Work Text:
1836
Jasper Whitlock is a miserable soul.
An unnatural and all-consuming thirst has been pounding through him for more days than he can count. Compelled to find a way to satisfy his thirst, he followed the most heavenly scent into a triage tent.
There, laid out on a raised cot was the body of a soldier fallen in battle, lost to the war. At the foot of that cot was a pail of blood and something else. Something that smelled less substantial but equally divine.
He was on it in a moment, drinking great gulps straight from the bucket until his belly was full of that fading warmth.
He was gone before the doctor returned.
The world was slipping back and forth in front of his eyes. The arsenic based preservative that had tainted the blood he’d ingested was taking its toll. And he felt at ease. Loose and comfortable in his marble skin in a way he hadn’t been since he’s been turned. He was almost clear headed. At least the blood lust was gone in that moment. All he wanted was to stay in that peaceful place.
He fought on through the Texas Revolution, following those heavenly triage tents where the dead were brought to be preserved for that long final ride home.
More often then not, he was under the haze of the arsenic used to preserve the bodies of the fallen. It numbed him some, to the emotions that reached out from every living thing around him, so he could know peace.
By the time the war ended, he was far gone on addiction. He craved the poison more than the blood that sustained him.
And that was how Carlisle Cullen found him.
Once the Revolution was done and the border established, Jasper had wandered out of the state in a drugged haze. He found himself sifting through the supplies of local doctors when he blew through towns, looking to get his fix on that wobbly peace that suffused his very being.
How was he to know that one such doctor would be another of his kind. A beautiful vampire, many decades his senior.
The good doctor helped wean him off the drugs and the human blood, introducing him to the vegetarian lifestyle he himself had kept since his own turning back in the 1660s. And wasn’t that a strange concept? Jasper had been a vampire scarcely a year and he had spent it all in wild pursuit of that which tempted him so. He could not imagine denying his bone-deep thirst for well over a century, and yet Carlisle Cullen had done just that. Had, for the better part of two centuries, been sustaining himself on the blood of animals while working closely with the blood of humans. And he’d never strayed from his principles in all that time with the temptation so real and close.
Together, they moved across the continent. Carlisle as the good doctor and Jasper as his student. And together they stayed, through the decades, and the additions to their family. They found peace and companionship in each other and in their mates, each of whom came to them in time.