He doesn't know if it's because the sea and air are both so similarly frigid, or because he's just so much warmer now, but Jacob doesn't notice when his legs first hit the water. He doesn't realize he's plunging down, down, down until the bubbles cloud his vision.

She's a black silhouette in the murk, a quickly fading form in a landscape where nothing holds its shape for long.

Jacob can relate.

But for the first time he feels genuinely grateful for the animal inside him. The strength that courses through his limbs, and lets him cut through the water so much faster. That familiar rush of adrenaline pounds behind his eyes, numbs the screaming of his lungs. Because Bella is his anchor in this world, and if she sinks he's going down with her. She's the albatross around his neck – not dead weight but the touch of a constant companion, a keeper of those most intimate of secrets, not ripped from his mind against his will, but freely given, shared.

He lunges for her, Bella's body now a pale chunk of ice drifting from the undercurrent, mired in the brackish tide. She flutters faintly against him, but the fight is gone from her limbs. The fight has been gone from Bella Swan for too long.

Fight is all Jacob has left now.

The surface seems miles away, but that's not half as frightening as the stillness of the body in Jacob's arms. He claws for the sky, not for himself, but for her. He'd gladly give what little air he has left if it would bring her back to life. He'd rend the sun itself and park it squarely over Forks if he thought it would bring the smile back to her face, the flush to her cheeks.

There's air in his lungs and rock beneath his feet and Sam's voice in his ears before Jacob's oxygen starved system can make sense of it all. He doesn't remember making it to the surface, or reaching the arc where the beach meets the sea. He only hears the blood pounding in his ears, and each beat screams her name.

"Bella, Bella, Bella." He chants in time with it. "Breathe Bella, Breathe Bella, Breathe Bella." It takes all his willpower not to push on her chest with the force of a train because he wants so badly to carve her open and let the air in, let the salty water drain. He wants to let the hurt out, the fear, the emptiness the sent her over the cliff in the first place. The poison, the pain. Maybe if he can flush is all from her body then she will live again. Then he can stitch her back together, patch the holes that riddled her heart, and see the sun course back into her features.

He doesn't know how to express how much he's been missing her, even though she's been here all along.

Bella's heart flutters under his hand as she chokes back to life, sputtering and heaving. He folds himself around her, a futile shield from the storm battering the coast. And there, wrapped around each other and barely on the edge of consciousness, they share a moment – something profound. Edward made Bella jump, but Jacob is the one who beat the life back into her. Clutching her numb body to his chest, neither of them can escape that cruel irony.