A/N: This was commissioned by vampygurl402 on behalf of arashi wolf's birthday. Alas, I apologize for its belated arrival. I found myself unable to finish, but for now, Happy Belated Birthday! What follows is Part 1 of this technically "two-shot" Jacella fic ;) Enjoy!
Disclaimer: Someday, Bella will meet a Time Lord, who will take her back in time just long enough to convince her younger self to correct a single mistake ;p
INCANDESCENCE
The last time I had been to Forks, Washington, was six years ago before my father died. He had been promoted to the Chief of Police and wanted Renee to send me out to celebrate with him. Charlie's idea of a celebration was fishing on the La Push Reservation with his best friend, Billy. Naturally he dragged me out into the wet wilderness any chance he could get. My visits had become far less frequent than the yearly summer trip by the time I was thirteen years old. Even with my stick thin figure I was starting to not look like his baby girl anymore and we just didn't know how to connect like adults. Like me, Charlie was never big on overt physical affection.
The summer before I turned fourteen we celebrated his new promotion in grand style, fishing. I sucked but I liked the fact that the sport required no talking. Charlie and Billy kept the beers rolling along and I might have enjoyed the silence, if it weren't for an annoyingly persistent voice in my ear.
"Hey Bells, you really suck at this."
No joke, kid.
"Seriously, you haven't caught a fish all morning!" he said while making a perfect cast over our heads.
I rolled my eyes but kept my eyes on my own line bobbing in the water.
He laughed. "Are you sure you're thirteen? Cause from where I'm sitting, I think I'm lightyears older than you in terms of skills, baby."
I pulled the bill of my dad's baseball cap lower over my forehead in frustration.
Does this kid ever shut up?
"I could show you how, if you want," he added with a tilt of his jaw. I glanced up at the kid in his effort to sit taller than me.
"I think I got it," I answered with more than a little sarcasm and immediately wished I hadn't opened my fat mouth. Because not only did the kid's black eyes flash down at me but he turned the full force of his broad toothy grin my way. I didn't think anyone could smile like that and mean it.
"Really, Bells? Because I'm kind of an expert."
"I doubt it." I glanced past him to see both our fathers struggling not to snicker out loud. Embarrassment colored my cheeks and I hung my head lower.
"Oh you'll see! I'll have another one reeled in within the next five minutes!"
I lifted an eyebrow doubtfully at him. "Five minutes?" And just when I thought the kid couldn't be any goofier, he had the nerve to stand up with a manly shrug.
"Sure, sure… You just watch and see, baby."
"I'm pretty sure you're two years younger than me, Jacob."
"Age is just a number, Bella!" His voice took on a boyishly high pitch then, however as his fishing line stretched taught and the rod arched dangerously low to the water.
"Looks like he's snared one, Billy!" Charlie hooted.
"Reel 'em in, son!" Billy cheered with a salute of beer can.
Jake was bent half over the water in his struggle to hold onto the rod. I was on my feet before I had time to think about what I was doing.
"Jake! Be careful!" I said as I put a hand on his shoulder. He jumped beneath my touch and turned to look up at me with an even brighter grin.
"Told ya, Bells!" He exclaimed and then his eyes went wide as the fish gave a vicious jerk. We both yelped as Jacob followed his rod into the river and I somehow followed Jacob.
"Let go!" I heard one of our fathers shout before my world was distorted with the rush and roaring water. I kicked my way up to the surface and saw the edge of the boat and heard our fathers laughing their asses off.
Nice, I thought, before I realized Jacob was nowhere to be found.
"Jake?" I called and gulped a healthy dose of river water in the process. Panic filled my chest as I remembered the fishing rod and his fingers clamped tightly over it. Had he been caught up in the line somehow? I sucked in a desperate breath and dove back down, forcing my eyes open against the dark water. I could barely make out my own hands let alone the fish in the water. But my hands made contact with something far too large to be a fish and I saw a flash of dark eyes meet mine in panic in the water.
And then I saw him struggling to pull his rod free of the rocks.
You stupid ass! I wanted to scream at him. The rod wasn't worth his life. With more strength than I thought I possessed, I grabbed one of his hands and pulled him up after me. I missed the next few seconds of water before we broke the surface and were pulled back in by our fathers.
The next thing I remembered, I was glaring at the kid with a blanket and my father's arms around me, my teeth chattering. And Jacob was smiling.
I got sick that summer with pneumonia and Renee forbade Charlie to take me fishing again. And yet, among the many tirades I had heard out of her mouth in the last few days, the one thing she mentioned most was the fishing.
"I should have let him take you again, Bella. He loved taking you fishing!" Renee sobbed next to me, her hands clawing at my arm. I stiffened.
Yeah, well you should have thought about that before you thought the plane fair was too expensive for yearly trips.
Billy glanced over at my mother for the tenth time since the service began. I tried not to notice the other people around us. Charlie asked for very little in his will. Just that his best friend give his eulogy at La Push if he died in the line of duty, and that I inherit his house. Renee insisted we move as soon as she heard the news…again. This time, we were moving to the place she and Charlie first met, the place she fell in love for the first time. She broke up with her boyfriend Phil over it. She said it would be good for us both to go back to our roots.
After all I was nineteen with nothing going for me. I started school in Arizona but felt like one of us needed a stable job and that person wasn't going to be my mother. School would have to wait. My life would have to wait. I didn't listen too much to what Renee had to say anymore, especially after what she did to Phil. But all this was coming from the woman who thought that crystals were cosmic connectors to ancient energy sources. And she swore could feel Charlie all over Forks since we had arrived, that he approved us coming here. I didn't want to hear it. I wanted to run away into the wilderness and try to pretend my father hadn't just died. I wanted to drown out hers and all the other meaningless sympathetic voices describing a loss I wasn't sure how to feel.
Billy looked at me, then and his annoyance melted into something deeper and sadder. "Charlie Swan is survived by his daughter, Isabella Marie Swan."
When I heard my name, I snapped. The blood began to pound in my ears and sweat began to coat my skin as I struggled for air.
"Bella?" Renee's lips moved in front of my face but I couldn't hear her, didn't want to hear her. The rest of the guests stood and honored my father in the Quileute way.
My feet took me to his graveside. The tribe had made an exception Renee told me earlier that morning, something about a grandmother of his I had never met before and old family ties.
At the moment, I was watching my mother throw herself down in violent sobs while his body was lowered into the dirt. I felt like I was watching from somewhere far away while Harry Clearwater half carried, half led my mother away with the others. Billy led the procession in his wheelchair. His daughters, Rachel and Rebecca followed closely behind.
It began to rain, the kind of bone chilling rain that you feel in your bones. I didn't try to move closer to Charlie's graveside. But I sank to my knees anyway, soiling my tights in the mud. I ran my fingers through the curling dark mass on my head and tried to find a reason to get up and follow the others. I stared at that empty hole in the ground and wondered if Charlie wasn't the lucky one for dying from blood loss after a shoot-out at the hospital. He could stay here in this place he loved forever.
Why didn't you fish with him more? Why didn't you fight harder to see him, Bella? A voice that sounded too much like Renee echoed in my mind. I was an awful daughter. For letting the distance make us distant, for never trying. I spent so much time trying to mother my irresponsible mother that I forgot how to be a kid. Charlie never got to know me as a teenager. Most days I suspect I don't know myself all too well.
But now it was far too late.
Now I knelt at the grave of a stranger who used to burn my grilled cheese sandwiches and tied my hair in pigtails, who taught me how to hook worms and not faint at the sight of blood. But I would never know him really and he had lost his chance to know me. And the injustice of it all, the unfairness, made me furious.
My fist hit the mud and it spattered on my face. I growled as I hit it again and kept hitting it until a pair of dirty black boots came to stand before me. I was embarrassed at being caught like a ten year old instead of an almost twenty year old, playing in the muck.
"Need some help with that mud pie?" a very deep and vaguely familiar voice spoke. My eyes lifted to find the source. His long jean-clad legs were thick with muscle and the russet skinned hands at his side were clenched into large fists. He wore a black tee shirt that seemed to barely constrain the hard planes of his chest, almost as if he had grown too quickly into the fabric. And his face was squared off into perfectly cut lines, framed by shaggy black hair that hung in varying lengths from brow to chin. Almost like he cut it himself, and not necessarily all at once.
A strange warm sensation twisted in my gut when I looked into those black gleaming eyes. Those eyes seemed to burn through my soul. And I might have imagined it, but I could have sworn he sucked in a sharp breath. Air seemed to be in short supply I found, as he held out an open palm and smiled.
God, that smile…
White, blinding and determined to split his face in two, practically incandescent. That smile made me want to agree to anything.
"Wanna get out of here?"
I nodded numbly and put my muddy and significantly smaller hand into his. His natural body heat seemed to shoot through my skin and fill me up. I hated the cold and Forks seemed determined to keep me that way. So it was no surprise that I stepped even closer to this mysterious Quileute giant and let him wrap his arm snugly around my shoulders.
The rain let up a bit as he used his other arm to lift my legs up from under me and deposited me onto his motorcycle. And his touch grew almost tender as he lifted my feet on either side and placed them where they needed to go. He glanced up at me briefly and again I couldn't shake that feeling of familiarity as he cupped my face between his palms to wipe some of the mud away. His touch and his eyes were almost too much then. Almost as if he sensed this, his thumb pressed my trembling lower lip.
"Trust me," he said and I shivered, eagerly wrapped my arms around his waist as he sat in front of me and revved the engine to life. A part of me crave this, craved the intimacy from this lovely stranger, this familiar, beautiful smile. And as he drove me away from Charlie's graveside, from my mother's hysterics and the tribe's judgment, I felt the heaviness begin to crumble enough. It was just a crack, a sliver and my emotions came to the surface for air.
I sobbed against my stranger's jacket until the rain washed my tears and the wind dried them away. We didn't drive very far, not that I expected us to keep on running. Real people didn't get to run away from life, from death. Real people had to face the cold and the rain and endure.
Review: If you're a Wolf Girl ;)
