Running Backwards

Prologue – Renesmee – Looking Back.

I remember my life so clearly before. So sweet, so full of light and laughter. I was born at the new dawn of my family; my existence solving almost all of their problems and pulling them out of their own personal dark age. I was loved. I was beautiful. I was happy.

Then it all went wrong. Of course it did. Just because I had never known pain to be a part of my life didn't mean it couldn't happen. Everyone in my life had felt pain, before my time. How could I have not seen it coming? Because at the end of the day, you can only be so happy without someone trying to steal it all, only be so happy with out jealousy and treachery to plunge you into the darkness of a total eclipse.

It all came down to jealousy in the end. The jealousy of one, extremely powerful, man. Aro had it all; he was king of his very own world. But Carlisle Cullen, my father for all intents and purposes, was the one who walked away; who turned his back on Aro's world and went to make one all of his own. His own little patch of heaven.

It should have been obvious that Aro would become jealouse. Of course he was. We had it all. First there was Carlisle, then he found a friend and a son in saving a dying 17 year old boy named Edward Anthony Masen. He gave Edward a new life and gained a family. Next Carlisle found love in Esme Platt Evenson and made her his wife almost instantly.

Soon Carlisle was on a roll. He stumbled across the beautiful Rosalie Hale, who had been engaged to be married at 18 and had been beaten and left for dead by her fiancé a week before the wedding. Such beauty in such darkness. The Cullen clan was now at even numbers.

It wasn't long before his adopted daughter found a new love in a man named Emmett McCarty, who had come out the worse after an encounter with a rather large grizzly bear. Beautiful Rose brought her Emmett home to Carlisle and Emmett McCarty became Emmett Cullen and Rose's husband.

Then the little freak Alice saw that the best place for her and her, extremely war sick, true love Jasper Whitlock was as part of the Cullen Clan, so they turned up and asked what rooms they could have. After a bit of confusion Alice became a Cullen and Jasper a Hale and each was adopted by Carlisle as his own.

Happy families? Not quite. Edward was still with out love to his family's distress. When they had all but given up on him pulling a Rose and simply coming home with someone he finally met her. She was Isabella "Bella" Marie Swan, she was beautiful and funny and extremely self-concious – hating the spotlight that Edward and the others just loved to put her in. She seemed perfect, one problem: She was human.

It wasn't long until Aro's little army was all over the situation, claming that Bella must either become a vampire or be killed. Not a good prospect. As a result of Edward's stalling the change he and Bella managed to get married and conceived a child.

That's where I come into the picture. My name is Renesmee Carlie Cullen. I'm a half-human half-vampire and my soul mate and absolute love of my life is a werewolf named Jacob Black.

So that's how not long after my 8th birthday I found my self in a large field, in a wedding dress, brandishing a baseball bat at my ball-holding aunt Alice and preparing for the best wedding after-party in the history of forever. I had just married the man of my dreams and now me and the family, his and mine, where going to kick back and play monster baseball. Cool huh?

Because of my rather unusual genetics I had reached full physical maturity at the age of 7 and supposedly mental maturity then too, but there's been some debate on that point. My Jacob had been pressured into holding off the wedding for a whole year by my overprotective family because of the whole "What would the neighbours think" thing. Frankly I don't think it made any difference to the horror in my human grandfather's eyes when we told him that I was a whole 8 years old instead of a little old 7. His face still went beetroot red.

He and all the other humans we knew, and actually liked, had attended the wedding but had all been shooed away at the end so that we all could drop 'the human act' and let our wild sides loose. This meant hitting balls so hard in baseball that it sounded like thunder cracks and running to catch said ball at speeds faster than the average car. Not our cars though – we all love fast cars. That might have something to do with how when we say "I can walk faster than this" we're not over exaggerating.

The rules of baseball are simple enough but when werewolves get involved you just know things are going to get messy. For one, the feel it is only fiar to be in wolf form while playing so they can run as fast as us 'cold ones'. I swear the insults I've heard pass between my two families make me laugh sometimes. 'Mongrel' and 'Leach' spring to mind a lot and 'Dog' and 'Blood Sucker' come up rather a lot too. Of course it's all in good fun. There hasn't been any proper fighting between the Cullens and the Quileute wolf pack since before I was born.

I used to wonder why that was but I learnt, through a lot of listening at doors, that the reason for the peace was because my Jacob was MY Jacob from the moment he first saw me. He imprinted, proving us to be soul-mates, and therefore meaning that the pack wouldn't hurt me or my family for fear of Jacob's revenge and possible suicide.

I remember crying over the lack of freewill in the matter for Jacob's part. I wish I had cried more now, now that I know the full extent of it all. Now I know the whole truth and I've learnt that some secrets really need to be kept. But all that came later, after my sunlit perfect life.

That's my happy place, the baseball game. I can still feel my heels digging into the earth, feel Alice's horrified gaze as I got grass stains on my designer weeding dress, hear my Jacobs laughter as the Black team (now including me) completely and utterly kicked the Cullen team's ass. I can feel the wind rush though my hair as I ran into my Jacob's arms at the end of the game, remember the happy yet awkward silence as I hugged my birth mother goodbye before she went back to her house and me and Jake when back to ours.

My happy place. My only escape. My home in my mind, when I close my eyes to the world and all that went wrong, all that made that day the last of its kind for many, many centuries. When I close my eyes, I'm home again.