Story [Edward Scissorhands] Dragons Live Forever -- Edward, OC , Updated 8/30/08 * Complete *

Summary: Years have passed, Kim's little granddaughter is grown, and she thinks she's finally found a way to save the "fairy tale man" from his lonely retreat. When she finds Edward, however, she discovers that she's in a different fairy tale than she expected.

Author's Note: This is actually a completed story, so no worries about abandonment. I'm just posting it in chunks for ease of reading.

Author's Other Note: The story genre is meant to be more or less what the original film was . . . whatever you consider that.

---

I had a reason for driving up the ruined access road to the crumbling mansion on the hill. Nobody ever goes up there without one. My reason had to do with a book, or that's what I told myself at the time.

The real reason had more to do with a memorial card which had stayed stuffed in my purse's credit card holder through Cairo and Paris and Bogotá and New York, plus half a dozen other places that I could only keep straight by carefully organizing my notes and photographs. I'd actually never liked anything about that memorial card, but in almost two years I'd never thrown it away. Sometimes, I could feel it "looking at me" from its grave at the bottom of my purse, and even though I'd buried it, its gaze was always kind.

I could feel those memorial-card eyes on me as I slowly edged along what might once have been a driveway. It was a cement and turf obstacle course now, and I cringed inside every time I heard the underside of my rental car scrape and drag across a slab of up-tilted concrete.

I was going anyway. I was trashing my rental car anyway because of a book and a memorial card with kind eyes that could look through anything.

I told myself I wasn't crazy.

People tell themselves the stupidest things sometimes.

Eventually, the "driveway" became impassable, and I stopped. I looked around at the dense evergreen thicket that nearly made a tunnel over my car, and then up at the decaying mansion that now towered overhead. The great black building reminded me of a rotted skull with its eyes fallen in and its jaw left gaping open. It had been considered haunted for as long as I could remember, but now it was starting to look bad even as a hideout for a ghost--or a monster.

I did not get out of the car.

The air inside began to cool and the engine ticked in the winter cold. Uncommon cold, given how deep in the South I was. But then, the nearby town where I'd grown up was slightly famous for its uncommon cold, and its amazing, occasional flurries of snow.

Thoughts of the soft, beautiful snow of my childhood reminded me of the reason why I?d come, and I carefully dug through the mound of pads, pens, film canisters, and "traveler's necessities" in my purse until I found the card holder. I held the battered leather-bound rectangle in my hands for a long moment, feeling the weight of the sacredness inside. Like all things that hold magic, the memorial card only held its power if it was looked at infrequently, and during times of greatest need. Magic grows thin and wears out if you try to use it everyday.

With a single tug, the card came free. There was the picture of my grandmother--the picture I'd never liked--taken with a soft-focus lens and then manipulated somehow so that the edges of her seemed to fade into whiteness. It's possible the card-printer was trying to make her look as if she were glowing like an angel. I thought she looked washed-out and wrong. My Grandma would never have wanted to be a paper saint, and even at her most frail, she was never pale or washed out.

The printers hadn't messed with her face, though, and I saw the same soft, alert dark eyes I remembered. I ought to remember them--I see them in the mirror every day. Her thin gray hair and wrinkles had only ever been window-dressing. I was a grown woman before I truly realized she was old. I ran my fingertip over the fake-gold stamped letters that made up her name: Kimberly Boggs Gardner. I did not turn it over to see that stupid "Do not stand over my grave and

 

This is so cool!! I can't believe I've never read anything of yours before. You're so good!!

If you've got a PM list, please put me on it

 

I don't think I've ever seen an Edward Scissorhands fanfic before. This is looking to be pretty nifty, ophelia. I would love to be on the PM list if you have one!

 

Thanks for taking the time to read and reply, guys, especially since this is such an odd thing to fanfic. The film came out when I was a junior in h.s., and I kinda identified with the weirdo characters.

Then I didn't watch it again for 18 years.

When I saw it again after all this time, the characters were still me as a junior in high school, but I just . . . wasn't.

That got me wondering--what happens afterward? Is the adolescent angst permanent, or is there something else?

That kind of wondering is why this fic exists. I don't normally drag 20-year-old Johnny Depp films out of the closet and fic them.

I very much appreciate your comments, though, and will definitely add you to a PM list.

 

I have to admit, I clicked because it's a pretty odd thing to write a fanfic about. I was intrigued since I'd never seen one based on this film (which I love -- yay for weirdo characters! ) before.

 

I told myself to shake off the lost-in-fairyland feeling. I hadn?t come to play Hansel and Gretel. I knew where I was and what I was doing there. I had only one goal: the house.

What a wreck.

The house had looked decrepit from a distance, but up close it was cracking, vandalized, burned in places, and open to the weather through a thousand caved and collapsed chunks of wall. If it had once had luxurious decorations on it, they?d long since fallen off. I didn't see a single intact windowpane in the place.

I kicked an empty old hooch bottle off the front steps. I figured that if there really was an axe murderer here, he either had very bad taste in "fortified wine," or else he wasn't too keen on confronting intruders. Apparently, even the winos roamed the place at will.

I kept that fact in mind as I slipped through the gap created by a partly-fallen front door. At first, I could see nothing but jagged, towering shadows. The only sound was the hollow moan of wind blowing through the cracks. I wasn?t sure if I was more afraid that there was someone there, or that there wasn?t.

?He?s hiding,? I told myself. "Grandma always said the whole crazy town terrified him into coming back to this place.? The man in my grandmother's fairy tale once had very good reasons to be afraid, so I could hardly blame him if he didn?t want to be seen.

Knowing that any "axe murderer" here might be more afraid of me than I was of him helped give me the nerve to walk a few more steps into the huge room. There were no lights to turn on, but my eyes adjusted quickly, and it didn?t seem so dark. Shafts of cold sunlight poured through holes everywhere.

Soon I could see that the crumbling room was filled with cobweb-covered parts and machinery, including near-human forms standing and lying everywhere. I think I might have turned and run from the "murder scene" if the diagrams in my special book hadn't prepared me for the truth. The "bodies" would be metal, stillborn products of a miraculous process that I still couldn't understand, even after a dozen readings.

I walked through the room with as much quiet care as muddy hiking boots allowed. Somehow, it seemed very important not to be caught sneaking around. I stepped over enormous gears that I had seen in sketches, and imagined them where they should have been, suspended by axles over my head. I lightly touched a bellows with rat-holes gnawed through its accordion-shaped middle.

Amazement soon had me gawking like a tourist, and I forgot to watch my feet. I was walking along, fascinated by the impossibly-high ceiling, when my foot knocked hard into something unyielding. The impact caused a dull wooden thud and the harsh rattle of metal.

When I looked down, I saw that I'd nearly tripped over a box. A large wooden box, filled entirely with needle-sharp blades.

The blades were all types and sizes, from pocket-knife sized to a scythe-like thing that was easily the length of a man?s arm. Many were dull and rusty from lack of use.

Some, however, were bright. Bright and shining and ready to use, as if they hadn't been lying there undisturbed for three-quarters of a century or more.

Had I stumbled a little harder, I would have fallen straight down onto them, onto the surgically-bright ones and the bent ones caked with rust. I looked at all those upturned points and felt cold inside.

Frightened, I called out the only name that might get an answer in that place.

"Edward?"

If my grandmother?s stories were true, I was calling someone gentle, a protector and a friend. I badly wanted that old fairy tale to become real just then.

There was no reply.

I stepped away from the box of blades, keeping a much closer watch on where I put my feet. I tried calling again: "Edward?"

This time I sensed some kind of change in the room. Maybe it was the almost-inaudible rustle of a curtain being drawn aside, or just a change in the currents of the icy wind. Either way, I was sure that something had drawn close, and was watching me.

I spun around, looking, but there was no way t

 

Oh wow, that's beautiful!! I love the descriptive details you add. And Poor Edward, I just want to hug him, scary appendages and all

 

I love your description of Edward, ophelia.

I agree with Nat -- sometimes you just want to hug him.

Lovely update -- it's reading like I'm watching a sequel to the film.

 

Thanks, you guys . . . this is one of the strangest stories I've ever written. I still don't quite know where it came from.

*********

"I . . . I . . . no. It's just me." It was the best I could do with adrenaline numbing my brain.
A kind of light faded from his eyes. "Oh. Will she come?"
I thought about lying to him. Maybe I should have--he wouldn't have known the difference. I didn't have enough of my wits gathered together to come up with a good lie, however, so I blurted out the cold, empty truth.
"No, Edward. She won't come . . . she's dead."
I had never before said anything that ended somebody's life. He didn't cry, or shout anything out, or even move. Instead, he just . . . stopped. It was like seeing a mechanical toy after its spring has snapped. For a moment I was afraid that I'd literally killed him somehow, but then his head bowed slightly. He was alive, but I could tell it wasn't the same life. I was sure it never would be again.
"Oh."
"I--Edward, I'm sorry. Somebody should have told you. I don't know why--no, I do. Up until just a little while ago, nobody really thought you existed. I didn't think so, anyway. I thought you were just a story my grandmother used to tell, maybe about somebody, but not about . . . about what you actually . . ." I realized I was staring at his grotesque hands. Feeling as if I were no better than those shrill, swarming neighbors, I shut up.
"She told you? About this?" He lifted one of his hands slightly and gave a couple of his fingers an experimental "snip." Those dark eyes of his were already full of so much pain that I couldn't tell if I'd just added betrayal to the burden he had to bear, but his voice sounded more worried than accusatory.
"She--it was a fairy tale she used to tell me when I was little. I guess I used to believe in it when I was a child, but you grow up, you start seeing the world the way it is, and you . . ."
One look at him was enough to prove that I was talking total nonsense again, and I closed my mouth. Apparently, I hadn't started to see the world the "way it was." And Edward, who still looked like a boy just out of his teens, had not grown up.
I tried again, and this time gave him the information that he probably really wanted to know. "She didn't tell everybody. Only me, that I know of. And I didn't tell anybody I was coming up here. No one's going to go looking for you. You're safe."
He seemed to relax just a little. He met my gaze again, and I think he looked at my face differently, as if he'd decided I was a person to talk to, and not just a threat to deal with. Then again, maybe he was just looking for traces of his lost Kim. If he was doing that, he'd picked the wrong grandchild. My hair is dark rather than red-blonde, and in general I look like my father's side of the family. The only connection most people can see is the eyes.
Maybe that was all that he needed.
He left his small pool of light and found another one a bit closer. His facial scars, which had seemed inhuman and horrifying at a distance, were worse when he came close. Now that I could see how sad and shy he was, however, the old cuts just made me ache for him. For the life of me, I couldn't imagine why I'd been terrified of him minutes before. He'd done nothing but let me see him when I called his name. Why had that seemed so bad?
"Did it hurt?" he asked.
"Did it?did what hurt?"
"When she died. Did it hurt?" His face remained as still as ever, but the pale sunlight picked out the glitter of grief in his eyes.
"No . . . no. She passed away in her sleep one night. It was very peaceful." That didn't at all do justice to the chaos her death had thrown my family into--complete with fights over the precise degree of awfulness that should be reflected on her memorial cards--but he didn't need to know that. I reminded myself to treat Edward as someone newly bereaved. It wasn't his fault that nobody had thought to tell him.
"When did it happen?"
"Well . . . it will be . . ." I didn't want to say it. Why hadn't we quit fighting over that stupid po

 

this is one of the strangest stories I've ever written. I still don't quite know where it came from.

Aye, but those are always the best ones.

"No, Edward. She won't come . . . she's dead."
I had never before said anything that ended somebody's life. He didn't cry, or shout anything out, or even move. Instead, he just . . . stopped. It was like seeing a mechanical toy after its spring has snapped. For a moment I was afraid that I'd literally killed him somehow, but then his head bowed slightly. He was alive, but I could tell it wasn't the same life. I was sure it never would be again.
"Oh."



I can just picture this. Very sad -- poor Edward!

I'm really enjoying this. I love your portrayal of Edward -- couldn't fit with the film any better than it is.

 

Thank you, Idrelle . . . and thank you for continuing on with the story. Somebody's got to read these weird little things.

***********

If he responded in any way, I couldn't tell. I remembered how helpful the townspeople's "help" had been years ago, and hoped I didn't sound just like one of them. "It's not dangerous . . . nobody's going to stare at you or try to hurt you. You don't even have to leave this place," I assured him.

I still didn't get any sign of encouragement, but started to walk toward him anyway. After all, I'd made a career out of talking to people who didn't want to talk.

He stopped me with a question when I was halfway there: "What's your name?"

How had I not told him that? Had I expected the fairy tale man to know me at once, just because I'd known his name for so long?

"Julie. I write under 'Julie R. Carter,' but . . . actually . . . you won't have heard of that." In fact, not that many people outside a handful of travelogue magazine editors would have heard of me either, and suddenly I felt stupid for mentioning it.

"What do you write?" he asked as I reached his side. His face was still hidden by a combination of shadow and tangled hair.

"Just . . . stories about interesting people in interesting places. Mostly places far away from here." The familiar little "so boring" joke at the expense of my hometown fell flat for someone who was confined to an irregularly-shaped patch of land that couldn't have covered more than an acre.

"I've never been far away from here," he said earnestly, as if somehow I wouldn't know that.

"That's okay. You don't have to go far away to find interesting things." Fifteen minutes earlier, that would have been news to me. I'd gotten out of my mind-numbing suburban town as soon as I possibly could, and hadn't looked back in eight years' time. The joke was on me, considering that I was standing in what might have been the most interesting place on earth--well within bike-riding distance of the house where I grew up.

Since he wouldn't look at me, I stepped around in front of him. The blades that had terrified me before were now inches from my leg, but that no longer seemed important. What mattered was that there were tears on the edge of his jaw, by the corner of his mouth, hanging from a loop of hair partly covering a cheekbone. I think some of them had hit the old scars on his face, and been channeled off in crazy directions. He didn't seem to be crying anymore, but he'd done nothing to brush the teardrops away.

Instinctively, I reached up to brush the moisture off his cheeks. Just as instinctively, he reached up to block my sudden movement toward his face.

Quick reflexes on both our parts saved me from impaling my hand on one of his "fingers." Just a few millimeters more would have gotten me stabbed. For one frozen second we stared at each other. His dark eyes were round with fear, and I began to get a sense of how little of his fear was actually for himself . . . and how little of it was irrational.

"I think . . . maybe you'd better go."

"No . . . no, it's okay. It was an accident. No harm done. Accidents happen to everyone, right?"

"Sometimes they happen a lot," he warned me. As if to underscore this thought, he very gingerly tried brushing one of his tears away. Perhaps he was embarrassed to have me see him cry. If that was true, I ought to have left the poor fellow alone. He got rid of the tear, but ended up cutting himself below his eye. Now he had a trickle of blood on his cheek instead of a tear track.

Edward seemed to have the same physical reflexes as anyone else, and the moment he cut himself he tried to touch the cut, as if trying to assess the damage. I believe he might have put out one of his own eyes if I hadn't grabbed his wrist.

"Wait--don't. Don't, I've got it," I said. It didn't take me long to dredge some crude first aid supplies out of my purse. I live out of that bag for weeks at a time sometimes, and yes, I really do have some of everything in it.

He seemed uneasy about havi

 

I'm sorry for missing a chapter!

These are so heartbreakingly sweet!! I love the little scissor contest they had And when Julie told him that Kim was dead, my heart broke for him.

Wonderful chapters

 

thank you for continuing on with the story. Somebody's got to read these weird little things.



Now, story:

I am really liking Julie, she's quite a sweet-heart -- definitely Kim's granddaughter. I loved the scene with the scissors and how Julie had to explain to Edward that what she said later was a joke. Nice touch. And Edward seems to have lightened up a little bit after that, although I wonder where Julie's mention of his creator is going to take them next.

Looking forwards to more!

 

Idrelle: Thank you! The first person to read this story actually asked if I was Julie, and I said no, not really . . .
she's what happens to people who believe in magic when they start to grow up, and adapt to the "real world." They learn new things, but they forget things, too. Julie goes on kind of a personal journey with Edward here.

He, of course, is my true self-insertion character. Why else would I write fanfic if I didn't want to use canon characters for that?

NYCG: Thank you as well! I hope the rest of the fic doesn't disappoint.

(A little longer section this time . . . the story didn't break anywhere convenient.)

**************

He nodded slowly. Edward stretched out one sharpened finger and moved as if he longed to stroke the image with a fingertip. I pulled the book away just before he sliced it. "That's--that's probably not a good idea," I told him. "I know you want the picture . . . you can have it--you can have the whole book--but let's keep it all in one piece, okay?"

He nodded again, looking at the picture as if mesmerized. Suddenly I regretted not finding a picture of my grandmother as a girl--the Kim that Edward remembered, and that she wanted him to remember. Too late, I realized what that would have meant to him. I didn't think she'd want him to see the paper-saint memorial card that my aunt had ordered a la carte out of the funeral home's showbook.

"Here . . . let me turn the page. We can turn back later. That's the thing about photographs--they stay the same forever." Edward seemed a little reluctant, but he let me turn the page. It was covered with the strangest collection of pen-and-ink sketches, illustrations cut from books, and handwritten notes, both in English and in French. Up in one corner was Leonardo Da Vinci's famous picture of a uterus cut away to reveal the fetus inside. Pasted diagonally from that was an ink sketch of a body with the insides showing. It was not a regular human body, or filled with regular insides. There were rivets, and gears, and strings and pulleys, and something that looked like a perfectly-cut-out Valentine's heart lying on the left side of the chest.

I tapped the drawing with my fingertip. "That's you," I told him. He stared as if fascinated, but this time restrained any urges to touch. "This writing around the edge is in French. I think it was cut out of a letter he must have written her. It says, 'You speak of playing God as if it were something wicked. Yet what else should any decent man play? Were we not made in the image of our creator, who started with a world of mud and clay, and left it a perfect garden? My dear, we have more than a right, we have a sacred duty, to imagine a world more beautiful than we found it, and to leave behind as much of that beauty as we are able.'"

Once Edward had pored over every corner and seam, he asked me to turn the page for him. I did him one better, and turned several pages, to the part that I really wanted to show him. "Look, Edward . . . you could turn book pages on your own. You could wipe your eyes if you needed to cry. You could touch people without worrying about cutting them . . . and you could leave the grounds of the mansion without being afraid. No one would hurt you for being different. They wouldn't know you from anyone else."

On the open pages in front of us were the plans for Edward's long-unfinished hands.

The inventor who created him had sent the designs to his friend in France, perhaps to ask for suggestions, or else simply to share the beautiful thing he planned to make.

I don't know what reaction I expected from him, but mostly he seemed shocked. He wanted to touch the pages again, too, which I tried to keep him from doing. "Careful--careful," I warned him. "It took all this time to find a second copy of these plans. I doubt we're going to find a third." He was persistent in trying to get one of his finger-blades under the page, however, and at last I let him.

He lifted the brown, faded book leaf very gently, as if to get a better look at it. I

 

Beautiful, ophelia! This just continues to get more and more interesting. I love the personal journey Julie seems to be going on through her meeting and Edward and what she seems to be slowly discovering about herself. I think you've also got Edward's characterization down perfectly. I love how he stood up to her to tell her that he is "finished" and that he seems to be what he wants to be, that he doesn't need real hands. I found the part where he was cutting up the page with the instructions for his unfinished hands very symbolic in that way.

He moved a few feet back and said with a touch of pride, "I can make that. With my hands."



That just made me ridiculously happy! He finally gets to share his work with someone else. I'm glad that Julie held her tongue about "wasting his talent"; like her, I don't think Edward really fits in anywhere in the commercial world. Still, I love that he finally gets to share the secret of the snow with someone else. Beautiful scene.

Looking forwards to more! This is one of my top favourite stories. I'm simply loving it!

 

Thank you, Idrelle! Sorry for wandering off for so long--what kind of excuses are there for not updating a story I finished 8 months ago?!

I rambled on about work in your story thread. So . . . that. Again.

And this is the last section:

*****

He held one of them up and spread his blade fingers, which made him look as lethal and bizarre as any slasher film villain. Perhaps Edward had learned to love his hands, at least some of the time, but the rest of the world wasn't about to follow suit. America's "diverse population" hadn't become diverse enough to accept that. In fact, those hands would probably get him put on some government security list, and he?d be repeatedly chased away from airports.

"Edward . . . you make beautiful sculptures, and you make snow . . . somehow. But you cut yourself, and then you can't take care of the cuts. You can't dry your own eyes when you cry. You stay in here all alone, and I think you want something else." I looked over at the lovingly-carved parents and child, and saw that while it wasn?t exactly the Biblical manger scene, the sculptor had worked to capture the holiness at the heart of every family. Even a family as semi-dysfunctional as mine. It had to be mine, since my grandmother's girlhood home was the only family life he'd ever really known.

He stood still for a while after that, his head bowed, his heavy metal hands hanging down at his sides. I thought maybe he was thinking about the option of pasting those plans for human hands back together.

If that was true, he didn't say so, however. Instead he suddenly darted past me and hauled another plastic tarp off an indistinct shape in a different corner of the attic. This sculpture was only partly finished. It was a young girl's head and torso emerging from the block of ice, looking so easy and perfect that it seemed she might step fully-formed from the block at any moment.

Edward approached the statue solemnly. "I suppose I'll have to give her wings, now."

I didn't understand what he meant until I saw an eerie familiarity in the ice girl's features. She looked nothing like my Grandma Kim. I looked nothing like my Grandma Kim. But the ice girl looked like me. The eyes were colorless, of course, but the shape was there, and so was the curve of her nose, and the line of her jaw. The girl appeared to be dancing, and I was sure I'd never been so graceful in my life, but if there was any truth to the statue, many years ago there had been a young girl named Kim Boggs, and that girl had looked like me. I reached up, wanting to touch her cheek, but then drew back, for fear of damaging the ice with the heat of my fingers.

"You can touch her if you want," Edward said. "You miss her." I remembered how he had wanted to caress the photo of his creator, and soon found tears burning in my eyes. Edward wasn't the only one who wanted to touch someone--a real someone, not a sculpture or a picture--and was helpless to do so. As far as my grandmother was concerned, my hands might as well have been a set of scissor blades. All the longing in the world wouldn't allow me to brush her cheek again.

Edward made only little snips to the ice block while I was standing right next to it. He also stayed bit out of my way, as if not wanting to crowd me or my feelings. His quiet presence was comforting, and I wished I hadn't gone up and imposed myself on him when he was grieving earlier. All that had accomplished was to embarrass him into trying to clean himself up, and then give him a cut under his eye.

After the tears had stopped being so insistent and demanding, Edward spoke to me. "I'm sorry my sculpture made you cry, Julie. It wasn't supposed to do that."

For some reason, that made me smile. "It's okay," I said, wiping my eyes on my non-sharp or deadly fingers. "It's not a bad kind of crying. Sometimes when you miss somebody a whole lot, being sad for them makes them seem less . . . gone."

"I know." From the look of things, he actually was marking out where he'd carve wing shapes on the back of his you

 

I'm speechless, ophelia. Really, I don't think I have any words that can describe this story anymore. It's a beautiful piece of work, and I especially love this ending. Thank you so much for sharing.

 

Thank you for reading all the way through!

It's an odd fandom on a new board during the deadest time of the year for posting, so I'm especially grateful you stayed on for the ride.

 

I read thru this and must say, it's beautiful. First time I've seen a fic to that movie.

 

This is absolutely amazing. I'm speechless - I don't know how to describe how beautiful it is. This is one of my favorite fanfics.