#bilight writes

The saga’s timeline length changes from around nearly two years to a solid 6 years. Instead of 3 months, the events of Twilight take around 11. New Moon and Eclipse also take up a year and 2 or 3 months each. The events of Breaking Dawn are massively reimagined, but the major beats (Bella being changed, the wolf pack splitting, the allies gathering, the confrontation with the Volturi) take up the remaining two years.

Bella and her peer group are older, and attending a local college.

Edythe replaces Edward. She’s 20, not 17, and Bella has just turned 19 when they first meet.

Edythe and Bella spend a lot more time as just friends, a bit over half a year, and have only just begun to consider each other as more when shit goes down during baseball.

Esme takes Jasper’s place guarding Bella, but Victoria is sent to intercept them rather than just standing guard. Esme still convinces them to spare Victoria, allowing them to incapacitate her, and the coven still offers to free her in exchange for Bella.

James still refuses, taking her capture as a sign that Victoria’s powers are no longer useful to him, but he also alludes to Alice being his singer, which freaks her out. Before they can find out more, he bites Bella on the wrist.

Panicking, Emmett knocks him down and Edythe grabs Bella. Victoria damages one of James’s arms and his back with Emmett’s help, and Alice traps him beneath a collapsing wall just as a fire breaks out, and they have to abandon the building quickly to get to safety.

After Edythe sucks the venom out, the coven returns to Forks with Victoria. They make peace during a little over a week as she recovers, with Esme’s help. She tries to offer her a place to stay, but Victoria is confused and lost after the death of James and runs away.

She wanders for a bit before visiting Laurent in Alaska, but though it’s a happy reunion, she feels out of place, like she’s intruding on his new life, and soon leaves. She eventually makes her way back to Forks, just in time for prom night.

She isn’t initially there to join the coven - she’s looking for Esme’s guidance in particular, and Esme wants to take her in, and convinces the majority of the coven to agree.

Edythe is 100% against it for fear of Bella’s safety, and Rosalie is not in favor of it either, because it could endanger them. Jasper is neutral. The other four - plus Bella - are in more or less full support of it.

Both Jasper and Victoria lose control with Bella’s papercut, but when Edythe shoves Bella aside and she gets injured by the glass, Edythe momentarily loses control, too. She doesn’t attack like the others, but it’s a very close call. This is why she decides to leave Bella. She does not abandon her in the forest because she’s not a prick.

During New Moon, Laurent goes to check on Bella, but unlike in my original post, he does so because Victoria has asked him as a favor for the sake of Esme, Alice, and to a lesser extent, Edythe. He spooks the pack but no fighting, chasing, or death ensues.

The Denali Coven, therefore, has no reason not to help fight the Newborns. James tries to get Laurent on his side when they arrive, but he refuses to betray Victoria. He joins Seth and Edythe guarding Bella so that both groups have someone who knew James.

Diego manages to escape James. Bree doesn’t know where he is.

During the battle for the Newborns, the lies that James has been telling Riley are revealed by Laurent. Riley abandons him and joins the other newborns. He tries to kill Victoria, but fails. After the battle has been ended and the Volturi arrive, Riley survives along with Bree, but he does not join the Olympic Coven. He is taken in by someone else...

Those are all the non-spoiler changes I've made to the original post that I can think of atm - let me know what you think! I also want to get some of my Breaking Dawn plot straight, so for anyone who’s interested, I might reblog this with the huge overhaul that that requires. Otherwise, thanks for reading!

(written to fit into the Victoria and Bree Cullen au)

here’s how it goes. you’re a quiet kid. polite. bookish. mature for your age. when you introduce yourself with a nod and a “nice to meet you,” adults smile like you’re a performer in a play and notify your parents of what a little grown up you are. your glasses are too big for you. they slide down your nose. when class breaks, nobody wants to play games with you. well, you don’t really like games anyways. you like books, you tell yourself, you like learning, you like things that other kids don’t. you’re hardly a kid at all.

you spend your recesses in the library, or huddled in a corner of the field with books in your lap. you read nonfiction, because you’re hungry, because you yearn to know more, because you’re starved for something new. you read fantasy books, because they’re given to you on holidays, and you couldn’t bear to let it sit in your room with no one to read it. and you grow to like them too. they’re a different kind of nourishing. these kids are like you. smart kids. mature kids. kids that don’t play games at recess.

it doesn’t matter to them. these kids have magic.

I’m so sorry I got this late, anon, and I hope you’re still around because the potential that this ship has destroys me... The tragic past.... the betrayal... the misunderstandings.... the reunion. I would absolutely write a fic if I had the time, just picture it...

The utter resentment Victoria would feel seeing Heidi stand with the vampires that killed their sisters... the faint pulse of grief and anguish and the simmering anger in Heidi's heart, choked down by Chelsea's spell, when she sees Victoria tethered to a man so like those who abused her as a girl...

Their story would diverge from canon before Twilight takes place. It's 1998 and Maria, the Egyptians, and the Romanians conspire in secret to build a newborn army to destroy the Volturi, but they will not be so hasty in their execution as they’d been in the past.

For this, they need vampires who are special, including a tracker, so Maria uses her American resources to find James. No Demetri, but he’ll do. Victoria will be a bonus, an unkillable fighter and spy, but she freezes at the proposal, old griefs and repressed terrors gnawing at her nerves. She urges James to say no. He placates her half-heartedly. But they promise him power, and when that fails to entice him, they offer him a chance to play the ultimate game: hunting the most elite of their kind. He agrees, and drags her and Laurent along with him.

Slowly, they manage to pick off the weakest members, targeting whoever leaves isolation, until a fifth of the members have been disposed of. (Some of the nameless ones we know nothing about, for sake of ease.) This strategy only takes them so far, and soon the groups are forced to face each other head on. They meet in battle. The Volturi have the advantage of powers, but there are rebel recruits with powers too, and their numbers - hidden so carefully using powers, strategy, and stealth, because Maria has learned plenty since her first war - easily quadruple theirs. It’ll be close.

The casualties soar, each Volturi member taking out five or six to every one the rebels fell. Victoria works her way to the frontline, and by happenstance, it's Heidi staring opposite her, still as arrestingly beautiful as she remembers. The fight between the two is all instinct, all feeling, and the anger and hurt in Victoria's heart is intense enough to make her feel sick but not enough to stop her from throwing herself on the brunette's back. She's shaken off easily; the two seem to be at an eternal standstill... until a newborn of abnormally impressive speed and strength manages to rip Chelsea's head from her shoulders, and Heidi... 

Heidi crumples to the ground at Victoria's feet. In perfect harmony, nearly a third of the remaining Volturi stagger to a stop, some losing their heads for their hesitation, but Victoria is frozen, watching. 

A few soft, low, distressed groans rumble in Heidi's throats, as she brings her hands to her head, as her face shifts from that callous serenity into pained confusion. The redhead just stares at the bent over figure of who was once her sister, disturbed, suspicious, curious and worst of all, worried, as the noises fade into whimpers, before stopping altogether.

And then all at once her expression folds into a great, gaping grimace, and from her throat tears a gross, broken wail. It’s a cry like an infant’s, a plea for relief offered with no understanding of why or from what. Around the battlefield, the few others who survived being freed from Chelsea form a chorus. The fighting starts to slow, as members of either side use the distraction as an opportunity to escape the carnage and coalesce with their fellow soldiers on their own territory.

Someone grabs Victoria’s arm - she hisses, eyes wide, nobody touches her, how - and she looks up at Laurent - the terror drains, her body has never flinched away from Laurent, he’s safe -

“Come on, Tigress,” he snaps, neither smooth like silk nor warm like summer and she hesitates. He growls and pulls and he runs, and she is dragged behind him, almost floating, and she only turns around just in time to see Heidi’s wide, black eyes lock on her, igniting with a fury so hot it singes her from a hundred yards away.

“What was that?” she demands in a hush, when they get back to the others, when she crosses over to Maria and bends down low and bends close at the side of her chair.

“You know Chelsea could control bonds,” Maria huffs, not impatient but not gentle either. “Killing her has the side effect of weakening the enemy forces. Quicker, than we had hoped, too.”

“The screaming, Maria,” Victoria pushes.

Maria scowls. “I heard it, too, Victoria! What do you want from me?”

“What exactly have her powers been doing to them all this time?”

Maria’s eyes flutter shut, before she sighs, a performance, but an earnest one, and beautiful, too. “We don’t know. But we are doing all that we can in retaliation, now.” She pauses. “I am sorry, about James. He was... He was not a man I liked to work with, but he had his strengths. And I know he meant something to you.”

Victoria stops, for a moment. She looks around at the others gathering there, few of them familiar, only one of them known. Softly, she thanks Maria and leaves her to plan. She hadn’t even realized that James was dead. She goes to Laurent’s side, and they sit on the forest floor, leaning against one another.

“I know he meant a lot to you,” he says, and she doesn’t reply. “I know you never wanted to get involved in the first place. If you leave now -”

She shakes her head. “I need to see this through,” and when he looks at her, she shrugs, “it’s what he would have wanted?”

He looks away, shrugging in that way of his, and she thinks he knows that she isn’t feeling anything she should. Maybe if she wasn’t at war already. Maybe if he had died some other way, at someone else’s hand, someone who wasn’t trying to kill her, too. For centuries, she’d felt tied to the world by him. Her hips by his jealousy, her throat by his teeth. Her eyes by the time he tried to kill her and her feet by his failure.

Something else is pulling her through now, though, and not by a puppet string, or a leash. A hand, Laurent’s hand, on her arm, and the sound of the most beautiful mouth in the world stretched open in a broken scream.

Miles away, in a shallow cave, that same mouth is smeared with the scent of human blood. The pain had hit first, then the anger, then love, but after that when the hunger had crushed her in its embrace, smothered in the name of duty to a coven that had abducted her from herself, there had been little room for anything else. But now, sated, resting, her mind conjures a face, and a word comes to her lips, unbidden.

“Sister...” she gasps. It’s what Hilda had called them, but it doesn’t feel right.

“Victoria,” she tries again. Better.

A different face slithers into her head.

“Foul creature...” She stands up. “Disgusting tyrant!”

The image of Aro smiles back at her in her mind’s eye, unaffected by her words, distantly amused at best. But she has known him, and his cronies, and his wives. She has memories upon memories of a woman like her who bowed to his every whim for four hundred years, and she has a girl that she loves and the army accompanying her to listen, and now... she has a voice. 

“I’m coming, Victoria... I’m coming, rat king,” she sneers, and disappears into the black, red stare flashing.

She will raise that voice to a riot and rip him to shreds.

...

So... yeah. They’re lowkey probably my second favorite Victoria ship.

Yall are just!!!! Feeding me!!!! I am so so here for this like you have no idea

5. Edward has the exact same coloring as her sister before they were both changed - Auburn hair and golden eyes. Her sister's are described as brown, I think, but I hc them as a light golden brown. So in my head, when Victoria sees him, the similarity is jarring. If you replace Edward with Edythe in the original saga, I think Victoria is even sooner to let him kill her (because that is how the fight has read to me since we learned Victoria actively suppressed her power (of survival!) during the fight). I think she'd keep seeing her sister as they fought, and when she killed her, the survivor's guilt might finally be eased by the image of Edythe walking away, because it'd look/feel like Anne was walking away and surviving while Victoria died. :(

4. I see her as having a very isolating childhood. Smeyer makes a point of saying that of the two sisters, Anne was the beauty. Their mother was a single parent and their father is implied to be the master of the house that she served at, so the whole family was probably ostracized. But I imagine Victoria, w/ her witchy features (orange hair and green eyes) and initially wilder personality, getting the worst of it. Sort of like Anne of Green Gables, but with less access to education, and a prettier older sister who was treated better (though not always well).

3. Victoria doesn't really know how to read. She was never taught as a human, and as part of Hilda's coven, they'd all still been adjusting to having a family at all, and hadn't had time to teach or learn anything more from each other yet when they were taken from her. Then, isolating herself for two centuries, she didn't need to. After James hunted and recruited her, he always responded to any expression of interest in the ability with derision, so she dropped it. She's picked up on certain things - it has been four centuries, after all. But only small things, mostly some parts of words common to street and shop signs. After she transforms Riley and the newborns, this becomes a real weakness. She can't understand if they write notes to each other - the real reason Riley is as powerful as he is is because he can make sure the newborns aren't using written messages to defy her.

2. Her ability to feel what she needs to do to survive is the vampiric manifestation of the coping/survival mechanisms resulting from PTSD caused by the abuse she and her sister when through.

1. Victoria's power to survive has more potential than she ever knew - it could've grown to be very powerful - and also had more of a grip on her than we saw. When her life is directly in danger, the pull feels like a yank on her brain and muscles - she hardly has to do anything to evade attacks. When her life is not in direct danger, it's like an unseen force is lightly touching her nerves - less of a pull, more of a gentle nudge. This is the force that disappears when her sister and coven dies, and reappears with James. She joins him because it "feels right". When he dies, it disappears again. The reason the nudge existed with Anne and again with James, is because the power to survive doesn't just move her to protect herself, it also moves her to protect the part of her life that she values, cherishes, loves - whatever makes her survival matter. Because protecting the reason she wants to live, keeps her alive as well.

The nudge that existed with Anne, was one that told her to keep Anne, and then all of Hilda's coven, alive. But there was no way to save her sisters once the Volturi arrived to claim Heidi, so it was either herself or nothing, so her body was yanked into running even as she yelled for her sisters to run. Once the last of her coven was killed, there was no one else she loved, and she had no real love for life, so the "nudge" went away completely.

The "nudge" that James inspired was because the possibility of him being the death of her was Never off the table, so her powers nudged her to keep him happy. She'd get random nudges to run away sometimes, but only for split seconds before he was paying attention again and the urge to stay resumed.

When he dies, the nudge disappears, because nothing has changed since her coven died. She still doesn't care enough about anything to have a purpose. So she cobbles together her own purpose - revenge, because that's what you do when you love someone, isn't it, and she needs something to break the silence. But it doesn't fix the problem, and eventually she doesn't want to go on. So, knowing how to survive and knowing what that means, she goes through the fight defying her power, avoiding its use, cursing Edward for taking away James because that was the only reason she could find to keep going.