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flowrs4ophelia
e x t r a s
A Twilight Series Fan Fiction by Sara C.
prologue: dissonance
chapter I: nocturnes
chapter II: cantante
chapter III: consequences
chapter IV: adagio in minor
chapter V: bête noire
chapter VI: accelerando
chapter VII: blood sport
chapter VIII: requiem
chapter IX: non troppo
chapter X: punishment
chapter XI: the song of orpheus
chapter XII: cherchez la femme
chapter XIII: diminuendo
chapter XIV: silenzio
chapter XV: children of the night
DISC ONE [download]
01 PROLOGUE / SOMETHING OUT OF TUNE
nine inch nails; adrift and at peace
02 LOVE AND BLOOD
sneaker pimps; walk the rain
03 FAIRY TALE LIFE
pj harvey; to bring you my love
04 ARO'S THREAT
marcelo zarvos; superman falls
05 AT THE BAR
the rolling stones; dead flowers
06 BELLA'S SECRETS
a perfect circle; the noose
07 NEW LULLABY
nine inch nails; the frail
08 THE LEGEND OF QAHLA AND THE COLD WOMAN
grizzly bear; disappearing act
09 JACOB HAS A NIGHTMARE
james newton howard; susan marie remembers
10 MONSTERS AND DEMONS
smashing pumpkins; disarm
10 THE VOLTURI APPROACH
wojciech kilar; the hunt builds
11 THE FIGHT
kerry muzzey; war of the worlds
12 JACOB FOUND DYING / THE END OF JANE
joe hisaishi; adagio of life and death
13 WHAT IS THROWN AWAY
pj harvey; shame
14 JACOB AND BELLA IN THE SUNLIGHT
alexandre desplat; sunrise on pontchartrain
15 ISABELLA CULLEN
veda hille; where am i from
17 EDWARD PLAYS AND WAITS ALONE
bear mccreary; elegy
DISC TWO [download]
01 CONFESSIONS
a perfect circle; thomas
02 LOOK FOR THE WOMAN
stina nordenstam; i came so far for beauty
03 AT THE BAR II
the doors; the wasp (texas radio and the big beat)
04 UNDERWATER FAREWELL
james newton howard; humanity goes on trial
05 DESPERATION
nine inch nails; the fragile (still version)
06 WISHING FOR ESCAPE
tori amos; horses
07 BELLA FLEES
adrian johnston; near escape
08 TRAVELING AWAY
grizzly bear; central and remote
09 WITHOUT LOVE
pj harvey; horses in my dreams
10 IN JAKE'S ROOM / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
grouper; heavy water
11 LAST VISIT TO THE MEADOW
vashti bunyan; glow worms
10 THE NEW CULLEN HOUSE
bear mccreary; thrace sonata no. 1
11 LA TUA CANTANTE
sneaker pimps; bloodsport
12 NIGHT ON FIRST BEACH
adrian johnston; a small red flame
13 THE END
emily haines & the soft skeleton; crowd surf off a cliff
NOTES ON SOME TRACKS
This "soundtrack" is a collection of songs I listened to a lot while writing WMTM because they either fit the mood of particular scenes, have lyrics relevant to the story, or make good "source music" that I actually imagine to be playing in parts.
Because Edward's piano playing is kind of the musical heart of the Twilight universe and his piano even plays a symbolic part in the scene that Bella discovers Jacob is her singer, there's some emphasis on piano in a lot of the song selections. I found some perfect Nine Inch Nails tracks with slightly creepy piano parts. (Most are from Still, a unique NIN album of more quiet and emotional songs which Trent Reznor did after getting out of rehab. In a way these songs that he poured all of his demons into are even darker than his usual angry yelly stuff, and the first time I listened to them it actually left me in a slight depression carrying through the day. Haha. But it's really beautiful stuff which I recommend to anyone who assumes Nine Inch Nails wouldn't be their thing.) Then the two Bear McCreary compositions, which are originally from an episode of Battlestar Galactica, are meant to be ones Edward would actually play during scenes. The Sonata starts with a less dark and melancholy variation of the same theme in "Elegy"; I imagine Edward likes to reinvent songs to fit his mood.
The classic rock songs for both scenes at the sports bar where Jacob works clash with the rest of the album like they should because of the contrastingly mundane nature of those scenes, but I also chose them because of their lyrics. In my first Twilight fic "The Dying of the Light," I actually named one the vignettes "Dead Flowers" in reference to this Stones song because I can sort of associate the lyrics with Jacob/Bella.
I make it no secret that I'm a big fan and collector of soundtracks. Film composers like Jerry Goldsmith, James Newton Howard and Thomas Newman get played on my iPod just as much as my Beck or Led Zeppelin, especially when I'm writing. So naturally I had to include some instrumental music from various movies to build something that sounds almost like some kind of cohesive "film score" for the fanfic. Coincidentally, I chose something from an Alexandre Desplat score for the scene between Bella and Jacob in the morning after the fight when this was obviously long before production for the New Moon movie started and Desplat was signed to do the soundtrack for it.
I worked in one recurring musical theme with the James Newton Howard tracks, which are both chosen for scenes dealing with the complicated feelings Jacob has for Bella now. These cues are from the score for Snow Falling On Cedars, a movie with similarities to this fanfic in that it involves a love story about learning to let go of the past and is in the stunning setting of the forests and beaches of Washington. It wasn't intentional, but I think I must have subconsciously made that connection or something when thinking this music would fit with the Twilight atmosphere.
"Heavy Water" and "Glow Worms," which are respectively used for a significant J/B scene and a significant E/B scene, are both one of the most amazing love songs I've ever heard with gorgeously poetic lyrics, so I liked sticking them right next to each other on the tracklist all Team Switzerland-like.
INTRODUCTION - SOME GENERAL COMMENTS ON THE WHOLE FIC
I started writing "What Music They Make" in November of 2007 after it started as a very vague and simple idea which, like most of my fics, was originally supposed to just be a one-shot (LOL, look how that worked out). I certainly didn't like the idea at first of doing anything very long involving Bella as a vampire, something I never thought I'd have any interest in writing, but I guess I gradually got more comfortable with her that way just as she becomes more comfortable with everything she is by the end.
At first I was going to title this fic "Bloodsport" after the Sneaker Pimps song which I used some lyrics from as an epitaph. The song describes how love can easily be unfair and actually has no connection to morality, and I thought this fit perfectly with the fic, which is all about how love can have a brutal and hurtful side and turn anybody into a monster. Of course this idea is represented both literally and figuratively and can be applied not only to the way Bella falling in love with Edward lead to her being turned, but also the lengths to which she finds she's willing to go to protect Jacob. There's also the possible unintentional harm of finding someone is your "singer" as it's revealed Jacob is to Bella (which has more of a "soul mate" kind of meaning in my story than in canon); or of imprinting, which is explored in the subplot about Jacob trying to live a normal life on the side of pack life and realizing the difficulties and irresponsibility of getting close to someone normal like Lilah.
Going hand-in-hand with these ideas that love can drive people to do crazy and harmful things is the message that it cannot necessarily justify anything. When Jacob being Bella's singer adds a whole new layer of intense attraction to the feelings she has for him, she comes to realize that this might have been the only variable missing before which made her feel like she needed Edward so much more, so there's an implication that she has possibly started to love him just as much as she loves Edward. But by now she's learned that this kind of love can't excuse her choices that inadvertently caused the deaths of Paul and Seth and could have caused Jacob's death the time they first met again. To me one of the most important quotes in the fic which completely encompasses the growth that Bella is starting to go through is when she tells Jacob, "I would not destroy myself or hurt anyone else to be with you, but I would to keep you safe." Even when she kills Jane to keep him from getting hurt, she feels she is stepping into a morally gray area and fears how much farther she could fall if she took a life so easily.
It's worth pointing out that Bella never actually chooses again between Edward and Jacob because at this point a relationship with Jacob is simply not viable because of their differences, even if their love for each other transcends them. He can still think of her in a romantic way despite her being a vampire, but not really in a sexual way, which is what makes the scene on the cliff with him trying to physically show her his feelings so painful. Instead she makes a very difficult choice not to give up her integrity for him by joining the Volturi, which Edward says would essentially be the same thing as what she did to be with him when she gave up mortality.
Which brings me to how the concept of Jacob being her singer is basically a metaphor for her facing the kind of temptation she faced with Edward all over again. As I'll explain more within a certain scene in the chapter commentary, this concept was what the whole story started with and the reason I wrote it. (Though only really becoming an integral plot point during the fight scene, it's so important I could have said something about it in the fic's summary. But I was pretty sure singer-Jacob was something that had actually never been written before, or at least not enough to be any kind of an established Jacob/Bella fic cliche. I wanted to be very protective of the surprise of that revelation in Chapter 2 and I think not spoiling it made an admittedly bizarre idea as effective as possible.) Though the title "Bloodsport" implies that this is a really significant part of the story and ties it into the themes, at some point I came up with the final title after thinking of the quote from Dracula "The children of the night, what music they make." I thought the phrase could be connected in a kind of funny way to the term "singer," and from there on the fic took on a whole music motif, with many of the chapters named with musical terms and Edward's piano music having a meaningful part in the scene that Bella and Jacob first meet again.
Of all the fanfiction I've done, "WMTM" is not one I'd list with what I feel is my best work, but it's one that is especially close to my heart. Based on the kind of reactions I've gotten since I started posting it in '08, it seems to have meant a lot to a lot of people, especially as a desperately needed alternative to Breaking Dawn which I never really expected it would be as I started writing it. To my amazement, even Edward/Bella shippers have told me they prefer this story to the ending SM wrote because they find its bittersweet resolution to be more satisfying and appropriate than a completely happy one. Since I've still never read BD myself, the world I've set up in this certainly feels more real to me than canon anymore, and I can't say any other fic I've ever done has stayed with me that strongly.
Blood sports, if you don't know, is what they call sports involving pointless animal cruelty like cock fighting or, somewhat appropriately, dog fighting (heheh). This chapter title calls back to the song lyrics in the epitaph, and it also refers to how meaningless and unjustified the slaughter going on in this chapter is.
Also, as the title can more subtly suggest, blood is very significant in this chapter. Oh yes. :)
On the final day they had to get ready, Bella and the rest of the Cullens all went hunting once more to make sure they would have as much strength as possible. She spent the rest of the day alone with Edward. They went to the meadow and stayed there for hours. It was as gloomy as usual outside and the ground was still a little soft from rain under the thick grass. Bella kept her eyes open and staring up at the gray sky while Edward made love to her. They said only little to each other.
At the beach in La Push, a small gathering of people from the pack sat around the circle of logs set up there for fires. Jacob lay across the ground with his head resting back on one of the logs and his legs bent so that his feet rested on the edge of the remains of black driftwood from the last fire someone had burned there.
Jared was dealing with it by talking about it, while Quil, Paul, and Embry sat staying very quiet by comparison. Just remember, he was saying. Just make sure none of them get a hold of you around your leg or anything. You have to pick somebody to stick close to and look out for. Especially because of the little one. Jane, Embry reminded him. Right.
Jacob just stared up at the sky that was already starting to tint to a darker gray, never saying anything. After a while he closed his eyes as if to shut out all of his surroundings and escape. But Jared never stopped talking, and no matter how much he tried to get lost in his own thoughts he could not ignore his words enough to let them all blur together into meaningless murmuring. Keep looking around you to be careful not to get your back to anybody. Make sure you always give Alice some space because if you do anything to directly affect what she's doing she won't be able to see it coming. It was like cramming for a really important test.
I took a bit of a risk by having the story get so far without much interaction at all between Bella and Jacob, and it did bother some people who were reading it for the J/B and I had to promise them I had big J/B stuff coming. Of course, what I found so fun about a lot of this fic (while some readers might have just found it frustrating) was how "J/B stuff" or other things I might have promised didn't necessarily come up in ways people were probably expecting, and I just had to hope these parts would be satisfying anyway and sometimes at least have the help of an element of surprise and originality. In a way the fic is all about Bella and Jacob still being in love, yet I'm not sure I even consider it a love story, and through a lot of the process of writing this I found myself feeling like I was writing to satisfy myself and displease just about everybody else because there was a line I didn't want to cross with them.
Anyway, it was important to me to leave the meaningful conversations and meetings between Bella and Jacob for when it really counts later. I know this isn't the only way in which the beginning of the fic seems a little slow and to be lacking something because I needed to build up to what comes in this chapter, and I hope the payoff justifies how much I was holding back before the action starts. But even in the first six chapters before Bella and Jacob finally get back on comfortable terms with each other, the story is actually loaded with all kinds of "J/B stuff" that's just very restrained. In this scene with Jacob on the beach when he's looking up at the sky, I meant for that to parallel the description of Bella also looking up at the sky while she's with Edward in the meadow. These separate scenes show them both anticipating what's coming in their own way, and they're not together and still aren't speaking much, but they're very much in the same place and connected right now.
When all of the vampires were within a few strides of them, a few of the wolves turned. Some of them just nodded to them in greeting and looked back away. But one of them kept looking their way. Before she had seen him coming, it seemed, Jacob was suddenly closer to her than anyone else there and looking right at her. For once she was able to meet eyes with him with a strong, unhesitant gaze. He stayed five steps away from her, and for a moment she noticed him glancing in the direction of Edward with a slightly annoyed look, as if he had noticed him appearing concerned when he came this close. Just out of the corner of her eye, Bella saw Edward then quickly turn away to stop looking at them.
The moment for one of them to say hello or some kind of greeting to open the exchange came and then passed after hanging there a while, and with that a certain comfort settled in place between them, for they did not need to say anything only for the purpose of saying something now. That was how they had been. They had never needed words to understand one another or felt the need to fill silences with anything just to make them stop feeling awkward. It was the first time they would directly speak to each other face-to-face since meeting again, but suddenly it didn’t feel like the first of anything, just the same as it had always been.
Jacob finally said what he had to. “How far away from you do I need to make sure I stay?”
She shook her head a moment, shrugging. “Just stay as far away as you can,” she said. “Try to avoid my scent as much as possible the whole time.”
He nodded, but something about the answer seemed to make it difficult for him to accept it like that. Something was bothering him.
“What if I see you need help?” he asked after a long hesitation.
She was taken aback by the question; she had not thought about that kind of thing at all, of course. But she did not have to think about it very hard. “The best you can do to help me is not get too close,” she answered simply.
Some intentionally misleading irony here, of course, as Jake is the one who will end up needing her help. This conversation could make one worry that she'll end up losing control and hurting him during the fight, especially if he tries to come to her help, when she'll actually be the only one who can help him later because she's the only vampire who could drink his blood. (She's the only one who could do it quickly enough to save him, at least. I imagine for any other vampire with a normal aversion to his scent and taste, trying to suck the venom out of a werewolf would be like having to guzzle down gasoline, and the reflex to stop once they started drinking would probably be as strong for them as the temptation to just keep drinking until he's dead is for Bella when she does it.)
In other moments in former chapters in addition to this, I took every effort to throw people off the right track in guessing what would happen during the fight. Naturally Bella is very troubled by the possibility of Jacob or any of his friends getting killed, but I didn't want to give the idea that there was a serious threat of me killing off Jacob or even just nearly killing him by talking about the idea too much; I dwell more on his worry about something happening to her because his feelings about it are a little more conflicted and confusing for him.
I hoped that even once readers got to the scene where Jake's been bitten, their immediate expectation would be that the legend Emily tells Bella in a flashback scene was foreshadowing this and he would be saved by becoming a vampire. Because this legend establishes my own fanon explanation of if and how a werewolf can be turned, and after that it's revealed that there is some danger of Bella biting Jacob, I thought some might guess from early on that the fic was working towards a vampire!Jake direction and they would have that expectation when they got to this chapter. It would certainly have been an obvious way of allowing things to get more Jacob/Bella-oriented if he were turned. Even though you'd think it would easily occur to anyone that she should just try to suck the venom out, I really hoped it would come as a surprise that even after she finds him in danger of either dying slowly and painfully or getting vamped, she would not want him to be a vampire any more than she'd want him to die and would find another option. After all my "bullshit-foreshadowing" that they'll have a relationship like Qahla has with his vampire mate after she turns him because that's where things can lead when a vampire meets their singer, he actually lives. And I think there's a much more meaningful portrayal of her love for him in that scene than I ever could have written by just finding an easy way to get them together...But more on that later.
(By the way, "qahla" is one of the only Quileute words I was able to find through some half-assed research, and I chose it for the protector's name in the legend because it means "sun." Judging by how much the legend says, he wasn't really anything like Jacob—not much of a "sunny" personality, LOL. But I used the name as just another indication that this story is meant to be paralleled at least in some simple ways to the situation between Jacob and Bella and addresses the question of whether a wolf and vampire could ever actually love each other.)
His face was carefully unchanging after he heard that, but then for a second she thought she saw a hint of defiance in his eyes, and even without seeing it she would know. He would never listen to her.
But she tried to assure herself that it didn‘t matter. It was the wolves the Volturi were after. There was no reason to think it was at all likely she would ever end up in serious danger while he was available to come to her rescue, but no one else closer.
Bella heard a faint, alarmingly delicate and soft voice speaking in a whisper, and looked to her left to see Alec looking away from Jane at his side, who he appeared to have just been quickly saying something to. Then he turned around and Bella only saw him lean his weight forward the slightest bit and dart toward the surrounding area in the start of a run before he turned into just a blur of fast movement and then just as soon had completely vanished from view, as if he had turned into nothing.
The Volturi are in many ways just convenient as a threat if you need some kind of villains in a Twific, but they're also awesome and really fun to write. Everyone seems to easily accept the reason for the conflict and I've gotten lots of praise for the plot even though I wasn't sure if them targeting werewolves like this would be entirely believable. Their motivation for attacking is kind of a MacGuffin, but at least I think the problem that comes up later because they want Bella to join them is something that most readers probably don't see coming yet makes perfect sense given the interest Aro shows in her in New Moon. Everything is so well-established in canon for something like that to come up later, and if this fic really does succeed at seeming like somewhat of a natural extension of what Meyer created I think that element of the plot is one of the things that helps it the most.
I've been especially fascinated with Alec and Jane ever since I read SM's extra backstory about them that's available on her site, because it makes them really tragic characters. Because of the kind of progression Bella goes through and also the way she has an advantage over Jane nobody else does, it seemed a natural choice to significantly involve her in the story. Bella killing anyone in such a brutal way, no matter how evil they are, would be a little surprising no matter what because it's just not how we're used to seeing Bella, but I knew making her kill Jane would have a really different effect than if it was anybody else and it just felt completely right.
Then, before she could even prepare herself, there were other empty spots in the circle of vampires surrounding them that others had moved from. And with a sudden breakout of hostile noises coming from both sides, loud growls and shouting, all too soon it had begun.
The world around her had been turned into a bloody horror movie playing at a speed too fast to follow as all the creatures of the night imploded into each other with murderous, unstoppable determination. The air was filled thickly with an ugly, chaotic song of the wolves' howls of pain, the vampires’ shouts and panicked cries, and Jacob's blood calling and pulling at her from his open wounds. The smell of any other blood was so overwhelming everywhere around her it was all indiscernible, unclear where it was from a wolf and where it may be some human's blood that had been spilled from a vampire.
I was always frustrated with the wasted potential for good action scenes in the books. The Twilight books may be full of sparkly estrogen and ridiculously PG-rated for vampire novels, but they can be surprisingly violent and have pretty gory images. But there's all that build-up in Eclipse to the fight at the end with all the vampires and wolves together and then it just happens "off-screen" while Edward reads everybody's minds and describes it. UGH. This chapter is my response to that, LOL.
And I had some of the most fun doing this that I've ever had writing anything. I don't write stuff like fight scenes all that often, especially in fanfic, but ever since I wrote this fic I've more often considered ways to work in action scenes into other stuff like my Heroes WIPs. I have to admit I liked the idea that doing a very detailed fight sequence that fills up most of a chapter would make this story stand out; everybody's done fanfic with love scene after love scene in it but not many people try to pull off something like this. It probably helps emphasize more than anything that the pairings aren't the whole point of the fic.
Not far away from where Bella, Collin, and Edward were, Alice was fighting the black-haired female. Bella was able to see enough of her while still concentrating on what she was doing to be able to tell that the female seemed to give up after a while after seeing how quickly Alice could react to every move. Then something happened that almost caught Bella’s eye too much for her to keep fighting; the female turned to try to run, and Alice completely missed an easy opportunity to stop her, suddenly going still and looking extremely confused and disoriented. Bella had known her long enough to tell that she must have momentarily stopped being able to see what was coming her way.
But Edward could tell something was going to happen before it did.
“Alice! Move!” he roared in warning. Too late.
Sam was charging right in Alice’s direction, clearly intending to move past her to get to somebody else, but completely unseen by her as she stood facing the other way. All at once he let out a terrible howl of pain and his legs failed. Bella felt the great thump of his huge body landing on the ground under her feet, and the momentum of how fast he had been running sent him tumbling forward out of control. It happened so fast Alice was taken completely by surprise and screamed as he knocked right into her and she was buried for a second under his limp form that was still trembling from Jane‘s torture. In this second after he then rolled off of her that she was still disoriented and couldn’t see anything that would happen they were both completely vulnerable, and to Bella’s horror there were suddenly three vampires coming at them like dogs running to meat that had just been dropped on the ground for them to grab, including the one that had been fighting her a moment before.
It was this one that stopped Jasper from making it in between Alice and her attackers as he flew toward her, and Jasper fought back with such sudden ferocity that it seemed obvious to Bella who would win that fight. The second went right for Sam before Bella drove him away and took him on, and right before Alice could get back on her feet the third, a male with long brown hair, had pounced right onto her, pinning her down on the ground and immediately starting to pull at one of her arms.
“Jasper?!” she called in a shrill voice with an edge of panic like nothing Bella had ever heard come out of her mouth before, and for a horrifying second Jasper could only let out a roar of rage as his opponent continued to be in his way and Bella was sure Alice was going to lose her arm. She did not notice the heavy pounding of running paws approaching before a huge mouth full of slick, glimmering teeth suddenly closed around the brown-haired vampire with a slight crunching sound. He yelped loudly and let go of Alice right away as Paul dragged him away from her, running off shaking him back and forth in the grip of his teeth.
My mental image of the wolves is a little messed up, probably in part because of the illustrations in the Japanese editions of the books which picture them a bit more huge than I think most of them are supposed to be. There are parts in the fic when my descriptions make it sound like Jacob is actually taller than a person in his wolf form, which isn't quite right if I think about it. And here I even describe Paul carrying a vampire away by biting him around the torso, which is one of my favorite bits in this chapter but I guess was getting a little carried away. They're not dinosaur size, LOL. It's too bad because a lot of the parts of this fight are a lot less spectacular to imagine with wolves that are only about horse size with the exception of Sam.
Still, I really like this bit with Paul saving Alice for some reason. It seemed right to give him a heroic little moment of badassery right before he's going to get killed off and was a blast to write.
Wherever Jane was, she had gotten bored with Sam and moved on to concentrate on something else, and with a somewhat relieved-sounding grunt he rolled quickly over onto his feet. Bella then heard from a little far in the distance the strange, unmistakable sound of a vampire’s body being destroyed, and she risked a glance over to the opposite side of the mob of monsters she was near, afraid of what she would see. But it was only Jacob with Gianna, holding her on the ground with one paw and starting to tear her apart by gnawing off a leg.
Then, stealing her attention away, a high-pitched canine whimper echoed from far away in the forest to her right that was piercing to her acute ears. Somehow she thought she knew the sound, intuitively connecting an identity to it. She looked that way and froze, realizing in a rush of scared thoughts that when she had thought she saw Sam he was moving in the opposite direction that the sound had come from. And though Jared and Paul were still very far away, she had just been able to see exactly where they were a minute ago, still fighting in the forest off to the left of her. She looked quickly back toward the groups fighting, following all the unbelievably fast-moving figures with her eyes to take in who was there and still not there, and it only confirmed the worries darkening her head to murky, unfocused black.
Edward had stopped and looked toward the trees in alarm right after she had when she heard it, but it seemed he had for a different reason. Embry was now available to come help Quil take on the two vampires near them. As they were driven away Edward suddenly looked at Bella with great fear, not worrying or imagining the worst but knowing, as Jacob was still close enough that he could tell exactly what was happening to him. He was looking at her like he knew what this would mean and was already painfully struggling to let her go. He clearly did not want to have to tell her, but his face gave it away anyway.
She could tell from the look in his eyes that it was bad. She knew. Jacob was alone.
She stared back at his begging face, feeling an agonizing pull, but already knew her feet were going to move. That was why it was so hard to look at him then.
Somehow whenever I read this part over again, I'm kind of disappointed with it. The moment she tells Edward "I love you" is supposed to have a lot of impact because you realize she's saying goodbye because they have to get separated and either of them could possibly get killed. I think I build up to the moment so much that it's kind of oversold...or something. Haha. Maybe I should have figured out a way to let the line speak for itself a little more instead of describing her feelings in all this detail leading up to it.
"I love you," she said, and then she was off.
She knew he would understand that she meant Don't follow me, that he already knew he couldn’t because it was too important for him to stay with the others, and that it would kill him. But still she ran and the trees rustled past her in a dark green blur.
It felt more and more like her heart was being slowly torn out of her chest the further she ran from Edward, while at the same time something else rooted painfully deep inside her like a sharp hook was pulling her forward, rushing far ahead of her so that she could not keep up, could not possibly run fast enough. It was almost like having a living heartbeat pounding inside her again, the way the gripping fear now felt like a constant, rhythmic stabbing of pain in that place in the center of her chest, driving her feet to pound against the ground and propel her forward like it seemed they never had before. With every panging stab of fear her head was screaming a name over and over. This bit is directly inspired by the writing style of James Ellroy, who's never afraid of using all caps in more than just dialogue to evoke a feeling of choas. Except he wouldn't even bother italicizing something that someone's supposed to be thinking because he just doesn't give a fuck like that. JANE JANE JANE JANE JANE JANE—
His scent was so easy to follow. His blood was everywhere. It wasn't long before she could also hear the panicked, hammering beat of his heart. The scent brought her to a very small clearing where the moon suddenly appeared round and bright over her head again and where small white flowers grew all around. Many of the flowers were stained red with blood. As soon as she reached this place she gasped and covered her nose and mouth, trying to keep her breath held and her head clear and sharp. The blood-painted flowers made a path of prominently noticeable red spots on the ground leading off to the end of the clearing opposite from where she stood, eventually leading to flowers that were all red, glistening wetly with it. And then they ended, blocked by a massive, dark shape that could have been mistaken for something not living if not for its small, trembling movements and heavy breaths.
And here it fucking is. The Scene. It actually all started with a comment
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anythingbutgrey left on one of my fics in which she mentioned her fear/prediction that SM was going to make Jake into a vampire in the last book, something I'd never even considered before then.Sometime shortly after I read that when different ideas for fic were mulling around in my head, I think I went from considering the potential of a story with Jake-turned-vamp/Bella-turned-vamp to thinking instead about what it could be like writing Bella as a vampire and in a situation with Jacob when she saves him from turning into a vampire like Edward does for her at the end of Twilight. And then I got this very interesting image in my head of this happening at night in the woods while they're in some dangerous situation, probably during a fight he's been hurt in, so that there's a very tense feeling of desperation as she's having to stop to drink venom from his blood. The usually confident and badass Jacob would be in this shockingly helpless state, naked after changing back from a wolf and in unimaginable pain and completely terrified by what's happening to him. And even though they'd be a vampire and werewolf and this would probably be a rare situation bringing them uncomfortably close together, I could see the act seeming very intimate in a way and the two of them almost kind of holding each other through it while he knows he might not make it and is extremely scared.
From there came the insane idea for the general premise of the story. Okay, I thought, that's weirdly awesome to imagine and actually...kinda hot, but haha, a vampire would probably never be able to suck blood from a werewolf. I mean, yuck. If I were to make it believably difficult and revolting for her, that would probably take something away from the scene as I picture it. Unless......UNLESS...OH HOLY SHIT. THAT'S...No, come on, that's crazy. That sounds like some completely unbelievable crackfic...Though I bet somebody out there would like it. AND I really don't think it's ever been done before...No. It's crazy and too out-there to have to explain and you couldn't pull it off...
Yeah, I wrote it anyway. JACOB IS HER FREAKING SINGER HAHA. IT'S THE EXCEPTION TO THE RULE. And there was a whole story to be developed just from that idea, a way that what it vaguely represents could challenge the conviction Bella has that Edward has always been the only one she ever could have been happy with. Maybe the fact that it's such a far-fetched and crazy thing none of the characters would have thought possible makes it perfect for this story, since it's essentially about Bella's reality being unthinkably shattered so that she has to reinvent herself and relationships with both Edward and Jacob in order to come to terms with it. (And besides, if I'd known back then about the imminent bullshit of E/B spawning that thing in canon, it never would have sounded like such a ridiculous idea.)
There he was, lying on the ground whimpering softly and shaking around a little as if he was trying to throw something small off of his back, his red-brown coat of fur shining slick with his blood in so many places. But a lot of this seemed to be left there just from wounds that were already healed. Even if some of his bones were broken, she couldn't see what had him in so much pain that he was trembling so uncontrollably, making her cringe and feel like she herself was hurting just by seeing him this way. And why was he alone? What would have made Sam leave him and the vampire that had hurt him go without finishing him off?
I love the image of the white flowers with blood dripped on them. I don't know why. The way this scene would unfold and be described just sort of came together more neatly in my head when I came up with that detail. And half the reason of including them is to lead up to the moment in chapter 9 when Jacob puts one of the flowers in her hair, which is one of my favorite parts of the whole fic. I think of it as his way of silently showing he still thinks of her as beautiful and is starting to come to terms with her being a vampire, because that's the same moment he's first seeing her in the sunlight, and the fact that it's the same flowers that were first described in such a dark and violent context seems to add to that somehow.
The answer seared into her mind at the same moment that he finally became aware of someone standing there and turned his huge head toward her. And as their eyes met, the gigantic wolf's with her amber vampire's, an involuntary, denying moan came out of her throat.
That was when she noticed he was clutching one hand over his right shoulder. She took his wrist to pull it away and look: there it was, a deep single bite right above where his collar bone ended. It was so ridiculous that she should think of something like this at such a time, but strangely enough, it was exactly where she had been thinking about kissing him as he held her in the car the night she had just nearly died.
Doing this to save him is a perfectly good reason, but she still experiences some euphoria and catharsis while tasting his blood. It's impossible for Bella to completely separate her selfless desire to save him and her less innocent desire for him, and a lot of her actions later in the fic come from her reluctance to face this. (When Jacob offers her the possibility of an unthinkable arrangement with him to try to convince her to stay, he's essentially showing her how her motivations have gotten more complicated than she wants to admit and that cheating to keep both her men is exactly what she's already trying to do.) The bite is in the place where she almost kissed him the night Harry Clearwater died because that moment represents something that can never be returned to but has still left a feeling of incompletion and abandoned possibilities. There is a feeling that if she kisses him (in a sense) there now, she is sort of giving into temptation and opening up something that she won't be able to put away again even though it's long past the right time to set those possibilities in motion.
She didn't hesitate. She waited only long enough to prepare herself, her left hand digging into the ground with a kind of fierce determination, before she bent over and put her mouth to the wound. She heard Jacob gasp softly, and with his hand she had pulled away from the bite and was still touching he held hers against his chest and gripped it tightly there.
The immediate feeling of release was so powerful and overtaking. To her body, this taste meant finally giving in, but she had to grab on so tightly to herself and not let her rational thoughts get buried under it. Mixed with his blood was something else thicker and tasteless like water that was harder to draw out and seemed to never stop coming out. Soon it seemed she was getting almost all blood and hardly any of the venom in her mouth, and she just hoped as much as she could with a brain that could hardly focus on more than one thing right now that the other taste would pass.
Jacob's right arm circled around her as he gritted his teeth against the intensely burning pain and his other hand she wasn't holding found itself raked in her hair, grabbing a tight handful of it at the back of her head. She would have thought he was getting ready to try to pull her off of him if she wouldn't stop, only he was holding her even closer to him.
Just then his breathing began to relax a little and she felt his hands both loosen their grip on her, and soon she realized that the pain must have been going away. Then his blood she tasted was finally clean, coming out completely thin and fluid. She slid her hand out of his and then tore herself away from him, groaning with the effort it took, and buried her face into her left arm on the ground beside him, her breaths coming out in quick panting. After recovering enough, she sat back up as he rolled onto his back. His eyes were glazed with tears, or so she thought she saw for a second before he blinked and his eyes rolled to the side to look at her.
It's probably not that believable that she would be able to stop this easily and not kill him, but since we know not everyone's experience to being exposed to a "singer" is always the same, let's just say for retcon purposes that Jacob's blood is a slightly lower level of irresistible to her than Bella was to Edward. He's more like her own personal brand of heroin when she's already had a hit somewhat-but-not-too recently. LOL.
"Are you alright?" Bella asked in a strained voice.
He managed a small nod. When he spoke, it sounded like it was hurting him and taking a lot of effort to talk. “Yeah. Just pretty banged up. She broke my ankle — and a few of my ribs — I think. It‘ll be a little while before I can go back in.”
He heard her take a long, deep breath. “Jacob,” she said in almost a whisper, sounding like she was struggling to keep her voice reasonably calm and level. “Stay right here. Don’t try to do anything.”
His eyes slowly grew wide as he started to understand. “Somebody’s coming,” he assumed.
“Yes,” she said. “…We’re being watched.”
“Shit,“ he whispered, looking back in the direction she had been staring, not appearing to be at all eager to just stay in place and do nothing.
“Listen to me,” she said, still very quiet and trying to stay calm. “You can’t do anything to help me. You’re not going to be able to defend yourself again yet. You cannot phase. I might have to do something I can’t let the others see.”
He looked at her with terrified eyes and started shaking his head vigorously, a tiny and weak movement. His voice came out shaky and uncertain. "Bell..."
“Please,” she begged, her tone still controlled but now with an obvious note of desperate emotion. “Jacob. Trust me.”
He listens to her. It's a lot to ask for him to just stay put and possibly have to watch her get killed, and it's a lot harder to see chivalrous and intensely protective Edward being able to do that. But Jacob can be reasonable and see that he's still the helpless one here, even though he has no idea how she could be planning to take care of this. You can get the idea that she probably never would have reached the kind of potential that she does in using her powers in this scene if she'd just stayed with Edward the whole time with him protecting her from getting her hands dirty.
The two who Bella had seen moving in the distance were getting close. She rose to her feet again and walked forward a little just before the short figure of Jane came into full view in the moonlight as she stepped out of the shadows. Then she was followed closely by Alec, walking up a few feet to the right of her. Jane was staring down at Jacob with a completely baffled expression.
Jane had looked back behind Bella toward Jacob, and this time as she started to go toward him again she abruptly stopped on her own. Her look of excitement as she was eager to finally kill the werewolf pack’s leader became a little more mild and uncertain.
“Jane?” Alec asked, raising an eyebrow and looking to the side at her to try to see what was wrong.
Bella only stood still staring down at her, all throbbing fear and anticipation, starting to fill with something that burned so excrutiatingly it was as if she knew right now how it really felt to be under her power.
I wanted Bella's powers to be sort of an antithesis to Edward's because that would seem to make some sense given that powers like his don't work on her. So the idea of projecting/giving thoughts as opposed to reading thoughts was where it started.
Her powers are a convenient plot device. The way she doesn't even want them at first and is reluctant to use them is a convenient plot device. I originally developed these things as nothing more than that. So it surprises me how easily they can actually be seen as a reflection of her struggle. Her fear of having power is her fear of having choice. She knows what kind of accountability and possible regrets could come with recognizing that she's always been in control of her own destiny, so she stubbornly resists it. But ultimately she grows tremendously by accepting it, just as her talent ends up having some more positive sides that she hasn't discovered.
Jane's eyes were looking directly at nothing as her mood very visibly intensified, as if she was realizing something that excited her in a heated, volatile way. Suddenly she turned her head to her right to look at Alec, and her lovely young face had become contorted and ugly with a sudden raging determination and anger. Not her own.
He looked back at her with gradually widening, shocked eyes, knowing that look on her face very well but confused to see it directed at him. Then Bella could tell the moment he was suddenly gripped with an uncertain fear, and he just barely started to take a step back away from her. "Ja—?"
His speech was cut off as his whole body jerked forward and he fell right to the ground, yelling out in pain.
Bella let it last for just a couple seconds, and then as Jane really seemed to have forgotten her and Jacob and was still looking only at Alec, she threw herself at her and easily pinned her to the ground. The growls and snarls that erupted between them echoed against the night sky as loudly as rounds of bullets. Alec was then released from the pain, but he was too confused for a moment while he still lay on the ground, trying to understand if his sister had really betrayed him.
Jane was so much smaller than Bella. Once she had her, she had her. She struggled wildly to try to break free and get off the ground and snapped at Bella with her teeth but kept missing, and soon the child's face filled with a chilling, possessed fear as she continued to be unable to get away. As her voice was accompanied by the deafening sounds of her body being torn apart that were almost like separate shrieks, she screamed for Alec. She screamed for Aro. She started to just scream wordlessly, begging for it not to be real, her voice shrill and silver in the uncaring dark.
Alec finally got on his feet, but in an instant Bella had him helpless and writhing on the ground again; Jane did not have to be looking at him to hurt him. She was even easier to control now. She was not thinking, and she had become just as scared as Bella. The little girl was burning, dying, hating everyone and cursing the entire merciless world she was a part of, not caring where she directed her anger as long as someone else felt the flames. Her desperate screams continued until the end, suddenly cut off when there was a horrible grating sound as Bella tore her head away from what was left of the rest of her body.
The descriptions of what Jane's feeling as Bella starts defeating her like she's "burning" is supposed to convey that she's reliving the first time she died right now. It's a reflection of how the terrible things she went through in the last moments of her human life as she and Alec were being burned shaped what she is now, and in a sense she's always reliving that and that's why she's so crazy and sadistic. It also makes her look a little bit pathetic and begins to establish that there's actually something slightly tragic about Bella having to kill this very young vampire.
So. Bella saves Jacob's ass. Twice. And shows there isn't much she won't do to do that. It meant a lot to me that I'd hopefully be able to accomplish developing her into the kind of character who saves people, yet is not some kind of inhumanly-tough Mary Sue action heroine, without it being hard to buy. I honestly don't think it's that hard to give Bella enough motivation to basically kick some ass if she's capable. We're just not used to seeing her this way since the books so often put her in this damsel-in-distress position. I emphatically disagree with those who think this is essentially what it takes to make a female character "strong" and that's all there is to it, so that was definitely not my approach in giving her a scene in which she takes control like this. I pretty much just thought Well, she's a vampire now, so let's show everything that really means and not sugar-coat it. Even if it's in very justified defense, there's no kind of human experience that can prepare you for having to gruesomely rip your kin to pieces with your bare hands to kill them.
But it's not only upsetting for her either, and I think the way it changes her ultimately does start to make her stronger. All of her actions at the end of this chapter come to signify a bit of a turning point in the whole Edward-Bella-Jacob dynamic, because Bella has grown in a way that means she knows she doesn't need anyone's protection. When she manages to save Jake from getting vamped without killing him in the process, it makes her more confident that she can control herself around him; Edward no longer lingers around as baby-sitter whenever she and Jacob see each other so it's finally easy to have scenes with them alone together. You see later on that Edward has trouble adjusting to these changes because he's so used to protecting her in some way. He and Bella pretty much have to reinvent their entire relationship now that they're finally on equal ground in every way and fully aware of it, but at first he just can't help but feel like they're growing apart in some way and finds it disconcerting.
When she stood up completely erect again and dropped Jane’s head to the ground, it made a heavy thud like a filled helmet. Alec was still on the ground, his face mangled with terror and anguish as he looked from the parts of Jane's destroyed body to her. She darted forward toward him as he started to get up on his feet, and then before she reached him he vanished.
All the sudden it was very quiet. Bella turned to look back at Jacob, totally still and calm now, and saw that he looked completely confounded by all he had just seen. His eyes looked vague and dead somehow, like he was feeling too much to express any one thing, but the way he was completely still sitting up on his elbows looking at her was enough to convey his shock. For the first time ever, she thought she might have some understanding of why Edward had been so nervous talking to her again after she had watched him kill Victoria.
She just kept staring right back at him. She wiped her tongue around the outside of her upper teeth and swallowed, tasting blood.
And one of the lines that kind of sums up the themes of the whole story:
She had been turned into a complete monster. Only love could do this even to someone like her.
I had a ridiculous amount of stuff I wrote for this fic and ended up throwing out, but this is pretty much the only thing I even nearly like enough to share. This is how I originally thought up the scene with the Uleys visiting Jacob when I first started getting random ideas down for this fic by writing different parts as they came to me, and it shows a lot about how the last chapter ended up a little different than the way I'd imagined it for a while. I was initially only going to show Anna Uley as an infant. Jacob and Bella's strange and limited relationship which nobody else really knows the real nature of anymore was going to be perceived as kind of scandalous. And not as many people Jake knows were going to be as straightforwardly forgiving of the Cullens and Bella, so you see Emily here having to try not to be too judgmental about him occasionally hanging out with a vampire who he still loves.
Emily and Sam were over for dinner. While Jacob was holding their baby Anna on his lap, making her giggle a little by bouncing her up and down lightly on his knee, Sam commented after a while, "It really reeks in here."
"I know," Jacob said apologetically. "It's Bella."
As if they couldn't figure that out.
Sam went into the kitchen to chat with Billy when he called to them asking something about how the Clearwaters were doing. Jacob found Emily looking at him with her arms crossed, a carefully removed look in her eyes.
"You're just fine with that?" she asked. "Bella dropping in whenever she happens to?"
He looked thoughtful for a moment, but just shrugged. "It can be really good to see her. When I see her. In fact, in a lot of ways it makes things easier."
"That's not what I mean. Does her husband know?"
He sighed as Anna put her little hand around his finger. "She just doesn't feel right after she's away from me for a long time. That's all. Edward doesn't want her to be unhappy. And she's not like us; she can't just get over something and move on the longer she has to live with it. And I think she would see trying that as a big waste of time when my years are quite numbered in comparison to hers."
"But she chose him. She commited herself to him. Doesn't that mean anything?"
He finally looked straight up at her, frowning. "I know. It's not the prettiest picture. Neither were you and Sam to begin with. These things sure as hell aren't always convenient. You wouldn't think so badly of it if they were wolves and she imprinted on me after he had already imprinted on her. Or if she had just imprinted on both of us," he added, finishing that statement with a slight humorous smile.
She looked vaguely annoyed for a second, not seeming to appreciate how he had brought her and Sam into it.
"You can't imprint on more than one person," she said, rolling her eyes a little.
He raised his brow. "How do you know?" he asked in a lighter voice.
She just smirked at him as Sam came back in.
I usually tried to write Lilah scenes sparingly because I know people don’t tend to take kindly to original characters—especially ones that are fucking established characters in any circumstances, LOL. But a lot of readers actually loved her surprisingly much and demanded more of her, and this might have had a little influence on my decision to show her still as a part of Jacob’s life several years down the road in the last chapter. So for anyone who’d actually be interested, here’s some general extra info about Lilah that I always had in mind as a reference for the way she is.
At the beginning of the fic Lilah is 22 years old (two years older than Jacob, who she often forgets is as young as he is because of how he looks). She is 5’6” and has dark blond hair in a short pixie cut, a womanly figure, light olive skin, and large and round brown eyes. Her mother died from cancer when she was eleven and her older sister Teresa is the only family member she’s still in touch with but lives far away in Chicago, where her family is originally from. She is of mixed white/African-American race. Lilah spends way too much money on cigarettes and CDs. She has an Asian lotus design tattooed on her back which she chose because it was her mom’s favorite kind of flower. Her apartment is filled with second-hand furniture in really ugly mismatched colors, has its walls covered in band posters, and usually smells like Chinese take-out food and weed. When she reads occasionally, she tends to only like nonfiction. The story of how her father disgustedly and heartlessly threw her out of the house when she was eighteen is something that actually happened to a girl I used to know (Don’t tell writers about your life because they’ll steal from it).
I leave it ambiguous whether she actually has deeper feelings for Jacob than she lets on, and I honestly have no decided opinion about whether she ever does. He observes that she’s surprisingly put together and functional considering her tumultuous life, but she may still have some issues that are just milder than they could be. Some details in the fic establish that she kind of has a habit of picking the wrong men, and maybe it’s ironically appropriate that she’s comfortable just casually sleeping with the really nice and reliable guy who could actually be a good boyfriend. It takes her a little by surprise how worried she is when she finds out what Jacob’s going through after his friends are dead and how hurt she is that he shut her out and didn’t say anything about it. When he starts the conversation they need to have to better define their relationship, she’s kind of embarrassed and reluctant (she doesn’t really like talking about feelings) but sees it’s necessary. If she’s possibly started falling a little in love with him, it’s nothing so strong that she can’t easily settle for just being friends before it gets a little messy for her.
Lilah befriending Leah in addition to him is what starts breaking the ice between Leah and Jacob after there’s been some awkward tension between them for a long time. The first time she’s going to meet all his friends for Christmas he makes a point of warning her about what a nightmare Leah can be and that she shouldn’t bother trying to make conversation with her, which she practically takes as a challenge. She quickly catches onto the fact that they actually care about each other in some weird and strained familial way and makes all kinds of efforts to make them lighten up a little around each other. After they start hanging out occasionally, Leah and Lilah make a pact that they’re going to stop smoking together. Jacob knows this is something Leah's only doing for her because werewolves can’t exactly get lasting lung damage but refrains from teasing her about it, and for a period of hell he has to deal with both of them being extremely irritable a lot of the time.
Lilah despises living in Washington and has only been there so long to stay near her friends. I imagine when she’s in her late twenties she finds the love of her life and they eventually move away to California together.
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Date: 2009-11-22 10:32 pm (UTC)You're seriously writing Twific again wheeee I'm so happy.
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Date: 2009-11-22 10:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-23 03:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 02:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-08 04:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-04 05:19 pm (UTC)It seems like whenever I'm feeling nostalgic about Twilight, I come back to this story. I'm not sure if you still have them, but could you reupload the soundtrack? I'd really appreciate it.