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goldeneyedgirl · 1 year

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Alright! That's the first time I send an ask message to someone I don't know and probably the last one (because, honestly, is kinda scary) but listen, baby, you had NOT the right to make me addicted to a fic where the mass-murderer-nightmare-of-the-south Major Jasper Whitlock is a whole ass baby daddy!!!! Seriously, I'd never imagine I'd read something like that and LOVE IT??? I mean, I could picture Alice being a mom in some aus, since her character seems to be very attached to the idea of having a family, but Jasper???? The one who killed a thousand of vampires and non-vampires with no mercy???? I have only one thing to say: I need more.

There is no way you're as scared of me as I am of you. I think we should just agree to be scared together.

Anon, THANK YOU for your message. All my messages mean so much to me, and to know that I've written something that you didn't expect to love? Ugh, made my day. My week.

The thing about babyverse is that I smashed out like 8k words of it during a Bad Time; I was having some kind of mental breakdown and writing the OG version was my way of mainlining a carton of ice cream and a bucket of fries to cope with my woes. I actually fucking hate baby fics because Jasper and Alice are not parents. Every single baby-related fic that I read on FF.Net pissed me off. But my brain ran away with me and then I decided to riff on the concept and we ended up with five or six variations on a theme, one of which you guys *love*.

I think the thing that is important to remember about Jasper is that he is an ice-cold killer, one of the most dangerous vampires on the continent with a strong reputation even though he walked away over *eighty* years ago.

In Hybrid-verse, this means there are people in the known that lie away at night wondering exactly what happened to Maria's Major because his reappearance would be catastrophic. None of his past changes because he has a son and a partner; it arguably makes it worse. He still suffers from depression, he still has guilt and shame, and now he's somehow ended up with a mostly-human son to raise.

And the fact that he wasn't close to his father, and has vague memories of Civil Era parenthood has him crazy unprepared for being a dad (he is totally stunned the first time Alice just casually breastfeeds Ollie in front of him one night; she teases him mercilessly that they can have sex and have a kid, but breastfeeding shocks him.)

As for Alice, she's just always an agent of chaos. I have a very, very hard time imagining her as a mother - baby-verse and the AH tattoo fic are the only two I ever bothered attempting that (and tattoo-verse is kind of a riff on a lot of the AH fics written in '05, so it doesn't really count.) Alice is always going to be authentically herself, and being a mother doesn't change her. Ollie is just the best-dressed kid in the room.

So have a little snippet of the OG, Official (if there ever is such a thing) Babyverse

“Oh my god, Jasper.”

I gaped at him as Ollie babbled at me, his chubby hands patting at my cheeks.

It had been two months since the Cullens had arrived back in Forks, since Jasper had come home to me - and to Ollie. It had gone by faster than I thought possible, honestly.

Edward and Bella had decided to get married in the last weeks of August - the plan was the wedding, a quick honeymoon somewhere in South America (a surprise for Bella, apparently), and home just in time to start freshman year at Dartmouth. Well, ‘home’ would be the house that Esme had picked out in New Hampshire. I didn’t know if they were even planning to come back to Forks after the wedding.

It felt like a strange and rushed choice after being apart for a year, but I had congratulated them and was pitching in with the wedding planning. They were happy about it, and that was the most important thing.

My own college plans were a lot more diaphanous than Bella and Edward’s, and I was mostly content just to work out my new normal with my son and my quasi-boyfriend. The summer wasn’t over yet, and I knew I’d have to have a few hard conversations before it was over - mostly that if the Cullens wanted to go to New Hampshire and play college students, I would be staying here in Forks with my family - Simon had suggested taking a bunch of community college credits online to stretch my college fund a little further and to keep me close to home for a while.

Adjusting Ollie on my hip, I gave Jasper a Look, as he tried not to meet my gaze. Since we’ve gotten home, he’d been… well, amazing. No one had ever taken co-parenting as seriously as Jasper was, and I had never seen as many parenting books as Jasper had somehow collected that first week. The Cullen house suddenly boasted an unnecessary amount of baby paraphernalia (right down to the framed photographs that Esme had asked Dad and I for - I had been mildly horrified to see my first photo with Ollie framed on the upstairs console table; my sweaty, disorientated, and white as a ghost face with Ollie on my chest immortalised next to Rose and Emmett in a Venetian gondola had really done a number on my self esteem.)

But Jasper had give me an insane amount of things since he’d gotten home. First it had been a new baby swing when mine ended up dying spectacularly. Then - when Esme found out that Ollie was an unenthusiastic sleeper at the best of times - there had been an insanely expensive cot that was meant to encourage him to sleep. Then there were books and toys - most of them under the guise of bonding with him. And then a second set of everything at the Cullens because Jasper didn’t want me lugging so many things with me every time we came over.

(Rosalie had - with all the subtly of an infomercial - asked me if I preferred bracelets or rings, and I had had to squash the idea of any kind of jewellery as a gift. Both of the Cullen women had grown up in an age where the birth of a healthy son and heir would have come with a sparkly piece of jewellery and I thought that was so gross. Jasper had listened to me rant for nearly fifteen minutes, bewildered, after Rosalie and Esme had been insisting he had to gift me some kind of diamond for Ollie - preferably in blue - for weeks. Cynthia had thought I was insane to refuse. The first and only gem I would accept from Jasper would be an engagement ring - when we were ready.)

And now, there was the latest - and most expensive - of his gifts.

“You bought me a car?” I said dumbly.

The blue SUV parked out the front looked perfectly normal; shiny and new but not out of place. It was no Mercedes Guardian or Aston Martin or whatever BMW Rose was driving. And I kind of liked that - no one would give it a second look in Forks.

The thing was, a car had been a much contested item in my family - the ancient little car Cynthia and I had been sharing had finally crapped out beyond repair and we had ended up pooling our savings to save for a new one. We were about three thousand dollars off something decent - Dad and Simon were vetoing anything that they didn’t deem safe enough. Simon and Dad were generous enough to occasionally loan me one of their cars, and Jasper had been more than willing to chauffeur me around.

Until now.

“I know you and Cynthia were saving for one,” Jasper began, reaching out to tuck one of Ollie’s curls out of his eyes. I was putting off getting his hair cut because his messy hair was too cute to lose. “But I was thinking…”

“Jas.”

“Cynthia has so many co-curriculars, and spends so much time on the Res that it felt like you’d be spending a lot of time in the car - or not getting to use it as much.”

I was still giving him a Look as Ollie had moved on to grasping at my necklace, fascinated.

“…I wanted to make sure you were safe,” Jasper said finally. “Rose helped me pick it out - and the carseat. Both have the best safety ratings on the market.”

Walking closer, I could see the carseat already fitted in the backseat. It was, frankly, perfect. I was concerned about the qualifier ‘on the market’ - I wouldn’t put it past Jasper to try and get some kind of unreleased bomb-resistant baby carseat.

“The car or the carseat?” I asked, looking back at him - he was finally looking a little bit guilty.

“What?”

“Which is the safest you could find - the car or the carseat?”

“Both.” Jasper looked at me and offered out the keys. Ollie reached out for them with a squeal of delight. “Let me do this for my family, Alice. I want to make sure you have what you need.”

It was hard to argue with him when he called us his family. It always made me melt a little, that he thought of us that way. I had had to squash more than one of his old-fashioned ideas of babies and parenting over the last two months, but his staunch determination to take care of us always made me give in.

The car was staying. I didn’t have it in me to argue when he was looking at me with that oddly hopeful gaze. And he wasn’t wrong - I did need a car, I wanted it to be a good and safe one, and it wasn’t like he’d gone out and gotten me something ultra expensive…

“HE BOUGHT YOU A CAR?”

The front door banged, Cynthia bolted onto the street, her eyes huge and her hands on her hips.

“All your brothers are married, right Jasper?” She asked before darting over to the car to inspect it.

“Nearly.” Jasper was trying very hard not to laugh; he really did get a kick out of Cynthia’s Teenage Drama Queen brand of dramatics.

“I am doomed to forever have to work for my money,” Cynthia sighed, pulling back and looking over at us. She’d gotten a job at Forks’ bakery slash ice cream slash coffee shop and had spent the last month acting like she was being forced to work in the mines in the dead of winter. It was eternally entertaining, and she was keeping the house supplied in free pastries, ice cream, and bread. “Give the baby to Jasper, Alice.”

I looked over and Jasper looked so hopeful, his hands already twitching.

“He always just stands there with this half sad-puppy, half-hopeful look that you’ll read his mind,” Cynthia said bossily. “Every single time, you wait for her to offer. Just take him - I do.”

Ollie let out a crow of delight as Jasper took him, babbling happily and waving my new car keys in one hand. Jasper had a look of such tenderness on his face that I felt bad he thought that I had some kind of ownership over the child we shared. That he felt he couldn’t just ask to hold Ollie.

“Hello Oliver,” he said, holding him so carefully. “Are you being good for your mother?” He got a spit-bubble reply; it had only taken two months for Ollie to recognise that Jasper was one of his people.

“You can ask me for the baby, Jas,” I said softly, leaning against his other side; his arm wrapping around my shoulders automatically. “You can hold your son, you don’t need my permission.”

“I don’t like to upset him; he’s always so happy with you,” Jasper murmured, nodding as Ollie brandished the keys at him importantly.

I rolled my eyes fondly. Ollie was happy when Jasper held him. Our son had taken like a duck to water at the sudden reintroduction of the Cullens to our lives; Esme was good for cuddles, Emmett was the one that would give me a heart attack by tossing him in the air and swooping him around until Ollie was red in the face and laughing, and Rosalie was someone that he was entranced with - something about the way that she was with him made Ollie go all soft and angelic when he was with her. Little ratbag had Auntie Rose wrapped around his little finger - probably why she had helped Jasper with the car.

Ollie still held a grudge against Carlisle for giving him his shots last month, hiding his face every time he saw him. Edward and Bella were terribly awkward around Ollie, but kind to him. Ollie adored Edward playing the piano, and every time Edward had played for him, he had been transfixed.

Whilst Jasper might have been one of Ollie’s people, he was only just grasping the concept of ‘Daddy’ and Jasper being one and the same. We would get there eventually. He was only a baby.

“Thank you for the car,” I said softly. “You didn’t have to, but I love it.”

“You do?” Jasper adjusted his grip on Ollie, before pulling me closer.

“I do. But you don’t need to buy me or Ollie all these things.”

He really didn’t. About two weeks after he got back, Cynthia had read him the riot act and pointed out that since he didn’t sleep, he could be pulling the nightshift, and maybe slip me the occasional twenty so I could buy diapers. That had resulted in him giving me a credit card, the acquisition of the sleep-training cot, and him literally expecting to sit in the tree outside my bedroom and watch over me and Ollie. He’d been surprised when I’d given him a set of house-keys, and allowed him to bring books and a laptop over so he didn’t have to actually watch us sleep. More than one night, he’d ended up in the living room giving Ollie a bottle and reading him back to sleep. There was nothing cuter than going downstairs in the morning to find Ollie passed out asleep on Jasper’s chest, as Jasper read some heavy book over his head.

“I want to. I love you both so, so much. This is nothing, Alice. This is just a car,” he said softly.

“Can you two kiss so we can go inside and I can make Dad and Pa feel bad for me?” Cynthia called and I started laughing, Ollie cooing at us before giggling along with me.

The rest of the Cullens had given no indication whether or not they would be relocating to New Hampshire any time soon, and I hadn’t asked because it wasn’t a conversation I wished to have: I was staying in Forks with my family and my son for the foreseeable future, and no amount of bribery would make me budge.

Not that Jasper would even try, I knew that. We had talked in through and he understood that I wanted this time with my father and with Simon and with Cynthia.

Jasper had been spending every spare moment with us, and desperately compensating for leaving me; I knew that Carlisle and Esme had given my parents half of the cost of my medical care for the pregnancy (which neither of my parents wanted to accept until I pointed out that the financial hit would affect Cynthia’s college options, not to mention finishing the house renovation. It might have been loose change to the Cullens, but that money made a difference to us.)

#when it comes to fit i am that food critic from ratatouille #my fic: hybrid babyverse #just imagine rosalie quizzing jasper on infant care #both of them taking it more seriously than the mcats #also push presents are gross #alice is a strong independent eighteen year old #jasper is so out of his depth and he loves it

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