A/N: I don't own Twilight or anything else. In the fashion of the last couple chapters, this one is a bit shorter, pretty mellow, and very Jacob x Leah. I'm still accepting questions for the Q&A session in the final author's note, btw.

Enjoy.

LXXXVII.

there's a picture frame of us in the corner just gathering dust
funny how time doesn't move quite the same

Paul's funeral was soon after Bella's. Paul's mother, Rosa, who took his death harder than anyone else, had fought long and hard for a traditional Catholic funeral in Port Angeles. Paul's father, Arnold Lahote, who had been living in Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island since Paul had beat him up, suddenly came out of the woodwork after Paul's death. He'd fought for the funeral to be a tribal one, held in the Quileute cemetery. Leah couldn't believe that Arnold had the audacity to act like he gave a shit about his son who he had abused for the first fifteen years of his life. Thankfully, Rosa had won, but there was a get-together in La Push afterward, at Paul and Bella's old home, where Arnold was present but not welcome.

Leah was out of her element the entire time. She hadn't cried during the funeral or even the burial. Surrounded by people she already knew, she felt incredibly alone. All she could ask herself was, Why?

The memories of her and Paul flooded her mind. She remembered when she had first met him, back when he had moved to La Push from Tacoma at the age of eight. She'd thought he was crazy, but fun. That description had stuck around through the years even when Paul himself wouldn't stick around. Paul had always been young and wild. He'd been free. He'd shown Leah how to be free—from the times she would sit on his bicycle handlebars as he pedaled down the street to his more sporadic moments, when he'd take her to see his mom on a random day, Paul knew how to live. He knew how to live freely.

He hadn't been the most static. He had always been running around, going too fast. He would leave as soon as he'd come back, and it would happen over and over and over again.

Paul has always been the comeback kid, Leah thought. Why can't he just… come back?

It was a horribly ironic, ugly, sunny day in La Push. If Leah didn't know any better, she would have thought that the badlands were fucking with her. Then again, nothing was normal—how could a world without Paul Lahote ever possibly be normal?

It was all hitting Leah. Everything. All at once. The last time she'd really cried since the world had crashed had been on the night of. After that, she'd kept it all in. She hadn't cried during Bella's funeral or even Paul's, but now, it was all coming around. She stood in Paul's old place, where she'd shared only too many memories with him, and it was all hitting her.

She had never truly hated Paul. She didn't have the capacity.

Since birth, Paul had always wanted to make an impact. It was incredibly funny, heartbreakingly sad, and downright ironic all at once. His dreams, hopes, and ambitions had been larger than what society had dealt him. He had held out for aces and kings while he kept getting twos and sevens in the world's horribly shuffled deck. Sometimes, Leah had wanted to bring him back down to Earth, but that was everyone else's job with him, so it never had to be hers.

When she thought about it, loving Paul had never been difficult. If anything, it was one of the easiest things she'd ever done. Basketball, high school, a little bit of college… all easy. Paul had fallen right into all of that. Loving him had been so easy—even though it was harder now—because he had made himself so easy to love. It had been in his smile, for sure, but even more in his soul and intentions.

He had reminded himself of the beauty in the world, all the time. Some people were optimistic in the way they reminded themselves that the sun was always rising somewhere. Paul had been different. His dad had beat him when the moon was up, but by the next sunrise, Paul had always been convinced that life was still beautiful. He had made himself so easy to love because he had been open to it, all the time.

His words rang in Leah's head right now. He'd told her this back when he had been the most tolerable, back when she had believed in him more than anyone else.

I came into this world screaming and covered in somebody else's blood, he'd told her, and let me tell ya—I ain't afraid to leave the same way.

Leah had never wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.

Jacob nudged her gently. "Let's step outside for a minute," he said, finally noticing the fact that she was drowning in her own tears.

She went with him to the bottom of the house's front steps, pathetically wiping her own tears away, which led to more tears quickly following behind. Leah began to sob. Her cries were loud and ugly, but they were no longer pent up.

Jacob pulled her into a tight hug, but it didn't help. He was warm—too warm—and with the sun baking her entire body, she hated this. She hated every single moment of this. It was so sunny today that it made her sick. The sun had the nerve to shine in this hellhole of a town they lived in while the human equivalent to the sun—Paul—wasn't even around anymore. He would never come back around.

She pulled out of Jacob's hug. "God," she muttered.

"What is it?"

"What is it?" she repeated. "Jake, do you know where we are? Or why we're here?"

"C'mon, Lee—"

"I knew Paul better than basically anybody else," she said, "and now he's dead. He's gone, Jake. He's always been coming and going, but he's never coming back."

"We know this," Jacob replied.

"Fuck, I almost wish Quil died instead," she admitted. "I mean, since this is all his fault, anyway."

"You're an awful fucking person for saying that," he told her. "That's fucked up."

"Well, it shouldn't have been Paul!"

"What, would you have preferred it was me who died?" he accused. "I was up there with the rest of 'em. It could have been me, you know."

"Oh my God, Jake, what the fuck?!" she exclaimed. "Of course, I don't wish it was you. Honestly, I feel super shitty for making you come to the beach that night when you didn't even want to go. You should have stayed home that night."

"Look, Leah," he said. "You can't tell me you want me around and then not want me around. You can't have it both ways and you know that. And Paul would have died if I wasn't there, anyway."

"Maybe," she said, her voice quieter. "I just wish he didn't die in a random act of violence. That's not how he wanted to go."

"Did he ever tell you how he really wanted to go?" Jacob asked. "Did he sit down and have a talk with you about it?"

"You're not gonna be a jerk-ass to me over this," she said. "Jake, I knew Paul. Really knew him. And you… you just put Bella on a pedestal because of whatever sick fantasy of her that you dedicated yourself to."

"What the hell are you even saying?" he demanded. "You can't compare them like that, Lee. You can't."

"I know how you view Bella," she said. "Everyone has always seen it. She's a fantasy to you, Jake. Even now. She had real problems and you turned them into cute personality traits because you thought she was gonna change your life. You said it yourself—you loved her because she was crazy."

The worst part of all this was that she was right.

Jacob hadn't loved Bella for who she'd been. He'd loved bits and pieces of her. He had preferred the non-suicidal part of her. He had loved the girl who had thrived in the summer, who had made him laugh and made him feel alive. He had loved the girl who had challenged him, not the girl who had made him want to cry and angered him and had him praying that he'd exit her line of fire unscathed.

She's not perfect, he thought. Bella was never as perfect as I wanted her to be.

"Why did you love Paul?" he asked Leah.

She dwelled on the question, her tired, red eyes filling up with tears again. She cracked a sad smile.

"That's it?" she asked. "That's your question?"

Jacob nodded. "That's it."

"I loved him because nobody else could. Nobody else knew how."

Leah felt herself burning underneath her black dress and the white sun. She was uncomfortable, but she realized it couldn't get much worse. She was starting to see pink, but it was only because she was looking on the bright side. She didn't have a choice.

If she had to turn all her pain, all her fear, and all her other negative feelings into beauty now, then that was what she would do.

Under the hot sun and blue sky, she stretched out her arm and took Jacob's hand. The feeling was familiar and platonic. She gave him a small smile, her salty tears already drying onto her cheeks.

"I'll see you around," she told him solemnly.

"I've still got you," he promised.

"I've still got you, too."

They were silent for a moment before he asked, "Is this goodbye?"

Leah never thought she would have to say goodbye to Jacob Black a day in her life.

"It might be," she told him. Then she let go of his hand and headed towards the bright blue sky without even a cloud in sight.

A/N: I'll catch you in the finale, dropping sometime on Wednesday, February 1st.

Thanks as always,

HS