AN: To help you envision her; Mary is played by Emma Watson. I tried a True Blood OC before, and it didn't work. Couldn't get past the first chapter. But Mary's story is laying itself out in such detail I'm pretty sure it'll work this time. I'm taking the story slow, so even though this is a Hoyt/OC/Jess triangle fic, I'm gonna write through the first season focusing on Hoyt and Mary, then Jess'll come into it when she does. I thought about putting this as a True Blood/Southern Vampire Mysteries crossover, as I think I might include some bits from the books that weren't in the series. However, as Jess is one of the main characters and there's no Hoyt/Holly romance like in the books, I'm just leaving it as True Blood. Also the timeline is so confusing on True Blood, so it might get a little confusing in the fic - I'll try my best not to mention the passage of time to make it easier. Anyway, rambling. Here be story now.

Twenty years before the vampires came out, a cup of tea was being shared in a living room. Friendly Lilly Pickens had just moved to the small town of Bon Temps in Louisiana to live near her sister, Charlotte. She quickly made chit-chat with her new neighbour, Maxine Fortenberry. Maxine was a prejudiced woman, but she had the manners not to show it clearly around new company - that and Maxine hadn't yet found a reason to hate Lilly.

The relationship between these two is important to the path our story starts on. Each woman had a little four year old - one a boy and one a girl. The boy, Hoyt, was Maxine's and the girl, Mary, was Lilly's. These four year olds are two thirds of our protagonists, and they were friends. Very good friends. They stayed this way for many years. Few people in Bon Temps went on holiday, so Mary and Hoyt never spent a day apart.

And then one day, when Hoyt was 18, he woke up and Mary was gone. She and her mother had left suddenly in the night, when Lilly has received a phone called telling her that her ex-husband had disappeared suddenly. Lilly and Mary had gone back to England to help find him. Lilly didn't want to leave Charlotte and her daughter Maudette, but she was too worried about her ex-husband to say goodbye. Lilly barely gave a thought to how it would affect Mary to leave Hoyt. Her daughter cried for days, not soley at the fact she was leaving him behind, but also because she didn't say goodbye.

Hoyt noticed that too. He spent a lot of time noticing it. Maxine noticed it too, she noticed how miserable her son was. She had liked Mary. She was a nice white girl - of course, she was British, which had taken some time for Maxine to get over. But there were a whole lot of people in the world who were worse for Hoyt than Mary.

What Maxine didn't know was when she got back to England, Mary met a woman - not just any woman, but a witch. Mary, ever fascinated by the supernatural, was eager to be taught the craft. Not everyone had the capability to absorb the magic of witchcraft, but Mary was a natural. By the time she was twenty-one, she was excelling at the art. Of course she was flawed - no witch is a perfect witch - but she was damn good.

By the time she was twenty-eight, Mary was hating her life. She'd put all her faith in her witchcraft, but she wasn't raking in as much money as she'd hoped. Of course, the skepticism of the general public meant people would think she were crazy anyway.

At this point the vampires had been "out of the coffin" for two years. There had been backlash against them, of course. They were being called unholy, evil, blah blah blah. Mary had done the odd job for a vampire here and there, but that was all. She was desperate to get out of Swindon, where she now lived. Really, she wanted to go back to Bon Temps. But she didn't have the money for even the plane ride, let alone a house and a visa.

How lucky she was when her cousin died.

Mary had never been close to Maudette, but Maudette had obviously liked Mary. She liked her enough to leave her everything. The day an American lawyer had turned up on her doorstep was a day full of surprises. Mary learnt that her cousin had been found strangled to death at her apartment, and her will stated that she left everything to her cousin Mary Pickens. The only reason Mary could think of to explain the unexpected inheritance was that Maudette had known Mary would want to be able to get back to Bon Temps. Was her desire to return really that obvious?

Regardless of Maudette's motivations, Mary now had claim to a place in Bon Temps and enough money to legally get herself there. And so she was on a plane the next morning.

It was an ordinary hot summer's day in Bon Temps. Hoyt and his friends and co-workers Lafayette Reynolds and Rene Lenier were drilling into a fenced off area of road with mufflers over their ears to stifle the sound. It took a few minutes of shouting for another road worker, Jason Stackhouse, to realise they couldn't hear him, so he stepped into their line of vision and mimed taking mufflers off. Hoyt, Rene and Lafayette, now as slow as Jason, stopped their drills and removed their mufflers.

"We got a new'un," Jason told them. "Just moved to Bon Temps." He nodded behind his friends, and they all turned to see Mary leaning against a cone.

Her eyes lit up when she saw Hoyt. (When applying for a job on the crew, Mary had had no idea Hoyt was on it too. It wasn't until Jason had mentioned Hoyt's name that she discovered it.) She could still see the eighteen yer old boy she had left ten years ago; he just had a bit more life experience in his eyes.

Hoyt looked at Mary, a look of interest changing to a look of disbelief as he realised who his new co-worker was. He'd told himself long ago that Mary was gone, and yet here she was. She looked even more beautiful than he remembered. Ten years had been good to her.

"Mary?" He spoke her name unsurely, not quite sure if he was dreaming or not.

Mary stood up straight and started making her way towards her new co-workers, her hands in her back pockets and a coy smile on her face - a look she wasn't unheard of adopting. "Hey, Hoyt," she said. Her accent was pure English. Anything Southern she may have adopted was gone.

"What... what are you doing here?" Hoyt was cautious and guarded, which Mary could understand. He had never known why she had left.

"I... I came back, Hoyt. For you, I... I missed you." Jason, Rene and Lafayette were staring, but Mary ignored them. "I, um... I'm sorry I left, Hoyt. I am so sorry. I didn't want to leave you. I didn't want to to leave Bon Temps at all."

"Then why did you?" Hoyt immediately regretted asking. He sounded angrier than he felt.

"My mum got a call, my dad was missing. She pulled me out of bed, threw me in a car and took me back to England. We found him, but... Mum didn't want to come back. I protested, but she refused to change her mind."

"You wanted to come back to Bon Temps?" Jason interrupted. "Why the hell would anyone wanna come back here?"

Mary looked at Jason. She recognized him, he'd been best friends with Hoyt since forever. He hadn't recognised her yet though. "It's not the place," she told him. She looked back at Hoyt with her shy sort of smile. "It's the people."

Hoyt siled at her, also quite shyly but full of admiration for his old friend. Or, well, more than friend. A boy and a girl grow up next door to each other and are joined at the hip for 14 years, you can't expect them not to fall in love with one another. Which is exactly what had happened. But Mary had left before either could admit their feelings. Unbeknownst to the other, both had spend their 10 year seperation wishing they'd told the other how they felt.

"Do you two know each other?" Rene asked, a foreign accent on his voice, but his question was ignored. Hoyt abandoned his drill, which stayed planted in the ground, and quickly swooped Mary up in a reunion embrace. Mary hugged him back, so glad to be holding him again after so many years without him.

"Either that's a yes, or we caught in some roman'ic movie wit' love at firs' sight an' bullshit," Lafayette commented to Rene and Jason. He had a deep, sassy voice with the sass overpowering the Southern tones.

Lafayette's comment pulled Mary and Hoyt away from each other, each smiling with a hint of embarassment at the mention of romance.

"Sorry," Hoyt apologised to his friends. "Um, this is Mary. We knew each other as kids."

"And teenagers," Mary added.

"You knew her too, Jason," Hoyt said to him. "You asked her to be your first kiss when you were eight."

Mary laughed at the memory. "I've never run so fast in my life!"

Jason looked as if a lightbulb had just lit up above his head. "You're cutie Mary Poppins from next door!" He said tactlessly.

Hoyt gave Jason a complete I-hate-you face.

"Mary Poppins?" Lafayette repeated, laughing.

Hoyt was red with embarassment, and Mary was suddenly finding the police car in the distance very interesting.

"You were supposed to forget that," Hoyt told Jason through his teeth. At a young age, Hoyt had given Mary the nickname Mary Poppins. Not just because Mary Pickens sounded like Mary Poppins, but because she had the tendancy to feel responsible for anyone who needed looking after.

The conversation was interrupted when the police car Mary had been watching drew up near the building site they were working on. Two officers stepped out, who Mary recognised after a few moments as Bud Dearbourne and Andy Bellefleur. They came over, walking in a very police-esque style, with hands on belts and lots of swagger.

"Jason Stackhouse!" Andy called. "Would you come with us, please?"

Jason looked sared, but he tried to make it into surprise. He asked Hoyt to take over, and show Mary the ropes.

"Who's the new girl?" Andy asked as he and Bud escorted Jason to the car.

"Oh, that's Mary," Jason said, proud that he knew and they didn't. "She used to live next door to Hoyt."

"Wait, Mary Pickens?" Bud asked.

"Yeah. Why?"

"Well, she's Maudette's cousin."

Jason pretended not to be even more scared. "So?"

"So, Maudette's the reason why we're here."

Hoyt, Mary, Rene and Lafayette watched this exchange from a distance. "What is up with Jason and the law, eh?" Rene mentioned. Mary made a mental note to ask Rene later where he was from.

"Reckon it's about Maudette?" Hoyt asked.

"Why?" Mary looked at him with interest. "They have a thing?"

"Girl," Lafayette turned to her, "Jason got a thang wit' all the women. Only gals he ain't done are his sister, and you. You betta watch yo back, Pickens," he warned her. "Stackhouse'll be afta you next."

"He tried already," Mary shrugged. "I'm not that kind of girl."

The next day, Mary dropped into Merlotte's with Hoyt. Police officers were surprisingly avid gossipers - everyone already knew she had moved back to Bon Temps. There were lots of people who didn't know her, but a few people who'd known her came up to greet her. Tara Thornton said hi and gave her a friendly hug as she went to sit down with Hoyt.

There were a few whispers about Mary being the cousin of the recently murdered Maudette, but no one came up to their table until the waitress did.

"What can I get for y'all?" Sookie Stackhouse, Jason's sister, bounded over with a pencil, a notepad and a great big smile on her face.

"Sookie, you remember Mary Pickens?" Hoyt introduced her. "She moved away about ten years ago?"

"Sure!" Sookie beamed at Mary. "Jason told me y'all were back. How come y'all decided to come back?"

"Maudette left everything to me," Mary told her. "I wanted back, so I thought I'd take the chance now I have a place."

"Well, it's great y'all are back," Sookie said. Mary, like most people in Bon Temps, didn't know Sookie's secret - she could read minds. And Mary was, as Sookie would put it, a clear broadcaster. She doesn't seem so crazy, Mary was thinking. Smiles a lot. She'll live longer. Sookie took their orders and bounded off, beaming. It wasn't often she dipped into someone's mind and found something decent.

"I like her," Mary said to Hoyt with a smile. "Jason good to her?"

"Yeah, yeah, they're real good," Hoyt replied, rubbing the back of his neck. He sounded distracted, and Mary told him so. "Yeah, I... I wanted to talk to you about something, Poppy." Poppy was short for Poppins. Mary sat back and waited for him to continue. As he tried to formulate his words, Sookie brought their drinks. When she left, he took a sip from a beer before saying, "did you miss me?"

He meant it sincerely. "Every day," Mary replied honestly. "I was so glad you weren't there the first few months. I didn't want you to see me so torn up. It's like... I spent every single day with you for fourteen years, and suddenly you were gone. You were my rock, and..." she shrugged, "I lost you." She'd been staring at her own beer while talking. Now she looked up at Hoyt. "Did you miss me?"

"Everything you said and more," he confessed. "My mama didn't help, she kept reminding me I shouldn't have let you go."

"It wasn't your fault," Mary told him immediately, grabbing his hand. He looked at it, then up to her. "You know it had nothing to do with you."

"I sure thought it was. For a hella long time. But I, um..." he squeezed her hand. "I'm glad you're back, Mary. I really did miss you."

She smiled a simple smile. "I missed you too."