I do not own anything of the brilliant Twilight universe. I am forever indebted to Stephenie Meyer for her brilliant fiction and for letting me play with her characters!


If every choice was the wrong one... what would you do?

If you had one second to decide for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Darkness or light?

Color or blackness?

And what if this crucial decision, the one to live or die, the one it all depended on, was taken away from you?

How would you cope with the knowledge that you are stuck in a world you would never have chosen for yourself, just because someone was too stupid to look past his own opinion?

It had been two years since Edward left. Since he had turned on his heel and walked away from what he had once proclaimed to be his only love, his one in a million, his mate, his future. Since I had been forced to learn the hard way that it's never good to love unconditionally. That to love meant to make yourself vulnerable – possibly more than any other time.

My two years had been vague, to say the least. I functioned. I ate, drank, did the housework. I went to school, worked, hung out with my friends. I hooked up with Jacob every now and then, just for something to do. For some resemblance of the old feeling. Luckily, we were both aware of the fact that it would never be because once he imprinted, he'd be gone for good. Claimed by some other girl, though he preferred to look at it the other way round. Either way, it meant that we could act on our mutual love without feeling obliged to one another. I liked that. To be honest, it was all I could deal with.

I graduated with honors. I had applied to several colleges, and gotten accepted by a fair share of them. However, I could never quite find my peace. Even when I went off to Quebec for my undergrad studies in American literature, I could never quite stop looking over my shoulder for the ghosts of my past.

And ghosts there were. Sure, I was quite the average college girl. On the outside, at least. I had always been good at keeping up appearances. Maybe that had been why I ended up earning the Cullen's trust in the first place. You never know.

While in Quebec, I mostly hung out with some girls I'd met during my lit classes. Fun girls, not quite as chatty as Jessica, who had moved to Florida with Mike, but exactly what I needed. They never asked many questions. They accepted me for who I was. For how I was. And there's no need pretending I'm not royally messed up...

My roommate was Becca. She and I wound up registering for the same classes in our freshmen year, and we instantly took a liking to each other. Becca was quite the athletic type, not that she'd ever try to persuade me to join her on any of her sports. It was just her thing, like mine was to mope for hours, to write diaries full of idiotic memories and somehow try to keep coping.

I'd never told Becca much about my past. Sure, she knew the general story – that I'd once lived in Phoenix, that I'd left so that my mom could travel with her new husband, that I'd graduated Forks High School and that I had suffered a bad breakup my senior year. She had never questioned this story, never requested to see any pictures or anything. That would have been pretty pathetic, too. I did not have any graphic reminders of my time with Edward, of what had once been the happiest time of my life. Of the time when I'd thought that I was reaching for eternity, that I was actually getting a chance at family, at love, at siblings. At whatever else the Cullens symbolized for me back then.

I had started drawing shortly after graduation. What had once been doodling while talking on the phone suddenly became that much more. Even though I was never going to be a real artist, I had started to substitute for the missing photographs with pencil and charcoal sketches. They were probably really terrible, but that didn't matter to me. I could immerse myself in my memories and draw everyone just as I had seen them so long ago. When I had finally finished the last line on Edward's perfect face, the last of the Cullens that I was drawing – I had started with Rosalie, for it didn't really matter to me whether or not that sketch turned out fine – I threw away my charcoal and started writing in my diary.

The first diary is more of a picture book, actually. It contains all the sketches, along with some little anecdotes that I cannot bear to ever forget. It's not often that I dig into my old cardboard box and bring it out to look at. Sometimes there's time to remember, but more often it's time to move on.

So move on I did. By the time I started my sophomore year, I felt as at home in college as I had in Forks. I had my share of friends in my dorm building, we hung out frequently to party, to get drunk, to just have fun. Many of them were guys, and most of them tried to get into my pants. However, I'd rebuke every one of them. There just wasn't that much of a spark there. There had never been that much of a spark, not even with Jacob, but with him it had been different. Hooking up had been about healing, about getting used to normal (or at least, closer to normal) skin temperature and not feeling as unloved and abandoned as I had felt after Edward's departure. Now I had gotten used to feeling unloved, and I had gotten over feeling abandoned. I had friends, at least in a manner of speaking. I had a future that I was working for. I was going to be an editor at some major publishing house. My dream was to find and support the next generation's Wuthering Heights. Maybe, someday, I would.

Tonight was just another party. It was a Friday night, and I could always trust my roommate to find the best location for the night. We went over to Carmen's dorm to watch some movies and have a couple of drinks first before walking out into the second floor hallway and get mixed up with the rest of the people there. Sounded like a plan to me – it was my usual Friday night routine, so to speak.

The movie we watched actually asked some restraint. It wasn't that I didn't like Bram Stoker's Dracula, I had studied his novel with unique intensity. It was just that I was absolutely forbidden to make one wrong comment on Gary Oldman's performance or the story line. I still felt obliged to the promise I had given Edward so many years ago, that I would never tell anyone. Stupid morals...

After the movie, we started on Cuervo. I liked that kind of booze. It was hard and quick, yet at the same time oddly comforting. After finishing an entire bottle between the three of us, we stumbled out into the hallway to the main party commotion. The music was blasting, people were chatting and dancing and making out in the corners. Becca and Carmen both excused themselves for some snacks and left me standing by myself. I looked around at all the people I knew and yet didn't know. I thought I saw Reg, who I had made out with at some previous party, but I couldn't be sure for he disappeared in the crowd and I wasn't going to look for him. Cuervo had made me calm and content, so I figured I'd just continue to watch everybody having fun. Some crap magazine had claimed not so long ago that with the right attitude, it could be enjoyable to watch people enjoy themselves. Well, no night like the present to find out!

I kept watching the people until the crowd thinned and I spotted Becca and Carmen in a far away corner, talking to three guys. From what I could tell, one of them was tall and muscled, a perfect athlete, with untamed golden hair. The other was shorter and had nondescript pale-brown hair which he wore tied back into a ponytail. The third one wasn't as engrossed in the conversation as the others. He was tall and sporty as well, in fact, he looked very much like the first guy who was currently deeply engrossed in conversation with Becca. While I was still trying to make my buzzed eyes focus on their faces in order to be sure how I knew these guys, I suddenly felt myself captivated by the third guy's stare.

Golden-brown eyes held mine for what seemed like an eternity. I couldn't look away. I was completely mesmerized, and amazed by the power of his gaze.

My last thought was whether or not I had had too much Cuervo and was finally hallucinating. Then everything went black as I fainted.

A/N: This is my first try at writing non-canon Twilight fan fiction. I have really grown quite fond of Team Jasper, and I'm hoping I'll do it justice. Please let me know what you guys think!