The night was quiet, the kind of stillness that only existed in Forks, where the trees swallowed the world whole and the mist made everything feel like a dream. You stood with Edward in the clearing he had brought you to — his clearing, where the sun had once revealed him in all his impossible, glittering beauty.

Now, under the silver kiss of the moonlight, he was just Edward. Yours.

He stepped closer, so close you could feel the ghost of his breath against your forehead, even though you knew he didn’t need to breathe. His hand lifted, achingly slow, as if giving you the chance to pull away. You didn’t. You never could. Gently, he brushed a strand of hair from your face, his touch feather-light, reverent.

“I waited a century for you,” he said, voice low, raw.

The words hit you harder than they should have — the weight of a hundred years stitched into a single sentence. A lifetime of nights spent alone, watching decades blur into centuries, convinced he would never find what his family had. That he wasn’t meant for it.

And then you.

You had shattered him in the quietest way. Without even trying, you had undone every careful wall he had built around his heart. You weren’t what he had expected—you were more.

He looked at you now like you were something fragile, sacred. Something he could break if he wasn’t careful.

“You were worth every lonely night,” he whispered, thumb trailing down your jaw, “every empty year.”

You didn’t know how to answer that — how could you? How could you tell him that even in your short, mortal life, you had never felt more real than in the moments when he looked at you like this? Like you were the only thing that had ever mattered.