Chapter Text
ACT I - Beginning
“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
— Semisonic, Closing Time (1998)
She was half-dead in the woods the night I found her. Broken, freezing, eyes empty like someone had scooped the life out of her and left the shell behind. I wrapped her up, held her steady, tried to pass enough heat into her bones to keep her alive. Thought that was all it was — a rescue. A single night where I did the right thing.
Turns out it was the start. Of what, I didn’t know.
But beginnings never tell you what they’ll cost in the end.
Chapter 1: Found
Friday September 16th, 2005
La Push Reservation, WA
September should’ve been spent settling into a dorm room, buying textbooks, and navigating my courses for Mechanical Engineering. Instead, I had fur in my teeth, an Alpha in my skull, and a tattoo carved into my arm like a brand. College didn’t stand a chance against the two laws that ruled my life now: the wolf is always right and protect the imprint above all else. No professor, no future, no ordinary life could compete with that. I didn’t even have an imprint — most of us didn’t — but the law was still there, a weight waiting to drop.
It was just a typical La Push evening, gray sky, thunder rolling low over the water, the kind of storm that had teeth but nothing we had not felt a hundred times. By September you stopped noticing the weather unless it tried to peel the roof off.
Patrol was the same as always. The six of us slipped through wet trees, cedar and moss sharp in the air, the link a steady hum. Sam was calm and heavy, Jared smug around the edges, Paul itching for a fight that never came, Quil and Embry wrestling in thought the way they always wrestled in real life. I paced at the borders of all of it, restless for no good reason. By the time we phased back and pulled on shorts, it felt like another box checked.
Emily and Sam’s house was warm and bright when we filed in, rain still dripping from our hair and shoulders. The kitchen smelled like fresh bread and venison stew, steam fogging the windows. Kim was at the counter beside Emily, sleeves rolled up, quietly tearing bread rolls into a basket. She smiled at Jared when we came through the door, then ducked her head again. This was the rhythm that kept us sane. Run the woods, eat like we were starving, head back out for a late loop, try to sleep. Same every day. Safe because it was the same.
Jared snagged the first bowl — Kim rolled her eyes but passed him the ladle. Paul shouldered him on principle. Quil made a show of swallowing an entire roll in one bite. Embry cracked a joke dumb enough to earn a swat from Emily’s spoon, which only made him grin wider. For a minute it felt normal, a bunch of guys too big for one kitchen, pretending we were just hungry and not something else.
The phone rang.
Emily answered soft as always, but her shoulders went tight before she said a word. She covered the receiver with her hand and looked straight at Sam. “It’s Harry, Charlie’s organizing a search party.”
Sam straightened. “For what?”
Emily’s eyes moved around the table. “Bella. She never came home.”
My fork clattered against the bowl.
“How long?” I asked. My voice cut sharp across the counter, and I didn’t care.
Emily hesitated. She looked at Sam like he could change the answer. “Charlie says he saw her before school this morning. His shift ended at five. She wasn’t home. He’s been looking for nearly three hours.”
The room tilted. Three hours in this weather? And Bella all alone in the woods. Sam started snapping orders. I didn’t wait to hear where he wanted me. I was already out the door and into the rain, skin prickling, bones buzzing with the need to run.
The storm didn’t let up once. Rain blurred the forest into gray walls with the occasional crack of thunder mixing with the wind as it tore scents into tatters. I ran for hours. Loops, then wider loops, circling and recircling the same ridges until my chest burned and my paws sank in cold mud. Sam split us into quadrants and kept the net tight. Jared griped in the link about wasting time on the leech girl. Paul crackled with irritation until I shoved his noise out of my head. All I needed was the trace of her.
By 2am the rain had hammered everything flat. Even so, small things held. A thread of her shampoo snagged on wet salal. A footprint half filled with water. A broken fern stem bent the wrong way. I pushed farther, almost four miles past the Swan place, deeper than she ever should have gone. My wolf strained for anything human. Wet cotton, salt, skin gone cold.
There. Faint, but real.
I skidded down a slope that wanted to dump me on my face, moss slick, mud trying to suck me under. At the base of a giant spruce, where the roots braided into a shallow hollow, a shape curled in on itself. For a second my heart stopped. I thought I was too late.
I shifted back before I reached her, skin stinging with cold as the rain hit bare shoulders. I yanked the shorts and sneakers tied to my leg free with shaking hands and pulled them on, feet slipping as I got down on my knees.
“Bells.” It came out a broken breath.
She was there, but not. Hair plastered to her cheeks, lips blue, eyes half open and empty. Her whole body shook in tight, jerky shivers that looked more like tremors than warmth coming back. When I put a hand on her shoulder she flinched, then her mouth moved.
“They never loved me. They left me.”
The words were so thin I almost didn’t catch them. It felt like they drifted up out of the roots, not her throat.
“Shit, Loca.” Relief and anger hit at the same time, an ache that made it hard to speak. “You’ve been out here all night.”
I pulled her against me. She felt like ice. Her soaked clothes dragged heat straight out of my skin. She didn’t fight me; hell, she didn’t do anything. She just folded into my chest as I got my arms under her and lifted. She weighed almost nothing, despite the rain drenched clothes. For a moment I thought about phasing, if only for the speed of getting her back to civilization. But I didn’t trust the slick ground and sharp stones; even worst I didn’t trust Bella had the strength to hold onto my fur as I raced through the woods. Instead, I walked, as quickly as I dared through the rain splattered dark, toward a smear of light that meant people and generators and help.
The command post looked like a war zone dropped into the mud by the time I got there. It was nearly 3am. Trucks in a long line, generator lamps throwing hard white across puddles, radios barking over each other, volunteers in rain gear lugging rope and tarps. Diesel and wet hemlock and hot plastic mingled in the air.
Charlie was there, drenched, face washed out to ash, eyes snapping to us the second I broke from the trees.
“Bella!” The word ripped out of him. He reached us in three steps and took her from my arms where she sagged against him, making a sound I couldn’t hear over the rain. Relief tore through his features so hard it looked like it hurt.
The paramedics moved in fast with their high-vis jackets, gloved hands, and voices that cut clean through the storm. “We have her, Chief. Let us work.” They eased her onto a stretcher, peeled wet layers away, checked her pulse and pupils, slid a thermometer under her tongue, wrapped blankets tight around her shaking body.
“She’s hypothermic,” one medic said. “Let’s get ‘er in the rig.”
Charlie lurched after them, one hand half raised. “Take her to the hospital. Let Doc Cullen check her. He’ll know what to do.”
Everything went quiet for a heartbeat, the kind of quiet that is worse than a shout.
Harry Clearwater stepped in, soaked to the skin, weight on his bad leg, voice low. “Charlie, Carlisle’s gone. He handed in his resignation yesterday. Family emergency, that’s what he said. They all left town.”
Charlie blinked rain off his lashes. “What?”
A deputy wiped his radio with his sleeve. “We checked the Cullen place earlier. Thought maybe she was with the boyfriend, Edward. House locked up, no cars, no one home.”
The medics slid Bella into the ambulance and gestured towards Charlie as he stood there a second longer, stunned, then climbed in after her. Voices kept running around me. People calling updates, names, coordinates.
A deputy near the trucks said, “red BMW? A tourist?” The words carried because nobody owned a car like that out here.
Another voice answered, tired and sure. Mr. Banner, biology teacher from Forks High School who always showed up for these things. “Doesn’t Ms. Simms, the librarian, drive one?”
Charlie flinched at hearing the exchange but said nothing. His world was splitting in two and neither half was steady. His daughter, nearly frozen. The librarian, involved in an accident. The family of the guy who had dated Bella for over six months, out of town without a trace. Soon the doors were closed and the siren yelped once and the rig slowly rolled away, red lights cutting the rain into slices.
I didn’t chase the thread about the BMW. Not then. All I could see was Bella’s face behind the glass, gray as river stone, lips still moving like she was trying to finish the sentence she had started under that tree.
They left me.
Now I knew who she meant. Not only him Edward, but all of them, the golden eyed Cullens. Good, let ‘em run. Hell, let ‘em keep running. I hated those leeches, every one of them, and if they were gone for good, even better. Bella didn’t need them, she had me. Except when I looked at her through the ambulance window, strapped under blankets and shivering, I felt the lie sitting there in my chest. Whatever they had carved out of her had not stopped bleeding. Saving her from the woods was not the same as getting her back.
The storm went on like nothing had changed. Generators droned. Radios popped. Someone yelled for extra blankets. Someone else asked for more lighting at mile marker thirteen, near the ravine where the BMW had careened off the road. The pack fanned out again because work didn’t stop just because one person got pulled from the dark.
That was how the night ended. Two rescues called. Only one life found. And even that one didn’t feel like they had truly been returned.