AN: Written originally for trascendenza's Vocabular Soup challenge (trascendenza./tag/(challenge)+vocabulary+soup), for the word "progenitor". Fun fact, this was written on March 7, and was my first Twilight fic. (I only now just got around to editing it.)
Disclaimer: Stephenie Meyer knows that this universe is hers and not mine, I hope.
Vintage Lace
He looked... nervous. The thought made me giggle, and Charlie diligently ignored my mercurial mood swing. I knew I should be concentrating on not killing myself in front of all of these people by stepping on the long hem of my dress. Alice and I had... compromised, at least, and I was in flats. But here was the man I'd seen fearlessly and single-handedly rip a revenging vampiress to shreds, looking nervous in the face of one young woman with a high lace collar.
Edward believes he is only a shadow of what he once was, that the boy that he was born had died in a hospital under the watchful eye of Carlisle nearly a century ago. He believed himself some monstrous echo of that doomed progenitor. He's ridiculous. I smiled brightly to myself, trying to focus on him, just as Rosalie had warily cautioned me, rather then the throng of standing people or the blaring, cliche music that announced my entrance from the lane onto the lawn of the Cullen residence.
Edward could think whatever he wanted, though I certainly hoped to break him of it. Someday. And it might take a long time. A very long time-- a luxury I planned to have. But standing on the alter, paler than my dress and stone-still with a set smile, Edward looked every bit the nervous young groom. There were no monsters here. He was a pale boy from a long-gone era, still seeming marked in the darkness under his eyes by the passage of disease, perhaps, but in that moment my one sadness was that Elizabeth Masen was not here to see her son get married.
And then I understood. This was important to Edward because this had always been important to Edward. It was a silky thread back to his human life, his proof that, after all, maybe he wasn't too far gone. He had a bride with a high lace collar and water swimming in her eyes, so maybe, just maybe, he had something like a soul as well.