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If I had never met Calliope Burns, maybe I could have loved moderately… that was a pile of horseshit and Juliette fucking Fairmont knew it.
Loving moderately was not something she thinks she even knew how to do. For as long as Juliette could remember she loved generously, loved quick and loved hard, she always had. She brought a stray dog she found on her way home from Ben’s house one afternoon when she was younger and young Juliette was immediately head over heels in love with the fur ball without a name. She ran to the shop and found anything and everything a little pup would need, and maybe a little extra. She took him home and set him up in her room, she spent the whole evening hyper focused on everything to do with him, love pouring out of her like an open wound. What she naively forgot, being so caught up in her love for the dog, was that she lived in a house full of apex predators, and she had brought in a brown fluff ball of prey. Sparing the gory details, it's easiest to say that Elinor Fairmont most definitely was not a dog person.
Juliette had loved that dog, and even though she had only had him for a matter of hours she cried her eyes out for weeks and had completely ignored Elinor's existence for all of them. So no, loving moderately was never in Juliettes arsenal, not even for random strays plucked off the street. Juliette swore after that to never love another being so that her sister had nothing to hurt her with, more so to not sink her fangs into. But when Juliettes blue eyes met golden brown, she knew she was done for and her whole self assuring mantra was out the fucking window.
What Juliette couldn’t have seen, or maybe what she downright refused to, was that those same eyes she locked onto at that party that night. The same eyes that followed her into the pantry. Would be the same eyes that bared hatred so strong Juliette almost died from simply being in eyeshot. Those eyes were owned by the same hands to hold a silver tipped spear at her heart. The same heart that was promised safe keeping very few hours before hand. What Juliette wanted to see was the love Calliope had in her eyes, love made for her and her alone. Love handmade in her dreams and in her bedroom. But when she looked into the eyes that in few short weeks had become her favourite, she saw nothing but pure seething hatred. So when Calliope told Juliette to, in plain terms, “Fuck off before I stake you”, all Juliette could find herself doing is looking into her eyes, she listened to her heartbeat. She searched for any sense of a lie like she did at the front of school after their second fight, but to her hearts increasing ache, she couldn’t find one.
Juliette chose to love, she chose to fall for Calliope. It ended the same as any other time she tried to love something. It was destroyed in front of her own eyes.
Stepping away from Cal, Juliette whispered, barely audible to the average human, another sorry that fell on deaf ears and ran towards her car. Not looking back to the eyes that followed her every step. The eyes that cried for all that she and her family had lost that night.
Juliette Fairmont was many things, a 4.0 student, friend, vampire, legacy, but she had become the one thing she had spent her whole life running from. A monster. So no, she did not look back at Calliope as she started her car in front of the Burns house, Calliope didn’t deserve the pain Jules brought along with her monstrous tendencies. If only Juliette could have listened to her head and not her fucking heart. If only she had chosen to love moderately. She would have saved herself from the growing hole in her heart. Not from silver, but from not being able to escape the insanity of first love.