A/N: Post-Eclipse, excludes Breaking Dawn, AU. Kind of a downer. Sorry.
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You've been living in the same dingy apartment for the past ten years.
The rented out sublet is two blocks away from your old house in La Push; it borders the Makah Rez almost threateningly and you can't exactly say that you're neighbors are thrilled about you being there (they want to pretend you don't exist, but it's hard to ignore a seven-foot-tall, one-hundred-and-eight-degree kid).
The walls are brown (they used to be white—you're not really sure when the color started to change), and there are faded rectangles from where you've hung pictures over the decade—hopefully, at first ("Realistically," you say to Billy, "one day I'll have a reason to show them off." Because you used to be optimistic), but throughout the long and endless eternity that is your life they have been replaced and cracked and eventually taken down.
Your bedroom might as well be a broom closet, and you're friends laugh because your feet (legs, really—the comforter stops at your knees) hang off the bed-frame like some overgrown teenager. Not too weird, because, after all, that's what you are (what you always will be).
You could move. You have the money to. You don't know why you stay at the dump.
(You're head tells you to leave, but her voice fills out the rest of your body. You can't)
You really should.
--
You walk to the beach every day and stare at the water, even though it's really closer to gray than blue (like the sky; like the rain; like your heart), and its not even all that pretty, not really (her perfect face flashes in the waves).
You sit on the same bleached log even though its been falling apart into ragged splinters of smooth, white wood and its sunken into the sand so that your knees reach your chin when you try to get comfortable.
Quil plays with Claire and watches you with the tired eyes of a forgotten friend, and the sound of his love is only background music (you don't look in his eyes. It reminds you too much of what you have lost).
You're there because there's nowhere else to go.
(You're there because it makes you think of her. You hold your breath and imagine you're drowning).
Billy convinces you to buy a beach chair, but you never end up using it.
--
At the eleven-year mark, she comes back (did you really expect she would disappear forever?).
Charlie figured she died nine years ago—an unfortunate car accident on the campus of her new college (Billy shuddered. "Same as your mother," he mumbled into the phone). You didn't go to the funeral, so you don't know if they had a closed casket or not.
But when she shows up at your paint-peeled door, you know that Charlie wouldn't recognize her anyway. She is so beautiful it makes you sick, and the scent of her skin burns your nose (and your head, and the pit of your stomach, and all the veins that lead to you heart), just like you know your own does too—her nose wrinkles and you can't help but notice the little freckles you so loved are gone now.
She sputters out the "Jake" in her singsong voice, and it doesn't hurt as bad as you expected when her sharp diamond ring drills holes into your palm.
Her lips are hard and cold and her body doesn't look the way you always imagined it (soft curves become sharp hips, birthmarks vanish like the breath in her lungs).
Not that it matters. You lie her down on every surface of the apartment that you hate so much.
--
You growl as she scratches her nails across your skin (need and lust, not love and want), and her teeth make bite marks in your shoulder that disappear in seconds. You ignore the numb sting of venom. You're used to it by now.
Her hands are white and smooth and there is something so wrong about the way they feel in yours (not the push-pull of opposites like those days in your garage—that was the natural way, the what-would-have-been, this is the result of a long line of waiting for something that died years before).
You don't make love, because what your doing couldn't be construed as making love, not when her breath is cold and she isn't sweating. Not when she has trouble saying your name even though she doesn't need to breath. This is the end, and it's forever.
It hurts when you kiss her, but it's still everything you've been waiting for.
In the back of your mind, you hear Quil telling you how pathetic you are.
For a second, imprinting doesn't seem so horrible.
--
She comes to you and her skin has blisters and her eyes are red and bloodshot—if nothing else, you know that she looks horrible in a way that makes you see her as beautiful
Soft kisses and sweet nothings; it's real because she chose you, not because you let her, and if you could stop time you wouldn't—you want to watch the way her face can change
Because her heart beats and she's dying slowly but so are you, so is everyone else in the world and that's okay
For now, you're alive, and it's not an escape but a reality; it's how you wake up in the morning and what you see when you go to sleep—it's love and family and life, and it isn't forever, but it's never going to end all the same
Dreaming is okay when the girl you're in love with can sleep (Bella can't).
Is it really cheating when the face you're imaging is just another facet of the one you love?
(It's not right all the same. This stupid apartment is closing in on you, and she doesn't like the sand anymore. There's nothing left except for that damn gray ocean)
(What can you hope for?)
.
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END