All the usual disclaimers apply.

Big super mega thanks to the one and only vjgm, beta supreme. Thank you for talking me into sticking with this fic when I wanted to pull it and throw it away. You are the most awesome!

Dear, dear readers, I know it's been a million years and twelve days since you've heard from this little fic. This last chapter just did not want to come out of my head. I would try and try to only sit and stare at an empty page. I tried leaving it alone for a week, a month and so on. Occasionally a line or two would come to me and I'd jot them down and try to continue from there. It wasn't until the last week or so that inspiration finally hit and I was able to get this last chapter out. This chapter was very important so it had to be just right.

Thank you all for sticking with me and for being more than patient. This has been an amazingly fun fic to write and I enjoyed exploring the characters in this world.

So, without further ado, let's put this little fic to bed, shall we?

~Previously on Bizzaro Twilight…

~CHPOV~

"But you found us all huddled together on in the middle of your bed, under that funky quilt you made using all of our old baby clothes, the squares were all lopsided and different sizes and the damn thing was wider on the bottom than it was at the top and it was possibly the most hideous thing…" Edward pressed the back of her hand to his face, "but, it smelled like you." His crimson eyes flashed to me and they seemed softer than they were when I first saw them, the red seemed warmer, not as dark. "Dad still has it on his bed." He smiled over at me.

"What?" Renee whispered as she turned, staring at me. "You hated that thing."

I shrugged one shoulder. "It was something that was special to you and when I remembered hard enough, it still smells like you."

Renee didn't say anything, her mouth hung open and she just stared at me.

"Charlie, I…" was all I heard before Renee was across the room, flinging herself into my arms, pressing her cool lips to mine.

I couldn't stop myself. I kissed her like I'd wanted to all this time, twelve years of waiting spilled out of me as I pulled her closer to me, wanting to consume as much of her as I could.

Her hands fisted in my hair as her icy tongue slid into my mouth.

"Um….mom, dad…" Emmett said gently. "We are like, right here, right?"

~APOV~

I knew this moment was coming. I'd seen it time and time again and no matter how hard I tried, it couldn't be avoided.

"I just don't understand why," Jasper whispered, causing Renee to break her embrace with Charlie and look at him. "Why were you gone for so long? Why twelve years, why not two or even five?" he asked, finding his voice, the hurt and anger tingeing the next words he directed at Esme and Carlisle. "For that matter, why did we have to be apart at all? We could have gone with you, as a family."

"It was the only way," I answered quietly. "I tried to find another way that might shave a year or two off of the time you all had to be separated from Renee. But every time it would end in disaster."

"Every time? What the hell does that mean?" he asked, trying his best to hide the pain and frustration, but his entire body shook with it and his voice became louder, more frustrated.

I reached up and took his face in my hands. "It means just that," I said softly, soothingly. "This isn't a perfect crystal ball I'm working with here, there's cracks in it, the visions I have are subjective. I see the path a person is on while they're on it, one split second decision could change everything."

"What, like the chaos theory," Jasper snorted sarcastically.

"To an extent, yes. The basic properties of the future are set, for the most part, but split second decisions throughout your life can affect the timeline that brings you to that future or destroy it all together," I explained. "Take the night Esme and Carlisle came to take your mother with them for example, I saw the future that would have been had you come to Alaska as a family," I winced at the memory of it, "it was beyond disastrous, let's just leave it at that, okay?"

Jasper sat back on the couch and I didn't need to tap into Rose's mind reading abilities to know that he was trying to get a handle on all of the information that had just been thrown at him. Jasper was the type of person that needed to process what was going on around him in his head.

We all stood quietly and waited.

"Okay," he finally said after about ten minutes of complete silence, "I guess I should be thankful that we didn't have to wait any longer than we did." Jasper looked over at his mother and truly smiled at her for the first time this evening. "You don't look like you did the last time I saw you, you look like how I always liked to remember you."

Renee smiled bigger than I'd ever seen another person smile before as she looked at all four men. "My boys."

"So we're all good?" Emmett asked. When everyone nodded he slapped his big hands together so hard that the windows rattled. "Okay, now what? Mom bites dad, Alice bites Jasper and we all ride off into the sunset?"

"Not quite," I said, wrinkling my nose and everyone in the room turned their eyes to me.

"Well," I began turning to Jasper, "you and your dad have to go back and pack for a hunting trip." Turning to Charlie, I asked, "You filed the vacation paperwork right?"

"Yep, I got the ball rolling when the boys started acting strange a few weeks back."

"Perfect, make sure you two stop into town, go buy some supplies or something, people need to see that you are getting ready for a trip, talk to a few people and make it known that you are all going away together."

"Can do," Charlie nodded before he stroked Renee's face tenderly, promising to be back to her before she knew it.

Jasper still had a slightly vacant look on his face and he hadn't really said much about everything that had happened in the last few hours. He needed this time alone with his father, to decompress.

~JPOV~

Everything happened so fast.

Dad was there in the house and knew everything, including that mom was still alive. Oh and a vampire, by the way, along with my two brothers, one of which tried to eat me the first time he saw me.

I heard the conversation around me, the memories and how everything was going to be hunky dory now that everyone was in the loop. I even heard the words that came out of my own mouth, asking the question that everyone wanted to. And even though Alice answered, the best she could, it still didn't make sense to me.

Driving down the road with my father, I sat silently, trying to wrap my head around all of it.

"Are you alright son?"

"Yeah," I lied as we pulled into the parking lot of Newton's Olympic Outfitters.

I was confused, excited, pissed, terrified, overwhelmed…everything, but alright.

Walking through the store I absentmindedly put basic hunting needs into the basket I was pushing without even really knowing what I was grabbing. It was like I was on auto pilot.

"Getting ready for your annual trip huh?" I heard a voice behind me ask. I turned to see Mr. Newton, the owner, nodding to my cart full of supplies.

"Excuse me?" I asked, completely lost.

"Your trip, with your dad and your brothers, you all go on one about this time every year, around the anniversary of your mom's…well, you know," he said, smiling uncomfortably.

I hadn't really thought about the date, but he was right. Every year, at about this time, we would all take a few weeks off and go away into the woods. I never put the two together.

"Yep, we're going to Canada this year, get a little change of pace," dad exclaimed, slapping me on the back as he walked up behind me, "do a little huntin', fishin' and what not. See what kind of damage the Swan men can do in the Great White North."

"Well, you boys be careful up there, those bears are no joke," Mr. Newton warned as he wander off to go bother the new customers that just strolled in.

We encountered a few more familiar faces in the store and at the station where dad told everyone we were headed up north on our hunting trip.

All the while, I watched as dad spun the lie, feeling my stomach churn at wondering what else he'd lied about in the last twelve years.

It wasn't until we were pulling up in front of our house that he said something to me.

"Son, if there is anything you want to know…"

"You knew," I said, cutting him off. "Mom was alive this entire time and you knew."

"No I didn't, Jasper. There were no guarantees. Your mother was so sick when they took her in, that they weren't sure if even they could save her. I was in the same boat as you and your brothers, she died for me too."

"No," I said, shaking my head, "you had hope, dad, we didn't."

"You aren't hearing me son. Nothing was set in stone, nothing was certain and as far as I knew, she didn't make it through the transformation," he explained before he scrubbed his hands over his face. "I'll admit, I thought about telling you boys when you were older, but I couldn't bear to see you and your brothers get hurt again. I saw what losing your mother did to you all." He looked down at his hands, fiddling with the simple gold wedding band that he'd never taken off. "I couldn't give you hope because I couldn't stomach the thought of what it would do to you all if it was snatched away," he explained. "Not knowing, was my burden to bear. My penance for making her go through more tests than she wanted to, out of my own selfish need to keep her with me for every second that I could."

All this time, all these years, he thought he was the one being punished for being selfish, when he was the most selfless man I'd ever known. I could feel my heart ache for him, especially now that I knew the whole of it.

The anger and confusion began to subside and I let the elation take over.

My family wasn't broken anymore. We were being stitched back together. Forever.

x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

Dad and I gathered a few things from inside the house before we left.

An old family photo album, the ratty old quilt mom made and anything that pointed to the Cullen's like Edward's journals that mentioned Bella or the forged note about Emmett running off with Rosalie that I'd shoved in a drawer in my room.

Everything else in the house, we left.

We sat in the truck in the gravel driveway and looked out over the sleepy town of Forks.

It would be a long time before we ever came back.

If we ever came back.

"You ready?" Dad asked as he turned to me.

I could count on one hand that amount of times I'd ever left Forks for anything other than our hunting trips and even then we never really went that far.

This was all I knew.

But Alice was all I ever wanted. Ever.

I took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. "Yeah, I'm ready," I nodded with a smile as we rolled through town for what could be the last time.

*~Two Weeks Later~*

I could hear and smell her approach a good minute before she was standing behind me.

Emmett was right, this vampire thing was cool.

"You wanted to speak to me?" Esme asked as she walked into the clearing where I stood.

Last week I saw her exchange with dad, the whispering and what not. The whole thing looked very medieval, but from my understanding, that was the era Esme was turned in, so I guess that made sense.

"What did you do to them?" I asked. "I know you said it was your gift, I'm just not so clear on what that means exactly."

"I'm glad you asked," she replied. There was a twinkle in her eye and a warm smile turned up the corners of her mouth. I got the feeling she didn't get asked this very often.

"I am what they referred to as, a giver. Through my gift I am able to give a part of myself, in this case, a part of my strength, my desire to refrain from the consumption of human blood. It is only a seed, the most miniscule of slivers, and it is up to the recipient to maintain it. You have to want it."

"How did you know you could do this?" I asked, my curiosity piqued.

"When I was turned, in thirteen eighty-nine, I awoke with a calm that the Volturi had never seen before in a newborn. We all assumed this was my gift because I didn't run wild slaughtering any humans I might come in contact with. I thirsted for them, yes, but I couldn't bring myself to harm an innocent," she explained. "The Volturi kept a village outside of their castle and used it as their own personal hunting ground." She looked down at the snow as if she were reliving it all over again. "I couldn't bear to be a part of such a thing, so I abstained, surviving on the blood of animals instead. Aro never understood it. He saw the human village as a herd of cattle. He fed them, clothed them, he even bred them to an extent. It was sick and I hated having to live around it, but at the time I didn't know of any other option because I didn't think there was one. For all I knew, we were the only vampires in the world." There was a hard look on Esme's sweet face that I didn't think was possible for such a soft, loving woman. "And that's the way Aro liked to keep us all, ignorant of the outside world, under his thumb and in his control until we no longer amused him."

Suddenly, her look changed, softened to the warm glow I'd seen in her from the first moment she stepped into the living room of the Cullen home on the outskirts of Forks.

"Then, the most beautiful creature stumbled across the feeding village one sunny afternoon in spring. I was drawn to him like I'd never been drawn to another being in all of my life." She smiled and her eyes twinkled with the memory. "One moment together, one look, and we both felt the pull. I kept him hidden from Aro and the others for a while, kept him human until neither one of us could deny what was destined to happen, that we were created to be together, forever.

"After I bit Carlisle, his rapid transformation frightened me and I had no choice but to turn to Aro. He explained that this only happens between true mates and he hadn't seen the likes of it in quite a long time. Carlisle was given the gift of empathy and he literally felt the villager's pain. The worry and despair in a child whose mother had been taken radiated through him as if it were his own. Desperate to ease his suffering I held him in a cave just outside the village. I hummed and spoke a prayer that I'd heard my mother give to my father when he'd been wounded in battle, a prayer of strength. I bent my forehead to his and felt a part of my being pass out of my body and into his. That is when I discovered my true gift. I was able to give Carlisle the strength to bear human suffering and my ability to refrain from human blood. We tried to live among the Volturi, but neither one of us had the stomach for their lifestyle. Not to mention we both felt that we didn't belong in that place. That we were supposed to be someplace else, as if there was something pulling us, calling to us. And through all of the changes with our girls, your mom and everything, even though it all felt right it always felt like there were pieces missing. That we were not yet complete."

She smiled warmly at me and took my face in her hands.

"And after searching for centuries upon centuries, I can feel that we have all of the pieces. That we are, as a family, complete."

"I understand," I nodded. And I truly did. Now I finally got that every moment was a thread in the blanket of this life. I understood that all of these threads weaved together to make a pattern, a picture, of what this life would be.

My life.

Our lives.

That one or two threads off color, weren't going to spoil the beauty of the final result, it gave it character. But if one thread was missed, the next thread would be in the wrong place and that threw off the entire pattern, distorting and ruining the picture.

If Esme would have discovered her true gift a day sooner, all of this may not have ever happened. I now fully understood the magnitude of waiting the full twelve years before the returned with my mother. That it had to be that length of time and any sooner would have destroyed everything. Granted, Alice said this same thing to me two weeks ago, but my human brain couldn't quite grasp what she meant at the time.

I understood that this, in this moment, was what I was meant to be.

What I was born to be.

"I'm ready," I said, pressing my forehead to Esme's.

There, in the middle of that snow covered Alaskan field, my life as I know it, began.

Chapter End Notes:

As always, thank you SO MUCH for reading! For those that have been on board for the duration, thank you for sticking around and for any new passengers, I hope you enjoyed this little ride on the crazy train!

Reviews are always GREATLY appreciated!! *MWAH*MWAH*MWAH*