ii. chapter two
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"Are you sure you want to do this?" Edward asked, holding Bella's hand perhaps a bit longer then necessary.
She grinned at him. "I'm sure," she promised. Her grin was brighter then the sunlight; they were all outside, near the edge of the forest, and the sun was glittering off the Cullen's skins. "I'm going to be fine, don't worry."
Her blood smelled like heaven. "Are you sure?" he asked again.
"I'm going to be fine," she said, smiling, and stood on her toes to kiss him lightly on the lips. "I'm with you."
-
The pavement of the alley is cracked and host to numerous black puddles. The few working streetlights cast a sinister orange glow over the brick walls and junk cars, the ragged people and skitter-eyed drug addicts across the street steadfastly looking the other way. Bella's eyes are red.
Edward can smell blood, distant and nagging in the back of his head, and he can hear the girl who Bella had attacked whimpering into the cement—oh my god I'm going to die I'm going to die shit I never said I loved her I'mgoingtodie—but all he can see is Bella's red, red eyes.
"Edward," she says softly. "You came."
"Bella," he whispers. His voice breaks on her name.
"You came," she says again, mouth curving up into a perfect (unnatural) smile, gruesomely red in her white face. She takes a step forward.
He takes a step backwards. "No, Bells, you can't do this. I'm going to take you home, all right? It'll be okay, I promise, please, Bella, just come with me and it'll be fine."
"I am fine," she replies. Her teeth are sharp and bloodstained.
"Bella…"
"I love you," she says simply, eyes lighting, and she moves to him with a swiftness and grace she wouldn't have been capable of as a human, touching him on the cheek with cold fingers. "Why don't you come with me? We can hunt together, we can make love, we'll be eternal together…look," she says scornfully, pointing back at the bleeding girl, who had made some feeble efforts to crawl away before her punctured lungs finally gave out and she died on in a grimy alleyway; "She called herself beautiful. We're beautiful, Edward. And we always will be."
"Yes, we will," he says desperately, capturing her hand in his own. "But you have to come with me."
Her hand is too cold and too strong. For a second, he does not recognize the woman he loves.
"No. I'll show you." Her smile is just as wrong as her hands. "I know you must think I've gone crazy, but really, I've got it all worked out. Edward, I'm going to be the most beautiful girl in the world for you."
"Bella…" he says helplessly, and she kisses him softly, lips icy and delicate.
"Come with me." Her eyes are still the wrong colour, but they're the right shape, and he takes her hand, unbeating heart lodged in his throat, eyes closed.
There are light, quick footsteps, and Alice emerges from the gloom of the unlit alleyway. "Let him go," she says calmly.
Bella smiles frostily at her, but drops his hand. "Alice. How's it going? Still seeing the future?"
"Obviously," Alice replies, crossing her thin arms. "This has got to stop. Killing pretty girls isn't going to make Edward love you again."
"He never stopped loving me," she says confidently, looking up at him to confirm it.
In every line of Alice's body there is malice. "He loved you for your blood. And now you have none left. Now either you stop, or we'll kill you."
"Edward wouldn't hurt me," Bella replies, still smiling the wrong smile, with her body tensed for a fight and lips red with blood. "And if you try to, I'll kill you."
The smell of a werewolf hits Edward's nose. He sags in relief, sending out mental threads to Jacob, who is approaching swiftly on massive paws. Jacob is calm, focused. He's not going to go to pieces the way Edward did.
"You still love me," Bella whispers, more uncertain now. "Don't you?"
He doesn't answer.
She smacks a quick kiss against his cheekbone and says so quiet he doesn't understand at first, "I'll make myself better for you, don't worry," and then she's gone.
He hears Alice yelling, Jacob racing by in a clatter of claws and fur, and then the two of them are running off into the darkness; but Edward, he sags against the graffiti-stained brick wall on the side of the alley and puts his head in his hands, praying to a God he doesn't believe in that someday, something will change.
Bella is gone.
Again.
-
Jacob comes back before Alice does, exhaustion and failure sketched in every line of his now-human skin. He crouches next to Edward. The grimy puddles gather around the soles of his bare feet. "She got away," he tells him.
"I know," Edward replies, not looking up.
"Come on, we'll meet up with Alice at the motel."
He doesn't move.
"Come on, you stupid vampire," Jacob says, dragging him upright by the elbow. His skin is pungent with the stench of werewolves and sweat and blood, but Edward leans into him anyways.
"I want to die," he mumbles.
"I know. C'mon."
-
Alice flies back to Seattle. The circles under her eyes are more prominent then before, and somehow, her skin is becoming creased and tense with worry. "I need to talk to everybody else," she says, folding him in a hug. "You know where to reach me, all right? I love you."
Edward doesn't hug her back. He doesn't say anything.
She bites her lip, struggling with herself, before turning to Jacob and saying flatly, "Look, I'm only asking you this because you're the only option, but…promise me you'll keep him from doing anything stupid, all right?"
Jacob is standing off to the side. He nods, though, and for a brief moment their eyes meet.
Stepping back from Edward, Alice squeezes his hands one last time, then turns away and walks to the airport terminal, not looking back.
They spend several hours getting out of New York, and stop in a small diner in Jersey City that has red vinyl seats with cigarettes burns and mildew crawling up the walls, hidden under vintage coca-cola ads and pink neon flamingos.
Jacob orders a huge meal for himself, and a coffee for Edward. He shoves it towards him. "Drink it," he says.
It's easier to obey him then to take an independent action. Edward drinks the coffee.
They're roaring down a mostly abandoned highway, and all they're getting is a top forties pop station, but Jacob gives him a hopeful look anyways and turns the volume up.
Edward's driving. He looks down the empty highway and considers drifting into the next lane, waiting until the next semitruck crests the next hill and then swerving into it. The sad thing is that it wouldn't be enough to kill them. They would crawl out of the mangled wreck of the car with their wounds already healing.
The radio is playing a wistful song. I got soul, but I'm not a soldier, a chorus of people sing, repeating themselves in a rising crescendo.
"I got soul, but I'm not a soldier," Edward joins in, the last line before the chorus dissolves into divergent wailing. The song goes on.
Edward turns the radio down a bit, not meeting Jacob's gaze in the rearview mirror, and asks him, "Why are you still here?"
Jacob's eyes widen, like he wasn't expecting Edward to talk at all, but after a few seconds he shrugs and looks back out the window. "I've got nowhere better to be."
As answer, it lacks something. Edward is too tired to figure out why.
Because of you, Jacob thinks, thoughts slipping through the murky depths of his mind like minnows. Because of you, you stupid vampiric asshole.
"You shouldn't," Edward mumbles.
Jacob ignores him, and after a few minutes, turns the radio up again.
-
They go on.
-
They wind down the East Coast slowly, taking time to see all the stupid tourist attractions littering the way, all the places off the highway tinged with decay and loneliness. It's somewhere in Virginia that they stop for the night, in front of a seedy motel with the vacancy lights flickering in pink neon.
"Classy joint," Jacob remarks, grinning.
Edward just huddles in closer around himself.
Jacob spares him an exasperated look, then pulls up the parking brake and gets out of the car, feet crunching on the gravel. In between the long hours of truck stops and bad coffee, somewhere between the last sunny day and the onset of autumn clouds, Jacob had stopped putting up with Edward.
Edward didn't particularly care.
The dusk is a mellow sort of warm when he gets out of the Volvo. Jacob's already headed off towards the lobby, duffel bag in hand, and he glances back at Edward just long enough to let him know he should pick up the pace. Back on the highway, he can hear the roar of trucks blazing onwards through the approaching night.
Inside the lobby is the typical kitchsy mess of faux-antiques and earnest tour brochures for local entertainment, but there is nobody behind the front desk to book a room with. In the corner, there is an old, cheap-looking piano, with a sign saying 'do not touch!!' propped against the keys. Edward's fingers itch.
"It says don't touch, asshole," Jacob says, leaning against the front desk.
Edward doesn't turn around, just lets his fingers hover over the keys, then presses down on one. An off-key C note rings through the lobby.
Something strange flickers in Jacob's eyes. "Don't fuck with the piano, man," he says, but Edward ignores him and sits on the bench, resting his hands on the keys lightly, not pressing down just yet.
"Seriously, Edward, if you piss the management off—" Jacob begins to say.
The piano is slightly out of tune, enough to make Edward wince, but he begins playing Moonlight Sonata. At first he goes slow. It's been long enough that his fingers are slightly uncertain on the keys, but he knows this song, he's played it so many times it's grooved in his memory, and once he settles into it, he starts playing it harder, fingers blurring over the length of the piano. If Jacob tries to get him away from the piano, he can't hear it, he can't feel it.
He's missed this. He's missed the music, how it felt to not only just listen to it, but to give it life and make it fill the air. He's missed the calm he feels when he plays, detached from everything but the notes, the bridges, hammering out the sharps and flats with steady fingers.
When he finishes the sonata, he crashes right into playing Rue Des Cascades, and then into Esme's Song, the one he wrote for her all those years ago in Chicago before he left the family in search of his own identity, and then finally into the piece he'd played for Bella, the lullaby in D Minor.
His fingers slowed on the keys, then finally petered out with a few high notes that hung in the air, slowly echoing away. He slumped over the piano.
"Whoa," said the room attendant, who had appeared somewhere in the middle of the playing. "Dude. I didn't know that piano actually worked."
And then Jacob was there, pulling him up off the bench, and Edward realized his own face was wet, that he'd been crying. "C'mon," Jacob says softly, guiding him upright and out the door. "I got us the room, let's go."
Edward leans on him, feeling the heat radiating through his skin and the werewolf musk that he's almost gotten used to. "I'm so tired," he mumbles into Jacob's shoulder.
Jacob's arm tightens around him for a second, but all he says is, "It's going to be okay."
"You don't know that," Edward says.
"No, not really."
Jacob opens up the motel room door, revealing clashing floral patterns and the typical beige walls, and drags Edward in. The air smells like strangers, old bedsheets and cleaning chemicals.
"I want it to be," Edward says sluggishly. "I want it to be different, this time, but it won't be."
Jacob deposits him on one of the queen beds, far more gentle then he would've been half-an hour ago, and asks, "Why not?"
"Because it won't be. She had all of me. She never believed that I loved her that much, not really." Edward looks up at Jacob, trying to read his expression rather than his thoughts. He says again, "I'm so tired."
Jacob sighs. "You're fucked up, man."
"I know," he says miserably.
Jacob looks down at him for a bit, inscrutable, then says, "Shove over," and collapses onto the bed next to Edward. His face is tight and unhappy. Their feet touch at the bottom of the bedspread, but neither of them move away. "This doesn't have to be a thing, you know," he says.
Edward doesn't reply for a while. After he'd seen the future through Alice, he'd thought that the slide into this thing, whatever it was, with Jacob, was going to be a lot more gradual, but here it was now, staring him in the face. He'd half-believed it would never happen.
"Okay," he replies eventually, and stays awake all night while Jacob slowly curls around him, all warm breath and hot skin and loud, thumping heart, unmistakably alive.
-
The next motel they stop at, the clerk taps the pen against the desk and asks, "Single or double?"
Jacob doesn't look him in the eye. "Single," he says.
Both the clerk and Edward raises an eyebrow at him, and Jacob looks down, the beginning of a flush rising on his face. "It's cheaper, okay?"
It isn't, really, because motels charge per person, but Edward lets it slide, just like he lets Jacob crash onto the bed next to him at night, lets him snuggled closer, sticking his warm face into Edward's neck where the bite marks from a century ago still burn cold. Edward lets him do all this, because he doesn't know how to ask for it, and he doesn't know how to say no to it.
They tangle together. They go on.
-
It's two weeks later, two weeks of carefully maneuvering around each other and unspoken question that are never answered, before Alice phones again. "Phoenix," she says.
They're in the Volvo, like usual, which is littered with Styrofoam coffee mugs and Jacob's takeout boxes and Edward's CDs that he buys in any town they stop in. They're listening to one of the new Coldplay songs.
Edward shoots Jacob a glance, then looks back at the road. "What about Phoenix?" he asks.
"Bella's going there next," she says, voice softening. "I think she wants to talk to her mother. How are you doing, Edward?"
He pulls over to the side of the road, looks over his shoulder, then wheels the car in a circle and starts heading back where they came from. Crazy fucker, Jacob thinks, but even inside his head he sounds amused.
"I'm doing fine," Edward says to Alice. "How are you?"
"Better," she says. "Jasper's been here for me. I'm better."
"Good," Edward says, and means it.
"Esme and Carlisle want you to come home and let the Volturi deal with Bella."
Up ahead, there is a curve approaching. Edward doesn't slow down. "I'm not going back to Forks," he tells her.
"We'll go somewhere else. Montreal, maybe, they have good music there, you'd like it, Edward."
"I have to find Bella first," Edward says. "Thanks, Alice."
"I love you," she says, and hangs up.
Jacob is thinking about the empty blue sky, wondering what the world looks like from above, wondering if there are any other aboriginal reserves nearby that give birth to werewolves. "Where are we going now?" he asks.
"West," Edward says, and floors the gas.
-
Going west means driving straight through a veil of rain that blankets the middle of the country, signaling the onset of fall. The windshield wipers pump constantly for a few days, then break and leave the glass mottled with rain. Jacob fixes them after Edward, going far too fast, nearly hits another car.
A year ago, Edward would have been going to the university in Alaska. A year ago, he would've just married Bella.
Somewhere in Texas, down the long, flat interstate highway, Edward swallows around the lump in his throat and tries to keep his hands from shaking on the steering wheel. The rain swoops down on the Volvo.
I wonder where Bella is, Jacob is thinking. Then, musingly, his thoughts trail on. I miss her. How she used to be. I think I still love her, but now…fuck. It's really pouring down. We've been chasing this fucking storm all across the south.
"We're always chasing storms," Edward says, so quiet it's barely audible over the wumpscut of the windshield wipers.
Jacob looks over at Edward anyways. His face is half-swallowed in the shadows, all the dashboard lights turned off, clock swallowed up by the night, so late it's morning again. "Don't you go poetic on me," he warns, quiet too, like there is someone else listening in on the conversation. "I barely survived it last time."
Edward replies with, "Most people don't like it when I read their thoughts."
Either Jacob is half-asleep, or he is more used to Edward's way of conversing then Edward knows, because he just says, "I've had plenty of time to get used to it."
"It's only been a few months."
"No, I'm a werewolf, remember? The whole pack can see my thoughts."
Edward's forgotten this, and Jacob can tell this, because he smirks and props his head up with long fingers.
"I...I didn't…" Edward begins.
Jacob cuts him off. "Thought you were special, didn't you," he says lightly, mockingly, with a soft smile. "It's all right. You'll get over it."
Edward is used to people indulging him, but not the way Jacob is doing it, intimate in the darkness with smiles on their faces. Instead of voicing this, he says, "I asked you before, but you didn't tell me why the pack couldn't see your thoughts right now."
The smile fades from Jacob's face, and he sits back against the passenger seat. "They're not looking right now," he says shortly, but it's muted by the night, any venom or regret drained out and left behind on the highway. Jacob sighs. "They're…they never did approve of you. When I came on this hunt for Bella, well…they cut me off, mentally. They never wanted me to fall in love with Bella while she was obsessed by you and the vampires."
"But you did anyways," Edward says.
"But I did anyways," he agrees peacefully, then says, "I loved her."
"Loved?"
Jacob looks out at the road, lips curving up, eyes tired. "I don't think she can be saved, Edward. I just don't…I don't want her to keep existing like this. It's not her anymore."
He catches his breath like it's a hitched sob, on the verge of control, and Edward is afraid to break the silence that settles between them, afraid of what will happen if he pushes deeper through the hidden parts of their souls, scrapes his fingernails through their grimy pasts and loses himself in the memories of what they used to be.
"If I don't have her…" Edward says, unable to control how his voice wobbles, hating the weakness, "If she can't be saved…I can't, either. I don't have anything to hold onto. I don't have anything left."
Jacob swallows, throat working, and then looks away, fingers splayed across his sharp face. "You have me," he says hoarsely, staring out the rain-flecked window.
Edward bites his lip so hard it bleeds, eyes prickling. "I know," he says eventually.
He's not looking at Jacob, he's watching the road, but he knows that there are tears in Jacob's eyes, running down his face. Edward keeps driving. It's all that he can do.
-
And so, through the night and the rain, they go on.
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