Fault Lines and Aftershocks: The Making and Remaking of Leah Elizabeth Clearwater
"Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong." George Orwell, 1984
The five figures crashed into the snowy battlefield as if they were an airstrike and not a peace delegation. The thick molasses tension of that battle field crackled like Pop Rocks in rain and everyone knew that the five figures would determine whether a "fight-or-flight" would happen next. The entire field held their breath and braced themselves, waiting to hear what the prophet had brought to the battle.
Leah pawed into the snow, the scent of the leeches burning in her nostrils like a swimming pool with too much chlorine. She wished she could take off the heads of each of the grey-cloaked opponents staring back at her with similar desires in their blood-filled eyes. Then she was distracted from her morbid fantasies when her attention was captured by an unexpected sound originating from the center of the five newcomers.
It was the sound of another heartbeat.
And then her own heart stopped.
She'd never forget the morning in 2001 when the ground shook like a jet during take-off under her feet. In under a minute, over a billion dollars in infrastructure damage was wrought by the sliding of the intraslab plates, as if the earth itself was a living, writhing creature woken from a long nap. It rearranged buildings, roads, airports, and daily life as it saw fit. Swathes of Olympia had to be rebuilt. Her cousin's old beloved Toyota, while deer-proof, rain-proof, and pothole-proof, was sadly not brick-proof and the crumbled monstrosity of an ancient building made the empty grey sedan into a metal pancake.
The aftereffects of the Nisqually Quake lasted long after the shaking stopped. Dramatic displays of the dynamic earth came with being part of the Ring of Fire, though. An earthquake in Japan could send a tidal wave to Washington...and vice versa. Despite knowing that, there was no way to really prepare for that kind of shake-up ahead of time.
She felt like that now. Her wolf heritage sent a tidal wave crashing into her, leaving a trail of ghost forests and collapsed shorelines in its wake and upsetting all she once thought secure and unchanging. The past year had turned her entire world upside down so many times she had lost count. What was one more dramatically life-altering event in the big scheme of things?
Of course, on the very brink of battle Leah Clearwater's wolf body would choose that moment to imprint. Of all the beings in the universe that could be the magnetic north of her compass, it would have to be the half-vampire man plucked straight out of the Amazon and dropped in front of her like a specially-delivered package, designed just to make her crazy. There was no denying it. She was now irrevocably tied to a man she would never have chosen and more likely would have preferred to kill on sight...not set up house with.
As a child, her great-grandmother constantly doled out advice – from the useful "eat the black chitons but not the green ones," and "this is where to dig for butter clams," to the much less useful "you need to rub this plant on you to properly attract a man." Leah took it all in with as much amused patience as she could. Every now and then, one of Granny's sayings stuck with her and made her smile, long after the old fireball was gone.
One of Granny's favorites was the constant admonition to pray.
"Pray boldly and pray confidently, but pray carefully…cause the Lord Almighty always answers prayer, but not always the ways you expect," Granny said, with all the piety and enthusiasm of the most devout of the Indian Shakers. Then she'd burst into her own vehement, long-winded prayers, day and night, singing her heart out with the old hymns.
Leah'd seen the truth of that saying more times than she could count and still hadn't learned her lesson. She laughed at herself the year she wished she didn't have to share her baseball bat with her brother…and he'd broken his arm the next week, leaving the bat all for her till it healed. Then there was the time she prayed for Jimmy Saint, the cousin of her neighbor, to stop calling her names when he came to visit. Their neighbors moved that summer and she never saw Jimmy again.
Her mother blamed the appearance of the tortoiseshell stray cat on Leah's supplications for a pet. The furry feline refused to leave their yard, no matter how Harry cursed and yelled at it. Leah named the cat, "Kitty" and snuck her into the house whenever her father wasn't looking.
Even as she grew up, Leah was reminded of Granny's admonition. There were the prayers for more visits from Cousin Emily and prayers for the old jalopy of a car to work again when it was sputtering and cranking and refusing to start. Those ones got answered too, but not in unexpected ways.
There was the time in high school that she made a flippant comment about how she was gonna pray she could eat anything she wanted without it going to her waistline…now her grocery and clothing budgets were through the roof and she was kicking herself for not also praying for "manna from heaven" and "clothes that would not wear out" to go with her miraculously enlarged metabolism.
One of the more unexpected was her girlhood prayers for a man.
Her Granny always told her, quite seriously, "to pray for a man who gets drunk on the Spirit instead of liquor."
This caused a chorus of hoots and whistles from the various family members present and each of her great aunts wanted to put in their two cents worth into her education about the opposite sex.
"I'd take a man who only got drunk on Fridays and had a house and a good job," Aunt Camilla answered.
"I'd be happy with a man who stayed sober on Fridays…and appreciated my house and good job," Aunt Eleanor piped in.
"Hang it all, I just want a man. I'll take what I can get!" Aunt Sally added and the grey-haired aunts all fell into a fit of giggles, much to their mother's chagrin.
"You all got no more discernment than a tree full of squirrels. You get what you pray for, mark my words!" Granny Grace said.
Leah thought she'd done well with Sam and he was the answer to her girlhood dreams. She had it all set, or so she thought. They'd done it all "right," avoided most of the "wrong," and were "role models" for the other kids on the Res, or so their families and teachers told them. They studied hard, worked even harder, and had their sights set on college. Her aunts all praised her for her good work at catching such a handsome, polite boy and predicted a rosy future for them both.
When it all went south faster than a fly ball over the back fence, she'd had to reevaluate. There'd been some real soul-searching and dream-weaving and prayers so sodden with tears they could have grown water lilies and she wondered what she'd missed.
Joining Jacob's pack and getting her own breathing space had been another unexpected answer to the heart cries of a broken-hearted girl who'd pleaded desperately to "get away from Sam." When Jacob had gotten over Bella by imprinting on the hybrid, she'd counted that too. She couldn't bear to see his mopey backside pining over the vamp's bride as if she were the pearl to his oyster. Jacob got his healing, albeit in a way Leah could have never seen coming, and that made Leah happy.
Leah hoped she'd find her own healing. She wanted to imprint if it meant the creaky chains holding her to her past would be broken and she could throw her freed hands into embracing her future.
This was not exactly what she had in mind.
Leah groaned as she picked the pine needles out of her hair and met Nahuel's brilliant, venomous grin. Yeah, this was definitely another of those "be careful what you pray for" mishaps and she wondered where she'd find the silver lining this time.
The man was beautiful. She'd not deny it. His honey-brown eyes were so rich even a bee would covet them and the elegant lines of his musculature echoed the jungle cat he was long ago named after. She could admire that…but she was now bound to the man for the remainder of their lifetimes and he needed more than a pretty face to make that palatable.
This man had never lived among humans and had never left the confines of the Amazon, let alone used paper money, a crosswalk, or an electric light. Leah had more in common with half of the vamps in attendance than the half-vamp that was her imprint.
And his family? Well, he came with worse daddy issues than Luke Skywalker and enough baggage to fill Sea-Tac's baggage claim twice over. Oh, then there was the red-eyed, possessive aunt he'd accidentally made into a blood-thirsty serial killer at birth. The guy was an all-around winner that was sure to impress her family. Nothing spices up family gatherings like bringing in new relatives who wish that it was Cousin Johnny and not Bambi on the menu for dinner.
She bemoaned this chain of events with all the self-pity of a mouse in a rat trap. Why couldn't she have imprinted on a quiet computer nerd from Port Angeles who still lived in his mother's basement and had an obsession with spitting sunflower seeds into his coffee cup? Or a distant cousin from Neah Bay with a love for collecting dilapidated pick-up trucks? Or a freckled musician who worked at Starbucks and dreamt of "making it big" someday?
You know, someone boring. Someone lame. Someone mundane and ordinary.
Someone completely and totally unconnected to drinking blood.
Strike that.
She'd accept someone who occasionally drank blood…as long as they were human and wanted to live in Forks…or Port Angeles…she'd even accept Seattle if she had to. Basically, she'd prefer nearly anyone else to the man her wolf-side chose for her.
Oh, how she loved all these lupine surprises!
As a young girl, her dad used to put his arms around her, brush her hair out of her eyes, and tell her she was "special" and "one-of-a-kind." She'd always found it endearing. Later, when her 7th grade crush wouldn't respond to any of her love notes, her dad said that someday she'd find someone "as special as you."
When she exploded into the only female wolf in collective memory, she gnashed at everything. Sometimes she really just wanted to get lost in a crowd and be one of the sheep instead.
"I don't want to be special or one-of-a-kind," she screamed at the prison of her wolf coat that cut her off from all her old foundations and past conceptions of "normal".
She thought back to a confrontation she'd had with Emily early on after she phased. It happened at her house when Emily tried (and failed) to make amends.
"This isn't what I wanted!" Leah shouted in anger as she threw a lamp onto the floor. It shattered and sparked with a satisfyingly destructive racket and she went to pick up another. Emily stayed her hand and gave her a pillow instead. Pillows didn't start fires or get destroyed from contact with the floor so Leah grimaced and threw it back onto the couch with a disgruntled growl.
"You think I wanted to be Sam's imprint?" Emily had shouted back at the top of her voice. "Do you think it's flattering that he chose me because his stupid wolf genes told him he had to and he can't wish me away, no matter how hard we both try? Yeah, it's grown on me and I love him now, but I would have never chosen this for myself."
Leah never chose to be a wolf and she would never, not in a million years, have chosen Nahuel. Yet here she was. Laying in a meadow while the only male hybrid human-vamp known in collective memory drew lazy circles along her back. She internally rolled her eyes. There was no denying it. Nahuel was every bit as "special" as her…and not necessarily in a good way. "Specialness" and "freakishness" were two sides of the same coin and it all depended on who was calling heads or tails.
Had she sought him out or had he sought her? She wasn't sure. It was all a haze now. All she remembered was being grateful for how the heat of battle had shrouded her agitated thoughts and kept her out of the spotlight of her packmates. She phased as soon as they left the clearing so she could keep her muddled mind to her own keeping.
After the disintegration of the battle, the many "visitors" of the Cullens had scattered like moths in daylight, the Cullens sought refuge in their glass-lined crypt, and the Wolves declared a celebratory bonfire at First Beach. She told herself she wouldn't seek him out. Not even when she thought he would leave with the rest and never come back. Not even when she discovered he hadn't left. Not even when Jacob invited her to the Cullens.
But in the trance-like flames of the bonfire, when the thrill of victory sang through her veins and intoxicated her senses, the spark in her breast was fanned into a fire and it threatened to burn her from the inside-out if she didn't let the breeze carry her to her chosen kindling. The smoke clogged her eyes and she couldn't see, couldn't think, she could only walk in the direction every cell of her body told her to go in.
She found him. In the forest, late in the night, wandering through the cedars like a ship without an anchor, wearing melancholy like they were an old pair of slippers. He startled when he saw her approach him. No word broke the trance that consumed them both and the heat of their first meeting melted them both from iron into steel.
The haze did not clear till the sun rose and she woke in the forest with pine needles in her hair, unfamiliar arms cradling her into a bare chest, and her cell phone ringing over and over again. She gasped and disentangled herself from both the man and the forest detritus that clung to her with uncomfortable amounts of intimacy.
"Hey sis! Where are you?" came Seth's voice on the phone.
"I needed some, uh, alone time," she said. "After everything, you know? I'm fine. I stayed out in the forest last night and forgot to tell mom. Can you let her know I'm ok?"
She stumbled over her words like a teenager caught sneaking out after curfew. She grew even more flustered when she felt a set of fingers gently removing leaves from her tousled hair.
"Sure, sure," he said. "Hey so we are going to have a little pack celebration today. Jake said to meet him at the Cullens for a BBQ at six. He said not to bother refusing…he'd just Alpha command you into it if he had to."
"Jerk," she answered, but the giggle that broke the word in half robbed it of its animosity and she tried to extricate herself from the arms that had subtly snaked around her waist.
"Uh, Leah? You sure you are ok?" Seth asked.
"Yeah, yeah. I'm fine. I'll see you then, ok?"
"Ok."
She hung up and looked at her phone. Sure enough, five other missed calls. It wouldn't be long before search parties or patrol parties came looking for one or both of them and discovered their interlacing scent trail. Her mood didn't improve when she realized she was on the Quileute side of the treaty line…with someone who definitely was not covered under said treaty. Someone who was burying her in a gaze of such heated admiration that she almost forgot to breathe.
Premonitions of what would happen if they were discovered…by Wolves or Leeches…made her stomach flip like an overdone pancake and her cheeks burned in anticipation of embarrassment. She'd need to face the fallout eventually, but procrastination sounded sweeter than confrontation. She turned off her phone and led him deeper into the forest…on the appropriate side of the treaty line…and pretended there was no outside world to pop her fragile bubble.
Author's Notes: This was supposed to be a one-shot, but then it got rather long and unruly so I split it into three parts (mostly written). Actually, this was the story I meant to write before the She-Wolf and the Raven decided to come into being instead. This one decided to come this week so here it is.
In the books, Nahuel is Mapuche, a people group from Chile/Argentina. In the movies, he is Ticuna from Brazil. I am kinda going with the latter but not really since he wasn't raised with humans and lived only with his aunt, he's going to be a bit of a cultural anomaly here.