A/N: I don't own Twilight or literally anything else of importance. Alright, so here is chapter 86 of Static. We're literally so, so, SO close to the end. I can taste it. This chapter, similar to the last few chapters, is pretty short. I would have - and should have - combined it with chapter 87 but it didn't flow well. This chapter is 97% Leah and Jacob, and it took a different turn than I planned. It's kind of an uneasy chapter, and a bit slow. The next one will be a lot more emotional.

Anyways, so next chapter is the penultimate one, and the one after that is the final chapter/first epilogue! (I have ideas for a second epilogue, but I am not going to pursue them because I told myself this story would be 88 chapters [plus a final author's note] and I am STICKING TO IT.)

ALSO, make sure to put in any questions you have about the story at all in the reviews - I'll be putting a Q&A in the final author's note, which is dropping at roughly the same time as chapter 88. Sooo, get those questions in, if you have any.

Enjoy.

LXXXVI.

all the photographs say you're still young

Bella's funeral was quiet and adorned with roses. There weren't many guests, but there were certainly enough tears to make up for it. There were enough tears to go around three times over, most of them coming from Bella's mother, Renee Dwyer, who hadn't known her daughter had been pregnant.

Leah, who had managed to not cry at all, found it hard to face Renee today. Bella had kept her mother in the dark about essentially everything, so the connection had been lost. The last time that Bella had come to close to going through the motions to meeting her mother again had been in March, when she'd been thinking long and hard about going to Florida to live with her. She had only backed out because she had gotten pregnant. The connection should have might as well never existed. But Leah watched Renee try to reestablish the connection, and it hurt her soul so much—then she remembered that what she felt would never come close to how Renee felt.

Renee cried the entire time. She cried during the service. She especially cried during the burial. She was crying when she and her husband, Phil, left. They had a flight back to Jacksonville to catch. Leah knew she'd be crying on the flight back, too. She could cry for days. Bella hadn't gotten that trait from her father.

The image of Bella's mother crying remained in Leah's head when she and Jacob got into his car to head back home.

Jacob started the car up, and then he looked to Leah. "You hungry?" he asked.

She wasn't hungry at all, but she didn't want to go home, and neither did Jacob. Home didn't feel right.

They ended up at the burger joint in Forks. They'd been there so many times, and in so many different configurations. It was quiet there, but suddenly, Jacob and Leah didn't feel so isolated or haunted. Leah felt like she could finally breathe. The sun was just peeking out from behind the clouds, and she took it all in from her seat next to the window.

Leah had just ordered a soda when she finally asked Jacob, "How are you doing?"

"I'm good," he said. The thing about Jacob, though, was that he so often lied about his feelings for convenience. He always said he was good, but it was hardly ever the truth. Leah, like always, could read right through him.

"No, for real," she said.

He nodded. "I am good," he assured her. "For real. I think I needed that funeral."

"It was pretty cathartic," she agreed.

He glanced out the window for a moment. Something caught his attention. Leah's gaze followed, but she found nothing.

What are you thinking about? she wondered. What are we doing? Where will we go?

"Bella's mom," he began slowly, "cried for so long."

"Yeah, I mean, that was her daughter."

"Bella was so young," Jacob said, facing forward again. "I felt like I knew her forever, but she was only twenty. I never thought I'd still know her when we're thirty and forty and fifty, but I never thought she'd leave so young, too. I just thought she'd… move on. You know?"

"I know."

"I feel like it's still last summer," he continued, "when me and Bells got together for the first time. She was so alive. She was… she was almost too alive, you know what I mean? I remember thinking, God, this girl is fucking crazy. But I loved her. I loved her because she was so crazy."

Something about that didn't sit well with Leah. Maybe it was the fact that he and Bella hadn't dated in a while. Maybe it was the fact that he put a dead girl on a pedestal for something as simple as an indicator of her mental illness. Maybe it was purely the fact that no matter what, he wouldn't get it. He would never see Bella as something beyond a concept or a dream girl or just some girl who fucked him a couple of times and fucked him over a couple more times after that.

Or maybe Leah was just crazy. Maybe she just wouldn't understand Jacob or Bella or whatever they'd had, but she let Jacob believe what he believed. She let Jacob refuse to see Bella as a person because it was what he did best. This was how he mourned.

The server delivered Leah's soda, and Jacob still looked mournful. He just better not say some crazy shit about me when I die, she thought.

"Pretty fucked up how Bella's mom didn't even know Bella was pregnant," Jacob said.

"They weren't that close," Leah replied, coming off a lot more blunt than she meant to. "It is what it is."

"I feel like people cried more just because she was pregnant when she died."

"You can't reduce her suicide to a fetus."

"That's what everyone else did."

"But, Jake, I just feel like she was so much more than a womb, or a potential mother, or Bella the baby killer. She was a person. She was a living person with all these characteristics besides being pregnant for six months. She loved the kids at her job. She loved to read. She loved sunshine and even though she was really bad at it most of the time, I feel like she loved to make people happy, too. Shit, she even loved Pinterest."

Jacob gave her a look.

"What?" she asked.

"You've never cared about Bella this much."

"She was—is—my stepsister. And I know that's not a good reason to suddenly care about her, but I think that, at this point, even if we weren't related by marriage, she would still mean something to me. We all mean something to each other. We're family. And, shit, Jake, she's a victim of mental illness. The fact that she killed herself because she thought her life had absolutely no value has nothing to do with her being pregnant. She just happened to be pregnant in the moment. She still would have been depressed. She still would have been not okay."

"You don't think she would have wanted to live for the baby?" he asked quietly. "Not even for Paul?"

"She still would have been not okay," Leah said. "She could still be alive and her baby would still be alive and she'd still be rich as shit, but I think her issues would have beat her out. Paul dying was what finally pushed her over."

"I think you're being kind of pessimistic," he accused her.

"I think I just saw her for who she was," she retorted. "Not for who I wanted her to be."

"You don't know everything," he told her.

"You're right," she agreed. Then she took a sip of her soda. "But I knew Bella. I've seen maybe some of her best times, and I've sure as hell seen her worst time. And I know that she was more than just some pregnant chick that the news is always talking about. She was a person with interests and maybe even some goals, but she had mental health issues and nobody helped her. She couldn't even help herself."

Jacob tilted his head and squinted his eyes a little. "Do you honestly think that you alone could have saved her?"

"Bella never needed saving. What she needed was someone to talk to, but nobody would listen. Maybe I was there for her, maybe I wasn't. I was a shitty person to her for a lot of the time, but… but we made up. I did what I could. In the end, she did what she wanted. People are always gonna do whatever they want."

Leah was suddenly filled with a sinking feeling. She pushed her soda glass away from her and impulsively got up from the booth. "Look, I'll pay you back for the soda later," she said. "I'm gonna go."

"But I was your ride here," he countered, genuinely confused. "How are you getting home?"

She had the strong urge to say, Don't worry about it, but then she felt the bile rising in her throat. "My place isn't far," she told him. "Paul's funeral is the day after tomorrow, right? I'll see you then."

She didn't even give him the chance the say goodbye before she bolted out of the restaurant doors.

Leah was pacing back to the condo she shared with Kim, her black dress subtly billowing in the slight wind. The sun constantly winked from behind the clouds. It was honestly teasing Leah—she didn't feel so bright today. Why did it have to be even vaguely sunny?

She paced hard and fast down the sidewalk, not caring if she wrecked her shoes in the process. She was so focused that she hardly even noticed the car driving alongside of her.

"You've got legs, ma," a female voice called from the open passenger window. Leah turned, and her disposition suddenly went soft. It was Kim.

Leah got into the car, sat down, and sighed heavily.

"Did your ride abandon you?" Kim asked, pulling back into the road.

Leah buckled her seatbelt. "No, I abandoned him," she explained. "I got messy."

"The last few days have been messy."

Leah nodded, and she could breathe again. She was okay now. She know she wouldn't be okay for Paul's funeral, but she was okay for the time being, and that was all that mattered in the moment.

A/N: Remember to get any and all questions you have about the story, its plot, its characters, etc. into your reviews. And of course, stay tuned.

Thanks as always,

HS