Work Text:
Emily Young never remembers her dreams.
She just—wakes, never quite sure why. Rolling soft, bittersweet edges between her teeth, unable to conjure more than a gentle blue shape…
This morning, there’s a shudder too. A catch in her breath, lungs stinging with the same cold that crawls down her spine. The bed is empty, Sam’s warmth long-since crept out of the tangle of the blankets.
She rolls over and makes bleary eye contact with the clock.
5:13.
Not surprising, exactly. Sam’s been away more and more every day that this red-haired vampire has lingered—dragging himself out to morning patrols so Jared doesn’t have to run them alone no matter how many times he says he likes it, staying out later than anyone else in the evenings under the guise of helping Embry adjust.
It’s still funny, if she thinks too much about how quickly she got used to sleeping with someone else. How inevitably an empty bed drags her out of slumber, earlier than she’d ever want to be up on her own…
The space heater in the corner hisses sympathetically.
“Damn you,” she tells it, and folds her pillow firmly over her ears.
Sam must’ve turned it on before he left—after all, there’s no need for it with him and his furnace-hot self in the bed. The little kindness, like all of the little unbearably gentle things about Sam, makes her stomach squirm.
The heater grumbles again.
“Mmph,” she replies, and kicks her feet free of the tangled blankets.
The shock of cold air down her calves jolts her the rest of the way up. Spring is creeping steadily in, sunlight lingering longer every day, but the mornings are still frostbitten silver. Her right arm aches with it, a tug deep in the muscle.
She sighs, and takes an extra second rolling out her wrist before she heaves herself out of bed.
These mornings alone have accumulated their own kind of routine, and Emily has to admit there’s something satisfying in the gentle rhythm.
(Though she’d still like to sleep in past six one of these days.)
Coffee first.
She slouches out to the kitchen and cracks the curtains of the little window above the sink—right now dawn itself is still a dream, night-indigo dappling toward violet at best, but eventually the sun will wash in and illuminate the whole room. She spins away from the frosted glass to set the coffee machine on the counter grinding to life.
Back to the bedroom. She takes an extra minute today to lotion her scars—a few of the ones on her shoulder are flaking and irritated—before she gets dressed. Then it’s eyedrops for her right eye, and the little silver engagement ring slides onto her left hand. She flicks her thumb once, twice, over the pearl set in the middle of it, then shoves back to her feet.
It’s Saturday, so she doesn’t need to worry about getting her class stuff together, or breakfast-to-go for the drive to the Pencol campus in Forks. (There is an essay for her Curriculum Development course due Monday that she should probably start working on, but that is most definitely a problem for two-cups-of-coffee-Emily.)
Today, she can just wander back to the kitchen. The coffee machine splutters through the last few drops; she snags her favorite mug out of the dish drainer and fills it.
Lavender streaks the sliver of sky behind the window now, filtered gently through the shadowy brush of pine needles. She grips her coffee firmly in both hands and lets the heat half-scald her palms, instead of picturing the way ice would brush her fingertips through the not-quite-frosted glass.
A shudder dances down her spine.
She ignores it, burns the roof of her mouth on the first sip of coffee, and sets it down so she can kick the fridge open. (Sometimes, like this morning, you have to shove the door closed harder and hold the edge braced so it actually opens—one of her second cousins left this house to her mom, and the refrigerator is one of the many, many ancient furnishings she and Sam had no chance of affording to replace.)
The door obliges, this time. She fishes her saran-wrapped mixing bowl out of its tiny spot on the cluttered middle shelf, and goes hunting for a spatula.
She made the dough for blueberry muffins last night, when statistics from her child development homework were starting to blur together into a throbbing headache and she needed to blast music and do something thoughtless for a bit. Which is lucky for her today, because she probably has about two hours before a horde of teenage boys descends on her house, and one round of pastries will not be enough.
On weekends, the whole pack (minus whoever looked the most sleep-deprived the night before) run the morning shift together, and they crash her and Sam’s house without fail afterward.
Tipping chairs onto wobbly legs, boasting way too loudly about dubious vampire-killing expertise—one is luck, two’s a coincidence, three makes it a pattern, Emily likes to tell Sam, and he harrumphs in response—and eating everything they can get their hands on…though Paul and Jared, at least, will make sheepish grocery runs for her in exchange.
They monopolize her living room, for Mario Kart tournaments or poker games with cheetos as the stakes or obscenely loud games of Pit, (which Jared swears has a point other than just yelling, but no one really believes him). Rarely, there are study sessions for the four of them who are nominally still in school.
They leave trails of crumbs, stains of tree sap, bins full of shredded clothes. (Emily really needs to get into sewing, or else find someone with a use for all these T-shirt scraps.) They pile the dishes they wash for her so precariously in the drainer that Emily holds her breath the whole time she puts them away.
And she loves it.
There are shapeshifters fighting vampires, and after they killed one they came to sit on the floor of her kitchen and drink hot chocolate to celebrate. One of her dining room walls is taken up with a huge laminated map that they dry-erase schedules and vampire sightings and patrol routes on (and occasional doodled stick figures or you-just-lost-the-game’s or you-owe-me-six-dollars-Embry’s).
On their last hiking trip, her boyfriend—her fiance—turned into a wolf and let Emily climb onto his back and cling there as he jogged through the woods—
A glob of dough splatters out of the bowl, misses the tin, and lands squarely on her toe.
(On instinct, she’s halfway to turning to defend herself, spatula raised to flick retaliatory dough. The countertop next to the fridge is empty, of course. The snorting laugh is just in the back of her head, and there’s no one to blame for the mess but her own carelessness.)
She shakes herself back to the present, scrapes the cold mush off on the cabinet baseboard, and sets down the mixing bowl for another swig of coffee.
She should turn on more lights.
The muffins are just about perfectly done when she hears the roar of a truck engine outside.
Which is—enough to give her pause.
The boys don’t drive to her house. They topple down onto four legs and race through the trees, snapping jaws into the wind and the misty sunlight. They shake and shudder into human forms naked on the porch, and dig through the bins of thrift-store clothes she’s taken to leaving next to every creaking door.
(And she doesn’t get other visitors, really. Not since…)
She inhales to a count of four. Holds. The back of her right arm itches, and she scrubs her palm across it as she exhales.
She takes a step toward the front window. The roaring engine outside sputters off, into the trailing creaks of old, too-hot metal settling. She grabs the edge of a curtain—
Jared’s voice floats through the screen, raised in unmistakable triumph. Her jaw stings as gritted teeth relax.
Behind her, the timer beeps its one-minute warning.
Fine, she thinks, and spins back to dig up her oven mitt. The boys have brought someone with them. It’s fine. She’ll know soon enough who it is, whether…
She’ll know.
She kicks the oven door open, a little more violently than is probably necessary, and slams the pan down on top of the stove. The muffins steam, perfectly done and golden-browned. The smell of them is perfectly sweet on her tongue when she inhales.
She strips the oven mitt off and reaches for the glass jar of sugar on the counter to her left. When she first scatters the granules, they just sit there sadly, but then they start melting into a perfect, glimmering crust—
The door bounces open, followed by a shuffle and scatter of feet. At least two of the boys, with their exuberant shoving steps. She’s right in the middle of popping a muffin out of the tin, but she calls teasingly back over her shoulder—“You guys hungry?”
There have been so many arguments in this kitchen about the fact that Jared’s the only one who even tries to eat before morning shifts, and he just scarfs down dry instant oatmeal packets. It’s honestly worse than not eating any breakfast at all.
She shuffles the muffin down onto the plate and turns.
Jared, first through the door as always. Embry, stepping politely out of his muddy shoes. And—
An unfamiliar white girl, who’s staring wide-eyed at exactly half of Emily’s face.
The second Emily manages to turn that into eye contact, the girl drops her gaze immediately to the muffin tin Emily’s still holding.
Oh.
She can’t help glancing over to Jared—he pulls a wincing face, which is…at least he’s apologetic, but it really doesn’t answer any of Emily’s questions.
“Who’s this?” she asks.
The girl looks back up, intensely enough that Emily’s pulled back to studying her just by surprise at the motion.
The stranger is now very obviously doing her best to look at only the left half of Emily’s face. It’s a little bit funny, and a lot like a pit settling in Emily’s stomach.
“Bella Swan,” Jared shrugs. “Who else?”
Of course. Jacob Black almost flipped the kitchen table over this particular topic last week—she deserves to know! I bet she can tell us stuff that’s helpful! What if the vampires were after her specifically!—and Sam has been literally pulling his hair out about it every night since. Of course she was going to end up here. Emily doesn’t know why she’s even surprised.
Though she has to admit, she’d expected a girl who dates vampires to look a lot less…boring.
“Leave it to Jacob to find a way around,” she says instead of any of that.
Bella Swan twitches nervously—her eyes flick over to the right side of Emily’s face, dart down onto her neck, and then refocus on just Emily’s left eye. The burning in Emily’s stomach gets worse.
“So, you’re the vampire girl?”
That gets her—she jolts into standing straighter and really looks at Emily for the first time.
“Yes,” she says, and juts her chin. “Are you the wolf girl?”
Embry and Jared laugh at that, and Emily can’t help joining in.
She also can’t help the faint thrill of electricity down her spine at all the implications of it—something ferocious. Something more. The wolf girl.
“I guess I am,” she says, and turns away.
Emily knows, of course, that she should be used to it.
It’s not like people are particularly creative about staring.
The list of options is short enough that she had it memorized before the first month was up. Curiosity. Disgust. Shock. Horror. Pity—which is sometimes a pale kind of attempt at sympathy, but both taste sour enough that she doesn’t bother differentiating.
(Often, here in La Push, she’s lucky enough to get an occasional hint of judgment thrown in. The people who spent years before this watching Sam hand-in-hand and star-dazzled-eyes for—for—someone else. Sometimes it isn’t slack jaws and soft gasps, it’s pursing lips and hissing whispers of her cousin. There’s a sick sort of satisfaction to that, at least. There are still some things that make her scars an afterthought.)
(Emily doesn’t go out much, regardless.)
She knows. She knows, she’s used to it.
Sometimes she paces their tiny bedroom waving her arms and ranting, ignoring how it always makes Sam look vaguely sick to his stomach. Most of the time, she doesn’t bother.
Most of the time, it doesn’t even bother her. (It can’t, or she’d never do anything at all.)
But Bella Swan is becoming—
Not quite an exception. Actually, not an exception at all.
Which is the whole problem.
The girl is curious and disgusted and horrified, and worst of all so clearly full of an overwhelming, self-righteous pity that means she won’t meet Emily’s eyes for longer than a second.
None of which stops her from staring whenever Emily isn’t looking.
As if she thinks Emily won’t notice the pressure of eyes scanning down her face, probing at her neck, snagging in horrified fascination on the ropy ridges of scar.
As if she thinks Emily can’t see out of her right eye, to catch the way Bella fucking Swan bites her lip and swallows and stares any time she’s hovering in that periphery—
And it’s nothing new. It isn’t. There are people in Emily’s classes who do the exact same thing every time she walks into a room, no matter how many times they’ve seen her before.
Emily’s mom does this exact thing—albeit with an added side of horror and grief that twists so very sharply into Emily’s stomach.
This is nothing, in comparison.
This is one stupid girl who ends up in Emily’s house because she has nowhere else to go.
She’s clearly uninterested in—maybe incapable of?—being friends. Stammeringly quiet, dripping guilt in every second she spends shadowing Emily around the kitchen and the garden and folding up into corners on the floor in the living room—
It doesn’t matter what she thinks.
Emily has a sinking suspicion that it’s getting to her anyway.
There’s an ache in her arm now, pulling from the ruined tendons of her wrist up to her shoulder—no matter how diligently she massages in the lotion, morning and evening, it stings and stings. Dead white skin peels off the purpled keliods all over her right side.
She digs her fingers in once or twice, for a beat too long, and pulls away with the same flakes caked under her nails.
“Em,” Sam says—low and rough and urgent. “Em.”
She rolls slowly into consciousness. His hands are on her shoulders, tangled in her hair, his arms trembling in the silver-black light.
“Sam?” she croaks, and—oh. Her throat feels…raw. Tastes like copper.
“Em.” He wilts visibly into relief. “Were you…having a nightmare?”
Sweat seeps down her spine and pools against the mattress. Her toes are tingling in cool air, sheets thrashed off her bare feet. She doesn’t remember, but her cheeks feel hot, and she can feel her right eye watering.
“I don’t know,” she says.
His hands waver against her skin—flutter for a moment, the prelude to letting her go, then press back into her skin. He’s fever-warm. Pressing so hard she can almost believe she feels the whorls of his fingerprints.
“You were screaming my name,” he says.
Emily closes her eyes, and rolls lightly out of his reach.
“I don’t know,” she says again. “I’m sorry.”
Something has to change, she thinks, something has to change.
Because if it doesn’t…
She snaps over, of all things, the dishes.
The boys usually do them as thank-you for her cooking, but today Jared came howling in late with news of a fresh scent trail leading off the cliffs near his granddad’s—meaning the vampire could reemerge anywhere on the coast.
The pack followed him out with barely a word, leaving her with a sink full of dishes and a hasty kiss from Sam brushed across the unscarred tips of her fingers.
Leaving just Emily Young and Bella Swan.
The other girl starts gathering dishes immediately. Emily can’t tell whether to be appreciative—at least she’s helping—or annoyed with the fact that the other girl can’t even seem to sit still in a room with Emily for a minute.
Maybe that’s unfair. No, it is. Emily’s being unfair.
She breathes, and clenches her left hand around her right until the grind of bones and the pull of muscle settles her stomach. Then she steps into the kitchen.
And it’s fine. Bella washes plates and hands them silently over for Emily to stack into the dish drainer. She does a good job, striking the balance of just enough foaming bubbles to get the dishes shining clean, steam curling off the metal sink basin, but also water saved in a way that speaks of long practice. She rolls her sleeves up and scrubs with fury.
It’s—Emily appreciates it. She does.
But then she reaches out for a frying pan, and Bella’s eyes snag on her hand—and the other girl fumbles the pass—and she swallows—and her gaze drifts inevitably up to Emily’s cheek—
Emily slams the frying pan down. Water splatters across the counter and soaks into the hem of her shirt.
“Okay, enough.” Emily snaps. Her heart hammers in her ears, thrashes against her ribs. “You know I can see you, right?”
The other girl’s cheeks go vividly, spectacularly red. She wrings her hands together and ducks her head back toward the sink.
No, Emily thinks, staring at that curtain of hair, heart still pounding.
She’s not letting this go. She’s done. She’s doing something. She can do something, she has to do something—because this, at least, she can control.
This one thing, she can try to make right for herself.
She grits her teeth, clings to the rubber handle of the pan, and tries to do the same with her patience.
“I can explain what happened, if you really need. But this—the staring—you have to stop. I’m letting you into my home. I would—just, you’re making me uncomfortable and I need you to stop. Please.”
“Sorry,” the girl says, “sorry, I…sorry.”
Her interlaced hands twitch apart for a moment, grab the sponge, then set it back down.
She still won’t look at Emily.
“I know they’re—a lot,” Emily forces out after another curdling moment of silence. “But if I can get used to them, I mean—”
She bites her tongue, cutting off the sentence before it can wobble any further into self-pity or regret, or any other fuel for Bella Swan’s self-righteous horror.
She inhales, and pries her fingers off the frying pan before the cramping in her damaged tendons gets any worse.
“Do you want me to explain what happened?” she asks instead.
Bella’s neck goes blotchy, vivid red as well. She picks up the sponge again, plucking at the balled-up fuzz accumulating on its back.
“Um,” she says, swallows. “Um, no, well, Jacob, Jacob did tell me. Already. What happened.”
“Oh.” Emily—freezes, just the slightest bit, in her skin.
It isn’t that she’s angry, exactly.
Really. She isn’t.
Jacob thought it a kindness, she’s sure—just like all the times Sam has growled at people not to stare, and she’s swallowed something bittersweet that’s not quite gratitude—
It’s meant to spare her an explanation, a confrontation, all of this current horrible moment she’s stewing in. It’s kind. It’s also…
She’s never actually said it herself. (Not the true version, at least, instead of the story about startled bears that she has to give most of the horrified people who ask.)
By the time she woke up, smothered in gauze in a plastic hospital cot, Sam had already yelled his self-incrimination to everyone in La Push who could know, and more than a few of them had the whole memory of the event as crystal-clear as if they’d all been there themselves.
Watching her make what shouldn’t have been a mistake, spitting words that shouldn’t have changed her life forever—
She isn’t angry and she isn’t disappointed. Because it’s a kindness to not have to fumble for her own words, startled and off-guard here in her kitchen with a damp dish towel twisting through her fingers. It’s a kindness, to not have to choose how much she wants to tell, and weigh how much of Sam’s story is hers to spill in the first place—she knows firsthand, after all, how impossible it is to resolve that equation with everyone satisfied.
And yet…
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Bella babbles. She glances up from the sponge, and—are those tears in the corners of her eyes? Emily almost laughs, except surely she must be seeing that wrong. Why would the other girl be crying right now?
“I know I shouldn’t have been staring, but I just…I don’t know, I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m sorry it made you feel weird though, really, I didn’t...I didn’t mean to.”
“...alright,” Emily says, once it becomes clear Bella’s sputtered out. “I mean, as long as you stop, it’s alright.”
“Are you sure?” Bella gulps out, and the shine in the corner of her eyes is certainly tears.
What is Emily supposed to say to that?
Of course it’s not alright.
(Nothing about any of this has been alright since the day her cousin’s boyfriend showed up at Emily’s back door telling her he would love her for the rest of her life or else die.)
But she’ll feel a hell of a lot better if they can just stop having this conversation.
Because really, really, what could Emily possibly say right now? Who does Bella Swan think she is, that Emily would just spill her heart to her? Or does she want Emily to be mad at her?
As if this one conversation about the staring was just as bad as the scars themselves. As if it couldn’t have been simple and easy and long-over.
(As if this one minor irritation even compares to everything else that Emily has forgiven. Everything else that she would forgive, in a heartbeat, if Leah would just—)
She slams her train of thought short, and unwinds one hand from the dishtowel to pick up the frying pan.
“I’m sure,” she says crisply. “Thank you.”
She goes back to drying, and pretends she can’t see Bella swiping away those inexplicable tears.
Emily Young never remembers her dreams—
And so this will all be gone in the morning.
Soon, and an infinity from now, she’ll wake up to a hissing space heater and a tangle in the blankets that still smells like Sam, with an ache spidering down her shoulder and an excitement twinging in the back of her mind for her great-aunt’s loom, finally dug out of storage and set up in the living room.
Soon, she’ll be awake and dreaming what she chooses—thinking about weaving tapestries and baking goods and passing the unit quiz next Tuesday, another step closer to a teaching license.
Soon, she won’t remember this.
But now—
Emily stands in the bright, familiar woods of her childhood, the familiar cold-salt scent of Neah Bay heavy on her tongue. Across the clearing from her, hands balled into fists, stands a girl she hardly recognizes. It’s herself, but both of her cheeks eerily smooth, her pointing right hand untrembling, her eyes flashing, both of them blown wide.
Inches from the younger Emily, a boy is frozen halfway through exploding into a blur of black claws and red jaw.
Emily should go to them, maybe—shove the strange tableau back into motion. Drag herself out of the line of fire, or shove Sam backward all the way into the bay she can hear humming in the distance. Take back the words seething on her tongue, spin her no into something polite and perfect instead of a knife jabbed into the soft flesh of Sam’s fear of becoming his father—or else cut harder, deeper.
In the dream, she thinks, I should tell him to go. In the dream, she thinks I should tell him to die, then, and don’t you dare pin it on me.
In the dream, she thinks if I can only choose one of you, I choose her. I always choose her. I wouldn’t have saved you if I knew it would cost me her.
In the dream, she still says none of it.
After all, even in her dream she isn’t sure she means it.
She looks down at her hands.
One of them is shredded to ribbons, all the purple and brown keloid she vaguely remembers building spun back open to glistening red. The other wears a pearl ring and a purple-blue friendship bracelet that unraveled off her wrist years ago.
For a guilty eternity, she can’t look away herself. She can’t look away from the damage. She stares, and stares, and stares—small and wondering—this is awful, this is unfair, why did this happen to me, how am I supposed to go on—
Footsteps scuff through the plants next to her. For one dizzy, delirious moment, still staring at the ruin of her hands, she thinks: good. Look. I didn’t choose this, you see, right, I was telling him to leave.
For one delirious, dizzy moment, she lets herself hope—she thinks Leah?
She turns her head to the right.
The motion spurts more red stickily down her neck. It’s an odd feeling, her pulse shoving so fervently against her skin.
Oh, Emily’s standing next to herself—all of six years old, a tiny bit sunburnt from days on the sea with her grandfather, eyes wide and solemn, braids painstakingly even and tied with silky pink ribbons.
“Did we deserve it?” she asks herself around two missing canines, then squeezes her tiny right eye closed and cocks her head. “Do we?”
She looks to her left instead. They aren’t this close to the bay—that shouldn’t be the direction toward it at all, even, that’s the way inland, back toward the home she and Sam walked away from to get here—
But the waves ripple and shine so close she can feel their spray on her skin, and seafoam sweeps up and down the gray sand like a long blink.
“I’m just trying to live,” she tells the ocean, one of her eyes watering. “I don’t know whether what I did was right. I didn’t need to be reminded of it. Why do I have to be reminded of it?”
“Why are they looking at us like that?” her little self asks.
Emily stares harder at the ocean, doesn’t turn around for the crowd of gazes burning down the back of her neck.
“None of this was fair,” she tells the ocean.
Waves sweep in and out again.
“Why aren’t we doing something?” the tiny girl asks, frustration swelling—was Emily really ever that impatient?
She looks down just in time to see the little girl balling both her hands into fists, rushing forward with her pink ribbons bouncing.
She crashes into the explosion tableau, and this time it’s the kid who stumbles too close into reach of those claws, and Emily can see the guilt in Sam’s expanding eyes, and there’s nothing, nothing, nothing she can do—
She looks back toward the ocean, eyes stinging, clinging to that wide, rolling blue.
Her stomach churns.
She wakes, rolling bittersweet edges between her teeth. Her right cheek aches. Sam’s side of the bed is going cold.
What am I supposed to do? she thinks for a bleary second, still struggling her way out of the shapeless blue—
The heater hisses in the corner. She squeezes her eyes shut, opens them again, focuses. Red numbers coalesce: 5:42.
Saturday, the back of her mind supplies.
She crawls upright, arching her back until it pops. Her wrist aches.
She needs to go downstairs, start making coffee, wait for the morning patrol to tumble back to her door—assuming that nothing goes wrong, but if it does she has no way to know—and she might as well cook in the meantime. There’s a textbook chapter she’s supposed to have read by Tuesday, she might as well start that.
She sighs, rolls her neck until it stops hurting, and shoves upright. Spring air kisses the backs of her calves. Behind every curtain she passes the sun still waits to rise, but she can see the lavender of it starting to bruise the clouds.
She reaches the coffee maker and starts pouring in the grounds.