Disclaimer:

Me: Blond, green-eyed, wears glasses, owns nothing Twilight.

Stephenie Meyer: Brunette, brown eyes, no glasses, owns all things Twilight.

Clearly, we're not the same person.

A/N: This chapter picks up during Bella and Jacob's conversation at the beach on page 351 of New Moon, and then goes AU. I did keep some of the original dialogue as it pertains to events coming up in future chapters. This is my first Twilight fic, please be kind!

Chapter 1: Holding Pattern

BPOV

"I'm ruining your spring break." Jake lamented, finding me curled upon the beach, trying to catch my breath.

"No, you're not. I didn't have any plans." I shrugged, trailing my shoes through the sand. "I don't think I like spring breaks, anyway." The tone of my voice must have registered with him, and he seemed to recall our conversation from the other day, when I'd told him about James biting me, and Ed - when HE saved my life.

"I still feel bad. I just wish we could get Victoria, and things could go back to normal." The frustration in his voice was clear, but the thought of Jake or any member of the wolf pack coming face to face with Victoria was the reason I was out on the beach freaking out in the first place. "We just need something, some kind of edge." He looked down at me, an idea clearly forming.

"What?" I asked, a little afraid of his expression.

"I know that it hurts when you think about them." he said the last word with hatred. "I know that you don't like to think about it, but..."

"But what, Jake? Where are you going with this?" I wasn't following his train of thought.

"Do you think you'd be able to tell me and the other guys exactly what happened with James and Victoria last year?" He looked at me, concern and uncertainty on his face. "Maybe we're missing something, a key piece of information that could help us catch Victoria." I started to protest, but he cut me off. "It might be something you don't even realize you know - something so small you don't think it's important." He looked really enthused about the idea, and it was hard to tell him no.

"Do you really think there's some detail from last year that could help?" I failed to see how it would do anything but cause me to shatter into a million pieces in front of the entire pack. Not really something I wanted to do.

"I really do, Bells." He put his arm around me, ignoring the slightly disapproving look on my face. "and I'll be right there, holding you together." I looked him in the eye as he made his vow, and it seemed, like the other day, that he really could hold me together when I started to fall apart.

"All right." I whispered, unable to look away. He held my gaze, his eyes burning intensely. The cry of a seagull broke through the moment, and I awkwardly shrugged off his arm. He pulled away, and looked off into the distance.

"I'll have everyone meet up tonight at Sam and Emily's." I nodded, grateful he was letting that moment go. "I think I'll take tomorrow off, the others should be able to run with out me." I glanced at him, curious. "We'll do something fun." He smiled.

"Fun?" The concept of fun seemed so foreign at the moment.

"Fun is exactly what you need. Hmm..." He tilted his head in thought as he stared off into the distance, the ocean waves crashing into the shore. "I got it!" He looked excited again. "Another promise to keep."

"What are you talking about?" He pointed toward the southern edge of the beach, where the flat, rocky half-moon dead-ended against the sheer sea cliffs. "Didn't I promise to take you cliff diving?" He grinned at me. "It'll be cold, but it should be warmer tomorrow." I contemplated the idea.

It had been days since I'd heard Edward's voice. It seemed I was addicted to my delusions, and it made things worse if I went too long without them. Jumping off the cliff would solve that problem.

"Sure, I'm up for it."

"It's a date." He said, pulling me up off the sand. He draped his arm around my shoulders again as we walked back to his house. "I'll go phase in a second, and let the guys know to meet us later."

"Okay." I agreed, "and then you're taking a nap." My attempting at ordering him around just made him smile. "I mean it, Jake. You look like you haven't slept in days." He shrugged off my worry, and darted over to the edge of the woods, disappearing into the thick branches. I waited for him, knowing it would only take him a moment to let the rest of pack know what was going on. He came back after a moment, adjusting the waistband of his cutoff sweatpants.

"We're all set." He said, as walked through his front yard, and into his house. I nodded, not looking forward to the meeting at all. I thought of that old saying - whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stronger - and resisted the urge to snort. The person who came up with that had obviously never been in love.

"Are you ready for this?" Jake asked. We were walking towards Sam and Emily's house. He grabbed my hand, and laced our fingers together. I opened my mouth to say something in protest, but one look at his face and the words died in my throat. He just looked so damn happy. Guilt welled up in my stomach, igniting the butterflies already taking up residence. It was all I could do to keep what little lunch I eaten where it belonged.

"As ready as I'll ever be, I guess." We walked up the driveway, towards the door. Jacob knocked once and then opened it. He held it open, gesturing for me to walk in first. I headed back to the kitchen, confident I would find the rest of pack already there, eating enough food to feed a herd of small elephants. We went into the kitchen, and the rest of pack barely glanced up from the table, which was laden down with food, as we took our places. Jake wasted no time in filling up a plate of his own, loading it with more food than I could eat in an entire day.

The room was filled with sounds of chewing for several minutes, and then Sam cleared his throat. Emily moved away from the sink where she had been washing the last of the pots and pans, and joined me near the doorway of the kitchen.

"Jacob thinks that maybe if we had more information about Victoria, and James, and the Cullens last year, that we might be able to figure out a way to get her. " Sam started off, causing the rest of the table to turn and look at me. Jake stood up and came over to me, grabbing me by the arm and practically dragging me to the table. He sat back down, and tugged me into his lap.

"Jake!" I screeched in protest, blushing bright red. He slipped his warm, muscled arms around me.

"I promised you that I'd hold you together." He whispered in my ear. My face flushed an even brighter red. "Bella's going to tell us exactly what happened last year – with her, James, Victoria and the Cullens." The snickers going around the table at my expense were suddenly quieted, as everyone took in the enormity of what I was about to go through. Not only would I be relieving a traumatic experience, but I'd be relieving that while Edward had loved me enough to save my life, he didn't love me enough to be with me forever.

"It was the first weekend of Spring Break." My voice was barely a whisper. Jake's arms tightened around me preemptively. "Edward and I had been dating for a few weeks, and he'd taken me to his house to meet his family. Alice saw that there would be storm that night, and they'd decided they wanted to play baseball." I didn't bother explaining that Alice could see the future. I had told Jake about that the other day, and with the pack's ability to read minds, I was sure that they all already knew.

"Baseball?" Almost the entire table repeated me, unable to fathom that the creatures they considered the most horrible would do something as mundane and normal as playing a game of baseball.

"It's the American pastime." I practically snapped, crossing my arms over my chest. The words sent me reeling back to another time, and I could almost feel Edward's arms around me, tampering with my memory as he convinced me to let him piggyback me to the baseball field.

You'll be the death of me, I swear you will.

I gasped as the memory threatened to overwhelm me.

"It's okay, Bells." Jake said quietly. "I got you." I looked at him gratefully.

"Like I said, they wanted to play baseball. We met up with his family in a clearing not far from his house. Everything was fine, and then suddenly it wasn't." I clenched my jaw. "Alice got a vision in the middle of the game – James, Victoria and Laurent had heard them playing and came to see what was going on." I shifted a little on Jacob's lap, knowing that from this point on, the story would be almost unbearable to tell.

Take your hair down.

That won't help, I could smell her across the field.

I'm sorry Bella...I'm so sorry.

"We tried to pretend that I was one of them, hoping they wouldn't stick around long enough for them to figure out I was human. Laurent took the lead – he was the vampire you killed in the meadow, by the way. It was a fake out – we found out later that James was a true leader of the coven, and liked to hang back and observe." I sighed, and reached up to play with my ponytail as I remembered.

"What happened then?" I hadn't realized that I stopped talking, distracted by my thoughts. Jake's question caused me to look up and meet the intense faces of the pack.

"The wind blew." I twirled a lock of hair around my finger. "I don't know if you know, but a vampire's sense of smell is as strong or stronger than yours." I gave a quiet chuckle. "I have it on expert authority that I smell really good, and suddenly my scent was all over the field." I tried to control my breathing, as the memories flooded back. I'd kept them locked up for so long.

You brought a snack?

"They didn't understand that the Cullens didn't drink human blood, and that I wasn't a meal." I shivered as I remembered the red eyes of the nomadic vampires. "James made a move for me, and Edward..." I inhaled sharply as I said his name – remembering how he'd dropped to a crouch in front of me, growling a warning into James' shocked face.

"He went on the offensive, and I thought it would be a fight right there. We managed to convince them to leave, and Edward got me out of there really fast. " The frenzied run to the car was one of my most terrifying memories.

He's a tracker, Alice, did you see that? He's a tracker!

"Edward had read James' mind. He was what they called a tracker – he picked targets and hunted them until they were dead. Edward, by defending me on the field, had made it his most exciting hunt. We came up with an idea to get me out of town while they found James and killed him." You could have heard a pin drop, it was so quiet. The boys had long since stopped eating, but no one was willing to interrupt my story. "Jasper and Alice drove me back to Phoenix to hide out. Esme and Rosalie stayed here and looked after Charlie, to make sure James or Victoria didn't go after him. Carlisle, Edward and Emmett went after James."

Being apart from Edward then had nearly killed me – if only I'd known how bad it could be without him. "We didn't count on Victoria. We didn't pay any attention to her at all, actually, because James seemed more of a threat. She looked up my Phoenix address, and after James talked to her, he gave Edward, Carlisle and Emmett the slip. He went to Phoenix, to my mom's house." I heard Emily gasp, and glanced up at her before continuing. "He watched my family's old home movies, trying to learn everything he could about me. I suppose what I did next wasn't the smartest, but I called my house and left a message for my mom that I'd left Forks, and was back in Phoenix, and told her to call me."

Jacob pulled my hand out of my hair. While I was talking, I hadn't noticed that I'd tangled it all around my fingers. He really was trying to help me keep it all together. "James called me instead, and told me that my mom had come home, and he wanted me to meet him at my old ballet studio or he was going to kill her." The fear that had overwhelmed back then was almost as overwhelming as the fear I experienced now, with Victoria running around, trying to attack my friends for protecting me. "I got away from Jasper and Alice, and met up with James." My breathing started to speed up. "He didn't have my mother, it was just a ploy to get me there. He attacked me, and Edw - the Cullens stopped him."

Everyone was quiet, absorbing my story. I was almost proud of myself, I'd made it through the entire story without crying or freaking out in anyway.

"Did James really bite you?" I wasn't sure who asked the question.

"Oh, um, yeah." I held out my hand with the scar so that everyone at the table could see, self-conscious. I felt like a lab rat under a microscope. I supposed that none of them had ever known anyone who'd been bitten before. I turned my hand so they could get a better look. The scar had never really bothered me until now. In the beginning, it was proof of Edward's love – a mark that I bore to show the world how much he cared. After he left, I touched it often, reveling in it's slightly cooler temperature. From that point on, I considered it the one thing that Edward couldn't take from me, the only tangible proof I had that he really and truly did exist.

It will be as if I never existed...

His voice echoed in my head, and I shook it trying to clear the sound. It wasn't the same as my delusions – this voice was the product of my memory, and not the insane workings of my mind. Feeling like the walls were closing in on me, I jumped off Jacob's lap, startling him, and stumbled outside into the night.

"Bells?" I heard Jacob call, his voice tinged with worry. I release a sob in reply, my arms wrapped so tight around me that they'd started to go numb. "Oh, Bella." I heard in my ear as Jacob found me in the darkness and wrapped his arms around me. "I got you...I got you..." he repeated over and over. How long we sat that way – with him murmuring in my ear – my body racked with agony, I don't know.

"You can't fix me." I hiccuped between sobs. "I'm broken." My voice cracked.

"Just let me try, Bella." He large hand smoothed back loose hair off my face.

"Take me home, Jake." Something in my voice must have resonated with him because he didn't argue. He paused before speaking.

"Yeah." The guilt rose to the surface again, magnified by my despair. Before I realized what he'd done, Jake scooped me up in his arms and carried me back to my truck. I should have protested. I should have insisted he put me down. Instead I took comfort in his warmth, selfishly using him to glue the fragile pieces of myself back together.

It will be as if I never existed...