A/N: Content warning for somewhat graphic description of werewolf transformation and Emily's injury, as well as suicidal ideation.
He was a good boy. Really, he was. Alison raised him well; as well as she could without his father in the picture. But Josh Uley was a bastard, and they were better off without him anyway. Fled to Neah Bay and left a toddler son behind; good riddance, said Alison, he can do his drinking and cheating somewhere else.
She took her little boy to the library, taught him to read and to count on his fingers. She took him to Seattle, showed him the art and the buildings that nobody from La Push ever made. She took him to school, wishing for a better future than the one she got.
You want to be good for something, Sammy, she told him, you get to the city. You get to Seattle. You make something of yourself. You're such a good boy that you could do it.
Alison raised her son with three principles. Number one, work hard. In school, or else you'll never get away. In life, or else nobody will respect you. In relationships, or else you'll be good-for-nothing.
Number two, you treat women well. The only thing good-for-nothing Josh Uley ever gave his wife were bruises and a son. Well that's not okay, you treat women like you want somebody to treat your mother, Alison said.
Number three. No walking out. You do not walk out of school, because no diploma equals no job equals no money equals no life. You do not walk out on your woman, son, you stay there and you fix it. You do not walk out on anything. If you do all these things, and you stick to them, you will be good-for-something.
Sammy worked hard, oh yes he did. He worked hard at reading and at math and his teachers told his mother that he was such a good boy and he really had a chance - at making something of himself, of getting to Seattle. As the chilly waves rolled in, Sammy turned into Sam and he worked hard at school; he was valedictorian and he earned a full ride scholarship to the University of Washington. He told his mother and she cried; she never went to college and neither did good-for-nothing Josh. Oh, you're getting to the city, I knew you could do it. You were always such a good boy. Seattle never seemed closer, and in his mind the streets were nearly golden.
And always, Sam treated women well - beautiful and lively Leah Clearwater was the only one for him from the start. He held open the door for this flame of a girl and carried her books and, when she let him, kissed her and loved her better than Josh Uley ever loved his mother. Alison warned him against marrying young because look where that got her but with Leah-and-Sam the rules were oh-so-different, and he proposed with his grandmother's ring. Treat her well, reminded Alison, and he said of course I will. It would be a long engagement; he would go to Seattle in the fall and then next year she would join him.
For eighteen years of his life, Sam Uley didn't walk out on anything.
And then he had no choice but to walk out on everything.
He shot up, not like a weed but like a geyser. He gained thirty pounds of muscle overnight. His temperature was so high he should have been comatose if not dead. He could hear a whispered conversation three houses down; he could smell who had worn a shirt four months ago. He opened the door of his room and the doorknob broke off in his hand. Not normal. Not normal. Not normal.
It was a little thing that finally did it. So stupid; he picked up a hairbrush and the handle snapped. Suddenly he was irrationally angry and everything was too too hot, his suddenly stifling shirt burning against his skin and he had to be outside, outside in the woods where he belonged (what?) and his bones splintered and his tendons crushed and his skin tore and his joints ground together and his muscles regrew and finally his spine snapped with a horrible cracking sound and he was running running running before he realized what was happening. His hands were now paws and his vision was now colorless and the trees were blurring past him and he was a wolf.
It took two weeks of snapping deers' necks with his massive lupine jaws and tearing the meat off their bones. Two weeks of peering through the treelines at Leah's silhouette in the window; at his mother crying on the porch swing. Two weeks of near madness before Billy Black wheeled himself out into his back yard and called out, "Samuel, if you're there, please come out."
He did, and Billy Black looked like he was going to faint.
The elders got him to shift back human, naked and crying and cut off all his matted hair and said you're a spirit wolf, Samuel, a protector of the tribe. You're alpha now, until young Jacob Black can take up his rightful position; leader of the pack, and technically chief. Others will soon join you. This is a great honor.
They gave him a small, abandoned house on the edge of the reservation. It was too risky to live with his mother.
He ate an entire loaf of bread in the form of turkey sandwiches, said his name was Sam, not Samuel, and when can I see Leah.
Then they told him about imprinting, love at first sight. Look a woman in the eyes and no hope for you; you can never leave her now. The old journals recorded a deep chest pain, like a heart attack, if the imprint and the wolf ever got more than ten miles away from each other. The imprint is the wolf's soulmate - the other half of his heart. A rejected imprint ends in death for the wolf, and when the she dies, so does he. Only imprints, besides the elders and the pack, may know the secret.
Leah was his soulmate, he said. This was not a problem. But how will that work when I go to college?
"You cannot leave the reservation, Samuel," said Old Quil Ateara in a grave voice. "Your priority is to protect your tribe."
It took a minute to sink in. Never leave the reservation. Never.
"I'm going to go home now," he said to the elders, who only reminded him that he must start patrolling the reservation for vampires (vampires!) as soon as possible.
When his mother saw him, nearly seven feet tall and gigantically strong, she did not cry. She did not say a word. She sat down in a kitchen chair and asked him where he was for the last two weeks. He said I can't tell you. She said you worried me sick. He said I'm sorry. She said you don't have much time before college, why couldn't you have spent it with me.
He stopped. He swallowed nothing, his tongue thick in his mouth. He said "I'm giving up the scholarship, I'm not going to college" and she got deathly quiet before she said "You were such a good boy, Sammy. What happened to you?"
I can't tell you, he said, and she made him leave.
He turned back into a wolf and slept in the woods that night, refusing to go anywhere near the small brown shack in the woods that now belonged to him. Then he went to Leah's house. He was going to tell her everything, rules be damned.
And then he saw her cousin, her best friend, the girl who was like her sister.
And he imprinted.
He loved Leah just like before but he needed Emily. His heart beat sputtered and realigned itself with hers. No, no, no. This was wrong (this is right, said his wolf). Leah, Leah. (Emily, Emily.) Not like magnets but more like a grappling hook, he was tugged towards Emily. Stranger, he thought. (Mate, said his wolf.)
His world was crushed and a new one molded from its dust. For half a moment he felt euphoria of the strongest kind seep through his body; the wolf had never been happier. Then immediately after, he realized what this meant and grief pried at the cracks in his heart. He had harbored a flicker of hope that none of this was real; that he would wake up in his bedroom at home from this nightmare, about to move to Seattle, and go kiss his fiancé and be six feet tall again instead of seven, and just be Sam Uley instead of a giant mutant wolf. But the feeling of the imprint was far too thick, gluttonous and real to be the product of a dream, and he realized with sobering finality that Seattle was dead, and so was Sam Uley. There was only wolf now.
Emily was good, good, far too good for him. She pushed him away. She was as loyal to Leah as Sam wished he could be. She winced away from him when he told her about the wolf, and left when he told her about the imprint. The pain started, a deep throbbing pain in his bones, pulling him in her direction.
He heard the whispers, the talk. Did you hear about Sam Uley? No. He gave up a full ride scholarship. No! Poor, poor Alison. He's really just like his father. And he was always such a good boy.
Leah didn't understand. Why would she - how could she? He had nothing to tell her. What could he say? I love you, Leah, but without your cousin I will die.
Emily confronted him. She said how could you do this to Leah? He said I have no choice, I hate it, I hate myself for it. She said I honestly don't care. He said I know. She got up right in his face and said I've heard about your father. He was a lying, cheating bastard. You're just like him, Sam Uley.
Just like his father. Good for nothing. Good for nothing, right, even though he killed a vampire last week. White-hot rage began to envelop his body. He felt his bones begin to snap, shouted "Get back" and reached out an arm in warning. Too late. Too late for Leah's heart, too late for Sam's future, too late for Jacob Black's childhood, too late for Emily's beautiful face. Helplessly he watched as his outstretched arm turned into the leg of a wolf and his fingers became claws, tearing the left side of Emily to fleshy ribbons. She screamed, he howled with the beating pain of his imprint, and something in him broke irreparably.
He visited her in the hospital, expecting her to turn him away. But she didn't, far far too good for him. She said, "I can see that this is killing you."
He could not say anything.
"You are lonely," she said, not a question but an observation. "You have no one."
"I have the elders," he denied.
She closed her eyes, at least the right one; her left eye was covered in bandages, and sighed. She was very tired. "If I do not accept this bond, this... imprint, what will happen?"
"My heart will stop beating," he told her. "I will die. I can't be away from you for very long."
"Then. I will accept the imprint."
The throbbing pain in Sam's bones ceased immediately, like a cool wave washing over him.
"But you need to do something for me," she said.
"Anything," said Sam, and it was completely true. The imprint could command the wolf to do anything, to fetch her a glass of water or walk into flames and he would have to do it.
"Stay the hell away from my cousin," said Emily. "You've caused her enough pain. You can't tell her anything because she's not your imprint, right? I know Leah. She'll never understand your need to be close to me, even in a friendly way, if it's anything like you've described. What woman would? She'll drive herself miserable in a relationship full of secrets. She will hate you and she will hate me and she will hate herself. She deserves better. She deserves to be happy. And now there is no way for her to be happy with you."
These words were cruel, completely true, and an order that he could not disobey. Emily was discharged from the hospital two weeks later, and moved into his house instead of returning to Neah Bay; it was most convenient like that. Sam went to visit his mother and instead found Leah's scent, not an hour old, and his grandmother's ring on the kitchen table.
He needed Emily, then; depended on her. He did not love her.
For almost three months, there was nothing between them but a somewhat sympathetic friendship, regardless of the rumors. Emily was the only person he could really talk to; she understood his loneliness completely. Her mother wasn't speaking to her because of her percieved crime; she had lost her best friend; she was thought of as a jealous homewrecker.
Four months in, he began to really love her, beyond the imprint's pull. Emily was gentle, warm, selflessly compassionate. Beautiful, despite the jagged, furious scars running up and down her left side. Soft. She was about as far from a vampire as you could get.
He killed another leech and escaped with only a gash down his abdomen; Emily tried to wash and bandage it but was startled as the skin began to knit itself together before her eyes. She let him rest his head on her lap and pet his hair as he cried for what he had lost; she made tea and sat up with him after his nighmares about the horrible metal screeching sound of vampire flesh tearing apart; of burning something that looked disturbingly human and was still begging as he ripped off its head with his teeth.
When a seventeen-year-old named Jared phased after getting a D on a test, six months after Sam became a wolf, she was there, cooking for the wolves' outrageous appetites and helping strategize, and Jared, or at least his wolf, recognized her as the Alpha's mate. Emily's presence seemed to calm his nightmares, and he imagined that he calmed her own. They slept much better if they were touching in some way, and they found themselves falling into each other's beds nearly every night - it was completely innocent, but necessary. Sam started to kiss her scars before he left for patrol each day, as a silent apology, and again when he returned. By the time volatile sixteen-year-old Paul Lahote joined the pack, Sam had been a wolf for a full year, and the pack was now the same size of the last, nearly seventy years ago. He hoped to God it stayed that size. He and Emily had given up any idea of sleeping in separate rooms. Paul seemed to believe that Sam had left Leah for Emily, and Sam explained about imprinting. In the pack mind, he showed him how it felt, so that Paul and Jared could recognize it if it ever happened to them. Not likely - imprinting was said to be rare - but just in case.
They never really addressed their changing relationship. Sam thought for a second that Leah would never have been content with anything so undefined, and then he was so disgusted with himself that he vomited.
Sam was selfish. Sam was cruel. Sam wanted to die. Even that, he could not do, unless he was certain Emily wanted it.
Sometimes the relationship felt like a triad, with Leah as an unwilling, unwitting third. Always dictating their actions, haunting their psyches. It was not her fault that Emily and Sam both thought about her constantly. They had hurt her so badly; pieces of her love still stuck under Sam's teeth. He saw her once, leaning against the wall of the Ateara's store. Waiting for someone.
He felt a surge of jealousy; he couldn't help himself. Then he noticed that she sagged - the life sucked out of her. And there were tear tracks down her face. For only a moment he let himself want to kiss them away. Then he went home to Emily. But first he stopped and picked a wildflower - absolution - delicate yarrow. When he gave it to her she beamed at him and said you're a good man, Sam Uley.
A/N: Thoughts?