THIS STORY IS BEING REVISED, due to various communication issues.
i.
Edward is seventeen when his heart stops beating.
He cries.
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ii.
Edward is seventeen twenty when he gets a new mother. He doesn't realize quite how much he missed his own until Esme hugs him the first time.
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iii.
Edward is seventeen twenty-six when he rebels. He travels the globe, feeding on criminals he finds with his mind. He is a one-man court system, prosecutor and jury and judge and hangman all in one.
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iv.
Edward is seventeen thirty when he sees a family on one of his hunts. The three little ones tumble about in the grass with exuberant shouts, while the father and mother sit quietly on the porch. The man is dark-haired, weary-looking, and his left ankle is twisted at a bit of a wrong angle. The mother is blonde, attractive, and several months pregnant.
He watches as their eyes shuttle between their children, each other, and their coming child. Slowly a smile splits the man's worn face as he rests a hand on his wife's belly. She leans over and kisses him gently. They almost glow with happiness.
He looks into all their minds and finds bright warmth, pure joy, and strong love. He wants it so much.
He memorizes their address, and goes home to his mother and father.
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v.
Edward is seventeen thirty-two when his father turns a young woman and adopts her as well. Rosalie's blonde hair reminds Edward of the pregnant mother two years before.
He takes a few days off and goes back to London.
The baby's a little more than a year old. When the mother leaves it babbling alone on the porch for a moment, he sneaks up to peer into the basket.
The baby goes silent and stares up at him with big brown eyes the exact shade of his once-favorite chocolate. She has a shock of the sunniest hair he's ever seen.
He crouches down and leans closer, and she breaks out into wild babble and waves her little arms. One of her hands bonks him on the nose. Her face squinches up, and he flinches, afraid she's hurt herself and she'll start crying and he'll have to leave.
And then she smiles.
It doesn't matter that she has only five teeth, that her hair is a bird's nest, that her jumper is a ridiculous green-and-purple plaid, or that she's maybe fourteen months old.
At that moment, she's the most wonderful thing he's ever seen.
The little girl hits his nose again, claps her hands, and giggles. "Ed ed ed."
He starts. No one has called him Ed since he was small—but no, he realizes, she's probably repeating something she's heard. She doesn't know him.
"I am Edward," he whispers to her.
"Ed ed ed ed ed."
"Edward."
Her face wrinkles in a small frown. "Eeeeeeeeeed-dur. Ed-dur. Ed."
One corner of his mouth turns up.
"Ed," she continues to babble. "Ed, ed ed ed, ed. Ed ed. Ed!"
He hears the mother coming back. Half a second later he's halfway around the house. Behind him he hears the little girl start to wail.
As he crosses back over the Atlantic, he remembers her big dark eyes looking at him as she giggles, and the way he felt when she smiled at him.
Brown is his new favorite color.
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vi.
Edward is seventeen thirty-four when Rosalie brings home a seriously injured young man who becomes Edward's second sibling. This time, it's Emmett's dark hair's similarity to the London father's hair that sends him back.
The baby's a toddler now, talking more intelligibly, golden hair curling around her head, laughing with her siblings as they play pat-a-cake.
When she's alone in the yard for a moment he goes up to her and leans down.
"Hello, little one."
She tilts her head, curls bouncing slightly, and stares at him in puzzlement for a few moments. Then she unexpectedly smiles.
Her wide-eyed stare is the same. Her hair holds as much sunshine as ever. Her bright smile hasn't dimmed a whit. And her eyes are still his favorite color.
She reaches up and swats his nose. She giggles.
"Ed-dur."
She remembers him, somehow.
He should not feel this absurdly pleased.
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vii.
Edward is seventeen thirty-five when he and his parents and brother and sister move to a small town in Washington. There, they discover other non-humans—a tribe of odd werewolves who are both extremely defensive of their land and extremely antagonistic to vampires.
He gets weary of all the complex negotiations running through everyone's minds, and remembers the London family's simplicity. He leaves to look in on the girl.
He arrives across from her house just in time to see her dash out into the street after her ball as an out-of-control vehicle careens around the corner.
The mother on the porch opens her mouth to scream as she lunges to her feet. There are approximately one-point-six seconds until impact. She can do nothing.
By the time he actually thinks about it, he's already curled protectively around the girl as they roll and skid to the other side of the road, propelled by the momentum of his dive. His clothes catch and rip on the stones. The lace on the little girl's dress tears, but she's locked in the rock-hard cage of his arms and doesn't even scratch herself.
The car creaks to a halt, and the goggled driver leaps out and sprints towards them, his face ashen with fear, babbling wildly about how the car wouldn't stop. The mother runs to them from the other direction, screaming her daughter's name.
He has no way to explain his unnatural speed to them, and so he flees.
A little voice calls after him.
"Bye Eddur!"
For the first time, he is truly glad he is no longer human.
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viii.
Edward is seventeen thirty-six when his now-married siblings have a fight. It starts out small, but by the end they've involved his parents as well—and progressed to insulting every person the other has ever had any type of relationship with. At first he's relieved when everyone shuts up, but then he finds that all their thoughts are so loud he can't concentrate on anything.
"Whatever's wrong, fix it," he tells them flatly. "I will be back in a week. I'm going to England." And he does.
During that week, he discovers that after the near-accident, the little girl's parents scoured the neighborhood for her savior. In fact, they've taken to referring to him as her guardian angel, even though he's only been seen once, and only by the mother and driver.
He also catches the little girl when she falls out of a tree. Her naming skills have progressed—she calls him "Edwur" when she thanks him.
Then she immediately pronounces him a knight and herself a princess, and proceeds to engage him in a five-year-old's playstory.
He can't remember ever having this much fun.
He plays with her every day until he leaves.
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ix.
Edward is seventeen thirty-seven when he officially meets the girl's family. It's spring vacation at the school he's attending, so he takes a few days of it in London.
He meets her siblings (including the original "Ed") first. He's playing with the girl when they come home from school. The girl must have talked about him a lot, he thinks, because her siblings rowdily join them in their game without so much as blinking at his presence or temperature. The little castle gains a king, queen, and knight, and they all play "rescue the princess from the villain."
He meets the parents when the mother calls the children in to help prepare dinner. He and the children are in the middle of a game of "tackle the tall one" which has morphed into a tickle fight. He's on the ground with four children on top of him, even the eleven-year-old boy, and they're all laughing.
"Ed!"
They stop laughing. Both he and the younger boy look up to see the mother on the porch. He has a feeling she's not speaking to her son.
After showering him with thanks, she presses him to stay for dinner and meet her husband. He refuses the dinner, but agrees to stay and help. The father is just as grateful as the mother.
He doesn't leave until the children are in bed.
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x.
Edward is seventeen thirty-eight when he hears that there have been bombs exploded in the London Underground. He's across the ocean in less than a day to check on the girl and her family.
He is unspeakably relieved to find them shaken, but safe.
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xi.
Edward is seventeen thirty-nine when a letter arrives for him. London's being bombed, it says in the elegant script of the little girl's mother, and her children are being evacuated in a week.
When he arrives in the war-blasted city, they're already gone.
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xii.
Edward is seventeen forty when another letter comes from the mother. Her children are home.
Something's different.
It's subtle, but it's there. The younger boy's greeting is just a little too formal, the older girl's bread just a bit too good for a thirteen-year-old to have made, the older boy's handshake a tiny bit too firm. When he looks at the mother, he can tell she has noticed these and other things too, and is bewildered by the change.
And the first thing the young golden-haired girl asks him, after she's greeted him and they've sat down, is "How old are you?"
He doesn't know what to say.
"Seventeen."
The girl shakes her head.
"No you're not," she says with a certainty she cannot possibly have. "I can see it in your eyes. You're older than you look."
It's not a question. He sees no option but the truth. He nods.
She takes his hand and smiles. "It's all right," she says quietly. "I'm older than I look too."
And she tells him of another world.
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xiii.
Edward is seventeen forty-one when the girl sends him a brief telegram.
WE WENT BACK STOP
He spends three days in England this time.
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xiv.
Edward is seventeen forty-two when the girl tells him of her third time and that she can't go back. She is sober and sad, but there is a light in her eyes that wasn't there last time he visited.
When he hesitantly points this out and asks why, she smiles.
"Because I found Him," she says, and almost glows.
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xv.
Edward is seventeen forty-three when Carlisle sits him down for a serious talk.
He laughs at the notion that the family could be in danger from the Volturi.
"They have a protector whose power far outstrips them," he says to his adopted father. "And He will not let her be harmed."
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xvi.
Edward is seventeen forty-four when the war ends.
He refuses to celebrate in Forks.
He celebrates in London.
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xvii.
Edward is seventeen forty-five when he decides to study abroad for a few years.
Of course he picks England.
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xviii.
Edward is seventeen forty-six when he realizes he loves the girl.
He doesn't tell her.
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xix.
Edward is seventeen forty-seven when the girl kisses him goodbye on the cheek.
For a moment, he truly believes Heaven exists.
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xx.
Lucy is seventeen when her heart stops beating.
Edward cries.
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epilogue:
Edward is seventeen one hundred four when he meets another girl.
Isabella Swan has the same chocolate brown eyes as her great-aunt.
Edward smiles.
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postscript:
Edward is seventeen one hundred sixteen when his granddaughter is born.
When Ren and Jake ask him if he would do them the honor of naming the baby, it takes only a split second before the words "Lucy Clara" leave his mouth.
He never tells them why.
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Let me just make one thing clear: I am not a Twilight canon fan. Most of my information comes by osmosis from a former-Twihard friend, and from various Twilight websites. This is obviously an AU of sorts in several places. Edward's ages are not always exactly accurate. Instead, they are "year accurate." All years figured by adding Edward's stated age to 1901 are canonical for both Twilight and Narnia. The postscript is purely my invention.
I imagine the story of the Twilight books would take place rather differently in this AU. Edward is not nearly as broody, and Bella would of course be a lot less Sue-ish and a lot more Su-ish. *bad pun* In this story, Charlie's mother's name is Susan not Helen, Lucy's middle name is Clara, Narnia bookverse is utilized, Renesmee's nickname is Ren, the main romance is one-sided, vampires can cry if they want to (perhaps without tears), and probably 75% or more of the story is implied rather than stated.
Incidentally, Lucy Clara Cullen-Black is one-quarter human, one-quarter vampire, and one-half wolfshifter. And you thought Ren's genetics were weird.
This idea (Edward/Lucy) was originally conceived for Lucille Brown's unusual pairings contest, but was obviously not finished in time.