Post BD one-shot
I sat on the cliff with my legs hanging over the edge. I wasn't afraid of falling. I could jump; free fall the one thousand feet to the bottom of the ravine and even land on my head and be absolutely fine. I know this to be a fact because Emmett tried it once. Rose was so angry with him. You could hear her screaming for miles. Just when I thought that she had exhausted her anger she turned on Jacob and me because we were the ones that dared him to try it. What was the fun in being immortal if you didn't have a little fun with it sometimes?
I can hear his light footsteps and I catch his scent behind me long before he reaches me. He will always smell like sunshine to me. I smile as he sits down and wraps his arms around me. Tomorrow we will celebrate our wedding anniversary, our 500th to be exact. I sigh and he tightens his grip around me. He doesn't have to be able to read my mind to know what I am thinking about right now. We have been together long enough that he knows. I miss my father. It was really hard on me when he died and I had to attend the funeral from the security of the forest. It was a sunny day and there was no way that I would be able to attend, even if I didn't still look like a nineteen-year-old when I was supposed to be nearly forty.
We buried my mother ten years after that. It was another funeral that I was not able to attend. This time it was because my mother and stepfather thought I was dead. After Dad died, we all thought it was best if I drop out of my mother's life. We weren't particularly close anymore, anyhow. It wasn't that difficult for me. I could still keep an eye on her through Alice and her visions. Where Dad had a quick death, he had a heart attack while fishing with Billy, Mom suffered through breast cancer. I did slip into her room one night towards the end. Edward and Alice were with me, making sure that I got in and out undetected. Mom thought that she was dreaming and that was what I had intended. I just needed to tell her that I loved her one last time.
So much has changed in the world since then. Jacob, Renesmee, and I noticed it more than the others at the beginning. Edward said that they had all been through it before. He could remember a world before computers, before television, before everyone had cars, and before airplanes could get you around the world in a matter of hours. Being able to adapt quickly was a mandatory trait to possess in our family. I never gave much thought to the phrase that "nothing stays the same" until I became immortal. For humans everything was constantly evolving and changing. The same was true for us, to an extent, only our bodies were unchanging. My Edward was the same handsome boy that he was the day that I married him, and he always would be.
There were times over the years that we were worried about the future of the world, that we were afraid the humans were going to destroy the forests due to their greed. Without the forests we would not have anywhere to feed. Our non-vegetarian friends had similar concerns. The humans had a knack of coming close to annihilating themselves, forget asteroids and comets falling to earth and destroying everything. Someone was always finding a way to make a weapon that was smaller than the last one that could kill more people.
Technology, cars, and music were always changing and evolving, too. I had a trunk where I kept little things I collected over the years. Ipods, DVD's, books, sheet music. Some of the devices I had still worked and some did not. My real prized possessions were my photo albums. I had discovered that I had a proclivity for photography and started to buy the latest in the state-of-the-art equipment. I had album after album of pictures of my family, nature, and landscapes. I liked taking pictures of new buildings and knowing that I would outlive it. I also never went hunting without my camera. I had a pretty incriminating album of Edward hunting a mountain lion and Emmett a grizzly bear. They were Esme's favorites of all my pictures. Mine too.
There were a lot of great times, too. Surprisingly, one of those times was the day that our daughter married Jacob. Renesmee looked so much like her father that she made the most beautiful bride ever. She was the only person I had ever seen that could rival Rosalie's beauty. She was the only person that could be that beautiful and not make evoke Rose's vanity and inherent jealousy. It was after the wedding that was hardest on Edward and me. I had told Renesmee that after the wedding she and Jacob needed to leave us for a while and live on their own until they were able to control their thoughts around Edward.
The last thing I needed was for my daughter to become a young widow because one of them had the wrong thought at the wrong time and Edward couldn't control his temper. He still had issues when it came to thoughts and fantasies other men had about the two of us. Not even Emmett and Jasper would be able to hold him back if he caught onto some actual memory of his baby girl having sex. None of us wanted to deal with the inevitable aftermath of it so we bought them a home in Hawaii. It was one place that Edward wouldn't go; too much sun and people, and he still hated being confined during the daytime. They lived there for the first ten years of their marriage before they returned to us. They still didn't live with us. Whenever we moved we always found a home that had a cottage in the woods for them to have their space.
There were a couple of times that Rose and Emmett went on their own, or Alice and Jasper would. We were just getting to be too big of a group to not arouse suspicion from the humans. There were a couple of times that Edward and I took off on our own. There was one memorable decade where Edward and I, along with Renesmee and Jacob, went to South America and stayed with Zafrina's coven. The hunting possibilities were refreshingly different and Renesmee, who was still a child at that point, enjoyed running through the jungle every day. What she didn't especially care for was the fact that we were continuing to homeschool her at this point. She hated that we had to keep her away from humans still, but she was still growing and changing every day. Jasper told her once that one day she'd miss being homeschooled when she was sitting in some boring French lesson, while she was better at speaking the language than the teacher was because she'd already been through high school a hundred times already. She just rolled her eyes at him and stomped off. She had a bit of a temper. If it were possible she would have given Edward and me each a head full of gray hairs.
She still likes to push her boundaries with us. She likes to go to college parties and drink. I guess it was one of the perks of her being able to survive on blood or human food. It's not the fact that she drinks, she can drink most of them under the table, and even drunk she'd be able to take anyone down that tried to hurt her. Besides, she always took Jacob with her. She never went anywhere without him. But we were afraid of what she could accidentally blurt out while drinking. One small comment could cause us a world of trouble.
Carlisle, as the head of the coven, and Edward and I as her parents, forbade her from going anymore. So she started sneaking out of the house with Jacob's help. There was a lot of tension between Edward and me with Jacob until he finally saw it our way. Of course we threatened to take Renesmee and leave with her and he got scared. Of course, he should have known that that would never have actually worked. She would have found a way to contact him and tell him where we were.
Edward nuzzling into my neck brought me out of my thoughts.
"Please tell me that you are packed and ready to go?" He asked me.
"Yep. Alice packed my bag with nothing but the new things she ordered me from that little lingerie shop you love."
"There are definitely times that I love my sister's shopping addiction." He grabbed my face and kissed me.
"Please tell me that it's time to go?" I begged him as I kissed him back.
"It most definitely is." He jumped up and pulled me up and into his arms with ease. We were headed to Isle Esme tonight to recreate our honeymoon. There may have been many changes in the world over that last five hundred years, big and small, good and bad. But one thing has always remained unchanged. And that was the love, desire, and sexual attraction between Edward and me. This was our forever.
A/N:
This was submitted for the Fandom for Colorado Wildfire compilation but they rejected it saying that it wasn't long enough and they have a minimum word count. I could see if I wrote a story with offensive content or Sweetpea123 and I had failed at editing and cleaning it up, but length? Really?I'm not saying that this isn't a short one shot because I know it is but, whatever. I can now see why they have so few people donating. When asking people to volunteer to write be gracious and accept what's offered. Yeah, I'm pissy about it. But there loss is your gain and you get it tonight instead of Halloween.