The human Jacob AU that no one asked for but I can’t stop thinking about
° The books are the same up to the movie theatre with Mike and Jake (except there are no mentions of Sam’s “gang” because it isn’t a thing, Embry is still hanging out with Jacob and Quil, Jake isn’t afraid he’s next)
° Jacob and Bella have a little laugh at Mike’s expense but make sure he gets home safe.
° Jacob doesn’t get “mono” and drop off the face of the earth, he and Bella just keep getting closer.
° and so, Jacob is with her when she find the meadow and Laurent finds her
° in my version of events Laurent did not decide to suddenly side with Victoria because that makes absolutely no sense. He had no trouble ditching her and James in the first book and has supposedly found a partner in Irina who is friends with the Cullens so why would he be doing Victoria a favour and scouting the area?? make it make sense.
° no, instead, Victoria located him and started asking questions about the Cullens and he, trying to dissuade her from going against them, tells her what he’s learned about them since coming to stay with the Denalis. Alice’s visions, Edward’s mind reading, he lets it all slip in the ernest belief she’ll decide it isn’t worth going after Bella, after all evasion is her heightened power; she should cut her losses and run.
° after talking to Victoria, Laurent decides to warn the Cullens, he has a bad feeling after their talk and suspects she won’t give up so easily.
° he finds the house empty which is peculiar, they seemed so invested in this little human and who do you think he runs across in the meadow but that very human accompanied by a friend.
° he tells her about his talk with Victoria but there is a menacing undertone to everything he says. He is trying not to kill humans for Irena’s sake but as his eyes can attest to, he’s had some slip ups, and, really, she does smell delicious. If she is no longer under the Cullen’s protection then there would really be very little harm in draining her and there’s only one witness to take care off. It might even be a mercy because if Victoria gets her hands on her she would not make it quick, he’d do it as painlessly as possible.
° all of this is said aloud because the reader has no insight into Laurent’s mind otherwise and he seems like a person who’s inclined to give the occasional monologue
° he tells her to run, before he changes his mind
° meanwhile, Jacob is freaking the fuck out. As soon as they reach the road Bella guns it for her truck while Jacob just keeps up a continuous stream of “what the fuck. what the fuck. what the actual fuck. they’re actually fucking vampires? what the fuck. oh, god, dad was right. What The Fuck.”
° after that the whole story comes out, how Jacob was actually the person who helped her figure it out, how she had envisioned spending eternity with Edward and how, now that he’s gone, she hasn’t just been robbed of the person she loves but of what she had come to accept as her future. She has never been able to confide in anyone about the whole story so she tells him everything, right down to what actually happened when she got injured in Phoenix. It’s not like they’re coming back, it doesn’t matter if she tells Jacob.
° Jacob is understandably on overload, Bella drives him home and he says he needs some time.
° this is when Bella starts trying to reach Jacob but he’s unreachable. He’s processing a tremendous amount of information and needs some time away from the madness of Bella’s life.
° Bella starts to get restless. Jacob isn’t talking to her, she feels isolated and she needs to see Edward. She jumps off the cliff.
° I kind of want Sam to be the one who sees her jump and who fishes her out of the water tbh. He doesn’t have Charlie’s number so he calls Jacob’s house.
° Jacob promptly freaks out.
° he brings Bella home, Harry Clearwater has had a heart attack.
° Jacob is frightened for Bella after her jump but he also needs to be there for his dad right now and Seth is so young, Leah seems different after she lost her dad too. He needs to be there for them.
° There’s also the fact that the girl he’s in love with is in love with a vampire but staying away from Bella did not give him the clarity he’d hoped for. It’s still a mess.
° Alice arrives, she doesn’t need blind spots in her visions to go and knock some sense into Bella. Yes, she’s alive this time but she saw her voluntarily jump off a cliff into a raging ocean. Before she left she was a mess talking about how Bella tried to commit suicide and she had to go ensure she wouldn’t attempt it a second time.
° When Jacob rolls up to the house and sees Alice there it feels as though his insides have turned to ice. Are they all back? Is he losing Bella before he ever really got to tell her how he feels?
° Alice leaves to let Bella explain the situation. She tells him only Alice is back and why she came to visit.
° Jacob is a mess, this whole thing is a mess, but he’s left with the feeling that he had when he saw Alice was there. He needs to tell Bella how he feels.
° They have the almost kiss in the kitchen. Jacob is still dumb enough to answer the phone in someone else’s house, he still tells Edward that Charlie’s at the funeral.
° Alice returns, frantic. They have to leave for Volterra. However, Jacob doesn’t basically beg Bella to let Edward kill himself and stay with him. Once he understands that Bella is serious and Edward literally is going to try to get himself killed because he thinks Bella is dead he understands that the only way she can live with herself is if she tries everything she can to stop him from succeeding.
° Instead he is the voice of reason: “Bella, listen to me, Charlie is about to come home to an empty house after burying one of his best friends. He will be beside himself with worry and this note is bullshit, you’re a horrible liar. Tell him you’re staying with Alice tonight because you’re going to Seattle together in the morning, there’s a sale or some shit that she wants to drag you to. Tomorrow night you call him and tell him your car broke down, you have to stay in Seattle while they order the parts for you. It might be a few days. That’ll buy you some time.”
° “And call me when you land or, I don’t know, I might worry too.”
° It feels like tearing his own heart out but he lets her go. He doesn’t beg her to stay.
° The events at Volterra play out the same way they did but Charlie isn’t left to deal with the same amount of shit he was in the original.
° When they return Jacob comes to visit her, she fills him in and, let me tell you, he has a few things to say.
° “I can’t believe you’re just going to get back together with him. Bella he lied to you, manipulated you and left you. His sister can see the god damn future, if you think he didn’t know how this would affect you then you’re wrong. And he still did it. Maybe he’s telling you the truth and he did it because he thought it would be better for you in the long run but he made that decision without you. If you just take him back then you are essentially telling him that was an okay thing for him to do and it just wasn’t.”
° Jacob is so angry at the Cullens and really, what he’s saying isn’t wrong. The angrier he gets the more Bella can feel her own anger flaring to life, it had been buried under the sheer relief of finding Edward alive, the euphoria of being told that he still loves her. Now she feels indignant; how dare he just make this decision for her, how dare he not take into account her own feelings on the matter, how dare he prioritise his own concerns over hers, and how dare the entire family just go along with it. They all left her.
° She drives herself over to the Cullen’s house to have a talk with them. The vote stays the same, the “if you don’t want me, then I’m not going to force myself on you, whether Alice is willing or not” part definitely stays in. However, Bella, after having taken the vote has a few choice words for all of them. “You all left me. I have spent months trying to learn to survive without you and it didn’t go all that well. I want to join you, I really do. But I don’t trust you anymore. You all made an enormous decision for me, without my say so. You’ve now made another decision that I was a part of and even though we don’t all agree, we all got a say. It’s going to take time for me to learn to trust you again, in the meantime all I have to say is this: you will never make a decision regarding me without my input again. Never.”
° She also talks to Alice separately, discounting Edward she feels the most hurt by the fact that she would have left her.
° Since Jacob is now the only person outside of the Cullens who she can actually talk to about her life, she tells him about her talk with them, including the vote.
° Jacob has an understandable freakout regarding the fact that Bella has definitively chosen to become a vampire. This is definitely not what he’d thought would happen after he and Bella had their last talk. And because he’s an impulsive teenager he brings Charlie the motorcycle, hoping that Bella will be grounded and get some distance from Edward and maybe even change her mind.
I have a lot of thoughts regarding the continuation of the series but it’s already a mammoth post so idk, i might do a separate post about Eclipse at some point.
