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“I imprinted on a leech,” Jacob thinks as he stares at the half-full pill bottle left over from his mother’s treatment before she moved to a better place.
“I imprinted on a leech,” Jacob thinks again, numb and hurting but unable to seek solace from the Pack, unwilling to let any of them see his mind, unable to let go and be free as his wolf because he can’t tell them and they can never know.
When he wakes up the morning after, Jacob checks that he didn’t dream of emptying the pill bottle and sits, stunned, in the garage as he stares at the empty container.
“I imprinted on a leech,” Jacob nearly whispers to the sharp ocean breeze, leaning into it until he falls and falls and falls. He hits the water hard and doesn’t bother fighting it.
Jacob wakes up on the shore, feeling empty and yet somehow emptier when he looks up at his father and sees the silent judgement in his eyes. Billy might not know for sure what he’s doing, or trying to do, but he has an idea and disapproves. “But,” Jacob thinks, “he doesn’t know his son imprinted on a leech.”
“It’s that male one, the one the Elders say can read any man’s mind, but if that was true the leech might have looked twice at me, looked and seen something of value, of worth. But he didn’t. He just turned his gaze, his attention, his all, back to Bella in that parking lot, and they deserve each other, they truly do,” Jacob reminds himself silently as he stares at the bathroom mirror and contemplates the razor he holds in his hand.
He’d thought, when he received it as a mark of adulthook, that he would be pleased to finally be old enough to use it. Instead, he gets both older and younger, and won’t need the razor for the foreseeable future because he won’t grow facial hair, won’t until his body finally lets him age again when everyone he loves is dead. He idly measures it against his wrist and wonders at how its length is just right.
Jacob wakes again in a sticky pool of his own blood and wonders absentmindedly if this would make the leech take notice, if he would see - but Jacob won’t let himself think about that. The leech, his leech, made his choice, and now Jacob has to make the only one left to him. The leech doesn’t want him in his life or anywhere, would happily see him dead, so Jacob should do as he wants and not be alive. Jacob turns the water on and watches red swirl easily down the drain and wonders why it couldn’t have been that easy for him.
Jake’s tired now, as he wheels his motorcycle out of the garage. He’d sold the one he fixed for her the day before and made sure to leave everything Billy or the Pack might care about where they’ll find it. He looks one last time at the house he grew up in surrounded by the changing color of the leaves, the house he’d thought his children would grow up in (but the leech didn’t want that, had made his choice), and starts his bike.
Jacob’s sure he’s a sight to see. He sleeps under the shadows of the trees at night beside the road because he’s actively seeking the worst that could happen. If someone mugged him or a car rolled over him, everything might finally be over. He only uses the cash from selling her bike when absolutely necessary and only on gas. He hasn’t eaten in a while and has only had whatever falls from the sky to drink, but that doesn’t really matter now.
Jacob pushes his bike as far north as it can go and leaves it on the side of the first road, out of money and out of gas, and tiredly thinks “Not much further now.”
Jacob shifts for the last time, pushing his starved body as far as it can go, grateful the Pack bond is stretched so thin that he can barely sense the presence of the others, can’t hear any thought besides his own or feel any emotion besides his own tired dull numb grayness.
He limps further and further, and when he is finally too exhausted to take another step, Jake closes his eyes to rest in the field of ice and snow, feeling his body change back to a human’s and wonders when the spring comes what the finder of his naked body will think. The lonely wind stirs over him, bringing the promise of an equaling blanket of snow.
His last thought before the world slows and crystallizes and he can only see white is to hope that his leech is happy with her.
Jacob does not wake again.
They feel him die, fell the loss of Pack, and howl their grief to the sky. They don’t understand, he’d had a hard week, but they didn’t realize he was gone until he shifted and was only a ghost, too far away to seem real.
Billy closes his eyes and mourns the loss of his child. He’d watched his son so rapidly decline, seen the absence of light and hope from his eyes, and understood that his son wasn’t really there anymore. It was just a body walking around, wearing his son’s face.
In the end, Same retrieves his body. All of the Pack know where he dies, remember the last direction they felt him alive, but it is left to Sam to bring his body back home. He doesn’t understand, none of them do, but he goes and brings back the body of Pack and wonders if he’d only noticed, if he’d only been stronger, if only he’d been a better leader, if his Pack would still be whole. He does not know, but he resolves to keep a closer watch on his Pack and sends his hope and resolution to Jacob’s soul.
Bella absently notes one day that she hasn’t seen Jacob for a while, but she turns her attention back to the bronze-haired god in front of her and lets that thought slip from her mind. Edward doesn’t even notice his absence at all, sure about Bella, sure about the ring he’s carrying in his pocket even though Alice has had some disturbing visions, sure that the thought he’d caught in the mutt’s mind had just been the thing’s way of messing with him.