Chapter Text
Harry Clearwater was dead, to begin with. Jacob had harbored the news like a lodestone, searching for his packmates as the information began to roll through their tribe. It was an insurmountable blanket of grief spreading throughout the reservation - a collective knot in all of their throats.
And then there was Bella.
Who knew why she’d thrown herself off a cliff into the tumultuous and freezing waters of the North Pacific. She’d expressed interest in cliff diving when they’d seen the young wolves pushing eachother around, weeks before. She was some sort of adrenaline junkie, on the heels of whatever the shiny freak had done to break her heart, all those months ago.
Jacob hadn’t been totally sure she didn’t have brain damage after crashing the motorbike she’d convinced him to fix up. Attentive and engaged one minute, but a zombie the next - she was prone to bouts of staring into the distance or jumping at the smallest thing, the next.
A storm of chaos and fractured resilience, her perfect brown eyes swam with fathomless depths - joy and ache, love and exile. He would have given anything to help her grow past her need for Edward freaking Cullen.
He’d been searching for her all afternoon when the bloodsucker appeared on the highway line between the reservation and Forks.
Not Edward. One of his sisters. The short and weird one with the darting eyes and spikey hair.
She was pacing the treaty line, crossing the street over and over again like an anxious cat, bristling and concerned, unworried about the black Porsche she left abandoned halfway into the road.
The seer renowned by even the elders of his own tribe…
And she was nervous, looking for Bella.
Just like him.
It was immediately a truce of convenience, of painful compromise - shared concern.
By the time they’d found her, the chill had embraced her, the water had inundated her, and she’d been washed ashore.
By the time he’d gathered her into his arms, those eyes he’d dreamt of since childhood were empty and unseeing - vacant as the cruel and unfeeling sky above.
Those eyes were closed, now.
At the Swan residence, the landline phone rang. Unanswered.
~*~*~
They were standing beside Bella’s abandoned truck, numbly waiting for Charlie when her phone rang. A grimace crossed her face before she answered, but she didn’t check the screen.
Of course she didn’t need to check who was calling. Jacob didn’t need to be able to see the future to know who it was, either.
“She’s fine, Edward. Rose is overreacting. You should come back to Forks, if you miss her so much.”
The line clicked silent as she hung up the silver cellular in her hand.
Jacob was stunned, mystified.
“Wh- why did you lie to him?”
“Because I could. Because the moment he’s close enough to hear the truth, he’ll try to end his own life. And I’ve already lost enough family, today. She was - she was supposed to be my sister. And because he didn’t make up his mind… we all lost her.”
She turned to face him, eyes brimming with the kind of sadness that was only reflected in his own heart.
“She deserves to be mourned properly,” she And he needs to face what he’s done. We can’t undo it… but we can give her this.”
His nose burned through the astringent and copper smell of vampire. His chest ached. The impossibility of her passing was pressing down upon him, smothering him and he wanted to run - to flee into the forests of the Pacific Northwest, push the limits of his wolffish body until his broken heart exploded into shards of glass.
But it would have to wait.
A reckoning with the bloodsucker who started it all was coming - and Jacob refused to miss it.
And then the little vampire said something he didn’t expect, and certainly wasn’t ready for:
“I need your help.”
~*~*~*~*~*~
I felt the impact, but the ocean’s tumult was more distracting, more immediate than the pain. A red halo surrounded my vision as blood mixed in the water. The waves pushed me around, jerking me back and forth in a spin until the current finally drug me deeper into the darkness.
The hallucination of Edward that accompanied me underwater was as insubstantial as ever as the wave bowled me over and I slammed once more - hard - into the face of the cliff.
“Keep swimming” he insisted, inside her head. “Don’t you dare give up!”
The ghost of Edward’s love, once again unable to save me from myself. If it had ever been real at all.
The pressure on my throat and lungs built until it didn’t, the light exploded behind my eyes until it didn’t, the darkness overwhelmed me utterly, deafening and total - until it didn’t.
For an eternity, my lungs were both crushed and exploding, empty and full, broken and overwhelmed.
Until they weren’t.
Until I saw the flame beyond the water. The anger beyond my pain.
Abandoned by Edward. Forgotten by the Cullens.
I raged against my fate, swallowing, choking - gagging - on gallons of water as my chest burned and seized in agony. The chill was numbing my limbs, and my legs slowed.
I thought I could hear Edward telling me to keep fighting. But I couldn’t help but wonder - why?
I didn’t want to fight anymore.
It was ridiculous… and also right that my existence should end here.
So short a life. I’d been an idiot - making plans based on the notion of forever, not long ago.
I was so, so…angry.
The riptide was raging, and so was I.
There was no fear, only building wrath - my final embers of self becoming an inferno. The broken, cruel apparition of Edward stared at me, falling apart into seamist.
Goodbye, and fuck you, was my last thought.
I dissolved into ice and darkness, and became nothing.
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Or at least…that’s what I thought was happening.
My eyelids parted to the light glistening through the water, a break in the clouds above sending a merciful crack of sunlight past the waves. It was much easier to see which way was ‘up’, now. The sense of relief was immediate when my chest no longer seized against the pressure of my failing body. The ocean no longer pitched me about, and I drifted serenely.
The storm must have subsided. My feelings of abandonment had not.
A glimmer of red fluttered in my lower periphery, and I was shocked to see Victoria of all people - gliding between the waves like silk against satin. She was dragging something bulky and dark in her arms as she swam toward the surface - but it didn’t slow her effortless vampiric grace.
She must not have seen me, yet.
I float upwards, kicking my legs to escape before she noticed me - and found no water tension to beat against. It was a strange sensation as I crested the surface of the water, grateful for the numbness so I didn’t have to feel the drag from my waterlogged shoes and jeans.
I struck out toward the shore, deliberately tracking a wider path so I could keep Victoria’s firey hair in view. The water wasn’t as biting as it had been, and though I was cold, it wasn’t unbearable anymore. Maybe I was getting used to living in Forks, after all.
Victoria reached the beach before I did, and hurled her burden to the beach. She leaned over to examine it, shifting bits and lifting parts of her prize, but she must have been disappointed by what she found because she let out a wail of frustration. The anger rolling from her was palpable - I could practically taste the betrayal in her cries as she raged and stomped on the beach.
I almost felt sorry for the vampire, even though I knew she was actively hunting me. I stayed low in the water, watching.
Victoria knelt again beside the thing that had angered her, and pressed her face against the sodden pile.
She waited.
We both waited, though I didn’t know for what.
Victoria uttered one more burst of enraged frustration, spinning to kick a log of driftwood so hard it shattered, creating a spray of rocks and sand that arced high into the air before she dove right back into the ocean. Bella was relieved to see her track a path westword - apparently swimming straight out to sea.
I was cautious when I began to move through the water again to return to the beach, watching for the reappearance of red hair beneath the waves, but none came. I grew bolder, reaching out for a stronger breaststroke when I saw it. My own hand, pale - almost translucent in the stormy waters.
Wasn’t I wearing grey this morning? I didn’t think I owned this shirt in white.
I was pulling myself onto the shore when I finally took a good look at myself. My jeans, the long-sleeved thermal top I was wearing - it was all white. My boots were even white, which was a major surprise by modern fashion standards. I would never have bought these, let alone wear this all-white ensemble out of the house like this.
Even stranger, my clothing seemed dry. There was no explanation for such a phenomenon, Spring or not.
…until, there was.
Until the moment I saw what Victoria had ditched on the beach.
Disbelieving, I held my hand up to my face, and noticed I could still see the light reflecting off the ocean through my palm.
About three things, I was becoming certain:
First, Edward’s abandonment hadn’t remotely saved my life - whatever his intentions had been.
Second, there was a part of me - and I didn’t know how big - that felt a deep, torrential unrest about how it had all ended.
And third… I was unconditionally and irrevocably dead.
And that made me very, very angry.