Téméraire: A Rosalie Hale Fanfiction

CHAPTER I: JUST A GIRL

A/N: Edited.

Oh I'm just a girl, living in captivity

Your rule of thumb makes me worrisome

Oh I'm just a girl, what's my destiny?

What I've succumbed to is making me numb

Jules could feel relief flooding her veins as her plane landed at William R. Fairchild International Airport. Her left ear was blocked entirely from the air pressure ten minutes into her first flight from Charles de Gaulle to Schiphol.

That had been thirteen or so hours ago.

This was it, this was the end of having to deal with everything on her own. All she had to do was get through customs and immigration, find her luggage, and find the policeman that was set to be waiting for her somewhere outside.

Jules could recall her excitement as a child, making this exact same trip every summer to visit her grandparents in America. It felt like a great big adventure back then, all the planes and the connecting flights at massive international airports. America had seemed like a distant dream then. She had been born there- in the little town of Forks Washington, a place her mother had called her home her entire life. For the first two years of Juliette Rowe's life, she was raised an American child in a small American household with two adoring parents, grandparents, an aunt, an uncle and a cousin. A full family.

Then her mother passed away. Her father never recovered. The heartbreak turned into full on raging depression and alcoholism, which then took hold of his life. It had been her paternal grandmother in France who had stepped in and intervened at last, an absolute force of a woman Jules adored with her whole soul. And so, her father saw fit to pack up his entire life and move with his daughter to France, where she was raised mostly by her eccentric grandmother. Every summer, the trio would make the trip to America so Jules would never forget where her mother had been from.

Jules had watched everyone she had ever loved die, in one sense or another. Despite the distance, she had remained close to her maternal grandparents- especially her Grandpa Geoffrey. Her grandmother Helen had been deep in the throes of Alzheimers for as long as she remembered, but her Grandfather had been present and had adored her more than anyone, despite his limited mobility as the years wore on. It had been Grandma Helen to go first after the passing of her mother, and then Grandpa Geoff when she was six.

On the flipside, Mamie Éloise had been her entire world. Jules finally understood her father's constant battle with depression when she lost her grandmother when she was thirteen. She felt as if the sun would never shine again on her life, as if she was drifting endlessly as a ghost upon the mortal plane. She was alive, yes, but she was no longer living. The melancholia became a part of her, and her Uncle Charlie understood when she and her father decided to stop spending their summers in America. They both had issues with grief, issues they needed to face together without the interference of school or work.

By the time Jules turned sixteen, she had thought she had finally come out of the dark ages. That she finally felt whole again. She had good friends, she had a social life. She had dreams and goals and ambitions. She had begun to feel what it was to wonder again. She spent her days in the sun in the parks of Paris, surrounded by her comrades in arms, flinging from one adventure to the next in the bustling crowds of the city. To her, the past year had been nothing short of the greatest of her life.

And then her father died.

This time, Jules did not have time to grieve. There were too many sudden complications to solve, too many loose strings to tie up. She had suddenly felt as if her entire world had been flooded and she didn't know how to swim. She was an orphan, an ocean away from her last living relatives. It was all up to her. She sorted out her father's affairs at his work, she dealt with the declaration of his death and her own legal status being changed. She had spent endless hours at banks and government offices instead of mourning, instead of grieving.