In Which I Suffer Through New Moon: Chapter 16 -- Paris · 3:11pm Apr 2nd, 2018
Bella wakes up on the beach, Jacob thumping her in the back to get the water out of her lungs. She gradually comes to her senses and puts together that Jacob rescued her. The other werewolves are nearby, asking if she’s okay. She says she’ll live, but Jacob still decides to take her to a hospital. He’d come back because Victoria had slipped past the werewolves and into the ocean. Jacob was scared because he thought she might swim to the beach, where Bella spends a lot of her time, so he raced back, found her tire tracks, and heard her scream as she jumped.
Even though Victoria escaped, the rest of the werewolves are okay. Bella heard something about someone returning to the hospital, but that’s unrelated; Harry Clearwater, a friend of Charlie’s and Billy’s, just had a heart attack.
Jacob takes Bella back to her house, where he gets her dry clothes and a place to rest. Bella sleeps, and when she wakes up, she starts drawing out-of-nowhere parallels between her situation and Romeo and Juliet. Basically, she thinks she knows how Juliet would feel if Romeo had dumped her for Rosalind and wonders if she’d go back to Paris. Meyer, when you try to point out that your story directly parallels some classic, it doesn’t really work. Basically, after thinking about the play for two pages, Bella realizes she’s in love with Jacob and wonders if she could change her mind about Edward.
Maybe. It wouldn’t be easy; in fact, it would be downright miserable to give up my hallucinations and try to be a grown-up. But maybe I should do it. And maybe I could. If I had Jacob.
CM + 1
Bella’s train of thought gets derailed when Sam and Billy return from the hospital: Harry just died. She decides to give them some time alone and go back home, so she’s there when Charlie gets back. Jacob drives her home and she thinks some more about loving him instead of Edward during the ride.
I couldn’t imagine my life without Jacob now — I cringed away from the idea of even trying to imagine that. Somehow, he’d become essential to my survival.
CM + 1
As they near her house, however, Jacob freaks out: he can smell a vampire. He attempts to drive past, but Bella tells him to calm down when she recognizes the car in front of her house as Carlisle’s car. Jacob’s peeved — Cullens as “nice” vampires or not, he and vampires are still enemies — and leaves her and her truck on the side of the road while he runs into the forest, changing into a wolf as he does.
Bella drives back to her house and enters. While she’s looking for the light switch, she suddenly recalls an image from her dreams, that of a strange orange flame on the water. She recognizes Victoria’s hair color and realizes she was in the harbor while Jacob was bringing her back out of the water. Now she’s alone in her house with a vampire.
And then the lights come on. Someone’s waiting for her. Oh, look, there are more chapters after this.
Clinginess Meter: 56 x 4
An aquatic escape is actually quite clever, assuming vampires don't need to breathe. (Do these vampires need to breathe? If their hearts aren't beating, then I'd think that oxygen wouldn't be an issue, but that would require Meyer to think about something beyond slamming supernaturally themed Barbie and Ken dolls together.)
Also, I am becoming more and more convinced that Bella is an Equestrian changeling, or at least has the psychometabolic needs of one.
4831152
Don't write it, it's not worth doing. D:
4831152
It's mentioned a few times (never any time that I've written down) that vampires don't need to breathe, so the only thing keeping them from staying underwater forever is their thirst for blood and self-control.
*...scribbles furtively*
4831152
Well, changelings are based to some extent on classical vampires—the fangs, the hissing, the draining of their victims—and Bella becomes a vampire in Breaking Dawn. Bella as a changeling actually sounds believable. Hay, that actually sounds mildly cool. Now I want to see fanart of Bella as a changeling. Someone, make this a thing!