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Sam stands outside the door, eyes weary and hands empty, and it’s like Billy has always known this was coming.
He's seen it strike them down, one by one by one...
Sam Uley. The laughing, dreaming, steady boy who Billy knew in glimpses at Harry’s bonfires, with his arms always so gentle around Leah’s shoulders, torn to pieces between love and this force. He could only describe it, stammering, as new gravity. Paul Lahote. Loud and brash and irreverent, always grinning, always planning, and so goddamn young, hollowed out to adoration whenever Billy’s daughter walked into a room. Drifting unmoored in her wake. Jared Cameron, young Quil—one by one by one.
And now Sam is on Billy’s porch with his shoulders slumped and his lips twisting as he works around the words, and Billy doesn’t even need to hear them. He knows—has been waiting for this in slowly growing horror ever since his son shook to pieces in the living room last year, leaving claw marks in the old wood floor.
“Billy…” Sam’s voice is slow, as deep as the lines carved into his too-young face, and Billy has raced past him, already staring from the end of the sentence.
Something in him has known, has been waiting for this in cold certainty, for weeks now. As his love for his son built behind his lungs, so like grief, with every day that passed with no word, no sign of his beautiful-laughing-sunshine boy. Nothing but the knowledge that he was trapped in the cold, lifeless woods around that nest of leeches.
“Jacob. Imprinted.” Every word is dragged out of Sam’s throat, and Billy wishes he could find his own voice to tell him there’s no need. Something in him has known for years now—glimpsed the fate they were being dragged towards from the moment of a phone call and a doctor's falsely-kind voice, and was just waiting for this instant to put itself into words.
Who is there for his son to see, if he refuses to leave Bella Swan’s foolish side?
One by one by—
“On the…child.”
Finally, Sam’s voice cracks. Part of Billy is spiraling somewhere distant and cold and roaring as the ocean on the day of Sarah’s funeral, and part of him has always known, and all of him is wheeling onto the porch. He reaches out, grips Sam's shaking arm, and smooths his voice into something calm enough to ease the burden on this boy who is still torn in two. "Thank you for coming to tell me, Sam."
“We didn’t—we can’t kill it now, Billy. We won’t do that to him.”
“Of course,” Billy says, and pours every ounce of his sincerity into it—wishes desperately for Harry, for humor in the face of horror to make it all better, the gift Billy never quite managed. But he isn’t here. Of course he isn’t. “Thank you, Sam.”
“He asked me to tell you. He can’t…there’s some danger, I think. He doesn’t feel ready to leave. It. Her.”
“Of course,” Billy says again—again, what else is there to say? Of course this is their course—fixed long ago, all of them trapped in the riptide pull of whatever magic it is these cold ones hold, too overwhelming for all these poor, brave boys to fight.
“I should…the pack. They still have questions, I’m sure,” Sam says, and Billy squeezes his arm one last time—wishing the boy strength, wishing him the courage to keep holding the weight of the world, wishing him to understand the kindness in Billy’s hands—before he lets him go.
“Of course.”
He has known, he thinks, since Harry—furious at Sam, so scared for his daughter, and dragging Billy and Quil with him again and again to turn over history in a desperate search for answers.
None of the stories about imprinting are in their own language. They have no word for it, even, that any of them could find. The pull Sam described, too strong for him to fight, to one person above all others. The snapping of strings that Jared stuttered through a description of—every tie of community and kin, every dream and every relation and every identity, ripped away—
Why would they have had a word for that?
He has known, he thinks, in some whispering fear, grown ever stronger as he and Harry tracked the stories. How they appeared far later than those of wolves. Later even than the attacks of the cold ones. How they changed over time, in the rare fragments where they appeared, sidenotes to other tales, from the urge to protect to the urge to love, to bond, to bind. How there was never more than one in a pack who felt it, before—and how he and Harry and Quil had looked at each other in silence. In fear of this, too, twisted, and twisting their sons. One by one by one.
He blinks, and finds himself in the living room, eyes fixed above the fireplace on the one painting Sarah had ever given him permission to hang up. It is a seascape, familiar and dreamy and bright, the rocks glimmering and the sea green, dancing with a wind he can almost feel. The sun is so very present in the image despite the swirls of gray Sarah painted as a sky, and Billy’s hands are shaking.
He has known, he thinks, for far longer than that. He has known since he lost her—in some small part of him that he tried so hard to ignore—
His family, for whatever fault, was not meant to last.
He has always known, he thinks, so why does it not hurt less?
“Dad?” Rachel says, high-pitched and panicking. Her hands, (warm and wide—she and her sister look so like Sarah, but she always had Billy’s hands), are on Billy’s shoulders, frantic. “Dad, are you—did you fall, are you okay?”
He is on the floor, he realizes.
Remembers. Spinning away from the painting, lowering himself out of the chair, fumbling, needing to feel the scar in the floor, proof of the moment Jacob transformed for the first time, massive and shaking and so scared—he had stared at Billy, and his eyes, despite everything else had still been his own. Still his son’s.
Billy's palm is still planted over the gouge, fingers dug into it. The wood is cool against his fingertips, and drying tears are cool on his cheeks.
“Rachel,” he rumbles, “your brother—”
The words catch, and crumble.
What? What has become of her brother?
His son...
What would this magic have to have done to Jacob, (what did it make him into), to tie him to something he had hated so deeply? How adrift it must have set him...a change even more profound than the others, who are still, at the end of the day, here , still a part of their family, their home…
“Your brother,” he breathes, and Rachel sinks onto the floor beside him, and they bury each other in a hug.
Jacob stands outside the door.
“Dad?” he says. It is soft and fond, far too sweet, and none of that is meant for Billy. Jacob’s shining eyes do not drift for a second from the too-beautiful child who clings to his hand. “I want you to meet Ness.”
The girl smiles, perfect and practiced. Billy inclines his head and smiles back. He does not move to let them into his home.
“She’s my imprint,” Jacob breathes, so reverent Billy’s stomach flips.
He had known, and yet…
Jacob looks up. His eyes glow, fevered, and they have never looked less his own.
“Good to meet you,” Billy says.
He does not take the hand the child offers.
One by one by one by one, he thinks, and turns his head before the boy who used to be his son can see his tears.