If you've read Long Long Long and Living in the Sun, you have all the backstory you need for Teeth. If not, I'm sure you'll still be able to follow what's going on, but just to make it easier to read this without having read the others, I've included some backstory in an A/N at the bottom of this chapter. Thanks for being here, dudes.

Leah is sobbing uncontrollably into her pillow when her phone buzzes. She has to stare at it for several long seconds before her brain believes her eyes.

It's Jake.

The last time they spoke on the phone was six months ago or more, and it was a terse, distracted conversation, because he was busy with his new life doing whatever, wherever. Since then it's been texts, short ones usually, just to make sure they're both still alive.

She's stopped expecting a call. Whatever pride she has left has prevented her from calling him. She made the call last time, and it was awkward, boring, brief.

She swallows and grits her teeth to get her voice under control, and answers the phone.

"Hey, Lee," he says, and at the sound of his voice she's sobbing again. "Want me to come over?"

She doesn't manage a response, but he comes over anyway, with a lot of beer and six bags of different kinds of chips, and four dips, and two salsas. She didn't even know he was back on the rez. Hell, she didn't even know he was in the country.

Leah's mom is at work and her dad is at Charlie Swan's house; in a couple of days, probably, they will both remember that tonight was the anniversary of the event that nearly destroyed their daughter, and they will feel terrible for leaving her alone. But Leah doesn't care. She waits for Jake in darkness, all lights turned off so that she can pretend she is somewhere else, somewhen else, someone else.

When Jake arrives they sit on the couch, lit only by moonlight through the screen door, and Jake yanks the tops off of two beer bottles with his bare hands. He passes her one beer and clinks the other against it, and says,

"To Dad and Sam and Emily and Claire and Jared."

Leah downs her beer in one go. It's been a year since the La Push Killings, and her life is no less over now than it was when she got the first call.

Leah actually thought, when her mother called her, weeping too hard to say more than Em's dead, that this was it: her life was over. Emily might as well have been her sister, they were so close. Emily was her best friend, easily as much her soul mate as Sam was. Leah spent the night with Sam, and they held each other and cried, and Leah did not know how she could bear this much pain.

Two days after that, her dad informed her with tears on his cheeks that Claire, Emily's niece and a flower girl in Sam's and Leah's upcoming wedding, had also been found dead. Claire had been tiny, just a toddler, very excited about the pretty dress that had been bought for her and very, very serious about her flower girl duties. And Leah, who had never really stopped crying in the whole two days since learning of Emily's murder, sobbed until her nose bled.

She spent the next night drinking with Sam and his best friend, Jared Cameron. They were both pretty big guys, tall, built, and it made her feel safe to sit with them in Jared's mom's basement, with all the lights on, being sad and being scared. She cried on Sam's shoulder.

Three days after that, a local man's dog went into some bushes to fetch a thrown stick and came out with part of a leg bone belonging to Jared. Sam was found in a stream a few miles away, not far from Leah's house.

Even then, her life wasn't over. She thought it was, but it wasn't. Not yet. Not completely.

A week later, Uncle Bill was found dead in his home. Uncle Bill, who couldn't lay eyes on Leah without inquiring of the the universe whether she was ever going to stop getting prettier. Uncle Bill, who told her the Facts of Life because he knew her mother wouldn't do the subject justice. Uncle Bill, her second father, her favorite elder, her lodestar.

Jake was nowhere to be found, and Leah knew then that he was dead.

When Jake turned up safe and sound eleven days later, Leah didn't believe it. She didn't believe it was Jake, or if it was, she didn't believe he was alive. If Uncle Bill was dead, if Sam and Jared and Claire and Emily were dead, Jake must be dead too. Seth must be dead. Her mom and dad must be dead. Everyone was dead, murdered in what newspapers were calling "suspicious grizzly attacks". Everyone was dead, murdered, eaten, digested, shit out, gone, forever.

Most of all Leah. She just hadn't stopped twitching yet.

Seth no longer felt safe in his own home, on his own turf. He didn't say it; it didn't need to be said. But after a while his grades started slipping too badly to ignore, and it was agreed between him, their parents and Leah that he would finish out the school year with some Makah cousins, maybe staying on through the next year as well. Leah felt he made the right choice. If things had been different, she would have insisted that the family stay together, but what point was there in that when serial murderering grizzly bears could just split you up anyway, without warning? No, it was better that Seth eke out the last of his childhood somewhere safe, away from this place. Away from Leah, even. She was no good for him now, or for anyone. She'd have to be mad to blame him for leaving.

For her part, Leah did not feel safe at home anymore either, but she also didn't really care if her body was found in a stream, all her blood rinsed away. After several months passed and there were no new killings, Leah did not think she was likely to get so lucky.

In the months directly following the murders, after he returned from his almost-two-week walkabout, Jake took up residence with Leah and her parents, keeping odd hours, being secretive and miserable. Jake never told anyone what he got up to, but he and Leah sat together in her room, listening to music, not usually talking. Sometimes Leah drifted off still sitting up, her feet tucked under Jake. When she dozed, she dreamed: dreamed that Sam and Emily and Claire and Uncle Bill and Jared and Jake were all still alive and well. The waking was terrible, and it usually took Jake some minutes to prove to her that actually, he was still alive. Technically.

Only once in this period did Leah feel something like life flowing through her veins. Her mother was in the kitchen, quietly crying into the beans she was fixing for supper. Dad was at work. Jake and Leah were pretending to watch TV.

"God, this sucks," Jake was muttering. Leah lifted an eyebrow.

"You're telling me," she said.

"I mean," said Jake, "like, I get it. Sometimes life hands you lemons."

"Lemons are full of acid," noted Leah. "Life gives you acid."

"And you just have to...get by, I guess. I mean, I get that."

"If you can," qualified Leah.

"But shit, she didn't even think about it. Just fucking took it. Took everything. She wanted to be rich and beautiful and young forever and now she is, but only because she's dead."

"Emily never wanted that," contradicted Leah.

"Emily?" Jake echoed, blinking at her.

"And Em wasn't rich," she added. "Beautiful and young and dead, yeah. But not rich." One hot tear squeezes out of the corner of her eye, but she blinks it back.

"I'm talking about Bella," said Jake.

"The fuck is Bella?"

"Um, Swan? Like, Chief Swan's daughter?"

Leah stared at Jake. "You're talking about Charlie Swan's bratty kid?" she said. "I thought you were talking about Em."

"No. And she's not bratty. Don't call her that."

"You just said she wanted to be dead and rich," pointed out Leah. "Sounds bratty to me. But hey, I don't know 'er. Whatever."

"She's not bratty," insisted Jake, his face suffusing red. "Don't you dare say that about her. She has had shit to deal with like you wouldn't believe. There's more to this. I know there is. There has to be. And I just let her leave. Fuck, I made her leave. God, I suck."

"Calm down, Jake—"

"No, you calm down," Jake shouted. He threw himself at her, swatted at her head, brought Mom running in from the kitchen, then ran out of the house like a cat with its tail on fire.

"What happened?" said Mom, looking after him.

"No idea," said Leah dully. "Whatever, he'll be back."

But he wasn't. Jake didn't come back. Left his bed unslept in, barely took any of his belongings, just vanished. He didn't call, and he responded to Leah's texts in brief, uncommunicative bursts. He was gone from her house, gone from her family, gone from her life.

Just gone. Like everyone else.

And that was when Leah's life was well and truly over.

Leah spent the long months that followed Jake's disappearance in nearly total isolation, dropping out of her classes at Peninsula College, ignoring her school friends' texts until her phone went silent altogether. She did not dare love anyone, ever again. She did not have the nerve.

When Jake reappeared nine months later, he was changed. He smiled his sweet Jake smile of yore, and hugged prolifically, and was not dead at all, not even inside like she was. He moved into his dad's house. Leah didn't understand how he could do it, how he could choose to live in the house where his own father was murdered, even if it did have a porch and an attic and lack a mortgage. She still can't step foot in the part of the woods where Sam's mangled corpse was found, drained of blood by the flowing water. Emily and Claire Young had been found in a different part of the rez. No one knows why they were drained of blood. Or Jared. Or Uncle Bill.

"It's an ongoing investigation," was all Chief Swan would say about it. If Leah wants closure, she's going to have to get it somewhere else. But she doesn't want closure. She doesn't care.

Jake offered to let Leah move in with him. Could she live in the very home where Uncle Bill was murdered? Then again, could she bear to stay put, sitting on the couch that she and Sam used to make out on, walking through the garden where Emily was teaching her to grow her own wedding bouquet? She couldn't bring herself to get rid of her wedding dress, which hung ghostlike in her closet and mocked her every time she reached for a jacket. Nor could she bear to put away the dozens of framed photos of her and Em, in all stages of life, which lined the walls of the whole house.

It was a no-brainer, in the end. She lacked the backbone to throw out all the things that reminded her of them, to salt Emily's garden, to burn Sam's couch; but she had just enough backbone to move out and live with Jake instead.

She took some books with her, some clothes, her pillow, her engagement ring. She took shoes and her toothbrush and her withering sadness. She took her memories and left behind all the evidence that she had ever been happy.

Now Leah has a meaningless, zombie-like job at a shoe store in town. Retail is easy. The customers are intimidated by her and her coworkers dislike her and her manager finds her difficult, but they can't fire her because they have a diversity quota to fill and everyone else who works there is white. Jake won't let her pay any of the utility bills, so she's actually able to start saving up her paychecks. Eventually, she may save up enough to resume following her dreams to become a vet, assuming she can manage anything so ambitious as having dreams again.

It's easy for Leah to live on Ramen, since she lost her appetite a year ago and never really got it back. Jake buys all communal necessities. She asks him where he gets all this money, but he never answers her.

Jake has changed.

He hit a serious growth spurt just before he bailed the last time, and now he's tall and fit and adult-looking. But his looks aren't the reason he never gets carded even though he's only seventeen: he's become self-assured, confident, articulate. He doesn't act like a kid who lost both his parents too young, too traumatically. He acts like a young man who's going places. He has left Leah behind, quite spectacularly so.

"Lee?" Jake prods a drifting Leah. She blinks and sits up, her mouth sticky, her brain half-asleep. "Can I ask you something?"

"Shoot." Leah stretched, cracks her back, tugs on all her fingers, flexes her toes.

"What do you do all day? I mean, like, when I'm gone."

"Work," says Leah, picking aimlessly at a thread that has come loose from the couch cushion

"You don't work every day," says Jake. "And even if you did, you only work for what, like, eight hours at a go? What else do you do?"

"Dunno. Watch TV?" Leah says it like it's a question, because it is. She doesn't know what she does. She doesn't notice. "What do you do? You're never here during the day. Where do you go?"

"Just around," says Jake, as vague as Leah. And they say no more about it.

Leah joins her mom and dad and Seth for Christmas. It's horrible. Seth is missing his friends, and girlfriend, from his new school. It doesn't surprise Leah that he's made new friends, or that he loves his new life, or that everyone up there loves him. She's relieved. Glad that she no longer has to worry about him. He'll be fine.

Her mom gives her a scrapbook she made, packed with photos of Leah with Em, Leah with Sam, Leah with Uncle Bill. Sue sits on the couch, tears in her eyes, already healing from the scars that have been inflicted on not just Leah but the whole Clearwater family. The whole rez. She reaches out to embrace her daughter, so they can cry and heal together.

Leah jerks out of her mother's reach and walks out the front door, down the street, and all the way to Uncle Bill's house, two miles away. She doesn't slam the door and she doesn't break into a run and she doesn't give any indication that she hears her mother sobbing and calling after her. She leaves the album.

Jake isn't at home, so Leah takes two Unisoms and passes out. She puts herself to sleep over the next few days, almost continually, until the year is over and a new one begins.

Leah and Jake sit together in his living room watching reality TV and consuming Natural Light. They drink their first beers in silence. Then Leah asks what Jake's been up to, and he says not much, tells her he's expecting a visitor in the next couple days, assures Leah she won't be inconvenienced, and they drink their second watery beers in silence.

"What I don't get," says Leah after she's popped the top on her third, "is how you could just leave like that. I never would have done that." Her eyes are fixed on a blonde who is fighting with a brunette in a gaudily-furnished McMansion.

"Lee…"

"I mean, your dad dies, you're traumatized, I get it. You took off and hung out with some cousin who wasn't me for a couple weeks. Whatever. I'm not judging you for how you grieve."

"I wasn't trying to abandon you," Jake starts to say.

"But you did," she says flatly. "Who cares if you didn't try to abandon me? You succeeded."

"Leah, I freaked out and ran away for a couple weeks. I had a lot of shit going on."

"You know I'm talking about the second time you did it," she says. "After you came back from wherever. You were here and we were starting to get it together, and then you disappeared again for nine months. No warning. God, Jake, where the hell were you?"

"Honestly?" says Jake, tipping the last of his second into his mouth and reaching for his third. "I was in Ireland."

"But...why?"

"It's...complex," says Jake. "You won't even believe me."

"Try me," she insists.

"Leah, can we please not fight about this right now? I can't do this now. Please."

Leah shuts up. She's good at shutting up. She's had a whole year to practice.

She is starting to doze off in Uncle Bill's recliner when Jake leaps to his feet, charges over to the front door, and throws it open. Leah doesn't recognize the man on the doorstep, but Jake crushes the stranger into a bear hug and drags him inside.

"Nahuel," he is saying, "You made it! How are you, man? God, I've missed the shit outta you."

Leah rubs sleep from her eyes and peers at the stranger groggily. He's not from the Rez. Doesn't look Makah, either, but definitely a native of some stripe. He's close to Leah's height, of a slight build, with long black hair braided down his back. His eyes are the same shade of medium-brown as his skin, and fringed with thick black lashes on top and bottom. He smells like the outdoors.

He is beautiful. And from the way Jake greeted him—that hug, that lingering grasp of the hand as he led Nahuel inside—Leah gets an unwelcome insight into just where Jake was for nine months and why he hasn't needed her the way she's needed him. Nahuel, whoever he is, is Jake's lighthouse at sea. After five seconds Leah can see that.

They might be lovers or they might not; Leah never had a sense that Jake was gay, but it seems there's a lot about him she doesn't know these days. Whatever Nahuel is to Jake, they're close. This asshole, this nobody, he stole her cousin and left her more alone than alone. Leah hates him immediately. It's a funny feeling, that hate: it's the warmest thing she's felt all year. She almost doesn't recognize the sensation.

"Nahuel and I met in Ireland," Jake is saying.

"So you're still sticking with the Ireland story?" she says, more nastily than she means to. Nahuel looks at Leah keenly, his beautiful black-lashed eyes kind and deeply understanding, and she suddenly wants nothing more than to punch him in the throat. She is appalled by the force of her reaction, blindsided by unfamiliar and unquenchable wrath.

"Leah," Jake says in shock, "I didn't…there's no story, I was really in Ireland."

"Doing what?" says Leah, staring pointedly at Nahuel, who drops his eyes.

"Taking care of some things."

"What things?"

"Leah, I can't really get into it—"

"Good night," mutters Leah, and goes to bed, clenching her jaw against all the things she has a sudden urge to scream. All of the emotions she hasn't felt in a year are crowding into her heart like passengers into the last lifeboat on the Titanic, and she completely fails either to comprehend her own rage or to sleep it away.

If you want to know more about what's going on and don't mind some spoilers for my other two stories set in this universe, Long Long Long and Living in the Sun, here's what you need to know:

1. To avoid promoting Meyer's offensive Quileute history, I changed the wolf pack to a small group of nomadic shape-shifters ranging from hundreds to thousands of years old, who happened to be living with the Quileutes and helped broker the treaty with the Cullens in the Thirties. Jake is the great-grandson of one of those wolves; Leah, unbeknownst to her, is a descendant of another. Sam, Jared, Embry, et al are not. For more on just how Meyer's version of wolfitude is racist and further details about what I changed, check out the A/N at the end of Chapter 8 of Living in the Sun.

2. James and Victoria murdered and drank several residents of La Push, including Emily and Claire Young, Sam Uley, Jared Cameron, and Billy Black. During this time, Jake encountered James. Proximity to the vampire forced the expression of Jake's latent werewolf gene. Soon he was welcomed into the aforementioned ancient nomadic wolf pack, who requested that the Cullens vacate the neighborhood temporarily for the safety of the local humans. Jake and his new wolf family followed the Cullens out of the country for several months, having only limited contact with his cousin Leah during this time, and telling her nothing of what had happened to him.

3. Jake imprinted on Nahuel. While my altered version of imprinting does not necessarily preclude romantic attachment, it also does not require it, and Jake and Nahuel are not dating. For more of my thoughts on imprinting and why I changed it, read the A/N to Living in the Sun Chapter 14.

I hope that explains enough for this story to make sense even if you haven't been with me through Long Long Long and Living in the Sun. Enjoy!