Hallelujah

I was making soup when Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" came on and I was struck with a plot bunny. Make of it what you will. Unedited mess is, as always, unedited. I am off to visit family for about a week, where I will cook lots of food and there will be no internet. Both of which I am grateful for at least a short while. I will respond to all the reviews from my previous peppering of posts, and for any this little ditty might glean when I return. Until then.

She always liked his hair long.

Jacob wasn't really sure how Bella ever intuited the importance of hair to people, his people. Maybe it was because she had so much of her own. He never asked. He wished he had.

Jacob remembered the first day she saw him after the phase. She'd come barreling onto the reservation in that truck that sounded like meteor crashing to earth. He remembered the shock that registered on her face. Her jaw slack and her eyes wide. She looked horrified. And not because he'd grown a foot since the last time he'd seen her. Jacob had good eyesight thanks to his new condition. Her eyes went straight to his head, above eye level.

She'd mentioned it a few times in passing after their initial antagonism had withered out. She eventually gave up being wary about holding his hand, but Jacob wondered if she realized just how often she touched him in return. She was always absently fingering his hair in a forlorn way.

Jacob had been less than thrilled that day Embry was forced to brace him by the shoulders and neck so Sam could shave his head after he finally phased back and puked naked in the woods near Rainier. Phasing for the first time had been awful, but in retrospect… he was glad for what Sam and Embry had done for him.

The hair was a practical thing. Running around as wolf with grown out hair was a bit like being some kind of Siberian yak. It didn't make for agility. But Jacob couldn't ignore sixteen years worth of his own experience. No one had ever told him the rules, but he knew: you only cut your hair in mourning.

His dad had cut his own hair when Sarah died.

Somewhere along the line, Jacob had figured it out. No one had died on the rez when Sam, Jared, Paul, Embry, Jacob, or Quil had phased. Leah and Seth, of course, had their father's passing. But to outsiders, nothing marked the shearing of the soul that fell like a plague on the other La Push boys.

Jacob's newfound cynicism thought it was quite a way to mark which teens had adulthood forcibly shoved down their throats. Maybe they weren't mourning anyone. They were mourning childhoods, college dreams, normal lives, and general expectations of normalcy. They didn't even have a shot at being rez-normal anymore. Sure, La Push would always be home, with its BIA-issued ramshackle, slab-based housing, with shoddy electrical – Jared didn't even have regularly running water. They'd always be Quileute. They'd always be Indian. There was no way to change where they came from, and they didn't want to. But living as pariahs among the shunned was not a fate any had ever contemplated.

With the phase and the shorn hair, came the severing of normal family ties. Houses full past capacity with cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, second cousins, in laws, and anyone twice removed wasn't in the cards. Wolves were unstable. Wolves were prone to anger. Wolves couldn't handle sensory overload. The phase didn't allow them their normal.

The phase was more than just the initial shock and horror of species transformation. The phase, for all its roots in Quileute legendary canon, taxed its subjects. The legendary tradition was ironic in the way it stripped other traditions from its subjects like steel wool to the skin.

The hair was just an all-encompassing symbol for the entire soul-eroding shit-fest. And Jacob was amazed at the way Bella intuited even just a fraction of that. It made him feel like he wasn't crazy, like the Council wasn't completely infallible in their rhetoric.

He'd let his hair grow out, because he knew she liked it. And admittedly it was a lot like running around as a St. Bernard while phased, but the fur was warm and it brought a little light back to Bella Swan's face.

But then she'd agreed to marry the leech. And he mostly just forgot about that portion of his appearance. He'd disappeared up north – as far as the Yukon at some points – and spent a lot of time in Vancouver and Seattle, getting hammered and laid. If he didn't shave for a week, then so-fucking-be-it. What the hell his hair looked like was beyond what he was willing to care about. As much as he tried to forget time, the militant lupine consciousness that lived inside himself always knew when and where he was. At all times. So Jacob knew exactly when Bella's wedding was going to roll around. And as much as he wanted to spend the rest of his youth being a social degenerate, he wanted to one last chance to say goodbye to his best friend.

So he dragged his ass back to Forks, and Leah of all people was there on patrol when he came back within the line. She didn't say anything but Jacob could feel the empathy, which was admittedly a lot better than the pity or even sympathy he got from the others.

He'd thought his imagination was spiraling out of control before her wedding, imaginging how horrific Bella and her life would become after her vows. He'd thought he'd imagined all the worst case scenarios. Strange and unrealistic – even by supernatural standards – scenes would come to mind and wake him from a dead sleep.

Admittedly, he never once imagined her stupid life choice would take her the way it did.

He'd almost lost his mind when he'd heard that she'd come back from her honeymoon "sick". In the words of Leah, sick my fucking ass. Seeing Bella so gaunt and pale and physically taxed by the parasite inside her caused Jacob's wolf to charge the bounds of the cage of his humanity. It slowly gnawed at his logical mind. Since he'd phased his life had been nothing but protecting Bella – first from himself, occasionally his brothers, then from Laurent, Victoria and her army… but his attempts had soon derailed. He couldn't protect her from Cullen if she willingly ran back to him. Well, he could still tear him to shreds, but Jacob wouldn't do that to Bella, wouldn't do that to the Pack's treaty. But some part of him was consoled by the fact that – if the occasion called for it – he could end Edward's entire existence inside of minutes.

But this baby, the parasite, that grew inside of Bella was not something he could protect her from. So much stripped was from phased tribe members, and now he couldn't even fulfill the role the phase charged him with. He couldn't protect Bella from this leech. This leech that lived inside Bella; there was no way Jacob could destroy it without destroying her. And – much like the force that compelled Jacob not to kill Edward – he knew there was no way he could kill the monstrous life she fostered inside of her. But it was more than just the knowledge that Bella was happy that fed the compulsion to not kill Edward. This compulsion keeping him from an outright slaughter was different than that. With the parasite… it was as much a part of her as anything else, and part of that was a sacred and instinctual line that Jacob had no right to cross. That was Bella's line to cross.

Bella chose to keep the baby, and that was a line Jacob couldn't cross – no matter how much his mind, stripped of tradition to make room for a legend, tried to. Time passed and Bella's entire form degraded rapidly. Her skin clung to her bones where muscle mass wasted. Her cheeks and eyes sunk into her face. Her movements grew fewer and measured. It was hard for her to breathe. The child chilled her to the bone from the outside in.

And Jacob couldn't protect her this time. All he could do was sit in the Cullen living room, the smell of bleach and saccharine cauterizing his breathing passages, and watch the threat suck Bella's life force. Ultimately, Jacob thought that brief time cast his degree of control into cement. If he could get through that without going completely ballistic and phasing in the middle of the house, then he could get through anything.

Then one day, Bella took one unmeasured step for the first time in so long and set off an explosive domino effect. Her back twisted and cracked in a way that Jacob heard and knew was paralyzing. Her body purged itself, throwing up blood such quantities that Jacob was convinced it wasn't just what she'd just consumed. Too much of it smelled like an acidic, rusty, and poisoned kind of Bella.

It seemed like a lifetime before Edward had cut and gnawed the baby from Bella's body, destroying anything that might've once been a torso. Jacob just kept giving her CPR. It was easy, it was mechanical, it was rote. Logically, his mind must've registered that Bella couldn't have survived that much blood loss. That she couldn't survive being disemboweled by her own child. But he just kept going.

He vaguely registered Rosalie taking the spawn from the room and Edward filling Bella's emptying veins with his venom – the life bleeding out of her, and the poison flooding in. Jacob's hyper-sensitive ears picked up the heart monitor like he was inside an industrial factory at full speed. That noise rang as a last hope, and Jacob wouldn't stop breathing air into Bella's lungs and pumping it back out until that factory noise was silent.

And it was.

It stopped. And so did Jacob. For the first time he looked down on the girl, only two years older than him. The fact that she was all but stripped naked might've been vulgar if she wasn't covered in blood an organ matter in a way that completely hid the fact that there might be a human shape under there. Edward was hunched over the end of gurney near her legs and Jacob just watched the carnage.

Bella had been torn open and hollowed out. Her legs were like broken matchsticks, and her mouth hung open, her eyes half shut. The smell was overpowering. Venom, blood, death, guilt, and anguish. He wiped his bloodied hands against his shirt and took a step back, horrified by the scene in front of him. What had they done to her?

He was out the door, down the stairs, and on the lawn in moments. He ran all the way back to the rez on two feet. For some reason, the wolf couldn't be found. For once it was silent and absent from his mind. Maybe the grief of loss and human mourning was beyond the capacity of even a supernatural wolf.

He kicked in the back door of his tiny house, not even caring or knowing who was home. He marched right into the bathroom, not bothering with the door, tearing his shirt over his head. He fired the bloodied thing into the barrel and turned the sink's faucet on full blast. He glanced his own reflection in the wavy glass mirror just long enough to realize that his face was streaked with tear tracks.

He washed Bella's blood from his skin which seemed to reach all the way to his elbows. His skin grew clean but he scrubbed until his own blood rushed to just under the surface of his skin. He crouched down, his knees no longer willing to take his weight, and he pressed his forehead to the laminate countertop and took a deep breath that rattled in shook on its way in and out.

He knocked the door to the cupboard underneath the sink open and reached inside looking haphazardly until he found what he was looking for. He forced the plug into the wall, and flicked the machine to life. It buzzed and vibrated in his hands. Jacob stood wiping the blood and water spray from the glass mirror and took the shears to his head, watching patch of his hair fall away and leave close to nothing in its wake like strip mining.

"Jacob?" he heard the feminine voice and the snap back of the door but didn't respond. There was the jostle of groceries on the counter and then Rachel was in the doorway, staring with her mouth open.

"Jacob," she spoke steadily. She reached up to his hand, the woman a full foot shorter than him, and halted the clippers. Jake's hand dropped once he felt the touch of her gentle grip. He collapsed down onto the closed toilet and his ears finally registered what he'd seen earlier. He was crying, big ugly sobs that probably hadn't been seen or heard from him since his mother died. Rachel just watched, completely at a loss.

"She's gone, Rach. She's dead. It killed her."

"Oh, honey," Rachel sighed, realizing what her brother was telling her. Rachel never liked Bella – everybody knew that – but she knew how much her brother cared about Bella. A great majority of Rachel's dislike stemmed from her inability to come to terms with how Bella couldn't love Jacob as much as Jacob loved Bella.

She closed the space between them and pulled him close, his face pressed into her U-Dub sweatshirt, as he pulled her closer by the waist.

"I'm sorry, Jake," she told him as his tears bled through to her skin. "I'm sorry."

She turned her head back to the counter and reached for the shears she'd placed down. She clicked them on and used her other hand to guide her brother's head. She cut a sloping line, matching his first uneven stroke, and worked a steady path around his scalp, shearing off the growth of two very long years.