breathe_abreath | Life Less Ordinary (1/?)

Title: Life Less Ordinary (1/?)
Author:

breathe_abreath
Genre: Hancest
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Zaylor
POV: Zac
Word Count: 2313
Summary: Even though there was a very tight knot in my stomach, and my heart was pounding a little faster than usual in my chest to let me know that I shouldn't read any of the letters in the envelopes, I swallowed my apprehension, pulled the first slightly crumpled piece of notepaper out, and unfolded it.

AU. Set in 2002/2003 (though Taylor's hair is set in 2004/2005 lol). No fame. No siblings. No Tulsa.

Author's Note: This story isn't finished, but despite my "finish fics before posting" policy, I'm going to slowly start posting chapters anyway.

This story is for

drunkinlov3, because she has been cheering it on since I first started writing it almost nine months ago. In fact, she's been cheering this story on since I first told her the basic idea I had for it over a year ago, and without her I probably wouldn't be so close to having it complete. I love you, Sammy! ♥

Part 1 - Lonely

I'm lucky.

I have had a very privileged upbringing, and I have always been well aware of that fact. My life never seemed unusual to me at all because it was my life and it was all I knew. When I was younger, I never considered that every other child my age on the planet wasn't doing the exact same things that I was. But the older I got the more apparent it became to me that my life wasn't the norm, that most people my age, most people of any age, never got to travel as much as I did and see as much of the world as I had.

My mother is a highly sought after and well renowned classical pianist. She's often compared to Bella Davidovich and Eileen Joyce, and she has worked with the likes of Andre Rieu and Leonard Bernstein. She's accumulated more awards over the years than she knows what to do with, and she has performed with the New York Philharmonic, the Boston and Chicago Symphonies, and dozens of other highly regarded orchestras the world over on countless occasions. And for most of my life I didn't realize that any of that was a big deal at all. I grew up “on the road”, I guess you could say. I didn't attend a real school until the tenth grade, I was taught by a tutor my parents hired to travel with us while my mother wowed the world with her musical ability. I learned about World War Two during a trip to Germany, and I tried out my very awkward and flawed Spanish for the first time in front of an impatient waiter at a restaurant in Barcelona. My art history lessons took place in the Louvre and the Tate, and by the time I was ten years old I'd visited all fifty states and every continent (except Antarctica) at least once. I know how lucky I was, and I wouldn't change any of it or trade any of the experiences I've had for anything.

But I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't a lonely life sometimes.

Although we officially lived in New York, we never spent enough time there for me to make and keep any friends. I got along great with my tutor, but she was in her thirties and we didn't exactly have a whole lot in common. And even though I loved my father, and we had a lot of fun exploring new countries together while mom was working, he was still my father, not my friend. I was given everything I ever asked for, but the one thing I always wanted and never had was a sibling. A brother, specifically. I wanted someone to share things with (obviously, not having a sibling meant that I never knew how much brothers and sisters apparently hate sharing anything), I wanted someone to keep me company and play I Spy with me and talk to me on long airplane journeys while mom and dad were asleep. When the lights went out in my hotel room at night, I wanted there to be someone lying in the bed next to mine, someone I could stay up with for hours, whispering jokes and secrets to in the dark. I asked my parents for a brother for Christmas more than once when I was little, but they always said the same thing: that I was the most amazing little boy in the world, and I was all they needed.

After fifteen years of almost non-stop globe-trotting my mother decided that she wanted to return to her roots in New York City, and she accepted a teaching position at her alma mater, Juilliard. My life became slightly more normal then, but still not entirely. Plenty of people attend private schools all over the world, but the majority attend public school, so when I was enrolled in the Trinity School in Manhattan, I found myself once again on the more exceptional side of average. And once again, I didn't know any better at the time to realize that my life was all that different from anyone else's. I felt like a regular, slightly awkward, fifteen year old high school student.

Having never really spent much time around people my own age up until that point, my interaction with my class mates during my first week of school was stilted to say the least. I'd always wanted friends, but when I finally had the opportunity to make some, I didn't have the first clue how. They weren't mean to me or anything like that, but they didn't go out of their way to make me feel included in the cliques they'd been forming and perfecting since kindergarten, either. My grandparents thought that was outrageous, because I was a “legacy”, and apparently the fact that half a dozen generations of our family had attended the school meant that I should automatically be granted access to any close-knit group I desired. But on the first day of my second week at the school, I met Lyle. He'd been a student at Trinity since the fourth grade, and he was more than willing to help me acclimatizes to my new surroundings and find my footing. He quickly became my best friend, though granted he was also my only friend, but that didn't matter to me. He was the only friend I needed.

We spent all of our time together, so much time that some of our fellow students eventually started rumors that we were more than just friends. At first we both just laughed their comments off, but after a while he started acting differently towards me, it felt like he was trying to avoid me. Then he started dating a girl in the grade below us, and suddenly he was spending all of his time with her instead of me. It put an end to the rumors about us being a couple, but it didn't do anything to quell the suspicions that I was more interested in guys than girls.

It wasn't true, I wasn't interested in guys or girls, really. I think I was still struggling to catch up on the years of socializing I'd missed out on, I wanted to have friends first before worrying about having something more with anyone. After a few more months of struggling to fit in I finally seemed to find a group of people that I could hang out with, even though I never felt as close to them as I had to Lyle, and most of the time it felt like none of them knew anything about me at all. All they needed to know was my mother's maiden name and that made me one of them, one of the legacy crowd. Apparently names mean everything in some circles.

By my senior year, I had settled into life at Trinity and resigned myself to my role there. I walked the halls like I'd been there my whole life, like I belonged there, like it was my birth right. And in a way, apparently, that was exactly what it was. I continued to receive the best education my family's money could buy, and when I wasn't at school or holed up in my bedroom with my nose in a book, I was usually out at some fancy party or event or fund raiser, smiling politely and doing my duty, keeping my family's good name intact. It was a small price to pay for being given the best of everything my whole life, and I never complained.

I just wished I didn't feel quite so alone all of the time. It didn't matter how many “friends” I had or how pretty the débutante on my arm at whatever benefit I was attending was, I always felt like there was something missing somehow.

I figured that maybe I'd feel better once I'd graduated from high school. Maybe college would be different, maybe everyone would be just as unsure of themselves and feel just as out of place as I did, and then I wouldn't feel so alone all the time. Which is why I dove into the college application process with ten times more excitement than any of my classmates seemed to.

There were certain schools that I had to apply to, they'd been chosen for me before I was even conceived. Princeton, my grandfather's alma mater, was top of the list, followed closely by Cornell, where my grandmother had studied. Since I'd never worked hard enough on my musical skills to get into Juilliard like my mother had, and my father had never attended college, my grandparent's choices for me took precedence. And while those schools are amazing, and I would have been honored to be accepted to either one, I felt myself being drawn more towards the west coast. I'd always enjoyed my time there whenever we'd visited California or Washington for one of my mother's performances, and I'd had my eye on schools like Berkley, UCLA and the University of Washington for years. My grandparents weren't really thrilled when I told them that I'd applied to all three of those schools in addition to their two Ivy League picks, but they didn't kick up too much of a fuss about it in the end. I think they felt that it wouldn't matter anyway; if I got into Princeton or Cornell I would be going to one of those schools, no question about it. And they saw no reason for me not to get in, so my own choices for higher education were nothing more than wasted application fees in their eyes, and that money was pocket change to them.

It was a random Thursday in December when my life got even more abnormal than it had ever been. I was working on an assignment for my European History class when I suddenly had a flash of genius and thought of something I'd picked up during one of my trips to Paris when I was twelve. I knew that my teacher would go crazy over it and it would probably improve my grade significantly, whether I deserved it or not. I felt like it was cheating a little, not all of my classmates had been lucky enough to travel to Europe or even out of the country at all, it seemed like I had an unfair advantage over them. But I found myself crawling into the dusty attic of our Upper West Side brownstone anyway, gazing around at all of the surplus belongings that had remained untouched since we'd moved in a couple of year before. I wasn't even really sure where to begin looking for it, all I knew was that it was safely wrapped up and stored in one of the many boxes and crates surrounding me.

I spent hours up there, not only searching for the item I'd originally gone up there to find, but allowing myself to become distracted by things I hadn't seen in years, things I thought I'd lost or that my parents had thrown out. I found baby clothes and old toys and photo albums, and even though I knew I had an assignment to finish, I couldn't make myself put any of it down until I'd taken the time to appreciate it and bask in the memories associated with it. The thing that really caught my attention, though, was an old photograph that fell out of a pile of paperwork when I lifted it out of a box to see if there was anything underneath it. At least, I thought it was a photograph, but when I picked it up and turned it over to see what it was of, I quickly realized that it was a sonogram picture.

I smiled to myself, wondering why my parents had never let me see it before. It was my first official baby picture, after all, and seeing it made me feel proud somehow. But as my eyes took in every detail of the black and white image in my hands, and I tried to figure out if I was looking at my head or not, I noticed a date in the top corner. The picture was taken on November twelfth... nineteen-eighty-two. I hadn't been born until nineteen-eighty-five, so I didn't understand why it was dated almost three years before that. My curiosity heightened, I carefully placed the sonogram picture down next to me and turned my attention to the stack of papers it had been stored with. Most of it was meaningless to me, but stuffed in between some very old tax returns and bank statements was a small stack of opened envelopes addressed to my parents from someone who lived in Wichita, Kansas. My parents knew people all over the world, but I couldn't think of anyone we knew in Wichita.

Even though there was a very tight knot in my stomach, and my heart was pounding a little faster than usual in my chest to let me know that I shouldn't read any of the letters in the envelopes, I swallowed my apprehension, pulled the first slightly crumpled piece of notepaper out, and unfolded it.

What I read shocked me more than anything ever had before in my whole life. I think I read it a total of ten times just to make sure I understood it properly, because it all seemed so impossible to me. And once I'd gotten far enough past the initial blow the words had dealt me to be able to move, I reached back into the envelope and felt around for the picture that the letter in my hands told me I would find in there. Sure enough, there was a picture. A picture of a baby.

A picture of my brother.

Life Less Ordinary (1/?)

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