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the-most-pathetic-edge-marquis · 1 year

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i was thinking about werewolves, and legends about calling someone you love by their name to transform them back, how much love that must take (and how that maybe wouldn’t be a good thing), and...

dream of the place where nothing is red

an au where jacob black is a full-blown, full-moon, body-horror werewolf. this story is nothing but vibes, please don’t overthink it. also, mild body horror ahead, enter at your own risk

(as always text below the read-more for those of you who prefer to read on tumblr; about 3,000 words!)

Bella stands on the cliffs and clenches her fists.

She’s put it together, all the pieces of clues, all the truths she didn’t want to admit.

The phone rattling to life in the midnight-dead-quiet of the house, startling her out of sleep to listen to Charlie stumbling and swearing through the dark. Grim reports and bodies in a morgue, in a too-regular rhythm, spaced almost far enough not to notice.

Pawprints torn bloody into black dirt, the dragging trails of heavy claws—too large to be anything but a bear, too unmistakably canine to pretend they are. Whispered stories between hikers in the store shelves.

Unanswered calls, ringing out and out to a full voicemail box to, eventually, the click of a disconnected line.

I’m not good anymore, a cracked voice, and cracked nails on shaking fingers. Rain pouring down and down and down, choking, drowning—

The moonlight silver on the waves.

Ssh, the ocean roars, crashes and churns and spits bitter salt against the rocks, so far below her it sounds like a whisper. You hear it. He’s coming.

She does. Not howls, for all that some part of her is braced for a high and piercing voice to split the lonely night. Just the thunder of footfalls, the huge heaving breaths of something too big to exist, branches snapping on its back as it churns toward her through the trees.

She inhales, and clings to the cold in her lungs. The cut on her forearm, so long and deep her brain has whited out the pain, pulses—she can feel cool liquid sliding down her wrist, taste the rusty, sour smell on the air. Her heart beats, furious as the waves. Blood drips off her fingertips, splashes onto lichen-streaked stone.

Above the forest, the full moon gleams.

And the werewolf bursts through the trees.

A scream flails in Bella’s throat. She bites her lip, refuses to let the sound free.

It’s huge.

Except even that isn’t enough to describe it, nowhere near.

The creature across the clearing—slinking to a wary halt at the sight of her, pawing at the place where forest melts to clifftop with a horrible screech of claws against stone—is so big that part of Bella’s brain has stuttered to a stop just trying to make sense of it.

Its head looms higher than hers, even on all four paws. Jaws snap open, closed, open. A red tongue lashes out over black lips, both oozing a darkness she won’t try to name. Teeth burn white in the moonlight, fangs so long Bella thinks she could wrap a hand around one and her fingers wouldn’t meet on the other side of it.

Muscle ripples under russet-red fur as it paces, tossing that huge shaggy head, and the force would be enough to tear her limb from limb without any effort at all.

Some shivering part of her wails run, RUN, but she knows it’s far too late for that.

She’s left herself only one way out.

Over the edge of the cliff. Down into the hungry roar of the waves. Maybe luring the monster after her if she’s lucky. If she’s quick and clever enough to make one last difference, even though her life has meant less than nothing since Edward left her—

The wolf shudders, tosses its head high one last time…and steps onto the stone.

Muscles coil in its back legs, readying for a spring. Its eyes burn in the heavy shadows under that bristling fur—she can’t tell quite where they end or begin, but she can tell they’re locked on her.

For one last moment, she pictures turning. Jumping. Both of them plummeting down into a rush of silver bubbles—drowning together, sinking somewhere neither of them can hurt anyone ever again. Dying this time not in the place of someone she loves, but with them, gripped in their jaws and thrashing down, down, down together.

But her heart pounds and the waves crash and adrenaline is as sharp and as bright in her veins as the gleaming moon overhead.

There’s a different story clenched in her fists tonight.

The wolf, (the huge slavering bloody-mouthed monster, the killer with screeching claws and bristling fur and a lashing tail), leaps.

Bella stands straight, summons every ounce of air in her aching lungs.

“Jacob Ephraim Black.”

Her voice cracks, but it doesn’t shake, and the wolf—the werewolf (the terrified, trembling monster out of place in these woods and knowing it, with too-bright eyes and jagged, wheezing breaths desperate to fill too-large lungs)—

Stops. Gracelessly, furiously, crashing to a halt at the last instant, digging claws into stone and sending shards of it flying—one grazes Bella’s cheek, slices it open.

It's so close that Bella can smell the sour-rot scent of someone else’s blood dripping from the jaws bare inches above her, so close that hot breath gusts across her face and sends shudders down her spine.

So close that she can recognize his eyes.

They’re not black, the way they looked across the clearing with subtlety scored away by moonlight and the shadows of trees and the buzz of terror under her skin. No, the wolf’s eyes are brown—deep, mesmerizing, rich and cool as the soil humming with life between pine tree roots—

She knows those eyes. Human eyes, stretched too big to fit in this massive skull, with pupils blown wide in terror and burst blood vessels staining their whites. Emotion hums from them into the pit of her stomach, even though there’s no cue to explain it. Terror. Rage. The desperate need to hurt, to heal, to run—

His pain hers, just like always.

Jacob.

Bella swallows. She strains onto her tiptoes and raises her left hand, (ignoring the pain that lashes lightning-quick from the cut up to her shoulder, ignoring the stained fur that makes it clear the half-baked plan of her blood luring him to her first failed). She can’t reach anything but the bottom of his muzzle, wants desperately not to get that close to the fangs bulging behind his pressed-close lips—

But then he bends his head. His eyes are still wary and wild, but the nose that he presses into her palm is cool. She slides her hand farther up his snout, into shockingly-soft russet fur, and watches him tremble at the touch.

"Jacob,” she says again, and clings tight. “Jacob Ephraim Black.”

He growls, low and fierce and so loud it rumbles into the pit of Bella’s stomach.

RUN! the back of her mind insists again, but she’s floated so far from that shaking, rational voice that it barely even registers. The wolf’s skin burns, and she's warm, flooded by it from the palm of her hand and sheer proximity.

The shape of the werewolf will be removed if he be reproached by name, the book had said, or if again he be thrice addressed by his Christian name.

It had taken her so long to find a copy of it, scouring library shelves off the desperate hint of one careless mention of a myth, if someone who loves a werewolf calls them by their name, they transform back! on a barely-maintained blog.

She’d stumbled across that searching werewolf and trying desperately not to collapse into memories at the just-barely-warped reflection of her first weeks here. (Was every legend true, every horror story and myth alive in the gloomy shadows of these trees? Was she going to keep falling in love with them for her whole miserable life—)

It was less than half a clue, less than half a chance. Hadn’t she already known first-hand how unreliable all the stories were? (A vampire standing in the sun, blazing gold tracing the map of where veins should’ve been, light caught blinding under his skin like it was about to sear away and she’d gasped on the verge of a scream, but he just smiled.)

But she’d been heartsick for weeks by then, gnawing on her lip so constantly, so deep, that the sores stung when she brushed her teeth. Notes about missing persons taped to their fridge in Charlie’s shaky scrawl. Stumbling across smudged pawprints on a hike with Jake and he whistled but the scar of a monster’s fangs on her wrist burned suddenly ice-cold.

Jake, leaving a movie early because he hadn’t wanted to cancel on her but Embry and Quil were already at a campsite waiting for him and he’d honked and waved furiously out the window as he peeled out of the parking lot, and she’d buried her head in her hands to hide the fact that she was grinning—

And then there was nothing, nothing, a phone ringing out to Billy’s pre-recorded voice.

One last argument in the driving rain, and the terror on his face. You have no idea what I’ve done, he whispered, and she grabbed his hand, begged, I don’t care, Jake, I don’t, please, but he tore free, spat you should.

And when she went back the next day even Billy had no idea where he was.

She’d been sobbing herself to sleep, sliding slowly back towards the blank-page apathy that she knew could swallow her whole. Dragging the screen out of her bedroom window to perch on the sill and let her feet dangle down over a drop that probably wouldn’t kill her, when the nightmares jerked her awake and refused to let go. Watching the woods behind the house, pulling a too-big hoodie tight around herself and trying to convince herself it still smelled like Jake.

He’d lent it to her, one miserable day when it started snowing out nowhere while they were in the garage and she hadn’t been able to stop shivering even curled up around the tiny, coughing space heater. And then, of course, he insisted she keep it at least long enough to get to her truck through the snow—and of course she’d kept meaning to give it back, but—

But she stood in the library months later with a reprinting of some priest’s book heavy in her hands, the only other stories of solutions she’d been able to find, (solutions, never cures), churning bitter in her stomach, and thought this.

(She’d been choking awake from nightmares for weeks. Silver knives buried in the middle of Jacob’s forehead, right next to the near-permanent smudges of engine grease because he always forgot and brushed hair off his face in the middle of working on the Rabbit. Her hands pouring poison down his throat and he looked at her heartbroken for one long moment before he choked, gagged, and instead of vomit his face crawled back out of his throat, bloody and swelling and snapping fangs—)

This I can do, she thought.

(The worst part was never the nightmares themselves. The worst part was remembering them as she stared at grainy obituary photos, at the flickering of plastic battery candles tucked in the memorial nook by the cafeteria and the glossy smile in a cheap picture frame between them—and love still sat heavy as a stone in her stomach. The worst part was waking up sweaty and screaming and knowing that the dreams were a best-case she’d never be strong enough to reach—)

And now she stands a bare step from the edge of a cliff, Jacob snarling and shivering beneath her hand, and he doesn't bite. The exhilaration is too strong to even remember her terror.

She winds her fingers tighter into his damp fur, soaked through now by the blood on her palm.

The wolf’s head is too huge to really meet both his eyes at once, but she tries anyways. Stares into that frantic, frenzied brown—thinks about the handful of fears Jacob’s confessed to her, slow and shaking every time like he expected her to hate him for it. Thinks about how she sometimes wanted to tear the world apart just listening (I don’t think I can remember my mom’s voice), but she could never find that anger in him—

“I love you,” she says, ignoring that this of everything she’s done tonight makes panic claw between her ribs, “Jacob Ephraim Black.”

She wants to slam her eyes shut as she says it. To have nothing but the feel of his name on her lips, to not have to know if the story was just a story, if she’s run out of whatever luck or coincidence stopped the wolf the first time she spoke—

She keeps watching. Grits her teeth and swallows her fear, and stares into brown eyes as for a moment, under the harsh light of the moon, everything goes still. Even Jacob. The tremors vanish. His growl and his gasps for breath fall suddenly silent.

The waves roar.

The wolf—

Blinks.

Hope has its own heartbeat in Bella’s throat. It pounds her temples, aches in the sockets of her eyes.

Jacob’s eyes snap open, pupils narrowed to pinpricks, a million miles away from meeting Bella’s gaze—and then he jerks his head away. Fur rips free in Bella’s fist with the force of it. She stumbles, dragged a useless step in his wake as—

He whips his head up and (finally, furiously) howls.

It rips the night apart. Ricochets out across the ocean, not plaintive or lonely at all, shrill and hoarse and agonized. Bella blinks back tears, ears ringing.

But the wolf is shrinking.

For a second Bella thinks maybe it’s just that aching hope, strangling her now—but he topples over sideways, and it’s unmistakable.

He curls in on himself, and with every spasm limbs shrink, huge heaving sides cling closer and closer to the ribcage twisting under his skin like something alive. The claws gouging into stone leave smaller and smaller trails—and then don’t break into it at all.

He keeps thrashing.

Red fur ripples, crawling onto its ends and then melting back into clumps and knots and messy, impossible lines—leaving smooth brown skin underneath it, shining sweat-slick.

A crack echoes out, like gunfire—another, and another—bones, Bella realizes dizzily, those are his bones breaking.

He whimpers, caught halfway between the wolf and the voice she knows some days better than her own.

She doesn’t have a plan. His head is still the wolf’s, with bristling fangs and jaws cracking at impossible angles as it strains to fit all of them—she doesn’t have a plan. Has a screaming primal terror in her stomach telling her to stay back.

But she steps closer.

“Jake,” she says.

He rasps another horrible half-human howl, and she sinks onto her knees beside him. He’s almost all human-shaped now, twisted down in the time it took her to get to him, into two long legs that bend in all the places they’re supposed to, a human torso scraping against the jagged stone, long black hair spilled out in a puddle around his head.

But his skin still seethes. Ragged patches of rust-red fur crawl across his thighs, wrap his stomach around to his back, line his shoulders. It clings stubbornly thick to his wrists and the backs of his hands, clustering around elbows that bulge not quite right, and—

His face. A long stripe of fur slashes across it, forehead to chin, around the edge of lips that still bulge a little out of his face, not quite done being a muzzle. One long fang curves over his jaw, digs viciously into the soft flesh of his neck. Bella chokes on a gasp.

He wrenches around. His eyes, still red with burst blood vessels, lock onto her, and this time she can see him recognizing her. Sees the shame, the guilt, burning straight down to his heart.

“Jake,” she repeats. He squeezes his eyes shut.

She reaches, catches one of his twitching hands—the inside of his palm is still coated in soft fur. She laces her fingers through his. Two of them are still half claws, knuckles melting into hard bone and razor-sharp edges—

“Jake, please.” Her voice cracks. She clutches tighter, not caring that she can feel her knuckles bruising against the claws. “Jake, I’m here.”

His hand is so, so cold, and she's never felt so useless—

Realization hits, electric.

She drops his hand, fumbling for the hem of her sweater. She wore it for—some stupid reason. Something in between a desperate attempt at scents that would catch his attention from wherever he was hiding, and just needing the comfort, as she stumbled out of the house with her heart in pieces, a note on her desk that she was hoping desperately she’d be back in time to burn before Charlie had to read it—

Give the werewolf his human clothes, and he will remember his human shape—

She’s wearing Jake’s hoodie. She drags it over her head, wincing as it drags against the cut on her arm, but then it’s loose in her hands, fabric still warm from her own body. Goosebumps prickle down the back of her neck.

She leans in, grabs Jacob under the arms, and heaves. (He’s heavy, but worse than that she can feel bones still moving under his skin, grinding below coarse red fur, and for a second she thinks she might vomit—)

But he groans as she drags him upright, and the sound is almost human.

“Come on,” she whispers, heart hammering, as he slumps forward onto her shoulder. (There are too many teeth in his mouth still, shining as his lips part to gulp down air, and she’s hyper-aware of their inches from her skin—) “Come on, Jacob.”

It’s hard, and horrible, and she’s going to be so sore tomorrow, but she pushes him up again just long enough to wrestle the hoodie over his head. He shudders, violently—

And this time when he collapses onto her shoulder, his arms fly up to hug her. To grip the back of her t-shirt, with fingers that aren’t claws at all. (She can feel blood soaking off them in tiny pinpricks, knows his nails must be cracking and tearing from their beds again, just like that last shouted conversation where she finally let herself suspect.)

“Bella,” he sobs, hoarse and desperate and familiar as the backs of her hands. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”

“Jake,” she says, one last time. Below them, the ocean murmurs, and finally, she uncurls her fists and reaches out to hug him back.

#is this original content?#jacob black #i have no explanation i was thinking about werewolves #i really cannot stress enough how much this is Just Vibes #which forks high school student do YOU think jacob murdered?!#it's up to you i didn't care enough to decide #opposite energy though #the quotes about werewolf lore are from an actual book by an actual English priest btw #also i've been thinking a Lot about symmetrical language in stories recently #so yes. that is on purpose #it might also be annoying idk i wrote this and desperately wanted to post it #also yes i stole this title from that really good poem #'when is a monster not a monster oh when you love it'#that is. you know. supernatural fanwork #it's a good poem

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