Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Persephone's Fall - A New One Shot by Unbidden16

Sponsored by:
Tricky Raven
Persephone’s Fall
by Unbidden16


Pairing: Jacob/Bella
RatingPG-13
Genre: Angst/Mythological
Status: Completed
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.









The skies were growing darker, their pinkened hues dissipating in favor of the deep purple and blue skies of nighttime. Above the single layer of pale lighting remaining of the day were the twinkling stars normally concealed by the Sun’s rays. Every night they returned as though a blanket had been pulled back from them.
Isabella Swan stared wistfully up at the sky, the seat beneath her swaying with the faint swinging of her legs. Her fine-boned hands curled around the chains to either side of her, her right cheek caressing the frigid metal as she leaned to that side.
This wasn’t her first night of residing in Forks, Washington, but she was still experiencing nostalgia. She’d left home, her real home, over two weeks ago to spend a couple months with her estranged father before college. Her mother, Renee, had always been the protective sort but realized that she’d denied her daughter of her father for long enough. Bella was old enough to make her own choices in life and she’d desired to get to know her father for the first time in her life.
Bella suspected that the eighteen years of time apart had done its damage.
Charles Swan was a workaholic, she’d come to find. He was rarely home and when he was he was either eating a meal she’d made them, late into the evening, or sleeping off his fatigue. They rarely spoke. More often than naught Bella wondered why she’d even bothered returning to the town of her birth. It was plainly obvious that the man that was her father was set in his ways and those ways had never and would never include her in them.
Sighing morosely, Bella swung her legs more forcefully. Her body swung to the beat, a pendulum that’s momentum remained constant so long as she continued the forward and backwards strokes of her legs.
She’d come out to the park at the edge of town because it was quiet in a way that wasn’t oppressive. While it was normally silent at her father’s it was a tense atmosphere. She didn’t feel at home or as if she could touch and do things freely there. When Charlie was home she stayed, for the most part, shut up in her room because the man seemed to have no interest in her. She would read quietly while he puttered around the house for an hour or so before he retired to his own room. After that she would meditate in complete silence, regretting her decision to leave her friends and true family in an effort to make peace with one she’d never truly met but desperately wanted to know.
Back in Phoenix, now Jacksonville, she could have been going out to watch movies with people she called friends. She could be dancing the night away in one of the many clubs either city sported. She could even be hanging off the arm of a man, had she found one that appealed to her and treated her well. A man that would be nothing like her father, she was certain.
She would have been happy.
Bella gave a particularly harsh push to her body to gain height. On a subconscious level she was trying to escape. She was trying to fly away from this place where she’d condemned herself to misery for three months before school finally started. Her decisions thus far weighed down onto her like a ton of bricks. She felt trapped in her own sorrow and loneliness. A prisoner of her own choices.
“And I used to call myself smart,” she chided into the chilling air as she swung.
For a time she just watched the horizon dip and rise with her movements. Her legs, bare from the knees up, glimmered in the pale light. She’d always been a light-skinned woman. No matter how much time she spent in the sun she didn’t tan. She burned and peeled and then she was returned to the way she was before the burning. Her feet were bare, the sandals she’d worn to the park on the sandy pit far beneath her, and seemed to touch each star individually as she swung upwards. The electric blue color she’d painted her toes just that morning made her giggle as she noticed how greatly they stood out against her skin and the sky beyond.
She absorbed herself in the feeling of the wind rushing past her, of the heat of the Sun fading away, and ignored everything else. Her life had taken a downward turn recently but in this singular moment she was content to just be.
“I would be careful not to swing so high…you never know if one of those chains might break.”
The husky, deep voice caused Bella to start, jerking around in a hazardous manner on her downward slope to view the intruder. In the midst of her turn back, the momentum carrying in a whipping motion back in the other direction, she saw him.
The man was a giant. Pure and simple. She’d never seen a man so tall, though his proportions were perfect. Long legs, each thick and solid. A nearly barrel chest and thickly corded arms of pure muscle. Dark, russet skin. Hair as black as pitch pulled back to the nape of his sturdy neck and hanging down to his shoulder blades. The man’s face was hard and imposing. Sharp cheek bones, square chin, semi-flat nose, and thin lips. His brow wasn’t heavy, simply dark and shading equally abyss-like eyes. He wore only a pair of what looked to be dark jeans and a navy blue t-shirt that hugged every contour of his sculpted chest. He had no shoes on. No socks. Just bare, big feet.
He was possibly the most attractive man she’d ever had the pleasure of seeing.
And also the scariest. She added quietly to herself as she worked to slow her swing more quickly.
He was sinfully gorgeous, there was no doubting that, but there was an aura around him that screamed ‘danger’. It wasn’t just the scar that segmented his lower lip at the leftmost corner and continued on over his chin or the way he stood as if waiting for a strike to be made onto his person…it was the threat he exuded. A near-menace. He was the male personification of dominance and alpha. He sucked the warmth right out of the air around him like a vacuum, leaving only a cold shiver of trepidation and borderline fear in its wake.
Bella came to a full stop, her head pivoted on her shoulders to gawk at this man. She didn’t dare turn away from him. She imagined him a wild animal, a wolf of sorts, ready to chew into her back the moment she looked away. Her toes slid into and settled within the confines of her sandals. She ached to feel the sand in them, knew she might feel the grass soon enough if she had to make a run for it, but resigned herself to the entrapment of the hard leather thong and sole.
The man looked her up and down as she stood, shakily, to her feet. His eyes were both appreciative and assessing. She knew what he’d see. Pale complexion, spindly arms and legs in great need of some muscle or fat, brown hair braided back to hang down to her butt cheeks, and a modest outfit consisting of a knee-length baby-blue skirt and white tank-top. She wasn’t a looker, simply average. She’d always been slender to the point of being emaciated, a point she’d tried to rectify tens of hundreds of times in the past. Her eyes were a lackluster brown, but framed by long lashes. Thin, pink lips and a pert nose completed her mundane look.
The man seemed not to care all that much that she wasn’t modelesque in stature or looks. The smile on his face screamed male approval.
The urge to run far, far away bloomed brightly in her chest.
Instead of running, though, Bella gulped down the unease lodged in her throat and stared the man down. Her fingers gripped the chains she’d been swinging from in a steel-like grip. Her knuckles appeared almost blue from strain.
“Can I help you?” She asked somewhat rudely, unconsciously taking a step backwards as the man’s obsidian eyes locked onto her own. A derisive smile tipped his lips.
“You could, actually.” He stalked forward then, his strides long and sure. Bella backpedaled several steps from the swing, unease shifting to outright fright as he approached. Catching her obvious retreat he stopped, his legs spread shoulder-width apart. Ready to bolt – either towards her or away she was unsure.
He looked her up and down once more.
“My name is Jacob Black.” He introduced himself, his words caressing across her ears and skin like decadent dark chocolate. That voice was one that could bring entire civilizations to their knees. “Tell me yours.”
“No.” She refused, retreating even further from him. Her car wasn’t that far away. She could run fast if she had to. Belatedly she wished she’d bothered to bring her pepperspray with her. Of course she hadn’t, though. What person in their right mind would think that the need for that particular protection device would be in Forks, Washington in a child’s playground?
Never assume anything, a teacher’s chiding voice from long-past rang through her head.
Too late for her to be remembering such things. She was in the middle of the situation and fretting over the shoulda, coulda, and woulda’s would do absolutely nothing to help her.
“You don’t trust me.” It was a statement, not a question. And certainly not one she was going to rebuke. She was a terrible liar as it was. This man would make her nervous enough that she’d burst into tears if she even tried to call the sky green let alone that she trusted him. He smiled faintly, one that wasn’t quite cruel or sinister. It was almost sincere. “You will.”
“W-what do you mean?” She was already tensing the muscles in her legs in preparation to run. She wasn’t waiting for the answer to her question. It was rhetorical anyway.
“Sweet little Bella,” the man cooed, his obsidian eyes flashing gold, “you are mine.”
She took off running.
Bella panted as she tore across the damp grass, her sandals kicked up and off with the dew-drops she displaced in her flight. Her feet grew numb quickly from the bitter cold ground. A masculine chuckle echoed behind her which only fueled her desire to flee that much more.
“Why do you run, little maiden?” The husky voice was much closer to her than she could have ever imagined. She squealed when she felt a brush of hot air puff over the back of her neck. Another chuckle. “Little maiden, soon to be my Queen.”
Her eyes trained in on her vehicle, a dilapidated red truck that had been through its own kind of off-roading war. Most people thought the truck was a run-down piece of shit. They expected it to break apart into pieces at any moment. She’d even considered converting the damned thing into a redneck front-lawn ornament when the engine had stalled out for the fifth time, but not now. Now she welcomed its solidarity. She welcomed what was stored so conveniently in its passenger seat.
Bella put on a burst of speed, ignoring the innate feeling of being prey to one fierce predator. Her right sole scraped forcefully against a jagged rock, maybe even broken glass, but she shoved the painful jolt out of her mind. Adrenalin helped to keep the pain at bay. All she could make herself understand was that she needed some form of protection against this…man and that protection was so very close.
“Little maiden, have you hurt yourself?”
Jerking when she felt fingers trailing through her hair, Bella lunged into the hard steel of her driver’s side door. The impact drew the breath from her lungs, but she pushed on. With shaking, but rapidly-moving hands she scrambled for the silvered handle.
“Can’t have that, now, can we?”
She was plowed into from behind.
Screaming automatically, Bella began to fight back against the wall of muscle that fitted itself against her entire back. Stony legs pinned her own smaller ones against the footboard. Hands the size of saucers, thick and intimidating, snatched around her wrists to secure them before her to the murky glass window. She bucked her head backwards as well as her hips in an attempt to dislodge the male behind her. All the while her voice strained to reach higher and higher tones in order to bring someone, anyone, to her rescue.
Lips touched her ear through her hair. A moist tongue traced its shell. A groan echoed in her ears even through her screams. She whipped her head around to the face she felt so close to hers in an attempt to bite into any amount of flesh she could sink her teeth into. Hands and legs immobilized as they were it was her only defense.
The big man jerked back with a hearty laugh, his chest shaking against her slender back.
“Little maiden, a kitten with claws and fangs aplenty.” The tone was amused and chiding. It sickened her and made her shout obscenities at him. He smirked at her through her peripheral. He shifted his hands still cuffing her wrists so that he could shackle them together in a single paw. His one-handed hold was no weaker than his two-handed one. He used his now free hand to trace calloused knuckles across her cheek. Again she attempted to bite him, this time intent on tearing his fingers from his person. “What a fine Queen you will make.”
His caressing hand snapped then and pinched tightly to her chin. His hand was so large that his palm enclosed her entire chin and a greater part of her throat. His fingers bracketed her cheeks and jaw where they spanned upwards to her ears. His middle finger flicked almost idly against the dangling earrings she wore.
“No!” She screamed through teeth made to clench. Again he rumbled with mirth and tilted her head to the side so that her neck was bared helplessly to him. His lips met the fragile column of her throat. His tongue bathed it while his teeth nibbled. Her heart raced from the uncontrollable fear pumping through her veins while goosebumps erupted over her skin from the intimate nuzzling being done to the most sensitive part of her body. A whimper escaped her clenched jaw despite her attempt to contain it.
“Shhh,” the male hushed her. His head lifted minutely so that he could speak directly into her ear. The hot air blowing from between his lips had her shaking. She could feel his smile against her skin. “I won’t hurt you, you silly thing. It would go against my nature, after all, to injure my mate.”
“L-let me go,” she pled on a choked sob through her clamped jaw. His lips began to suckle on her throat and she found herself whimpering again, this time louder and more consistently.
“Never, my little maiden. My Queen.” His teeth clamped over the flesh of her neck and compressed. She screamed as loudly as she could with his hand collaring her. Her hips bucked forward harshly into the truck in a renewed attempt to flee. She was still trapped.
“You are mine. You always were and mine you will remain.” His words were barely intelligible now. Every syllable was accompanied by an inhuman growl. Before her very eyes she could see the hand holding her wrists so firmly morphing into something not human. Coarse hair grew over the backs of his palms and digits. The same hair she witnessed sprouting there tickled her face where his other hand clenched. Sharp points ticked harmlessly at her lobes. The body so firmly pressed to her expanded and grew. Her shaking came to a crescendo as a near seizure with her horror.
“Dear God in Heaven,” she swore and prayed at the same time. Her voice was quiet as if that alone would keep this beast-man from slaughtering her. From eating her.
Razor-sharp points settled over the curve of her throat where her neck met her shoulder. She shuddered and jerked, screaming continuously now. In the span of a single breath the countless fangs at her throat bit down and sunk into her flesh. The pain was instantaneous. The scream morphed into a squeal and she sobbed.
As she cried the man drew from her neck. Bella could feel each suckle he made as if it was her that was drinking from a juice-box. His lips helped to keep the blood from dribbling anywhere but into his mouth. Her fingers clenched down into her palms, piercing skin, in an attempt to create another pain to focus her mind on.
After several minutes, perhaps hours, she began to feel numb. Lethargy and something else subdued her far more easily than even chains could have. Her body sagged and slumped, the only thing keeping her upright was the beast pressed so fully against her and draining her life away. Her eyelids drooped of their own accord.
For a short time more he drank from her, his tongue lapping at the wound he’d made. Sometimes his sucks were hard and painful. At other times it was almost gentle and she could barely feel them. Eventually he pulled himself away from her neck, his tongue stroking over the wound she no longer felt. His nose, dreadfully cold and moist, poked at her cheek as if in question.
As he pulled his body away from hers Bella felt herself falling. It was a surreal experience. She was aware of everything, albeit tired and mostly numb. She simply could do nothing to save her own self. It was like she was simply a reader immersed into the body of one of the characters she so fanatically read about.
Two large arms snatched under her and tugged her upwards. The world spun on its axis even with her eyes firmly shut. Had they been open she suspected that she might have viewed things as a child does after jumping off of those spinning carousel contraptions in play-parks. Topsy-turvy. Lopsided. Unreal.
Sleep now, my Queen, a seductively deep voice resounded through every cavity of her mind. It lulled her and embraced her. Warmth was seeping into her being and making her even more tired. Funny, but she thought death was supposed to be cold?
Sleep, the voice repeated.
Unable to resist the voice or her body’s plaintive requests she allowed herself to slip off into oblivion where nothing could hurt her. Better yet it was a place where that beast-man could not reach her.
Dropping off at last she heard one more chuckle from the beast, this one indulgent.
What was so funny?

XxXxX

Bella groaned as she rolled under silken sheets. Her entire body was achingly sore. Her head pounded to a louder and separate beat from her heart giving her one of the worst migraines of her life. Her hands clenched around the sheets covering her to aid them upwards over her head so that the awful, bright light outside of her eyelids would go away.
A now familiar and dreaded chuckle tickled at her ears.
“Not a morning person, I see.” A large hand petted down over her hip to her thigh through the sheets. She flinched uncontrollably and curled up on herself in order to hide, pitiful though the action may have been.
A frightened squeak left her lips.
“Had I not told you last night, my Queen, that I would not hurt you?” The hand returned despite her protective gesture and petted her side unrepentantly. “You’re mine to protect now and for eternity, little maiden.”
“Get off of me!” She shouted, scooting to the other end of the bed she was laying on. She peeked her eyes out from under the blankets to view the beast-man once more. He looked as he had the night before. Dark and terrifying. Whatever it was he’d turned into lurked in his dark eyes, but his body was completely human now. She could face the human easier than she could the creature that had torn at her throat.
Remembering it, recalling the pain and the later numbness, her hand jerked upwards to settle over the wound. Instead of bandaging, scabbed, or sutured cut she felt raised, hard bumps. Her brows furrowed. Was it…?
“It has scarred over.” He reached over towards her as if he would massage the scar along with her, but she scrambled further away. Her feet met the floor and she backpedaled into the wall. The man had stood on his own side of the bed between them, his eyes glinting. As menacing as he looked the night before she could almost swear she saw something human in him now. His shoulders weren’t as stiff and his hands were loose. He looked almost calm before her.
“Why?” She hissed, still rubbing at the scarred skin. Each swipe of her fingers left the spot tingling with fire.
“Why what, my Queen?”
“Why’d you do this?” Her free hand swept around her gesturing at the room. It was not her room back at her father’s home. This place was far too large and magnificent. Over-sized King bed. Burgundy sheets and comforters. Dark-stained wood. Antique furniture that befitted a mansion. No, this was not her home. “Why am I here?”
“Because I was not and will never let you go.” There was the predator again. The menace was back. Tension slipped into his spine as if it had been waiting for this. He took large steps towards her. She cowered into a corner, but had nowhere else to go. He towered over her, his dark eyes trained down onto her. His scent, for the first time, assailed her. He smelled like the forest after a storm, all wet ground and pine. Intertwined with that was musk.
Curiously, her heart began to beat heavily with something other than fear.
“I am Jacob Ephraim Black. I am Supreme Alpha.” His shoulders pulled back and widened so that his already massive chest was thrust forward. Pure power radiated off of him. “You are my Alpha Bitch. My Queen. You will remain here with me, your mate, until the Spirits reclaim us.”
“No,” she gasped, shaking her head. The beast, and he was a beast because she refused to think of him as anything but, stared determinately down at her. This was something that he believed in. Something that he would not flounder on.
She snapped.
“No!” She screamed, throwing herself at him. Whether it was surprise or pain that felled him, Bella managed to thrust a fist into the man’s groin. Air whooshed from his lungs as he doubled-over. Again she shot her fist out at him, not noticing the bandages wrapped around her palms. This time she cuffed his ear. Again and again she hit him, the word ‘no’ falling from her lips like a delirious prayer. The beast-man had righted himself sometime during her barrage and simply let her beat on him.
For an unidentifiable amount of time she ranted and wore her body down, trying to inflict pain on the man. She wanted him to feel pain. She wanted him to know how helpless she felt. In the recesses of her mind, a darker part of herself, she wanted him to die for what he’d put her through and would undoubtedly continue to put her through.
Bella railed against him until she collapsed on the floor, her hands hanging uselessly upon her lap. Her head hung forlornly. The man knelt before her and ticked his hand under her jaw. She refused to look at him and he sighed.
“You will see, little maiden. Here with me is your home.” He tried to take her into his arms, but she flailed, slapping his cheek. He was silent for a stretch and then rose to his full height. “You’re my Queen. You will accept this one day.”
“I hate you,” she spat, her eyes bleeding salty tears.
Another sigh.
“I know.”
With that he was gone. He left her to her solitude, the door unlocked behind him. Still she remained on the floor in her corner, crying. She would escape, she would run and never look back, but not now.
Now she would bide her time and let her despair dissipate to a more manageable level so that she could better free herself later.

XxXxX

Over the long days which bled into months she found that she and her captor were not alone in this place. This place that consisted of huge stone walls, imposing fire-places bigger than any normal man, and grandeur. The halls were filled with people, all of them male. All of them seeming carbon-copies of the man that had taken her. They were all large in stature. They all exuded power. Not a single one of them gave her a moments’ peace when their eyes landed upon her as she wandered the halls searching for an exit.
Bella had lost count of how many rooms this place had. She’d crossed too many stoic, dark faces to be able to remember them all. A few stood out, of course. A man with a heavy brow was introduced to her while she wandered by her captor. His name was ‘Sam’ and was, according to her beast-man, his second-in-command. Another, Paul, was the head of their Enforcers. A male that hunted down and killed other males of their kind. One male, the smallest of any of them she’d seen since being brought to this place, was called Seth. He led the kitchen staff. He didn’t unnerve her as much as the others, but there was still much about him that she did not like or trust. He was a beast just like the rest of them and she steadfastly stayed away from all of them whenever she had the chance.
She never found an exit.
There were windows, yes, but they were all sealed shut. She could find no way to open them and never found one open. Any doors she found led to another room or hallway. There was no outside for her no matter how long and hard she searched. She could see freedom on the other side of the windows, a dark, looming forest, but it was beyond her reach.
The man, Jacob, hovered over her wherever she turned. She never spoke his name and never offered hers, though he’d known it somehow that first night. She asked for nothing, not even her freedom. He would not grant it to her, anyway. She didn’t speak to him. She didn’t acknowledge him unless he had her physically cornered and forced her attention on him.
She hated him.
He made an effort to talk to her even when she didn’t respond. He tried to touch her and hold her no matter how many times she lashed out at him. He attempted to welcome her into the home he insisted was theirs. He even told her of her father and mother and how they were in her absence. Her mother worried, of course, but they’d been told she was most likely a runaway. Most children of divorced families ran away from home and never came back. It sickened her that they didn’t look for her harder. Had she been so unimportant to them?
What made it worse was that her captor was rubbing it in her face, subtly, but still there.
“You have family here now, my little maiden.” His hand had reached out to stroke her hair, but she threw it off. His lip twitched, but that was his only sign of his dislike of her always tuning away from him and his presence. “I will always be here for you. No one else could care for you in the way that I always will.”
Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months. Her resolve to leave, to be away from the beast that had introduced her to a world where Shapeshifters ruled and made her its Queen, never wavered, but depression bloomed. She ate nothing of what he gave her, instead sneaking food from others’ plates from the main halls when they weren’t looking. Even that was sparse. They way Jacob looked at her was intense and sickening. He was waiting for something and she didn’t know what it was…all she knew was that it could not be good for her.
Late at night he came to her, no matter where she hid in their ‘home’. He would lead her bodily back to the room she’d first woken up in, lay her out on the bed, and then spread himself out next to her to sleep. He didn’t sleep, though. He just watched her and petted her, whispering words of love and promises of forever into her ear. She only found solace in sleep, which was so hard to come by with him beside her. Teasing and tormenting her in ways no one ever had.
She was marked as his and he would never allow her to leave.
Those were the only two things she thought of late at night.

XxXxX

“Please,” Bella begged suddenly one evening at the main-hall table. Every obsidian eye in this horrid place looked to her as she stumbled up to Jacob and set her head upon his knee. She still flinched when his hand settled onto her scalp, but she didn’t push him away. Not this time. “Please, let me go.”
“Your home is here, my mate.” His fingers stroked her temples.
“Please,” she rasped, forcing herself to kiss his knee. The muscles in his legs tensed, but then released as quickly. She’d taken him by surprise. “I need to do something. I need other people. Please.”
“We are your people.” He intoned simply, as if she were slow. Her hands clenched minutely and she didn’t doubt he’d noticed. He never missed anything about her.
“Not wolves. I need human contact.” Bella kissed higher on his leg. She didn’t care that she was demeaning herself in front of so many. Queen or not, she was alone. She was beyond shame. The need for someone other than these beasts overruled everything she had once stood for. Days, months, or years. Exact time didn’t matter in this place…it simply drew away one’s sanity like water would leach into a sponge. She couldn’t stand much more of the quiet she’d secluded herself into.
Jacob was silent for a long while and simply continued to pet her hair. She rubbed her cheek into his thigh, desperate to make him release her. She would do anything at this point.
She feared she’d lost her humanity in this place.
The beast was a man now. He was Jacob.
That frightened her.
“You will return,” he promised them both, his tone as hard as the night she’d met him. He shifted under her minutely, but kept his hand on her. She glanced up at the underside of the table as if seeking the answers only God could give her. She’d never been religious before, but she found herself praying to Deities far and wide now. Prayed for patience and resilience. Too late, of course.
Isabella Swan was a nearly completely broken woman.
A single, ripe fruit was held in front of her face underneath the table. With shaking hands she took the apple from Jacob’s proffered one. As she did so he wrapped an arm around her chest and tugged her up onto his lap. His lips connected with her temple chastely. Her eyes remained trained onto the succulent looking red fruit.
“You will return,” he vowed again and used a palm to nudge her cupped hands closer to her face. “Eat.”
Momentarily looking to those surrounding them at the table, she saw through their penetrating stares. They had been waiting for this. They’d been waiting for her to give in. They’d been waiting for her to break. They knew that she now knew that in order to live instead of simply existing she needed to submit. She had to be their Queen and in return she would have a semblance of freedom.
Sick to her stomach, but knowing no other way to save herself, Bella bit into the apple.
The juicy piece of fruit might as well have been a physical tie between her and this place, her new home, because she was bound here for the rest of her life, however long that might be. Jacob Ephraim Black, the beast from the park, would ensure that she always remained his.
“You will stay,” he spoke into her neck softly with affection.
Bella nodded her head mutely.
She would stay because she was Persephone and Hades would never allow his Queen to leave the world he ruled in her name.
She was a prisoner of her choices once more.
…And a prisoner she would stay.

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