Disclaimer: I don't own Twilight. All of that belongs to Stephanie Meyer, yadda yadda, I don't make money off this, you know the deal.
A/N (important): So, this is fanfic involves literal world-traveling between the setting in Life & Death and Twilight itself. Beau is the only character to awaken or crossover into Twilight, just as forewarning. This all occurs within the story's lore, so be prepared for some open-minded magic involving the Quileute tribal lore. This story directly explores an aspect of it Quileute lore that was discussed within the books themselves, so nothing is 'made up', outside of Beau waking up in a world that is very similar to his own, but filled with vastly different people.
Some things have been modified in the events that occurred in Life & Death to fit this story, namely: the storyline persisted without Beau being turned at the end. A portion of New Moon's plotline will be referenced in Beau's story leading up to Julie Black turning into a werewolf and cutting a helpless, confused Beau out of her life.
Summary: Beau had never given much thought to how he'd die, but being attacked and turned by Lauren was not one of them. When he wakes up in his new body, he finds himself in a world quite similar to his own, albeit with people from another timeline. ["World" crossover. BeauxLeah, suggested BeauxEdythe]
Rating: Mature, 18+. Death, gore, and heavy romantic elements are not overlooked or glazed over.
WAITING BETWEEN WORLDS
∞ Chapter 1: Life & Death ∞
There was a very good possibility that he was going to die. Beau hadn't given too much thought as to how he'd die, not until recently. When it came down to it, he'd imagined that he'd play a part of his own demise: a hit-and-run one night on the drive back home from work, or contracting some rare, poisonous disease, or even being the sole person in the last ten years in Forks, Washington's history to die from a wild animal attack.
He hadn't expected to die here of all places, in their little meadow in the woods.
The wildflowers were in full bloom. It was February, and just like that day nearly a year ago when he'd come here with Edythe, the sun was out in full force, not a cloud to be seen. It'd been months since he'd been here—even longer since Edythe had left him, as had all of the Cullens—but nature hadn't wasted any time in reclaiming what was hers. Waves of pastel exploded amongst the thick patches of grass like someone had taken tins of pink, blue, and yellow paint and smeared it along the ground. Standing around the edges of the meadow were clusters of pine trees, their heavy branches bowing inward towards him protectively like grey-green sentinels.
The scene would've been perfect if not for the woman standing at the opposite side of the clearing. She was a splotch of ash against the colorful frame around him, someone who stood against the natural order of things.
Lauren.
Instead of being afraid Beau felt a crippling wave of relief hit him. It didn't matter that she was staring at him with bright red eyes; it didn't matter that she was slowly starting to stalk towards him, the smile unfurling on her face equal parts wicked as it was breathtaking. Beau found himself stalk still and watching, desperately tracing over her familiar face with his own sort of hunger. It wasn't Edythe's face, not even Lauren held a candle to her beauty, but it was familiar enough that the sight of it had his heart catching.
"Beau?" She sounded just as surprised as he felt. That helped him relax a little. "Beauford Swan?"
"In the flesh," he could hardly contain his relief. There was something off about the look on her face, something Beau couldn't quite pinpoint what. He reveled in her dark hair and perfect skin, in the unnaturally graceful, cat-like grace with which she moved. Everything about her screamed Not human!, and yet Beau didn't recoil from the inhuman perfection, he gravitated towards it with all the desperation of a dry drunk.
In the back of his mind he heard Edythe's voice, so quiet at first that he almost thought he imagined it:
This is dangerous Beau, she whispered angrily, Leave!
How could she expect him to leave though? This was the first time he'd heard her in weeks—he had started to suspect, to fear, that he wouldn't hear her ever again. Lauren smiled at him, unaware as to the internal conflict he was fighting. When she didn't say anything further, Beau felt a prickle of uncertainty touch him finally. Questions began to break through the flimsy barrier in his mind sheltering him from the fear he should've felt. That knee-jerk reaction of self-preservation had never been one of his strong attributes, particularly when it came to vampires.
Why was Lauren here of all places, and now?
It was then that it struck him. Beau's eyes sought hers, and the vivid redness of her irises gave her away. They weren't the supple gold or red-brown that he was used to seeing on his vampires—well, no longer his vampires really, but rather the Cullens. The unique coloring of their eyes that signified their vegetarian diet was absent, a dead giveaway that despite staying with the Denali coven, she clearly hadn't stuck to their diet.
Beau swallowed thickly, trying to play off his nervousness by reaching up and scratching the back of his head. He hoped he looked more embarrassed than scared to her.
"I thought you were staying with the Denali coven?" He asked after a moment. Pretending that nothing about this situation bothered him in the slightest, Beau took a step forward into the meadow. Edythe growled in warning, but he ignored it, his eyes fixed on Lauren's perfect face.
"I was," Lauren said softly, staring back at him just as intently. "I… admire their restraint, and I enjoyed their company, Ivan especially."
A heavy pause hung in the air until Beau prodded further.
"But?"
"But," she smiled at him humorously, "I felt like it was time to leave. Their lifestyle is intriguing, but I found myself cheating whenever the possibility arose. I'm sure you can understand how difficult that type of diet is for people like us."
And she smiled at him then, like they were in on some shared, secret joke. Beau felt the first thrill of fear strike him then, and it was all he could do to stop from shivering.
Run! Edythe's voice whispered into his ears, the soft, bell-like note of her voice urgent. Can't you see she'll kill you?
"I didn't mean for it to turn out this way, Beau." Lauren continued smoothly. She had moved a few feet closer to him, slowly this time, like a predator cautiously staking out its prey. Even though they were a good twenty feet apart, Beau knew she could cross the distance towards him in a matter of seconds if she wanted to.
He could tell it was taking her every ounce of control to restrain herself.
"You see," her whimsical voice carried effortlessly towards him, "after I left the Denali clan I traveled back down south. Would you believe it if I told you I'd run into Victor again?"
Beau nodded slowly. Of course that made sense, why else would Lauren have come this far south again? To see the Cullens? Even if the others had been on friendly enough terms with her after the altercation at the baseball game, there was no chance in hell that Edythe would've seen their relationship the same way. Not when Joss had been so intent on killing him, and Lauren having had been part of her clan had done little to earn her any favors.
No, it made perfect sense that she had come to find him.
Lie to her, Edythe begged.
"Hopefully it was short and sweet." His mouth was moving but he barely registered what he was saying. All he could focus on was the distracting sound of Edythe's voice. It didn't matter that it was all in his own head, not when she sounded crystal-clear. Beau thought he'd lost her—it'd been weeks since he'd heard her sweet voice. "If you want to visit with the Cullens, they should actually be back from their trip soon."
"Oh?" Lauren arched a delicate brow.
"Yes," he was fumbling, struggling to patch together a plausible story. That thrilling rush of seeing Lauren had evaporated completely now, and while Edythe's voice was just as lovely as ever, the fearful edge to her tone was starting to set his heart into a panic. "They were going on a hunting trip to Northern California for a week—"
Lauren was suddenly closer, though Beau couldn't recall having seen her move.
Lie, Beau! Edythe shouted now inside of his head, you have to try harder than that! But in all of a fraction of a second, he suddenly didn't care anymore.
Lauren had stepped out into the middle of the meadow and the sun touched her finally. Her skin refracted and glittered, a thousand tiny suns reflecting off her body and nearly blinding him. All thoughts left him as the air was stolen from his lungs. It was as if the world had suddenly decided he wasn't worth sustaining now that a creature of perfection had emerged from the shadows. All of its energy—every single drop of sunlight sifting through the canopy above them—seemed drawn to the ethereal creature like a moth to flame.
"I didn't mean for it to be this way, Beau." Lauren purred, her bright eyes glittering like rubies. "But it'll be better this way, you'll see. I'll make it quick, painless—what Victor was planning to do to you… Well, you'll thank me in the end."
I'm going to die, Beau thought numbly. He felt petrified under Lauren's hungry eyes, and his legs were as heavy as if he'd stepped waist-deep into wet concrete.
It hit him again and again, turning into a maddening mantra: I'm going to die. I'm going to die. I'm going to die.
Beau heard Edythe's voice in his head begging for him to run, to try to save himself, but he didn't see the point anymore. Edythe Cullen was not coming back to Forks, Washington. He was a nobody to her, human, just about as imperfect of a match as could possibly be.
As death sauntered towards him, he allowed himself one last reprieve. At least he knew the last year or so of his life hadn't been purely his imagination. If Lauren was real, vampires were real, and that meant all the memories that Edythe Cullen had tried so hard to take away from him were also real.
And that was enough for him.
Beau's body only unfroze right at the end. Suddenly he could feel his legs shaking underneath him and his heart pounding inside of his chest. The panic and adrenaline hit him like punch to the gut, sending him into a desperate frenzy to survive. Edythe was screaming in his ear, telling him to run, to hide, to do something. The desperation to her voice was what stemmed him into action finally. He didn't want to disappoint her, not even at the end.
Beau turned and tried to run, but after just a few steps his sneakers were skidding along the dewy grass, and then Lauren was suddenly there. He felt her cold, marble-like fingers grasp his wrist and snap him back towards her. He flailed like a doll, his body unnaturally twisting back towards her. The force of it was so sudden that his arm swung back awkwardly, and he heard the sickening crunch of his wrist breaking.
Beau shouted in pain—and then screamed when he felt something icy-hot burst inside his shoulder. He never felt the pain of her fangs breaking into skin, only what came afterwards. Beau's face was smothered by thick, dark hair, and as he tried to shake himself free—gasping for breath while twisting and turning desperately in her ironclad grip—the pain from his broken wrist became secondary to the bite. White-hot pain began to spread like wildfire along his skin, a horrifying sensation he had felt just last summer when Joss had tried to kill him. This time it was a thousand times worse, starting from his shoulder where Lauren was… was…
"P-please—" Beau choked. The wet sound of her teeth tearing deeper into flesh—literally ripping him open—was somehow quiet to the obscene sound of her suckling on his blood.
His vision started to fade into blocks of white and black. The fire wouldn't let him dissolve into total unconsciousness yet, and instead he felt every agonizing second as it started to consume him live. It was spreading torturously slow, drawing down his arms and encircling its burning fingertips around his throat and heart. He remembered suddenly, vividly, Archie telling him all those months ago that the transition took three days to complete.
Three days of this, of total hell, if he were to somehow survive.
His head fell back and his mouth twisted open, soundless screams and begs for help silenced by the venom's hold on him. Through the haze of adrenaline and pain, Beau thought for a wild moment that he could hear a wolf howling in the distance.
He was drifting on an endless ocean. The waves occasionally spilled over him and pulled him under, inciting a flood of fear and terror as he struggled to swim back to the surface—only he never made it. His body was useless and heavy, and all the effort he put into swimming back up simply made him realize the restraints of his frail human body when he sank back under. Beau found himself uselessly swallowing mouthful after mouthful of water, resolved that if he couldn't save himself then he might as well drown himself. Get it over with already, just die; he didn't want to struggle under the weight of the ocean anymore.
He might've found it curious that his body could still be burning when he was submersed in water, but Beau had stopped trying to make sense of anything anymore. The fire burned him from the inside out, licking along the his nerves, muscles and bones, leaving nothing but ash in its wake.
He just wanted to die.
In the brief moments that he could make sense of the world he realized that he wasn't actually in the ocean, at least he didn't feel he was. He could still make out some kind of wet substance brushing against his skin, but it was so consequential against the all-consuming flame that he hardly noticed it. Did it really matter in the end? He supposed not. Lauren had lied, that was the only thought he clung to, the last memory that persisted in the forefront of his human mind. Beau remembered her fangs digging deep into his shoulder. She had bit him several times, savagely ripping at him with the sort of frenzy with which a lion tore apart its prey.
That was his living hell now, only worse. His body was heavy and immovable, paralyzed from the vampire venom that was slowly working its way through his body. It favored his long limbs the most, seeming to take some kind of sick, twisted pleasure out of giving him the terror-inducing sensation that he was about to drown to death. In the last moments of these suspended, near-death experiences Beau would hear a flicker of the world around him to remind him that he wasn't dead.
Not yet.
"We shouldn't have taken him here." Someone said quietly, but the voice was only distantly familiar, an echo of a husk he might've heard once in the past.
"What else could we have done?"
"Let him die." A female voice interjected coldly. There was no remorse in their tone. Beau wished they were brave enough to let him die. "He won't be human anymore after this. What do you expect us to do with him, Julie?"
"Save him!" Julie shouted. "We have to do something—he's good. He isn't like the others. He can be different. The treaty doesn't say anything about what to do with humans in Forks that are turned into vampires, least of all people we consider family, Sam. The Cullens didn't do this to him, this isn't even his fault."
"If you had let me go after that vampire alone none of this would've happened." Her voice was fading now. "You made me wait for the others, and by the time we got there it was too late. He's your responsibility, don't you get that?"
"It doesn't matter. We did what was safest for the pack." Samantha Uley's voice was still strong, her resolution unwavering. "Either he dies before he turns, or we will kill him."
Yes, please, he wanted to shout. He begged over and over again: kill me kill me kill me. Anything was better than the pain.
"The safety of our tribe… no, for humankind, comes before anything else Julie."
It grew quiet again. At times Beau felt odd spurts of pain erupt along his arms and legs, different from the normal burning sensation. It was a rough pressure, as though someone was grabbing him and pulling—and it made everything ten times worse. He wanted to cry out to whoever was touching him to stop (and if they wouldn't stop, then to just kill him; he'd never taken Julie or her family for torturers), but his body refused to comply. All the words he wanted to scream, to sob out, died in his throat.
A new wave of white-hot pain suddenly seared over his chest, drawing dangerously close to his heart. The sound of people whispering disappeared in an instant, and all he could hear was the aching sound of his body's death. Beau's scream was caught in his throat as he was dragged back under the painful tides once more. He tried to focus this time, to ignore the painful sound of his heart hammering against his ribcage. It was sounding more and more frail with each passing minute, and yet it determinedly kept fighting the inevitable, like a bird battering against the bars of its cage.
It had to be over soon. How much longer can this last? And yet some part of him didn't want to know the answer to that, because as far as Beau knew he could've only been burning for a few hours now, not days.
He heard the voices again much later, still quiet, one of them belonging to an older person, the other to someone he knew. Someone who, like Edythe, had carved a gaping hole into his chest.
Julie.
"This is dangerous—"
"I know it is," Julie snapped.
"And it might not even work, you realize that, don't you?"
"Yes."
"I can't stay for much longer then to show you how it is supposed to be done. If what you said was true, then his Burning should be done soon, and if he catches scent of me Julie…"
"I know," Julie's voice was quieter this time, full of guilt and worry. The sound of a branch snapping cut through the air like a gunshot. "I wouldn't have brought you here if I didn't have anyone else that could help, mom. I know you don't agree with this, but I can't just… I can't just let Beau die."
"I know." Bonnie sighed heavily. He felt her age in the sound of her voice. "I wouldn't be able to look Charlie in the face again if we didn't try."
It was gravely quiet for several minutes as the two busied themselves with their task. Beau found he could focus much better now; it was easier to form coherent thought then it had before, and it gave him some small seed of hope that it was almost over. The fire was finally beginning to ebb away, taking its final lap back to his heart to finish the job. The ashes it left in its wake—his arms and legs, parts of his chest—felt dead and heavy, but most importantly they didn't feel at all anymore. Those parts of him could've been made of stone for all he cared, just so long as they weren't burning.
He listened to the strange sounds around him, trying to distract himself from the venom circling around his heart.
A stick—or something like it—was being drawn around him. It was a slow process, as if someone was drawing multiple circles, or a spiral, around his body. The faint crackling of a woodfire grew louder and louder as more wood was dumped onto the pile. He could smell pine needles and wet dirt, and something else, something both wet and appetizing that stung the back of his throat, but it was still muted against the wilderness draped around him.
Beau tried to lift his hand and give some kind of signal to Julie and Bonnie that he was still here, that he was alive and could hear them, but his body refused to budge.
The venom drew closer yet to his heart.
"In all the legends of our people this has only happened a few times for the tribe. Transference isn't something that can really be taught, Julie." Bonnie's voice cracked. Beau was startled to realize just how close she was to him. "Our people first achieved this by our great chieftain, your ancestor, when he and his warrior brothers left their bodies to join to their wolf counterparts. As you know, his brother wound up killing his human body and it left him locked away inside of their wolf forms."
"They managed to overcome that though and turn back," Julie interjected, as if by some chance Bonnie might overlook that silver lining. "They became the first shapeshifters."
Beau's head hurt trying to understand what they were talking about. Ancestors turning into wolves? Shapeshifting? His head was spinning, but he couldn't be sure if it was because of their words or because his heart had kicked into a new gear and was fluttering wildly. The burning was growing pitch again, so hot that he swore he could smell it, could taste it on his tongue.
"Beau has never left his body like this. I have never left my body like this. No one in our current tribe has," Bonnie said gently. "All we can do is try."
She didn't expect this to work, whatever 'this' was. Beau could practically taste the resentment bubbling off of Julie's skin at Bonnie's weak resolution. He knew she wouldn't stop trying whatever plan she had cooked up in her mind. Julia was one of the most resolved and stubborn people he had ever met in his life. Beau's attention tapered off when he heard them start murmuring again, this time using words that he couldn't understand. He realized after a minute that it wasn't so much speaking as it was chanting. There was a hidden rhythm to the words, a mantra to it, one that was repeated first by Bonnie and then by Julie. A seemingly endless loop, chorus by chorus sang by first mother then daughter, until finally only Julie's voice remained. Minutes passed, hours burned, and then time became inconsequential.
Bonnie was gone, had been gone for some time, yet Beau hadn't quite grasped that yet.
He didn't know if it was another language or if he was simply losing his mind—and there was a strong possibility that it was both. He focused on his burning body instead, exhausted of trying.
No, not his body anymore, his heart was burning now.
This was it, the end.
There was a moment that transpired when the universe drew a line between his life before and his life after. In the mountain reserves far north of Forks, Washington, near Neah Bay, a man's humanity was stripped of him and his body was left to rot. For exactly eleven hours and twenty-seven minutes, Julie Black stood alone in the woods before Beauford Swan's twitching, turning body. His body had hardened from the vampire venom, and between the bursts of rainfall and heavy winds, he'd been washed clean of the blood from his wounds. Everything that had made him human vanished before her very eyes: his blood, his deep blue eyes, and finally, in the end, his heartbeat.
Julia Black feverishly chanted the old Quileute song that the first wives had sang over their warrior husbands, once upon a time used to help guide their spirits as they traveled across the astral planes. She heard when his heart began its frantic, final battle against the venom, and she heard when the venom finally snuffed it out.
She had turned then, fur replacing skin, her bones breaking, growing and reforming in a flash of a second to replace the human girl with a great red-brown wolf. Julie waited for an hour for Beau to wake. She kept her distance and paced back and forth amongst the trees, keeping a careful distance between the two of them just in case. She ignored the furious screams of her sisters and brothers inside of her mind. Samantha's howls shook the Quileute reservation and echoed in her mind as she ordered the pack to rush to Julie's location to end this—to end him.
Except there was no need to.
With every passing minute Beau's body remained motionless, lifeless. The sickly-sweet smell of vampire was on his body, but it wasn't quite right, not even to Julie's inexperienced wolf nose. There was still something distinctly human about it that gave pause to her hopeful victory.
Her eyes narrowed in on his arms and legs several times, and then his face, sure that she had seen him move—
Any moment now, she reassured herself. Any moment now… C'mon Beau, wake up!
Only he didn't, he wouldn't… at least not in this world.
[End Chapter]
Woohoo! Wow, this felt so good to write. I doubt it'll have a huge audience, but for those that do read it I hope you sincerely enjoy it! I try to update once a week, but please keep in mind I work full time. This is a bit of a wild ride so if anyone has questions let me know!
~Ephi