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For those of you wondering about the possibility of sequels, please read the author's note at the end of this chapter.

EPILOGUE:
PROM
(AN OCCASION)

The doorbell rang at six o'clock sharp. I answered it to find an angel on the front step.

Her eyes were bright, and her smile was dazzling. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders and down her back in soft mahogany waves that made me ache to reach out and touch them. Her dress was something blue and frilly that left her shoulders bare and my mouth dry, and on her feet were some of the highest heels I'd ever seen. For a moment, all I could do was stare.

"Wow," I said when I finally remembered how to speak.

Bella's smile brightened as she stepped inside. "You, too."

I glanced down at myself and laughed.

If Bella was the picture of perfection, I was anything but. Maybe the tuxedo wouldn't have been so bad if I'd been able to wear the whole thing, but the lower part of my right leg was still encased in plaster, making any sort of dress pants an impossibility. Instead, I'd been forced to settle for a pair of black sweatpants with part of one leg cut off. It wasn't exactly elegant, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances.

"Not even close," I told her. "But you—you look absolutely amazing."

My mother chose that moment to emerge from the kitchen. She spent several moments praising Bella's dress and shoes, then turned her eyes to me. "I'm just going to go upstairs to get the camera," she announced, an amused smile touching her lips as she pushed a small plastic box of refrigerated flowers into my hand. I stared down at the corsage, trying to remember how to tie it onto Bella's wrist. Bella smiled softly, sliding the flowers out of my hand and pinning them into her hair.

"You really didn't have to do this," she said as we made our way down the front walk some time later. I didn't know how many pictures my mother had taken, but it had been hard to pull my eyes away from the vision beside me long enough to smile at the camera.

"Have you ever, in all your years of high school, actually gone to prom?" I asked quietly.

"No," she answered.

"Then I had to."

I led Bella toward the driver's side of my car and opened the door for her. It wasn't exactly traditional, the girl driving the guy to prom, but my cast still prevented me from being able to use the pedals. Besides, it seemed kind of fitting for us. As couples went, we were about as nontraditional as you could get.

As we pulled into the school parking lot, I noticed Rosalie's red convertible sitting in its usual spot.

"Looks like Rosalie finally changed her mind," I noted.

We both knew, of course, as had Alice, that Rosalie had been planning to come all along. She had been adamant in her refusal for weeks, but I knew her well enough now to understand that it had all been for show. Rosalie loved any occasion to dress up and be the center of attention. She wasn't likely to miss an opportunity like this one. Still, deep down, part of me wondered if her refusal had had anything to do with me. Having Bella and her cousins come to prom had been my idea, and although the rest of Bella's family had accepted me into their lives, Rosalie still hadn't warmed to me even the slightest bit.

As we stepped through the balloon archway at the door of the gymnasium, I glanced up to see crepe paper streamers hanging down from the ceiling. Twisted pastel garlands were draped along the walls, and every table and chair was adorned with a tissue paper rosette.

Bella smiled. "Is this what I've been missing all these years?" she asked.

"It's part of the package deal," I explained with mock solemnity. "Cheesy décor is a prom tradition."

Stepping away from the ticket table, Bella and I turned toward the center of the gymnasium. A wide gap had formed in the middle of the dance floor. At first I thought no one was dancing at all, but as the people at the edges of the crowd shifted, I realized that everyone was gazing in awe at two dancing couples—Bella's cousins, of course. They were intimidating, perfect in their immaculate tuxedos and designer dresses, and they danced with a flawless grace that this gymnasium had probably never been witness to.

Even if I'd still had two good feet, I'd never have been able to dance like that. I glanced down at my cast apologetically.

"I'd ask you to dance, but . . ."

Bella said nothing. Instead, she took me by the hand and led me toward the middle of the dance floor.

"Um, Bella . . ."

"Edward Masen, you promised me the full prom experience."

"Yeah, but I hadn't figured this part out yet."

Bella just smiled softly and sank into my arms, pulling me into a slow, circling dance that didn't match the rhythm of the music at all. I smiled down at her, trying to focus on where my right foot was as we turned. She laughed and tilted her face up to mine.

"You're thinking too much," she said.

"I'm trying not to step on your feet."

"It's okay. I won't break." And then she lowered her head again to rest her cheek against my shoulder. The moment was perfect—too perfect to let it pass by. I told myself to stop thinking and pushed away everything except the girl in my arms. And for a little while, the rest of the world fell away.

It was some time later when a strange awareness began to brush at the edges of my mind. I glanced up automatically, my eyes drifting toward the edges of the dance floor to find Jacob and Josie Black watching me. I noted with some amusement that Jacob was wearing a dress shirt and a tie, and he looked like a fish out of water. But that was all I noticed about him because it was Josie who caught the rest of my attention.

I froze at the sight of her, shocked into immobility by the memory that rose to the surface. I remembered that dress, remembered the last time I'd seen it, though it had been her mother who'd been wearing it then. It had been their anniversary, and Billy and Sarah had brought the kids over to stay with my mother so they could go out for the evening. It was Sarah's 'special occasion' dress, the fanciest one that she owned. It was strangely disconcerting now, all these years later, to see it on Josie—to realize, in that one moment, just how much she was turning into her mother.

Bella stepped away from me, turning suddenly cold eyes in Josie's direction as she started across the dance floor toward us.

"Hi, you must be Bella."

Bella's eyes darted briefly toward Jacob, who was standing at the edge of the dance floor and trying to look like he belonged there.

"And you must be Josie Black." Her voice wasn't exactly cold, but it wasn't very warm, either. If Josie had missed her glare, she couldn't have missed the tone. She hesitated for just a moment, caught off guard by the coolness of Bella's greeting before remembering herself.

"Would it be alright . . . could I have just a moment with Edward?"

Bella nodded slowly and stepped away. People were starting to look in our direction. I could see the speculation growing in their eyes, the excitement as they began to wonder if a girl fight was about to break out at prom. Best to play it down, to make it seem like nothing was out of the ordinary. I reached down to pull Josie a step closer and did my best to look like I was dancing with her as I swayed from side to side without moving my feet. Unlike Bella, Josie's toes could be broken. She lifted her hands to place them awkwardly on my shoulders.

Dancing with Bella was one thing, but this was strange and uncomfortable, like two adolescents at a middle school dance.

"So, you came to the prom with your brother . . . and not even your own prom."

Josie averted her eyes.

"Yeah, um, Dad paid us twenty bucks to come."

Twenty bucks? What was Billy up to now?

"So that's what it took to get Jake into a tie, huh?" I glanced toward the refreshment table where Jacob was making his way through a tray of cookies. Something was different. He'd grown since the last time I'd seen him. Even from across the room, I could tell.

"And you in a dress. I'm not used to you looking like a girl."

Something darkened in her eyes. Oops.

"You look pretty," I blurted out quickly, trying to cover my slip. It wasn't a lie, even if I had said it to keep her from hitting me. She blushed and looked away. I decided to change the subject.

"Okay, I'll bite. Why did he pay you twenty bucks to come to someone else's prom?"

"He said it was a 'safe' place to talk to you." She shook her head. "I know, it sounds crazy."

Actually it didn't, and I was starting to suspect that I knew what Billy had in mind.

"He wanted us to tell you something. He said he'd get us that master cylinder if we did."

"Okay, so what's the message?"

Josie looked away again, clearly embarrassed. "I know this sounds crazy, but . . ." She paused and took a deep breath. "He wants you to break up with your girlfriend. He told me to say 'please.'"

"Wow."

"Yeah. He's been . . . kind of weird lately. He almost lost it when you got hurt down in Phoenix. He thought . . ." She trailed off, too embarrassed to finish.

"Josie, I got hit by a car. Some drunk driver, probably. They never found the guy."

"I know," she answered, eager to convince me that she believed. "He just . . . he doesn't trust your girlfriend's family, you know?"

"Yeah, I know." We had stopped swaying now. We were just standing in the middle of the dance floor.

"Can you give him a message back for me?" I asked. Josie nodded. "Can you tell him that Bella's family really did save my life? If it hadn't been for them, I wouldn't be here now."

She nodded. "I'll tell him," she promised, but I could see there was something more.

"That's not the whole message, is it?"

She shook her head. "No. He . . . he said to tell you, no, to warn you that"—she lifted her hands from my shoulders to make little quotation marks in the air—"'We'll be watching.'"

I smiled, forcing out a laugh even though there was a chill crawling up my spine.

"I'm sorry." She dropped her hands to the side and took a tiny step back. "I know it sounds ridiculous."

"Yeah. Well, tell him I said, 'thanks,' okay?"

She nodded, her eyes shifting slightly to focus on something just over my shoulder. Bella must be coming back.

I glanced toward the far wall. "You know, that guy over there in the corner's been watching you since you came in. I think his date ditched him. If you wander over in that direction, he might just ask you to dance." I saw Josie glance back toward the other side of the gym and the sophomore I had mentioned, but her eyes didn't linger very long.

"It was nice meeting you," she said instead as Bella appeared at my side.

"You, too," Bella answered, her voice carefully neutral.

"I'll see you around," I told Josie as she turned toward the refreshment table. I nodded in Jacob's direction, then tried not to smile when Josie grabbed him by the elbow and dragged him out the door.

"It seems that she wasn't interested in dancing with Andrew," Bella noted.

"Apparently not." I hadn't really expected her to be. As strange as it made me feel, it looked like the closest thing in the world I had to a little sister had a crush on me. I shook my head to clear it.

"Do you want to go outside?" I asked Bella. She nodded and mumbled something about the smell and getting fresh air.

I led her out through the gym doors, past the couples who had given up watching Bella's cousins and were now dancing on the edges of the dance floor. As we stepped outside, I could see that the light was fading; the sun had stopped hiding behind the clouds and vanished below the western horizon. I thought about what Bella had said once, about how twilight was the easiest time of day, as I led her toward a bench in the shadow of the madrone trees.

"So, how's your first prom?" I asked as I took my place beside her on the seat. She chuckled as she reached up to adjust my tie.

"Well, I've been slow dancing with the handsomest young man in school. I do believe some of the other girls are jealous."

"That's just because their dates are all staring at you," I teased, but then her gaze flickered down toward my cast. Something changed in her eyes, and she looked away. I hooked my finger under her chin and tried to tilt her face back up, but she wouldn't budge.

"Bella. . . ."

She frowned for a moment, finally relenting and lifting her face toward mine.

"It's still my fault," she said softly.

"No, it isn't." I cupped her porcelain cheek in the palm of my hand. "It was mine. You saved me, Bella. Don't forget that part." I rubbed my thumb across the curve of her cheekbone and smiled faintly. "My avenging angel, sweeping in out of the darkness."

"You still could have been killed," she reminded me softly.

"That wasn't part of the plan."

"And this was?" she asked, pulling away from my hand and gesturing toward my leg.

"Not exactly," I admitted.

We hadn't talked about this, not really, but it was something that we would have to talk about some day. I considered my options. Maybe it was best to bring it up now. After all, she could only get so mad at a high school prom. I took a deep breath.

"Bella, I made a conscious decision to let James beat me up. I was trying to stall him, to give you and your family time to get there so that you could take him out before he had a chance to turn the tables and start hunting you."

I saw something flash in her eyes.

"Edward! What were you thinking? What if we hadn't gotten there when we did? He could have killed you! He'd already bitten you. What if Carlisle hadn't thought of sucking the venom back out? It would have been too late."

I shook my head. "Maybe not."

Bella just stared.

"I didn't know if James would kill me, but the moment I decided to trick him into throwing me around that restaurant was the moment that I stopped expecting to make it out of there alive."

"You wanted to die?" I could see the confusion in her eyes, the hurt. I reached out to cover her marble hand with mine. I didn't know how she would take this.

"No, never that. I just wasn't expecting to . . . live."

I saw it then. One kind of horror replaced another in her eyes, and she jerked her hand away.

"Your burns," I told her, explaining even though I could see that she already understood. "Your father being dragged across the prairie. Esme's fall. Emmett being mauled by the bear. I knew how badly I'd be injured, but I knew there was another way for me to survive. It was the only chance I thought I had."

Bella was up now, on her feet so fast that my eyes hadn't been able to register the movement.

"You wanted to become a monster?" she asked. There was something in her voice, some edge that I couldn't seem to identify as either horror or anger.

"No, I just . . . I thought it was the only chance I had."

The fire seemed to go out of her at that, and after a moment she sank back down beside me on the bench. When she spoke again, there was a different edge to her voice. It sounded almost . . . fragile.

"And what about now?" she asked quietly. "Now that it's not your only chance?"

"I don't know," I answered truthfully.

"You don't know?" she asked, the pitch of her voice rising on the last word. I waited until her troubled eyes had settled on mine and reached out to take her hands.

"Bella, I'm not saying that I want it. Honestly, I don't know what I want. I'm seventeen years old. I haven't seen enough of life to know what I want out of it, but I do know that I love you, and that whatever I want my life to be, I want you in it."

I glanced away for a moment before looking back into her eyes.

"Anyway, it doesn't really matter, does it? It seems like the decision has already been taken away from me. Alice has already seen it, hasn't she? In Phoenix, she wasn't surprised that I'd been bitten. She hadn't seen it coming, but it was like . . . she was waiting for it."

"Alice's visions change all the time," Bella reminded me.

"I know, but judging by what she said, they must all end the same way."

"Not all of them," she said after a moment, shaking her head. "I don't want that for you. I don't want you to be cursed to this. I want you to live a normal, happy life, Edward."

"I know," I said again, "but Bella . . . it's something that we're going to have to think about some day."

For a moment, that fire was back in her eyes.

"No, it's not."

"I'm not saying now. I'm not saying next week, or even next year, just 'some day.'"

She studied me for a moment. "Why?" she finally asked.

"Because I'm only human, and it's hard not to be tempted. I mean it when I say that I love you and that I want you in my life, but there's a part of me that keeps thinking that maybe we don't have to settle for just one lifetime together. Maybe we can have forever, instead."

"You can't imagine what you're contemplating, Edward." She slid her hands out from under mine.

"Hey, I'm not contemplating anything now. Right now, I just want to spend the evening with the most beautiful girl in the world." I reached down to brush my fingers against a curl that had settled on her shoulder. It was just as silky as I had imagined—the only part of her that was soft to the touch. "We'll worry about tomorrow when it comes. Tonight, I just want to enjoy taking my girl to the prom."

She studied my face for another moment, then slid a little closer to me on the bench.

"But you're still going to think about it, aren't you?" she asked softly. "Some day . . ."

"Yeah," I said, "but not tonight."

She tilted her head to look up at me in the growing darkness.

"I love you more than everything else in the world combined," she said, reaching up to touch my cheek. "Isn't that enough?"

"Yes, it is enough," I answered, smiling down at her. "Enough for forever."

And then she lifted her face and pressed her cold lips against mine.

. . . . .

And there it is - the end.

I want to start by thanking each and every one of you for your reviews and support. I honestly cannot say that enough. There have been many times when I was stuck with a writer's block and ready to give up on this, and every time, without fail, some new review would appear in my inbox at just the right moment, encouraging me to keep going, reminding me how much fun this universe really is. I've been writing this for you just as much as I've been writing it for me, and I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have.

This has been, without question, the most involved project that I have ever undertaken. I started writing this in January of 2010 without really intending to do anything with it. It was just an idea, a passing thought of "what would Twilight have been like if . . ." that had taken root in my brain, and I started writing just to get it out. When it didn't go away, and when my version of the universe kept growing beyond Twilight, beyond New Moon, I realized that just a couple of chapters wasn't going to do it, so I set out to tackle an entire novel and decided to post it here. And it's been one heck of a ride.

Many years ago, after falling in love with one too many fanfics that just stopped and were never finished, I promised myself that I would never do that to a reader, that I would never start writing a fanfic without knowing that I would finish it, and sadly, that promise is why I have decided not to write the rest of my "Looking Glass" version of the Twilight saga. My life has changed a lot in the past four years, and I no longer have the amount of free time that I need to do justice to Edward and Bella's story. Right now, it's a struggle to find the time to finish one chapter every two months. New Moon has twenty-four chapters and an epilogue. Even if I were able to stick to my two months per chapter schedule, I wouldn't finish that story until around May of 2018. Eclipse's twenty-eight chapters and an epilogue would keep going until March of 2023. And Breaking Dawn . . . well, you get the idea.

Now, before you stop reading, let me finish. Yes, I know what happens in my version of New Moon. Yes, I know what happens in (at least some of) Eclipse. Some of the groundwork for Breaking Dawn has already been laid out in my version of Twilight. In fact, I've even added an epilogue to Breaking Dawn, a chapter that has no corresponding section in the original, simply because my version had a loose end that I couldn't bear to leave dangling.

So I leave the decision to you, my readers. While I'm not going to be able to write these stories chapter by chapter, that doesn't mean they'll stay locked inside my head forever. What I do with them is up to you. I've had a couple of ideas - I could answer any questions you have about the rest of the "Looking Glass" universe in PMs . . . or I could collect all of the questions as a sort of Q and A and post it here as an extra chapter. I've also considered writing short summaries of the changes I'd make to the rest of the books and posting them as extra chapters on this story - one chapter per book. I am, of course, interested in any other suggestions you may have, so drop me a line and let me know what you think. Because I would love to share the rest of this world with you. After all of your time and support, it's the best way I know to show you how much I have appreciated each and every one of you.

Thank you for an amazing four years.

Willa