Chapter Text
When he first joins the Cullen family, Jasper is completely confused.
Everyone around him is awfully friendly and tolerant, and they guide him like mentors, even though, like hell, Jasper is older than paranoid Edward, upstart Rosalie, and even Esme, the wife of the head of the coven. She annoys him the least, but somehow she acts like his mother. Esme smiles warmly and sweetly, but her tenderness is imprinted on his tongue with a luscious aftertaste, and his throat is cramped with phantom nausea. He couldn't feel the real one, not even if he wanted to, not even if he ate human food that tasted like earth.
There was a swampy, dull sense of guilt about every step Edward had taken, Carlisle radiated a chilling restraint, and Rosalie's emotions spilled acidic envy on his tongue. Jasper drowns in their emotions, and if he could die, he would surely suffocate in his first days among the Cullens. Alice becomes his salvation. He senses in her an almost childlike sincerity that surely reminds him of the sweet water from a clear mountain stream. Jasper bathes himself in the echoes of her feelings, lest he dissolve into the boiling cauldron of the Cullens' emotions.
He finds it hard to bear the presence of all the clan members in one house, and so at first, for the next ten years, Jasper shuns everyone and only goes out hunting with Alice. Most of the time, though, he prefers to be alone, so he sneaks into the woods before sundown (every Cullen residence he's ever been to has a forest, a mass of trees with little light between their crowns). He spends the night there, which is usually longer than necessary, but no one asks any questions. The Cullens treat him as part of their family and let him enjoy what Jasper has grown accustomed to over the years.
Freedom.
Or, he adds to himself, a semblance of it, because every year he becomes convinced that he feels like a wild animal that has been chased into a zoo enclosure.
All in all, it's not as terrible as it might seem, because for the first time in his life – and sub-death, obviously – Jasper lets himself think that he has found a home. A family. He's cared for, he's loved. He... also loves. Perhaps what he feels for Alice is love, because there's no other way to describe the aching deadness of his need to be near her. Alice is as simple and warm as you can be when you've been dead for more than a hundred years.
Jasper had once thought that to love was to burn and glow and melt like the heat of a golden sunset, but those thoughts were probably nothing more than the idle speculation of an unhealthy youth. All lies. Love is about serenity from the start, not all-consuming fire. He convinces himself of this even as he catches echoes of burning love from Emmett to Rosalie and vice versa. When he feels the burning fire in Carlisle's chest every time he looks at his wife.
When suddenly, after nearly sixty years in the coven, he feels the same kindling fire beneath his ribs, which surely only alarms him because Edward suddenly finds himself near a mortal.
Her name is Isabella, but she strictly forbids anyone to utter her full name. She also seems, unknowingly, to keep her away from any of the Cullens' gifts. Alice sees events around the mortal, but her visions are indistinct, blurry; Edward can't read her thoughts, and Jasper, no matter how he tries, can't make her fear him properly. Next to Bella, he finds for the first time the trembling silence of a chorus of other people's emotions, being near a human thing, and in the first days of their acquaintance he doesn't even know what the fuck it all means.
Just like he doesn't know why something unpleasantly scrunches up inside every time she looks up at him.
"Edward will ask you to tutor Bella in history. She's falling behind," Alice informs him one night as they return from their hunt. Jasper frowns.
"I'm not going to have to wipe her mouth after she eats. Edward knows history as well as I do, let him explain the causes of the Great Depression to her himself."
"You'll accept it." Alice certainly can't hear him; she's smiling, looking straight ahead, but her eyelashes are twitching for some reason. On Jasper's tongue, overpowering the taste of the cougar's bitter blood, something even more bitter bloomed, something that was not his. He senses Alice's sadness, but he doesn't dare ask what makes her sad, because she only shakes her head. "It's the way it has to be."
He tries to protest almost all the way through the morning and on his way to school. But Alice certainly doesn't hear his questions, she chats about miscellaneous and pointless things, and then says a brief goodbye and runs off to her art class. Jasper has chemistry on the schedule, but he stays in the library because he's certainly not ready to cross paths with Jessica Stanley's fountain of emotion today.
And Jasper is hardly surprised when he sees Swan at the table in the co-working area. She is strenuously scribbling something in her notebook, with her pencil against the sheet. It squeaks almost more deafeningly than any other in this library – to the point of irritation. Jasper thinks about leaving for the first second, but then Bella looks up and awkwardly waves her hand at him, recognizing him at the first moment.
"Will you be here long?" The distance between them is decent, but after all, the mortal knows that Jasper is a vampire with amazing hearing, so she asks the question when he hasn't even taken a step in her direction yet. Swan's hair is not the way it should be, chaotic, completely human, and Jasper looks at the tangled strands a little longer than he should.
Edward's mortal is utterly haphazard, unsteady, and so quiet that Jasper involuntarily wonders why she's even around them all the time now. Irritation boils under his ribs, and he's about to leave when he realizes belatedly that it's his irritation. It can be clearly felt in the silence of her presence, because Swan, in some incredible way, without even being gifted as a vampire, stifles Jasper's ability.
He notices this on the first day of their formal introduction inside the coven, but now, being around her, he realizes that he feels no emotion but his own around her.
"Until the end of class," Jasper replies, and barely smiles. Not to Bella, but to his own sense of serenity.
In less than an hour he realizes that Isabella Swan's company is not the worst thing fate could offer him.
***
Edward does ask Jasper to study with Bella, but only because he can't stay near her for that long. He understands that Edward is disturbed and frightened by the fierce temptation to sink his teeth into his girlfriend's neck, to drink all of her blood, and so he does agree. To help someone he is almost used to thinking of as a brother. To not feel the phantom despair of wanting to drink a man's blood every time, belonging not even to Jasper himself, but to Edward.
To rest from the intrusive swarm of other people's emotions.
"Do you want to bite me, too? " Bella asks, and Jasper raises an eyebrow. He sits on the chair in the corner of her bedroom while she gathers the scrawled sheets of paper.
"I do. It's quite normal desire for a vampire," he says, and he sees Bella's lips pursing. He wonders if it's fear or a desire to ask more questions, and Jasper smiles. Lifts the corner of his mouth instead of baring his teeth. Normally reading people through their emotions is as easy as looking into their minds, but it's oh so different with Bella. She is a closed book with glued pages, but Jasper is a bookworm. He's bound to want to read it, but, of course, out of excitement, not personal interest. "But I won't throw myself at you. At least not until I'm hungry and your veins are opened."
"Oh, so I'm not your type?"
"Literally," he nods and looks at Bella standing at the window.
She bit her lip nervously, and then suddenly says, "And Edward? "
"What? Apparently you're his type, he's tiptoeing around you endlessly."
"That's not what I ask. I mean that I'm… if I’m his type literally," she repeats with a chuckle. Bella swings the curtains open, and the light of the sunset floods the room. It glides over her skin and tangles in her hair, which no longer looks dark in the orange glow, but burns with an inky gold. Flame. Fire. "What if he doesn't hold back one day?"
"Don't let him taste your blood, even on pain of death, and then probably you may be able to save yourself."
***
A few weeks later, just on pain of death, she lets her boyfriend drink blood mixed with tracker's venom. And while each of the Cullens calls Edward a hero, Jasper notices him licking his lips predatorily and greedily remembering the feeling of satiety.
***
However, it's Jasper, not Edward, who's considered as the monster anyway. Fair enough, Whitlock thinks as he watches Carlisle drive injured Bella away from her failed eighteenth birthday party. In the end, it was Jasper who attacked Bella, not Edward.
(For some reason, nobody talks about the fact that when they smelled human blood, they all dissolved into a desire to take at least a sip. But each in their own. As for Jasper, he accepted the lure of six more vampires. And he couldn't help himself).
Edward slams his fist against the wall and wails for a long time, pining with despair and hopelessness. They feel like something tasteless with a slight astringency, and it's quite bearable, but Jasper realizes that he's tired. All he's been doing for the past few months is dragging the spectrum of Edward's revived emotions onto himself, and so every day he wants to get away from the Cullen house.
He is unspeakably annoyed by Edward with his moping of a classic literature character, a romantic hero who is capable of the most intense suffering that none of the other characters would understand.
It just so happens that Jasper, being only a minor character, feels far more than the protagonist.
Ironic.
He doesn't complain, though, and only leaves toward the woods in the morning, heading to the residential area of Forks. Jasper knows Alice is watching him, but he doesn't turn around. Alice knows where he is going, but she doesn't try to stop him. Because some things are inevitable, and she of all people should understand that.
The streetlamp outside the Swan house isn't lit. Maybe it's been turned off because there's already a light on the horizon, maybe no one cares about the blown-out bulb. As Jasper approaches the house, he notices the sheriff's car pulling away, and it probably isn't the best time for a visit, but Jasper Whitlock (now Hale) simply can't find another, because in a few days the Cullens will be gone, leaving behind a place of home and a little mortal that everyone secretly dreams of draining.
Jasper shouldn't care, actually. He's the only one who doesn't want to kill Bella, but he foreshadows the yearning for the peace he has barely found around this mortal. He almost envies that there are people in the world (and certainly not only people) who are allowed to be with her even to the very end of her short, miserable life. If only it were possible...
If only.
Jasper knocks on the door three times, ignoring the presence of the bell, and when Swan opens, she smiles quietly and steps to the side. Inviting. Letting him in. Permitting.
"Apology accepted."
"Fine," Jasper replies, making his way into the house. It's empty, like it's not alive at all. It's warm, but it's quiet, like having Bella around. "I don't know how long you've been able to read minds?"
"Edward's companionship is paying off." She grins and take a sip of the warm tea. Then she suddenly acts irrationally, and her bandaged palm rests directly on top of the hand of Jasper, who is seated across from her at the table. "I don't blame you. I can't imagine how you put up with all this... cackling. Emotional, I mean. Sometimes I can't handle my feelings, and it almost makes me sick to my stomach to be so powerless. I don't know how you don't lose control."
"But I did. Yesterday." His fingers under her palm tingle with the distinct heat emanating from Swan's human body. She feels like fire to him, and looking up, Jasper meets her gaze. Curious. Unsure. Unreadable. "I wanted to tell you that Edward is thinking of running away. And the family supports him."
"Good intentions," Bella snorted, rolling her eyes. Dawn was setting on the horizon, and the bit of sky visible from her window flashed crimson and orange. "He wants to break up with me?"
"For your safety, of course," Jasper shrugs and barely wrinkles his nose. He carefully grabs her palm and barely squeezes it in his hand to keep it from hurting. "But it's stupid and childish to lose you."
"I wish he understood that."
Jasper sees a large tear rolling lazily down Bella's cheek. As hot as her palm and her breath and her whole being. The drop burns Jasper's finger as he brushes it away in a short, almost imperceptible motion. But for some reason he doesn't take his hand away from her face.
He convinces himself that the fear that swept over him in an instant was only an echo of someone else's emotion, not his own fear of not seeing her again. He thinks the fear comes from somewhere outside, from a neighbor or a mailman on a bicycle rushing by. But, in all honesty, Jasper knows that's impossible, and everything he feels around Bella belongs to him alone.
He bursts to ask her something, but the words "Do you want me to stay?" burn into the fire of his breathless chest.
This isn't love, Jasper reminds himself, but he stares at Bella, who leans into his touch and kisses his palm impulsively.
Only the dawning orange sun, which finally rises and begins a new day, stands witness to this.
***
"Don't go," she asks at the end of the day, grabbing his hand.
And Jasper thinks that if he gives in, he will surely burn with his own feelings, which she not only stifles, but also inflames.
And he chooses to burn.