Basking

[lurkythespork.livejournal.com]

Title:  Basking

Author: Me, your murloc truly

Fandom(s): Twilight series

Rating: PG

Word Count:  About 1050

Inspiration: Working on Esme's core-dump, and seeing that there was some potential in that little bit where Jasper snuck in on me.

Warnings: Reference to violence, as well as a reference to the Civil War

Summary: The Cullen family, from the perspective of a Jasper with an actual personality and mind of his own.



Alice once drew a caricature of me as the Cheshire Cat.  She said she was inspired by walking into the sewing room one day, and Esme was working and I was just enjoying how she felt while she worked.  "All relaxed like a cat sunning itself," Alice said, showing me the picture.  Emmett framed it for us and it's in the living room, along with her other "family portraits".  She's gifted at drawing.

The analogy is good, though.  Contentment is a warm kind of yellow, and Esme shines yellow most of the time, spiked occasionally with orange frustration or red joy, depending on what she's pondering while she works.  The sun is a yellow star, and it's like sunbathing to be around contented people.

Carlisle, on the other hand, is more green than yellow when he's in his normal state.  That's the color of calm happiness, and it's soothing to be around.  I've only once seen him stressed up to blood-red, I've seen him push orange sometimes, but usually he's a kelly green.  He's blessed with a very even temper, and that helps me to be around.

He says that I see moods and emotions as color because of something called "synesthesia".  I have a sense that my Touched brain wasn't wired to process, so it just translates to colors.  Better color than smell, I reckon; teenagers' attitudes already stink enough figuratively that I don't know that I'd like to experience it literally.

They tend to be all over the place, bad attitudes.  Crimson red when the person is angry; blue when he's numb; purple to black when he's feeling sorry for himself.  The worst is when they're a big knot of colors, all twisting and swirling around each other like someone vomited M&Ms.  I get the itch to untangle it for him, although I'm not supposed to play with people's feelings.

Alice wanted me to, for Bella, but I won't do it.  Bella and Edward need to figure out how they feel about each other without my poking in.  She's very excited about Bella, and has been since she started having visions about meeting her.  Alice, always a big ball of bright scarlet enthusiasm that peaks at white and troughs at citrus orange.  That's why I married her; she sets me on fire in more ways than just ones a gentleman can't talk about.  I've never seen anyone else who could be scarlet-happy and salmon-affectionate at the same time.

I've seen Edward red, but not often.  Almost anything to do with Bella, and he'll go red in an all-fired hurry--happy scarlet or angry crimson.  Until Bella, he was purple and black, with orange when Rosalie gets on him about things.  I felt sorry for him, sometimes, though not nearly so much as he felt sorry for himself.  I gave the boy some leeway; loneliness is a gnawing emptiness that no amount of sweater-knitting can fill, especially if you're not the kind of person who can be completely happy by yourself.  Resignation is blue, like numbness.  I don't like blue.  Maybe that's left over from the War of Northern Aggression.  I'm still not over that.

Rosalie's not over hers, either.  She runs a constant red-orange unless she's under the hood of a car.  Living around the Untouched makes her frustrated and sometimes a lot unhappy, but unlike Edward, she doesn't sink down.  She gets mad.  I love my sister, but an anger that keeps you orange all the time isn't a healthy defense mechanism.  At least her orange is a happy orange when she's playing with Emmett.

Emmett, another constant yellow--as energetic as Esme's yellow, but not so much focus, and less variation.  Kind of a lemon yellow instead of a sunshine yellow.  He's a good man, but a little simple.  He's happy to play Halo for a couple days at a time or take apart cars with his wife, and also happy to chop up some firewood so we can watch a nice fire in the hearth.  Of course, that might be because he karate-chops the wood to split it.  He can turn anything into playtime.

Of all of us, he's the one who "slipped up" during my time as a Cullen, though.  That was the one time I've seen Carlisle up to crimson.  Esme went down to dark purple for weeks.  Emmett hasn't done it again since Edward and I explained things to him, though.  I told him that if he ever broke our Momma's heart like that again, I'd tear off his legs and burn them.  He thought it was a joke until I took off his right arm.  Edward backed me up; he can be a good man when he's not being a durn fool.

Excuse my language, please.

Come to think of it, the women of the house are more vibrant than the men.  That's interesting.  I'll have to reflect on it.

Bella, on the other hand, is a strange one.  I don't trust her; she's not settled enough.  Her colors are all over the spectrum all the time.  I'd think she was mentally ill if I was qualified to diagnose her.  I surely wouldn't turn her.  My experience with newborns is that the less settled they are before, the less controlled they'll be after.  Carlisle thinks it's because the Touched don't mature.  I respect him, but I think it's that it's harder for a man to be humble enough to control himself if he's gotten power.  You can't be a native Texican and not appreciate that.

I think about these things when I bask, and my opinion's direction changes with the mood of the person I'm near.  I just have to make sure they're not coloring my thoughts with a different palette.  Can't imagine how Edward deals with it, when he gets entire trains of thought.

A/N:  Jasper refers to humans as Untouched and vampires as Touched; that's his dry sense of humor at work.  He needs a sense of humor.  Things are changing radically in my AU Cullen household as I play with these characters.  I may write the Lurky AU after all.