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Suggested Listening: "Daniel" by Joshua James
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Quil had never been good at dealing with grief.
His dad died when he was little. He went to the funeral, and even though he could barely remember it, Quil recalled plain as day that he didn't shed a single tear during it. That he didn't cry even when he could hear his mother doing it at the kitchen table for nights after.
He didn't cry.
His father always told him that boys didn't cry, and he remembered being entirely too angry because of it.
He remembered what it did to him and how it felt, and how he finally broke down and let it go after Billy Black looked directly into his eyes and told him he was no less of a man if he needed to cry.
He cried, but only that once. He let go of the rest of it once he did.
Quil had no problem crying when Embry died.
Aside from him, the pack had fully embraced every single stage of grief, some more than others. Some only went through a single stage, while others went through the entire gamut of them.
Jacob buried himself in his work, fixing and changing the oil in every single engine this side of the Quillayute River. After the first two weeks, and for almost a month after that, he had the pack train every single day for hours at a time. Working on defense tactics. Increasing their offensive teamwork.
He didn't have to say it, because Quil could read between the lines.
Jacob was coming up with ways to make sure what happened to Embry never happened again.
Jacob had never been very good at grief either.
Paul yelled at everything and every person that crossed his path. Jared locked Kim in their house and fucked it out of his system. Leah disappeared into the mountains for almost a week, "taking a break" as she called it, and Seth walked around like a zombie. Sam fared better than most of them. He was stoic, unyielding, the same way he always had been, but even Quil had seen him turn away at the funeral. Taking a minute for himself and no one else.
The imprints cried too, and Quil really couldn't blame them.
They'd all moved through their stages, and after three months, were finally trying to pick up the pieces of their severed lives. To put back together their broken pack, and find some kind of a way to deal with the glaring absence in it.
And no matter how badly it hurt, no matter how much he missed his best friend, Quil kept moving...through it all. There were moments he took to himself, too. More often than not, he would go down to the basement in his mom's house, losing track of the hours as he took out every ounce of anger, hurt, and aggression inside him on the punching bag hanging from the floor beams.
Only stopping when he wasn't sure where the sweat started and the tears stopped.
But he kept moving, because he didn't want to get stuck in that fucking spiral also known as his grief. He didn't want to go to that place he was when he was little. He refused.
But what killed him more is how he could see Bella going to that place.
How he could see her inadvertently taking Maddie with her.
Sometimes, people thought Quil was stupid. That he simply didn't comprehend things, but in reality, it couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, Quil saw everything. He saw what was happening and what wasn't happening.
He saw that even though he claimed to be moving, in reality, he was fucking stuck.
He laid in bed at night and realized he had done nothing he said he would. He had broken the only promise he made, and he hadn't been there. He had walked away every single time he tried, not wanting to push Bella. Not wanting to insert himself into her life when she was still so clearly figuring out how to live in it again…
Fuck, he didn't know what to do. He didn't know how to get through to her. How to help.
How to be there...
But he had to keep trying. He just fucking had to, because he promised.
Quil was sure he had broken a lot of promises in his life.
And this wasn't going to be one of them.
AN: A little glimpse into where Quil and the rest of the pack are at...
The next chapter should be the last of the worst, as I've dubbed them. Then we'll start to see some bits of sunshine and healing. Thanks so much for your support, everyone!
Thoughts on this?