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ONE

A Fiery Encounter

Isabella Marie Cullen seems to have discovered teleportation. She doesn't know what to think of it.

One moment she's walking into a ritual bonfire, and the next, she's standing in the middle of an alley, in what appears to be — she uses her superhuman hearing to listen to the people nearby — somewhere in England? She can't be sure. The English and the Welsh and the Scots all sound the same to her still, even after those two decades she spent in Bath. Granted, the population in Bath wasn't diverse enough for her to get a shot at differentiating accents, but one encounter with Scottish brogue should have been enough — if her hearing is sharp enough to tell the sound of one person's heartbeat from another's, then it should be good enough to pick apart people's accents. But it isn't, and though she'd eventually learnt to incorporate an overall "British" accent into her own speech, she spent two decades floundering because her acquired lilt sounds like a bastard lovechild of different accents, and none of the Brits she's met since seemed able to figure out why her accent sounded so wonky.

She dusts off her pants — she never did get around to calling them trousers — reflexively sniffs the air, and frowns as she notices one very disturbing detail: this place, wherever the heck this is, smells weird.

She takes another whiff, thinking it's just her overactive imagination playing tricks on her, but sure enough it still smells the same: weird. It's not so much that there are new scents in the air as that there are old scents it, ones that should no longer exist. Ones that, to her knowledge, have not existed in over two centuries.

"Ugh. Are you smelling this?"

Bella spins so quickly it almost gives her a whiplash, her eyes landing on a familiar man.

Jacob Ephraim Black ignores her exclamation, his thick brows drawn together in a pinched expression that looks like a cross between nausea and constipation. He makes a motion to cover his nose with his hand, aborts the attempt, then decides to pinch his nostrils instead. "God. It's like the Industrial Revolution exploded in my nose."

Her eyes, she figures, are probably as big as saucers as she comes to the realization that Jacob is here. With her. She doesn't even want to think about what that means. "What the absolute hell are you doing here?"

"I'm fine after my recent joust into a raging pit of fire, thanks for asking," he mutters sarcastically. "How about you? Any scorch marks? Singed hair? Actually, never mind, don't tell me. Mr. Morbid Cullen would have my hide in the afterlife if he finds out."

"You followed me," she states numbly, not knowing what else to say. She decides to ignore the last part of his tirade.

"No duh." He rolls his eyes at her. "Sorry, was I supposed to just watch you kill yourself? I don't think I got that memo, so you'll have to excuse my stupidity."

"Stupidity is right! You followed me!" She repeats, outraged. "You walked into a huge, deadly pyre, and risked being burnt to death! You didn't even know what that fire would do to you!"

His eyebrow arches up. "I think I'm quite aware of what fire generally does to people, thank you."

She hears him, of course, and her scowl turns fierce. "You couldn't have known what would happen to you, but you jumped right into the pyre anyway. Jacob, are you completely insane?"

"You know, that question is so hypocritical, I don't even know where to start."

"This isn't a joking matter," she snarls at him. "You could have died!"

"Again, hypocritical." He glances at the people passing by, and makes an amused sound at the back of his throat. "Is it just me, or are the people here really... I don't know, frumpy?"

Startled out of her tirade, Bella finally spares a moment to study the passers by. They seem... she can't be sure, but are those women wearing shoulder pads? Who even does that anymore?

"I..." She trails off, then resumes to glare at him. "Stop changing the topic, Jacob! You walked into the fire!"

"We've established that," he snaps. Upon seeing her thunderous expression, however, he ends up sighing in resignation. "Just stop getting on my case, would you? I only did what you did yourself, and if you think what I did was insane, then you should really start questioning your own sanity."

She sighs. "What were you thinking?"

"What, you mean when I walked into what could have been my funeral pyre? I wasn't really. Thinking, I mean. And if I was, it might have been something like holy fucking shit. You know, just the usual thoughts of a guy seeing his best friend walk into a fiery pit of doom."

She cringes, but says nothing.

"But we don't really care about what I think, do we?" He continues. "No, we only care about what you think. Never mind that I was goddamned terrified when I saw you about to kill yourself, since it's only what you want that matters, and damn everyone who gives a shit, right?"

"But I wasn't!" She starts. "I wasn't about to kill myself! The ritual pyre was supposed to—"

"I don't give a flying buttfuck what it's 'supposed' to do," he snarls. "It was fire, Bella. Fire kills Cold Ones. You're a Cold One. Do the fucking math."

"I... I'm sorry."

He stares at her. "No, you're really not, but whatever."

"Fine," she snaps with a scowl. "I'm not sorry for what I did. I wanted to leave, Jake. I've wanted to for a very long time. It would have been something else, if not that fire. So I'm not sorry I walked into that fire, even if I am sorry for worrying you."

"... I kind of wanna rip your head off right now, but I'm sure that would ruin the point." He sighs. "Okay. Fine. You're forgiven. I get why you did it anyway," he gains a faraway look for a splitsecond, before his gaze turns back to her. "Even if it does piss me off to kingdom come."

Bella gives out a humorless laugh at that, and throws her arms around him. "Thanks, Jake. I really don't know what I did to deserve a friend like you."

"Well, that's easy," he replies with a smug grin. "You don't deserve a friend like me." He wrinkles his nose as a gust of wind blows past them, and he adds, "Ugh. That is just nasty. Did you seriously march into a pyre, risk getting burned to death, just to go to this smelly dumpster? Is there something I'm missing? Are there unicorns here?"

"My heart's desire."

"Your what?"

"My heart's desire," she repeats. "The ritual fire was supposed to bring me to my heart's desire. And I'd like to think that I know myself well enough to know what that is. Or whom."

He gapes at her. "You don't mean—"

"I exactly mean." She gazes at the darkening sky, her lips pulling up to a smile that Jacob hasn't seen her wear in over two centuries. "He's here, Jake," she murmurs. "Somewhere nearby. My husband, or a version of him. I'll finally have him back. After two hundred and ten years, I'm finally having Edward back."

A/N: I've had this in my iPad for months, and I thought I should just get it out there. Tell me what you think!