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flowrs4opheliaTitle: What Music They Make
Previous chapters: Prologue + I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | IX | X | XI | XII | XIII | XIV
Characters & Pairings: Jacob/Bella, Edward/Bella
Rating: R
Summary: When an unexpected conflict with the Volturi brings Jacob back into her life, Bella finds that being a vampire only makes it even more complicated for her to be in love with two people.
Notes: IT'S DONE. HOLY SHIT. A very heartfelt thank you to everyone who's followed this story and left me comments. Plus huge thanks are due to Layla (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ninety6tears) for being my ever-reliable beta reader through this whole madness.
It probably seems kind of like beating a dead horse to finally post this last chapter after all this time, especially because Chapter 14 actually functions okay as a final chapter. But I still have a big attachment to this fic and I really wanted to end it more or less the way I always imagined ending it since I started the fic over two years ago rather than just give up and call it finished. It'll be interesting to see if I even get many comments, but it was something I just needed to do before I could move on with my life. LOL.
The chapter ended up pretty long so it's posted in two entries.
ETA: I've done a master post for this fic with lots of extra stuff including the soundtrack playlist you can download.
chapter XV children of the night
A month later, all the preparations had been made for the Cullens to move away from Forks. They had already bought a new house in Alaska under a new name most of them would be taking, and Carlisle had found a job at a new hospital there.
The day they were going to leave, Bella and Edward spent a few hours together in the meadow. The sun was not out. Not long before now, Bella might have wished it was bright outside so it could feel more like that first day they ever came here together, when she stared at the incredible thing that was his glimmering body in awe and felt like she was sitting beside someone godlike and out of her reach. But she did not long for their past the way she used to, for the newness and innocence of that time before his appearance in sunlight had become second nature to her and something she now could confidently know as an unremovable part of her life rather than marvel at.
As dusk approached, they both knew it was time to go back, but they were hesitant to move. Finally she was the first to rise from the ground. He followed her at a leisurely pace, looking back behind him all the while. She stopped and looked back at him when they reached the edge of the meadow, gazing back at it with him after seeing the wistful look in his eyes. She knew her own face probably held the same look.
"It’s hard to believe we will not come here together ever again,” he said quietly, obviously deep in his thoughts and memories. “It is quite sad. Everything started here in this town. And this is our place..."
She smiled a little as she looked to the side at him, and then took his hand encouragingly. "We have a lot of other places to go together now," she said softly.
He gazed at her face a while, his own gentle smile slowly spreading across his face. With some acceptance in his expression, he turned to run away with her, still holding onto her hand. And with that they left behind their untainted past, the simple fairy tale, a still life so stable and frozen in its blissful happy ending. Instead they were heading into a life with no ending at all, complete uncertainty, constant forward motion and change.
Jacob came to the house along with some of the other werewolves just as it had gotten dark. Everyone met in the front yard, the two groups facing each other. Jacob addressed Carlisle, telling him in as polite a way he could what it meant that they would no longer have any boundaries set for his family not to cross. In short , he knew it wouldn’t be against the agreement they’d made with the Volturi for one of them to simply pass through the area again, but he still wasn’t responsible for anything that might happen to one of them here.
At some of his words, Bella noticed Quil glance at her with a bit of a smirk. She could tell it was no secret that she was an exception to this warning; she knew for a fact now that ever since a while after the word had gotten out about her part in bringing down the Volturi on them, Jacob had forbidden everyone in the pack to ever hurt her “unless it’s necessary to protect someone else.” She had wondered but not wanted to ask if he had specifically excluded himself from that loophole in his order and made it still forbidden if the “someone else” was him.
Bella realized how formal and unnecessary this all seemed as Carlisle and Jacob then shook hands to signify their agreement. An agreement to end an agreement. There was something almost humorous about it; the Volturi requiring them to at least go through the motions of not being allies because they couldn’t permit them to co-exist. Even though they all knew, if begrudgingly, that there would probably never be any reason to attack each other again.
Quil and Embry both stayed behind with Jacob a moment as the others were leaving. Looking at Bella, Embry shrugged as if thinking to himself, Screw it, and then leaned over to give her a quick hug and said, “See you, vampire girl.” Quil just reached for her hand and squeezed it briefly, smiling at her and saying noting.
Then Jacob and Edward were facing each other, and after a few seconds of them standing still like this it seemed the silence should have gotten awkward. And it was, a little, but Bella had no doubt that this silence was being filled with some kind of thoughts of Jacob’s that he would not say out loud as his last ever words to Edward.
Then Jacob finally spoke again, his tone stiff and unsure. “Right...well...Stay in good health, Edward.”
Bella rolled her eyes at his obvious sarcasm; Edward smirked a little, and actually reached out to quickly shake his hand, saying, “Don’t worry. This time I think we can be quite confident you’ll never have to see me again.”
Jacob laughed light-heartedly, and even Bella was able to smile. Despite their words, there was no real animosity in either of their voices.
Before she and Jacob turned to each other, she picked up a canvas wrapped in paper that had been sitting on the porch. She felt strangely shy explaining it to him.
“This is...um...something I decided I’d like you to keep,” she said. “I painted it while I was away.”
His brow lifted. “You sure?”
She shrugged. “I did a lot of them. It’s one less thing to have to pack.”
Of course, he could tell this wasn’t the real reason she was giving him this one. He was also able to tell somehow that he probably shouldn’t take off the paper and see what it was until later when he was away from everyone else.
“I can’t exactly carry it back home with me as a wolf,” he realized aloud. “You want to give me a ride?”
“Oh...I don’t know,” she said. “On the roads I could be seen.”
“That’s right,” he said. Ever since he’d seen her again, it had been easy to forget sometimes that she was supposed dead by most of the people she used to know.
Then Bella touched his arm and said, “Wait. I can ask Carlisle to lend me his car. It’s safe...”
They did not talk very much as Bella quickly drove the sleek black car around the long winds of the road. They felt no need to say anything. They both knew how this felt for them.
“Are you sad to leave Forks?” Jacob asked her at one point, his tone very casual. He clearly meant the place itself and not the people.
She nodded. “Yeah. I think this town is always going to feel more like home than anywhere else, no matter how long I live away from it. But this had to happen eventually. And it’ll be nice living somewhere where I don’t have to stay hidden at home all the time. After I got a taste of that kind of freedom again in Florida, it’s been bothering me more than usual.”
They were silent for a while, listening to the classical music Carlisle’s radio was playing softly. Then, just as they got close to the reservation, Bella said, “Jake...”
When she kept hesitating, he turned his head toward her. “What?”
“What were you saying to Edward in your head?” she asked, unable to help her curiosity.
He smiled, leaning back in his seat and putting his hands behind his head. “That he’s a filthy bloodsucker and an asshole,” he answered.
Bella smiled knowingly. “Fine,” she said, echoing his joking tone. “If you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to.”
He was still and quiet for a long moment, and then finally said with some reluctance, “I...apologized for the way I acted when I was trying everything to convince you not to go to Volterra.”
Bella did not look at him, but he could see the look of surprise that took over her face.
“Well...I guess I didn’t apologize so much as just explain that it wasn’t done out of disrespect for him, because I wasn't even thinking,” he explained further. “When I was actually trying to steal you away from him—you know, a long time ago—I didn’t respect what you and him had or take it seriously that you were together because of what he is. To me, it was like he didn’t count. But I guess I don’t really see him that way anymore. Everyone in your family you’re with now...They’re good people. It’s kind of too bad you’re all leeches.”
As they were nearing his house, she looked to the side at him and smiled warmly. “If you could go back, would you actually do anything differently, though?”
Shrugging, he admitted, “I guess not. I’d just feel a lot more crumby about it on account of him.”
She laughed softly.
"And also...I just told him I'm grateful and relieved that he's obviously been able to make you happy," he continued, "even with everything you've lost."
They were now parked outside his house, and she turned to look at him incredulously.
“But of course,” he added quietly, “if he’s not enough to get you through life sometimes, your best friend is always still here.”
She couldn’t find any more words. Her face started to crumple a little with sadness, and he immediately leaned toward her and kissed her forehead, his eyes closing with a similar expression of faint pain.
“Just drive away now,” he said softly, then turning away and getting out of the car carrying the covered painting.
He stood and watched her driving off even though he could see nothing of her through the dark, shining windows and only watch his own reflection in them getting smaller and smaller.
When he got inside, he went right to his room and set the canvas down on his bed, slowly tearing off the paper with a lethargic lack of energy. The colors of the Olympic penisula scenery were instantly recognizable just through the first narrow tears, even though they were brighter and more defined than one was usually used to seeing them, part of a rare scene with a bright sunset. Or sunrise. Somehow, as he uncovered the whole painting, he got the strong impression that it was supposed to show the breaking of day, not a sunset.
It was First Beach. Their place. But this sentimental meaning of it alone was not what made him stare at it in slight disbelief with the breath knocked out of him for a second. That wasn’t the point. What made his heart feel so overwhelmingly full as he looked at it was that he knew Bella had not painted this anywhere near La Push. But to someone who was familiar with the beach and didn’t know any better, it would unquestionably look like something that had to have been painted while looking at it or a picture of it as a reference. Every detail, from the rocks that came out of the water in the distance to the large piece of driftwood pictured right in the bottom right corner that he and Bella had always sat on together like a bench, was painted so accurately he could tell a photograph of the scene from the same angle would hardly be distinguishable. No human would have the precise enough memory to be able to do this.
It wasn’t signed on the bottom. In case he kept it hanging somewhere that visitors to his house could see it, it wouldn’t be a good idea for Charlie to see a new painting with his deceased daughter’s signature in one corner. Jacob turned it over, not exactly expecting to find anything. But there on the inside of the wooden frame he found the tiny message in impossibly neat writing: “Do you remember? Love always, Bella.”
And the intended meaning of the gift was clear. No matter how far away from this place she was, it and the crystal clear memories associated with it were always going to be with her. And it was the same for her memories of him. Nothing would ever fade for her and she would always miss him when she couldn’t see him, always love him every bit as much as she still did now.
She would always want. She would always have.
As the Cullens all stood together outside of their now emptied house under the dark blue sky of a night that had almost completely fallen, Jasper took out his lighter, volunteering to do the job. He looked around at all the others' faces, seeing if they were ready. They all waited in a preparing silence, and Carlisle nodded to him.
He sprung into action, disappearing into a window of the house. The others could hear him moving quickly from place to place inside, and then after a while they started seeing dark smoke escaping from windows, and then saw some of the flames he'd started beginning to light up the dark cavities of every room where they had spent so many days and long nights.
They had decided this was necessary. Or even if not completely necessary, reasonable. The Volturi would be returning here soon wanting to see that the Cullens were honoring their agreement. The more convincing they could make it appear that they were serious about never moving back to Forks again, the less they needed to worry about them feeling the need to keep checking in on the area for very long. And it meant a lot to Bella, and even a little to some of the rest of them, for this place to finally be as safe from vampires as possible.
Besides that, though none of them had said as much, it was understood that most of them did not like the idea of someone else occupying this house for ages after they were gone. It was one of their only homes they had ever had designed and built specifically for them and their needs, and they just couldn't imagine it getting turned mundane being lived in by humans for the first time.
Jasper came back to stand with the others, and Alice came to his side and wrapped both her arms around his waist as she stood by him and watched. Edward had taken Bella's hand, and he also went to Esme's side to put his arm around her shoulders, and then she and her son exchanged small, bittersweet smiles. As they watched the fire starting to consume the entire house, their golden-amber eyes all reflected the light of the flames and looked like softly burning embers.
Bella squeezed Edward's hand in hers, leaning her head against his shoulder. She knew she would probably be crying if she could. Even if their memories of living here would always stand out to them in many ways, for the rest of her family this home was still just one of many, while it meant worlds to her for so many reasons. But this was a good thing. She, more than any of the rest of them, needed to let go.
Jared married Kim a month later. Jacob and four of his friends ended up gathered at a table at the wedding reception, watching as they had their first dance.
“Aren't they just sickeningly cute?" Brady said as he joined their table, sitting next to Leah and immediately taking the cigarette she was smoking from her fingers to steal a drag.
Embry laughed. "Another wedding for one of us," he mused. "Doesn't it make you feel kind of old?"
"Not me," Collin said with a laugh. "Heck, we've all got plenty of time before we'll even start looking any different."
"Jake, are you planning on still being single once Quil and Claire get married?" Embry asked.
"That's funny," he said sarcastically, but with a small smirk.
A curious look crossed Brady's face. "Are you still fooling around with that cute waitress? Layla, or something?"
"Lilah," Quil corrected.
Jacob shook his head and answered, “No, it's not like that anymore.”
"Could I get her number?" Collin asked with a grin.
"Shut the fuck up."
Many of them broke into short laughter.
Brady went on, "Huh. I thought that might...you know...turn into something. You actually seemed kind of close."
Jacob shrugged. "Sure. But not close enough."
"For what?"
"What else? For it to be worth the risk."
"Would it kill you to try to be happy with somebody?" Embry asked.
"No, but it wouldn't be very fair if it didn't work."
"That's no way to think about it."
"Easy for you to say. You've already imprinted on somebody."
Quil smirked and said, "I thought you were so certain that's never going to happen to you."
"That won't be much of an excuse for never telling somebody it could happen if it does once I've already married her and given her three kids or something."
Collin shook his head slowly, looking a little depressed by the truth of it. "Ugh. It's tough luck, isn't it?"
Embry sighed. "It's not like you can ever make sure you'll never hurt anybody anyway," he said. "That's just life, isn't it?"
"That's not the point," Jacob said. "Any girl I’m going to get involved with just has a right to know what kind of risks she's taking, at least if it starts to get serious. And if I’m going to tell her anything I better be pretty damn sure I'm ready for that and she's the kind of person who could handle it. It's not as simple as just...meeting somebody nice."
Quil shook his head, letting out a long sigh. “Dang...When did we get so grown-up and responsible?”
The others laughed again. Even Leah, who had been sitting in a bored silence most of the time, cracked a grin.
Jacob thought back on what had brought them to this conversation, and said, "The funny thing is...Lilah and I have kind of gotten even closer ever since we decided to just be friends, and now everybody else at work seems to be getting the idea that we’ve started going out."
Quil cracked up laughing.
"That must be awkward," Collin said.
He shrugged. "She thinks it's hilarious."
"I guess she was never dumb enough to fall in love with you, then," Quil said.
Jacob laughed. "Thanks. Either that or she's as good an actor as I am."
Emily came over to their table after she'd been talking to Sue at the one next to theirs. Embry was the first to look up and see her. “Hey, Em!” he said as she waved in greeting.
She gave off a radiantly cheerful appearance in a bright mint green dress, one of her hands rested on her now quite large belly as she walked over as if lingering there unconsciously. At her appearance, Leah considerately put out her cigarette by smashing the end into her hand. Jacob stopped himself from laughing as he noticed her breathing hard through her clenched teeth for a moment, knowing what she must be doing even as the table blocked his view, and then she relaxed a little and sat shaking her hand with the now subsiding pain as the burn was already healing. Always with her tireless show of toughness.
“Don’t you look pretty as a picture,” Embry said to Emily.
“Thanks,” she said, smiling in a way that somehow lit up her entire face even though only the beautiful half of it could smile. “I feel like a whale.”
“Bet you can still move fine on the dance floor,” Jacob said, offering his hand to her.
“Are you trying to get away from us?” Collin teased him.
“Yes,” Jacob answered, and his completely serious tone made them all start laughing again. “No more kids’ table crap for me.”
He got up and started dancing with Emily to a slow song, talking with her casually about how the ceremony had gone for a minute as they swayed in slow circles. Then she said, “I heard some of what you were talking about over there...Quil’s right, you know.”
Jacob looked down at her with a raised eyebrow. “About what?”
“It’s pretty amazing how grown up all of you are already. It’s strange to think it was only five years ago you were still that innocent and more carefree kid...when I had to tell you not to fight with your brothers...”
“Em, you’re gonna make me cry,” he said sarcastically.
“I mean it. I know you still have a lot of doubts about how well you handled that situation with the Cullens. But I couldn’t be more proud of you. Sam was right to want you to lead the pack instead of him.”
He smiled at her half-heartedly. “You know I’d much rather have stayed that innocent kid a lot longer...”
“Of course you would. That’s why it’s so admirable you didn’t just endlessly wallow in bitterness about everything that’s happened to you like Leah—Bless her.”
Jacob raised an eyebrow again, mouth tightening in a small smile.
“Okay, so you had plenty moments of complaining and self-pity, too,” she said, making him laugh. “But you’ve still become capable of always doing what you know you have to, no matter how much you don’t like it or how hard it is. And I know whatever happens to you now...even if you don’t find someone for you anytime soon, or even ever...you’ll be able to handle it and you’ll be okay. I think you could handle anything.”
He smiled warmly, leaned down and kissed her cheek. "Do you know how much I love you to death? And you really do look nice, by the way."
She smiled back at him. "I guess I feel nice. I feel...surprisingly great. I thought this would be a lot harder, you know. All of this when our whole family should still be here, but they're not..."
He nodded somberly. "I know."
"And it is hard, but...I don't know. A couple months ago it felt like the world might as well be coming to an end and it was hard to have any hope. And now...Kim and Jared are married and very happy today. I'm about to have a baby. Bella had been dead to you for years, and now she's a good friend again. We've all still got each other, when things could have ended up a lot worse. And with the Cullens gone, we should finally have some peace here. What happened with the Volturi was terrible, but because of it and the trust you were willing to establish between us and the Cullens, we ended up breaking a cycle going back many generations, and that's pretty incredible if you think about it. It's possible nobody will ever have to be turning into werewolves here ever again."
Jacob let that sink in for a while. Then he said, "If that's the case, then I guess after enough time there won't be anybody who even believes the legends are true anymore."
Emily looked at him closely and curiously, tilting her head a little. "Jacob Black. Don't tell me that makes you a little sad. The thought of there being no more protectors ever again after you're gone, nothing special and magical about this place anymore?"
He let out a short laugh and said sarcastically, "Well gee, when you make it sound that cheery..."
"Yeah," she said with a knowing smirk. "I thought so."
"What?"
"The crazy kind of life you've had...even though it's brought you a lot of trouble and grief...I bet as long as it wasn't for the people you've seen die, you wouldn't ever trade it in for a normal one. Not for anything."
He looked like he wanted to disagree at first. But then after some consideration, he sighed and just looked at her with slightly narrowed eyes, seeming annoyed by her ability to figure him out so easily.
"Let's just enjoy a normal life today and not think about it," he said, and she smiled in agreement.
After another month passed, Bella started going to high school again for the first time of many. She actually enjoyed going on long shopping sprees with Alice during the first weeks of living in their new town, because nobody here knew her and it was okay for her to be seen. Starting anew in a different place felt so liberating in many ways that it made her wonder why she had been hanging onto something that she'd already lost for so long by wanting to stay hiding away in their house in Forks.
Two months later, Jacob came home from work to find a note Billy had left him on the fridge before leaving with Sue: It's a girl. Anna Lucille. 7.5 pounds.
Seven months later, the pack and their families met together at a bonfire to commemorate the deaths of their friends a year ago. Paul's mother told stories about him misbehaving as a boy that had everybody laughing and tearing up at the same time. When Leah started sniffling beside him, Brady reached for her hand resting on the log they sat on and squeezed it. She didn't look at him, but for a split second she smiled a little.
From far away, sitting alone, Bella watched and listened, running her bare toes over the sand.
The Uleys came over to Jacob's house to drop off some lasagna Emily had made. She nearly always had an overabundance of food she'd cooked and would end up handing some of it off to other people whether they needed it or not.
Sharp eyes watched the meeting from outside the tiny kitchen window, curiously observing as Anna, now three years old, came scampering in with her parents following her. Bella could easily make out their words.
"Hey, Banana," Jacob said brightly, looking down at her with his hands hidden behind his back. "Have you got a new dress?"
Anna nodded her head, grinning big, and said, "My grandma made it."
"I should have known," he said, smiling over at Emily as she put the food away for him; he knew Emily's mother to be some kind of genius seamstress. "Hey, I've got a surprise for you."
"Where?" Anna said, restlessly rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet.
Jacob took his hands out from behind his back in closed fists, showing them both to her. "You'll have to guess what hand it's in."
She stared for a moment, then pointed to his right. "That one!"
"The left?" he asked, holding up the other one. "Are you sure?"
"No, that one!" she said, giggling.
"Okay, if you say left..." He opened his large left hand to show her a little bottle of bubbles, faking astonishment. "Woah, how did that get there?"
Anna took it excitedly and then as she started filling the kitchen with the bubbles she blew out of the tiny wand attached to the cap, Sam said to him with an amused smile, "Now she'll never calm down. Quit spoiling my kid, huh?"
Jacob laughed and nudged him with his elbow. "Whatever, I just found it in my box of cereal today."
Smiling, Bella watched them all together for another minute, and then while Jacob was momentarily turning away from the others to put something in the garbage, she said something to him with her mind. Hi. I'll just see you at the usual place when you've got time.
His reaction could not give away to anyone else there what was happening, but his brief smile to himself after he went still for a second in surprise was enough to know he'd gotten the message. After that she turned and quickly fled.
Inside, Sam was getting a slightly disgusted look on his face and looking around. He glanced out the window just moments after he might have been able to see something for a second. "It really reeks in here," he muttered.
"Sorry," Jacob said, knowing he didn't need to explain what it was. "She must have come by here while I was out earlier. At least it's always easy to tell so I know I can expect her to drop in again soon."
Emily looked at him with her arms crossed, raising an eyebrow. "Couldn't she just call when she wants to drop by? They've got phones."
He smiled. "Animals can communicate through scent very effectively," he said, jokingly matter-of-fact.
Sam gave a short laugh. "I wonder if it would do much to keep other leeches off our lands if we marked our territory by pissing on trees—Ow," he said, getting a kick from Emily's foot for forgetting to watch his mouth around Anna, though she was still completely distracted playing with her new toy. He and Jacob both laughed as he reached for her hand with an apologetic look. "Sorry."
As soon as they had left a while later, Jacob grabbed a can of soda from the fridge before heading outside. He drank it as he walked energetically toward the woods, heading to a designated place he and Bella both knew about half a mile past where the trees ended going into the neighborhood, easily recognizable by an especially huge tree with some thick upraised roots.
He found her sitting delicately on one of the roots, patiently waiting. As he approached he finished off his drink, crushed the can flat in his hands, and then put it away in the pocket of his jeans. She turned to look at him with a smile of greeting, and he stayed back about eight feet, remembering it was always harder right at first for her to be exposed to his scent again.
"No need to be so shy," he said as he started pulling his shirt off over his head.
"I don't like to interrupt your plans," Bella said with a shrug.
"Coming in and saying hi isn't interrupting. You could have met Anna."
"Yeah, I bet Sam would love that," she said sarcastically.
"He should. You were kind of looking out for her before she was even born." He was now pulling his shoes and socks off, starting to make a pile of all his clothes on the ground.
She just shrugged again. "I'm glad I got to see her anyway."
As he turned slightly away and started unbuttoning his pants, she looked away.
"Nothing you haven't seen before," he pointed out teasingly.
She smiled tightly as she heard him finishing undressing. "Not from every angle," she said, as if that was very relevant.
Jacob laughed. "I guess that's true."
Shortly after that came the brief sound from behind her of bones converging and straining in lightning-fast rearrangement and then the ground giving under the added weight of some great mass. She stood up and looked behind her shoulder at the reddish-brown wolf with a challenging grin.
"Ready?" she asked.
He came forward to stand next to her, not going past the large tree. It was always their starting point, and a point a few miles off in the distance that used to be where the treaty line was drawn was the destination. Bella crouched down in a ready position, and his large yellow eyes watched her count down with her fingers, three two one.
They both propelled themselves forward, shooting off as fast as bullets. Jacob pounded against the ground heavily with every quick stride while Bella's tiny and graceful feet were effortlessly quiet, but for a while they kept about the same speed. There were about seven feet of space maintained in between them, and as Bella ran with a fired up smile and her hair whipping back behind her, she could look to the side and see Jacob's big right eye looking at her through all the thick foliage they charged through and past.
But when they got closer to the end point he started gaining speed, finally putting all of his energy into it, and started passing her. This was how it usually happened. After playing quite a lot of baseball games with her family, Bella knew by now she had only average speed for a vampire. Up against a werewolf that usually wasn't quite enough; as long as he wasn't tired at all, Jacob would beat her in a race nearly every time.
Sure enough, Bella was eventually chasing the sight of his tail flying behind him as he got many meters ahead of her, and then he made one final long leap to the finishing point, stopping so abruptly his paws slid forward a little clumsily on the muddy ground before he turned around.
She was laughing at his ungraceful stop as she met him there, and he growled ungratefully.
"Maybe I hardly ever beat you," she started in a teasing tone, turning away from him as she looked down at how dirty her shoes were now, "but at least I can come to a sudden stop without nearly falling over."
His smell suddenly came looming very close, and before she had the chance to look behind her he shoved his snout hard into her back and pushed her over onto the ground.
"Jake!" she said with annoyance, turning around with the front of her clothes now covered in mud, and his throat just rumbled with his odd-sounding wolf laughter.
"That's it," she said decidedly as she got back on her feet. "We're going again."
When they raced all the way back to where they'd started, she didn't beat him this time either.
After he was human again and had changed back into his clothes, they walked toward the beach together as night was falling, and he told her, "Don't worry. You'll catch up to me someday."
Her smile then was just a little sad. She knew that was true.
The Cullens' new home was in a secluded area in the mountains and was even larger than their last house, with grand balconies extending from two of the bedrooms and enough rooms for Edward to keep two pianos now. Bella had turned half of the top floor into a studio for her to paint in. It was the one place in the house she had all to herself and would go to spend time alone with her thoughts doing something that came easily; Edward had joked once that she had finally found a relaxing activity to replace sleeping.
She honestly didn't find that too far from the truth. Instead of working through her thoughts with revelations in dreams, she painted pictures now. In fact, she painted more than they knew what to do with. A couple years ago she had started a website to start selling some of her paintings under a pseudonym, including a bio describing herself as a 36-year-old male restaurant owner who lived in Indiana with his boyfriend which made Emmett die laughing when she read it out loud to everybody. By now she'd starting gaining enough minor cult popularity that everything always sold within an hour, and none of her buyers knew that she gave most of their money away to charity.
One afternoon when she had been painting and listening to Edward playing downstairs for a while, she heard his footsteps on the first floor as he started to walk away from the piano after finishing a sonata and said something to him by putting her voice in his head. Can't you play one more, please?
She could hear him laugh lightly as he went back to the bench, and then the house filled with delicate notes again as he started Debussy's "Pagodes."
Everyone knew Bella enjoyed some measure of privacy while she was painting, but later Edward got too nosy about what she was coming up with today as he often did and came into the studio to see her for a moment. She turned to smile invitingly at him and then looked back at the canvas she was working on, continuing to paint with incredibly fast brush strokes that would almost be just a blur of movement to a human's eyes.
"Hm," he said, looking around at other ones she had finished which were still drying. "These are different. Is there some theme here, or are you going completely abstract now?"
Bella grinned a little, rising from her seat to go stand beside him. "It's a series," she explained. "They're not exactly supposed to be abstract. I just got this thought of trying to visualize and paint things...you know...that can't actually be seen. Different feelings and perceptions. Like this..."
She pointed to one which was an explosion of intricately detailed textures in soft pastel colors in the center of a dark gray background. "This is titled The Caress of Light. It's the feeling of sun on your skin."
Edward's brow slowly lifted as he looked at it. "But only the way it feels to us," he said, somehow getting a clear idea that it depicted a sense much more intense than the way a human feels the warmth of the sun.
She nodded. "Well, yeah. And this other one is The Shape of Song. It's the sound of you playing piano."
He looked at that one closely, taking in the soft impressions of different purple and blue colors that filled it. Then he pointed to the only other finished one, which was all in very bold colors and had a much more aggressive and messy feeling. "And that one?"
"That's the sound of a human playing piano," Bella answered.
He broke into laughter at her joking tone, and then she shook her head.
"No, that one's...Well, I'm calling it The Music of Blood."
Edward's face went a little more serious in realization, and he stared into the canvas for a long moment like he was falling into its bizarre and wild beauty. "It's...the scent of blood," he said. "Blood that sings for you."
She nodded.
He was now shaking his head slowly in amazement. "That's remarkable," he said, looking around at all the paintings again. "It's like...I can somehow understand exactly what you're trying to convey, and the sensations just jump out at me. I said your talent must have something to do with being able to express how you see things to others, but...How do you do it?"
She shook her head, seeming to feel overly complimented. "It's not like you'd ever be able to tell what these are supposed to be depictions of if I didn't tell you. It's only when I explain the title of each one that it just clicks."
He smiled and then shrugged. "Well, the effect is very impressive nonetheless." He looked at them some more and started sighing. "They won't mean much to the people who buy them."
"A lot of my art doesn't make sense to people outside of our world," she said. "But the stranger they are and the more cryptic the titles are, the more people seem to like them."
He laughed again. "Or perhaps you have a few fans who aren't fooled by your bio—at least the part that says most of your work is inspired by dreams. That painting The Protector and the Cold Woman might have sold to someone who knows a lot more about certain Native American legends than the average person and didn't just think it was romantic. And the one of yourself shimmering in the sunlight with blood all over your clothes and a flower in your hair? Somebody might have found the title Diamonds Are Forever sort of funny and not that cryptic."
Bella's eyes widened just a little at the thought, and then she crossed her arms and continued to look at all the paintings thoughtfully. "I don't know...I like the idea of people with mundane lives owning a little piece of my life and being able to enjoy it as just fantasy. It makes me feel like I can still be a little connected to their world."
He smirked. "And so the legacy of our kind often perpetuating the myths of our kind themselves continues into the twenty-first century."
She giggled, leaning into him and wrapping her arms around him. He held her with a content sigh, kissing her cheekbone, and then she put a thought of hers into his head which made him laugh adoringly—an image of them alone together in a luxurious room somewhere in Greece.
"Again?" he asked. "We just got back from going away together two months ago."
"But we go back to school soon," she said. "We won't have as many chances for that sort of thing during the year."
"This is true. We'll have to think about it."
Her next thought she once again communicated directly into his head: That's no fun. We should be more spontaneous.
He laughed again, leaned in and kissed her, and they kept their foreheads rested together for a while.
"How did I ever live without being able to talk to you like this?" Bella wondered. After just a few years of finally having mastered all the aspects of her abilities, it was already as natural to her as if she'd always been able to do it and was now very hard to imagine being without.
He only shook his head a little in answer. Then in a swift, silent movement together, they had both lowered themselves to the floor as they started kissing again.
Now, she said as he gently pressed her back onto the wood floor. Right here. For it occurred to her that it was one thing they'd never done.
He held her hand back against the floor by her head, intertwining his fingers through hers and smiling eagerly down at her. "No wonder you find it so horribly distracting when I come in here," he muttered.
She laughed softly before she lifted her head up a little and his lips found hers again with an invigorated force.
The next time Bella visited Forks was at Christmas. She was there waiting patiently by Jacob's window when he woke up after sleeping in quite a bit, a wrapped gift sitting at her feet.
"Well, good morning," he said with surprise, and then raised an eyebrow when he noticed the package. "Santa came?"
Bella smiled. "It's a blanket I had as a little girl," she explained. "And which my mom also had as a little girl. It's something I've been holding onto just for the memories, but we've been getting rid of a lot of things to get ready to move again and I thought...maybe Anna..."
He nodded. "Sure, sure," he said through a yawn as he got out of bed. "Sam and Em would love for her to have it. And they'll probably guess it's not really from me or Billy as soon as they see it's wrapped."
"You don't wrap your Christmas presents?" Bella asked.
Jacob left the room and she heard him go into the closet for a moment. He came right back to show her a couple tied plastic bags with bows stuck on them with a sheepish smile.
She sighed, shaking her head, and then she took the two pathetic gift bags as she passed him to leave the room. "Get dressed," she said, "and then I'll show you how this is done."
Bella found a neglected supply of gift wrap after a fast search through his house, and then they sat on the floor of the den as she helped him wrap up a mind-boggling amount of gifts for all his friends and some of his friends' parents or kids, trying to give him quick lessons along the way in curling ribbon and folding the ends of packages neatly.
"You can only do this because you've got such dainty little hands," he complained after doing the best he could to get Jared's box to look good.
Bella suddenly freezed in the middle of finishing the last package, and then she looked toward the front of the house.
"What?" he asked, looking over at her.
"Somebody just pulled up outside the house," she said curiously, and then quickly started finishing wrapping the present in fast blurs of movement as she kept talking. "A woman. I hear her talking on her phone."
"Oh crap, it's Lilah," Jacob said, looking over at the clock. "You know, my friend—Is it really past noon already?"
"Lilah's spending Christmas with you?" Bella asked.
He shrugged. "One year Sue insisted I bring her along to have dinner at her house after she met her once and found out she doesn't really do anything on Christmas. Her dad's kind of an intense religious freak who disowned her years ago, so...Anyway, now it's become a yearly thing and she and Leah are sort of tight and it's just plain freaky..."
Bella laughed and then looked toward the front door as she could hear Lilah getting close. As she started to stand up, Jacob held a hand out and stopped her.
"Hey, just sit tight," he said. "It's fine."
She tilted her head at him, looking a little doubtful. "What are you going to say?"
"Don't worry about it," he said, shrugging. Then after he heard a knock at the door he called, "Come in!"
Lilah burst in through the door mumbling a stream of curse words describing how cold it was, holding a coat tight around herself and carrying something in a plastic bag.
"Good God, you can hardly tell which house is which around here," she was saying breathlessly as she pulled a newsboy hat off of her short-cropped hair and headed right into the den. "With all the snow piling up on your....Hi."
Her voice trailed off weakly and just barely got the last word out as she noticed Bella.
"Hey," Jacob said to her, then nodded toward the bag. "What's that?"
Lilah's attention was partially entranced by the unexpected sight of Bella, and she kept staring at her a moment before she realized she was staring and finally looked back at Jacob, giving him a delayed answer. "Uh. Pie. It's a pecan pie."
Jacob looked a little unpleasantly caught by surprise. "Oh...Uh...You didn't have to bring anything."
Bella grinned at his slightly scared expression while Lilah rolled her eyes a little; it seemed obvious that Jacob had had bad experiences before with food Lilah had touched.
"No need to run away screaming," she promised. "It's store-bought."
Jacob laughed and then noticed her glancing curiously at Bella again. "Sorry," he said, gesturing toward the alarmingly beautiful girl next to him as he stood up. "This is my friend Bella."
"Hey," Lilah said with a smile.
"Hi, you must be Lilah," Bella said amiably as she got to her feet as well. "And it's really nice meeting you, but I better get going."
Lilah occupied herself finding somewhere to throw her coat off after she and Jacob turned to each other to say goodbye. Bella could hear him holding his breath as she came close to hug him, as he often did to make the smell not so bothersome when he got very close to her; his voice sounded a little tight when he whispered close to her ear, "See you."
When she drew back, she raised a hand to his face with a last warm smile, sliding it away as she walked past him toward the front door. After putting her gloves away in her coat pockets, Lilah came to stand closer to Jacob and watched as she stopped one last time at the door.
"You guys have a nice time," she said to them with a last smile before opening it, letting a charge of freezing air into the house and then abruptly leaving through it.
"Well, they're not supposed to eat until two, but I'm sure we can go on over to the Clearwaters'," Jacob said. "Just have to wake up my dad from his nap..."
When he looked back at Lilah, he found her still staring at the door Bella had left through in some awe.
"Hey. Lilah." Smiling in amusement, he whistled to get her to look at him.
She turned her head, still seeming a little bewildered, and then finally said, "My God, Jacob. I mean...Wow. Isn't she a little young for you?"
He had to laugh loudly at the irony, and then he just shook his head as he turned away from her to get his own coat. "Actually, she's way too much for me to handle."
"Yeah right," she said, snorting with laughter. "You?...Weren't you ever going to tell me?"
"What?" Jacob asked, throwing his hands up innocently as he turned back to her. "I've known Bella forever. There's nothing to tell."
"As if. She looks like she's kind of lost except when she's looking at your face."
He just smirked at her a little mysteriously. "She's married."
Lilah's brow shot up. "Woah. I guess I actually don't want to know."
He smiled uncontrollably, laughing more. "No, it's not like that. Well...I mean..."
She started laughing as well after he kept struggling to explain it. "Well, yeah, I guess she looks a little too...straight-edge for that."
"Maybe I like them that way," he said, his mysteriousness now much more joking. "I'm full of surprises."
She broke out into laughter again. "Uh-huh...I bet she makes a real nice pie," she said, now just teasing him.
He grinned and then shrugged, saying, "She used to."
Lilah raised an eyebrow at that but then just shook her head, dismissing the comment like she was used to ignoring all the other strange sorts of things he sometimes said by now.
Go to the rest of chapter XV.
Previous chapters: Prologue + I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | IX | X | XI | XII | XIII | XIV
Characters & Pairings: Jacob/Bella, Edward/Bella
Rating: R
Summary: When an unexpected conflict with the Volturi brings Jacob back into her life, Bella finds that being a vampire only makes it even more complicated for her to be in love with two people.
Notes: IT'S DONE. HOLY SHIT. A very heartfelt thank you to everyone who's followed this story and left me comments. Plus huge thanks are due to Layla (
ninety6tears) for being my ever-reliable beta reader through this whole madness.It probably seems kind of like beating a dead horse to finally post this last chapter after all this time, especially because Chapter 14 actually functions okay as a final chapter. But I still have a big attachment to this fic and I really wanted to end it more or less the way I always imagined ending it since I started the fic over two years ago rather than just give up and call it finished. It'll be interesting to see if I even get many comments, but it was something I just needed to do before I could move on with my life. LOL.
The chapter ended up pretty long so it's posted in two entries.
ETA: I've done a master post for this fic with lots of extra stuff including the soundtrack playlist you can download.
A month later, all the preparations had been made for the Cullens to move away from Forks. They had already bought a new house in Alaska under a new name most of them would be taking, and Carlisle had found a job at a new hospital there.
The day they were going to leave, Bella and Edward spent a few hours together in the meadow. The sun was not out. Not long before now, Bella might have wished it was bright outside so it could feel more like that first day they ever came here together, when she stared at the incredible thing that was his glimmering body in awe and felt like she was sitting beside someone godlike and out of her reach. But she did not long for their past the way she used to, for the newness and innocence of that time before his appearance in sunlight had become second nature to her and something she now could confidently know as an unremovable part of her life rather than marvel at.
As dusk approached, they both knew it was time to go back, but they were hesitant to move. Finally she was the first to rise from the ground. He followed her at a leisurely pace, looking back behind him all the while. She stopped and looked back at him when they reached the edge of the meadow, gazing back at it with him after seeing the wistful look in his eyes. She knew her own face probably held the same look.
"It’s hard to believe we will not come here together ever again,” he said quietly, obviously deep in his thoughts and memories. “It is quite sad. Everything started here in this town. And this is our place..."
She smiled a little as she looked to the side at him, and then took his hand encouragingly. "We have a lot of other places to go together now," she said softly.
He gazed at her face a while, his own gentle smile slowly spreading across his face. With some acceptance in his expression, he turned to run away with her, still holding onto her hand. And with that they left behind their untainted past, the simple fairy tale, a still life so stable and frozen in its blissful happy ending. Instead they were heading into a life with no ending at all, complete uncertainty, constant forward motion and change.
Jacob came to the house along with some of the other werewolves just as it had gotten dark. Everyone met in the front yard, the two groups facing each other. Jacob addressed Carlisle, telling him in as polite a way he could what it meant that they would no longer have any boundaries set for his family not to cross. In short , he knew it wouldn’t be against the agreement they’d made with the Volturi for one of them to simply pass through the area again, but he still wasn’t responsible for anything that might happen to one of them here.
At some of his words, Bella noticed Quil glance at her with a bit of a smirk. She could tell it was no secret that she was an exception to this warning; she knew for a fact now that ever since a while after the word had gotten out about her part in bringing down the Volturi on them, Jacob had forbidden everyone in the pack to ever hurt her “unless it’s necessary to protect someone else.” She had wondered but not wanted to ask if he had specifically excluded himself from that loophole in his order and made it still forbidden if the “someone else” was him.
Bella realized how formal and unnecessary this all seemed as Carlisle and Jacob then shook hands to signify their agreement. An agreement to end an agreement. There was something almost humorous about it; the Volturi requiring them to at least go through the motions of not being allies because they couldn’t permit them to co-exist. Even though they all knew, if begrudgingly, that there would probably never be any reason to attack each other again.
Quil and Embry both stayed behind with Jacob a moment as the others were leaving. Looking at Bella, Embry shrugged as if thinking to himself, Screw it, and then leaned over to give her a quick hug and said, “See you, vampire girl.” Quil just reached for her hand and squeezed it briefly, smiling at her and saying noting.
Then Jacob and Edward were facing each other, and after a few seconds of them standing still like this it seemed the silence should have gotten awkward. And it was, a little, but Bella had no doubt that this silence was being filled with some kind of thoughts of Jacob’s that he would not say out loud as his last ever words to Edward.
Then Jacob finally spoke again, his tone stiff and unsure. “Right...well...Stay in good health, Edward.”
Bella rolled her eyes at his obvious sarcasm; Edward smirked a little, and actually reached out to quickly shake his hand, saying, “Don’t worry. This time I think we can be quite confident you’ll never have to see me again.”
Jacob laughed light-heartedly, and even Bella was able to smile. Despite their words, there was no real animosity in either of their voices.
Before she and Jacob turned to each other, she picked up a canvas wrapped in paper that had been sitting on the porch. She felt strangely shy explaining it to him.
“This is...um...something I decided I’d like you to keep,” she said. “I painted it while I was away.”
His brow lifted. “You sure?”
She shrugged. “I did a lot of them. It’s one less thing to have to pack.”
Of course, he could tell this wasn’t the real reason she was giving him this one. He was also able to tell somehow that he probably shouldn’t take off the paper and see what it was until later when he was away from everyone else.
“I can’t exactly carry it back home with me as a wolf,” he realized aloud. “You want to give me a ride?”
“Oh...I don’t know,” she said. “On the roads I could be seen.”
“That’s right,” he said. Ever since he’d seen her again, it had been easy to forget sometimes that she was supposed dead by most of the people she used to know.
Then Bella touched his arm and said, “Wait. I can ask Carlisle to lend me his car. It’s safe...”
They did not talk very much as Bella quickly drove the sleek black car around the long winds of the road. They felt no need to say anything. They both knew how this felt for them.
“Are you sad to leave Forks?” Jacob asked her at one point, his tone very casual. He clearly meant the place itself and not the people.
She nodded. “Yeah. I think this town is always going to feel more like home than anywhere else, no matter how long I live away from it. But this had to happen eventually. And it’ll be nice living somewhere where I don’t have to stay hidden at home all the time. After I got a taste of that kind of freedom again in Florida, it’s been bothering me more than usual.”
They were silent for a while, listening to the classical music Carlisle’s radio was playing softly. Then, just as they got close to the reservation, Bella said, “Jake...”
When she kept hesitating, he turned his head toward her. “What?”
“What were you saying to Edward in your head?” she asked, unable to help her curiosity.
He smiled, leaning back in his seat and putting his hands behind his head. “That he’s a filthy bloodsucker and an asshole,” he answered.
Bella smiled knowingly. “Fine,” she said, echoing his joking tone. “If you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to.”
He was still and quiet for a long moment, and then finally said with some reluctance, “I...apologized for the way I acted when I was trying everything to convince you not to go to Volterra.”
Bella did not look at him, but he could see the look of surprise that took over her face.
“Well...I guess I didn’t apologize so much as just explain that it wasn’t done out of disrespect for him, because I wasn't even thinking,” he explained further. “When I was actually trying to steal you away from him—you know, a long time ago—I didn’t respect what you and him had or take it seriously that you were together because of what he is. To me, it was like he didn’t count. But I guess I don’t really see him that way anymore. Everyone in your family you’re with now...They’re good people. It’s kind of too bad you’re all leeches.”
As they were nearing his house, she looked to the side at him and smiled warmly. “If you could go back, would you actually do anything differently, though?”
Shrugging, he admitted, “I guess not. I’d just feel a lot more crumby about it on account of him.”
She laughed softly.
"And also...I just told him I'm grateful and relieved that he's obviously been able to make you happy," he continued, "even with everything you've lost."
They were now parked outside his house, and she turned to look at him incredulously.
“But of course,” he added quietly, “if he’s not enough to get you through life sometimes, your best friend is always still here.”
She couldn’t find any more words. Her face started to crumple a little with sadness, and he immediately leaned toward her and kissed her forehead, his eyes closing with a similar expression of faint pain.
“Just drive away now,” he said softly, then turning away and getting out of the car carrying the covered painting.
He stood and watched her driving off even though he could see nothing of her through the dark, shining windows and only watch his own reflection in them getting smaller and smaller.
When he got inside, he went right to his room and set the canvas down on his bed, slowly tearing off the paper with a lethargic lack of energy. The colors of the Olympic penisula scenery were instantly recognizable just through the first narrow tears, even though they were brighter and more defined than one was usually used to seeing them, part of a rare scene with a bright sunset. Or sunrise. Somehow, as he uncovered the whole painting, he got the strong impression that it was supposed to show the breaking of day, not a sunset.
It was First Beach. Their place. But this sentimental meaning of it alone was not what made him stare at it in slight disbelief with the breath knocked out of him for a second. That wasn’t the point. What made his heart feel so overwhelmingly full as he looked at it was that he knew Bella had not painted this anywhere near La Push. But to someone who was familiar with the beach and didn’t know any better, it would unquestionably look like something that had to have been painted while looking at it or a picture of it as a reference. Every detail, from the rocks that came out of the water in the distance to the large piece of driftwood pictured right in the bottom right corner that he and Bella had always sat on together like a bench, was painted so accurately he could tell a photograph of the scene from the same angle would hardly be distinguishable. No human would have the precise enough memory to be able to do this.
It wasn’t signed on the bottom. In case he kept it hanging somewhere that visitors to his house could see it, it wouldn’t be a good idea for Charlie to see a new painting with his deceased daughter’s signature in one corner. Jacob turned it over, not exactly expecting to find anything. But there on the inside of the wooden frame he found the tiny message in impossibly neat writing: “Do you remember? Love always, Bella.”
And the intended meaning of the gift was clear. No matter how far away from this place she was, it and the crystal clear memories associated with it were always going to be with her. And it was the same for her memories of him. Nothing would ever fade for her and she would always miss him when she couldn’t see him, always love him every bit as much as she still did now.
She would always want. She would always have.
As the Cullens all stood together outside of their now emptied house under the dark blue sky of a night that had almost completely fallen, Jasper took out his lighter, volunteering to do the job. He looked around at all the others' faces, seeing if they were ready. They all waited in a preparing silence, and Carlisle nodded to him.
He sprung into action, disappearing into a window of the house. The others could hear him moving quickly from place to place inside, and then after a while they started seeing dark smoke escaping from windows, and then saw some of the flames he'd started beginning to light up the dark cavities of every room where they had spent so many days and long nights.
They had decided this was necessary. Or even if not completely necessary, reasonable. The Volturi would be returning here soon wanting to see that the Cullens were honoring their agreement. The more convincing they could make it appear that they were serious about never moving back to Forks again, the less they needed to worry about them feeling the need to keep checking in on the area for very long. And it meant a lot to Bella, and even a little to some of the rest of them, for this place to finally be as safe from vampires as possible.
Besides that, though none of them had said as much, it was understood that most of them did not like the idea of someone else occupying this house for ages after they were gone. It was one of their only homes they had ever had designed and built specifically for them and their needs, and they just couldn't imagine it getting turned mundane being lived in by humans for the first time.
Jasper came back to stand with the others, and Alice came to his side and wrapped both her arms around his waist as she stood by him and watched. Edward had taken Bella's hand, and he also went to Esme's side to put his arm around her shoulders, and then she and her son exchanged small, bittersweet smiles. As they watched the fire starting to consume the entire house, their golden-amber eyes all reflected the light of the flames and looked like softly burning embers.
Bella squeezed Edward's hand in hers, leaning her head against his shoulder. She knew she would probably be crying if she could. Even if their memories of living here would always stand out to them in many ways, for the rest of her family this home was still just one of many, while it meant worlds to her for so many reasons. But this was a good thing. She, more than any of the rest of them, needed to let go.
Jared married Kim a month later. Jacob and four of his friends ended up gathered at a table at the wedding reception, watching as they had their first dance.
“Aren't they just sickeningly cute?" Brady said as he joined their table, sitting next to Leah and immediately taking the cigarette she was smoking from her fingers to steal a drag.
Embry laughed. "Another wedding for one of us," he mused. "Doesn't it make you feel kind of old?"
"Not me," Collin said with a laugh. "Heck, we've all got plenty of time before we'll even start looking any different."
"Jake, are you planning on still being single once Quil and Claire get married?" Embry asked.
"That's funny," he said sarcastically, but with a small smirk.
A curious look crossed Brady's face. "Are you still fooling around with that cute waitress? Layla, or something?"
"Lilah," Quil corrected.
Jacob shook his head and answered, “No, it's not like that anymore.”
"Could I get her number?" Collin asked with a grin.
"Shut the fuck up."
Many of them broke into short laughter.
Brady went on, "Huh. I thought that might...you know...turn into something. You actually seemed kind of close."
Jacob shrugged. "Sure. But not close enough."
"For what?"
"What else? For it to be worth the risk."
"Would it kill you to try to be happy with somebody?" Embry asked.
"No, but it wouldn't be very fair if it didn't work."
"That's no way to think about it."
"Easy for you to say. You've already imprinted on somebody."
Quil smirked and said, "I thought you were so certain that's never going to happen to you."
"That won't be much of an excuse for never telling somebody it could happen if it does once I've already married her and given her three kids or something."
Collin shook his head slowly, looking a little depressed by the truth of it. "Ugh. It's tough luck, isn't it?"
Embry sighed. "It's not like you can ever make sure you'll never hurt anybody anyway," he said. "That's just life, isn't it?"
"That's not the point," Jacob said. "Any girl I’m going to get involved with just has a right to know what kind of risks she's taking, at least if it starts to get serious. And if I’m going to tell her anything I better be pretty damn sure I'm ready for that and she's the kind of person who could handle it. It's not as simple as just...meeting somebody nice."
Quil shook his head, letting out a long sigh. “Dang...When did we get so grown-up and responsible?”
The others laughed again. Even Leah, who had been sitting in a bored silence most of the time, cracked a grin.
Jacob thought back on what had brought them to this conversation, and said, "The funny thing is...Lilah and I have kind of gotten even closer ever since we decided to just be friends, and now everybody else at work seems to be getting the idea that we’ve started going out."
Quil cracked up laughing.
"That must be awkward," Collin said.
He shrugged. "She thinks it's hilarious."
"I guess she was never dumb enough to fall in love with you, then," Quil said.
Jacob laughed. "Thanks. Either that or she's as good an actor as I am."
Emily came over to their table after she'd been talking to Sue at the one next to theirs. Embry was the first to look up and see her. “Hey, Em!” he said as she waved in greeting.
She gave off a radiantly cheerful appearance in a bright mint green dress, one of her hands rested on her now quite large belly as she walked over as if lingering there unconsciously. At her appearance, Leah considerately put out her cigarette by smashing the end into her hand. Jacob stopped himself from laughing as he noticed her breathing hard through her clenched teeth for a moment, knowing what she must be doing even as the table blocked his view, and then she relaxed a little and sat shaking her hand with the now subsiding pain as the burn was already healing. Always with her tireless show of toughness.
“Don’t you look pretty as a picture,” Embry said to Emily.
“Thanks,” she said, smiling in a way that somehow lit up her entire face even though only the beautiful half of it could smile. “I feel like a whale.”
“Bet you can still move fine on the dance floor,” Jacob said, offering his hand to her.
“Are you trying to get away from us?” Collin teased him.
“Yes,” Jacob answered, and his completely serious tone made them all start laughing again. “No more kids’ table crap for me.”
He got up and started dancing with Emily to a slow song, talking with her casually about how the ceremony had gone for a minute as they swayed in slow circles. Then she said, “I heard some of what you were talking about over there...Quil’s right, you know.”
Jacob looked down at her with a raised eyebrow. “About what?”
“It’s pretty amazing how grown up all of you are already. It’s strange to think it was only five years ago you were still that innocent and more carefree kid...when I had to tell you not to fight with your brothers...”
“Em, you’re gonna make me cry,” he said sarcastically.
“I mean it. I know you still have a lot of doubts about how well you handled that situation with the Cullens. But I couldn’t be more proud of you. Sam was right to want you to lead the pack instead of him.”
He smiled at her half-heartedly. “You know I’d much rather have stayed that innocent kid a lot longer...”
“Of course you would. That’s why it’s so admirable you didn’t just endlessly wallow in bitterness about everything that’s happened to you like Leah—Bless her.”
Jacob raised an eyebrow again, mouth tightening in a small smile.
“Okay, so you had plenty moments of complaining and self-pity, too,” she said, making him laugh. “But you’ve still become capable of always doing what you know you have to, no matter how much you don’t like it or how hard it is. And I know whatever happens to you now...even if you don’t find someone for you anytime soon, or even ever...you’ll be able to handle it and you’ll be okay. I think you could handle anything.”
He smiled warmly, leaned down and kissed her cheek. "Do you know how much I love you to death? And you really do look nice, by the way."
She smiled back at him. "I guess I feel nice. I feel...surprisingly great. I thought this would be a lot harder, you know. All of this when our whole family should still be here, but they're not..."
He nodded somberly. "I know."
"And it is hard, but...I don't know. A couple months ago it felt like the world might as well be coming to an end and it was hard to have any hope. And now...Kim and Jared are married and very happy today. I'm about to have a baby. Bella had been dead to you for years, and now she's a good friend again. We've all still got each other, when things could have ended up a lot worse. And with the Cullens gone, we should finally have some peace here. What happened with the Volturi was terrible, but because of it and the trust you were willing to establish between us and the Cullens, we ended up breaking a cycle going back many generations, and that's pretty incredible if you think about it. It's possible nobody will ever have to be turning into werewolves here ever again."
Jacob let that sink in for a while. Then he said, "If that's the case, then I guess after enough time there won't be anybody who even believes the legends are true anymore."
Emily looked at him closely and curiously, tilting her head a little. "Jacob Black. Don't tell me that makes you a little sad. The thought of there being no more protectors ever again after you're gone, nothing special and magical about this place anymore?"
He let out a short laugh and said sarcastically, "Well gee, when you make it sound that cheery..."
"Yeah," she said with a knowing smirk. "I thought so."
"What?"
"The crazy kind of life you've had...even though it's brought you a lot of trouble and grief...I bet as long as it wasn't for the people you've seen die, you wouldn't ever trade it in for a normal one. Not for anything."
He looked like he wanted to disagree at first. But then after some consideration, he sighed and just looked at her with slightly narrowed eyes, seeming annoyed by her ability to figure him out so easily.
"Let's just enjoy a normal life today and not think about it," he said, and she smiled in agreement.
After another month passed, Bella started going to high school again for the first time of many. She actually enjoyed going on long shopping sprees with Alice during the first weeks of living in their new town, because nobody here knew her and it was okay for her to be seen. Starting anew in a different place felt so liberating in many ways that it made her wonder why she had been hanging onto something that she'd already lost for so long by wanting to stay hiding away in their house in Forks.
Two months later, Jacob came home from work to find a note Billy had left him on the fridge before leaving with Sue: It's a girl. Anna Lucille. 7.5 pounds.
Seven months later, the pack and their families met together at a bonfire to commemorate the deaths of their friends a year ago. Paul's mother told stories about him misbehaving as a boy that had everybody laughing and tearing up at the same time. When Leah started sniffling beside him, Brady reached for her hand resting on the log they sat on and squeezed it. She didn't look at him, but for a split second she smiled a little.
From far away, sitting alone, Bella watched and listened, running her bare toes over the sand.
The Uleys came over to Jacob's house to drop off some lasagna Emily had made. She nearly always had an overabundance of food she'd cooked and would end up handing some of it off to other people whether they needed it or not.
Sharp eyes watched the meeting from outside the tiny kitchen window, curiously observing as Anna, now three years old, came scampering in with her parents following her. Bella could easily make out their words.
"Hey, Banana," Jacob said brightly, looking down at her with his hands hidden behind his back. "Have you got a new dress?"
Anna nodded her head, grinning big, and said, "My grandma made it."
"I should have known," he said, smiling over at Emily as she put the food away for him; he knew Emily's mother to be some kind of genius seamstress. "Hey, I've got a surprise for you."
"Where?" Anna said, restlessly rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet.
Jacob took his hands out from behind his back in closed fists, showing them both to her. "You'll have to guess what hand it's in."
She stared for a moment, then pointed to his right. "That one!"
"The left?" he asked, holding up the other one. "Are you sure?"
"No, that one!" she said, giggling.
"Okay, if you say left..." He opened his large left hand to show her a little bottle of bubbles, faking astonishment. "Woah, how did that get there?"
Anna took it excitedly and then as she started filling the kitchen with the bubbles she blew out of the tiny wand attached to the cap, Sam said to him with an amused smile, "Now she'll never calm down. Quit spoiling my kid, huh?"
Jacob laughed and nudged him with his elbow. "Whatever, I just found it in my box of cereal today."
Smiling, Bella watched them all together for another minute, and then while Jacob was momentarily turning away from the others to put something in the garbage, she said something to him with her mind. Hi. I'll just see you at the usual place when you've got time.
His reaction could not give away to anyone else there what was happening, but his brief smile to himself after he went still for a second in surprise was enough to know he'd gotten the message. After that she turned and quickly fled.
Inside, Sam was getting a slightly disgusted look on his face and looking around. He glanced out the window just moments after he might have been able to see something for a second. "It really reeks in here," he muttered.
"Sorry," Jacob said, knowing he didn't need to explain what it was. "She must have come by here while I was out earlier. At least it's always easy to tell so I know I can expect her to drop in again soon."
Emily looked at him with her arms crossed, raising an eyebrow. "Couldn't she just call when she wants to drop by? They've got phones."
He smiled. "Animals can communicate through scent very effectively," he said, jokingly matter-of-fact.
Sam gave a short laugh. "I wonder if it would do much to keep other leeches off our lands if we marked our territory by pissing on trees—Ow," he said, getting a kick from Emily's foot for forgetting to watch his mouth around Anna, though she was still completely distracted playing with her new toy. He and Jacob both laughed as he reached for her hand with an apologetic look. "Sorry."
As soon as they had left a while later, Jacob grabbed a can of soda from the fridge before heading outside. He drank it as he walked energetically toward the woods, heading to a designated place he and Bella both knew about half a mile past where the trees ended going into the neighborhood, easily recognizable by an especially huge tree with some thick upraised roots.
He found her sitting delicately on one of the roots, patiently waiting. As he approached he finished off his drink, crushed the can flat in his hands, and then put it away in the pocket of his jeans. She turned to look at him with a smile of greeting, and he stayed back about eight feet, remembering it was always harder right at first for her to be exposed to his scent again.
"No need to be so shy," he said as he started pulling his shirt off over his head.
"I don't like to interrupt your plans," Bella said with a shrug.
"Coming in and saying hi isn't interrupting. You could have met Anna."
"Yeah, I bet Sam would love that," she said sarcastically.
"He should. You were kind of looking out for her before she was even born." He was now pulling his shoes and socks off, starting to make a pile of all his clothes on the ground.
She just shrugged again. "I'm glad I got to see her anyway."
As he turned slightly away and started unbuttoning his pants, she looked away.
"Nothing you haven't seen before," he pointed out teasingly.
She smiled tightly as she heard him finishing undressing. "Not from every angle," she said, as if that was very relevant.
Jacob laughed. "I guess that's true."
Shortly after that came the brief sound from behind her of bones converging and straining in lightning-fast rearrangement and then the ground giving under the added weight of some great mass. She stood up and looked behind her shoulder at the reddish-brown wolf with a challenging grin.
"Ready?" she asked.
He came forward to stand next to her, not going past the large tree. It was always their starting point, and a point a few miles off in the distance that used to be where the treaty line was drawn was the destination. Bella crouched down in a ready position, and his large yellow eyes watched her count down with her fingers, three two one.
They both propelled themselves forward, shooting off as fast as bullets. Jacob pounded against the ground heavily with every quick stride while Bella's tiny and graceful feet were effortlessly quiet, but for a while they kept about the same speed. There were about seven feet of space maintained in between them, and as Bella ran with a fired up smile and her hair whipping back behind her, she could look to the side and see Jacob's big right eye looking at her through all the thick foliage they charged through and past.
But when they got closer to the end point he started gaining speed, finally putting all of his energy into it, and started passing her. This was how it usually happened. After playing quite a lot of baseball games with her family, Bella knew by now she had only average speed for a vampire. Up against a werewolf that usually wasn't quite enough; as long as he wasn't tired at all, Jacob would beat her in a race nearly every time.
Sure enough, Bella was eventually chasing the sight of his tail flying behind him as he got many meters ahead of her, and then he made one final long leap to the finishing point, stopping so abruptly his paws slid forward a little clumsily on the muddy ground before he turned around.
She was laughing at his ungraceful stop as she met him there, and he growled ungratefully.
"Maybe I hardly ever beat you," she started in a teasing tone, turning away from him as she looked down at how dirty her shoes were now, "but at least I can come to a sudden stop without nearly falling over."
His smell suddenly came looming very close, and before she had the chance to look behind her he shoved his snout hard into her back and pushed her over onto the ground.
"Jake!" she said with annoyance, turning around with the front of her clothes now covered in mud, and his throat just rumbled with his odd-sounding wolf laughter.
"That's it," she said decidedly as she got back on her feet. "We're going again."
When they raced all the way back to where they'd started, she didn't beat him this time either.
After he was human again and had changed back into his clothes, they walked toward the beach together as night was falling, and he told her, "Don't worry. You'll catch up to me someday."
Her smile then was just a little sad. She knew that was true.
The Cullens' new home was in a secluded area in the mountains and was even larger than their last house, with grand balconies extending from two of the bedrooms and enough rooms for Edward to keep two pianos now. Bella had turned half of the top floor into a studio for her to paint in. It was the one place in the house she had all to herself and would go to spend time alone with her thoughts doing something that came easily; Edward had joked once that she had finally found a relaxing activity to replace sleeping.
She honestly didn't find that too far from the truth. Instead of working through her thoughts with revelations in dreams, she painted pictures now. In fact, she painted more than they knew what to do with. A couple years ago she had started a website to start selling some of her paintings under a pseudonym, including a bio describing herself as a 36-year-old male restaurant owner who lived in Indiana with his boyfriend which made Emmett die laughing when she read it out loud to everybody. By now she'd starting gaining enough minor cult popularity that everything always sold within an hour, and none of her buyers knew that she gave most of their money away to charity.
One afternoon when she had been painting and listening to Edward playing downstairs for a while, she heard his footsteps on the first floor as he started to walk away from the piano after finishing a sonata and said something to him by putting her voice in his head. Can't you play one more, please?
She could hear him laugh lightly as he went back to the bench, and then the house filled with delicate notes again as he started Debussy's "Pagodes."
Everyone knew Bella enjoyed some measure of privacy while she was painting, but later Edward got too nosy about what she was coming up with today as he often did and came into the studio to see her for a moment. She turned to smile invitingly at him and then looked back at the canvas she was working on, continuing to paint with incredibly fast brush strokes that would almost be just a blur of movement to a human's eyes.
"Hm," he said, looking around at other ones she had finished which were still drying. "These are different. Is there some theme here, or are you going completely abstract now?"
Bella grinned a little, rising from her seat to go stand beside him. "It's a series," she explained. "They're not exactly supposed to be abstract. I just got this thought of trying to visualize and paint things...you know...that can't actually be seen. Different feelings and perceptions. Like this..."
She pointed to one which was an explosion of intricately detailed textures in soft pastel colors in the center of a dark gray background. "This is titled The Caress of Light. It's the feeling of sun on your skin."
Edward's brow slowly lifted as he looked at it. "But only the way it feels to us," he said, somehow getting a clear idea that it depicted a sense much more intense than the way a human feels the warmth of the sun.
She nodded. "Well, yeah. And this other one is The Shape of Song. It's the sound of you playing piano."
He looked at that one closely, taking in the soft impressions of different purple and blue colors that filled it. Then he pointed to the only other finished one, which was all in very bold colors and had a much more aggressive and messy feeling. "And that one?"
"That's the sound of a human playing piano," Bella answered.
He broke into laughter at her joking tone, and then she shook her head.
"No, that one's...Well, I'm calling it The Music of Blood."
Edward's face went a little more serious in realization, and he stared into the canvas for a long moment like he was falling into its bizarre and wild beauty. "It's...the scent of blood," he said. "Blood that sings for you."
She nodded.
He was now shaking his head slowly in amazement. "That's remarkable," he said, looking around at all the paintings again. "It's like...I can somehow understand exactly what you're trying to convey, and the sensations just jump out at me. I said your talent must have something to do with being able to express how you see things to others, but...How do you do it?"
She shook her head, seeming to feel overly complimented. "It's not like you'd ever be able to tell what these are supposed to be depictions of if I didn't tell you. It's only when I explain the title of each one that it just clicks."
He smiled and then shrugged. "Well, the effect is very impressive nonetheless." He looked at them some more and started sighing. "They won't mean much to the people who buy them."
"A lot of my art doesn't make sense to people outside of our world," she said. "But the stranger they are and the more cryptic the titles are, the more people seem to like them."
He laughed again. "Or perhaps you have a few fans who aren't fooled by your bio—at least the part that says most of your work is inspired by dreams. That painting The Protector and the Cold Woman might have sold to someone who knows a lot more about certain Native American legends than the average person and didn't just think it was romantic. And the one of yourself shimmering in the sunlight with blood all over your clothes and a flower in your hair? Somebody might have found the title Diamonds Are Forever sort of funny and not that cryptic."
Bella's eyes widened just a little at the thought, and then she crossed her arms and continued to look at all the paintings thoughtfully. "I don't know...I like the idea of people with mundane lives owning a little piece of my life and being able to enjoy it as just fantasy. It makes me feel like I can still be a little connected to their world."
He smirked. "And so the legacy of our kind often perpetuating the myths of our kind themselves continues into the twenty-first century."
She giggled, leaning into him and wrapping her arms around him. He held her with a content sigh, kissing her cheekbone, and then she put a thought of hers into his head which made him laugh adoringly—an image of them alone together in a luxurious room somewhere in Greece.
"Again?" he asked. "We just got back from going away together two months ago."
"But we go back to school soon," she said. "We won't have as many chances for that sort of thing during the year."
"This is true. We'll have to think about it."
Her next thought she once again communicated directly into his head: That's no fun. We should be more spontaneous.
He laughed again, leaned in and kissed her, and they kept their foreheads rested together for a while.
"How did I ever live without being able to talk to you like this?" Bella wondered. After just a few years of finally having mastered all the aspects of her abilities, it was already as natural to her as if she'd always been able to do it and was now very hard to imagine being without.
He only shook his head a little in answer. Then in a swift, silent movement together, they had both lowered themselves to the floor as they started kissing again.
Now, she said as he gently pressed her back onto the wood floor. Right here. For it occurred to her that it was one thing they'd never done.
He held her hand back against the floor by her head, intertwining his fingers through hers and smiling eagerly down at her. "No wonder you find it so horribly distracting when I come in here," he muttered.
She laughed softly before she lifted her head up a little and his lips found hers again with an invigorated force.
The next time Bella visited Forks was at Christmas. She was there waiting patiently by Jacob's window when he woke up after sleeping in quite a bit, a wrapped gift sitting at her feet.
"Well, good morning," he said with surprise, and then raised an eyebrow when he noticed the package. "Santa came?"
Bella smiled. "It's a blanket I had as a little girl," she explained. "And which my mom also had as a little girl. It's something I've been holding onto just for the memories, but we've been getting rid of a lot of things to get ready to move again and I thought...maybe Anna..."
He nodded. "Sure, sure," he said through a yawn as he got out of bed. "Sam and Em would love for her to have it. And they'll probably guess it's not really from me or Billy as soon as they see it's wrapped."
"You don't wrap your Christmas presents?" Bella asked.
Jacob left the room and she heard him go into the closet for a moment. He came right back to show her a couple tied plastic bags with bows stuck on them with a sheepish smile.
She sighed, shaking her head, and then she took the two pathetic gift bags as she passed him to leave the room. "Get dressed," she said, "and then I'll show you how this is done."
Bella found a neglected supply of gift wrap after a fast search through his house, and then they sat on the floor of the den as she helped him wrap up a mind-boggling amount of gifts for all his friends and some of his friends' parents or kids, trying to give him quick lessons along the way in curling ribbon and folding the ends of packages neatly.
"You can only do this because you've got such dainty little hands," he complained after doing the best he could to get Jared's box to look good.
Bella suddenly freezed in the middle of finishing the last package, and then she looked toward the front of the house.
"What?" he asked, looking over at her.
"Somebody just pulled up outside the house," she said curiously, and then quickly started finishing wrapping the present in fast blurs of movement as she kept talking. "A woman. I hear her talking on her phone."
"Oh crap, it's Lilah," Jacob said, looking over at the clock. "You know, my friend—Is it really past noon already?"
"Lilah's spending Christmas with you?" Bella asked.
He shrugged. "One year Sue insisted I bring her along to have dinner at her house after she met her once and found out she doesn't really do anything on Christmas. Her dad's kind of an intense religious freak who disowned her years ago, so...Anyway, now it's become a yearly thing and she and Leah are sort of tight and it's just plain freaky..."
Bella laughed and then looked toward the front door as she could hear Lilah getting close. As she started to stand up, Jacob held a hand out and stopped her.
"Hey, just sit tight," he said. "It's fine."
She tilted her head at him, looking a little doubtful. "What are you going to say?"
"Don't worry about it," he said, shrugging. Then after he heard a knock at the door he called, "Come in!"
Lilah burst in through the door mumbling a stream of curse words describing how cold it was, holding a coat tight around herself and carrying something in a plastic bag.
"Good God, you can hardly tell which house is which around here," she was saying breathlessly as she pulled a newsboy hat off of her short-cropped hair and headed right into the den. "With all the snow piling up on your....Hi."
Her voice trailed off weakly and just barely got the last word out as she noticed Bella.
"Hey," Jacob said to her, then nodded toward the bag. "What's that?"
Lilah's attention was partially entranced by the unexpected sight of Bella, and she kept staring at her a moment before she realized she was staring and finally looked back at Jacob, giving him a delayed answer. "Uh. Pie. It's a pecan pie."
Jacob looked a little unpleasantly caught by surprise. "Oh...Uh...You didn't have to bring anything."
Bella grinned at his slightly scared expression while Lilah rolled her eyes a little; it seemed obvious that Jacob had had bad experiences before with food Lilah had touched.
"No need to run away screaming," she promised. "It's store-bought."
Jacob laughed and then noticed her glancing curiously at Bella again. "Sorry," he said, gesturing toward the alarmingly beautiful girl next to him as he stood up. "This is my friend Bella."
"Hey," Lilah said with a smile.
"Hi, you must be Lilah," Bella said amiably as she got to her feet as well. "And it's really nice meeting you, but I better get going."
Lilah occupied herself finding somewhere to throw her coat off after she and Jacob turned to each other to say goodbye. Bella could hear him holding his breath as she came close to hug him, as he often did to make the smell not so bothersome when he got very close to her; his voice sounded a little tight when he whispered close to her ear, "See you."
When she drew back, she raised a hand to his face with a last warm smile, sliding it away as she walked past him toward the front door. After putting her gloves away in her coat pockets, Lilah came to stand closer to Jacob and watched as she stopped one last time at the door.
"You guys have a nice time," she said to them with a last smile before opening it, letting a charge of freezing air into the house and then abruptly leaving through it.
"Well, they're not supposed to eat until two, but I'm sure we can go on over to the Clearwaters'," Jacob said. "Just have to wake up my dad from his nap..."
When he looked back at Lilah, he found her still staring at the door Bella had left through in some awe.
"Hey. Lilah." Smiling in amusement, he whistled to get her to look at him.
She turned her head, still seeming a little bewildered, and then finally said, "My God, Jacob. I mean...Wow. Isn't she a little young for you?"
He had to laugh loudly at the irony, and then he just shook his head as he turned away from her to get his own coat. "Actually, she's way too much for me to handle."
"Yeah right," she said, snorting with laughter. "You?...Weren't you ever going to tell me?"
"What?" Jacob asked, throwing his hands up innocently as he turned back to her. "I've known Bella forever. There's nothing to tell."
"As if. She looks like she's kind of lost except when she's looking at your face."
He just smirked at her a little mysteriously. "She's married."
Lilah's brow shot up. "Woah. I guess I actually don't want to know."
He smiled uncontrollably, laughing more. "No, it's not like that. Well...I mean..."
She started laughing as well after he kept struggling to explain it. "Well, yeah, I guess she looks a little too...straight-edge for that."
"Maybe I like them that way," he said, his mysteriousness now much more joking. "I'm full of surprises."
She broke out into laughter again. "Uh-huh...I bet she makes a real nice pie," she said, now just teasing him.
He grinned and then shrugged, saying, "She used to."
Lilah raised an eyebrow at that but then just shook her head, dismissing the comment like she was used to ignoring all the other strange sorts of things he sometimes said by now.
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no subject
Date: 2009-11-22 11:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-22 05:30 pm (UTC)I love this story. It's so beautiful.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-30 11:08 pm (UTC)Good God. Just rip my heart out now.
and I was going to make it threw this chapter.
Sorry that this is the first comment from me. I've been reading this story for a few hours now, not being able to do much of anything else.
That line made me turn away and so I got side tracked enough to leave a comment! :D
I'm terrible.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-31 08:22 pm (UTC)Crush The Castle
Date: 2011-02-18 09:23 pm (UTC)