Twilight fanfic: THE LAST SLEEP (pt. 5)
Jan. 9th, 2010 02:57 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.
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. They all felt it because of the feeling of something hot beginning to cool in their bones, all of their senses diminishing to a shallow calm. In the first year they were all ecstatic to have secrets again, and they could easily say that out loud. Even a short time spent as a wolf could teach someone for a lifetime that everybody has something they'd rather hide.
Jacob spent a Thursday night stationed at Paul’s truck, with Embry and a sardonic but now kinder Leah Clearwater, one summer when Forks and Sappho were seemingly being victimized by a suspicious strain of robberies. Hardly anybody in La Push owned a gun, so Sam had come up with the idea of giving every pistol in town to somebody willing to help the local cops work security at the borders. The old Protector spirit isn’t dead after all, Jacob was thinking to himself as he lit one of the cheap cigars the police had given them in friendly gratitude, sitting against a back tire with Billy’s shotgun straddled between his bent knees. But of course the enforcement in Forks isn’t ever any help, ever since Chief Swan...
He let his mind go dead after that. He listened to Leah and Paul, who were sitting in the truck bed just behind him.
“I think it’s funny that we’re just supposed to stop whoever looks suspicious, like—”
“I know. If this crook is a woman, I bet we’ll just wave her on through.”
“If it’s a woman and Sam’s team gets her, we’re screwed. You’re the only one who can get really aggressive with women if you have to.”
“I don’t know about that...”
“What?”
“I’m just saying, if it got to the point where you were forced to turn into a gigantic dog, they’d be running away, not calling their lawyer.”
“I don’t know, it is La Push. If we had a judge, he’d probably believe that shapeshifting abilities can be abused, you know?”
Leah laughed.
Smiling at this exchange, Embry stopped his slight pacing around the truck to sit down next to Jacob. He took off his glasses and rubbed them clean on his shirt. A little bit after he stopped phasing he’d become badly nearsighted and had to get some lenses put into some hand-me-down thick rims. They befitted the way he’d taken to blinking and anxiously twitching a little when he was bored; Jacob knew there was a longing to phase for the simple fun of it, the craving to feel the wind whip over the thousands of warm, wild hairs. There had always been a joke among the pack that being werewolves was the secret way Quileute men stayed on the wagon, but Jacob was the only one who had brought out a bottle from his top shelf.
And as tempting as it was, Jacob was the only one who had phased in the last ten years, and everybody knew why. Even after she’d left, he would shake into the teeth and the speed and he’d go looking for her every few weeks, which was turning later into every few months, only to find that the smell of the forest was just as empty as the drafty voicelessness in his head.
The other members hadn’t exactly gone back to looking teenage before reaching their actual mid-twenties, but they’d quickly lost a lot of weight, and Quil in particular was so much skinnier than he’d ever been in the years before maturing into a werewolf that he’d been almost unrecognizable at first. As for Jacob, despite presently looking his actual age, there was a tired wisdom in his eyes that made him look slightly older than his friends. This was probably why he’d go out to eat with the guys and always get asked by some white bartender if he was somebody’s older brother, probably why he managed with grown women in his desolate trailer bed on an occasional evening; one after another they’d be the type to smile and bite their lips when the wind teased through their open shirts and these were the only details he’d remember the following week. They would like him a lot, but never loved, and that was fair.
On this night Embry asked, as many of them sometimes did, if it got harder to phase, the longer “they” were gone.
Jacob did his usual shrug. “Depends on my mood, I think. Sometimes I end up giving up if I’m just too tired. But sometimes, like that night my boss pissed me off...it took off like gangbusters.”
Embry gave a slight chuckle. “Probably wouldn’t work as well for the rest of us. You were always so much better at controlling it...”
Jacob was swallowing a sip of gin with a dry smirk. He lightly asked, “What do you think, man...If I kept doing this, would I just live forever?”
Embry considered it with a shrug, and then proclaimed, “You can’t keep a good dog down.”
Leah overheard that, and with a mellow giggle she reached down and lightly shook Embry at the shoulder in a spirit of mirth. “Huh, what is that? All Dogs Go To Heaven?”
Paul then gave out a low sniggering in recognition of the phrase and they all started laughing in a spirit of self-mockery, even Jacob falling into a relaxed snicker and repeating it with a thoughtful look to the side. “ ‘All dogs go to heaven’,” as if that was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.
The rest fell into their own joking rhythms while Jacob’s attention scattered out to the navy horizon. It was on nights like these, when his blood was slow and his thoughts relaxed, that were actually the worst. Without the fierceness of spirit that a grudge requires, Jacob could not clutch in his mind why his simple pain had made him so furious, endlessly angry for years after she was gone.
On other days it just burned him into the worst, cruelest of moods. But on nights like this his heart crept out from the corner it had again and again been chastised into, and he just missed her, and that was all there was to it.
The family spent half a week hunting in Greenland surrounded by the quiet chaos of constant white, leaving in their leisurely wakes splashes of red stains against the snow backdrop, only what was left of the blood cells clinging to the fur.
Bella and Rosalie headed up north as Edward and Emmett stuck to the eastern coast. The two sisters talked less and less these days, but they still hunted together, and that was at least something. Even more so than Edward, Rosalie seemed to regard Bella as something yet to come into action, as a possible impermanence. Sometimes Bella could feel Rosalie’s eyes on her like she wasn’t sure whether she was just going to pack up and vanish soon. She would sometimes rest her head on Rosalie’s shoulder when they just happened to sit next to each other just to feel closer to the ground, like she had something to hold her from drifting away.
After Bella was neatly finished with her prey, she went to find Rosalie almost a mile away, next to an icy creek. She’d borrowed Jasper’s expensive Nikon and was now wading into the shin-deep water to snap close-ups of a wiry tree glazed with shining frost. Bella did the idle favor of picking up her leather shoulder bag from where she’d left it several feet away. Until Rosalie was ready to run back there was an attempt to admire the colors of the sky as it became inked with seemingly unnatural colors, but it was a numb distraction from the peripheral. Maybe helped and not helped by the prowess and the complication of her inhuman mind, as her eyes focused forward on the high horizon she was really looking at the wolf.
Rosalie’s flattened kill, a mass of dirtied white fur that seemed to Bella so pet-sized and with a hue likened to a doily. With its ferocity taken by the easy extraction of blood that had claimed its life some moments ago, there was simply no comparison. But still it reminded her of the face she’d left behind, the regretful bloodshed that punctuated those memories.
The weak supply of sunlight was fading, and with it the charged thrill of the hunt, and Rosalie came readily up to Bella’s side. As they took up their fast but relaxed return, the sight was taken by her turned back. Bella still, in her mind, was looking at the animal, but as they walked away she imagined it a man.
Jacob Black was 38, physically aged to almost 30, when in the stale dark of his kitchen he flipped on the light and realized he wasn’t alone.
The smell was less potent to him now but still making him scowl. Quickly recognizing the white figure sitting calmly at his table, he growled, “Jesus, Cullen. What is this, a detective movie?”
Edward’s eyes, deeply troubled, glared with immediate impatience. “...I didn’t come here for your petty jibes.”
Jacob’s face slowly calmed and fell to a low dread. “Right. What do you want?”
There was a pause.
“Well. I was hoping...” Edward spoke flatly. “For your help.”
After a few seconds Jacob began shifting with bottled anxiety. “What, did she send you here?”
“No.” Edward sat there and fixed his eyes tensely on the tabletop, lips pressed firmly together. “Jacob, I am asking you to fix this. Because you, and she, and I all know...that I can't.”
"You can't," Jacob repeated bitterly. He shook his head back and forth, furious and unbelieving, then barked, “How dare you. How dare you. You—coward—This should be in your hands if I could even—”
“Yes.” Edward’s voice was stiff, but became shakier as he went on. “You may call me a coward and it would be no consolation to either of us that it's true, that I have nothing in me that can be used to force myself to destroy something that I have made my entire world. I think you would understand if you saw what she is becoming...She is...all this motion without any will—you don't see...”
Jacob gave him a look that made him stop. “I don’t think we’ve been knowing the same Bella since it happened. And she hasn’t seen me...”
“Precisely.” Edward could see that his response was unexpected, and suddenly he seemed like he was pushing himself to say something he’d known for a long time and never uttered to anybody. “She loves you. I think you realize that. You don’t seem to understand what exactly that means.”
Jacob’s jaw was tensing as the words gripped straight to his heart, the sound of them foreign and cold but his soul starving for them, pathetically crawling out for that fact that he had known, but hadn’t known, having never been able to accept either thing as truth without giving up any hope of peace.
Edward’s voice sounded thinned out, strangely weak and human. “She just wouldn’t accept that when she was...alive...It was a complication she couldn’t afford. But it has been immediately clear to her—to all of us—from the moment she woke up from that dream she thought that this life was going to be. She has not forgotten you and she never can...She hasn’t managed to separate the half of her—of her heart—that belongs to you. She could. But she won’t. She thinks it would make her a monster.”
Jacob turned away, wiping his hand over his face; the dim lamp on the counter behind him silhouetted his figure as both his arms went up, his head clutched in on himself...
“But that part of her that is you is going to die. You are going to die, and she can’t recover from that; no more than I could change to recover from it, if I was the one...”
“I wanted her...” Jacob intervened in a wooden voice that was low and small, “I wanted her to have some semblance of a life. That was why I chose for her to...” He didn't finish, but Edward understood.
“She could have that, if you promised to give her what she has on mortal terms,” Edward said, somehow more gentle. “She could live until she’s lived a life, she could finally grieve without being afraid of eternal pain, with no more beating her own thoughts into the ground all the time.”
Jacob leaned over his counter and just closed his eyes. Edward allowed him a private atmosphere by focusing out of his window, encompassing a perfect silence.
They were silent for many minutes, then finally Edward was standing and pushing the chair in under the kitchen table. Outside it was beginning to dawn with a low blue light.
Jacob tightly turned to face Edward again. His expression was grim and sour, but decided. When he finally spoke, it was with a piercing hatred that Edward could not resent.
“I will do this for her.” Sharply, he added, “But you know that if I go straight to hell for this, she’s going with me.”
Even Jacob knew not to witness what Edward's face looked like after he told him that, and averted his eyes. It was a numb rivalry; he took nothing from hating him now, and he was even working on sympathizing, but he knew he'd really lose it if he saw what this pronunciation of the future was doing to the guy's head.
In a few jerky movements, Jacob moved to open the door of his fridge. With his voice still shaky, he said, “Please get out of my fucking kitchen.”
February in Norway was Alice’s favorite, everything mildly thriving in rises of green outside the window of their holiday cottage on the coast of Bodo. As it got closer to summer there was an eerie compromise between the brightness in the sky and the crisp cold.
Rosalie seemed even to enjoy herself more openly than usual; she and Emmett would come back from long walks down the beach with chunks of ice showering from her hair, presumably from her husband’s amused design. All of the Cullens would come in laughing from the cold to thaw the frost off their bodies, sometimes pairs hopping two at a time into a hot shower and then flicking back outside again for a quick hunt. All of them except Bella, almost constantly doted on by Edward as she sat drawing on a notepad at the kitchen table, even though her airs had livened significantly. Even in her sadness there was more motion and substance to her previously vacant eyes. As impossible as it was for her stamina to wane, she just seemed tired. There was no other way to describe it.
Back when there wasn’t quite a family of Cullens, one of Carlisle’s curious ongoing errands and one that occasionally gave Edward some cheer was to hunt for places that would have his favorite kind of snow. Rosalie had described it to Bella once, but having never seen any snow before coming to the floury blizzards of Forks, she of course hadn’t experienced the rare phenomena.
When the forecast had predicted probably no more snowfall for the season, Bella was lying on her back next to Edward while they listened to the radio, and they heard the wind-tunneling mouth of the front door opening just before Alice whirled in trailing her hot pink scarf and happily declaring, “It’s all glimmering outside.”
Surprisingly, Edward left Bella’s side and went ahead, probably not expecting her to join them when after five minutes she was the only family member still in the house. But some minutes after that she appeared at the front doorway, and several of the Cullens turned to watch her standing there with her soft snow boots on under her long sweater, some with a slightly guarded expectation. With her arms crossed she stepped almost timidly forward and off the front porch, her eyes scanning through the air like she wasn’t sure what she was seeing.
The snow was the tiniest lightest little specks of ice, so small that out of the light they were practically invisible, like dust. But the most enchanting sight was where the sunlight, beaming down through the gaps in its indifference to the coming winter, ignited spotlights of thousands of glittering flecks; it seemed as if the snow itself, falling so slowly it hardly moved, was carrying the sun down between all the branches in glittery slivers candied with gold.
Bella stepped into the light to confirm her assumption that the sun wasn’t blazing enough to make their skin look the same as the snow. For some reason that was what put her into a state of such freed awe: that it seemed then like even the world as it was within mortal reach held its own secrets, little things of a beauty rare even to an immortal family.
And then it was there, that pardoning thought. She was not going to live forever, and there was so much she still wanted to do.
A fraction of a moment and she was out closer to the beach right next to where Edward stood with his hands in his jacket; she pulled one out of its pocket and held it between both her hands.
Emmett had turned his car on so they could listen to the radio, and the first station they got to had a jazz number that Jasper started unconsciously swaying to with his arms around Alice’s shoulders as he stood behind her. Bella and Edward slowly and automatically tilted into each other’s arms, and danced.
Later she was lying back with her feet hanging off the bed as he pulled her boots off, causing a slight mist of the snow that had gotten in them. Her feet wriggled as if she could feel the blood returning to them. She said, “Come here.”
He kissed her to the rhythm of her hips swaying up to his, removing her hair from a loose braid down her shoulder. In a pause between joined lips, the relaxed perfection of her face framed a pair of honey-amber eyes looking at him lovingly; her hands rubbed up his arms and shoulders and grasped him gently behind the neck.
“I want to stay here a bit longer.” Her voice was tranquil. “We could see the midnight sun. I want to see it, when the sunlight never disappears. It’s perfect for us here because it never gets too bright.”
Edward let his thumb brush along her collarbone, maybe nodded slightly.
“And then I want to go back to Forks,” Bella continued. “Just for a while.”
“Alright,” he softly replied after half a moment. His eyes locked into hers again, the meaning in that devoted expression deeper than before in these days. His constant disposition was longing, and it was now in a kind of hunger to leave his own body for the refuge of hers rather than simply be inside her that he said something they had always felt so little need to say, like he was the one who needed to feel it on his tongue. “I love you.”
Bella used to consider what she had with Edward above the common weight of that phrase, that cliché in the movies that women watch on their Saturday nights; even when she’d had the impulse to say it, it had been a redundant declaration of a truth etched so thoroughly in them that seemed to thicken the very air. Now, from nowhere but within herself, she had arrived at a different place. If she saw some human couple hand-in-hand by the water she would wonder if they, perhaps one of very few, knew what that was like. She would have no doubt that it was whispered anyway, a declaration of something wonderful set in the ordinary, nothing more perfectly common than a pair of lovers coming in from the cold to warm each other’s hearts with a single timeless murmer.
She whispered, “I love you too.” She would tell him every single day.
Jacob awoke after the smell of her in his dreams, his senses following it to the foot of his bed, and then his body freezing to a calm attention of the figure blotting into his vision...
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.
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. They all felt it because of the feeling of something hot beginning to cool in their bones, all of their senses diminishing to a shallow calm. In the first year they were all ecstatic to have secrets again, and they could easily say that out loud. Even a short time spent as a wolf could teach someone for a lifetime that everybody has something they'd rather hide.
Jacob spent a Thursday night stationed at Paul’s truck, with Embry and a sardonic but now kinder Leah Clearwater, one summer when Forks and Sappho were seemingly being victimized by a suspicious strain of robberies. Hardly anybody in La Push owned a gun, so Sam had come up with the idea of giving every pistol in town to somebody willing to help the local cops work security at the borders. The old Protector spirit isn’t dead after all, Jacob was thinking to himself as he lit one of the cheap cigars the police had given them in friendly gratitude, sitting against a back tire with Billy’s shotgun straddled between his bent knees. But of course the enforcement in Forks isn’t ever any help, ever since Chief Swan...
He let his mind go dead after that. He listened to Leah and Paul, who were sitting in the truck bed just behind him.
“I think it’s funny that we’re just supposed to stop whoever looks suspicious, like—”
“I know. If this crook is a woman, I bet we’ll just wave her on through.”
“If it’s a woman and Sam’s team gets her, we’re screwed. You’re the only one who can get really aggressive with women if you have to.”
“I don’t know about that...”
“What?”
“I’m just saying, if it got to the point where you were forced to turn into a gigantic dog, they’d be running away, not calling their lawyer.”
“I don’t know, it is La Push. If we had a judge, he’d probably believe that shapeshifting abilities can be abused, you know?”
Leah laughed.
Smiling at this exchange, Embry stopped his slight pacing around the truck to sit down next to Jacob. He took off his glasses and rubbed them clean on his shirt. A little bit after he stopped phasing he’d become badly nearsighted and had to get some lenses put into some hand-me-down thick rims. They befitted the way he’d taken to blinking and anxiously twitching a little when he was bored; Jacob knew there was a longing to phase for the simple fun of it, the craving to feel the wind whip over the thousands of warm, wild hairs. There had always been a joke among the pack that being werewolves was the secret way Quileute men stayed on the wagon, but Jacob was the only one who had brought out a bottle from his top shelf.
And as tempting as it was, Jacob was the only one who had phased in the last ten years, and everybody knew why. Even after she’d left, he would shake into the teeth and the speed and he’d go looking for her every few weeks, which was turning later into every few months, only to find that the smell of the forest was just as empty as the drafty voicelessness in his head.
The other members hadn’t exactly gone back to looking teenage before reaching their actual mid-twenties, but they’d quickly lost a lot of weight, and Quil in particular was so much skinnier than he’d ever been in the years before maturing into a werewolf that he’d been almost unrecognizable at first. As for Jacob, despite presently looking his actual age, there was a tired wisdom in his eyes that made him look slightly older than his friends. This was probably why he’d go out to eat with the guys and always get asked by some white bartender if he was somebody’s older brother, probably why he managed with grown women in his desolate trailer bed on an occasional evening; one after another they’d be the type to smile and bite their lips when the wind teased through their open shirts and these were the only details he’d remember the following week. They would like him a lot, but never loved, and that was fair.
On this night Embry asked, as many of them sometimes did, if it got harder to phase, the longer “they” were gone.
Jacob did his usual shrug. “Depends on my mood, I think. Sometimes I end up giving up if I’m just too tired. But sometimes, like that night my boss pissed me off...it took off like gangbusters.”
Embry gave a slight chuckle. “Probably wouldn’t work as well for the rest of us. You were always so much better at controlling it...”
Jacob was swallowing a sip of gin with a dry smirk. He lightly asked, “What do you think, man...If I kept doing this, would I just live forever?”
Embry considered it with a shrug, and then proclaimed, “You can’t keep a good dog down.”
Leah overheard that, and with a mellow giggle she reached down and lightly shook Embry at the shoulder in a spirit of mirth. “Huh, what is that? All Dogs Go To Heaven?”
Paul then gave out a low sniggering in recognition of the phrase and they all started laughing in a spirit of self-mockery, even Jacob falling into a relaxed snicker and repeating it with a thoughtful look to the side. “ ‘All dogs go to heaven’,” as if that was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.
The rest fell into their own joking rhythms while Jacob’s attention scattered out to the navy horizon. It was on nights like these, when his blood was slow and his thoughts relaxed, that were actually the worst. Without the fierceness of spirit that a grudge requires, Jacob could not clutch in his mind why his simple pain had made him so furious, endlessly angry for years after she was gone.
On other days it just burned him into the worst, cruelest of moods. But on nights like this his heart crept out from the corner it had again and again been chastised into, and he just missed her, and that was all there was to it.
==================
The family spent half a week hunting in Greenland surrounded by the quiet chaos of constant white, leaving in their leisurely wakes splashes of red stains against the snow backdrop, only what was left of the blood cells clinging to the fur.
Bella and Rosalie headed up north as Edward and Emmett stuck to the eastern coast. The two sisters talked less and less these days, but they still hunted together, and that was at least something. Even more so than Edward, Rosalie seemed to regard Bella as something yet to come into action, as a possible impermanence. Sometimes Bella could feel Rosalie’s eyes on her like she wasn’t sure whether she was just going to pack up and vanish soon. She would sometimes rest her head on Rosalie’s shoulder when they just happened to sit next to each other just to feel closer to the ground, like she had something to hold her from drifting away.
After Bella was neatly finished with her prey, she went to find Rosalie almost a mile away, next to an icy creek. She’d borrowed Jasper’s expensive Nikon and was now wading into the shin-deep water to snap close-ups of a wiry tree glazed with shining frost. Bella did the idle favor of picking up her leather shoulder bag from where she’d left it several feet away. Until Rosalie was ready to run back there was an attempt to admire the colors of the sky as it became inked with seemingly unnatural colors, but it was a numb distraction from the peripheral. Maybe helped and not helped by the prowess and the complication of her inhuman mind, as her eyes focused forward on the high horizon she was really looking at the wolf.
Rosalie’s flattened kill, a mass of dirtied white fur that seemed to Bella so pet-sized and with a hue likened to a doily. With its ferocity taken by the easy extraction of blood that had claimed its life some moments ago, there was simply no comparison. But still it reminded her of the face she’d left behind, the regretful bloodshed that punctuated those memories.
The weak supply of sunlight was fading, and with it the charged thrill of the hunt, and Rosalie came readily up to Bella’s side. As they took up their fast but relaxed return, the sight was taken by her turned back. Bella still, in her mind, was looking at the animal, but as they walked away she imagined it a man.
==================
Jacob Black was 38, physically aged to almost 30, when in the stale dark of his kitchen he flipped on the light and realized he wasn’t alone.
The smell was less potent to him now but still making him scowl. Quickly recognizing the white figure sitting calmly at his table, he growled, “Jesus, Cullen. What is this, a detective movie?”
Edward’s eyes, deeply troubled, glared with immediate impatience. “...I didn’t come here for your petty jibes.”
Jacob’s face slowly calmed and fell to a low dread. “Right. What do you want?”
There was a pause.
“Well. I was hoping...” Edward spoke flatly. “For your help.”
After a few seconds Jacob began shifting with bottled anxiety. “What, did she send you here?”
“No.” Edward sat there and fixed his eyes tensely on the tabletop, lips pressed firmly together. “Jacob, I am asking you to fix this. Because you, and she, and I all know...that I can't.”
"You can't," Jacob repeated bitterly. He shook his head back and forth, furious and unbelieving, then barked, “How dare you. How dare you. You—coward—This should be in your hands if I could even—”
“Yes.” Edward’s voice was stiff, but became shakier as he went on. “You may call me a coward and it would be no consolation to either of us that it's true, that I have nothing in me that can be used to force myself to destroy something that I have made my entire world. I think you would understand if you saw what she is becoming...She is...all this motion without any will—you don't see...”
Jacob gave him a look that made him stop. “I don’t think we’ve been knowing the same Bella since it happened. And she hasn’t seen me...”
“Precisely.” Edward could see that his response was unexpected, and suddenly he seemed like he was pushing himself to say something he’d known for a long time and never uttered to anybody. “She loves you. I think you realize that. You don’t seem to understand what exactly that means.”
Jacob’s jaw was tensing as the words gripped straight to his heart, the sound of them foreign and cold but his soul starving for them, pathetically crawling out for that fact that he had known, but hadn’t known, having never been able to accept either thing as truth without giving up any hope of peace.
Edward’s voice sounded thinned out, strangely weak and human. “She just wouldn’t accept that when she was...alive...It was a complication she couldn’t afford. But it has been immediately clear to her—to all of us—from the moment she woke up from that dream she thought that this life was going to be. She has not forgotten you and she never can...She hasn’t managed to separate the half of her—of her heart—that belongs to you. She could. But she won’t. She thinks it would make her a monster.”
Jacob turned away, wiping his hand over his face; the dim lamp on the counter behind him silhouetted his figure as both his arms went up, his head clutched in on himself...
“But that part of her that is you is going to die. You are going to die, and she can’t recover from that; no more than I could change to recover from it, if I was the one...”
“I wanted her...” Jacob intervened in a wooden voice that was low and small, “I wanted her to have some semblance of a life. That was why I chose for her to...” He didn't finish, but Edward understood.
“She could have that, if you promised to give her what she has on mortal terms,” Edward said, somehow more gentle. “She could live until she’s lived a life, she could finally grieve without being afraid of eternal pain, with no more beating her own thoughts into the ground all the time.”
Jacob leaned over his counter and just closed his eyes. Edward allowed him a private atmosphere by focusing out of his window, encompassing a perfect silence.
They were silent for many minutes, then finally Edward was standing and pushing the chair in under the kitchen table. Outside it was beginning to dawn with a low blue light.
Jacob tightly turned to face Edward again. His expression was grim and sour, but decided. When he finally spoke, it was with a piercing hatred that Edward could not resent.
“I will do this for her.” Sharply, he added, “But you know that if I go straight to hell for this, she’s going with me.”
Even Jacob knew not to witness what Edward's face looked like after he told him that, and averted his eyes. It was a numb rivalry; he took nothing from hating him now, and he was even working on sympathizing, but he knew he'd really lose it if he saw what this pronunciation of the future was doing to the guy's head.
In a few jerky movements, Jacob moved to open the door of his fridge. With his voice still shaky, he said, “Please get out of my fucking kitchen.”
==================
February in Norway was Alice’s favorite, everything mildly thriving in rises of green outside the window of their holiday cottage on the coast of Bodo. As it got closer to summer there was an eerie compromise between the brightness in the sky and the crisp cold.
Rosalie seemed even to enjoy herself more openly than usual; she and Emmett would come back from long walks down the beach with chunks of ice showering from her hair, presumably from her husband’s amused design. All of the Cullens would come in laughing from the cold to thaw the frost off their bodies, sometimes pairs hopping two at a time into a hot shower and then flicking back outside again for a quick hunt. All of them except Bella, almost constantly doted on by Edward as she sat drawing on a notepad at the kitchen table, even though her airs had livened significantly. Even in her sadness there was more motion and substance to her previously vacant eyes. As impossible as it was for her stamina to wane, she just seemed tired. There was no other way to describe it.
Back when there wasn’t quite a family of Cullens, one of Carlisle’s curious ongoing errands and one that occasionally gave Edward some cheer was to hunt for places that would have his favorite kind of snow. Rosalie had described it to Bella once, but having never seen any snow before coming to the floury blizzards of Forks, she of course hadn’t experienced the rare phenomena.
When the forecast had predicted probably no more snowfall for the season, Bella was lying on her back next to Edward while they listened to the radio, and they heard the wind-tunneling mouth of the front door opening just before Alice whirled in trailing her hot pink scarf and happily declaring, “It’s all glimmering outside.”
Surprisingly, Edward left Bella’s side and went ahead, probably not expecting her to join them when after five minutes she was the only family member still in the house. But some minutes after that she appeared at the front doorway, and several of the Cullens turned to watch her standing there with her soft snow boots on under her long sweater, some with a slightly guarded expectation. With her arms crossed she stepped almost timidly forward and off the front porch, her eyes scanning through the air like she wasn’t sure what she was seeing.
The snow was the tiniest lightest little specks of ice, so small that out of the light they were practically invisible, like dust. But the most enchanting sight was where the sunlight, beaming down through the gaps in its indifference to the coming winter, ignited spotlights of thousands of glittering flecks; it seemed as if the snow itself, falling so slowly it hardly moved, was carrying the sun down between all the branches in glittery slivers candied with gold.
Bella stepped into the light to confirm her assumption that the sun wasn’t blazing enough to make their skin look the same as the snow. For some reason that was what put her into a state of such freed awe: that it seemed then like even the world as it was within mortal reach held its own secrets, little things of a beauty rare even to an immortal family.
And then it was there, that pardoning thought. She was not going to live forever, and there was so much she still wanted to do.
A fraction of a moment and she was out closer to the beach right next to where Edward stood with his hands in his jacket; she pulled one out of its pocket and held it between both her hands.
Emmett had turned his car on so they could listen to the radio, and the first station they got to had a jazz number that Jasper started unconsciously swaying to with his arms around Alice’s shoulders as he stood behind her. Bella and Edward slowly and automatically tilted into each other’s arms, and danced.
Later she was lying back with her feet hanging off the bed as he pulled her boots off, causing a slight mist of the snow that had gotten in them. Her feet wriggled as if she could feel the blood returning to them. She said, “Come here.”
He kissed her to the rhythm of her hips swaying up to his, removing her hair from a loose braid down her shoulder. In a pause between joined lips, the relaxed perfection of her face framed a pair of honey-amber eyes looking at him lovingly; her hands rubbed up his arms and shoulders and grasped him gently behind the neck.
“I want to stay here a bit longer.” Her voice was tranquil. “We could see the midnight sun. I want to see it, when the sunlight never disappears. It’s perfect for us here because it never gets too bright.”
Edward let his thumb brush along her collarbone, maybe nodded slightly.
“And then I want to go back to Forks,” Bella continued. “Just for a while.”
“Alright,” he softly replied after half a moment. His eyes locked into hers again, the meaning in that devoted expression deeper than before in these days. His constant disposition was longing, and it was now in a kind of hunger to leave his own body for the refuge of hers rather than simply be inside her that he said something they had always felt so little need to say, like he was the one who needed to feel it on his tongue. “I love you.”
Bella used to consider what she had with Edward above the common weight of that phrase, that cliché in the movies that women watch on their Saturday nights; even when she’d had the impulse to say it, it had been a redundant declaration of a truth etched so thoroughly in them that seemed to thicken the very air. Now, from nowhere but within herself, she had arrived at a different place. If she saw some human couple hand-in-hand by the water she would wonder if they, perhaps one of very few, knew what that was like. She would have no doubt that it was whispered anyway, a declaration of something wonderful set in the ordinary, nothing more perfectly common than a pair of lovers coming in from the cold to warm each other’s hearts with a single timeless murmer.
She whispered, “I love you too.” She would tell him every single day.
==================
Jacob awoke after the smell of her in his dreams, his senses following it to the foot of his bed, and then his body freezing to a calm attention of the figure blotting into his vision...
