Disclaimer: I don't own the characters from Tuck Everlasting. I do, however, own the plotline that my brain has invented for them here, and any OC's I needed to introduce to move the plot along.

Notes: Although I've made quite a few changes, this is based mostly off of the movieverse, where Winnie was around 15 when she met the Tucks, and where her gravestone read "Winifred Foster Jackson 1899-1999 Dear Wife Dear Mother". This is because I don't really think a ten year old girl would have bonded so intensely with a 17 year old boy, and I certainly don't think they'd have fallen in love. I'm using the headstone dates to develop a rough chronology of what Winnie was up to during this time, but be warned that the years might not match up exactly to the ages I intended. It won't hurt the plot though, so long as you aren't too nitpicky ). The dual timelines won't exactly match in the beginning, either. This is because Jesse's interacting with major world events, while Winnie's timeline is more focused on her life, since women were kept in the home for the majority of the 20th century and men, well, weren't. Oh, and the prologue is the only section that will be written from a 1st person perspective. Two more things and I'm done: I really suck at updating regularly, so please don't ester me about that. This is my first Tuck Everlasting fic, so bear with me. Reviews would be appreciated. …Which should just about cover every major point I wanted to make before beginning. That being said, here goes nothing.

Prologue – Date unclear

All around the world, Indian summers are viewed as something magical, something extraordinary. For a week or two during the frigid chill of late autumn, summer returns in all its glory, warming the world and giving us hope that the warmth will return, and it is this hope we take into the frozen winter, this hope that sustains us through the seemingly endless cold and damp. Considering that, it's no wonder that Indian summers are hailed around the world as a time of uncanny happenings, a time when strange things can happen and seem logical.

I didn't meet the Tucks during Indian summer, however; I met them when summer was in full bloom, enchanting the world with its warmth and beauty. They enchanted me with the way they went about life, never rushing, always taking their time to do things properly. It seemed to me at the time that Time didn't exist for them, which, as I later found out, was all too true. But on one of those magical nights, after Jesse and I had finished dancing beneath the stars and collapsed, laughing, to gaze into the fire; one night after I had learned their secret, he told me the last detail of their transformation: they had found the spring of immortality during an Indian summer.

Now, I don't presume to suggest that it was the weather that had any effect on what would happen to the Tucks, but I do know that Indian summers are a time for unusual happenings. I, myself, have lived through enough of them to know that claims of strange, almost eerie happenings during Indian summers aren't entirely unfounded, although the connections may be tenuous at best and damn near impossible to prove. Yet, eerie and strange though they may be, they are undoubtedly enchanted times. There are numerous incredible, awe-inspiring things I have lived through during Indian summers. But I won't delve into those just yet, for I'd hate to ruin the tale I have in store for you. Let us just say that the magic of Indian summers has had a profound effect on my fate and destiny, and I would warn you not to underestimate it.

Besides, you never know what magic there is to be found on a given day, and surely the wisdom of legend of myriad cultures around the world is not to be discredited so easily.

After all, nearly every culture tells a tale of a fountain of youth, and one fateful summer, I met a family who had found it. The Tucks changed my life forever, and, I'd like to think, for better. There are no doubts in my mind that my life was improved by my short interaction with them during my fifteenth year, and were I to be given the opportunity to change anything in my life, I would choose only to extend the time that I spent with them. They taught me many lessons that I would never have otherwise learned: lessons about life, and love, and what it means to truly live and love. Of course, it would be many years before I fully understood the depth of those lessons…