#he legitimately thinks jasper's scars are from the civil war

[goldeneyedgirl]

flattering ask time: baby-verse is an obssession. i love how you put these two totally non-parents weirdos as such a childcare team. like, jasper is fucking frozen because his son - who he feeds, baths, put in bed, play with and cuddles - called him...daddy. i just know parenthood hit him hard with that one.

damage alice is another obssession. as a neurodivergent person myself, it's so funny to me that we both have very similar "episodes".

now the questions about both of these fics: would you say that jasper is more of a warm/soft parent or the emotional distant parent who, at the same time, is always there for his son (since you already told here he is, in fact, a good dad). and, for damage alice, are you going with opportunist cullens who see alice as an experiment or something to be saved because they need to prove to god that they are good people and stuff, or with nice cullens who just want to take care of this little girl and give her a home?

(now, english isn't my first language, so excuse me if there are any mistakes ❤)

I am SO flattered that baby-verse seems to be so loved because Alice and Jasper are, like, the most pro-choice of the Cullens (as a side note, I think Emmett is also pro-choice because he saw first-hand what large families stuck in poverty went through.) So the idea of them juggling a dependent life is kind of insanity. But Alice is a perfectionist, and Jasper is both devoted to Alice and hugely overprotective, so they would figure out something that worked.

For Jasper's parenting style, it's different depending on the angle you look at it from. Jasper is very, very quietly involved. He is incredibly warm with Oliver, and very emotionally available for him throughout his life, but as Oliver gets older (especially once he's in his teens and young adult years), he realizes just how little he knows about his father. Alice also knows that Jasper is an equal parent to her - he knows Oliver's teachers' names, his favourite movie, allergies, crush etc. But to anyone on the outside, it would very much look like Alice was the primary caregiver - even Emmett gives him some hell for letting Alice do a lot of the heavy lifting. Jasper does this intentionally, as a protective thing, as a way to conceal his own vulnerabilities. It also helps when Oliver is just too old to convincingly look like their kid and becomes a cousin or a younger sibling to outsiders. As an adult, Oliver would say that his father is very mysterious to everyone but Alice, but that Jasper was a very good father (much to Jasper's relief. He has a LOT of anxiety over the idea of a 'good' father.)

I started Damaged Alice years ago before I realized and was diagnosed as neurodivergent and it's eye-opening how many behaviours I incorporated that imply Alice is ND. I hate the way that the transformation makes vampires 'perfect' - it's so boring and ableist. Give me Esme with OCD and anxiety, and Emmett with bear-attack scars, and Rosalie who has to wait for her physical wounds to heal and ugh. There is nothing thrilling about straight, white, Mormon neurotypical people.

In Damaged Alice, the Cullens kind of fall in between both categories. There was a plot point that Alice was sent to find the Cullens by the Groundskeeper (who heard about them from Alice and her visions), because they would protect her. There is a letter to explain the situation - I don't know whether I will keep that, honestly, because I like the idea of Alice being a mysterious figure.

But when Alice does arrive and is clearly not NT, the Cullens take her in for protection because they genuinely care about this poor girl's welfare (you can argue that their sentiment is apart of their Good Christian Family act but Carlisle's faith has shaped so much of who he is and how he approaches his family and vampirism, that it's impossible to split the two). At that point, she definitely functions as someone much younger and her newborn state has left her with a lot of feral behaviours and impulse control (there's a temper tantrum in a shopping mall because she wants a pet rabbit).

As time moves on, it's more and more clear that the Cullens have put her in a box because they don't expect her condition to change, when the venom is healing the damage to her brain - it's just a very, very slow process. Even after Jasper arrives and Alice latches onto him and improvement is made, the Cullens still resist letting her evolve and mature. They really expect her to stay childlike and dependent on them. Carlisle has an invested interest in her mental state, being a doctor, and Esme likes having someone she can dote on like a child.

And a lot of Alice's ND behaviours - lack of eye-contact, going non-verbal, meltdowns - are things that the Cullens try to cure her of; and they never really understand that Alice is dealing with excess sensory input because of her visions. A lot of her meltdowns are because of visions (especially when she sees Jasper fighting in the South). And her family really don't understand that. But no family is perfect (especially not families with ND individuals), and Alice and Jasper understand each other here (and in all my fics, lets be real).

Thank you so much for your ask, and your English is perfect <3