Grief is a Freight Train,
Oh what's a little pain
When you've got so much to Love
Forever is a slow dream
Oh what a vivid thing
When you've got so much to lose.
Close my eyes
Try to remember what you said to me,
Before you say Good-bye

Sara Jackson Holman - Freight Train

Chapter 52: Fade

When she was changed, nothing else seemed to matter.

When she left, life mattered even less.

February

March

April

May

I woke when I heard a grunt, followed by my entire body being shoved off my mattress. My face hit the hardwood floor and cracked roughly. A rough groan gurgled from my gut and I collapsed in on myself.

"Come on," I heard Embry growl from the other side of the bed. He let the mattress fall against the frame with a thump and stalked to stand in front of me. My bleary eyes looked up at him from my place on the floor and I glared.

"Fuckin' rude," I muttered wryly, glaring up at him.

Embry didn't look sorry. In fact, he looked more annoyed with me than ever.

It didn't stop him from plopping down on the floor next to me. I pressed my face into the cool hardwood and opened one eye.

"What?" I croaked.

He surveyed me for a few minutes, his dark gaze taking in my resting form. That was Embry for you – never spoke without thinking it through. He spoke with purpose.

"You're scaring me."

I blinked my one open eye, staring at him. Sitting up, the room spun slightly and I groaned. I dug the heels of my hands into my eyes and tried to see straight. Everything was just a blur. A messy, sad, blur.

"What day is it?"

His lips quirked. "You mean what month? It's May. It's now May. We're three weeks into May, actually."

It all came back to me.

I'd somehow gotten drunk enough to show up to work stumbling, and I'd been fired by my father. I'd sobered up in time to phase and pick a fight with Aidan over nothing. It'd been so bad Jake had stepped in and suspended me from the pack for a month. But that was back in April…

"You're been in here, asleep…or drunk…for weeks. You gotta do something, man. Something," he muttered, trailing off.

Glancing around, I realized my bedroom was a sea of empty bottles and dirty clothes. I could smell how awful I was and I can't even imagine how I looked.

Embry stood, his knees cracking. He offered me one last, pity-filled glance from the doorway.

"At least do us a favor and take a shower."

He shuffled off down the hall, his lanky frame quietly padding away. Leaning down to sniff my armpit, I reeled back with a grunt. He was right. I was gross. Leaning back against the box spring of the mattress, I rubbed my eyes until I could see straight and cracked a few aching joints. A ray of sunlight was pushing through the blackout drapes across the room and I turned to glare at it in annoyance.

There I go again, feeling angry at something as insignificant as a ray of sunlight. I almost chucked at the absurdity of it. Standing up, I shuffled to the window and pulled the drapes over the beam of sunlight with a grunt. How dare that little ray of light rudely barge into my room? I turned back towards the bed when the curtain shifted again, the tiny beam seeming to flood the room again.

Glancing over my shoulder, I realized it wasn't going away.

It wasn't going away.

It wasn't…

She wasn't….

I swallowed the suddenly dryness in my throat as I realized just why the little ray of sunlight in my dark, cold bedroom annoyed me to no end.

The sunbeam was Lexi. The darkness was now my world. And no matter how hard I tried to push it out, there would always be a little ray of light in my heart, just for her.

I had to wake up.

I had to break out of this vicious cycle.

I felt like death, I looked horrible, and smelled even worse.

It was like a fog had been lifted.

I showered, shaved, and even had Embry help me cut my hair. I would have asked my mom, but frankly didn't want to scare her with the way I looked. I'd lost some weight during my depression-riddled hibernation, but it wasn't something a few thousand calories every few hours wouldn't fix right up. Adding a visit to see her to my mental list, I scraped together enough money to run to Forks with Embry and pick up a half dozen sub sandwiches and a few pizzas. We tore through half of it and three gallons of milk before calling it a day and flopping on the battered L-shaped couch in the living room. I took one end of the couch while Embry took the other.

We were channel surfing for mindless TV, finally settling on some celebrity cooking show. Embry muted the mindless dialogue after a few minutes.

He looked at me, his eyes focused on my face.

"What?" I snapped, more concerned with the look on his face than annoyed.

He shrugged, looking back at the television. "You scared the crap out of me, man."

Frowning, I sat up on one elbow.

"Huh?"

"Before, you just…." He trailed off, shaking his head. "The last time you phased I saw your thoughts and you were just….blank. Then you went a little nuts and had that fight with your dad and then," he snapped his fingers, "you were just gone."

"What did you expect me to do?" I snapped. Embry's psychobabble was getting old, and quick. He had no idea what I was up against. His imprint still had a beating heart – the rest was just details as far as I was concerned. What was he bitching about?

"Nothing," he relented, sounding defeated. I hating snapping at him, but he just wouldn't drop it. The last thing I needed or wanted right now was for him to tell me I'd been a million miles away – I knew it. Felt it. I'd gone into some weird sort of wolf hibernation, just shutting off my brain and body. I'm sure I'd gotten up to eat, use the toilet and change positions, but I couldn't remember any of it. Ulgh, I could practically hear Embry's internal monologue from across the room I knew him so well. While he wasn't usually one to pry into anyone else's shit, I at least had the sense to know that it wasn't from a malicious side of him – if Embry even had it. It came from a drive to fix it and make it better.

I fell back against the ratty pillow, staring up at the ceiling. "I lost my imprint and I guess I lost myself a little, that's all."

Embry was quiet for anther few moments before speaking again. "I checked on you every day and you were either asleep or just…staring. Blank, man, completely gone."

Turning my head, I avoided his eyes. "Well I'm back now."

Almost twenty minutes of silence passed. I think we were both lost in the hum of our thoughts and sluggish from eating so much, but neither one of us spoke until Embry broke the silence.

"Can I ask one question?"

I heaved a sigh. "Yes."

"The last time I saw your thoughts, you were thinking about Lexi-"

Her face flew to the front of my mind. Choppy images my brain had sewn together in a moment of loneliness and desperation. My heart surged with emotion as I saw her hands, her eyes, her smile, a flash of pale blonde, the taste of her chapstick on my lips after we kissed, the way her hands felt running along my shoulders…

"That's private," I snapped. The moment was gone. Damn shared pack mind…

"I know, but sometimes you slip. My point is I saw the memory you last had of her. You must have been thinking about it."

"I always am thinking about it," I said under my breath. "Wait, as a human?"

"No, when you saw her before they left. For Alaska."

"Oh," I dropped my head back onto the couch pillow. The last time I'd seen her was with the Cullens. They'd been about to leave town and the pack had met with them to discuss a plan of action. There she'd been – still small, but pale, wide-eyed, and not quite herself. But still, there had been something there that was still so her….

"What about it?"

He thought another moment before answering. "Well…your thoughts weren't…disgusted. Like, when we think about any other vampires, ones that we don't know or whatever, our thoughts shift and we think of them as…less than they are. Of parasites, enemies, you know?"

"Yes…."

"Well, I know that's how you pictured feeling about Lexi while she was changed."

"And?" I demanded.

"And that's not what your thoughts were like that day. Not at all. You were watching her and noting all the changes in her, but you weren't disgusted. You were far from it. I remember you even thought about going up to her and-"

"Stop it," I snapped, cutting him off. I knew where he was going with that and I had no interest in rehashing it. I knew what I'd thought about that day. I'd considered walking up to her to see her up close and touch her and see if the imprint bond had truly been broken.

"I'm just saying-"

"I'm going for a run," I grunted, hauling off the couch. The screen door slammed behind me as I took off into the worn path in the side yard. The spring sun was setting and the sky was a mixture of brilliant neon colors on one side and the treacherous blue grays of a storm rolling in on the other. I tore off my clothes and tossed them in a bush, only because I knew I was running low on just about everything and had neither the money nor energy to shop for new things. The wolf was easier to summon than I'd thought. Within seconds I was on all fours and thundering through the woods. I barely even realized where I'd gone until I'd gotten there.

The Cullen house sat deep in the forest, but I knew a lookout point where I could get a good view. It was sick, really – she'd only lived there for a short time, but somehow seeing it made me feel closer to her. A few scattered lights were on in the house and that made my heart jump up in my chest before I realized that Seth still lived there and was likely home.

The sharp angles and shiny glass sat unmoving through the trees. Like its inhabitants, it looked no different than it always did. Time had done nothing to change the sleek, stylish home.

I couldn't bear it. Turning away, I ambled through the thick forest and my thoughts returned to Lexi. As usual, Embry was right. He was very perceptive and he'd seen my thoughts about her that day in the forest before she'd left.

I'd stood ten feet from her, smelled her scent, watched her take me in with her new eyes, and fought the urge to touch her. It was surprising that I hadn't found her utterly repulsive and I'd been almost unable to move as she spoke to me. She'd assured me that she was okay, that the Cullens were treating her well and helping her adjust. Her eyes had even started to change from the jolting newborn shade of red to a tawny, slightly golden orange. I'd been shocked to see the inner rims lined with the golden hue the rest of her new family carried and I'd finally felt somewhat okay about the way things were.

Lexi had done the best she could with what she'd been given.

I needed to as well.

The days got easier. Slowly, but they did.

I got out of bed every day, I ate enough to get back up to a normal weight, I went and saw my mom, and I started to live my life.

Putting one foot in front of the other got easier – minimally, but easier – every day.

I still hunted for the bastard the killed her and patrolled around her dad's house, but I did my best to accomplish other things too. I didn't go crawling back to my dad, even though I needed the work. An old coworker took pity on me and helped me get a job working for the town of Forks doing maintenance work and landscaping. It was a far cry from my dream of being an architect, but I'd burned a lot of bridges in my hot-headed haze. I had to take what I could get to pay my bills and try to maintain some semblance of normalcy.

I even cut out booze.

It wasn't a conscious thing, really – more like I knew I'd fall too easily back into an alcoholic stupor if I let myself, so I decided to just avoid it all together. It wasn't easy.

At the point when I'd been the deepest into the bottle was when I'd started seeing Lexi. It wasn't real, of course I knew that, but my booze riddled thoughts had conjured up a mental image of her that was sometimes so realistic it both hurt and soothed me. Her soft, wavy blonde hair and quirky smirk were always offset by her dancing, sea-green eyes as she watched me. Sometimes she'd smile, sometimes she'd just watch me with an unreadable expression as I'd sunk further into whatever alcohol I'd chosen that night.

She seemed to show up when I'd needed her most.

But, she was gone now. As were the drunk nights and shirking my pack duties. Reality had been a swift kick in the nuts, let me tell you.

Embry laughed in his head at me as we patrolled, drawing me back to the present.

Get out of my head, asshole.

No, he echoed back. I missed hearing your thoughts, man, he said, bumping his furry shoulder against mine. I feigned annoyance at him, but didn't dwell on it. I'd scared the crap out of him and he's been working double patrolling shifts to try to help cover my ass while I'd been…well, doing whatever it was. Hibernating or whatever. I knew he didn't mean it.

When Quil and Jacob had imprinted so many years ago, Embry had been somewhat lost. He hadn't found an imprint and like me, had no plans of retiring like some of our other brothers. Alone and free to do as we pleased, we'd become best friends over the years. His laid back attitude and ability to see through my bullshit had been good to me and he'd even been able to be a voice of reason several times in my wild phase. Not many, mind you, but I did sometimes listen to him back then.

We patrolled through the night, toughing it out through all the spring rain. The younger pack members were currently struggling through finals and worrying about prom, so we'd agreed to step up for a few weeks. It wasn't bad, getting back into the swing of things. I'd gained my muscles back somewhat and was slowly feeling like myself.

That all came to a fucking horrible, grinding halt as soon as I caught the scent.

Shit, do you…?

Do I what? Embry questioned, confused. He held his nose in the air and sniffed, oblivious to the scent.

I doubled back and ran my nose along the tree. Where were we? Oh right…the northern border, over by…it couldn't be.

You wanna fill me in man?

My brain buzzed as the scent awoke something in me that had been dormant for some time now. It was like I could feel every nerve and conscious thought shifting, contracting, and pulling throughout my entire body. It flooded my chest and made it suddenly tight.

I knew that scent.

Lexi.

I pictured Brady's time while Lexi was away like the blank pages in New Moon. Brady, miserable, time inching past without him noticing...

Thanks for reading!