Disclaimer: I do not own anything in the Twilight universe. Just my own characters. :D

I see our fate, I see our past
And all the things that could not last
It's heavy on these eyes, frozen as I hold this photograph
It's all we've left that's of any worth
And it's so much more than a thousand words
Now in this frame is our only way we can endure
Picture, Mute Math

Chapter One

The beginning is hard to find, when the route to the present is so filled with holes, and patched sloppily and carelessly with lies, folk tales, and falsehoods. When all I wanted to was to know Bella Swan, a person so seemingly uncomplicated with a kind face easy enough to decipher, no one could tell me. Nobody knew about her as a child, her teenage years, or her young adulthood: no one, save for Bella, Jacob, and the last of their friends who still remained. All my parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and my brother and sister and I had heard was very vague: "I was born, I grew up, I met your grandfather, and here I am." A boring story with much to be desired.

When my grandmother died, all the secrets of the life that she shunned and buried in her past came forth, piece by piece. No one, not even my own mother, her daughter, knew that such a life existed for her, and was waiting, whenever the time came for her to reclaim it. Her little red house on the beach held in it every whisper, and every inclination of a path, and a love forgotten. All it took was an open ear, and a willing listener.

The floorboards creaked under foot, and some gave way to hiding places full of small treasures; things that no one understood, and therefore ignored. I collected all of these things, decades old, and barely recognizable after being left to rot for some seventy years. The CD still played, but barely. I had to dig through the attic for an old player of my mother's, covered with dust and grime, just to hear it. But upon listening for the first time what was held on the disc, I knew that the digging and the not knowing were well worth it. Buried with the CD was a pair of blue shoes, high-heeled, silky, and stained from being holed underground for so long. I wondered how many times I had stepped over those very floorboards where these things were hidden; how many times my mother, and her family had stepped over them, ran, rolled on the floor, and lay right over these hiding places, not knowing what was underneath them. Too many, I believed. Far too many times.

My grandfather Jacob followed shortly after Bella. We watched him, not believing when he told us that he was okay, just waiting for his turn. We knew that a very short span of time would pass where he would be able to be without her. When he died, curled up in his favorite recliner, it was hard to be sad for his passing because we knew whatever great, divine afterlife he had created for himself, it was centered around Bella. Because of this fact, we knew he would be in no happier place than by her side.

My mother cried, of course, her tears spilling on the collar of my uncle Billy, his new wife standing next to him, bewildered, and at a loss. My aunt Tessa simply stood there, over the chair where he was found, looking down expectantly, as if thinking he would materialize right in that spot where she, for nearly her whole life, knew where to find him. The last of Jacob and Bella's children, my free-spirited uncle Liam, was in the kitchen with the youngest of our family, Tessa and her husband Brian's kids, teaching them magic tricks with a fake coin. I remember standing rooted to the spot in the bedroom I had spent countless nights in, pacing back and forth, my cousin Charlie watching me, his hands tightly wound around the end of the wooden bed post. His knuckles were white, whiter than even the shade his face had taken over the last several weeks. The loss of our grandparents, to him, was tremendous, and he was only realizing after they had gone just exactly what he'd never be able to get back.

"Remy," he called to me, his voice shaky and thick with tears collected in his throat, "I never knew them. I never knew our grandparents." He threw his face into his too-white hands, and his shoulders began to shake. "And now I never will."

We were all feeling this way, all of us kids, who found our grandparents to be an enigma, something to be discovered, and someone interesting to know, whose marriage had created us. We knew virtually nothing about them, but had spent most of our childhoods in the little red house on the beach. We all felt the great loss of them both, in such a short time - that it had happened so suddenly and so swiftly, in the blink of an eye, was an especially difficult thing to process.

I kept a close eye on all their friends and their families, the grandchildren who were our age, and their parents the age of our parents. The Quillayute community was a small one, a close-knit one. We all knew each other, had grown up just across the way from each other, ran across the same beach, crawled over the same hiding spots. Sam, Emily, Quil, Embry… all of them, gone in just months following the deaths of our grandparents. It was as if they all had made an agreement long before any of us had ever been even an idea in their minds; that somehow they knew, years in their future, they would all go in just weeks of one another.

That was years ago now, nearly five, and the secrets that were hidden in the small Quillayute community still plague me, still haunt my dreams. I would play the old, decrepit CD over and over again if I wasn't afraid that at any moment, it might break into dust. I would show the shoes I found to my mother, if I wasn't afraid that she would take them from me, or mistake them for old, and donate them, or throw them away. It's just me now, wondering, knowing, sensing, that there was something bigger that was hidden from all of us in the sleepy Washington town. Charlie still pines over the loss, while the rest of our brothers and sisters, and our cousins Clara and Danny move on with their lives. I wish I could do the same, but I can't. Something always brings me back to the little red house on the beach, kicking at floorboards and peeking under dust-covered furniture, hoping and praying that something significant will present itself to me. But nothing has. Not yet.

--

We were collected under the stars, the whole family, in lawn chairs around a bonfire on First Beach. The fifth year anniversary of the near-simultaneous deaths of the elders was drawing near, and the atmosphere in La Push reflected that. There had been more family gatherings than I cared to remember, as if our parents didn't want to give us the opportunity to miss them as much as they missed their own.

My cousin Danny scooted closer to me in his chair, a hotdog and a skewer both held in his right hand. He held them out to me, offering, but I shook my head. "No," I told him. "No more hotdogs."

He shrugged, said, "Suit yourself," and pushed the hotdog on the end of the long stick, and into the brilliant driftwood fire. "I can't say I blame you, though. These little get-togethers are becoming a little tiresome, eh? Two days is the anniversary of grandma's… you know," he raised his eyebrows, and turned the stick over in his hand, "and that was all well and good for the first couple of years, but I'm not coming back here every year to mourn her."

A chuckle escaped my lips, and I nodded in agreement. I wanted to be able to say more, to add more to Danny's abuse of this growing ritual between almost every inhabitant left in La Push, but I couldn't. The only thing on my mind at the moment, much like everyone else's, was Bella. It seemed funny how someone from the outside had come in and brought us all together this way. Not many outsiders made their way in successfully; life on the reservation was simple, and most people who considered themselves to be open-minded still didn't like the idea of someone not at least related through marriage, or a distant cousin coming in and disturbing the peace. But for some reason, and the only reason I could think up was because Jacob loved her, Bella was accepted.

"Yeah," I agreed. "It's been a long time."

I saw Danny peer at Charlie from the corner of his eye, and then roll them toward the clear night sky, dotted with stars. He stuck his charred hot dog inside a bun, and bit down angrily. "You know," he said, his mouth full, his words muffled, "I worry about that kid."

I nodded my head again. Danny didn't even have to say his name for me to know that he was referring to Charlie. As far as any of us knew, he was very different in character than the man he was named after.

"Life on the rez has severely crippled him," Danny said, letting just a hint of sympathy show through his malice.

"He was close to them," I said, shrugging. I saw Danny cock an eyebrow from the corner of my eye. "Well, as close as we could be, I guess."

Our grandparents had always kept themselves at a distance. And sometimes, the words that came from their mouths seemed horribly rehearsed – especially some of the lines that Bella spoke. It was as though they had anticipated the onslaught of questions, the want of stories and folk tales from us as children that they had prepared themselves; prepared what they were going to say to us. Our parents: my mother, Tessa, Billy and Liam, had always dismissed this as their normal behavior. They've only ever lived on this small reservation, they claimed. What do you expect? They haven't traveled far from the exact place they came from.

My mom and her two brothers, Billy and Liam, had all moved away as quickly as they were allowed. Charlie belonged to aunt Tessa, who had stayed at La Push nearly all of her years, marrying one of Embry Call's kids. Charlie had spent more time around the elders than all of us combined. I couldn't say it to Danny, but I felt that he had reason enough to be emotional at that time of year.

"Earth to Remy," Danny said, waving a hand in front of my face. "Where'd you go just then?"

I shrugged. "Nowhere. Just tired, I guess." I wiped my hand over my eyes to clear them of the haze of smoke that had been traveling through us all night. "What were you saying?"

"Just asking if you were ready to move into UW," Danny said, taking the last bite of his charred hotdog. "Got everything packed?"

"Oh," my mood darkened even further, if it were possible, "yeah. Sort of."

"Don't worry," he said, in a tone that was supposed to be supportive, and knocked me with his shoulder. "College is going to be awesome. Best time of your life."

If only I could tell him that, even though it should have been, college wasn't on the forefront in my mind. Tomorrow, after so many years of putting it off, my mother, aunt and uncles were finally going to purge Bella and Jacob's house of everything that remained of theirs.

"Remy," Danny nudged me again with his shoulder, "Are you okay?"

I nodded halfheartedly. "Yeah. I think. I just…" I sighed, and tried to bring myself to say the words that were on the tip of my tongue. "It's weird, you know?" How could I possibly put together the right words to tell Danny that I was feeling the exact same things Charlie was feeling as he sat across from us, his face grim, when I knew how he felt about everything – the family bonfires, the simultaneous sadness?

Danny shook his head, his brow crinkled. "No, I don't."

I diverted my eyes from his probing gaze, and stared down at my hands, intertwined and fumbling. I shook my head slightly from side to side, and took in a deep breath of salty sea air. I quickly changed my train of thought. "Moving out," I explained. "It's going to be weird."

Danny patted me on the shoulder, and gave it a secure squeeze. "You'll be okay. Me and Rae are going to be there. New people, new everything. You can get yourself away from all of this." He waved his hand across the air in front of us, creating an invisible barrier that separated us from them.

"Right," I nodded my head. "Right."