a/n: Bigblueboat and 2Shaes at Project Team Beta made it readable. I just make it up.
"There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil who has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk. "
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Carlisle manages to charter Bella and me a flight from Port Angeles to Napa so we can find where Emmett's hidden himself away in a barn with a starlet in the process of turning into a vampire. Just saying all that is exhausting and I'm a vampire. I don't get tired.
Bella frowns and hems and haws for a couple minutes before I finally just raise my eyebrows at her. "What are you waiting for? Are you ready to go?"
She points upstairs to where we can still hear her boyfriend having sex with a member of the Volturi guard. "I'm supposed to just barge in and pack a suitcase?"
"She'll know you're coming," Jane says. "Just decide that you're going to do it, and you can go on up."
Bella looks at the preteen and scoffs. "I don't understand. She'll just stop screwing my boyfriend if I decide to go to my room?"
"Yeah," Jane says, already looking bored with us. "Go ahead."
Bella looks at me. I can tell that Jane certainly believes what she's saying. I shrug my shoulders.
"If I go up there and I have to see the two of them…you know." Bella wags a finger at Jane. "You're going to be grounded for a month." Bella goes upstairs, and I look at Jane.
"I don't get it. She's psychic?" Jane nods, looking at her cuticles.
"So she knew Jasper would be here?"
Jane nods again. "She knew that Jasper would be here and that the only way that Aro would let her come here is if she did some embarrassingly public thing to get punished."
"Hence the Eastern European reality show," I say.
"Yep," Jane pops her "p". "She knew that it was just bad enough to get us sent here but not bad enough to get us killed."
"And you went along with this?"
Jane shrugs her shoulders. "Volterra is boring."
Bella comes back down with a bag and a weird, thoughtful look on her face.
"How'd it go?" I ask. She looks at Jane and then me.
"Uh, good," Bella says. She looks at Jane and gestures at her with her chin. "Thanks for the tip."
"You got your stuff?" I ask.
Bella nods, still looking confused. "Yeah. She met me at the door in a robe and was…kind of…friendly?" Bella shakes her head.
"I'll explain it on the way," I say to her. "Let's get going."
I beg her to let me drive the Mustang, and we set off for Port Angeles. As we're heading down the highway I gesture to her clothes.
"So, how do you pack, exactly? Do you just throw a bunch of dirty clothes and black eyeliner in a bag?"
She glares at me. "What's your problem with the way I dress? I don't look like enough of a preppy douche to be seen with you?"
"It's just that I haven't seen your level of hygiene neglect since 1993. Did you get changed before or after Kurt Cobain died?"
She mumbles something I can't make out but it sounds like "gucking drick."
"What?" I ask.
"One month after he died," she says, staring straight ahead. I could die laughing if I wasn't already dead.
Bella's Change
Bella Swan was a quiet but stubborn teenager who liked reading, Pearl Jam and a long-haired dropout named Ben Cheney. Ben Cheney liked smoking pot. So when Bella's mom got tired of getting calls from the attendance office that Bella had cut class or calls from the school counselor that Bella was flunking math or calls from her friends that they had seen Bella in downtown Phoenix with "that juvenile delinquent," Rene called up her ex-husband and told him she was shipping their daughter to him to "straighten her out."
Charlie was excited to see his daughter, and he arrived early to pick her up from her flight in Seattle. But Bella Swan had never gotten on the connecting flight she was supposed to catch in Portland. There was no way she was going to be shipped off to Chief Charlie and be expected to entertain herself in what sounded like the most boring town in America.
She quickly made new friends among the large teenage homeless population that cycled between Seattle and Portland. She perfected her panhandling technique, slept in bus stations and on people's couches and learned a lot of new things. She learned how to only shoplift from the chain music stores because the indies were the good guys. She learned to stay out of the shelters because they always wanted to lecture you about getting your life back on track. She learned that local bands would almost always let young girls into shows for free because guys would show up where the girls were.
It was a great adventure, and Bella was enjoying almost every second of it. She felt a little bad about Charlie and her mom, but she figured she could always go back when it stopped being so fun.
In the mean time, there were great bands to go see and totally cool people to hang out with. She got to see Pearl Jam before there was ever a guy making fun of Eddie Vedder's lack of diction on national TV. She saw Kurt Cobain just walking down the street in Seattle one day. He came over to where she and some friends were sitting and asked them if they knew where he could score. It was cool.
And then Kurt got famous, got Courtney pregnant, got married, got himself sent to rehab and then got so fed up he took a bullet to the brain.
Kurt's death was the beginning of the end. The kids in Seattle took it hard. There were candlelight vigils and a string of overdoses. Some kids went home. But Bella wasn't about to show her face in Forks just yet. Soon, but not yet.
Then, Jasper Whitlock found her.
He was walking down a wet alley on a typical late spring day in Seattle when he smelled her blood. She smelled terrific. For a homeless kid.
"Hey, sweetheart," he said to the sleeping girl, nudging her converse with his cowboy boot. He smirked at her army jacket.
She opened her eyes slowly. "What the fuck do you want?"
"Feisty," he thought. He liked feisty women. Maybe she'd be fun to play with first.
"You just look like you might need some help, darlin'."
She squinted at him. "I'm not a hooker," she said, rubbing her sleepy (and dirty) face. "Even if I was, I don't fuck rednecks."
His eyes widened, and he felt his cold body responding to her sassy mouth. He decided he didn't want to kill her.
"No, you just look like you might be cold and hungry." He smiled at her in as charming a way as possible. "And I don't fuck rednecks, either," he added. He caught just a hint of a smile.
He pulled out his wallet and gave her some money. "Get yourself some food, sweetheart."
She took the money slowly, looking at him with suspicion. "Thanks," she mumbled.
He tipped his hat at her and walked away. With another girl he was sure he'd be able to look back and catch her staring. With this one, he decided not to risk his own disappointment.
He went about his day, killed another girl, got a hotel room, and watched some news. He found himself thinking of the girl and, in the middle of the night, he went back out to where he'd seen her. She wasn't there but he picked up her scent easily.
It took him to a run-down little diner, the back of a strip club, and then a ratty little house in the University district. The dull thump of music came from the inside, and he could smell the drugs without even opening the door. But there were only four sets of heartbeats, all sleeping people. Heavily sleeping people, as if they had been using powerful central nervous system depressants. Funny, she hadn't seemed like a heroin user. Jasper was a little surprised.
He jimmied open the door and followed her scent to a filthy couch. She was splayed across it, wearing just baggy jeans and a black bra. She'd taken off her shirt to tie off and the belt was still around her upper arm. She was also not one of the humans in the house with a heartbeat.
He felt a sudden, inexplicable sense of loss, and he placed his cold hand on her sternum. She still felt warm. It hadn't been long.
He didn't know if it would work, but he felt the impulse suddenly to try to save her.
He bit her and then he started to administer chest compressions. He was desperately trying to use the venom to heal her still heart.
Amazingly, it worked. As the venom hit her heart, he managed to get it going again long enough to start the change. She began to thrash.
When the passed-out junkie in the armchair came to, he killed him. He took her thrashing, agonized body and made his way outside. Hot-wiring a big Lincoln, he was thankful to see that it had a full tank of gas. It must have been an anomaly in this neighborhood.
He drove through the remainder of the night, stopping finally at some abandoned summer cabins he's stayed in once before. He saw her through the rest of her change and then through her outraged anger at what he had done to her. It was six months before she would sleep with him, and that seemed to be merely out of boredom.
He would get that anxious feeling, the one that made him leave every woman before her. He would start to plan how he would abandon her. And then she would call him an ignorant redneck or roll her eyes at his attempts to impress some human waitress, and he would be enamored of her all over again.
He knew she felt ambivalent about him much of the time. He had told her that they were mates and she believed him. Why wouldn't she? He was the only vampire she really knew. Her sire, her teacher. He told her of the Volturi leader whose mate had died, how he had wandered the halls of their stronghold for thousands of years, lifeless and alone, unable to die but with nothing to live for. She was just sensitive enough to fear that fate if she left him.
It was her idea to change their diet. It had always bugged her to feed from humans, and when he let slip that there was an alternative, she insisted they try it. He thought it would be too hard for her.
It was a mistake, he quickly realized. It exposed her to other vampires. It brought her in contact with that insufferable, snide head case, Edward Cullen. Who was probably her real mate, Jasper quickly realized.
But Jasper thrived on conflict and messing with Cullen was some of the most fun he had in years.
Until that dark-haired thing walked in the door and beckoned him with a little finger and all his restlessness and fighting were over.
"You were a junkie?" I ask her, my eyes wide.
"No," she insists. "I was totally a...recreational user. It was just the thing to do." She seems upset.
"I don't mean to sound judgmental," I say.
"You've eaten humans, right?" She turns back to me. We're riding in a little charter plane to Napa, where I hope to find Emmett and his newborn, train wreck, Hollywood starlet girlfriend.
"Yeah, just when I was with the Volturi," I shrug my shoulders.
"Well, I only did heroin when I hung out with Gen-X slacker heroin addicts," she say, sticking out her chin at me.
She has a point, and I drop the subject. And bring up another lame one.
"So why the clothes?" I ask. "I mean, I don't dress the way I did when I was changed-"
"Because spats are hard to find," she cracks.
"Why the grunge-wear?"
She looks down at her clothes. "This is who I am," she answers.
Our conversation is interrupted by that scourge of California, the sun. Bella and I scramble for the pull-downs on the windows so as not to have an aviation disaster.
We end up having to lurk in a hangar until nearly 9 pm, surely causing some speculation, since fucking California is so fucking sunny. Bella and I are finally able to set off in a rental car to locate Emmett.
Who it turns out is in a barn. Because that seems like a normal place to keep vampires. And a werewolf, sorry, Seth!
Emmett's little girlfriend is on what I'm guessing might be the second day of her change and boy, is she a mess! She looks nothing like the squeaky-clean Disney star with the blond hair and the well-concealed boobs. For one thing, she's covered in blood and screaming obscenities. For another, well her clothes took a bit of a hit.
"What did you do to her?" Bella glares at Emmett. Seth is nowhere to be found.
"She was driving," Emmett says. "Although, she was in no condition to be driving, in retrospect. She was clearly...under the influence." Emmett looks really nervous under Bella's stare but there's something else. He's also just...glowing. Not in an "I'm-out-in-the-sun-and-I'm-a-vampire" way. More of an"I'm-in-love-with-a-screaming-mess" way. It was weird but nice to see.
"We got in an accident," Emmett is continuing to fuss over her while he talks. "She was losing a lot of blood. She was going to die, and I just…" He looks at me helplessly.
"It's cool, Em," I say. I'm actually really happy for him. Bella looks at me skeptically and then she sighs.
"I'm going to go see if I can get her some clothes and some stuff to clean her up. Where's Seth?"
"He is renting a van," Emmett says, his eyes never lifting from Rosalie Hale. "We thought it'd be easier to get her up to Washington in a van of some sort."
"Good call," I say. "We've got limited time, though. I actually think she'll be easier to transport while she's changing."
"That's what I thought, too," Em adds. "You can be radar-detection, and Seth can drive." He turns to Bella. "Thank you for coming along," he says. "I think she might feel...safer if there is a woman there when she wakes up."
Bella's concerns for Rosalie have made put her on edge with Emmett, but his sweetness seems to melt her a little. She nods at him.
"I'm going shopping," she says, jingling the keys at me, and she leaves the barn.
Emmett looks at me. I look back at him blankly. "What?" I say.
"What's with you and Angry-Girl?" he asks, raising his eyebrow at me.
"Well, you know, we had a big fight, and she kissed me," I let slip with a shrug.
Emmett laughs. "Well, she probably still thinks you're a pig."
"Yeah, but at least I'm not Whitlock," I say.
It's the little things, you know?
a/n: Thanks you for reading, reviewing, retweets, etc! xoxo JuJu
