Thanks to my good man for beta'ing this. This story is my attempt to address some of the inherent difficulties of an adult-child imprint, especially given an unlimited time frame. Specifically, I am intrigued by the idea of a romance that takes decades to percolate, and the pain of outliving one's mortal lovers and friends. I originally wanted this story to span at least a century, but I'm not Neal Stephenson: I am just not clever enough to know what the future will look like.

I do not own these characters. Leave as many reviews as you want, including constructively critical ones, as I welcome discussion. Hope you like!

It was puberty that did it. For almost three years I spent every waking moment with Jacob, and when I looked at him I saw only a walking jungle gym with a big smile, hair to yank, and hands to make cat's cradles on. I saw a reading partner and a mentor and a tutor and an opponent in tree-shaking races that ended with both of us clutching our sides in laughter and scraping embedded twigs out of our feet. Jacob taught me to swim, to build a fire, to check the oil in a car. I adored and idolized him. He thought everything I said was funnier and smarter than any other child had ever been in the history of the world. I thought he could do anything.

Unfortunately, I was burdened with half-vampire, half-human mutant supergrowth. It came with the territory of being an antichrist. By the time I was one, I looked seven. By the time I was two, I could easily pass for eleven, although my growth seemed by then to have slowed almost to normal. When I was two and a half, I started having hair in weird places and my bony chest developed what appeared to be mosquito bites where my breasts would eventually grow. Rosalie took me to CVS to buy me boxes of pantyliners to catch all the smelly drippings that now made a mess of my underwear, and, three months before I turned three, I had my first wet dream.

The dream was about Jacob, and my mind-reading father happened to be listening in on my thoughts that night.

I was swimming through thick golden daylight toward Jacob. He was waist-deep in water, though why his living room would be flooded I didn't know. I could see a narrow trail of hair tip-toeing downward from his belly button. I could tell that he didn't have any clothes on above or below the water, even though the refraction of the light made it impossible for me to see anything I hadn't seen before. I kept asking him to come out so we could have a race, but he only laughed and then fell very slowly into a back float. I was noticing that my legs felt curiously light and free when Edward's wordless roar woke me up.

I had never seen Edward like this, nor had anyone else. He looked truly insane as he yanked me out of bed and flung me at my mother, who had appeared in the doorway. I was still half-asleep and groggy; in all the confusion, my dream was temporarily banished from memory. I didn't know why he was acting like this, and no one explained. He disappeared from sight. Bella strained her ears and suddenly tensed.

"He's headed for the boundary line," she said nervously. I heard a feather-soft shuffle, caught a vanishing glimpse of Emmett and Rosalie taking off after my father, and then heard nothing of them for three hours.

My mother settled herself elegantly on the silk bedspread beside me and took my hand. "What happened, sweetie?" my mother asked me gravely.

"I don't know. Dad woke me up...I was having a dream." The contents of the dream came back to me and I cringed, but it was too late to withdraw from my mother's touch. Bella's eyes widened as she saw what I saw.

"Oh, Renesmee, your father saw that?" I nodded miserably.

"Why's he so mad? I didn't do anything wrong, did I?"

"No, baby, you didn't. Honey, is that the first dream you've had with Jacob in it?" I shook my head mutely. I dreamed about him all the time. She knew that. Why was she asking?

"He isn't usually naked, though," I said, trying to be helpful. "What's wrong with Dad? I go swimming with Jacob all the time." But I knew it wasn't the swimming that had upset my father. I was only two and no one had even thought to give me The Talk. But my mind and body were much older, twelve, maybe thirteen. Jacob had even started giving me secret driving lessons. And I had felt an exquisite nervousness around him for months now.

When Edward came back, he joined me and Bella in my room.

"We're leaving at the end of the week," he said tersely.

"Is Jake coming?" I asked.

"No. Jacob needs to stay here with the pack, Renesmee." Edward looked terribly strained, the way he looked when he got thirsty, though he'd fed just a few days ago.

"But he'll visit? Like we planned?" My voice rose in panic.

"We'll be too far away to visit."

"How far?"

"Newfoundland."

"No!" I squeaked. "No! Jacob has to come too, you have to let Jake come too!" When Edward just stood there like a statue, I lost my head. I launched myself at him and started clawing at his face, scratching his eyes. My fingernails slid over them like they were glass marbles. He didn't even have the decency to blink.

"Renesmee!" Bella tried to pry me off of him, but it took both of their efforts to wrestle me back to the bed and hold me there. Unable to move, pinned under their hands, I resorted to screaming at them. Edward clamped a hand over my mouth to stifle my shrieks, and I bit him. Eventually they just called Jasper in to calm me down. It was dawn before I drifted off to sleep.

We had known for some time we would have to move. The Cullens had been in Forks for too long; their lack of aging was beginning to grow conspicuous. But the plan had been to move to a town an hour away soon after my third birthday. My growth had slowed enough by now that we thought I could have a normal highschool career if I started in the next year or two. We would be close enough for Jacob to wolf up and visit every day without abandoning the pack. The Cullens would do another round of highschool, and we could all go to college when we graduated.

Jacob had spent the last few years making up his high school diploma. He confided in me that he wanted to go to college once he'd saved up enough money from flipping cars. He didn't precisely need a college education-or at least, not in the way most people do. He would likely never have a normal job, and college couldn't teach him anything about being an immortal vampire-hunting beast of the night. Still, he said, it was important to be well-rounded.

And now, for who knew how long, he would be well-rounded without me.

For the rest of the week, I wasn't allowed to be alone. One of my parents was always with me, and Jasper hovered nearby in case I needed to be sedated again. On the morning of our departure, my father told me stonily that I could say goodbye to Jacob. He came with me, one hand gripped like a vice around my upper arm as we ran through the woods.

"Jake will never accept this," I said hopefully as we crossed a stream. "He'll come after me."

"No he won't," said my father simply.

"Jake loves me!" I shouted. "Unlike you!"

"You're being childish."

"Because I'm a child, maybe?"

He didn't say another word until we reached the boundary. I was allowed to cross at will, but the Cullens were still constrained by the treaty. Jacob stood at the boundary line, worry crinkling up his forehead.

"Nessie, are you okay?" He asked me as soon as we were in earshot.

"They're taking me away!" Jacob pulled me into a bone-crunching hug. My toes dangled several feet above the ground and I began to sob openly into his shirt. We stood there for a long time before my father prissily cleared his throat.

We arrived at St. Johns in early summer and stayed in a posh hotel until Esme could pick out a house. Edward, Bella and I shared a suite with two bedrooms, a large common area and two gigantic, marble-paved bathrooms. I took four-hour-long baths, sometimes adding hot water as the bath cooled off, sometimes not. I was piecing together what had happened, partly from talking to Rosalie and Emmett, partly from eavesdropping.

When Edward had seen Jacob in my dream, his first instinct was to go murder the little pedophile. Fortunately for them both, Rosalie and Emmett caught up with Edward before he could catch up with Jacob. When the three of them did finally run across Jacob, he listened to Edward's ranting. When he realized what he was being accused of, he came very close to dismembering my father.

"She's only a kid, for shit's sake. What kind of monster would touch a kid?"

Then Edward read Jacob's mind for a solid two hours. Five minutes would have been sufficient; Edward had been reading minds so long that he was preternaturally skilled at sussing out lies. Eventually he was satisfied that Jacob had never done or thought anything objectionable, and he and Rosalie and Emmett returned to the house, leaving a bewildered and angry Jacob standing in the woods. They never told him about my dream.

The worst part was that Edward was right: Jacob didn't come after me. He just let me go. No one in the world knew Jacob as well as I did, and even I couldn't understand. If our positions had been reversed, I wouldn't have slept until I found him.

Eventually, in the face of another of my tantrums, Alice broke down and explained.

"Edward gave Jacob some very compelling reasons not to track us down."

"He didn't tell him about the-" I began, horrified.

"No, lord no, all the soldiers in Volterra couldn't drag that out of him. He sort of...gave Jacob a carrot and a stick."

"Huh?"

"He told Jacob that I saw a tiny glimpse of something terrible happening to you, but that I couldn't see it properly because you're so tied up in him. Which is true-well, not that I saw something terrible, but it is true that until we left Forks I haven't gotten more than a few fleeting glimpses of your future. That was the carrot. Let you go and save your life."

That was so many brands of awful I couldn't even focus on it right now. "What's the stick?"

"Well, he...you're not going to like this, Nessie."

"What part of this have I liked so far? Just tell me, Alice. Please?"

"Edward told Jacob that if he came after you, or tried to contact you in any way, it would just mess up my visions, and we couldn't have that, so..."

"What, Alice? What?"

Alice said in rush, "He said if Jacob came after you he would hunt down and kill all the werewolf imprints, and their families. And he would tell every nomad he met for the rest of eternity to come help themselves, until the Quileute tribe was obliterated." Her voice was heavy with shame. All the air went out of me in a whoosh and I sat down, hard.

I could see exactly how it must have happened. Jacob wouldn't have cared, at least not at first. The imprint was irrational. He would have gone back to the pack and begun to make plans. But every member of his pack, and the Alpha of the other pack, would hear this conversation ringing in his head.

Four other werewolves had imprints; they would feel as strongly about danger to their imprints as Jacob felt about me, and even those without imprints had loved ones they stood to lose. They would fight Jacob, if they needed to, but it wouldn't even come to that. He would feel their own fear and rage and know, even if the imprint didn't want to let him, that he had no choice. He couldn't do to them what Edward was doing to him. No one who knew my father could doubt he meant what he said-except Bella, and she was an idiot. For Jacob to consider throwing his entire tribe under the bus just so he could be with me would tear the Pack apart. He could never be so despicable.

He was the Alpha, and he would act like it.

Esme found a gorgeous old mansion perched on the edge of a cliff that overlooked the bay. It had been a summer "cottage" for some millionaire when it was built in the 1890's, then turned into a hotel in the 50's and eventually abandoned to rot. Carlisle bought it and he and Esme and whoever was around worked night and day, first to make sure it wasn't in any danger of sliding into the bay, and then to make it look like a summer retreat for a billionaire. Working on the house, Esme seemed to blossom like a flower in the sun. She whistled delicate snatches of birdsong that she picked up from the local bird population. I wasn't any hand at fine craft, but I liked to sit with my grandmother while she hand-carved railings and scalloped shingles where the siding had blown off the house.

A sizeable porch ran around three sides, and the second and third floors were almost nothing but white mullioned windows, with a little bit of wall to hold them up. I had a room on the third floor, with a balcony that faced the sea. All of the rooms were perfect, but mine had the best view of the rising sun. I didn't want a room that faced west.

We enrolled at St. Augustine's High School. Emmett would be a senior, while Bella, Rosalie and Jasper were juniors. Edward and Alice were sophomores and I started out at the bottom. Having me around galvanized Alice and Rosalie: they seemed determined to take full advantage of this new high school. Although classes didn't start till mid-August, most of the extracurriculars had auditions and camps in July. Alice cheerfully signed up for the school's color guard. Jasper, not to be left out, joined marching band, to widespread Cullen amusement.

"Just like the drum corps," he said in an exaggerated drawl.

"Don't forget your fife!" Emmett sang out when Jasper left for his first practice.

Rosalie signed up for cheer camp and theater, and Emmett made it onto the football team with no effort at all, other than the effort required to hold himself back from his full strength. Edward and Bella were the only ones who didn't bother with the charade, which wasn't surprising. When it came to human teenagers, my father had a superiority complex that would have shamed Nero, and my mother had been in such a hurry to discard her own humanity that it never even occurred to her to try to enjoy it now.

I did soccer. Like Emmett, holding myself back to human-speed was tricky, but at least it was something to take my mind off of Jacob. The trouble was, it didn't work. I thought of him constantly. I needed something more vigorous. Something that would let me stretch out more, and maybe even tire me out so I wouldn't have to cry myself to sleep anymore.

Something like rugby.

In early July school sent out an email announcing that St. Augustine's rugby club would commence soon, and that anyone interested should come to an information meeting and tryout a month before school started up again. There were no girls in the club, but it wasn't explicitly forbidden. What girl would have gone out for rugby?

Of course I had to do it. When I showed up for tryouts half the guys started laughing and half looked apprehensive, like I was going to ruin their fun by being delicate. They had a point: I was ninety pounds soaking wet, with bones jutting out in the way of children preparing for a definitive growth spurt. The captain gave everyone a speech about how rugby was an intensely violent sport, and no one was going to go easy on anyone, and if you didn't like it you could just leave. This guy had obviously envisioned some sort of Boys' Town, with him as mayor. He explained the game and put us through our paces. By the time the sun was going down, I had made thirteen tackles and nearly broken one guy's arm by accident. My face was covered in mud and someone's blood, I didn't know whose. At least half a dozen guys had trickled off the field in search of first aid. The captain decreed that everyone who had stayed this long could come back next week for a pick up.

A few of the guys started jokingly to refer to me as Crusher instead of Carlie, the name I'd adopted in St. John's. It was a nickname that I certainly lived up to. I was missing Jake so viciously that rugby became an outlet. I didn't get into fights as a general rule, but tackling seniors that weighed twice as much as me was a satisfying way to vent my anger at Edward.

After that first day none of the guys bothered taking it easy on me. Sometimes we'd all go get food together after a game, and I would be one of them. But even after a practice, when the others were barely dragging their feet to the showers, I was still bouncing off the walls. I took to swimming mile-long laps in the ocean before bed just so I could get to sleep.

Over the summer I became friendly with a girl who lived about a mile down the road, the sister of one of the boys in the rugby club. Jean was a trifle introverted, but she warmed up quickly enough when faced with my unquellable bone-deep cheerfulness. And of course Alice charmed her easily.

Jean and I spent all the warm weather cliff-diving and swimming at the public beach near her house. We could have swum on my family's private waterfront property, but I liked people-watching. Jean was a good swimmer, and she laughed as easily as she breathed once the shyness had been overcome. Once I met her I began to think I might not be miserable in St. John's. We had sleepovers at each other's houses. I worried about bringing her to the Cullen establishment, but the Cullens had gotten enough practice in the years when Bella was still human that nobody thought anything of it but me. She adored Esme's cooking and my gigantic book collection. I suspected she had a crush on Jasper, but the only ones who would have known that were Edward and Jasper himself, and they both tended to make themselves scarce when we had girl nights. And if Alice knew anything about it, it didn't change the way she behaved toward Jean. Even Rosalie made an effort not to be snide.

My father didn't, of course. He couldn't have stopped acting superior if his life depended on it. And Bella was terminally bad at interacting with humans; she hadn't really built those skills in life, and now that she spent twenty-seven hours a day with Edward, she had less than a kitten's chance on a racetrack of developing a sense of empathy.

But Jean didn't notice or mind, and I relished her friendship. When she came over Esme would cook us up a feast, complete with elaborate cupcakes and popcorn, and Jean and I would settle on the enormous suede couch in the den to watch movies. Alice, being only a pretend year older than us, often joined the festivities. If it was an especially good movie, so would Rosalie and Esme. Bella never did, though. Having fun wasn't really her thing.