Birthday fics!
Law of Inertia
Some afternoons, they study.
Bella corrects his essays in red pencil, recommends books for the Independent Reading part of his course - Ender’s Game, Fight Club, American Gods. She herself is a classic nineteenth century narrative, all dry humour, no nonsense chapter titles, and everyone winding up married to the right person. However, almost against her will, she also leans depressingly towards Atwood, Plath, Woolf.
I am not that cliché, she tells herself, thumbing through Edna St Vincent Millay’s Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink, and wondering uneasily why her self-declarations have the slippery textures of lies.
And Jake? Jake isn’t stuck in some outdated era. He’s modern, postmodern, post-postmodern. They haven’t invented a name for what he is yet, besides here.
He reads her Physics AP textbook, teaches the units to himself, then teaches her. He is good at that, at untangling the hieroglyphics and odd little vector diagrams with their arrows and their inexplicable numbers. To him, it’s intuitive, to her, it’s frustrating : attaching numbers and calculations to gravity, motion, sound, light, simple truths that encompass the whole world. Moons revolving around planets, planets around suns, the whole universe going around in tidy tick tock motion, that sort of thing. No matter what horizontal velocity and the law of gravity tell her, it makes absolutely no sense that whether you jump off a cliff or simply drop off of it, you hit the ground at the exact same time.
“Then it doesn’t even matter,” she says, frustrated, her graph paper smudgy with the marks she’s been unable to erase. She crumples it up, grabs another sheet. “No matter what you do, you’re screwed either way.”
“It’s about choice,” he says, amused. “Whether you choose to go down fighting or not” (as she battles with her protractor).
She mutters something rude about why Newton’s mother didn’t have the sense to drown him as a child, and Jake’s laughter is loud and golden enough to make her forget about the sound of the rain.
“It’s so simple,” he says. If she had only turned her head to see the way he was looking at her, the whole afternoon might’ve turned out differently. “The formula’s written out here, you must’ve just made a mistake setting up the equation. The answer is right underneath your nose.”
“I just don’t see it,” she says, finally throwing her mechanical pencil and eraser to the side.
“You wouldn’t,” he says. He fingers the edge of her stack of Millay poems, complete with her neatly handwritten annotations that explain every scheme and trope and that miss the point completely. “Of course you wouldn’t.”
~
They give up on finish their homework, but there’s a pretty bad storm brewing outside and soon enough the cable cuts out. They resort to digging into a chicken that she stuck into the oven, and because they are bored and adolescent and this is the closest they can get to danger while tucked up in a cosy house, a game of Truth and Dare.
“Truth,” he says.
“First movie crush?”
“Easy. That Violet girl from that movie with Jim Carrey. Uh, A Series of Something Something Events.”
“Didn’t know Australian was your flavour.”
“I am open to variety.” He doesn’t say that overall prefers brunettes, because that would just be too easy and honestly, kind of lame. “Truth or Dare?”
“Uh…” Normally, she’d jump at any chance of Dares, but they’ve just had a lazy afternoon doing homework and she’s very full of roast chicken and apple pie. “Truth.”
“The same.”
“What?”
“First movie crush.”
Her mouth twitches. “Promise not to laugh.”
“No guarantees.”
“Bah. Er… Cedric Diggory. From Harry Potter. The fourth one, I think?”
He sniggers (no guarantees: it’s not like they sign blood contracts or anything), and then says, “… Wait. Doesn’t he die at the end of that movie?” He sniggers a little more, she is so easy to tease. “You got a thing for dead guys, Swan?”
(She waits for the panic, the pain, to leap up and seize her, for the hole to gape like the Grand Canyon, which is why it’s so weird when her breath keeps coming normally.)
She laughs and says, “Hey, Violet got married at the age of fourteen, didn’t she?”
“Almost married,” Jake argues. “And then she saved herself.”
She sniffs a little. “British accents are worth ten more points than Australian ones.”
They start to argue about “swank” upper crust British accents versus Cockney slang, then they get into Welsh and Irish. Charlie walks in on them cracking up over their terrible, terrible attempts at Swedish accents, and thanks five or six of the saints above for Jacob Black’s inhuman ability to get his daughter to smile.
~
Jake’s English marks improve dramatically. The problem with him, Bella says, is that he has really good ideas, he just doesn’t know how to articulate them, sometimes.
(The problem with her is that she has really stupid ideas and she knows a million and one ways to justify them to herself, with a thousand-dollar vocabulary.)
Bella’s Physics marks improve only marginally; she already had a B+ to start with after all. She has an excellent tutor, but no mind for it: she still gets tripped up on questions of circular motion, and can never wrap her brain around the idea that the sun has far more a gravitational pull over the earth than the moon does.
end.
Title : Gateau
Author : ophelietta
Fandom : Twilight
Characters/Pairings : J/B, the Swan and Black clan.
Summary : An incident involving cake.
Notes : Pre-Twilight, part of the wee!Jake and wee!Bella universe. Takes place after this but before this. The Chocolate Cherry Gateau is from one of my cookbooks, "Cakes and Bakes". :D
ETA : Now with fanart by
alizarin_skies! :D
Gateau
“You want,” Billy says, speaking slowly, to make sure he understands, “to bake a cake.”
Nod.
“For Mom’s birthday.”
Nodnod.
“But you can’t bake it here, because…?”
Jake’s mouth pops open with all the incredulity that a seven-year-old can muster. “It has to be a surprise…!”
Billy sighs. Pulls out the phone. He loves his children, yes. This doesn’t mean he claims to understand them.
~
“Hello, Charlie,” a small, boyish voice says politely.
Charlie struggles not to laugh at the utter seriousness contained in those two words. “Hello… Jacob?”
“May I please speak to Bella?” (Sarah Black has beaten telephone manners into all three of her children with a wooden spoon, although she would flip if she knew that ten-year-old Rebecca sometimes answered the phone with, “Olympia Pizza, may I take your order?”)
“I need to ask her for a favour,” Jacob continues, still perfectly serious. “’S very, very important.”
A… favour. That’s not code for “date”, right? No way, Charlie thinks. Bella is nine and Jacob is seven, and Bella is very mature for her age, as Renee anxiously tells him and retells him as she hands her off every summer.
“Bella, phone for you.”
She approaches the phone cautiously; the only other person who phones her is her mother. Charlie meanders around the kitchen “cleaning up” and pretending he’s not eavesdropping.
“Hi? Oh, Jacob… Okay… Mm-hmm… Yes, of course I know how to. I’ve been doing it for years, it’s not that difficult… Yeah… mm-hmm? Well, um, yeah, I… could. What, so do you want me to - you want to? Do you have stuff to…? Well, all right, just let me ask Ch - my dad. Dad?”
“Yes, Bella?” he says, instantly dropping the wash cloth that he wasn’t really using anyway.
She looks perfectly unruffled as she asks, “Can Jacob come over?”
Not a date, Charlie says to himself. Bella is nine and Jacob is seven. There is no way it could possibly be a date.
~
Jacob thrusts a bunch of wildflowers at Bella when she opens the door.
“For you!” he says cheerfully. “Mum says it’s polite to bring stuff for people when you visit.”
Several different expressions flicker across her face as she takes the little bouquet (tied with a red elastic), but what stays is the blush on her cheeks, almost the exact shade of pink as the wild roses now in her hand.
“Thank you…?” she mumbles, and he beams. He waves to his father who remains sitting in his red truck, and after a nod in return, Billy drives away.
When he comes in, he drags behind him a bag of cooking things that must weight more than he does. “I brought a bunch of stuff from home,” he says, confidentially. “I had to be sneaky like a ninja, so that no one would notice. I knew I had to bring things like flour and eggs and sugar, but I didn’t know what, um, tools to bring, so I just… brought a whole bunch and hoped I picked the right ones!”
~
“RACHEL? REBECCA?”
“YEAH, MOM?”
“WHERE’S THE COLANDER?”
“WE DON’T KNOW, MOM.”
“WELL, WHAT ABOUT THE CHEESE GRATER?”
“NO CLUE, MOM.”
~
Jacob’s picked out the recipe beforehand, a beautiful cherry chocolate cake, and Bella goes over it, making a few light notes in pencil. She sorts out all the ingredients and cooking utensils (a cheese grater? She leaves that one in the bag). She is almost going to ask him where he got cherry brandy, but then she looks at his small body which could squeeze into all sorts of corners, and she decides not to ask.
“So, we’ve washed our hands, and um, my hair’s really short, but you should probably… tie yours back?”
Jacob’s hair is more than shoulder length; he shakes it out in a little black whirlwind. “I used my hair tie on your flowers,” he says. “Do you have another one?”
“Probably, in my room.” His hair is really, really shiny, Bella notes, fascinated. And so much straighter than her own, almost like silk, and - “Can I braid your hair?” she blurts out, feeling stupid the instant the words comes out.
“Sure,” he says, still as cheerful as ever. He’s used to Rachel and Rebecca tackling him and using the rainbow-coloured elastics for their braces to make little tiny pigtails all over his head. Next to this, Bella’s request is nothing. She’s even nice enough to ask. Jacob adds ten points to his Bella tally.
Which is why he doesn’t squirm and wriggle the way he does when the twins usually pin him down for a hairdo. He sits nice and still and hums a little; it’s very nice, when she brushes his hair out like that. It reminds him a little of Mum. Bella’s hands are very gentle and she doesn’t make the braid too tight, which means another ten points.
~
Charlie relaxes a little. They’re baking a cake, she’s braiding his hair. It’s like Jacob’s a girl, he comforts himself. Just imagine she’s with one of her little friends who’s a girl. It’s not remotely close to a date at all.
~
Bella sets the oven then gets the cherries and the syrup simmering on the stove, and she lets Jacob sift together the flour, cocoa, and baking powder. He hums while he does so, and it’s better than the radio.
She beats the eggs and the sugar together, and Jacob keeps the bowl steady when she folds in the flour mixture and the melted butter, and then they bake the cake for forty minutes. In that time, she beats together the heavy cream with more of the sugar, but she doesn’t do quite as careful a job with it as she usually does.
“You’ve got whipping cream on your nose,” Jacob says, laughing, as he totters on the stool that she’s placed him on so that he can see over the table properly. Then he totters a little closer, and with all the gravity of a little boy, places a kiss on the tip of her nose.
“There!” he says brightly. “All gone, now.”
~
This is, fortunately, the moment that Charlie comes into the kitchen. He quietly has a heart attack, briefly ducks back out, grabs his gun belt, and dashes back - to find Jacob all the way across the kitchen, peeking into the oven’s glass doors to see if the cake is done yet. Bella seems completely engrossed in her bowl of whipping cream and if her face is a little flushed, well, the oven’s warmed up the whole kitchen, right?
Charlie backs out slowly, suspiciously. Maybe he was just imagining things.
Totally not a date.
~
They turn out the cake, fresh and steaming, and slice it in half. She places the cherries and the cherry syrup in the center of the two layers, but she lets Jacob swirl the whipped cream on top of the cherries, as well as swirl the cream on the very top. She shows him how to make chocolate curls for decoration, and they place a few extra cherries in the very center as a final touch.
Then they high five, covered with whipping cream and cherry syrup and flour and melted chocolate, with matching grins. Partners in crime.
~
Of course, the Swans are invited to the birthday party. Sarah Black oohs and ahhs and adores the cake; she sweeps up both Jake and Bella in a huge hug, and they both go, “Mom!”, which makes Bella blush afterwards, until she laughs along with everyone else.
As soon as the kids get their slices, Rachel says, “You little twerp.” She looks at her brother with a knowing eye. “You just wanted to go on a date with that Swan girl, didn’t you?”
Jacob just runs away laughing. But he never says No, either.
end.