Epilogue

Aro's POV

We stayed with Rosalie Cullen for a year before I "gently" insisted on moving out. Being in such a rich setting with so many other vampires around reminded me of Volterra and while Rosalie thought her little regime was nothing like ours, I chose to not tell her just how similar they were to the Volturi in the beginning. Trying to govern anything as vast as an entire race of supernatural beings—and she'd gone so far as to include other beings—eventually leads to doing things you never would have believed you would do in an attempt to keep everybody safe if not happy. Aside from my personal ambition, we made it possible for every vampire living now to continue to exist by modeling the behavior necessary for our ultimate survival in a modern world.

But it wasn't my business anymore. I just wanted my life with Charlie. We didn't go far, we just found an apartment in the city away from them. We investigated a few but I already knew I wanted the first one we looked at. It was perfect, simple. As far from my former life as I could get. More like our home in Forks only smaller. The second floor of a little building in a quaint part of town. It had a moderately-sized living room whose windows overlooked the street below. There was a tiny kitchen which the realtor tried to exaggerate a little knowing it would likely be a drawback for most people. The bedroom was plain and comfortable and there was a stand alone claw-foot bathtub that became a shower when you pulled the curtain around it.

But my favorite thing, and I couldn't have explained why, were the smells that rose up from the floor below when the little bakery there made its wares. I knew immediately that it was my new home. I felt like it always had been, like it had been built and was sitting vacant for us, waiting. Bella had a similarly strong reaction to it. She said it was "special" and we shared an odd look, standing across the bedroom from each other, like we were both trying to remember something we'd forgotten. She never came there again after helping us move in, she said it scared her a little bit, like it was haunted.

But it was home to me and we stayed there as long as we thought we could get away with it, buying the building when we left so we could return after enough time had passed.

We moved around like this every ten or fifteen years, staying with Rosalie in between those each time. We tried to avoid the "adventures" that seemed to follow Bella and Jacob around like a curse but couldn't always dodge them completely and sometimes they were fun enough to be worth the trouble. And it was fascinating to be part of a family bound together out of love rather than need or obligation.

Melany called a few years after we settled in Baltimore the first time and said she had been diagnosed with lupus. She became a missing person later that week and was completely content to move into Rosalie's for her transformation. She said that living in a house full of vampires whose grounds were patrolled by mythological lion creatures was, "the best Make-a-Wish ever." She wasn't much of a newborn in terms of ferocity. She sat around alternately reading and interrogating the various members of the house about their lives. Benjamin in particular who I think she would have tried to marry if he were older.

We visited Volterra fifty years after the battle in Forks and found that the castle had actually been torn down. The locals said there was a fire and the only thing left standing was the clock tower in the square, its hands frozen halfway between three o' clock and four. I was surprised to find that I only felt a vague sadness at finding it all gone. Among the rubble I retrieved a few small items I knew were hidden in secret vaults but I left most of it, letting the trap doors shut on my rooms of ancient treasures, sealing away priceless paintings and jewelry and archaic human weaponry. They were tombs now for my first family whose grave was a field in a faraway forest.

We returned to Forks, to our first home together, seventy-two years after we'd left. We met with the current head of the Quileute to explain our presence and our adherence to the terms of the Cullen treaty.

On our hundredth anniversary, we decided to take the honeymoon we'd never had and, with Rosalie and Bella's permission, we took a boat to Isle Esme and spent a decade in the sun, swimming in clear blue waters and making love on white sand beaches and watching the sunset from the highest branches of tropical trees.

It was a life better than any I ever would have imagined for myself and one I would have likely scoffed at before and I was grateful fate was less stupid than I was and kind enough to force this sweet, impossible existence on me.

And secretly, I waited with a black dread for the day Falstaff would return, not just to play his silly tricks on me but with revenge in his heart and the goal of destroying the things I loved. I spoke only to Bella about this and every time we met, we pooled the research which we gathered independently unbeknownst to the others because we knew that the next time, our encounter with him would only end with his death.

Or ours.

END NOTES: Sorry for the delay. Lots happening in the real world place. Because of the rushed posting and scant editing, there were a lot of things which were unclear so I've made a little guide explaining some things that might have been confusing. I am planning a third story but it looks pretty far out into the future just now. I'll probably be editing/posting my Aro/Ness fic next and then trying to focus on More Than You Needed.

Falstaff: I will be getting into his origin story more in the sequel but for now, this is how he works. He also operates on a type of "venom" similar to vampire venom, only purple and with the ability to incapacitate humans and possibly other vampires. I'm trying to decide if his venom would work on all vampires or just Charlie since he was bitten by him as a human and had Falstaff's poison in his during his transformation. Falstaff is able to become a raven, transform into a type of female (enough to gather semen from human males;s when he is a male, the human semen he has collected is mixed with his venom as he has no reproductive abilities himself as either sex.)

Charlie: He has dual powers as a vampire. One is a result of vampire venom. He is able to perceive and interpret other people's emotions and intentions based on his years of learning to do this in life as a cop. His other powers are a result of having Falstaff's poison present at the time of his transformation. He can transform at will into a large white dove. I'm still debating about if he will also share Falstaff's other abilities, possibly a mirror to his poison which allows him to make people stronger for a short time or turn them into birds. That's a little far and will be worked out in the sequel.

Rosalie: Alive, obviously. She heads an organization similar to the Volturi although less far-reaching covering (at the time of the last chapter) only North America. She has a partner, Julian, who she met shortly after arriving in Baltimore. He was already a vampire but not a vegetarian at that time.

When she meets Falstaff, he adopts an appearance which will make her trust him by using his glamor ability and giving himself Emmett's eyes which he "learned" from photographs left at the Cullen's house in Forks. Although she doesn't know it, Leah encountered him multiple times in disguise during which he learned the details of the Forks battle.

Falstaff casts another glamor on Rose to make her see our heroes as members of the Volturi. He chose those specific people for their body types and genders as his glamor only covers physical appearance and not voices or dramatically different physical size and weight. Felix is big like Jacob. Sulpicia and Athena are small females like Bella and Ness. And Marcus is taller than Aro.

Helen: She is a vampire created by Rosalie. She has two daughters (Ariel (15) and Lauren (18)) who she changed after herself to protect them from her abusive husband. Ariel and Lauren have the ability to bind people both physically and verbally. They all must be in fairly close proximity for their powers to operate correctly. it is unknown what would happen to their powers if one of them were killed.

The thing used to burn Charlie is the cautery scalpel already seen in More Than You Needed. Those who have read As You Wish already know the significance of the Baltimore apartment. If you haven't read it, guess you'd better.