AN: Wrote this as a part of TPF Short Story Challenge March/April 2023. Thought I'd share it and see what you all think.
The prompt is 'I Wish I Knew You When I Was Young'.
Isabella Swan considered herself a successful woman. Her teaching career was at an all-time high, with years spent building a reputation as a stern but fair Classical Literature Professor at the University of Washington. While she'd originally gone out of state to get her degree, it didn't take long for her to leave New York behind to return to her roots, or as close as she was comfortable with, which meant Seattle. Now, here she was, about to turn 38, a date she dreaded with every year that passed, and she couldn't quite handle the news she received the morning of.
Sue Swan, formerly Clearwater, had called Bella just that morning. Thinking she was going to be receiving her yearly much hated yet secretly adored birthday wishes, her step-mother had left Bella's heart bleeding on her office floor. Charlie Swan, retired Chief of Police and beloved father and husband, had passed in his sleep of natural causes the previous night.
To say Bella was devastated would be an understatement. She'd spent so many years avoiding Forks because of the events of her 18th birthday. While she had tried to spend time with Jacob and get to know him after her first breakup, she simply couldn't deal with any more drama. So when Jacob started avoiding her, she let him. Pushed him from her mind until he, like a certain family, were relegated to a dark and dingy corner at the back of her mind. It was there she buried her past, it was there she buried her heart.
She had been inconsolable in those first months after being abandoned by them. Then she'd become angry, that rage fueling her rebellious motorcycle rebuild project and subsequent trek down the west coast after Jacob's disappearance. Unfortunately, that had run her afoul of a gang of idiots near southern California who thought she would be easy pickings, only for them to end up staring down the barrel of her father's service revolver she'd taken, along with whatever cash he'd had in his wallet.
She nearly killed them all when another night intruded into her thoughts. Drunken idiots cornering her, a Volvo careening carelessly into the parking lot, feral black eyes. In her fear-addled mind, she'd seen nothing but darkness and felt nothing but rage at feeling like the 'helpless human' again. But she wasn't helpless this time was she? No, the gun felt heavy in her hands but she held it steady as she aimed true for the so-called leader's head. All it would take was a pull off the trigger and she could end this nightmare.
Luckily, the men appeared to be scared so shitless that the night and day of the memory versus her reality was enough to bring her back from that precipice. She was not like them or their kind. She was not so willing to take a life just to save her own. But she was not that weak, pathetic girl she'd once been either, as she took aim at the nearest bike and began systematically taking out each tire until she had only one bullet left. She needed a safety insurance in case they tried to rush her, after all.
"Let this be a lesson, boys," she'd all but snarled at the trembling young men. "The next person you try to jump might not be so willing to let you walk away. The nearest town is fifteen miles north of here. I suggest you get to hiking."
There was a brief hesitation before she twitched the gun back towards their group, causing the men to fall all over themselves to rush off down the road. Not only had that been a lesson for those despicable men, but Bella has learned something valuable herself. Her life was not so meaningless as she had thought, nor did she need to feel helpless anymore. Yes, she had briefly been a part of a world where she was nothing more than prey, weak and at the mercy of their protection. But now that it was just her on her own, amongst other mortals, she felt herself more confident in her place.
To hell with vampires and whatever else might be out there. Isabella Swan was human, and no one was going to take that from her.
Unfortunately, her road-trip ended rather abruptly when she arrived at her mother's house to find a police escort waiting on her. She'd been taken into custody and extradited all the way back to Forks, Washington to face her father's wrath. She'd been forced into community service for the theft of his money, though charges involving the gun were never brought up thankfully. Neither wanted that on her record, but he wasn't going to let her off that easy. She was forced into court-mandated counseling alongside her community service, non-negotiable by both her father and the courts should she want to avoid jail time.
It wasn't the worst punishment she could have gotten by far, and the extra work and counseling helped her mind begin to heal from the heartache she'd experienced over the last several months since she'd moved to Forks. She learned that her worth was not dependent on who she could take care of, nor was she deluded enough to imagine she would ever be a part of the vampire world again. She considered the loss of that family a dodged bullet. She'd seen what happens to vampires when turned with unhealthy mindsets and she was almost terrified to think of what she would have been like for the next hundred years had she gotten her wish and been turned.
Luckily, she'd gotten herself a job that helped her save up enough money to buy a decent car while helping Charlie support their continued cohabitation. And soon after her graduation she got the biggest surprise of her adult life when her father presented her with a rather lucrative savings fund he'd been funneling money into from the day she was born. After many heartfelt hugs and declarations of appreciation and apologies and thank-yous, Bella was soon off to college.
She'd since refused to return to Forks, even when she got news during college that Charlie had remarried to none other than Sue Clearwater. It turns out not long after Bella had left, Harry Clearwater had passed of a heart attack, and in the intervening years what started out as comfort between two people who had both lost a dear loved one turned into something more. Eventually, they had begun a tentative relationship and two years into Bella's college life, she received the invite to the wedding of Charlie Swan and Sue Clearwater.
She hadn't been able to make it, due to her classes and the simple distance between them, but she'd Skype called them and wished them all her love and told her father how proud she was of him, which may or may not have led to a breakdown of tears as he temporarily left the room, 'to wash his face'. Sue wasn't so reserved, her cheeks wet with the evidence of her joy, even if Bella could still see a hint of sorrow in her eyes for a love long-lost.
It was during one such Skype call that she'd been introduced to her new sister- and brother-in-law, Leah and Seth. Seth was an excitable newly-minted adult, having turned 18 at some point during that year, though he looked like he was in his 20s and built like a linebacker. He reminded her briefly of Jacob, though thankfully the brief sting in her heart didn't last long. Leah, who was supposedly almost five years Seth's senior, didn't look a day over 20 at best. I really wanted to ask for her skin-care routine because this girl was flawlessly beautiful in a way that made Bella's heart rate jump dramatically.
It wasn't the first time Bella had considered it, what she'd once seen as a 'taboo' topic for such a small town. She'd spent way too much time appreciating the fairer sex, though, for her to consider herself 'straight' by any means, and it took being away at college for her to finally come to understand herself better. In fact, her first girlfriend and 'first time' had happened all within the first few months of her college life when her dormmate, ironically a girl named Lauren, took her to her first Freshman party.
It didn't take long or many drinks for Bella to realize that she found her tipsy gaze drawn more and more to the skimpy skirts and tight tops surrounding her rather than hard muscles and ruggedly handsome faces. Unfortunately, her relationship with Lauren didn't last beyond their first year, and as sad as Bella was to lose her company, she wasn't nearly as heartbroken over it as she should have been. It didn't take long after the breakup before she realized she'd never actually fallen for the young woman. She'd simply enjoyed her company and presence (both in her life and in her bed), but she'd never opened her heart to the girl, and vise versa. They were a passing fancy, a curiosity that they satisfied and found themselves moving on amicably the next year.
Bella didn't really date much after that, at least not while at college. That wasn't to say she was celibate, either. She was a young, healthy college student with a very healthy sex drive, but she made sure she was always upfront about her encounters that she wasn't looking for anything serious. Part of her wondered if she ever would be ready, but in those early years she didn't really care to find the answers.
Fortunately, after she graduated top of her class and got her degree in Classical Literature, she'd been able to find a teaching job close to home. WU quickly became her new home, and she settled in to what she found would be her dream job. She was so enamored by the entire experience, being on the other side of those multitudes of desks, and she quickly learned who she wanted to be as a teacher when a bunch of rowdy Seniors decided to try and 'test' the new and obviously young teacher by disrupting her class with inane counter-debates that had nothing to do with their current assignments.
She didn't carry a gun this time, but the years had fostered in her a dark sense of propriety. No one was going to disrespect her class, her work, or Wuthering Heights. She'd walked herself right up to the group of young men not much younger than herself and simply narrowed her eyes at each one in turn. She'd face down a vampire who had tortured her and beaten her to within an inch of her life, been left for dead in the middle of the woods by another, and stared down the sights of a revolver holding the life of punks like these in her hand.
Whatever they saw in that look had each of them sobering quickly, averting their gazes quickly while trying to make themselves at small as possible. "As much as I will encourage debate in my classes, the subject at hand is one of my favorite novels by Emily Brontë. I would therefore ask that you leave discussions of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' for another class."
That one incident had solidified Ms. Swan's reputation as a 'take-no-shit' kind of teacher. No one seemed to understand how she'd shut down a group of the most obnoxious young adults at the school, but word spread quickly that you don't fuck around in one of Ms. Swan's classes. That wasn't to say she wasn't considered a good teacher, either. Many of her students took to her style of debate and rebuttal with fervor, many seeking her out after classes during office hours to continue many such discussions.
She, of course, had to field just as many propositions from those same students, but she wasn't very much surprised. She'd learned to accept at least one thing from her former life and that was the fashion advice force-fed to her by the tiniest vampire in the world. She kept her style business casual, but she was still young and dressed to her figure which had developed into quite the surprisingly attractive sight, even she had to admit. Even still, as much as she found it flattering to be asked out by men and women alike, there was no way in hell she was going to date her students. Big no-no.
Not to say her fellow Professors hadn't tried their hands at her either, one quite literally who wound up with a broken wrist. She hadn't gone to college for 4 years without learning a thing or two about self-defense, especially when she was the new lesbian on campus that some men thought they could 'fix'. Needless to say, Lauren and a few of their mutual friends had ensued a many of those men could no longer reproduce, while the girls pulled Bella aside and began teaching her what she needed to know to survive.
The years had passed and Bella was content with her life. She Skyped with her dad and Sue, unless they came for a visit, which happened more often than Bella expected. She even continued to Skype with her step-siblings, especially Leah who seemed to get a lot of things about Bella that no one else ever bothered to pick up on. Like her need for solitude, the fact that she refused to talk about her high school days, or her inability to settle down. It wasn't even that Bella was 'restless' or 'needed to sow her wild oats' (her father's unfortunate words, not hers), she just couldn't be bothered with commitment when no one would ever truly know her. There were parts of her life that could never be known and it all revolved around a secret that could get her and everyone she loved killed if it ever got out.
How could she love someone so completely when she could never be known? After so many years of dating on and off and her numerous failed relationships, she realized she couldn't. Isabella Swan was meant to live the rest of her mortal existence alone.
Finding out her father had passed without her being there was a devastating blow. She had avoided Forks like the plague, had left behind every single reminder of the town she once called home. And now the one reason she had to ever go back there was dead. The irony that her final return to Forks would be to bury her father was not lost on her. Not only had she lost touch with her step-siblings over the last several years, but her father had been visiting less and less. Now she was constantly wiping away the regret pouring down her cheeks as she made the drive back to the one place she'd hoped never to return.
She wasn't that surprised to see that not much had changed in the intervening years. Newton's was still the biggest store in town, even though it had expanded in size, the diner was still as busy as ever, and save for the upgrades to roads and additional stores and a new mall outside of town, it felt like stepping back in time for Bella. She expected to see Mike, Angela, and Jessica walking down the street at any moment.
Even the house was the same, though thankfully Sue had managed to liven it up a bit with a woman's touch. Heaven knows Renee never put in that kind of effort, Bella thought, more than a little bitter over her mother's disowning her when she came out as gay. The useless bitch couldn't even be bothered to come to Charlie's funeral.
It was a beautiful service, no doubt arranged by Sue herself as Bella hadn't had any wherewithal to deal with anything other than the fact that her father was gone. She hardly remembered the eulogy or sermons, the well-wishers passing in a blur of unknown or half-remembered faces. It was all quite unremarkable, at least until Sue invited Bella back to the Rez. There was a celebration of life to be had for her father, his years spent with Sue earning him an honor amongst the tribe.
Bella found herself following along, numb to all things even as they lowered Charlie's body into a plot that held two headstones. It would seem Sue planned to join him even in death, and any other time the morbid thought might have brought solace to Bella's weary heart. But the closer she got to La Push, the more reasons she remembered she shouldn't be there. Not only was she worried about running into Jacob and opening that old wound, but she was likely to see Leah and Seth in-person for the first time. The thought of seeing Leah alone after radio-silence for the last several years hit her with a sharp ache in her chest, imagining her step-sister looking much like when she'd first been introduced to Sue: laugh-lines turned crows-feet with age, seeing as Leah was at least a year or two older than Bella; strands of grey beginning to peek through, harder to hide with her silky-black hair compared to Bella's brunette; aged much like Bella but expectedly just as beautiful as the last time she'd seen the Native woman.
It was there at a massive bonfire, surrounded by people she didn't know other than Sue, that Bella truly felt how hollow her life had become. This here was a thriving community full of rich culture and loving families. Yet Bella was an outsider, a Pale Face that didn't belong, who would never truly belong anywhere. It was no surprise that she felt tears leaving cold tracks down her cheeks, but what was surprising was the familiar voice suddenly coming from beside her.
"Bella means 'beautiful', right? It would make sense that you would make that true even while crying."
With a gasp, Bella turned to face Leah, only to swipe furiously at her blurry vision because there was no way this girl was her step-sister. But even as she cleared her eyes and stared for far longer than was appropriate, reality didn't change. Leah Clearwater looked as if she hadn't aged a day in 20 years! Even in her Skype calls, Leah had looked older and older over the years, appearing to age right alongside Bella, but the woman sitting beside her couldn't be anyone other than her step-sister.
"H-How?" she managed to whisper through the lump in her throat.
Leah wasn't quite looking at Bella, though the smirk that lifted the corners of her lips was exactly as Bella remembered it. It was the same smirk she'd given Bella when she came out to Leah, before the Native woman had admitted to her own bisexuality. "Would you believe me if I said it was good genes?"
Bella was already shaking her head, features firming into the same stern look that made her students quiver in fear. "Bullshit! Your Skype calls showed you aging but here you are, as young as the day I first saw you."
Leah's smirk fell into a sad smile as she nodded. "I wished so often back in the beginning that you had stayed around, but I also knew it was selfish when you wanted nothing but to forget about this town. Especially those bloodsuckers."
Bella's heart stopped for one brief moment before thundering into a gallop. She looked around with fearful eyes before leaning in close, her voice a harsh whisper. "How the hell do you-?"
"-know that you were dating a vampire?" interrupted another familiar voice, one that had Bella shaking with a mixture of repressed fear and anger. She turned slowly and met the youthful gaze of Jacob Black, his face and body also appearing no older than his early-to-mid 20s. There was a deep well of sadness as their eyes locked, only for him to look away with a sigh. "If you'd stayed around just a little longer, I would have found a way to tell you. I could have gotten away from Sam long enough to remind you that the Cold Ones weren't the only monsters in those old tales."
Bella frowned as she dredged up those years-old stories that had led to her discovery of vampires. About the Protectors and Cold Ones. When she finally realized, she glanced between Leah and Jacob with disbelief. "Werewolves?! Are you fucking kidding me?!"
Leah finally looked up, her gaze hard even though she still wouldn't meet Bella's furious gaze. "Oh what? Vampires were good enough for you to hang around, but a Pack of wolves is where you draw the line now?"
Bella wanted to slap that look of disgust off of Leah's face, but she refused to be the aggressor here. "Excuse me if it's difficult to keep up with the fact that a woman who I considered my best friend over the last decade or two tells me she's a fucking supernatural creature that doesn't fucking age! Is this why we never met in person? Because you couldn't put on a filter to age your face up?"
Leah suddenly looked away, but not before Bella saw the raw look of hurt in her step-sister's eyes. "You don't understand! It wasn't a secret we were allowed to tell. We were bound by the Alpha of the Pack to not reveal anything to you. Even when we killed that redheaded bitch who was hunting for you!"
Bella felt her stomach drop, her breathing turning shallow as she easily pictured flaming red hair and crimson-red eyes. "V-Victoria was after me? But why?"
It was Jacob who replied, his voice somber. "We aren't sure, but she seemed dead set on killing you. Kept testing our borders after the Cullens left." Bella flinched at the name she hadn't even allowed herself to think, much less say, in over 20 years. "One day she came at us with a large group of leeches, trying to overrun us to get to you, but we managed to kill them all and take the redhead down in the process." He paused, a heavy sigh leaving his massive chest. "We lost Sam and Paul that day, and I became Alpha of the Pack and have been keeping our people safe ever since."
A quiet sob slipped almost silently from Leah, but Bella heard it. The moment she moved to reach for the woman, Leah leaped to her feet, facing away from the human. "We didn't just lost Sam and Paul, we also lost my cousin, Emily! No one knew until it was too late, but the moment Sam died, Emily took her own life to join him. Fucking imprints!"
Bella glanced at Jacob who was looking at Leah with so much shared pain before addressing Bella's unasked question. "We wolves have soulmates, or what we call 'imprints'. From the moment we start shifting, if we meet the eyes of our imprint, everything changes. Gravity no longer holds you to the earth anymore, your imprint does. You will become anything and everything for them. It is a soul-deep connection that no one can resist. Until we lost Sam, we had no idea what would happen to the imprintee should they lose their wolf."
Bella studied Leah's trembling form for several moments before slowly coming to a painful conclusion. "Is this why you never wanted to meet?" she whispered to Leah, the wolf-girl going deathly still.
Leah finally took a deep breath and turned, her eyes locking with Bella's-and Jacob was right. Everything did change. Bella could feel her lungs moving in a way they never had, not even when she had been with him. Her heart was suddenly pounding away in her chest, synced to the woman in front of her. That youthful face held such a painful combination of joy and agony, but Bella couldn't get one question out of her head.
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
Leah flinched, but now that their eyes were connected it was as if neither could look away. "I couldn't be certain you were my imprint until I saw you during one of mom's Skype calls. But by then you had moved on with your life and were long-gone from the world of the supernatural. How selfish would it be for me to find you and form that bond when it seemed like all you wanted to do is forget we ever existed? And so long as I never met your eyes in person, I wouldn't suffer the agony of what Emily went through."
Bella felt tears welling up in her eyes because every word Leah said of her was true. When Jacob abandoned her, she'd wanted nothing to do with anyone; not her friends from school, not her mother, not anyone from the Rez. She'd purposely avoided anything that might remind her of heartache, but all the while she'd had her happy ending waiting just across the Quileute borders. What a fool she'd been! So full of her own pain and sense of betrayal that she'd lost a lifetime at Leah's side. Because even before the imprinting, Bella had always thought Leah the most beautiful woman alive, and the more they got to know each other the more it cemented in her heart and mind that she would never find a love like her. She'd resigned both of them to live in the shadows of what their lives could have been.
Finally Bella stood and reached for Leah, surprised when the young wolf fell into her arms willingly as they embraced at last. "I'm so sorry, Leah. If I had known, I never would have run! I mean, our parents would still have wound up together but I'm down with the 'help me, step-sister' kink." Leah gave a watery laugh, joined by Bella and a nearby chuckling Jacob, but the tension was no where near broken. Bella finally pulled back and stared the beautiful young woman in her dark eyes and felt her heart break for all the years they had missed.
"I wish I knew you when I was young."