Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Native Grounds is a blue painted wooden cabin just across the street from the beach with a coffee machine inside, three benches outside, and a window for Leah to serve out of. The air around it smells rich and warm and inviting, even as she shivers in her thick parka. Judging by the weather and the lack of customers she’s not sure why the place is open, but she buys a coffee to make it a little less awkward that she jumped in her truck as soon as Leah gave her the address on Ocean Drive and hung up on her. She sits on the closest bench, sipping her coffee slowly while Leah reasons that going swimming in 45-degree weather is a stupid idea. It makes her feel even worse about wearing her swimsuit underneath her sweater. 

“You’d probably go into shock,” Leah says, sipping her own coffee from a yellow mug, safe inside the hut in a light sweatshirt, her rivers of dark hair protected from the wind that’s turning hers into knots and snarls. “You don’t even have a wetsuit.” 

“On New Years -” Bella pipes up as if she’s thought it through. 

“On New years they had a fire and blankets and people that had done it before right there and thirty people around to call an ambulance. You? You’d go into shock, and be on your own on the beach, and your fingers would be too numb to call 911. If you didn’t drown first.” 

“We could build a fire?” 

“You need a permit. And I don’t care, because the guys who did it New Years were idiots too.” Leah brushes her off like Bella’s a fly she can’t shake, and her cheeks flood red. It was a waste of gas coming down here. She should just go home, try calling Jess, try emailing Renee, try going back to bed because she doesn’t want to do either of those things. “Maybe that would be fun back home in California -”

“I’m from Phoenix, we didn’t have an ocean.” 

“Fine! Then maybe it would work in an above-ground pool, but it isn’t going to work here. If you want to drown yourself go do it on someone else's beach.” 

There aren’t many ways to answer that so she doesn’t and she stays quiet, cheeks red, embarrassed for the idea, embarrassed for bringing it to Leah, as if their father’s friendship was theirs. She doesn’t even know why she’s pushing this when there are a million other less stupid ways to fill the time until school starts. She stares at her feet, drinking her coffee as quickly as she can so that she can leave. Maybe Leah’s right, but she can’t exactly stop her from heading for the beach and taking a dive, even if she’d rather do it with someone close by. 

“You’re literally freezing right now -  get in here,” Leah says, catching her shiver and rolling her eyes before disappearing from sight. Around the side a door opens, offering access to the tiny shop and Bella only stares for a second before she hurries inside because Leah’s right and she is freezing. 

Inside the walls are papered with posters and stock lists and flyers that make the small square seem even smaller, and with the space heater blowing hot air in the corner it’s also probably a fire hazard. It’s like a furnace and Bella starts sweating in a second, shrugging out of her parka and stuffing her hat in her pocket at the bubble of hot air. She can feel her cheeks starting to colour, and her hands prickle at the sudden temperature change. Leah slams the glass service window shut, locking out the whipping wind and the noise of it. 

“It’s supposed to be good for you though,” and that’s weak. Neither of them believes Bella’s chasing health benefits in freezing water. She’s heard that, things about roman plunge pools and spa treatments and pores. She stands awkwardly against the wall, looking at the ground as Leah continues staring out of the serving hatch like she’s expecting customers to suddenly appear. Or maybe she’s just mad that she’s been guilted into letting Bella inside. 

“You know what I do to stay healthy? I go running. Why don’t you try that first?” 

“Historically running has been pretty dangerous for me.” Bella retorts, a small smile working onto her face and Leah snorts, probably agreeing with her. Bella doesn’t exactly look athletic, and stories of her various injuries (particularly last spring's... incidents) must have made it down here. 

“Well I know how to deal with grazed knees,”  Leah says, refilling her cup from the pot beside the window and offering it out to Bella’s half-empty paper one. “So what else did it say online about swimming in freezing water?” 

“I guess I didn’t do my research. I’ll let you know,” she says, standing to get a sugar packet for her coffee, ducking around Leah to reach for them by her elbow. “Hey, why’d you ask if my dad told me to call you?” 

“I don’t know,” Leah shrugs, turning away and rapidly stirring sugar into her cup to avoid her eye. “Thought he might have put you up to it. Not sure he’d like the idea of you jumping into freezing water though.” she changes the subject deftly and Bella lets it go. 

“Probably not,” she shrugs, not about to tell Leah just how many things she’s done in the last year that Charlie wouldn’t approve of. Bella sips her coffee, reading a promotional booklet on the table for arts and crafts classes at the community centre. When she looks up, half expecting Leah to tell her to go home, she finds her doodling on a notepad with a faraway expression. There’s a tap on the glass and it makes them both jump, knocking them out of the silence that was so nearly comfortable. 

“Geez, two customers in one day?” She grouses, rolling her eyes at Bella and she responds with a laugh that’s far too big for such a small joke. She slides the window open on its squealing hinges and greets a group of lost-looking men in their late twenties wrestling a map and asking for the third beach trailhead. Leah directs him quickly enough back on the 110 heading back to Forks and tells him where to turn off and park his busted up van. They stick around a while, buying coffee and granola bars to thank Leah for the advice and they’re noisy, laughing and joking with one another on the benches. Leah doesn’t seem to like it much, rolling her eyes and resuming her doodling until they leave. She still doesn’t tell Bella to go home, and, warmed by the billowing heat in the small shed, and hearing the tapping of rain on the roof turn heavier she doesn’t push her luck, staying quietly in the corner. Maybe Leah forgot she was even there, maybe she was just so inconsequential to the other girl that she’d melted into the wooden slats and posters of the interior. She thinks idly about the hikers, caught in the downpour on their way to third beach. 

The pair don’t say much, talking about the rain and Rachel Black and Hannah and her husband, but Bella finds the sheer presence of another person to be oddly comforting. Leah doesn’t speak all the time like Jessica or Alice, but when she’s there she’s making noise. Maybe she mutters to herself or drums her fingers but it’s enough because things have seemed too quiet lately; since she woke up or came back to life or whatever. Some days even the sound of her footsteps or the sputtering pipes In her bedroom walls feel like hammer blows to her head and she can hardly concentrate on her homework from the shock of it. 

When she’s alone it feels too quiet for her, and every long silence drags on and on forever like she’s waiting for something to interrupt it. Like she’s waiting for the phone to ring or for someone to slip through her bedroom window. 

A couple more people stop in at the cabin, a local for coffee, but more often it seems to be a place for strangers to ask stupid questions, and Bella muses to herself that Leah’s about as suited to working in the makeshift tourist office as Bella is to working at an outdoor sports warehouse. She decides this when a group of intensely rude college-age kids on break ask if there’s anywhere to hire surfboards on the front and Leah’s whole head rolls back like she’s shaking off his question entirely. The closest place is a shop in Port Angelus, and Leah tells them there’s better coffee in PA as well, glaring at their licence plate until they’re back on the main road. 

When Leah’s shift is over she shuts the place down and locks the sliding window while Bella shrugs her way back into her coat. Maybe she can drive around the backroads until Charlie’s shift is over instead of going back to an empty house. Leah locks the side door up with a slam that rattles the thin wooden slats and Bella stands, her fingers twisting together as she tries to think of a way to thank Leah for letting her stay. 

“Give me a ride home?” Leah says, already half in Bella’s truck as she settles on the bench seat

“Sure,” she says, turning on the thundering engine with a twist of her key. 

“Thanks,” She reaches out a hand to fiddle with the radio before finding the empty hole in her dashboard and stilling, her fingers outstretched to the mess of scratches and loose wires tangled inside. “What the hell? What did you do to your dash?” She accuses and Bella flushes brilliant red, looking at the empty hole in her truck that she usually tries to avoid. 

“Radio was busted so I took it out,” it’s not a total lie. She had busted the radio’s plastic and metal casing when she ripped it out, it probably didn’t survive. 

“Jeez, Bella what did you do, take a hammer to it?” 

“Screwdriver.” Leah raises her eyebrows but doesn’t comment further as Bella backs out and gets back onto the main road, moving on muscle memory to follow the familiar roads of La Push away from the beach and into the residential area off the 110. The Clearwaters house is no more than 10 minutes away, but walking through the pounding rain would have been miserable, and it feels good to be able to give Leah something back for not kicking her out into the drizzle with nothing to do. She turns off the engine in front of the house, seeing lit windows through the sheets of rain on her windscreen. 

“They - the Cullen’s gave me a new radio for my birthday. I didn’t want it in my car,” she says quietly, surprising herself and suddenly so embarrassed by the confession she hopes that Leah doesn’t hear her - or that Leah pretends she doesn’t hear and leaves anyway. She doesn’t, one hand on the door handle slipping back into her lap. 

“So where’s your old radio?” That stumps her, and she realises she hadn't even thought about the crackly old one Emmet had removed and replaced on the night of her birthday before everything went to hell. 

“I don’t know. Maybe they trashed it.” She can’t imagine that when they packed up the house and ran that the Cullens would have bothered to keep her crappy radio alongside their precious artwork and designer clothes. Leah shrugs and moves her hand back to the door and she watches the bones in her hand flex beneath her skin, clenching and unclenching on the handle until she speaks again. 

“Are you back to school on Monday?” 

She nods, surprised to find she’s looking forward to it. To her class schedule and an assigned lunchtime and a reason to get up in the mornings. But the days until then stretch out in a way that seems to go on forever, and the thought makes her slump down in her seat. 

“I’m working again tomorrow. You can come by if you want to.” 

“Yes!” Bella says, too fast, embarrassingly fast and Leah snorts but doesn’t mock her as she opens the door and steps out into the rain. 

“You can keep trying to convince me if you want,” Leah says, a smile brightening her face for a second before she slams the door shut and breaks into a run to the shelter of her front porch. 

‘Cold water helps to boost white blood cell count because the body is suddenly forced to react to changing conditions. Over time, your body becomes better at activating its defences.’

Her bedroom has gone dark around her, and she hasn't yet managed to stand up to turn on any of her lamps. The computer screen glows blue and white, lighting a little bubble across the keyboard. Leah had probably been joking when she said ‘convince me’ but she’d heard the words like a mission. It was like studying, and she was good at studying. She was good at arguing too, and she was better at both than she was at making people like her.

It had only captured her attention at the bonfire because it was loud and stupid and a little thrilling. She’d remembered it because it was the only excuse she could think up to get out of the house. In the dark, it does seem pointless but seeing Leah hadn’t been, even if it was awkward and new. It seems reckless too, in a way that Charlie would hate and she tries to avoid the niggling words in the back of her brain that tell her she’s not just trying to fill time and that recklessness might be the whole appeal. She can’t avoid them though. His words cut through her like a knife, too clear and sharp. There’s a clarity in every memory of Him that’s missing from the rest of her life before and after. 

‘Don't do anything reckless or stupid,’ He’d made her promise, ‘for Charlie’s sake’. The memory brings that bitter gnawing back, the breathlessness that feels like her lungs are carved from stone and she wraps her forearm around her body, forearm pressing into the soft flesh of her stomach to ground her there. She doesn’t want to feel hurt still. She wants to feel angry and bitter. She wants to snarl and storm and bite instead of curling up into a ball beneath her bedsheets like she has for months. She used to be so much stronger. She moved across the country, she stared down vampires with gold eyes and vampires with red ones. She’s been tossed into mirrors and nearly flattened by cars, and she’d been ready to scream and kick those few sick creeps in Port Angelus until she went down swinging. 

'Cold water brings us close to the pain barrier. Endorphins are released when we’re in pain, to help us cope with it.'

Except that, as reckless as it is, and as much as she’s promised Him she wouldn’t do anything reckless, she’s still looking for something to remind her that her heart’s still going, something to make it pound as fast as it used to. There’s got to be something - she can’t be eighteen and done with excitement forever already. 

“So it’s good for your immune system. Boosts your white cell count,” Bella says, resting her elbows on the window sill, rattling off the fact she’d found on some website advertising ice baths in a New York spa instead of a greeting. 

“Weak.” Leah barely looks up from wiping down the counters inside the booth, just jerks her head to the side door, inviting Bella in. “Hannah’s husband still has a cold from doing it and she says he could get taken down by a stiff breeze right now.” 

“You seem really against this, Rachel said you’d wanted to do it, or I wouldn’t have asked.” 

“Yeah with -” Leah stops herself, winding the rag around her fingertips and twisting it sharply. “it seemed like a fun idea at a party on New Year's eve, not as a hobby.”

“Yeah well I don’t have any hobbies,” Bella says, trying not to think about that too hard as she slips her homework out of her bag, the half-written essay glaring up at her. Hobbies? When would she have had time for hobbies? She had a checkbook to balance and calls to landlords and power companies to beg for a little extra time on that unpaid bill. The closest thing she’d had to a hobby was following Renee to pottery classes or yoga or whatever it was this month. 

And as soon as she started to enjoy something, Renee’s interest would seemingly curl up and die. 

“Get one then. And besides, aren’t any of your other friends interesting in doing something this stupid with you?” 

She does wonder at that, tries to imagine Jess or Angela or Mike or Eric taking a plunge into cold water for no good reason. It seems unlikely, Jess was surprised enough to answer the phone and find Bella on the other end, she doesn’t think she or the others would drop everything just to indulge her. 

Instead, she just shrugs and doesn’t mention that she doesn’t want to call them yet. She’ll see them in a couple of days back at school, and that’s going to be its own hurdle. They all know who she’s been recently and who she was before that. They’ll be expecting her to be the person that moved to Forks almost a year ago and honestly, that person doesn’t seem to exist much anymore. 

With Leah, she’s not clawing her way back to anything that existed when He was there. Maybe the only thing she’s crawling back to is misty memories of two kids following their dads on fishing trips, and that seems easier, less painful. She doesn’t have to be anyone she remembers with Leah. 

She doesn’t go on Friday - she spends the day cleaning and trying to convince herself and Leah that she has other things to do with her time, even if she doesn’t really. She works a slow shift at Newtons selling thermal underwear and waterproofing spray then heads for the thriftway and spends the evening cooking a fish recipe to use up some of the freezer stock that’s piled up. She even turns on the radio, putting it down low and keeping it on that rambling jazz station that Charlie favours as they eat dinner together. It’s barely 7 when she calls Leah’s house to see if she’ll be at work the next day. 

It’s misty when she pulls up to the warm blue cabin but she can see a shirtless, tanned back in a pair of jean cutoffs walking away. When she steps out of the cab and slams her door he turns, eyeing her with dark eyes before moving back into a job and slipping around a corner out of sight. 

“Fucking asshole,” Leah snarls, the anger emanating off her so hotly that Bella flinches away, standing awkwardly at the window, like crossing the barrier into the cabin might only enflame Leah’s anger further. 

“Who was that? He didn’t look like he was looking for maps.” 

“Paul, and he wasn’t. Told me to keep hikers out of the woods like he thinks he’s my boss,” she mutters something angrily under her breath, but jerks out her hand to the table in the back and Bella hurries towards it, throwing down her bag but sitting on the edge of her seat, the air in the cabin crackling with the anger rolling off the other woman. 

“Why does he want hikers out of the woods?” she asks, trying to keep her voice calm and low as if it might cool Leah off. 

“Beats me,” she scowls, throwing down her cleaning rag, her long fingers wrapping around her yellow coffee mug and taking a long swallow as she turns, her eyes narrow and assessing. Bella stiffens immediately, shrinking back in the chair. “He was pretty interested in you coming around here too.” 

“Me?”  Bella asks, her eyes widening. She’d only showed up twice, but apparently, someone had taken notice. It makes her squirm uncomfortably, but Leah either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care because when she speaks it’s even more bitter, words spitting from her lips like bullets. “Am I your cautionary tale? You’re hanging ‘round here to see how getting dumped can ruin your life - ‘but only if you let it?'” She says, her fingers up to form air quotes like she'd heard it too many times. 

“I don’t know. Is your life ruined?” She responds, her words trying for a venom that isn’t present in her voice. Leah raises one eyebrow like Bella’s the dumbest girl she’d ever known, and Bella figures she’s probably missed something. But Leah doesn’t reply for a little bit, sizing Bella up like she’s about to make some decision.

“Looked that way for a while.” Leah shrugs, turning those dark eyes away and Bella’s shoulders relax, though she doesn’t remember tensing them. “Honestly you look like you’ve hardly got a life left to ruin,” she says, a mean smirk on her lips that has Bella’s shoulder tightening right back up again. Maybe that was true, Bella mused, not all that insulted but still on edge with the sheer bitter energy twisting Leah’s face. 

“I didn’t know you’d been…” dumped was Leah's word, but Bella doesn’t like that. It makes her feel like a sack of potatoes, a weight that someone got tired of carrying. It hits a little too close to home and she rephrases awkwardly, no phrase summing up how it felt to her or how it must have felt for Leah. “That you’d been with someone.” 

“I thought the chief would have told you.” 

“He didn’t.” 

“You remember that guy, Sam from the bonfire?” She doesn’t really, most of the swimmers had been shadowed by the leaping flames of the bonfire and the silvery moonlight, but she recognises the name. It takes her a long moment to remember that ‘Sam’ was the one that had found her in the woods and brought her back to Charlie the night He left. “We were together, and now we’re not. And now he’s got a little club and thinks he can send in his little flunkey to tell me what to do instead of coming here himself.” It makes a little sense, Bella realises, the thought dawning on her as she remembers Leah’s mocking at the bonfire. Apparently, it hadn’t been the swimming she’d found so distasteful, but the man doing it. 

“So,” she starts, breath hoarse around the question she shouldn’t ask, shouldn’t even think. But it comes out anyway: “Is your life ruined?” 

The other girl glares at her for just a second, before the expression seems to fall away. Leah turns back to the little window overlooking the parking lot and Bella stares at the back of her head, wondering if Leah will answer or if Bella should leave and never come back. When Leah speaks again her voice is quiet, almost unsure in a way that Bella’s not heard her sound before. 

“I guess it’s not as ruined as I thought it would be.” 

Bella nods to herself, eyes falling shut as she tries to comprehend that. Silence stretches around them, only broken by the hum of the electric heater and the distant sounds of cars on the road. It’s so quiet she can hear Leah’s stance shift on the wooden floorboards, and she thinks again that it feels like a bubble, a delicate soap bubble they’re both sheltered inside. 

They don’t say anything for a long time, the atmosphere too heavy to break until Bella can’t stand it anymore. 

“It increases libido,” Bella blurts out, her face turning red as soon as the words are out. 

Leah turns sharply and looks at her like she’s crazy, her eyebrows furrowed like she’s trying to solve a puzzle. “What?” 

“Cold water swimming. Apparently it um increases estrogen and testosterone production and that… increases libido,” she says, her words stilted and formal, like she’s reading from a textbook and trying to abate Leah’s mood with a fact that can only be making the situation worse. Until Leah’s stony expression cracks, and the corner of her lips turn up. She laughs, laughs so hard that she bends at the waist and her cheeks redden and Bella can’t help it, a little laughter crawling up her throat and spilling out her lips, catching her by surprise. 

“Well that’s a better argument than your last one, I’ll give you that, Swan.” 

When she wakes up screaming on Monday morning, she isn’t surprised. She doesn’t always dream about the woods, but it's rare not to remember the shadows, the long, sprawling limbs and the voices calling through it. She considers it a gift not to dream, certainly not the norm. 

It isn’t raining, in fact for a long moment, the house is oddly quiet. No pipes stirring, no wind, no tree branches knocking at her window. Rolled up in her blankets she stares up at the ceiling, tracing pale shadows thrown from the street lights outside through her bare tree. The sharp shadows reach for her, and for a moment she can’t be certain she’s even awake at all, that this might be just another dream. Then she hears the thud of feet finding the floor and the opening of Charlie’s bedroom door. She quickly rubs the tears on her cheeks away and sits up. 

“Bells?” he calls, still sounding surprised as if they don’t do this every other night. He might never get used to this, even if she did months ago. Her dream still flickers at the edges of her consciousness, tall trees seeming to make up her walls instead of the wallpaper and tacked up photographs. He opens her bedroom door, and the emptiness, the quiet of her room and her dream begins to slip away. 

“Sorry, Dad,” she murmurs, looking past him into the dark hallway.

“It’s okay,” he says, his voice soothing, like he was talking to a whispered animal or, maybe more likely in his line of work, calming rowdy kids down enough for the drunk tank. “Can I get you anything?” 

“I’m fine,” Her eyes fade in and out of focus, for just a moment there are trees in the corners of her room holding up a rooftop of the star-strewn sky instead of popcorn ceiling. She checks her clock and finds the red numbers glowing on just after 6 AM, and too late to bother going back to sleep when she can leave for school soon. Charlie stands in the doorway, his shoulders rising and falling a little quickly, belying his calm persona, looking at her like he expects her to start screaming again. “Really, I’m sorry for waking you and I’m okay, Dad".  

“Harry called yesterday. Said Leah had seen you on the reservation.” 

“Yeah,” is that a problem?  She wants to ask but doesn’t. “Yeah, we got talking at the bonfire.” 

“That’s… that’s great Bella,” and Charlie bursts into the biggest grin she’s seen in months and a curl of vicious guilt snakes down her throat. Her mouth opens but all that comes out of a puff of air. Charlie looks ecstatic that his adult daughter had managed to leave the house for something more than school or work or the grocery store. His standards might as well be on the ground. 

“Yeah,” she responds, not sure what she can say, her throat thick with feeling. Charlie doesn’t seem to need anything, and god she’d glad for it. He just nods his head once, twice and lets it go. But she’s glad he knows. Glad he knows she tried and maybe eventually she’ll even tell him it was nice. 

“You all ready for school?’ She doesn’t know how to feel about school, she’s pretty numb about most of it, but there’s something to be said about having something to wake up in the morning for and a place to go. 

“I finished my last assignment Saturday.” 

“That’s great. Senior year right? You’ll be off to college before I know it,” he stands in her doorway, an awkward, wistful look on his face. He looks around, to the junk she’s tacked up to her walls, to the small but slowly growing pile of laundry in the corner, and the smile is fond in a way she doesn’t really recognise. 

School feels different than it did before winter break. It’s not the weather, drizzling as usual, or the new semester starting and the teachers droning on about coming exams and ‘getting serious’ and college applications. It doesn’t feel like it did before the break, and it doesn’t feel like it did before her birthday either. There’s a gnawing in her gut, but not the one He left behind, this is a loneliness she’s made all on her own. In her classes, the seat beside her is empty, because He used to sit there, and no one had dared to take his place. In the lunchroom, Jess and Angela talk about their breaks, about what they got for Christmas. They don’t ask her what she did, probably because they don’t expect her to answer. The memory feels faded, like a faded photograph, but she knows before break questions, concerns and casual conversation directed at her only gnawed at her consciousness, never at the forefront, never anything to put any effort into. She doesn’t blame them for not trying anymore. 

It’s her turn to try, she supposes. She opens her mouth a few times like a fish, realising she’s forgotten how to join in, forgotten where to look for a lull in the conversation. Jess and Angela speak quickly and quietly to one another and anxiety rears its ugly head. She doesn’t want to interrupt. Is she even a part of their conversation just because she’s sitting next to them? 

“What did you guys do for New Years?” Eventually, she blurts out, her voice stalling on the first syllable like her truck when she doesn't double pump the clutch. She's cut off the end of Angela's sentence, spoken too early to catch the lull. Jess jumps a little, turning to face her fully. Her mouth forms empty, soundless words for a second before she tries for a smile with a few too many teeth and starts again. 

“So about New Years,” Jess starts, an award blush on her cheeks and a grimace on her face. “I don’t know if you were upset - it’s just honestly I didn’t think you would want to come to a party, and I mean, you’re the chief’s daughter and I thought maybe - we didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, you know?” 

“Huh?” She blinks dumbly before understanding dawns. “Oh because you had been drinking?” Jess splutters, her face going brilliant red as she begins to defend herself. Her hands are fluttering by her face, and it makes Bella feel terrible to see the anxiety on her face. “Jess I don’t care about stuff like that,” she wraps her fingers together awkwardly. It’s somewhat gratifying to know that her father might be the reason she wasn’t invited more than her own social failings. “I wouldn’t tell my dad about stuff like that.”

“Oh!” Jessica says, the nerves on her face clearing a little, and her face smoothing into something a little kinder. 

“So I know I felt awful when you called but it was so great to hear from you! It feels like it’s been a million years since we talked, so tell me everything, how was your break?” 

“It was good,” Bella starts, a smile turning up the corners of her lips. Slowly, her voice a little stilted, she goes through what she did like she’s reading a calendar. But at least she can remember it.