Sunset: A Twilight Fan-Fiction

What Ifs

        What if soulmates existed?

        What if soulmates and reincarnation existed?

        What if Bella and Edward were always meant to be?

        What if Bella was once a girl in the early 1900s...

        And what if she saw Edward?

        What if she saw him, perchance, from a distance on June 7th, 1918, and thought to herself that this was the man she wanted to spend her life with?

        Perhaps she felt embarrassed by the thought the moment after it popped into her mind. She didn't even know him, true, but from where she was—meters away, sitting on velvet seats in her carriage, as the horses clop, clop, cloped down the busy Illinois street with her driver to show them the way—she thought he looked pretty near to perfect. Perhaps she saw him standing there on the sidewalk, with his red-brown, windswept hair and his beautiful green eyes, and thought he looked like a greek statue of Apollo.

        And maybe she watched him whenever she had the chance after that. At every party she heard he would be attending, maybe she would also sent her RSVP without delay, though she'd never liked even the everyday dresses she had to wear around town, never mind the fancy ones she was forced into when she was to attend a party. She would watch and listen and think he was both unbelievably brave and devilishly, adorably stupid for wanting to join the war so soon in his life. Maybe she would hear him telling his friends that he would enlist on the very day of his eighteenth birthday, and she would be pulled into fantasies where he chose to stay, so he could marry her instead.

        But Bella was shy. She never took a step forward, never did anything to make him notice her, because she was afraid he wouldn't, even with her right under his nose. She'd always known she wasn't very noticeable. Or worse, he would notice her, and know just as well as she had all this time that he was simply too good for her. She didn't think she could take that kind of rejection, and so she simply watched from the sidelines as her beautiful, godlike, daydream-husband talked and danced with other girls, party after party.

        And if all this happened, then she definitely regretted not making her move.

        Because when Mr. Mason went down with the Spanish influenza, she knew there was every chance his son, her Edward, had it too, and she could not imagine a world without him. A world without Edward Anthony Mason was... bleak. Gray. Unbearable. Yes, that was it: too miserable to bear...

        And then, possibly, her nightmare came true, as her daydream-husband went into the hospital. She knew she wouldn't be allowed into the hospital, where the sickness was so thick in the air, but she just had to try. So perhaps she wore the most inconspicuous rag of a dress -- borrowed from her maid -- and snuck into the hospital. Perhaps she found him, a sleeping angel among diseased humans, and perhaps she went to sit beside him, kissed him on the cheek, and whispered to him all the things she had hoped for them, all the happy endings they could have had. Until a doctor with blond hair and skin pale like his patients' found her, and she had to run so that she wouldn't be taken in with the rest of the ill. She knew she wasn't ill; she felt healthy as a horse as she walked home.

        But maybe she was wrong.

        All the same, she might have been at peace with her fate, as she was taken into the hospital, to die, because she'd been looking through a window onto her love for the past three days, and the day before, she'd seen that her Edward was no longer in his bed. She believed he was dead, and found this truth too miserable to bear. So maybe she was happy, or glad in the very least, to not have to spend much more time without him. Not that she'd ever had him to begin with; but without the thought of him, alive and well and beautiful as always, just a short carriage ride away.

        But perhaps, as she started to swim in and out of consciousness every few hours, she began to feel so disappointed. Because now she would never know what Edward's lips would have felt like on her own, never know what it felt like to see him smile that breathtaking, crooked smile for her, never see his love for her in his eyes or feel his hand in hers or his body beside her own.

        But then again, we all know that that wasn't how it would go.

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Hey there!

So I was rereading the series, in particular the part where Edward tells Bella what kind of life they would have had if he'd met her when he was human, and the idea for this story popped into my head on the way to school. I was so excited to write, I just marathon-wrote until I finished. In my mind, it's super romantic, but I don't know if that's how it turned out—Vote and drop me a comment to let me know what you think.

One more thing, for those who fangirl/fanboy over the Mortal Instruments/Shadowhunters series, I have another fanfiction that I've started posting chapters for.  Unlike this one, that one is intended to be full novel-length, so if you want something more substantial to read, this is your calling. It's called Sword of Fire and Gold (A Shadowhunters Fan-fiction) so check it out. 

And if you have no idea who Cassandra Clare is—well, I forgive you. -_-

Vikk <3