vampire. "Can he at least bring it down octave?"

In the other room the notes became even higher.

Ratios were important in nature. Everything came in ratios. Bugs to plants, plants to plants, plants to animals, animals to animals, animals to people, people to people, people to vampires, vampires to vampires; if this ratio was ever disturbed, brief chaos would ensue before it would be balanced once again. This included sound. If the height of one wave formed an uneven ratio (1.2 :1.7, 3:66:5.39, ect.) to another wave the sound was hideous. If the ratios were even (1:1, 1:2, 1:3, 2:5, 7:9, ect.) they sang.

Esme and Carlisle were perfect ratios. They rose and danced around each other, crossing paths, making music that was almost too beautiful to bear. Edward mentioned once in a brief moment of truce between the two of them that Carlisle and Esme were something like a harmony. Rosalie still preferred ratios.

Symmetry was an expression of perfection. And Rosalie was nothing less. The left side of her body was a perfect mirror image of her right. Her cheekbones arched perfect angles that (if drawn into lines) would meet at 120 degrees. Her slender nose (a straight 180 degree line) pointed perfectly down her face. Her eyes were at a 1:2 ratio comparing width verses length. Her length of her mouth was another 1:2 ratio comparing the widest part of her nose to the line of her lips. The tip of her nose formed a perfect 90 degree angel to each corner of her mouth.

"You're unbelievably vain." Edward commented not bothering to hide his insolence.

For once Rosalie did not care; she did not even look away from the mirror. She read once that math was the language of God. The statement was pretensions but she liked it. She liked seeing God in the lines of her face.

Edward, always the listener, laughed. "Don't tell me that it is as corny as it sounds."

Rosalie did not answer; she was still too overwhelmed with the perfect geometries of her design.

"The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not."

"What the hell are you reading?"

Edward hissed as he closed the book sharply. Rosalie could tell by his face that he was not happy that she had surprised him.

"Get out!"

Rosalie scoffed. "So' enamored' by your own voice you have starting reading out loud then?"

"Get out of my room!"

Rosalie did not budge. She was not at all intimidated by Edward's anger. "Who wrote that?"

Edward blinked, surprised. He answered through gritted teeth. "Emerson. Now get out!"

"Interesting quote." Rosalie continued.

Edward let his guard drop, but not completely. He spoke as if in challenge. "It is one of my favorites."

Rosalie met his challenge. "Angels wouldn't sing, you know."

"Oh yeah?" Edward asked irritated. "I thought I told you to leave."

She threw her hair behind her shoulder smirking as she did so. She turned on her heel and moved at a human pace out of his room. "They speak in patterns and theorems and create beauty with matrices."

"You're a bitter bitch." Edward hissed.

She stopped and turned around to face him. A slight smile pulling at her lips. Her thoughts a jumble but she was certain Edward knew what she was about to say before she said it. She spoke anyway.

"Did you know that you're just as vain as me?"

Edward did not answer but glared dangerously at his sister.

"I see God in the lines of my face, you see God in the movement of your fingertips. Other than the fact that I'm right, I fail to see how you are any different than me."

She then added with just her thoughts, 'But, I suppose, you are too lost in the music to even care.'

"Do you really hate yourself that much?" She would ask him.

He would respond, allowing the notes from his song reverberate completely into silence before responding.

"No more than you hate yourself."

Rosalie had overhead Esme speaking in a soft whisper into Carlisle's ear. "Do you think that it had ever occurred to them to try a duet?"

Carlisle chuckled softly; a crescendo curving on a coordinate plane. Each point readable, a decided perfect map. "Matrices and music – they like their madness too much to try it. God forbid they create anything other than chaos."

Chaos really was not really chaos. Everything had gravity. Everything pulled and pushed at each other trying to find a balance; the balance mathematically being zero – where the rising and falling moved at the same rate. A disruption to the balance of zero would result in a domino effect and then everything would be thrown back into chaos trying to balance once again. Chaos was simply a series of patterns that reacted in accordance to the variable and a constant.

"You're stubborn."

"As if you're any better." Rosalie scoffed.

Edward sneered.

Some equations had more than one constant; in this case Rosalie being one constant and Edward being the other. Usually these equations made the answer harder to find and the zero even farther away.

X, Y, and Z were Rosalie's favorite variables. She liked them best all together in all three dimensions. The possibilities were nearly limitless.

Edward asked her once how she labeled Emmett. "Is he your X, Y, or is he your Z?"

Anger in many instances served no purpose.

"I don't know Edward. What would you call your loneliness?"

He did not speak to her for months.

"Infinity!" Emmett laughed as Rosalie explained his life-span "Is a damn big number."

Rosalie was glad Emmett did not mind that infinity was a straight line racing off into forever. This simplicity was comforting.

Edward's anger was not.

"Why?" He snarled. "Why did you damn him?"

She did not answer him. In her head numbers danced.

Edward growled. "Don't think I can't understand you."

Rosalie scowled.

"You know," Emmett said one day listening to Edward play, "I don't understand why you and Edward argue all the time. It seems to me as if the two of you believe in very similar things."

He was speaking loud enough that Rosalie was certain that Edward had heard him as well. But it was not like Emmett ever bothered to try and hide his thoughts.

Rosalie was too surprised to be mad. "Why?"

"Music and mathematics, they are both really complicated things, but they seem to have more similarities than differences. I don't know… almost like they are parallels."

Rosalie leaned her head on Emmett's chest. "Did you know that parallels never meet?"

And the music changed.

Accelerando.

Racing further and faster ahead into infinity.

A/N: This was originally a single chapter in my other story, Laurel's Defiance. However, I believe this chapter is strong enough to stand on its own as a one-shot.