Twilight fanfic: THE LAST SLEEP (pt. 2)
Title: The Last Sleep
Characters/Pairings: Bella, Jacob, Edward, Rosalie. Jacob/Bella, some Edward/Bella.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: AU, Post-NM: When Bella's future is abruptly altered by brutal circumstances, she seeks comfort in an impossible balance between her life with Edward and a restrained relationship with Jacob.
Bella wouldn’t hunt. Not wanting to acknowledge that she felt like killing for the taste, she stayed at the house, and stayed at the house. She knew she wanted human blood without yet knowing what they would smell like to her now; the thought of it made her venom thicken in her mouth. When she couldn’t stand it anymore she killed a fox, wincing at how easy it was. She knew what her hands could do, what they were capable of crushing into sand with the slightest effort. When she walked she barely felt her feet hit the ground, a sensation that would have made her dizzy if her head wasn’t calm and steady like a brick all the time, at least in the physical sense.
Emotions affected her body in a way she wasn’t used to. Her head never swam and her heart never raced, but pain seemed to shock the air around her into a freezing, disorienting smoke. She was disconnected and drowning out of her skin; her sensations made no sense to her. She should feel more solid than this. She should feel like nothing could break her.
She could think of everything at once. She couldn’t stand to think of anything.
================
In her soft humanity, every touch from Edward had caressed her to him, eager and aching and blushing like any woman; but in her strange body she fumbled with a virginal innocence, and her legs tucked up to shyly hide her naked body. As she sat curled and burrowed on the bed in Edward’s room, his voice was soft and reassuring in her ear. He smelled different to her now. The scent was the same, but somehow its elements were distinguishable from each other rather than mingled into their former irresistible mystery.
Bella got under the blankets that still smelled a little bit like her old body in the bed that they no longer needed but didn’t get rid of. In the darkness of the room she held Edward’s hand and stared into nothing, feeling the sameness of their skin wash over her, wishing she could suspend this: her beauty and her strength and Edward so close to her body, everything she wanted mockingly granted by this harsh robbery. She craved the very desire of it now that it was forever fulfilled. She wished her muted and crackled thoughts could want something other than to rip the throats off of animals and condemn their blood to her body.
==================
Even though the family of course did not sleep, they all maintained a habit of solitude at night. She remembered Edward telling her about the long walks he used to take before her little bedroom became his nighttime retreat. Her capacity for patience seemed to have already adjusted to immortality; she was more or less incapable of being restless.
Bella had a thin white gown, more like a night slip, that she wore in the house a lot of the time, not feeling much need to look presentable. Unfeeling to the cold, she was wearing only this, a thin layer of delicate cotton next to her chilled white-ribbon skin as she sat with her legs crossed in the middle of the vast field behind the Cullen house.
She had a book open on her lap. Her sharp eyes would have no problem reading it in the darkness of the field, but she had not looked at one word. She sat up lithe and straight, oddly graceful even in just sitting still, even as her body shouldered the grave burden that kept her eyes fixed forward. Looking at nothing in particular, she weighed the sickness of her existence against all the reasons she had wanted this before.
The tall green grass blew in the wind, its mournful expanse around all sides punctuating her solitude. Still and pained, Bella’s thoughts sought for one comfort, the thing her mind had been seeking in its endless remorse: a memory, just one, in which she’d decided that she wasn’t sure, that she needed more time.
In the house on top of the piano, the first article about the missing eighteen-year-old and her father had been ripped thin out of the newspaper and set there, accompanied two months later by the announcement of their memorial services. Another month had passed as invisibly as dust, and every morning Bella would approach the piano and her fingers would brush in a tremor over the newsprint. She had not yet managed to read them, to see the quipped, abridged accounts of her family’s grief. It was strange, and it made her feel stupid, to see her own name in a newspaper; sooner or later, her name would have had to be in the paper, sooner or later when she and Edward had finally packed up their lives for Alaska. It was like she’d always imagined she’d be writing the story herself, and that it would be the same as reading about a strange person disappearing in another town, to confront the disaster she’d constructed for the disposal of her unwanted life.
But when Alice had first returned from the convenience store with the newspaper to hesitantly show it to Bella, it wasn’t as simple as knowing that the news was wrong, that it was all a deception; when she saw her own senior yearbook picture as well as one of Charlie’s police portraits sitting sadly next to the tragic headlines, it felt like a heavy and solid truth: Isabella Swan was dead. They were both dead.
She had been so stubborn about what she’d wanted, and surely, though, she’d had some fear? If Edward had one day kissed his way from her cheek, to her jaw, to her throat, and then nuzzled his teeth around her neck, she would have hesitated?
Surely she would have realized, going home to cook dinner for Charlie that night, that there would never have been a way to truly say goodbye.
The moon was brimming from behind the clouds like white, mean fire, and Bella longed for movement, some kind of change.
It was like sleepwalking, as close as she could ever get: Her body was alert and awake, but something jostled her hard metal bones, and before she knew what she was doing, she felt the wind on her face and knew that she was running.
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It was like the forest found her, rather than the other way around. Standing off the edge of the potholed road, she found her bare feet halted just outside the swallowing dark expanse of trees in an area now forbidden to her. Even though she’d passed through a few green fields and the rough breeze to get here, something still felt more wild and wistful and dangerous directly over the boundary of where she stood. Beyond the border the air seemed electrifying, teeming with the movements of every animal; she could smell it all rustling like a pulse. There was even a whiff of saltier, lighter air coming from farther west. The beach. The movements of the branches and the lifting of the leaves arguing loudly, the wind forbidding and beckoning with its slight mystery, all the secrets she was never told; she longed to let it get the best of her.
Her still arms sensed the tickle of her gown blowing slightly over her skin, her bare legs feeling the tease but not the temperature of the icy breeze. She inhaled a rich sample of the wind, letting her eyes close for half a moment.
Then her elegant white foot stepped over the border into the La Push woods.
Everything moved as before while her ghostly figure drifted slowly through the woods, her graceful steps landing noiselessly over sticks and roots, but it seemed to her that something would snap at any moment. She was not wary. It was more like she was waiting.
She walked rather slowly; for her it should have felt like she was hardly moving at all, but with the heaviness of her heart Bella had not yet explored her body’s full potential for inhuman speed. After some long moments, maybe almost an hour, she knew she was rather deep into the woods. She stopped for a moment and relished the certainty that she had never been in this exact place before, filled with the weird thrill that what she was doing was wrong.
She caught the scent of something some fifty yards away: a big animal, possibly a deer. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was. With a dull ease of movement, she found and snatched a rabbit off the ground, snapping its neck and beginning to drink the sour blood in one bite, tasting an orange hue to the red she thirsted for.
It should have looked ungraceful, her shoulders stooped with raw indulgence as her neck bent in for purchase of the limp dead creature, but the gown and her skin were the same translucent, ethereal white, and her hair billowed with an impossibly graceful mind of its own, licking at the smallest currents of the wind. She was vicious and angelic, stripped to lightning, and that was how he found her.
Her head turned and her hands slowly let the hare drop to the ground as a patch of darkness seemed to shift, revealing itself as the massive wolf body appearing through a tangle of branches, romping slowly towards her; she lifted an arm to wipe the thin trickle of blood from under her mouth, and a sliver of moonlight caught over her eyes just as the poison-apple color in them was fading to a warmer crimson.
With the same hazy slowness that had brought her into the forest, she went to him, stopping a couple yards away to marvel, still as a statue, sensing that the familiar eyes were taking in the sight of her with pained amazement.
Her old friend had once feared that she would be afraid of this creature he could be, that it would disgust her that he could take the form of an enormous and dangerous thing; always, when she knew that he was good, her fascination had outweighed her fear. Even now, standing so close and feeling herself tense with a kind of furious awe at this body that she knew was made to destroy her, her heart felt humbled. The warm and terrible beast, as brutal as it would be to her now, was still one of the most beautiful things she thought she would ever see.
So with the weight of that being true even in her now very long life, she looked for the longest of moments before she noticed that the wolf was trembling, its russet fur shivering, reminding her of his hands, and there was no going back. With thick apprehension, not knowing if he simply ached to rip her body in half, she slowly reached out her hands and went forward until her arms were buried around one giant leg. Her face pressed longingly into the fur, feeling the overwhelming warmth of the fuming animal, a fireside to her permanently thawed body.
“Oh, Jake.” She sighed quietly, her voice sweet and sadder than any other sound he’d ever heard. “You smell awful.”
Jacob Black toppled out of himself, the transformation knocking him to his knees where his head was lowered weakly, as if in surrender. His breath heaved to the grass, his shoulders making choking motions, until her white hand found his dark hair; he then pulled her down to his lap and, slowly and sadly, cradled her against him.
She could not cry, but her white body seemed to sob all over. A sound came out of Jacob’s throat like a sigh shaking off a growl, and then his voice was muttering to her silent anguish, the familiar deep hum of it just as she remembered.
“Shush. Bells...It’s alright.”
Jacob wept silently for both of them as she clung, mutely, into his warmth.
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Other times after that were less easy; after being away from each other for a couple days they’d have to get accustomed to the repelling flavors all over again. Their senses tricked them into thinking they were strangers until they would realize, no, there is a trace of him in there, of her. You.
A couple nights later they found each other almost timidly, Bella crossing her arms over her shirt as Jacob came out from behind a tree buttoning his pants. As his hands fumbled, Bella noticed something dangling from his right wrist...
He saw it catch her eye and said, “I told you I had it. I had to repair the chain first...”
He’d found her bracelet somewhere between his front door and his couch on that first morning after. It must have caught onto something and snapped off. She thought she could remember being there, some scattered and bruised impressions of unrecognizably strangled voices. She didn’t try to remember the pain.
They were sobered up by the seemingly loud and flat sound of each other’s voices, and fell quiet, looking at each other with some nine feet of space between them. Finally, Bella seriously asked, “Why did you put it on?”
They both knew why. They had to fool themselves into getting close to each other now. He’d hoped for just a touch on the wrist, and he needed a reason to let her. And she thought how this was so pathetic, but when she went a few steps toward him, her senses became invaded by that otherness in his blood. Not just the smell that the Cullens had always described but the total tensing feeling that his whole body was offensive, threatening, vile sick trash. Since first experiencing its shocking affliction through her emotional weakness the first time they’d come together in the woods, it was too easy to forget what it was like when away from it.
And it was only fair for this inconvenient instinct to fool her again and again into feeling like Jacob wasn’t Jacob anymore. She knew it was the same for him, as false but as impossible to not feel.
It was an odd effort, to slip the chain onto his wrist, probably out of his pocket right after he’d unphased; of course she’d notice, and she didn’t need to wait for him to answer. As he kind of sheepishly unclasped it, she took a few quick steps towards him and held out her arm, hand closed.
In a slow but eager way, one side of his mouth smiling with relief, Jacob linked the bracelet around her wrist, and his long dark fingers fumbled until the clasp was fastened.
He started to pull back, but Bella grabbed his wrist, and for a moment they both stood still while she seemed to steel herself. Then, gradually, she stepped forward until she was steadied against him.
His arms wavered for a short moment, and then wrapped around her, and held tighter and tighter until it was that bear hug that used to push the air from under her ribs, this time lasting longer than ever because she didn’t have to breathe. The moments happened in a profoundly slow way that would’ve formerly seemed awkward, a little too tender. But Bella needed to be touched even by him, and their now opposing selves therefore insisted on a relationship that oscillated abruptly between the most physically intimate of friendships and a distant tolerance.
Later they sat next to a very narrow stream that was slightly inscrutable from a few yards away. With both their legs hanging over the water, Jacob’s long ankles allowed his bare feet to skim into the water. It was cool outside and Bella, thinking that the water must be like ice, was vividly reminded of Jacob’s natural warmth by that small thing, remembering the way she would sometimes inch closer to his body on cold nights by the ocean. Even though it wasn’t that long ago, it felt a lifetime away that she had been capable of being bothered by the cold; even though she could still feel temperature, could feel his skin pleasant and scorching when they managed even to touch anymore, the strong sense of need rather than want for it was gone now.
Just like making love to Edward, when it eventually happened, would occur out of some decided gestures rather than the involuntary quickening of a pulse. There had been a time of her human life when her mind and heart had stunted her into feeling so indifferent about experiencing anything, but now things had become physically and irreversibly limited. Every single thing she did, aside from drinking blood, was like the last bite of food one takes just to clear the plate when they’re not hungry anymore, the tired and sore feet after a whole day at an amusement park; requiring more effort than instinct, it was all almost boring. Everything immaterial was the only thing that could really matter to her now. The sudden emotional trepidation she’d felt with the Cullens since her transformation made the abstract pull between her and Jacob the only part of her previous life that had yet managed to float to the surface.
She frowned as she stared down into the creek, then allowed some of the moist dirt to smear splotches around her paper-white knees as she lowered herself a little to dip her feet in the water next to Jacob’s, wanting but not wanting to coil her toes up to his and maybe hoping the streaming of the water would carry his emanating heat to her submerged skin without them having to touch any more than they were now, with their shoulders propped close together.
Through all of her thoughts, Jacob was examining her face with a mix of careful awe and concern. Sometimes when she caught him glancing at her like he’d never seen her before, it took her a moment to remember she didn’t exactly look like she used to.
“What are you thinking about?” Jacob finally asked, the question awkwardly missing the casual tone it would have in the everyday conversations in other lives.
It took her a moment to paraphrase the depth of it in her thoughts. Finally she let out a slightly incredulous bitter laugh and just said, “Sex.”
He responded with a small smirk of astonishment, but when he seemed to figure out what she meant, a kind of grim scoff.
“God, you know...” She looked down with a slow amazed shake. “It was just everywhere...When you’re young, it’s like it’s all anybody thinks about, and you think it’s going to matter if you die young that you never got a chance to experience all that. But then, you know...I’m dead, and it’s the last thing on my mind, it just didn’t matter compared to all these other things. But I never did that...And it feels like I’m just now realizing it.”
In a mingling motion of hesitation and comfort, Jacob reached up the arm that had been craned against hers up slowly behind her back and touched the back of her head with a mix of distaste and fascination. Then his fingers gently traced a few strands of thick hair as if testing whether the texture was any different now. He dared a consoling massage to the back of her neck, inviting her head to slowly tilt against his shoulder.
“Would you...” He sighed. “Could you please stop that?”
“...What?”
“You’ve been holding your breath. It’s creepy.” After an uneasy sidelong glance, he added almost matter-of-factly, “And it’s not fair.”
She shifted on her rested cheek to look up at him for half a second before looking forward and allowing her lungs to respire. It didn’t take long for her smell to fog up with Jacob’s scent, this close to him with his unkempt hair teeming with it. Her body automatically stiffened in protest of their proximity, and Jacob leaned back away from her before she had the chance to resist her instincts. Instead of reflecting his action, she also propped herself back slightly, her body supported by her hand on the grass under the arc of his identically positioned arm. Her head lingered so that she was kind of leaned over but not touching his chest right under the shoulder, looking down in an appearance of pensive suspension.
“Can I ask you something?” Bella quietly said, “And don’t tell me that I don’t want to know.”
Jacob said nothing in protest, but he felt to her a little caught off guard.
“When I was taken to your house that night...”
He took a moment to nod, as if to confirm he was prepared for the subject.
She explained, carefully stepping around directly mentioning what she’d been going through, maybe for both their sakes. “I only have vague images from that shortly after. Like it was a dream-More like how you might be aware that you’re in a bed even when you’re not waking up from some awful nightmare. But it wasn’t until around the third day that I remember acknowledging anything around me, what anybody might be trying to say to me. It took me so long to even open my eyes, I just wanted it to be a dream, or I wanted to really die...”
Their position made it so that it would be awkward to try to look right at each other, and it may have been a convenience for Jacob, who seemed to only stare numbly forward or down through all of this.
“I wanted to ask you,” she continued cautiously, “if the pack considered just...ending it.”
Jacob’s gaze tensed away just slightly and his breathing cracked with a kind of dry shudder. With a measured tone, he finally explicated, “We weren’t sure what we were supposed to do. When it comes to that-Of course there was no breaking of the treaty, but you weren’t considered under the treaty anyway, you were just some...But who was thinking that technically? If one of us-whoever was actually capable of doing it-did it, it would’ve been out of pity. None of us expected something like this to happen, you know it would’ve been for you...” Jacob’s voice was breaking off miserably, his arms beginning to tremble slightly. Bella’s free hand automatically went to him, but rested in-between them again, not knowing what to do, if she should actually get farther away.
He breathed in and out one labored breath, then said, “They made it my choice.”
Bella pressed her lips together, her eyes widening in her immediate attempt to retain her composure. She sat up a bit straighter, looked forward into the distance for a moment, and finally flatly demanded, “Why?”
Jacob hesitated, trying to measure her reaction, not sure if she was angry.
She repeated almost at a whisper, “Why, Jake? Why not just let me die?”
In his hesitance, he turned his position so that he was sitting facing her, his legs stretched in front so that his feet were barely situated on either side of her.
“Are you serious?” He finally said, quietly but shamelessly, “Because I need you. And I don’t mean need you around, I need you somewhere...Could you honestly expect me to make a decision that ensures that you would no longer exist?”
She said nothing, just staring forward as if she wasn’t even listening to anything he said.
“And yeah, I guess it’s really selfish, that I practically told you you’d be dead to me if you chose to be this way, and then ended up choosing it for you because it was the only way you wouldn’t have to be destroyed. And of course I knew all the grief you’d have to go through. But it was just too...” Jacob’s voice wavered a little, “Too soon. I couldn’t just let you die. It wasn’t your time...”
Her face turned to him with quietly flaring bitterness. “Wasn’t my time?...I died, Jacob. I was dead the moment he found me out there. There was nothing you could do. There was nothing anyone could do.”
With a wounded look he examined her intently, finally shaking his head and saying, “You’d think...given what I am, that I could feel that way about it. And when I had to make myself face what was happening to you, I tried to just start telling myself that you were gone and that was that. And it was easy enough to believe that when I saw you, so messed up by the agony it was like...you weren’t even in there. But then...”
Bella drew her legs up to her body, hugging herself around the knees, the lacy hem of her summer skirt blowing lightly in the breeze the most animated movement around her stony body right then.
“...I was looking away from you, and I was against the wall across the room. And after a moment I realized I could smell you...” Jacob leaned up closer to Bella. “Even then you were more, you know. Potent. I could detect everything changing in your body from across the room, and it was sickening that you could smell so awful to me, before I realized...part of it was just you, it was the way you’ve always smelled. And as much as I couldn’t stand those two things mixed together into one thing, I couldn’t deny that you were still Bella. And that maybe, in a way, you could live.”
Jacob took Bella’s lack of response in acceptance that any anger seemed to have left her, replaced with the usual pulse of misery in her face. He shifted back closer to her, only to have his senses newly irritated; his eyes watered and he bent his head over his knees to rub them, his voice letting out in a kind of coughing grunt mixed with a sigh of despair. Seemingly disarmed by that, Bella’s face filled with grim empathy, and she inched away from him, pulling her dress over her legs and crossing her arms. The image of that was even sad to him: that he gave her a reason to feel self-conscious with such a flawless exterior. Her new appearance was one thing they had not talked about, but in an exchange of glances it was often known that they were both thinking about it.
Looking like he longed to touch her, knowing that he should not and didn’t want to, he went on, “It was too much of you. I swear, it’s like...You smell so ugly, but you also smell like you. And better. It’s the same with how you look. You’re more of you than I can take.”
As if needing some distance, he stood up and took some tired steps until his right shoulder was propped against a tree several feet away from where he’d been sitting. Standing against it, he looked off into the same distant haze Bella had been fixed on with a demeanor of resignation.
“You’re not dead, Bella,” he softly insisted. “You just want to be.”
She had to look away, as if she could actually wound Jacob with the look of anguish coming upon her face, her figure tightly collapsing; she moaned, “It just doesn't seem real...Everything’s broken up.” Her hands in her lap were contorted, claw-like white trees. “God, Jake, my dad’s-in pieces...”
“-No. No,” Jacob was urgently saying, coming behind to quiet her with his hands brushing through her hair, pressing his lips briefly to the top of her head.
“Don’t do that. Don’t."
Both their hands were shaking, but he didn’t care. He didn’t know what else to do.
"Don’t ever.”
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She hunted.
She couldn’t go to the far places with the bigger animals...
Characters/Pairings: Bella, Jacob, Edward, Rosalie. Jacob/Bella, some Edward/Bella.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: AU, Post-NM: When Bella's future is abruptly altered by brutal circumstances, she seeks comfort in an impossible balance between her life with Edward and a restrained relationship with Jacob.
Bella wouldn’t hunt. Not wanting to acknowledge that she felt like killing for the taste, she stayed at the house, and stayed at the house. She knew she wanted human blood without yet knowing what they would smell like to her now; the thought of it made her venom thicken in her mouth. When she couldn’t stand it anymore she killed a fox, wincing at how easy it was. She knew what her hands could do, what they were capable of crushing into sand with the slightest effort. When she walked she barely felt her feet hit the ground, a sensation that would have made her dizzy if her head wasn’t calm and steady like a brick all the time, at least in the physical sense.
Emotions affected her body in a way she wasn’t used to. Her head never swam and her heart never raced, but pain seemed to shock the air around her into a freezing, disorienting smoke. She was disconnected and drowning out of her skin; her sensations made no sense to her. She should feel more solid than this. She should feel like nothing could break her.
She could think of everything at once. She couldn’t stand to think of anything.
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In her soft humanity, every touch from Edward had caressed her to him, eager and aching and blushing like any woman; but in her strange body she fumbled with a virginal innocence, and her legs tucked up to shyly hide her naked body. As she sat curled and burrowed on the bed in Edward’s room, his voice was soft and reassuring in her ear. He smelled different to her now. The scent was the same, but somehow its elements were distinguishable from each other rather than mingled into their former irresistible mystery.
Bella got under the blankets that still smelled a little bit like her old body in the bed that they no longer needed but didn’t get rid of. In the darkness of the room she held Edward’s hand and stared into nothing, feeling the sameness of their skin wash over her, wishing she could suspend this: her beauty and her strength and Edward so close to her body, everything she wanted mockingly granted by this harsh robbery. She craved the very desire of it now that it was forever fulfilled. She wished her muted and crackled thoughts could want something other than to rip the throats off of animals and condemn their blood to her body.
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Even though the family of course did not sleep, they all maintained a habit of solitude at night. She remembered Edward telling her about the long walks he used to take before her little bedroom became his nighttime retreat. Her capacity for patience seemed to have already adjusted to immortality; she was more or less incapable of being restless.
Bella had a thin white gown, more like a night slip, that she wore in the house a lot of the time, not feeling much need to look presentable. Unfeeling to the cold, she was wearing only this, a thin layer of delicate cotton next to her chilled white-ribbon skin as she sat with her legs crossed in the middle of the vast field behind the Cullen house.
She had a book open on her lap. Her sharp eyes would have no problem reading it in the darkness of the field, but she had not looked at one word. She sat up lithe and straight, oddly graceful even in just sitting still, even as her body shouldered the grave burden that kept her eyes fixed forward. Looking at nothing in particular, she weighed the sickness of her existence against all the reasons she had wanted this before.
The tall green grass blew in the wind, its mournful expanse around all sides punctuating her solitude. Still and pained, Bella’s thoughts sought for one comfort, the thing her mind had been seeking in its endless remorse: a memory, just one, in which she’d decided that she wasn’t sure, that she needed more time.
In the house on top of the piano, the first article about the missing eighteen-year-old and her father had been ripped thin out of the newspaper and set there, accompanied two months later by the announcement of their memorial services. Another month had passed as invisibly as dust, and every morning Bella would approach the piano and her fingers would brush in a tremor over the newsprint. She had not yet managed to read them, to see the quipped, abridged accounts of her family’s grief. It was strange, and it made her feel stupid, to see her own name in a newspaper; sooner or later, her name would have had to be in the paper, sooner or later when she and Edward had finally packed up their lives for Alaska. It was like she’d always imagined she’d be writing the story herself, and that it would be the same as reading about a strange person disappearing in another town, to confront the disaster she’d constructed for the disposal of her unwanted life.
But when Alice had first returned from the convenience store with the newspaper to hesitantly show it to Bella, it wasn’t as simple as knowing that the news was wrong, that it was all a deception; when she saw her own senior yearbook picture as well as one of Charlie’s police portraits sitting sadly next to the tragic headlines, it felt like a heavy and solid truth: Isabella Swan was dead. They were both dead.
She had been so stubborn about what she’d wanted, and surely, though, she’d had some fear? If Edward had one day kissed his way from her cheek, to her jaw, to her throat, and then nuzzled his teeth around her neck, she would have hesitated?
Surely she would have realized, going home to cook dinner for Charlie that night, that there would never have been a way to truly say goodbye.
The moon was brimming from behind the clouds like white, mean fire, and Bella longed for movement, some kind of change.
It was like sleepwalking, as close as she could ever get: Her body was alert and awake, but something jostled her hard metal bones, and before she knew what she was doing, she felt the wind on her face and knew that she was running.
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It was like the forest found her, rather than the other way around. Standing off the edge of the potholed road, she found her bare feet halted just outside the swallowing dark expanse of trees in an area now forbidden to her. Even though she’d passed through a few green fields and the rough breeze to get here, something still felt more wild and wistful and dangerous directly over the boundary of where she stood. Beyond the border the air seemed electrifying, teeming with the movements of every animal; she could smell it all rustling like a pulse. There was even a whiff of saltier, lighter air coming from farther west. The beach. The movements of the branches and the lifting of the leaves arguing loudly, the wind forbidding and beckoning with its slight mystery, all the secrets she was never told; she longed to let it get the best of her.
Her still arms sensed the tickle of her gown blowing slightly over her skin, her bare legs feeling the tease but not the temperature of the icy breeze. She inhaled a rich sample of the wind, letting her eyes close for half a moment.
Then her elegant white foot stepped over the border into the La Push woods.
Everything moved as before while her ghostly figure drifted slowly through the woods, her graceful steps landing noiselessly over sticks and roots, but it seemed to her that something would snap at any moment. She was not wary. It was more like she was waiting.
She walked rather slowly; for her it should have felt like she was hardly moving at all, but with the heaviness of her heart Bella had not yet explored her body’s full potential for inhuman speed. After some long moments, maybe almost an hour, she knew she was rather deep into the woods. She stopped for a moment and relished the certainty that she had never been in this exact place before, filled with the weird thrill that what she was doing was wrong.
She caught the scent of something some fifty yards away: a big animal, possibly a deer. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was. With a dull ease of movement, she found and snatched a rabbit off the ground, snapping its neck and beginning to drink the sour blood in one bite, tasting an orange hue to the red she thirsted for.
It should have looked ungraceful, her shoulders stooped with raw indulgence as her neck bent in for purchase of the limp dead creature, but the gown and her skin were the same translucent, ethereal white, and her hair billowed with an impossibly graceful mind of its own, licking at the smallest currents of the wind. She was vicious and angelic, stripped to lightning, and that was how he found her.
Her head turned and her hands slowly let the hare drop to the ground as a patch of darkness seemed to shift, revealing itself as the massive wolf body appearing through a tangle of branches, romping slowly towards her; she lifted an arm to wipe the thin trickle of blood from under her mouth, and a sliver of moonlight caught over her eyes just as the poison-apple color in them was fading to a warmer crimson.
With the same hazy slowness that had brought her into the forest, she went to him, stopping a couple yards away to marvel, still as a statue, sensing that the familiar eyes were taking in the sight of her with pained amazement.
Her old friend had once feared that she would be afraid of this creature he could be, that it would disgust her that he could take the form of an enormous and dangerous thing; always, when she knew that he was good, her fascination had outweighed her fear. Even now, standing so close and feeling herself tense with a kind of furious awe at this body that she knew was made to destroy her, her heart felt humbled. The warm and terrible beast, as brutal as it would be to her now, was still one of the most beautiful things she thought she would ever see.
So with the weight of that being true even in her now very long life, she looked for the longest of moments before she noticed that the wolf was trembling, its russet fur shivering, reminding her of his hands, and there was no going back. With thick apprehension, not knowing if he simply ached to rip her body in half, she slowly reached out her hands and went forward until her arms were buried around one giant leg. Her face pressed longingly into the fur, feeling the overwhelming warmth of the fuming animal, a fireside to her permanently thawed body.
“Oh, Jake.” She sighed quietly, her voice sweet and sadder than any other sound he’d ever heard. “You smell awful.”
Jacob Black toppled out of himself, the transformation knocking him to his knees where his head was lowered weakly, as if in surrender. His breath heaved to the grass, his shoulders making choking motions, until her white hand found his dark hair; he then pulled her down to his lap and, slowly and sadly, cradled her against him.
She could not cry, but her white body seemed to sob all over. A sound came out of Jacob’s throat like a sigh shaking off a growl, and then his voice was muttering to her silent anguish, the familiar deep hum of it just as she remembered.
“Shush. Bells...It’s alright.”
Jacob wept silently for both of them as she clung, mutely, into his warmth.
==================
Other times after that were less easy; after being away from each other for a couple days they’d have to get accustomed to the repelling flavors all over again. Their senses tricked them into thinking they were strangers until they would realize, no, there is a trace of him in there, of her. You.
A couple nights later they found each other almost timidly, Bella crossing her arms over her shirt as Jacob came out from behind a tree buttoning his pants. As his hands fumbled, Bella noticed something dangling from his right wrist...
He saw it catch her eye and said, “I told you I had it. I had to repair the chain first...”
He’d found her bracelet somewhere between his front door and his couch on that first morning after. It must have caught onto something and snapped off. She thought she could remember being there, some scattered and bruised impressions of unrecognizably strangled voices. She didn’t try to remember the pain.
They were sobered up by the seemingly loud and flat sound of each other’s voices, and fell quiet, looking at each other with some nine feet of space between them. Finally, Bella seriously asked, “Why did you put it on?”
They both knew why. They had to fool themselves into getting close to each other now. He’d hoped for just a touch on the wrist, and he needed a reason to let her. And she thought how this was so pathetic, but when she went a few steps toward him, her senses became invaded by that otherness in his blood. Not just the smell that the Cullens had always described but the total tensing feeling that his whole body was offensive, threatening, vile sick trash. Since first experiencing its shocking affliction through her emotional weakness the first time they’d come together in the woods, it was too easy to forget what it was like when away from it.
And it was only fair for this inconvenient instinct to fool her again and again into feeling like Jacob wasn’t Jacob anymore. She knew it was the same for him, as false but as impossible to not feel.
It was an odd effort, to slip the chain onto his wrist, probably out of his pocket right after he’d unphased; of course she’d notice, and she didn’t need to wait for him to answer. As he kind of sheepishly unclasped it, she took a few quick steps towards him and held out her arm, hand closed.
In a slow but eager way, one side of his mouth smiling with relief, Jacob linked the bracelet around her wrist, and his long dark fingers fumbled until the clasp was fastened.
He started to pull back, but Bella grabbed his wrist, and for a moment they both stood still while she seemed to steel herself. Then, gradually, she stepped forward until she was steadied against him.
His arms wavered for a short moment, and then wrapped around her, and held tighter and tighter until it was that bear hug that used to push the air from under her ribs, this time lasting longer than ever because she didn’t have to breathe. The moments happened in a profoundly slow way that would’ve formerly seemed awkward, a little too tender. But Bella needed to be touched even by him, and their now opposing selves therefore insisted on a relationship that oscillated abruptly between the most physically intimate of friendships and a distant tolerance.
Later they sat next to a very narrow stream that was slightly inscrutable from a few yards away. With both their legs hanging over the water, Jacob’s long ankles allowed his bare feet to skim into the water. It was cool outside and Bella, thinking that the water must be like ice, was vividly reminded of Jacob’s natural warmth by that small thing, remembering the way she would sometimes inch closer to his body on cold nights by the ocean. Even though it wasn’t that long ago, it felt a lifetime away that she had been capable of being bothered by the cold; even though she could still feel temperature, could feel his skin pleasant and scorching when they managed even to touch anymore, the strong sense of need rather than want for it was gone now.
Just like making love to Edward, when it eventually happened, would occur out of some decided gestures rather than the involuntary quickening of a pulse. There had been a time of her human life when her mind and heart had stunted her into feeling so indifferent about experiencing anything, but now things had become physically and irreversibly limited. Every single thing she did, aside from drinking blood, was like the last bite of food one takes just to clear the plate when they’re not hungry anymore, the tired and sore feet after a whole day at an amusement park; requiring more effort than instinct, it was all almost boring. Everything immaterial was the only thing that could really matter to her now. The sudden emotional trepidation she’d felt with the Cullens since her transformation made the abstract pull between her and Jacob the only part of her previous life that had yet managed to float to the surface.
She frowned as she stared down into the creek, then allowed some of the moist dirt to smear splotches around her paper-white knees as she lowered herself a little to dip her feet in the water next to Jacob’s, wanting but not wanting to coil her toes up to his and maybe hoping the streaming of the water would carry his emanating heat to her submerged skin without them having to touch any more than they were now, with their shoulders propped close together.
Through all of her thoughts, Jacob was examining her face with a mix of careful awe and concern. Sometimes when she caught him glancing at her like he’d never seen her before, it took her a moment to remember she didn’t exactly look like she used to.
“What are you thinking about?” Jacob finally asked, the question awkwardly missing the casual tone it would have in the everyday conversations in other lives.
It took her a moment to paraphrase the depth of it in her thoughts. Finally she let out a slightly incredulous bitter laugh and just said, “Sex.”
He responded with a small smirk of astonishment, but when he seemed to figure out what she meant, a kind of grim scoff.
“God, you know...” She looked down with a slow amazed shake. “It was just everywhere...When you’re young, it’s like it’s all anybody thinks about, and you think it’s going to matter if you die young that you never got a chance to experience all that. But then, you know...I’m dead, and it’s the last thing on my mind, it just didn’t matter compared to all these other things. But I never did that...And it feels like I’m just now realizing it.”
In a mingling motion of hesitation and comfort, Jacob reached up the arm that had been craned against hers up slowly behind her back and touched the back of her head with a mix of distaste and fascination. Then his fingers gently traced a few strands of thick hair as if testing whether the texture was any different now. He dared a consoling massage to the back of her neck, inviting her head to slowly tilt against his shoulder.
“Would you...” He sighed. “Could you please stop that?”
“...What?”
“You’ve been holding your breath. It’s creepy.” After an uneasy sidelong glance, he added almost matter-of-factly, “And it’s not fair.”
She shifted on her rested cheek to look up at him for half a second before looking forward and allowing her lungs to respire. It didn’t take long for her smell to fog up with Jacob’s scent, this close to him with his unkempt hair teeming with it. Her body automatically stiffened in protest of their proximity, and Jacob leaned back away from her before she had the chance to resist her instincts. Instead of reflecting his action, she also propped herself back slightly, her body supported by her hand on the grass under the arc of his identically positioned arm. Her head lingered so that she was kind of leaned over but not touching his chest right under the shoulder, looking down in an appearance of pensive suspension.
“Can I ask you something?” Bella quietly said, “And don’t tell me that I don’t want to know.”
Jacob said nothing in protest, but he felt to her a little caught off guard.
“When I was taken to your house that night...”
He took a moment to nod, as if to confirm he was prepared for the subject.
She explained, carefully stepping around directly mentioning what she’d been going through, maybe for both their sakes. “I only have vague images from that shortly after. Like it was a dream-More like how you might be aware that you’re in a bed even when you’re not waking up from some awful nightmare. But it wasn’t until around the third day that I remember acknowledging anything around me, what anybody might be trying to say to me. It took me so long to even open my eyes, I just wanted it to be a dream, or I wanted to really die...”
Their position made it so that it would be awkward to try to look right at each other, and it may have been a convenience for Jacob, who seemed to only stare numbly forward or down through all of this.
“I wanted to ask you,” she continued cautiously, “if the pack considered just...ending it.”
Jacob’s gaze tensed away just slightly and his breathing cracked with a kind of dry shudder. With a measured tone, he finally explicated, “We weren’t sure what we were supposed to do. When it comes to that-Of course there was no breaking of the treaty, but you weren’t considered under the treaty anyway, you were just some...But who was thinking that technically? If one of us-whoever was actually capable of doing it-did it, it would’ve been out of pity. None of us expected something like this to happen, you know it would’ve been for you...” Jacob’s voice was breaking off miserably, his arms beginning to tremble slightly. Bella’s free hand automatically went to him, but rested in-between them again, not knowing what to do, if she should actually get farther away.
He breathed in and out one labored breath, then said, “They made it my choice.”
Bella pressed her lips together, her eyes widening in her immediate attempt to retain her composure. She sat up a bit straighter, looked forward into the distance for a moment, and finally flatly demanded, “Why?”
Jacob hesitated, trying to measure her reaction, not sure if she was angry.
She repeated almost at a whisper, “Why, Jake? Why not just let me die?”
In his hesitance, he turned his position so that he was sitting facing her, his legs stretched in front so that his feet were barely situated on either side of her.
“Are you serious?” He finally said, quietly but shamelessly, “Because I need you. And I don’t mean need you around, I need you somewhere...Could you honestly expect me to make a decision that ensures that you would no longer exist?”
She said nothing, just staring forward as if she wasn’t even listening to anything he said.
“And yeah, I guess it’s really selfish, that I practically told you you’d be dead to me if you chose to be this way, and then ended up choosing it for you because it was the only way you wouldn’t have to be destroyed. And of course I knew all the grief you’d have to go through. But it was just too...” Jacob’s voice wavered a little, “Too soon. I couldn’t just let you die. It wasn’t your time...”
Her face turned to him with quietly flaring bitterness. “Wasn’t my time?...I died, Jacob. I was dead the moment he found me out there. There was nothing you could do. There was nothing anyone could do.”
With a wounded look he examined her intently, finally shaking his head and saying, “You’d think...given what I am, that I could feel that way about it. And when I had to make myself face what was happening to you, I tried to just start telling myself that you were gone and that was that. And it was easy enough to believe that when I saw you, so messed up by the agony it was like...you weren’t even in there. But then...”
Bella drew her legs up to her body, hugging herself around the knees, the lacy hem of her summer skirt blowing lightly in the breeze the most animated movement around her stony body right then.
“...I was looking away from you, and I was against the wall across the room. And after a moment I realized I could smell you...” Jacob leaned up closer to Bella. “Even then you were more, you know. Potent. I could detect everything changing in your body from across the room, and it was sickening that you could smell so awful to me, before I realized...part of it was just you, it was the way you’ve always smelled. And as much as I couldn’t stand those two things mixed together into one thing, I couldn’t deny that you were still Bella. And that maybe, in a way, you could live.”
Jacob took Bella’s lack of response in acceptance that any anger seemed to have left her, replaced with the usual pulse of misery in her face. He shifted back closer to her, only to have his senses newly irritated; his eyes watered and he bent his head over his knees to rub them, his voice letting out in a kind of coughing grunt mixed with a sigh of despair. Seemingly disarmed by that, Bella’s face filled with grim empathy, and she inched away from him, pulling her dress over her legs and crossing her arms. The image of that was even sad to him: that he gave her a reason to feel self-conscious with such a flawless exterior. Her new appearance was one thing they had not talked about, but in an exchange of glances it was often known that they were both thinking about it.
Looking like he longed to touch her, knowing that he should not and didn’t want to, he went on, “It was too much of you. I swear, it’s like...You smell so ugly, but you also smell like you. And better. It’s the same with how you look. You’re more of you than I can take.”
As if needing some distance, he stood up and took some tired steps until his right shoulder was propped against a tree several feet away from where he’d been sitting. Standing against it, he looked off into the same distant haze Bella had been fixed on with a demeanor of resignation.
“You’re not dead, Bella,” he softly insisted. “You just want to be.”
She had to look away, as if she could actually wound Jacob with the look of anguish coming upon her face, her figure tightly collapsing; she moaned, “It just doesn't seem real...Everything’s broken up.” Her hands in her lap were contorted, claw-like white trees. “God, Jake, my dad’s-in pieces...”
“-No. No,” Jacob was urgently saying, coming behind to quiet her with his hands brushing through her hair, pressing his lips briefly to the top of her head.
“Don’t do that. Don’t."
Both their hands were shaking, but he didn’t care. He didn’t know what else to do.
"Don’t ever.”
==================
She hunted.
She couldn’t go to the far places with the bigger animals...