The Definition of Want - Chapter 3
Title: The Definition of Want
Author: audreyii_fic
Fandom: Twilight (Team Jacob)
Rating: M
Characters: Bella, Jacob, Edward, and others (J/B)
Genre: Romance/Humor/Angst -- you know, all the good ones.
Warnings: Bad language and eventual sex.
Summary: You know how Edward offered to let Bella and Jacob make puppies? And we all secretly wondered how that would go? Yeah. It's one of those. Set post-Eclipse. (Link to the beginning.)
banner courtesy of boredess
banner courtesy of leithalia
Chapter Three :
A/N: I managed the Sunday update, in spite of spending most of the day hauling away a tree. Writing would have been more fun.
i could never pretend that i don't love you / you could never pretend that i'm your man
Trampled by Turtles, "Wait So Long"
This time, the phone rang after breakfast, as I was washing out the cereal bowls in the sink. (Yes, I have been known to do dishes.) It was a fishing morning, meaning there was no one else to answer the phone (trout apparently bite best just after sunrise, but I suspect that's just something old men invented to get away from their families as early in the day as possible), so I had to grab the receiver with a soapy hand. "Hello?"
"Hello, Jacob, this is Edward. Would you be so kind as to not to hang up on me?"
Undead sarcasm. Just what I needed to start my day off on the right foot. "Depends on what you have to say."
"Bella and I would like to discuss the details of your offer."
"Oh, right," I said casually, as though I hadn't been thinking about it every single second for the last few days, expending all of my energy coming up with new methods to hide my idiocy from the Pack, wondering if was even a name for the type of debilitating mental illness I was clearly suffering or if it was an entirely new form of insanity. On the advice on a manipulative century-old teenager I'd bartered the possibility of providing offspring to his fianceé in order to keep her from killing herself. 'The Isabella Complex,' the doctors would call it. They'd teach about it in medical schools for decades to come. Philosophers would debate the subject for even longer, always returning to the same crucial question: "Why didn't Jacob Black just walk away? Was it faulty brain chemistry? Unstable ethical grounding? Or was he just a total fucking moron?"
All the good money was on the third explanation.
"Jacob? Hello?"
I blinked. "What?"
"Will you meet us at the treaty line in an hour?" Cullen's voice said curtly.
Us. The hell with that. "I'll meet Bella at the treaty line in an hour, if she wants to," I snapped. "You aren't part of this discussion."
"Whatever you might wish," said the bloodsucker coldly, "I am Bella's fiancé, and the scenario being proposed involves me as much as it involves you."
I smirked. "I thought the whole point was that you couldn't be involved, leech. Tell me, does anything keep working after your heart stops? I mean, if there's no blood left to flow, can you even--"
He cut me off. "This bickering is childish. We will be at the treaty line at ten-thirty. If you are not, we'll assume that you've withdrawn your offer."
Then he hung up on me.
Now who's the childish one?
I'm not going, I thought stubbornly, returning to the dishes. I'm not.
***
I did, of course. (Another point for total fucking moron.) I even got there five minutes early. She was going to be there and so I naturally came running -- Pavlov's werewolf salivating at the sound of Bella.
Watching the Volvo approach, I was able to see at least one bright side in this whole mess: no matter what happened, no matter how awful things got, no matter how much I lost, my Rabbit was always going to be way the fuck better under the hood than that bloodsucker's Swedish piece of shit. That counted for something.
Said Swedish piece of shit pulled over to the side of the road and came to a stop with the tiniest tell-tale squeak of the brakes (he'd better get that fixed or Bella would wind up going right through the windshield, with her luck). Cullen was out of his seat almost before the engine was cut and practically teleported to the passenger's side, opening the door like Bella didn't know how to work a handle, offering his hand to help her out of the car.
Bella was pale and drawn, like she hadn't slept properly in weeks -- which, between Victoria and this insanity, she probably hadn't. She smiled at me anyway and my heart clenched. Goddamn it, if I could just get her out of here, away from all this bullshit, she'd come to her senses, I knew she would, she'd be able to get some rest--
--Cullen's yellow eyes snapped to mine and narrowed threateningly.
Hello to you too, leech, I thought. Then, for Bella's benefit, I added, "How about we actually have our conversations out loud, Cullen?"
"Keep your thoughts appropriate then, dog," he snarled.
"I'll do my very best," I said. Risin' up, back on the street... "So, bloodsucker, had any good venison recently?"
"Stop it, both of you," Bella said, glancing back and forth between us as she walked forward, still holding onto Cullen's hand. "Please don't do this right now." She turned her brown eyes to me, and she looked like she was one hard knock away from total collapse.
I nodded reluctantly. "All right. Sorry, Bells. How's it going?"
She shrugged. "No one's tried to kill me this week, so, you know, can't complain."
I couldn't help it -- I laughed. She bit her lip to hold back a giggle, and there was my Bells, happy and whole... or as close to happy and whole as she ever got. So many times, it happens so fast, you trade your passion for glory... "Well, it's only Saturday. There's still a whole weekend left. Plenty of time for a zombie horde to show up on our doorsteps."
"That'll make Charlie happy," Bella said. "It'll be a chance to put his shotgun to good use."
"Quil and Embry have stockpiled a bunch of majorly explosive fireworks," I offered. Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past, you must fight just to keep them alive... "I sure hope they're for the zombie apocalypse, because otherwise, I'm kinda worried about what Quil's planning to--"
"Stop it," Cullen interrupted suddenly, glowering at me.
Bella jumped and looked at him in confusion, but I just grinned. "If you don't like Rocky then stay the fuck out of my head, Cullen." The line between Bella's eyebrows deepened, so I sang (badly), "It's the eye of the tiger, it's the thrill of the fight--"
She groaned. "Jake, that's going to be in my head all day!"
"Exactly!" Sometimes I was just so brilliant I couldn't stand myself. "I'm sick of everyone reading my thoughts, so I tried a couple of things on the Pack and it turns out eighties music is perfect for kicking out eavesdroppers. Great, huh?" And the last known survivor stalks his prey in the night...
"Very clever," Cullen grumbled. "Care to stop playing games? We have serious subjects to discuss."
Bella's face fell, and she nodded to Cullen apologetically. "Right. I'm sorry."
"I didn't mean you, love, I meant him." Cullen kissed her hand, but Bella's smile was already gone.
I glared and turned up the mental dial. And he's watching us all with the EEEEEYYYYYYYYEEEE of the tiger! Cullen rolled his eyes, but hell, it made me feel a little better.
"Now," Cullen started, "we've talked about your conditions, and--"
"Excuse me." I raised my hand. "I'd just like to go on the record as saying that you, Edward Cullen, have no business being part of this conversation. Anything that does or doesn't happen is between Bella and I."
Cullen exhaled slowly (making a fine show of being alive) and turned to Bella. "It's entirely up to you," he murmured, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "If you don't want me here, I'll go. Would you like me to leave?"
At the word 'leave', Bella's eyes widened. She shook her head.
"Then I'll stay," Cullen said. He looked up at me resolutely. "As long as Bella wants me at her side, then that is where I will be."
Sometimes, I wondered if Cullen honestly didn't know how much he was dominating her. Maybe he really thought that submissive and adoring was her natural state of being. If he'd never met the other Bella, the one who snorted Coke out of her nose when Jared told a dirty joke and sneezed for five minutes straight, then I almost felt sorry for him.
Almost.
"Fine," I said, crossing my arms and leaning back against the Rabbit. "So you're here. Great. Can Bella at least be the one who talks? Being as it's her body we're discussing?"
"It's fine, Jake," Bella said quietly. Her eyes were studying the ground. "If I have something to say, I'll say it."
"Good, because I have a question for you." It would be so much easier to talk if Cullen wasn't here, if I could talk to my Bella, if I could just get her away from him for a little while-- then he tensed. Shit, dropped my Eighties Thought Guard. Risin' up, straight to the top... "Bells, do you even want to be here? Because it really doesn't look that way to me."
"You don't get--" Cullen started, but Bella raised her head.
"It's okay, Edward. I can speak for myself." She let go of the bloodsucker's hand and looked me in the eye. She looked calm and steady and God I wished I believed that was what she really felt like, wished I didn't know that it was the 'I need to look strong so Edward thinks I'm good enough' paint job she slapped all over herself whenever she was around him. Went the distance, now I'm not gonna stop... "I want to be here, Jake," she said. "I do. So let's talk, okay?"
There wasn't anything I could say to that except, "Okay, Bells." My life would be so much easier if I didn't love her. But I did and there was no use complaining about it. Just a man and his will to survive...
"All right, then." Cullen stepped forward, obviously ready to take over the conversation again. "Bella has shared your conditions with me."
"Didn't know I was contagious," I deadpanned.
Bella pressed her lips together to hide a smile.
"She shared your conditions with me," Cullen continued, looking peeved at what he no doubt considered to be infantile behavior, "and I think they are acceptable."
No surprises there -- this whole insane thing was Cullen's idea, after all. "Fabulous," I said. "Really. Just great. Does Bella think they're acceptable?" Not to mention, did I think they were acceptable? Three days of thinking hadn't clarified anything in my head. Hell, I still couldn't believe we were really talking about this. This was a kid we were talking about, a flesh and blood kid that for some bizarre reason we were considering bringing into this freakshow, a kid who would one day ask "Daddy, where did I come from?"
"Well, son, Mommy wanted to kill herself for a bloodsucking parasite, so the bloodsucking parasite decided Mommy should have you to make her happy, and Daddy agreed because he loved Mommy very much and was willing to do anything to keep her alive. Now run along and play!"
Holy God.
"That's what we're here to discuss," Cullen said. "Bella is willing to go along with the plan, and there's no reason not to execute it as soon as possible." As soon as... wait, what? "But we need to establish some... parameters to your requests."
Bella stared at the pavement.
"They're not requests," I said, trying to get my feet back under me. "They're conditions, and they're non-negotiable." If someone had told me six months ago that I would be having this conversation, I would've asked what they were smoking and if they had any left to share. "The kid would be half mine, half Bella's, and none yours, Cullen. It would be with me on the rez, inside the treaty line, for a lot of the time. You do anything to stop that, and I'll count it as a treaty violation, got it? I'll have the Pack at your door before you can blink."
"I understand that," he said. "And I will respect it."
"Bella and the kid don't leave Forks," I added. "Not for more than, you know, summer vacations and stuff like that." I glanced at Bella, who didn't look up, and found myself saying, "I'd like it if it went to the reservation schools. But that's... that's something we talk about later, I guess." What. The Fuck. Was I Doing?
"This is where things become difficult." Cullen frowned. "Sooner or later, people will start to wonder why my family and I aren't aging. We have to move."
"Well, that's your problem," I snapped. "Where you go isn't important. I only care about what Bella does."
"Bella will be my wife," he said coldly. "She will be my family. So it is important, whether you like it or not."
The wolf in me bristled. "It's still your problem. Live under a rock, for all I care. If we do this, Bella and the kid stay here, within easy reach of the rez and the Pack if need be. You figure out the rest of it."
Cullen stared at me for a long moment. Then he glanced down at Bella and his expression softened instantly. He nodded.
"And again, if she turns--" I tried to catch Bella's eye, but she steadfastly refused to look up "--if you turn, then you leave and the kid stays with me. And that's that. End of story."
"That's acceptable," Cullen said.
"I'd rather hear Bella say it, if you don't mind," I growled at the bloodsucker before turning back to her. "Bella?" I said in gentler tones. "Bells, look at me."
She looked up, and for the first time in a long time, I couldn't read her expression.
"I'm not kidding, Bells," I said. "I'm not bluffing. This isn't some kind of con or cheap manipulation that you can work around. You can't come to me crying and thinking I'll change my mind. I won't. I'm deadly serious. If you become a vampire, you can't keep our baby, do you understand? I won't agree to that. I will never agree to that. And if you run, I will find you. "
I'd thought about this a lot, and I meant every fucking word. If Bella turned it would destroy me. I wouldn't let it destroy anyone else.
"Do you hear me, Bella?"
She nodded, her eyes never leaving mine.
"She agrees," Cullen said.
"I didn't say that, Edward," Bella snapped, glaring at him. Whoa. Cullen looked stunned and I was pretty sure I did too. "Just because I understand doesn't mean I'm agreeing to anything. So just... give me a minute, okay?" She stumbled away from us both, crossed the road, and walked off into the forest. The underbrush hid her from sight within seconds.
"Bella, stay close!" Cullen called as he took a short step after her, anxiety written all over his sculpted features. "It isn't safe!"
I rolled my eyes. "For the love of God, bloodsucker, she'll be fine. We'd both hear anything big enough to worry about. Don't freak."
He looked physically pained to have her out of his sight. "There are just so many potential... a tree could fall, she could step wrong.... anything could happen to her, anything. She's just so... fragile."
"You know," I said, "she's really not."
Cullen looked at me, and within the space of a heartbeat, he was a monster again. It was amazing how much of a show he put on for the people around him -- I guess to make them more comfortable. She probably didn't even realize how much he did for her, how he pretended to inhale and exhale, how he blinked, how he moved. But a vampire didn't need to fake anything for a werewolf, and suddenly he was as still as a reptilian predator waiting for prey in the marsh grasses. "Just so we understand one another," he said, "you should know that I'm only saying these things in the hopes that Bella will agree to the plan and never try to change. But if she decides five years from now that living in Switzerland will make her happy, or wants to travel the world in a sailboat, or even if she never changes her mind and insists on turning -- and she wants her child with her -- then that's what she'll have. I will see to it that she has whatever she needs, without consideration for you or any deal brokered."
I smiled grimly. "Hey, if you want to start the first supernatural custody battle in history, that's your call. Bring it. I've been waiting for an excuse to tear your head from your shoulders."
Cullen bared his teeth. "Likewise."
We both listened for a moment -- the leech probably a little more carefully than me, given that he was the one with the raging paranoia issues -- and determined that nothing with a lot of teeth was in the immediate vicinity (aside from us). Bella was somewhere nearby, but it didn't sound like she was moving. Probably she was sitting on a log and thinking in a very Bella-esque way. I didn't blame her. It was a lot to think about. A lot of crazy shit to sort through, most of which made absolutely no sense.
If it bought time...
"I don't think you'll succeed, you know," Cullen said.
"Excuse me?"
"In your plan to use this situation to get Bella to stay with you. You are welcome to try, but I don't think you'll succeed."
I could deny it, but there wasn't a lot of point. "It's not so much a plan as a hope," I said. "If you're going to read minds, bloodsucker, at least do it accurately." I sat on the bumper of the Rabbit, glaring at the leech and his fucking Volvo. "Besides, if you'll recall, this 'situation' was your idea."
"It was," Cullen agreed. "And I still believe it's a good one."
"Then why are you bitching about my so-called 'plan'?"
"If Bella decides she genuinely wishes to stay with you, I would never stand in her way," Cullen said, giving me a long look. "She can have whatever she wants. But if I think you're manipulating her... that's a different matter entirely."
"You're a fine one to talk about manipulation," I countered. "You've done nothing but pull her strings since you two first met. That's probably why she collapsed like a broken marionette when you left. No one to make her dance."
"So you think you'll step in?"
"No," I said, "I think she can dance on her own. Even if she doesn't."
Edward opened his mouth to respond, then snapped his head to the side -- Bella was coming out of the woods. "We'll finish this later," he said.
"You bet your ass we will."
Bella crossed the road and stood in front of me. She was white as a sheet, but she hadn't been crying, which was a pleasant surprise. Good for her. "Edward," she said, "may I talk to Jacob alone for a moment? Please?"
It made me sick that she asked his permission.
"Of course, love," Cullen said, back to his fake breathing and fake blinking and fake humanity. He moved forward to kiss the side of Bella's face, leaving a cloying stink all over her. I managed not to wrinkle my nose in disgust. "I'll wait in the car."
Bella waited until the Volvo's door closed before she spoke (not that it made that much difference; the bloodsucker had damn good hearing), and focused on something over my shoulder. "Jake, is this what you want?"
I groaned. "Bells, I'm a lot more interested in hearing if this is what you want."
She smiled, still studying something in the distance. "Yeah, but I asked first."
Damn. "I guess you did."
This was insane. This whole thing was fucking batshit insane. My father would shit a brick. Charlie would shit a brick. Sam would shit a brick. We'd have to lie, say it was an accident, a one-time thing that Cullen had forgiven her for. If anyone suspected that we'd done this on purpose I'd be stone dead before I could even phase to defend myself.
Half the time the kid would be living with filthy bloodsuckers and would come to me reeking like a dead mouse wrapped in an Easter lily. God forbid, he might grow up thinking being a sparkly undead monster was cool, might take after his mother and start begging for the bite before he got "too old."
Bella wasn't going to leave her leech. She would be mine, but just a little bit, just enough to not be enough, just enough to keep me from ever moving on.
"Jacob?"
"I'm thinking," I said truthfully.
But Bella would be alive. It would buy time, time for her to wake up, to see that living life really wasn't so bad. We would make cute kids, I knew we would, and it wouldn't be what I really wanted but it would be so close... Not to mention that the future-seeing leech had said there might be three, not one. Bella might stay. There was still a chance. There was still hope.
But either way, it wasn't a choice between Now or Later. It was a choice between Too Soon and Not Ever.
I wasn't strong enough to face Not Ever.
"Jacob, if--"
"Yes." My voice was hoarse. "Yes, this is what I want."
Holy. Fuck.
Bella swallowed. "Okay, then."
"But what about you, Bells?" I persisted. "What do you want?" None of this mattered if this wasn't something she wanted.
She smiled sadly, looked down, shrugged. "Edward thinks it's a good idea."
Goddamn it. "I'm not asking what Edward wants," I said harshly. That bloodsucker was always in the way, even in the way of a straight fucking answer. "I'm asking what you want."
"I guess... I wish I didn't have to decide," she said softly, head bowed. "But I have to, don't I?"
Something in my throat closed up. "Yeah, honey. I'm sorry, but you do."
She took a deep shuddering breath, then stepped forward, closing the distance between us and resting her forehead against my chest. She smelled disgusting, but I wrapped my arms around her all the same. I always would.
"I think..." she said, her words muffled against my shirt, "I think we should try this."
My heart stopped. "Are you sure, Bells?"
Her laughter was a little choked. "No."
"But if you're not sure, then--"
"I'm close enough." She pulled away and swiped at her tears. "I mean, I never imagined anything like this, but when I think about what we could..." Bella looked up at me, and she was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, "...I like a lot of it."
I couldn't help it, I couldn't stop myself-- "But there could be so much more to like, if you just--"
"Don't, Jake," she said, her expression closing, becoming his Bella instead of my Bells again. "Don't ask me that."
I swallowed back my words. "Right." But I'm not giving up.
The bloodsucker glared daggers at me through the Volvo's windshield... so I pulled out the big guns. And the man in the back said everyone attack and it turned into a ballroom blitz! And the girl in the corner said boy I wanna warn ya, it'll turn into a ballroom blitz! Ballroom blitz!
Cullen winced.
Ha. Serves you right, motherfucker.
If Bella noticed any of our telepathic macho posturing, she didn't comment. She did, however, glance over her shoulder at her fiance. "I have to go," she said, taking a step back, pushing her hair out of her face. "Edward thinks it's best to start this right away, so I guess... I guess I'll call you? When it's, um, time?" Her cheeks flushed pink. "It'll be, uh, a week or so... I have to, you know, do the math. And then we'll... figure something out. I guess."
Oh. Right. That part. The part that makes babies. Funny, you'd think that would be first and foremost in my mind, and yet it hadn't even occurred to me until now that we'd be... wow. Okay. "Sure, sure, yeah. Call me."
"I will." Bella's face was beet red. She actually looked sunburned. She took another few steps backwards. "Well... I'll be seeing you, Jake."
"Yeah, I guess you will." I put on a smile I didn't feel. "Bye, Bells."
"Bye," she mumbled. Then she all but dove into the Volvo. Cullen spared me one more death glare, then he pulled away like the forest was on fire, making a U-turn that smoked the tires before racing away from the treaty line at fairly impressive speeds for a Swedish piece of shit car. I hoped Bella got a chance to put her seat belt on.
I stood by the side of the road alone.
Total fucking moron.
***
Chapter Four: Wherein Leah throws rocks and plans are made.
A/N: I think it's obvious that this is what I was thinking about.