CHAPTER 31
Fall into Me – Forest Blakk
She hears a swish of fabric, and knows that Demetri is a few steps behind her like he usually is. She's familiar now, with the small sounds that he makes.
She wished he would go away. She was hurting and wanted to be alone. She wanted to replay what happened with the Cullens, how Seth put himself firmly on their side over hers. She wanted to berate herself for not handling things better. Her anxiety will never allow her to do anything else. She will obsess over every barb, every volley, and imagine all other possible outcomes. She wanted to sit with her loneliness and guilt.
She speeds up her steps, but of course Demetri keeps up.
She finally had enough and turned angrily to cuss him out. Demetri stood stoic at the barrage of verbal abuse. It annoys her that he never reacts to her tantrums, unlike literally everyone else that she had met. He just stands there, waiting for her to calm down. Which she does. She hates it, but his calmness was affecting.
Demetri's defiant façade of cold boredom was perfected in his thousand years with the Volturi. The she-wolf may be given to bouts of rages and rudeness, but he knew that ultimately, she was good.
"Let's go for a drive," he says, when she's stopped. Leah's hackles rise again at the invitation, but she was tired. She was also feeling a bit guilty for yelling at him. He didn't even say anything.
"Fine," she says, grudgingly.
Moments later, they were driving in an Italian sports car along a circular route around the nearby hills.
Her phone rang. Demetri glanced and saw the name 'Sue' flash. Leah declined the call like she always did. He didn't say anything. It wasn't the first time that he saw Leah declining to take a call from her mother.
Not offering any explanation, Leah stared at the scenery. Forests and beaches always calmed her. Although, it was a shame that they were not near enough to see the sea, and the trees in the forests here were not as dense as the Pacific Northwest.
"You are frowning?" Demetri prompted her, which brought her thoughts back to the fight earlier.
"Sometimes, I wish I was that kind of girl," she replied. Demetri raised an eyebrow.
"Oh, you know what I mean. I would cry, and everyone would drop their capes on a puddle for me or whatever."
Demetri chuckled. "I can't imagine you wanting to be such a woman, even sometimes."
"You're right. I'd roll around the mud to spite whoever is trying to help me instead."
Demetri tilted his head. "No one in there was trying to help you."
"I'm aware," Leah rolled her eyes. "But sometimes…" She stops. She was about to say, sometimes she wondered how different her life would be if she wasn't so hell-bent on being right. If she bit her tongue and stayed quiet at least some of the time. Maybe she would have actual friends. Or at least people who liked to spend time with her.
But admitting this was a weakness, and there was a part of her that held back from trusting Demetri fully.
Before he could reply, his car sputtered. He pulled to the side just in time before it died.
"Bloody contraption!" he said, irate.
"Sounds like the battery," Leah said.
"The what?" Demetri asked.
"Pop the hood," Leah said, pulling her long hair into a knot.
"What?"
Leah rolled her eyes, "Are you telling me that you've been alive long enough to be a fossil…"
"I am not that old."
"…but you don't know how to open a car's hood?"
"Of course I don't maintain cars. There are lemmings to do that."
"Oh, for fuck's sake… just get out of the car."
Leah went around to pull the lever for the hood. Demetri ignored how tiny her waist was as she leaned over the machine's engine. "Looks like I was right. When was the last time this car was taken for a drive?"
"I've been preoccupied with escorting your party."
"This hasn't been driven in weeks, then? You couldn't get a lemming to drive it for you?"
"They know better than to drive one of my vehicles."
"You have to drive a car regularly, or it breaks down just sitting in a garage."
"Well, then, I'll buy another. I've never kept a car long enough for it to break down."
"You and the Cullens, with your disposing cars as soon as they get a microscopic scratch. Cars are bad enough as they are, but so much consumption is terrible for the environment."
Demetri rolled his eyes, "Here you are with one of your lectures about climate and leather and meat and thrifting." He said the last word with almost a shudder. "I cannot, I will not, ever wear clothing that's been worn by someone else."
Leah didn't say anything, just raised her eyebrows and shook her head.
"Where did you even learn to do this?" Demetri waved a hand over the engine.
"My dad taught me. Benefits of being poor, you learn to fix a bunch of stuff."
"I cannot imagine any benefit to being poor."
"You're like what, about as old as Pangaea? Roughly?"
Demetri refused to take the bait.
"You never learned any basic thing about cars?"
"I happen to know a great many things," Demetri said defensively. He did not want to appear incompetent to Leah. "I can play almost any musical instrument in the world. I speak multiple languages…"
"Great. You can talk to the car in its native tongue and convince it to run. Or maybe next time, we'll take your octobass for a drive."
Demetri took a deep breath he didn't need. "Well, can you fix it?"
"Nope," Leah said.
"Then why lecture me if our situation remains the same in any case?"
Leah took a very deep breath that she really did need.
"Not my point, Gandalf." She looked at her phone. No signal. She surveyed the road they were on. It was rarely used that Leah wondered if it was private land. "Guess we should walk."
"We're close to a town. We can cut through the forest."
So they began to walk, at a human pace. If either realized that they could have run at full speed and not spent more time in each other's company, neither gave an indication of it. And neither checked their phone signal again.
Demetri had so many questions playing in his mind. It was hard to settle on just one.
"Do you not object to Jacob Black imprinting on Renesmee beyond the fact that it entraps the Cullens to live near your tribe?"
He wondered if maybe he chose wrong, if he pushed too far with the question. But imprinting he knew to be a big part of Leah Clearwater's life, and yet she had never brought it up.
Leah debated if she should respond. "I have a lot of my own theories about imprinting. None of which I care to share. In any case, no one wants to listen to what the bitter, jilted harpy has to say about it anyway."
"I wouldn't have asked if I didn't want to know what you thought," he paused, wondering if he should push further. "Do you believe the same as all the others, then? That it is soul mates finding each other?"
Leah scoffed. She had spent the better part of a whole decade talking to the voice in her head, the Spirit possessing her body. She knows it doesn't feel love, hope, grief. It doesn't belong in this world, so it doesn't follow this world's rules. It doesn't understand the emotions of this realm.
"I think that the imprinted, the imprintee, and everyone around them choose to believe whatever they want about it. It's easier that way."
Her mind flashed to the phone call with Charlie. He said something was going on with the imprinted couples on the rez. She wondered if he'd learned anything more.
"Hmm…" Demetri muttered.
"The elders are playing guessing games to explain the wolves. Since they're not wolves themselves and never have been, it makes the whole thing just so freaking dumb. Honestly? Your random ideas about imprinting are probably just as good as theirs ."
Demetri tilted his head, playing with this in his mind. "What are your ideas about it?"
Leah looked at him, "That's for me to know, and for you to not know."
He decides to drop the topic, not wanting her to end the conversation entirely. He decided instead to swerve to a lighter topic.
"So what happened to your woman-lover?"
"Which one?"
Demetri chuckled. "The one you told Miss Renesmee about."
Leah shrugged. "Same thing that happens to all my relationships."
"What's that?"
"I eat them," she said bluntly.
Demetri whipped his head towards her in surprise.
Leah rolled her eyes. "They always want more than I'm capable of giving. They always want me to stay."
"And you don't want to stay?"
Leah scoffed. "I run. It's what I do best."
Demetri inclined his head at this information. "What happens if you meet someone you can't run from?"
Leah hesitated. "Hasn't happened yet."
There was nothing Demetri could say at this, so they were quiet for several minutes.
"You don't speak to your mother."
Ah, so he did see, Leah thought. "No, I don't." She paused before adding, "We are not really close. I don't think we ever were, even when I was little. I guess some parents and kids just don't jive, you know? Personalities, maybe, or whatever. But with the whole thing…" with the pack, with me phasing to be the lone she-wolf, the imprinting, everything… "it's probably for the best that we don't spend so much time together." Leah said, nonchalantly. These are words she's repeated multiple times. It shielded her mom from being targeted if people thought she didn't care. And it shielded her from looking weak.
Demetri was silent for a few moments.
There was something in her tone of voice. He'd listened to her speak in all her various moods. He knows by now when she's being obstructive, if not fully dishonest, which she usually was whenever she was feeling vulnerable.
Before he could speak, Leah asks him, "What was your life like when you were human?"
Demetri falters at the question. It's been so long since he'd been asked, since he'd stopped thinking about it.
His mind was flooded with memories that were suppressed long ago. The past few days, he's been remembering more and more. He remembers how the warmth of the sun felt, or the drops of rain, or the sea wave. He remembers the taste of some foods he used to eat, before his change made them all putrid in his mouth. He remembers faces or names, rarely both, but still.
"I…," he clamps his mouth shut, because he feels himself beginning to stutter.
"I mean, you ask a lot about me," Leah said, somewhat teasingly. But he sensed (or hoped) that perhaps she had an inkling of what he was feeling.
"I was born poor… to a father with a heavy hand. My mother died when I was young, and my older sister did the bulk of my upbringing. Anthea. That was her name. Although, I don't remember now what she looked like. I don't remember anything at all about my father, other than I hated him. After he remarried, he sold Anthea to a wealthy man."
Leah made a face, and he had to smile. "It was the way back then. Girls were mouths to feed. A dowry is essentially payment from the parents for others to take their daughters off their hands.
"My sister and the man who bought her, a merchant, kept moving place to place. No matter where they went, no matter how much my father beat me, I always found them. Until my sister died giving birth to the man's child. This was the first manifestation of my ability.
My father and I survived with street performing..."
"Like juggling?" Leah said. Demetri had to laugh.
"Not quite so clownish. I was a musician. I still am," Demetri smiled at her. She felt a tightness in her chest. "I made a good amount of money finding people. You see, a thousand years ago, Greece, or what people now know as Greece, was racked with strife. Finding deserters, thieves, runaway slaves, spies, became invaluable. Word spread that if anyone needed a person to be found, they should ask the lyrist. And that was how my sire found me."
That was a simplified version of his human life. He left out a few other details. Perhaps someday, he will confide them all to Leah.
"Your sire was Amun? Carlisle said you didn't want to leave him."
"I didn't, though not out of any fondness for him. I was fond of Kebi, his mate. She reminded me of my sister. I just did not wish to serve anyone else. I wanted to be released of the sire bond, to be free."
"And yet, serve you did."
"Yes. Serve I did." Serve I do, Demetri thought sadly. For a thousand years. He suddenly felt the weight of his years.
Leah Clearwater had never served. When forced to, she broke free. And he knew. That even though his orders were to observe and research, the true goal is recruitment. Or destruction, if the she-wolf is a threat.
But she'll be destroyed anyway, if she joins the Volturi.
And Demetri did not want to witness that. He did not want see her soul get crushed. To see her personality, acrid though it may be, change for her own survival. He did not want her to serve the way he does.
To see her grieve all that she would be cut off from, should she join the Volturi.
"You should take calls from your mother." It was a statement.
Leah was a bit surprised by the switch. "No, I shouldn't," she replied with another statement, signaling that this was not a topic of conversation that will be continuing.
"You will come to regret that someday. Human lives are fragile and much too short." If he had said this a few weeks ago, Leah would have taken it as a threat. Now, she was just irritated at his prying.
"What the hell business is it of yours?"
"Is this what you want? To be alone?"
"Maybe I do want to be alone. That's my choice, isn't it?"
"You are not yet thirty years of age! And you are proclaiming that you wish to be alone. You cannot possibly comprehend what loneliness even means. Decade after decade. Century after century. All that you love will eventually die. And there will come a time, even if your perfect memory does remember them, when they will feel nothing more than a dream or a figment of your imagination. You do not know what it is to carry grief and loneliness and loss over a space of immeasurable time!"
Leah was quiet. This was probably the most emotion he'd shown since they met. Just when Demetri thought she would ignore what he said and just simply shut him out, she says, "You've been lonely a very long time haven't you?"
He had to take a small step back. He felt like a clumsy human slipping on ice, trying to get traction. What was it about this infernal woman?
Leah pursed her lips. "Do you know that one of the theories is that imprints are gifts to the wolves for their sacrifice?"
Demetri tilted his head, wondering where this was going.
"By their logic, I am neither worthy of receiving such a gift, nor am I worthy of being someone else's gift.
"You know that my fiance imprinted on my cousin, did you know how my mother celebrated? You know that I'm the only she-wolf, did you know what that felt like in the pack? If you had gone through what I went through, would you just get over it, forgive and forget, hold hands and sing kumbaya?"
Demetri softened, "You don't have to forgive without them giving their repentance. But when they try to reach out, meet them halfway. The time will come when they will no longer be there to reach out at all, and you will have nothing but your grief and your regrets, and your thoughts of what might have been. Don't blindly push them away thinking they will always be there for whenever you are ready to reach out.
And no matter what you might say, you are not quite as content with being alone as you profess. You burn all your bridges down, and wonder why people are not crossing. Don't do it for their benefit, do it for yours! Show yourself the same kindness and consideration you would give to a teenage girl with a broken heel."
Leah bit her lip. She hated emotional discussions. She wanted to run somewhere far away and not have to listen to this. But she knew that as fast as she might be, Demetri will be able to keep up.
"What if they're better off without me?" she said, almost unconsciously.
Demetri felt a twinging feeling in his chest, around the vicinity of a dead heart, "There is no version of a world that is better without you."
As he said the words, he realized how much he meant them.
And he was terrified.
NOTE: Been struggling with writing lately… I hope it makes sense what I'm aiming for with this pairing, how two people centuries apart in age might fall in love.