Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

September 

November 

December

Her heart is beating, and for the first time in what feels like years, she can hear it. She can hear the roar of it in her ears, feel it beating so hard against her ribs they feel ready to crack and splinter. She can feel the flush in her cheeks and the tears spilling down her cheeks, staining paths on her skin. 

“I’m not going anywhere!” 

Her parents are shouting too, both of them and Renee is crying. When did Renee get here? 

She’s been speaking all this time. If she hadn’t been speaking then Charlie would have called Doctor Gerandy again, so she knows she’s been speaking, but it’s the first time her voice feels like it’s coming from her own mouth. Her mouth feels like it’s stuffed full of cotton wool, but she can feel it forming words and dragging in breath for the first time in what feels like a century. 

She surprises herself with some of the things she says. 

“I’m not leaving and you’re not taking my fucking coat!” She catches herself, unfamiliar profanity catching in her throat but spilling out like acid, loaning her that little bit more power and certainty, making her feel that little bit more powerful. 

Why is she standing on her bed? Why are her clothes everywhere? She doesn’t know, but she doesn’t stop. Whatever she’s holding in her hands she hurls it at the wall, hearing plastic crack and splinter. 

December 17th 2005 

She can hear the sound of raindrops tapping on her window pane. Her eyes open slowly, surprised to hear the sound as if she’d forgotten it. Everything: the sound of rain on her window, the grey light filtering through her curtains, the thick quilt against her skin seems to have come into sharp focus. It’s loud and bleak but it’s so… Forks. She’s still in Forks; the sound of raindrops on the glass proves it. “It can’t get this grey in Florida,” she rasps, rolling onto her back and hearing a familiar roughness in her voice. 

There’s a familiar heaviness in her eyelids too, but she isn’t as tired as she had been when she crawled into bed yesterday afternoon, and that’s nice. Her eyes snap open suddenly when she realises why this morning feels so different. Her voice is rough, it always is, but her throat isn’t raw from screaming herself awake. It’s so early that the sun’s barely risen behind the clouds, but it can technically still be classed as the morning. 

She slept the whole night. 

She has nowhere to go but she peels away from her mattress, the alien feeling of waking peacefully putting her off balance. The wooden floorboards are cold and she picks her feet up to avoid tangles of clothes and trash carpeting her floor as she makes her way over to the window; shut against the rain but not locked. Never locked. 

She reaches out her palm to the glass that’s foggy from the heat of the house and the cold winter air outside and wipes away the condensation. She can watch fat raindrops rolling down the glass, feel the gentle tap each drop makes. She pulls her hand away and her palm is pale white, wet and cold from the window and she shouldn’t be surprised but she is - because she can feel the chill on her skin. And she can feel how warm she is by contrast. 

She knows she’s alive in theory. She inhales deeply like she’s trying to prove it to herself. She’s kept herself alive; she’s cooked and eaten, she’s gone to school and taken notes - shoddy notes when she flips open the chemistry book on her desk for proof and finds doodles and unfinished sentences and homework assignments she didn’t turn in. She’s alive, but when she checks her phone and finds out it’s December 17th she can hardly remember one day out of nearly two months. Does that count as being alive? 

The tree outside her window is bare. Apparently, it’s been bare so long that there aren’t even any leaves on the ground anymore, they’re just gone, blown away in the wind or turned to mush by the rain. Last time she remembers looking they’d been just starting to turn orange and brittle in the Fall. She’s never seen a real Fall before, and she missed it.

Did Renee come to take her to Florida for Christmas? Is that why she’d been so upset when Bella had said no? 

She rubs her eyes so she can stop looking at her room. Was it always messy, or did she manage all of this while she was screaming at Renee? There are clothes everywhere and her CD rack has been upturned, shiny cases cracked and splintered from being stamped on. Bella has to guess that Renee has gone home by now, but she can’t remember if she’d said goodbye. Maybe not, after the way she had acted. 

She has the presence of thought to know that she shouldn't have done it, but she barely remembers doing it and it’s difficult to feel remorse for something that she feels so removed from. She only really has the evidence scattered at her feet and in the rawness of her throat; the memory doesn't feel like her own. 

Her mom and her sunshiny attitude had strolled in as if she belonged in Forks, trying to brighten up Bella’s bedroom with attitude and amiability alone. She’d talked about all the things they’d do in Florida like Bella wouldn’t suddenly be too tired to get out of bed. She talked like the last time they’d seen each other Bella hadn’t been in a hospital in Phoenix. Like the last time she’d seen her mom, He hadn’t been sitting at Bella’s bedside. 

She folds at the thought, pain raking through a hollow, empty space in her chest and falls heavily to her knees, arms knotted around her stomach like she’s trying to keep her organs locked inside her chest. It’s like a slideshow, the memory of Him pretending to sleep on a short couch, of Renee leaning over her in her hospital bed. She tries to breathe again but it’s like her lungs have rotted away inside her and won’t fill with air. “I think that boy might be in love with you”, Renee had said like it was obvious; like it made any sense. 

The rain on her window is so loud she covers her ears, gasping for breath that just doesn’t quite sustain her. 

December 20th 2005

She feels bad about Renee for days. She knows it’s been a few days because she’s making an effort now. She’s paying attention to the date, and because she knows the date she knows what day it is, and that means she’s bringing the right books to school, and deciding that on Thursday she’ll go to the Thriftway, and on Friday when she finishes her shift at Newton's she’ll try and make a lasagna. Going backwards she works out that it was Friday she’d come home to find Renee parcelling her stuff into suitcases and trash bags. 

It took Renee trying to donate her raincoat to Goodwill to really set her off, that memory came back when she found it tangled in her bedsheets like she was trying to protect it while she slept. “You won’t need it - it’s humid but not that humid!” It's a blur after that, but she can see evidence of what happened and she can remember hearing Renee cry. The next day she remembers better: barricading the door with her back just in case Renee was going to break it down and force her into the back of a van aimed at the sunshine state. 

She could see what Renee was trying to do in her own muddled way, with some distance she can allow her mother that. Renee had done it herself years ago: boxed up her things and threw away what she didn’t want and walked out of Forks with no plan of coming back. But Bella wasn’t Renee, and Renee would never understand what it felt like to be the one left behind. She wants to go back and have the chance to explain it to Renee properly, calmly but she doubts her mom would understand even if she could say it aloud. Charlie has his yellow kitchen cabinets to remind him of Renee in a house they lived together, but she doesn’t have a sliver of proof that He was here and that she loved him more than she’s ever loved anything. He always felt like a dream and she’s terrified he’ll fade like one. 

Even so, she knows for certain she shouldn’t have thrown a tantrum when she slips on the river of CD cases beside her bed and falls hard on her tail bone because then looking at the mess is unavoidable. She scowls down at the broken and cracked cases like it’s their fault she upended their nice safe stand and left them there to stomp on. Her behind hurts, and she can already imagine the bruise she’ll have as she curls up her legs and reaches for a handful of them. 

She hasn’t been listening to music lately. It demands an effort and thought beyond survival that she just doesn’t have in her anymore. The last time she heard the kitchen radio playing, it had been a classical station and she had wanted to scream. The jewel cases in her hands have sharp edges and she makes a pile of those that might still play. She hurls the broken ones sharply in the direction of her trash can. 

She isn’t thinking as she snaps up from her seat and starts to pick up discarded shoes, tossing them to lie in their proper place beneath her window sill instead of scattered all over. It’s not neat exactly, but they’re all in one place and it’s a semblance of order that clears a little more of the floor so she won’t trip over them again. There are still clothes she can slip on though, and she snatches them up, stomping around her small bedroom like a caged animal, muttering underneath her breath as she tosses most straight into her laundry basket and some on her bed to hang back up in her closet. 

Her head is throbbing, and maybe that’s because she’s hungry or thirsty or tired or sad, but she knows if she stops now she won’t try again and she wants it done. She wants to do something while she has the energy to do it, and when she came home from school she hadn’t crawled into bed right away, and that has to mean something. She is as needlessly aggressive with the task as she is unsteady. It's like she’s recovering from the flu and she has to take a break, sit down until her head stops spinning and her legs stop shaking, but there’s energy that feels foreign pent up inside her, a flush on her cheeks and her hands balled into fists. Sitting on her bed, surrounded by clothes she can’t stop looking at it. The mess she made and how angry the memory makes her. 

Amongst the scattered clothes, she finds her compilation of classic novels ripped in two at the weak binding and she’s actually not as heartbroken about that as she thought she’d be. It’s not like she wants to read about a woman falling in love with a name she can’t say anymore, and she trashes it without remorse. 

In the corner, underneath an old T-shirt is a familiar lump of metal and wires poking through a torn-up garbage bag. It looks ugly, it looks almost monstrous, like something her truck chewed up and spit out. It’s sharp, she knows and had some memory of her fingers bleeding by the time she’d ripped it out of her truck's dashboard and scratches on her arms from dragging it up here. She doesn’t want that memory. She doesn’t touch it, but she shoves it across the floor with her toe until she can dump it in the back of her closet. 

The floor’s clearer, and because it’s clear she can see dust bunnies in the corners, and with a dirty t-shirt balled in her fist she sweeps them into a corner, telling herself she’ll bring up a brush later. She’s being loud, and she’s not doing a very good job but it’s making her feel better. 

The sound eventually attracts Charlie, and she can hear his heavy footfalls on the stairs before he ducks his head around the door. He watches the scene in silence and she starts folding the clothes on her bed. Some of them need ironing, but she’s not going to do that so she throws them in the direction of the laundry basket to put off the task a little longer. 

“When did mom leave?” She asks eventually, feeling guilty that she needs to. Charlie looks at her with wide eyes, like he expected the toaster to ask a question before his daughter. 

“Sunday,” Charlie says, brushing his thumb over the bristles of his moustache, smoothing it down in a nervous action she didn’t see often. “She was pretty upset, Bella.” 

“I’ll give her a call. Apologise.” She swallows the action so loud and so difficult that for a minute she feels like it might swallow her tongue by accident. “Sorry. I just didn’t want to leave.” 

Charlie sighs and neither of them can look the other in the eye. Charlie’s focusing on the wall behind her head, and her eyes are fixed, folding a t-shirt with more precision than anything else on the pile. “Well if you want to stay, I want you to stay too. So long as it’s what’s good for you.”

“It is.” 

December 23rd, 2005 

On the last day of the semester the rain is coming down like a river, and when Bella walks into the den after her shift at Newton's she freezes when she sees a rich green tree taking up a corner and a thoughtful look on Charlie’s face. He jumps at the sound, and he looks awkward and guilty, eyes darting between her and the tree like he’s not sure what he’s done and why he’s dragged it inside.  

“Dad?” She asks, standing in the doorway like an idiot. Her eyes must be wide as anything because she’s never seen something like this outside of the movies, but the tree kind of suits the faded walls behind it and the old plaid blanket he’s spread beneath it. 

“Christmas?” He says, raising one hand, waiting for her to confirm this is something she wants, something that makes her happy, something she recognises. But she doesn’t. Christmas with Renee rarely felt like Christmas; Arizona heat was one surefire way to kill a festive mood, and real trees are expensive, so the last couple of years they’d used a silver plastic one that leaned to the left and wasn’t strong enough to hold any decorations. This tree is huge and strong and smells like pine. When she opens the dusty boxes on the couch the decorations are old and shiny and red and tangled up with lights and plastic holly laurels and there are tall candles wrapped in newspaper. 

Christmas. She nods to herself, picking up the tail end of a string of lights so tangled they look like a tumbleweed. She nods to herself again, and then a third time to Charlie, meeting his gaze and giving him a small, weak smile. She sits on the arm of the couch and starts untangling with far more vigour than the task demands.

She sees Charlie nod his head a few times as well out of the corner of his eye and he leaves and comes back with the kitchen radio and a rag.  She takes in a long, deep breath, preparing for the sound to hurt, the memory of hearing that classical song still raw in her heart. He fiddles for a minute, tuning into a jazz station as she bows her head and sets her jaw. But the radio is full of static, and the volume is low and the DJ interrupts with ads and call-ins. It hardly feels like music, just noise. It doesn’t hurt, and she’s barely listening as Charlie hums off-key to himself. He sits down on the other end of the couch with a dust rag and starts cleaning up the old baubles, setting clean ones on the coffee table. When she asks, Charlie insists that he gets a tree every year, he says that he always decorates for Christmas and that this is totally normal. But the candles are wrapped in newspaper that’s more than ten years old, and there’s only so much dust you can blame on a year.

They don’t say much. It’s obvious that neither of them really know what they’re supposed to do for Christmas, but he’s clearly trying to figure out how to do this, and she’s too busy figuring out how to be a person again to come up with any suggestions. It’s nice. Awkward, but nice. 

When Charlie goes to bed she pulls out the gift she’d bought him after her shift at Newton's: a new set of fishing lures wrapped in the brown bag they’d come in because she forgot about wrapping paper and doubts they have any scotch tape. It looks a little pathetic, and the gift wasn’t inventive, but she’s trying. Honestly, she’s just happy she remembered Christmas at all. 

The next morning Charlie’s added a few gifts of his own wrapped in plastic bags with store names on them and a bright orange gift bag that must have arrived from Renee. He has to work the night shift but in the morning he finds a faded cookbook that reminds him of his mom, and when he goes to work she uses it to make lumpy sugar cookies, cutting them into stars with a steak knife because they don’t have any cutters. They taste like sawdust because even when she was better she’d never been a great baker, but it feels conventional and somehow familiar. 

It’s different from anything she’s ever done before, and she wants things to be different. 

December 31st, 2005. 

Charlie spends New Years at La Push, no surprise there. Hell, she’s surprised they made an overcooked ham for Christmas instead of just setting up camp at the Clearwaters or the Blacks table. So a bonfire on the frigid beach on New Year's Eve holds an appeal, even if she’s wearing two pairs of leggings underneath her jeans. It’s not raining really, just that misty sort that soaks through you without your notice and it’s bearable wrapped up in her thickest sweater and her raincoat. 

She and Charlie join the elders at the community party in a restaurant just off the beach, but after a half-hour of following him around hearing ‘Oh how you’ve grown!” She tells him she wants to check out the bonfire. It’s bitterly cold and the fire is tended by a group of wildly underdressed teenage boys, but it’s dark and the people bracing the cold are closer to her age and don’t know her face, so she can wander around freely on the sand. 

“Bella!” she hears, shaking her from her solitary wandering and in the darkness, it takes her a long second to recognise Jacob Black. She gives him a wave and he dives towards her like she was sending up neon lights. The smile on his face makes her flinch. The last time she saw him was prom when he’d told her she should stay away from Him. He wasn’t wrong, but she still doesn’t want to be reminded that everyone except her could see it was only going to end up killing her. What had Jacob said? ‘We’ll be watching you.’ 

“Happy New Years, right?” He says with a grin that’s so wide it had to hurt his jaw. He’s gotten taller she thinks, craning her neck up to look at his youthful, happy face. 

“Think we still have a couple hours left before that,” she replied, trying to make a joke, but her voice is flat. It’s strange, she’s made progress with Charlie, but it looks like she has a long way to go with anyone else. She licks her chapped lips when Jacob doesn’t reply, and she gets that because she hadn’t given him much to work with. The silence between them is just a little too long before she finally finds something to stay. 

“So are your sisters home for the holidays?” Jacob looks thrilled the conversation isn’t over, his white teeth gleaming as he grins. 

“Rebecca stayed with her husband and his family this year,” he says, and Bella feels bad for bringing it up. She knows the Black’s aren’t the happiest of families - in the back of her mind she remembers Charlie mentioning Rebecca had gotten married to a surfer not long ago and hadn’t visited since. “But Rachel’s here! She’s not staying long but she’s right -“ Jacob pauses, pointing one finger like an arrow circling around the silhouettes on the beach, seeking out his sister and finding her with a group of three standing a few feet away from the bonfire “There! With Leah and Hannah. Oh, you probably remember Leah - Harry Clearwater’s daughter? - but I can introduce you to Hannah. She and her husband moved here a couple months back.” Before she has time to answer Jacob swings an arm around her shoulders and propels her over to them. When they get there he doesn’t move it off and it feels like a weight that might make her sink into the sand. 

“Guys - you remember Bella?” 

Rachel does look familiar when she turns into the yellow light of the fire, and Bella waves a greeting from a distance, hampered by Jacob’s hold on her. Would it be rude to shake him off? She experiments, jostling a little but he doesn't seem to get it or she hasn’t tried hard enough and it stays. “Hey, Happy New Year,” she says lamely and with about half the enthusiasm Jacob had. But next thing she knows there’s an arm offering her a loose embrace and she takes it, using it as an excuse to shrug off Jacob’s arm and keep it off her, standing a little closer to the trio of girls. 

“Of course! Charlie’s daughter,” Rachel says kindly enough, but there’s a little trace in her voice, some saccharine sweetness she’s finally come to recognise in her last week of school. It has a cushion, like bubble wrap. It's pity, and she knows immediately that Rachel knows. 

“Bella Swan?” The shorter of the other two girls says suddenly, her eyes wide, bringing up one palm immediately to cover her mouth like she hadn’t meant to speak. So there was another one that knew. It takes her a minute, but she figures that this girl is Hannah, the girl new to the reservation because her face doesn’t ring a single bell. There’s a spark of hazy recognition for the taller girl, maybe because she’s looking Bella up and down like she’s trying to remember her too. Leah’s got about an inch or two on Bella, and her face is so fine-boned in the half-light that she feels like she should be looking at a charcoal drawing of a woman. She's intimidatingly pretty, but at least she doesn’t say anything while Bella shifts her feet, trying to ignore the obvious conversation Hannah and Rachel are having with their eyes. 

“In the flesh,” she says, trying to make them stop. “So you’re in college now right?” 

“Yeah Washington State,” Rache’s attention is captured quickly enough, and she tries to temper the spark of pride that she's finally picked the right thing to say because Rachel nearly glows at the chance to talk about it. “It’s going so great! I mean it’s hard, obviously, but I like living in Pullman, and it’s a nice change from things around here. You must be a senior by now, right?”

She doesn’t need much input, and Bellas glad for it because she doesn’t have much to add, nodding along dumbly as Jacob chimes in occasionally, talking about what Bella and Rachel had missed at La Push like it’s a WS vs Home contest. 

“God here we fucking go,” Leah says suddenly, interrupting the stream of conversation, her eye turned to the waters edge where - what? Bella’s eyes widen like she can’t quite tell what’s happening, but she’s pretty certain there are six figures at the water's edge stripping off their coats, then their shirts, then the rest of their layers like that’s a normal thing to do in December. “The annual ‘look at us swim-a-thon’.” Around them, most of the party has moved a little closer to watch them like it’s a show, even Jacob does, darting away from her side and towards a pair of boys he seems to know well. 

“What are they doing?” Bella says, appalled and hugging her arms closer as if their near nudity was making her colder. It makes her feel old, but the way the frigid air is stinging her face she can’t imagine that water is safe, and she tries to remember how to treat hypothermia before they’ve even dipped a toe in the water. 

“Some of the guys do it every year, it used to be this big thing up in Canada and they do it in Seattle, I guess it just made its way here too, I’ve never seen Paul join in before though,” Rachel explains quickly, and Bella notices that Leah’s face is set in a scowl and her eyes are on the ground, kicking up sand with her boots. 

“Who is it?” Bella asks, squinting through the salty sea spray and smoke from the bonfire. 

“Sam Uley and Jared - they’ve done it the last couple times, that’s Paul and those two are older than me, I think they work at the Fishery - and the other one’s my husband,” Hannah says with an apology in her voice. She nods a goodbye and heads for the crowd, either to stop him or to egg him on or just to see him shirtless. Bella’s not really sure what the protocol for husbands is, the Cullens may all have been married, but they weren’t conventional and she realises she’s never really known anyone married before. 

At the water's edge, there’s a girl cheering like her life depends on it as the silhouettes of the swimmers disappear into the black water. There are a few fans of the display doing the same, laughing, cheering them on to go deeper and to stay in longer. There are cries from the swimmers too, high screams like it hurts and she imagines it probably does. 

Behind her, she can hear Leah telling someone to go fuck themselves. 

“You said you’d give it a try one day if I remember right, Leah,” Rachel said, her voice a little waspish to match Leah’s. 

“Really?” Bella asks, not turning, her eyes still fixed on the black water. The waves aren’t high but the six disturb the water: all flailing limbs trying to stay warm and keep their heads above or below the waves. They look ridiculous, like kids that never learned to swim, but they’re roaring with pride and the crowd watching is laughing too like it’s supposed to be fun. 

“You’re remembering wrong. I like my toes attached to my feet and my clothes on my body,” Leah snipes back quickly and Bella snorts, agreeing with her. Honestly, she’d prefer less nudity all around if anyone was asking. When she looks up Leah’s looking at her, she smirks a little and digs her elbow into Rachel’s side. 

“Surprised your brother isn’t joining in - any chance to impress his little crush, right?” 

“Don’t embarrass him!” Rachel jabs her right back “Or give him any ideas.” 

“Better be careful, Swan, if his puppy dog eyes are anything to go by Jacob might be hoping for a kiss at midnight.” 

“Huh?” Bella looks around, her eyes wide like that’s crazy. Then it hits her. She’s at a New Years Party, and if the movies are anything to go by, that’s not unheard of. But It takes her a second to realise they were talking about her and Jacob as if there was any chance. She snorts at the idea, still watching as the shrieking guys start dunking each other under the water. “You mind if I hide behind you when the countdown starts?” 

Leah cracks a smile. Even if it’s tiny, she actually smiles more a twitch or a spasm than a smile, but she still smiles at something Bella said. 

“You’re pretty small, it shouldn’t be too hard.” 

The swimmers start to move out of the water, and maybe she gets why they’d want to do this when people laugh and embrace them while they shiver and throw coats and blankets around their shoulders. Soaking wet and towelling off they’re given pride of place at the fireside. They’re shaking and they look awful, faces still and slow with shock but they’re alive, holding out their hands to the fire and she can almost feel the pins and needles, the stabbing of warmth pushing back into frozen fingertips. 

January 3rd, 2006. 

She’s trying to keep busy. She can’t lie to herself when she’s so desperate to keep busy that she’s scoured the house twice over for junk she can donate to goodwill or trash. 

She could call Jess, she supposes, but she doesn’t want to talk to her again. She’d tried the day before, and Jess had been whimpering down the line, trying to pass off a New Years hangover as the flu and hinting that she couldn’t talk because her mom was listening in for gossip. Even if Jess has recovered by now, she doesn’t want to ask what she got for Christmas and check-in to see if Jess and Mike are on or off these days. It’s too banal, too numbing, like sitting in the lunchroom staring at the walls and letting the world go on around her again. And she doesn’t want to hear Jess say ‘Bella?’ down the line like it’s so shocking for her to call, even if it is. She’s tired. She’s still so tired that all she wants to do is crawl into bed, but if she does that then there’s no guarantee she won’t wake up with another month missing and look out the window to see leaves on the tree again. How long will it be this time? A week? A month? Will she graduate and not even notice? 

It feels strange, to realise that the house around her seems too big, too quiet and too cold in a way that she would usually call happy solitude. In Phoenix, she’d been alone most of the time, and keeping tucked quietly away on the couch or in her bedroom while Renee was out at classes or work or on dates never seemed as daunting or infinite as it has since the holidays had begun. Maybe He had spoilt it for her. Being alone had become so rare that even in the middle of the night there someone to talk to. Maybe his family had spoilt it for her as well, with Alice always seeming so pleased to see her, trying to parcel time to be together as a pair or with the entire family. 

She dials the Clearwaters number because she can make up an excuse to talk to Sue if she picks up. If Sue picks up she can ask if these Pyrex dishes are hers, or if they came from another donor that’s brought them food at some point in the last two months. If Sue picks up Bella can have something close to an easy conversation, go back to her pointless sorting of the kitchen cupboards, and forget she even called. 

“Hello?” it isn’t Sue. 

“Hey, Leah?” 

“Yeah who’s this?” 

“It’s um - it’s Bella - Bella Swan?” 

“Oh, you need my dad?” Leah’s voice fades out as if she’s already ready to hand off the phone to someone else. 

“No!” Bella says too loudly, the phone making a strange streak of feedback at the sudden volume. She swallows, face heating and tries again more quietly. “No, I was actually calling to talk to you.”

Leah doesn’t respond, and the silence stretches on just a little too long until Bella carries on.  

“I just - I don’t know if Rachel was kidding, but do you maybe wanna try that cold water swimming thing?” she says the words before she even realises she wanted to try it. Sure, at the bonfire she’d thought she could see a spark of something appealing in diving into the cold, black water for a few minutes, but not enough that she actually wanted to try it. Apparently, she does though. 

There’s another long pause, like Leah’s questioning her sanity and anxiety creeps in. Leah hadn’t exactly been the warmest or most welcoming person she’d met in Washington, and even if Rachel had been serious and it was something Leah wanted to do, she had plenty of opportunities to try it with people she knew and liked better than Bella. But Bella didn’t think Angela or Jess would even entertain the idea, and that put her out of options. 

“Why?” 

“I don’t know, I guess I don’t have anything else to do today?” or most days. 

Leah sighs but maybe it’s a groan like she’s annoyed, and Bella nearly hangs up then and there.

“Did someone tell you to call me?”

“No I just - look never mind I just thought -” 

“Not my parents or Charlie or Rachel or anyone at the party? No one told you to call me up to hang out?” 

“No, why would they?” 

Leah sighs again, but she sounds less annoyed, and less like she’s doing Bella some big favour. 

“If I say no are you going to do it anyway?” 

“I don’t know, maybe?” she hears Leah mutter something on the other end of the line that she can’t hear. 

“I’m working today, come by.” 

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. 

Chapter Text

It’s stupid. It’s a stupid, terrible, functionally insane idea. 

The driveway is overgrown, thick foliage brushing the sides of her truck, the road a little uneven from fallen branches. And when she kills the engine of her truck, the quiet is terrifying. 

The nose of her truck is pointed at the Cullens house.

She wants to kick herself for doing it. She didn’t even plan it, didn’t properly think beyond the quiet query rattling around her brain. She got in her truck, and the next thing she was driving the familiar path she didn’t want to think about, let alone travel. She’s supposed to be with Leah, Leah’s at work, and Bella doesn’t have a shift at Newton’s today, so it’s pretty much expected at this point that she’d be holding up her corner at Native Grounds. The regulars have even come to expect her: She should be there, with  Leah,  and instead, she’s here and she’s alone. 

The quiet makes her contemplative in a way she’s come to despise. 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 and when Bellas away from her she misses the noise and the messy rhythm of it. When she’s alone it feels too quiet for her, and every long silence drags on and on forever. Here, the cab of her truck is deadly silent, like not even birds or the breeze dare disrupt the meadow where the Cullens had once made their home. She tries drumming her fingertips on the steering wheel, trying to replicate that energy, that noise about Leah that she finds so comforting, but it just irritates her and feels awkward, even with no one to watch her. 

That’s why she’s here though, isn’t it? Leah had mentioned it weeks ago, that if the Cullens had left so soon after taking the radio out of her truck, that maybe they hadn’t had time to trash it or drive it to the junkyard or do whatever you did with ancient truck radios. That maybe, just maybe, there was a chance it was still in there. When she looked at the empty gash in her dash, she imagined her radio in the Cullens garage, shoved in a closet or kicked underneath one of Rosalie’s workbenches so it didn’t pollute her expensive tools. 

She swings open the truck’s door, the squeal making her cringe, and again she feels almost heard, almost watched. Maybe it’s a vain, stupid hope that the house is not as uninhabited as it looks. Maybe it’s dread. The Cullens don’t need to come into town for food, they don’t need to go to school, they don’t need to be seen if they don’t want to be. It’s not completely crazy to think that they’re still here, so much closer than she can bear, and just hiding from her. Her feet hover, half in, half out of the truck, but entirely unable to take the step into the overgrown grass. She won’t even let the toes of her boots touch the high grass like it’ll knot around her and drag her out of the safety of the cab. 

Would Rosalie have left her tools behind? She wonders suddenly, and the thought surprises her because it’s so practical. No matter how expensive they were the Cullens could always just buy more, would they bother packing them up at all? Maybe inside the house was exactly as she’s seen it last, the furniture unmoved, the closets still full, walls still spotted with expensive art. 

When she's dared to think about this place, looming in her bad dreams and her emptier days, she'd never expected time to touch it. When she thought of it, it had been as warm and inviting as it had been on her eighteenth birthday when roses, cake and candles had welcomed her inside. She takes a long, raking breath and looks up to the white house again. It looks grimy. Weather-worn and uncared for, ravaged by the empty months. 

There’s no one in there. Who cares if they left behind old clothes and expensive tools; they left behind her just as easily. 

She sits in her truck for a long time, until the sky turns pitch black and the gentle rain starts to pound down hard enough that she can’t see the house as anything more than a ghostly white smear in her windshield. 

When she finally gets home it’s late. Later than she usually shows up, and late enough that Charlie’s probably starving, guilt wracks through her and she leaps out of the truck, heading for the open door and calling out an apology because she didn’t call ahead. 

“I’m sorry I’ll start dinner -“ she stops. 

“Oh good timing, Bells,” Charlie is at the stove, and the thought worries her because she’s not seen him successfully cook before. Was he that hungry? Why weren’t the smoke alarms going off? 

“It’s just breakfast for dinner. I know I’m not the best cook, but I can rustle up a cooked breakfast like nobody,” he says, fluffing his moustache as he flips the last few rashes of bacon onto his plate. The smell is thick and unhealthy and salty and mouthwatering as he hands her a plate loaded with toast, bacon, sausage, tomato, mushroom and eggs. Guilt gnaws for a different reason. Charlie lived without her for sixteen years, and there she is, thinking he can’t manage a meal without her? 

“This is great,” she says, smiling down at the fried eggs on her plate, yolks golden and runny and better than she’s ever managed to make them. She always overcooks eggs. They both settle into their assigned kitchen chairs, the routine familiar. “You know, if you wanted to practice… maybe we could cook together when you’re on the early shift?” 

“That sounds real good, Bella. 

“How about steak? Steak’s easy.” She takes a bite of toast gleaming with golden yoke. It’s perfect. 

“Last Deadlines are up soon, we’ve got our Washington State applications in weeks ago, but I have a few more safety schools my mom wants me to apply for,” Angela says around a stack of textbooks and papers she’s started to bringing to most lunches. They’re all about college admissions, about writing the right essays and SAT scores, things Bella has barely any information about because, if they’d been told this in class, clearly she hadn’t been listening. It makes her feel totally off guard like she’s ten steps behind everyone else because the future she’d been planning has gone up in smoke.

Mike is taking a year out to work in his parent's store, he’d told her that when they were on shift together. He likes the store, it’s easy, stress-free and he’s toying with a vague plan to road trip with Tyler next summer. He wants to save up some serious money, and use it to either spring for a college out of state or a better car - he’s not sure yet. Vaguely, she toys with the idea herself. She doesn’t want to leave Forks. She doesn’t want to leave her dad, or La Push, or the ghost of the Cullen house looming at the edge of her consciousness. Every day is starting to feel like it did when Renee had arrived: like if she leaves Forks; her familiar bedroom and the familiar roads that she’ll never come back. That she’ll forget everything that happened here. But Leah will be gone in the fall, heading to college herself, and so will Jess and Angela and Eric and Tyler. 

“Are you applying to anywhere in Florida with your mom?” Eric asks her. She shrugs and mumbles, the response she’s given to everyone that’s asked her in the last few weeks. The first few times they ask again, forgetting that they asked and forgetting that she didn’t answer, but they’re starting to notice she hasn’t answered, and what that probably means.

Forks isn’t going to stay unchanged the way she wants it to. If everyone leaves and she stays behind, won’t it be just like before? Even staying in Forks, like Mike, won’t stop time. It won’t stop her from changing, it won’t stop her from growing older. it won't stop her truck from rusting and the Cullen house falling into disrepair. She’s not sure she wants to go exactly, but as everyone chooses their next steps it becomes more and more obvious that she can’t just choose to do nothing because even staying behind is a choice. 

“Hey - can I borrow these?” She asks, flipping through a couple of Angela’s brochures - all for in-state colleges that can offer cheaper tuition and that’s good because her college fund is minuscule. The University of Washington brochure stares up at her, plastered with smiling students carrying textbooks and touting a modern, metropolitan Seattle city campus. She flicks through and finds one for South Seattle College, where Leah is planning to attend in the fall. She doesn’t open them, but she slips them in her bag, and when she sees Leah a day later she flips through them, and only a small portion of her interest is faked. 

Bella knows, theoretically that Leah had to retake her midterms over the summer because she didn’t show up for three of them. And she gets why, because of that, Leah thinks she might be some cautionary tale. But she’s not that at all: Leah worked her way through summer school to make up her midterms and took so much extra credit to keep busy that she graduated with better grades than she’d expected, even if she refused to go to the celebratory bonfire on the beach and be proud of it. If anything, Leah’s a better example than she’d ever admitted. She thinks about that a lot as she’s trawling through every Washington college prospectus she can find. She thumbs through Washington State a couple of times, thinking of Rachel, but the campus is more rural, and being in a city again appeals to something in Bella that had liked the noise and size and anonymity of Phoenix. She just keeps coming back to UoW. 

“I guess if you happened to end up in Seattle it wouldn’t be the worst thing.” Leah interrupts Bella’s ceaseless scribbling and when she looks up Leah is focusing on scrubbing the already clean counter. She hasn’t even said it out loud to Leah about Seattle, but maybe she can see her writing messy notes about admission deadlines and the vague essay plan taking shape. 

“We could be study buddies.” She smiles as Leah’s answers with a derisive snort. “What are you gonna major in?” 

“When I was a kid I wanted to be a lawyer.” Bella starts, somehow not having expected that answer. But it makes sense: Leah would make a good lawyer; Bella can picture her already, arguing in court in a sharp suit. She waves a hand, brushing away the thought.

“You don’t still want that?” 

“Too long in school,” Leah shrugs, not seeming heartbroken but certainly not happy about it either. “I’m gonna major in business.” 

“That suits you,” Bella says, imaging Leah still in a sharp suit but in a board room this time. The image is all wrapped up in Leah’s commanding voice and that ‘take no shit’ attitude she owns so well. There’s not all that much she thinks Leah couldn’t do. Knowing her, Bella wouldn’t think she’d be the best fit for a tourist office/coffee shop, but Leah knows La Push, the trails, the roads and the shore like the back of her hand. She knows what the locals want by heart, and knows better than the oldest, greyest hiker that comes through. And she makes really good coffee, even if she doesn’t always serve good coffee to the customers. 

“What about you?” 

“I don’t know, English I guess,” Bella muses, but honestly it was never a concrete plan. She’d never really had one besides finish high school, go to college, major in something, and find any job going. Before she’d moved to Forks, she was pretty sure she’d go to college in Arizona and live with her mom until she graduated, but things changed so fast she hadn’t had much time to come up with a solid alternative, and last springs sudden potential for a bloodthirsty eternal life had certainly made her think even less about college applications. “I guess I used to want to be a writer.”

“But not anymore?” 

“I don’t know, seems a little…” Too hard? Too unstable? Too “I liked reading,” she gives up, her shoulders slumping at the lame explanation. Except that wasn’t being a writer. And when was the last time she wrote anything that wasn’t a school essay? Even before this and before Forks, she wasn’t exactly bursting with imagination, and the thought of writing fiction, writing thoughts and feelings down about other people when she barely had control of her own wasn’t exactly appealing. Leah shrugs her shoulders and turns away, saying hello to a customer and serving them a coffee. 

She and Charlie have developed a routine. She cooks two days a week when she gets back from Newtons and Charlie’s on the night shift, he cooks two days so she can stay with Leah until late, and three days a week they cook basic-but-getting-better dinners together. 

“So I sent off my application for UoW today,” Bella says as she and her father sit down at the dinner table, passing over the cutlery. Charlie stills, looking up at her with so much surprise it could be insulting. He chews quickly, cheeks puffing out so he can speak without a mouthful of noodles and vegetables. 

“Bella, that’s great!” He says, smiling so wide Bella can see his back teeth. “So Seattle?” 

“I have a couple of backup schools to apply for. UoW is kind of a long shot; my application is rushed because I was so late.”

“Well, it sounds like you’re being smart. I thought maybe you’d want to go back to Phoenix,” he looks at his plate to avoid her gaze, but Bella can suddenly tell just how happy he is that she’s only moving four hours away. That new feeling, that warmth of familial affection rises in her chest and she hurries to assuage his worries. 

“I’m not sure I can handle the sun anymore,” she baits him around another bite of her dinner. “Think of all the money I’ll save on SPF.” 

“Have you thought about your major?”  

“Yeah,” she hums, a little far away in thought about the options that have started cropping up as she scrawls out essay plans that ask her questions like ‘ What do you want to achieve with your college degree?’  And ‘ How will you make a difference?’  And ‘What kind of person are you? ’ “I’ve been thinking a little about journalism. Or maybe teaching.”

“Well you’ve got plenty of time, that’s what college is all about.” 

“You’re right,” She nods, having heard it all before and still hearing it most days around the cafeteria. Time sounds good though, time to think. “And anyway, it all depends on how financial aid pans out. My college fund is pathetic.” 

“You kidding me Bells? I’ve been putting away for college since you were this high,” Charlie snorts around a mouthful of stir fry. She watches him shovel noodles into his mouth, surprised by how surprised she is by that. That warmth is there again. 

Bella’s rethinking every choice she’s made since New Years.

Her sneakers are worn and old because she only wears them for gym, and her outfit consists of her Forks High gold gym shorts underneath an old sweatshirt that makes her feel both underdressed and overdressed. Her bare legs are freezing, stuck with salty sea spray and sand, while the top half of her is dripping in sweat. 

Ahead of her, long limbs wrapped up in black and grey athletic wear, Leah has kindly started running in place to let her catch up. The wet sand they’d been jogging on has fallen away, and the grass and greenery of the forest trail are easier to deal with but much more dangerous, filled with reaching branches and roots that might as well be booby-trapped just to grab her.  

If she hadn’t been pretty damn close to death already, she’d think this was it. 

She picks through the greenery nervously, eyeing every exposed root and pile of slippery leaves until she meets Leah’s gaze, finally close enough to see the amused expression on her face. She flushes, but her face is already so red and sweaty that she probably can’t tell. Leave it to her to insert herself into Leah’s hobby and suck this much at it.

“You weren’t kidding when you said you’d be slow,” Leah calls, the soles of her sneakers tapping on the wet undergrowth, bouncing her on the spot rather than slow down. Geez, where does she get that kind of energy? 

“I pretty much only run when I’m being chased,” Bella gasps, finally catching up to her. Leah peels from her spot, jogging beside her, slowing considerably so they can run side by side.

“You practically begged to come along,” Leah snorts, her legs and arms pumping in perfect rhythm. Beside her, Bella looks like a puppet with knotted strings. 

“I really - can’t -“ she gasps, not certain if she’s having a panic attack or if this is just what it feels like to jog. “- talk when -” she doesn’t have to finish her thought, something much more humiliating happens. The toe of her sneaker catches on something, wrenching her down sharply from her upright position until she crashes into the muddy, damp bracken of the floor. 

“Shit - Bella?” Leah drops, kneeling beside her as Bella crawls into a sit to survey the damage. Her legs are covered in wet bark and mud, but there’s a cut on her knee, not very deep but plenty wide and beginning to gently ooze. 

It’s red, brilliant red and thick and she thinks about a paper cut, about a glass table, about Jasper’s snapping teeth and the eyes of an entire family going black with hunger and hate. Her breath heaves, and she didn’t even know it could be harder to fill her lungs with air than it already was.

“I’m so sorry!” She gasps, slapping her palm over the sluggishly bleeding cut. Someone might as well be grasping her throat in their fist, keeping it shut tight. The green forest begins to tower over her, evergreens looming, looking down on her from impossible heights that make her small, tiny and getting smaller by the second. The woods are filled with shades of darkness, muddy browns and emerald greens and grey shadows but in the corner of her eye is that a flash of white? Of pale skin? Of rusty orange hair? She whimpers, her vision blurring with tears or oxygen deprivation - she doesn’t care. She can’t even feel the bracken floor digging into her, the roar of her heart too loud for sight or feeling to break through it. The forest begins to fade, turning into black spots in her vision and numbness spreading from her fingertips and toes up to her arms and legs. Is this what it felt like on New Years? For the boys swimming in that ice-cold water? Painless and terrifying?

She hears something, the sound soft, smooth, just about breaking through the roar in her ears. “Bella!” It feels far away, but the hand wrapped around the back of her neck doesn’t. It reminds her she has a body to go with her screaming heartbeat and she reaches for them. For the voice until it sounds clearer until she can feel the warmth of someone else’s skin against her own. 

She splays out her fingertips on the cold and damp forest floor, the surface anchoring her to the ground, to the earth, just in case she floats away and Leah’s hand isn’t enough to hold her down. 

Leah slowly counts to seven, and Bella recognises it as something Renee had tried to make her do before; a meditation technique. She breaths in slowly until Leah reaches seven and starts again. As She counts up again Bella breaths out, her lips pursed, rationing the air she’ll let go until Leah’s count is complete. They go around in a circle, Bella’s not sure for how long, but until the trees are just trees again, and she can focus on the inky black end of Leah’s ponytail and wipe away her wet eyes with tingling fingertips. 

She draws a hand up to cover Leah’s on her neck, squeezing her fingers in gratitude as Leah stops counting. Leah’s dark eyes are still worried, her head bent very close to Bella’s face like she’s checking she’s still breathing properly. She smiles weakly, letting go of Leah’s fingers and Leah drops her hand shortly after. 

“Thank you,” she whispers, her voice raw with emotion. She digs in the pocket of her shorts with clumsy fingers and extracts a couple of bandaids, ignoring Leah’s wide eyes. 

“You came running with bandaids?” Leah asks eventually, one eyebrow raised like it was funny. It is, she supposes. 

“I told you - me and running are a health hazard,” Bella shrugs, trying to modulate the wavering tone of her voice. She’s glad Leah thinks it’s funny, she wants Leah to think she’s funny, rather than someone who collapses at a speck of blood and memory. She wipes as much of the dirt and drying blood away as she can with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. It’s nowhere near sanitary but damp and sweaty is one thing, bloody is another completely, and she never really got over her queasiness at the sight of blood. Leah’s quiet while she fixes herself up, slapping on two bandaids to cover the gash completely, catching her breath and retying her ponytail. Eventually, Bella has nothing else to do to waste the time, and Leah stands. 

“Come on, we can turn back,” Leah says, offering a hand. Bella takes it, letting Leah haul her to her feet. 

“No, I’m totally fine.” She locks her knees so she doesn’t bend double to clutch the stitch in her side or wobble on unsteady feet. She’s pretty sure she’s wearing a ‘bring it on’ face, but Leah looks at her like she’s crazy. “I just - I get queasy at the sight of blood. Sorry.” She lies, and they both probably know it’s a lie but Leah lets it pass her by. She doesn’t start jogging, instead, she walks, continuing up the path. When Bella stumbles on her shaky leg, Leah grips a fistful of her sleeve roughly, then readjusts, wrapping her fingers more gently around her wrist like a bracelet. It’s small, something tiny and insignificant, but like Leah’s fingers at her neck, it’s an anchor. A weight. A little flag that reads  I’m here and so are you. 

“Okay, but if we go left we can cut this short and go up the cliffs. Are you as scared of heights as you are of blood?” 

Bella laughs, gasping even after only a few steps that she takes with Leah by her side. She doesn’t notice, but Leah’s grip on her wrist loosens again and slips down, and their fingers fit together more comfortably as they pick their way across the rocky ground. 

When they reach the top of the cliffs, Bella still can’t breathe very well, lungs tight in another stitch, but it’s not because of memories this time. It’s because she’s tramped through the ferny undergrowth as the ground started to turn steeper and the trees gave way to the wide-open space of the cliffs and the trail towards the edge. 

She and Leah stand at the edge for a long minute, and Bella can’t help but breath out a ‘woah’ at the grey-blue ocean, nearly the exact shade as the sky in the distance. The two seem to melt together, the horizon so distant it’s hard to pick out. Leah snorts at her expression because it’s not nearly enough to encapsulate the sheer size of the world before them. If she looks down, just beneath her feet she can see the power, the strength of the ocean churning seafoam, strong enough to crush and drown her. But looking out into the far distance it looks still. Dark and still and entirely undisturbed. 

It makes her feel small again, but not like it had in the woods when she could only think about things towering over her, looking down on her, ready to stamp on her. This is different. It makes the world massive, awesome and unbearably wide, unobstructed by anything. 

She breathes the salty air deeply, still focusing on her breathing more than she usually would, folding air into her lungs and coaxing it out again. Leah leaves her side to sit down, leaning back on her elbows and stretching her legs out in front of her a few steps away from the edge. The rocky ground is wet and pretty uncomfortable, but they’re both already soaking wet and cold and a few moments later Bella joins her, sitting at her side, legs folded beneath her and plucking at pebbles on the ground. 

“So apparently it burns calories.” She says, offering another pointless fact about the ice swimming. She’s mostly given up on the idea, but she doesn’t have much else to say after her meltdown, and she doesn’t want Leah thinking too hard about it. She also doesn’t want to deal with silence right now. “Swimming is the best exercise you can do anyway, and cold water makes you burn calories even faster because your body is working so hard to keep you warm,”

“Are you trying to lose weight?” Leah muses, that expression on her face that is so knowledgable that Bella has to look away, feeling naked. 

“No.” 

“Is this another suicide mission like you falling asleep in the woods?” Bella inhales so sharply she coughs, choking on Leah’s words. 

“ Suicide  - I wasn’t - that’s not -“ She splutters, pulling herself up to meet Leah’s eye in surprise. Is that really what people thought? She wasn’t  suicidal . Sure, maybe there have been a few times when she hadn’t much felt like living anymore, but that’s not  suicidal . And anyway, those thoughts are coming less these days. “I’m not suicidal. How’d you even know about that?”

“Everyone knows about that, Bella, Fucking  Sam  dragged you out of the woods when he went playing hero when you went missing.” Leah looks bitter, as she always does when Sam enters the conversation, but today it’s like she’s personally pissed that Bella needed to be saved by her asshole ex. “Sorry, would you rather not know what people are saying about you?” 

“Yes - no - what - what are they saying about me?” 

“Well, I guess it’s pretty lucky everyone around here hates the Cullen’s. If they didn’t they’d probably think you’re pretty pathetic for the drama you caused,” Leah’s honesty is a sight to behold. She doesn’t much care for softening blows, and Bella wonders if that would have bothered her a year ago. If it did, it doesn’t now. She’s so used to people wrapping her in cotton wool that the occasional slap is sometimes refreshing. Sometimes it makes her laugh. 

“Who would think that?” 

“Me. I would think that.”

“Wow, thanks, Leah.” She folds her arms and tries to tamp down the smile curving her lips. Maybe Leah does think she’s pathetic, maybe she  is  pathetic - but she doesn’t treat her like she is. Leah snorts to herself, finding Bella petulance funny, and Bella doesn’t believe for a second that Leah thinks she’s as pathetic as she says. She wouldn’t have let her hang around this long if she did. “Why do you do that?” 

“Do what, tell you the truth?” Leah asks, her head cocked to the side, amused by Bella’s suffering the way she usually seems to be. 

“Pretend like you’re so mean to me.” 

“I am mean.” Her back straightens, her brow furrows like she’s putting on her mean girl mask all over again. And sure, Leah can be mean, but she’s not a  mean girl . In fact, Bella thinks she might be one of the nicest people she knows right now. 

“No, you’re not. You’re nice. You let me come bother you at work -“ 

“You just make the place warmer. Body heat, you know?” 

“You let me come running with you even though you knew I’d be bad at it.” 

“It’s safer to run in a pair,” she shrugs like she hasn’t been running the same trails for nearly ten years alone without a problem. Like Bella would be  any  help if they ran into trouble. If anything, Bella makes running a whole lot more dangerous for the both of them. 

“You held my hand so I won’t trip,” Bella says, pointing her finger in Leah’s face triumphantly. Like there was any way Leah could lie her way out of that one. 

“You’re outta bandaids.” Is that a blush on Leah’s cheek? 

“You’re  nice  to me, Leah.” She says, at last, throwing up her hands and falling onto her back to look up at the wide grey sky. 

“So I don’t want you dead. So what?”

“So nothing.” She shrugs, because it’s not like she’s expecting Leah to change, and she doesn’t  want  Leah to change. “If you don’t want me dead, I think running’s off the table, I’m gonna attract bears.” Bella holds up her leg, bloody smear still very clear around the edges of the bandaid and Leah doesn’t look away in time to hide her smile. She could drop it if she wanted to. She’s got an out to not talk about what Leah and La Push thinks of her. “I don’t  want  to die, you know,” Bella says, at last, not taking the out, not letting herself off the hook so easily. She doesn’t want to talk about it. But if Leah and La Push thought that, did Charlie think that too? “That’s not what any of this stuff is about.” 

“It isn’t?” Leah asks, looking up at her from her. Bella shakes her head, turning just a little so she can look up where Leah’s just ahead higher, still propped up on her elbows while she sprawls on the damp ground. Leah doesn’t look judgmental, in fact, her face is entirely neutral. 

“I just - I just wanted a break. Like a pause. For a while there I kind of felt like I already  died and no one noticed.” She swallows around the words, just barely letting them crawl their way up her throat like a dirty secret but they start falling out of her, coming faster than she can think about them or push them back in. “But if anyone did notice then there’d be a funeral, and people would look at pictures of me, and say stuff about my life, and they’d cry, and then it would just all be over and everybody would move on and move away. And I don’t want it to be over yet.” 

Leah nods, her brow furrowed, leaning much closer, almost as close as before and Bella can see how long her lashes are, sweeping her cheeks as she feels for an answer. 

“You look pretty alive to me.” 

“I don’t know,” she says, trying for a weak smile, trying to make it a joke “Sometimes I get all screwed up in my head and I can’t remember how to breathe, and then I’m not so sure.” 

Leah scoffs, and Bella flinches like she’s expecting Leah to hit her when she raises a hand. People don’t usually move quickly around her. It’s like they’re expecting her to bolt. And before today, Leah hasn’t touched her much. Most people don't; not in anything more than an accident, like brushing her aside or bumping shoulders when they’re standing too close. 

Leah places two fingertips against the pulse point at her throat and shushes her, waving her hand with something close to annoyance. They’re both dead silent, and she can hear Leah breathing next to her, watch the rise and fall of her shoulders, feel her fingers pressing into her skin. Bella bites the inside of her lips like she can staple them shut. She’s going to say something stupid, she’s going to ruin it. 

“You feel pretty alive to me,” she says eventually, reaching down and taking Bella’s wrist, pulling her fingers up to feel the thrumming of her pulse for herself. She can feel it, the throb of her heart, and it’s beating fast. 

Chapter Text

"Happy Valentine's day!"

Leah hates Valentine's day for two reasons; the first is something about commercialisation and cards stores. The second is because her birthday falls on the same day, and something about that grinds Leah's gears; maybe because she doesn't want to be connected to candy hearts and cupids. Maybe it's too many years of being overshadowed by the holiday itself. Ironically, Bella used to hate Valentine's day too: it seemed like a holiday invented to hurt single people and raise the tensions between those that weren't. This year she doesn't have to think about whether she likes Valentine's day; it's Leah's birthday, and that's worth celebrating. it's improved as well because there's no fear of awkward gifts or attention.

"You want me to put salt in your coffee, Swan?" Bella doesn't wait for the invitation, slipping around the side door to let herself in while Leah pours her a cup. "Why aren't you at work?" It's a Tuesday, and Bella should be working a shift at Newton's, but she begged the day off. She'd had to ignore Mrs Newton waggling her eyebrows and nudging for taking Valentines off to spend with a 'friend'.

"And miss your special day?" She teases, shucking off her coat. A week ago, Leah let slip that she was turning twenty and that Rachel and Rebecca Black would both be missing it for the first time. The fact that it would be the first birthday without Sam in several years was implied and carefully skated around.

Bella hadn't brought up her disastrous eighteenth, but Leah had been happy enough to talk about her past birthdays: parties on the frigid beach, dinners at home, and pot lucks in the community centre with most of the students at the Rez school.

"Your parents invited me and Charlie to dinner."

"Of course they did," Leah groans, bowing over the desk beside the service window to vent her faux frustration. "Why can't you go hang out with them and leave me the hell alone?"

"Because I bought dessert?" Bella says, pulling out a thick biography on Joan Didion; set reading for most journalism intro classes that she's been skimming. Charlie has raised an eyebrow when she came home with it, but she's been very clear that she's not declaring a major for a while yet.

"I'm going to start locking that door and leaving you out in the cold," Leah mutters the threat into her folded arms, still sprawled over her paper-strewn desk as Bella look at her over the top of her book.

"I can fit through the window."

Leah groans again, louder this time and stretches up to her full height. Bella tilts her head to the side, suddenly noticing a change.

"Have you - Leah you're - you're twenty, how are you still growing?" Bella asks, seeing that Leah is stooping to see out through the hatch where she wasn't a mere few weeks ago. Was that even possible?

"Late growth spurt I guess. It's driving me crazy, half my clothes don't fit," she turns, kicking up one leg and Bella suddenly notices that her jeans are a couple of inches higher on her ankle than was strictly fashionable. Even her shirt is beginning to look more like a crop top than a baggy baseball tee, a strip of tanned skin showing. "I thought I was done with this years ago, and I can't remember growing pains hurting this much."

"Wouldn't know, I don't think I've grown since I was about fourteen," Bella muses, tilting her chin up as if it'll make her look taller.

"Maybe you should try running again, you're starting to look a little shrimpy next to me," Leah snorts, straightening her shoulders to draw up to her full height and tower over Bella in her chair. She rolls her eyes as Leah pats the top of her head like she's a puppy.

"We both know that's a bad idea."

"True. You know even my goddamn feet have gotten bigger? That's crazy, right?"

Leah's shift doesn't take that much longer. Just about long enough for a few locals to stop by and say a happy birthday to Leah that she receives with varying results. She always thought Forks was a small town where gossip was king, but it's nothing compared to La Push where even familiar hikers seem to know Leah is celebrating.

When her shift is over and the sun is long past set, Bella darts to her truck to waits for Leah to lock up. She turns the key and lets it idle for a second, heaters warming the cab unbearably and headlights flaring thick yellow light over Leah. Her shadow on the cabin wall looks like a giant as she ducks through the rain and throws herself into the cab, shaking the rain from her hair.

Leah picks up the plastic tray she'd strapped in with the seatbelt so it doesn't move and places it on her lap, peeling away the dome lid to see the rich chocolate sheet cake from the Thriftway.

"You could have led with this, Swan," she admonishes, sweeping the tip of her finger through a rosette of thick frosting before Bella can bat her hands away.

When they reach the Clearwater's house Charlie's cruiser is already in the driveway, the rain pounding down heavier. The door slams open like a hurricane has it but it's just Seth - Leah's little brother and practically her complete opposite in size, mood and affection - standing under the awning waiting for his sister. Leah rolls her eyes, but the smile doesn't drop from her face as Bella parks and shuts off the engine.

Seth greets Leah with a bear hug, and Bella imagines if she weren't so tall Leah's toes wouldn't be touching the floor with the force of his hug. They spill into the Clearwater's house to riotous conversation, Charlie, Billy Black, Sue and Harry calling out a ring of song and the smell of pot roast thick in the air. She sets the cake down on the table that's been set up, the couch pushed back to make the room a little bigger.

"Jacob?" Bella starts as a stranger that looks a little like Jacob Black moves towards her. He, much like Leah, seems to have grown about three feet since she last saw him and his long, silky hair is gone, cut short and sticking up. Even his clothes are different, his jeans cut off at the knee despite the February cold and his shirt thin. "Jeez, you look different."

"Well maybe if you'd come see me more," he says, shrugging a pair of shoulders that are so broad he looks like a weightlifter. But he leans down and swings an arm around her shoulder, and it's so alike what he'd done on the beach at New Year. Except this time he dwarfs her and lets her go just as soon as he starts. "I heard you've been hanging out with Leah."

"Oh yeah, who'd you hear that from?"

"Paul."

"You hang out with Paul?" Is the question she asks, but the real one is: 'So you're hanging out with Sam.'

An uncomfortable silence falls between them when Jacob nods hesitantly like he knows what she means to ask. Bella, with Jacob not far behind head for Charlie and Billy where they're holding up a corner like a pair of wallflowers, but they both smile at her, and Billy says a warm hello, interrupting something about the game. Jacob leans down to speak to Billy, and Bella observes the Clearwaters.

"- achel called and missed you, I said to try again later," Sue says with her daughter in her arms. Sue and Leah look like mirrors of each other, glossy black hair down their backs and the same nose and eyebrows. The Clearwaters together are a shock, even more so when Tiny Seth joins like a xerox of the two of them. Standing next to Charlie she looks at him from the corner of her eye, and wonders if people look at the two of them and think the same thing. Her eyes and colouring are his, she's known that since she lamented missing out on Renee's lighter hair. But there's something in the cleft of his chin she recognises from the mirror, that, and the wave of his hair.

"Dinner should be up in ten!" Harry calls from the kitchen, an oven mitt in one hand and a couple of beers in the other. He hands one off to Charlie, and then, with an air of ceremony, hands another to Leah.

"Maybe a little early, but who's going to tell?" Harry asks, a twinkle in his eye as he winks at the chief. Her shoulders tighten, thinking back to Jessica and the New Years party she wasn't invited to for this very reason.

"I don't see nothin','" He shrugs, a half-empty bottle in one hand and a fresh one in the other. The Clearwaters laugh, and Leah twists off the cap, taking a sip from the glistening green bottle.

"Can I have one of those too?" She asks, trying her luck with this friendly, party Charlie. He pauses brow furrowing at her question with his nearly empty bottle up to his lips. Her smile falls, and she gets ready to apologise before he sighs loudly, and passes over his half-empty beer, surprising the hell out of her.

"You're driving. And drink that slowly." He orders her, punctuating his order with one sharp finger and what could only be his cop voice. He ruins the effect by twisting the cap off his fresh one. For a second she feels grown-up, mature; like a girl in a movie as she holds the room temperature beer in hand and takes a careful sip.

She gags at the taste of it, heavy on her tongue and even worse going down. "Oh, that's gross."

"Right?" Leah agrees, her face screwed up as she comes to stand beside her and clinks their bottles together.

"Don't even think about it, Son," Billy Black says, and Bella can't help a small smile at Jacob's dejected expression when he's denied his own.

"I had champagne at my mom's wedding - that's not so bad."

"Fancy," Leah mocks her, waggling her eyebrows. Then she starts, a wicked smile on her face. "Oh hey, you'll hate this - look," She grabs Bella's hand and pulls her to the left, towards a wall of framed photos. She taps one wooden frame and when Bella looks closer, she can recognise herself, tiny and missing her two front teeth in her smile. There's a blue fish on a line and a much younger Leah beside her, grinning just as widely. Charlie, Harry, Billy Black, Rachel and Rebecca, a small Jacob and a minuscule Seth are all there, all grinning for the camera in waterproofs.

"I don't remember that at all," she marvels, surprised to see herself so young and so happy in the rain and overcast sky.

"I quit fishing pretty young, I guess we didn't see much of each other after that." Bella hums in agreement like that's the reason they didn't know each other. Maybe if she'd come to see her dad the way the custody agreement decreed, she'd have known Leah a long time ago. Maybe she'd have known Charlie better too.

"You know I don't think I've been in your house before? At least I don't remember it." Bella realises suddenly, looking at the gap-toothed picture of her and the Clearwater's.

"I'll give you the tour," Leah says, taking her wrist again, leading her out of the warm, crowded living room. She points towards doors in every direction "Bathroom - mom and dads room, Seth's room," before leading her through the one at the end of the short hallway.

It's casually messy - lived in, Bella would call it. With pale cream walls covered in posters, sketches, art prints and photos, all taped to the walls in a riot of colour and life. There's athletic gear tossed over the end of her single bed, and at its foot is a haphazard pile of books and CDs. On the opposite wall is a poster of the Seattle skyline, and above it is a flag from WSU that must have come from Rachel.

Carefully she picks her way towards Leah's bed, above which are lines of glossy photographs. Noticeably, there are a few empty rectangles, cream wall glaring through, and she can guess who was in the photos that don't hang there anymore. But the ones that remain are beautiful and stretch back years. Younger Clearwaters and Rebecca and Rachel feature heavily, as do the cliffs, beaches, and forest around La Push. 

Behind her, Leah stands with her back to the wall, taking a slow sip of her beer. Bella hesitantly takes another of her own, trying to steel herself against that horrible taste.

"My dad got me a camera for my birthday - I should use it more, I wish I had all this," she gestures vaguely towards the wall of friends and family. She sits down on Leah's bed, smoothing down her navy coverlet and peering around the rest of the room as Leah moves to sit beside her, mirroring her posture to look up at the photographs she chose to paper her walls. Some of the keepsakes she has up are very familiar, others not so much. On a tack above her pillow are a pair of wooden carvings on braided thread hanging from the wall and Bella runs her fingertip over one slowly, finding a stylised likeness of a wolf. The other beside it is in the likeness of a bird.

"Yeah - I'm not so good at carving, but they taught us at school," Leah runs a hand through her hair, seemingly embarrassed by the slightly imperfect sculpture. "That's supposed to be a raven, he's part of the stories."

"They're beautiful," Bella affirms quickly, and she isn't lying. They're all strong lines and angles, like architecture. Leah smiles softly before her face smooths like she doesn't care at all for compliments.

"And you probably know the wolf stories. People don't keep them as secret as they're supposed to."

"Yeah," Bella grasps at the old memory, remembering Jacob and her first trip with her Forks Friends distantly. An unwelcome blush comes to her cheeks when she remembers flirting for the information, a desperate ploy to learn about the Cold Ones. "Quileute people are descended from wolves, right?"

"In some stories." Leah shrugs Bella takes another sip of her beer, the taste not much improved.

"Girls - dinner's ready!" Sue's voice calls from the front of the house and Leah stands, offering Bella her hand without thought to head back to the main body of the house and the party.

They take their seats beside each other just as Sue, Harry and Seth begin piling vegetables, salad and pot roast of the long trestle table. No one waits, pouring food onto their plates and conversation is loud and raucous. Leah is grabbed in every direction, her attention wanted by everyone and soon Bella is dragged in. College is an unceasing topic, but so is the weather, the most recent baseball games, school and work. It's loud, busy, Bella finds more salad and meat fed onto her plate without asking or serving herself. In the warmth of the house her cheeks are flushed and her smile is wide and thoughtless.

The phone rings and Leah answers it calling out to the entire group "It's Rachel!" She even drags Bella onto the line to say hello. Rachel is in Pullman - couldn't get away from classes and couldn't take an eighteen-hour bus journey to come back to visit. When Bella tells her she's applied to WSU she screams down the line, ordering the two of them to visit her there soon. Both of them, not just Leah.

She leaves the two of them to say goodbye, and clears the table with Seth and Charlie, talking about what they remember of Rachel and Rebecca's antics.

When Leah settles beside her again the heavy chocolate cake is cut with another unwieldily chorus of happy birthday starts up again. The phone rings, cutting through Bella's laughter and Leah stands, feet so light she almost dances over to the phone.

"I bet it's Rebecca - who wants to bet Rachel had to call and remind her?" Leah grins, causing another ring of laughter to echo as she heads for the phone and picks it from the cradle. Around them the conversation continues, moving on. But Bella's eye skates over Leah as she draws the phone to her ear. Seemingly in slow motion, her face falls, her mouth an open 'O' before it twists down like a scar.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Leah's voice cuts through the din and kills the conversation. It's bitter, the kind of bitter Bella hasn't heard in a while, like it could make snails curl up in their shells.

"Happy birthday? Happy fucking birthday?" Leah snaps, a tinny mumble on the other line that even Bella can hear across the room, that's how silent it's become. "It was a pretty happy fucking birthday until you picked up the phone, Emily. Why don't you give me a real gift and lose this fucking number?"

She slams the phone down so hard Bella can hear the plastic casing crack, and moves so fast she can only see a blur.

"Leah!" Sue calls after her but Bella's already halfway out the door, grabbing her coat and holding it over her head like an umbrella. Leah's faster, with much longer legs and she's practically at the end of the street by the time Bella's spots her, looking for her in the darkness and thrashing rain.

"Leah!" She calls but doesn't expect a response as Leah heads for the beach and Bella follows behind her, a clumsy, distant shadow running after her. The pavement turns quickly enough to wet sand that's even harder to stand on. She slips and slides on it, water in her eyes and hair getting soaked, even with the coat held above her.

Leah finally stops, letting Bella catch up to her. Staring out into the dark surf, her fists clench and her whole body ripples and shakes with rage. She's quiet for a long time like she's finding a way to unclench her jaw. Bella doesn't let her shake her off. She clutches at Leah's wrist like she's going to float away. When she does speak it's rough and mean and her breathing is ragged.

"I had it all planned out. I had my scholarship and my financial aid and fucking Sam was going to drive down and see me on weekends and when I graduated I was going to come home and we'd get married and get a place together. Everything was ready. And then he changed his mind and she screwed me over and they took it all away. Even the stuff I wanted to do alone, college didn't fucking work because it was all painted with him - with all the shit we were gonna do together."

She's horrifically familiar with Leah's words. They feel like a stone in her stomach, and she slips her hand down, palm to palm holding her hand. Her coat falls to the ground, rain lashing down on both of them, but it doesn't matter.

"I lost a whole fucking year because of them!" She screams, her voice echoing off water. Her face is flushed and blotchy, carved through with lines of pure, unadulterated rage. She's shaking with it, long convulsions running down the length of her spine. It's so violent Bella wants to step back, scared to see so much rage living beneath Leah's skin, but she doesn't, her hand squeezing Leah's. Are people supposed to shake like that? She surges forward again, afraid for Leah more than she's nervous for herself. Leah's skin is baking hot, like a fever coursing through her and Bella gasps at the feeling of her hot, dry skin on hers. Weakly, Bella knots her whole arm around Leah's, clinging it to her chest, not content that just her hand could hold her still or close.

Leah barely seems to notice her, but she stands still while Bella holds onto her, her body still wracked with hysteric sobs and tremors.

"One," Bella says, at last, a little too quietly. Leah doesn't look at her, ignores her completely in favour of grinding her teeth, eyes far away. "Two," Leah's eyes don't leave the horizon, she makes no outward sign of listening at all as Bella continues, counting up to seven and back again. Slowly, very slowly those racking shakes begin to subside, replaced by long inhales to Bella's count. Her breath smooths and deepens, almost like the careful rhythm of sleep. Leah's eyelashes are stuck together with tears and Bella reaches up, brushing away the tracks on her cheeks with the back of her hand. She isn't talking anymore, but she's shaking like a leaf, and she suddenly drops onto her ass in the sand, pulling Bella down with her until they're splayed on the ground together, legs tangled.

It's difficult, and her arms feel like hoses but they reach out. She's shaking a little herself, almost expecting the rebuff as she wraps an arm around Leah's waist, tugging her a little closer against her chest. Leah's still warm, like the electric heater in their shed and Bella buries her face in Leah's shoulder, not about to let her move away. They both stay quiet for a long time, soaked to the bone and both shaking from the cold.

"Is it awful to say how glad I am that you're not in Seattle yet?' Bella whispers, hoping the words are lost in the rain. There's a long pause where she's sure the other girl didn't hear her. She's sure the words are in the wind until Leah's palm cradles the back of her bowed head.

Bella buries her face tighter into Leah's shoulder. Tears begin to swell in her eyes and she refuses to let them fall, because Leah doesn't deserve so much unhappiness, and she doesn't deserve to deal with her on top of that. So close, their breathing synchronises, and Bella imagines she can breathe for Leah, breathe through Leah.

"I know it isn't what you planned, but it can still be good." Bella grinds out, speaking onto the fabric of Leah's light shirt. "It can still be so great."

"Yeah. Yeah, I know it can." There's a long pause, and Leah's shoulders lift and fall with a steadying rhythm. She lifts her arm to scrub at her wet cheeks. "I think maybe it wouldn't have worked if I'd gone last fall. Even if I passed my exams, I don't think I would have… made it." Leah admits and her voice is thicker at that confession that it was with anything else she's said about Sam. So much of what happened with Sam and Leah wasn't even about him; it was about Emily - Leah's cousin and her best friend - and it was about Leah who deserves better than both of them and the life that fell apart.

"And hey: doing college single is supposed to be fun, right?" Leah snorts suddenly, trying to make a joke of the whole thing like there aren't still tear tracks on her face. "Maybe I'll find the guy of my dreams, and fucking Sam and Emily'll be jealous of how happy I am."

"Yeah," Bella affirms, but her throat feels like sandpaper. Looking up she sees Leah looking out into the dark surf and into the far distance. She can imagine it: Leah finding a guy that's smart and handsome and kind, better than anyone either of them knows. A guy that can keep up with her and her ambitions. She wants it for her friend, wants more than anything for Leah to have that kind of happiness. But the selfish part of her wonders: where will I be? "That's what college is for, right?"

"Exactly." Leah laughs again, it's wet and weak but she laughs. "Come on, we should go back." Bella quickly brushes away the lingering wetness of her cheeks with the back of her hand and reaches back, patting the ground to find her cast aside coat to drape it over their heads like it even matters if they get any wetter at this point. They stand, brushing sand from their jeans and pushing their sopping wet hair out of their eyes. The wet sand is easier to walk on when Leah's twines her hand with hers, and they head back for the lit street without much haste.

"And if you were in Seattle already your gift would really suck."

"Gift?"

"Maybe it's a crappy gift." Bella flushes, looking down at the cracked pavement. She'd been dithering over it for a long time, not sure it was even a gift or more like an obligation she was dropping on her. "I was thinking we could drive to Seattle and I could - I don't know, take you to dinner somewhere nice when we got there. I know you want to visit your campus and I need to see UoW. I thought we could do that in the morning and spend the afternoon in the city."

"That sounds," Leah swallows, the sound audible. "That sounds really good. It's not crappy at all."

"Well, pick a weekend," Bella's flush has barely lessened. There's something like nerves in her stomach; like if they left La Push the friendship they built on the beach and in Native Grounds would feel different. Or maybe it's because they've talked about Seattle before, and this suddenly makes that fantasy more real. They turn a corner too quickly and find themselves back on Leah's street.

"But we can't drive all the way to Seattle without a radio. Does Charlie have an old boombox or something?"

"I never told you about that," Bella hums, her face flooding red. Don't say it don't say it don't say it "I went to the Cullens place to see if I could find it."

"No way." Leah looks surprised, and maybe she's imagining a mission impossible scenario with laser beams and lock picking.

"I couldn't even get out of my car." Leah crows with laughter, but, surprisingly, Bella starts laughing first.

"Idiot." Leah elbows her in the side and she agrees; the picture is so stupid with distance. Without the white house and its baggage.

The Clearwater house comes into view, and Bella lets her jacket fall and their pace increase to get out of the rain. They slip back into the house and are kindly ignored as they shrug out of their wet layers and settle back at the table like nothing happened, still dripping wet as sheet cake is passed out.

"So the year out is off?" Mike asks, coming up to her register where she's addressing a thick manilla envelope. It's a Friday night, so Newton's is empty. Mike's not even scheduled to work, but he and Jessica are avoiding each other right now, and Tyler and Lauren have started dating again. All that combined means that Mike doesn't have many people to hang out with right now.

Technically she's supposed to be doing inventory on the hiking boots, but the final deadline for Seattle Pacific College is Friday, and she doesn't have the time to waste. He leans halfway across the counter, very much in her personal space and she has to lean back to avoid breathing on him. Tyler and Lauren also explain why he's been hanging on her every word a lot more lately; he doesn't want to be a third wheel.

"Yeah," she says like it isn't obvious. But she's glad to finally have an answer and thrilled to finally have a way out of Mike's unceasing 'we can hang out so much more if we're both staying here next year!' His sideways glances were beginning to feel like a claim. "I don't think staying in Forks would be good for me."

"So what's your first choice?"

"I've applied a couple of places - don't wanna jinx it, you know?" Bella says, keeping it vague. She's been doing that with almost everyone, even Renee when she asked. Her UoW application's long gone (so's the deadline) and there's nothing she can do now but rely on superstition and hope. And she's never been very lucky or believed in any kind of higher power, which is why she's applied to three other colleges in Seattle.

She dreads to think what will happen if nowhere accepts her. It's a familiar, stomach curling nervousness, but it's one that everyone, even Angela, seems to be feeling right now.

The chime of a new customer sounds and Bella hurriedly hides her envelope out of sight, but when she looks up it's Leah, a bag slung over her shoulder and rain in her long hair.

"You're early," Bella calls out, waving her over, Mike beside her is entirely forgotten.

"I know, I wanted to see what kind of camping store hired you of all people." Her smile is wide and careless and she swings her bag up onto the counter.

"Hey," Mike straightens up, his chest so puffed out he slightly resembles a bird. He's still far too close to both of them like he's trying to make sure he's in their eye line at all times. Leah looks like she didn't even notice him until he spoke up like she's surprised to see him, standing a few inches shorter than she is. "I'm Mike - Mike Newton, like the store?" He says with a wide-open smile, gesturing around the warehouse.

"Leah." She gives him a polite quirk of her lips, not really a smile. Already, Bella can imagine what she's thinking of Mike's eagerness, but it's sweet of her not to say it out loud.

It's kind of like worlds colliding.

"Anyway, I bought snacks for the trip but I didn't know what your favourites were -"

"You're taking a trip?" Mike butts in, Bella and Leah turn to look at him. Bella wonders if Mike knows how rude he gets sometimes, or if it's that egotism and golden retriever over-excitement getting the better of him. Mike wedges himself a little closer, like a barrier between them, his face darting from one to the other like a tennis match. Leah's face has soured considerably, her affability quickly drying up.

"Yeah. Leah's staying at mine tonight and we're driving to Seattle tomorrow. Birthday Trip," She explains shortly, though she'd told Karen Newton this already when she changed her shift, it had either gone ignored or not filtered down to Mike.

"Oh, no way! You know, I was thinking of a group of us going to Seattle in Spring Break - we could take my mom's minivan?"

"Yeah, maybe," Bella responds, trying to keep smiling as Leah gently pushes him out of her way and positions herself back in her spot directly across the counter from her. She thumbs through a paper sack of candy before spotting the brown envelope hiding beneath Bella's sleeve. She pinches a corner between finger and thumb and pulls it, squinting at the address scrawled on it.

"Oh, where's this one? Pacific College?" She scoffs, dropping the envelope quickly. "You can do better, your UoW essay was good."

"The University of Washington?" Mike pipes up again, not willing to be forgotten.

"Yeah," Bella flushes bright red like she's been caught in a lie. God, what if Mike tells everyone she's applied to UoW and she has to tell them all she got rejected? "Yeah, we're just taking a look. Leah needs to visit South Seattle College too."

"Oh, well you guys have fun out there." He responds, at last, his enthusiasm a little dampened.

"We will," Leah says, not looking at him as she snaps open a box of Raisinets and pours them into Bella's hand. "So have you ever had to demo setting up one of those tents? Or did you just call the ambulance straight away?"

Chapter Text

The window's cracked, letting in a curl of cold air and the kitchen radio sits between them on the bench seat. The station crackles a little but Leah’s feet are kicked up on the dashboard, tapping along to the Billboard charts. The slight concern Bella had had that her road trip partner would sleep the whole way to Seattle were unfounded, and her commentary had been consistent and peppered with dark commentary, La Push Gossip and shouted lyrics. 

That, and a few light-hearted complaints about a neck cramp that came from camping on the couch in Bella’s living room. Whatever, Bella had been curled up on Charlie’s recliner when they’d finally slept, sleepy discussions about maps finally abandoned. 

The sun has finally risen and begun to filter through the clouds after an hour or two of driving in the dark, lighting Leah up in faded yellow and even the drizzle is starting to clear. Bella chewed on the tail end of a Twizzler, watching the planes coming in at SeaTac airport. If the road signs and Bella’s shaky map skills are anything to go by, it wasn’t far until they reached The South Seattle Campus. 

“ - my finance meeting at 11, when’s your campus tour again?”  

“1:30, but there’s another one at 3:30 if we want a long lunch or the meeting runs over.” 

“I hope not - I swear if they make me fill out anymore scholarship or financial aid forms I’m going to lose my mind. How many times do I need to sign my goddamn name?” 

Originally the plan had been to split up, for Leah to visit her campus and Bella to visit hers and meet somewhere in the middle, but neither know Seattle well, and Charlie had asked them to stick together. Bella didn’t argue that point at all, not wanting to lose Leah in city noise and let her spend her birthday trip alone. So when they pull up in the parking lot they get out together, eyes tilted up to the tall buildings where Leah’s going to be spending her days. 

Leah’s campus isn’t large, but they explore what they can, eyeing the milling students and bustling buildings, grey concrete dotted with thin saplings. It’s strange, it’s new. She isn’t sure what she expected, for it to look like Forks High? With its red brick and ramshackle buildings? Or maybe more like her school in Phoenix, with metal detectors and chain-link fences. It doesn’t look like either. The buildings are big and sprawling, with the occasional cafe sprinkled in. It's like a group of office blocks with a little more signage. The building walls are papered with flyers for bands and art showcases, and the groups of students congregating must be their age - but they seem so much older. 

Eventually, Leah has to leave her for her meeting, and Bella settles in at the student centre's cafe with a cup of coffee and her newest book: a dry textbook on educational practice. It’s long, and very rarely interesting, so her attention wanders to people watching. The student centre isn’t busy, it’s a Saturday after all, so most people must be off-campus. The ones that are surrounded by books and sheaves of paper and look wretched. Due dates must be coming up. 

“So, education major?” 

The voice startles her, but the boy settling down in the armchair opposite her own might be worse. She supposes he’s handsome, his hair golden blonde and artfully disarrayed in a way that reminds her of Him and his bronze tangle. She takes a long draw of her coffee before she has to answer, and when she does, she offers only a monosyllabic:

“No.” 

“Don’t tell you’re reading  that  for fun,” he says, the corner of his lip quirking up with a confidence that makes her even more opposed to the conversation. He seems like the kind of guy that hasn’t been said no to very much. She’s somewhat reminded of Mike and his hapless friendliness, or maybe what Mike  will  be in a few years with more experience. 

She just shrugs, hoping he’ll take the hint, but he doesn’t. Instead, he leans forward, offering his hand for her to shake. She doesn’t have much choice but to take it, holding her hand limply in his and pulling it back as soon as she can. His skin is warm and soft, and his eyes are a dark brown, alight with open friendliness she doesn’t care for. She wonders, vaguely, if she was this bitter and unfriendly before, or if this is a symptom of heartbreak, or maybe even of Leah. She thinks back to the few people that have hung around too long or been a little too friendly at Native Grounds - Leah has a talent for making them feel unwelcome at best, humiliated and terrified at worst. 

“I’m Riley.” He introduces himself, the light not dimmed at all by her lukewarm, awkward reception. She doesn’t give him her name in return. 

“You’re a student here?”

“Yep. I wanted to get some credits before transferring. I just got accepted to Oregon!” 

“Oh,” she says lamely. If nothing else, she’d been hoping he might be able to give some perspective on the college for Leah’s sake, but someone with one foot out the door isn’t the right person to ask. With that hope dashed, she can’t think of any excuse for Riley to keep talking to her, and she’d been enjoying people-watching in the quiet murmur of the cafe. Maybe seeing people surrounded by a stress she doesn’t comprehend yet - a stress she imagines is made up of roommates and phone calls home and lecture theatres. “Congratulations.” 

“Thanks! What about you?” 

“I’m just waiting for someone.” She toys with the idea of telling him she’s in high school; that’s sure to scare him off. But there’s a strange illusion here she doesn’t want to dispel. It’s like playing she’s a college student already, waiting on Leah to finish up her classes so they can explore Seattle together. They’ve been talking about it for weeks, but in the sprawling, massive city it feels solid and tangible. Even if the stranger isn’t a part of the picture. 

“Bella!” Her name being called makes her jerk up again, a little lost in her imaginings, turning to see Leah at the door and heading towards her. She’s smiling, and Bella’s own lips turn up at the sight. The meeting went well. 

“Hey! So how’d it go?” Leah sits down, perching on the arm of Bella’s chair. Her arm comes up to loop around the back of her neck and draw her into a one-armed embrace. She’s baking hot like she always is and practically vibrating with excitement - but there’s a strange sheen of sweat on her forehead like she’s been running and her eyes are a little unfocused. 

“Good.  Really   Good . I qualify for the next level of bursaries because my grades -“ 

“Congratulations!” The voice is as unwelcome as it was the first time she heard it, more so, maybe, because it interrupts Leah when she’s speaking. That, and it interrupts Bella own chance at telling Leah how  proud  she is of her. Riley is smiling, as bright-eyed as before, and seemingly unaware that Bella had forgotten him, and Leah had barely registered him in the first place. Leah looks at him like he’s an unwelcome invader, the smile on her lips fading and turning down. 

“Sorry, was I talking to you?” Leah’s voice is sharp as a whip and Bella has to fight a smile that might urge her on. Instead, she lays a hand on Leah’s arm where it hangs loosely around her shoulder and squeezes softly. “Who even  are  you? 

“I’m Riley,” He rears up, taken aback by the sudden mood that’s fallen over the pair of girls. “I was just talking to your friend -“

“Get lost, Riley.” She snaps, staring Riley down so hard he looks like he might melt underneath the heat of her gaze. 

“Leah -“ Bella mutters, taking her hand and winding their fingers together to calm the sudden, inexplicable anger. Yeah, Leah’s no stranger to harsh words and blunt honesty, but the shaking, wracking words and flush remind her only of the indelible rage from her birthday. She looks around quickly, but luckily they haven’t earned much attention from the frazzled students in the cafe. 

Leah pauses for a long moment, the flush high on her cheeks and her eyes glassy. It clears slowly and she shakes her head like she’s shaking off raindrops. The colour on her cheeks is still dark and her body is still rolling with the aftershocks of the sudden outburst. 

She hears the scrape of a chair and Riley’s quiet voice. 

“I didn’t realise you two were -“ He starts but doesn’t bother finishing. “Sorry. Nice to meet you, Bella.” 

Neither one of them addresses him as he leaves, Bella doesn’t even look at him, focused on Leah’s expression that keeps sinking back and forth between scared and sick to  murderous . 

“Are you okay?” Bella asks, her voice quiet, tracing her fingertips over the gentle notches of Leah’s knuckles and watching her expression as it comes back to something more present. 

“Sorry. I don’t know what that was.” She chokes out, voice thick with upset rather than anger. Her other hand comes up to cover hers, holding Bella’s hand between her two. "Was he bothering you?” 

“No, it was fine,” she reassures quickly, trying to meet Leah’s avoidant eyes. 

“Oh.  Oh . Shit. Did you want him to stay?” Leah asks, trying to pull away, her posture stiffening and unwinding her arm from around Bella’s neck, putting space between them. 

“Huh?” It takes her a moment to understand what Leah think she knows, and she almost laughs. The assertion is ridiculous. Like Bella would be upset that Leah chased off some awkward flirting. Like Bella would be interested in some  college boy  when she was here for  Leah . 

“Are you crazy?” Bella snorts, standing with her and stuffing her heavy textbook into her backpack. Her coffee is cold and forgotten. “I was hoping he’d give me the gossip on South Seattle, but no dice.” 

Leah snorts, the flush still there on her cheeks as she wipes the sweat from her forehead. 

“Just can’t have my ride ditching me,” 

“Yeah, the best part of your birthday gift is the hitchhike home,” Bella rolls her eyes and folds Leah’s hand in hers. “C’mon, burgers for lunch?” 

They eat a greasy take out in the truck in the parking lot at Bella’s (hopefully) future campus. The rain has returned, killing their plans of eating at one of the photogenic picnic benches or on a grassy knoll as the prospectus promised. 

The windows have steamed up, the air inside warm and placid and stinking of fries. 

“What about that Mike you work with?” Leah muses, pointing a fry dripping in ketchup in Bella’s face. Her chirpiness is strange and doesn’t suit Leah’s usual calm, measured tones. It feels almost… forced. Like maybe she’s trying to make up for whatever happened in the student centre by acting like any of it was normal. 

“What about those surfers that always come by?” Bella responds with much less baleful chirpiness than Leah. 

Leah hasn’t really let it go since the cafe. It’s weird, because it’s a topic they’ve both avoided for practically their entire friendship; the concept of dating; the concept of men; the concept of either one of them falling in love again. They’ve talked a little about what had happened before, but never about what could come next. Leah is frustratingly nonchalant about the idea, and Bella is working hard not to snap at her for even considering it. 

“They can’t talk their way out of their wetsuits,” Leah snorts, chewing on her fries and flapping her hand like she was batting away a particularly irritating fly. 

“What’s the point in any of that when we’re going off the college soon anyway?” Bella asks, raising her own hands in exasperation that Leah’s been hinting at romance since they parked. She’s barely gotten much information about Leah’s meeting before Leah started quizzing her about seemingly every boy she’d ever mentioned. 

“In six months,” Leah rolls her eyes again at what she considers to be a particularly weak excuse. 

“What’s the point in six months?” Bella pushes. It’s something she’s always thought. She’d never been one for flirting, for dates, for lightness. A relationship that’s going nowhere seems inexplicably pointless. Even if she were going to fall in love - like it was something she could plan for - what would be the point in getting her heartbroken all over again six months down the line? 

Leah wipes away the condensation on the window, not replying as she finishes her burger in a last few bites. 

“I’m serious, one guy gets a little close and you decide to marry me off? What’s going on with you?” Bella finally snaps, folding her arms tightly over her chest.

“I guess I’m just - you’ve got options, is all I mean.” 

“What? I don’t  want  options.” She says petulantly, glaring at the foggy windows, trying to pull back the anger bubbling up her throat. Her anger always turns to tears, and she doesn’t want Leah to see her cry more than she already has. She thinks back to something she’d thought about before - that if Leah ran off and met the man of her dreams in Seattle, then where would it leave her? But now she wonders about what would happen if it were the other way around - wonders if, if it was  her  that ran off and fell and love - would Leah be okay? Would Leah be  glad ?

“What if they were a really good six months?” Leah asks finally, her voice quiet.

“I’m having a really good time right  now. ” 

Leah sighs gently and reaches out, a warm hand falling on Bella’s shoulder. Bella shakes her off. 

“Are you sick of hanging out with me or something?” Her voice cracks humiliatingly. The thought is unwelcome and awful, that Leah’s finally gotten tired of her and was just looking for an out. It was like the woods all over again. It was  ‘I don’t want you’  all over again. It is, and it isn’t. If Leah wants to leave she can damn well leave and Bella’s heart can break over it - but Bella’s not going to be pawned off like an unwanted birthday gift. She’s not going to let herself be convinced she was the one who wanted to go or that this is all for  her . Not  again . 

“You’re right.” She scoots closer on the bench seat and Bella has nowhere to go and isn’t quite childish enough to scoot further away. Not  quite . “I’m being an ass.”

“I thought you understood.” Her voice cracks and hot, fat tears fall from her eyes. Her face is turned away, but she isn’t near lucky enough to hope Leah doesn’t see it. 

“I  do ,” Leah says, so close she can feel the warmth of her like a furnace wrapped all around her through the thick knit of her green sweater. She curls an arm around Bella’s waist and hooks her chin onto her shoulder. 

“I guess I feel like I’m holding you back. You spend  all  your time with me and I’m -” Leah’s voice is muffled, her mouth pressed into Bellas sweater. Her words tumbled away into nothing, and Bella wonders what she means to say. What Leah thinks she is that’s holding Bella back. “Maybe if you’d decided to go bother Rachel or Hannah instead of me then you’d be happier. Going out, going on dates or whatever.” 

“I’m not unhappy,” she swallows, rubbing the cuffs of her sweater against her cheeks and leaning back into Leah’s embrace. “And I don’t want to go out on dates or whatever.”

“I feel like I’m the reason you’re not moving on.” Bella doesn’t answer, her tears finally drying even if her face is still red and stinging with the evidence of them. She thinks about that for a long, seemingly endless moment. Is she moving on? The ghost of Him is still very much there, a twinge in her chest when something reminds her of the Cullens, but is that love? Is that stagnation? It feels like the phantom itch left behind, but it doesn’t feel like an open wound the way it once did. More like the ache that sometimes skates through her once-broken leg when the weather changes suddenly. 

It feels like a bitter memory, and it feels like pain, but it doesn’t feel like the end anymore. 

She wonders when that happened. 

Somewhat weakly they’d finally made their way onto a campus tour. The buildings were very much the same as Leah’s, just as anonymous and nondescript if perhaps more confusing. With a damp map and a chipper guide, they’d seen the library, the dining hall, the student centre and the small, cinderblock accommodation that Bella’s dreading a little bit. She’s always been private, the thought of sharing a small room with a stranger is nerve-wracking. 

But Leah had laughed when she’d wondered aloud how much she could conceivably cook on a hotplate and suggested she start taste testing instant ramen now. 

When they’d asked for dinner advice, the guide had pointed them towards Capitol Hill to explore ‘city life’ as she called it. The sun was beginning to go down when they parked, but the streets were lively and busy with emerging Saturday nightlife. The bars and restaurants were slowly beginning to fill and groups and couples huddled in raincoats and umbrellas dotted the streets. The lights of the street, garish neons and warm yellows reflected on the wet pavement prettily, making the whole place reminiscent of a modern oil painting. 

It was a world away from any ‘city life’ she’d ever known in Phoenix, where even the most urban parts seemed to sprawl lazily in the sun-baked street. No, in Seattle everything was tight and tall, sprayed with colour and eclectic music and rich smells. Huddled in their raincoats Leah had taken her hand again, not about to be separated in amongst the growing crowds as they peered into place after place, looking for somewhere that suited them and didn’t seem quite so hectic. It was a difficult combination, as everywhere seemed to be filing ups fast and Bella started to gnaw on her lip. Maybe she should have made a reservation, or maybe they shouldn’t have stayed so long talking to the Freshman guide about the trains in Seattle and what neighbourhoods were cheapest to live in. 

Her worry proved unfounded as they turned down another sweet and eventually they found a place with wide windows looking out on the street, low music and the spicy smell of Mexican food emanating from inside. The lights gave off a warm orange glow that carpeted the pavement beneath their feet and they slipped inside gratefully as a bitter wind cut through the street. 

“Table for two, ladies?” A friendly greeter said when they stepped inside and began peeling off layers, water dripping from their waterproofs.

“Please.” 

They’re led to a small round table in the back, the air so warm Bella had to shrug off her thick sweater and Leah peeled out of her hoodie, leaving them in thin t-shirts that feel out of place after a day of cold fog and rain. Leah reaches out across the table suddenly, peeling a wet curl of hair stuck to her neck and Bella thanks her as they reach for menus and settle more comfortably into the mismatching chairs. 

“Do you think I can get the waitress to sing happy birthday to you?” Bella teases, reminded that this is Leah’s trip after the hustle and quasi drama of the day. Leah flashes her a warning glare in response. 

“Hitchhiking sounds more appealing by the minute.” 

They order, talking gently about their respective campuses. Bella wonders aloud if off-campus housing would be that difficult to organise, if the result is a room to herself, she thinks it might be worth it. 

Leah is against it. “It’ll be good for you to learn how to live with someone, you’re an only child - you have  no idea  what it’s like.” 

“Because you always have such a good time with Seth?” 

‘Good  and  bad. I may hate Seth, but I love him too. That must be what having a roommate is like.” 

The waiter drops off their meals, Enchiladas dripping with cheese, chillis and peppers for Bella, and spicy Tacos for Leah. The smells are mouthwatering, and they barely manage to speak until the majority is gone. 

“Here - try these -“ Leah says, scooping up a puddle of peppers and beef and dropping it on Bella’s plate. Their heads are bowed close to one another as Bella copies her, pressing a long string of melted cheese and sour cream on her partner's plate. They share amiably for a few mouthfuls before it becomes a more bitter war, Bella’s fork edging after more and more of Leah’s seasoned mince as she bats her away in indignation. 

It’s then that Bella looks up and realises they’re being watched. 

At the table across from them are two women, older than they are by at least ten years and eyeing them with a matching set of amused smiles. She grabs a napkin quickly and wipes at her mouth, face reddening at whatever they’re so amused by. Leah doesn’t notice, still using her fork to steal away a few more roasted green peppers from Bella’s plate while she’s distracted.  They must think we’re acting like kids in a nice place,  She thinks to herself, mortified to have been caught with no table manners by the older pair. 

It’s then that she realises their smile is more fond than it is mocking, like something she’d expect from a doting grandparent. It’s then she realises they’re holding hands, their fingers knotted together on the tabletop. She looks between the pair - the  couple  - and Leah and realises very quickly what they think this is. And, honestly, she realises, it does look exactly like that. She and Leah are bowed together in such an easy intimacy that anyone might mistake it for romantic. It's not something she ever considered before. She’s never been one for female friendship (or any friendship) before, and she and Leah had moved into casual touches so quickly and easily she hadn’t questioned if it was something other women did. It had just seemed so… obvious when she and Leah fell into each other like planets in orbit. 

“You okay?” Leah says, breaking her reverie suddenly, “I’ve eaten most of your peppers and you haven’t even stabbed me with your fork.” 

“Yeah - yeah totally,” she says, giving her a reassuring smile and reaching across the table to snatch another bite of Leah’s tacos. Leah flicks her fingers playfully but doesn’t do much else to stop her. “I’m just worried about the rain - we should probably go before it gets worse.” 

Leah agrees, and they finish dinner talking lightly about how the hell they’re going to pay rent - even with Leah’s bursaries - in one of the most expensive cities in the US. 

When they finish up Bella pays the bill - much to Leah’s attempts to refuse - and shrug back into their damp clothes. On their way out their hands knot together again, and Bella can’t tell which one of them was at fault for it. She can almost feel the couple at the next table watching them, making assumptions about something they just don’t understand. 

The drive back to Forks was long, dark and wet. The rain was so bad towards the end Bella could hardly drive straight. They got back much later than either of them had planned, having to stop for a brief pause a few times on the shoulder when the highway became a wet blur outside the windshield and every other car on the road was just a smudge of yellow headlights. Leah had offered to drive a half dozen times, but she didn’t drive much and had never dealt with the temperamental truck before - putting her behind the wheel seemed even more dangerous than just driving through. 

Eventually, somewhere nearing midnight they made it back to La Push. 

“No way I’m letting you drive anymore. You’re staying here tonight,” Leah said with a finality that Bella felt no need to argue with. They’d had a long day, and between the early morning, the long miles of driving and the emotional rollercoaster of ups and downs she was struggling to keep her eyes open and her car driving straight. Charlie had even suggested it when he called to check in - telling them to either get a motel between Forks and Seattle or to bunk at Leah's - anything to do even a little less driving in the deluge that was becoming bad even for Washington’s standards. 

“Okay.” 

They dash through the rain and Leah unlocks the door, finger to her lips to tell her to keep quiet. They toe-off their wet boots by the door and slip through the house in the darkness. Leah knows every step with the familiarity of home, but she offers a hand for Bella to stop her walking into any walls and she takes it, trying not to think about earlier on Capitol Hill. Shutting her bedroom door behind them, Leah turns on her bedside lamp and throws them out of the dark. It’s warm and cosy and inviting as she tugs off her still damp sweater, wet hair sticking to her neck. 

“You can borrow some sweats,” Leah whispers rummaging through her closet for clean, warm clothes. They’re polite, turning away from each other as they shuck off their layers and pull on soft cotton that smells like her. Bella wants to think that this is just what slumber parties feel like, but Leah slept on her couch only yesterday, and it didn’t feel like this. There’s a buzzing electricity that Leah clearly can’t feel - an alertness that makes her feel wide awake, even with the heavy exhaustion at the edge of vision. 

Leah collects their clothes, laying them over her closet and desk chair to air dry overnight and slips into bed, her movements so slow and clumsy she almost resembles Bella for a second, her eyes half shut as she holds the comforter up for Bella to crawl into the twin bed beside her. She doesn’t say a word about Bella taking the floor, doesn’t say that the twin bed is too small for them to comfortably lie in so Bella doesn't say anything either. Leah is tall, made solely of limbs so there’s not much space between them, their hips and shoulders touching until Leah curls up on her side, her chin resting on her shoulder and her eyes shut. The sheets are soft and thick and they smell even more like Leah than her clothes do. She’s surrounded by her; by Leah’s warmth and presence as she starts to gently snore in her ear as she stares at the ceiling. 

It’s like a lullaby. Bella hardly has time to listen to the thudding rain on the window before she falls asleep, head dipping and burying her face in Leah’s jet black hair. 

Chapter Text

It’s not like she’s never thought about it, okay? 

Like, it’s come up before. 

Renee was the kind of liberal that was very supportive but had never really met anyone that was very different from her. So when Bella was fifteen and awkward and still hadn’t had a boyfriend or a crush or even a whisper of interest in much at all, she sat Bella down in the kitchen for one of her talks. One of her talks that employed all she’d learned from re-runs of Will and Grace and watching the Ellen show. 

Renee’s talks had been clumsy and rarely enlightening over the years, and this one was just the same. There was the period talk where Renee had tried to extol the virtues of using sea sponges instead of tampons during an eco-warrior phase and the sex talk that had come when Renee was in the middle of a pregnancy scare and was more about reassuring her than educating Bella. 

Renee’s talk about girls was just as unfocused and had veered off course so quickly that Bella had never actually had to give an answer or do much soul searching. 

Her mom had said something about ‘whenever you’re ready’ but that was paired with something about plaid shirts that Bella wouldn’t exactly call enlightened. After that Bella guessed that Renee had probably never met a real lesbian before, but she was awfully certain about the two women she’d seen at Hobby Lobby, and apparently those two women at Hobby Lobby dressed an awful lot like Bella. 

She’d thought about it for a while, long after Renee had forgotten about it and gone back to talking about her new boyfriend Phil and the boys in Bella’s classes. Pretty soon Bella had forgotten about it too. 

She was fifteen, and she wasn’t interested in anyone. She couldn’t remember a boy or a girl that made her blush or her heart flutter, hell she couldn’t even  imagine  a boy or a girl tempting enough for that. She didn’t know what she wanted. That was easy to deal with in Phoenix. She was one in a thousand, easy to ignore, and because of that, it was easy to ignore everyone else. She had been busier then as well, more wrapped up in caring for Renee and Renee's house and Renee's problems. When was there time to date? When was there time to even think about dating? Then Forks had happened and it had become very, very clear what she didn’t want. Mike, Tyler and Eric to name a few. Then  He  had happened, and she figured he was the thing she did want. By those odds, what she wanted was 100% guys. Or maybe, by those odds, she was just 100% interested in vampires. 

Gah , this was hard. 

Particularly because percentage was starting to feel a little skewed; with Leah’s arm thrown around her hips and her chin on Bella’s shoulder. She’s so  warm . She’s so warm and heavy and she can see the fine hairs on the back of her arm, lit in the gentle dawn creeping through the open window and following the path of delicate muscle beneath her skin. It doesn’t feel like it used to - waking up beside someone already awake and still as a stone - not at all. But there are certain… familiarities in the way it feels to be so wrapped around someone. And Bella can't think of any other reason for her heart to be in her throat. Her arm is asleep, and Leah’s head is heavy, lolling on her chest as it was but Bella barely wants to breathe and risk waking her. If Leah was awake she might move away. If Leah was awake Bella might say something stupid. If Bella says something stupid it might all disappear.

Her foot twitches involuntarily and Leah snorts gently in her sleep. God, it’s like being hit by a train of unadulterated affection. How did people sleep like this? How did people sleep with someone beside them that was so… warm. And soft. Someone so alive and gentle and unguarded in unconscious. Their breath so slow and rhythmic that it feels like a meditation. Since she woke, she’s barely breathed, scared of waking her. She didn’t even dream, or if she did it was entirely indistinguishable from reality. She woke to a fuzzy, warm world and a room lightening from black to grey to white. 

Leah groans in her sleep, rolling over loudly enough that Bella can’t pretend to sleep anymore. Leah’s arm falls away and she misses it like her own limb. 

“Morning,” Leah mutters, her throat thick with sleep. Slowly, awkwardly, Bella peels her arm away from where it’s curled around Leah’s shoulder, even though the others girls eyes are still shut. 

“I should go,“ she whispers, voice barely louder than a whisper. It wavers like she’s afraid, even though she isn’t. Part of her hopes Leah will go back to sleep so she can keep lying here and not have to say anything or do anything. 

Leah doesn’t say anything in reply, just grunts idly and burrows deeper into the comforter, pulling it up to cover them both a little more, her eyes falling shut to stave off having to wake up so early. But Bella has no chance of going back to sleep. 

“Leah. I should go - Charlie’s probably worried.” 

Leah grumbles loudly, probably about five seconds away from telling her to quiet down and let her sleep, but Bella slips out of the bed before she can complete the thought. Her clothes have dried well enough overnight, and she turns away from Leah and the bed, pulling off the warm sweats and replacing them with her own stale clothes, changing with her back to the other girl. 

When she turns, Leah’s eyes are half-open, looking at the floor. Her arm is stretched out across the empty place in the mattress Bella has left behind, like she’s looking for her. There’s a frown on her lips, but she looks more awake. 

“Breakfast?” She asks, and the question seems to confuse her more than anything as if she wasn’t the one offering. She wants to say yes. She wants to crawl back into bed and sleep another hour or two, then sit in Leah’s kitchen and eat the same thing Leah eats for breakfast.

“Go back to sleep,” Bella says, bowing her head to press her lips to the crown of Leah’s hair as if that’s something they’ve ever done before. As if that’s not a liberty Bella’s taking. Bella jolts back, swallowing down the embarrassment for doing that when she’s so confused. For taking advantage of her when she’s half asleep and Bella hasn’t yet decided what it means. Leah looks up at her with a dry, puzzled expression, eyeing the distance between them. 

It’s still early enough that the house is quiet as she tiptoes her way through, maybe Harry and Sue aren’t awake yet and for stupid, selfish teenager reasons she doesn’t want to deal with Leah’s parents right now. She has too much to think about. The road home is empty, shining with yesterdays storm but Bella can hardly see it. 

When her truck finally thunders back into her driveway, she heads for the computer in her bedroom before she even shrugs off her coat, booting the old thing up with a single-mindedness she recognises only from English essays, spending time with Leah and  Him.  When it finally chokes to life she opens up google and finds herself staring at the search bar, fingertips awkwardly poised over the keyboard. It feels like if she types it, that might make it real. 

Renee hadn’t been the first one to ask, okay? 

When she’d been invited to join the Gay/Straight Alliance in Phoenix she’d brushed it off easily enough, figuring they were scouting everyone for members. It happened every September: the clubs and societies started handing out flyers and having bake sales and they were easy to ignore. That was normal, except she’d been asked to join twice, and the girl inviting her had said something that Renee would echo a year later, something about ‘whenever you’re ready’, and ‘if you need to talk, we’re here’. 

That was a pretty big coincidence, she figured, but it was enough of one to set her fingers tapping ‘ lesbian ’ into the search engine and hitting enter too hard. While she waits for the results her feet tap the ground like a drum, or like a thudding heartbeat. 

The results take so long to load on Charlie’s crappy dial-up that she stands, nearly knocking over her desk chair in her hurry to pace the wooden floor. When they eventually load she shouts ‘Finally!’ to no one, mutters about dial-up and clicks the first selection, hammering down on the mouse. 

——

After forty-five minutes of slowly loading web pages, she’s pretty sure she’s not a lesbian. 

What she does know now, is that she has a child block on her computer, and honestly she’s glad for it, because she’s not ready for whatever is behind the grey and red wall that had popped up on the screen. 

While things with Him were sexless by necessity, that didn’t mean she didn’t  want  to have sex with him. It was awkward to think about because she doesn’t like to think about Him, even if she can do it without having a panic attack now, but also because she doesn’t like to think about sex in general. Thinking about sex with Him isn’t quite enough to send her spiralling, but it gets close enough that she has to take a cereal break, her stomach growling in protest over that breakfast with Leah she refused. 

On her cereal break, in between bites of frosted flakes, she changes tack and tries to reason if she’s attracted to men in general, or to that one specific man. 

When she gets back she has another avenue of research that leads her to new words that don’t seem wrong but don’t seem right either, because they say yes: you can be attracted to men and women and other genders in between, but if she could do that then why had it happened so rarely? Why in eighteen years had one, maybe two people ever captured her like that? And how could it feel so different? 

‘The potential to be attracted – romantically and/or sexually – to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.”

She leans back in her chair and lets out a long, deep breath and asks herself, Is she attracted to Leah the way she was attracted to Him? 

The answer is no. Leah makes her feel different. Leah makes her feel strong and brave and freer than she’d ever felt. Leah made her feel like an adult, but not the kind of adult that was born forty; the kind of adult that was free to explore, not weighed down by responsibility. And Leah makes her feel wanted as well, and it’s weird because Leah has said plenty of times that she wants Bella to go away and find someone else to bother, but when Leah says it she laughs, or wraps an arm around her, or throws a blanket over their legs or talks about college. And Bella knows that Leah wants her around. 

Some people who have the capacity to be attracted to people of any gender choose other words to describe their sexual orientation, such as bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, omnisexual, fluid, or queer. 

The names are overwhelming, and send her down a fresh few rabbits holes to find out their differences and intricacies, trying to apply each one to Him and Leah in turn like finding the right pair of jeans. Her chin is resting on the desk, eyes heavy with the strain of the bright screen in her dark bedroom when the phone trills, the noise making her jump and she sits unmoving for so long she has to run to catch it when she remembers she's alone in the house. 

“Hello?” 

“Bella?” It’s Leah, her voice clear and awake, not the peaceful, sleepy tones she’d left over an hour ago “I was just checking you got home, you left really early.”

“Yeah,” Bella croaks, her voice still thick from a lack of speech this morning. “Yeah, I’m home. Sorry - I just had some stuff to do today.”  

“Oh okay. Is everything - I mean is everything okay?” 

“Totally.” It’s too early, too soon to explain. Too soon to make Leah understand what’s going on with her right now. There are risks to weigh, and in the place saying something, saying the wrong thing, she can’t say anything. Her voice is stilted, and there’s a long silence because of course, Leah wants more of an answer than ‘totally’. 

“Bell, are you - I mean did I - we… Bella, what the fuck’s wrong?” Leah stammers for a moment but her final question comes out with a heated snap that Bella knows well. 

“Leah,” She breaths, her heart catching in her throat.  Don’t say anything. Don’t say anything that might freak her out. Not until you’re sure.  “Really, everything is fine I just have some stuff I need to do today. I’ll call you back later, okay?” 

Leah lets out a quiet, huffy ‘whatever’ and hangs up. It’s not how she wants to end it, but she can't think of anything to say if she calls back and tries to make it better. Stretching her sore back, spine popping from sitting too long hunched over, she walks back to her computer. Her eyes skate across one of the lines near the bottom of the webpage. 

Some people prefer to avoid any label at all.

Sitting back in her uncomfortable chair, the light grey because she didn’t bother to snap on the overhead light she wonders… Does it really matter what she calls herself? 

Does it really matter  how  she loves Leah when it matters so much more that she  does  love Leah? 

Because she does. There’s no avoiding that now. Not when they’ve talked more about a concrete future than she could envision with her family, with her friends, with Him. Not when the whole world is painted with where they’ll go together and what they’ll do together and it all seems so  bright . 

She calls Charlie at the station to tell him she got home safe, that they’ll talk about Seattle at dinner, and that she’s making pasta. 

Then she calls Jess. 

Jess fits her bedroom very well. It’s a whirlwind of band posters, twinkle lights and lines of crystals and fairy statuettes, bright and blatant in personality, portraying the whole story of a girl that feels very, very far away from Bella’s own interpretation of her. The girl herself is bopping her foot along to the radio turned down low as Bella peers around the room, taking in all the little details of a person she’s known for nearly six months and never hung out with (or even called) for the sole purpose of ‘talking’. 

Or in Jessica’s words ‘girl chatting’. 

She thought about calling Angela, but a nagging part of her knows that while Angela is a very accepting person, but also the daughter of a pastor and very prone to awkwardness. Jessica has an impressive way of kicking through discomfort like tissue paper, a way that almost reminds her of Leah’s intimidating confidence. 

She kind of needs to be kicked right now. 

“If this is because you have a thing for Mike, I’m sorry Bella but I really don’t want to know about it.” Jessica’s voice eventually cuts through her thoughts, and she startles, turning towards the girl where she’s sat propped up on her bed. She can’t help the bark of a laugh that sentence shocks out of her. 

“ So  not the issue I’m having.” 

“Well you said you wanted to talk about crushes, there aren’t a lot of other options in Forks. Except maybe Tyler, who I am considering now that Mike’s out of the picture again. So if it’s not about Mike, and I’m guessing it’s not about Tyler -“ Jessica pauses, one brow raised until Bella shakes her head, firmly denying Tyler as a candidate. “Then spill”

“I have this… friend. And I think I’m having all these… feelings. I just - I thought you might be able to help me figure out what the difference between being someone's friend and wanting something more than that.” 

“This is why being friends with boys is such a nightmare,” Jessica rolls her eyes dramatically, falling back on her bed, and Bella is so not ready to correct her line of thinking. “But I think I can help you.” She pats the bed beside her, and hesitantly Bella sits down beside her feet. Her hands firmly balled on her thighs. “What made you think you were having  feelings ?” 

“We - we were out to dinner. And we were sharing our food and had a really good time. Then I just - I just suddenly realised what it looked like from the outside.” The words start to come quicker, spilling out as she stares intently at the shaggy purple run on Jessica's floor. “We looked like a couple, and we were acting like one, and anyone that saw us would have thought that’s what we were.”

She feels the stir of the mattress as Jessica sits up again, and the others girl voice is slow: “People thinking you’re a couple doesn’t make you a couple.”

“I know that.” Her brows furrow, trying to figure out how to explain it properly. This is why she needed someone to talk to that was… not involved. Someone, she could bounce her thoughts off until they came out right. “But when I realised that’s what they thought it made me think about why I was acting like that. Why we were holding hands. Why we were going to dinner together. What we were talking about. And suddenly it just didn’t feel like the stuff you do with your friends.” 

“Well, what were you talking about?” 

“Just what we’re gonna do in college.” 

“Like, what you’re gonna study?”

“No, what we’re gonna do  together  while we’re  both  in college. In the same city.” 

“Oh!” Understanding seems to have dawned on Jessica like a stack of bricks, and her blue eyes are wide and her mouth is a perfect O. “So you were discussing your  future   together .”

She can’t think of anything to say to make it sound any less or any more romantic than that. She doesn’t know what she even wants to make it sound like. 

Jessica doesn’t give her long to mull it over, “Well that is awfully Angela and Ben of you, but plenty of friends go to college together I guess.”

“I guess,” she echoes, but it feels like something in her chest, something like the expansive fronds of a fern dry out, curl up and retract inside her. Like Jessica’s summation isn’t what she wants to hear. 

“Although - not usually holding hands at dinner together.” Bella falls back, bouncing as her back hits the mattress, parallel to Jess but lying top and tail like kids at a sleepover. 

"Definitely not something friends do a lot of," Jessica snorts, and Bella almost joins in. "If you're not dating, then why are you holding hands?" 

“It just feels nice. Before - with -  you know,  everything was so intense.” Her breath hitches and the words are full of falters as she tries to push them out. It’s easier, looking up at the popcorn patterned ceiling and the swatches of fabric pinned up that make it feel like a fortune tellers tent. “Everything was so explicitly  romantic , like a novel.” She picks at Jessica’s comforter, trying not to remember the touches of icy skin and proclamations of love and affection and forever. “This is different, it’s casual and it’s easy and it makes me feel good and I don’t want to stop doing it. But is that just… having a really good friend?” 

Jessica is quiet for so long Bella has to peek at her, and when she does she can see Jessica staring up at the same ceiling, twisting a curl of hair between her fingers. 

“That sounds like a really nice relationship to have with someone. Romantic or not.” Jess’s voice is surprisingly soft, and Bella arches her neck to get a glimpse of her face. “When I was with Mike I was trying really hard to do all these romantic things, like a movie, you know? But I didn’t actually like spending time with him, or talking to him that much.” At that admission, Bella props herself up on her elbows and see Jessica’s face properly, and finds it full of resignation and 

“But you were so upset when you broke up,” 

“Yeah, but not really about him.” 

“Oh,” Bella understands, very suddenly, the commonality between them. “You didn’t want to be alone.” 

Jessica hums, admitting nothing aloud.

Bella stays a little longer, talking about Jess's first crush (Harry Wilson in sixth grade) and how she realised that pushing him over at recess was actually a cry for attention, but it isn't all that helpful. what's helpful is remembering the curling, dry disappointment that came when Jessica so briefly declared them 'just friends'. It might have even been a surge of protectiveness over what she and Leah have, that it was common or basic or that it could be so easily dismissed or understood. 

“Leah called while you were out,” Charlie calls from the den as she gets in, the sound muffled by the game. 

“I’ll call her back later!” She replies, dropping her keys in the dish by the door and heading for the kitchen. She’s getting there, but she still doesn’t know what to say if Leah asks what the hell went in this morning and last night. And after her chat with Jessica, which so quickly veered away from talking about Leah, she still feels a little raw. Chopping and stirring, repetitive, mindless tasks, give her time to mull on her thoughts quietly, and most importantly, to mull over exactly what she’s going to say to Leah when she calls her back. 

She makes a puttanesca, nothing fancy or skilful, but Charlie’s smile is wide when he sits down for dinner, cracking open a fresh beer that can’t possibly suit the meal. 

“So, tell me everything, Kiddo!” He starts, and his face is so warm and open it takes only a second to realise his smile isn’t about the food. He missed her. 

“Seattle was so great! You know I like the city but the campus is so pretty and if I take a journalism major I can apply for an internship at one of the huge newspapers in the city!” 

“That’s amazing! But aren’t you still thinking about teaching? Did you look at the courses around there?” 

“Yeah - so if I wanna teach high school I should major in English first -“ 

 They talk about Seattle and colleges courses long beyond dinner, and until it’s late enough to turn in and too late to call Leah back. The cowardly part inside her relishes another day to get her head together. 

With school the next morning, there isn’t time to pick up the phone before she’s out the door, and calling Leah back has to wait until she gets home. By then, it’s been almost two whole days since they spoke, and she misses her more than she can worry about what to say. She doesn’t even take off her coat before she’s dialling and the phone is ringing

“Leah?” She asks, her voice surprisingly breathless. But it’s not Leah on the line. 

“I’m sorry, Bella. Leah’s not feeling well. Mono.” 

Chapter Text

Tuesday 

“Sorry Bells - she can’t come to the phone right now, she’s really sick!” 

Wednesday 

“Sorry Bella, Leah’s not up to visitors.” 

Thursday 

“We don’t need soup. Leah needs rest.” 

Friday  

Just above the phone, Bella’s developed a nervous habit. The yellow paint on the cabinets was peeling already, but with every Leah-less phone call to the Clearwaters Bella had started picking at it. Sheering yellow flakes on paint off with finger fingertips. She does it from the moment she finishes dialling to the minute the Clearwaters hang up on her, and like a bloodstain, the old fashioned redwood beneath the yellow paint is growing daily. 

“Bella, we’ve been really clear with you. Leah is sick. Don’t come here, don’t visit, and stop calling. When she’s up for calls, she’ll call you.” 

She’s really trying not to sound obsessive. Or annoying, or creepy, or even just irritating to the Clearwaters who she  knows  are busy - but how sick do you have to be to not be able to lift a phone? How sick do you have to be that in a whole week there isn’t a single second thought that you should call your  best friend?  Or pass on a message? 

The yellow flakes that shower the counter are brittle and small, but she crushes them with her thumb until they’re powder. 

It’s bullshit. It’s not even good bullshit, it’s blatant, and it’s basic and obvious she’s almost insulted by it. The lie is so obvious it feels like they’re not even trying anymore. Leah isn’t sick, and grinding her teeth, Bella knows it. At first, she tried to convince herself that's all it is, but she can imagine Leah, fever flushed and about to be hospitalised still ordering everyone around. it's the kind of image that, a few days ago, had made her smile when she felt stupid and lonely and confused.

So she’s left with two options: Leah is unconscious, and she has a right to be worried, or Leah doesn’t want to speak to her. 

The selfish, snarling and nasty part of her hopes Leah is comatose, but the Clearwaters won't even give her that. Just 'sick', 'mono', 'too weak to come to the phone' and 'resting'. How much rest can one girl need before she needs a hospital? 

Did Leah see the women in Seattle as she did? Did Leah suddenly see their linked hands as something that it wasn't supposed to be? Or was her pathetic crisis so obvious that Leah noticed it before she could name it? Either option is as bad as the other, and the very thought stood her dialling the phone half a dozen times. She didn’t ask for this, and neither did Leah. Leah was nice to her, a basic stranger on the beach. But she didn’t ask her friend to grow a crush and grow soft. They both had their own romantic crap to deal with: Leah didn’t ask for an identity crisis and a queer crush on top of everything else. She remembers that little fern of affection she felt growing in her chest last weekend. Those furling arms, velvet soft and encompassing. The more she gnaws at her lips and waits for the phone to ring, the more it seems to dry out and die all over again, leaving her feeling boneless, ragged and limp. 

Fine. The Clearwater's want her to leave it alone? She’ll give them a deadline. Ignoring an email from Renee in her inbox, she asks her search engine ‘How long does it take to get over mono?’ 

Two to four weeks, it tells her. 

She can deal with two to four weeks.  

She gives it two weeks and four days before she declares her passivity entirely over. 

Her Saturday shift at Newton's - starting before the sun even rises - barely touches her. Stacking shelves she plays through some of the arguments she might have with the Clearwaters. Hypothetically, could she break the door down and not get arrested? If she did, would Leah be proud? Would she laugh at her, or would that finally be the last straw? 

In a harried haze, the shift passes quickly, and she tosses her apron down and heads for her truck. The Beast roars to life and the familiar road to La Push grinds out beneath her wheels. She barely has time to notice that the grey sky is almost clear and letting a few rare lines of sunlight pepper the road, not until she’s well into the drive and roaring up the coastal road when - 

Native Grounds Coffee and Tourist Information open! 

For a usually careful driver, she swings onto the curb way too fast in her haste to stop, yanking out the keys and half running towards the warm blue and red hut. The window’s drawn shut, but she can see a tall, slim shadow through it that drives her forward. She’s halfway up the path, narrowly avoiding slipping on the loose gravel and wet grass when the window slams open and she jerks back sharply, barely understanding what's right in front of her. 

“ Paul ?” She asks, her steps stilling at the sight of one of Sam’s cronies. It’s like walking upstairs and finding there’s one less step than you imagined. It’s like a rug being yanked out from under her. 

It’s  weird  and it’s  wrong . 

“Swan.” That’s all she needs to put some fire in her steps again, stomping towards the counter in her heavy boots, truck keys still clenched in her hand. They dig into her palm sharply and even more sharply when she slams her hand down on the counter, the sound metallic and loud. 

“What are you doing here?” Her question is overly aggressive and she regrets that: but not enough to cool off. 

“Leah’s sick. Asked me to cover.” His face is carefully blank like he’s working very hard on not showing a single thing on his face. 

“You and I both know that Leah wouldn’t let you cover for her. Leah fucking hates you.” 

Paul grinds his teeth sharply, the sound audible even at a distance. He doesn’t defend himself though, not even a tertiary ‘we made up’ she wouldn’t have believed. He just shrugs. 

“Someone’s gotta keep this place open. Owner can’t shut down just ‘cause Leah's busy.” 

“So she’s  busy , not  sick ?” Paul’s fist clenches, and she knows she’s starting to annoy him. 

“Look, the Clearwater’s asked she’s left alone. So unless you’re here for maps and coffee, I’d get back in your truck and drive back home.” 

“Where’s Leah, Paul?” 

She stares into Paul’s eyes like she can hypnotise the truth out of him. He doesn’t say anything, his dark eyes caught on hers until - they flick to the left. It’s quick, but she turns her head, looking for what he sees in the distant tree line across the main road. 

She wishes she hadn’t, because she’d know Leah anywhere. 

The line of her back, the turn of her head. It’s the same, and entirely different as she darts in and out of the tree line. The glossy line of hair down her back is gone, not pulled out of her face, but  gone . Her hair is cut so short Bella almost thinks it isn’t her darting into the trees, but it is. she recognises the loping gait of her run, the length of her legs in her running shorts. She doesn't turn back, but it's Leah, healthy and whole and she isn’t alone. 

She recognises Jacob Black quickly enough, his shirt discarded and cut off jeans covering his enormously long legs. She recognises the high, braying laugh of other men, even over the distance between them. But then, like a punch in the gut, she recognises the third man; the man Leah’s chasing after. 

“She doesn’t want to see you.” 

No, Bella thinks. With Sam back in the picture, Leah probably doesn’t want any reminders of her. 

She tries really hard not to think about it. 

When she avoids something, really avoids something, she imagines digging a deep, deep hole in the dirt, somewhere lost in the forest behind her house. Somewhere quiet and untouched. She takes names like Leah, Sam, Cullen, Seattle and La Push and labels like bisexual, loyalty, love, and useless and unwanted and she shoves them all inside and buries them deep. So deep they should never see the light of day. So distant that no one will ever see them. It works - for a few days - keeps her standing upright, keeps her talking to Charlie. But she can feel it, even then. Like the Tell-Tale Heart under the floorboards. Louder than any of the others,  Leah  and  Sam  play like a drum. 

Charlie only asks about Leah once then not again, and that shows he's paying attention to her reactions. She isn't, so she isn't sure what she'd said to make him steer clear of the topic of the Clearwaters entirely, but she's glad for it. He never asked about the kitchen cupboards, though she's stopped that now, with no one to call. She’s fragile as glass and slow: she’s not normal and everyone notices. But they don’t say anything. She’s as curious as they are to see what might crack her. 

As it happens, it’s a letter. 

Waiting for her on the kitchen table when she gets back from school, white and stamped with the Washington State logo. It’s a small envelope, and that should tell her everything she needs to know as she holds it between finger and thumb like it might be diseased. She sits down on the stairs, knees giving out beneath her before she can make it to her bedroom. She tears the letter a little as she rips through the envelope, unfolding it and staring blankly at the first line until she finally lets the words go in. 

“Dear Miss Swan, 

After carefully reviewing your application, we regret to inform you that 

She crumples the page in her fist. 

It’s like a punch to the gut. No, it’s worse. It’s like someone reached into her chest and found that furled little fern and ripped it out by the roots.

And it doesn’t matter that Washington State is a safety school. it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t want to live in Pullman. It matters that  they  don’t  want  her. 

Her knees buckle and she falls hard, bruising her ass as she hits the step beneath her. She bows her head and tips forward, burying her forehead in her cupped hands, grinding her palms into her eyes and feeling the tears welling up and the sobs making her whole body shake. 

And she screams. 

Loud and hurt like an animal at slaughter. 

She hasn't had a nightmare in weeks, she notices vaguely. So long that screaming almost feels foreign: but she falls back into it like an old embrace. 

“Bella!” She hears, vaguely, distantly, alongside a large crash and the thunder of footsteps. Charlie falls beside her, arms reaching around her to hold her up. Most likely he’s checking for injuries, but there’s nothing. Nothing wrong with her that anyone can see except the crushed letter in her hand. She manages to take enough control of her hand to drop it, not wanting to keep hold of the physical evidence that she’s been found so lacking. So unworthy. 

“Don’t want me - they don’t -“ she gasps, her voice as agonised as she points jaggedly at the fallen letter. Charlie snatches it up, scanning the first few lines. “They don’t want me!”

“Bells - It’s okay, it’s just a school,” Charlie hushes her, his hand stroking her hair, trying to soothe her but she won’t be soothed. She brays, deep and pathetic but it gives her enough strength to force out the words. 

“It’s too fucking  hard ,” She gasps, voice cracking and shaking and the words  hurt  to force out but they won’t stop. That pit in the forest, those names, those labels, she can feel them digging out of the grave she dug for them. “Everything - it’s too fucking hard. I don’t wanna be this -“ 

“Bella,” Charlie speaks, a hand finally resting on her shoulder and squeezing, shaking her gently and wrenching her away from the front of his shirt. It’s stained with salt already. “Bella, please -“ 

“I don’t wanna be this  burden  on everybody,” Charlie tries to disagree immediately but he hasn’t thought about it. He hasn’t considered how heavy she is to carry, how much heavier she’s gotten in the last year. “I am - on everyone - on Mom, on you, on fucking  Edward  and on Leah.” 

“You’re not a burden on me, Bella. Never.” 

She can’t see, eyes blurry with tears but she can feel Charlie pull her into an embrace that’s so tight she can hardly move. His hand cradles the back of her head as her body shakes with violent sobs. He says it again as her shaking slowly abides, her chin tucked into the crook of his neck. 

“You’ve got no idea how happy I am to have you.” It nearly makes her start again. It hurts because it sounds like something Renee must have said before, but it sounds so true this time, so heavy. Maybe because Charlie doesn’t say stuff like that. Doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve, just like her. 

“I never want to crowd you, Bella.” He begins, his voice shakes and she wonders if he might be fighting tears himself. “You’re like me. You’re  just  like me. You like to be left alone to fix things yourself, and whether that’s wrong or right, I figured you knew I’d always be there to help you when you needed it." He breaths, deep and ragged and she can tell that he's struggling but that he's going to force the words out. "If I haven’t - if I haven’t shown you that, if I haven’t taken enough care of you then that’s my fault. It’s not yours, and it’s not because you’re a burden.” Her fingers are knotted into his shirt, and she realises she’s clinging onto him as well. When she speaks, finally, it’s clearer, watery and weak, but she snorts out a weak little laugh.

“You barely even get to sleep at night because of me.” He chuckles a little in response.

“Yeah well, I missed most of that when you were a baby. I was at work or taking care of my parents when you were small. It’s my turn to do the late shift, right?” 

“I’m  eighteen , Dad.” 

“And I’m forty-two,” he says with a shrug like that means anything. Slowly, she peels her hands out of his shirt, the watery waver in her voice slipping away enough that she’s starting to feel stupid and ashamed. She kind of wants to slip away to her room and not talk about this. She tucks her hands into the sleeves and brings them to her eyes, rubbing away the salty tears blinding her. 

“I’m supposed to be together by now.” Charlie laughs properly at that, letting her go and sitting on the step just below hers on the stairs. 

“Now, Bells that’s bull crap. What’d I tell you about college? I told you how much time you’ve got to figure that stuff out.” He smoothes down his moustache, and his eyes are a little glassy, his nose a little red in a way that has both of them awkwardly shuffling a little further apart. Resolutely, Bella looks at her bitten nails and Charlie stares at the wall. “You’re so young, Bells, but you act like you could die of old age at any minute.”

“Mom always said I was born middle-aged.”

“Well, that ain’t true. You remember coming here one summer and throwing our whole catch back in the river for mermaids to eat?” 

She shakes her head, rubbing her red-raw face. 

“Or you and Jacob Black playing pirates down at First Beach? I reckon he’s still got the scars from you and a wooden sword.” It doesn’t match with how she remembers it. When she thinks of herself as a kid, she pictures how Renee describes her, as boring and orderly, ordering her Mom to pay the bills and fanning a chequebook. She pictures herself as dull and adult before she could walk. She hardly remembers the beach, the rivers, the forest. 

“Kid Stuff,” She mutters. She doesn’t remember playing, and ‘pirates and mermaids’ seem like an indulgence she was never meant to have. 

“You’re  were  a kid, Bella. You’re still  supposed  to be young. To do stupid crap. What the hell's got you so desperate to be old? Because I can tell you right now: it ain’t all it's cracked up to be.” 

“I’m the sensible one.” She says instead of answering properly. That’s ironic, right? That Charlie’s version of ‘being young’ is so dissimilar to the version of ‘being young’ she’s imagined would go on forever. The Cullens and forever youth seems so shallow in the face of Charlie’s kind of childhood. She picks at her nails and tries not to look at the discarded letter again but it’s there and she does. Her voice is a little sharper, almost hinging on anger at what that stupid piece of paper did to her. “What happens if I’m twenty and still doing stupid crap? If I’m not in college or I’m not with someone or I’m not working? What if I’m just here, still doing nothing and I still haven’t figured anything out? You’re not gonna think it’s okay then.” 

“I was 22 when I married your mom - thought I had everything figured out then too. But we both know that wasn’t true.” He sighs deeply and she feels momentarily bad for making him think about Mom. As she always does when she thinks about Renee and Charlie, she thinks about his yellow kitchen cupboards and the paint she’s been chipping away at. “And ‘sides. You’re not doing nothing, you’re in school, you’re working for the Newtons, you’re cooking me dinner and letting me learn how to cook for the two of us. If that’s enough for you, it’s enough for me.” 

Bella leans her head against the wall heavily. The tears aren’t gone, they’re still leaking out lazily: conversation too open to let her close off completely. And Charlie too close to let her huddle away for a few moments and bury herself and Pullman. All she feels is wrung out and tired and stupid. She doesn’t want to go to Pullman, who cares if they don’t want her. She’s too busy dealing with all the things she  does  want to take up space with a college that’s too far away and too rural and too science focused. 

“Now, you wanna help your old man make a fish fry or what?”

In the kitchen, dressed in flour from a malformed batter, she looks at the yellow cupboards on the walls, peeling and old and faded. The patch by the phone she’s been steadily sheering away is almost violent in its ugliness. They’re so unlike Charlie. So telling of an uncertain youth that belonged to both him and Renee. So incongruous with the rest of the house that Renee might as well have stamped her name on them. Touching the yellow paint, another little piece of it flakes off on her fingertips like snow. 

“Dad, do you think maybe I could repaint some of the house?” 

Chapter Text

Two feet. Two hands. Four paws. 

Running is the thing she does to get away from everyone. 

For a few moments, a few sharp, precious little moments it works better than anything. Forest beneath her feet, trees line in the distance, the scent of the evergreen trees fulling her up and her thoughts not fighting for space. Being nowhere that reminds her of anything. Not Emily’s house, and all the bullshit involved in that. Not work, where she’s not allowed to be alone in case she brings the hut down. Not her bedroom, that reminds her of too many people. It’s peaceful. It’s beautifully fast. Faster than she could ever have dreamt of. Fast and quiet. Then Sam or Jacob or Jared or Paul shove their way in. Because she’s still too volatile to be left alone in this form. Fuck that. She’s as volatile as she’s always been. If anyone’s making her erratic it’s the voices in her head that won’t leave her in peace. 

And it isn’t like she doesn’t have the right to be angry. 

Everybody is right now: angry she’s here, angry about the awkwardness, angry that out of every girl in the tribe it had to be her to break tradition and join the band. Even her dad is angry because this shit wasn’t supposed to fall on her and now she’s stuck in whatever the hell kind of life this is. 

She’s not angry about Bella. She can’t be. She can’t think about her. There’s too much to unpack if she starts thinking about Bella. 

She’s angry about her hair. Sam cut it badly. After that first day her new form had slipped past her it was matted with leaves and mud. Her first little run was disorganised and panicked and ended with a fight somewhere around Olympia that left them all shaken. “This is why we can’t keep it long,” He’d said, and she supposes it makes sense, why the boys of the wolf pack had one by one fallen to a crew cut and a pair of cutoffs. It’s all so very utilitarian and so very sensible and so entirely distant from the little gang/clubhouse/cult theory she’s been running on when Jacob fell to it and Billy started acting weird. 

Sam’s hands were shaking when they took the scissors to her hair. 

Hers were too. 

It was the first time they’d been alone together in almost a year, and she was crying about hair. 

“Is this some kind of fucking punishment?” Leah had wetly asked as he sheered off the first handful of hair and left it uneven just below her chin. It felt like losing a limb. Leah rarely felt beautiful, and usually, it didn’t matter much. She felt tall and imposing and strong. Usually, she felt like the kind of person noone really wanted to be but her. But losing her hair feels like losing a piece of herself that she loved once. Sam used to stroke it when they were in bed together, does he remember? Her mom used to comb it in long, slow strokes by the fire while she told her stories. Bella said it was beautiful.  

Don’t think about Bella. 

“It’s just hair, Leah,” Sam had said, but his voice was thick in a way that made her think he knew full well it wasn’t just hair. “It’s just more practical.”

It is more practical. More practical for a life that’s spent half in the woods in fur and half in a blur of sleep and arguments and nudity. That’s another thing to be angry about: how much unnecessary nudity is there in life now? Four boys: Paul, Jared, Jacob and Embry. Four boys and her and she’s seen every inch of them either in the flesh or in each other's heads like a constant, badly shot X-rated movie. 

And how much have they seen of her? Everything. 

She clenches her fists hard, nails digging into her palms to stop that line of thought before she shifts. She’s really working on her control, and she doesn’t want to shift in her own bedroom. She fixes her eyes on her bedroom, on the photos on the wall, on the Seattle poster, on the piles of shredded clothes on the floor. She fixes her breathing, going in and out with long, slow breaths. Don’t shift. Don’t think about the boys. Don’t think about Bella. Don’t change. 

Her dad knocks gently on the door, and even though it’s shut she can hear the ticking of his heart that’s just a little more laboured than Mom’s. She can smell the salty spray of the ocean on him that tells her he’s been down by the shore, probably Native Grounds. He goes there a lot now to see Sam, now that she can’t be trusted in the enclosed space in the public eye, the Pack have taken it in turns to run the place. Don’t think about that either. 

“Did she call again?” 

“Nothing today. But that’s good, you were gettin’ all upset.” Her dad looks guilty. He shouldn’t, it’s not his fault that she’s not been able to get within three feet of the phone anytime it rings. Like a boundary line, she’s been repelled anytime that shrill noise starts sounding. Sam’s orders are powerful things, and the first law he’s laid down was that there was to be no contact at all with Bella Swan. The first few days, anytime it rang she’d race for it like she could trick his little curse with sheer force of will and the speed she has that no one can match. She couldn’t, and she’d shifted half a dozen times, completely cut off from even Bella’s voice down the phone, snarling and heading for the trees to rage. 

“Time’s running out on the mono excuse.” She remarks as he sits down on the end of her bed, her voice snippier than she likes to get with her parents. Everyone else can get the anger, she doesn’t want to lay it on her dad. He’s been looking rough lately, and this whole thing is a pressure he doesn’t need. “What’s the plan after that?” 

“We’ll deal with that when we get there.” We’ll get there, Leah thinks to herself. Bella will keep calling. She wouldn’t let Leah’s mom and dad keep her away, not without proof of Leah kicking her out herself. She’s sure of that. She hopes that. 

Don’t think about it. 

She didn’t call today. 

Her hands start shaking all over again and she stands sharply, heading for the window but not ducking out of it just yet. 

“I still get to have a life.” She grinds out slowly. She’s said it plenty over the last week. She can stop shifting. Taha Aki from the stories had. He’d settled down and stopped changing, grown old, and had a family. If he could do it, so could she. They couldn’t make her stay like this forever. That’s why she needs to get a hold of herself, be as fixed as Taha Aki was and will herself to stop and settle down. Except, of course, he did it after three wives and who knows how many years, but she can’t think about that either. “I can’t be this forever.”

“Then we just need to focus on that control of yours,” he nods towards her shaking hands, and his wise, slightly judgemental face just makes it worse as she ducks out and darts across the open lawn and into the cover of the woods. 

As soon as she hits the cover of the trees she tugs off her thin vest and her running shorts, nearly ripping them in her haste. She doesn’t waste time tying them to her leg like the older ones do, just letting them drop into the springy ferns to find later. Like a wave, she folds into a fresh skin of silver fur. 

Leah! The voice comes though, Jacob. She doesn’t try to hide her irritation because it won’t work. It tinges her thoughts like molasses, thick and heavy. It’s rare she can turn and not find someone already there, calling out for her. Now that there are five of them, there is almost always one patrolling. Maybe that’s good, they need protection, she just doesn’t want to be it. 

I had control over it. She thinks, pleased that it’s the truth. She didn’t burst into this form in a fresh, senseless rage. She slipped into it like clean sheets. It wasn’t involuntary. 

Pretty impressive! Jacob concedes. 

Any fresh scent? She says, cutting off that smug, pleasant line of thinking before it grows. She doesn’t want congratulations for controlling a freak show, not from him, not from her dad, not even in her own head. Control is necessary, it’s not a skill, it’s not a gift or a blessing. It’s not something to be proud of. 

Don’t think about it.

It’s the shit she has to get done so she can get this over with and get on with her life. 

Don’t think about Bella.

Her claws wrench deep rivets in the earth as Jacob gives the answer, a trail, just around the boundary line, crossing the river over and over like a tease. That sweet, sickly scent crisscrossing the forest. 

Emily’s house. Damnit, that’s something she’s got every right to be angry about because it’s goddamn beautiful and there’s a picture of her in it. Emily and Sam have a lot to be sorry for, but getting a photo of her printed, putting it in a frame and sticking it above their staircase is number one on her list. 

She’d been dragged inside the first time by Sam’s orders. The Alpha had enough of her refusing, filthy and bloody at the threshold to go anywhere near the little wooden house near the shore. So she’s been marched in and dumped in the bath tub and Emily had stared at her until Sam, sweetly, kindly, lovingly asked her to leave, stroking those scars on her face. Emily’s clothes were too small for her, and she’d had to wear Sam’s home. 

“Just like old times, right?” She’d sniped bitterly, pulling his hoodie over her naked chest. He didn’t say anything. He’d just called her dad and told them they needed to talk at his place. Then he told her dad she was a freak. The only one, the very first: the girl shapeshifter. She’s surprised her dad didn’t have a heart attack right then and there, with how white his face had gone. 

She thinks about it a lot. How freaked out did he have to look when he already knew about the other four running around the woods? 

“Leah?” Emily calls from the kitchen, leaning out the open window to see her on the porch, sheltering from the rain in her mismatched jean shorts and vest. She doesn’t startle, hearing the minute shifting of weight from the kitchen, the brush of condensation from the glass, the sad, disappointed sigh. 

Caught, Leah opens the door and slips inside. It’s hard to avoid her at her own house, but Sam insisted they meet here to map the scent’s progress across the peninsula. to try and work out what it wants and where it's going. 

“Hungry?” There’s a dishtowel thrown over her shoulder and pearly soap bubbles clinging to her wrists. Did Emily ever think about college? Or was this enough for her? Caretaker, pack mother, dishwasher, and muffin maker? 

“Ate before I came.” She lies, looking around, noticing a new precious memory in every corner of the house. Nicknacks, junk and photographs. A whole life together in just a few months. “Sam?” 

“Just visiting Billy, wanted to see if he’d managed to dig up those treaty records.” 

Leah nods stiffly, and Emily looks uncomfortable, wringing her soapy hands. Waiting for her to explode. There it is. On the wall by the stairs, there’s the photo of her and Emily when they were barely teenagers, smiling because they hadn’t done anything to each other yet. Leah and Emily both have long hair, and clean, layered clothes, and they’re the same height. 

“Jacob told me you’re getting faster. You always did like -“ 

“I’ll wait outside.” Leah interrupts her, pushing open the door with her shoulder, managing not to push it off its hinges as she barrels into the tree line. 

Her last pair of jeans: gone in a second. 

Her thin threads of control: gone in a second. 

It isn’t her coffee shop. It isn’t her tourist office. It’s a shed with a coffee maker and a few maps owned by somebody else that she works. She barely even likes it there. It’s just warm and paid and easy. And hers. 

Seeing Paul fucking Lahote in there is a slap in the face. 

“Paul knows as much about customer service as he knows how to get a damn date,” She grouses, watching him from the tree line across the street as he switches the coffee machine on and doesn’t bother with the heater because he’s his own furnace now. she kicks the stones with her toes and they fly. 

Paul scowls and mutters a quiet 'fuck off', because of course Paul can hear her bitching and then he slams the window shut. 

And on one of the first sunny days of the season? They’ll be lucky if the La Push tourist trade survives Paul fucking Lahote. But apparently, this is what pack is. ‘Pulling everybody’s weight’ ‘sharing responsibility’ ‘trusting Paul fucking Lahote’. She’s shaking the second he puts out the open sign. Shaking so hard Sam looks concerned she might actually kill him. 

“Relax, Leah. You wanna keep getting paid, you let one of us keep the place open. And it’s Paul’s turn.” Sam says, his voice careful and authoritative. It means nothing to her, calling Paul a fresh list of foul names, and trying to stop the tremours, certain he can still hear her. Then she stops. Her heart jumps into her throat. Because it’s there, it’s the roaring, ridiculous orange truck and Leah wants to scream but she’s rooted to the spot. She’s still shaking. God, she can’t stop fucking shaking. Deep breaths, pulling in air. She can’t stop shaking. Fucking Paul! She wants to scream. If it wasn’t for fucking Paul she would have been calm, cool, collected. She could have smiled and waved and maybe managed a conversation underneath Sam’s watchful glare. But because of fucking Paul she can’t get a grip and it’s not safe. 

She’s not going within ten feet of Bella when she’s shaking like this. 

She thinks of Emily’s scars, she thinks of Bella’s soft skin. She thinks of spilling blood on the asphalt. 

She turns away, sucking in deep breaths to try and stop them. If she can do it, if she can get control, if she can prove how okay she is, maybe Sam won’t order her not to. Maybe she’ll get her chance to see Bella properly, to apologise for not coming to the phone. Sam owes her that, doesn’t he? She won’t get to stay, or explain for real, but it’ll be something. She can’t imagine what Bella thinks is going on with her. 

She can hear her stomping across the gravel. She can smell her on the wind, sweet and fresh but it’s not helping. If anything the proximity to her and the proximity to Paul’s weak-ass lies only makes a snarl crawl out of her lips. Is he doing it on purpose? Trying to fuck up her life even more?

“Leah fucking hates you,” Bella snaps and that’s the last straw because Leah wants to laugh and she wants to cry and she wants her friend back but she can’t go near her. She bolts, rippling, ready for the change. She shakes so violently she nearly buckles, Sam’s hand on the back of her shirt wrenches her up and throws her out ahead of him and the other boys as they follow her. She needs to get the hell out of here before she loses her damn mind. She barely makes it under cover before she changes, Jacob just a second behind her to keep her in check. 

Don’t think about Bella. 

Don’t think about it. 

Asshole! Stupid, selfish, asshole! She snarls, careening into an old redwood, needles dropping and bark splintering at the aggression. Jacob reels around her as she replays Paul’s words in her head, knowing she’ll see Bella’s face through his eyes later. 'Leah doesn’t want to see you,' he’d said. What gives him the right? She’s got two hands tied behind her back to keep them apart, and he barges in like he can speak for her? 

Like a slideshow, she can see the back of Bella’s head, the memory of her in Jacob’s mind. What did her face look like when Paul told her that shit? Does she even want to know? Will it be agony or indifference, will it be the way she was at New Years: that hollowness? 

He shouldn’t have said that. Jacob’s head is full of calming thoughts. Quiet lakes, smooth stones and breathing techniques. Jacob's a marvel of control, the king of cool and god if he isn't smug. It drives her crazy and she howls, Long and loud and clear. Surely Bella hears it as if her friend has any capacity to translate the cry into a feeling and relate it to her. 

I’ll kill him. I’ll rip his face off for saying that. 

Stop it. Sam’s voice barges into her consciousness like a blooming bruise as he shifts, heavy and thick and impossible to ignore. It chokes her. Paul shouldn’t have said that. But you know you can’t go near her. You’re too volatile. 

I’m getting a handle on it! She paws the ground, raking bracken. Her display today was anything but control. Her body heaves with deep breaths coming too fast. Jacob’s incessant in and out’s in the background of her mind make her snarl.

You could have hurt her. It’s better she stays away. Flashes slip between them. Those weeks Sam had spent away when they were still together, the first shifted and scared, avoiding her completely. Then, unbidden, Emily’s face comes between them, scarred with long, deep furrows. She’s not completely sure which one of them thought it. Then a thought that’s definitely hers. Bella’s face, that soft, pale skin marred by the same scars. Or worse, Bella bleeding on the ground and silent. she can feel Sam screaming out at the image, translating Emily's face onto Bella's and vice versa, the memeory like a brand between the three of them of Emily screaming. 

She howls again, the sounds lower and more breathless as the image reflects in Jacob and Sam’s head both. 

Don’t think about Bella. 

Leah… Jacob thinks gently, and his thoughts are a slideshow. Her, just now at the shack, the smile on her face when they both heard that ridiculous truck with a hole in the dash where a radio was supposed to go. Bella, windswept and pale and furious at the window of Native Grounds, Paul’s presence carefully thought around. 

Stop it. 

She tells Jacob, but she can’t stop herself, because she thinks about Seattle. She imagines the space needle and a flat like a sitcom they could share together. But it’s ruined, the whole imagining scarred because she can’t do it like this. She can’t go to Seattle like this and then, like a joke, she remembers they guy in the coffee shop from Seattle that had been flirting with them both like he deserved one of them or both. She’s nearly phased then, before she even knew what that was. Before she even considered what she and Bella were. 

You can’t keep a secret from a Wolfpack. 

Leah… Jacob thinks again and he sounds so awkward because he’s cycling through a bunch of lifetime movie ‘acceptance’ tropes again before she snarls, diving forward to dig her teeth into his leg. 

No! That’s mine! She digs her teeth in harder, drawing blood as Jacob snarls until Sam barks sharply at her and she pulls away. But she doesn’t stop thinking. That’s mine and you don’t get to have it. You don’t get to know it or think it until I fucking tell you that with my own mouth. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about Bella. Don’t think about me. 

She wants to cry but in this form, she can’t. She can only feel angry and strong but she wants to curl up into a ball and cry. And she hates crying. Between patrols and not being able to stay calm and not being able to answer the phone and not having her thoughts to herself she’s hardly had time to think since her first phase. She can’t go home, because she’s doesn’t feel secure enough to put her parents in danger like that. Sam leads her back to Emily’s - the last place on earth she wants to be - but she goes. Even waits in the bushes for him to bring her clean clothes but she doesn’t go in. It’s raining gently, though the sun is a weak and spilled yellow, but just enough that it looks like the forest is spotlit.

Curled up in a copse of trees, Jacob and Sam leave her to continue their patrols and give her space. They don’t try and console her again

Fucking Emily doesn’t get the memo, turning up with tissues, a blueberry muffin and a knit blanket, bundled in a sweater.

“Starting to see how your face got so messed up. Approaching angry werewolves with tissues sound like good idea?” It’s a low blow, but Emily doesn’t even flinch, tossing her the things in her hands and squatting a few yards away from her. Leah lets the blanket and the tissues drop to the dirty ground but catches the muffin in her lap. Emily, idiotic Emily holds much closer than Sam would recommend, given today's antics. She rears up automatically. She’s thought about it, but she can feel what that would do to Sam like a knife to the gut. 

“Sounds like a stupid one, but you’re not angry.” She says gently, smoothing down the hem of her sweater with her knuckles. It’s not a nervous gesture, but one of comfort, like Emily needs comforting. 

“I can still throw up a few claws if you’re that desperate.” She leans her head back heavily against the damp bark. She uses the hem of her vest to rub her eyes, only a little petulant. She can’t even feel the cold, in the spare clothes she keeps at Sams now. Frustratingly, it’s difficult to muster any anger now. She’s tired and wrung out like an old dishcloth, the holes starting to show in the fabric. Phasing would be a useful escape from Emily, but would it be worth it to be thrust back into the Pack’s mental conversation? Who knows. Whatever, she doesn’t phase. 

“Sam said Paul’s driving you crazy again.” 

“Paul’s been doing that since school. He’s an asshole.” Emily snorts gently, prettily. She rolls her eyes because she can already imagine Sam’s little swell of love at such an action if she ever thought about it in front of him. Emily’s like that to Sam: a woman of endless fascination, every action like a portrait or poetry. 

Leah wants to throw up. The rain finally stops, she can feel the change in the atmosphere before it happens, the gentle rise of the hair on her arms. She curls her arms around her middle, the way she would if she could feel the cold through her wet hair and damp limbs. 

“Why are you so okay with this?” Leah asks eventually, head lolling against the tree trunk, taking a bite of the proferred muffin Emily tossed toward her because she’s starving damnit. Phasing is like the most ridiculous cardio she’s ever experienced and she needs the carbs if she’s going to be able to go home. 

“With what?” 

“‘With what?’ Your fucking boyfriend is a werewolf genetically inclined to love you.” It’s accusatory, it’s rude. It’s direct and Sam’ll give her hell for it. “You feed and clothe a bunch of naked assholes that can’t control their tempers. Including now, me. How are you okay with that? How are you okay with any of this?” 

“Loving someone? Being loved? Having five people that protect me and the tribe and the land I love?” She sighs deeply, as if it’s that easy. She gestures to the scars running down her cheek and she looks younger, annoyed and huffy and the mere twenty years old she actually is but never looks anymore. “It’s hard, obviously. It wasn’t the plan, but whether it’s love or the imprint or fate… It’s more than I thought I’d get to have.” 

Emily always wanted a family. A husband. Children. 

Emily’s mom and dad weren’t… what she wanted. 

“Sam thinks it’s a genetic thing, to pass on the shifting gene,” Leah says, staring into the bracken and not at Emily. “I don’t know if he ever told you that?” 

“He had that theory,” Emily says, sitting down with a sigh. How does she feel about that? Knowing that their love story, their destructive imprint was all built on biology and breeding? “I don’t believe that.” That is surprising. Leah almost forgot Emily could differ from Sam, like the two weren’t one body. Emily worries her lower lip like she isn’t sure she should continue. “You have all this power: Speed and strength and healing; eternal youth if you want it. I just think… for some people, maybe they wouldn’t give it up without good reason.”

Leah snorts. Sure, Sam thinks about the time he won’t have to do this anymore; when the tribe is safe from sickly sweet scent trails and he can settle down with Emily properly, thinks about kids and a future in his little wooden house, but that’s so far away and such an impossible task, all based on a thread of control that even he, the oldest can’t keep a hold of some days. “Voices in your fucking head and never moving on?”

“Not everyone sees it that way,” Emily says and her voice is almost a reproach. Suddenly Leah thinks about Paul, the bastard, and the joy he feels sometimes when he can differentiate the scent of different flowers from ten feet away and feel the oncoming rain, how pleased he is by the senses he’d been given. She thinks how free running on four paws is. How fast. How quiet it can be in the forest. “Taha Aki didn’t find his imprint until his third wife, maybe hundreds of years after he changed. If it was about biology, why didn’t he find her sooner? Why didn’t he imprint on any of his first wives? He had children with all of them, so why not the first or second?” 

“So the imprint is a little ‘job well done’ sticker and retirement?” 

“I think it’s a reason to stay.” 

She finally meets Emily’s eye and she could say what she says so much more cruelly. When she speaks she speaks almost softly. “But Sam is still out there.” 

“I know,” Emily nods, and her eyes are a little watery. “But if you believe in that, maybe the fact that we found each other so soon means he’ll be done soon.” 

And god, that’s so fucking sad. Because Emily really believes this is a fairytale. That it’s going to end the way she wants. And it’s so much sadder that she wants to believe her. 

“Then why was it you and not me?” That’s bold. And dangerous. Sam might kill her for asking it, or he might cry. Either option is despicable. Emily holds her gaze for a long minute, but she doesn’t look upset, or surprised, or offended. 

“Oh Leah,” Emily says and it doesn’t even sound pitiful, more like Emily knows something she doesn’t. “Do you really think you’re ready to stay?”

Don’t think about Bella.

“No."

Don’t think about Bella. 

She thinks about the guy in the coffee shop instead. Or she thinks about some stranger appearing in La Push like a bad dream, of catching his eye and being caught the way Sam was caught. She thinks about losing Seattle again, that college might not hold the same call once she's settled in to be someone's wife, of never even getting the chance to go and come back before she stays. She thinks about leaving Bella; for good this time before they even got a chance. The boys can see it in her head but Emily can surely see it on her face. No, she’s not ready for the house by the shore and a peaceful life like they are. She’s not ready for the feeling the way Sam feels it, like a calling. Like settling down. Like stopping, in any sense of the word. What would be the better option? If she could see Bella again and imprint, pull her away from Seattle with her and keep her here, on a house by the shore and calling that love. Or not imprinting? Letting her go alone while she waits, stuck here to see if she can get out or if she can fall in love and pull someone in. 

But there's an option worse than all of them.

Loving her.

Being with her. Whether it's here or in Seattle, building their little future together, and letting some stranger come along and rip it all away because it's what fate or biology decides is fair. 

“No. Not yet.”

Chapter Text

Charlie deals with living in an episode of home improvement much better than expected. Hell, he even seems to get a little excited about it.

Armed with an old spatula, a blaring radio and surprising aggression Bella scrapes away the flaking yellow paint from the kitchen cupboards revealing pale wood. It only takes her an afternoon to rid her and Charlie of it all, biceps burning and knuckles scratched up from a few over-enthusiastic and over-aggressive scrapes against the sharp edges. She’s overzealous, too fast and too thoughtless with it, but watching it scatter as dust feels like wiping something clean. When the spots and flakes of twenty-year-old paint are vacuumed up the kitchen seems desolate but fresher, renewed but not finished. 

In the den that evening she and Charlie ate hasty sandwiches, the kitchen not really ready to be used properly and talked about colours briefly.

The yellow cupboards, she had assumed, were only there to be restored to their former glory, like a painting from an old master, and wondering if what she had seen of the cupboards had faded over time or if they were always the hauntingly chirpy shade. 

“The yellow’s a little old-fashioned,” he says eventually, a beer in his hand. He picks at the label, not looking at her practised lines of shades and concepts or her and that’s good, because she’s trying to stop her mouth from falling open. “Not yellow. But I did like how bright it was in there when it was raining. Something bright.” 

She really hadn’t expected that the cupboards could be anything but yellow by the time they were done, but she agrees entirely. 

It's another day before she has anything to show him, she spends hours at the weak DIY store in town one drizzly Sunday, picking up cards and matching them against one of her photos from last September, her and Charlie with their arms wrapped around each other the kitchen. She tests them against the deep brown of the wood-panelled countertops, and the light spilling through the south-facing window.

that evening, she builds lines of colours on the couch arms and considers them. 

“What about ‘Brilliant blue?’” She asks, holding up a fresh shade the colour of La Push’s ocean in summer. 

Charlie hums gently in approval as she shows him half a dozen shades from sapphire to gray, then u-turns and begins holding up emeralds and teals. He seems happy with all of them, with anything that isn’t what it was before. Eventually, she settles on two heavy tins of ‘Warm Sky’ blue and a glossy woodstain the colour of redwood trunks. 

Repainting the kitchen takes her a week. The cuts of her knuckles make it harder, breaking open when she moves too quickly or too thoughtlessly, scabs crusting overnight and bursting freshly in the evening, but they’re harmless, wrapped in bandaids. It's a week of takeout because the kitchen is draped in sheets and poisonous fumes. A week of ditching her stuff as soon as school lets out and going to work. It’s not the same way she kept busy at the beginning of the year. She’s not running away from her bedroom this time, or away from quiet and discontent. In fact, when she isn't painting, she's looking up advice on wood staining techniques on the computer in her bedroom, or how to stop the paint from drying unevenly. She tries not to think about Leah, but it’s better and it’s worse. Worse of course, because she’s alone. Better of course, because she’s alone and dealing with it in a way she didn’t know she could anymore. But she does. It hurts, but she can still breathe. She’s upset, but she can still stand. She’s lonely, but there’s still life in her, life for her. There’s paint and stain and strong scents to deal with, and she finds that she likes the detail work. She’s slow and precise when she’s got the hang of it, and there’s some satisfaction in looping masking tape around every outlet and sideboard in a room before she can even touch the paint. It’s slow and steady and it makes her hands and arms and spine ache. But slowly, the kitchen cabinets turn a burnt red and the walls, formerly a faded cream are masked with a rich, gleaming blue that makes the room feel larger and warmer than the yellow had managed.

Charlie doesn’t comment on it much while she’s there, dodging over her to bring her a fresh glass of water every few hours. Sometimes to turn down the blaring talk radio so he can hear whatever game is on, and sometimes to turn it up higher so he can hear it from the den. He is, as always, unflappable, only raising an eyebrow when she’s removed the doors from their hinges to let them dry with fewer streaks than the first coat. He generally doesn’t comment much on the mess she’s making, except to ask if she needs help, more painter's tape or to tell her he likes the colour that’s starting to take over. She caught him once, running his hands over the edge of the countertop like the whole place was brand new and he was seeing it for the first time. 

A wekk later, on Sunday afternoon she screws the cabinets back into place and it’s done. It almost surprises her to find there are no spots left to cover, no streaks left to repaint. Charlie is out fishing and the house is quiet, the late Spring air is heavy, whistling through the open window, and the sound and scent of the air caught in the forest outside begin to wash away the paint and oil clinging to the fresh surfaces. She pulls the paint-spotted sheets from the kitchen table, dusting off the table with a corner until the old wood shines. The wide window looks out into the woods, bowing trees and dappled grey light, the table and chairs framing it like a painting. She looks out on it, idly folding the sheet into an untidy square and laying it down without looking, watching the breeze bend the branches like waves over water. It’s like breathing, like calm, quiet breath, in and out. Pride swells in her that she’s had some change here, some mark on Charlie’s kitchen and the summer she has left here. 

Steps heavy but careful with the teetering cans, she stashes the remaining paint and the spotted canvas in the back of the garage to take to the junkyard. Or, possibly, to save for the next room. She’s already told Charlie that she’s having thoughts about her bedroom and the colour purple. Then she slips up the stairs to retrieve the envelope, heavy paper rustling almost imperceptibly against her fingertips. It’s unopened, the glue slightly creased where she’s run her fingers over the opening a hundred times in the three days since it arrived. She stretches her back and sets it down at the kitchen table, laying her phone beside it like a dinner service. She takes a long, deep breath and snaps open the cell, calling up Leah’s home number, her call history littered with it already from weeks of fruitless calls. Tucked beneath her jaw and her shoulder, she thumbs the envelope, ready to tear it open if Leah answers, if Leah would be there with her when she does. 

Three rings go unanswered and she drops the envelope. It keeps going, five and six and seven before the Clearwaters answering machine takes over. She snaps the cell shut without leaving a message, it’s not like Leah doesn’t know she’s calling, she doesn’t need to delete a needy message from her ex-friend.  Maybe the Clearwater’s invested in a caller ID, because she hasn’t got beyond the answering machine in days. It’s been weeks, in fact, since she even considered what she’d say if Leah was to suddenly pick up, like the ease and familiarity has leeched away. She stands, that little tendril of bitter, drying up hope inside her limbs curling smaller and smaller every day as she shoves the letter into the pocket of her sweatshirt. 

The kitchen’s done, she reminds herself, taking another look around. Leah wasn’t here, Edward wasn’t here, and she did something for her and for Charlie. Something to be proud of. The only thing left to do with it is to use it. She stretches her back again, hearing the vertebrae pop, mentally cataloguing recipes to celebrate her success and make a decent, very hard-earned meal, grabbing her keys and the cash Charlie keeps around for groceries. The rain is barely perceptible, more like an especially wet fog as she makes her way out to the Beast and slams the door shut behind her, laying her head back against the headrest of the bench seat briefly. 

She sighs, a long, heavy sigh of satisfaction, imagining lasagne or potentially steak and reaches out the dial of the radio. Her hand finds empty air and it jolts her up out of her comfortable recline, looking at the empty space in her dash like she’d never seen it before. It’s ugly. It’s spilling over with loose sockets and wires that are supposed to be hidden, looking at it, it looks like an upturned plant, roots made naked in the empty air. 

God, she thinks, that’s so embarrassing. Who had seen this mess? Who had averted their eyes like it wasn’t there? Had anyone believed her bullshit ‘it broke’ line, looking at this? She raps her knuckles against the torn casing, tearing open the scrapes on her knuckles from her DIY project again, beading with a few rubies of blood but she doesn’t care. She tore her ancient, beautiful truck apart for the sake of a stupid radio and a hole she thought someone had carved into her chest. She swears loudly. Then she swears again even louder. Edward hadn’t ripped a piece out of her, just like Leah hadn’t plugged it up. The hole in her chest was her creation, just like the dash. Better to be empty than upset. Better to be quiet than scream. Better to be numb than hurt. But that’s not her anymore. she’s not going quietly, she’s not letting it scab and she’s going to let it hurt if it fucking has to. With a final, formative ‘Fuck this’ she blots the back of her hand on the edge of her paint-stained t-shirt, she turns the key and reverses out of the driveway, foot heavy on the gas as the road starts to spill ahead in front of her. 

The driveway to the Cullen house is green and lush, wilder than it had been on her last failed attempt and raining branches and fern fronds down on her windshield. Spring, she supposes, was allowing the forest to take over at an even more abrasive speed. She makes her way up to the clearing, cutting a path through the overgrown track at a snail's pace, the road rocky and potholed by the changing weather and encroaching roots. She was probably the last car to follow this route way back in January. She tugs on the hand break, just in front of the steps leading towards the door, and throws herself from the truck. The door opens, her feet on the ground, one after another. She’s a little loose, weak with the forward momentum and stumbling around the front of the house, heading for the massive garage around the back. She tries not to look at the achingly beautiful house, the sight of too many memories good and bad. she trusts herself more than she did, but she has no desire to curl up and let those memories take her again. Every step on the damp ground takes her a little further than she managed last time, and she tries to focus on them, even as the damp soaks her canvas sneakers. When she reaches the door she catches herself on the handle, surprised when it opens under her hand, not even locked, and not even stiff or sticking. It’s dark inside, dust and damp heavy in the air but she doesn’t look for the light, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom. 

Tucked away in the corner, but touched by the light from the open doorway there is an all too familiar shape. A layer of grey dust obscures it and envelopes its shape, but there is the silver Volvo she knew very well once. In the dark, it looms, a mess of sleek lines and shadow. Does her heart stop? Or does it start to beat so fast that she just can’t hear it anymore? She doesn’t care, she uses it. Turning away her eyes and making for the other side of the room, Rosalie’s workbench, tools still in place on the wall as if they had only stepped out for a few hours and forgotten to return. She stomps over to it, her shoes leaving tracks in the ground like footprints through the snow. She pulls at the drawers beneath, finding rattling tools, nuts and bolts and spark plugs but no radio. She clutches the bench's edge and stoops down to the heavy shelf underneath, bathed in shadows. 

There it is. 

Dials and buttons, diminished, dirty and degraded and older than she is. But it’s there. Her radio. The missing piece of the Beast. She reaches for it with both hands, clasping her fingers around the sharp metal and feeling the unsmoothed edges dig in and the shift of trailing wires. It’s heavy and she braces herself for the weight as she pulls it out from beneath and cradles it in her hands. 

A laugh bubbles up inside her because for just a second it feels easy. She falters a little under the ungainly weight and hugs it to her chest. It's still here. there was a horrible part of her that wondered if they would have had time to trash it before they left if they would have cleared out any trace of her missing piece, but they didn't. They didn't have time or they didn't think to, and she takes a staggering step back towards the door and into the damp, foggy air, sucking in deep, clean breaths. The quiet is desperate, broken only by her heartbeat and the sound of the loose wires swinging from her arms. 

Then she realises, as she comes back to the damp ground and her body, that it is quiet. Oddly quiet. 

It’s spring, and the singing of birds, the roaring of their wings in flight, the floor disturbed by deer and rabbits and all kinds of jostling creatures are ever present, constant, even through the open windows at home, farther from the treeline than she is now. But it isn’t here. It isn’t now. She tries to remember if there had been any sound when she’d leapt out of her truck, but she was too focused on putting one foot in front of another to listen. She turns sharply as if the movement will startle something into life, but it doesn’t. There’s nothing until low wind lifts her hair, and with it comes the rattle of a door. Her breathing quickens, turning from her deep, measured breaths into hyperventilation. she turns with deliberate stillness to the house she'd been trying to ignore. 

The door of the house is open, caught in the wind and knocking unevenly on its hinges. 

“Fuck,” she gasps, taking a staggering step to the side, away from the garage, away from the open door, the radio clutched against her chest as if it could protect her. She looks down at the back of her hand, the blood dried and flaking off, the small wound barely noticeable, barely important. Unless, of course, you could smell it from yards away. She’d forgotten that bleeding was impossible here. 

To the right of the door, set against a large uncovered window something moves in the gloom and her staggering legs still, locked in place. Her heart continues to race, but her breathing stops. 

After seemingly a century, the door opens with deliberate slowness, and she watches it, wide-eyed as a hunted deer. 

Pale hand. Slim limb wrapped in beige wool. Swathes of caramel hair and wide, dark eyes. Her peach mouth is poised, open to speak, her hand raised and open in greeting or in peace. 

“Esme?” 

Behind them, an eruption of crashing branches sounds, the thundering of heavy footsteps, and the screaming howl of a wolf. Like a bullet from a gun, a vision of silver fur sails towards them. 

Chapter Text

She screams, because there isn’t anything else she can think to do, and there isn't time for a better idea. 

She falls to her knees and curls in on herself to protect her face and stomach from whatever the fuck has come for her now, a terrifying sound emanating from her throat like a wounded cry. She can’t move. She can’t think. She forgets Esme, supernaturally strong and surely able to protect her if she chooses to, but Esme doesn’t make a sound she can hear. 

On the exposed skin between the hem of her jeans and the top of her shoe, she feels something soft as velvet graze her for only a second and flinches, folding her body further over the sharp edges of the radio she’s clutching. Over the pounding of blood in her ears come the sounds of panting, heavy breaths and a low, keening whine that starts and stops every few moments. And warmth. Intense, fiery heat circling her like a furnace. And she's not dead yet, though surely more than seconds have passed by her. 

Slowly, she raises her head, body shaking and eyes blurry with fearful tears. Like a wall, a silver-grey wolf the size of a horse is curled around her, pounced and ready to strike. It’s shaking too, long, shaggy hair bristling and rippling with tremors. Her eyes are level with its shoulder, only able to see the soft, silky hair because its head is turned away. She raises a little higher, dropping the weight of the radio onto the springy ground and shifting back onto her knees, finding Esme who stands, still as stone at the doorway to the Cullen house. The cold and damp sinks into her light clothes at her knees, but she hardly feels it. 

“I won’t hurt her.” Esme raises her hands, both palms up in surrender as she speaks, her melodic voice clear and measured. A soothing mother, even in this. The wolf snarls in response, shaking violently. In the distance there is another keening, ripping howl and the wolf turns towards it, head whipping around, its shoulder-grazing Bella’s neck. It moves, slowly, pacing a slow circle around her, turning from Esme to the distant sounds in the forest until it comes closer. 

Another shape parts the shadowy vale of ferns and branches, another wolf. This one is larger, russet furred and slow, and the silver wolf whines slowly. It’s a strange sound, almost miserable in the middle of the standoff and it clutches around her more closely until she can’t move its long limbs and the sheer size of it around her. It whines again, over and over as if it’s in pain, bowing its head to the ground and Bella can only feel a strange, ridiculous sympathy for the pain in its cry. Thoughtlessly, like she would a friend she reaches out, palm flat, coming up to lay a hand on the place where its shoulder meets its neck. Its skin is warm as a campfire. The wolf stiffens and she yanks her hand back. She expects the wolf to snarl at her impulsive action, to bite, to claw. It doesn’t do any of those things. Its shoulder drops like it’s chasing her retreating touch, and it doesn’t look away from the stalking red wolf. 

Finally comes a third figure, this one human and tanned, bare chest gleaming and familiar. 

“Sam?” Bella calls gently, not wanting to alarm any of them. 

He nods tightly, looking at her peering out over the wolf's spine. His arms crossed over his bare chest. it’s then she realises how entirely out of place he is, how out of place all of them are. Two wolves, two people and Esme scattered across the Cullen’s yard. 

Finally, the staring contest between the two wolves ends, and the tension in the air seems to lighten a little. 

“Both of you - home,” he says, and the word carries such a clear order she almost wants to bow and submit to it, even with her unerring dislike of the man. The grey wolf gives a resounding snap towards the man, but slowly, it takes. A few steps away, uncurling from around her. Unthinkingly she reaches out, her palm grazing its side as it goes and when she does it turns, those big, liquid eyes are far too human and far too full for her to deny the suspicion lingering in her any longer. 

It makes for the forest edge slowly, then turns again, its eyes darting between her and Esme at the house and Sam beside her. 

Sam and Esme exchange a long, baleful look she can’t place well. 

“You have nothing to fear from me, Sam,” Esme eventually calls. Sam’s face twists, but he moves forward as if this is permission of some kind, offering Bella a hand and tugging her to her feet. She snatches her hand quickly out of his. Supernatural occurrences notwithstanding, she still doesn’t like Sam any more than she did before. 

“I think you’re going to need some things explained,” he sighs as if he’s surrendering. How old is Sam, she suddenly wonders. Twenty something? He looks older than that, weighed down and overburdened. "Seems like you're - seems like things have changed." 

Bella just nods, gritting her teeth hard as Sam looks between her and the slightly broken foliage the two wolves had disturbed. Another sonorous howl comes cutting through the trees and she flinches, wondering if it’s the grey or the red wolf letting out that scream. 

“But I have to deal with… that,” he’s shaking slightly, just barely perceptibly, and she guesses he must be freezing, running around shirtless in the rain. “But do you think you’re safe here with…” he at Esme from the corner of his eye, not saying her name, not even calling Esme ‘Her’. It’s that that confirms her suspicion: Sam knows very well what Esme is, and the wolves most likely did as well. 

“I’m safe.”

“Could you come to La Push around seven? Things should have… calmed down by then.” She stares at him for a long moment, willing herself to say no. After everything, Sam and Leah; backs turned away and the unanswered phone calls, she really wants to say no. Like giant wolves and Sam are nothing to her, like suspicion after suspicion and story after story aren’t churning around her head like waves. But she has to know, pride and heart be damned. 

Instead, she nods, and he nods back sharply before turning and bounding back into the forest. She watches until the trees swallow him up, and then she has nothing to do but turn to Esme, awkwardly bowing to gather up her radio, the whole reason behind whatever just happened. It’s when she tries to brush away a little water from it that she notices her hands are shaking. She’s in shock then. That makes sense. 

“Bella,” Esme says, her voice gentle like she’s a spooked horse. With exaggerated slowness, Esme starts to bridge the space between them. She keeps her hands busy like she can buff out the age and pitting from her ancient radio with just the sleeve of her shirt. 

“Didn’t know anyone was here.” She says, her face feeling immensely cold and hollowed out. “Sorry. Guess I broke in.” Was she breathing? Esme’s hands float an inch away from her arm, as if uncertain she’s allowed to touch her. It hadn’t been that way since before the trouble in Phoenix, not since the Cullens became easy with touches and she’d become easy at accepting them. What would she do if Esme touched her? 

“Bella, that doesn’t matter -“ 

“What are you doing here?” Bella interrupts suddenly, the question pouring out. Does she want an answer? There are so many unsatisfying ones Esme could give, was there even one that wouldn’t make her feel like shit? Esme sighs gently, surely expecting the question. 

“Alice. Alice works very hard not to see you anymore, but a few weeks ago your future was strange, it kept flickering in and out. She said there was a blue hut, and people she couldn’t see, and that the decisions kept clouding and unclouding. She was worried, and I was worried. I said I would come to check on you to make sure you were safe. When I found you were I - I should have left, but I didn’t. I wanted to speak to you, but it didn’t seem fair.”

She swallows. If Esme had called, or if Esme had turned up at her door, how would she have responded? She can’t reason out any clear, reasonable response she might have had if Esme were to arrive in the middle of her loss of Leah, or the frantic decorating binge to dull that loss. She still isn’t entirely sure how to respond to the woman even as she stands in front of her. 

“It’s cold - you’re chilled to the bone, Bella, would you like to come inside?” 

Bella swallows, looking briefly back into the unlit doorway to the house. What did it look like inside? Was it dusty and draped in cloth the way she had imagined? Or pristine, cared for, as if it had never been abandoned at all? What would hurt more? She shakes her head, staggering on loose, shaking limbs to the porch steps and settling down on them instead. 

“Would you at least take my jacket?” Esme asks, already slipping the rich wool coat from her shoulders. Bella barely nods and Esme lays it over her like a blanket. 

“Those wolves…” Esme begins, “That man. Do you know them… him well?” 

“I know Sam a little,” She replies, propping her elbows on her thighs and keeping her eyes on the distant trees. “He’s a dick.” Esme snorts, seemingly surprised by the language. Quickly, she shrugs back on her mothering exterior. 

“You know you don’t have to speak with him you don’t want to. If he pressures you to go to La Push when you don’t want to -“ 

“It’s not him I need to see in La Push, Esme. And I’m safe. It feels safe to go, it feels right.” Esme just nods, seeming to accept it. 

“It is lovely to see you, Bella. I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed you.” Esme says, her voice light. “But I do wonder - you’re as difficult to read as you always were - how you’re feeling about my being here?” 

Bella sighs, bringing a hand up, pressing her heels into her eyes to rub away the encroaching headache from too much energy and action and too much thinking. When she got dressed this morning and stomped out the door she had only planned for a trip to Thirftway to celebrate her success, and she’d been thrown into this. 

“I’m not sure how I feel. I think I was just starting to forget, and now it’s this thing I have to think about again.” She brushes her hair behind her ears, rolling the tiredness out of her shoulders that’s beginning to settle. “But that would have happened whether you were here or not. Happened as soon as I decided to come get my radio.” 

Esme mods mutely, looking stoney and emotionless. 

“It is good to see you, though,” she realises suddenly how much like a sullen child she sounds. She walked into Esme’s home. She didn’t own Forks and the Cullens didn’t bow to her whims. Edward had promised they wouldn’t return, but she should have guessed that was a lie too. “I’ve been decorating Charlie’s kitchen, I think you would have enjoyed it.” 

Esme’s smile grows prettily “I’d love to see it.” Bella smiles in return but it feels hollow, like a platitude they’re both sharing. In truth, the thought of Esme being in her kitchen feels in some way like an invasion, the same way entering the Cullen house does now. She wonders if she should just stand and leave, pretending like this hadn’t happened. But part of her protests, a lost love for Esme craving a little more time with the lovely older woman. Unable to say that though, she tilts her head slightly to the side brushing her cheek against Esme’s shoulder. Esme runs with it, pulling an arm up around her shoulders in a soft embrace. 

The cold skin is something impossible to forget but still, it feels brand new; like sinking into cold water.

Tears start to leak down her cheeks at the memory of it. It was simple and stupid, but friendly embraces had been few and far between before Forks, with only Renee to give them and that had never felt like enough. Not until more recently with Jessica and Charlie and Leah had touch been something normal and necessary, not the gift that only the Cullen’s seemed willing to bestow. She’s sobbing, raking in breath and hardly able to explain why it hits her so hard to feel cold, solid arms around her again. It feels like the first time again. 

“I’m sorry - I’m sorry,” she gasps. “It’s just - it’s just been so long.” She babbles, voice thick and embarrassed, “For me I mean, I know it’s nothing to you.” 

“Short for us, perhaps, but even I can see time has passed. We don’t feel it the same way, but we’re not immune to loss and time.” Esme carefully strokes her back, pulling her sleeve over her hand to brush away the flowing tears. “ You’ve grown. Perhaps you don’t like to hear that - I remember how you felt about growing older -“ 

“It’s good to hear that.” Bella interrupts, surprising herself, her own hand coming up to rub away the tears on her cheeks. She doesn’t move too far away from Esme, but straightens she isn’t buried in Esme’s shoulder like a child. It is good to hear she’s changed, that there’s a marked difference made by the months they’ve been gone and the work she’s done. Like the kitchen, the proof of time passing and her being a part of it again. “I like that I’ve changed since everything. I’m - I can’t remember what he looks like properly. Edward. Not the details.” 

“You don’t have any photos?” 

“He took the ones from my photo album.” 

Esme sighs, giving an eye roll that is uncharacteristic and yet still fascinatingly classic and slips a wallet from her jacket pocket. She hands it over, the smooth leather supple and expensive. 

“If you’d like to see, there’s a family photo in there.” 

Her hands shake a little, but she unclasps it, the bifold falling open to reveal a plastic pocket with a 2x3 inch photo inside. 

What was she expecting, a white-walled mall photograph? An oil painting? Instead, it’s a little blurry, taken at a slightly off angle on a camera that’s far from the top of the line. It’s from her birthday, her green dress gleaming in the centre of the frame. She can’t remember if Esme or Carlise took the photo because only the younger Cullens inhabit it, to the far right Rosalie and left, as far away from her as possible is Jasper, the two blonde pillars framing the photograph and complementing each other. Beside them their partners, Emmet and Alice: both dark and joyful, and exact opposites in style and size. That only leaves the two of them in the centre, a silver gift in her hands - the deceptively light, empty radio box she hadn’t yet opened. It’s only been seven months, but she can see the difference Esme described. Her hair is inches shorter now, just below her collar bones and a little thicker and curlier than it was as a result. Her face as well seems a little younger, rounder than what she sees in the mirror today. God, she almost pities that girl, that imperceptibly different her. She looks young, and thinking about that right now, thinking about being that forever: those lightly rounded cheeks; that heart so utterly not her own; that tetherless, desperate child. Edward was right. Changing her would have been a tragedy. 

“It is good to see it,” Bella says, her voice stronger, tears not flowing anymore as she hands back the wallet. “Change, I mean.” 

Esme nods, her eyes looking distant, distracted. Upset. 

“Bella you needn’t listen to me, but I’ve been thinking recently about immortality.” 

“Esme, of course, I’ll listen to you.” The older woman lets out a soft sigh, her arm still loosely around Bella’s shoulders and trying to recreate the affection Bella loosely wraps her arm around Esme’s waist, connecting the two of them. 

“My husband - My first husband, that is,” Esme said with a faraway look, eyes on the far trees. Bella had heard of Esme’s former life in snippets. A lost baby. A cliff. A husband too free with his hands made the Cullen family bare their teeth. “Fought in The Great War. Edwards war. He didn’t have Edwards's desire to fight - Edward would call it ‘the call’- Charles was drafted soon after we married and every single day I hoped he had died.” Bella’s eyes widen a fraction, surprised by gentle Esme’s desire for anyone’s death and how matter of fact she was about that wish. Then she nodded, recognising she had no right to judge Esme that desire, not with only the barest understanding she had of the faceless man. "He didn’t of course, rather he came back and was as despicable as he ever was. But he was changed as well. How could you not be by something so awful?” Shellshock rings through Bella’s head. White feathers and bad dreams and empty eyes in old news reels. Handsome, strapping lads screaming in army uniforms and in their beds. PTSD, people knew now. 

“I think of Edward often, if he had been allowed to live his life as a human. How the war would have taken him, shaped him. How changed he would have been by something so awful. But also how changed he would have been simply in years, by growing older.” Esme’s cold hands take hers and squeeze them gently between them.

“We’re frozen as we are in our last moments. Try as I might, no matter how much love I feel for my children, every hour I think of my son. No matter the joy I still think of the cliffs in Columbus. Sometimes when I kiss Carlisle I can still see Charles behind my eyes. There is no real healing, no real forgetting - that all comes with age and time and faltering memory we don’t feel anymore. When I think of Edward, of who he was and who he still must be - he wanted to be a war hero, wanted to save people from a danger he barely understood because he considered it a duty, a calling. But in his last days and weeks, he was a sick child, orphaned by a threat that hung in the air he breathed. A threat he could neither see nor escape that took away everything he knew.”

“He must have been terrified.”

“Yes. Yes, I imagine he must have been.” Esme sighs, leaning forward on her folded arms, curling in on herself tiredly. “And so was I, and so I still am. So does it not stand to reason that Edward still is?”

Bella can’t answer that, and she doesn’t try to. She just nods, slowly at first, then changes the subject. Edward is the obvious topic, but not one she has the energy to discuss in much depth. She doesn’t ask where he is, or how he is. She asks about Alice and Jasper (they’re both attending college, both studying history. They’re also both pretending this is the first time they’ve met and playing at being strangers falling in love), Carlisle (teaching medicine at the same college), and Rosalie and Emmet (living separately as a married couple). Esme seems happy too, and they speak at length about the daycare she’s funding and managing from afar. The Cullens seem settled, a little more separate than when she had known them, but the way Esme speaks it sounds normal. In a few years, they’ll play at being a family again, because the family unit in high school isn’t the rule for them, just one of their many states as time passes.

Eventually, Bella stands and says her goodbyes. Esme says nothing about staying or going, just lifts up her radio for her and walks with her. They don't walk through the house, but skim around it, the last strings of conversation beginning to lilt and turn final, as Bella explains why she wants her radio back in the first place. 

When they reach the Beast Esme asks permission very softly, like she’s still concerned Bella’s going to break down again. She gives it, and in a few minutes Esme managed to fit her radio back into place, a few connecting wires snapped together with a twist of white fingers. The plastic casing on the dash around it is still damaged, scratched like an animal had escaped it or twisted like gnarled tree roots. But when she turns her keys the crackling radio bursts to life, screeching a gaudy love song from the 90s. 

Bella knots her arms around Esme tightly, thanking her for something Esme might never understand, and when she drives away, she sneaks one last look at Esme in her rearview mirror as she does, picking her way through the pitted driveway until the sight is obscured entirely. 

At La Push, she can’t find it within herself to summon upset or anxiety as she parks. She’s made some guesses about how this will go, but there are a thousand ways and she’s working very hard not to get stuck on one. Just in front of her windshield, Native Grounds glows blue and gold, a bright spot in the falling night. She steels herself with a long, deep breath and swings open the door. She doesn’t make it more than a few paces before Leah opens the side door and peels away from the shack, meeting her halfway. Bella shoves her hands in her pockets, though it isn’t cold and Leah swallows audibly between them. Her eyes are wide and fixed like she’s afraid of her, Leah seems to be positively shivering with anticipation, her body taut and bouncing on her toes.

“Hey,” Bella says, and her voice is so thick it cracks, making her blush. Leah’s mouth forms a weak smile like she’s trying to stop her mouth from doing something different. 

“So I can just - tell you - what’s going on now, if that’s what you want. If you’d rather not know - or ask questions that’s fine too,” Leah blurts out the words, her body still keyed up and 

“Do you want me to know? You didn’t before.” Bella kicks the dirt beneath her feet, towing it up so she doesn’t have to see the look on Leah’s face and so Leah can’t see her. Does she look bitter? Hurt? Childish? Leah reaches out, her fingers reaching between them but not touching. 

“I always wanted to tell you. To talk to you. To answer the phone but I - I couldn’t. Wasn’t allowed to.” 

“And now you are?” 

“Now I am. Now I can tell you everything you want to know.” Leah swallows again, taking a half step between them. Had they ever been this awkward? Even that first time Bella had showed up at Native Grounds asking about cold water swimming? “Bella. Please, can you just… ask me something?” 

“Do you want to go for a walk?” Bella asks at last, reaching out and catching Leah’s eye. She looks like she’s drowning, and Bella isn’t wounded enough to let that pass. They set off across the scrubby grass, heading for the beach. Leah’s strides are long and graceful, though she’s intentionally slow to let Bella walk comfortably. They’re closer now, and she can feel the furnace heat of Leah’s skin through her sweater and coat. How could she ever think that was a human trait?  

“I figured out what I want to know.” Leah’s head whips around, looking at her and not the ground. “How many of the Quileute legends are true?” 

“Far as I can tell? Just the big two: Cold Ones being the ones you’ve known about a whole lot longer than I have.” There was a hint of reproach in her voice like she was upset Bella managed to keep a secret from her. 

“Cold ones and?” She pushes, the grass and rocky paving turning and giving way to pebbled sand. The tide is out, barely lit a bleak grey, sun a strip above the water. 

“You already figured it out, didn’t you?”

“You told me on your birthday, Jacob told me almost a year ago. Then today…” Bella snorts gently. How could she have missed it? “I’ve got another question.” She swallows, thinking to a mere few hours ago when the whole world had become so intensely fucked. “Were you the silver wolf or the brown one?” 

Leah snorts as well, but her face twists like she’s awaiting the gallows. “Silver. I didn’t want you to get hurt by that - by her.” 

“Sam?” 

“Sam leads the pack. He changed first, but not last, obviously, hence the vanishing of La Push teenagers, one by one, into his little cult.” 

“And you can’t - you can’t stop it? You’re all like this forever?” 

“We can stop it eventually, the legends say. That we can calm the transformation eventually and grow old and die like everyone else. It’s what I want. What I’m trying really hard to do, but it’s hard. Believe me, Bells, I’m trying to stop it.” Leah’s eyes are like searchlights, grabbing hers and holding on. She responds in kind, latching onto Leah’s hand and holding it between both of hers, not letting her go. They've come to a complete stop, two pillars on the empty beach. Leah’s eyes are wet and glassy, and Bella wonders how long Leah has been trying. “I’m - I’m trying.” 

Bella hushes her, pulling her hand to her chest and making her stop. “I believe you. But it’s okay, Leah. If this is happening to you I want to help you. I would have helped you from the start after Seattle if you’d have let me.” 

“I know.” Leah bows her head, a long, shining trail finally leaking from her eyes as she buries her head in Bella shoulder. Her arms curl around Bella’s back, pulling her against her and god it’s like coming home. It’s warm and it’s inescapable and it makes her feel like her pulse is throbbing with life and the push and pull of the ocean so close to them. “I knew you would and I wanted to talk to you. The whole time I just wanted to talk to you, but there were rules and this stupid magic that meant I couldn’t just pick up the fucking phone and tell you.” So magic exists, apparently, in some form. Bella supposes she should have guessed that but she files it away to ask about it late. Her hands come up, running her fingers through Leah’s choppy, smoothing it back and hushing her. 

“But now you can?” 

“Things are different now,” Leah swallows. “The rules are different for me now,” Leah says like the words give her some strength and straightens, brushing the back of her hand beneath her eyes hastily and resuming walking, pulling Bella along with her. 

“How is it with Sam? Seeing him every day?” 

“It sucked at first. Still does, but now it sucks because he’s the asshole I have to listen to. Not so much because he was a cheating asshole that broke my heart anymore.” 

“So what’s changed?” 

“Loving him feels really far away now. Did even before I saw you again.” Leah sighs heavily, tugs Bella down to sit on the driftwood log washed-up that’s been worn smooth by years of wind and sea. “There’s this thing we do. More Wolfy-Magic. Imprinting, or soulmates or some other dramatic crap like that. I would have called bullshit on it if I hadn’t seen it and felt it myself - seen the way it feels for Sam - but it’s like the whole world tilts around one person -“ Leah stops abruptly, squeezing Bella’s hand tightly. 

“I'm doing this the wrong way 'round.” Leah swallows, “I liked you long before this: I want you to know that. Before I had to go away I liked you.” Bella’s face stretches into a grin but Leah isn’t looking at her, like she’s rehearsed this in her head and she glares at the waves, forcing out the words. “When Newton was all over you before we went to Seattle I realised there was just no good reason for that shit - and then I did it again at that cafe on campus with that guy and it just clicked that that’s not how you treat your friends but it probably is how you treat people you like - and - and then when you slept at mine it definitely wasn’t how you think about your friends and I know we never talked about if you like girls and I know I never told you when I started thinking that I did but I wasn’t sure and then I was really - really sure and then everything exploded and there wasn’t any time -“ 

Bella hushes her again, dropping her head on Leah’s shoulder. 

“I googled some things. And my friend - Jess - knew before I did that I probably wasn’t entirely heterosexual. And I like you. I really fucking like you. And I liked you before all this and I’m going to like you after this.” Like feels stupid, but Leah started it and it’s a day of revelations much greater than like and love and the hint at it is more than enough. Leah laughs brilliantly, half hysterical. 

“Oh thank fuck,” she says, half doubled over, before finally turning to meet her eye, bringing one hand to rest at the place where her shoulder meets her neck, fingertips edging just between the neckline of her t-shirt. 

“The thing: imprinting. It means you’ll be anything for anyone, like you’ll mould around them, be perfect for them, I’m thinking maybe it means I can stop the change and be what you need me to be.” The words seem romantic, like a caress but Bella stops, pulling away sharply, her hand moving Leah's away from her skin because it's too distracting. Because those words sound eerily familiar. 

“Edward had nothing but me,” she says, and she can’t think the words before they crawl out of her mouth. “That’s not fair, he had his family, but that’s how it felt. He didn’t have to work, he didn’t need to be left alone to finish his assignments, or have friends to look out for. He didn’t need to sleep or eat or use the bathroom. I was this thing in his life that could come before everything and he could… He didn’t have a new hobby or a different friend he had to put time into, it was just me.” Leah looks confused, bridging on hurt. Which makes sense, it’s not every love confession that an ex takes a starring role in. “And that was really fucked up, Leah.” 

“So you don’t want -“ 

“I want you. I don’t want some version of you that you think I need. I don’t want you to change around me, or fit into my life. You’ll hate me for it, and maybe I’ll start to hate you, and one of us will leave, because supernatural shit or not, that’s not love. I want you,” she repeats her last point again, willing to do it a dozen times because when she does Leah’s face anxious expression smooths slowly into something more hopeful, softer. Bella breathes in the salty air, smoothing her fingertips along Leah’s jaw to keep her there, with her while she finishes her point. “If imprinting is all about being everything a person needs, then I need a whole fucking person. Someone with friends, someone in school or someone with a job or somewhere to go every day, just - someone with a life, and a future they can have with me.” 

“I want that. I want you too.” Leah breathes, and Bella doesn’t pause, doesn’t wait, leaning forward and taking Leah’s lips, tasting the salt of the ocean on her lips and the tattoo of their heartbeats raging as they kiss. it lasts an age and yet not enough time, but Bella pulls away eventually because she knows she can do it again. When they part Bella's head is spinning, dizzy on the taste of Leah and that promise that there's going to be more and that Leah wants her too. Leah's hands are splayed on her neck again, thumb tracing the line of her jaw and Bella laughs. It's gentle at first, a little giggle that bubbles up until Leah joins her, the two of them laughing, foreheads pressed against together, gasping for air. because it's ridiculous that the greatest revelation of the evening isn't magic and wolves and soulmates but this. 

“You still wanna try swimming?” Leah asks when they've subsided, jabbing her chin towards the churning waves and it takes a long second to click. Cold swimming. She almost laughs again. 

“You always said it was stupid!” 

“It is stupid, but you wanted to do it.” 

“You said it was dangerous!” 

“I’m supernaturally strong, Bella, I don’t think a rough wave is going to go through me to get you.” 

“You said it was too cold! Frostbite!” 

“I’m magically imbued with the body temperature of a furnace.” 

“We don’t have swimsuits!” 

“Not a problem for me if it isn’t a problem for you,” Leah’s grin is brilliant, her eyes tracing over Bella pointedly. “Girlfriend.” 

Bella laughs, her cheeks almost hurt from smiling and she stands, tugging off her heavy sweatshirt like it’s a challenge. Leah meets her immediately, her thin shirt sticking to her as she pulls it off. In the approaching night the beach is empty, and Bella is glad because her cheeks are brilliant red and though she can’t see well, when she toes off her boots and jeans she thinks Leah’s are as well as they stand briefly naked before each other. She wants to feel nervous, idiotic, she wants to remember this is stupid and dangerous and illegal but she doesn’t, because Leah grabs her hand and they run along the rocky, silken sandy surf and dive into a breaking wave, the two of them screaming at the shock of cold water. Bella paddles madly, limbs flailing and raking in shuddering breaths. 

“Are you feeling healthier?” Bella gasps out when she can see, up to her shoulders in the glacial water, shivering and shaking, heart racing and lungs tight with the effort of going. But second by second, it’s getting better, the water feeling less like a sharp attack. And from her left she can feel Leah before she hears her, so warm she might as well boil the water around them. 

“No,” Leah breaths, not quite as affected as Bella but still early feeling something, “Libido - however…” Leah says, a leering tone on her tongue that makes Bella bellow with laughter. She reaches out, clawing through the water towards her and hooks an arm around Leah’s neck. She responds in kind, hooking her arm around Bella’s waist, each of them treading water as they clasp one another. With her, the cold is there, but unnoticed, like a rush of energy, like the fog of breath on a cold morning, like a reminder that she has felt warmth before and will again. Wrapped around Leah in the water, she takes her lips again, feeling only warmth.