A/N: I haven't abandoned 'Human Nature'; it's just turning out to be a pretty dark piece of writing, and I'm not in the right place in my head at the moment to concentrate all my efforts on it, so here is my therapy: hopefully amusing all human fic :D. Sure everybody writes it, but now it's my go!
I am making a concerted effort to keep the characters as IC as I can, considering nobody's a vampire and all, but there will probably be a few moments when I fail horribly. Just warning you now. Oh, and if you're a Jacob fan? Me too, but I'm horrid to him in this chapter. I have guilt.
Chapter One – Grimm
"The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in."
- W.H. Auden.
Once upon a time in a land far, far away from many places, but comparatively close to others, there lived a girl.
The girl was shy, quiet and unassuming with rich brown eyes and pale, pale skin. She lived peacefully in the far away land, always caring for others, never thinking of herself.
Then there came the incident with the broom, and the day the girl decided that her peaceful, unassuming life just wasn't enough.
That was the day Bella Swan's fairy tale began.
In the end what it came down to was the touching.
She might have thought, when she first opened the door, that he was only coming round to settle her in; to say goodbye; to be her best friend again. After six hours of listening to his ranting, she'd begun to realise she'd made a major error of judgement.
She'd spent almost the entire time she'd been in her new apartment, in her new city, in her new life trying to convince her old life to get out and leave her the hell alone.
"You know you're being ridiculous, Bells. You need us! We need you! This has gone too far and it's got to stop…"
She settled further into the plastic covered cushions of her very first sofa, and forced the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. Maybe, if she pushed hard enough, she'd go totally blind and could pretend he'd gone away. She sighed deeply, and repeated the line she'd been using for the last five and a half hours.
"It's my decision, Jacob. I'm a grown woman. I need my own life."
"What you need is to be looked after! You can't cope out here on your own! You should stay with Charlie, or with me. I'd look after you. I'd treat you like a princess, you know that."
Actually, perhaps opening the door hadn't been her first mistake. Perhaps her first mistake had been returning to Forks after four years of college, and admitting it hadn't been all she'd thought it would be. Or maybe it had been years before that, when she'd left her flighty mother in the care of her sprightly young husband and gone off to Forks to play wife and mother to her terminally undomesticated father. Maybe it was an accident of birth. Whatever that first mistake had been, Bella Swan had spent nigh on twenty four years living with the consequences.
Jacob Black storming around her apartment, tearing at his hair and ranting at her inability to take care of herself, was just the most recent one.
"I coped just fine in college, Jake."
She dropped her hands from her eyes; blindness wouldn't make him disappear, she was starting to believe nothing would. Maybe she could start her job anyway; maybe nobody would notice the insane stalker raving behind her everywhere she went.
"You hated college! You told me so yourself. You said it was nothing like you expected."
Confirmation, then, that her overwrought confession of a miserable college education was definitely something to be added to the pile of 'Bella's big mistakes'.
It hadn't been a lie, of course, Bella was a dreadful liar and always had been, but it had been a slight exaggeration of the truth brought on by too many glasses of wine and the sympathetic ears of Charlie and Jacob. The truth was that she'd gone to college with the express intention of leaving the old, reliable Bella back in Forks to rot. She would be brave, sexy and witty. She would flirt and dance, drink and grow up. Then, after the first semester, the truth had hit her with the force of a wrecking ball. She was none of those things. All she had the time for was study, all her passion saved up for her books, and the only social event she ever attended was graduation, with Jacob and Charlie smiling at her from the front row. She'd never have admitted to them that half the reason for her unhappiness was her sickening guilt at leaving them behind. After all, it had taken her this long to admit it to herself.
College had been a waste of effort, or so she'd thought till she'd returned home.
She'd been happy at first, returning to her comfortable old routine of laundry, cooking and shifts at a Mom-and-Pop outdoors store. It had been familiar, and the old Bella had embraced it. She had even embraced Jacob, just the once, just to see if what he'd been telling her since Junior High was true, to see if maybe they really were meant to be together, and that had been comfortable too. She might have put on her slippers and settled down there and then to a life of contented domesticity.
Then Angela happened.
She'd spent a lot of time with Angela at school, since they were both the shy, studious, unassuming types, and they'd remained friends, in their own quiet way, ever since. It had been a Friday afternoon and Bella was working in Newton's, arranging Hi-Vis jackets with impeccable precision, when the over-door bell rang, and Angela came stumbling in.
This had been odd in its self, and should have been Bella's first sign that something unusual was afoot. Bella was the clumsy one who stumbled and slipped her way through life; Angela was as steady on her feet as she was in her mind, or so Bella had always thought, anyway.
So Angela stumbled in, all bright eyes and flushed cheeks, and told Bella that she'd met the man of her dreams, found a job she adored, and she was off to New York City, right now. Sayonara and good riddance to old, reliable Angela and her old, reliable life.
Bella had screwed up her face into the best smile she could manage as she watched her leave, and then she'd walked into Mr Newton's office and quit on the spot.
Jacob hadn't liked that. He'd liked this move to Seattle and this new adult job even less.
Which was why she should have known better than to let him in; hindsight was always twenty-twenty.
Mind you she was getting better at tuning him out, or so she thought. Unfortunately she'd tuned him out so successfully that she didn't even realise he'd stopped his pacing until she found herself glaring at the knee of his jeans.
"Just come home with me," he wheedled, and the voice she'd once found so warm and comforting made her stomach turn, "I need you, Bella."
"Oh you need me do you?"
There was something dangerous in her voice now, something she was unfamiliar with herself, and if Jacob had had any sense whatsoever, he might have known when to quit. Unluckily for him, his common sense went momentarily absent without leave.
"Of course, Bella, we were made for each other. Come home with me, come home with me and I'll make you happy…" and then he touched her.
He didn't just touch her shoulder, or stroke her hair - either of which she might have forgiven being, as she was, the forgiving type - he put both his big hands round her shoulders, lifted her from the sofa, and pressed his lips to hers.
That was the moment it all changed, and old Bella, comfortable, quiet, homebody Bella, blinked out of existence.
The first defining action of new Bella's existence was to wriggle free of his grasp, and punch Jacob Black square in the nose. She didn't even gasp at the pain in her knuckles. Somewhere, buried deep inside her psyche, a remnant of her old self cringed in horror. Her new self had an irrational urge to jump up and down whilst squealing like a toddler
"Bella!" Jacob clutched at his nose in horror, eyes wide, watching her like she was some sort of rabid animal, "What's got in to you!" His eyes narrowed, "Oh God. Bells, are you on drugs? Is that what this is about?"
"What this is about, Jacob Black," she snarled, trying not to draw attention to her injured hand and flexing it gently behind her back, "is you telling me what to do."
"I just want what's best for you!"
He was backing up now, picking his way between the piles of boxes scattered through her living room and into her kitchen. She kept pace with him, trapping him in the corner of the kitchen area with his back up against the cabinets. She might have tried to herd him towards the door before, but now she was determined: she was going to have her say.
"You want what's best for you. That's all you've ever wanted. You and Charlie and even my mother, not one of you ever bothered to ask what I wanted or what I needed…"
"Bella, Bella," he soothed, and she felt the bile rise in her throat, "we just want what's best for you…"
"You keep saying that!" She was shrieking now, her dark hair falling out of its ponytail and sticking to her furiously red face. "You don't know anything! You don't… you don't…"
He used her exasperation to his advantage, spinning them round so that she was the one stuck, trapped against the cabinets, trapped like she'd always been before – how he wanted her to stay. He looked down at her with a mixture of pity and lust, a combination so obnoxious, so inconceivably irritating, that her aching right hand clenched reflexively readying itself for another smack.
It closed on the wooden shaft of her cellophane wrapped broom.
"Oh, my Bella," he sighed.
She gagged. Had she ever found that attractive? Had she ever thought that that was what she wanted? She sure as hell didn't think so now.
"For the four hundred and eighty sixth time tonight, Jacob. I am not yours, nor was I ever, nor will I ever be so. I'm happy, I'm grown up, I'm living my own place on my own terms. How does this not get through to you? I really think you should leave."
He leant down; his lips far too close to her face. For a fleeting moment she imagined vomiting on his shoes. That would get the point across very effectively, surely?
"Get out."
She kept her voice level, gripping the broom handle with all her might. When he smiled his pitying little smile at her, she squeezed it so hard she thought it might shatter.
"You don't mean that, Bells."
Count to three. Swallow the angry tears. Stay Calm.
"Get. Out."
In a move that she would never have thought herself capable of, she swung the broom from behind her and brandished it like a weapon.
"But you love me," he said, and she snapped.
It was surprising, really, that despite his size and ridiculous attitude she still managed to force him down the corridor to the front door even with the broom as leverage, but from the moment she'd lifted it to his chest and heaved something had changed in his expression. The absolute conviction, the arrogance was gone. She should have felt guilty; she thought maybe she would have, once, but instead all she felt was relief. Relief and a sense of power that she had thought she'd never feel.
She'd forced him in to the corridor now, and her shouts along with the sound of a six-foot five giant being smacked with the bristle end of a broom seemed to have attracted a small crowd of onlookers from neighbouring apartments. Perhaps they were concerned about domestic violence, or perhaps they were just checking out the newest nut-jobs the landlord had let in, but none of them as much as spoke.
For a moment there was total silence in the corridor. Bella watched Jacob, Jacob watched the broom, and the combined gazes of the neighbours flickered between them, all waiting for the first move.
For the first time in her life, Bella made it.
"I don't love you," she began – a female neighbour gasped -, "or at least, not in the way you want me to love you. You've been my best friend for so long Jake, but that doesn't mean anything if you can't let me make my own choices. I'd never force a choice like this on you, you know that."
"You want me to leave?"
He sounded so sad, so broken, that if she hadn't been telling him the same thing for most of the day she might have felt guilty enough to let him back in. As it was she battened down the hatches of her heart, and nodded.
"I want you to leave."
He made as if to take a step towards her, and she raised the broom in warning.
"Now, Jacob,"
To her great surprise, he actually did; shrugging off down the corridor with his tail between his legs.
Bella stood in the doorway, broom held aloft in victory, surrounded by the murmurs of her neighbours, and swallowed back the last of her traitorous tears.
There was no going back now, because if she needed to fix things with Jacob after this it was going to take a whole lot more from her than she was willing to give.
So she stood there - a new Bella for a new life - and figured how hard could it be, really? Because if mousy little Angela Weber could do it, Isabella Swan damn well could.
Yes, it had started with the touching, but that wasn't where it ended.