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Chapter Text

"The wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they'd lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come."

Jodi Picoult, "Lone Wolf" 

  Prologue (Leah) 

An officer stands with her. Officer Josephson, she thinks vaguely. He found her name and number on an insurance card. 

***

Seth is the first at her side, and then Jared and Kim, who are followed by Quil and Brady, but it is only when the roar of the motorbike can be heard from outside that the tears which have been threatening to spill over for nearly an hour now finally stain her face.

His bike left tossed and abandoned, Jacob is too quick for the automatic doors. His face hardens as he waits for the glass to slide open, and for just a moment she thinks that he's going to break through, but then he sees his family standing together at the front desk. She knows that he is counting, figuring out which of them are missing. One, two, three.

He looks for the person he knows who will always tell him the truth. Four, five, six.

Their eyes meet. "Emily," she whispers. 

***

The doctor comes to the seating area and asks to see the immediate family in private.

"We are their family," Jacob says from beside Embry. They are finally all together as they have not been since the day after Sam quit cold turkey. "All of us."

Seth stands up. Paul sits on the other side of him and looks unsure because Rachel is gone, searching for coffee after being unable to stand the bouncing of his knee any longer. Kim is on Jared's lap, wrapped in his arms and sobbing the loudest of all of them.

"I'm sorry," the doctor begins, but he doesn't need to say anything else.

Somebody wails.

"Sam," she whispers.

***

Seth is throwing up. Brady and Collin are on the floor. Kim is inconsolable, but now Jared cries with her. Rachel has dropped her coffee.

Leah has grabbed onto whoever is close—Embry, and Quil. They hold her tight as she fights the phase she has painstakingly refused for two years.

Paul's bolted. There's nobody left to keep Jacob on his feet.

But an Alpha is always able to find impossible strength. Chief Black. "Where is the baby?" he demands. "Where is Joshua?"

Officer Josephson is quiet as he steps forward. He has been here for as long as she has. "He was in the care of a minor. A babysitter, at the time…" She vaguely registers somebody murmuring Claire's name. "We have placed him with CPS for the night."

Her eyes are puffy but as murderous as Jake's, though her body trembles harder. "CPS?"

"Child Protective Services. They take cases like this. They deal with the welfare of children in these times." The officer straightens himself and looks at each of the brothers and sisters who have refused to leave the waiting room. "Of orphaned children."

Chapter Text

You told me you could be strong. You have the wolf blood in you."

George R.R. Martin, "A Clash of Kings"

Step One is Denial (Jacob)

It was three years ago that Sam gave everything he had to Jacob, keeping only Emily for himself. He phased for the very last time, got into bed, and made her his wife the next day.

Leah scowled throughout the whole ceremony, but not for the reasons she might have two years or so prior. She scowled because Emily had wrangled her into a dress and ranked her as maid of honour. Claire was a flower girl, and every single one of Sam's brothers were best men.

Jared and Paul were the next to leave. Leah followed not long after, and then so did Embry, but still Jacob feels each of them even after they go because there is something in that type of brotherhood that cannot be broken by choosing to move on. They stay with him always, whether they run with him or not.

They haven't picked up the scent of a nomad sucker for eight months now, but it hasn't lessened the raging fire in the pit of their stomachs or the ties he has to every single wolf. He knows when Paul is fighting with Rachel, or when Embry is on his way to work at the garage, and he has an itch underneath his skin when Leah struggles with her temper. He felt Sam's joy when Joshua was born, despite his phone not ringing for another half an hour. His heart skipped when Emily's car crashed on the 101.

It will always be this way for as long as he is Alpha, because it's an Alpha's job to know, to protect, to lead, to feel, but Sam's gone. Jacob has this space in his head that Sam usually fills, a spot which has become worryingly quiet and out of reach, unnerving him and making him anxious because Sam's gone.

***

"I don't care about your darn protocols, Miranda." Charlie Swan might have struggled to be a full-time father when his daughter came back to him, but Chief Swan is the best policeman this side of Washington and the first man Billy Black called. His cruiser sits outside the red house, the driver's door wide open. "Those kids were family to me and my girl."

Jacob knows that Charlie will never forget how Sam carried his daughter through the forest and brought her back to him. He knows that Charlie will forever grieve for Bella, who now has golden eyes and lives in cloudy Northern Ireland but whose grave is still visited most days in Forks. The pain Charlie still feels mirrors Jacob's own, made all the more clear on their faces by the blue beacon on the cruiser which flashes through the kitchen window.

It doesn't happen so much anymore, but there are times when Jacob catches himself wishing that Bella was still around. She was always better equipped to deal the sadness of others than she was her own, better at giving her love, but instead it is Charlie who is here, his eyes wet but his voice firm and dangerous. He shouts down the phone and fights Jacob's corner, although Bella had never really done much of that.

"Yes, we'll be here at this number," Charlie finally says, his voice carrying a little less heat than before, but for him this is not defeat. He has been on the phone for an hour already, and is already punching in Sue's number without pausing for breath because he and Sue Clearwater are a little more than friends and because she has contacts from working at the Reservation's clinic. Jacob knows that she will say Seth is in his old room and Leah has gone missing.

Billy carefully rolls his chair to the table and takes away Jacob's cold, untouched coffee.

"She's telling me we can't do anything until nine tomorrow morning… Yes, he's here… I haven't seen her around." Charlie looks across to Jacob, who shakes his head. No, he doesn't know where Leah is. Sam might. But Sam's not here.

In many ways, different ways, Sam was a better Alpha. Jacob was never sure whether it was because Sam had never before had a real family of his own or if it was because he had little choice in the matter, but Sam had always been able to bring everyone together and get them arguing over the last slice of pizza instead of arguing over who was taking the double shift. He'd pulled each and every one of them through their first phase despite having nobody around when it had happened to him. He'd cut their hair and he'd given them purpose, even if they'd not wanted it. He'd shown strength.

"You should get everyone together," Billy says as he puts a fresh hot cup in front of his son, just as Charlie quietly asks Sue whether she knows Sam and Emily had a lawyer. "Sooner rather than later."

"Later," Jacob says, because asking them all to be together without Sam is unthinkable and cannot happen.

He thinks that even if he could gather the strength to find Leah he would probably end up with a bloodied nose or broken arm for his efforts, and that most of the others have someone who, tonight, at least, can bring better comfort than even a bonfire might be able to. They've only ever had them to celebrate before, never to mourn, and they have always been together.

Billy sighs.

But unity is something they know, and so Leah will come back. She always does, just as Paul has been fading in and out all night but will settle again. And Embry will go back to the garage, but for now he's leading patrol for the first time in a year, falling easily into his old place of second-in-command. Collin and Brady are out there at his side and revel in familiarity, just as Jared does with Kim and Quil with Claire.

Jacob thinks that maybe he should be with them, except he can't do anything or be of real use to anyone until he knows where everyone is, and that includes little Joshua Uley, who has a place in his head too.

***

Leah does come back. She turns up just as the sun is rising.

She smells of big cities, of smoke and sweat and the trouble they bring to small-town girls. There is a whiff of tequila about her, too, despite the trouble she still has trying to get rip roaring drunk. There are some wolf things that you can't get rid of, and one of them is the gift of generous metabolisms. Being able to find your Alpha even though you haven't answered to him for two years is another.

"Billy's asleep," he says by way of explanation as she looks around the empty room. "Charlie left a while ago. A few out running patrol. Embry and Paul broke their streaks."

She doesn't care about that. "Josh?"

A year ago Emily named Leah as godparent to her first and only child. Sam named Jacob, and Joshua is just about the only thing in common he has with Leah nowadays because he's either on patrol or at the garage and she decided to try her hand at community college. He didn't know that Positive Psychology was a thing, but apparently it's a good preparatory course for something or the other.

"Foster family."

Her eyes dance dangerously in the light of the new day, and her bare feet and her messy dark hair which she still keeps cut short makes her look fierce and untamed. "You gonna spring him?"

"We are." Maybe she knew, Jacob thinks. Maybe she figured that he's been trying to reach for her the way he's been trying to reach for Sam. "Eight o'clock. Lawyer's waiting."

They are conspirators, united and determined. Leah nods once. "Have you slept?"

Not at all. "About as much as you have."

"This will be fun."

A sleep-deprived Leah is dangerous, especially now that Jacob has wolves phasing left, right and centre again. He owes Quil ten bucks after swearing that Embry could keep his head.

Leah heads for the shower. Later, she recognises the lawyer because it's the same one who told Emily she inherited the house in La Push.

***

"I know this is a very difficult time for you. I imagine that you probably have a lot of questions."

"The baby." It is three minutes past eight, but Charlie said nothing could happen until nine. "Where is he?"

"The foster family he was with last night have brought him here, and I've already arranged for his transfer." The lawyer looks old and tired, but not as old and tired as Jacob feels. "CPS feel he will adjust better in his own environment, so it is just a matter of you both taking him home."

"Your place or mine?" Leah deadpans. She is wearing Rachel or Rebecca's old clothes which are too small for her, but the other man hasn't seemed to notice. Instead of smiling politely he looks at both of them with obvious confusion and puts down his pen.

"Sorry," he says eventually. "Did Mr and Mrs Uley talk to you about their guardianship arrangements at all?"

The matching looks on Jacob and Leah's faces say no, they didn't.

"In preparing their will, we talked about what would happen to Joshua and who would take care of him in the event that they should both die, and, well, they named you. Both of you."

Jacob would be able to feel Leah's amused shock even without the supernatural ties, he is sure. She laughs until she's crying again.

***

You can say no, says the lawyer's echo, but Leah is already signing something the social worker has given them and then Jacob is signing something. Somebody carries Joshua into the room on her hip and Jacob blinks and Leah is off her chair, and it becomes sixteen minutes since Sam has given everything he had to Jacob and kept nothing for himself.

Chapter Text

"Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite."

Jodi Picoult, "Handle with Care"

Step Two is Anger (Leah)

"Utilities. Upkeep. Mortgage."

"Tax," Jacob offers up, his hands tight against the steering wheel of the only car he has ever refused to sell.

"Tax!" She throws her head back, just as Joshua resumes his crying from behind them. "Yeah," she says, humming her agreement. "It's enough to scare me too, kid."

Joshua looks like his father, all dark hair and gorgeous skin and big brown eyes. His expression is the same when he scowls at her too, though she thinks his disappointment might look a little like his mother's when he realises that his Aunt Leah is going to ruin his life, all because his parents knew that she would not be able to say no. They knew that she would be the first to sign those goddamn papers and that she would be the first to reach for their son.

She hates it. She hates that Joshua never cries as much when Jake holds him. She hates that she had to be the one to go back and ask for a child seat because they didn't even think to bring one. She hates that the social worker stood and looked doubtfully at them through the window as they argued animatedly over where the seat belt needed to be.

Most of all Leah hates that she didn't realise the truth in the old lawyer's words when he said that the CPS felt Joshua would adapt better in his own environment. She'd been trying to remember the quote about children and how it takes a village and had wondered how Billy or her mom would take to having a baby under their roof again.

She looks back at the crying one-year-old and knows she has nothing to give, because her already battered heart has died with Sam and Emily, but still she is expected to raise him in the same house which has raised wolves.

"Question for you," she says, much in the same way she challenges her professor. "What in the name of Taha Aki were your folks thinking when they decided, hey, here's an idea! Let's give the thing we love most in the world to the most dysfunctional two of our family! What a thrilling psych experiment that will be!"

Jacob's sweaty palm pushes at her shoulder. "You're scaring him."

"He's scaring me," she mutters.

Jacob sighs, long and deep, but she wants him to be angry. She wants him to shout and scream at her like she was screaming into the darkness of Seattle about eight hours ago, but instead he says, "Find that moose he loves so much. Y'know, the thing with the deformed head your mom got him."

"I hate that thing."

She hates that after Joshua is wrestled out of his borrowed car seat, his cries turn to jolting hiccups as he nestles against Jacob's warmth and clutches Moose. Or maybe he stops bawling because the house smells of a past life, of muffins which were baked only the day before, of loyalty and love and family before they even get to the door. Either way, suddenly he is the most settled he's been since they figured out how to strap him in.

"He'd do the same with you," Jake says, valiantly attempting to smooth the scowl from her face when she sees Joshua's eyes starting to droop. "It's just the heat thing."

"Alright." Leah shuts the car door and holds out her arms expectantly, though she knows what will happen. "Try me."

Gently he attempts to peel the baby away from him, and as if on cue the crying starts again.

She threatens under her breath that Moose is going to be the first casualty of whatever this is, and Jake's free hand flies up to cover one of Joshua's tiny ears. He looks hilariously horrified with her, much in the same way Billy looked after Rachel and Rebecca died their hair blonde (Leah had spent hours convincing them they didn't need the bleach, and Billy had just known she'd had something to do with it all. Her dad had laughed until his throat was sore and her mom had cut her allowance).

"One day, you'll thank your mom for Moose."

Leah scoffs and stalks off towards the house. "No promises."

***

Joshua sleeps in Jacob's arms for two hours, barely stirring while Leah argues in vehement whispers about the next eighteen years they are supposed to spend together. Jacob seems to nod in the right places and hums his agreement while Leah follows him around the house, and occasionally he will murmur one or two words that don't serve as the answer she wants, or he wonders aloud to only himself as he pulls pots of baby food out of the cupboards and struggles with child-proofed drawers. He's not really listening to her, she's not stupid, but it's better than being alone.

"I mean, you don't understand," she hisses. "A baby is exactly the kind of commitment you ran away from when you refused to be Alpha for all that time. It's messy, and nobody in their right mind actually wants dirty diapers or their clothes soaked in vomit or—"

"Kim wants it," he says. Kim is two months pregnant. She bawls when she sees an ASPCA commercial.

"That's what I mean!" Leah replies a little louder than before, but quickly drops her voice again because this is the longest that Joshua hasn't cried since she first reached for him in the office. "Jared imprinted on her, she's not in her right mind."

Jacob hums and carefully shifts Josh to his side as he looks in the fridge for the second time.

"Jake, babies are a bad idea. With a capital and the biggest exclamation mark you've ever seen and everything. They pee and puke, probably at the same time, and their poop gets everywhere. They bite. They're animals."

"Like dogs?"

"Exactly!"

He closes the fridge and gives her a pointed look. "So what's the problem?"

"You don't understand," she hisses again.

Jacob goes back to his murmurs and his nodding, but it really is better than being alone.

***

In between her classes, Leah has a part-time job in the library at her college that she works Saturday through to Wednesday. She's never much cared for books and the awful gut-wrenching stories some of them tell, but the library is peaceful and she enjoys enforcing the quiet as much as she likes the methodical task of organising and stacking the shelves after its contents are returned. She revels in having time to herself after so long of having to share everything.

On Thursday, she catches up with assignments and studying, even if she is only taking one course; she's doing something that doesn't include running and listening to her brothers who are all steadily moving on with their lives.

She eats with Sam and Emily on Friday.

Today is Friday, she thinks, as she watches her family who have forced their way through the door. Her one-sided argument with Jacob will have to keep until later.

She's not sure how or exactly when she started having dinner with Sam and Emily. It just happened once, then twice, before they started sitting down together so regularly that they starting leaving their Friday nights free. Sometimes they were joined by Kim and Jared or Paul and Rachel or Seth and their mom, and after Joshua was born Jacob started showing his face once a month too.

It wasn't the same as being together before. She might have had to try harder than usual to bite her tongue, to stop herself from saying something hurtful, and sometimes she didn't try at all, but she always went back and eventually she stopped swallowing bile when Sam touched Emily. It got better. She got better.

Sam might have said that it all started around the time he was preparing to step down as Alpha, because having to follow him to the ends of the world never helped either of them. Emily would say that it was when Leah left and had to follow no one. All Leah remembers is that after a while, some weeks she wasn't just coming by on a Friday and some weeks she would end up sitting for hours and hours with only Emily until Sam got home from his job at Jake's garage.

"And you had no idea?" Jared asks from beside Paul as he brandishes his bottle of beer. "Seriously?"

It takes her a moment to realise that Jared is talking to her. Jacob has been a traitor of the first order and left her to go and relieve his wolves who have barely taken a break; it took Embry all of five minutes to come through the door and fall asleep on the couch. There is familiarity in the way her brother takes his old place and lets his head fall back, because he could never get into his own bed without being shouted at by his mom.

All of them fill the house as they once did and even she joins them in taking comfort in their usual spots.

"Do I look like I was prepared for this?" She waves her own bottle back at him which is regretfully plastic and filled with cow's milk for Joshua, who is awake after sleeping for so long and pulling on Rachel's hair. "I'm about as ready to look after a person as I am a goldfish."

"Your goldfish died," Seth reminds her in his lightest tone.

"Medusa was murdered," she snaps. "Persephone never liked her."

"Your hamster, too," Seth continues as if his sister hasn't spoken. She throws the plastic bottle at him with dangerous speed and Kim squeaks loudly, but Seth catches it with one hand and passes it to Rachel with a mile-wide grin. "You're losing your touch."

Leah wonders if she is. Her brother still runs in formation with Jacob, now third-in-command while Quil has assumed the position of Beta in his wait for Claire, and despite having fought with her inner wolf for two years she now finds herself wishing that she could be with them. She misses being able to sprint and snap her teeth at anyone who annoys her, and she always found it easier to process and deal with things when on four legs.

Paul shakes his head. He's been looking a little fearfully at the way his fiancée coos over Joshua, because it has taken him long enough to put a ring on her finger and he's still letting go of the reputation which took him years to build. It's a shame, because he was always good for a fight when she needed it. "I don't get it," he says. "Any of it."

He's not the only one. They are all looking worn and torn from the last twenty-four hours or so, made all the more worse by a heavy absence of the two people whose scent is still around them and whose child gurgles on Kim's lap. Joshua is being passed like a baton between the two women who crave him most.

"You and Jake aren't together, but you have to live here? Together? You have to look after Joshua. Here."

"What if only one of you honoured their wishes?" Kim asks, her words hesitant and careful.

"Who would you pick?" Leah is suddenly the centre of their attention, but they can't seem to answer her. "Because I know who I'd pick, but he's still off playing protector and trying to run a business at the same time—"

"What about—"

"—and Sam's got absolutely no family to speak of, two out of four of Emily's proper family are currently in this goddamn house and Mom's older now." She can't stop now she has started, and the words come out so quickly that she has no time to think about what comes next. "She might be good for babysitting every now and then but she's not got my dad anymore, has she, and Claire's mom is seven months pregnant, so that's way out of the question. So who is left? Me. And I think that we've already established that I do a piss poor job of looking after things, but Sam and... They loved him. They loved him."

For a long while, the only sounds are of Joshua seeking Kim or Rachel's attention and Embry snoring softly. Leah thinks she can hear pounding of paws from outside, rhythmic and soothing, or maybe it's her heart, but her shoulders sag.

Then Paul grabs another beer and says, "Well, the kid's not dead yet," which earns a clap over the ear from Rachel and then they are all laughing like they thought they would not again.

Joshua looks at them all with wide eyes, which search for something he knows. He pulls away from Kim and reaches out. Leah is across the room in seconds.

She will never tell a soul that she would not have signed those papers as quickly as she had with Jake beside her. She will never admit that she has already tried to hurt Moose. But when a pair of arms wrap around her neck she knows that if she were alone she would have picked up the pen only a minute later, when he was brought into the room. She knows that Moose can be fixed up, no matter how many times she will try to pull its head off.

"Piss poor job, huh?" someone mutters, and Rachel smiles as she passes over the bottle.

Chapter Text

"Well, now that we have seen each other," said the Unicorn, "If you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?"

Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass"

"One thing my father taught me," he told her quietly, "is that everyone has their price. From the highest to the lowest, we will all bargain. It's just a matter of finding what yours is."

Jayne Castel, "Dawn of Wolves"

Step Three is Bargaining (Jacob)

The first time Jacob had torn a vampire apart, he'd managed to stand himself up on two shaky legs and had puked into the bushes until there was nothing left. He'd felt as if his insides were still churning over in bile long after he had fallen into bed that night, and despite being downright bone-weary he hadn't been able to sleep. His eyes had stared into the darkness as he'd listened to the soft snores of his dad in the next room, his body trembling with something other than rage for the first time in weeks.

The next day he'd ran a fourteen-hour patrol with burning, watery eyes, the feelings and memories of Jared and Embry consuming him, rolling over him in dangerous waves until he could no longer remember where or who the sense of unrestrained pride and triumph came from, until the three brothers had lost complete ability of individual thought.

As wolves they were victorious; they had done what they'd meant to do, what they had been born to do, to protect, to fight the enemy who had made them this way, but as boys they were a wreck, shocked to the core with pure terror after being so permanently hardened in a way they were never supposed to be.

It had passed, of course, the victory and the panic, as everything else did. It was the one thing Jacob had been able to count on, until now.

Did grief pass? It didn't feel like it, although his own was so textbook, so aptly described in the pages Leah had brought home from the library. Books filled the house, stacked haphazardly on the kitchen table and lying bookmarked in the least likely of places: next to the fridge, the phone, Joshua's crib, tucked into his stroller's basket, ready to be picked up again should they suddenly be struggling with something where only the answer could be found on paper.

Leah didn't stop reading. She read How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, On Grief and Grieving, Parenting With Love and Logic. She read anything with any type of meaning, any type of relevance, often muttering to herself and sometimes reading paragraphs aloud to baby Joshua as if he had a hope of understanding. She'd once tried to read Jacob an excerpt of Requiem, but he'd thrown By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept at her head and she hadn't bothered again.

If she knew that Jacob was as terrified as she was, she didn't let on. If she had realised that, despite all of her books, she was still looking to him as if he knew what he was doing, she didn't start turning away. He quickly understood that while she might not have answered to him for a long time, sometimes she still expected him to tell her what to do when her books let her down.

"Just hold him," he'd say. "Comfort him."

"But it says that we need to let him learn how to self-soothe. It's very important."

He'd wanted to say that there were more important things than letting Joshua cry it out for an hour, but instead he'd nodded in his usual way and carried on.

Jacob nods a lot, these days. He agrees when he should, assures her when she's looking a little lost, and takes Joshua to the garage when she needs a break. He tries to keep what's left of his family together, in one piece, all the while scattering the remaining pieces of himself all over the Reservation to those who need it.

He formally identifies Sam and Emily, because nobody else can. It's the first time he's seen death in such a way, with cuts and bruises and broken bones, eyes closed in an act of serenity. Before it's only been granite skin, dismembered limbs and raging fires, so cold and unnatural that his skin crawls just to remember the feel of it.

He holds Leah up during the service, because she needs it the most. He speaks for Sam and Emily when she can't read Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep. His memories of his mom's funeral fade a little more with each year that passes, but he will never forget people saying goodbye to Sam and Emily.

He will never forget how Alphas should be strong, determined, resolved, even if they would rather be fighting an army of fifty newborns alone than leading a pack. He cannot be, cannot show anything else, and he must carry that which others cannot, for to do nothing would be to say that he agrees with what has happened. To be still would be to say that he approves, that the first real loss the pack has suffered is acceptable. It would be telling the Reservation, the world, that he's okay with Sam and Emily having been taken from them. He cannot sit, he cannot be still, for then he would be lulled into calming down, forced to stop, to reflect.

But he can't help it. He's crumbling, slowly, scared and unsure, and he'd do about absolutely anything for somebody to take these feelings away from him.

***

"I've read the will and your submissions, and given that you folks were named as guardians I see no reason to countermand the parents' wishes." The judge's heavy pause is filled with Joshua's happy jabbering, who is entertaining himself by swatting the side of Jacob's head with Moose.

Leah grabs his arm, her breath hitching in her throat, as Jacob thinks that he's starting to feel the same way she does about the toy with the deformed head.

"I hereby grant joint legal and physical custody of Joshua Levi Uley to Leah Clearwater and Jacob Ephraim Black."

Judge F. Casey bangs his gavel, and the air escapes Leah but she's still tense as if she's waiting for something else.

What more do you want? Jacob thinks. It is done. We've done it. He nudges her, wanting to leave, wondering if he'd be able to get away with wrestling Moose from Josh's chubby fingers in front of the judge now that he has the legal right to do so.

"Congratulations," says the other man, though his voice is toneless; it's late in the day and he's clearly wanting to wrap it up. They are dismissed.

Leah's grip on Jacob's arm slackens, only for her hands to come down on the table they stand behind. She's made sure that she's taken away another's power to dismiss her by hanging up her grey coat. "That's it?" she demands vehemently. "You're not gonna ask us anything?"

Jacob groans, trying to arrange his face into some sort of an apology as the judge looks questioningly at them over the rim of his glasses.

"How do you know we're not drug dealers, or, y'know, in a sex gang or something?"

"Are you drug dealers, in a sex gang, or something?" the man asks her with vague humour, his tone now weary.

"Well, no, but—"

"No," Jacob says, fighting the desire to laugh with despair and also hit Leah very, very hard, but he's sure that would not be prudent either. He begins nudging at her again, and it is not long before Moose is being waved at her head, too, both Jacob and Joshua together trying to herd her from the room. They need to get out of the room as soon as possible before she really does throw up questions which will challenge their ability as decent human beings. "No, we're not, sir. C'mon, Leah."

"But—"

"Leave." The double-timbre of the order doesn't work on her like it might her brother, and she knows it.

"Your Alpha shit doesn't work on me anymore," Leah growls hotly, but he knows that he's won when she then throws a disappointed look at the judge and stands up straight.

He knows why she is disappointed. She does not know that he has heard her practicing careful and reassuring answers to potentially invasive questions in front of the mirror in the bathroom. She thinks he doesn't know the real reason why she's been reading so often. But he does, and he understands.

"Thank you," he says, though to who he's unsure—the judge, to make amends, or Leah, who is finally dragging her feet and pulling herself away. She grumbles all the way to the car, all the way through Port Angeles, right up until they reach the outskirts of the Reservation before she takes advantage of the slowing car and escapes. There is no point in reaching for her, no point in trying to bring her back. She'll do that on her own.

He feels it like a shock of electricity underneath his skin as he listens to Leah's clothes rip and watches the shreds float to the ground. Joshua's piercing cry follows, his sleep disturbed.

It's taken her nine days to crack. He'd bet Embry that she'd be flying through the trees only an hour after the funeral.

***

"We need to figure something out," he tells her when she returns. She looms in the doorway, stark naked, her dark choppy hair standing up on end, her body exhausted and covered in dirt. He will not say what she needs to hear, because she probably knows word for word what he will say. "A routine."

She scoffs. "Routine."

"I have to lead patrol in the morning," he continues, his voice light as if he's not heard her, "and if Ruth Fuller doesn't get her car back soon Embry's not gonna be able to talk her down again."

"I have an exam tomorrow." She stalks into the house and up the stairs. She's a liar—the only time she's been at the college recently is to go to the library, to get her books and let them know that she won't be working for a while.

He raises his eyebrow from across the room.

"You're the Alpha," she spits out. "Delegate."

Forget the army of fifty newborns. He's willing to take on a hundred of them with maybe a side of vampiric royalty if it means Leah will pull her shit together, but these days he so rarely gets what he wants that he'd settle for as little as being able to sleep for five hours straight.

***

Embry holds up a dual head ratchet to the stroller. He's managed four days straight on two legs. "Now," he says, "here's something you can crack Auntie Leah's skull with. Personally, I'd use an air ratchet. It really rams things on home, but I think your Uncle Jake will be pissed if you ruin it."

"How about a good old-fashioned screwdriver?" asks Paul from across the workshop floor. He's still struggling to keep himself from blurring out of sight, but working at the garage again helps keep him in the here and the now, so Jacob doesn't dare complain, especially not when it means the back-log of cars are clearing out faster.

"Wouldn't do enough damage. Her head's too big," he says from underneath the hood of Mrs Fuller's Honda. The tedious work is a welcome distraction, and being with his two brothers is almost like the early days of the pack. But he can't go back. He can't have a few more years.

"Empty, though, and larger targets are harder to miss," Embry muses, considering the tools he's proudly laid out on the workshop floor to show Joshua. He picks up the red-handled locking pliers. "What do you think about this one, sprout? No? Me neither..."

Embry leans forward and, instead of reaching for the riveter like Jacob thinks he's going to, he snatches something from underneath the stroller, from the basket which has been stretched out by the diaper bag. "What's this?" He pulls a face, as if offended. "Didn't know you were into sappy shit."

"Didn't know he could read," mumbles Paul, and Jacob swats his almost brother-in-law over the back of the head as he passes and takes the book from Embry, who is waving it about with a teasing grin.

There are several dog-eared pages, neat and purposeful within the battered book he is studying, his frown thoughtful. My Best Friend's Girl. He flicks through it, catching glimpses of text which has been highlighted with a bold yellow marker. These are words which have resonated with Leah, things she wants to remember, he thinks.

He looks at the front cover again, trying to remember if he has seen her with her head buried in this particular book before he turns to the very first folded page.

'You've got to love her. Promise me', he reads. 'Even when she's really bad, or says something horrible, you've got to love her. Promise me. Please promise me.'

And then, a few pages afterwards, 'If someone... If they tell you something often enough you believe it. Self-fulfilling prophecy. I want that to happen to you and Tegan. If she calls you Mummy often enough you'll believe it. She'll be a part of you that you'll never... you'll never want to let go. She'll become your daughter.'

Jacob quickly realises that this is Leah's way of speaking to him when her words fail her. These are not things she wants to remember, they are quotes and excerpts that she wants to share with him, that she wants him to remember. Her borrowed books have been left all over the house, in the car, the garage and in the depths of the stroller for a reason.

"This is a dead blow mallet," Embry begins explaining, his attention already back on the baby and interrupting Jacob's epiphany. Joshua looks mesmerised. "Nut her over the head with this and you'll loosen her up a bit, y'know, when you want some chocolate or if she's grinding your gears."

Jacob knows he should probably shut Embry up—the kid is a damn sponge and Leah will flay whoever is responsible for Josh's first word being something like pissed or nuts—but he also knows that he is the one who needs to learn. He goes back to Mrs Fuller's car, one eye on the engine and one eye on the book.

I didn't feel better. Each sob didn't release pain, it brought more of it. More of the things I'd hidden from, had pushed away, pushed down, pushed behind me were cascading out in an embarrassing mess. Mess. I was making a mess. And I couldn't stop.

By the time he hands over the keys to the decrepit Honda, he's resolved to buy her bookshelf.

***

Leah has put up a calendar. It's so large that it covers the space between the fridge and the backdoor.

She hands him sticky notes. "Green for me. Yellow for you. Commitments. Appointments. First person to run out gets pink."

It's not an apology and neither is it five hours sleep. It's Leah getting her shit together. He smiles.

He hands her the book from the garage, an exchange of sorts, an understanding. She smiles.

Chapter Text

"Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant."

Elizabeth Wurtzel, "Prozac Nation"

Step Four is Depression (Leah)

Another pitiful Washington summer seamlessly blends into the vivid colours of autumn, bringing with it a sense of familiarity; the rain pelts the land just as it seems to do all year round and the clouds are closing in on them, a shield against the sun which fights to shine through and provide forgotten warmth. Over the roaring winds and rolling thunder, Leah can hear her mom talking in low volumes with Charlie downstairs as if the storm has given them privacy from her keen ears.

So far they have kept the secret that she retreats to this side of the Reservation when she is supposed to be at the community college, though she's sure that Jacob knows; she's lost count of the times her control has slipped since Port Angeles—control which has taken her two years to master and has suddenly become unchecked, wild and worse than ever before. Each time she falls onto four legs again it only strengthens her old ties to the Pack. These days Jake would be probably able to find her even if she was in a crowd of five thousand, but he's understanding enough not to test the theory just as he is to not ask why she goes through the motions of getting ready for a class she has no intention of attending.

Leah withdraws into the solace of her old bedroom because there are no pretences here. She does not have to make sure that Jacob eats and sleeps in between keeping his Pack-family together and running his business. She does not have to convince Joshua that chicken paella in a pot isn't all that bad (sometimes she slips him a few biscuits to get him to eat like she knows Jacob does, and then she'll snatch some for herself). She does not have to bite her tongue every time one of her brothers falls back into old habits and walks through the front door without knocking, as if they are expecting Emily to be in the kitchen pulling a fresh batch of muffins out of the oven. Here in her old room she can shut the door and privately pull herself together just enough to be able to survive the next two days. She can kick and she can scream, or she can stare at the desk and wonder how long it will take for her to break it into twenty pieces.

Being alone in this way is almost as frightening as the unavoidable, easy routine she has fallen into with Jake, but unlike before when she was desperate to make Sam and her brothers suffer her broken heart alongside her, this is a type of pain she does not want to share.

"When Sam left the first time…" Her mom sighs from below, louder now, her weathered voice agitated and worried. "This feels worse."

"That's because it is." Charlie tends to murmur his agreement much in the same way as Jacob does, but unlike Jacob he pushes a little more and tends to remind the Clearwater women of things they might not want to hear. "You needed time, too."

Leah likes Charlie. He will never be her father, but his nature is similar and he calms the fiery spirit of her mom which she's inherited.

"I didn't shut myself away," says her mom, that same fire flaring, but it bounces off Charlie's shoulders.

"No. You didn't. You cooked until your pantry was empty and then you cleaned until your hands were red raw."

Nobody will forget the months after Sam left Leah, but neither will they forget the months after Harry left Sue.

"She's not shuttin' herself away either," Charlie continues gently. "That girl of yours knows what she's doin', honey."

Charlie has more faith in her than she does herself, she thinks as her mom sighs. The sound is muffled and defeated, if only for now.

The house is overcome with a new silence while the storm batters against it, pounding against the windows of Leah's childhood home, akin to the one raging in her heart. It prickles at her skin like an old friend as she lies on her old bed and stares up at the ceiling, looking for clues in the peeling white paint that might help her carry on.

There is little which makes sense anymore, aside from Jake and Josh and the system they have all worked out between them. She relies on their unspoken rules which have become as absolute as Pack law: adhering to the calendar (after Jake caught her switching around his yellow post-it notes), both being home at least an hour before Joshua is put down for the night (after Leah found herself straying into Oregon, missing bedtime by four hours), and talking (mostly). Jake has promised that he'll take better care of himself so long as Leah stops trying to test how many sedatives she needs to slip into his beer for him to fall asleep before eleven. Leah has said that she's not ready to give up the Pack again, not yet, so when she's not exploding out of her skin with little warning she has taken on running inner perimeter patrols (much to Seth's annoyance, especially since she's found herself slipping into the position of Second after Embry hung up his fur again). It's now nine months since they last caught wind of a bloodsucker, but the lingering fear of vampiric royalty following stories of missing leeches is always in the back of their minds.

Before long, Charlie's heavy footsteps take the stairs, her mom's hushed encouragement following him and urging him forward until he's knocking on the door. He waits only a moment before he slips through. The mattress dips with his added weight, interrupting her peace, though her dark eyes remain on white paint.

"It's nearly four, kiddo." The class she is supposed to be in is nearly over, and soon she will have to blink and return to a home she still does not know. "Jake'll be waitin'."

Her head makes an odd movement, as it does when either Charlie or her mom come to remind her that she has to start moving again. She vaguely wonders if Joshua has had another field trip to the garage today, if Embry has managed to get grease all over the diaper bag again. She will kill Call if Joshua's babbling one day turns into a string of expletives, family or not.

"Alright." Charlie's hand rests lightly on her ankle for a moment. Physical contact is neither or their strong points, but his hand lingers long enough to know it is of comfort before he pulls away and clears his throat. It takes him a few minutes to find the words he wants, knowing that she probably has none to give, knowing as well as she does that her mom is hovering on the third step and straining her ears to listen.

"It doesn't go away," he says softly. "Harry, Bella…" His heartbeat is audible, stuttering uncomfortably and painfully. "They don't go away. And Sam and Emily won't leave you either."

It is another long while before she whispers, "I don't want them to go away." She just wants someone to take this away so that she can be the person Sam and Emily thought their son deserved. She murmurs as much to Charlie, unsure if he understands her garbled words even if he understands why she keeps herself away for a few hours every week.

He does, and his lips twist apologetically. "Nobody can. It belongs to you, kiddo. Only you."

Leah sits up, slow and weary in contrast to the winds before she finally looks into the eyes which mirror her sorrow even to this day. She will never forgive Bella Swan, not for Jacob and not for Charlie. She will not forget the human girl who caused so much grief in a selfish bid to get what she wanted. "You miss her?"

She doesn't know why she asks because she knows the answer, but sometimes there are things which need to be heard.

"Every damn day. Miss your old man, too. Hell, sometimes I catch myself waitin' for Sarah to answer when I call Billy."

She remembers when Jacob reached for the phone to call Sam last week after she told him she'd heard Micah Greene was having a worrying growth spurt, and she'd had to buy them a new handset.

"But that's fine," Charlie says gruffly, his limit nearly reached. "I don't want to forget."

***

When visitors come, they bring something to fill the house.

"Just a little something," they say, or, "This has just been lying around forever."

The Imprints tend to bring food, and their men often carry in furniture and homely things that only their wives could have put into their hands. Suddenly Leah and Jacob are owners of clocks and bookends and bedside tables and plant pots and kitchen utensils, as if they have been living in squalor for all these months.

The bookends go on the new bookshelves. Most of the books have been returned to the college library (dog-eared pages, yellow text, baby food stains and all), but the very few paperbacks they own between them fill some space on the shelves. They still seem bare, depressingly so, but Jake had been so pleased with himself after assembling the units that she's kept quiet and has begun filling the shelves with other things.

The council elders start turning up, too, so often and out of the blue that Leah jokes they are bringing Jacob offerings—tributes, gifts for their Alpha, as if there is a tribal custom they have forgotten, but really she knows it is because their family never turn their back on their own. Joshua Uley is now their responsibility, too.

The house starts feeling… full. She can't explain it. It's always been homely and welcoming, but everyone on the Reservation knows how to make their money stretch and are used to a simple way of living. Children go without video games in favour of running outside until the sun goes down, and families complete their homes with people rather than belongings. Sam and Emily were no different, and kept just enough to make themselves and the Pack happy.

There's now a rocking chair (from Charlie) which sits in the corner of the nursery, though Leah thinks that nowadays Joshua is so busy crawling all over the place that there's no time for her to be lulling him to sleep. There are rugs with traditional patterns (from Old Quil) covering the hard floors, so that they do not forget their heritage on their worst days. There are old but well-cared for toys (from Claire) littered across the open living room, and there are clothes in the wardrobes for Joshua when he turns three and four and five (from Sue, who keeps just about everything Leah and Seth have ever owned).

Life starts again, albeit slowly, and when Jake finally takes a day off and her mom's babysitting, they turn around the nursery, shaping it into a little boy's bedroom. They don't speak a word as they paint the walls but Leah knows that he's also wondering what's going to happen to the two other bedrooms.

One of the doors has not been opened for as long as they have been living here. The first night, after they'd brought Josh home, they'd shared the bed in the spare room and had whispered into the early hours rather than being alone with their grief but they've been taking turns to sleep on the couch ever since. Despite the blankets which Kim has given them and the new pillowcases bought by Tiffany Call, it's still the same type of uncomfortable, and sometimes when it's Leah's night she's tempted to stretch out on the front porch instead.

"We've been tiptoeing around for too long," Jacob says when they're washing Raleigh Green and an off-white out of the paint rollers. Used to the silence they usually find themselves in, he startles her when his voice is like an announcement. "If we're going to live here, we have to stop acting like they're coming back."

They stand together at the sink, arm to arm. Recently she's noticed that he has a habit of touching everything, of being close to people, to her, but she can't figure whether it's something new or not. Until Joshua had come into the world, they'd always made an effort to keep out of each other's way. Now she often watches him as he brushes his hand against others, as he lets his fingers find warmth in anything he can to remind himself that life still exists, that everyone he cares about is still in tact. She knows that he checks that Joshua is still breathing as much as she does because she hears him wandering up and down the stairs, back and forth on the landing during the nights. Maybe it's an Alpha thing, she thinks, a type of protectiveness she does not understand, or maybe it is a part of the way he is healing. Maybe it is both.

She stares at the colours mixing with the running water and holds her breath.

"They're not coming back." Jake runs a rough hand over his face as, slowly, she turns off the tap. "I want to stop feeling guilty every time I move something, like I'm ruining some sense of order I don't know about."

Yesterday, she'd pointedly ignored the look he'd given after moving a photograph frame—the one holding a shot of pregnant Emily wandering down First Beach, unaware of the camera on her. Leah wonders if he's noticed she's taken down the painting decorating one of the upstairs walls which she pulls more faces at than she does at Moose.

"I want to stop us having to sleep on the couch because it's like we're intruding, or something, y'know?" Jake continues. "I don't want to force myself to fit into his life anymore."

She busies herself with picking the already-drying paint out of the sink, staining her fingers, knowing that something has to change and that they're not going to get better until it does. Both of them are guilty of holding onto things they should have already started letting go. Not forgetting—never that, no, but they've been moving and not really going anywhere for a while now.

"I threw away the painting at the end of the hall," she says eventually, pulling away from the counter. He follows, of course.

"I know."

"And I haven't been going to my class."

"I know," he says again. "Your professor called."

"I want to get rid of the rocking chair."

"Done."

"We can't tell Charlie."

"Kim's throwing herself a baby shower in a couple months." Typical. "She can have it."

Leah finally meets his eyes, which are more resolved than she's seen for a while. If he can do it, she decides, her gaze searching, then so can she. She's not sure she would have lasted this long without him, and he's never asked her for anything she couldn't give.

"Alright." She looks away and nods once, determined. "No more pretending," she agrees, and there's a trace of an old, familiar smile on Jake's face as he follows her back to the sink.

Chapter Text

"The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof."

Richard Bach, "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah"

Interlude: Part One (Embry)

"Jake!"

Leah's panicked scream turns his blood cold, and it takes him only a fraction of a second to follow Jacob across the yard and through the back door. The lawnmower and the half-cut grass are forgotten as they tear through the open kitchen and burst into the wide living room, their hearts pounding in time with one another's, a savage beat of fear and intensity as their bodies prepare to slip into another skin.

"Jake!" she yells again, but Jake is already there, raking his eyes over his Leah (because Leah is as much his as Kim is Jared's—they just don't speak about it because it seems, apart from Leah and Jacob themselves, everybody has realised the truth). Then his brother's eyes turn to Josh, the worry in them the exact same. Not because Leah and Josh are the only other two people in the room but, Embry knows, because they are the only two Jacob cares about more than his Pack.

Josh shrieks with glee at the sight of them, and his face splits into a smile that he has learnt will give him his heart's desire. He's not the same bawling baby Embry remembers bringing the garage roof down with his screaming in that first awful month. Sometimes it feels as if Josh laughs all the time, now. He knows how to high-five. He has conversations with that ugly creature—Moose—in a language only he understands while he sits in his stroller. He still cries some, but that's usually when Leah's not around; he loves Jacob, but he absolutely worships Leah.

Embry fights the desire to laugh in his outrageous relief when the kid falls backwards and lands on Old Quil's woven rug with a soft thud.

"Oh, Jake!" Leah whines. Her nose crinkles with her disapproval, just as chubby arms immediately reach out for her and tiny fingers claw the air impatiently.

"What happened?" Embry demands, because though Jake's only taken eleven long strides from the back yard he is breathing as if he's just ran all the way down to California and back on two legs.

His own adrenaline is still surging through him. He's not the only one who had been sick with fear, because now he has something to lose, too, after his mom had broken her vow of secrecy. (Who is my father? he'd demanded—not for the first time, though it was the first time he had been near-tears because Sam's death nearly fucking ruined him, not knowing whether he'd lost a brother who had shared his blood as well as magic.)

"He stood up!" Leah bends and gently lifts Josh—Sam's son, Jacob's son, Embry's nephew—to his feet.

(Joshua Uley, his mom had whispered.)

"He just pulled himself up and he was about to walk but then you two blundered in and scared him back onto his ass!"

"Oh, for the love of—" Jacob growls as he throws his head back. "I thought—I thought you were in trouble, Leah!"

Jake doesn't have to mention Italian bloodsuckers for Embry to understand a slice of his panic.

"I didn't want you to miss it!"

Without support to lean on Josh sways slightly, unsure and unsteady. He looks at Leah with a frown, and then at his feet, his face screwed with his concentration as if he knows what he needs to do. Then, as they all hold their breath, waiting, his little face brightens like he's figured out life's mysteries and he's staring at Leah again as his right foot sticks out and then—

"Jake!" Leah says again, but now her voice is no more than a gleeful whisper. She flaps a hand wildly above her head, demanding his attention, unable to tear her eyes away from what is about to happen.

Embry doesn't dare speak. He listens to Jacob's heart hammer with a different beat as they watch a small foot hit the floor, as the one behind follows. Then again, and again, until Leah's laughter fills the house and then she's lifting Josh up, and Embry and his brother are cheering and clapping so loudly that the wolves on patrol can probably hear them across the Reservation.

Leah swings Josh around and around. Her brown eyes are shining as she laughs deliriously in her joy, and Josh laughs with her, happy because she is happy.

***

Some time later, weeks afterwards, his brother figures out what everybody else knows.

Chapter Text

"He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my actual brother. He seemed like someone I'd always know even if I never saw him again."

Cheryl Strayed, "Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail"

Interlude: Part Two (Micah)

When two bodies of stone and ice dance along their northern patrol line, teasing and taunting and slightly shimmering in the winter sun, Micah Greene's howl splits the air.

When the red-eyes turn to ash, he revels in glory. (You're one of us now. Brother. Wolf.)

When he stumbles onto two legs, he trembles uncontrollably from head to toe. He's unused to this body which has grown five inches in only two weeks, which will never stop burning or threatening to explode.

When Sue Clearwater's daughter cuts off his black braid, she tells him of his birthright, of stories he's heard as a child but now listens to with new ears. She ignores Billy Black's son—leader, Chief, Alpha—when he gives her stern warnings underneath his breath, because she speaks with a candidness which doesn't stop the trembling. It makes it worse. And Micah thinks he'll never be able to look her in the eye again without his bones rattling in fear.

When the baby cries upstairs, though, Leah's face isn't as hard or dangerous, and she rubs his shoulder as she passes.

"You'll be alright, kiddo," she says. "You did real good today."

When Jacob's eyes follow her up the winding stairs, Micah pretends not to notice. His dad had looked at his mom like that, before the sea had swept him away.

And when he learns about Sam and Emily, about imprints and bonds which can never be broken, Paul Lahote (who is decidedly just as scary as Leah Clearwater, but whose eyes are the same when he's around his Rachel) laughs at him when he asks how long ago Jacob imprinted on Leah.

"They're not like that," Paul tells him after he's recovered.

There are a few others biting back their laughter as they build the bonfire. (You're one of us now. Brother. Wolf.)

"Not yet, anyway," Paul says.

When Jacob walks down First Beach with Leah, the baby toddling between them and kept steady by their joint hands, Paul loudly asks if anyone managed to catch the last Seahawks game.

Chapter Text

"I let it go. It's like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home."

Joanne Harris, "Five Quarters of the Orange"

Step Five is Acceptance (Leah)

The bonfire is a good idea for the Pack. They show their new brother what it is they all fight for, even when they no longer answer the call (it was hard, Embry tells them, to keep himself on two legs after hearing their battle-cry in the far north which had swiftly morphed into victory), and they wrap him up in the tribal council's tales told over the raging fire (which is the best they've ever built, because next to defending their lands building a fire to ward off their enemies is what they do best. It's also November, which, Leah thinks, means the cavemen are more inclined to beat their chests and fuss over their cold imprints).

Micah, his hazel eyes wonderful in the firelight, has long since steadied himself and gives her a small smile. Thank you, it says. She tightens her arms around Josh, wrapped in his blanket and snoring softly on her lap with Moose, and she nods. It's what families do.

Yes, the bonfire is a good idea. Even Jacob, who had been so hesitant in bringing his family together like this without Sam, is smiling. It had been so, so easy to run with him, to tear up those leeches as an Alpha and his Second, after weeks of separately leading patrols so that one of them could always be with Josh. Their son. And she'd understood everything in that second she had fallen in line, because he'd had to open his mind to her in order to be able to work as one. Together.

So she doesn't push him away when he leans into her, when his hand rests on her lower back, her leg, her arm. She understands that it's something deeper than an Alpha needing to feel close to his wolves as he heals, and Jacob understands when she growls at her brothers who don't avert their eyes from her family. It feels as if they have been waiting a long while, and it wouldn't be surprising if they'd all placed secret bets behind her back.

They look happy about it, though, happy for them, so she doesn't growl too loudly—just enough to let them know that this is very, very new for her, and they're being unhelpful.

"Oh, get over yourself, Leah Clearwater," Kim barks when Leah bares her teeth at Jared's smug grin. Kim is suffering a trimester which makes her sweaty and miserable, and she all but bites when she's told she's positively glowing.

Glowing red, Leah thinks. "How's that decaf coffee workin' out for you, Kimberly? Any good?"

She grins when Kim makes an obscene gesture, brave and brassy now that the keen eyes of the tribal elders have left.

Her mom, Billy, and Old Quil (who toes the line between old and absolutely ancient with every year that passes), had not thought they would be called upon to share their traditions and their stories ever again, after Collin and Brady had made them an even ten and there had been no more fevers. They'd helped build the fires after the Cullens had left and had prayed their children were safe. But they don't understand what it is to feel thunder in their hearts, even when the lands are quiet. They don't understand the Italian leeches, who count time differently.

The doctor's parting words on the day he'd moved his coven had been a promise: the psychic would give them warning when the red-eyes moved. Not a promise to help, to stand with them, though Leah knows Jacob suspects they would if he asked. He'd call in their owed debts against the wolves of La Push without a second thought, even if it meant reopening old wounds.

She tries not to worry, to push it away and bury it deep. Maybe she will have been dead for fifty years by the time bloodsucking royalty comes for them. Maybe they will come tomorrow. Maybe they won't come at all. But no amount of uncertainty they face stops her from pressing her own weight into Jacob's side, whether she belongs there as a Second or something else entirely, and he understands her quiet prompting to get their child home.

***

Neither of them spend a night on the couch again.

***

There had been empty spaces around the flames, spots on the sand which nobody dared sit. They had kept them open, reserved and warm for those who had been missing, and Leah had known the vacant places would never be filled, but still her eyes had flickered up every so often. As if Sam and Emily were going to appear upon the dunes and ghost towards them, as if they'd never really left.

It is only right, she thinks, after a night of welcoming and celebrating and pure unity, to slip out of the house where Jacob and Josh still sleep, to wander across the Reservation and perhaps do the hardest thing she has done since she said goodbye.

Dawn's just breaking when she approaches, but she is not alone.

The stranger does not look up. He remains on his knees, his body bent as if in prayer, his sorrow speaking to the ache in her chest which she will forever carry.

She's never met him before, but she does not have to pull his hands from his face to know who he is. She does not have to scream or shout for him to know that she hates him for what he's done. Instead she stands next to him and stares into the brightening horizon, and she waits. She is not surprised to finally see him here, having known that one day soon he would come, unable to keep himself away whether he knew what he was coming back to or not.

The dark-haired man chokes back a sob. She wants to ask who told him.

They stay like that for a long while. He doesn't move an inch; he is crippled with shame, broken with heartache. He doesn't seek comfort or sympathy—he knows that he doesn't deserve it. So she does not look down at him, does not reach out, and she does not look at the words left for Sam and Emily on the headstone she knows so well.

She chose them.

If love could have saved you, the epitaph says, you would have lived forever.

She doesn't remember much of the funeral. She remembers it was Jacob who held her, but she can't think who held Josh. She remembers she couldn't finish the reading, but not what it was supposed to be about. She doesn't remember which of the elders led the service, and the hours after Sam and Emily had been lowered into the ground are also a blur.

Sam's father finally lifts his head. Leah knows that he sees enough in her almond-shaped eyes to recognise she is Harry Clearwater's daughter, just as she sees enough of Sam and Embry in his strong and angled features. She might have inherited her mom's spirit but she is her dad's image, just as the man standing at Sam's grave is the near image of him.

If she had met him a year ago, she might have destroyed him. She would have left the scraps out for Emily. If she had met him before that, as a teenager who all those years ago had found warmth and security inside of Sam's arms, she knew that still she would have demanded blood.

But not anymore. The fire she has left is for the protection of her family—for her boys, her brother, her mom and her Pack, and even Charlie Swan, who have all rebuilt her shattered heart piece by piece and who give her strength. She will not waste it.

It's uncomfortable to look at him, so she trains her eyes back onto the clouds and thinks how glad she is that her Joshua has Emily's eyes. Looking at this Joshua is like looking at a future Sam won't have. There will be no wispy, greying hair, no lines around his eyes. For a brief moment, she wonders what Embry will see know that he knows the truth. Then she wonders whether Joshua Uley knows that he left behind two sons, instead of one. That he had a daughter-in-law. A grandson, who has wrapped himself around her heart in a way she has not allowed for a long time. And against all odds, Jacob Black has done it too.

"They have a son," she tells him before he can decide what he wants to say; before she can change her mind and leave him alone in his misery. She might not want to rip his head from his shoulders, but still she feels sad for him. This man does not understand family, and so she continues, because the hope she can see in his eyes and the acceptance his son had given him is something she's only beginning to learn. Slowly. "He'll be two in April."

She had never asked why Sam had named his son after his absent father—mostly because he probably would not have told her, but also because it had no longer been her right to ask such things. She thinks that even if she had gotten an answer, she's not sure she would've fully understood. Being forgiving enough to move on is something she has also begun to learn in recent years.

"Two," the man whispers hoarsely, still upon his knees.

"He's here. On the Rez," is all she dares to say, because perhaps he will never understand family and perhaps he does not want to. It strikes her that she might regret saying what little she has already, and sends a silent prayer of thanks to the force which gave Sam and Emily the idea to legally bind their son to his godparents, instead of leaving them to rely on the tribal council to decide who would raise their boy.

"He's here," she says again, after she considers what she will do if this man wants nothing to do with them still. Protective. Fierce. Wolf. Mother. "With family."

She does not tell him that she is a part of baby Joshua's family, now, that he calls her Mama—his first word.

(No and bye-bye had quickly followed. Then uh-oh, which has become Joshua's most favourite thing to say. He likes to throw his Crunchies onto the floor before he says it.)

She doesn't tell him how she had nearly put holes into the papers she'd signed to claim his grandson, because time spent with a pen in her hand was time spent without Josh in her arms. She recalls Jacob's messy scrawl on the next line, almost as illegible her own.

She doesn't tell him that only a week after Joshua had taken his first steps he'd said that first word. Oh, how she'd worried—she'd had dreams of a mute black wolf crawling through the forest while the feet of his Pack had moved so fast it had seemed as if they were flying as one. But they were only dreams, she told herself when she woke with a racing heart, just as she reminded herself it should come as no surprise that a son of a warrior and his passionate wife would reach his milestones only when he was damn well good and ready.

She doesn't tell Sam's father any of this, because one too many winters ago he gave up his place in their lives, his place on the Reservation, and because she doesn't know him—not really, not at all. He should want to learn these things for himself.

"Is he with Allison?" he asks.

Sam's mom had never really recovered from being walked out on, and she'd not cared as she downed her last bottle of vodka. "No," Leah says, because dead and gone catch in her throat. It requires effort to point at a headstone only one row before where they are. After another moment, she can see that he understands and he finally pulls himself to his feet, as if to get a better look. He reads the name, the dates, and then below.

Love never ends. Words from Sam, like the ones she has given.

Joshua Uley swallows heavily, once, twice, before he turns to her, eyes red and already starting to spill over again with tears. He's tall, and looks much older than he really is. He'd not been much older than she is now when he'd left.

"Is he looked after?" he asks, and she thinks maybe her questions can wait. Maybe they do not matter. Maybe it matters that he has come, late or not. Forgiveness. Hope. Acceptance. She's working on it.

"Would you like to meet him?"

***

Jacob throws her a questioning eyebrow from beside the high-chair where he has Josh trapped for breakfast, but stands to firmly shake Sam's father's hand and welcomes him in. She whispers a thank you which nobody else can hear because he trusts her enough to let this man in and save what he wants to say for later.

Joshua Uley only stays for an hour, but he comes back the next day, and the next, staying a little longer each time. (He can't resist his grandson, but then most people can't. Leah's long noticed how people look at Josh and smile because they cannot help themselves, how he'd had that effect on adults from the moment he'd been born.)

She quickly realises that while she and Jacob have had each other for support the moment she'd turned up in the little red house (and even long, long before that—she's never quite forgiven him for getting one side of him mauled by a newborn on her behalf) Joshua Uley doesn't seem to have anybody. Watching him is like watching herself six months ago, so she doesn't shut the door in his face and she doesn't ignore the shadows underneath his eyes. This, she thinks, is the forgiveness Sam had already gifted his father—the forgiveness, acceptance and hope she has learnt. And eventually she stops thinking that one day he won't come back—even when Embry decides to tell his own truth and Joshua Uley learns that Tiffany Call had disappeared because she was pregnant, he comes back to the house at the edge of the Reservation because he refuses to miss another day, let alone another twenty years.

And when Christmas comes, he is there.

Their house is so full that there's no place to sit; the Pack lean against the walls and the imprints fill the kitchen, as tight as sardines with Leah and Claire's pregnant mom and Sue, while Collin and Brady have been relegated to the floor, muttering to Micah that he needs to get used to it. Kim sits on the couch, huge and looking slightly feral, silently suffering with Jared and Mrs. Cameron either side of her, while Billy is nearby, having swallowed his pride and talking quietly to Joshua Uley while Charlie Swan watches on.

In the near-impossible space which remains, there are gifts and cards and food and toys, and there is Jake, telling the story about the morning they'd had to anybody who will listen. (Most have now heard twice how he and Leah were woken up three hours early by Josh, who is not yet two and had somehow understood he needed to be annoyingly excitable, and when he'd opened his first present—a plastic, toy steering wheel coloured red and yellow and blue with stupidly loud buttons—he'd looked to Jacob and said, "Da-da.")

It isn't the perfect Christmas, their first without Sam and Emily, and maybe it never will be. It will never be the same, and it's not better, but she's better. And they're alright—they're more than alright, better and stronger with every day that passes.

Jacob catches her lingering gaze and grins knowingly. They might have gotten it backwards, the two of them, but as she fights her way through the kitchen and reaches him, finally she truly understands why Emily and Sam trusted them with their son.

Josh twists in warm arms at her approach, and she matches Jacob's grin.

No, it's not perfect, but together, Leah thinks that they could be pretty damn close.

Chapter Text

"Are you ready?" Klaus asked finally.

"No," Sunny answered.

"Me neither," Violet said, "but if we wait until we're ready we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives. Let's go."

Lemony Snicket, "The Ersatz Elevator"

Epilogue (Jacob and Leah)

While it is that big families can be a loud and turbulent thing but also just the right mix of chaos and love, they all live ever after.

To say they do so happily would be to imply that Leah doesn't break Embry's nose in two places when Josh curses for the first time, or that Jared does not sleep on the old couch for a week after Kim, quite literally, throws him out for laughing at her baby names, but such endings aren't always so easy.

It's hard for Jacob to learn that, while Leah cannot stand being in an empty house, she likes to be alone sometimes.

It takes a while for Leah to learn that, while Jacob takes pride in being an Alpha and a Chief, his shoulders drop when he comes home and that some days he'd rather be just Jacob.

When Leah gives up her old bedroom and goes back to her classes, it takes her just as long to understand that the careful glances from her professor and her classmates are not because they think her awfully weak for being gone so long, but because they've missed her snappy retorts and they're waiting for her challenging questions. (She tells Jake, and he says he was bored without her smart mouth, too, during those two years she spent trying to be normal.)

When Jacob to agrees to sell the motorbike, it is unsurprisingly a little harder to persuade him to give up the Rabbit for something bigger. Instead, he buys Leah a red Explorer and pretends to not notice when she covers the back with stickers in her defiance of having to keep his first love on the drive. He knows she's only doing it to annoy him, so he keeps quiet, but when she eventually sticks black fucking paw prints on the windows, he begrudgingly tells her she's made her point. (She never takes them off, and the Rabbit becomes Joshua's first car.)

When Josh has an allergic reaction to mango and he turns blue, he spends a night in the hospital but three days looking as dreadfully pale as Leah who'd kept his little heart beating. After Sarah and Harry and then Sam and Emily, the horrible truth that parents can die has been replaced with children can die, and for a month it's hard for Leah to not slip out of bed more than Jacob still does to creep across the moonlit landing and check that their child is breathing.

(It is no surprise that his second birthday party is mango-free on pain of death. The house is as busy and noisy as Christmas was, though slightly upstaged by the recent birth of Annie Cameron, but Josh is so preoccupied with his mounds and mounds of presents that he doesn't even notice.)

But they're together, so happiness is never far off.

Happiness is knowing that Josh has Sam's brave heart but Emily's kindness and, now that he's found a voice of his own and is suddenly stringing impossible sentences together, he has Leah's love for a good argument but Jacob's ability to win it. Happiness is coming home to each other, to him, and seeing their friends in his face but also seeing as much of each other in him as they do the people they will always remember.

And so when it is a year since Sam and Emily died, Leah and Jacob make sure the bonfires on their beaches and their cliffs can be seen from miles and miles away, just as they do every year after, so that the world will always remember, too.

Chapter Text

Outtake/Bonus Material: The Bonfire (Jacob)

Leah's different.

Maybe it's because of all those self-help books she buried her head in, or those heart-breaking novels she devoured day after day for a week straight while looking for answers to questions she didn't quite have the courage to voice. Maybe it's because of all the other library books she ruined with her highlighting and her marking, after finding what she had been looking for and then forcing him to see it, too.

Maybe it's the sense of purpose she's found, the responsibility and pride which comes with being an Alpha's Second. Jacob has no doubt that Leah was born to flank an Alpha—she has Ateara, Black and Uley blood running through her veins, after all, and he often wonders whether they've stumbled upon the reason she had pushed against Sam's leadership so often. Perhaps it wasn't simply down to loving him and hating him at the same time. Perhaps it is Leah's natural-born fire which cannot be extinguished, a will that is stronger than even Quil's, who had sensed it and had accepted his new role as Third without so much as a fight. Perhaps it is nothing but her own magic which makes her stand taller, her body radiating a different type of confidence and now strong and lean with muscle she has regained.

Or maybe she's changed because of Joshua, whose first word was Mama and not Lee or Jay like they had spent months trying to encourage.

Or maybe it's all down to Leah alone. She's really the one who has kept them in one piece, because she's been keeping him in one piece, whether she knows what she's doing or not—even after she'd broken her two-year streak and had gotten half-way across Oregon in an escape attempt, before coming home hours and hours later covered in dirt. (She still thinks he doesn't know about that, about where she went, about how quickly she ran, but he doesn't say anything because he's guilty of wanting escape sometimes too. He still dreams about what it would be like to see Canada again.)

She's not the same person he remembers making snide remarks in his head all those years ago, purposely trying to rile him, to get him to snap at her. Neither is she the same as when she was standing in his old living room, planning with him to free Josh from foster care (she'd looked more animal than human, then, more unsettled than ever before) and yet looking at her now, he sees that there is a softness in her. He's not sure whether it's always been there, buried and forgotten about, or whether it's something new, but it's only recently that he's noticed.

It's hard not to look at her, as they walk towards the bonfire their brothers are building. (Because it's important to celebrate, to welcome a new brother, even when the guilt and upset of doing so without Sam and Emily damn-near cripples him. The only reason he's not run a mile yet is because of Josh, toddling unsteadily between him and Leah, his tiny hands linking the three of them together.) Leah thinks the gathering will do them all good, that it will teach Micah a few things despite nearly having traumatised him with her own lessons. Jacob had truly felt for the boy, but if there had been any doubt in the past few days about her being the raging fire to his calm waters, she had extinguished it and had re-established her position amongst them all.

Leah takes her eyes off Joshua's funny bemusement of walking in the sand for the first time and meets his own, catching him staring openly at her. She doesn't falter one step in the last rays of winter sunlight which still warms the beach as she studies him the way he is her. "What?"

Once, she might have said it with a daring snarl. Now, her lips pull with the same smile she'd been giving Joshua still wobbling between them. At some point her eyes have lost the dangerous shadows within them, just as the dark circles underneath them have faded now that she's become used to surviving on less sleep again.

"You did good," he replies, because he knows that sometimes she needs to hear it as much as Micah had needed to after having his braid cut off. But Leah had in fact been brilliant—she had torn the arm off the red-eyed white-haired leech and had stopped its foreign mate escaping with a type of lethal anger he's only ever noticed in the wolves who have imprints. He knows that he, too, had seemed different than before, and that it's because of what they now stand to lose should they fail.

Jacob also knows that while they'd chased the bloodsuckers down Leah had seen and heard every single thought he'd had, after so long of ensuring that they led separate patrols. While Quil had chanted Claireclaireclairemineminemineclaire, Jake had been unable to distinguish himself from his brother in their frenzy and had kept up a steady chorus of Leahjoshleahleahleahleahjoshjoshleahleah. Betraying himself and his new feelings had been the very reason he'd made a point of not running with her after she'd started phasing again, because he knows that months ago it would have probably scared her further away than even Oregon; she would likely have been in Arizona by the time he'd heard from her again.

But she's still here, even after she'd been compelled to lift the shutters of her own mind and they'd all heard her own mantra of Joshjoshjoshjoshjoshmyjoshmyjacobmyjoshandjacob, which had stunned him as much as it had seemed to stun herself.

Leah finally averts her eyes and trains them back on Joshua, but she doesn't lose her smile. "If you're going to start getting all territorial about this," she says quietly enough that their brothers with sensitive ears can't hear, "you can take my turn on the couch tonight."

"I was kinda hoping you were going to get into a my horse is bigger than your horse thing with Kim or Rach," he replies, "because I'd so win that."

She tries to cover her laugh with a huff as she reaches down to pick Josh up. "It wouldn't be a fair win. I've probably seen more of their husbands than even they have."

He tries to not get all territorial about that, and his silence is enough to make her laugh again as Josh burrows into her warmth and they get closer to the Pack.

"Anyone see the last Seahawks game?" Paul yells suddenly. "What was the score?"

Jake's not sure whether Leah can tell it's a bit forced—he knows what they've all been secretly talking about for weeks now and he'll honestly be surprised if she hasn't figured it out yet, because he knows the new kid already has.

"Ignore him," Rachel says, shoving Paul as she passes. (Rach and Kim are dependable in that they are always the first on their feet and gunning towards the poor kid who just wants to be with his mama, but when Jake looks for Kim he sees the look on her red face and knows she's going to be pretty shit company tonight. Kim and pregnant do not go well together.) His sister starts smoothing down Joshua's dark hair. "He's been weird ever since he realised he was missing out on all the fun."

A lie, Jacob thinks, but a good one. As Leah rolls her eyes, seemingly unsuspicious and instead rather annoyed that Paul will forever be an idiot, Jacob smacks a kiss on the top of his sister's head by way of a greeting and a thank you.

Paul scowls as he crouches beside the wood. "Have not."

"Dunno about you, but I barely kept myself on two feet." Embry shakes himself, as if he still feels the sharp current of an Alpha's call rippling over his skin. "Didn't stop lookin' north until you shut up howling."

"Drama queen."

It is easy to bicker and laugh and to fall into an old life as Paul and Embry build the fire higher and higher, a warning to their enemies and a welcome for family, while they wait for the elders. Seth kicks a ball around with Quil, Collin, Brady and Micah, while Rachel continues to fuss over Josh even though Leah does not relent her hold on him, and Kim watches from the sand, seething as Jared seems at a complete loss. Jacob keeps an eye on all of them—some more than most, of course—as he pretends to arrange the blankets and the logs.

Leah notices his lingering gaze—again—and gives him a pointed look that he thinks might mean, Territorial fool. The couch is yours. But he simply grins back, triumphant and feeling lighter than he has in what seems a very, very long time.

"Moron," she says, later, when the elders arrive and they all take their places around the wood which is now burning bright. Beside him, she wraps Joshua and his favourite plush toy (which she's still never thanked Sue for) in a blanket on her lap and, though she might indeed think that Jacob is a moron instead of a fool, she leans into his touch when his fingers slip underneath her shirt and he splays his hand on the warm skin of her back.

He keeps her and Josh close all through Billy's tales and Old Quil's wise words, because now that his world has finally stopped blurring around the edges, he knows he must protect them—this—above all else. All too often has he found himself with nothing else to give, his whole heart spent, empty in its loneliness, but finally, finally he has learnt that he must be as fierce and wild as Leah can be to keep it—them—safe, to be selfish and not feel bad in wanting this only for himself. He has suffered enough loss for a lifetime. His mom, Harry, Bella, Emily, Sam… He's not sure how he's managed it, unsure of how he's still here.

Then, after their dad has left, parting with an approving nod and pride dancing in those old eyes, Leah finds her way underneath his arm and his sister positively beams.

Paul winks.

Embry looks pleased; Jake realises that his brother has probably won the secret bet they had going.

Seth gives him a thumbs-up.

Collin and Brady lean over the log and pretend to empty their stomachs. In between them, Micah is quiet but clearly amused.

Quil laughs. "So who called it?"

This, Jacob thinks, is how he survived all those years.

"Me," Embry says, perhaps a little too excitedly. Jacob can feel Leah's growing annoyance, and so he keeps his arm locked around her shoulders.

She growls regardless of the anchor he provides. "If you carry on," she says dangerously, but low enough to not wake the sleeping child with a bubbling threat in her throat, "Christmas at ours is cancelled."

Embry scoffs loudly, although for a moment Jared seems downright petrified—Kim's mood will undoubtedly be even worse next month, and he has no plans to suffer his wife alone.

"I mean it," Leah warns.

Jacob has to hide his smile in her hair.

But Embry just waves a hand as if to say, Yeah, as if, before stretching it out expectantly. "Ok, people. Time to pay up." He grins at Leah. "You don't even wanna know what we're betting on next."