The curtains were drawn on the room, but it was brightly lit. Jasper sat hunched beside Seth, his honey blonde hair hiding his face. She stepped forward, and Jasper raised his head. His eyes were scarlet.

"Easy, Jasper." Carlisle said.

Clenching her hands into fists, Leah crossed to her brother. Once she was sure he was safe, she would tear the throat from the vampire. Seth's face was pale beneath his russet skin. A blanket was pulled over his shoulders, but she could still see the bite mark on his throat. His skin was cold as she laid her fingers on his cheek. He looked dead. Fucking dead. If it wasn't for the ragged breaths slipping past his lips, she would have thought he was.

"Seth?" Her voice broke, and she could feel wetness on her cheeks.

A moan was her only response.

"He can't respond." Carlisle said, his voice soft. "I'm not even sure if he can hear you."

She had to stifle a sob. Seth was all they had left. And because of her, he might die. She glanced up at Jasper. His face was drawn tight, tension stringing his shoulders tight as a bow-string. As if he could feel her gaze on him, he finally ripped his eyes away from Seth.

"You fucking bloody bastard. What the fuck did you do to him?" She snarled, feeling the wolf raise its metaphorical hackles within her.

Carlisle set a hand on Jasper's shoulder, and Jasper's lips drew back in a silent growl. "If Jasper hadn't found your brother, he would have died."

She looked back at Seth. She had to control herself. For his sake. Once he was safe, she would destroy the leech. She would raze the house to the ground, tear apart every god-damned cell within him. But that was for after she saved Seth. "What the hell happened to him?"

Pale fingers grasped the blanket covering him, and pulled it back with clinical care. With Esme's help, Carlisle unpeeled the bandage around his chest. As the blood soaked bandage came off, Leah sucked in a breath between her teeth, and hovered her palm over the trail of wounds. If she had lowered her hand, her long fingers would have fit directly into the ruined flesh.

"These... these are..."

Jasper's voice was as bitter as if his venom had slipped into his words. "Werewolf wounds."

Werewolf.

Werewolf.

For a long, long time, Leah's brain refused to processes the information. Synapses refused to fire, and all she could hear was the roaring of her blood, and the cold, pressing silence of the room. She was staring into the abyss, and the abyss was destroying her.

For all she and Jake had wondered a loud if Sam possessed the hatred to hurt her brother, for all the thought that he did had made her sick, she had never truly expected to see the wolf claw marks that split her brother from clavicle to hip.

"Sam," she whispered, voice catching in her throat. She could feel the wolf under her skin regain its footing, reaching to tear and destroy. Another part of her wanted to fling herself into the nearest set of welcoming arms, be they human, or wolf, or even leech. The man she had once loved had nearly murdered her baby brother. And even if he hadn't been the one to deliver the deathblow, he had to know. With the exception of her and Jacob, all the other wolves were still linked to Sam.

They all knew.

And she was going to kill them all.

Carlisle's voice broke her from her murderous thoughts. "You think Sam could have done this?"

She turned to him, keeping her fingers locked with Seth's. They were tense, and she worried they might hurt him, but right now, his touch was the only thing keeping her grounded. "If Sam didn't, one of the others did."

"With Sam's knowledge and consent." Esme added, her lips a tight line. Her hands were clenched on Jasper's shoulders, Jasper still sat in the only chair in the room, his bloody eyes staring past her at her brother.

Red with her brother's blood. The thought made Leah's stomach roil like the churning sea. She nodded briskly, turning back before the wolf broke free. She smoothed hair from her brother's face. He looked so peaceful lying there, nothing like the brother she knew. His face was slack, with none of the twist of expressions that normally accompanied his sleep. Seth was always tossing and turning, murmuring half-formed words in his sleep. Her brother looked dead lying there.

For a moment, regret joined the rest of the pain and anger within her. If she had sucked it up, and stayed with Sam, kept his voice in her head for the rest of her days, maybe this wouldn't have happened. She could have convinced Seth to come back, not to follow Jacob off on some half-cocked irrational plan. She could have talked Sam down, told him Seth was a kid that had changed too early. He couldn't be expected to act rational. She could have forced Sam to see reason.

But she hadn't, and she knew in her heart there was no way she could have.

"If Sam... or whomever it was," Carlisle started, "tried to kill him once, there's a chance that they may try to attack him here."

It took every scrap of control that Leah had not to wolf out then and there.

"Let them try." Jasper's voice was rough; a dangerous growl better suited to a wolf than a sleek, elegant killer.

Leah looked at him sharply. She hadn't been expecting that. It was strange how hearing that note in her own voice for so long made her so sensitive to it in others. That note that someone else may have registered as possession, but that she knew was an attempt to appease guilt with protection. Guilt and something else...

Self-loathing.

She knew it all too well.

"He's right. Sam's pack is no threat to us with Jacob's help." One of Esme's hand left Jasper's shoulder to tuck a strand of hair behind an ear. "He'll be safe here, Leah."

She wanted to argue, but she knew Esme was right. Where else could she take him? Home? Sue wouldn't be able to protect him. She would just get her mother killed. To Jacob's? Even with her there, Sam's pack would tear them to shreds. Besides, she was only delivering them straight to Sam. Where else was there? A hospital? They'd kill Seth just as surely as they tried to deal with the unknown venom.

"Right now, I'm afraid that Seth's greatest danger is still his wounds." Carlisle said, voice somber. He came forward and set his fingers beside Seth's wounds. "Infection's setting in. Though not as fast as I would have thought." He squatted back on his heels. "Leah, you should call your mother. Once infection sets in, some patients go downhill quickly. Esme will show you the phone in the kitchen."

"I'm not leaving him."

"Leah." Carlisle said, fixing her with his too-gold stare. "I would prefer if you left the room. Now that his bandages have been removed, I need to clean his wounds. At the rate that his genetics and the venom are burning off the morphine, it won't be a pleasant procedure."

Didn't they get it? This was her baby brother. There was no way in hell that she was leaving his side to spare herself some agony. She had lived through it before, and she would live through it again.

"No."

Carlisle looked like he was about to argue, and Leah squared her shoulders. These vampires may not know it yet, but she gave just as good as she got. A sudden sense of cold wind at her shoulders made her turn back.

Esme was holding out her cellphone, a touch-screen dial-pad on the glowing at her. "You better make your call quickly, Leah, before Carlisle starts. Tell your mother if she wishes for a ride or protection, or if you think she may be to distraught to drive safely, that I will come and get her."

For a moment, Leah hesitated. A quick look around the room convinced her that none of the vampires harboured any intention of leaving. As much as she didn't want to leave Seth's side, she also didn't want these vampire's privy to the conversation where she revealed to her mother that Seth was in danger of dying.

With shaking fingers she dialled home. There was only one call she could imagine that would be worse, and she knew she might only be avoiding that call by a few hours. Her mother picked up before the first ring had even ended. "Hello?"

"Mom. I found him." Leah said, and was instantly ashamed of the tremor that went through her voice.

"Oh thank God." Her mother breathed, and Leah could see the lost look in her eyes disappearing. She could hear it in her voice, a sense of the woman she had been before Leah's latent genes had quite literally exploded. "Where is he? How is he?"

"He's alive Mom. But he's hurt." Again she smoothed the hair from Seth's face, refusing to look down at the wounds stretched across him. "He's hurt real bad."

Her mother gave a broken sob.

Leah could see Esme close her eyes as if pained, and she realized that with their hearing, the Cullen's were listening to both sides of the conversation. Sue's breathing was rushed and hard, and she knew that her mother was getting lost in the past. That brief moment when Leah had thought she had wiped the pain and grief from her mother was lost. "Mom, Esme Cullen is going to come and get you, okay?" She asked softly, feeling more like a parent then a daughter. "I want you to stay there until she comes."

For a moment Leah didn't think her mother would answer. Then, finally, she whispered her assent. "Okay. Are you sure you're safe there? You don't want me to get Jacob, or Sa-"

"No." Leah's voice slammed down over her mother's. Jacob here would be bad enough. But Sam would be a disaster. She tried a softer approach, already feeling guilty for shouting. "It's fine Mom. Just let me deal with the packs."

"If... If you're sure. I love you, honey."

"I know Mom. I love you too."

Leah hung up the phone, and handed it back to Esme. Esme gave her a small, sad smile. "You did well, Leah. We'll be back shortly." With a blur, she was out of the room.

"I do think it would be best if you were to leave." Carlisle said, as he began to gather materials. Leah didn't recognize most of them, but the bleach-like scent of them made her think of hospital hallways and death.

"No." She said, her voice tight.

Carlisle spared her a glance, and then turned back to his supplies. "If you're sure."

"Yes." Leah said, tightening her grip on her brother's hand. She was certain. Painful or not, she wasn't going to leave him.

...

As he sat, caught under Esme's hands, Jasper had the chance to study Leah Clearwater. Though he didn't know either of the Clearwater siblings well, they seemed to be a study in contrast. From the few times he had seen Seth, there had been an optimism about him, though the edges of that had seemed to darken as time went on. Leah though, was a tangled mess of emotions, and it was making his stomach turn, if in a metaphorical sense rather than a literal.

Leah Clearwater was hate and anger, pain and grief, blame and self-loathing. She may be a study in contrast with her brother, but she was painted in the same blue-black and blood-red hues of himself.

Carlisle situated himself at Seth's side, bringing along a tray filled with gauze and other instruments. "Jasper, I'm going to need you to hold down his legs again. I don't know how much the morphine will dull the pain."

Hanging to her brother's hand, Leah looked up. "Can't you give him a sedative or something?"

Carlisle ran a gloved hand through his hair, and then, scowling, peeled it from his hand. "No," he said, looking down as he did. "I don't want to risk a sedative. The venom already acts as one on some level, and to add anything more potent than morphine to this... to this cocktail of wolf genetics, venom, and morphine would be to risk putting him in a coma." He looked up, his voice growing even softer. "I don't know if I could revive him if that were to happen."

Pain flared in the girl's eyes. Clenching her jaw, she nodded.

"Jasper?" Carlisle prompted.

Closing his hand's around Seth's thighs, he tilted his gaze down, anything to keep them from Carlisle and Leah. His hand's, calloused from years of a rough life, were nearly as white as the sheet covering the werewolf's legs. They hadn't been that way in life. In life, they'd been tanned nearly to the same colour as Leah and Seth from the Texan sun.

Yet even in life, they had been blood covered.

Carlisle's first swipe at the wound brought a pained moan, while the next started the screaming. Gritting his teeth – fangs, Jasper kept the boy down while he bucked. Nearly instantaneously, Leah left her brother's side and gripped his shoulders. With the way the boy moved, Jasper was surprised he didn't break his spine.

Cautious of the weight and grip he had on the boy, Jasper held on. One wrong flex of a finger, and he would tear through his flesh like it was paper. He couldn't hurt the boy any more than he already had. With every mistake he made, with every drop of blood he drew, he would send the pain back to himself seven-fold. Seth was an innocent bearing Jasper's personal Mark of Cain.

With vampire speed, Carlisle finished quickly. The five long scratches had been sterilized, the sand and sea salt cleaned away. A while later, Seth settled, the pain on his face slowly disappearing as the morphine took hold.

Leah knelt, burying her face in the curve of Seth's shoulder. Opposite, Jasper was relieved, of where his bite mark stood out, red and angry on the boy's copper skin. Pain rolled off Leah as her shoulders shook with silent sobs. It blotted out everything. No anger, no hatred, none of the aged grief she wore.

Just pain and the burning chemical taste of self-loathing.

Jasper didn't take his hands from Seth's thighs. It felt like somehow, he could channel his own strength into the boy if he touched him. Some karmic, chi, life force thing. In normal times, the thought wouldn't have crossed his mind. But now was not normal times, and the boy could have anything Jasper had, even if it cost him his life.

Carlisle was saying something to him.

"What?" Jasper asked, shaking his head as if it would dislodge him of his dark thoughts.

The man's voice was quiet, as he bent beside him. "I need you to leave."

Jasper blinked at him. Surely he wasn't hearing him right. "What?"

"Sue Clearwater is coming here, and after you drank from Seth, you won't be able to control yourself around a human."

"But..." Jasper scrambled for an answer. He couldn't leave Seth, just walk off like nothing was wrong. Everything was wrong. The wolves could come while he was gone. The venom could kill him. So many things could happen, and Jasper wasn't about to leave the boy to face them on his own. If Seth died, Jasper would be damned a thousand times over.

"I know you're struggling with being responsible. But right now, to protect him, you have to protect the ones he loves from yourself." Carlisle's voice was soft, but there was a note in it that spoke of finality. Jasper could nearly taste the disappointment in him. It burnt at him. "And you had better go soon, because your mother drives like a woman possessed."

Jasper nodded, though every instinct screamed for him to stay. In some ways he was glad he was being forced away. He wasn't sure if he could stand another minute of Leah's blame and Carlisle's disappointment.

Carlisle smiled. "Don't anything stupid like going after Sam. Call Alice. She won't be able to see us with Seth and Leah here. Assure her nothing is wrong. "

He nodded again. Alice was smart. Alice could help him through this. She got him like no one else did. Watching the Clearwater siblings, he forced himself to remove his hands. Leah had settled, and was murmuring things to her brother while he slept on, the last threads of pain noticeable in the way his lips twisted and his forehead creased.

"It's okay." Carlisle said, this time loud enough for Leah to hear. She glanced up at them, before turning back to her brother. "Esme will find you if anything happens."

Jasper nodded, and tearing his gaze from the siblings, fled, choking on disappointment and hatred.

...

One moment the blond western leech was there when she looked up, the next, there was just vacant space beside Carlisle. "Where did he..." she started glancing around.

"It wouldn't be good for him to be here while your mother is." Carlisle said, stripping off his bloodstained gloves. Her brother's blood seemed to be everywhere. Dripping from wounds, festering in his neck, staining the leech's eyes and covering the discarded gloves. "I think," Carlisle continued, "that it would be good for Jasper to get some air. You are aware of his ability?"

"He can fuck with people's emotions."

Carlisle sighed, though she wasn't sure if it was from the subject at hand, the bitterness in her voice, or her choice of word. "That's true, though he tries not to. Beyond that, he feels them. He told me once that they were like waves on a shore. Sometimes, they're just a gentle pull around his ankles, and sometimes they're the waves of a hurricane, desperate and drowning."

Leah watched as Carlisle changed the morphine drip, and re-secured the IV in her brother's arm. All the wolves had known of Jasper's ability to mess with emotions, but they hadn't known that he could feel everything they were feeling. It was a strange mixture of feeling violated and feeling pity. She knew what it was like to have other people's thoughts in her head, knew what it was like to wake up from dreaming of tonsil-hockey because of some one else thoughts. She couldn't imagine feeling every persons emotions. No wonder the bloodsucker always wore such a pained expression.

"Can't he just..." she waved her hand as she searched for words. "Turn it off?"

"No." Carlisle said, and then cocked his head as if he heard something. "Your mother will be here soon." Even with wolf hearing, she heard nothing but the sound of birds and wind.

...

Sue did what Leah had expected. She cried, asked questions of the doctor, and cried some more. As Sue brushed at Seth's sweat-matted and bloody hair, and Carlisle talked to her in his soothing way, Leah caught Esme's eye. Less than three hours ago, she would have thought someone was mad if they had suggested she would leave her mother alone with one of the Cullen's. Now, she was suggesting it.

In the hallway, Leah slumped against the wall. She had never felt so tired in her life. Even in the weeks following her father's death, the brand-new wolf inside her had kept her awake. Alive. Now, even it seemed to week to push onwards. Esme watched her with pity. Or maybe empathy. Maybe before her father's death, Leah would have been able to tell the difference.

"Your mother has been through a lot." Esme said quietly.

"Yeah." What could Esme understand about it? She'd never lost her husband because her own daughter had given him a heart attack. Her fucking family was made of cold stone and immortality.

"It has to be hard on her, worrying about you and your brother."

Leah could hear the next part, though Esme didn't put voice to it. Especially since your father's dead. Since you killed your father.

"What was it you wanted to talk about, Leah?"

She blinked back tears. She wasn't even sure why she felt the need to do this. Why she cared what the fuck anyone thought. But this was her mother, and she couldn't stand the thought of anyone seeing her as weak, or crazy.

The wall was the only thing holding her up any more. "I just... I just want you to know, that this isn't who she is. It's just, since Dad... but she's not some crazy-"

Esme held up a hand, effectively shutting her up. "Just because your mother is suffering from depression, I don't think she's crazy. Your mother needs some help, but it's no different from you needing antibiotics for an ear infection." Esme stepped closer, and though she didn't touch her, Leah felt that if she had been willing, Esme would have held her like a child. "I know you may not care, but you have to understand, that I'm proud of your family. You've done this on your own for so long, and you've persevered far better than I ever did."

Leah thunked her head against the wall, trying to think of a way to respond to that. The voices from the other room were elevator music as she considered.

Carlisle's soft, "I'm afraid we won't know for a while, Mrs. Clearwater."

Her mother's tear-stricken voice, "Oh. I see."

The weak, bleary voice that asked, "Mom?"

Seth.

Her heart beating wildly in her chest, Leah pushed herself from the wall and back into the room. Esme followed at her heels. Sue and Carlisle hovered over Seth. She shoved past them, flinging herself to her knees at Seth's bedside.

His unfocused gaze landed on her. She stared at his eyes, looking for the stain of red the venom should have placed over them. She couldn't tell. His eyes were too dark to see any addition to them. "Seth?" she whispered, scared of what his answer would be.

"Leah?"

Relief rushed into her, and she wanted to flop backwards into her mother's arms. "Hey, hey," she gasped, trying to fight back tears. She had to stay strong. "How are you feeling?"

He shut his eyes, lips pulling to one side as he groaned. "Crappy."

At least his answer hadn't been hungry. She laughed, pressing a hand to her mouth to stop the quiver of her lips. "That's wonderful."

One eye slitted open as Seth groaned at her. "You were always mean to me." He shut his eyes as he shivered. "What happened?"

She froze, hand to her lips. She had never thought that Seth wouldn't remember. She'd presumed that once he awoke – if he ever awoke – he'd be able to tell them straight away who had left him dying. Assure them that it had been Sam, so she could tear the fucker's head off with not a single dash of doubt.

Never had it crossed her mind that he might not remember.

"Seth, you were found on the beach after being attacked." Carlisle said.

Leah turned to look at him and nearly missed the violent shudder that went through Seth at the sound of the vampire's voice.

Seth's eyes bore into hers. "By a vampire." he hissed desperately. His finger's scrabbled until he caught Sue's arm in a weak grip, as if he could somehow protect her.

Seth was staring at her like she was insane for not moving. Like she was betraying him. Leah wanted to say no, that it hadn't been a vampire, if only to wipe the fear from Seth's face, but she couldn't force herself to. No matter how kind Esme may have acted, and no matter how well Carlisle had treated Seth, it had still been their fucking red-eyed monster that had bitten him.

Introduced venom into his already dying system.

"No, Seth." Carlisle started in his soothing trust-me-I'm-a-doctor voice. She knew it all too well. The doctor that had sewn up Emily's face had used the same voice. The same horrific accident survivor tone.

"Yes." Seth stressed, but his eyelids were beginning to flutter. The morphine was doing its job of pushing him under.

Sue leaned forward, running her hand down Seth's cheek. "No, no, baby. It was all just a bad dream." She crooned as if he was still a child. A tear slid from underneath Seth's closed eyelid. She wiped it away.

"Go back to sleep Seth. It will be alright." Carlisle agreed, stepping away. "We can talk after you sleep."

Seth's eyes twitched beneath his lids. "No." It was a small sound, just caught by Leah's improved hearing. She doubted her mother heard it at all.

Her brother had been attacked by a vampire, and she was forcing him to stay within the viper's nest.

...

Deep in the forest, Jasper stopped running. He stood in the fringes of civilization, barely within cell service. Wasn't that the perfect metaphor made real for him? He was a monster, a killer disguised within society. Not human, and yet, not fully a monster.

Alice was first on his speed-dial. She picked up instantly, her usually happy voice sounding strained. "Jasper."

"I don't know what I'm doing." He said in lieu of greeting. Above him, the sky was tinted with reds and purples. He watched wave after wave of blood soak into the clouds as the sun set.

"What's going on? All of a sudden it just went dark." He could picture her, golden eyes bright with anxiety. Now that she was aware he was alive, and he hadn't started screaming that someone was dead, she would have settled into the sheets and comforters on their bed, probably curled into the curve of Edward's arm.

How close she was to being wrong.

It spilled out of him. His hunger, Seth's broken body, the guilt that plagued him, Leah's emotions, Carlisle's disappointment. Alice listened in silence for the whole thing. She made small noises to indicate her interest, and her empathy.

Sometimes he thought she should have been the empath. She was so much better with emotions than he was. She knew what to do; when to poke at wounds to drain their bitterness and when to sew them so they could heal. He fumbled in the dark, groping for a way out.

She was quiet for a long moment after he finished. "Jasper, sweetie..." She started, and he could hear the rustle of sheets as she repositioned herself. "I don't rightfully know what to tell you." Her voice was hesitant, each word thought about before spoken aloud. For once, he wished he was Edward, if only so he could pluck her thoughts from her mind and know what she truly thought of him.

Though he wasn't sure he could survive what he would see.

Hello lovelies. Sorry for disappearing. Life has gone to hell in a hand basket. To make it up to you, have an extra long chapter. I do have some questions. How's the pacing? Do you guy's find it slow? Seth will get up soon, promise. What about Leah? Do you like Leah? Do you want longer chapters like this, or shorter ones like before? Do you find me annoying yet? DO YOU LIKE ME /flings self at leg and ignores as you desperately try to shake me off. LOVE MEEE

ahem.

imean... thank you dear readers ;3