Twilight fanfic: THE LAST SLEEP (pt. 6-B)
Jan. 9th, 2010 03:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninety6tearsTitle: The Last Sleep
Characters/Pairings: Jacob / Bella (/Edward)
Rating: PG-13
On the morning after that night in the hotel, Bella and Edward had gone hunting together in a baited silence. Afterwards they’d sat still at the base of a bald wintered tree, Edward cradling Bella into the crook of his shoulder. She’d spoken sort of robotically in a voice painted with simple wisdom, words like brush strokes coming up from her voice and painting the eventual recollection a vivid inescapable crimson, leafing the trees with summer oranges and reds as the moment became woven into the passage of time. Words translated right from her delicate consciousness, a ticker-tape line of sentences to give him these moments’ glimpses straight into her mind, wrapping and binding him to a promise.
Promise me you won’t leave the rest. I know that after this happens you’ll want to disappear for a while. You’ll think the only way to fix the pain is to run far away from anything you’ve ever known and start all over again. But after I’m gone no one except for them will ever truly know you. No one else new ever will again. Please. Tell yourself that they are what is left of me, and you’ll make it. And live long enough that I am only a light winking somewhere in a crowded sky. Please.
This wasn’t a single conversation that they’d had; this wasn’t something she’d said aloud in a single string. But thirty-five years later, when Bella felt like she’d been muttering mere fragments and repetitions of these words to Edward in a frantic insistence, descending through decades, the end of their story took these urgent sentiments and placed the puzzle pieces together, melded them into understanding. Bella had known for many years now that she was asking Edward to do something that, by all knowledge that either of them had, he simply could not do.
Long enough for the universe to conjure through its own impossibilities, to birth new galaxies from accidents, for you to both remember and forget me, to carry me with you as only a memory of a memory of a moment. It will be like I wasn’t even here, like I was something that ignited so briefly it was barely there but created something in you, new lines of endless determination in a future you must write for yourself. But written with them.
With your family. Without me.
People walking down an aisle to look at a body that used to be a being that used to be their breath; they can’t do that either. They do it anyway, somebody does, every single day. All those miserable miracles she had told herself were out there were Bella on the day that she really understood. The goodbyes were so impossible that even as they happened they couldn’t happen; her body was elsewhere. It resisted. In her entire vampire lifetime she had never needed so fully to deceive herself. She couldn’t.
The entire Cullen family was at an airport in Belfast. Bella was the only one with a ticket. This seemed the best way: to send her up to the calm skies like the beginning of a vacation; practically the only thing none of them could do was fly after her. Not enough time to swim or run after, and the awful muting of a public place would be the bitter setting of the last words. Her flight was boarding in ten minutes; the family had loosely arranged itself in a kind of line she had to walk along. She did so as she needed, not even realizing how the group, drawing enough attention with their collective impact of beauty, drew the curious stares of many who walked by with the very solemn sight of how they seemed knotted together in thick suffering.
First, Esme, who kept running her fingers through Bella’s hair, her attempts at forming any thoughts into words coming out as whimpers, eventually dropping her grasp to the hands or sleeves of her husband, who said his very small-sounding words, gently against Bella’s left temple, so that Esme didn’t have to try any harder. Before she gave him a final embrace, he assured her, in the most labored sincerity, that he had already forgiven her.
“So long, baby, I’ll never forget you”: Emmett was one of the few who actually managed to smile, even though he looked so unusually troubled it immediately threatened Bella’s resolve. He detected that, watching her bite down on her lip as she met his eyes in building anguish, and quickly responded by pulling her to him and hugging her in a rocking, tight embrace. When Bella was finally somehow freed from her brother by both of them, she turned to Rosalie.
A distant bystander would have probably been puzzled by the seemingly heartless tall blond who had stood looking inattentive, almost bored, as Emmett and Bella said goodbye. When Bella turned to her, she took to an almost aloof air, just barely bothering a big-sisterly touch on Bella’s shoulders and then a straightening of the collar on her jacket.
Rosalie sort of cleared her throat and then just asked, “How do you feel?”
The final question, simple enough. Bella opened her mouth a little before finally allowing, “I feel old.”
“Yes.” Rosalie shifted. “You...You lived well.” She crossed her arms and let Emmett lightly hold her from the side. She didn’t seem to want Bella to really touch her. Bella reached and quickly squeezed one of her hands. She left it at that.
Alice, looking like she was choking on something, only managed to start by reaching up to pinch some lint off of Bella’s hat, and then grimace at it, remarking, “Really, are you trying to look like an eighty-year-old?”
The shortest laugh escaped Bella before she quickly squeezed Alice into her arms as if it was the only thing that could momentarily keep her from breaking down. Alice always felt so small and childlike in such a close embrace; Bella’s guilt grabbed menacingly in her gut and she moaned a small pained “I love you.”
A sad sigh was returned, along with, “Love you too, honey.” By the time she was released from Bella’s frantic grasp, she had been calmed into a lachrymose-seeming subdued gloom. While it simply wasn’t possible for Alice's husband to keep everyone comforted, the majority of his talent was being spent on her.
Jasper was a heavy truth of a body, the collected wounds marking his face, some his and some not his. Somehow he was the worst so far to behold, as Bella realized with a sense of morose exhaustion just now, how hard it must have been for him to live with this, live with her and what she’d spliced sorely into the emotional core of his family and the new grief that would now be his constant neighbor. But he managed even to put on a gentlemanly smile, take her hand and kiss it on the knuckle. She embraced him with a miserable whisper of, “I’m sorry, Jasper...”
“Bella. Shh.” He held her in a very brief, brotherly tenderness; but before she broke away, his voice, cutting itself apart with quiet repressed misery and truer than any other sound, suddenly said in her ear like a secret: “We love you.”
She closed her eyes into his shoulder before it seemed so profoundly that there was nothing around her, nothing in her arms. The family took themselves to the side, crowded themselves away looking through the massive glass window out at the slow and stopped planes. In the noiseless pocket of the smoothly bustling airport, it was now only Bella with Edward.
For a long moment they stood without touching each other, gazing piercing in joined unison at each other’s faces, still. In both their minds, their history was retold, arriving at simple, happy things, the lifetime ago when he first felt the warmth of her skin; they filled the torn spaces with a blinding innocence, a forgotten feeling of youth, for they had now, both of them, began to feel so much older.
There were places in time now that Bella could not remember, a realization that usually gave her a pain in her heart, but was now benign. The memories she had were white-hot with a very painful beauty, blazing and scattering along her body as Edward finally reached out a hand and let his fingers caress a strand of her hair hanging from her hat. She reached up and slipped it off her head. He stepped forward into her and placed his lips atop her hair, slowly. Slowly, she held him at his waist and he tilted her face symmetrically and then bending to his: They kissed. They kissed forever, etching themselves joined into the space so that the separation was slow enough to seem unreal. Edward left her skin with a self-resistant final grasp on her shoulders, which he somehow, somehow let go of.
The entire goodbye was wordless. All of her thoughts and confessions were outside of her, and she had become these others, everyone she left behind.
Do not imagine me as gone. Imagine me in a different order, the fragments out of sequence. Ex vivo, I go. Wait for the world to scatter and churn the atoms into its own infinite dust, and in its manifestation of the impossible, the inevitable, wait. Wait for the awful and glorious sequence to unfold my self to you a second time. Or don’t. Or die. But do not leave what is left of me.
Please.
On the plane it was very quiet. She sat appearing very listless, looking across the aisle to where a man sat with his daughter. He was affectionately twisting at the girl’s pale blond locks as she looked at a coloring book. He noticed her tired-looking glances that seemed an appreciative longing directed at the girl; Bella made sure to smile, and he smiled back.
She tried to wallpaper her thoughts with the little girl’s affectionate chattering even when the appearance of her leaning back and closing her eyes made the father reduce their talking to candid whispering. In a way quite opposite to her old remembering meditation, she attempted with every strength of her thoughts to steer herself away from everything she’d just left.
She was afraid. Despite the feeling of exhaustion wearing on her heart, her body lived and wanted with still immortal vigor, and part of it did still instinctively clutch to its strange version of life; she had gained back the desire for being when she was promised this day was going to come. And maybe there was no human sense in it at all, in the equivalent of getting on a plane one already knew would crash and burn and rip into pieces, but that was also why it was right. She imagined, if this plane were to actually crash: leaving devastation, torn and burned bodies floating in a pool of oil and water; and herself, still alive among the bloody ruin. And then it happening to her ten times more. That, she knew, was a future more horrifying than the darkest afterlives.
“Do you want me to finish the story tomorrow?”
The girl across the aisle was falling asleep. Still blind under her closed lids, Bella picked up a squeeky yawn in her ears.
The father chuckled a deep hum of affection. “Okay, goodnight, Lily. I love you, honey.”
“Goodnight, Daddy.”
She carried those words with her after they landed, her mind going comatose with its hold on every shred of warmth she could muster into feeling. The airport found her facing close to the window watching the planes roam on their wheels, just like where she’d left her family, with her body still as a mannequin and her eyes closed. After a moment she felt as if she could not do it on her own much longer, she would lose it, she’d suffocate.
Then at her side, a warm hand closed around hers.
She smiled.
36 hours ago, Kalaloch, Washington.
The scrap of paper is scribbled with a trembling scrawl, “Bowerman airport—10 pm,” on the back, or the front, depending on which way you hold it. The other side anyhow, reads in thicker marker, “FOR SALE.”
The woman must be pretty determined because she plucks it up from the windshield and is holding it in her hand when she comes knocking. He flinches when the noise gets him off the couch, ends up taking a moment to gather why exactly she’s there.
“Hi,” she greets quickly when he opens the front door. “I saw your ad about the Mercedes. Thought I’d come take a look at it?”
His screen door jams and wobbles noisily before he gets out of his threshold and then out onto the porch. “You saw the ad, huh?” His tone suggests he doesn’t actually know what she’s talking about. She just nods, and when Jacob sort of unconsciously starts heading down the driveway to where the SL is parked, she follows with her hands in her pockets.
“She’s looking really good, I have to say,” the woman says. “You might be asking for too little, really—Other people are gonna try to negotiate you out of your asking price, but...well, I’ve really been looking for one of these.”
Jacob isn’t really sure what he’s doing, brushing some of the year’s early snow off the front windshield of the still pristine-looking Benz, checking over it with his bottom lip in his mouth. He looks up finally and shoves his hands in his pockets, kicking some ice underfoot as he walks more purposefully back over to the woman with a grimace on his face.
“I’m sorry,” he confesses. “I can’t sell you that car.”
“Are you kidding me?” the woman protests weakly. “You put in the ad...Look, I drove forty miles to look at it...”
Jacob smirks nervously, looking more directly at her now. “Alright, listen...What’s your name?”
She’s lively-looking, he figures single since she came in a pick-up truck with no one else in it and people rarely go to look at cars by themselves, much less this kind of car. She doesn’t look quite fifty, which means she’s less than a decade younger than Jacob looks. Which he feels slightly uncomfortable for even contemplating, but...
She flatly offers her name: “It’s Saffron, Saffron Carter.”
“No kidding?” The corner of his mouth curls up. “Your name is Saffron?”
“Yeah.” She rolls her eyes a little. “I go by Sadie sometimes, so if you can’t say that with a straight face...”
“Okay, Sadie, then.”
He’s starting to think that if he was going to sell the car, she’d be the perfect person to sell it to. He’s wondering if she’s a natural blonde.
“I tell you what...There’s a decent restaurant a few miles west. I could buy you a nice big steak to make it up to you?” He shifts a glance to his feet and back up again before saying, “I could even...make it worth the drive, if you’d like.”
She tilts her head, not exactly in a negatively scrutinizing way. “I don’t even remember your name, and you’re asking me for a date.”
He just shrugs. “It’s not my fault my name is a little more common than ‘Saffron’.”
She’s looking him up and down quite properly now; he’s cautiously optimistic that he’s in just before she gives a little satisfied smile. “Let me get my purse, okay?”
She’s excited about the car, alright, and in the mere four-minute drive to the River Lodge he’s able to gather she knows a thing or two about classics. He’s already invented a biography for her in his head: She's attractive, so "divorced" goes without saying. Father probably owned a successful business selling farm equipment; she became a salesperson for many years before being promoted as a CEO somewhere, recently quit to move to a less urban setting and needs a zippy little car to prove how much she means it. It’s one of the better stories he’s made up for a woman he’s met that he doesn’t really plan on getting to know, which means in a strange way that he really quite likes her. He even asks her enough questions to start proving him wrong by the time they’re in the parking lot.
But he still does all the motions with only half the meaning, and she catches on, probably assumes she’s in for a one-night stand and doesn’t appear to mind. It’s no difference what she thinks about his reasons for not being a good whole piece of gentleman, because the end result is probably the same.
They sit at the bar in the restaurant and she orders the least expensive steak. Shortly after they’ve sat down, Jacob reaches to take a book of matches from a little basket sitting by the tip glass.
It’s the kind of quiet place where you hear every little thunk of a beer bottle being set down; she’s half-done with her Heineken when she casts him a look that makes him realize he’s become very quiet.
“So, Mr. Black,” she says, having made a joke of pulling her newspaper page back out to double-check his name. “What’s your deal?”
“What’s my deal?” Jacob has been idly sitting forward and turning the matches over in his hand.
“What makes a guy put a car on the market and suddenly change his mind?”
“Oh. Well...” He sighs, milling it over in his mind. “A friend of mine gave me that car, actually.”
“Ah.”
He rests his chin on his hand, staring off at where the bartender is mixing a martini. He finally mutters, “Tomorrow is the last time I’m ever going to see her.”
Sadie frowns in mild sympathy. “Where is she going?”
“Oh...” Jacob gives a sigh, a shrug, and he slips the matches into the front pocket of his jacket. “Off to her family, I guess.”
His voice is distant and almost flat, and the woman next to him parrots his thoughftul posture, looking his face up and down with a sort of pleased confusion. “I’m beginning to think you’re a very unusual man, Jacob Black.”
Jacob chuckles. “No...Not really.”
It’s easy enough, but for now, it isn’t really true for him. He will enjoy his date with Saffron Carter. And later tonight, maybe, she’ll go home with him, but it’ll all be held at arm’s length by some arm that isn’t his, a hazy loosening of the senses that has pulled suffocation over his life ever since he told that lie that was yes, I can do this, I am going to be alright. To this day, he can't say whether it's true. He doesn’t know if he should sell the car. He can’t tell which of the notions is thinner, whether his life is going to end tomorrow, or if maybe he’s going to finally be able to start living.
A short time before Billy died, he mentioned to his son how many native cultures consider drowning to be the worst possible death, that it leaves its victim trapped in a kind of limbo, that it does not allow others the right chance to say goodbye. In his dreams, in his daydreams, in his lucid thoughts he sees himself plunging into the depths after Bella, a mile’s struggle to the ocean floor, and not even to save her, not this time. He feels the stifling pain in his lungs and his muscles and his skin: all of this to sever the stubborn relationship of her indestructible body with itself, to separate the atoms into dust, he washes her into the world, he sets her free. This is what he tells himself, every night and every day, because his life is another thing but it is always there, this thing he has to do.
He knows that he will do it because he has done it before. It would not be the first or even the second time that his actions have defined the question of her existence; his place in her life is the same as it has ever been, to save it but never to hold it in his hands.
He remembers her as just a delicate girl in a pair of loose jeans, walking tightlipped on the beach in that hidden composure like she wanted always to just melt into the sand, and he wonders time and again if he was a teenage boy falling forever in love with a death wish. Whether he rescues her cold and choking body so that she can live to walk right into the arms of death, whether he rips her from the throes of such a monster into the half-life, she yearns always for another existence, the next existence. This is why he thinks sometimes that it can’t be the end, because this is him and Bella, forever and always.
On and on, she breaks. He fixes. He gives her back.
Characters/Pairings: Jacob / Bella (/Edward)
Rating: PG-13
On the morning after that night in the hotel, Bella and Edward had gone hunting together in a baited silence. Afterwards they’d sat still at the base of a bald wintered tree, Edward cradling Bella into the crook of his shoulder. She’d spoken sort of robotically in a voice painted with simple wisdom, words like brush strokes coming up from her voice and painting the eventual recollection a vivid inescapable crimson, leafing the trees with summer oranges and reds as the moment became woven into the passage of time. Words translated right from her delicate consciousness, a ticker-tape line of sentences to give him these moments’ glimpses straight into her mind, wrapping and binding him to a promise.
Promise me you won’t leave the rest. I know that after this happens you’ll want to disappear for a while. You’ll think the only way to fix the pain is to run far away from anything you’ve ever known and start all over again. But after I’m gone no one except for them will ever truly know you. No one else new ever will again. Please. Tell yourself that they are what is left of me, and you’ll make it. And live long enough that I am only a light winking somewhere in a crowded sky. Please.
This wasn’t a single conversation that they’d had; this wasn’t something she’d said aloud in a single string. But thirty-five years later, when Bella felt like she’d been muttering mere fragments and repetitions of these words to Edward in a frantic insistence, descending through decades, the end of their story took these urgent sentiments and placed the puzzle pieces together, melded them into understanding. Bella had known for many years now that she was asking Edward to do something that, by all knowledge that either of them had, he simply could not do.
Long enough for the universe to conjure through its own impossibilities, to birth new galaxies from accidents, for you to both remember and forget me, to carry me with you as only a memory of a memory of a moment. It will be like I wasn’t even here, like I was something that ignited so briefly it was barely there but created something in you, new lines of endless determination in a future you must write for yourself. But written with them.
With your family. Without me.
People walking down an aisle to look at a body that used to be a being that used to be their breath; they can’t do that either. They do it anyway, somebody does, every single day. All those miserable miracles she had told herself were out there were Bella on the day that she really understood. The goodbyes were so impossible that even as they happened they couldn’t happen; her body was elsewhere. It resisted. In her entire vampire lifetime she had never needed so fully to deceive herself. She couldn’t.
The entire Cullen family was at an airport in Belfast. Bella was the only one with a ticket. This seemed the best way: to send her up to the calm skies like the beginning of a vacation; practically the only thing none of them could do was fly after her. Not enough time to swim or run after, and the awful muting of a public place would be the bitter setting of the last words. Her flight was boarding in ten minutes; the family had loosely arranged itself in a kind of line she had to walk along. She did so as she needed, not even realizing how the group, drawing enough attention with their collective impact of beauty, drew the curious stares of many who walked by with the very solemn sight of how they seemed knotted together in thick suffering.
First, Esme, who kept running her fingers through Bella’s hair, her attempts at forming any thoughts into words coming out as whimpers, eventually dropping her grasp to the hands or sleeves of her husband, who said his very small-sounding words, gently against Bella’s left temple, so that Esme didn’t have to try any harder. Before she gave him a final embrace, he assured her, in the most labored sincerity, that he had already forgiven her.
“So long, baby, I’ll never forget you”: Emmett was one of the few who actually managed to smile, even though he looked so unusually troubled it immediately threatened Bella’s resolve. He detected that, watching her bite down on her lip as she met his eyes in building anguish, and quickly responded by pulling her to him and hugging her in a rocking, tight embrace. When Bella was finally somehow freed from her brother by both of them, she turned to Rosalie.
A distant bystander would have probably been puzzled by the seemingly heartless tall blond who had stood looking inattentive, almost bored, as Emmett and Bella said goodbye. When Bella turned to her, she took to an almost aloof air, just barely bothering a big-sisterly touch on Bella’s shoulders and then a straightening of the collar on her jacket.
Rosalie sort of cleared her throat and then just asked, “How do you feel?”
The final question, simple enough. Bella opened her mouth a little before finally allowing, “I feel old.”
“Yes.” Rosalie shifted. “You...You lived well.” She crossed her arms and let Emmett lightly hold her from the side. She didn’t seem to want Bella to really touch her. Bella reached and quickly squeezed one of her hands. She left it at that.
Alice, looking like she was choking on something, only managed to start by reaching up to pinch some lint off of Bella’s hat, and then grimace at it, remarking, “Really, are you trying to look like an eighty-year-old?”
The shortest laugh escaped Bella before she quickly squeezed Alice into her arms as if it was the only thing that could momentarily keep her from breaking down. Alice always felt so small and childlike in such a close embrace; Bella’s guilt grabbed menacingly in her gut and she moaned a small pained “I love you.”
A sad sigh was returned, along with, “Love you too, honey.” By the time she was released from Bella’s frantic grasp, she had been calmed into a lachrymose-seeming subdued gloom. While it simply wasn’t possible for Alice's husband to keep everyone comforted, the majority of his talent was being spent on her.
Jasper was a heavy truth of a body, the collected wounds marking his face, some his and some not his. Somehow he was the worst so far to behold, as Bella realized with a sense of morose exhaustion just now, how hard it must have been for him to live with this, live with her and what she’d spliced sorely into the emotional core of his family and the new grief that would now be his constant neighbor. But he managed even to put on a gentlemanly smile, take her hand and kiss it on the knuckle. She embraced him with a miserable whisper of, “I’m sorry, Jasper...”
“Bella. Shh.” He held her in a very brief, brotherly tenderness; but before she broke away, his voice, cutting itself apart with quiet repressed misery and truer than any other sound, suddenly said in her ear like a secret: “We love you.”
She closed her eyes into his shoulder before it seemed so profoundly that there was nothing around her, nothing in her arms. The family took themselves to the side, crowded themselves away looking through the massive glass window out at the slow and stopped planes. In the noiseless pocket of the smoothly bustling airport, it was now only Bella with Edward.
For a long moment they stood without touching each other, gazing piercing in joined unison at each other’s faces, still. In both their minds, their history was retold, arriving at simple, happy things, the lifetime ago when he first felt the warmth of her skin; they filled the torn spaces with a blinding innocence, a forgotten feeling of youth, for they had now, both of them, began to feel so much older.
There were places in time now that Bella could not remember, a realization that usually gave her a pain in her heart, but was now benign. The memories she had were white-hot with a very painful beauty, blazing and scattering along her body as Edward finally reached out a hand and let his fingers caress a strand of her hair hanging from her hat. She reached up and slipped it off her head. He stepped forward into her and placed his lips atop her hair, slowly. Slowly, she held him at his waist and he tilted her face symmetrically and then bending to his: They kissed. They kissed forever, etching themselves joined into the space so that the separation was slow enough to seem unreal. Edward left her skin with a self-resistant final grasp on her shoulders, which he somehow, somehow let go of.
The entire goodbye was wordless. All of her thoughts and confessions were outside of her, and she had become these others, everyone she left behind.
Do not imagine me as gone. Imagine me in a different order, the fragments out of sequence. Ex vivo, I go. Wait for the world to scatter and churn the atoms into its own infinite dust, and in its manifestation of the impossible, the inevitable, wait. Wait for the awful and glorious sequence to unfold my self to you a second time. Or don’t. Or die. But do not leave what is left of me.
Please.
On the plane it was very quiet. She sat appearing very listless, looking across the aisle to where a man sat with his daughter. He was affectionately twisting at the girl’s pale blond locks as she looked at a coloring book. He noticed her tired-looking glances that seemed an appreciative longing directed at the girl; Bella made sure to smile, and he smiled back.
She tried to wallpaper her thoughts with the little girl’s affectionate chattering even when the appearance of her leaning back and closing her eyes made the father reduce their talking to candid whispering. In a way quite opposite to her old remembering meditation, she attempted with every strength of her thoughts to steer herself away from everything she’d just left.
She was afraid. Despite the feeling of exhaustion wearing on her heart, her body lived and wanted with still immortal vigor, and part of it did still instinctively clutch to its strange version of life; she had gained back the desire for being when she was promised this day was going to come. And maybe there was no human sense in it at all, in the equivalent of getting on a plane one already knew would crash and burn and rip into pieces, but that was also why it was right. She imagined, if this plane were to actually crash: leaving devastation, torn and burned bodies floating in a pool of oil and water; and herself, still alive among the bloody ruin. And then it happening to her ten times more. That, she knew, was a future more horrifying than the darkest afterlives.
“Do you want me to finish the story tomorrow?”
The girl across the aisle was falling asleep. Still blind under her closed lids, Bella picked up a squeeky yawn in her ears.
The father chuckled a deep hum of affection. “Okay, goodnight, Lily. I love you, honey.”
“Goodnight, Daddy.”
She carried those words with her after they landed, her mind going comatose with its hold on every shred of warmth she could muster into feeling. The airport found her facing close to the window watching the planes roam on their wheels, just like where she’d left her family, with her body still as a mannequin and her eyes closed. After a moment she felt as if she could not do it on her own much longer, she would lose it, she’d suffocate.
Then at her side, a warm hand closed around hers.
She smiled.
36 hours ago, Kalaloch, Washington.
The scrap of paper is scribbled with a trembling scrawl, “Bowerman airport—10 pm,” on the back, or the front, depending on which way you hold it. The other side anyhow, reads in thicker marker, “FOR SALE.”
The woman must be pretty determined because she plucks it up from the windshield and is holding it in her hand when she comes knocking. He flinches when the noise gets him off the couch, ends up taking a moment to gather why exactly she’s there.
“Hi,” she greets quickly when he opens the front door. “I saw your ad about the Mercedes. Thought I’d come take a look at it?”
His screen door jams and wobbles noisily before he gets out of his threshold and then out onto the porch. “You saw the ad, huh?” His tone suggests he doesn’t actually know what she’s talking about. She just nods, and when Jacob sort of unconsciously starts heading down the driveway to where the SL is parked, she follows with her hands in her pockets.
“She’s looking really good, I have to say,” the woman says. “You might be asking for too little, really—Other people are gonna try to negotiate you out of your asking price, but...well, I’ve really been looking for one of these.”
Jacob isn’t really sure what he’s doing, brushing some of the year’s early snow off the front windshield of the still pristine-looking Benz, checking over it with his bottom lip in his mouth. He looks up finally and shoves his hands in his pockets, kicking some ice underfoot as he walks more purposefully back over to the woman with a grimace on his face.
“I’m sorry,” he confesses. “I can’t sell you that car.”
“Are you kidding me?” the woman protests weakly. “You put in the ad...Look, I drove forty miles to look at it...”
Jacob smirks nervously, looking more directly at her now. “Alright, listen...What’s your name?”
She’s lively-looking, he figures single since she came in a pick-up truck with no one else in it and people rarely go to look at cars by themselves, much less this kind of car. She doesn’t look quite fifty, which means she’s less than a decade younger than Jacob looks. Which he feels slightly uncomfortable for even contemplating, but...
She flatly offers her name: “It’s Saffron, Saffron Carter.”
“No kidding?” The corner of his mouth curls up. “Your name is Saffron?”
“Yeah.” She rolls her eyes a little. “I go by Sadie sometimes, so if you can’t say that with a straight face...”
“Okay, Sadie, then.”
He’s starting to think that if he was going to sell the car, she’d be the perfect person to sell it to. He’s wondering if she’s a natural blonde.
“I tell you what...There’s a decent restaurant a few miles west. I could buy you a nice big steak to make it up to you?” He shifts a glance to his feet and back up again before saying, “I could even...make it worth the drive, if you’d like.”
She tilts her head, not exactly in a negatively scrutinizing way. “I don’t even remember your name, and you’re asking me for a date.”
He just shrugs. “It’s not my fault my name is a little more common than ‘Saffron’.”
She’s looking him up and down quite properly now; he’s cautiously optimistic that he’s in just before she gives a little satisfied smile. “Let me get my purse, okay?”
She’s excited about the car, alright, and in the mere four-minute drive to the River Lodge he’s able to gather she knows a thing or two about classics. He’s already invented a biography for her in his head: She's attractive, so "divorced" goes without saying. Father probably owned a successful business selling farm equipment; she became a salesperson for many years before being promoted as a CEO somewhere, recently quit to move to a less urban setting and needs a zippy little car to prove how much she means it. It’s one of the better stories he’s made up for a woman he’s met that he doesn’t really plan on getting to know, which means in a strange way that he really quite likes her. He even asks her enough questions to start proving him wrong by the time they’re in the parking lot.
But he still does all the motions with only half the meaning, and she catches on, probably assumes she’s in for a one-night stand and doesn’t appear to mind. It’s no difference what she thinks about his reasons for not being a good whole piece of gentleman, because the end result is probably the same.
They sit at the bar in the restaurant and she orders the least expensive steak. Shortly after they’ve sat down, Jacob reaches to take a book of matches from a little basket sitting by the tip glass.
It’s the kind of quiet place where you hear every little thunk of a beer bottle being set down; she’s half-done with her Heineken when she casts him a look that makes him realize he’s become very quiet.
“So, Mr. Black,” she says, having made a joke of pulling her newspaper page back out to double-check his name. “What’s your deal?”
“What’s my deal?” Jacob has been idly sitting forward and turning the matches over in his hand.
“What makes a guy put a car on the market and suddenly change his mind?”
“Oh. Well...” He sighs, milling it over in his mind. “A friend of mine gave me that car, actually.”
“Ah.”
He rests his chin on his hand, staring off at where the bartender is mixing a martini. He finally mutters, “Tomorrow is the last time I’m ever going to see her.”
Sadie frowns in mild sympathy. “Where is she going?”
“Oh...” Jacob gives a sigh, a shrug, and he slips the matches into the front pocket of his jacket. “Off to her family, I guess.”
His voice is distant and almost flat, and the woman next to him parrots his thoughftul posture, looking his face up and down with a sort of pleased confusion. “I’m beginning to think you’re a very unusual man, Jacob Black.”
Jacob chuckles. “No...Not really.”
It’s easy enough, but for now, it isn’t really true for him. He will enjoy his date with Saffron Carter. And later tonight, maybe, she’ll go home with him, but it’ll all be held at arm’s length by some arm that isn’t his, a hazy loosening of the senses that has pulled suffocation over his life ever since he told that lie that was yes, I can do this, I am going to be alright. To this day, he can't say whether it's true. He doesn’t know if he should sell the car. He can’t tell which of the notions is thinner, whether his life is going to end tomorrow, or if maybe he’s going to finally be able to start living.
A short time before Billy died, he mentioned to his son how many native cultures consider drowning to be the worst possible death, that it leaves its victim trapped in a kind of limbo, that it does not allow others the right chance to say goodbye. In his dreams, in his daydreams, in his lucid thoughts he sees himself plunging into the depths after Bella, a mile’s struggle to the ocean floor, and not even to save her, not this time. He feels the stifling pain in his lungs and his muscles and his skin: all of this to sever the stubborn relationship of her indestructible body with itself, to separate the atoms into dust, he washes her into the world, he sets her free. This is what he tells himself, every night and every day, because his life is another thing but it is always there, this thing he has to do.
He knows that he will do it because he has done it before. It would not be the first or even the second time that his actions have defined the question of her existence; his place in her life is the same as it has ever been, to save it but never to hold it in his hands.
He remembers her as just a delicate girl in a pair of loose jeans, walking tightlipped on the beach in that hidden composure like she wanted always to just melt into the sand, and he wonders time and again if he was a teenage boy falling forever in love with a death wish. Whether he rescues her cold and choking body so that she can live to walk right into the arms of death, whether he rips her from the throes of such a monster into the half-life, she yearns always for another existence, the next existence. This is why he thinks sometimes that it can’t be the end, because this is him and Bella, forever and always.
On and on, she breaks. He fixes. He gives her back.
end.
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Date: 2010-01-23 02:51 am (UTC)You took my breath away.
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Date: 2010-01-23 07:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-25 03:40 am (UTC)When you showed me the first chapter of this like two years ago when you'd barely started it, I couldn't have imagined where it was going and what the full meaning of the title could be. The fact that you originally came up with this idea so long ago is weird to think about considering how reading it now still made me consider things about the canon I never had before. If you were to tell me before I read something like this what it's about, the premise might sound overly angsty and like something that's hard to identify with, but the way Bella's situation is handled sort of forces me to realize that there's a difference between being suicidal and just rejecting immortality, especially when it's been forced on you in traumatic circumstances comparable to what Rosalie went through.
And have I mentioned how great it is how you draw that comparison in the way Rosalie is sort of prominent in this story without actually being heavy-handed about it at all? Her perfectly understanding line "You lived well" feels like one of the most important lines in the whole fic. It takes a lot of strength to face the pain in life and still be able to enjoy it, as Bella actually does, but perhaps it's unreasonable to expect anyone to have to face their existence with that kind of strength eternally, with no relief in sight.
And yet the sacrifice it takes on Jacob's part to give her what she needs is such a painful and tragic but moving thing. I'm not sure if any fic about J/B actually ending up together can show his love for her quite the way this one does. It's appropriate that the ending is slightly ambiguous, not actually showing what happens to him in the end, but you just have that sort of horrific but understated moment of him TAKING THE MATCHES so casually, obviously thinking about what he is about to do. Jesus Christ.
ALSO THAT KISSING SCENE OH FUCK. GUH.
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Date: 2010-01-31 03:47 am (UTC)And anyway, I find it very interesting and good that you really felt that connection between Bella and Rosalie was one of the stronger points, because I suppose if I back up and think about it, I wanted to impose what by BD becomes the category of "everyone's problems but Bella's" ONTO BELLA and sort of see if the character has enough of a presence to even survive it. I don't want to profess some grim pride in writing something that would make Stephenie Meyer weep herself to sleep over her fallen Mary Sue, but I would also really hope that that isn't actually what I wrote? As you say, rejecting immortality is not this inherently dark thing, it's really something that I'm disturbed to see a good amount of these fans don't want to consider, and that's another probably uncomfortably meta element of the story, but it is also the only ending to the story I felt I could write.
And this is random, but I just love your enthusiasm for...the matches. I wasn't even sure if it was obvious what that actually means or not.
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Date: 2010-04-06 12:40 am (UTC)AHHHH
Date: 2010-04-27 05:04 pm (UTC)Re: AHHHH
Date: 2010-04-28 01:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-26 01:05 am (UTC)I liked the realistic take on Bella finding herself thrust into becoming a vampire without really ever choosing it (unlike the books, where she never really considers the choice she's making very deeply); her discomfort as an immortal and only being able to enjoy it when she puts an expiry date on it. Jacob's suffering was pretty heartbreaking, too- a guy who can't help but do everything he can for this girl, and it never being enough. The casual, subtle way his act of euthanasia is described is great; never shown, merely implied. The idea that, although he doesn't believe it, but there may be a glimmer of release for him and his life might actually get better once Bella is gone is an good touch.
Anyway, great read.
Also, just read your comment above and I have to say, I'm totally with you on the potential dragging one into the fandom, rather than the execution. I'm stuck here because I was sucked into the potential these books and the characters had, and was bitterly disappointed when they swiftly proved to be mediocre to bad fanfic that had no higher storytelling purpose than as some housewife's silly masturbatory fantasy [/rant].
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Date: 2010-07-26 11:45 pm (UTC)And word to your rant - I think a lot of us at SOB feel the same way. My love/hate relationship with this fandom is a soap opera in itself XD
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Date: 2011-06-14 07:49 am (UTC)I hated the series. I read it because I was 18, heartbroken, and sucked in by the desire to read a love story. It didn't sit well with me from the first book, but I made it through them all. I didn't like any of the characters. They were skeletons to me, painfully empty blots on a page that had more potential than the author had the talent or patience to deal with. I still can't believe a halfway decent idea was dropped on such an unworthy person.
Which brings me back to your story. I think you found the darkness in all of them and set it on fire. You took these serious, painful, and dark personalities and tried to breathe something into them. I have always had a fondness for Jacob, but you broke him open to and it HURT, to see him in your light. His devotion to Bella is heartbreaking because he gives everything, and you didn't shy away from that in this story.
Bella feels a lot less pathetic to me as well. Which is surprising, because I was pretty much set to hate her as the worst written heroine in ALL of literature, but you did wonders with her agony. What she became made a whole hell of a lot of sense.
I think what really got me, however, is the subtly in which you wrote. Little things, little key things echoed inside me long after I finished the story. I remembered Roselie saying "You lived well." Bella hurting Jacob when their instincts took over, Jacob casually reaching for the book of matches (I damn near cried then), Bella actually choosing to live her half-life, Jacob's insistence that she may have chosen differently, the kiss they shared that was heartbreaking and thoroughly necessary, Bella saying she wanted to live with Edward, love him, but die with Jacob (kind of fucked up but that's what she does, she uses, and he is used), her killing the momma dear and Roselie understanding, Billy saying that drowning is the worse way to go....
There is a deep darkness that haunted the entire series that you captured brilliantly. This is definitely one of the best stories I have ever read, because of the unflinching, bright light you shown on the complexities of this scenario.
Oh...the last line of the story, broke me. Utterly broke me. I think the biggest shame of it all was he never got to break free of her, no one did. Their all revolves around her and no one, absolutely no one, should ever have that kind of power.
Bravo.