So the lion fell in love with the lamb and all that, blah, blah.

I said that to Eddie once when we were sitting on the balcony of our Volterra apartment one day. He'd just looked at me blankly with an eyebrow raised before asking quite seriously whether he was the 'lamb' in this relationship.

Heh.

It might seem unbelievably stupid to anyone looking in, but about a year after Alice and Jasper's wedding, Eddie and I took the four-year-old DB and moved to Italy. After all, we had nothing to fear from the Volturi now, without unleashing the Guard on their pasty, withered asses. It struck me as strange that Marcus and Aro had not replaced Caius in the ruling Triumvirate.

At least it had seemed strange until Eddie told me he caught Aro staring after me, contemplating.

We enrolled DB in school there, and it took me a long time to convince her that she had to actually talk to her teachers instead of just placing her thoughts directly into their minds. She seemed incredibly disappointed, but she still opened her mouth obediently and uttered her first word. Or words.

"But I don't want to!"

"And I don't want to put up with this attitude every morning! But I'm getting it anyway, aren't I?" I hadn't felt really like a mum until that moment.

DB smouldered into silence, only sharing her thoughts with Jack when he came to visit. The little girl insisted on going to bed early that night, and Eddie and I finally managed to get some… alone time for the first time in a year.

I was wired as he slipped my little satin gown off my shoulders and I tugged him closer by his open shirt. It was honestly the longest time I had ever gone dating a guy without the sex, and the first time he touched my naked body, I-

…yeah, like I'm going to tell you that, you perv.

Anyway, it was all fireworks and shooting stars until DB broke the spell by picking the gravy stroke* to bang on our door demanding a glass of water. I'd never really wanted to strangle the child until that moment.

It kind of got worse in the morning when I realised, as evidenced by stained sheets, that I'd scored bloody fingermarks into Eddie's back and left black and blue bruises on his hips.

I was mortified, but Eddie laughed it off, commenting sarcastically that since high school he had always been kind of curious about S&M.

DB, sitting at the table, suddenly asked what S&M was.

The kitchen then got really quiet.

The three of us still went back to Fawkes during the school holidays. We had to, as Chuck, Carl and Esme still lived there, though Emmett and Rosalie had gone off to California in the US of A, and Alice and Jasper had settled somewhere in Tasmania. With the kids, of course. Christmastime was the only time I had ever known the massive Collins's house to be completely packed to the rafters.

Banging around in boxes in his old room, Eddie somehow managed to find a copy of his old yearbook, which he made the mistake of showing to me. I found an early picture of DB's mother, Eddie's ex. She looked amazingly sweet and wholesome in a way I would never look.

I also found a picture of her vampire husband, and whistled.

"God, I can see why she left you."

Eddie scowled, but he affectionately tugged on the end of my plat.

Emlin and Sam eventually married. Around the same time, I asked Jack what he had meant when he had warned me to stay away from Eddie. Jack said matter-of-factly that if I had managed to stay away from Fawkes in the first place, the elders of his tribe would have gotten what they had always wanted.

The hunters slaughtered and the vampires eradicated. My father, Eddie's parents and Jack's pack were continually working on maintaining the teetering truce between the three factions.

Inez didn't leave with her sisters and father when the trio decided to leave the safety of the skinwalkers' reservation to the greenery of the English countryside. Instead she decided to stay and try to rebuild the Fawkes vampire community. The hunter John left with the vampire Verity. The two of them seemed quite enamoured with each other, and I wondered whether I'd started a trend.

And Fawkes was a sanctuary once more.

Eddie had a PhD and Bachelor of Law, but he decided to get himself a part-time job as a mechanic. That gave him the opportunity to still travel and do what he did best, and during the next two years, more vampire hunters than I would have liked tracked through my door at one time or another. He became renowned as a bit nutty, with his vampire girlfriend and demon foundling. It was only later that I realized what he had been doing.

It seemed that DB wasn't quite one-of-a-kind after all. From the information he had picked up, Eddie surmised that DB would age quite normally until the age of twenty-five or thirty, and then stop getting physically older.

It was a relief to realise that there really might be someone out there to spend eternity with DB when she grew up. That she might have a life when the rest of us were gone. After all the little girl had gone through, I could think of no one else who deserved a happy ending more.

It was still off-putting, in a way. DB would eventually look older than me. Eddie, though ageing veeery slowly, would eventually look older than me. Already, Eddie and I had gone from people looking disapprovingly at us with DB and going 'my, you must have started young', to pretty blonde waitresses cracking onto my man and saying 'it's so nice of you to buy your little sisters dinner'.

Although he didn't seem to be bothered by it, I was starting to worry about Eddie's mortality.

If all I had heard was correct, he had a very good chance of living forever, though he would still age, at an extremely decelerated rate. But sooner or later the vampire blood in him would start overwhelming his system, with the possibility of driving him insane. The obvious solution would be to make him a vampire like myself, but...

Would I rather have a man who loved me for a lifetime, or a vampire that would loathe me for all eternity?

The average vampire story wasn't meant to be this complicated.

One day, the three of us were in a bookstore in Sydney when DB immediately pranced over the rack of supernatural novels and snatched up a glossy book with some sort of symbolic image on the cover. While Eddie looked at technical manuals the next aisle over, DB spun around and brandished the book at me.

"You should totally do this!"

I raised an eyebrow. "What, write a book?"

DB pulled a face and puffed a black curl out of her eyes. "No, go into publishing. Yes, write a book!" She rolled her eyes.

The store assistant cast us a strange look, and I motioned for DB to keep her voice down. "What about?" I frowned. "You might have not noticed, but I'm not exactly the scholarly sort, DB."

DB grabbed my hand and pointed at the nameplate on the shelves.

Vampires.

"Write our story." She whispered excitedly. I was thinking of something to say when Eddie came up behind me and draped his arm around my neck, pressing a kiss to my pale cheek.

"What are my two favourite girls doing?" He asked, reaching out to ruffle DB's curls with the other hand. DB giggled, and hid behind the vampire novel.

"Ella's going to write a book." She told him matter-of-factly.

"Really?"

"She's going to write our story." DB showed him the vampire book, and he reached out to take the novel, scanning the back cover.

The shop assistant was still looking over at us suspiciously, and I gave her a small grin and a wave. "I'm not sure that's a good idea." I said around my smile. "The Volturi's whole existence is about keeping the secrecy of people like me. I think they'd probably object to me writing a book about us."

"I think it's a good idea." Eddie said, eyes still on the book.

"Excuse me?"

"Well, what's a better way to hide something than in fiction?" He replied. "No one's about to murder an author because they think they're a vampire."

"Plus you could write from home." DB added.

"Change some names, a few facts..."

"You could even use a nom de plume! And you'll need a snappy title!"

"I'll think about it." I took the vampire book from Eddie's hands and put it back on the shelf.

"Write a book..."

And that's it. My vampire story that I like to think is slightly different to everyone else's.

I changed names. Changed a few facts, and even a few genders.

I won't say The End. 'Cause me and Eddie and DB and all our friends and family are going to keep going on. We won't just stop as soon as you finish reading this. We'll still exist some way. So I'll just say-

To Be Continued.

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Disclaimer: The concept of Twilight belongs to SMeyer and those associated.

AN: For those of you who've read The Reformed Vampire Support Group by Catherine Jinks, you'll recognise a similar ending. If you haven't, I heartily recommend the book, if you don't take your vampires that seriously.

*For those who've never heard that slang before, the gravy stroke is the, ah, final stroke before orgasm. Yes, I'm obscene.

So I won't say The End, only To Be Continued.