A/N: This is the alternate ending for my story, No Choice, and won't make much sense if you haven't read NC. It splits off after chapter 19, though we've skipped ahead in time here.
This was written because Jake is a little brat and demanded an alternate ending, and was then finished and polished as part of a FandomGivesBack auction ;) Many, many thanks to TeamNoChoice for their bids on this and my other auctions! And as always, thanks to my beta and sister Jezunya, and my pre-reader, our mother TheOracle, without whom none of this would be possible.
Let me stress again that this is the alternate ending, not the real ending. The real ending is still a few chapters away, but on its way, promise ;)
No Choice Alternate Ending – The Years Have Turned To Dust In My Hands
Jasper POV
Despite my military training, I had never been a particularly skilled tracker. I had learned enough to be passable, but it didn't come naturally to me, as it did to others. In the last half century I had had cause to put my skills to the test many times, and my searches had always come up empty.
But I had clues now, finally: a confirmed sighting, a definite starting place. More than I had had in all my previous decades of searching.
It took me eight weeks to find Bella, once I set out to search for her again. The starting point proved invaluable, and I was aided considerably by the rumors traveling through the nomad world of the vampire woman with the giant wolf pet. Jacob's trail was easy to identify – werewolf isn't a scent one forgets – and after that I merely had to move faster than them as they meandered through the wilderness of northern Canada. They stopped often, her floral scent and his mongrel stench layered over an area many times, circling and returning, sitting, laying, staying. For what, I couldn't begin to guess.
They were stopped again when I finally caught up with them, and I held the advantage of being downwind. I paused a moment, letting her emotions seep into me before she became aware of my presence. She was laughing at something, some comment I was too far away to hear clearly, her joy effervescent, easy and light. I smiled along with her, her levity and my somberness mixing into a melancholy that smelled of her.
I crept forward, drawn by the sound of her laughter, though it was alien to me. The eight days she had spent with us, fifty years ago now, had contained more emotion than entire years in other times, and yet none of those roiling, terrible feelings had led to the pure musical tones of Bella's laugh. I let it wash over me, examining the cadence, the subtle note changes, as though memorizing her laugh now would make up for an eternity of never once hearing it.
Her chuckles trailed off, and I moved forward more confidently, buoyed by her cheer. I stepped on twigs with purpose, angled around them until the wind was at my back, and walked at an easy pace, waiting for the moment she would realize…
Her surprise broke over me like an ocean wave, multicolored and shimmering. Incredulity, disbelief, shock, then wonder rippled through her. And then she was running, elation screaming through the forest towards me, and I couldn't help but smile. Bella had never been quiet with her emotions.
And yet beneath her delight were darker entities, more familiar in their Bella-smell: hurt, loss, mourning, regret, and a half century's worth of what-ifs. Her screams during those early morning hours in Rio de Janeiro still clung to the insides of my ears, and I couldn't help feeling that the strangeness of her laughter but familiarity of her pain was illustrative of the sort of brother I had been to her.
She burst through the trees and underbrush then, dark hair flying behind her, golden eyes bright. Stopping dead in her tracks, she stared at me, breathing unnecessarily, and her kaleidoscope emotions reminded me fleetingly of the earliest movies I had seen, centuries ago now, barely more than disjointed images flipped past quickly, giving the illusion of movement. She settled on joyous wonder after a moment, and a slow smile broke across her face, as she still stood, staring, barely fifteen feet from me.
The forest behind her shook and creaked, and a deep voice rumbled out of it: "Bells? Everything alright?"
She blinked rapidly, and for a fraction of a second I looked for Morse Code patterns in those flutters, before recognizing them for the unconscious spasm of someone shocked back into the present.
"Everything's fine," she called back over her shoulder, her gaze not leaving mine. Her voice was precisely as I remembered it, of course.
"You sure? I can smell someone there. Who is it?" He was on-guard, protective fear and distrust spiraling through him, strong enough to let me ignore their roots in an unshakable love for the girl standing in front of me.
She grinned, though a shadow of embarrassment underlined her words. "I thought as much – all these years with me have completely destroyed your sense of smell. It's Jasper, you idiot."
"…Cullen?" came the reply after a brief pause. Quizzical now.
"Of course!" she shot back, and my mind's eye supplied the crystal clear image of the second passport Alice had had me procure for Bella, that last day before our desperate rush to Rio de Janeiro. Cullen, Isabella Marie it had read. She'll want both, eventually, Alice had said. Bella's snap decision to leave us less than a week later had surprised no one as much as Alice, shocked no one as much as my tiny, brave wife.
"Come and say hello," Bella was saying to Jacob. She started to turn back to me, but stopped mid turn. "But put some clothes on before you come out here!" she added.
Rustling and crashing noises emanated from the bushes several yards away, followed by a long moment of silence. "I can't remember where I left them," Jacob's voice drifted over to us. His emotions had shifted to chagrined and slightly bemused.
Bella rolled her eyes, but there was a twinge of nervousness under her laughter. "They're in my backpack, silly!"
"Oh right," he muttered, and his footsteps retreated further into the forest.
She turned back to me in earnest then, rolling her eyes again as though to say: Wolves, always losing their pants, and I grinned back at her.
"You look well," I said into the silence that followed, taking a few ambling steps towards her.
Her smile slipped slightly, regret and melancholy seeping back in. "You do, too," she said softly.
"I see you've kept up with the diet," I said, noting the bright, unblemished gold of her eyes, sidling closer. Only a few feet separated us now, and it felt more like a real conversation, somehow.
She rolled her eyes again, and I wondered if it was a mannerism she had picked up from the dog. "Please. I've probably done better than you have – I've had a werewolf babysitting me the past however-many-years."
I sniffed at her impertinence, and won the grin I was hoping for. "I'm going on seventy years without a slip, I'll have you know," I said. I didn't count the near-miss of her eighteenth birthday, and hoped she wouldn't mind.
Bella beamed at me, either forgiving the omission or not doing the math in her head.
"What you said about the effect the others have on me really helped," I continued, my voice soft. "Now when it gets bad, I take some time to myself, break the feedback loop. I can nearly stand high school again."
She laughed, that golden peal of laughter that was so alien and yet familiar. "Are you back in school, then? Some place cold and rainy?" Her eyes twinkled, but the pain that hid behind her words was so strong as to nearly be visible.
I smiled slightly, playing the polite game of responding to the emotions presented, not the emotions felt. "We've taken a break from that particular masquerade, actually. We've been living as an artist commune the last few years, although I think that may be drawing to a close as well."
My voice turned down of its own accord, and I stopped talking. There was a reason it had ended, a reason we were splitting off into couples for a few years, with unsure promises of reunions someday. It was the same reason I had spent the last months planning and tracking, the reason I was now in the wilds of Canada, standing in front of the girl who had changed all of our lives. I had come all this way to tell her, and yet I felt the words catch in my throat.
I motioned for her to walk with me to cover for my abrupt lack of words. She smiled and fell into step beside me, and together we ambled easily through the forest.
How could I possibly tell her? I didn't know what I had expected to find, but this happy, vivacious woman was not it. Her contentedness overlaid every other emotion like a patina, and I recognized it as the comfortable, easy happiness she had once described to me, so long ago now. And yet her sadness and regret were there as well, pouring out of her as she looked off into the forest ahead of us, more akin to my reality of the last five decades than her easy laughter.
"How's Alice?" Bella asked, interrupting my thoughts. The remorse and homesickness rolling off her nearly knocked me off my feet.
I stepped over a fallen tree, offering her my hand as she climbed over after me, but didn't meet her gaze. "She's well," I said as we continued on. "She misses you – everyone does. She's decided to finally open a dress shop in Paris. We hope to be there before the end of the year."
"That's fantastic!" Bella replied, but her smile didn't reach her eyes, and melancholy, deep and dark, weighed her exuberance down like a stone in water. "Are the others going to Paris as well?"
I shook my head. "Just Alice and I. Rosalie and Emmett have decided to try running an auto garage, in upstate New York I believe, and Esme and Carlisle will be spending some time in Denali, and then maybe England."
The empty space after the echoes of my words died away was momentarily lost on me. I had become so used to that silence where someone else should fit that I hardly noticed it, almost able to ignore the twisting pain of absence.
"And Edward?" Bella asked in a small voice, just as the incompleteness of my list registered in my mind. "How is he?"
Could I tell her? I stopped walking and turned to look down at her. I looked into the golden eyes of this woman who would be, until the end of the world, my little sister, as surely as though our mother had shown me how to hold her as an infant, how to protect her fragile neck, as surely as though I had seen her first steps. As children she would have looked up at me as she did now, hopeful and trusting.
I looked into her eyes, her emotions and mine becoming a tangled knot as the last fifty years raced through my mind. The things I should have seen – her eyes slowly turning gold, her graduation from college, her first day at a new high school, her wedding – fighting for space with fifty years of missing her every day, of Alice's unending sorrow, of Esme always planning for one too many, of Edward—
I looked into her upturned face, so hopeful and trusting, and I lied.
"He never really recovered," I said quietly, and turned away from her.
Her emotions swirled behind me, a vast yawning maw of regret and longing tangled up in guilt. But how much more regret, how much more guilt, if I told her the truth?
"Oh," she sighed softly, sadly. I heard her swallow, felt her try to find the bright side in all of this. "If you think it will help," she continued a moment later, "tell him I say 'hello'. But only if you think it will help."
I nodded, though it was a promise I couldn't keep.
We talked for a while longer, circling around their camp, conversing in the strange small talk of two people trying desperately to avoid the obvious, painful subject. In the end, there was nothing left to say. There were platitudes and promises to come to Paris, but they rang hollow in the wake of my inability to tell her the truth. I had been so determined that she should know, so convinced that she needed to know, as though that could change anything. But here at the edge of the world, her emotions undiluted by the echo chamber of others, I knew with a certainty that the truth would only hurt her.
I would hold this for her, protect her this one time, as the brother I had never been able to be to her.
The truth that had driven my searching, propelled me on foot across the length and breadth of the continent, and that now would forever separate me from Bella, was that after fifty years of arguing with his delusions, after decades of vampiric hunger strikes and screaming pleas for the girl who would never hear them, Edward had finally gotten his way. It was impossible to prove to him that she lived, when we could not produce her, when we had no evidence of her existence except for a closet of faded clothing and her dried blood on a single, tiny stone.
I was sane, I had seen her with my own eyes, and yet at times I needed to be reminded that she had existed at all, this sister I had dreamed of my entire life. So much harder, then, for Edward, his mind shattered and his heart forever yearning for the one person we could not find, though we turned the world upside down searching. It was only after his death that we happened upon the breadcrumbs that would eventually lead me to her. Lead me to her too late, the unwilling, incapable bearer of bad news.
Edward was gone, but Bella lived. In the wilds, with the wolf by her side and my lie firmly planted in her heart, she was content, if not truly happy. I tried to derive some small comfort from that.
I said my goodbyes to Bella as the aurora borealis lit the sky, knowing it was for the last time, and then began the long, lonely trip home.