#the enrollment at the tribal school has doubled since 2016 I learned while doing a quick google

[gisellelx]

Twilight Advent, Day 12

Masterpost/prompts

Dec. 12 - Tell us some headcanons about a Twilight character you don't usually post about.

I had to ask for this one. There are so many and I generally have some semblance of something for most characters that any of the characters I write more often interact with. @bellalaine and and anon had some great suggestions though and they are characters I think about infrequently, Victoria and Sarah Black.

Victoria is one of the reasons I don't care for the Illustrated Guide. Above all else, I am interested in motivation. And while her very thorough backstory there suggests a more interesting story, it didn't actually impact the story in any meaningful way suggesting it was made up out of whole cloth after the fact, rather than taking bits of the character and fleshing them out.

But her backstory there and what is presented in canon is at least consistent with how I've thought about her in the times I've needed to, which is that going after the Cullens/Edward wasn't about avenging her mate; it was about proving to herself that she was powerful. This stems from the fact that there was absolutely no reason for her to have rolled up on the Cullens with an entire newborn army (and TIG has to jump through several hoops to explain this!) when she easily could've lured Edward and killed him during the timeline of New Moon, seeing as he was alone, if it really was about "a mate for a mate." Prior to meeting James, she was self-sufficient. She wasn't looking for a mate; she was content. She was interested in keeping undercover, the trait she learned as a human. In some ways, James's need for flashy hunts and kills grated on her, especially coupled with his lack of devotion to her. And then he tries to kill this girl, and the girl's vampire entourage takes out James.

She didn't go mad. Building up an army isn't what madness looks like. Learning enough about Alice's gift to evade it isn't what madness looks like. She went after the Cullens because she needed to prove to herself that she could. The backstory she's given in the guide would suggest that this could very easily be "little sister" syndrome and that would track.

Sarah Black was perfectly content to only have girls. Billy wanted a boy, but only sort of—he was worried about what would happen if vampires ever came back to Quileute lands. So they were actually not particularly trying for Jacob, but they weren't trying to avoid him, either.

Sarah doted on Jacob when he was a baby; it felt easy after having had twins. She sung him the oldies music she heard from her own mother growing up. When the twins were asleep and Jacob was awake, she would put him in a cradleboard and tell him the story of when he was born.

She, more than Billy, worried for her kids getting off the reservation. This was an internal struggle for her: she desperately wanted her children to revere and love their background as members of the Quileute peoples, but she also was not willing to look away from the poverty and difficulties of life on the Rez, especially after Billy developed diabetes. She wouldn't have fully approved of how Rachel and Rebecca did it, but she had always instilled in them that they should keep their heritage and it would protect them, but then that they should go into the world. She told them, even though Billy disagreed, that it would be okay if they married white men, as long as the white men were good.

Sarah was the pusher of the children's educations. She read them things they didn't get in school: though the tribal school augmented the typical grade school curriculum with Salish texts, she read them things like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Bud, Not Buddy and later so much Sherman Alexie. She wanted them to be able to contextualize the world off the Rez. They couldn't afford to send the girls to a private boarding school, but she was already trying to consider what things they would need to know to go to college. After she died, Billy found two neat, identical piles of books tucked away in the closet where Sarah kept her paints: two copies per title of Romeo and Juliet, Brave New World, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Jane Eyre, The Bluest Eye, The Great Gatsby, Julius Caesar, Hamlet—all the books that every high schooler not in a tribal school would be reading. But after they were tainted by their mothers' death, the girls never did read them.

Finally, her frybread was well and truly the bomb. These days, Sue sometimes makes a dark joke that the only reason Billy likes hers is because Sarah got out of the way. And they laugh, a little, and then tell the old stories.