AN: This one is a teensy bit longer than usual just because I couldn't find a more reasonable breaking point. Thank you so much to the many reviewers that provide so much encouragement!

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Jacob's lips pulled back and his teeth were bared at me in the same moment that I registered I'd said Edward's name to his sworn enemy. The noise that came from inside of Jacob was completely inhuman. The blood left my face and I involuntarily shrunk away from him, looking for a way to legitimize what I'd said. "Jake—listen—I'd told him goodbye. I was done talking to him—"

"I know," Jake snarled. He was back in his crouch now, but the growling had gone. "I wanted to see you because you said goodbye." His eyes closed, and it took me a minute to see what he was doing. I remembered another night, a million years ago, when a boy named Jacob Black had made the same face in this same bedroom, trying desperately to control himself. He exhaled deeply, and the smell of blood and dirt momentarily filled the room, as if the wolf were leaving his body. "I've waited years to hear you…tell him goodbye." He looked down at me again. His eyes were clear and bright, softened with the effort of speaking and feeling.

I found myself lost for words. The guiding emotions inside of me wanted to reply with more inappropriate wishes, more selfish and probing questions, but I waited. It occurred to me that I had just witnessed the beginnings of what everyone had feared—the monster inside of Jacob was Jacob now. He spent so little time with human emotions and reactions that his body had immediately responded with violence to a thought—or a memory—that hurt, even if rationally he knew there was no threat. But they couldn't have known, without seeing inside of his mind, how much Jake was left in the wolf. I thought of the effort what I had just seen must have taken him and shuddered.

Jake looked ashamed and backed away from me, his head instantly lowering submissively, his weight back on all fours. "No, Jake—" I called out to him, and he stopped moving, but didn't raise his eyes. He was reacting to the shiver he had seen go racing through my body. "I was only thinking about how hard this must be for you, to go from being…an animal, to a person, having a hard discussion with…whatever I am to you." He met my eyes again. "Please come closer, I don't want you to go away." As earlier, with Edward, I found it was crucial to say what I meant. I couldn't afford a single wasted word. To prove what I said I moved forward and lay back down across the bottom of my bed.

He moved towards me again, but stayed seated instead of laying down like before. His head was easily two feet above mine, his hair hanging down. We were quiet for a minute.

"Leah knew I wouldn't hurt you," he whispered to me. "Leah and Sam understand the way I feel about you." He took a deep breath. His face was very dark beneath the curtain of his hair, the dim light he'd let me turn on elongating the shadows across his features. "Leah was scared…I would hurt the pack." I didn't dwell on the image of Jacob's massive wolf body rampaging through Quil and Embry, his beloved friends.

"But…Edward?" I whispered back, determined to acclimate him to the name; it would come up many more times, I was sure. I waited until his jaw unlocked to continue. "How would fighting him hurt the pack?"

"Break the truce," he simply said, and I nodded, wondering at how much I had forgotten.

"Leah is smart," I said.

"Yes," Jake said. "Leah and Sam…make great leaders." Fierceness blazed in his eyes when he looked at me. "The vampire would not have stopped me."

I didn't take the bait. For one thing, Jake might be right; I had never seen anything—human, vampire, or wolf—as terrifying as my reintroduction to Jake. The only word that fit was monster. Even though we were whispering together and he was sitting upright, the air of wildness around him never left for a second, and the image of his bared teeth would reappear in my nightmares, I was sure.

I was also battling several other feelings…Jake was willing to fight through his own pack just to see me again? After all of this time? I wasn't sure what to do with that. I still wasn't entirely comfortable with my own reasons for seeing Jake; I didn't trust myself to care for him first. If I found I was using him again, I couldn't live with myself. But it wasn't only humility and a twisted nobility that bound me to this room with the monster. The names for how I felt squirmed around in my chest as I looked into the shadows of his face.

"Jacob…" I stopped myself, checked my intentions, and continued, "why did you want to see me?" Was there an answer that would have made me uncomfortable enough to not want to know? I couldn't think of one. To make you beg for forgiveness. To tell you I love you. To see you humbled by time. To ease some of my loneliness. All of them made sense, in our bizarre world. What would I do with the information? That was the thing, I promised myself; I wouldn't do anything with it. I would allow Jake to decide what to do with it.

He was silent for much longer than these thoughts raged in my mind. Finally he laid down again, flat on his long back, and stretched out staring at the ceiling. He would have looked starved if not for the miles of muscle draping his frame. I stared unabashedly at the scars, trying to decipher them…were they teeth marks? Layer upon layer of razor blades diving in to his molten skin? I shook my head and pressed my eyelids with my fists.

"In the woods, by myself, there are no words," Jake whispered. He closed his eyes. "I have seen your face for a long time, losing…the words we had together." His voice was trance-like, and I found myself leaning over the edge of the bed to listen more closely. "When Leah found me…she said you were here, so I came again. I watched for you. I watched you with him—" the murder in his whisper was so blunt my heart seized—"and when you said goodbye to him…I missed words." His eyes were still closed.

"You missed being human, Jake," I whispered back.

"Only with you," he replied, and turned his head to look at me. I crawled down off the bed and sat next to him, curled beside his shoulder and looking down at his face. His hair fell back below him, and I could see every faint line traced by mysterious cause into his skin. A vivid white slice interrupted the deep ocher of his lips, and beneath his left eye another scar ran parallel to the dense edge of his lashes. He watched me look at him. I noticed that all of his muscles were tense, his pulse racing. This was the closest he had been to anyone in years, I realized, and pulled back a little.

"I'm not who I was," I said. I didn't want him to think I was something or someone I couldn't be; I wasn't frail and clumsy and loveably malleable Bella Swan any more, and I had my own version of damaged loneliness to combat. He had to know that.

"You can't change what matters," he said in the tone of someone who had tried, and failed. We watched each other, neither of us able to relax or move.

"Who's to say what matters," I muttered, and finally broke his gaze. I gently reached over him, so that he could see my arm, and pulled a leaf from his hair. He let me, but watched my hand the whole time. My weariness worked in my favor, as I could only move at a tolerably slow pace. "So don't answer if you don't want to talk about it, or can't. But, how does a werewolf end up with so many scars?" I kept my tone light and reached again. He could go back to the previous subject if he wanted to, but I didn't have any other replies for now.

"Fighting," he said. I guessed that cutting the fat out of every sentence made things pretty simple to understand, but I still wanted details, if he didn't mind.

"Fighting what?" I said, my eyes flicking back to his. He watched my hand; his muscles were still tense, but his pulse had slowed.

"What have you got?" He grinned, and I caught my breath. It was getting closer to the old smile. He noticed and it faded as his brow creased, misinterpreting my breathing again. This time I chuckled darkly.

"It seems like it's not quite as easy for you to read my mind any more, Jake."

He shrugged, and a shy smile replaced the bright one. He watched my eyes and pointed to his lip. "Shark."

"What!?" I nearly leapt out of my skin. Jacob's eyebrows flew up and his grin returned, preternaturally bright. I had startled him, but his delight in shocking me overrode his body's signals to strike. So many muscles twitched I was dizzy, but then he moved his finger to the scar below his eye.

"Vampire," he said. I stared at him, inhaled, and determinedly selected another twig to pull from his hair. His hand slid down his chest. "Gunshot." My hand froze. "Vampire." His palm was spread out against the razor thin ripples criss-crossing his rib cage. Without thinking, I put my hand over his.

"Stop," I whispered. We were both very still. "You've been hunting vampires. That's what you do, in the woods." He wasn't grinning, but his face was defiant. I didn't cry, but I couldn't move my hand. "Jacob, that's suicidal," was all I could say.

Surprising me, he moved his giant hand and folded mine inside. "You taught me how to get the venom out," he whispered. I knew what he meant; the icy scar on my palm itched and twisted against the heat from his skin.

It didn't make me feel better; I knew that vampire venom was fatal to the wolves. I waited for him to continue, knowing these were too serious for him to have healed himself alone. He whispered again, the sound growing faint by the end of his brief story. "I track alone. When I find one…I bait it, if I know I can't kill it by myself. To La Push. And then I help Leah's crew destroy them."

"At the expense of your body."

"The right tool for the job," he said, grinning widely once more. His voice was so faint I was leaning towards him again. "They'd never let me die."

Something else occurred to me. "What do you mean, Leah's crew?"

"The first generation." I knew instantly what he meant—there were more wolves now; Leah must be in charge of the first group of boys brought through the horror of the change by Sam. "Sam takes the rest." He looked at me. "Leah is in charge of the fighters."

"So she knows where to find you, I guess, when there's going to be a real fight?"

"She knows how," he said, and left it at that. We looked at each other. I was only six inches above his face, needing to get that close to hear him. His eyes were wide, and I could tell he was forcing himself to breath deep and slow. Under the scent of blood and dirt, I recognized the other mysterious layer to his smell: the thick, purple smoke that erupted from pyres made of broken vampire limbs. I leaned back, but only a little; Edward had also been a murderer of monsters, once upon a time, and I knew Jacob—in spite of what he might tell himself—would never kill a vampire with golden eyes. It seemed that I could only want to be this close to deluded heroes.

He blinked and then his mouth opened. His brow creased slightly as he pushed the air across his vocal cords. "I'm out of words," he forced the last whisper, and smiled shyly again. I could tell he didn't mean he was ready to go.

"Only for now, though, right?" I hadn't taken my hand out of his; I let the warmth emanating from his body course through my palm, lulling me to sleep, and continued to watch him as I lowered myself on to the floor next to him. He nodded, his eyes following me until I couldn't see them any more over the horizon of his chest. I kept my hand in his while my eyes closed and the exhaustion immediately crashed over me, eradicating the more painful moments in our exchange but unable to block the force of his body's heat. I felt his mammoth frame began to shift and curl around me, never letting go of my hand, just as the long day finally faded to black.