Jacob stopped running. He knew the sun would be rising on Forks, but in the densely crowded wood, it was still as dark as midnight. The ground beneath his bare feet was damp, littered with decomposing leaves and branches. He could feel the hundreds of small cuts on his feet and arms healing, even as he stood in the cool forest.

He sat down. Running through the wood, ignoring the branches hitting as he pushed his way through them, had left him covered in natural debris. Leaves, wet with dew and melting snow, stuck to his bare skin. Sitting down on the fallen tree trunk would add moss to the coat he was collecting, but Jacob didn't care.

He was still running on the adrenaline of the fight, but it was slowly seeping away. The blood through his veins was cooling down now, forcing him to feel things that he didn't want to feel. Think things that he didn't want to think. It had been fifty years, and Edward still hadn't recovered from her death. What did that mean?

Jacob knew what it meant. It meant that it was all over. If after all of this time, Edward hadn't been able to move on, he never would. Jacob couldn't kill him. He'd waited all this time, given up any chance at having a life, for nothing.

He was distressed. Lost.

Not literally, there was no way that he could get lost in these woods. They were his home.

He was lost in every other sense of the word. In every way that truly mattered.

Why hadn't the vampire moved on?

He was a cold hearted monster. Why was he still broken?

Jacob still wanted to kill Edward. With every fibre of his being. He wanted to rip the sneering head off the frozen shoulders.

But he couldn't. Jacob could see in the depths of pitch black eyes that that was exactly what Edward wanted to. Jacob couldn't give him what he wanted. He wouldn't.

(...)

Jacob drew his knees to his chest, wrapping his long arms around him. He began to feel the cold, unlike he ever had before. The wolf heat kept him running a few degrees hotter than everyone else, but this, this feeling cold, this was human.

He hadn't cried since the day of the funeral, hadn't let himself grieve for her, because it hadn't been over. But now it was.

Jacob was broken. Had been since he had heard her last heartbeat. And now he knew it. He knew it because, looking into the depth of those bottomless eyes, all that he had seen was himself, reflected there.

All this time he had thought that he was doing it for her. He had thought that it was all because he didn't want her death to go unavenged. But it had been for himself. Because he couldn't let her go. Just like Edward, Jacob hadn't moved on. Hadn't grown up.

Jacob wanted to hit something, but he was exhausted. He was angry at himself, as much as he had been at Edward all this time. What had he done for Bella? What had he turned his life into? She wouldn't have wanted this. Bella would have told him to do something good with his life, not throw it away. She would have wanted him to be happy.

Jacob hadn't been happy in half a century. Since they had sat and joked together in the Cullens house.

Jacob cried, hot tears running down his face. All around him the world was cold and still. Empty. He was the last source of heat in this frozen world, and he was dwindling fast.

In Jacob's mind, Edward had become nothing more than a black eyed monster. A demon. Even through Jacob had recognised the grief in the man's eyes at the funeral he hadn't let himself understand what that meant. Edward hadn't been allowed to entertain human emotions. Nothing other than a wedding band and empty vows should have tied him to the beautifully human Bella, that and the creature that had been growing incessantly inside of her. He couldn't have felt anything real towards her.

Jacob suddenly realised just how much Edward had loved Bella. It had been deeper, darker, and more absolute than anything that Jacob could ever experience. They had promised each other forever, and yet had so little time. Everything that the child had robbed them of, the both of them. Jacob couldn't let go of his disgust, but he could no longer pretend that he was that he had felt about Bella had had anything on the way that the two lovers had felt about each other. Jacob wondered if the vampires had their own form of imprinting. Because that's what it looked like. He knew what it was like for a wolf to lose his mating pair. And it was what he had seen in Edward's eyes.

Edward wasn't a monster. The realisation went against everything that Jacob had been taught to believe, everything that he had been happy to hold onto for half a century, but that didn't make any less real.

At the very least, Jacob amended, he's no more a monster than I've allowed myself to become.

Every hour that he had trained, every time he had forced himself to shift going against every instinct that told him just to stop, just to settle down, it had all been for this nothingness that consumed him now. Changing so many years after a threat had been removed, when he had not had a fresh trace of his enemy in decades, it had caused Jacob physical pain. It wasn't natural, denying his human side, and Jacob feared that along the way he had lost a lot of his humanity.

He didn't have anyone else. He was completely, finally, utterly alone. He had no family left, no pack that wanted to associate with him any more. He thought that he had lost everything the day he had lost Bella, but the truth was that he had given it all up himself. He had given up so many chances at having a normal, happy life. Passed them by in his blind pursuit of something that would fill the emptiness that he had never acknowledged.

Jacob had only had one thing left for so long. Only Edward, the bloodsucking monster. And now he didn't even have that. Edward had been his anchor, holding him into the earth, just knowing that he existed somewhere, that somewhere he had the same chances at new happiness as Jacob did. That had been enough to dispel some of the darkness that Jacob could no longer deny, the darkness that would consume him now, sitting in the cold and empty silence.

The sun was risen fully, and the dense canopy was no longer enough to keep out the beams of day. Jacob cursed the playful rays as they danced across the leaf litter. They were evidence of the passing time. And time was a pressure that he could barely deal with. He was broken and he had no idea how he should go about putting himself together. He was a man out of his time. There was the possibility of trying to integrate himself back into the community, go back to being Alec. Pretending to be his own son.

But Edward was still in the house, a Cullen back in Forks. He may not be able to bring himself to leave the house, but his presence so close to the reserve would have an impact on the new generation. Young people would begin to shift. Jacob had no heir, he would be the natural alpha. He could return to his place at the head of the pack. But it was only Edward. When he had been in the house, Jacob hadn't seen any sign that the others were going to follow. There was little point training a new generation for a false threat. Edward wasn't a threat to anyone, only himself.

Jacob realised that Edward had probably been counting on the new pack forming. Even if Jacob had re-joined civilisation, growing older and moving on, the new generation of wolves would have been activated upon his arrival. Alice couldn't see their kind, so all Edward had to do was break a couple of their rules and he would have his wish.

Jacob didn't want that to happen. His anger still glowed, aching to flare back into life. It told him that the bloodsucker deserved to die, even if that was what the monster wanted. Ridding the world of the man would be a service. It didn't have to be the revenge that Jacob wanted. Jacob needed to free himself from the grasp that the man's memory had over him.

But a cooler, more rational part of him kept the fire reduced to mere coals. He didn't want to kill a man who wanted to die. It went against everything that Jacob had thought he stood for. And he didn't want to give Edward the satisfaction.

There was something else, something that threatened to throw water on the fire of anger and hatred. Jacob knew that there was another reason he wasn't willing to kill the man. Something that he had thought would always strengthen his anger and resolve. A huge chunk of Jacob's obsession. In the face of the truth of what Edward had become, it was having a very different effect. But Jacob wouldn't allow himself to think about that. He wouldn't let it completely extinguish the flame that was seemingly all that was keeping him warm in the melting snow.

Jacob stood suddenly, causing the world around him to stir into life. Rustling marked the hurried movements of small animals who had ventured into the apparently safe stillness. His jarring movements shocked the natural world back into its predator-prey mentality. He shook out his limbs, trying to awaken them from the disuse. Before pins and needles could set in, Jacob was running again.

He had no direction, no vision of what to do next. But it didn't matter. What really counted was that there was something behind him. He was running from Edward and from the person that he had become. He was a sixty year old man living in the body of a teenager. He was tired of it all.

But living was the least he could do. He had spent so long destroying himself in her name, but none of it had really been for Bella. Maybe he could rebuild himself, after all this time, because it was what she would have really wanted.

He tried to pull his world out of the orbit that he had flung himself into. He could feel himself gravitating towards the house behind him, feel it and its single inhabitant pull at his skin, irritating it. It was almost magnetic, the way that it felt. Edward had been his every thought for so long that Jacob couldn't just forget that the vampire existed.

(...)

Jacob made it to the edge of the wood at the back of his only house without turning around. With his eyes opened by the plethora of revelations, Jacob understood disgustedly and for the first time, just how much he was obsessed with Edward. Not with Edward in relation to Bella, or Edward as his natural enemy, but something else. Something that his mind had been intently rebelling against for so long that Jacob had never even gotten a chance to recognise it. He had been able to hide it under everything else; fear, jealousy, hatred, anger, anything that would place more layers over what he felt.

Jacob made his way into the house that he now owned. His father was gone, taken by time.

It had been a long time since Jacob had shifted while clothed, so he wasn't uncomfortable with being naked, but he had left the shreds of his shirt and trousers lying on the floor in the Cullen's living room. If he was going to try to join to community again, it may be best to do it clothed.

The house was a mess. Jacob didn't spend much time there, not enough to reasonably account for the mess. The sheer quantity of dirty dishes and take out containers would suggest at least one more occupant, but Jacob knew that no one else had been in the house since his father's funeral.

He really needed to clean up. And go shopping, he thought as he opened a cupboard to find nothing but a few crumbs and an empty cup.

He shut the cupboard with a sigh, hearing the hinges creak. The house was either falling apart from age or lack of use, either way Jacob felt guilty.

Moving through the rooms, he tried to forget the sight of Edward lying on the floor, empty and oblivious to Jacob's presence. But the image was burnt into the back of his eyelids and the corneas of his eyes. Maybe he should have rejoiced at such a sight, but all that he could think of the way he himself had curled into a ball in the forest, outwardly just as empty and pathetic.

Whatever he had been expecting to find in that house, it hadn't been a mirror. A reflection of himself. The closest thing to a kindred spirit that he had in the world.

The only person that he had left.