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Jacob mostly kept to a set schedule on the island. Wake up, teach his class if school was in session, work on anything at the Homestead that needed repairing and head home to spend time with Belle. It was a bit predictable and occasionally broken up by going to see Bella and the baby or Coraline but it was his life and he loved it.

The island, of course, occasionally decided to throw a wrench in those plans and if his way home became a swamp or there was a freak blizzard, Jacob tried to take it in stride and just keep moving on. It wasn't anything new after three years and some change, right? Except today. He'd pulled open the door to his and Belle's little house expecting to see his wife working on some new invention...and got greeted with a complete decor change.

So the new carpet was nice. So was the air conditioning, which wasn't available in abundance on the island (being inside a room without feeling hot and sticky and without the air so thick that he could breathe without drowning was a novelty) but he couldn't figure out how it got here. Was this some trick? Some temporary decorating change that was going away whenever the island's wacky magic decided to swing back to (relatively) normal? Jacob didn't know. Smarter people than him had been stumped by the island and he had never professed to be into researching or anything that involved reading or sitting still for very long.

But the biggest change about this place was the little undercurrent of power he felt. There was a little ripple, a little spark in the air and it just felt different than he'd felt in the three years since he'd shown up on the island and resigned himself to not being able to shift anymore. Maybe he'd learned to live without that part of himself but he'd never really accepted it and he sure as hell had never rejected it. Could it be? Was the wolf still under there after all and he was finally in a place where he could access it?

He turned the corner away from the front desk and let loose on his control, feeling his body shift and change into the wolf he hadn't been since showing up on the sandy beaches of Tabula Rasa all those years ago.

Finally.

[[See Jacob either before or after he shifts into a wolf - don't worry, he's not going to bite.]]

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"You've been working in the stables?" Jacob shouldn't be all that surprised since Belle loved horses but it did bother him his wife had to have a job to support himself because he wasn't there to help her.

"I mean, yeah, we can go get something from the gift shop."

"It's hardly anything I'm not used to," Belle replies, given that she spends several hours there doing what she would have done for Philippe anyway. She enjoys it, not only because it gives her the chance to free her mind and earn money in the meantime. "Besides, it's nice," she confesses. "I put in my work, and at the end of the day, it's rewarded with money. I'm going to try and sell some inventions to the hotel, if I can manage to scrape something useful together."

"I'm sure everything you make is useful to someone," Jacob said, beaming. There was nobody he was more proud of on a daily basis than his wife and knowing that she'd thrived here without him was just a testimony to how resilient and intelligent she was. While she'd missed him, she'd done all right without him too and that was a comfort.

"They have a lot of useful things already," she replies, but it's filled with warmth and teasing, the things she's been missing in the months she's been here without him. "It's nice to be in a place that has technology like this, but it means I've had to do a great deal of catching up."

"You'll learn it," Jacob assured her. While it was nice to be back in a world of every electronic convenience, he guessed there were some advantages to the simple life on the island.

"You'll learn it and then you'll make it ten times better."