Chapter Text
The fact that vampires were somehow both inherently alluring and inherently off-putting to humans meant that, though she enjoyed a fair and pretty consistent amount of space from the other students at school, every now and then, and especially in the early days of having moved to a new place, Rosalie Hale would find herself being approached by one of them.
Usually it was the result of a dare; her intimidating beauty and her general air of disdain tended to ward off anyone who might think to pursue her in earnest, and then one had to take into account Emmett’s size. His beauty. But those very things made her an appealing target to any teenage boy out to embarrass his friend. Alice didn’t get a lot of it, since her beauty was of the spritely kind and Jasper’s menace was more visceral than obvious. (It was more fun to egg one’s friend on to flirt with the hot girl with the visibly-muscular boyfriend than the cute girl with the boyfriend who gave one chills that couldn’t really be explained.) Bella didn’t get a lot of it because, now that Nessie was old enough to travel on her own instead of joining them in high school, Edward and Bella were back to being more insufferably romantic than ever and, as such, left no gaps into which a human teenager might slip. (Anyone could flirt with a girl who had a boyfriend, but you had to be a different kind of person to flirt with a girl who was practically in her boyfriend’s lap at all times.) Edward had fielded his share of admirers before, and Jacob had actually gone on dates with some of the humans who had taken a shine to him, but now Edward was paired off and Jacob was away with Nessie and her friends, so Rosalie remained the primary comically-desirable one.
In essence, she was not wholly unused to humans walking up to her when she first moved to a “new” town, but usually it was at least preceded by the words “I dare you to ask out Rosalie Hale” or “I dare you to go talk to Rosalie Hale” being whispered across the room. This time, she had no warning.
Also, this time, it was a girl.
Not unprecedented, but a welcome change of pace.
She was shorter than Rosalie, and her build was rather on the stocky side. Full and curvaceous. Ample, even. She wore a long-sleeved shirt with black and gray horizontal stripes, a jean skirt, black tights, a salmon cargo vest covered in pins, and black and white tennis shoes with salmon laces. She had a round face, framed by a halo of tiny curls. Her eyes were dark brown and keen, behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, and she wore both black and white eyeliner that seemed to pop, against her brown skin. Her lipgloss smelled coconutty, her perfume…Estée Lauder, Rosalie was pretty sure.
The human walked up to her with a determined gait– leaving behind a pair of friends who, far from giggling behind their hands, appeared surprised and vaguely dismayed, as if on some level they could intuit even on the second day that the Cullens were a dangerous bunch to just strut up to –and asked, “Did you just throw away that whole tray of food?”
Rosalie stared for a moment, at a loss. The rest of her family had paused in place, too, in their various stages of having thrown away their food already or having been about to do so. Rosalie had just finished dumping the contents of her tray into the trash and adding her tray to the stack above. The only reason she hesitated a moment before answering was…well, she wasn’t sure what it was. She supposed the human had just taken her aback. Usually, she didn’t spare a glance for the humans who tried to spark conversation with her, but at this moment she couldn’t seem to look away.
The steady noise of overlapping conversations continued around them; the cafeteria at large took no notice of the interaction.
“Yes,” Rosalie said, after a full second had passed.
“Why did you do that?”
Rosalie regained her aloofness. “Is that really any of your business?”
“Just seems wasteful.” The human seemed completely unconcerned as to whether it was, in fact, her business. A trait which normally annoyed Rosalie, but now she almost marveled at it. Such confidence. Such brash, invasive confidence. “I noticed you all did the same thing yesterday, too. That’s why I’m bringing it up.”
Rosalie’s latent ice queen tendencies pushed her to inquire, “What, is there something else we can do with food that we bought and don’t want? Is there some kind of donation bin that I’m missing?”
“No, but it seems like maybe in the ordering process you could have just not asked for this much food if you weren’t going to even come close to eating any of it. You didn’t even open your forks and stuff.”
True. The little plastic packs with forks, knives, and napkins were as untouched at the food itself. “What, are you the trash police or something?”
“How dare you accuse me of being a cop,” the human deadpanned.
Rosalie couldn’t help cracking; she let out a breath of laughter. Bella tilted her head as if deciding whether she should be offended on behalf of her father.
The human smiled, at the validation of her joke, and put out her hand to Rosalie. “I’m Jacqueline. Or Jackie. Whichever.”
“Jacqueline what?” Rosalie asked.
The human smiled quizzically. “Are you asking me for my full name?”
Rosalie felt bizarrely certain that she would have blushed, if she could. “It…would appear that I am.” She took Jacqueline’s hand and shook it. Humans were so warm to the touch, and she found that her hand was fascinated by the cushy, fragile little limb. “I’m Rosalie Hale.”
“Jacqueline– Wow, your hand is really cold! Jacqueline Walker. I’m a senior.”
“So are Rosalie and Emmett,” Alice chimed in, pointing between her mentioned siblings with a tone of delight and false surprise, as if some serendipitous discovery had just been made. What was she doing? Evidently, prolonging the conversation. And the others– in particular, Edward and Jasper –were just watching. “Emmett, you should introduce yourself; you guys just made your first friend, here!”
Rosalie turned to Emmett to catch his reaction and found that her mate was glancing between Rosalie and Jacqueline as though something were mathematically amiss. Or, not amiss…As though something of cosmic importance had just slotted into place in front of him and he was still trying to put together what it was.
Still, when Alice brought attention to him, Emmett put on his usual relaxed smile, the dimples that Rosalie so adored appearing in his cheeks. “Hey there,” he said to the human. “I’m Emmett. As my sister Alice already sorta told you.” He reached to shake Jacqueline’s hand, which caused Rosalie to realize that she was still holding it, idly playing with the soft, malleable flesh with her thumb while Jacqueline just stood there with an amused smile and a raised eyebrow and more or less just let it happen.
Rosalie quickly relinquished her grip, dread building in her as she realized. This kind of quickly-budding fascination, historically, only meant one thing. And if having seen the genesis of vampire love several times wasn’t enough, the glee in Alice’s expression made it clear as day.
Rosalie quickly grabbed Emmett’s hand and dragged him away before either of them could be in the human’s presence a moment longer. “Well, now we’ve met. Have a good day,” she said.
She heard Jacqueline remark, “Well, that was colorful,” to the remaining Cullens, as she and Emmett escaped the dining hall.
And Alice’s windchime voice sanguinely replied, “Don’t worry. They’re not shy; they’re just weird.”
Already, the urge to turn back was undeniable. The irrational frustration at not having looked long enough to memorize each of Jacqueline’s curls individually, and not having heard enough of her voice; there were so many words she had never heard her say! The awful feeling of something unresolved and incomplete. From the way that reluctance weighted his stride, Emmett was clearly experiencing the same, but he put forth no resistance in following her. Thank God.
Under a minute. They’d known of her existence for under a minute. How did the mechanisms of mating work so fast? Like a thousand fish hooks in the heart, in the mind, reeling them in.
There was no point pretending that she could wile away the rest of the day in class, now. She would be hyper-focused on whether or not she could hear Jacqueline’s heartbeat or smell her scent at any given time. She wouldn’t do it. Rosalie was not going to burden an innocent human with the affairs of vampires, least of all out of love. Time away, that was what they needed.
(Oh sure. After all, it worked so well for Edward.)
She and Emmett left the building. They got in their car. They drove all the way back home.
Carlisle was at work. Esme was out volunteering somewhere. They had the house to themselves.
Rosalie raked her fingers through her hair and sat down on the living room sofa as heavily as if she actually had any physical need for rest, but not so heavily that she broke it in half.
It was now that Emmett chose to break the tension. “So. I’m guessing we got the same sort of…?”
Rosalie growled.
“Yeah. Thought so.” He sat down more gently and wrapped an arm around her. “It’s okay, babe.”
“Is it?”
“I mean. It’s better than a singer.” When Rosalie didn’t respond, he reiterated, “It’s better than wanting to eat her, right?”
“I am going to kill Alice. She knew that this would happen; she made the timing perfect. She made sure that I waited to throw out my food until after Edward– Edward! Oh, I am going to kill him, too.”
“Jeez, yeah; they really did keep this from us,” Emmett said, though his tone was puzzled rather than angry. “Like they wanted it to happen.”
“Because Alice is a romantic and Edward is in the palm of her hand, when she wants him to be! For some reason, Alice thought it would be better if we had no forewarning, and now we went and made a spectacle.”
“None of the other humans noticed.”
“Still, it was so…embarrassing.” Belatedly, Rosalie closed in on her greatest gripe about what had just taken place. Even more than the objectionable thought of falling in love with a perfectly healthy human, she had embarrassed herself. Something she never did. Never, in life or in vampirism. She had not been her poised, composed self. She had bolted with Emmett in tow like there was a fire in the building. Remembering Jacqueline’s perplexed look, her raised eyebrow, made Rosalie bury her face in her hands. “Good grief, that was humiliating.”
“It wasn’t too bad-“
“It was! She said it was colorful.”
“Colorful is good! Better than colorless.”
Rosalie groaned. “I guess it’s a good thing that I can’t risk ever looking at her again.”
“She seems cool, though. Like, she’d probably be fun to talk to…”
“Em, don’t let the mate bond win. First we’ll be talking to her, then we’ll be turning her, and I don’t want to steal any human’s life.”
“We’re not gonna steal her life. Say…we spoke to her one more time, just for closure, and then never again.”
“It’ll always feel like just one more time, for closure. And then next thing you know, she’s seeing something she shouldn’t and we have to change her because of the Volturi, or she starts getting older, we become terrified of losing her, and we want to change her. We’ll want to! I already feel…” She didn’t know how to describe it. The closest she could come was likening the feeling to a mental and emotional thirst; she needed to know Jacqueline, and she needed to let these inchoate stirrings flourish into love, into more than love. Not to do so was an irritation of the worst kind.
“Hey,” Emmett said. “Whatever we need to do, we’re going to do it, okay? We’re not gonna do anything we shouldn’t do.” He said things in the simplest ways. Rosalie propelled herself into his arms and tried to stop her mind from analyzing every pin she’d seen on Jacqueline’s vest.
But then her mind strayed to Alice, which drove her back to her feet. “Goodness, what will Alice be cooking up? She’s sure to have something planned.”
“We can’t get ahead of someone who can see the future.”
“Well, we can’t let her interfere with Jacqueline’s life, or show Jacqueline something she isn’t supposed to see!” (She realized she was saying her name a lot, but it was a nice name. It felt good to say.)
“I don’t think Alice would-”
"She could already know everything about Jacqueline! Where she lives, and who with, and whether they lock the doors....I'm calling Carlisle, before I rip our sister's head off."
Emmett passed her her phone, with that adoring smile he tended to wear whenever she raved about things like this.
Rosalie dialed, impatiently waiting out the ringing of the phone and mentally casting her mind back to determine whether she'd been a good enough daughter recently to convince him that they should move again, already.
While she still remembered it was the right thing to do.
...
"Well, they didn't say they weren't going to do it again," Jackie mused, she and her two long-time best friends headed to class, "but they did flee in terror. Or two of them did."
"Wow," Kira said. "I can't believe I'm friends with a bully."
"They're the ones bullying the planet with the most wasteful nonsense I've ever seen," Jackie maintained. "I was super nice to them."
"Right. That's why they fled in terror," Brianna chortled.
"Keep it up; I won't drive neither of y'all home. You'll be sitting sad on the curb."
"Nuh-uh," Kira needled. "Drama Club lets out after band; by the time you get to your car, I'll already be on the aux, four-deep in my 'Jackie's a bully' playlist."
"They did throw away literally all of it, though," Brianna added. "And they drive three or four cars to school, even though they're all coming from the same house. Put together, that's cartoon villain stuff. Someone needed to say something."
"I can't believe I'm friends with two bullies," Kira amended. "Out here violating our zero tolerance policy."
They carried on, playfully bickering, all the way to math.
Despite the topic of conversation having gravitated heavily toward the morality of her approach of the situation, Jackie was more interested in the Cullens' reactions. She so enjoyed weird, unexplained things, and the sudden flight of one third of the family for seemingly no reason seemed to add to all that was off-putting and weird about the school's newest students. While also adding some humanizing dimension to the weird, creepily heteronormative, little-boxes-made-of-ticky-tacky vibes of all these ivory mannequins.
"One of them's staring at you," Kira added casually.
Jackie looked. Oh, it was the bronze-haired one, staring pretty openly from the other end of the hallway while his dark-haired sister-girlfriend read a book at his side. If each of the Cullen pairs had a distinct energy to them, Jackie would dub them the Young Republican couple. "Oh no. Looks like I'm gonna be disappeared by Incest Junction. Not how I wanted to go down, but..."
The distant Cullen scoffed and looked away, like he could hear her. The timing was so perfect that all three girls cracked up.