Legal Disclaimer: 'Twilight' and it's sequels and prequels belong to Stephanie Meyer and Little Brown publishing company. This is a piece of amateur and speculative fiction based on that world. No profit was made, nor intended to be made. I make no claims of/to ownership on any and all of Stephanie Meyer's intellectual property.

AN: This one-shot is for Guns and Drums. We were joking one night about her propensity to throw random objects when mad and how more than a few of them come uncomfortably close to her husband's junk. I dared her to buy him a protective athletic cup as a Christmas gift. She did it. I owed her a one shot about Sam. She requested that Sam 1. be happy. 2. come to the realization that imprinting does NOT mean he's in love with Emily and 3. he ends up with neither Emily nor Leah because NOT all of life revolves around romance. In short, she wanted a happy Sam, a happy Leah and if I could fit in, a happy Emily as well... but all in their own life situations. So here you go my dear, I hope you and everyone else enjoys this. It was most definitely a challenge worth taking up.

Porch Swings

(Sam/Leah-Friendship)

Sam and Leah were old. There may have been nicer ways to put it, but at the end of the day they were wrinkled, gray haired and old. They had outlived everybody, their entire pack, the council, half the Cullens, and everybody from La push and Forks that they had called friends. They had outlived their respective mates, and in Sam's tragic case, one of his grandchildren. They were old. And they had spent the majority of their time together on this porch swing trying to make sense of it all.

The porch swing was on Leah's side porch. Her long dead husband had put it up as a wedding present to her when Sam let him in on the notion that Leah had always wanted one for her dream home. The two wolves had spent so much time on it. Leah had told Sam that his wife wouldn't die giving birth to their first children on it. Sam had told Leah that even though she had adopted all three of her children, no matter what ANYONE said, she was their mother. They had grieved the first pack death together here. It had been Jared, he had been too slow one day and a vampire had gotten to him. They had also grieved the last pack death here, it had been Seth... who had died an old man in his sleep. By then they had retired. They had grieved here when each packmate took the journey and left them behind. When each friend did. Oddly, they even grieved Jasper, Rosalie, Emmett and Esme when news of their deaths had reached them. Especially Esme. And they had done it on this swing.

Leah's husband David used to joke that he may have given the swing to Leah as a gift, but the real gift was that it had given Sam and Leah back to each other. David had been a remarkably unjealous man. He knew that Sam and Leah still deeply loved each other, but that the flavor of that love had changed over the years, though it was no less intense. When David had died, Leah had sobbed into Sam's chest on this swing for hours, till she was dehydrated. He had held her and promised that someday, the grief would lessen and that when she thought of him, the memories would be sweet and not taunting. He would know, he had lost his mate first and she had done the same for him as he sobbed his grief over Keisha into Leah's lap.

Keisha. Not Emily. Emily was long gone. It wasn't death that had taken her from the rez and from Sam, it was the sudden realization that they weren't actually in love. They were in lust, the breeding urge that was imprinting certainly had made sure of that. They were in fear, Emily was terrified of making Sam angry and she was terrified of leaving him and having to explain her face, her neck, her chest to whatever man saw her naked. They were in guilt, Sam had watched his mother be beaten by his father and when Sam had hurt Emily like he had, it broke a part of him for decades, not because she was his imprint, though that did play a part, but because he remembered his mother bloody and broken at his father's feet. He remembered vowing never to be him. The lust, the fear and the guilt kept Sam and Emily together for 2 years 4 months, 1 week and 3 days. Then they finally had the first honest conversation of their entire relationship and walked away from each other.

Emily had had to be the one to walk away first. She knew that. Imprinting had given her a power she had never known before and that she would never know again. However she took a deep breath... and gave that power back to Sam when she decided to face her fears and walk away. It took her a few years to find her path. But she did finally find it. She moved away to Chicago, and in an odd stroke of luck found another Makah living there. He was tall, somewhat slender and fiercely intelligent. He was also deaf. It was ironic that the one thing that Sam's claws had not taken away from her, her rich alto voice that still held a note like an angel was the one thing that Micheal couldn't hear. For all of her life Emily never felt so loved as she did with Micheal and that fact that she was his first and only choice made it all the sweeter. They lived a long marriage, had one perfect daughter and a fully honest and happy life together.

When she died, having reconciled with both Leah and Sam many, many years prior, they had grieved her here on this swing and then took the plane to Chicago alone to go to her funeral. Much like they had done when her husband had died 3 years previously.

Sam and Leah had tried to make it work once Emily had released him, but it was too late. They had both changed far too much, had hurt each other far too much. So instead of standing to face the world looking deeply into each others eyes facing it as 2 halves of the same whole, they chose to face it standing shoulder to shoulder, watching each others backs.

Friendship is so undervalued. True friendship is as great a gift as true love. Once the dust had settled, once the anger was released, Sam and Leah realized that that was what they had. And they cherished it. In their darkest moments, in their lightest days, Sam and Leah were there for each other in the unique way that only those that have found their soulmate and realized that they AREN'T romantically compatible do. Privately both David and Keisha had always felt that Sam and Leah helped each other with the crap that neither one of them could deal with.

David. Leah had found her mate first. He was a newly elected council member, which meant he got to know right off the bat about the pack. His first real interaction with Leah had been her charging into his office and demanding to know why some "dipshit" had decided that the tutoring program at the rez community center should be cut to make more room in the budget for more money for the pack. She had been in fine form, furious, and he had never been able to forget the words she had nearly spat at him.

"I lost everything to be a wolf. And it needs to mean something. I protect every man, woman and child with my goddamn body. I bleed for them. And if you're telling me that you have decided, in all your retarded wisdom, that instead of helping me make this place better, you're going to piss away our tribe's children's future just so I can have an easier time paying my water bill... YOU CAN GO FUCK YOURSELF!"

Within a week the tutoring program was reinstated and the pack never did get that raise. Whenever any packmate complained, Leah bitchslapped them right upside the head. Never let it be said that their she-wolf was without her convictions.

He had asked her out to dinner a month later. He liked that she could take care of herself. He liked that her insane metabolism made it so that she would actually eat when he took her out to dinner. He loved that she had a fetish for brutal honesty and he admired her for the person she had become though adversity. In short, he fell in love for exactly the person Leah was. Not some memory of her like Sam was carrying around, not some idealized version of her like Jake still sometimes thought about. Her. Who she was in the present. As far as David was concerned, Leah was exactly who he was looking for, her and her inner wolf.

When he proposed, Leah had panicked. She had run to Sam crying. She could never give David children that were his biological own. She was unworthy. How could she say yes? He had asked her if she had left David standing there with a ring. When she said yes, Sam had actually growled at her, cuffed her over the ear, told her that David loved her and if she threw him away because she was feeling insecure because of him, Sam was going to quite literally kill her. It took him 4 hours, 1 bottle of scotch and perhaps the most intimate and emotional conversation he ever had with another living soul to convince Leah that she needed to say yes to David. That this guy was the one, her mate and if she threw him away, than she really wasn't worthy of him.

She had gone back to his house, still crying and told him that she wanted to marry him, to be his wife, to be his mate. David simply put the small engagement ring on her left ring finger and kissed her. In many ways and for a few years, he was more sure of Leah than she was of him. To his credit, he understood why.

They were married for 3 years when they adopted a set of twin boys from a teenage mother on the rez. They were there at the boy's birth and took them home. Leah was so happy she cried. Her she-wolf was even more attentive than her human side was. It never surprised David nor Sam that Leah was a superlative mother. 4 years later, Leah wanted a daughter, and so she and and David adopted a baby girl from China. And with that, Leah's family was complete. She reveled in it. She luxuriated in each first, in each anniversary. She had finally gotten what she had been convinced that life as a wolf had stolen from her: the love of a man and a family of her very own.

She was one of the very last wolves to retire, but she enjoyed every single last moment of her life with David, loved her grandchildren and her great-grand children with an all consuming ferocity that was seemingly unique to Leah. The day David passed away, even her long dormant she-wolf woke up to howl with a boundless grief, before going back to sleep. Sam had found her on her porch swing, curled up and destroyed. So he sat with her, let her sob and stayed for weeks till she was ready to live and greet life again. To take joy in her children and grand-children again.

He was there for her the way she had been there for him when his own mate had died. Someone should have warned him that being a wolf, even if you retired, meant that your lifespan got lengthened. Not that he wouldn't have chosen Keisha, he just would have liked to have been prepared is all.

Sam met Keisha in a supermarket. He was on his way home from his job at a construction site down by the Hoko River when he quite literally ran into her shopping cart with his truck. It was not the most auspicious of meetings. Instead of trying to beat him to death with the frozen chicken she ended up holding, she laughed instead. Then he offered to go in with her and rebuy everything his F250 had destroyed in the parking lot.

Then he took her to dinner. Then he took her to the movies. Then he took her hiking. Then he took her home. And she stayed there. Unlike the rest of the pack, he had a bit more trouble with the council with his mate. She wasn't his imprint, the Emily ship had sailed a long time ago, but Keisha wasn't even Native American, she was Black. Therefore, NOT what those in the know had been planning for him, the former alpha and first phased of the new pack when it came to a mate. But... he loved her, his wolf loved her, and after all the grief and trouble he and romance had been through with each other, he wanted this, he needed this. So he fought for it.

In an odd twist of fate Leah was his best lady at his wedding to Keisha, a favor he would pay back at her wedding to David by giving her away.

They had 5 children. He had never wanted so big a family, but apparently multiple births ran in Keisha's family, so they littered... twice. After that Keisha had her tubes tied and Sam got himself snipped. 5 kids was stretching the budget as far as it would go. Anymore would break the bank. But he loved it, he loved coming in from patrol and just being able to sense his family, his mate, their children... this was worth everything he had been put through.

So when Keisha was 55 years old and diagnosed with breast cancer, he never even thought she wouldn't beat it. But she didn't. It took cancer 3 years to kill her, and when it did, all he could do was drag himself to Leah's house, put his head on her lap in that damn swing and sob like a child. She held him the entire time. Much like Leah a few years later, it took him some weeks to return to living. But grieving with his oldest and truest friend helped him more than he would ever be able to say.

The death neither of them ever got over was Sam's granddaughter. She had died at the age of six due to a fever that no one, not even Carlisle Cullen had been able to bring down. By that time both of their spouses had died and they had sat with Sam's daughter and her husband and held them through their grief. Then they would retire to this swing and stare into the night. So shocked, so distraught, so exhausted that neither of them could even cry.

Looking back on their lives they could say that every moment had been worth the sacrifices, except that one. Sam would never get over his granddaughter's death in a far more profound way than the fiasco with Emily's scars. Leah never got over seeing Sam that destroyed, even she had grieved deeply for the little girl. It just seemed... wrong.

So here they were, Sam was nearing 100, Leah was 1 year younger than he was. Both of them sitting on the swing. Sam had given his house to one of his grandkids years ago and had moved in with Leah. The two, crotchety old wolves understood each other. They just... knew each other.

They also knew that it was coming to an end. They couldn't say how, or even why. They just knew.

"Do you have any regrets Lee-Lee?" Sam's still resonant voice asked.

"I thought I would, way back then, when I still was hurt and angry all the time. But now... no. Life was good to us Sam. We just had to experience the bitter to appreciate the sweet." Her voice was a bit more quavery than his, but only a bit.

His old and weathered hand reached out for her, to find it meeting him half way there as the swing rocked in the breeze.

"You were my real soulmate Lee-Lee." he said. "Just not..."

"Like that." she finished for him. "I know, you were mine to, just the same."

The swing rocked in the breeze some more as they watched the sun set. Sam leaned his head back, closed his eyes. Heard his granddaughter for just a moment, heard the soft whisper of his mate Keisha, felt the weight of Leah's hand in his. He was happy.

Leah made sure Sam's funeral was just the way it should be, even his children, who by now considered her their aunt, deferred to her. After it was over, after exactly 1 week went by, she sat on her porch swing and watched the sun rise. Her life had been such a good one. She closed her eyes, and never opened them.

XXX XXX XXX XXX

In a place Leah could neither describe nor quantify, she felt her mate David's hands on her skin, heard the rich laughter of her oldest friend. She opened her eyes, David was holding her from behind, much like Sam was holding Keisha.

"Took you a whole week?" Sam asked.

"What can I say... I was always a late bloomer."

***Okay folks, go check out Guns and Drums! She's an amazing writer who has a very interesting fic going on called 'The Anticlimactic Non-Imprinting of Embry Call'. It's AMAZING, go read it, you won't regret it.***