A/N: Yes, this is a real update. These characters have been in my head a lot recently and it's past time for me to finish the story they started. As always, feedback and constructive criticism is greatly appreciated. Also, as a general note, Quil and Claire's timelines are not in sync right now. They will be all caught up with each other in my next chapter.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not Stephanie Meyer and I do not own Twilight.
Ten minutes later Quil found himself bursting through the front room of Jake and Nessie's house on the southwestern border of La Push, nearly falling into Noah Uley, Sam's oldest son and one of the newer members of the pack.
"Dude, watch it."
He didn't spare a glance at the teen, instead making his way inside the small rag-tag circle that had formed before his arrival.
Jake, Sam, Sue Clearwater, and Charlie Swan stood askance around the room. Emily sat on the edge of an oversized matte leather sofa, her chin resting on folded fingers, elbows pressed into her knees as Nessie looked on from the other end.
Looking from face to face waiting for someone to start speaking, Quil crossed his arms, barely acknowledging the squeak of the wetsuit he was still wearing or that one bare foot was anxiously tapping the hardwood floor beneath him.
Finally taking the initiative, Jake looked from Quil to Emily and back again. "Alice didn't actually find them. But we've figured out how to get in contact with them now. She got us one step closer, or at least a step in the right direction toward finding the Locklears."
Or rather, as they were now referred to, the Walker family. Claire's parents had changed their surname from Locklear, allowing them to drop off the radar of the Cullens and the pack.
Apparently having nothing better to do, Alice had scoured every resident of Clallam County looking for clues as to whether or not the decisions they made over the course of pursuing Emily's sister would lead them towards achieving Aiyanna's wishes. And while she hadn't seen the whole family making its way to their corner of the Pacific Northwest, she had envisioned a local gas station attendant checking the license of a girl named Claire Walker when she bought a case of Barefoot Moscato and a pack of Slim Jims. The clerk hadn't paid any attention to the state on the license, so it had been blurry to Alice, but this then led to following a trail through the possible futures of other business owners along the 101 through Forks. She saw Claire checking in at the Olympic Suites Inn. She saw Claire grabbing a burger at the diner. Claire asking a man with Native American features questions about the La Push Reservation. Asking about a woman who lived there named Emily and her mother Aiyanna. Eventually got in deep enough to go back an undetermined amount of time prior to her showing up in Forks to see Charlie calling every Todd and Dena Walker in the continental US.
"In some versions Claire comes alone," Jake murmured. "In others, she comes with a couple different women. And Quil…"
Jake paused, seemingly uncomfortable as he peered through squinted eyes at his cousin, one of his closest friends. "Sometimes Alice loses her and she doesn't come at all. But sometimes…sometimes she comes with a man. A young dude who isn't her father."
Quil could feel all the air rush out of his lungs. Someone else had started to speak but all he could register was the subtle numbness that trickled from his racing heart straight down to his tingling limbs.
A man.
Claire was coming with a man.
Jake's words oozed through every synapse in his brain, playing on repeat for moments that seemed like hours until a hand sliding around his back jerked him from his dazedness. Emily had sidled up beside him and pulled his big body into her tiny one as fiercely as she could. He focused all his attention on where her skin made contact with his, using it to anchor himself to the room so he didn't phase right there in the middle of the Black's living room. In that soothing, motherly tone, Emily's next words creeped into his ears through the fog he was in. "If we play our cards right, we might be able to get our family back here."
Thinking of Aiyanna, Emily's mother, and disentangling himself from her embrace, he sat down heavily with a gruff snort in the spot Emily had just come up from, throwing his head into the back of the couch and throwing an arm over his eyes.
Just this morning out in the surf, not even two hours ago, he'd told himself he didn't care as long as Claire was happy and he could see her again. Confronted with the reality that she really may not be alone, he realized what a lying idiot he was.
He cared so much it incinerated every other thing besides how he felt about her. The imprint that had seeded itself so deeply into the mind and heart of the spirit warrior he shared his soul with commanded every moment of every day, and everything else was just going through the motions. She was a woman he didn't really even know, but still somehow instinctually understood he would remember and recognize better than the back of his own hand.
"Seth is at the station right now putting together a list of potentials so we can start making phone calls. In the meantime I'm gonna call one of my contacts in Seattle and see if they have any resources we can access." Charlie, cool calm and collected while addressing a tense room, looked over at Emily. "Is there any place we didn't try the last few times we looked that you can think of where your sister would go, just so we can maybe narrow down the search a little?"
"I'll think on it Charlie, but I feel like I've exhausted every possible thing I know about Dena."
And so, the next few weeks passed in a blur. It was an endless cycle of leads from Alice that never went anywhere: one week she saw Claire coming with various escorts and the next she never saw them even making contact, never saw Claire making her way back.
So Quil continued on, spending his eight hours a day at the shop managing the office while intermittently logging time at the tribal council office where he balanced budgets, acted as a liaison between the tribe and the US Bureau of Indian Affairs, worked with the small businesses the council was attempting to help grow, and attempted to aid Billy Black in creating a commercial code to take before the rest of the council and the elders for approval, something he hoped would make improving the economic status of his people a more broadly attainable goal. He had dinner with his mother or at Embry and his imprint Tala's house, and then he would patrol the late shift three nights a week, giving the imprints and the fathers in the pack who were still phasing time with their families and the younger wolves time for school work or, in the case of Sam and Jared's older sons who were running the bulk of patrols, time for video games and much needed sleep.
To Quil, the hardest part about all of it was that even if she did show up, there was no way that Claire remembered him. He spent countless hours of his life chasing a shadow that he could at least put a name to, could hear her voice like an echo from the distance, but she had no idea that he even existed. He had confided this to Nessie after one drunken night with Embry and Jake in the Black's backyard, before Jake and Ness had children and before he and Jake took over a good chunk of the responsibilities of the council.
"Quil," she had said, her eyes lighting up in that strange way that gold does when it's still molten and gooey. Like they knew some secret of the universe. "She knows she's missing something. There's a part of me that Jake fills that no one and nothing else can." He had given her a raised eyebrow and a side eye at that, just to see her blush and splutter. "I didn't mean it like that, perv! I just meant that there's a hole that...you know what, never mind." He had laughed at her and pulled her into a hug as an apology, but Nessie snuck her hand up to his face and hit him with the atom bomb of her thoughts. Her looking into Jacob's eyes and feeling a piece of her soul slip into place. Being away from him and always feeling noticeably bereft. "If what I know from the other imprints is true, Quil, she feels it too."
He didn't know if that comforted him or made it worse. To think of her somewhere feeling empty and alone, feeling like he did, was too much for him to bear when there was nothing he could do to offer solace to either of them.
A month after he started making phone calls, Charlie called Seth who called Quil freaking out that Charlie had found them. That Claire had been the one to answer the phone. Quil passed out in his mother's kitchen that night, overwhelmed by an emotion teetering between exuberance and terror. When he came to, Jake was standing over top of him, his mother with her head in her hands at the kitchen table and Emily standing next to her like she didn't know whether to chastise him for his theatrics or lay down in the floor with him and hyperventilate.
It was the first thing on his mind and out of his mouth. "Jake, is she coming?"
Jake laughed and offered Quil a hand which he ignored, opting to throw his head back against the floor and brace for the impact of the answer to his question.
"Alice says yes."
He breathed a lungful of air, deeper than he had in longer than he could remember, and he cried right there on the floor of his mom's kitchen, onlookers be damned.
This burgeoning feeling of excitement would begin to dissipate for Quil and even for Emily over the next few days when Alice couldn't pin down the when, the how, or the who. It could be days. It could be months. It could be years. Charlie had traced the unlisted phone number that belonged to the Locklears to a large suburb of Atlanta. It would have been impossible to find them without asking the Cullens to do something illegal, not that they minded. But Emily said if she knew her sister, they'd be moving soon if Todd's angry diatribe towards Charlie was any indication. Claire may not even live with them.
If they couldn't pin down the time it meant Claire was fighting an internal battle and it would be best to wait for her to come to them lest they risk completely losing the whole family all over again.
During the day, after two weeks with no indication that Charlie's phone call was going to get them anywhere, Quil pretended like it was business as usual. His pack brothers thought he was on the verge of a breakdown, and they weren't wrong, but he had to pretend like he wasn't potentially on the precipice of something that would change his life or he might crumble from it. Embry was tiptoeing around him like he would explode at any minute. His mother called him incessantly to ensure he hadn't allowed himself to float off over the edge of the horizon on one of his morning surf sessions.
At night, just like every other night in his innumerable years of being imprintless that had stretched on endlessly, when he was alone in his bed, alone in the empty house that was the last tangible piece of his grandfather that he had, he allowed Claire—the three-year-old Claire, the only one he knew—to push her way to the forefront of his mind. He tried to imagine her growing older without him. Tried to morph her from the spunky toddler to whom he was tied inexplicably into an adolescent with a Barbie collection and skinned knees. A gangly preteen with braces. A teenager coming into her own, having sleep overs with friends, going to high school and joining extracurricular activities that he wouldn't be able to help guide her through, and her crying alone over the latest guy who broke her heart.
He would've been there for her through all of it, changing himself along with her to be whatever she needed from him. Her older brother, catching her when she fell off her bike or sneaking her ice cream or teaching her to swim. Her best friend, someone to complain about her parents and school to, help her with her homework, teach her to drive, threaten the life of any boys who came around.
"Sometimes she comes with a man."
This single sentence played on repeat in his head from the moment Seth had told him that she'd been the one to answer the phone at her parents' house. It nearly broke him, much as he denied that it even mattered.
He never really allowed himself to dwell on the woman she inevitably would become. It had never been important to him.
But lately, lonely even in a life crowded with people that he cared about and who cared for him and with the possibility looming that she maybe, just maybe, might be coming back into his life despite his forlorn surety that she never would, he couldn't stop thinking about Claire the Woman. Someone that would confide in him and him in her. To cook dinner for and fight over the television with and brush his teeth next to in a house they shared. She was abstract, of course, a construct of his wandering mind and pitiful, bleeding heart. But she was still there, no matter how strange it felt or how much it hurt him in those moments where it was just Quil and an empty right side of the bed. He didn't see other women, never had, not that he wanted to. They weren't Claire, weren't his other half that had been ripped away in some cosmically planned comedy of errors.
And then unexpectedly, during a cool night on Second Beach in front of a bonfire erected in celebration of the end of summer, like a specter that floated in on a fall breeze, there she was.
Claire.
Claire was exceedingly embarrassed that she didn't know anything about her aunt and grandmother besides their names and that they lived in La Push. How the hell was she supposed to find these people with just that to go on? Luckily neither La Push or the neighboring town of Forks she'd have to drive through to get to the reservation were very big places, a little factoid she'd discovered from mercilessly googling everything she could about them during her mind and butt-numbingly long flight. Surprisingly, in an age of information overload, there had been little to nothing available about the reservation. Just some general information like coordinates and population on the tiniest Wikipedia entry she had ever seen. The tribe had a website that listed employment opportunities, information about the Quileute Days festival held in the early summer, and contact information for the council members, but aside from that there was very little for her to go on.
Oh, well. It was too late for any of that to matter, anyway. She had gotten in a rental car at SeaTac around 3am local time, exhausted out of her mind but so nervous about being on the other side of the country and driving straight towards the potential big bad wolf that she had forgotten about the basic necessities of human life like food and sleep and gotten behind the wheel like a woman possessed. One hard rock playlist and two hours later she found herself driving through a town called Port Angeles, decent in size but quiet and still in the early hours of the morning. She stopped long enough to put gas in the sedan and grab a much needed supersized dose of caffeine before going along on her merry way. The GPS told her she was only about an hour from Forks, where she imagined she would get a hotel room if only to maintain a safe distance from the reality of why she had ventured out to the west coast in the first place.
Standing in the early morning light and feeling her skin become slick with the cold dew lingering in the air, Claire noted how much cooler it was here than back home and she did a silent victory dance that she had at least had the forethought to pack warmer clothes.
As she pulled back onto the highway her phone buzzed from its home in the cup holder, a shrill sound chirping through the car's speakers and interrupting the music she was using a crutch to avoid falling asleep. The annoying tone alerted her to a phone call from her best friend. Switching hands on the steering wheel, she hit the 'answer' button and put the receiver up to her right ear. Before she could get a greeting out, she was met with a grunt and an expletive.
"Thanks for the call letting me know you weren't dead somewhere." Her friend's droll tone was colored by the Saturday morning sleepies.
Claire let out a huff and a laugh. "Good morning to you too, Jules."
"I'm not gonna stay on the phone long because I'm barely functional but I just wanted to make sure your plane hadn't crashed or that you'd been kidnapped somewhere between civilization and podunk nowhere."
Claire could imagine Jules laying sideways on her bed, halfway hanging off the side after waking up from the strange position in which she tended to sleep.
"Go back to sleep, even though it's freakin' 9am there so I don't know what you're complaining about."
"Love you too, Claire. Text me later." With that, the line went dead.
Jules had been Claire's best friend since their early teenage years. Jules was the person that she could count on and confide in all the things that she didn't think her parents would be able to hear or accept. She knew all about Claire's little secrets, her dissatisfaction beyond normal teenage angst with her seemingly perfect life. The fifth grade first kiss that Claire swore had ruined her life. The anger she felt at her parents for never talking about the rest of her family. Dancing with Ryan Holcomb at junior prom and the way every nerve in her body rebelled when he tried to take her to bed after some groping in a hotel room that she had thought would do the trick in making her feel like a regular, feeling, sexual human being. Dating faceless man after faceless man in college until she met Derrick. How for the most part, despite being together for four years, there was no spark. He did absolutely nothing for her besides offering her an equal partner to go through life with that she wasn't nauseated at the thought of showing affection to and who may be able to help her satisfy that primal urge for motherhood.
Jules knew, too, about the faceless man she'd been dreaming about for at least as long as she was old enough to remember. The tug in her subconscious every time she misbehaved or did something reckless. The feeling that she was betraying someone else by even looking at guys when she hit puberty.
Jules knew it all, and in exchange for her not running away screaming from Claire's crazy, Claire was the family that Jules, a foster kid since age five, didn't have. Claire hadn't had many friends growing up as a side effect of being more introverted and preferring quality over quantity, and Julia Robinson was the cream of that crop. They had been inseparable after bonding over a shared love of softball, choir, and classic rock.
Passing the push lean sign that welcomed travelers to Forks, Washington, her running thoughts ceased as the need for a bed, any bed, forced itself to the forefront of her list of things that were most extremely and immediately important to think about. Not long after entering the Forks City Limits, Claire pulled in to the Olympic Suites Inn and after killing the engine, she threw her head back against the seat and prayed that she wouldn't end up regretting the rash sequence of decisions she had made in the last twelve hours.
She prayed that she hadn't come too late to meet her maternal grandmother.
She prayed that she would finally find the answers to what she'd been inadvertently searching for her entire life.