Jade's Journal Entry 1
Today's Date: My Birthday
Chris got me this for my birthday gift. I know. I wasn't expecting it, either. We're not as close as we could be. Between my training, high school and his… well, our 'family business' I'm not sure who to blame for the state of our relationship, actually. Maybe Gerard?
I know he can see that I'm in pain. He sees me more clearly than most. I don't give him enough credit for that. I'm not sure how much therapeutic relief I'll get from this, but I figured it was a good place for me to expel these thoughts. They're too much, sometimes, so much that I can't escape them; even when I sleep, I dream of them. They haunt me.
Pen to paper. I'll lay it all out, and maybe then I can finally close it all away and get some rest.
So, what's the big deal? What's my big secret? What's so terrible and incomprehensible that I've kept it a secret from everyone, even my own family? What could me, a fifteen-year-old girl who wants for nothing, possibly have to keep me awake at night? Well, I'm not actually fifteen, for starters. I'd estimate that (spiritually at least) I'm actually a few years older than Chris, to be perfectly honest—old enough to have a mortgage and a few kids of my own, had fate been so inclined to give me the chance. Hah. Yeah, right. I'm probably not making much sense. Let me try this again.
I was alive, before this. I mean I had a whole other family—a military family, ironically enough—so it was different and yet… not so much. I'm an Argent now, after all, and being raised in a family of hunters can be pretty militaristic at times. Especially with Gerard for a father. Anyways, because I grew up with a parent in the military before, I never settled in one place for too long. In my previous life, we moved around so much that now, in this life, I feel stuck. Trapped in Beacon Hills. And that's not even the weirdest part.
Okay, here it goes. My big secret. No way you're going to believe this. Are you ready?
I watched a show about this town. It was called Teen Wolf, only it was set in the 2010s and the storyline centered around a group of teenagers six years younger than me. I watched their lives, their tragedies and triumphs. I laughed at them, and I cried over them when they died or were hurt. In my old life, when I watched the show, I didn't have many actual friends, and so I grew overly attached to characters in books and TV shows. That was particularly true for the characters of Teen Wolf. Especially Stiles. He was so funny, but he had such a sad life.
Anyways, there it is. It seems so stupid when I lay it out like that, but the truth is, this has been eating my conscience alive for my entire life. Because I know things now. It's almost like I'm psychic, but I'm not. Still, I know the future. Everything I knew from watching Teen Wolf, from reading fanfiction, from imagining what it would be like to meet the characters or hold a conversation… how I might change the outcome of certain events if I had been there, if I was only given the chance. And now it's really, really real. They aren't just characters anymore, they're my family. I know the dark truth about all of them, about our past and the duality of my dad's shadowy personality. One which I believe Kate inherited. They'll go to any lengths to exterminate the werewolves. They hate them just for existing. It's not simply that werewolves can be dangerous, it's that my sister and my dad have both forgotten that werewolves are also human a long, long time ago. Sometimes I wonder if Kate ever really knew it in the first place. It's more of a game to her, a way for her to strategize and outmaneuver the enemy. She and dad had a mind for strategy. You should see them play chess. A single match can go on for hours.
And when she's hunting werewolves, her favorite methodology is conning them into a personal relationship and then killing them and anyone who stood in her way. Originally I thought that might've been a Derek specific thing, but it wasn't. And she never stops long enough to consider that the other person isn't playing along, isn't also out to kill her, isn't participating in her big competition of who can kill who first. It's not much of a game when the other person has no idea what's going on. She's a hunter in the truest sense.
My childhood is a whole other issue altogether. I can remember being born.
It was very, very painful, but maybe not for the reasons you'd think. One second, I was a seventeen-year old driving home late one night from the grocery store, and the light at the stoplight turned green. I moved forward along with the rest of traffic and looked over to see the blinding white light of a pair of headlights piercing through the window to my left, then there was a deafening crash and a wave of heat and I was screaming.
And I didn't stop screaming, not even when I felt what must have been a giant hand gently lifting me up and wrapping something soft and smooth around my shoulders. No, not just my shoulders, my whole body, encasing me like a straitjacket, smashing my arms against my sides as a giant calloused palm cupped the back of my neck and head and lifted me even higher into the light.
I can remember something blowing across my face, and then I stopped screaming and gasped and opened my eyes…
Imagine waking up one day and being purged out of a womb, but with a fully installed young-adult mind with an entire adolescent life's worth of knowledge stuck inside your head. Imagine being trapped as a baby, reduced to infantile motor-skills and the horrifying realization that you died. You were dead, everyone you loved was gone, and your new dad was Gerard Argent.
Yeah. Welcome to my life.
When Jade was born, the first thing Gerard noticed were her eyes. They were like an endless pool of trapped smoke, grey but with shadows of black that gave them a curious depth. And strangest of all, no visible pupils. It was then he knew something was seriously wrong.
This had never happened to him before, or to anyone he knew of, for that matter. He'd never even met a child who was blind. He felt woefully underprepared for that sort of a handicap, and if there was one thing Gerard hated, it was being underprepared.
His mind spun with all the steps he might have to take to give her every advantage he could. Already he was adapting the plans he'd made to teach her like he had her siblings before her, scrapping the traditional means of training altogether and resolving to come up with a new way to show her how to fight—how to survive, how to thrive in spite of this setback.
In the end it seemed that she was not totally blind, at least. Jade seemed to be able to see shapes in front of her, and she did respond to light. Obviously there was no pupillary response to gauge, but she would shrink away from the light and scream at the top of her little lungs if one was flashed directly into her eyes. It would be impossible to know for sure one way or the other until she was older—all babies were born with underdeveloped vision, after all—but for now at least, Gerard took solace in the fact that Jade could see shadows and shapes and that was something. It was better than nothing, certainly.
Aside from this physical anomaly, his youngest daughter seemed quieter than both Chris and Kate had been. In fact, she didn't even seem to cry when she was hungry. This too was concerning, but only because it signaled that she had poor survival instincts. Gerard and his wife adopted a regimented feeding schedule for her and it all seemed to be working out fine.
She was also quite large, as far as babies went. The bright sky-blue and white body suit that had been carefully set aside for her was the standard newborn size, and it was too small. Her little feet had stuck through the bottom. They'd had to borrow a plain, larger set from the hospital, and the majority of the clothes that they were gifted at Jade's baby shower no longer served a purpose. They would need at least a size larger than the newborn size.
But what was most striking about his youngest was how defined her personality was, even from the very beginning. Of course, she tired as easily as any newborn did, but in the moments she was conscious, Jade wanted to explore. She would wiggle and wiggle and it was all he could do to keep her from rolling out of his hands and bouncing off the couch. The whole thing was actually hilarious, if you asked him, though it almost gave his wife heart-failure more than once.
And then one day, Jade actually fell. It was several months down the road from when they first brought her home, and by that point Jade had enough control over herself to be able to lift her head and crawl around on her belly if they left her unattended long enough.
He'd been outside with Chris, practicing shooting targets with their newest guns, when his wife came bounding outside with Jade screeching in her arms, covered in blood. For a long moment everyone panicked, but after he heard that she'd merely fell and butted her head against the leg of a table, Gerard knew it looked much worse than it probably was because it was a head wound, which bleed far worse than other types of injuries.
He rushed her to the hospital and waited patiently while they fixed her up, and checked her over for more serious internal injuries (there were none) and that's when his daughter surprised him yet again. She reached out to grab a fistful of the dark, curly hair that belonged to the nurse currently holding her, and said, "McCaw."
Gerard blinked and the woman holding his daughter threw her head back and laughed prettily. "Oh, what a smart girl!" She cooed. "Did you hear the doctors call me that?"
Jade let go of Nurse McCall's hair in order to touch the woman's face instead. They locked gazes for a moment, and then Jade kicked her feet and laughed in delight. Nurse McCall raised her eyebrows and smiled.
"Hi," Jade waved to the doctor that had slipped in the room behind Nurse McCall. The young nurse jolted in surprise and exclaimed at the sudden appearance of her coworker.
"Oh! Doctor Hilliard! I didn't hear you knock; I'm sorry!" Nurse McCall moved as though to hand Jade off and Gerard smiled thinly as he interjected.
"That's because she didn't. We call Jade our little alarm-system. She always seems to know everyone who's in the room, even if they're trying to hide."
He let his smile curl higher until it creased his cheeks and wiggled a finger at tiny Jade, who folded her arm against her side and settled herself against Nurse McCalls hip.
"Oh, I wasn't trying to hide," Doctor Hilliard laughed. "I'm simply here to observe Nurse McCall. She's new here, so we're still evaluating her to get a better scope of her skills."
Nurse McCall looked like she had more to add to that but thought better of it due to the patients currently waiting for a more thorough explanation of Jade's injury and treatment. "Well, at least we know those little eyes of hers work after all," She quipped, trying to lighten the mood. And then froze with dawning horror coloring her face red. Nurse McCall sputtered, looking from Jade to Gerard to Doctor Hilliard and then back to Jade. "No! That's not how I meant it—I—I didn't mean because of the way her eyes look. I mean, I think they're pretty! They're like two little shining moons—"
"Nurse McCall," the doctor called in a warning tone, and the younger woman closed her eyes and pasted a smile on her lips that didn't quite reach her eyes. She took a breath, and when she opened them again they flickered remorsefully.
"What I meant to say was that the fall wasn't enough to cause a concussion. She didn't even need stitches. We closed the wound with glue, which will dissolve on its own in about a week. Change the bandages if you notice too much bleeding, and after about three days remove them to give it a chance to air out." She continued through the treatment instructions, and when she finally handed Jade back over to Gerard, Nurse McCall took the opportunity to apologize for her faux-pas earlier.
All in all, it was an eventful day, but not all that traumatizing for Jade. In fact, she seemed rather pleased by her trip to the hospital—as though she'd met a new friend—and it didn't take long at all for the small cut along her eyebrow to heal and fade into a deep pink, jagged line. He was just relieved that her eyes turned out to be visibly unusual, and that was it. From what he could tell there were no actual visual deficits that accompanied their ghostly appearance. If anything, she was able to notice things as carefully as any paranoid adult would.
Yes, he could find use for them yet.
(Author's Note): Here we are, you guys. I hope you're ready, because I've never done anything like this before for Teen Wolf. There aren't very many stories out there about events before Scott was bitten. Personally, I've always wanted to read one so I thought, you know. Why not write one?
Jade's eyes were inspired by the Hyūga family's eyes in Naruto.
Please review and let me know your thoughts, or questions!