Disclaimer: Stephenie Meyer owns everything seen here. Damn it all.

And So I Fell

I didn't mean to fall in love with her.

My whole life I had never fallen in love before. Even before the end of the world, when I was in high school, I hadn't felt it. I don't even remember most of those girls now. They just blur into a faceless collection of bodies and hair and fake laughter.

There was one girl, Kara Morn, who I thought that I loved, but that was more lust and physical than anything else. It was nothing like this.

Then the end of the world came and I didn't have any time to think about loving someone, I didn't have a chance to. It was just my brother and I, our parents didn't escape, on our own constantly on the run trying to survive one day at a time.

My brother mourned for Jodi, he had loved her and she hadn't made it out, and I respected that but I had not understood why or what had happened. I could grasp love until I had felt the sting of it myself.

When we got to the caves I thought maybe it would happen now, maybe. The people here, when they paired up and fell in hard it ran deep and far. It wasn't like normal times, there was no divorce, no breaking up, no falling in love with someone else. It was all or nothing and since I had not been consumed by emotion for any of the women here (even though I had a crush on Paige for about a day) and I didn't want to.

I had been perfectly fine by myself, with my brother.

And then it happened. Wanda came to the caves and I never felt completely fine by myself.

At first I hated her, I desperately hated her for what she was, for what her species did to mine. I hated the way she, and the rest of her kind, erased humans and invaded my planet.

But then I realized, once the poison propaganda of my brother and Jared, Jared who hated her the most out of anyone, that this wasn't fair. Wanda hadn't done anything to me specificly, she just existed. It wasn't her fault that she was a parasite, not really.

So I became close to her. I began speaking to her, listening to her, looking at her, just being with her as much as I could. And then it happened. I fell.

I hadn't realized what was happening to me until it was too late, until I was deep into the hole and could not be brought back out. I had never been in love and so I had not recognized the feelings that were rising up in my chest whenever she was near, the way that I was beginning to feel fiercely protective of her. The jealousy that would become painfully evident every time that I saw her look at Jared.

Then Kyle had attempted to kill her and that's how I knew. When I had felt the fear that she might be dead, the fear that poisoned my blood and froze my bones and boiled my brain. I had been terrified and when she had been alive, even if she was perilously close to the edge of death with my brother, the way relief had rushed through my body getting rid of my horror and I could hold her, healthy and breathing and ultimitely alive in my arms is when I knew.

My love for her just happened, the way that the sun rises and sets everyday, the way that you know that night is going to fall. And I knew that I never wanted to be apart from her, that I would do anything, anything at all, for her.

I would never be the same again.

A/N: I love Ian. He's amazing, and he's SO much better than Edward. And that's all I've got to say about that. :) Please, if you are reading this Mrs. Meyer, write a sequel! Please!