He awoke to music. It filled the room, through the walls and into the corners. The melancholy tune waxed and waned, but it was enough to rouse Jacob from his sleep. He thought that he'd been asleep. Maybe he had died. Maybe was dead.

Though his eyes were open, Jacob couldn't see the roof above him. He couldn't see anything. He was too caught up in the music, in the doleful notes. He'd heard music like this before. It was sad, soft and slow, but there was something else. There was a hope beneath the notes. Desperate and almost broken, but it was there. He knew someone who had played with hope he didn't think he deserved. Or he had known them, a long time ago.

After a while, the music stopped. Or maybe it had never been playing in the first place. Maybe it existed somewhere within Jacob. He couldn't feel anything else. He thought maybe his heart might be beating. But he couldn't feel it. All he could feel was the music, sinking through his skin.

Slowly the roof came into focus. He could see the plain white plaster. He became aware that other things existed. The concept didn't feel foreign to him. He'd known it before, or perhaps it was just so overwhelmingly obvious that it didn't need to be known.

The rest of the room came into focus. And then went out of focus. Jacob was bewildered by it all. Everything was starting to make a strange sort of sense again. He began to remember things. Important things. He began to worry. He must have been out of it for a while but he had no idea how much time he'd spent in darkness and searing pain. He could hear movements in the other rooms of the house, but couldn't tell whose movements they were. No one came into the room. The room itself was completely empty, no furniture at all. Why had he been left in a room to wake up alone?

Jacob wondered if he could sit up. He supposed it was possible. Why not? People did that. When their skin was actually intact and their flesh wasn't really torn from their bones. When they were whole. And Jacob thought he was whole. It had taken a while, but he had realised that the nightmare was just a nightmare. And it was over.

So he sat up. Twisted so that his legs were dangling over the edge of the table that he had been lying on. It felt alright, to move. Actually, it felt great. He wanted to move more. He wanted to walk out of this empty room and...

Ugh. There was something. Something important that he was trying to remember, but stayed just out of his reach. Something existed outside of this room. Should he try to find it?

Or perhaps nothing existed. Though his body appeared to be functioning very well, his mind was still hazy, this thoughts jumbled and unordered. Perhaps he had gone mad, cuckoo, somewhere back in the darkness. Perhaps he'd lost his mind.

Lost. Lost, something important. Someone. Back in the dark, or before that? Jacob didn't know.

He pushed off the table, falling to his feet. Standing appeared to be an achievable function. Good.

Jacob felt the world around him. Felt...everything. Had it always been this way for him? The...hearing...the seeing. The feeling. Everything inside his head was fuzzy, but out of it...the world existed in a stunning clarity.

His body seemed sound, even as he took a few short steps towards the door. The door got closer, as expected. The ground moved beneath him, but not in strange or worrying ways.

With a twist of his hand on the knob, the door opened. In a few more steps he was out of the room.

Other stuff did exist. The corridor he found himself in wasn't familiar, but it didn't seem to be threatening so Jacob padded along it. There were noises, in the corridor, but Jacob couldn't tell where they were coming from. Perhaps from behind one of the many doors that lined the hallway. He considered going through one of them, but then decided against it. It didn't seem right to go through those doors, and besides, it seemed like the voices were coming from further along the corridor. So he continued walking.

As the noises grew louder, to the point where Jacob could almost distinguish words from the fray of sounds, so did the smell. Jacob wrinkled his nose as he smelt it. It wasn't that it was overtly disgusting, rather it was overly sweet, cloyingly so. It could be nice, it could be beautiful, if it weren't so powerful.

Jacob tried to ignore it. It wasn't important, somehow he knew it wasn't important, even if he didn't quite know what was.

He continued moving. He wasn't sure if the corridor was long, or if he was just moving too slowly. There was too much detail to take it all in, and his mind could only comprehend a fraction of it all. The world was amazing.

He reached a door, and just knew that it was the right one. This was where he was supposed to be. He hesitated with his hand on the doorknob. He couldn't remember what was behind the door. He couldn't remember much of anything, but he was worried. What if it wasn't something that he wanted to see? What if it was something he had been trying to escape by entering that nightmare? What was waiting for him? His brain groggily tried to keep up. He knew, and yet he knew nothing about what he might be facing in mere seconds.

He pushed the door open. In a few short steps he was well into the room. He looked around. The voices had stopped, elsewhere in the house. Light filled the room, streaming through one of the large windows. It was morning, or maybe afternoon, but the sun was strong.

There was only one person in the room, sitting on a stool by a piano. As Jacob's eyes adjusted to the strange and unnatural brightness, he tried to make the figure out.

By the time he could see again, the person was on his feet and had moved haltingly towards Jacob.

Jacob saw him.

And recognised his face.

Edward.

In a fraction of a second, everything came rushing back. Everything. From the very beginning. It was too much too quickly. He felt his head spin at the sheer amount of memory, at everything. A whole lifetime's worth of…everything. Jacob's vision went black around the edges and suddenly he was falling to the ground, unsteady legs no longer enough to keep him standing.

As he fell, he breathed out a sigh, a single word.

"Edward."

It was barely louder than the beat of a butterfly's wing, but Edward heard and was beside him instantly.

Jacob looked up into the familiar face. It had been so long. How long had it been? Edward gazed back at him, relief and concern mingling in equal measure on his face. Jacob tried to smile weakly.

I'm finally home, was his last thought before everything went black.

(...)

Jacob collapsed into Edward's arms. His eyes fluttered open and closed tiredly. Edward stared down at him, taking in every single feature, every single motion. He had thought…He'd tried not to, but he'd thought that he might never see this again.

Jacob stopped opening his eyes, but Edward could hear his heart beating lightly. He was okay, just asleep.

The man was different. Edward hadn't known what to expect, but different had been a given. Jacob's heart was still beating, though unnaturally slowly. Perhaps it was just that Edward was used to hearing Jacob's heart beat rapidly. But it had definitely changed. He was breathing too. His skin was colder than in had been, colder than human skin. But it was nowhere as cold as Edward's. He seemed to be...in-between. Somewhere between where he had been and where Edward was. Edward didn't ask what that meant. Even Carlisle would have no way of knowing.

His eyes were the same. When Edward had first seen him stumble into the room, unsure of whether he should go to him, it had been the eyes that had struck him. He realised then that he had been afraid of Jacob. Afraid of what he might become. But they were Jacob's familiar eyes, and Edward couldn't begin to comprehend how glad he was for it.

(...)

He awoke to music. It wasn't the same as had been playing earlier, and it was much closer. He sat up, stretching out his arms. Eyes open, he scanned the room. There was still only one other person in it, but Jacob knew that others had been there. He could smell them, but not only that, he could sense them. All of his senses had clicked together and he was seeing the world in a way he had never seen it before.

Seeing Edward in a way he had never seen him before.

He stood as Edward stopped playing. He stepped forward hesitantly. How long had he been away? Had everything changed? Did Edward regret his decision? What had happened while he had been out of it?

Edward vanquished his thoughts as he rushed to Jacob and pulled him close. Suddenly, all of the ice running through Jacob's veins, unnoticed since the pain had disappeared, rushed to the surface of his skin towards where it made contact with Edward's. Jacob staggered forward, into Edward, the odd sensation causing his head to spin again. Blood rushed to his brain and he gasped. Instantly Edward let him go and stepped back.

Jacob's eyes were blown wide open and he was staring at Edward with unadulterated awe.

It hadn't been unpleasant, quite the opposite. It was almost like a direct hit of pleasure running straight through him. It made his head spin and his heart beat faster. It had been like an instant high, just what Jacob had imagined it would feel like to take drugs.

And it had been Edward.

Edward was looking worried, afraid that they had run into some unpleasant side effect of his change.

Jacob wrapped his arms around the vampire and hugged him tighter, savouring the sensation. It was amazing. Edward wound his arms back around Jacob and clung to him.

Neither man released the other. Jacob smiled into Edward's neck, feeling like they had finally done it. They had beaten it, everything that had been going wrong since forever. Maybe it was finally all over.

The feeling of Edward's lips on his skin was ten times more potent that the sensation of his touch. Jacob grew giddy with it, as Edward kissed his neck, kissed whatever part of his skin he could reach. Jacob knew that Edward could feel exactly what that was doing to him. He felt Edward in his mind, felt Edward's presence there.

Jacob moaned softly as Edward kissed him. His eyes closed involuntarily as he tilted his head back, giving Edward better access.

Edward found Jacob's lips and kissed him hard. Jacob smiled into the kiss, momentarily forgetting that anything else existed. Nothing else mattered, they'd made it through the worst. And they were both still here.