I, London Man, did NOT write this story. This was written by Frosty. I am just hosting it because EF was going to cancel their account. EF allowed me to have them on my site so people can read or reread them if they wanted.

I did NOT steal this story. Also, I want to thank Frosty for letting my host their stories.

Chapter 26: Breaking the News

Harry Potter and the Setting Sun

Disclaimer: HarryPotter by J.K. Rowling, the Twilight Saga by Stephanie Meyer and all related materials belong to their respective owners. This is non-profit fanfiction.

Warning: This story contains slash.

Chapter Twenty-Five – Breaking the News

The casual way in which Jacob asked his question made the entire experience feel a bit surreal. The shaggy werewolf had just beaten another werewolf unconscious and now he was acting like nothing had happened.

Before answering, Harry looked back over his shoulder to see where Rachel was checking on the unconscious form of Paul. "Uh . . . I think that maybe it can wait."

Jacob followed the wizard's gaze to the front yard. "Don't mind him. He'll be alright when he wakes up."

"Right up until the next time you two decide to have at it," Billy interjected.

"Not my fault Paul's the way he is," Jacob said. He walked past his father without even looking at him.

"Damn right," Leah added. She moved to stand where Seth had pulled Harry away from the fight.

Quil was standing awkwardly by the door. He had tackled Paul and Jacob hard enough to knock them out of the house and then backed away so as not to be pulled into the fight himself. Now he was just standing by the door looking like he didn't know what to do. He was clearly conflicted between his loyalty to his new pack and his old friend.

"C'mon, Harry, let's get out of her," Jacob said as he took of Harry's arm and led him out of the house. Leah and Seth followed, but Quil remained planted next to the door.

"How long have things been like that?" Harry asked as the group exited the house and into the night air. He hadn't seen Paul at all since before the battle with Victoria. In fact, other than one or two tense encounters with Sam Uley, he hadn't had direct contact with any member of the 'old pack,' as he'd come to think of them.

"What do you mean? Paul's always been like that," Leah joked.

Harry smiled at Leah's jab at Paul's personality. "Yeah, okay. He's always been a bit hot-headed, but I don't remember him ever being that violent."

"He liked to pick fights like that in the first few weeks after he transformed," Jacob said. "But he calmed down after about a while. He started getting real touchy again after the lee- er, the Cullens returned."

"Billy thinks it might be something instinctual," Seth added. The youngest of the werewolves present moved in front of where Harry, Leah, and Jacob were walking side by side. He turned around and began to walk backwards so that he could more easily talk to Harry while he walked. "He thinks that we all started to transform in first place because the Cullens and then that red-headed vampire and her pals were 'round. He thinks that tempers run higher when there are more of them around."

"Makes a certain amount of sense," Harry admitted.

"It's a load of bull," Leah interjected argumentatively. "Billy just doesn't want to admit that Paul's a little shit. He has this whole fantasy about Paul and Rachel being the perfect parents of a whole litter."

"Ugghh! That's my sister, you know!" Jacob complained.

"Yeah, well, if you thought he was mad before . . ." Harry started.

"He's gonna be really pissed when he finds out that you've decided to become a vampire," Leah finished the thought.

Harry stopped abruptly and looked at his friend in surprise. "W-What? How?"

"I've known it was heading this way for a while. I'm pretty surprised it took this long," Leah explained. She might have expected it, but she sounded really unhappy about the idea.

"What?" Seth cried. "No!"

By this point all four friends had stopped walking. Harry decided to take the plunge and finally pulled his left hand out of his pocket. Jacobs's eyes bulged out comically when they caught sight of the engagement ring. Leah, by comparison, just looked resigned.

"Edward asked me to marry him. I said yes," Harry explained simply. The horrified look on Seth's face at those words made Harry's stomach churn awfully. Seth's horror quickly gave way to fury and he stormed away from his friend.

"I wanted to make sure that I'm not going to cause a war," the wizard said quietly as he watched Seth stomp away. "I know it'll be hard. I won't be able to live in Forks anymore. And, of course, I'd be banned from La Push. And Sam will try to kill me and the Cullens because of the breach of the treaty."

"No he won't," Jacob interrupted Harry's mild rant.

"He won't?" the wizard asked in surprise.

"Well, he probably won't. See, it was my ancestor—Ephraim Black—that made the treaty with the Cullens. When I was part of Sam's pack and recognized him as the alpha, he got to make all of the decisions. But I'm not part of his pack anymore. When I split off and became the alpha of my own pack, my pack basically became the true pack of La Push because I'm the La Push alpha by blood. Sam's pack is just a bunch of squaters that we let live on our land. Sam and them have to respect the treaty that my pack has with the Cullens as long as they live in La Push. They breach a treaty that the true La Push alpha has bound all of La Push to, then they get banished from La Push. As long as I give you permission, then the treaty won't be breached by you becoming a vampire. Sam and his pack can't do anything. They can all just piss up a rope for all I care," the alpha explained in an all-business voice.

"Oh," Harry said. He looked at the two werewolves that had remained with him. Leah looked oddly calm and resigned. Jacob's face looked like he was every bit the detached alpha his business voice conveyed, but his eyes told Harry that this was a nightmare for him. "So when I come back to the area to visit, we'll be cool, right? As long as I don't cross the border or get seen by humans who might recognize me."

Jacob looked taken aback by Harry's question. "What do you mean?"

"I meant every word that I told you last year, Jake. I'm not going to let my relationship with Edward destroy my friendship with you. I know it will be difficult, but I'll visit. And call a whole bunch."

"Really?" Jacob asked hopefully.

"Of course," Harry said sincerely. "What? Do you think I'm a liar or something?" he then challenged playfully.

"N-No," the alpha stammered. " I just thought that . . . well, you know."

Harry gave Jacob a wry grin. "I know. You thought that I'd been too busy being a ravenous animal to think about being friends with you."

Jacob gave a short, embarrassed nod in response.

The wizard turned his attention to Leah at that point. She still seemed oddly resigned about the whole thing. "Okay, you're freaking me out a bit. Why aren't you screaming?"

"Because it's your choice," Leah said blandly. "Don't get me wrong, I think that you're making the wrong choice. No, scratch that. I know you're making the wrong choice. But, it's your choice to make."

Harry let out a relieved sigh. "I thought for sure I was going to get a 'mortal enemies' speech."

"You probably would have, if you hadn't been dying a few months ago," Jacob said.

"What do you mean?"

"When we—and by 'we,' I mean Seth, Jacob, Quil, and myself—thought that you were gonna die, we kinda warmed up to the idea of you becoming a vampire in order to save your life. Once we started to think about it we realized it would still be you in there. You'd just smell a lot worse and have a way weirder diet," Leah explained. "It stuck with us."

Harry thought about Leah's words for a minute. The part that he really focused on was the list of names: Seth, Jacob, Quil, and Leah. The four wolves who thought that he had the right to make his own decision about becoming a vampire were the four werewolves that had split away from Sam Uley's pack.

"So, the fight with Sam really is because of me."

Leah seemed genuinely surprised at Harry's conclusion. "What makes you think that?"

"I'm not an idiot. All of the wolves who hold a particular controversial opinion about me rebel and then form their own pack. It's not exactly rocket science."

"Well, I was pretty sure rockets were going to be used at one point in the fight," Jacob joked in a bad attempt at lightening the mood.

"The fight wasn't about you exactly," Leah began to explain. "Your situation just made things pretty clear."

"How so?"

"Sam was pretty defensive about the whole thing. Whenever I'd bring the issue up, he'd say that I was just trying to find something to fight with him about. It was really stupid because every time we were in our wolf forms at the same time, I could tell what he was thinking: can't let their numbers increase. He was pissed off that we'd be in favor of the Cullen coven getting any bigger than it already was." Leah hesitated for a minute before continuing. "As your health got worse, so did the fights between some of the pack members. Things came to a head when Seth and Jacob saw you all unconscious and bloody after the fight with Victoria. They started to argue with Sam and he . . . well, he used an injunction to make them stop arguing with him."

Harry let out an involuntary gasp at that. The injunction was the power of a pack alpha to issue a binding order on his subordinates. As far as Harry knew, Sam had never used one before.

Jacob took over the story at that point. "The injunction felt like this great weight being forced on us. It was suffocating. And it pissed me off. Sam actually used his authority to stop any discussion about you becoming a vampire. He used his authority to enforce his views on us. I knew that if he did it once, he'd do it again. And suddenly, it was like I realized I didn't have to follow his orders anymore."

"You became an alpha," Harry deduced.

"Exactly. I left Sam's pack. And Seth, Leah, and Quil followed. Sam and the others tried to stop us, but the shock of not being able to hear us anymore . . . The sudden separation put everyone in a state of shock."

"So the two packs can't hear each other's thoughts?" the green-eyed boy questioned.

"No," Leah answered. "Different packs, different pack mentalities. Jacob and Sam can hear one another's thoughts to a certain extent when they're near one another. But other than that, no. The packs are wholly separate."

"So . . ." Harry began, holding the word out for several seconds longer than necessary. "I started the fight, but it wasn't my fault?" he asked uncertainly.

"Your situation was the catalyst for a fight that was bound to happen sooner or later. Sam would have used his power like that sooner or later. He was too damn scared of losing control," Leah reassured her friend.

"Then you're okay with me marrying Edward and becoming a vampire?"

Jacob and Leah shared a look before Jacob answered. "'Okay' is probably too strong a word. 'Accepting' might be better."

"'Utterly opposed, but accepting,'" Leah amended.

"And you'll still be friends with me?"

"Of course," Leah said as she pulled Harry into a one-armed hug. Jacob gave the wizard a bear hug as soon as his packmate released him.

"What about Seth?"

Leah wondered, and not for the first time, how Harry could be so oblivious as to how her younger brother felt about him. She always assumed that the wizard knew but was caring enough to not mention it; she figured Harry was just sparing Seth's feelings. "He's a bit more strongly opposed to you becoming a vampire now that you're not about to die. He'll come around. Just give him time."

"Okay then. What about Sam's pack? I assume I've got to let them know sooner or later."

"I'll deal with them," Jacob said with a bit of an edge to his voice. "I'm going to have to talk to Sam about Paul, anyways. If Paul can't control himself well enough to not transform that close to my sister, then he needs to stay the hell away until he can."

"Sam won't like that one bit," Leah pointed out.

"Like I said before. Like I said earlier, he can go piss up a rope if he doesn't like it,"

The trio turned towards the border and stopped talking about such serious matters; instead, they joked about Harry's upcoming wedding. Jacob criticized Harry's ring for being too girly and asked if the wizard had a dress picked out. Leah made a point of pointing out that Washington wouldn't recognize their marriage. But, then again, what state did recognize the marriage between a century-old vampire and a sixteen-year-old—soon to be seventeen-year-old—wizard?

When the three friends reached the La Push border, Harry was handed off like a child of divorced parents at the end of the weekend. Jacob and Leah gave Edward stern looks that warned of grievous bodily injury should he harm Harry in any way. Edward responded with a polite, if somewhat strained, smile.

Soon enough, Harry and Edward were at the Cullen house. This reception, Harry knew, was bound to be much more welcoming. Edward had wanted to walk in, hold Harry in his arms, and shout the announcement to the whole room. Harry had something a little different in mind.

The happy couple entered the living room where the various other family members were sitting about doing the various things that immortals did to pass the time: Carlisle was reading, Emmett and Jasper were playing video games, Rosalie was silently watching the game, and Alice was quietly talking with Esme. Without skipping a beat, Harry walked directly to Alice and raised his hand so that she could get a good look at the ring.

"Not too over the top. I reserve veto power on the guest list and anything that will make me look too girly. Otherwise, just have at it."

Alice squealed with delight at the broad power she had just been given to plan a wedding. It took everyone else a moment to figure out exactly what was going on.