Pandora

Chapter XI:

continue living

Edited by YanaTG and updated on 11/05/2020

I've decided to put original version of Pandora (chapter 1-18) on Dropbox (as PDF). Dropbox has two options you can choose from: with reviews replies or without.

Dropbox links are in my TUMBLR ACCOUNT: sunset-wishes-upon-hill

Adaptability was such a scary thing. Humans were good at adapting and responding and coping. Few weeks of living with vampires in castle, she almost forgot they were vampires and that she was their food. Almost. Few vampires, like Felix, managed to distract her from that fact with his confident, easy going personality that evoked her memory of Ben and Austin.

"Don't tell me girls actually go for that cheesy line." Jessica frowned, sipping her bitter, dark, extra shot Americano just the way she liked it.

"What makes you think I'm making an effort to impress you?" Felix retorted as he sat across the spare chair from her.

Gianna had gone out to get her dinner while Jessica volunteered to man the desk while the position was empty only to find herself an amusement toy for a boring vampire. Jessica couldn't help but laugh at the sight that was comical, his broad, tall body too small for the chair that she swore its legs was going to give out soon and he'll tumble to the ground.

"No, I assume those girls weren't exactly the brightest bulb on the porch if they think those pick-up lines are romantic."

"They don't mind it as long as…" He trailed off, leaving the finishing of the sentence to her imagination.

"..They die a painful death?" Jessica intoned.

"No need to be jealous."

"I guess the vampire world doesn't have a vampire therapist," Jessica retaliated, "Because you guys need one. Several in fact."

Felix's attention suddenly shifted over her shoulder as his lopsided smirk stretched further to his ear and for a moment, Jessica thought He really lost it hasn't he? Living for thousands of years is pretty long enough to drive someone mad. A cold hand snatched her away from her wandering mind, jerking her head to look up at the hand's owner and found equally crimson eyes as the one across her gazing down at her, perfect, white teeth in display as his lips bared a small grin.

"Felix has been keeping you entertained."

"Actually, I decided to grace my presence to him – lucky him." Jessica replied with a smirk of her own to the towering vampire across her.

"Will you be so kind enough to grace me with your presence then?" He politely asked.

"Uh…sure?" Jessica answered hesitantly, shooting a look toward Felix whose smirk – which can't possibly stretch further – only broadened with a look that suggested he knew something she didn't.

"Keep on smirking; I'll punch it off your face." Jessica raised a brow in a challenge and Felix erupted into a roaring laughter and she heard a smaller, more refined sound above her. It was so different from Felix's rough, coarse voice and it always sent tingles down her neck.

"Come." Demetri said, pulling her up from the chair toward the stairs that would lead them to the ground above.

The night in Volterra was always so beautiful, Jessica thought, the clear, cloudless sky; the large bright moon hovering above her and the stars that twinkled so brightly like space diamonds as she used to call it as a child. The town was like a ghost town after 6pm and very little artificial lighting lit the street. She would have thought it was dangerous to roam outside alone with a few people outside but she always like the night than morning – the wind, the mood, the sounds and thought the world was more beautiful with the moon in it than the sun. It was also convenient for vampires to come out without wearing their hood and contact lenses to hide their vampiric features.

"You were gone for a while." Jessica started after a while of walking.

"Work." He curtly said.

"To track people down?"

"And to eliminate if necessary."

"Are those people vampires?"

"Mostly."

Jessica froze before quickly recovering, "You track down humans too?"

"Those who discovers our identity needs to be dealt with before the world realizes vampires exist."

"..So you turn them."

He smiled and made an amusing huff through his nose, "We rarely turn humans into vampires – smaller populations are more convenient to control and monitor. To have a choice in the matter is a privilege not many of us had, you're lucky."

"So they tell me!" She smiled sadly as she watched an older lady walk across them with the aid of the walking stick and a bag of grocery in her free hand. He followed the line of her stare then back to her.

"Is that what you want?" He asked softly, slowly realizing, shifting his observation back to the frail, old woman hobbling with difficulty to walk a longer stride than a shuffle. "To grow…senile."

Jessica rolled her eyes, "Not senile, hey that's just offensive to the elders! I meant just..old. After living a life I want, fulfilling my dreams, achieving my goals and just seeing the amazing, beautiful things in the world…that's what I want."

His face scrunched up, puzzled as though he had trouble processing the sentences.

Jessica watched as different emotions flashed past his face, asking, "What is beautiful to you?" Then she pointed at the run down house in the high ground among the stacks of houses, a dim light shone through a small window, "I think that's beautiful."

Demetri's frown deepened, "..I'm not sure how you'd consider..a shack beautiful."

"You need to learn to give meanings. Which is why I don't really need to go to an art museum." Jessica said as the strength in her voice faltered, "..I don't want to lose that." The implication she would if she turned into a vampire rang loudly between them.

Beauty was subjective. Beauty may be effete and superficial in his eyes but not to her. Beauty was all around her. Its meaning came from the meanings one assigned to it. Like the slow look in the shower that gets you lost in the droplets or the spontaneous tears on your walk home from staring at the colors painted in the sky and really 'seeing' it for so long.

The run down house on your walk home has history, if you know how to 'look' and feel it.

The trees you pass by can be assigned meaning the same way Van Gogh's painting does, if you look at it with the same depth.

If you knew how to look deeply, without concepts and constructs, you can see with sensitivity – a deeply present moment and view that's untainted and meditative. The meaning one is able to derive and assign to their moment to moment experiences will be more than enough to entertain, understand and learn about the world, and yourself.

"A human who wants to become senile and die…" Demetri muttered to himself in amusement, "You're odd."

"Look, Mr. I-live-forever-and-don't-have-to-worry-about-becoming-senile, my 86 years old grandmother would beg to differ. She would probably beat Felix with her flip flops and make him cry more than the day he was born."

He grinned, humour at the expanse of his best friend and partner were past time he often enjoyed, peering as various sorts of emotions streaked past her countenance in a way he could only describe as something 'human'. She looked up at him with a large, toothy grin and he found himself studying the imperfections carved out on her face. His first impression was that of an unremarkable, mediocre girl who, if not for Alec, would have been another faceless human he wouldn't have registered whether he passed by her on the street or a lifeless body among heaps of discarded human food.

She ended their contact, looking down to the ground as she stepped on something spongy, letting out a scream and jumping back against his chest. He shot down to see what had her so frighten, his eyes landing on a small toad where her foot had landed and blinked.

Jessica let out a disgusted choke, backing away to a considerable distance, "EUGH! EWW!"

"You're afraid of.. a toad?"

"I have trypophobia! I don't know why but my mind makes this crazy link between that and the frog and just hell to the no!" Jessica exclaimed, vigorously rubbing the goose bumps raised on her arms.

"And you're not afraid of vampires?!" He grinned.

"Not as much as that toad over there!" Jessica turned to walk the other side, not waiting for him to follow.

With speed her naked eyes couldn't register, he was by her side, chuckling at her misfortune and resuming their leisurely pace.

"I think you'd make a lovely vampire." He commented, "And I'm curious as to what kind of gift you may develop, if you were to have one."

"I don't think I'd make a great vampire." Jessica shook her head, "I'd make a horrible one."

"I never imagined I'd become a vampire – I never could fathom such thing even existed as human. You would never know unless you try." He revealed.

"How did you become a vampire?"

"During one of my many hunting trips, my creator was impressed by my tracking skill and turned me, believing I'd make a great tracker as a vampire. He was right."

"Was it painful?" Jessica asked, morbidly curious, "Becoming a vampire?"

"It's the only pain that is forever etched in my mind."

Well, the more she hears about being a vampire, the less appealing that choice seemed to be.

"Um..more than Jane's?"

He paused, face contorted with thought, "Good question, no one had yet to ask which is worse – although neither would be considered more preferable over the other. But the sensation is similar, but I reckon Jane may do worse."

Jessica allowed the word sink in, remembering that violent burning pain that spread through her nervous system and how any more than that would mostly likely unhinge her mind from the overloading of her pain tolerance more than her brain could ever compartmentalize.

"Do you remember when you were a human?" Jessica ventured, peering at him under her lashes.

Demetri didn't reply straight away, waiting few minutes to curtly answer, "No."

"Not even your family? Friends? Anyone?"

"The dead are easily forgotten and left behind." He was tense now; his body lean and hard as a blade of a sword seemed to sharpen even more and made him more dangerous.

"Right..because the living have to live on." Jessica muttered somewhat bitterly. That had been what people had said to her at her grandfather's funeral, when she was just eight just few years after she moved to Forks and found herself back in Nevada and had been inconsolable. Mourning should have been natural thing to do – especially for a child who had just lost her beloved grandfather all the while inured to move to a strange, little town and struggling to fit and adapt. She wasn't just crying because her grandfather died, it felt as though everything seemed to fall apart and nothing seemed to be going the way she wanted it to go. Because 'Life doesn't go your way as you live, what can you do?' they said.

She exhaled, emptying out all the air in her lung as she looked up at the sky and clenched her eyes shut for a moment. Jessica opened her eyes, counting the stars embedded in the darkly cloaked sky, "I rather be senile then. Being a vampire doesn't sound too awesome as people make it out to be."

"Your friend would beg to differ." He revealed much to her surprise. "So do Gianna. Whether you live 80 years or 100 years, there's no person that would say life is long enough. Everyone says it feels as short as taking a nap." He paused then continued, "There's no one who wants to grow old and die. It's a terrible thing isn't it? Young, old, the good or the bad, it's always the same. Death is rather fair in its treatment. There's no such thing as a particularly terrible death, that's why it's frightening. Your behaviour and age, your personality, your wealth, beauty, your personal beliefs; all the things that add up to make us who we are, they only matter while we're alive. Death makes every last one of them null and void. So any death is terrible."

"Is that one of the teachings from your global religious studies?" Jessica asked curiously.

He smiled, "Yes and no."

"Well," Jessica shrugged, "I think death is not that frightening. I mean don't you think it's futile to live in fear of death? Everyone's going to die sometime so is there any point in pretending not to see it for the present? The thing I'm really afraid of is making a wrong decision while I'm alive and hurting innocent people."

Jessica came to a stop at the entrance to the castle. The place where everything has started.

"Benjamin P. Hardy once said. 'If time is relative, we don't need to assume one minute means one minute. Perhaps five minutes could be squeezed into one minute, or five hours, or five years. The compression of time is not a matter of compounding activities, but the compounding of meaning', so I try not to get too hung up on how much time I have." Jessica expressed with a sad smile, the underlining knowledge that she may not get out of this situation alive, be it a vampire or eroded mass discarded into the sewage spoke between the two.

Demetri met her gaze and for the first time, she wasn't afraid of red anymore. There was an eerie beauty in it that she hadn't notice before, an alluring pull that tugged her deeper into him as she saw herself reflected in the pool of blood.

His hand reached up toward her and she stood her ground, wondering and curious. His finger came to tilt her chin up, his thumb briefly caressing her jawline, "Pity." He said, "I would have liked that you become a vampire."

"Vampire life probably isn't for me."

"I stand by what I said before. You would have made a lovely vampire. Better than Edward's human."

Bella. A vampire. I fear for Earth what her clumsiness as a vampire would do.

"Hey Gianna, do you think you'd make a good vampire?"

Gianna looked up from typing up an email to the Volturi's accountant regarding the monthly expense. It made Jessica laugh when she heard about the satellite branches scattered all over the world – the irony of an ancient vampire coven not being exempted from such a humanely task like tax returns and pay roll was just so hysterical. From what Giannna had revealed, the Volturi, on the front, was a very old, mysterious ancient family residing in Italy who owed majority part of the town and had been involved in dealing with rare, priceless arts – many of the names which she recognized were still hanging on the famous museums in Paris and London, were loans given to the curators in good faith.

It turned out the Volturi was rich. Filthy, dirty rich, it seemed. After all, flying out private jets and funding around fifty people's trip expenses three to four times a week wasn't cheap. Gianna explained the 'victims' were made sure to be brought from all sides of the world, never more than two from the same country or states and there were stringent criteria that had to be met before they were ever contacted, a task that is given – much to Jessica's shock – highly skilled, human investigators with access to people's database. Orphans, widows, homeless, those without family or friends – the types of people who would be a ghost in the system, who would not be missed and most likely to be forgotten without anyone remembering they were even there in the first place. It was sad enough for anyone to be isolated and neglected, but to be targeted as food and discarded to organic lump was even sadder.

The secretary looked up from the computer, blinking, "Huh?"

"Do you think you'd make a good vampire?"

Her frown deepened, brows upturned as Gianna looked at her as if to say 'are you high?', "Huh?"

"I meant do you think–"

"I heard what you said, twice," Gianna interjected, the rhythmic clicking away in the background, "But what kind of question is that?!"

"I mean you said you were going to be a vampire, right?"

The clicking stopped, Gianna's eyes glued onto the computer screen and her whole body still. Minutes later, her fingers resumed typing, clicking send with the mouse and sipped her coffee.

"As long as I do my job, there won't be any problems."

Jessica slowly straightened from the chair, eyes narrowing, "..A-are you saying there's a chance..that you won't be..?"

"I'll become a vampire." She affirmed firmly, "When the time comes, they'll turn me."

Jessica felt her lips thin, biting the inside of her cheek from spitting out something that would ruin whatever friendship blossomed between them.

"Well, do you think you'd be a good vampire?" Jessica decided to restart again.

"What do you mean good? Good as in hero-good or..?"

"Uh, good as in you'd be better at being a vampire than a human?"

"Yes." Gianna confidently replied with a smile, "You know how you sometimes feel empty in your life even though you have everything you want and need, for me, that emptiness is being human. I think I'd adjust to vampire life quite well."

Jessica nodded, their conversation reaching to an end. Gianna began to write something else and Jessica was left free to allow her mind to wander.

"Oh!" Gianna suddenly cried, "Before I forget.." She rummaged through one of the table drawer and pulled out a SIM card and large, rectangular box and slid it across to her, "Your phone, I keep forgetting about it. The SIM card is to replace the one that was damaged – it's the same number, same name and address."

"Oh thanks, it's fine." Jessica shyly accepted, reading the cover as she realized with a gasp, "This is the latest one! But my one was really old!"

Her phone had been her fourteenth present. It had always been her dream to have an iPhone, saving up her allowances to buy it only to realize thirty dollars a week would take years but on the day of her birthday morning, she found a wrapped gift on her bed and lo and behold, it was her dream phone. It wasn't cheap, she knew it, and it was a luxury more than her parents could afford to spend.

She wistfully stared at the box, opening to pull out the glistening, rose gold phone that shone back at her.

"Don't worry about it, I should have gotten you the phone earlier than you coming up here to make phone calls each day."

"It beats just lying around in the room all day."

"How is it living with vampires?" Gianna grinned excitedly, urging her to spill the beans.

Jessica hummed in thought, "Have you seen Planet Earth II, the one with Iguana VS Snakes?"

"Oh, the one that just hatched and had to run for his life from group of snakes."

Jessica nodded, "It was the most stressful and anxious moment in my life."

"Same!"

"Yeah only I'm that iguana and they are the snakes."

"Oh…"

Bella: Are you alive?

Jess: Duh, how do you think I'm texting you then? Just in my room.

Bella: I mean..are you still human?

Jess: *Picture sent*

Jessica sent her a goofy, close-up selfie, sticking out her tongue while making sure her eye colors showed its usual dark blue colour.

Bella: Jess, why do you not want us to come and get you? You didn't even call me for few days other than a voicemail that I or Edward shouldn't come and get you. Are you alright? Did Jane hurt you?

Her brows shot up as she read the last line of the message. What? How did Bella know?

Jess: How did you know Jane hurt me?

The phone vibrated, screen changed to incoming call as she clicked accept and put it against her ear.

"Bella, that's freaky, how the hell did you know about what happened with Jane?"

"Would you believe if I said..Alice can see the future?"

"Yeah," She nodded amusingly, "After all I've been through, that's probably the least surprising fact. I knew Alice was hiding something when she guessed last year's Met Gala theme four months before it was announced publicly and what we needed to study on Mr T's."

"You said she was working for Met Gala and we only had two subjects to study for Mr T."

"How was I supposed to know she had gift of seeing future?! Besides, Mr T likes to throw in the most random question to throw us off."

"Well," Bella sighed exasperatedly, impatience laced in her voice, "Are you going to tell me why you don't want us to come and get you?" Then her voice dropped, almost becoming quiet and there was a note of quiver that only came out when she was worried and upset like the time when she told her Edward broke up with her and the Cullens suddenly decided to move away, "I'm worried about what will happen to you..I don't trust them, Jess, I don't want to lose you."

"Hey, hey, it's going to be fine, Bella." Jessica bit her lip to steady the trembling seizing her vocal cord, tears gathering in the corner of her eyes, "I'll be fine, I don't want to involve you or Edward or Dr Cullen more than I already have because of this stupid decision of mine. So promise me, o-okay? Just not now. I'll try to find a way."

Bella sniffled, "I'm here for you, Jess, Edward and Dr. Cullens won't mind it."

"I know–"

"J-just remember that you can always ask for my help, okay. If you're having a hard time, promise me, you'll ask me for help instead of keeping it to yourself and hurting yourself. I know you tried to be there for me when Edward was gone and I just shut you out and you gave me the space I needed..because I think you're like that too. You don't like to bother others and keep everything to yourself and even if people want to be nice, they don't know how. So if you need help, just say you need help."

An eight year old Jessica stood in front of the closed casket, her little face reflecting on the polished oak wood.

"Because you had the same face." She muttered in daze, mind wandering through the old memory, "When I first saw you and then after Edward left. A face not knowing what to do when it's just too hard to bear. And wished you'd at least scream or something than torturing yourself."

"Just promise me."

"I promise."

"..So…how is it over there?"

Jessica sniffed, a small smile spreading across her face, "I guess I'm doing okay. Still alive yay! How about you?"

"Same as always. Mr T wants 5000 words on 'The claim that all actions are really self-interested can be given two possible interpretations. One is true but boring; the other is interesting but false.' I don't know why I chose philosophy."

"Because Edward likes it, remember?"

"Oh, yeah..uh, Jess, this might be a personal question.."

"What is it?"

"Eh-hem, uh, what's-well-uh-your relationship with Alec?"

Jessica's eyes widened, dreading as to where this was going, "Bella, what are you saying?"

"Uh..what I'm suggesting is..there's nothing going on between you guys right?"

"Bella, are you drunk?"

"Jess, I'm not-I'm just–"

"There's nothing between us." Emphasising nothing to leave no room for any doubt, "That's just weird. Okay, he's like fifteen or sixteen or whatever his age may be–just no."

"Okay, just tell me if anything happens yeah?"

"Yes, mum, I'll make sure to let you know if I get a vampire boyfriend."

"Jess, I'm serious, just let me know if something happens, okay? I've got to go. Talk to you later."

"'Kay, Bella." Jessica let out a sigh, sliding down the headboard she was leaning against to her back. Tracing at the gold bowed wreath ceiling, rich with relief and painting, her thought began to stray once again and Jessica Stanley found herself drowning in the darkness of her own mind.

Edited by YanaTG and updated on 11/05/2020