Twilight fanfic: THE LAST SLEEP (pt. 4)
Jan. 9th, 2010 02:54 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.
On a summer morning, after distantly noting the color of her eyes in the grand hallway mirror, Bella wanted to go out among people. Edward was thankfully out hunting with Jasper, Alice and Carlisle. Emmett, Bella figured, was the only one who would take her word for it that she was ready to be out in public, so she asked him to accompany her. He picked up Carlisle’s little flashlight and beamed it into her pupils in a mock-doctorly way. “Trust me, I’ve over-hunted,” she said with a laugh.
They found a busy outdoor market in Oak Harbor and slowly strolled around the kiosks in their relaxed grace, occasionally giving polite smiles to all the sellers whose business they of course declined. Bella only had to stiffen in resistance when someone came close enough to brush up against her. She was glad that Emmett was able to watch out for her self-control without mistrustingly reaching for her arm whenever this happened. After a while, he seemed impressed with her restraint.
“Can you distinguish at all...”
“No, not very well.” Bella shook her head, already knowing what he was asking. Jacob had been curious before, and now that she was surrounded by a lot more people, it only confirmed that human blood was just a swimming temptation to her senses, all of it the same and equally provoking. They paced up and down the same aisle where it was the least occupied with people.
Emmett nodded, probably expecting that to be her answer. “That won’t be for a while. It’s great, though, you’ll like it.”
Bella gave a half-smile. “Emmett...?” She’d just remembered something she’d been wondering about lately, and she’d decided Emmett was one of the more suitable people to ask.
“Yes?” he beamed at her eagerly.
“You remember a little bit of your human life, right?”
He reacted like she’d hoped; he seemed totally oblivious to how this topic could be grim in any way. “Yeah, some little things.”
“But, you know...what kinds of things?”
“You’ll remember some faces, some experiences...It seems like you retain things from your childhood and from the most recent the most vividly. The bookends. And you might remember some general things that don’t have any certain event tied to them. Like I remember that I got spanked a lot as a kid...”
Bella smiled, then tried to slowly explain. “I guess I just want to figure out the parts that are the most important for me to remember, to always try to think about. I know Rosalie...She dwelled on things that were less important to hold on to...” Bella paused, knowing she was broaching the only topic she knew could make Emmett resistant. “...And she wishes she’d remembered parts of her life that mattered to her more. But I just can’t begin to sort out what the most important things are to me. I mean, how can I begin?”
“Hmm.” As Emmett casually considered her question, he meandered over to a stand where he theatrically pretended to examine some apples. Bella smirked lovingly as he gave a toothy grin to the vendor and happily jingled out a couple quarters to give him.
“Well....” Emmett began as they walked primly off again, him now holding a ripe yellow apple. “If you were to ask Carlisle this question, I’m sure he would say something about holding onto your integrity and all of your human virtue...I can admit we all owe it to him that he did that...”
Bella pressed her lips together knowingly. “But?”
Emmett smiled and tossed up the apple, catching it repeatedly in his palm as they walked farther away from the crowds. “My input is that if you think too much about what you want to remember you’re gonna miss out on remembering all the good stuff. You may think you need to hold onto some of the unpleasantries so that you don’t forget all the lessons you’ve learned?—Forget the lessons. Hell, learn them later...And I don’t really need to tell you what the good stuff is, do I?”
It was really the exact answer Bella had expected, and not the comfort she’d feebly hoped for: that she could push herself to remember all the important things. Every Easter Sunday with the chocolate melting on her small hands, every restaurant with a breezy patio where she and Renee had spent hours laughing together, and every moment mingled in that was a first with Edward, a best with Edward. She knew now in a way she never did when she was human how the memory of a love for another person, being so untraceable and intangible, wove itself into many irreplaceable segments and was not the same shape without its every part; she wanted to remember every improvised detail of the age formula she and Jacob had playfully argued about over their RC sodas in those days that she threw her homework into the back of the car, and it wasn’t enough to remember a sunset that they watched together but the grainy sound of the earth under their shoes. Every single one of these things seemed to matter more than the rest, and still there was the nagging sense that Emmett was wrong: she had a lesson to learn, and she shouldn’t neglect to remind herself of the awful things that she’d done. Things that she’d thought, things that she’d wanted. She had the power to make herself ignorant of them, but it would never be in her nature to let herself forget.
Emmett was looking sidelong at her as they started to walk back. Bella was removing the designer sunglasses that obscured her eyes, and not wanting him to worry, her eyes bounced to follow the apple he was still occasionally tossing in the air. “Waste of money,” she teased. “It’s not like anybody was suspicious that we weren’t buying anything.”
“We’ll see...” Emmett grinned. “I might need something to throw at Edward when he broods at me for taking you out.”
The next afternoon that Bella went out to see Jacob, she felt newly relieved, as she was sure he did, about their decision a couple weeks ago that she’d developed adequate self-control. It had seemed in the strenuous period of Jacob assisting her in that aspect that the continuously embittering and at times simply obnoxious experience of it had them kind of automatically wary of each other. It wasn’t until they’d gone back to their leisurely visits in the middle of the woods that Bella had realized how much she’d come to dread those uncomfortable meetings; it had begun to seem like they hadn’t managed to speak to each other gently in almost half of a year, and they’d quickly fallen back into their old patterns once that element of constant tension was taken away.
Before Jacob appeared to her in one of the sunnier clearings where they frequently spent time, Bella smiled as a rubber ball came sailing with the arc of an upward kick and bounced off of a tree right next to where she’d been resting her elbow.
“What’s that?” Bella demanded with a laugh.
Jacob approached in his ripped denim shorts, shrugging. “I found it stuck in a tree on the way here.”
She smirked, and in a flicker she’d gone briefly into a darker closing of pines and come back with the medium-sized ball, producing the rubbery plucking noise of the plastic against her hard fingers as she lightly set it back to Jacob. “You’re not actually suggesting we play fetch?”
This got her a joking fist-shake of warning just after Jacob caught it between his long hands. With a kind of shrug he chucked the ball far behind his back.
Bella still stood in the shade of the trees until the fraction of a second he’d be expecting to hear the ball hit the grass, at which time he saw she’d flitted away to gracefully snatch it up and was already snapping back. He smirked as he came out to meet her in the clearing.
His pace slowed. “I’m still getting used to that.” There was more sun than usual, and Bella’s exposed skin was scintillating.
She looked down at one of her arms, then with a weak shrug admitted, “It’s still weird to me too,” before all-too-quickly planning her aim and then tossing the ball in a smooth athletic arc; it landed wedged between two high branches in a sparser tree where its translucence made it catch the sunlight and glow, a contrived second moon.
They planted themselves under this tree after Jacob confessed his great exhaustion from spending most of the night out with Quil and Bella said she wouldn’t mind if he dozed off a little. The ground rose up to the base of the trunk to form a kind of small hill; they both leaned along the elevation to rest their heads against the wood, Bella’s head crooked just above Jacob’s shoulder and their bodies forming a lopsided ‘V’ in the rugged grass.
Jacob still squinted at Bella’s glimmering, the way it happened in impeccable patches between the branches’ shadows, his eyes noting with fascination that through the meshy blue fabric of her dress he could faintly see the gleaming of the covered areas: a pearlescence that winked with the slightest movements of the cloth. Feeling a little strange about it, she insisted, “I thought you were going to sleep.”
“Yeah...Won’t you get bored?”
“I won’t get bored.” She shifted away slightly when Jacob unconsciously propped his forearm over his mouth and nose. “Do you want me to leave you alone for a while?”
Jacob’s eyes gave her a sidelong glance that didn’t travel much farther than the raised bone at the top of her shoulder. He muttered, “I’ll live” before his hand reached and gave what was meant to be a reassuring brush to her arm, but there was hesitance and curiosity, like he almost expected her firm skin to feel any different. Bella couldn’t help thinking of the first time she saw this with Edward.
“I know,” she muttered delicately. “It makes it almost look softer...”
Jacob had finally closed his eyes and was lying still and unresponsive, so Bella fell shyly silent and didn’t expect him to say anything. But after a pause, when she’d rested her head back and was looking up into the leafless knots, Jacob calmly pronounced, without opening his eyes, “I like it.”
There were times like this when Bella could only stare forward blankly before smiling as the warmth of his words would creep in and bloom through her chest, these quietly excited emotions powerful enough to make her remember a heartbeat; and with that recollection, all the memories would rush and swell to the one vital point and replay more vividly than was possible outside of these moments. It was still hard to be what the two of them used to be before their bodies were stolen from them and transformed into biological opposites, but when they seemed to hold still enough: On these days that Jacob was content, and her friend, as simply as it was when they’d met at the snapping fireside as just two perfectly human teenagers, Bella’s guilt thawed out of her and left some regular poor kid that came up missing with her father in yesterday’s paper by no fault of her own.
Bella closed her eyes and let her mind take root. She relaxed into a kind of trance that let her thoughts come effortlessly, the heaviest and most deep-woven traces of her life racing to project themselves first.
Even in the calmest, most sedated mind of a vampire, the traffic of thoughts resembles what a human could only experience as a ceaseless and overcrowded clamor of information, and with this mental agility Bella’s memories could naturally unfold so that her imagination was quite vividly in multiple places at once. Bella first thought about her and Edward’s meadow, so recently reminded of it by Jacob’s reaction to the sun on her skin, and it was the second time they’d ever gone there, when he gave her a fancy French braid and told her stories about Emmett and Alice. And like a hazy sound that intercepts but does not interrupt a dream, she heard the occasional clang, the rushing wind of a heady box fan, and the weak transmission of a classic rock song tinning out of Jacob’s old radio. She smelled gasoline; she smelled Renee’s nail polish, felt the tacky sticky cling of a six-year-old finger testing the almost-dry drip on a newspaper and saw the Fortune Wheel spinning on TV as she was overhearing a conversation with Charlie on the phone. One thought catapulted into many: almost forgotten to her, the unwelcome tickle of a teardrop braving the cinematic fall down a cheek, and several specific instances of glum despair to match. She concentrated on mapping these all together, finding the similarities that connected them, one never remembered without another and another following suit in a bright blue line like a veiny interstate line in a road Atlas.
Bella came slowly out of her deep reverie when she sensed Jacob’s eyes on her. Her eyelids opened to see him looking down at her with curious scrutiny.
“...Sweet dreams?” He gave a half-smile, and Bella gave him a blank look, not sure if that was supposed to be a joke. “You almost looked like you were asleep. Even breathing slow...”
“No,” Bella replied needlessly, sitting up a little. “I was sort of daydreaming, really. But it’s hard to explain -- It’s a lot different when you can focus on so many things at once...”
Still curious, he quietly asked, “What were you thinking about?”
“All kinds of things. Remembering...” Bella started gesturing her hands with the uncertainty of her explanation. “You know I told you how...it’s going to eventually be difficult for me to remember details of my mortal life?”
Jacob’s face became grimmer, but he slightly nodded.
“When I have time to just think, I sort of let my mind go where it wants and revisit all these old memories. I guess I’m just trying to process the stuff that’s the most important to me by making it so that I’ll remember what my mind just makes me remember. It’s not much of a scientific approach. Who knows, does a vampire even have a subconscious?”
Jacob cracked an attempt at his old smile, looking at Bella’s face with some pensive affection. He reached a hand up to brush a couple strands of her hair behind her ear, a rare form of physical contact that ever happened between them. He knew he was being brave when he asked, “Do you think about Charlie?”
Bella brought her knees to her chest and hugged them, looking away from Jacob for a few seconds until she muttered, “Of course I do.”
More hesitantly, Jacob bit his lip for a moment until he kicked himself into adding, “Do you ever think it would be easier if you didn’t?”
She looked at him searchingly and gradually arrived at astonishment. “You mean if I didn’t remember him?”
“I’m sorry...” Jacob clumsily choked on his caution before adding in conflicted frustration, “But it just tears you up thinking about him. And sometimes I think you’ll never stop blaming yourself for what happened. And I get it—Cause why shouldn’t it be your fault, right? Since you were already planning on hurting him so bad? I get it, okay, but it’s bullshit.”
In response to his sudden conviction Bella was now all fragile and defensive, her body coiling away from his almost with disgust. Jacob sighed heavily and restlessly stood up.
“The part that doesn’t add up to me, is where it feels all perversely fitting to you that even after this terrible thing happened, you got exactly what you’d wanted. But maybe if you weren’t wallowing in how crappy you feel about everything you’d give yourself enough respect to realize that maybe, if you’d still had a choice, you would’ve changed your mind.”
Bella looked almost angrily up at Jacob, who’d paced several steps back from where she was sitting.
“Because you’re a good person, and you don’t want to hurt anyone. Because you love your parents,” Jacob explained flatly. “And maybe just because you were in love with me.”
Bella rubbed a hand over her brows, restlessly combing her bangs from her eyes. “Maybe you don’t know what you’re talking about?”
“Yeah?” Jacob laughed bitterly. “Are you messing with me, or do you really not remember what it was like, when it was just the two of us? You honestly think that if he hadn’t come back until even a little bit later, you and me wouldn’t have been...”
Bella scoffed and tried to give a low blow. “And you don’t think I would’ve gone back to him anyway? I was always pretty good at hurting you.”
“For Christ sake,” Jacob practically whined. “You think you’re this awful person.”
Bella’s voice was shaky and clipping when she snapped, “No. I don’t. I think I killed my father and I’m always going to think that unless I forget he ever existed. You really don’t know, do you, that I think about him constantly? I’m the last person in the world who can do this and I don’t know why I ever thought I could. It’s not funny, and it’s not so you can contemplate my regret, or do whatever amuses you...”
Her sudden weakness made Jacob take a few steps back to her, his expression pulled from a looming desperation. “What regret, what do you mean?...Over ever wanting it?”
Bella’s arm fell limply into her lap, her face tightened as if she could start shaking and sobbing. Jacob came closer and sat back down, slowing his breath to prepare his senses as he gripped her around her hard shoulders. Her frame calmed just slightly and she slowly brought her hands up over her face, letting out a slow burdened catch of air. And she whispered, “Listen, I don’t know. I’m scared.”
The sun was going down, and a colder breeze picked up as Jacob sat still next to her, not knowing what to say. Finally he just muttered an apology, sounding like a sad child.
“I’m sorry.”
Bella let out another rough sigh. “I don’t want to forget all these things, but sooner or later I won’t want to remember. Jacob...You can’t keep doing this, right? With me? And some day I just won’t be able to get to you, and I’m letting myself need it too much. And I’m starting to feel like I’m not changing right, like I’m still different from them, as if I wasn’t made to exist like this...You’re used to me denying things, and in this case it might even be the healthy reaction, but I don’t have the luxury of going through the stages and I’m stuck with this guilt." She looked off to the right, her thoughts sifting into trouble, he could tell. It seemed she was daring to admit something to herself when she quietly declared it: “I don’t want to live forever.”
“You won’t,” Jacob said in a calming tone. “I promise.”
She shook her head with a disbelieving grimace. “How can you promise?”
“You’ve seen enough vampires destroyed to know that they’re not really immortal. Probably nothing is. Sooner or later everything burns, it just has to.”
At that brief affirmation that was reminiscent of how a parent would passively uncomplicate something to a child, Bella was quiet for a moment, considering maybe she should leave it at that. But she didn’t. “Vampires die when they anger other vampires. They tear each other apart like fiends...I don’t want that, I want to die like...a person, not like a monster.”
Jacob stared at the ground, holding rock-still like he needed to stay calm, almost like he was worried he’d lose control.
His jaw tensed. He asked, “You got any ideas?”
She moved very slowly forward, his arm dropping from around her as she bent down into something a lot like sending up a terrified prayer with her face ducking down into her knees. Her admission came from an angry suppressed tremble, an uncontrollable calculation always ticking deep inside her that had bluntly arrived at nothing but cruel truths, never with any way out.
“You could do it.”
She heard a cracking breath like a filthy word coming out of Jacob’s mouth without the strength of air to pitch his fury into sound. He cowered in on himself for only a moment before he shot up quickly enough to alarm Bella when he started walking quickly away into the spotted shadows of dusk, his hands trembling.
She waited.
When he started walking back, the beaten posture and redness around his eyes was like the state of someone who’d just thrown up. His jaw shuddered; she opened her mouth to speak and he cut her off.
“How long, exactly, have you been planning on asking me to do you this little favor?” His voice was sour and grating almost beyond recognition. “I guess I’m supposed to feel like this is my responsibility, since I chose for you to live—”
“No. No...” Bella shook her head, wide-eyed. “And you didn’t choose for me to live, you just—”
“—You’re alive to me.” Jacob’s sudden volume and passion seemed to come out of him uncontrollably, shocking even himself. “I changed my mind about all that faster than you can imagine. It’s not enough for you to exist, if that was all I thought there was...I would’ve rather—”
“You would’ve rather had me dead?” Bella quietly challenged, almost afraid to throw his own younger words at him.
“Don’t.” Jacob’s fists kept clenching and unclenching; he took a staggering step back, then came forward again, “Why else should it be me? He could...Are you going to tell me that it would be harder for him?”
“Jacob.” Bella spoke pleadingly, not just with a wracking fear that Jacob was about to completely explode, but seeming afraid that she herself would weaken. “I am just asking you to do something for me because you are my friend. Not because I think you owe me anything. And we both have a long time to think about this, so just calm down...”
Jacob paced heatedly over to a large rock and kicked it forcefully off into a mess of shrubs. Then he turned back, snickering bitterly. “No, I get it, it’s been really obvious. Of course, the whole time, this was why you were hanging onto me?”
Bella gave him a look of desperation as if begging him to understand how ridiculous that was, unable to articulate any means of disarming his escalating near-panic.
“I mean, Jesus, Bells, should this have actually crossed my mind before? How do I know you weren’t doing one of your mind tricks on me?”
At that, her brows slowly narrowed a little. “Stop being stupid. Never.”
“Well, if you didn’t want me to figure it out for a while, how do you know?” Jacob sharply pointed out.
Bella gave out a flaring sigh, then slowly collected herself off the ground, standing sternly in front of the tree and seeming like she might be backing farther away if it wasn’t there. A deeply frustrated shiver of tension was running through her, and with it she displayed an air of frightened caution.
“Jacob,” she said, watching her close friend just walk back and forth with his every feature distorted with a rage she could see was protecting a weak fluttering pain, almost like a vulnerable hole had just been torn out of his stomach. “I’m sorry.”
Not enough; too much. With his lips tensed together, Jacob shook his head and came walking up to Bella. He was pulling something out of his back pocket. Giving no thought to their proximity, he glared close up into her face, closing an emphatic grip on her shoulder with his left hand; and holding up with his right, a white book of matches.
“You wanna die?” Jacob said poisonously; he tossed the matches at Bella and they toppled down to her unmoving feet. His breath landed angrily on her face and she wanted to scream, she wanted to clock him in the face. He was a werewolf and he smelled like an animal and she was anything but and none of her senses could remember a lifetime when this mess of a man was an eager boy that saved her life and felt like home, not right now, not right now.
Her thoughts turned quickly into a fearful pleading, Not right now echoing like a metallic clang through her skull; but Jacob couldn’t remember either, so he told her to rip her own goddamned head off and set herself on fire, and he turned around and started walking away.
Bella sucked in a grateful breath outside of his close scent, but his words had struck her sick. Her voice shook a growl after him, “That’s the kind of end you think is fitting for me?”
Without turning or stopping, he ripped back, “I don’t do favors for bloodsuckers.”
Somehow Jacob sensed that it was as if some terrible whip had cracked and the beastly tempers they always kept subdued had suddenly come unhinged, and despite the fact that Bella was almost silent when she flicked toward him in a gut rage, he phased just in time.
The sound of their impact was loud enough to create a cracking echo through a sizeable circle of the forest, alarming a murmur of many animals: Here and there a ripple of response, a flock of birds somewhere departing from their scattered leisure on some high branches.
What Bella heard, more profoundly, was the curdling whimper when Jacob backed away, limping off of his front leg where she had just struck a long rip in the muscle.
She stood impossibly still as the familiar red wolf turned its eyes on her in a way that splintered her somewhere in her stomach, his features crippled with sadness even in such a powerful body. Too paralyzed to even speak out of her awestruck mouth, she just stood there as he turned and slumped away, disappearing into the collected darkness.
She didn’t move; she stood there for many hours into the full light of morning. Alice’s vision of her had cleared into focus, and she gradually detected the familiar thumbprint of Edward in her senses before the pale figure quickly appeared in front of her. She fell into the silence of his chest and arms, the impossible quiet of the two like phantoms in a wind. Even as he picked up her heavy body and carried her home straddled around him like a child, a dead silence filled her ears. In her lungs and through her veins, that dusty quiet like waking up in a house to immediately sense that one is alone. She would feel it when she wasn’t by herself, a sour underbelly of freezing calm, and her daydreams would fill with a cold longing for reckless clamor, her old broken bones.
Even if he couldn’t have assumed by Bella no longer coming to the woods, Jacob knew seven years ago that the Cullens had left...
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.
On a summer morning, after distantly noting the color of her eyes in the grand hallway mirror, Bella wanted to go out among people. Edward was thankfully out hunting with Jasper, Alice and Carlisle. Emmett, Bella figured, was the only one who would take her word for it that she was ready to be out in public, so she asked him to accompany her. He picked up Carlisle’s little flashlight and beamed it into her pupils in a mock-doctorly way. “Trust me, I’ve over-hunted,” she said with a laugh.
They found a busy outdoor market in Oak Harbor and slowly strolled around the kiosks in their relaxed grace, occasionally giving polite smiles to all the sellers whose business they of course declined. Bella only had to stiffen in resistance when someone came close enough to brush up against her. She was glad that Emmett was able to watch out for her self-control without mistrustingly reaching for her arm whenever this happened. After a while, he seemed impressed with her restraint.
“Can you distinguish at all...”
“No, not very well.” Bella shook her head, already knowing what he was asking. Jacob had been curious before, and now that she was surrounded by a lot more people, it only confirmed that human blood was just a swimming temptation to her senses, all of it the same and equally provoking. They paced up and down the same aisle where it was the least occupied with people.
Emmett nodded, probably expecting that to be her answer. “That won’t be for a while. It’s great, though, you’ll like it.”
Bella gave a half-smile. “Emmett...?” She’d just remembered something she’d been wondering about lately, and she’d decided Emmett was one of the more suitable people to ask.
“Yes?” he beamed at her eagerly.
“You remember a little bit of your human life, right?”
He reacted like she’d hoped; he seemed totally oblivious to how this topic could be grim in any way. “Yeah, some little things.”
“But, you know...what kinds of things?”
“You’ll remember some faces, some experiences...It seems like you retain things from your childhood and from the most recent the most vividly. The bookends. And you might remember some general things that don’t have any certain event tied to them. Like I remember that I got spanked a lot as a kid...”
Bella smiled, then tried to slowly explain. “I guess I just want to figure out the parts that are the most important for me to remember, to always try to think about. I know Rosalie...She dwelled on things that were less important to hold on to...” Bella paused, knowing she was broaching the only topic she knew could make Emmett resistant. “...And she wishes she’d remembered parts of her life that mattered to her more. But I just can’t begin to sort out what the most important things are to me. I mean, how can I begin?”
“Hmm.” As Emmett casually considered her question, he meandered over to a stand where he theatrically pretended to examine some apples. Bella smirked lovingly as he gave a toothy grin to the vendor and happily jingled out a couple quarters to give him.
“Well....” Emmett began as they walked primly off again, him now holding a ripe yellow apple. “If you were to ask Carlisle this question, I’m sure he would say something about holding onto your integrity and all of your human virtue...I can admit we all owe it to him that he did that...”
Bella pressed her lips together knowingly. “But?”
Emmett smiled and tossed up the apple, catching it repeatedly in his palm as they walked farther away from the crowds. “My input is that if you think too much about what you want to remember you’re gonna miss out on remembering all the good stuff. You may think you need to hold onto some of the unpleasantries so that you don’t forget all the lessons you’ve learned?—Forget the lessons. Hell, learn them later...And I don’t really need to tell you what the good stuff is, do I?”
It was really the exact answer Bella had expected, and not the comfort she’d feebly hoped for: that she could push herself to remember all the important things. Every Easter Sunday with the chocolate melting on her small hands, every restaurant with a breezy patio where she and Renee had spent hours laughing together, and every moment mingled in that was a first with Edward, a best with Edward. She knew now in a way she never did when she was human how the memory of a love for another person, being so untraceable and intangible, wove itself into many irreplaceable segments and was not the same shape without its every part; she wanted to remember every improvised detail of the age formula she and Jacob had playfully argued about over their RC sodas in those days that she threw her homework into the back of the car, and it wasn’t enough to remember a sunset that they watched together but the grainy sound of the earth under their shoes. Every single one of these things seemed to matter more than the rest, and still there was the nagging sense that Emmett was wrong: she had a lesson to learn, and she shouldn’t neglect to remind herself of the awful things that she’d done. Things that she’d thought, things that she’d wanted. She had the power to make herself ignorant of them, but it would never be in her nature to let herself forget.
Emmett was looking sidelong at her as they started to walk back. Bella was removing the designer sunglasses that obscured her eyes, and not wanting him to worry, her eyes bounced to follow the apple he was still occasionally tossing in the air. “Waste of money,” she teased. “It’s not like anybody was suspicious that we weren’t buying anything.”
“We’ll see...” Emmett grinned. “I might need something to throw at Edward when he broods at me for taking you out.”
==================
The next afternoon that Bella went out to see Jacob, she felt newly relieved, as she was sure he did, about their decision a couple weeks ago that she’d developed adequate self-control. It had seemed in the strenuous period of Jacob assisting her in that aspect that the continuously embittering and at times simply obnoxious experience of it had them kind of automatically wary of each other. It wasn’t until they’d gone back to their leisurely visits in the middle of the woods that Bella had realized how much she’d come to dread those uncomfortable meetings; it had begun to seem like they hadn’t managed to speak to each other gently in almost half of a year, and they’d quickly fallen back into their old patterns once that element of constant tension was taken away.
Before Jacob appeared to her in one of the sunnier clearings where they frequently spent time, Bella smiled as a rubber ball came sailing with the arc of an upward kick and bounced off of a tree right next to where she’d been resting her elbow.
“What’s that?” Bella demanded with a laugh.
Jacob approached in his ripped denim shorts, shrugging. “I found it stuck in a tree on the way here.”
She smirked, and in a flicker she’d gone briefly into a darker closing of pines and come back with the medium-sized ball, producing the rubbery plucking noise of the plastic against her hard fingers as she lightly set it back to Jacob. “You’re not actually suggesting we play fetch?”
This got her a joking fist-shake of warning just after Jacob caught it between his long hands. With a kind of shrug he chucked the ball far behind his back.
Bella still stood in the shade of the trees until the fraction of a second he’d be expecting to hear the ball hit the grass, at which time he saw she’d flitted away to gracefully snatch it up and was already snapping back. He smirked as he came out to meet her in the clearing.
His pace slowed. “I’m still getting used to that.” There was more sun than usual, and Bella’s exposed skin was scintillating.
She looked down at one of her arms, then with a weak shrug admitted, “It’s still weird to me too,” before all-too-quickly planning her aim and then tossing the ball in a smooth athletic arc; it landed wedged between two high branches in a sparser tree where its translucence made it catch the sunlight and glow, a contrived second moon.
They planted themselves under this tree after Jacob confessed his great exhaustion from spending most of the night out with Quil and Bella said she wouldn’t mind if he dozed off a little. The ground rose up to the base of the trunk to form a kind of small hill; they both leaned along the elevation to rest their heads against the wood, Bella’s head crooked just above Jacob’s shoulder and their bodies forming a lopsided ‘V’ in the rugged grass.
Jacob still squinted at Bella’s glimmering, the way it happened in impeccable patches between the branches’ shadows, his eyes noting with fascination that through the meshy blue fabric of her dress he could faintly see the gleaming of the covered areas: a pearlescence that winked with the slightest movements of the cloth. Feeling a little strange about it, she insisted, “I thought you were going to sleep.”
“Yeah...Won’t you get bored?”
“I won’t get bored.” She shifted away slightly when Jacob unconsciously propped his forearm over his mouth and nose. “Do you want me to leave you alone for a while?”
Jacob’s eyes gave her a sidelong glance that didn’t travel much farther than the raised bone at the top of her shoulder. He muttered, “I’ll live” before his hand reached and gave what was meant to be a reassuring brush to her arm, but there was hesitance and curiosity, like he almost expected her firm skin to feel any different. Bella couldn’t help thinking of the first time she saw this with Edward.
“I know,” she muttered delicately. “It makes it almost look softer...”
Jacob had finally closed his eyes and was lying still and unresponsive, so Bella fell shyly silent and didn’t expect him to say anything. But after a pause, when she’d rested her head back and was looking up into the leafless knots, Jacob calmly pronounced, without opening his eyes, “I like it.”
There were times like this when Bella could only stare forward blankly before smiling as the warmth of his words would creep in and bloom through her chest, these quietly excited emotions powerful enough to make her remember a heartbeat; and with that recollection, all the memories would rush and swell to the one vital point and replay more vividly than was possible outside of these moments. It was still hard to be what the two of them used to be before their bodies were stolen from them and transformed into biological opposites, but when they seemed to hold still enough: On these days that Jacob was content, and her friend, as simply as it was when they’d met at the snapping fireside as just two perfectly human teenagers, Bella’s guilt thawed out of her and left some regular poor kid that came up missing with her father in yesterday’s paper by no fault of her own.
Bella closed her eyes and let her mind take root. She relaxed into a kind of trance that let her thoughts come effortlessly, the heaviest and most deep-woven traces of her life racing to project themselves first.
Even in the calmest, most sedated mind of a vampire, the traffic of thoughts resembles what a human could only experience as a ceaseless and overcrowded clamor of information, and with this mental agility Bella’s memories could naturally unfold so that her imagination was quite vividly in multiple places at once. Bella first thought about her and Edward’s meadow, so recently reminded of it by Jacob’s reaction to the sun on her skin, and it was the second time they’d ever gone there, when he gave her a fancy French braid and told her stories about Emmett and Alice. And like a hazy sound that intercepts but does not interrupt a dream, she heard the occasional clang, the rushing wind of a heady box fan, and the weak transmission of a classic rock song tinning out of Jacob’s old radio. She smelled gasoline; she smelled Renee’s nail polish, felt the tacky sticky cling of a six-year-old finger testing the almost-dry drip on a newspaper and saw the Fortune Wheel spinning on TV as she was overhearing a conversation with Charlie on the phone. One thought catapulted into many: almost forgotten to her, the unwelcome tickle of a teardrop braving the cinematic fall down a cheek, and several specific instances of glum despair to match. She concentrated on mapping these all together, finding the similarities that connected them, one never remembered without another and another following suit in a bright blue line like a veiny interstate line in a road Atlas.
Bella came slowly out of her deep reverie when she sensed Jacob’s eyes on her. Her eyelids opened to see him looking down at her with curious scrutiny.
“...Sweet dreams?” He gave a half-smile, and Bella gave him a blank look, not sure if that was supposed to be a joke. “You almost looked like you were asleep. Even breathing slow...”
“No,” Bella replied needlessly, sitting up a little. “I was sort of daydreaming, really. But it’s hard to explain -- It’s a lot different when you can focus on so many things at once...”
Still curious, he quietly asked, “What were you thinking about?”
“All kinds of things. Remembering...” Bella started gesturing her hands with the uncertainty of her explanation. “You know I told you how...it’s going to eventually be difficult for me to remember details of my mortal life?”
Jacob’s face became grimmer, but he slightly nodded.
“When I have time to just think, I sort of let my mind go where it wants and revisit all these old memories. I guess I’m just trying to process the stuff that’s the most important to me by making it so that I’ll remember what my mind just makes me remember. It’s not much of a scientific approach. Who knows, does a vampire even have a subconscious?”
Jacob cracked an attempt at his old smile, looking at Bella’s face with some pensive affection. He reached a hand up to brush a couple strands of her hair behind her ear, a rare form of physical contact that ever happened between them. He knew he was being brave when he asked, “Do you think about Charlie?”
Bella brought her knees to her chest and hugged them, looking away from Jacob for a few seconds until she muttered, “Of course I do.”
More hesitantly, Jacob bit his lip for a moment until he kicked himself into adding, “Do you ever think it would be easier if you didn’t?”
She looked at him searchingly and gradually arrived at astonishment. “You mean if I didn’t remember him?”
“I’m sorry...” Jacob clumsily choked on his caution before adding in conflicted frustration, “But it just tears you up thinking about him. And sometimes I think you’ll never stop blaming yourself for what happened. And I get it—Cause why shouldn’t it be your fault, right? Since you were already planning on hurting him so bad? I get it, okay, but it’s bullshit.”
In response to his sudden conviction Bella was now all fragile and defensive, her body coiling away from his almost with disgust. Jacob sighed heavily and restlessly stood up.
“The part that doesn’t add up to me, is where it feels all perversely fitting to you that even after this terrible thing happened, you got exactly what you’d wanted. But maybe if you weren’t wallowing in how crappy you feel about everything you’d give yourself enough respect to realize that maybe, if you’d still had a choice, you would’ve changed your mind.”
Bella looked almost angrily up at Jacob, who’d paced several steps back from where she was sitting.
“Because you’re a good person, and you don’t want to hurt anyone. Because you love your parents,” Jacob explained flatly. “And maybe just because you were in love with me.”
Bella rubbed a hand over her brows, restlessly combing her bangs from her eyes. “Maybe you don’t know what you’re talking about?”
“Yeah?” Jacob laughed bitterly. “Are you messing with me, or do you really not remember what it was like, when it was just the two of us? You honestly think that if he hadn’t come back until even a little bit later, you and me wouldn’t have been...”
Bella scoffed and tried to give a low blow. “And you don’t think I would’ve gone back to him anyway? I was always pretty good at hurting you.”
“For Christ sake,” Jacob practically whined. “You think you’re this awful person.”
Bella’s voice was shaky and clipping when she snapped, “No. I don’t. I think I killed my father and I’m always going to think that unless I forget he ever existed. You really don’t know, do you, that I think about him constantly? I’m the last person in the world who can do this and I don’t know why I ever thought I could. It’s not funny, and it’s not so you can contemplate my regret, or do whatever amuses you...”
Her sudden weakness made Jacob take a few steps back to her, his expression pulled from a looming desperation. “What regret, what do you mean?...Over ever wanting it?”
Bella’s arm fell limply into her lap, her face tightened as if she could start shaking and sobbing. Jacob came closer and sat back down, slowing his breath to prepare his senses as he gripped her around her hard shoulders. Her frame calmed just slightly and she slowly brought her hands up over her face, letting out a slow burdened catch of air. And she whispered, “Listen, I don’t know. I’m scared.”
The sun was going down, and a colder breeze picked up as Jacob sat still next to her, not knowing what to say. Finally he just muttered an apology, sounding like a sad child.
“I’m sorry.”
Bella let out another rough sigh. “I don’t want to forget all these things, but sooner or later I won’t want to remember. Jacob...You can’t keep doing this, right? With me? And some day I just won’t be able to get to you, and I’m letting myself need it too much. And I’m starting to feel like I’m not changing right, like I’m still different from them, as if I wasn’t made to exist like this...You’re used to me denying things, and in this case it might even be the healthy reaction, but I don’t have the luxury of going through the stages and I’m stuck with this guilt." She looked off to the right, her thoughts sifting into trouble, he could tell. It seemed she was daring to admit something to herself when she quietly declared it: “I don’t want to live forever.”
“You won’t,” Jacob said in a calming tone. “I promise.”
She shook her head with a disbelieving grimace. “How can you promise?”
“You’ve seen enough vampires destroyed to know that they’re not really immortal. Probably nothing is. Sooner or later everything burns, it just has to.”
At that brief affirmation that was reminiscent of how a parent would passively uncomplicate something to a child, Bella was quiet for a moment, considering maybe she should leave it at that. But she didn’t. “Vampires die when they anger other vampires. They tear each other apart like fiends...I don’t want that, I want to die like...a person, not like a monster.”
Jacob stared at the ground, holding rock-still like he needed to stay calm, almost like he was worried he’d lose control.
His jaw tensed. He asked, “You got any ideas?”
She moved very slowly forward, his arm dropping from around her as she bent down into something a lot like sending up a terrified prayer with her face ducking down into her knees. Her admission came from an angry suppressed tremble, an uncontrollable calculation always ticking deep inside her that had bluntly arrived at nothing but cruel truths, never with any way out.
“You could do it.”
She heard a cracking breath like a filthy word coming out of Jacob’s mouth without the strength of air to pitch his fury into sound. He cowered in on himself for only a moment before he shot up quickly enough to alarm Bella when he started walking quickly away into the spotted shadows of dusk, his hands trembling.
She waited.
When he started walking back, the beaten posture and redness around his eyes was like the state of someone who’d just thrown up. His jaw shuddered; she opened her mouth to speak and he cut her off.
“How long, exactly, have you been planning on asking me to do you this little favor?” His voice was sour and grating almost beyond recognition. “I guess I’m supposed to feel like this is my responsibility, since I chose for you to live—”
“No. No...” Bella shook her head, wide-eyed. “And you didn’t choose for me to live, you just—”
“—You’re alive to me.” Jacob’s sudden volume and passion seemed to come out of him uncontrollably, shocking even himself. “I changed my mind about all that faster than you can imagine. It’s not enough for you to exist, if that was all I thought there was...I would’ve rather—”
“You would’ve rather had me dead?” Bella quietly challenged, almost afraid to throw his own younger words at him.
“Don’t.” Jacob’s fists kept clenching and unclenching; he took a staggering step back, then came forward again, “Why else should it be me? He could...Are you going to tell me that it would be harder for him?”
“Jacob.” Bella spoke pleadingly, not just with a wracking fear that Jacob was about to completely explode, but seeming afraid that she herself would weaken. “I am just asking you to do something for me because you are my friend. Not because I think you owe me anything. And we both have a long time to think about this, so just calm down...”
Jacob paced heatedly over to a large rock and kicked it forcefully off into a mess of shrubs. Then he turned back, snickering bitterly. “No, I get it, it’s been really obvious. Of course, the whole time, this was why you were hanging onto me?”
Bella gave him a look of desperation as if begging him to understand how ridiculous that was, unable to articulate any means of disarming his escalating near-panic.
“I mean, Jesus, Bells, should this have actually crossed my mind before? How do I know you weren’t doing one of your mind tricks on me?”
At that, her brows slowly narrowed a little. “Stop being stupid. Never.”
“Well, if you didn’t want me to figure it out for a while, how do you know?” Jacob sharply pointed out.
Bella gave out a flaring sigh, then slowly collected herself off the ground, standing sternly in front of the tree and seeming like she might be backing farther away if it wasn’t there. A deeply frustrated shiver of tension was running through her, and with it she displayed an air of frightened caution.
“Jacob,” she said, watching her close friend just walk back and forth with his every feature distorted with a rage she could see was protecting a weak fluttering pain, almost like a vulnerable hole had just been torn out of his stomach. “I’m sorry.”
Not enough; too much. With his lips tensed together, Jacob shook his head and came walking up to Bella. He was pulling something out of his back pocket. Giving no thought to their proximity, he glared close up into her face, closing an emphatic grip on her shoulder with his left hand; and holding up with his right, a white book of matches.
“You wanna die?” Jacob said poisonously; he tossed the matches at Bella and they toppled down to her unmoving feet. His breath landed angrily on her face and she wanted to scream, she wanted to clock him in the face. He was a werewolf and he smelled like an animal and she was anything but and none of her senses could remember a lifetime when this mess of a man was an eager boy that saved her life and felt like home, not right now, not right now.
Her thoughts turned quickly into a fearful pleading, Not right now echoing like a metallic clang through her skull; but Jacob couldn’t remember either, so he told her to rip her own goddamned head off and set herself on fire, and he turned around and started walking away.
Bella sucked in a grateful breath outside of his close scent, but his words had struck her sick. Her voice shook a growl after him, “That’s the kind of end you think is fitting for me?”
Without turning or stopping, he ripped back, “I don’t do favors for bloodsuckers.”
Somehow Jacob sensed that it was as if some terrible whip had cracked and the beastly tempers they always kept subdued had suddenly come unhinged, and despite the fact that Bella was almost silent when she flicked toward him in a gut rage, he phased just in time.
The sound of their impact was loud enough to create a cracking echo through a sizeable circle of the forest, alarming a murmur of many animals: Here and there a ripple of response, a flock of birds somewhere departing from their scattered leisure on some high branches.
What Bella heard, more profoundly, was the curdling whimper when Jacob backed away, limping off of his front leg where she had just struck a long rip in the muscle.
She stood impossibly still as the familiar red wolf turned its eyes on her in a way that splintered her somewhere in her stomach, his features crippled with sadness even in such a powerful body. Too paralyzed to even speak out of her awestruck mouth, she just stood there as he turned and slumped away, disappearing into the collected darkness.
She didn’t move; she stood there for many hours into the full light of morning. Alice’s vision of her had cleared into focus, and she gradually detected the familiar thumbprint of Edward in her senses before the pale figure quickly appeared in front of her. She fell into the silence of his chest and arms, the impossible quiet of the two like phantoms in a wind. Even as he picked up her heavy body and carried her home straddled around him like a child, a dead silence filled her ears. In her lungs and through her veins, that dusty quiet like waking up in a house to immediately sense that one is alone. She would feel it when she wasn’t by herself, a sour underbelly of freezing calm, and her daydreams would fill with a cold longing for reckless clamor, her old broken bones.
==================
Even if he couldn’t have assumed by Bella no longer coming to the woods, Jacob knew seven years ago that the Cullens had left...
