On The Rocks, With A Twist (Vampire Academy) *Adrian/OC*

01. Hit Me

Joanne Hatcher, more commonly known as Joey, was a girl who liked to live in the moment. She rarely planned ahead and she didn't see any point in dwelling on past regrets.

Right now, however, she was feeling very stupid.

She generally coasted through life, acting on impulsive whims. Her latest had been dropping out of St. Vladimir's Academy, where she'd been training to become a guardian, not long before her graduation, in an attempt to pursue a career with the alternative rock band she fronted.

That had been... stupid, for lack of a better word. Dhampirs, half vampire and half human, like herself, generally followed one of two options – being a stay at home mom (so not happening) or being trained to become a protector of Moroi.

Joey had been following the second option at St. Vladimir's; a prestigious guardian training academy. She'd been there for the last several years and had been close to graduating as an official guardian, but impulsive as ever, when she'd had a call from one of her band mates suggesting that their band could make it big, she'd jumped at the chance and dropped out without another thought.

Bumming around with her band had been insanely fun at times. It had been so different and so much better than her lifestyle at the Royal Court. They hadn't done too badly either, considering the little time they'd actually been performing together. They managed to book themselves a couple of small venue gigs and even recorded an amateur EP together. Nothing major, but nothing to sniff at.

After a year of trying to fit into the music business, they'd had to concede that the likelihood of them making it big was very slim. Joey's band mates had homes in the human world that they'd been able to go back to, whereas Joey had ran out of money and had been forced to return to the Court.

Even though it hadn't worked out, she never would have thought that she'd regret the time she'd spent on her music break. But when she'd gotten home, things hadn't quite gone as she'd expected.

From childhood to when she'd left for St. Vladimir's, she'd breezed through her life at the Court. Her mother, Mela, may have been the only Moroi around who'd actually married her dhampir guardian, but she was actually a very well-liked member of one of the twelve royal vampire families.

The Conta family had been fairly quiet over the last few years, with Joey's aunt Marie as the head of their line, but Mela was very popular as the middle princess. She had a lot to say in matters at the Court and her status generally allowed Joey to bend more rules than most.

But when Joey had returned home and very naively stated that she'd like to finish her training and graduate from St. Vladimir's, the academy had refused her point blank. For starters, at the age of twenty, Joey was now too old to return to school. And no matter how good of a guardian to-be she'd made, they didn't want dhampirs who weren't one hundred percent committed. Joey actually had been a good guardian in-training, but recklessly dropping out to follow a spur of the moment decision showed that she was impulsive and couldn't be counted on to protect a Moroi in the long run.

She'd insisted that now that her lapse was out of the way, she was still committed to putting Moroi first. But since her father was an elite guardian himself, he was not impressed at what she'd done and insisted that she'd gotten what she deserved.

Luckily, Joey's mother was a lot softer. She'd been telling everyone that 'teenagers will be teenagers' and had promised Joey that she'd try her best to pull some strings and see if there was a way she could redeem herself and prove to everyone that she could still be a good guardian.

After a discussion with the royal council, Mela managed to find a solution. But it was not quite what Joey had bargained for. The council agreed that she could complete her field experience at the Court as a trial – where it would be carried out in the same way as it was at St. Vladimir's.