anythingbutgrey (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
anythingbutgrey) wrote2007-07-24 01:54 pm
anythingbutgrey) wrote2007-07-24 01:54 pm
Entry tags:
Twilight -- Conversations We Pretend Never Happened
title: Conversations We Pretend Never Happened
rating: PG?
pairing: Jacob/Bella
summary: He knows the rest of them know about her. He wants to keep her to himself, even the version in his mind. He has always been selfish.
spoilers: through new moon + the first chapter of eclipse in the back of new moon.
thanks to:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
infiniteskies for the beta and my lovely friend Lydia for writing a poem by the same title as this. Which I have stolen.
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
-- Sylvia Plath, ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’
She tells him about a poem she read in reverse.
She says, “I thought it would be funny to see how it went, and I was bored. It was years ago.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he laughs. His garage is filled with the faint smell of gasoline and strawberries.
She laughs too, the hollow laugh she has had since the Cullens left. She doesn’t know he can tell. He pays attention to pretty girls. He has always paid attention to her.
“It actually did,” she says, smiling quietly in remembrance. “It was an interesting perspective, like I was looking into the past and everything was backwards.”
He screws in a bolt. Normally he can’t hear anything when he works in the garage. He blocks everything out and he likes it. But he hears everything she says and even things she doesn’t. He likes that even more.
“Still sounds confusing,” he says. He has never been the type for poetry.
He watches her frown, remembering something else. The past is dangerous for her. “It was,” she says, sounding even further away.
He scrambles to find some way to distract her. He briefly thinks of ways to kill Edward Cullen if he comes back. He thinks about that a lot these days.
“I’ve never much been a fan of poetry,” he says. He lets his voice drop even deeper. “I’m into those manly things. Cars.”
She giggles at his tone and he smiles, successful. “I’ll bring some in tomorrow,” she says, determined, thoughtful.
He loves the way she says tomorrow like a promise.
***
Their tomorrows stop short. It’s not his fault, it’s not her fault, it’s the Cullens' and their name still tastes like dirt, but for a different reason now.
He shouts, “She would understand.” He shouts it to his father and to Sam and to Embry and Paul and Emily and everyone but Sam shudders when he says it. Sam just looks at Emily, thinks about how he brought her into this inner circle. Everyone can remember how beautiful she was.
He shouts so loud the trees shake. He shifts uncontrollably the first few days. Sam says that’s just how it goes. They all got angry too easily, he says, thinking of Emily again.
They say he’s a natural. They call it a gift. The word makes him spit. Too much tastes like mud these days.
He can control it so well because of her, not in spite of. After those first few days it is Bella that keeps him in check, it is Bella that whispers in his head at night words she would never say by the light of day. It is Bella that tells him he will be alright, to breathe. When he needs to shift, it is Bella that tells him he is not a monster.
It is for Bella that he learns control. One day, he hopes, he can be with her without seeing Emily’s face in his mind.
Just once he watched her from outside her house, keeping quiet under the trees. She smiled once at her father and she looked just as lost as she was before she found him. He found her. She found the bikes. He can’t keep it straight, who saved who and how.
He knows the rest of them know about her. He wants to keep her to himself, even the version in his mind. He has always been selfish.
***
The first time he’s alone after she finally figures it out he collapses to the ground, laughing and wheezing at the same time. He hadn’t realized it was taking him so much energy just to stand.
He spends too much time guarding her house. He thinks I am just protecting her, I am just protecting her as hard as he can and hopes they can’t hear the part where he doesn’t know exactly what he’s protecting her from. He knows it’s not just Victoria. It’s also the dark of night, the cold, a menacing breeze, the nightmares.
The first night he hears her scream he moves faster than he has ever moved in his life. It’s the night he thinks he’s too late and she’s dying, dead or worse. It’s the night he only keeps himself from changing because he wouldn’t fit through the window as a wolf. He thinks Victoria Victoria Victoria like a curse and tastes his own blood in his mouth. He has failed her. He will be sick behind a tree. They will find him in the morning, shirtless, shuddering and lost. People will look at him and think, What could possibly have happened to this poor child? People will ask him and he will not be able to answer. He will go mad.
He reaches her room and there’s no one there but her, her fist pressed against her mouth to keep from screaming again. It takes him a minute to re-learn how to breathe. They look at each other and she blinks, but is not afraid of him. She is afraid of something.
She is crying.
The fact makes his hands shake.
“What is it?” he whispers. His voice sounds like someone else’s. His heart pounds so hard he can feel it pulsing in his head.
She just shakes her head. Her mouth opens, closes, opens. No sounds come out.
He wants to ask if she’s okay and knows that’s a stupid question. He wants to ask her what he should do. He feels like he wouldn’t get an answer.
He takes her into his too-warm arms instead. Her skin is so cold he feels like he could melt her. Her body shakes with shivers and sobs, but she stays quiet.
He wishes she would make any noise at all so he knows she’s alive somewhere inside.
***
He wants to kiss her.
Looking at her makes his body feel like fire.
She would want to kiss him too, if they had had more time. He knows.
Time, however, has a habit of being uncooperative. It steals life away.
She runs because Edward Cullen is in danger and Jacob feels himself turning into nothing.
***
The others had starting combining them into one word, JacobandBella, like they were inseparable. He thought they were. He never argued.
Then the Cullens come back. He disappears into the woods for three days. No one on the reservation worries and everyone understands because they all know. About Bella, about him and Bella. There are few secrets on the reservation. There are enough, clearly, since he’s in a pack of teenage werewolves and no one knows, but the lesser, more human secrets, those are spilled inconsequentially, like water.
He comes back and goes to Emily, who always has hot tea and promises not to tell Sam when Jacob starts sobbing at her table. He swears never to go into his garage ever again. He knows he could still smell her in there, free of the sickly sweet stench the Cullens leave behind.
Even thinking their name leaves him sour inside.
***
He goes to warn Edward Cullen that if he so much as bites Bella the war will begin. Jacob thinks, very clearly, knowing the bloodsucker will hear him, If you hurt her, I will kill you myself.
Her voice is sharp as pins when she says, “That is none of your business,” and for the first time since before he changed, he feels his body turn to ice.
He tries to fight the shifting, the anger, the primeval desire to kill Edward Cullen. He thinks, If you kill him you will lose her forever and it doesn’t help because she is already so lost. He thinks, You would hurt Bella and he stops shaking.
“Ugh,” he says with the taste of blood and dirt, that same taste he has in his mouth when he thinks of the Cullens, of this Cullen. “I would never hurt her.”
They all notice how Edward Cullen flinches at that.
Jacob reaches out to her and she reaches out to him and for an instant he’s alive again. It doesn’t matter anymore, though, because Edward is back.
Jacob disappears into the woods again. He verges on losing himself entirely, and he knows the pack can hear him. Without Bella, he regresses to those first few days, the rage, the pain, the uncontrollable changes. He is anchorless and drifting.
Sam finds him at the beach where Jacob first met Bella. Or, re-met her. When he told her stories because she was interested and pretty. When they were nothing to each other.
Jacob has met Bella for the first time many times: before they can remember, at this beach, in his garage, at the movie theater, outside her house clinging to a monster. He is terrified that one day it will not be Bella he meets, but a twisted version of her, an enemy.
Something raw and repulsive scratches at his stomach and he thinks he may be sick.
“We’ll get them if they try to change her,” Sam says. “Before they have the chance, we’ll get them. Truce be damned.”
Jacob whispers the words like a mantra, so quietly he can’t hear his own voice. Be damned, be damned.
He shakes his head. “No matter what I’ll lose her,” he says and Sam looks surprised. Jacob doesn’t understand why. He realized that a long time ago, the instant Bella ran off to save her precious vampire and maybe even before.
They sit in silence for hours. The waves do not calm him like they used to, when he was a child. He should still be a child, and the knowledge that he is not makes him shudder.
He can imagine the taste of salty bitterness on his tongue, imagines the sea watering down the words of werewolf and vampire, the image of Bella becoming an unrecognizable watercolor.
The waves do not soothe him like they once did, though, and Bella’s face is crystalline.
***
She won’t stop writing him letters and he knows he has to end it somehow.
Dear Bella,
Yeah, I miss you too. It doesn’t change anything. Sorry.
He finally gets it out and wishes it would change everything.
He wants to sign it Love, Jacob, but he can’t anymore. He doesn’t even remember when he decided he loved her, when it became fact; historical, tangible fact. It came as naturally as breathing, as easy a transition as kneeling to sitting. He knows that the next time he changes they would know that he wrote it, and he’s not allowed to love her anymore.
They never say it, but her name carries an echo of traitor.
***
He still dreams all the things Bella never had to say:
I love you, but it’s not enough. You would always know you were second best, can you live with that? You saved my life. I love you, but not enough.
Can you live with that?
The answer is always yes.
---
feedback?
Whole Again - A Jacob/Bella Soundtrack
Sort of Beautiful - A Jacob/Bella Soundtrack
rating: PG?
pairing: Jacob/Bella
summary: He knows the rest of them know about her. He wants to keep her to himself, even the version in his mind. He has always been selfish.
spoilers: through new moon + the first chapter of eclipse in the back of new moon.
thanks to:
infiniteskies for the beta and my lovely friend Lydia for writing a poem by the same title as this. Which I have stolen.At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
-- Sylvia Plath, ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’
She tells him about a poem she read in reverse.
She says, “I thought it would be funny to see how it went, and I was bored. It was years ago.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he laughs. His garage is filled with the faint smell of gasoline and strawberries.
She laughs too, the hollow laugh she has had since the Cullens left. She doesn’t know he can tell. He pays attention to pretty girls. He has always paid attention to her.
“It actually did,” she says, smiling quietly in remembrance. “It was an interesting perspective, like I was looking into the past and everything was backwards.”
He screws in a bolt. Normally he can’t hear anything when he works in the garage. He blocks everything out and he likes it. But he hears everything she says and even things she doesn’t. He likes that even more.
“Still sounds confusing,” he says. He has never been the type for poetry.
He watches her frown, remembering something else. The past is dangerous for her. “It was,” she says, sounding even further away.
He scrambles to find some way to distract her. He briefly thinks of ways to kill Edward Cullen if he comes back. He thinks about that a lot these days.
“I’ve never much been a fan of poetry,” he says. He lets his voice drop even deeper. “I’m into those manly things. Cars.”
She giggles at his tone and he smiles, successful. “I’ll bring some in tomorrow,” she says, determined, thoughtful.
He loves the way she says tomorrow like a promise.
***
Their tomorrows stop short. It’s not his fault, it’s not her fault, it’s the Cullens' and their name still tastes like dirt, but for a different reason now.
He shouts, “She would understand.” He shouts it to his father and to Sam and to Embry and Paul and Emily and everyone but Sam shudders when he says it. Sam just looks at Emily, thinks about how he brought her into this inner circle. Everyone can remember how beautiful she was.
He shouts so loud the trees shake. He shifts uncontrollably the first few days. Sam says that’s just how it goes. They all got angry too easily, he says, thinking of Emily again.
They say he’s a natural. They call it a gift. The word makes him spit. Too much tastes like mud these days.
He can control it so well because of her, not in spite of. After those first few days it is Bella that keeps him in check, it is Bella that whispers in his head at night words she would never say by the light of day. It is Bella that tells him he will be alright, to breathe. When he needs to shift, it is Bella that tells him he is not a monster.
It is for Bella that he learns control. One day, he hopes, he can be with her without seeing Emily’s face in his mind.
Just once he watched her from outside her house, keeping quiet under the trees. She smiled once at her father and she looked just as lost as she was before she found him. He found her. She found the bikes. He can’t keep it straight, who saved who and how.
He knows the rest of them know about her. He wants to keep her to himself, even the version in his mind. He has always been selfish.
***
The first time he’s alone after she finally figures it out he collapses to the ground, laughing and wheezing at the same time. He hadn’t realized it was taking him so much energy just to stand.
He spends too much time guarding her house. He thinks I am just protecting her, I am just protecting her as hard as he can and hopes they can’t hear the part where he doesn’t know exactly what he’s protecting her from. He knows it’s not just Victoria. It’s also the dark of night, the cold, a menacing breeze, the nightmares.
The first night he hears her scream he moves faster than he has ever moved in his life. It’s the night he thinks he’s too late and she’s dying, dead or worse. It’s the night he only keeps himself from changing because he wouldn’t fit through the window as a wolf. He thinks Victoria Victoria Victoria like a curse and tastes his own blood in his mouth. He has failed her. He will be sick behind a tree. They will find him in the morning, shirtless, shuddering and lost. People will look at him and think, What could possibly have happened to this poor child? People will ask him and he will not be able to answer. He will go mad.
He reaches her room and there’s no one there but her, her fist pressed against her mouth to keep from screaming again. It takes him a minute to re-learn how to breathe. They look at each other and she blinks, but is not afraid of him. She is afraid of something.
She is crying.
The fact makes his hands shake.
“What is it?” he whispers. His voice sounds like someone else’s. His heart pounds so hard he can feel it pulsing in his head.
She just shakes her head. Her mouth opens, closes, opens. No sounds come out.
He wants to ask if she’s okay and knows that’s a stupid question. He wants to ask her what he should do. He feels like he wouldn’t get an answer.
He takes her into his too-warm arms instead. Her skin is so cold he feels like he could melt her. Her body shakes with shivers and sobs, but she stays quiet.
He wishes she would make any noise at all so he knows she’s alive somewhere inside.
***
He wants to kiss her.
Looking at her makes his body feel like fire.
She would want to kiss him too, if they had had more time. He knows.
Time, however, has a habit of being uncooperative. It steals life away.
She runs because Edward Cullen is in danger and Jacob feels himself turning into nothing.
***
The others had starting combining them into one word, JacobandBella, like they were inseparable. He thought they were. He never argued.
Then the Cullens come back. He disappears into the woods for three days. No one on the reservation worries and everyone understands because they all know. About Bella, about him and Bella. There are few secrets on the reservation. There are enough, clearly, since he’s in a pack of teenage werewolves and no one knows, but the lesser, more human secrets, those are spilled inconsequentially, like water.
He comes back and goes to Emily, who always has hot tea and promises not to tell Sam when Jacob starts sobbing at her table. He swears never to go into his garage ever again. He knows he could still smell her in there, free of the sickly sweet stench the Cullens leave behind.
Even thinking their name leaves him sour inside.
***
He goes to warn Edward Cullen that if he so much as bites Bella the war will begin. Jacob thinks, very clearly, knowing the bloodsucker will hear him, If you hurt her, I will kill you myself.
Her voice is sharp as pins when she says, “That is none of your business,” and for the first time since before he changed, he feels his body turn to ice.
He tries to fight the shifting, the anger, the primeval desire to kill Edward Cullen. He thinks, If you kill him you will lose her forever and it doesn’t help because she is already so lost. He thinks, You would hurt Bella and he stops shaking.
“Ugh,” he says with the taste of blood and dirt, that same taste he has in his mouth when he thinks of the Cullens, of this Cullen. “I would never hurt her.”
They all notice how Edward Cullen flinches at that.
Jacob reaches out to her and she reaches out to him and for an instant he’s alive again. It doesn’t matter anymore, though, because Edward is back.
Jacob disappears into the woods again. He verges on losing himself entirely, and he knows the pack can hear him. Without Bella, he regresses to those first few days, the rage, the pain, the uncontrollable changes. He is anchorless and drifting.
Sam finds him at the beach where Jacob first met Bella. Or, re-met her. When he told her stories because she was interested and pretty. When they were nothing to each other.
Jacob has met Bella for the first time many times: before they can remember, at this beach, in his garage, at the movie theater, outside her house clinging to a monster. He is terrified that one day it will not be Bella he meets, but a twisted version of her, an enemy.
Something raw and repulsive scratches at his stomach and he thinks he may be sick.
“We’ll get them if they try to change her,” Sam says. “Before they have the chance, we’ll get them. Truce be damned.”
Jacob whispers the words like a mantra, so quietly he can’t hear his own voice. Be damned, be damned.
He shakes his head. “No matter what I’ll lose her,” he says and Sam looks surprised. Jacob doesn’t understand why. He realized that a long time ago, the instant Bella ran off to save her precious vampire and maybe even before.
They sit in silence for hours. The waves do not calm him like they used to, when he was a child. He should still be a child, and the knowledge that he is not makes him shudder.
He can imagine the taste of salty bitterness on his tongue, imagines the sea watering down the words of werewolf and vampire, the image of Bella becoming an unrecognizable watercolor.
The waves do not soothe him like they once did, though, and Bella’s face is crystalline.
***
She won’t stop writing him letters and he knows he has to end it somehow.
Dear Bella,
Yeah, I miss you too. It doesn’t change anything. Sorry.
He finally gets it out and wishes it would change everything.
He wants to sign it Love, Jacob, but he can’t anymore. He doesn’t even remember when he decided he loved her, when it became fact; historical, tangible fact. It came as naturally as breathing, as easy a transition as kneeling to sitting. He knows that the next time he changes they would know that he wrote it, and he’s not allowed to love her anymore.
They never say it, but her name carries an echo of traitor.
***
He still dreams all the things Bella never had to say:
I love you, but it’s not enough. You would always know you were second best, can you live with that? You saved my life. I love you, but not enough.
Can you live with that?
The answer is always yes.
---
feedback?
Sort of Beautiful - A Jacob/Bella Soundtrack