It's a Fever Dream (feverdream) wrote in shadows_rpg, @ 2019-01-16 02:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | #november 2017, amelia, amelia x jasper, jasper |
Who: Amelia and Jasper
When: Late afternoon, Monday, Nov 27th
Where: Green Street
Status: Complete
After fighting with Jules in her car, Jasper didn’t bother going back to class. He’d just ducked out to ‘use the restroom,’ so he knew his absence would be much more notable than if he’d skipped out between classes, but he couldn’t care. Hell, he’d left his backpack sitting by his desk, and he couldn’t care about that either. Luckily he had a pretty good excuse to just disappear, since to the outside world his sister was still missing and all.
He drove fast and angrily back home, Jules’s words spinning around in his head along with all the rage at having his privacy so blatantly violated. Maybe it was stupid to think that anywhere was safe, but a nosy-ass neighbor filming him through the fucking fence? What the fuck was that? Jasper didn’t quite know what he was going to do about it, just that he was full of rage and the desire to do something. He parked crooked in the driveway, glad to see that his dad wasn’t home, and stormed into the house. “Amelia!” he called, pushing and kneeing the excited dogs away. “You home?”
Amelia was curled up on her dad's bed, reading one of the books she'd gotten from Charlie. She wasn't expecting anyone home for another couple of hours so hearing Jasper come barrelling through the door startled her a little until he called her name. "In here!" she called back needlessly because she was already on her feet and rushing out to meet him. He sounded upset and if she'd learned anything from the years she barely remembered it was that if someone was upset, you moved. He looked upset too, in a kind of hurricane-person way and Amelia gave him a concerned frown, tilting her head back as she observed him. "What happened?" she asked and every fiber of her being felt like it was priming up for fight or flight.
Jasper probably should have thought about not scaring his sister as he came home, but he wasn’t thinking about much at all. The urgency of telling her that the backyard wasn’t safe to talk in was blotting out everything else. Overreaction? Maybe. But Jasper’s anger didn’t think so. He felt a bit of nonsensical relief when he spotted Amelia, but it didn’t do much to make him relax. “This bitch next door,” he fumed, pointing toward the side of the house Elodie lived on. “Have you talked to her at all? Said anything about who you really are while you’re outside where she might hear it?” Jasper knew that wasn’t an explanation, but he wasn’t exactly thinking rationally, and he wanted to know if any damage had been done before he filled Amelia in.
A week ago Amelia might not have known who Elodie was but she'd spoken to Ruby about how Elodie had witnessed everything and noted that Ruby'd been nervous about her knowing and clearly she hadn't been just paranoid if Jasper was this angry. "What did she do?" she asked with a sliver of cold anger in her own voice. If Jasper was angry and Ruby was upset... Then yes, Amelia was going to be furious too. She had never even seen the girl but by now the name was starting to sound like a problem.
“She fucking recorded a private conversation I had with Ruby on the back porch, and then texted it to Jules!” Jasper exclaimed, feeling like punching the walls with every word. He needed to calm down, he needed to think about this rationally, but that was proving very difficult. At least it was unlikely that Elodie was home, so he couldn’t go over there and break her nose like he really wanted to. “So now Jules is fucking pissed at me, and god knows what else this bitch has heard, and I don’t want you talking to her, okay? I thought we were cool, but she’s shady as fuck and I don’t trust her now.”
Amelia's expression softened into more despair than anger because she knew damn well which conversation they were talking about. Poor Ruby, this meant Jules was pissed at her too and between her and Jasper being hurt, Amelia wanted to kill their neighbor. "Why would she do that?" she asked quietly though the answer rang in her head already. Elodie was a bitch, she wanted to hurt people and that made her dangerous.
“‘Cause she’s fucking crazy, I don’t know,” he snapped, running a hand through his hair and giving it an annoyed tug. “Everything’s fucking crazy lately.” Pushing the dogs aside again, he stalked to the kitchen, intent on getting a drink. He probably needed to smoke a bowl too, or have a beer or something. Maybe five. Fuck. “She’s probably just like Victoria Chapman, always wanting to start shit,” he said louder over his shoulder.
"I don't know who that is," Amelia said though she knew she didn't have to since she didn't know who anyone was and she was just guessing it was someone from school who liked to start shit. "So why's Jules pissed at you? You didn't do anything!" Did he? Had Ruby not told her everything? She followed Jasper into the kitchen, followed closely by the worried dogs. "Did you?"
Jasper didn’t expect Amelia to know who Victoria was, it was probably a good thing that she didn’t. But he knew she’d watched enough TV and movies to know the type of girl he was talking about. The questions were more important than her anyway. Jasper did end up pulling a beer out and cracking it open. “No! I mean, I just ...” Jasper stopped and sighed. “Ruby came over here to like, tell me she had feelings for me. Romantic ones. Like ‘why didn’t we ever go out’ and ‘I’ve never felt this way about anyone’ and that kinda shit. I was totally taken off guard, and she looked super upset and she’s like, my oldest friend, so I tried to let her down easy, and ... Jules was mad that I didn’t mention her, or I wasn’t like, more forceful about saying no or something, I dunno.” He took a swig from the can and slumped into a kitchen chair, pinching the bridge of his nose. Fuck, what a mess.
Amelia hesitated before sighing. "She told me," she admitted. "But she was under a spell or something, she's mortified and she's not really in love with you so Jules has nothing to worry about and she's your friend so of course you let her down easy. I would have had to kick your ass if you'd been mean to her." She was rambling fretfully and she stepped closer to Jasper, then heaved herself up to sit on the counter. "Do you want me to talk to Jules?" It might not help but what if it did? Jules was mad at both Ruby and Jasper but she wasn't mad at Amelia for anything so it couldn't hurt, right?
Under a spell? Had they all been under a spell or some shit? Jasper had been pretty sure it was some kind of drug, but what did he really know? It felt like the answer to that was ‘very little.’ He rubbed at his forehead while Amelia’s words warred with Jules’s reminder that everything they had blurted that Saturday night had been the truth. And why had it still been affecting Ruby when it had worn off of them? Ugh, it all gave him a headache, and he drained half his beer can before he shook his head a little. “No, that’s sweet, thanks, but ... she’s really hard to talk to when she’s like this,” he told his sister. He was no better -- probably worse -- but still. He didn’t want to put Amelia through anything unnecessary. “What I do need to do is to figure out how to not kill that bitch next door,” Jasper added in a dark mutter.
"We could kill her," Amelia blurted out, only half-joking. Who knew what Elodie had heard in the backyard. Amelia sure as shit couldn't remember everything she'd done out there, maybe she'd called her dad dad or said something else that revealed her true identity and while Amelia really wanted to do just that, she couldn't. "But I guess that's not allowed here... We could scare her." She reached out for a bowl of clementines that Gavin had only bought because she asked him to and she seemed to be the only one eating and slowly started peeling one as she spoke. "How hard can it be to scare someone like that?"
Those were the exact things that Jasper was worried about. If Elodie was nosy enough to eavesdrop and record a conversation between him and Ruby, how curious must she be about the girl their age who had suddenly moved in? It was a bit jarring to hear Amelia say she guessed murder wasn’t allowed here, like she’d done it elsewhere, but Jasper really wasn’t in the mindset to dig into that at the moment. His brow furrowed a little as he watched her start to peel the orange, and he quirked an eyebrow up. “Scare her how?” he asked, curious as to what Amelia had in mind.
Amelia was quiet for a moment as she thought about it and the only thing she knew for certain was that she didn't really want to talk to Jasper about the 'how' of it all. "Everyone's scared of something," she said finally. "Most people are scared of pain." There was a memory coiling in on itself in her mind, vague and not at all visual, more of a blooming darkness somewhere in her gut. Grabbing, screaming, twisting. "I'll talk to her." She plopped a slice of her clementine in her mouth, giving Jasper a wary look, certain he'd tell her no and then how the hell would they prevent this girl from ruining everything?
Amelia wasn’t wrong. “No,” Jasper said automatically, shaking his head. He really didn’t want Amelia anywhere near Elodie, even if he knew he couldn’t completely forbid her from doing anything. “She’s really manipulative and you don’t ... have a lot of experience with stuff like that, right?” He sounded kind of apologetic about that, squinting one eye a little. He didn’t want to insult her intelligence or anything, he just got the feeling that Elodie was more devious than his sister. “I’m gonna talk to her, it’ll be less suspicious coming from me anyway. I’ve got a reason to be really pissed off, you don’t.”
"She hurt my friend, she hurt my brother-" Amelia stopped to bitterly correct herself. "She hurt my cousin. She's spying on us. I've got plenty of reasons to be pissed off." The scary part was that she was pissed off to the point where she wanted to hurt Elodie, a kind of impotent rage that made her insides feel all cold and weird. "Besides, it looks bad if you hurt a girl, Jasper."
Jasper’s face got a bit pinched and he shook his head, waving a hand in a vague gesture. “I meant like ... publicly pissed off,” he corrected. “‘Cause if you’re my cousin, then this is all just drama that doesn’t involve you, right? And I’m not gonna hurt her for real.” He waved his hand again, really only half-convinced of that. “It looks worse if my girl cousin is out like, fighting my battles for me or whatever. And we can’t have you gettin’ arrested or something.” There were a lot of reasons on both sides, and at least it was distracting from worrying about how he was going to make up with Jules.
"Oh there'll be nothing public about this," Amelia replied. "I won't leave a mark." It'd be her word against Elodie's and she really had no reason to go after the girl. If she did it right there'd be no aftermath either. Just words. Hopefully words that'd make Elodie back off. "What are you planning to do anyway? Yell at her at school?" That didn't seem terribly effective, even without the yelling. Maybe if he threatened her but something about that left a bad taste in Amelia's mouth. Girls should be dealt with by girls.
Jasper had meant that it wouldn’t make any sense to Elodie that Amelia was pissed off, but he didn’t seem to be getting that point across, so he gave up on it. “No, I was gonna go yell at her at home,” he said. “What are you planning on doing?” Jasper couldn’t help but sound incredulous at that. He couldn’t imagine his sweet baby sister doing anything to really hurt anybody. Or ‘scare’ them, like she was talking about. She was the least scary person he knew. If he really wanted to scare Elodie, he would send his dad over to talk to her. Or Uncle Caden.
"I don't know yet, I don't know her," Amelia replied with another little shrug. She plopped the last of the clementine in her mouth and slid down off the counter so she could put the scraps in the trash. "For now we'll just not do anything in the backyard but let the dogs play. Don't give her anything else." It was frustrating because she considered the backyard a part of her home, the one place where she could be Amelia instead of Lyra, and now some bitch next door had taken that from her.
He still looked skeptical, because he was, but Jasper nodded anyway. “Yeah ... definitely don’t say anything out there,” he murmured. He was still going to do something about this specific thing -- how could he not? -- but some of the fire had gone out of him. It threw him off balance to think about Amelia being any sort of vengeful or anything, because she’d been such a sweet little girl, but God knew what she’d been through and survived. Suddenly he felt like their roles were strangely reversed -- he was the innocent one and Amelia was the older, tougher sibling. Jasper tried to shake it off, draining the rest of the beer and standing up to toss the can in the trash. “I’m gonna warn Ruby too. I don’t think Jules will take it out on her or anything, but she oughta know.”
Amelia winced a little. Ruby was going to be so upset, she'd been mortified by her actions already and now Jules knew. Amelia had to wonder if Ruby was the type to blow up at someone - if she would go after Elodie. Amelia knew she'd want to be there to back her up if happened it'd likely be at school and just thinking about it made Amelia feel so left out again, isolated from everything that was happening out there. "I can tell Ruby," she said. That way maybe she could suss out what Ruby would do - if anything. "I want to tell her," she amended, in case Jasper tried to stop her from doing this as well.
Jasper’s brow furrowed as he looked at her. He definitely wasn’t used to someone inserting themselves into his business like this, especially not a family member. Gavin would probably rather die than talk about Jasper’s social life, his mom didn’t give two shits, and his uncles never asked him more than surface questions. “Why?” he asked Amelia, looking a little perturbed that she was insisting on getting involved. “Does she like, not wanna talk to me?” He and Ruby hadn’t talk-talked since that day, maybe Amelia was trying to shield her or something.
Amelia gave him a crooked and curious little smile, surprised by the question. "No, that's not- I think she feels mortified about the whole thing and you telling her this will just make it worse," she said though it came out a little questioning at the end. "And I want to see how she reacts."
Girls talked to each other more than they talked to dudes, Jasper knew that for sure, and he thought it was possible that Ruby and Amelia had become close enough that Ruby might confide in her. He didn’t like the idea of a go-between, because what if Ruby had questions about what Jules specifically said ... but maybe he needed to give her some room to come to him if that was the case. And maybe he needed to focus on his actual girlfriend now. Jasper scrubbed his hand over his face and sighed, feeling kind of deflated now that his temper had had time to simmer down. “Okay,” he relented in a murmur. “Just ... lemme know how it goes.”
"Of course," Amelia said but she wasn't oblivious to the way Jasper's mood played all over his features so she closed the distance between them in two quick steps and wrapped her arms tightly around him. "Let me know how it goes with Elodie too," she said, her words just a little muffled against his chest. "And if it doesn't go well I'll totally murder her for you." This time she was joking, a show of comraderie since she didn't feel like she could do anything else and she hated seeing her brother upset. A part of it was a kind of helplessness because if someone got upset, bad things tended to happen. This was true for their family as well as her upbringing away and she couldn't shake the overwhelming urge to fix things.
The hug was helpful, and Jasper settled his arms around his sister for a firm squeeze. Nobody really hugged him except for Jules and the brief back-pats with Ruby, so it was kinda nice to be comforted that way. He chuckled deeply at Amelia’s promise. “I will. And I’ll keep that in mind,” he murmured. He probably still ought to go over and ambush Elodie when she came home, but the fire had gone out of him and all Jasper really wanted to do right then was go smoke a bowl. And try to figure out how to make things right with Jules. “Any advice on like ... making Jules not hate me? Since you’re so smart now,” he added with obvious affection.
"I'm not smart now," Amelia said with a little laugh and a shake of her head as she backed up a little, wrinkling her nose at him. "I don't even understand why she's mad at you." It wasn't like Jasper and Ruby had kissed or anything, Ruby had been under a spell or something and Jasper had rejected her. The only person who really sucked in the whole situation was their next door neighbor for butting in and violating their privacy.
Jasper didn’t really understand it either, he didn’t think. He got that Jules was upset by how she’d found out about the whole thing, but it shouldn’t have even been a Thing. Nothing had happened. Ruby had acted weird because of some drugs or some shit, and Jasper hadn’t been a giant bastard to her and somehow that was a problem? He shrugged a bit. “Her and Ruby have like ... bad history, I dunno,” he said. “And I didn’t tell Jules myself. Guess I should have. But I didn’t want to like, cause more trouble between them. Fat lotta good that did.” He just hoped Jules didn’t try to make it Ruby’s problem too.
Amelia nodded, then reached up to pat his shoulder. "Seems like a waste of energy to be mad about it so... I hope she sees that." There wasn't much else she could say, she didn't really understand the situation or why Jules was angry, it felt like there were so many things she just didn't know or understand and thinking about it just made her frustrated so she tried to steer clear of them. "What are you going to do now?" she asked, trying to decide if she should glue herself to Jasper's side for the day or go back to her book.
He nodded a little, appreciating that she was trying to make him feel better. He didn’t point out that Jules tended to waste a lot of energy on being upset about various things, because he didn’t want to seem like he was talking shit about his girlfriend. He loved her, but she could be a handful. Focusing on Amelia’s question was a better idea than delving into all that. Not that he really had a good answer for her. “I dunno,” he said, shrugging. Part of him still wanted to go kick Elodie’s ass, but he probably ought to smoke that away. “Go roll a blunt, maybe. Try to figure out what to say to Jules.”
That didn't sound like he needed company so Amelia decided she'd leave him be for now. "I'll be in dad's room if you need me," she told him, studying him for a moment as she tried to suss out if she really should leave him alone or not. It was tempting to ask to try smoking with him but she hadn't really gathered the courage to ask and she wasn't even sure if she wanted to so she decided against it and not for the first time.
Getting Amelia to smoke with him had occurred to Jasper too, but he was hesitant so far to bring it up. It had to be her choice, he didn’t want to pressure her by accident. Part of his mind still saw her as his nine year old sister anyway, and didn’t like the idea. So he hadn’t offered. Yet. Who knew when that might change. Not today though, because he kind of wanted to be alone. “Okay,” he said as he stood up. Jasper kissed Amelia’s head and shuffled toward his own room. They would figure dinner and everything out later, right then he just wanted to flop down and push it all away.