Twilight fanfic: THE LAST SLEEP (pt. 3)
Jan. 9th, 2010 02:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninety6tearsTitle: 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.
She hunted.
She couldn’t go to the far places with the bigger animals because there was no way of getting to them that guaranteed no risky proximity to the better blood. Alice insisted deer wasn’t too bad, definitely better than raccoons or whatever Bella had been picking off. Bella found herself almost foolishly waiting around for someone to teach her how to do something when she smelled two creatures together, big enough, and Edward just nodded at her and she gave in, her feet flying impossibly fast and her body carried effortlessly in the violent intention to take one down, and when she did it was like crumpling a piece of notebook paper to break its neck. Quickly she solved the unpleasant texture of the hair by ripping off a good portion of skin, and then the soft muscle, liquid and warm on her teeth, the blood entering her system like a steady electric surge.
It could be better. This would always be true.
Edward was then right next to her, but he spotted his own game and hesitantly left her side. Bella sat up and back, cross-legged in front of the kill, looking to scan the distance for whatever animal Edward was pursuing. But something in her immediate vision...
Right close to her, a young fawn, all cottony and clumsy, shivering on its legs slowly towards the carcass in front of her. Having no recognition, it faltered back, and its head was low when it sauntered away slowly, solitary.
Bella’s body became very still except for a hand reaching gradually down, feeling for the top of the deer’s head lying close to her knee, its smooth bristled surface between the ears. With a shaky exhale, she held unmoving for one second before giving down with her shoulders.
She had already acknowledged that Rosalie was approaching at walking pace. Her new sister, clean and thin in her jeans, stopped where she found Bella just outside of her vision over her shoulder; Rosalie leaned into a protruding appendage of a birch with a look almost like fear when she heard the tiniest angry moan, the sound of bones cracking slowly into sawdust between Bella’s cringing fingers.
When Bella’s head slumped over as if in shame, Rosalie went to her, her footsteps graceful and silent over the dry leaves. Bella felt her standing close at her side, just a tenth of an inch from touching her. She reached up her limp-feeling hands all smeared with purple-red, as if to wipe them on her blouse, but then only dropped them in helpless disgust with the knuckles down on her lap. She wasn’t clean like the others, her mind always somewhere else.
Rosalie took half of a self-debating movement forward, then crouched down on long agile legs, sort of like a graceful insect, in front of Bella, avoiding the severity of looking her right in the face. “The males and females smell distinct from each other,” she explained flatly. “It will be a while till you can tell the difference, but if there are two of them, or if it’s young, or if it’s a female, and you don’t have the stomach for it...Always check. And you broke the neck wrong. If you want it to be painless, you applied too much pressure before you snapped it.”
Edward had returned, was standing close by over Rosalie’s shoulder in trepidation, and after a pause of reading Rosalie’s thoughts directed at him, turned back.
He would go to Carlisle and Esme, tell them Bella carried many guilts about her but this was one he couldn’t understand. He would tell them that he was scared. He would tell them, trying to piece everything out, how it’s always hard to adjust; remind them how hard it was for him, but that even he eventually realized that it wasn’t his fault, that he didn’t choose this.
And Esme would sadly whisper, “But she did.”
One day when Jacob and Bella had their backs to a huge tree trunk in a crackling downfall of rain, he said something he seemed to have been wanting to ask for a while.
“The others, the rest of the pack,” he explained, “They don’t know that I’ve been seeing you. I didn’t tell them, but I was just waiting for them to see it, or maybe smell it? They don’t know.” He looked narrowly at her. “How do you do that?”
Bella, like him, was beginning to figure out that she had a talent. Secrets. The first few times she’d met Jacob, her only attempt to skirt around having to talk about that with the family was an immediate shower as soon as she got to the house. It still left a hint of the smell, and Alice should have been able to figure it out. She’d detected none of the restrained curiosity she’d expected. Everybody should have had a good idea where she’d been going at night, but it was almost like they barely pondered it.
She didn’t understand how she could make that happen without knowing she could do it; but eventually, as her visits to her werewolf became routinely needed, as the possibility of the Cullens leaving Forks loomed up just waiting to be protested for Bella’s needs, she didn’t want it to be a secret any more, and it wasn’t. This would allow the pack to see everything the next time the wolves went running together, and though Bella imagined Jacob would get the same look of strange worry and confusion she’d gotten from Alice the first time she could smell Jacob on Bella’s laundry, of course she couldn’t protect them both from exposing their nighttime lives to those around them forever. Then again, she probably could. But there was something admittedly uncomfortable about forcing what was essentially an artificial stupidity into those she loved for the sake of a dependence on privacy.
They still hadn’t gotten rid of Bella’s bed at the Cullen house when one night she was slowly hanging up some new clothes Alice had ordered for her from some Italian boutique; Edward had been sitting on the bed reading one of his poetry volumes when she came in, but it didn’t take long for her to sense that he was just desolately staring at the pages when he was even looking at the book at all. When she was done, she found it hard to turn around; she slowly tucked flat the black paper bag she was holding, folded it in half, then sighed and slipped it more carelessly between a couple satiny shoe boxes on the top shelf.
Her feet padded gracefully and soundlessly on the way to the bedroom door. But Edward said, “Bella—” and her direction shifted to a heavy current that brought her to his side. With a breath that sounded almost frightened, his arms closed around her hips. She cradled his head against her with a gentle care that was reminiscent of how he used to have to handle her.
After seemingly gathering his thoughts enough to calm himself down, Edward said in an aching quiet, “I won’t be able to lose you like this.”
Bella became more still before flatly replying, “You can’t lose me.”
Edward shook his head. “It all went so wrong, Bella. You’re becoming—not even someone else—you’re becoming a void. And you’re just so consumed by this self-loathing...”
“I don’t want to talk about Dad,” Bella replied a little hotly, like quivering her hand back from being burned.
“Bella, it’s not your fault.”
“That means nothing coming from you.” Bella shook her head, her glossy red eyes steeling with honesty against the small note of regret at having to say it. “When would you ever hold it against me if I did something terrible? Forgiveness just isn’t something you can grant me.”
She let out a breath, but it caught as she saw the hurt deepening in Edward’s expression and she quickly said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean...”
“Don’t you understand why I’m scared?” Edward stood up with a rising urgency, almost seeming angry. “If you let all this bitterness take over you, you’ll just get lost. And you’ll end up like most.”
“You think that I’ll...” Bella looked at him through a fragile daze that was just waiting to flare up in anger. “I’m not a murderer, Edward.”
Edward glared down at their feet, seemingly to avoid looking that way at her, before heavily refuting, “Neither was I.”
Bella’s face slowly fell; she backed just a step away from Edward and hugged her arms to herself as if she was cold.
“I won’t ask you to stop all this. You don’t need to explain anything to me,” Edward said in a gentle, measured tone. “But I can’t let you go to him in denial of the fact that he can’t always be there—And then what will you do about the guilt, if you can’t ever realize that it doesn’t belong to you? Whether he’s gone tomorrow, or seventy years from now, can you afford to mourn him? Another living soul whose pain you so readily take responsibility for? What then? Could you come home to me and still be my Bella?”
Her head dropped slowly, a layer of silky dark hair falling over her eyes. She stood that way silently until Edward, weakened, stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her. The small sound of her breathing became quick and desperate, and her voice muttered into his ivory shoulder, “I’m still here. I’m still here. Edward...”
The slight cold of their skin brushing together created the sensation of a gust of wind coming in from the window, everything becoming awash with the candid color of moonlight. The fabric between them felt so thin; the air was so thin and the night was thin like white gauze peeling easily away, and it fit like an elegant glove when Bella found herself holding Edward so close to her body that she could hardly remember the forbidden nature of their physical contact from when she was human. And of course it crossed her mind, the price she’d paid for this, that maybe it was despicable for her to enjoy any of the things she couldn’t do before. But out there in the woods somewhere there was a boy that bore the meaningless potential of her life in his palm, a young man she’d hurt and who would be waiting for her anyway, in the middle of the night, whenever she needed him. And that was enough to let her think that she deserved something, for now; to allow Edward to patch up the half of her heart that still remembered its own love for him.
One foggy early morning when the sun was barely beginning to patch down between branches, Jacob was pacing around the pines, pulling his jacket off, peering up into the treetops with a look of slight irritation.
“Bella!” he hollered up. “I can smell you!”
There was a deep graceful fall and the thud of both solid feet and one hand; she landed, laughing, right behind him. He turned at her with chagrin.
“Sneaky leech,” he said with a smirk. She communicated a Shut up by briefly rolling her eyes.
These were the best days, filled with their own impossible versions of childlike games. Jacob would take wolf form and they’d run, racing each other or racing nothing, flitting around and between all the trees until everything except for them became a blur and didn’t seem real. It reminded her of the days of their motorcycles humming fast over the La Push dirt roads, the wind licking in their hair, their laughters not drowning in the noise and speed but seeming to become it.
They halted near the edge when they came close to the beach, Bella managing to erase the momentum with a quick lilting step, Jacob slowing and stopping in the process of thawing down to his human body. Clawing idly at the stringy length of his hair, he muttered a curse word as he looked around on the ground in several directions.
Bella was merely looking him over with friendly derision. With a scoffing tone, she asked, “Did you lose your clothes?”
“Yes,” Jacob replied, laughing a little at himself but hardly embarrassed. Bella was already a flitting blur in the nearby trees and shrubs, returning in some ten seconds holding the bundle along the partly shredded long rope.
“Here.” She swung the rope teasingly a couple times, then after catching a whiff made a face, complaining, “Bleh. They’re sweaty,” bunching the cloth up and pitching it straight to his torso.
He laughed huskily, not bothering with any privacy as he began untangling his pant legs. Bella herself was considerably bare in only a thin cami top and briefs. As their paired forms, dark and pale, wound through the woods more and more like animals every day, any kind of loose clothing had only become a nuisance that would go home shredded by the brambles.
When Jacob, holding his t-shirt between his teeth, was slipping a foot into one pant leg, he paused at the realization that Bella had walked a couple steps away and then gone completely still. He could tell she’d stopped breathing.
“Bella?”
Her helpless face turned just slightly. She looked horrified, terrified; completely maddened.
He heard it then, just faintly. A voice hollering from on the beach, an echo carried by the wind. Bella flinched.
“No—”
With a terrible groan, Bella hauled herself up and tore away, heading lightning-fast to the edges of the shade, but because of Jacob’s quick perception of what she was about to do she found herself slamming into a teeming surface of wolf hair.
She stepped back, almost stunned, as Jacob narrowed his frame into an aggressive warning growl. Then she kind of stumbled back, her face tightened by impossible restraint, turning and making rapidly but stiffly back into the forest.
Jacob dephased, picked up his jeans again and slowly put them on, then was sloppily pulling on his t-shirt as he followed where Bella had gone, knowing she’d run far enough to get control of herself. It was almost ten minutes of walking before he heard the brisk drop of her feet landing from far up. He turned in the direction of the sound and soon enough made out the blurry checker texture of her white body speckled with faint shadows approaching at a staggered pace.
She was holding a dead owl between her hands, biting into it like a child walking along sucking on an orange. Her expression was one of queasy self-disgust mingled with a relaxed relief, and it was easy to see how her entire body yielded to the sickening need, all the feathers poking out in a disfigured spray from where it obscured the sight of her lethal teeth.
It was something Jacob just couldn’t see. He turned his head away, sort of awkwardly looking down like one does when they’ve just caught somebody in the middle of something really embarrassing, giving them a moment to pull their pants on in the most terribly silent way. Bella soon rid her hands of the corpse and slowly came up to Jacob’s side, her face pulled flat in an almost sheepish look that encompassed what had manifest itself in her as heavy disappointment. Her face was perfectly clean and she seemed to not have made any mess at all, but there were a couple slivering lines of red dripping down one hand and Jacob was the first to notice. As if to impatiently dispel any further unease Jacob went ahead and took her hand, slowly smudged the blood off on his shirt, not quite looking her in the eyes and with a visible tension in his jaw. She was a bit more touched by the action than he might have expected. Her hand lingered over the fabric of his shirt. He picked it up and held it between both of his hands as if he was trying to keep it warm. When his controlled eyes met hers they held more sympathy than disgust, colored with an expression so far from what she’d imagined he was thinking of her a second ago it was like an unexpected splintering of comfortable light.
They went and sat down in the slow-motion twinkling of dusk, remaining silent for a very long time. When Bella finally stood up to leave, Jacob half-nervously asked her if there was any particular reason they always saw each other at night.
She thought for a second, trying to scrutinize if there were any complicated implications to what he was asking. She supposed it was a perfectly simple concern, thinking aloud, “Oh...I guess your social life would be suffering by staying up all night all the time...”
He crooked half a smile, saying nothing until she answered the question.
“No, there’s really no specific reason.”
His face lit up just a little. “So could you come tomorrow? In the afternoon?”
“...Sure, I don’t see why I couldn’t start coming in the daytime. Except...” She nervously scratched at a nonexistent itch on her arm. “When more people are outside...What happened earlier...”
“Maybe that’s the idea,” Jacob hinted. “Face it, you’re never going to get better at it by staying as far away from civilization as possible.”
“That’s...a unique viewpoint,” Bella said with a lift of the eyebrows. “But it’s way too dangerous. I’m still young, I’m stronger than the rest of the Cullens and I could end up ripping your arms off if my instincts got me carried away.”
It both frustrated her and lifted her spirits a little that Jacob was smiling beside himself like he actually found that funny. “You honestly think you would do that?”
She wanted to smile back. After a moment she just said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The drive was an aggravation, even with only a very occasional passing of a car on the country highway that made Bella’s body stiffen slightly in restraint, but Rosalie promised better hunting in the desert-like Arizona regions. She apparently had a preference for peccary, which Emmett teasingly described as “Those ugly things?” It almost made Bella laugh; she could remember learning about all these animals at her Phoenix grade school, but there had been one lunch table conversation when she’d mentioned javelinas and Mike Newton insisted she was making up words.
By morning they were in the middle of a vast, bare plain where no living soul would be wandering for miles on either side. As the sun was rising up a piercing light on the horizon, Rosalie and Bella were standing side-by-side, poised in the kind of stillness that just let the world circulate its distance around them, waiting, sometimes with their eyes closed, to pick up a scent. This method of hunting, while maybe inefficient, allowed for the only conversations Rosalie and Bella ever really had apart from the rest of the family. During the course of Bella’s adjustment, the two of them had found a benefit in practically becoming exclusive hunting partners, and this odd variety of intimacy was the basis of how their rapport had improved. They never spent time together doing anything else. Their connection was of two sisters, not of friends.
When the sun had come blazing into their skies, Bella looked down at her own arm and wiggled her alarmingly shining fingers closer to her face. She’d seen her own skin come alive with glittering light, but never in such a bright open place where her entire body just resonated at the skin.
Rosalie looked over with a relaxed smile. “I like to think we’d look like a mirage. Was it always so hot when you lived around here?”
“No, not always.” Bella dropped her hands back at her sides where they suspended slightly off her hips in an anxiously ready stance. “How long have we been standing here, thirty minutes? I’m starting to wonder what woodpecker would taste like.”
Rosalie looked at Bella for a beat before looking back forward and closing her eyes to bask in the direct light; it was almost like a conversation over sun-tanning. “You want to tell me about your special talent, then?”
It could only make Bella smile a little, the way that Rosalie brought up in such a relaxed invitation what the rest of the family seemed adverse to regarding in the fear that she wouldn’t want to talk about it. “Somebody’s hungry for gossip,” she teased.
Rosalie let out a deep, musical laugh that approached that sisterly fashion of being somewhere between loving amusement and mockery before she exclaimed, “It’s not like I’m going to tell anybody. Well, except for Emmett...”
Bella rolled her eyes in understanding. After a brief pause, she flatly explained. “As far as I’ve figured it out, I can negatively manipulate people’s perceptions of...things. If I don’t want a person to know something, it’s completely impossible for them to figure it out. And the only way I can control it is to change my mind about whether I want them to know.”
Rosalie’s face stiffly considered that for a moment, in her thoughtful expression that sometimes looked deceivingly twisted with slight disgust. She finally commented, “I suppose that’s fitting.” It wouldn’t be the first time Bella had pondered whether that could be taken as a compliment, but she wasn’t dwelling on it now, since Rosalie seemed entirely neutral about the implications of her abilities. “But how far can you take it? Could you make yourself invisible?”
Bella had tried this kind of thing on many occasions, often for Jacob’s curiosity. “I don’t know, it’s only things people don’t know already, and I imagine that physical perception is a lot harder to erase. It’s not like I could make anybody forget something.”
Rosalie gave the slightest nod like that was the kind of response she expected, “So it’s secrets. You’re your own...Secret Keeper or something.”
Bella had a delayed adjustment to Rosalie’s response. After a moment, she very slowly turned her head to the side, her face squinted with disbelief. “You read Harry Potter?”
Rosalie offered the simple explanation of, “Esme could talk me into anything.” After a moment, her body strained a little. She pointed with a sudden certainty in a direction up Bella’s right and just said, “Bobcat.”
The word “picnic” put an ironic scour on Bella’s tumultuous state, as she and Jacob, even equipped with their own blanket underneath them, lay obscured by the richest patch of trees close to a sun-honeyed meadow where a family of three were having just that. A relaxed Saturday outing, and food, while Bella’s system already full with animal blood was screaming at her that the people enjoying this food were food. They had been at this for thirty minutes: trying to keep up a regular conversation they’d be having if Bella wasn’t practically being driven mad. She lay on her chest next to Jacob, fists clenching tightly beneath her, and when she seemed really about to lose it he’d automatically put his arm over her.
“You know that wouldn’t actually do any good if I tried to take off?” she grumbled at Jacob, covering her nose simultaneously against him and the all-too-pleasant much more distant smell.
“It might if I phased,” he suggested, laughing a little arrogantly at her as he imagined Bella suddenly pinned under the weight of a giant paw.
“I told you I don’t want you to do that.” She’d insisted on this, repeatedly: Only if he absolutely needed to. Having him phase around her when he wasn’t in a good mood presented a whole other danger for both of them.
“But isn’t that the reason you’re doing this with me? The big ‘just in case’...I can fight you off? If it was you and a Cullen they couldn’t stop you.”
She was silent for a second before assuring him, “I’m stronger than you, Jacob. Not as strong as I’ve been, but for a while I’m still...And that’s not even the point.”
She cut herself off in an onrush of the terrible urge, coarsely rubbing her fingers into the dirt, her breaths heaving.
Slightly flared by his distaste at seeing Bella like this, he remarked with a tone of annoyance, “Wouldn’t it help some if you stopped breathing?”
“But I want to smell it,” she snapped. “Don’t you get it? God, maybe if I got closer...”
Bella stood up, and Jacob warily covered her path. “Oh, come on,” he sighed with disappointment.
She stepped up to him and gave him a glowering but non-emphatic shove to the chest. His body lilted back just a little before he responded by pivoting himself towards her at an angle that suddenly allowed him to lightly pin her back to a tree, resting his palms on the chipped trunk at either side of her shoulders. She frowned indifferently as he grinned beside himself. She knew he’d be too bothered by their proximity to relish it for much longer.
At that thought, a sinking ache of loss entered her gut; she was realizing more fully than before this small thing among so much that she’d lost. How Jacob’s admiration of her had just lit up, bloomed into her and filled her with a more brisk confidence when they used to always be so close to each other, hand in hand or shoulder to shoulder. Now their physical contact could only offer brief glimmers of this before they recoiled from the discomfort. It had occurred to Bella long ago how sad it was that she was now naturally repelled from her closest friend, but somehow she was stung more deeply than ever at the inner revelation that Jacob’s magnetic attraction to her, having been something she forcefully thought too little of to consider how she took it for granted, was now vanquished for a reason beyond his own control.
Whatever Jacob thought Bella was thinking about, he was intending to talk her somewhere away from it. “What is the point?” he asked, prodding for some continuation of their previous exchange.
She looked at him in the eyes, gathering her self-control enough for the moment. “I thought...I figured I could control myself around you better because you would never forgive me if I failed. If I slip up...Edward will be disappointed. But he’ll understand. I don’t want somebody who would understand. You’d just hate me more than you already do.”
She’d lost her concentration. Her eyes shifted wide open towards the clearing. She pushed Jacob’s arm away, began walking away, not running, knowing he’d stop her but just wanting...
In no time he was covering her front again, grabbing her wrists in what she could feel was a furiously hard grip but couldn’t hurt her at all. “Stop. We’re staying right here,” he commanded irritably; he pushed her back against the tree with her hands locked at her sides. She could have easily pulled out of his grasp; it was the dark warning look in his eyes that made her stand still.
Her head rocked back against the tree trunk. She laughed bitterly. “You do hate me, don’t you?”
Jacob’s anger stayed solidified where he had her hands and arms restrained. His instincts agreed with her comment, but the rest of him resented it; as he had her pinned down he let out a sigh that loosened him in the chest, and he let the side of his face slowly rest so that his head was slightly above and next to hers. Their bodies felt forcibly rather than willingly tilted together, him seeming to make himself lie down in all the waste just to be close to her, sinking through suffocating sand all the way to the bottom that was her body. With his gaze turned up and away he could only feel her, but she wouldn’t even feel like a girl, the girl he once freely loved with a crackling heat that barely ever existed in someone so young. Bella couldn’t even place how she’d become so aware of this part of him; the closeness was uncomfortable and she opened her mouth to mutter, What are you doing? but only managed to weakly mouth it next to his shoulder. She knew what he was doing. Bella Swan, having been so robbed from his physical senses, was hurting in every possible non-tangible way, and he couldn’t even get inside; he couldn’t hold her together if the pieces were stuck in all the wrong order. Not if he hated being this close. She heard the sad smile in his voice when he poised his head down slightly to mutter into her ear.
“Bells, honey, I loathe you,” he gently promised. “I always will.”
On a summer morning, after distantly noting the color of her eyes in the grand hallway mirror, Bella wanted to go out among people...
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.
She hunted.
She couldn’t go to the far places with the bigger animals because there was no way of getting to them that guaranteed no risky proximity to the better blood. Alice insisted deer wasn’t too bad, definitely better than raccoons or whatever Bella had been picking off. Bella found herself almost foolishly waiting around for someone to teach her how to do something when she smelled two creatures together, big enough, and Edward just nodded at her and she gave in, her feet flying impossibly fast and her body carried effortlessly in the violent intention to take one down, and when she did it was like crumpling a piece of notebook paper to break its neck. Quickly she solved the unpleasant texture of the hair by ripping off a good portion of skin, and then the soft muscle, liquid and warm on her teeth, the blood entering her system like a steady electric surge.
It could be better. This would always be true.
Edward was then right next to her, but he spotted his own game and hesitantly left her side. Bella sat up and back, cross-legged in front of the kill, looking to scan the distance for whatever animal Edward was pursuing. But something in her immediate vision...
Right close to her, a young fawn, all cottony and clumsy, shivering on its legs slowly towards the carcass in front of her. Having no recognition, it faltered back, and its head was low when it sauntered away slowly, solitary.
Bella’s body became very still except for a hand reaching gradually down, feeling for the top of the deer’s head lying close to her knee, its smooth bristled surface between the ears. With a shaky exhale, she held unmoving for one second before giving down with her shoulders.
She had already acknowledged that Rosalie was approaching at walking pace. Her new sister, clean and thin in her jeans, stopped where she found Bella just outside of her vision over her shoulder; Rosalie leaned into a protruding appendage of a birch with a look almost like fear when she heard the tiniest angry moan, the sound of bones cracking slowly into sawdust between Bella’s cringing fingers.
When Bella’s head slumped over as if in shame, Rosalie went to her, her footsteps graceful and silent over the dry leaves. Bella felt her standing close at her side, just a tenth of an inch from touching her. She reached up her limp-feeling hands all smeared with purple-red, as if to wipe them on her blouse, but then only dropped them in helpless disgust with the knuckles down on her lap. She wasn’t clean like the others, her mind always somewhere else.
Rosalie took half of a self-debating movement forward, then crouched down on long agile legs, sort of like a graceful insect, in front of Bella, avoiding the severity of looking her right in the face. “The males and females smell distinct from each other,” she explained flatly. “It will be a while till you can tell the difference, but if there are two of them, or if it’s young, or if it’s a female, and you don’t have the stomach for it...Always check. And you broke the neck wrong. If you want it to be painless, you applied too much pressure before you snapped it.”
Edward had returned, was standing close by over Rosalie’s shoulder in trepidation, and after a pause of reading Rosalie’s thoughts directed at him, turned back.
He would go to Carlisle and Esme, tell them Bella carried many guilts about her but this was one he couldn’t understand. He would tell them that he was scared. He would tell them, trying to piece everything out, how it’s always hard to adjust; remind them how hard it was for him, but that even he eventually realized that it wasn’t his fault, that he didn’t choose this.
And Esme would sadly whisper, “But she did.”
==================
One day when Jacob and Bella had their backs to a huge tree trunk in a crackling downfall of rain, he said something he seemed to have been wanting to ask for a while.
“The others, the rest of the pack,” he explained, “They don’t know that I’ve been seeing you. I didn’t tell them, but I was just waiting for them to see it, or maybe smell it? They don’t know.” He looked narrowly at her. “How do you do that?”
Bella, like him, was beginning to figure out that she had a talent. Secrets. The first few times she’d met Jacob, her only attempt to skirt around having to talk about that with the family was an immediate shower as soon as she got to the house. It still left a hint of the smell, and Alice should have been able to figure it out. She’d detected none of the restrained curiosity she’d expected. Everybody should have had a good idea where she’d been going at night, but it was almost like they barely pondered it.
She didn’t understand how she could make that happen without knowing she could do it; but eventually, as her visits to her werewolf became routinely needed, as the possibility of the Cullens leaving Forks loomed up just waiting to be protested for Bella’s needs, she didn’t want it to be a secret any more, and it wasn’t. This would allow the pack to see everything the next time the wolves went running together, and though Bella imagined Jacob would get the same look of strange worry and confusion she’d gotten from Alice the first time she could smell Jacob on Bella’s laundry, of course she couldn’t protect them both from exposing their nighttime lives to those around them forever. Then again, she probably could. But there was something admittedly uncomfortable about forcing what was essentially an artificial stupidity into those she loved for the sake of a dependence on privacy.
They still hadn’t gotten rid of Bella’s bed at the Cullen house when one night she was slowly hanging up some new clothes Alice had ordered for her from some Italian boutique; Edward had been sitting on the bed reading one of his poetry volumes when she came in, but it didn’t take long for her to sense that he was just desolately staring at the pages when he was even looking at the book at all. When she was done, she found it hard to turn around; she slowly tucked flat the black paper bag she was holding, folded it in half, then sighed and slipped it more carelessly between a couple satiny shoe boxes on the top shelf.
Her feet padded gracefully and soundlessly on the way to the bedroom door. But Edward said, “Bella—” and her direction shifted to a heavy current that brought her to his side. With a breath that sounded almost frightened, his arms closed around her hips. She cradled his head against her with a gentle care that was reminiscent of how he used to have to handle her.
After seemingly gathering his thoughts enough to calm himself down, Edward said in an aching quiet, “I won’t be able to lose you like this.”
Bella became more still before flatly replying, “You can’t lose me.”
Edward shook his head. “It all went so wrong, Bella. You’re becoming—not even someone else—you’re becoming a void. And you’re just so consumed by this self-loathing...”
“I don’t want to talk about Dad,” Bella replied a little hotly, like quivering her hand back from being burned.
“Bella, it’s not your fault.”
“That means nothing coming from you.” Bella shook her head, her glossy red eyes steeling with honesty against the small note of regret at having to say it. “When would you ever hold it against me if I did something terrible? Forgiveness just isn’t something you can grant me.”
She let out a breath, but it caught as she saw the hurt deepening in Edward’s expression and she quickly said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean...”
“Don’t you understand why I’m scared?” Edward stood up with a rising urgency, almost seeming angry. “If you let all this bitterness take over you, you’ll just get lost. And you’ll end up like most.”
“You think that I’ll...” Bella looked at him through a fragile daze that was just waiting to flare up in anger. “I’m not a murderer, Edward.”
Edward glared down at their feet, seemingly to avoid looking that way at her, before heavily refuting, “Neither was I.”
Bella’s face slowly fell; she backed just a step away from Edward and hugged her arms to herself as if she was cold.
“I won’t ask you to stop all this. You don’t need to explain anything to me,” Edward said in a gentle, measured tone. “But I can’t let you go to him in denial of the fact that he can’t always be there—And then what will you do about the guilt, if you can’t ever realize that it doesn’t belong to you? Whether he’s gone tomorrow, or seventy years from now, can you afford to mourn him? Another living soul whose pain you so readily take responsibility for? What then? Could you come home to me and still be my Bella?”
Her head dropped slowly, a layer of silky dark hair falling over her eyes. She stood that way silently until Edward, weakened, stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her. The small sound of her breathing became quick and desperate, and her voice muttered into his ivory shoulder, “I’m still here. I’m still here. Edward...”
The slight cold of their skin brushing together created the sensation of a gust of wind coming in from the window, everything becoming awash with the candid color of moonlight. The fabric between them felt so thin; the air was so thin and the night was thin like white gauze peeling easily away, and it fit like an elegant glove when Bella found herself holding Edward so close to her body that she could hardly remember the forbidden nature of their physical contact from when she was human. And of course it crossed her mind, the price she’d paid for this, that maybe it was despicable for her to enjoy any of the things she couldn’t do before. But out there in the woods somewhere there was a boy that bore the meaningless potential of her life in his palm, a young man she’d hurt and who would be waiting for her anyway, in the middle of the night, whenever she needed him. And that was enough to let her think that she deserved something, for now; to allow Edward to patch up the half of her heart that still remembered its own love for him.
==================
One foggy early morning when the sun was barely beginning to patch down between branches, Jacob was pacing around the pines, pulling his jacket off, peering up into the treetops with a look of slight irritation.
“Bella!” he hollered up. “I can smell you!”
There was a deep graceful fall and the thud of both solid feet and one hand; she landed, laughing, right behind him. He turned at her with chagrin.
“Sneaky leech,” he said with a smirk. She communicated a Shut up by briefly rolling her eyes.
These were the best days, filled with their own impossible versions of childlike games. Jacob would take wolf form and they’d run, racing each other or racing nothing, flitting around and between all the trees until everything except for them became a blur and didn’t seem real. It reminded her of the days of their motorcycles humming fast over the La Push dirt roads, the wind licking in their hair, their laughters not drowning in the noise and speed but seeming to become it.
They halted near the edge when they came close to the beach, Bella managing to erase the momentum with a quick lilting step, Jacob slowing and stopping in the process of thawing down to his human body. Clawing idly at the stringy length of his hair, he muttered a curse word as he looked around on the ground in several directions.
Bella was merely looking him over with friendly derision. With a scoffing tone, she asked, “Did you lose your clothes?”
“Yes,” Jacob replied, laughing a little at himself but hardly embarrassed. Bella was already a flitting blur in the nearby trees and shrubs, returning in some ten seconds holding the bundle along the partly shredded long rope.
“Here.” She swung the rope teasingly a couple times, then after catching a whiff made a face, complaining, “Bleh. They’re sweaty,” bunching the cloth up and pitching it straight to his torso.
He laughed huskily, not bothering with any privacy as he began untangling his pant legs. Bella herself was considerably bare in only a thin cami top and briefs. As their paired forms, dark and pale, wound through the woods more and more like animals every day, any kind of loose clothing had only become a nuisance that would go home shredded by the brambles.
When Jacob, holding his t-shirt between his teeth, was slipping a foot into one pant leg, he paused at the realization that Bella had walked a couple steps away and then gone completely still. He could tell she’d stopped breathing.
“Bella?”
Her helpless face turned just slightly. She looked horrified, terrified; completely maddened.
He heard it then, just faintly. A voice hollering from on the beach, an echo carried by the wind. Bella flinched.
“No—”
With a terrible groan, Bella hauled herself up and tore away, heading lightning-fast to the edges of the shade, but because of Jacob’s quick perception of what she was about to do she found herself slamming into a teeming surface of wolf hair.
She stepped back, almost stunned, as Jacob narrowed his frame into an aggressive warning growl. Then she kind of stumbled back, her face tightened by impossible restraint, turning and making rapidly but stiffly back into the forest.
Jacob dephased, picked up his jeans again and slowly put them on, then was sloppily pulling on his t-shirt as he followed where Bella had gone, knowing she’d run far enough to get control of herself. It was almost ten minutes of walking before he heard the brisk drop of her feet landing from far up. He turned in the direction of the sound and soon enough made out the blurry checker texture of her white body speckled with faint shadows approaching at a staggered pace.
She was holding a dead owl between her hands, biting into it like a child walking along sucking on an orange. Her expression was one of queasy self-disgust mingled with a relaxed relief, and it was easy to see how her entire body yielded to the sickening need, all the feathers poking out in a disfigured spray from where it obscured the sight of her lethal teeth.
It was something Jacob just couldn’t see. He turned his head away, sort of awkwardly looking down like one does when they’ve just caught somebody in the middle of something really embarrassing, giving them a moment to pull their pants on in the most terribly silent way. Bella soon rid her hands of the corpse and slowly came up to Jacob’s side, her face pulled flat in an almost sheepish look that encompassed what had manifest itself in her as heavy disappointment. Her face was perfectly clean and she seemed to not have made any mess at all, but there were a couple slivering lines of red dripping down one hand and Jacob was the first to notice. As if to impatiently dispel any further unease Jacob went ahead and took her hand, slowly smudged the blood off on his shirt, not quite looking her in the eyes and with a visible tension in his jaw. She was a bit more touched by the action than he might have expected. Her hand lingered over the fabric of his shirt. He picked it up and held it between both of his hands as if he was trying to keep it warm. When his controlled eyes met hers they held more sympathy than disgust, colored with an expression so far from what she’d imagined he was thinking of her a second ago it was like an unexpected splintering of comfortable light.
They went and sat down in the slow-motion twinkling of dusk, remaining silent for a very long time. When Bella finally stood up to leave, Jacob half-nervously asked her if there was any particular reason they always saw each other at night.
She thought for a second, trying to scrutinize if there were any complicated implications to what he was asking. She supposed it was a perfectly simple concern, thinking aloud, “Oh...I guess your social life would be suffering by staying up all night all the time...”
He crooked half a smile, saying nothing until she answered the question.
“No, there’s really no specific reason.”
His face lit up just a little. “So could you come tomorrow? In the afternoon?”
“...Sure, I don’t see why I couldn’t start coming in the daytime. Except...” She nervously scratched at a nonexistent itch on her arm. “When more people are outside...What happened earlier...”
“Maybe that’s the idea,” Jacob hinted. “Face it, you’re never going to get better at it by staying as far away from civilization as possible.”
“That’s...a unique viewpoint,” Bella said with a lift of the eyebrows. “But it’s way too dangerous. I’m still young, I’m stronger than the rest of the Cullens and I could end up ripping your arms off if my instincts got me carried away.”
It both frustrated her and lifted her spirits a little that Jacob was smiling beside himself like he actually found that funny. “You honestly think you would do that?”
She wanted to smile back. After a moment she just said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
==================
The drive was an aggravation, even with only a very occasional passing of a car on the country highway that made Bella’s body stiffen slightly in restraint, but Rosalie promised better hunting in the desert-like Arizona regions. She apparently had a preference for peccary, which Emmett teasingly described as “Those ugly things?” It almost made Bella laugh; she could remember learning about all these animals at her Phoenix grade school, but there had been one lunch table conversation when she’d mentioned javelinas and Mike Newton insisted she was making up words.
By morning they were in the middle of a vast, bare plain where no living soul would be wandering for miles on either side. As the sun was rising up a piercing light on the horizon, Rosalie and Bella were standing side-by-side, poised in the kind of stillness that just let the world circulate its distance around them, waiting, sometimes with their eyes closed, to pick up a scent. This method of hunting, while maybe inefficient, allowed for the only conversations Rosalie and Bella ever really had apart from the rest of the family. During the course of Bella’s adjustment, the two of them had found a benefit in practically becoming exclusive hunting partners, and this odd variety of intimacy was the basis of how their rapport had improved. They never spent time together doing anything else. Their connection was of two sisters, not of friends.
When the sun had come blazing into their skies, Bella looked down at her own arm and wiggled her alarmingly shining fingers closer to her face. She’d seen her own skin come alive with glittering light, but never in such a bright open place where her entire body just resonated at the skin.
Rosalie looked over with a relaxed smile. “I like to think we’d look like a mirage. Was it always so hot when you lived around here?”
“No, not always.” Bella dropped her hands back at her sides where they suspended slightly off her hips in an anxiously ready stance. “How long have we been standing here, thirty minutes? I’m starting to wonder what woodpecker would taste like.”
Rosalie looked at Bella for a beat before looking back forward and closing her eyes to bask in the direct light; it was almost like a conversation over sun-tanning. “You want to tell me about your special talent, then?”
It could only make Bella smile a little, the way that Rosalie brought up in such a relaxed invitation what the rest of the family seemed adverse to regarding in the fear that she wouldn’t want to talk about it. “Somebody’s hungry for gossip,” she teased.
Rosalie let out a deep, musical laugh that approached that sisterly fashion of being somewhere between loving amusement and mockery before she exclaimed, “It’s not like I’m going to tell anybody. Well, except for Emmett...”
Bella rolled her eyes in understanding. After a brief pause, she flatly explained. “As far as I’ve figured it out, I can negatively manipulate people’s perceptions of...things. If I don’t want a person to know something, it’s completely impossible for them to figure it out. And the only way I can control it is to change my mind about whether I want them to know.”
Rosalie’s face stiffly considered that for a moment, in her thoughtful expression that sometimes looked deceivingly twisted with slight disgust. She finally commented, “I suppose that’s fitting.” It wouldn’t be the first time Bella had pondered whether that could be taken as a compliment, but she wasn’t dwelling on it now, since Rosalie seemed entirely neutral about the implications of her abilities. “But how far can you take it? Could you make yourself invisible?”
Bella had tried this kind of thing on many occasions, often for Jacob’s curiosity. “I don’t know, it’s only things people don’t know already, and I imagine that physical perception is a lot harder to erase. It’s not like I could make anybody forget something.”
Rosalie gave the slightest nod like that was the kind of response she expected, “So it’s secrets. You’re your own...Secret Keeper or something.”
Bella had a delayed adjustment to Rosalie’s response. After a moment, she very slowly turned her head to the side, her face squinted with disbelief. “You read Harry Potter?”
Rosalie offered the simple explanation of, “Esme could talk me into anything.” After a moment, her body strained a little. She pointed with a sudden certainty in a direction up Bella’s right and just said, “Bobcat.”
==================
The word “picnic” put an ironic scour on Bella’s tumultuous state, as she and Jacob, even equipped with their own blanket underneath them, lay obscured by the richest patch of trees close to a sun-honeyed meadow where a family of three were having just that. A relaxed Saturday outing, and food, while Bella’s system already full with animal blood was screaming at her that the people enjoying this food were food. They had been at this for thirty minutes: trying to keep up a regular conversation they’d be having if Bella wasn’t practically being driven mad. She lay on her chest next to Jacob, fists clenching tightly beneath her, and when she seemed really about to lose it he’d automatically put his arm over her.
“You know that wouldn’t actually do any good if I tried to take off?” she grumbled at Jacob, covering her nose simultaneously against him and the all-too-pleasant much more distant smell.
“It might if I phased,” he suggested, laughing a little arrogantly at her as he imagined Bella suddenly pinned under the weight of a giant paw.
“I told you I don’t want you to do that.” She’d insisted on this, repeatedly: Only if he absolutely needed to. Having him phase around her when he wasn’t in a good mood presented a whole other danger for both of them.
“But isn’t that the reason you’re doing this with me? The big ‘just in case’...I can fight you off? If it was you and a Cullen they couldn’t stop you.”
She was silent for a second before assuring him, “I’m stronger than you, Jacob. Not as strong as I’ve been, but for a while I’m still...And that’s not even the point.”
She cut herself off in an onrush of the terrible urge, coarsely rubbing her fingers into the dirt, her breaths heaving.
Slightly flared by his distaste at seeing Bella like this, he remarked with a tone of annoyance, “Wouldn’t it help some if you stopped breathing?”
“But I want to smell it,” she snapped. “Don’t you get it? God, maybe if I got closer...”
Bella stood up, and Jacob warily covered her path. “Oh, come on,” he sighed with disappointment.
She stepped up to him and gave him a glowering but non-emphatic shove to the chest. His body lilted back just a little before he responded by pivoting himself towards her at an angle that suddenly allowed him to lightly pin her back to a tree, resting his palms on the chipped trunk at either side of her shoulders. She frowned indifferently as he grinned beside himself. She knew he’d be too bothered by their proximity to relish it for much longer.
At that thought, a sinking ache of loss entered her gut; she was realizing more fully than before this small thing among so much that she’d lost. How Jacob’s admiration of her had just lit up, bloomed into her and filled her with a more brisk confidence when they used to always be so close to each other, hand in hand or shoulder to shoulder. Now their physical contact could only offer brief glimmers of this before they recoiled from the discomfort. It had occurred to Bella long ago how sad it was that she was now naturally repelled from her closest friend, but somehow she was stung more deeply than ever at the inner revelation that Jacob’s magnetic attraction to her, having been something she forcefully thought too little of to consider how she took it for granted, was now vanquished for a reason beyond his own control.
Whatever Jacob thought Bella was thinking about, he was intending to talk her somewhere away from it. “What is the point?” he asked, prodding for some continuation of their previous exchange.
She looked at him in the eyes, gathering her self-control enough for the moment. “I thought...I figured I could control myself around you better because you would never forgive me if I failed. If I slip up...Edward will be disappointed. But he’ll understand. I don’t want somebody who would understand. You’d just hate me more than you already do.”
She’d lost her concentration. Her eyes shifted wide open towards the clearing. She pushed Jacob’s arm away, began walking away, not running, knowing he’d stop her but just wanting...
In no time he was covering her front again, grabbing her wrists in what she could feel was a furiously hard grip but couldn’t hurt her at all. “Stop. We’re staying right here,” he commanded irritably; he pushed her back against the tree with her hands locked at her sides. She could have easily pulled out of his grasp; it was the dark warning look in his eyes that made her stand still.
Her head rocked back against the tree trunk. She laughed bitterly. “You do hate me, don’t you?”
Jacob’s anger stayed solidified where he had her hands and arms restrained. His instincts agreed with her comment, but the rest of him resented it; as he had her pinned down he let out a sigh that loosened him in the chest, and he let the side of his face slowly rest so that his head was slightly above and next to hers. Their bodies felt forcibly rather than willingly tilted together, him seeming to make himself lie down in all the waste just to be close to her, sinking through suffocating sand all the way to the bottom that was her body. With his gaze turned up and away he could only feel her, but she wouldn’t even feel like a girl, the girl he once freely loved with a crackling heat that barely ever existed in someone so young. Bella couldn’t even place how she’d become so aware of this part of him; the closeness was uncomfortable and she opened her mouth to mutter, What are you doing? but only managed to weakly mouth it next to his shoulder. She knew what he was doing. Bella Swan, having been so robbed from his physical senses, was hurting in every possible non-tangible way, and he couldn’t even get inside; he couldn’t hold her together if the pieces were stuck in all the wrong order. Not if he hated being this close. She heard the sad smile in his voice when he poised his head down slightly to mutter into her ear.
“Bells, honey, I loathe you,” he gently promised. “I always will.”
==================
On a summer morning, after distantly noting the color of her eyes in the grand hallway mirror, Bella wanted to go out among people...
