Thunderbird and His Cumulonimbus
2006, Washington
Rosalie growled and instinctively flung herself between the wolf and her mate. The wolf answered and lunged, two other wolves materializing out of the forest with their teeth bared. Their teeth gnashed and saliva dripped from sharp incisors. She would have been at the grey one's throat, if not for the brief flash she got of the red-brown wolf's eyes.
She froze. She could not breathe or remember that she was in the middle of a fight for the life of both herself and her mate. All she could do was drown in an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.
It couldn't be.
She did not remember meeting him as a wolf. During the days burned into her pristine and inalterable vampire memories, he had stopped phasing, and his human years were finally allowed to settle on him like snow on a riverbank. Yet, even back then, she somehow knew what he had been like as a wolf, back in the days when he still danced on the line between myth and corporeality and he carried the weight of immortality on his fur-lined back. Then it was Rosalie's turn to clothe herself in ageless permanence and continue the dance in his place.
He had died, for real this time. She knew it. She had seen him the day before he breathed his last. That was the end of it. That was supposed to be the end.
Why, then, did she know those eyes?
He had told her once that he always recognized her. It didn't matter if she was as tall as a young buck or as short as a young sapling, he still knew her. He said her features shifted and changed as much as the way she talked and the way she carried herself and all the parts of her that were given to her by whichever people claimed her as their own. There was another part of her, that intrinsic spark of eternity that she carried that made her soul, and that part always stayed the same, no matter how the rest of her was translated into a new form.
"It's like a tree," he told her. "I can tell if a chest has been carved out of oak or cedar just by looking at it. It don't look nothing like the tree no more, but I know it once grew as an oak or cedar. Even if it is nothing but a seed or an acorn, I still know what tree it could be, if it's allowed to sprout up tall and given enough years. Even if it's caught fire and turns to smoke and ash, I can tell what kinda tree is burning by the smell. You, well, you're like that. I'd know you anywhere, whether you're nothing but a seed or as old as a driftwood flame.
"You always come back, some time or another, and I find you again. It was the way of things. After a while, I learned I gotta wait and then I gotta look, cause sometimes you are a little slower and harder to find than others. Then I gotta move real slow and patient-like cause you can be a little slower to remember, sometimes. But I know all the old songs. If I need to, I can sing to help you remember, cause your soul knows how to sing with mine."
She didn't remember when he said it or what he wore that day, but she did remember the flash of his brilliant smile that made her heat up like sitting next to a woodburning stove on a winter's day, and she felt like she'd always know him too. But he'd never been the one to leave first. She didn't remember much, but she did know that. She'd never had the chance to find out if she'd know him or not. He'd always been the one to wait for her.
She didn't believe him, that day they met up in Olympia. He spoke of "old days" like she would remember them, as if she had lived back then, too. She didn't know anything about the days when the whales still filled the Juan de Fuca Straight or the prairie still grew tall with grasses. She didn't remember the old stagecoach road or the sound of the potlatch songs coming from the old longhouse at La Push. She remembered some things, but they were the echo of days long past and they bounced through her mind like a ball in a pinball machine and upset all her best tries to forget them.
She had not seen him since that day in 1988 when his hair fell as white as whalebone and he gave her that old bentwood cedar chest. He was buried in La Push, or so the papers said.
Why, then, could she feel the weight of him, the sense of him, staring at her now through a pair of lupine eyes?
It took Carlisle 's gentle touch on her arm and Emmett's retreat across the treaty line to calm her and bring her back to the present.
Victoria. They were hunting Victoria and she'd crossed over the treaty line, leading the Cullens straight into the pack of Quileute wolves.
Rosalie's eyes stayed fixed on that red-brown wolf, hope and fear choking her in equal measure, and only Emmett's concerned hands pressed on her shoulders kept her from falling back into the past... and across the treaty line to pry the truth from those brown wolf eyes, like paint off a windowsill.
She had to be mistaken. It was an uncanny resemblance. It was the adrenaline of the moment. She had been so caught up with the chase that her mind was playing tricks on her. It was the shock of seeing wolves again, that's all.
Rosalie gave a silent prayer of thanks that Edward was away in Florida and not there with them as an unwanted audience to her internal unraveling. She normally controlled her thoughts better than this. She made sure to never think of him when Edward was around, not back then and certainly not after. Still, she felt as if her mind and heart were old clothes in a washing machine and she was all agitated and upset and washed out in soap and suds and grey water.
She had till Sunday to let her thoughts roam free and then she must shut her thoughts back up into that dark place that daylight never reached. She'd need to hide them tight in that old cedar box, where they belonged, and not let them keep parading through her mind for Edward to wring out to dry in the heat of his mental gaze. She could do it. She had to.
Besides, she'd done it before.
oooooo
The Cullen house reverberated with the bass of the song blaring through the speakers. Flashing lights warred with gyrating bodies and hands outstretched like tree branches reaching for the ceiling. All of the graduating class of Forks High turned out for that party, and Alice made sure it was a party that they'd remember for the rest of their short lives.
Rose did her part to make it come together. She smirked as she compared this graduation party to some of the ones they'd had in the past. She still thought that little affair in '68 was her favorite, but this one had its own memorable qualities.
She was running another platter of cheese and crackers to the food table when she saw them come.
The wolves. Of course, the wolves would come. Of course, Bella would invite them.
There were only three and they looked more uncomfortable than sheep in wolves' skins. By the way their eyes widened, she almost expected them to bleat like little lambs and run away from the slaughter they felt sure would find them in the Cullen house. By the way the Forks High girls eyed them, they were probably safer running.
It was strange to see them in their human form. Rose had met the Alpha when they negotiated the treaty, that first time and this time, but he'd been the only wolf to come in human form. Both times, the Alpha had been an imposing figure and one which commanded respect, even without the fur and claws. These ones, though, they were so very young.
Were they always so young? Rosalie wondered. He hadn't been, or at least, she didn't think so. Her vague and hazy memories of before, well, he couldn't have been as young as these ones.
Maybe it was Rosalie who now felt old. She glanced across the room at all the graduating seniors until she found her brother's human girl. She seemed even younger. Young in life, more so than young in age. She had come from such a different world than Rosalie had and it made Rosalie feel all the more like a papyrus scroll in a computer class. When Rosalie was that age, well, she was a lot older at that age and she couldn't remember a time when she'd been allowed to be that young.
Bella was but a child, a girl who thought herself a woman. She had a neglectful mother who harbored so much bitterness over what she felt she lost to being a mother, that she failed to teach her own daughter to think any differently. She had no close relatives or family members to teach her anything else or to consider it from any other way. All she had was Edward - the self-absorbed idiot who was trapped forever in the body of a seventeen-year-old boy.
Yes, Rosalie loved her brother. Yes, she preferred to have him nearby than off somewhere brooding and sulking to himself in a cavern of self-loathing, as dark as any bat cave, but she still felt keenly the inequality in the relationship between the pair. Edward wanted to allow her to be human, without letting her choose to be human. He wanted her to have everything and nothing. He thought she could have everything she wanted - by telling her what it was she wanted.
Sometimes Rosalie that it was all about Edward living vicariously through Bella, redeeming that 17-year-old part of himself who never got to live. Other times, she thought it was Edward clinging to his idea of a woman who didn't actually exist, her silent mind allowing him to love his fantasy woman instead of recognizing the reality living right before his oblivious eyes. Bella wasn't much better. Rosalie had done her best to persuade Bella, but Bella was as stubborn as a mule and wouldn't hear of it. All she could see was Edward so Rosalie would leave her to her own self-inflicted punishment and wash her hands of the affair.
From the moment she first heard Edward's jealous rage over the interloping wolf, Rosalie had secretly harbored the hope that Bella would wake up in time to see what she could still have. Rosalie didn't even need to meet the dog to know he'd be better for Bella than her brother. Rosalie despised the wolves and fully recognized that they could be dangerous, but at least they could still give their mates a chance at a normal life. They could give up phasing to become fully human again. They were not frozen perpetually as supernatural beings. They could live and change and choose.
Rose had nearly rescinded her "vote" for Jacob when the idiot had kissed Bella against her will. Now, she decided against him entirely when she caught the wet dog smell emanating from the trio of teenage wolves. Even in their human form, they were rank. The wolves did not bother hiding their distaste for Alice when she answered the door… or their obvious appreciation of Bella, who frowned when she saw them and turned on her heels to flee in the opposite direction. The tallest, most impressive of the three boys gave her chase, taking hold of the unmarred hand to claim her attention for himself.
The infamous Jacob Black, then, Rosalie surmised. This must be the secondary author of Edward's latest round of girl troubles (second only to himself), and Edward's rival. Rose snorted. It served Edward right to have to hear the wolf pine over his girl.
She was about to return to get the next platter of nachos, when she caught the flash of smile the young wolf poured out for Bella like a drink offering. His gaze was so obviously ripe with more than friendship that Rose's dead heart stopped like a race horse in a gopher hole and she gasped.
She knew that look...from him…
No, that wasn't right.
Rose had never set eyes on Jacob Black before, but she had seen that look before… from him.
Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, Rose shouted to herself. Not that one. Please. Not that one. Please let me be wrong.
With a casual glance over his shoulder, Jacob escorted Bella across the room where the pair whispered together, hidden by the shadows and the pulsating pattern of lights from the dance floor. Jacob helped placed a bracelet on her wrist and Rosalie could just make out a hand-carved wooden wolf hanging from it.
Though smaller and created by a hand less skilled in woodcraft, it matched the chess piece in her cedar box exactly.
Rose fled to her room. She closed her eyes and tried to take deep breaths as she lay on the floor.
In and out. In and out.
She tried to think of anything else. She prayed that Edward would not notice.
She must be mistaken... she had to be mistaken.
She knew she wasn't.
The wolf didn't react, didn't notice. Maybe he hadn't seen her. Maybe he didn't care. Maybe it didn't work that way… whatever "it" was. It was better this way. It was a good thing for him not to know, not to remember… or so she tried to convince herself. She could pretend that she didn't remember, too. She didn't want to remember.
She fought the urge to withdraw the cedar chest from the attic. She knew it was there. She could feel it calling to her. She knew what she would find in it, if she opened it up again, but she could not think of it. Not now. Not until she was alone and her mind was her own.
It all seemed so distant, so impossible before. He was human, or, kinda human, back then. She was not, at least not that time.
Now that it was happening, all over again, it was even more impossible than ever.
Oooo
The stars shone brightly and the moon cast strange silhouettes of the trees onto the clearing below.
"Damn. Did you ever see anything like it?" one of the Cold Ones exclaimed.
"What is it?" came Bella's soft voice. "I can't see."
"The pack has grown," Edward answered.
Jacob Black ground his teeth and growled as he took in the coven of Cold Ones before him. Every hair on his back raised and his every instinct told him to attack and tear the monsters to pieces. He wanted to throw Bella onto his back and take her as far away from them as he possibly could. Instead, there she was, attached to Edward, as if she were a barnacle and he the rock.
He pawed at the ground, anxious for the training to begin and he glanced over the coven again. He had felt unsettled, ever since their last run-in at the treaty line. That moment in the woods, when they nearly clashed, had run in and out of his dreams for weeks. It was the stuff of nightmares and horror stories and yet it was now his "real life" and he had to deal with it, but it still crept into his subconscious like smoke under a doorway and sometimes made it hard to breathe.
As he looked over the group again, taking in their corpse-like faces, their unnaturally graceful movements, their sickly-sweet scent, and their predatory eyes, he felt physically ill. He let his gaze fall upon Bella again and let himself drink her in, and her only. He did not suppress the stab of pain that accompanied it in time to hide it from the others.
You're pathetic. Leah interjected. Get over it. She wants to be Bride of Frankenstein, let her.
Jacob let his eyes drift over to the leech who still kept Bella in his lifeless arms and he shuddered. How do the humans find these attractive? He wondered and he fought the wave of nausea that accompanied it.
You gotta admit. The blonde one is pretty hot. If you are into that whole supermodel zombie look. Embry thought, in response to Jacob's internal monologue. Jake snorted.
Nah, Jake thought back. Not my type.
Dude, she's exactly your type, Embry thought, staring at the blonde leech again. You used to drool over girls like her in every movie and TV show growing up.
Did not. I'm into brunettes.
No. You aren't. You are into Bella. You got into Bella because she was the only girl around who would spend more than two minutes putting up with your nonstop chatter about your car and who wasn't a blood relative.
So, I used to have a thing for blondes. I got over it. Jacob retorted. Besides, I wasn't so much into the supermodel look. It was more of a…
His thought got muddled as he realized he didn't know how to explain it, or if he had even stopped to figure it out for himself.
Yes, he had always been drawn to blondes, but not as a category in and of themselves, but because they reminded him of someone else. Someone he felt he once knew, but he couldn't quite put a finger on why. It was someone who seemed more like an apparition than reality and sometimes he felt he made it all up or that it was all forgotten or something in-between.
Somewhere, in that woolen space of a recurring dream, she danced through his mind like the melody of a song he had once known, but then forgotten.
She was a splash of flame and snow, a laugh, a tear-stained face, a cedar box. When she came wading through his subconscious, her footprints burned and left deep furrows of faceless memories in her wake. He couldn't explain who she was, but she was always the same. Her image glinted in the back of his mind like the sun off ocean ripples, there long enough to catch his attention but still as immaterial as the waves themselves.
He swallowed, hoping that none had caught the glimmers of thoughts in his mind and relieved to find most paying attention to the ongoing fight training and Leah's continued barbs over his boyhood fantasies and not on the figment of his imagination.
He needed to focus. He needed to get his mind into the coming fight and prepare to take Bella to a place she would be safe. Bella was a real woman, not a phantom. He mentally compartmentalized the woman and put her back in the box where she belonged. He would not share her with Edward or his pack. She belonged to him alone.
He stared fixedly at Bella and refused give his attention to any of the leeches, for as long as he could help it.
oooooo
In that strange space between waking and sleeping, death and life, he saw her again.
The dreams came back, only they felt different than dreams. They were heavier than dreams and they tasted more like earth than sky. Normal dreams were forged of flights of fancy. Like cotton candy, the sticky threads of daily life spun themselves into the fantastical nighttime escapades. All it took was the tip of the tongue, a splash of water, for them to disintegrate completely. These were different. They were forged of old fired bricks and after the sun rose and the rain stopped, they remained, as hard and strong as they once were, ready to build something new.
He had little enough time to dwell on it. Between healing from battle wounds and his broken heart, he had little margin left to consider the phantoms and apparitions. He needed to get away from this place, from the images that were creeping into his subconscious, from the memories he felt tangling around him like invisible cobwebs.
He had to grieve the loss of hope he had for Bella… and the loss of the parts of himself he'd still been clinging to like a life preserver. Somehow, in his mind, she had become synonymous with his old life, his "normal" life, and by holding onto her, he could hold onto a world without monsters and myths and shape-shifters. She grounded him and made him feel like he was still just a teenage boy with his first crush on a teenage girl; a boy who fixed cars and watched cartoons and forgot to put his socks in the laundry hamper. He hadn't signed up for super powers or super villains or superstitions. He didn't want "super" anything, yet it seemed he couldn't spit in the dark without hitting some kind of supernatural danger ready to swallow up whatever was left of his sense of normality.
He thought he could "rescue" Bella. He thought he could fill the place her idiot undead boyfriend had left and patch up the holes he'd so carelessly caused. Jacob thought he could be the one to make her eyes glimmer and put heat to her cheeks and breathe life back through her body again.
But she chose him.
The insecurities flooded him like the Quillayute River after the snowmelt and he fled. Back to the forests, back to the mountains, back to the endless quiet. He needed to be alone. He needed to think. He needed to sort himself out.
And it still felt like déjà vu… like something was happening which had happened before and the truth of it fled from his grasp faster than a paper plane in a windstorm. No matter how he chased or reached for it, it just kept tumbling away and slipping from his fingers and he just kept running after it again.
Oooooo
Rosalie hated Jacob Black. If his stench and his arrogant disdain didn't do it, his constant stream of insults was enough to ensure she wished he would leave and never come back. Yet, she was stuck with him until Bella's baby came. She hoped that as soon as Bella was turned, Jacob would lose interest and leave. His lovesick puppy routine was growing older than Halloween candy on Labor Day weekend and she just wanted him out of her house and life.
While Esme watched over Bella, Rosalie stole a few moments to herself on the front porch. It was a warm summer night and she could close her eyes and take in the scent of the Calawah River and the spruce trees and for a few moments, she could forget about being Rosalie and just be.
You were wrong, she told to an invisible memory. She stood in just the same place as the last time she'd seen him and she glared at the place, as if he could feel her ire from his place in the afterlife. I do not recognize you at all. I do not think you came back. You were never like this. You were never so cruel.
It had taken two showers to get all the food out of her hair. It would take more than that to wash away the sound of his mocking laughter as he called her a "dumb blonde" again.
Rosalie was used to the constant smear of eyes upon her, admiring her, criticizing her, despising her, longing for her, hating her. She could rarely walk through a space unnoticed, but she was not necessarily always noticed for the things she wanted to be noticed for. Most people, when they saw her, didn't see Rosalie Hale. They stopped at the curve of her waist and the glint of her hair and thought they knew it all.
Jacob Black was no different. He was like all the others.
Royce King chose her for her great beauty…and then rejected her once he saw what was beneath it. Carlisle, also, chose her for her beauty, intending her for his beloved son…the son who also rejected her once he saw inside her. It was lemon juice in an open wound. She gained throngs of admirers who flocked to her because of her pretty face, but the women scorned her out of jealousy. The men, welly, they only wanted her as one wishes for a bouquet of roses. She was something pretty to place upon one's dining table- a temporary fancy to be discarded once it no longer serves its purpose or begins to wilt.
She remembered the fine china that graced her mother's table during formal affairs. Her finest set had gold rims, intricately painted rosebuds, and swirls of vines circling each plate and cup. When the chandelier's crystals threw off a thousand shards of rainbow light, the table settings gleamed back like something from a fairy story. Rosalie used to stare at it all from behind a door before the maid would send her out to play again. She never was allowed to sit at the great table during those grand affairs… at least, not until she was "old enough" and her presence added as much finery as the china and the chandelier.
Back then, she could only peep from behind the door and then disappear into the kitchen to eat her supper with her nursemaid off of the plain white flatware. Those porcelain plates each had a rim of navy around the edges. They had no flowers or gold or anything that sparkled in the light and the light overhead was a simple one that gave Cook enough light to knead the bread and wash the utensils after supper. They were the "everyday" plates that only graced the kitchen table and kept Rose well fed and happy.
Those were the plates that held animal crackers and hot chocolate and around which Nurse told her stories before sending them upstairs to bed. She chipped the edge of one once when she was startled by a cat slipping through the kitchen and accidently poured her plate on the floor. The chip never vanished and each time she ate off that plate, she remembered how Cook laughed at her for spilling her dinner on a cat. Cook never bothered to replace that plate. She simply hid it when the master and mistress dined in the kitchen and pulled it out again when she was only serving Rosalie.
When Rosalie was old enough to join the adults in the grand dining hall, she had to sit up ramrod straight and wear her finest frock. Her curls could not fall out of place. She made sure to take small bites and keep quiet, unless spoken to. There were no animal crackers or bedtime stories and she couldn't help but feel like even the laughter she heard was all wrong. It was not the right kind of laugh- the kind that explodes out of one's belly like a firecracker and soaks everyone around you with a contagious glee. No, this was forced, polite, pretty laughter that bounced off of gold edges and diamond necklaces and white gloves but made everyone feel a little colder afterwards.
Yet, Rosalie's purpose was to grace the head of one of those fine tables, dressed as prettily and finely as the table itself. She was to be another ornament to make the dining hall splendid and make the master of the house appear grand. She was to be all gilded edges and painted rosebuds and glittering crystal… until she, too, was put away in a cupboard until the next grand affair.
She wished she could have stayed in the kitchen… and be used every day for the most mundane of meals. Even after she grew cracked and chipped, she would still have a place she belonged and would be surrounded by "trying children" and "pesky cats" and "ornery servants" and "unexpected deliverymen" and all the constant noise and bustle of everyday life. But she was "too beautiful" for that and her momma made sure she would have "something more."
That was the problem. Being "too beautiful" meant she would, like all "exceptional" and "too beautiful" things, belong in the halls of a museum to be gawked at and admired rather than used and in risk of gathering chips and cracks and stains. She did not wish to be a painting on a wall or a statue in a hall or a bouquet of roses on a table, but that is what she was expected to be.
If all that mattered of her was her beauty, then of course, she would display it with all the grandeur of a peacock and pretend it was all that mattered to her…because it was all that mattered to anyone else. She would be the finest roses anyone had ever laid eyes on and the gold of her edges would shine the brightest. She would capture the eye of every person in the room and make sure they stayed fixed on her like glue on paper, because once those eyes strayed, then she would be thrown out or put away on a shelf and forgotten until the next grand occasion.
Carlisle came along and made sure she was ossified permanently as a marble statue of Venus, a thing of beauty to be praised and admired from afar, but never approached, never touched, never chipped or cracked or found in back kitchens and sparse drawing rooms. She would forever be a temporary fixture in the social circles in which they travelled. She would never, ever change.
Then there was Edward. Her "brother" coolly and dispassionately acknowledged her beauty, but as soon as she spoke or thought or breathed, she gave herself away as a living, breathing thing and that spoiled it all. He resented her for existing and intruding on "his" family and "his" space. He resented Carlisle for thrusting her upon him, hinting that he was anything other than entirely self-sufficient in and of himself. He resented Esme for bestowing any of her boundless devotion on a creature other than himself. He was resentful of sharing the spotlight, the center of attention, and the adoration of the circles in which they entered.
She couldn't bear to have Edward continually sifting through her mind, criticizing her internal, private monologue, smirking at her insecurities, and dismissing her as unworthy. She was as stripped bare and humiliated before Edward as she had been for Royce. While not intentionally seeking to rape her mind, Edward still enflamed her all too recent wounds and left her soul as bruised and bleeding as her body had been when Carlisle first came upon her in the streets.
She preferred to hide within herself, masking herself with what he expected to find. If she wrapped herself in the robes of Narcissus and only allowed vanity to be seen, she was safe. She did not even know she was doing it; it was second nature. She knew, as she had always known, that her fate depended on the whims of the men around her and if she wished to thrive, she needed to earn their favor, keep their appreciative eyes on her, and make sure she was never completely forgotten.
But Carlisle, like Royce… and Edward… never gave her a choice. They dictated her life and her future and did not wait to hear what she thought of it and they saw only what they wished to see
Carlisle was different. Carlisle never cared if she was a belle or a debutante or a beggar. He saw her as he saw everyone - as someone with intrinsic worth and the capacity to do good. She clung to him like a lifeline, drinking from him all the fatherly affection and devotion her own father never deigned her worthy to receive. And in Esme, dear Esme, she found less a mother than a kindred soul- one who also grieved for the possibilities she would never have. She was another fierce heart who loved too deeply and received fully the punishment for being so attached and vulnerable.
She would stay. Forever and always, if she could drink up the love Carlisle and Esme had to give her.
If all she had was Edward, she would have left the day after she woke and never looked back.
It figured that Bella managed to attract both Edward and Jacob Black. In Rosalie's book, they were nearly the same kind of irritating awful. If it wasn't enough of a soul bond to have them both smitten with the same woman, then their combined forces in the "I Hate Rosalie Hale" club sealed the deal.
Sleepless Beauty.
Blondie.
Psychopath Blonde.
Dumb Blonde.
Why, of all things, did Jacob Black fixate on her hair and her appearance?
"I want a wife with golden hair," drifted through her mind and tapped at her conscious thoughts, wishing to drag a better-forgotten memory to the forefront.
It was not the first time she had been reduced to becoming nothing but a fancy dinner plate or a diamond necklace or a badge of honor.
She just didn't expect to hear it from him. That's all the more reason she told herself that she was wrong… that he had been wrong.
Oooooo
Jacob absolutely despised Rosalie Hale. It wasn't only that she was a bloodsucking leech who was literally sucking the life out of the woman he loved. To be fair, that was a big reason he didn't like her, but it was also because something about her set him completely on edge.
He tried to avoid her as much as possible, but that was easier said than done when essentially living together in the same room for weeks at a time. When they were together and he was forced to breathe in her stench and recognize that she existed, he tried not to look at her. When he did see her, he dwelt on those vampiric traits that he found particularly repugnant - like the dark shadows beneath her eyes and the surreal pallor of her skin. He never tried to see the woman who predated the monster or bothered to recognize that she ever was anything but an undead bloodsucker.
"You could try to get to know her. You might like her," Bella exhorted him one afternoon. "I didn't like her at first, but it's cause I didn't know her."
"There's nothing to like about her," Jacob answered. "There's nothing to get to know. You better like what's on the surface cause there's nothing underneath. I mean, does she think about anything but her hair?"
"Do you?" Bella asked. "I mean, you seem to spend a lot of time fixated on her hair, too."
Jacob had grumbled something unintelligible in return, but Bella's comment bothered him. He realized he was avoiding the blonde vamp, but it was because she made his head start to swim and stirred up emotions that he didn't think were his. When he accidentally looked her in the face, then he had to see her. There was something about her flash of irritation, the flickering of her eyelashes, the way she looked out the window that reminded him of something. It transported him to a time and place he couldn't quite identify, kind of like how the scent of cinnamon always made him think of his grandmother.
Then there were the dreams. The longer he stayed around that house, the more vivid the dreams became and the day he dreamt of gold eyes instead of blue, he woke up in a cold sweat with his whole body shaking.
Usually, his phantom had eyes that covered the gamut of different shades of blue.
They had never been gold before.
He had been around the leeches too much and it was going to his head.
The next time the dreams came, he was relieved he didn't remember them the next morning. When he woke, he felt all scrambled up and clammy, like he usually did after those kind of dreams, but he didn't remember the details.
It was later the next morning that Edward found him. He gave Jacob a penetrating stare, as if his eyes alone were enough to dredge the Puget Sound.
"What is it?" Jacob finally asked.
"How did you know Rosalie had violet eyes?" he asked.
"Excuse me?"
"Your dream. You dreamed you were in Rochester with Rosalie. How could you possibly know what Rochester looked like back then? You were dead right."
"I don't… to both. I have no idea where the hell Rochester is and I don't even know what it looks like now. I sure as hell don't know anything about Blondie. I don't care what she looks like, then or now."
Edward's shoulders shook with his silent laughter. "Don't worry. You wouldn't be the first man I've caught dreaming about Rosalie, but it's like you saw a color photograph of her when she was still human, but that's impossible."
"I do not dream about the psychoblonde," Jacob retorted.
"Right. And Bella never says your name in her sleep."
Jacob sighed and turned away. "No one has purple eyes," Jacob said. "That's weird."
"Elizabeth Taylor did," Edward said. "And Rosalie Hale."
"Elizabeth Taylor? Who is that?"
"Never mind."
It bothered Jacob though, more than he cared to admit. He did not like to think of the Cullens from before… or the fact that they were once human. He knew bits and pieces about them from Bella, but he did not like putting the pieces too close together or try to tease apart a coherent storyline about any of them. The idea that each leech was once a daughter or son or father or mother was unsettling, to put it mildly. He did not know which was worse- that a brother could turn into a cold-blooded killer or that a cold-blooded killer could also be a brother.
He finally Googled Rochester… and Elizabeth Taylor. It didn't help.
The first time Jacob Black came upon Rosalie on the porch, she gave him a scathing glare that was so sharp it woulda cut glass.
"Why did the blonde stare at the orange juice container?" Jacob asked.
She rolled her eyes so he continued. "Because it said, 'concentrate.'"
"You're an idiot," she said.
"What did the blonde do when her computer froze?... Put it in the microwave."
"Ha, ha. Not funny."
"Oh, I think I'm hilarious."
"Congratulations. Nothing shows true wit like laughing at your own jokes."
"Lighten up, Blondie. Learn to have some fun."
"Oh, haven't you heard? Blondes always have more fun," she answered, a wicked grin on her face.
"Yeah, I think I've had enough of your kind of fun," he answered darkly. "You have been enjoying all this a bit too much for my tastes."
"Enjoying what?" she asked.
"Watching Bella die… but I shouldn't be surprised. You all kinda get off on that kind of thing."
"Jackass. You don't know anything," she hissed back.
"Tell me, then. That thing in her is killing her. Why don't you care a rat's ass about that? I'm sorry if I can't get on board with your lack of regard for Bella's life. She's my best friend, not some kind of baby maker so you can get the kid you always wished you had."
She opened and closed her mouth once like a fish out of water before her eyes flashed with anger. "Listen to me, dog, someday, when you have a child of your own, you'll understand. You'll do anything for that baby, even if it costs you your life. You think she'd be fine and dandy after burying her child? You may think you can just turn back the hands of time and pretend she can unknow that baby, but that baby is part of her now. She can't ever go back. Even if she never planned on it and even if the baby doesn't make it, she will love that baby till the day she dies and she will never, ever forget it."
"And you would know," is what Jacob meant to say, but when he caught the look on her face, he closed his big mouth for once and didn't answer. He realized that she actually might and that thought unsettled him. Afterall, she had lived a life before she became a Cullen and he had no idea what that life entailed. He was making baseless assumptions… and using her as a punching bag for his own anger and to vent his feelings of helplessness over Bella.
He sighed and dropped his head into his hands so he could rub on his temples. He didn't look up when he heard her walk farther away from him on the porch. He stared out into the silhouette of the forest, his mouth tasting the coming storm, and for a moment, he felt like he was a piece of wood being carried along by a river current. The forces pushing him onward were so strong he could not swim hard enough to get away and he was not quite sure where he would end up.
"Storm's coming," he remarked. Soft thunder rumbled in the distance after a flash of lightning.
"You know, I heard once that it's a giant, angry bird who makes all that commotion and shoots lightning out of his eyes," she said.
"Nah, it's just an electrical discharge," he answered. "Haven't you taken science? You see, there's warm air and there's cold air and when they meet, boom! Lightning!"
"Yes, but who makes it happen?" she said, one eyebrow raised. "Who moves all the currents of air into place so the storm clouds can form? Who makes the electrical discharge build?"
"A giant, angry bird, of course."
Rosalie's burst of laughter mingled with his own for a moment and he turned in time to catch her with her head thrown back and her eyes alight with humor. For the first time, he allowed himself to look at Rosalie and see her… not just the glint of her hair or the purple shadows beneath her eyes or the unnatural stillness of her movements, but what she must have looked like before.
He could see her with flushed cheeks and bright eyes, a little smaller, a little less perfect, and her sails full of life, but her laughter was the same.
How did he know that? He wondered to himself. His entire body froze with an unsettling inkling that this had all happened before… not just him sitting here, like this, with Rosalie, but this exact conversation.
He swallowed heavily, closed his eyes, and let a shudder run through him.
If he bothered to be honest with himself, he had to admit that he knew her. He just didn't know how.
oooooo
Author's Note: I really do love constructive criticism. It makes me think and consider work in different ways. I got a great complaint from a reader this week. Since it's the longest review this story has gotten yet, I have to take it quite seriously. Essentially, the point this guest reviewer made is that they wanted more "Rosalie/Jacob" time right off the bat. I originally intended to slowly work our way in that direction using interludes, but this comment made me reconsider. I think there was some truth to it and it's a great suggestion. We can absolutely start off with more of the canon characters/timeline before progressing into the back story. I mean, I already had this mostly written and it just meant rearranging my previously concocted order. I just needed some brilliant reader to suggest it so I would think of doing it. So, here's our characters in "current" time.
I wish I could respond to my guest reviewer with my thanks, but for the rest of you, many thanks to you for your feedback, ideas, and encouragement!