THE REMNANTS

Chapter 13: Epilogue

"Off we skip like the most heartless things in the world, which is what children are, but so attractive; and we have an entirely selfish time, and then when we have need of special attention we nobly return for it, confident that we shall be rewarded instead of smacked," J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

.-.-.-.-.

Isabella Cullen

2252

Isabella Cullen wiped the sweat and dirt from her brow and took a swig of water. While her aunts and uncles did not feel the effects of changes in weather, her human mother had genetically endowed her with a much greater sensitivity to heat and cold. She picked up her trowel again and kept digging.

Dr. Peabody kept her busy with her "internship" duties. It was primarily menial labor-digging here, sifting sediments there, writing down measurements as he shouted them or fetching him coffee. Sometimes she received the brunt of his tempers as he shouted his frustrations caused by his latest round of data analysis or she acted as the sounding board for his next batch of theories. She didn't mind it. She was here voluntarily for a "college internship" she had forged to get her into the dig site.

Her aunts and uncles never could answer her questions in a way that fully satisfied her curiosity. She knew Alice kept things from her intentionally, but she couldn't pry her answers from the woman no matter how she pleaded, bribed, and argued.

...

"Did my mom love my dad?" she asked Alice one day, when she was still young. Alice's face fell.

"I don't know," she answered.

"Was I a mistake?" Isabella pressed, hoping she could glean anything at all from Alice's iron-sealed lips. Alice's nose wrinkled as she cocked her short, spiky head to one side and she shook her head.

"You are the best thing that has ever happened to our family. Whatever the circumstances of your birth, good has come from it. I do not know the full story of what happened between your parents, but I do know that I'm thankful that we got you out of it," Alice said and she reached forward to kiss her on the forehead.

Such replies hardly satisfied her curiosity. She never told her family, but she remembered the day Alice found her.

She lay on a pile of blankets on the floor of a light blue room. She nestled in close to what had once been her mother. The familiar heart beat stopped only moments before Isabella took her first breath. When she came gasping into the room, all was still and silent. None of her rooting cries or fearful wails woke her. She slept in silence, her brown eyes glazed over, and her gaunt, nearly skeletal face pale and lifeless.

For days, Isabella fought to survive in anyway she could. The most beautiful sound in the world was Alice's voice when she found her and gathered her tiny, scared, lonely self into her arms in her first experience of warmth and contact. Alice cleaned her, tried everything she could think of to feed her, and gazed at her with such an expression of awe and fondness that Isabella loved Alice most of all from that moment on.

...

Isabella needed to know more.

When the discovery of mass graves in northern Chad came onto the news, she never would have noticed it, if not for the sudden panic and disgust Jasper accidentally spilled into the room. The shared glance between Jasper and Alice told her all the rest she needed to know. She signed herself up for the excavation team the next day.

For six weeks, she dug in the heat and the interminable sands at the old medical facility. She gleaned enough from Dr. Peabody to begin to understand why the Cullens only spoke of Edward's early life and never his life after he left them. There wasn't a lot he left behind that inspired familial pride.

During those hard, busy days, people came and went from the dig site. It took quite a team to excavate so large of a bunker. She got to know a few, but most she barely paid attention too. There were two, however, who caught her notice. She never would have paid any attention to them if it weren't for their obvious fascination with her. These two Chadian workers stopped digging to stare at her whenever she passed by. They were dressed like most of the other workers in a white turban and khaki uniform and they spoke to each other and the other works in the local dialect as they shoveled sand day in and day out. These two shared more than their uniform since they were obviously identical twins. Both were tanned to a rich olive brown with unusually green eyes and they stood taller and broader than all the others.

One day, Isabella sat alone at a table to eat her lunch in the shade of the tents. She noticed two shadows fall upon her feet and she looked up from her sandwich to see the "Chadian brothers" (as she'd come to think of them) standing before her. She didn't fear humans for none could really hurt her, but this pair approached her as if they shared her confidence and something about it was slightly disconcerting. Both stared at her and she felt compelled to shrink and hide from their penetrating gazes.

"Who are you?" one said to her in a stilted English.

"My name is Isabella Cullen. I am one of the archaeology interns here with the University of Boston," she said as she attempted to feign more ease then she felt.

"I am Khalid and this is my brother Kassim," he said and both men nodded to her in greeting.

"Umm, cool. It's great to meet you," she said and tried to hide her nervousness with small talk. "What brings you to work here?"

"We've come to recover the body of our mother so we can return her to her people," Khalid answered. He never took his eyes from her and it made her shift in her seat and drop her own eyes to her sandwich.

She gave him a confused expression when her mind registered his answer. "Your mother? You mean your grandmother?"

"No. Our mother."

"But the most recent burial we've found is from at least three quarters of a century ago...," she said.

"We know. The most recent burial, if we are correct, is around the time of your birth," Khalid answered and closely watched her response. She startled at that and grew even more off-kilter.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"You have our mother's eyes and our father's hair," he said with such a surety that she gawked at him. "Our mother had no memories of your birth so you must have been born in the few years after her death. You are seeking your mother the same as we are."

She shook her head and stood to back away from them. Before she could, his hand shot out and touched her exposed wrist. She jumped as images filled her mind that had not been there before. She was about to protest when she was stopped by a face she recognized.

"That's my father!" she exclaimed. She'd seen enough of the Cullen family photographs to recognize that face, even if she'd never seen it in person. Yet the image she saw was not a photograph. It moved and spoke and laughed and carried the distant haze of a memory.

"That is our biological father," he said. "Though not the father who raised us and claimed us as his own."

"Wait-that would make us…," she said. Awe filled her as pieces clicked together and invaded her world with their earth-shattering meaning. That would make them my brothers...

"You are daughter of the Desert Jinni even as we are his sons. We are blood kin," he said, as if reading her revelation on her face.

"But that would mean…wait, you are like me? Our father was a...," she said, her voice growing in excitement.

He nodded.

"Wow! I never thought I'd meet another...I thought I was the only one," she said and she laughed out loud in her wonder and relief. "Not only like me, but actually related to me…I didn't think I had any blood relatives in the world."

They laughed. "There is a village in the mountains a few hours north where you have hundreds of blood relatives."

"Wait-what? Like us?"

They shook their heads. "Not like us, but the descendants of our mother. She bore a son with our adopted father before our births and his descendants have grown and are enough to fill multiple villages."

She sank down in her chair and took a sip from her water bottle. "No way," she whispered. "Why didn't Alice tell me?"

...

The half moon overhead gave just enough light to reflect off the towering rock formations on either side of their camp. The campfire burned with a rosy glow as a tea kettle simmered. A woman brought her a cup of sweetened, steaming tea and a serving of dates and disappeared again. Isabella kept her eyes closed so she could see it all without distraction. Kassim, the far quieter brother, held onto her hand and shared his stories with her. As if they were here own memories, he shared generations of family stories. He showed her their long travels from Morocco through the Arab peninsula and back again. he showed the laughing man with dark hair and caramel-colored skin that was her half-brother and the father of each succeeding generation he told her about. He showed her the memories of their people-the camel races, the boyhood bird hunts, the festivals and weddings. Then the image shifted to that of a woman with deep brown eyes so very much like her own except they were framed by long, brown hair filled with silver jewelry. In the memory, the woman sang songs in Arabic and cradled a small boy in her arms. This image was painted with so much adoration and wistful longing that tears pricked her eyes.

"That is our mother," Kassim whispered. "That memory came from Dawlah."

"I have no living memory of mine," she said sadly. She let her own memory come to her mind and he read it from her and nodded.

"You can share ours," he said. "We can show you our father's songs and our mother's stories. You will not find those digging in the sands at Barzakh. Our mother, before she died, shared all the best parts of both herself and our father so we could keep those memories with us forever, though both are now gone."

Her eyes lit with longing. "Show me. I want to know everything," she said and she grasped both his hands so he could paint his pictures for her.

"I will show you. After, you will tell us what you know of our father and his people."

She nodded. In her mind, she thought through everything she wanted them to know about her family she loved so much.

"I will."

...

Dr. Peabody cursed and swore and flew into a temper like she'd never seen before.

"Dr. Peabody, what is the matter?" she asked him, a little hesitantly.

"She's gone! That's the matter!" he shouted.

"Who is?" Isabella asked.

"The Toubou woman. Her body was in for analysis last night and when we arrived this morning, she was bloody gone! We've checked every camera we can think of and we can't find out what happened!" he said and cursed again. He ran his hands through his mussed hair and his face looked even more haggard than usual.

"I'm sure she'll turn up," Isabella said tritely. They did it. They brought her home to where she belongs, she thought to herself. Inwardly, she grinned.

oooo

Jasper Whitlock

2243

One day, over sixty years after she brought home Isabella and news of Edward's death, Jasper finally asked Alice what really happened. She told him. It was cathartic, in a way, to no longer keep the secret entirely to herself. He could feel the relief pour through her as if allowing a dam to burst and the water to finally run free through channels unobstructed by secrets. He had always felt everything she did, but feeling it and knowing the underlying reasons were hardly the same.

"I couldn't do it anymore," she said. "For so long, I'd covered up for him and let him do as he pleased and it never made anything better. The hardest thing I've ever had to do was throwing that match. Jazz, no one should ever have to make that choice."

Her shoulders shook with her sobs as she relived that day, so long before, and so perfectly preserved in her unerring memory for all time.

"Jackass. Even dead, I still had to clean up his messes," she said between sobs. "I couldn't leave that crypt intact like it was. The technology that he developed-it was brilliant, world-changing. Can you imagine what would happen if someone came across it? I didn't need to imagine it. I saw it and, trust me, the whole world is better off now. I got it all. I had to scour that nasty place from top to bottom, but I found all his remaining stores of DNA and tissue, his blueprints and plans, his hard drives and records, and every single piece of machinery or paperwork on the science of human genetic reproduction I could find.

"That place was beyond creepy. I kept feeling like someone was watching me whenever I walked through the halls. I'm telling you, Jazz, my brain isn't broken and it made me paranoid. I don't know how Edward didn't snap sooner. I wished you were there with me more times than I could count."

Jasper shook his head at the thought. He could think of a million places he'd rather be than in a front row seat to his brother's self-destruction. He'd known it couldn't have been pretty, but Edward truly never did anything by halves and when he chose to go to the "dark side," he went all the way in the deep end.

"The only thing I brought with me out of that place was that baby girl," Alice said. "I buried the whole place under as much sand as I could so it couldn't be seen by anyone passing by and we got outta there as quick as we could."

"I wish he was still alive so I could kill him again," Jasper replied, disgust and deep sadness emanating off of him in waves so strong that Alice had to put her hand on his chest to stop him from projecting his emotions.

"If I hadn't already killed him, I would have when I found that woman. There she was left completely helpless on the bedroom floor to give birth to his child all alone while he drank himself into oblivion. I think he'd been out of it for nearly a month. The selfish bastard. He had to have known. I mean, how could he not know he made one of them pregnant? It's kinda hard to miss something like that. Then he just left her there like she was another of his sick experiments…Jasper, I should have killed him decades sooner."

"Maybe," he said. "I don't understand, though. How could he have gotten so far off? The man I knew never woulda done that."

"That man disappeared a long time before, I think," Alice said. Her eyes were downcast and her face was shadowed in a grief that never seemed to grow less poignant, no matter how many years filled the chasm between her and that day.

"But darlin', you said he still had a choice. You saw other options. He didn't have to become that or stay that. He could have done somethin' else. It wasn't so black and white. That's why you held up hope for so long."

"You're right," she said. "And that's what is so frustrating. He reached so many turning points which could have drastically changed his life, if he had only chosen differently. Instead, he let himself be consumed by his obsession and the farther he traveled, the harder it became to go back. Until just a few years before the end when he no longer had another choice."

She sighed and flopped onto her back on their bed and closed her eyes. "All the 'could have's'. There are so many decisions I wish I had the chance to make over again. If I had gone sooner, said something different, could I have fixed it?"

"Regret don't get you nowhere but with your head stuck up your ass, always lookin' at where ya've been instead a where you're goin'," Jasper replied.

Alice laughed. "You are right."

"Besides, it ain't all bad. Look at what Edward's bad decisions left us-that precious girl. I've never seen Rosalie or Esme so happy. They have purpose and joy like they've never had before. Even Carlisle has more joy than he ever had before. Maybe the good parts of Edward are preserved and that poor Swan girl gets another chance at life."

Alice smiled and leaned her head against Jasper's shoulder. "You are right. I just wish Edward and Isabella Swan could have been around to see them. The old Edward, I mean. He would have been overjoyed. The man who actually fathered our girl was not our Edward. The one I found on the floor of that lab-that is a man I would've decapitated before I let him within a hundred miles of our sweet baby."

"Darlin', both were Edward. How is that so different from any of us? You know better than us all how we all make decisions every day and those decisions lead us somewhere and shape us in some way. Like a pebble in the ocean, we get shaped and worn away and made just a lil' different. How am I any different from Edward? I ain't. I was that, once, and I could be that again, if I don't watch myself. There's a side a Jasper capable of great good as surely as there's a side a Jasper as capable of great evil. You could too, in your own very Alice way, cause yer own tornado of chaos for everyone if ya wanted. Like those pebbles, we choose what gets to shape us each day and whether we are goin' to walk in one direction or another. I'll tell ya, my aspirations for self-control are because I don't want to be that Jasper again and I know I could be and I won't ever forget it," he said.

She nodded quietly, lost in thought as she considered his words. He could feel the bittersweet tonic of relief, sadness, regret, and hope dancing through her as she thought. He sent another wave of love and acceptance to her, just to help her a little a long the way. She smiled when she caught it. She turned to lean on her elbows again and he could feel another wave of grief course through her, a grief so deep he didn't think it would ever truly be uprooted-like the stump of a deep-rooted cottonwood tree, the tree was gone but sometimes the stump still got in the way.

"It's just, I knew the part of Edward that was capable of great good and it was so hard to see him become that. I loved him so very much and to see that happen-it felt like I had to see him die twice. I don't think I'll ever stop being sad," she replied.

"You did," Jasper replied. "You watched his heart and soul slowly die first yards and yard before his body and you got every right to feel all shook up about that. You cry if you need to. I've got a shoulder here, just awaitin' for you," he said with a wink. She sat up and threw her arms around him and half-laughed, half-sobbed into his chest.

Oooooooooo

Buffy Slayer

2177

Buffy came home to her London flat and collapsed on her secondhand couch. She pulled her salsa dance shoes off her feet, but not before she practiced her latest steps around the kitchen a few more times. She grinned and opened her cupboard. A jar of noisette-a gift of the Parisian deities, still sat half-full. She only let herself partake after particularly strenuous activities or on special occasions, thus preserving her precious stock for months.

She smothered a generous amount on a biscuit, poured herself some milk (who knew fresh milk was so much better than powdered?) and collapsed onto the couch for a binge-watching marathon of her latest show. Before she took a bite, she lifted her biscuit in her customary solemn salute.

"Here's to you, girl," she said to a large photograph of herself. In it, she stood at the base of the Eiffel Tower holding a hand-drawn sign that read, "Badiyah was here."

Then she took a bite of her chocolaty hazelnutty deliciousness and praised the French again for their gifts to the world. She checked her watch. She still had two hours before Vivian's 30th birthday party extravaganza. She set an alarm, just-in-case (and promised herself she'd heed it, no matter how good her show).

Twenty minutes in, as she sat riveted, she was surprised to hear a knock on her door.

Probably just Billy asking her to take in his mail tomorrow or Sherry wondering if she would come out for a stroll.

She opened the door, looked up into the face of the man towering over her there, and screamed.

Before her stood none other than her creator, or so she thought at first. The man was the same height with the same face, but the longer she stared, the more she questioned her first assumption. For one thing, he stared at her out of a peachy, flushed face, with bright green eyes, and very short auburn hair. For another, he stared at her as if he thought he knew her, but was surprised to see her, and then questioned his own assumption.

A man in a black suit stood beside him, his hand on his arm, and a yellow envelope in his hands.

"Ms. Slayer, I apologize for startling you. I'm Agent Smith. I understand what a shock it is to see your brother-in-law again after he was presumed dead for so long. I am afraid he is suffering from a bad case of amnesia still and can't remember how to speak, let alone anything about his identity. When he came to my office's attention yesterday, we sought to locate his next-of-kin and I'm afraid you are his closest remaining relative. I have all his paperwork for you, here, and I've come to discuss his case with you as we determine the best course of action. May we come in?

Buffy nearly choked out her response. "Come on in," she said and invited them both to sit on the couch. She tried to hide the empty chips bag under the couch as she sat and she brushed crumbs off the cushion as covertly as she could.

She couldn't take her eyes from the man. He was thin, too thin, and his stumbling steps had the clumsy air of being out-of-practice. Still, it was the vivid eyes that threw her completely for a loop. Had Edward gone mad, stopped drinking blood, and turned into this? Or maybe taken up drinking grass instead?

"Before we begin, I suggest you read this. Mr. Swan here carried this letter on his person when we found him. It is addressed to you," the suited man said as he handed her the letter. She opened it and there in a cursive script that would have been elegant (if it didn't look like it had been written in a bumpy car), were these words:

My Dear Ms. Slayer,

There is no one I can think of so qualified to take on the care and education of Anthony Edward Swan as yourself. The human life of Edward Anthony Masen ended in his 17th year. Anthony, my human replica, will finish the life I was unable to live. As you were given the opportunity to complete a life so tragically cut short, I ask you give him the same opportunity. You have both been gifted a second chance, a second soul, a second life. Make the most of it.

Do not hold my past misdeeds against him. He is innocent of all iniquities except of carrying my cloned human DNA.

Within this envelope you will find all he needs to start his new life. I only pray he proves wiser than myself.

I would ask for your forgiveness, but I know I do not deserve it. The only other gift I can give you is the promise that you will never hear from me again.

Sincerely,

Edward

"That unimaginable bastard," she hissed as she read it. She crumbled it up and threw it on the ground and turned to glare at the intruder. His cheeks flushed with nervousness and he gave her such an oblivious, open expression that he reminded her of a little, lost boy. She couldn't help but shake her head and let her anger drip off her face (for the moment).

"Thank you, Mr. Smith. I'll take that envelope now," she said with a sigh.

Ooooooo

Darling

2375

A woman, pale as moonlight and twice as lovely, crept into the long deserted remnants of Barzakh. With a small half smile on her face, she ran her graceful fingers along each crumbling wall and her bare feet lightly danced over the collapsed walls. Her laughter echoed through the long forgotten hallways that now housed only wild creatures.

She was home.

She had waited-so long and patient. She had prepared and watched. Now her life's work could begin.

It took time to dig out a new cavern, even deeper, even stronger, even more impermeable than the former. It took much less time to import her equipment. She had prepared for centuries and as soon as the cavern was prepared, the rest fell into piece like perfectly carved puzzle pieces.

She pulled out the ancient box filled with all her creator's even more ancient plans and set to work. Despite the dullness of her human memories, this was muscle memory to her- as instinctual as walking. She knew what to do.

When she first saw the dull, dim green eyes blinking in the light of the overhead cavern lamps, she closed her eyes and inhaled. That scent-so unique to him, so strong and magnetic, it drew her in like a moth to flame. She grinned the gleaming, venomous grin of the predator and drew her tongue along his now air-filled chest.

"Hello, Edward. Have you missed me?" she whispered in his ear. His green eyes, not yet shuttered with eyelashes and brows, blinked and sought the source of the sound. She moved into his line of vision so she could stare into his face with her own golden eyes-the eyes which would so soon turn blood red.

"It's just you and me now, forever," she hissed as both a promise and a threat. Even if she chose to turn one, or more, of her new creations, her capacity to clone the blood of her human genetic counterpart meant that, even as a vampire, Edward would be hers. He would follow her to the ends of the earth and back and he could not live without her. She was his sun and moon, his earth and sky. From now on, each newly birthed manifestation of her creator was now hers to do with as she pleased.

She threw back her head at the rush of power she felt. The movement sent a cascade of mahogany curls rippling down her flawless back and her bell-like laugh echoed off the inescapable walls of her Temple.

~The End~

ooooo

Thus finishes (or begins?) our dark, dark tale. Thank you for joining me on this unexpected journey. It's been a privilege to share this journey with you and have you along to give comments, critiques, and thoughts. Please feel free to continue sharing, even long after this has been posted and grown cobwebs.

For those of you who were curious-Edward's final "goal" he worked towards was the sharing of his technology for organ cloning. No, Alice didn't get it all. He set up a safe-deposit box for Anthony Swan to inherit a decade after his "birth". ;)

Why was Isabella able to have children? If we follow Haldene's rule (as most mammalian hybrids do), some of the females can be fertile even if all the males are sterile (as in the cases of mules, zonkeys, ligers, etc.). By this logic, should could have potentially mated with either a human or a vampire. What do you think she did? ;) Did her brothers have families? I'll let you figure that part out too.

A final note:

There are stories of vampire/human offspring from around the world (which the entire Twi-verse vampire population is ignorant of, despite their extensive life-spans and education so it's rather baffling how surprised they were by Renesmee's existence)(see dhampir for eastern European examples). Only in some cases of the global mythology is maternal mortality part of the tale (and in those cases it's a convenient explanation for why a mother died in childbirth).

I am totally over analyzing this, but it doesn't make sense for a one-to-one childbirth/maternal death rate in vampire/human offspring. If the hybrid can adapt enough to have a protective/vampiric amniotic sac, figure out how to extract blood from the stomach (as opposed to through the blood stream), and so greatly enhance the rate of gestation, they should also have developed more efficient methods of maternal recovery from childbirth.

I know, I know. In the Meyer world, Bella had to nearly die in childbirth in order for Edward to no longer waffle about turning her. It made for a much more dramatic, hold-your-breath kind of moment to wait to see what would happen and have it all epic-like. However, barring dropped cups of blood, vampires who don't know their own mythology, and solo childbirth in the Amazon, I have to think it should be possible to survive it, otherwise it's a genetic fail of a reproductive strategy and should not be possible to reproduce.

Looking at the non-human world, all creatures who have matriphagy or gerontophagy (the babies eat the mother), they produce much greater numbers of offspring as to make it biologically adaptive in some way or another. Based on that, I think there are ways where the human mothers should be able to survive. Here's my (rather graphic) theory:

a.) the amniotic sac/placenta contains vampiric properties which would supernaturally heal the mother if consumed after childbirth. This is actually pretty normal in the majority of the mammalian population, along with much of the human world already (but none of the poor women in the Twi-verse stories had anyone around who knew that or it was too late already). (Or, you know, stitches...cause women have C-sections and survive them all the time. If pregnant women can survive stab wounds and C-sections, there should be some that can survive this.)

b.) Some of the biological adaptations of the hybrids are there to help them survive in extreme circumstances (such as what Isabella's mother under went). Without access to nutrition and appropriate social support (i.e. the fathers ditched them and they were disowned by their families...such as the poor Twi-verse examples), the survival mechanisms kick in to make sure the kid lives. Hence-matriphagy/gerontophagy (the mother gives her body to feed her children). In some of the spiders that do this, it's only in extreme circumstances when they don't have another choice. (Yes...I'm learning a lot by homeschooling a kindergartner this month. Who knew?)

Then again, in the Meyer world, male vampires can reproduce and female vampires can't because of "capacity to change" and that also seems pretty illogical. Oh well. We still read it and enjoy it...or else we wouldn't be here reading this now! :)