twenty-eight

(Leah)

As Leah enters the circle around the fire, she is aware of every single gaze upon her. But she keeps her head up, her back straight, and pretends that she does not notice.

She pretends that she does not see the way they are all on the edge of their seats and holding their breath, watching her closely as she passes them, waiting for her next move. Because she knows they saw it - all of it, every moment from when she'd arrived until now, and she silently dares just one person to say a single word about what has been unfolding before their eyes. Dares them to say a single word about her.

(She almost wishes that they would, just so she has a reason to snap at them the same way she snapped at Embry's hand.)

Jacob gives her fingers a comforting squeeze as if he knows, as if he understands, and it is with that reassurance she keeps her chin high and allows him to guide her into the only empty seat left - a gap between Quil and Embry, just as if they have both been saving the spot on their bench solely for her.

Quil is stone-faced, monitoring the silent crowd at her back, assessing again, whilst Embry holds out a welcoming arm that he drapes over her shoulders the second Jacob lets go of her hand and she takes her place. And though neither boy gives any obvious kind of indication that they have heard her thundering heartbeat, she could swear that - as if by some unspoken agreement - they both subtly shuffle nearer and close any holes in their defence.

Quil and Embry have both become her friends in these past few weeks. Her true friends. They are the reason the two cracks in her chest left by Rachel and Rebecca no longer hurt as much.

Neither of them seem to pay Jacob any attention as their friend looms over her, making sure that she is alright (Leah would call it fussing, but she secretly enjoys it far too much). Quil simply maintains his watch, guarding her as stalwartly as Embry is.

The gratitude she feels for them in that moment is near-crippling.

She still hasn't so much as looked up to check how her mom is coping in case she accidentally catches somebody else's eye and loses her dinner, but she has a feeling the pack are still watching the scene play out between her and Jacob, between the two of them and his best friends who are a solid wall either side of her.

The tension around them is almost stifling, suffocating, and it makes Leah wonder just how badly it must have gone the last time an imprint had been introduced to the pack if they are this tense. Bad enough that Paul and Jared had gotten into it over Kim . . .

In spite of their closeness, the boys can do nothing to soothe the sudden spike of panic that courses through her when she belatedly realises that there is nowhere for Jacob to sit as near as she needs him to be. But before that panic can take root, her wolf gently nudges her legs apart with his knees and settles on the ground between her feet, apparently content with the arrangement.

She doesn't mind it so much, either. Especially not when Jacob tilts his head back against her stomach to look up at her, his sunny upside-down grin a little too devil-may-care for the situation, and it's so . . . so utterly Jacob that she thinks she could kiss him for the tiny bit of normalcy he offers.

Leah scrunches her nose back at him, her hard shell softening as he leans on her. He is almost entirely at ease, hopefully in no danger of losing his cool tonight.

She probably could kiss Embry and Quil, too, if Jacob wouldn't rip their heads off for it. If she didn't still want to rip Embry's head off herself for the bruises still adorning Jacob's face and the blood dried into his shirt. She hasn't quite forgiven him for it yet - even if he was supposed to be 'helping' and is currently acting as one half of a perfect buffer between her and the rest of the group. Between Sam and her cousin, who she has no intention of speaking to tonight.

Not for the rest of her life, if she can manage it.

Someone clears their throat from across the fire, and Leah finally dares look up to see that it is Billy who commands their attention.

The Chief sits between her mother and Old Quil, his deep-set eyes dancing in the firelight as he looks around the gathered circle. He sends her small but encouraging smile when his gaze falls on her, a fleeting signal of support - the only slip in his otherwise business-like appearance - and she feels momentarily bolstered by it. He knows just as well as anyone else that she does not want to be here.

Leah doesn't look away from his weathered face as he begins talking. Because Billy is not wrong - she does not want to be here.

It feels awful to be gathered like this without her father. She can hardly stand to think of it. Can hardly stand to think of him, especially right now.

As if in response to the all-too familiar wave of grief, her hands seem to reach out of their own accord and fall on Jacob's shoulders - seeking out the only right thing in her world. Her thumbs brush the back of his neck, causing him to visibly shiver underneath her touch, but she can't be sorry for it when the contact grounds her so.

She'll use whatever she can to get herself through this. Even if it does make her look a little clingy.

"The Quileutes have been a small people from the beginning," Billy starts, satisfied by the fallen silence around him. "And we remain a small people still, but we have never disappeared. For as long as magic lives in our blood, so will we.

"It happened long ago that Q'waeti bestowed us this magic. He had journeyed for many years beforehand, instructing any people he found and all who would later come in the future, teaching them how they should act, showing them how to build their homes. How to hunt, to fish. He went on and on until he reached the Quileute land, and found it empty save for the two wolves he saw.

"Q'waeti transformed the wolves into people. He told them, 'The Quileute shall be brave, because you come from wolves. In every manner, you shall be strong.'"

The sound of a pen scratching furiously against paper as someone takes notes is all that can be heard as Billy leans back in his chair, pausing for breath. He seems to look at each member of the pack, eyes lingering on his son for a moment longer than the rest.

"Soon came the Quileute's first great Spirit Chief - Kaheleha," he continues. "The title passed from generation to generation until it passed to Taha Aki, a peaceful man known for his wisdom. The people lived well and content in his care."

Billy turns back to the circle, to those hanging on his every word. "But there was one man who was not content. Utlapa," he says, and a low hiss runs around the fire. They all know the next part of this story, just as they know its end.

Between her legs, Jacob ever so slightly tips his head back against her hands which have begun carding through his hair, leaning into the pressure. She doesn't know when exactly she started doing it, only that she's suddenly realised she is, but she can't bring herself to stop.

After countless minutes of this, of all but staring in wonder as Jacob seems to sink further and further into her with every touch, Embry gives her a gentle nudge, jolting her back to the present.

Leah looks to find him smiling down at her. She is by no means short - she is nearly five foot nine - and he and Quil are not as tall as Jacob, perhaps an inch or two shorter than his six foot seven, but still she feels like a child sitting between them. No wonder their instincts seem to revolve around protecting everyone else in sight, being so ridiculously huge. Sometimes it's still difficult for her to reconcile them with the men they have become, especially when she still remembers their baby faces.

She raises an eyebrow at Embry, her hands still working their way through Jacob's unruly hair as his father speaks.

What? she silently asks, barely remembering that she is supposed to be angry with him. She actually feels . . . almost calm, in truth. Calmer than she has been all afternoon, so long as she manages to keep her focus elsewhere. She hasn't thought of the eyes on the other side of the fire for nearly five whole minutes - a real achievement.

"Sorry," Embry mouths, throwing a barely perceptible nod at the back of Jacob's head. Then he grins his best toothy grin and squeezes her shoulders, his arm still around her, all but batting his eyelashes.

"Shh," Leah mouths back, though she is fighting her own smile as she turns back to Billy who is almost at the end of Taha Aki's story now. She has barely heard a word of it.

She watches as Billy straightens in his chair, folding his hands in his lap.

"From that point on," the man says, "Taha Aki was more than either wolf or man. They called him Taha Aki the Great Wolf, or Taha Aki the Spirit Man. He led the tribe for many, many years, for he did not age. When danger threatened, he would resume his wolf-self to fight or frighten the enemy. The people dwelt in peace. Taha Aki fathered many sons, and some of these found that, after they had reached the age of manhood, they, too, could transform into wolves. The wolves were all different, because they were spirit wolves and reflected the man they were inside.

"Some of the sons became warriors with Taha Aki, and they no longer aged. Others, who did not like the transformation, refused to join the pack of wolf-men. These began to age again, and the tribe discovered that the wolf-men could grow old like anyone else if they gave up their spirit wolves. Taha Aki had lived the span of three old men's lives. He had married a third wife after the deaths of the first two, and found in her his true spirit wife."

Billy looks at her; she looks at him. The smile on his face turns beatific, and the firelight reflected on his face makes him seem years and years younger.

"And though he had loved the others," he adds, watching her still - watching her and his son with what she recognises as pride in those old, tired eyes, "this was something else. He decided to give up his spirit wolf so that he would die when she did."

Leah sucks in a breath, realising for the first time that the third wife was an imprint. It seems glaringly obvious, of course, now that she has heard the story again - a story she has heard countless times before throughout her childhood but now has different meaning to her entirely.

Billy nods - to her or himself, she can't tell - and turns back to the group.

"That is how the magic came to us," he says with an air of finality, shifting in his chair to look at Quil's grandfather beside him, "but it is not the end of the story . . ."

Old Quil wastes no time in launching into the next tale, a seamless transition between the two men, but Leah pays his words even less attention than she did most of Billy's.

Imprint. Spirit wife.

She doesn't think it is any coincidence that that story was chosen tonight, and she wonders briefly if it is the same introduction Emily and Kim received on their first official bonfire, too. Wonders what Jacob makes of it, now that he has a different perspective.

He's heavy against her legs. She would have thought that he was asleep except for the way he occasionally turns his nose into the inside of her thigh, breathing deep and humming quietly when she scratches her nails against his scalp. He's no better than a house cat. Dog.

She almost laughs at herself for the bad joke. Still, she knows he'll get a kick out of it when she undoubtedly shares it with him later.

As if to experiment, she digs her fingers deeper, applying a little more pressure. And Jacob - he practically purrs underneath his breath, his head lolling to the side.

It's fascinating, how he responds. And she can't help but spend the rest of the meeting like that, utterly, entirely absorbed by him. She probably wouldn't have been aware the whole thing had ended if not for Embry's arm retreating from her shoulders.

He stands up, stretching wide with a groan that quickly morphs into a wide yawn, loud and fairly exaggerated. "Almost fell asleep on you there, chiquita. You're warmer than that fire."

She sighs. "Still sticking with the Spanish, then?"

"He probably doesn't even know it's Spanish," Quil utters, rubbing a rough hand over his face as if greatly pained by his friend. "I'd wager he got it from that song - his mom likes the old stuff."

Leah barks a laugh, startling even herself, because Quil is not far wrong. The rendition she had been given her on her doorstep had been nothing short of appalling.

Around them, other conversations have started too, low but casual. Jacob, meanwhile, is still on the ground, and she carefully leans forward to peer down at his face so as not to jostle him in case he's finally given in to his exhaustion. She feels it, too.

Sure enough, his eyes are closed.

"Is he asleep?" Quil asks.

"I'm not waking him up," Embry says, stepping backwards. "He'll deck me again."

"You'd deserve it," Leah tells him with the utmost sincerity, and he sticks his tongue out at her. It's like he already knows that she's forgiven him, even if she hasn't necessarily decided as much quite yet.

Asshole.

She is smiling, shaking her head at him (because, fine, she has forgiven him), as Jake begins to stirs at her feet.

"I'm awake," he grumbles. "I think that was the longest one yet. What time is it?"

"S'not like you listened to a word of it anyway," Embry scoffs. "Were you snoring, or was that purring I heard?"

Quil is quick on the uptake, his own grin forming. "Definitely purring."

"I'm getting up in about three seconds," Jacob says against her leg, voice even, almost contemplative, though he makes no effort to move. Her hands are still buried in his thick hair. "So if I were the two of you, I'd start running now."

Leah looks at Embry, her smirk something sinister. "One."

"Two," Jacob says, and he chortles when his friends bolt away before another word can be said. "Works every time."

"Are they always like that?" she asks as the boys decide to make an unannounced beeline for Seth, their arms raised as if about to tackle her not-so-little baby brother to the ground. Laughing with him. Playing.

"Pretty much," Jake answers, the same fondness in his voice as hers before he hauls himself to his feet and comes to sit beside her. He straddles the bench, legs braced either side of it, of her, and automatically reaches out to wrap her up with a type of ease they're already both familiar with.

Leah leans into him, watching her brother now brawling playfully on the ground out of the corner of her eye with Quil and Embry. They look young. Really young - the age they ought to be, if the world was normal. Even Seth seems to have regained the youth he's lost in recent weeks.

"They're idiots," Jacob says, chuckling against her hair as Jared peels himself away from his Kim to join in, levelling up the playing field in Seth's favour, "but you'll get used to it."

She likes the sound of that. Thinks that it doesn't sound that bad at all, having those two boys around.

"They're practically family," Jacob carries on, as if it's an explanation. "So you don't really have much of a choice about that part, to be honest."

"They are family. Quil's your cousin."

"Yeah." He turns wistful. "And Embry . . . he's as good as, I guess. He more like a brother, though. Sometimes I feel like we're closer, me and him, y'know?"

Leah nods, and dares ask, "Would it be so bad if he was?"

Jacob stiffens against her, surprised. "He told you about that?"

"That's what the weird handshake was about," she tells him quietly.

"Right. For your secret club." He edges himself impossibly nearer as if it might make her more inclined to share, all but nosing at her cheek. "So are you going to tell me what that's about now?" he asks. "And when exactly you and Embry had the time to figure it all out?"

She feels her lips twitch in spite of herself. "Jealous?"

He hides his face against her shoulder, arms tightening, and she can hear the effort it takes to keep his tone even as he says, "You seem friendly."

"He'd told me about . . . you-know-what. And he was upset, and I wanted to cheer him up . . . I said we could start a club, me, him and Quil," she says, shrugging. "Dead Dads and Absent Fathers Anonymous. Granted, it's a bit of a mouthful, but it's the first thing I could come up with. He seemed to like it though." She shrugs again. "So that's what we are now."

Jacob pulls back and looks at her so closely that he's nearly cross-eyed - so closely that she can see realisation dawn on his face when he finds her own remarkably free of the sadness people have come to expect whenever she so much as alludes to her father.

"Dead Dads and . . . What?"

"Absent Fathers." Her voice is surprisingly steady despite the sadness she feels but does not let him see. "Anonymous."

When Jacob doesn't stop staring, Leah looks right back at him with an arched eyebrow. "What?"

"You're dark," he says as if this has just occurred to him. "Like really, really dark."

Leah smiles, slightly cheered by the words she considers to be a compliment. "Embry said the same thing. He also said the handshake would annoy you, so that's why we did it."

"Dark," Jacob says again with a tiny grunt, "and mean."

"Quil said that, too," she tells him happily, and laughs when he drops his head to groan against her shoulder.

"I might have to disown them." Grumbling, he pulls her back flush against his chest and presses his face into her neck. Possessively. Part of her positively thrums in response, and she knows exactly what part that is but cannot find it within herself to argue with it. "Anyone would think you're their imprint."

"Too bad for them," she replies, not sounding at all sympathetic. She's perfectly fine with how things are.

Disclaimer: Heavy use of direct lines lifts from Eclipse (because it was important to the story — I make no claims of originality) and also from The Origin of the Tribes story, the latter of which can be found with a quick Google search.

A/N: The bonfire was turning into this huge thing of fluff (surprise — it's me) so I have split it into two parts and am aiming to get the next bit out as soon as. It just needs a bit of fine-tuning first (and work is kicking my butt big time). I could literally write about Leah spending time with these three all day.

On a side note, I re-read Meyer's "retelling" of the Quileute stories in Eclipse ahead of writing this part and decided to stamp all over her stupidness. Can you tell? Honestly. It's like the woman just chose to ignore her research — if she did any at all, and I'm kind of inclined to believe that she didn't. I think she sucks. I can't even tell you how much. The pack had so much potential and just . . . eugh. I will never be able to read or write enough fix-it FanFiction to be satisfied.

Anyway. Fun fact time! This story currently totals over 100,000 words, the most I have ever written for a single fic. In comparison, Google says Eclipse is 148,971 words long, averaging about 5,300-ish words a chapter (Breaking Dawn is nearly four times as long) and yet I still have most of its major plot points to cover . . . ha. What have I done to myself?

My notes seem to get longer and longer every time despite my belly-aching about them, but I just have to keep telling you how awesome you all are. Truly, the best people I have found in any fandom I've ever dipped my toes into (though I think we can say I am submerged in this one) and I will never be able to thank you enough. But I'll say it again anyway: thank you!