underlined for emphasis, Renesmee Cullen and Jo Harvelle, PG
Title: underlined for emphasis
Author: metonomia
Fandom: Twilight, Supernatural
Rating: PG
Warnings: a little violence, even less language
Prompt: Prompt #4 - I was thought to be 'stuck up.' I wasn't. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure. - Bette Davis
Summary: Be the change you want to see in the world, she quotes at herself, and laughs because she'll never change again, and tells herself instead let the world change the way you want to see.
Author's Notes: I started out trying to stick fairly closely to the prompt, but the final story doesn't really have much to do with it. The title is from T.S. Eliot's poem Whispers of Immortality, and a huge thank-you to be_themoon for the beta!
When Renesmee Carlie Cullen is seven years old, she looks and thinks like she is seventeen, and she decides that no sane seventeen-year-old girl, no normal girl, would let anyone call her ‘Nessie,’ and she refuses to speak to anyone who does so. It’s childish, she admits to Jake - the first to break the nickname habit.
“But you’ve all always spoiled me, yeah? Childish is what I know how to be. Besides,” she giggles, “I like throwing everybody off balance. It doesn’t happen much.”
Finally they get the picture, and ask what she would prefer to be called. She thinks about changing her entire name, or maybe just taking the ‘Renesmee’ out and going by Carlie, but she can’t do that to Esme, who has signed all her school forms and lets her stay with the main family when Bella and Edward go on second honeymoons right in their house, or to Renee, who Bella - Mom - never lets Renesmee see but who calls every weekend and who sends her postcards filled with sun and sand and palm trees.
“I like ‘Ren,’” she tells them, and the choice feels good. Grown-up. A compromise, made by her, for her.
+
“I like immortality,” she confesses to Edward - to her father, one day as they sit playing a never-ending duet. “I don’t feel like a freak - maybe because I’ve always been like this. Maybe because I don’t have to be changed, but I also get to change. I like the idea of going back to high school in a few centuries and reading about history and remembering what I was doing on that day. I’ll be like a living library,” she laughs, and he lifts his hands off the keys to ruffle her hair and then turn back to playing without any break in the music. He never actually responds, so she knows he disagrees with the sentiment, and she feels strangely close to her mother for once, in love with her own supernatural existence and the opportunities it gives her.
+
It’s hard, trying not to love a person who has been custom ordered for her - except that sometimes Ren remembers that it really works the other way around. She’s been marked as prime mating ground for Jacob, and though he would never say that, or even think it, it’s true. She looks at her parents and thinks that even if they are utterly ridiculous, at least they chose each other without some invisible hand shoving them together. Besides, she’s known Jake since forever. Claire is all whispers and giggles these days, IMing Ren with plans for prom dresses and wedding flowers and careers that she and Quil can go into as a couple. It’s cute, in a way, but when Claire asks how Jake is, with that gossipy tone that means she expects romance novels and engagement rings, Ren doesn’t know how to respond. Jacob is Jacob, her Jacob, her uncle and brother and friend, who taught her to hunt and once drove her across the country just because she wanted to see it all. He’s gorgeous, and she’s old enough to see that, but she cannot understand how she could ever want him. Even worse, she can see that he wants her, that he wants so much to hold her and kiss her and love her, and that he sees absolutely nothing weird about that. But it is weird, and she doesn’t know how to tell him that she will never love him woman to man.
“Jake,” she finally tells him, “I’m going to live forever.”
“So I have to stick with the wolf thing forever,” he shrugs. “You’re worth it.”
“That’s stupid,” Ren says flatly, and tries not to care when he fails to hide his wounded look.
+
When she’s finally eighteen, in years and not just looks, she collects letters of recommendation (none from her family, although she is tempted to let Emmett have a try) and writes up essays, picking through her millions of words for the few that describe her best, carefully listing only one teenager’s worth of sports and classes. She applies all over the country and chooses Kenyon, decides she’ll major in anthropology - study humans and the way they change, she thinks, and she can maybe find something about herself, her family. And even if she doesn’t, she figures that an unlimited lifespan gives her plenty of time to write the perfect anthropological thesis. Be the change you want to see in the world, she quotes at herself, and laughs because she’ll never change again, and tells herself instead let the world change the way you want to see.
“Like the bird?” her new roommate asks when they first exchange nicknames, and Ren likes the girl immediately.
“Nothing so fragile,” Ren grins, and offers her hand, which the other girl takes in an enthusiastic grip, strong for a human.
“Jo,” she says, and asks Ren if she wants to go explore the campus, which it turns out is exactly what Ren wants to do.
+
She has friends here, people who have never known her before and are a lot like her, and they like her, too. They sit outside, studying or eating or just laying across each other laughing and playing music too loudly. Ren picks up a smattering of freckles and even a bit of a tan, and takes triumphant pictures to send back home. Her and her friends eating dinner, studying, going to the movies. Dressing up for Halloween - Ren is a zombie - and tossing handfuls of candy in the air. In every photo she is smiling, laughing, and when she writes having tons of fun in Ohio, love you, miss you on the back of her posing with Jo in the doorway of their room, she knows that Bella will cry tearlessly and Edward will shake his head in surprise and Esme will look at Rose as they both smile, and she really does miss them all, just a little bit.
She puts up the glossy pictures of her family that Bella refused to let her leave without, but after hanging out in Ren’s room becomes code for slobbering over Ren’s hot cousins, she takes them down and pastes them in her postcard notebook next to Renee’s hugs and kisses from the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone. It’s easier to think of them as Mom and Dad when she isn’t constantly explaining them away as sister, cousin, my brother and his fiancee. In November she calls her mom and tells her about classes, about rereading Eliot and Saturdays with her discussion group, about the archaeological dig in Turkey she’s thinking of going on in the summer.
“I think I’m going to visit Grandma for Christmas,” she says, and Bella sighs a little but agrees.
“Love you, Mom,” Ren admits before hanging up. Distance is good, she decides. Change is good.
When she comes back from Christmas in Florida, Ren finds Jo absently flipping a knife between her fingers, letting it trail across the page of her textbook. Ren’s eyes pick out the scars it leaves on the page, rough white cutting through the glossy covering to underline whatever words Jo likes best. She imagines the blade slipping, falling from Jo’s hand to underline a vein in the girl’s arm. She wonders what Jo’s blood would taste of, and if she would regret draining her best friend down to nothing.
Jo glances up and the knife disappears as she leaps up, discomfort masked in welcome by the time she throws her arms around Ren.
“Welcome back.” Ren catches the plea in her voice for no questions, no judgment.
“Whatcha reading?” she asks.
“Socrates bitching out his whiny friends,” Jo replies, eyes wary. “I think the jerk just wanted to claim invention of migraines.”
“Socrates will always be around to give us headaches,” Ren declares, “but New Years’ parties are only once a year. Come on; we’re supposed to pick up sparkling cider.”
+
Jo teaches Ren how to drink, popping bottle caps across the room and lecturing on the finer points of doing shots. Ren likes the burn of the alcohol, which numbs the thirst always tickling her throat. Fire with fire, she tells herself, and weighs the relative merits of becoming a raging alcoholic, but it turns out she is the most embarrassing lightweight ever. She never manages to really dull the thirst without completely blacking out, which is just stupid, and Ren refuses to be stupid if she can at all help it.
She’d been doing so well ignoring the little tickle in her throat, but once it rears up she fixates upon it like she hasn’t since she was about three years old. She develops a nervous cough trying to rid herself of the perpetual itch, and spends several days berating herself for not allowing Carlisle to set up a supply of donated blood. After self-castigation runs out, she uses one night to yell at her mother over the phone for spoiling her so much. It was all good for her to have a moral breakthrough and stop stealing the blood from the veins of the sick when she was still easily able to hunt, but now that she’s here, where hunting is impossible unless she develops a real taste for squirrels, she would just about kill for a bag of B-negative.
+
For spring break Ren and Jo decide to road trip across to Nebraska to visit Jo’s mother, and Ren pretends she doesn’t see the bag of knives and guns Jo heaves into the trunk. She’s grateful for them, though, and for the fact that Jo doesn’t hesitate to get them out, when they run into some sort of shapeshifting monster at a disarmingly quiet rest stop in Illinois.
“Head down, Ren,” Jo yells as she loads, fires, creeps cautiously from behind the car to check if she got the thing.
“Like hell,” Ren mutters, out of her seat and on top of the shifter just as it swipes at Jo. She’s out of practice but muscle memory sets in and she kicks it back a few yards before settling into a hunting position, arms loose in front of her, balance good and eyes darting everywhere.
“Are you trying to get killed?” Jo shrieks as she shoots at the monster again; the bullet goes wide as it dodges, but its movement sends it straight into Ren’s arms and she has her teeth to its throat in less than a second. A minute later it is dead and Ren is really full for the first time in ages - the thing tastes bitter and a little rancid, but blood is blood and this is the first she’s had in over half a year. She gasps a little for breath as she breaks away from the body, the knife she grabbed off of Jo sliding out of its throat as though she killed it with the weapon, and turns to grin at her friend.
“Not at all,” she chirps, looking hard at Jo, who is frozen in something like shock and confusion and awe, trying to gauge if she saw what Ren really did.
She thinks that she would survive if Jo decides to put a bullet in her, but the beating of her heart, loud and frantic, tells her that she would rather not test the theory. She steps forward slowly, glancing in the car window to make sure no blood stains her face, and holds her hands out in supplication. For what, she’s not sure; she is fully aware that she could close the distance between them long before Jo could get a shot off. Jo could be left dead on the side of the road, a young woman attacked by a wild animal as she stretched away the long hours of the road. Ren would be back at school when the news came, innocent and heartbroken to hear of her friend’s death.
And she would be heartbroken, and she will not kill Jo. And it doesn’t even matter, in the end, because Jo is lowering the shotgun with a helpless little laugh.
“So, you’re a hunter, too?” she asks with a certain measure of relief in her voice.
“I guess,” Ren replies. “Never killed anything like this, though.”
“There are monsters like this all over the place,” Jo tells her, handing Ren a towel to wipe down the knife, and deftly unloading the shotgun and placing it back in the car. “My family hunts - hunted - them. It’s basically the weirdest family business ever, but I can’t get away from it apparently, not even by going to college.”
“I know about weird families, trust me,” Ren says.
“And you know how to hunt! So, want to ditch Nebraska and go check out a haunting in Mississippi? Just, no telling my mom. She’d kill me for going off even with another person.”
“I’d love to,” Ren agrees. “But I get to drive this time.”
“Fine, you can drive, but then you have to let me tell you about the monsters we might find. I don’t want you to be surprised by anything. Like, did you know there are actual vampires and werewolves?”
“No way,” Ren laughs as she gets behind the wheel.
Author: metonomia
Fandom: Twilight, Supernatural
Rating: PG
Warnings: a little violence, even less language
Prompt: Prompt #4 - I was thought to be 'stuck up.' I wasn't. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure. - Bette Davis
Summary: Be the change you want to see in the world, she quotes at herself, and laughs because she'll never change again, and tells herself instead let the world change the way you want to see.
Author's Notes: I started out trying to stick fairly closely to the prompt, but the final story doesn't really have much to do with it. The title is from T.S. Eliot's poem Whispers of Immortality, and a huge thank-you to be_themoon for the beta!
When Renesmee Carlie Cullen is seven years old, she looks and thinks like she is seventeen, and she decides that no sane seventeen-year-old girl, no normal girl, would let anyone call her ‘Nessie,’ and she refuses to speak to anyone who does so. It’s childish, she admits to Jake - the first to break the nickname habit.
“But you’ve all always spoiled me, yeah? Childish is what I know how to be. Besides,” she giggles, “I like throwing everybody off balance. It doesn’t happen much.”
Finally they get the picture, and ask what she would prefer to be called. She thinks about changing her entire name, or maybe just taking the ‘Renesmee’ out and going by Carlie, but she can’t do that to Esme, who has signed all her school forms and lets her stay with the main family when Bella and Edward go on second honeymoons right in their house, or to Renee, who Bella - Mom - never lets Renesmee see but who calls every weekend and who sends her postcards filled with sun and sand and palm trees.
“I like ‘Ren,’” she tells them, and the choice feels good. Grown-up. A compromise, made by her, for her.
+
“I like immortality,” she confesses to Edward - to her father, one day as they sit playing a never-ending duet. “I don’t feel like a freak - maybe because I’ve always been like this. Maybe because I don’t have to be changed, but I also get to change. I like the idea of going back to high school in a few centuries and reading about history and remembering what I was doing on that day. I’ll be like a living library,” she laughs, and he lifts his hands off the keys to ruffle her hair and then turn back to playing without any break in the music. He never actually responds, so she knows he disagrees with the sentiment, and she feels strangely close to her mother for once, in love with her own supernatural existence and the opportunities it gives her.
+
It’s hard, trying not to love a person who has been custom ordered for her - except that sometimes Ren remembers that it really works the other way around. She’s been marked as prime mating ground for Jacob, and though he would never say that, or even think it, it’s true. She looks at her parents and thinks that even if they are utterly ridiculous, at least they chose each other without some invisible hand shoving them together. Besides, she’s known Jake since forever. Claire is all whispers and giggles these days, IMing Ren with plans for prom dresses and wedding flowers and careers that she and Quil can go into as a couple. It’s cute, in a way, but when Claire asks how Jake is, with that gossipy tone that means she expects romance novels and engagement rings, Ren doesn’t know how to respond. Jacob is Jacob, her Jacob, her uncle and brother and friend, who taught her to hunt and once drove her across the country just because she wanted to see it all. He’s gorgeous, and she’s old enough to see that, but she cannot understand how she could ever want him. Even worse, she can see that he wants her, that he wants so much to hold her and kiss her and love her, and that he sees absolutely nothing weird about that. But it is weird, and she doesn’t know how to tell him that she will never love him woman to man.
“Jake,” she finally tells him, “I’m going to live forever.”
“So I have to stick with the wolf thing forever,” he shrugs. “You’re worth it.”
“That’s stupid,” Ren says flatly, and tries not to care when he fails to hide his wounded look.
+
When she’s finally eighteen, in years and not just looks, she collects letters of recommendation (none from her family, although she is tempted to let Emmett have a try) and writes up essays, picking through her millions of words for the few that describe her best, carefully listing only one teenager’s worth of sports and classes. She applies all over the country and chooses Kenyon, decides she’ll major in anthropology - study humans and the way they change, she thinks, and she can maybe find something about herself, her family. And even if she doesn’t, she figures that an unlimited lifespan gives her plenty of time to write the perfect anthropological thesis. Be the change you want to see in the world, she quotes at herself, and laughs because she’ll never change again, and tells herself instead let the world change the way you want to see.
“Like the bird?” her new roommate asks when they first exchange nicknames, and Ren likes the girl immediately.
“Nothing so fragile,” Ren grins, and offers her hand, which the other girl takes in an enthusiastic grip, strong for a human.
“Jo,” she says, and asks Ren if she wants to go explore the campus, which it turns out is exactly what Ren wants to do.
+
She has friends here, people who have never known her before and are a lot like her, and they like her, too. They sit outside, studying or eating or just laying across each other laughing and playing music too loudly. Ren picks up a smattering of freckles and even a bit of a tan, and takes triumphant pictures to send back home. Her and her friends eating dinner, studying, going to the movies. Dressing up for Halloween - Ren is a zombie - and tossing handfuls of candy in the air. In every photo she is smiling, laughing, and when she writes having tons of fun in Ohio, love you, miss you on the back of her posing with Jo in the doorway of their room, she knows that Bella will cry tearlessly and Edward will shake his head in surprise and Esme will look at Rose as they both smile, and she really does miss them all, just a little bit.
She puts up the glossy pictures of her family that Bella refused to let her leave without, but after hanging out in Ren’s room becomes code for slobbering over Ren’s hot cousins, she takes them down and pastes them in her postcard notebook next to Renee’s hugs and kisses from the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone. It’s easier to think of them as Mom and Dad when she isn’t constantly explaining them away as sister, cousin, my brother and his fiancee. In November she calls her mom and tells her about classes, about rereading Eliot and Saturdays with her discussion group, about the archaeological dig in Turkey she’s thinking of going on in the summer.
“I think I’m going to visit Grandma for Christmas,” she says, and Bella sighs a little but agrees.
“Love you, Mom,” Ren admits before hanging up. Distance is good, she decides. Change is good.
When she comes back from Christmas in Florida, Ren finds Jo absently flipping a knife between her fingers, letting it trail across the page of her textbook. Ren’s eyes pick out the scars it leaves on the page, rough white cutting through the glossy covering to underline whatever words Jo likes best. She imagines the blade slipping, falling from Jo’s hand to underline a vein in the girl’s arm. She wonders what Jo’s blood would taste of, and if she would regret draining her best friend down to nothing.
Jo glances up and the knife disappears as she leaps up, discomfort masked in welcome by the time she throws her arms around Ren.
“Welcome back.” Ren catches the plea in her voice for no questions, no judgment.
“Whatcha reading?” she asks.
“Socrates bitching out his whiny friends,” Jo replies, eyes wary. “I think the jerk just wanted to claim invention of migraines.”
“Socrates will always be around to give us headaches,” Ren declares, “but New Years’ parties are only once a year. Come on; we’re supposed to pick up sparkling cider.”
+
Jo teaches Ren how to drink, popping bottle caps across the room and lecturing on the finer points of doing shots. Ren likes the burn of the alcohol, which numbs the thirst always tickling her throat. Fire with fire, she tells herself, and weighs the relative merits of becoming a raging alcoholic, but it turns out she is the most embarrassing lightweight ever. She never manages to really dull the thirst without completely blacking out, which is just stupid, and Ren refuses to be stupid if she can at all help it.
She’d been doing so well ignoring the little tickle in her throat, but once it rears up she fixates upon it like she hasn’t since she was about three years old. She develops a nervous cough trying to rid herself of the perpetual itch, and spends several days berating herself for not allowing Carlisle to set up a supply of donated blood. After self-castigation runs out, she uses one night to yell at her mother over the phone for spoiling her so much. It was all good for her to have a moral breakthrough and stop stealing the blood from the veins of the sick when she was still easily able to hunt, but now that she’s here, where hunting is impossible unless she develops a real taste for squirrels, she would just about kill for a bag of B-negative.
+
For spring break Ren and Jo decide to road trip across to Nebraska to visit Jo’s mother, and Ren pretends she doesn’t see the bag of knives and guns Jo heaves into the trunk. She’s grateful for them, though, and for the fact that Jo doesn’t hesitate to get them out, when they run into some sort of shapeshifting monster at a disarmingly quiet rest stop in Illinois.
“Head down, Ren,” Jo yells as she loads, fires, creeps cautiously from behind the car to check if she got the thing.
“Like hell,” Ren mutters, out of her seat and on top of the shifter just as it swipes at Jo. She’s out of practice but muscle memory sets in and she kicks it back a few yards before settling into a hunting position, arms loose in front of her, balance good and eyes darting everywhere.
“Are you trying to get killed?” Jo shrieks as she shoots at the monster again; the bullet goes wide as it dodges, but its movement sends it straight into Ren’s arms and she has her teeth to its throat in less than a second. A minute later it is dead and Ren is really full for the first time in ages - the thing tastes bitter and a little rancid, but blood is blood and this is the first she’s had in over half a year. She gasps a little for breath as she breaks away from the body, the knife she grabbed off of Jo sliding out of its throat as though she killed it with the weapon, and turns to grin at her friend.
“Not at all,” she chirps, looking hard at Jo, who is frozen in something like shock and confusion and awe, trying to gauge if she saw what Ren really did.
She thinks that she would survive if Jo decides to put a bullet in her, but the beating of her heart, loud and frantic, tells her that she would rather not test the theory. She steps forward slowly, glancing in the car window to make sure no blood stains her face, and holds her hands out in supplication. For what, she’s not sure; she is fully aware that she could close the distance between them long before Jo could get a shot off. Jo could be left dead on the side of the road, a young woman attacked by a wild animal as she stretched away the long hours of the road. Ren would be back at school when the news came, innocent and heartbroken to hear of her friend’s death.
And she would be heartbroken, and she will not kill Jo. And it doesn’t even matter, in the end, because Jo is lowering the shotgun with a helpless little laugh.
“So, you’re a hunter, too?” she asks with a certain measure of relief in her voice.
“I guess,” Ren replies. “Never killed anything like this, though.”
“There are monsters like this all over the place,” Jo tells her, handing Ren a towel to wipe down the knife, and deftly unloading the shotgun and placing it back in the car. “My family hunts - hunted - them. It’s basically the weirdest family business ever, but I can’t get away from it apparently, not even by going to college.”
“I know about weird families, trust me,” Ren says.
“And you know how to hunt! So, want to ditch Nebraska and go check out a haunting in Mississippi? Just, no telling my mom. She’d kill me for going off even with another person.”
“I’d love to,” Ren agrees. “But I get to drive this time.”
“Fine, you can drive, but then you have to let me tell you about the monsters we might find. I don’t want you to be surprised by anything. Like, did you know there are actual vampires and werewolves?”
“No way,” Ren laughs as she gets behind the wheel.