Mirrors: A Twilight Fanfiction

Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it probably belongs to Stephanie Meyer.

Author's Note: Good lord, I love this pairing. It is like my favorite thing to read. I wanted them to imprint so bad! D:

Leah Clearwater was used to considering herself inhuman, a freak.

There had always been some shallow satisfaction she could gain by looking into a mirror. Even now, she would catch herself sighing over the memory of how beautiful she had been. There had never been a question in the matter—Leah was a looker. She could see it through her reflection when male eyes had followed her with admiration, female eyes with envy. She was slender and tall, with soft lips and big, dark eyes framed by long lashes. And she had always believed in dressing herself to accentuate it. Leah loved the attention.

She had had no problem admitting to her own vanity, she recalled. But coupled with her independence and self-confidence, it hadn't troubled her. Pride was a well-deserved flaw, she knew, as long as it didn't make one stupid or spoilt. It certainly hadn't made her fickle—she had always been slow to love, slow to smile, slow to trust. She set high standards, which led her to being hard to please, hard to impress. Ad she had liked it that way. Now, of course, 'slow' had been brought to a screeching halt. Leah didn't love. But being a freak, however unwanted, did have its advantages. So Leah told herself she didn't mind.

Of course, it was a lie. Leah minded, had always minded, always hurt.

Even after she had lost the perception of beauty amongst the strange unfamiliarity of her own body, she had never tired of looking in the mirror. As a matter of fact, she had only grown more engrossed with studying the planes of her body, the lines of her form. Leah could see the not-human under them, but at least she could tell she was utterly, physically there. When she wasn't looking in the mirror, she sometimes wasn't sure that she was more than a figment of her own imagination. Sometimes, in the few steps before her reflection entered her line of sight, Leah panicked.

Her breath would come in gasps, and she'd wrap her arms around her still-slender frame as if to hold herself together. She was somehow afraid that she would see nothing but the bedroom echoed back, leaving her lost. But in the end, she could always find herself in the glass, pale under her skin tone and glossy with cold sweat. The sight was a pathetic reminder of how Bella Swan would look in Jacob's memories, which was motivation enough for Leah to straighten her back, pull herself back together under a smooth façade, and leave the mirror behind for a few hours—but not until she had reached out to press her fingertips against the glass and watch the movement repeated behind the barricade.

It reassured her that she was solid, but couldn't show her humanity.

The mirror had been a kind of drug to her, sustaining and supporting her. It hadn't been healthy—Leah could feel that in her very bones, even when she didn't have the strength to care. But it had been all she knew, until Leah found Jacob. Figuratively, of course. Jake had always been there, in the back of her mind, in the back of her life. It hadn't taken much to bring him to the front—one argument was all the passion either of them had needed to spark fire within their bones.

She wondered if subconsciously, she hadn't known it would happen all along, needling him as she did. After all, it didn't take rocket science to know that passion of any kind was dangerous to have near Jacob. Leah didn't love him, but she liked him well enough, and that was all either of them needed. It was a good thing, too, since neither of them was really capable of trust or love or selfless commitment. Leah could offer respect, though, however warily given, and she basked in the fact that Jake would return it just as warily.

Jacob made her human again, with human needs and human wants.

Leah had a natural fiery nature, balanced nicely with a brutally-honest type of practicality. She knew at once that falling for Jacob wasn't an option, but at the same time, falling in with him was completely and totally possible—almost unstoppable—and that doing so would almost be like opening back up again. There was something so very serious about Jake, and it made Leah gleeful that it nothing to do with her and everything to do with him. Likewise, she was practically giddy over the fact that Jacob was just as totally unable to leave her as she was him—they didn't need imprinting to be bonded. That some bonds were stronger than imprinting.

After Jacob, Leah felt human. And like a human, she couldn't resist the urge to look at herself, to see if the difference had gone skin deep (because, despite what people say, skin deep is the deepest kind of beauty and represents the deepest kind of change). Time after time, though, Leah was disappointed—she could still see the monster beneath her flushed skin. And yet, at the same time, she looked more human than she ever had with her heart on her sleeve and her hopes in her eyes. And subtly, Leah learned that the monster didn't matter anymore, and disappointment eventually stopped trying to swamp her. She stopped falling to her knees, and she stood up to the mirror.

One day, Leah knew that she would break it. One day, she would prove her humanity in blood.