six.

(Jacob)

It's almost noon by the time Seth rouses and drags his feet downstairs with red eyes, looking for all the world as if he is carrying the weight of the tribe upon his back.

Jacob sends the kid a brief smile from where he's kneeling in the doorway, surrounded by the few tools he's pilfered from Harry's shed. (It pales in comparison to the collection he has in his garage, but he's long since learned to work with the hand he's been dealt — fixing a door and its frame is nothing after everything else that's happened in these last few months of his life.)

Seth barely lifts his head in acknowledgement. If he is surprised to find someone else here — someone from the Pack, that is — then he doesn't show it. Maybe he even expected it. "What're you doing?"

At this point, Jacob has more or less resigned himself to hanging out at the Clearwaters' house until he's forcibly kicked out. And so he says, "Come sit. I'll show you."

He spends the next twenty minutes or so guiding Seth through what he's managed so far. He's not all too sure if Seth is absorbing the lesson, but it's a distraction nonetheless. He might not be ready to leave, but he reckons that listening to the sound of his own voice has to be a better use of his time than counting Leah's heartbeats above him.

"Okay." He sits back on his heels and studies his handiwork with a critical eye before handing Seth a clamp. "I'll do the wood filler, then you start clamping."

Remarkably, Seth listens, his face set with concentration as he watches how Jacob seals the cracks. Then, as instructed, he places the clamp and starts twisting its jaws together.

"Wait — gently, okay? You'll break it."

"It's already broken," Seth mutters, frowning with the barest hint of frustration.

Jacob rolls his eyes, though it's mostly at the look Seth gives him from underneath that untamed hair of his. It looks like a damn haystack. "The clamp, dummy. You're a lot stronger now."

Something loosens in the kid's face. "Oh." He immediately relaxes his fist over the handle, looking suddenly wary of himself; he's hesitant as he starts tightening the clamp again. "How'dya learn to do this, anyway?"

"I broke the door on the garage once. Split the frame just like this," Jacob explains. "Well, actually, your dad did. But my dad still blamed me."

Seth presses his lips together as tightly as he's winding the clamp, evidently trying not to react — and failing miserably.

"Billy showed me what to do," Jacob continues, pretending not to have noticed, "but he said I was the one who had a hissy fit and locked myself in; I was the one who forced him to get Harry over to break it down in the first place . . ." He passes Seth another clamp. "Here, let's do the top next. Anyway," he says with a huff as they both stand, "it was my fault, so he said I was the one who had to fix it."

Seth has secured the clamp and reached for another by the time he finds his voice. "I didn't know he did that."

Jacob keeps his voice purposefully light. "I think he enjoyed it — I remember he looked real pleased with himself when it all came down, standing there like he'd just won World's Strongest Man or something. My dad laughed himself stupid . . . but maybe that was at me, 'cos I probably looked like a thirteen-year-old who'd just shit his pants."

"He scared you?"

"Oh, yeah. I called him Mister Clearwater for like a month after. Until he told me to stop, anyway — he said I made him feel like he was eighty."

None of this makes Seth smile like Jacob had hoped it would. If anything, it does the complete opposite. "Won't he be wondering where you are? Billy?"

"Probably not." Jacob's smile drops. "Sorry, kid, I didn't think. D'ya want me to go?"

"No," Seth says all too quickly. "No, I don't. I just thought — doesn't he worry about you?"

"Nah."

(His father may be a bit . . . cantankerous, especially when it comes to being persuaded to go to a doctor about his feet — even though the head bloodsucker doesn't work at the main hospital anymore, Billy will never be convinced to step foot inside of the place — but he is nothing short of proud that his son has joined the Pack.)

"I reckon Charlie will be keeping him pretty busy today, anyway," he adds quickly.

Remembering yesterday, he wonders what Charlie had thought after finding the bullshit note Bella left him. After he'd learned the bare details and had torn off in his cruiser to race home.

Please, please, please take care of Charlie, she had begged.

Jacob feels a fleeting moment of guilt.

Maybe he should go home. If Charlie is there . . .

No. No — this is more important.

It's become a little startling to realise Bella has not been crossing his mind as much — and only even then with a little prompting. He's hardly been thinking of her at all, when less than two days ago he was thinking of nothing but Bella. All. The. Time. When he was patrolling, when he was in the garage, when he was lying awake in bed and staring at the ceiling and—

Well. The Pack Radio is going to be broadcasting a totally different kind of show now, that's for sure. Although . . . Jacob doesn't think his brothers will miss The Bella Show too much.

Or maybe they will. Especially when they learn that another one of them has found their imprint.

"Oh." Seth looks uncomfortable. "Right. Sorry."

By the time Jacob realises that Seth has misinterpreted the expression on his face, it's too late to school his features into something somewhat neutral-looking. "S'fine," he says instead. "I'll catch him in a bit, see if Charlie's calmed down any."

"Can you tell Leah about Dad, later, before you go?" Seth's lips twist in some semblance of a smile as he works. Talking about his big sister is easier. Jacob has noticed the same thing about Leah whenever she talks about Seth, too. "I think she will really like that story."

"Yeah, sure," he says, doing his best to sound amused whilst he ignores the way his heart just skipped. It's automatic, involuntary — exactly the same as being unable to stop tilting his head a fraction towards the ceiling so he can listen for the sound of her breathing, of her heartbeat.

(Gentle — even and steady, much like Sue's across the hall, he thinks. Still sleeping. She's been out for a while.)

Damn it all to hell.

He had sat with Leah for at least two hours before deciding that he had to move, that he had to get out of her room. Already she is tightly woven into everything he is and what makes him who he is, all he will be — this brand new person. And whatever she feels in return, his wolf will always return in kind; it is supposed to do and be what she wants, after all, and, apparently, they're all going to be deliriously happy about it.

Apparently.

Regardless, the wolf wants it. Real or not, mirage or not. The wolf demands that he — they have to have it all, otherwise they'll die.

Well — not really, but something pretty close to it.

Fucking imprinting.

It hadn't been easy, leaving her room. Jacob hadn't been able to smell anything that didn't belong to her. She's all warm amber, summer wind and something wild, and her goddamn scent has been driving him absolutely crazy since she brushed past him and Sam in the kitchen yesterday. He can still smell it now. And yet, being there with her as she'd curled up in his lap and rested her head against his chest after her crying jag, finally at ease . . .

Jacob had known then that he had to move before he put himself in danger of doing something really, really stupid. So he had set her down on her bed and pulled the covers over her, already missing her warmth, and he'd left.

Somehow.

(Nothing is warm to him anymore — except for the Pack. And now Leah. The world turned into a horrible, cold place after he phased; his temperature now pushes a whopping whole hundred-and-nine degrees, and he has to tell himself every time he lifts his dad that the old man still has a pulse.)

It had gone against the grain to leave Leah. The new grain, he supposed. But if he had stayed and she'd woken up . . . He has a feeling he would have told her everything. About the warmth, about the imprint, about Sam, about him. About them. She likely would have been declaring her disgust towards him by now.

Keeping something like this from her will do neither of them any good. He knows that. In time, he's going to do or say something which she won't understand and he won't be able to explain it away.

How can he possibly tell her this final part? How can he tell her that the thing which took Sam away from her has now irrevocably taken her away from him, too? Because Leah might never forgive Sam, or Emily, but it's obvious to anyone with a brain that she still loves him — her reaction to what she has been told already has proven as much. He'll only be taking that away from her if he tells her the truth, and then he'll have as much of a chance as Sam does to win her forgiveness.

(And that will only happen when hell freezes over. Not before.)

Tell her. Don't tell her. Tell her. Don't.

He is in deep, deep shit either way.

After a while of working in silence, Seth's eyes quickly scan the quiet street. (It's not the first time, and probably not the last.) "Will we see the others today? You know," he adds, self-conscious now. "Sam, Embry . . ."

Jacob doesn't laugh. When he hasn't been acting as if he can see through the ceiling and into Leah's room, he has also been staring down the driveway. Waiting. Like he's expecting to be caught in the act, to be seen somewhere he shouldn't be.

"I guess." It's well past noon by now — someone is undoubtedly going to come looking for them at some point. "We can always go to them, if you'd prefer. They're mostly always at Emily's."

Seth's eyes bulge. "Emily's? No. I can't. She'll . . . She's going to hate me," he whispers, horrified.

"Of course she won't! Sometimes she hits us with her spoon or her towel, sure, but that's—"

"Not — not her."

"Oh. Leah?"

Seth nods rather morosely.

"Well — yeah, probably," Jacob concedes. "For like half a second, though, kid. S'not your fault, you know. She knows that. She'll understand."

Seth over-tightens the clamp, breaking it. His hands shake, his breath coming in frightful fits and sudden starts.

"Seth—"

"Don't. Please." The kid's voice breaks on the last word, almost as if he's about to choke. "I gotta — I have to—"

He takes off like a bullet, barely hidden underneath the cover of the trees across the way before splitting his skin. And whilst Jacob knows there are some things that he can't fix — things like Seth thinking everyone hates him and blames him for Harry's death — he so badly wants to go after his brother, but he's a coward and he can't make his feet move.

Coward.

The single world chants at him as he finishes the work alone. Coward, it taunts as he rolls up the rug in the living room. He rolls it so tightly that there are no holes, no frayed threads to be seen or to betray what happened upon it, and sets it outside. Out of sight, out of mind. Then he sands the door frame down, screws the hinges back in, tests the lock, that one word echoing off the wood and back at him all the while.

Coward, coward, coward.

There's nowhere else to go, so he goes to his garage where everything once made sense.

Parked exactly where he knew it would be, Jacob looks at Charlie's cruiser with something like cold shame before he slips through the side door.

Charlie is kind of predictable when there's trouble with Bella and he doesn't know what to do: he seeks Billy out — because Billy has two daughters, which means that he's supposed to know what to do during times of crisis. Charlie hasn't yet seemed to have figured out that Billy is absolutely clueless when it comes to these things. Rach and Becca are proof of that.

Jake doesn't blame his dad. He hadn't known what to do for his sisters, either, and leaving the Rez for the big wide world was something they'd always planned to do even before their mom had died. But maybe they would have stayed a little longer if Billy hadn't been at such an obvious loss. Maybe they would visit more than they did, which was, suffice to say, never.

Becca always blames the price of plane tickets; Rach always has some big test, or some project she just can't get out of — not even on Thanksgiving, which they don't celebrate on principle alone but still get together for so they can watch the football and gorge on food all the same. The past few Christmases have gone by without them, too, just like his birthday, Billy's birthday, Easter, their birthdays, the Fourth of July . . . This year's holidays will be no different.

By the time Charlie figures this all out, Bella will probably have a dead heart and crimson eyes and will already be on her way to forgetting them all. It's why Jacob won't go in the house. She might already be dead (because that's what bloodsucker means: dead — no, worse than dead) and this could be the last time that Charlie comes over to beat the world and his daughter's decisions to rights with Billy.

It usually takes a while for his dad to calm Charlie down. This time last year Charlie had come over for the same reason — Bella taking off without warning — and Jake had slept here in the garage, in the hammock, just to escape the yelling.

Only now, with his new keen ears and heightened senses, Jacob can hear every word from inside the house. He whacks his beaten stereo to life in an attempt to drown it all out and starts picking up the nuts and bolts he'd tipped out of his toolbox two days ago.

It takes ages, just as he'd predicted. He wears through the same album in the stereo thrice over, volume rocketing as he practically rearranges his whole damn garage so he can get every single piece of metal he'd so carelessly set free. He doesn't care. It's keeping him busy, keeping him away from doing Really Stupid Things and away from Facing The Consequences.

When he's gotten everything back in his toolbox (and has rearranged that, too — twice), he even kills the music and tries sleeping in the hammock, which he hasn't done in forever, but twenty minutes of restlessness has him pretty damn sure he's never going to sleep right ever again. The imprint has gotten him all bent out of shape. It's not right. He's not right; he's exhausted — he's not slept for days — so it only makes him that more frustrated when he can't shut off. If he were still a normal teenager he would have definitely passed out by now.

He has to tell her. He can't live like this forever. He can try and distract himself all he wants — hell, he could rip out the head gasket of the Rabbit and keep himself busy for a whole day — but sooner or later he's going to have to patrol. He's probably only gotten away with not taking a shift for so long because they all think he's still looking after Seth, but they're all going to find out. And someone (three guesses who that will be) is going to spill the beans. Better he do it first.

And he's about to get up and face his fate — honest, he is, he swears he's going to — when Seth barrels through his door red-faced and stark naked. There's twigs in his hair.

"I didn't know where else to go," he says, as if he's surprised to find himself here. "I went back home and you weren't . . . I couldn't—" He swallows thickly. "I'm sorry."

Jacob gets to his feet and throws Seth a pair of shorts from the small stack he keeps for emergencies only. They're all mostly worn, faded cut-offs which have seen better days and are way too tight, but it's better than going into the house in his birthday suit in front of unsuspecting visitors. "It's fine." He did offer his hammock up, after all. "Don't worry. You hungry?"

"Starving," Seth breathes.

Jacob smiles wryly. "You'll get used to it." He strains an ear to the house, but hears nothing. "Is Charlie's cruiser still out front?"

"Nobody's in. I knocked. Well, sorta," Seth admits sheepishly, which Jacob takes to mean that the kid just let himself in, "but then I heard you in here."

"S'fine," he says, shoving at the kid's shoulder and herding him out of the garage while resolving to give the kid the haircut of his life as he eats. "They're probably at yours."

"I saw the door. Thanks."

"Sure, sure. You didn't go in?"

Seth focuses on his feet as they walk up to the house. "My mom was crying. I wasn't even on the drive and I could hear her and I . . . Leah — she was trying to . . . I can hear everything, Jake."

"It turns into background noise soon enough. Trust me."

Seth's sigh sounds like something it shouldn't for another few decades: weary, all-too knowing, a bit deprecating. They all have the same sigh now. "It's annoying."

"If you think that's bad, wait 'til you start patrolling with Jared. Dude sings hair-metal after a night with Kim because she doesn't want him thinking about — well, you know."

"Does it work?"

"Nope."

Seth sighs that sigh again. "Great."

Emily is ecstatic when Jacob arrives with Seth two hours later. She waves them in excitedly, her smile stretching all the way up the left side of her face where it meets the corner of her shining eye. Tears, Jacob realises, but wisely keeps his mouth shut as he pushes Seth and his new haircut into her home.

"Hi, Emily," Seth says quietly.

"I'm so glad you're here. Well, not that — you know, but you're here, I'm so pleased," she babbles. "I didn't think you'd come but I baked some muffins just in case because Sam said that you might but he didn't know when and I wasn't sure if it would be today or tomorrow or—"

"Jeez, let the kid breathe, Em," Jacob says, forcing a laugh. He can feel Seth's tense shoulders underneath his palms as he steers him forward. And whilst he is suddenly feeling like a traitor of the first order, he knows it is nothing compared to what Seth is feeling. His nerves are rolling off him in waves.

Her half-smile twists into bashful embarrassment. "Sorry. Sorry, Seth. Would you like a muffin?"

Seth looks back at Jacob, to Emily, then at Jacob again, completely out of his depth.

"They're blueberry," Emily says, as if it helps, and Jacob tilts his head with the permission that Seth is asking for.

"Uh. Sure," he eventually replies.

Emily grins and rushes into the kitchen.

"She's . . . different," Seth whispers, watching her go.

Jacob chuckles and drops his hands. "She's just happy to see you, kid," he tells him just as quietly.

"I haven't seen her in months. Not even after — I didn't realise how bad—" he starts to say, but quickly shuts up as he hears Emily begin to hurry back and reappears with a whole tray of blueberry muffins, smiling wide.

Dutifully, Seth takes one, and then another, with her encouragement.

"Jake?" Emily offers the tray up to him, all but bouncing on her feet and unable to keep still.

He suspects the muffin will probably taste like betrayal might, but takes one anyway. Emily grins.

"The others have been in and out all day," she tells them. Seth is looking around. "Sam and Jared left about an hour ago."

"Any word on Quil?" Jacob can't help but ask.

"Not yet. Sam thinks it will be really soon," she says. "Come and sit down, Seth."

As with everything, Seth looks to Jacob before he does anything. And Jacob really, really hopes that it's not going to last, because as familiar as it is from his days before pack-life, when Seth hero-worshipped him a bit even then, it's going to get old pretty quick. Still, Jacob nods, permission given, and wills the kid on.

He's not sure whether it was a good idea to bring Seth over with nobody else here. But it had to happen — Seth is going to be spending a lot of time here, as they all do. Even Kim (who is no better than a frightened mouse and barely speaks a word to anyone but Jared and Emily) appears every so often to make camp at the kitchen table and catch her boyfriend up with his homework. She calls it their den, because her wolf has been here since the beginning when it was just him and Sam holding the lines together, while Paul eats most of his meals here and Embry has all but claimed the couch in the corner for himself — if only because it's a place he can sleep without his mom shouting at him.

Point is, they're all here so often that it feels strange to not have Paul and Jared fighting over the last piece of chicken or Embry flat on his back and snoring, but then, Jacob has usually been wherever the pack is over the last month — and Bella during all the weeks before that. He has become used to it.

And Emily loves it. She positively beams when Seth takes a chair and reaches for a third muffin five minutes later. Jacob's not even eaten his first.

By the fifth muffin, Seth is starting to look like he belongs. By the sixth, he's talking to his cousin without prompting, apparently glad of someone else familiar who he can talk freely with. And by the seventh, it eventually seems he has relaxed enough that Jake sinks onto Embry's couch.

"You know, if you're that hungry," Emily says, "I can make you something else. Something hot."

"I don't know why," Jacob grumbles, leaning back. "He ate me out of house and home only a few hours ago."

He slings his arm over his face, trying to settle — but his wolf has its back up, prickling in protest. He locks it down and stamps on its tail for good measure; he is so goddamned tired. Please, he begs it, let me sleep.

Traitor, it howls. Judas.

He ignores it and focuses on Emily's laugh, Seth's half-hearted protest, before he mumbles something of his own which is incoherent to even himself and then — finally, finally, thank you — succumbs into uneasy unconsciousness.