L'ETRE ET L'AME -- Chapter 5 A Twilight Fan Fiction
At first, Jasper worried how Emmett’s departure might affect Bella. Up until that point, she had spent most of her time in Alaska secluded with a computer. However, Emmett had taken on the role of big brother in Bella’s life long before the disastrous birthday party, and Jasper wasn’t at all certain that the Denali family would be able to step-in and fill that empty place when he left.
So, it came as a pleasant surprise to see Kate and Irina, and even Tanya, warm to Bella once she pried herself away from her writing and showed them the slightest interest. In fact, they tucked her under their collective wing and made every attempt to help her settle in to her endless vampire days. It was Tanya who spearheaded Bella’s outfitting, trapping her, with the help of Irina and Kate, back at the computer (of all things!) to click her through their favorite online boutiques. A week later, boxes began arriving at the house, but not before Tanya and Irina had already gone into Fairbanks and purchased Bella a perfectly serviceable wardrobe. Bella thanked them all with a profusion of embarrassed gratitude and responded eagerly when they offered involve her in their current interests.
Kate taught Bella to use the scroll saw so she could try her hand at intarsia (Bella was making a duck), and it was going moderately better than her attempts to learn crocheting from Irina. Tanya taught her the basics of photography, and they had passed a couple of evenings trying to capture the Aurora digital-style. It was also Tanya who had also encouraged Bella in a more unorthodox vampire pursuit.
“Want a piece?” she asked, offering Bella the pack of Big Red chewing gum.
Bella considered the shiny foil sticks skeptically, and Jasper chuckled under his breath. “Is it going to make me . . . throw up?”
“Well, it took me a long time to be able to tolerate it, and I actually started with some natural mint stuff,” Tanya said, chewing steadily. “I guess gum just produces more venom, and you don’t really ingest much of anything. Although, I still can’t manage a breath mint.”
Bella turned the pack over to read the ingredients then sniffed the open end. She looked over at Jasper. “Have you tried it?”
His felt his nostrils twitch at the very idea. “No.”
Bella returned the pack. “Maybe I’ll start with mint sometime.”
That didn’t mean that everything was rainbows and buttercups though. While there weren’t the number of conflicts he had experienced with other newborns, they still existed. Jasper kept careful tabs on any sudden rush of anger or frustration from Bella, and the other women were reasonably cautious as well.
Only once had Bella truly lost it, when Kate mis-cut the last available piece of hickory. Bella “flipped like Ninja” as Kate later put it, knocking over the saw table in an attempt to plow her through the wall. Fortunately, Jasper had arrived to restrain her before the garage was completely destroyed, and now every time Jasper felt the tension rise anywhere in the house, he wondered whether he should step in and take control of the situation. He asked himself the question a dozen times a day: Should he intervene, or shouldn’t he? He found himself irrevocably tied to Bella, and he wanted to make the change as easy for her as he could. While he could have eased her frustration or wiped out her anger without so much as a single word, it would leave her helpless to her own emotions. Therefore, he kept a cautious distance.
Jasper thought it might be like parenting in some way; he wondered if Bella would be offended by the comparison.
He was idly strumming Heart of Gold on his guitar one night when his mind drifted back to an article Rosalie had given Edward on the “biology of parenting” when he first decided to pursue a relationship with Bella. It was nothing Edward (and Jasper for that matter) hadn’t read before-how parents’ deep attachments to their infants is connected to their offsprings’ helplessness, their dependence, and on the singularity of the relationship. All of the things that Bella was to Edward.
On the last page, Rosalie had hand-written: “There are words for men who become obsessed with infants--none of them nice.”
Jasper deadened the strings and stared up at the ceiling for a moment. There was a singularity to his relationship with Bella too, but so far it expressed itself only in mutual avoidance. She kept her distance, nodding sometimes at him when they were in the same room, her anxiety sparking off of her in faint greens and blues. He couldn’t understand why she should still be so ill-at-ease with him-especially now that he could no longer hurt her--but he tried to be considerate too and spend as little time around her as he could without being impolite.
Bella and Tanya came drifting through front room then, dressed in coats and boots, but lacking cameras.
“We’re going hunting,” Bella told him.
“Oh, well, have a good time,” he said, on reflex.
Tanya tossed a wave in farewell, and closed the door behind them.
Jasper leaned the guitar against the wall and enjoyed the feeling of “aloneness” for the moment. The house was empty now except for him; Irina and Kate had gone to Fairbanks that morning for some woodworking supplies and late-night clubbing, and it was a relief to be alone with his own emotions for a spell.
After a few minutes of aimless pacing, he sat down at the dining table and watched the feathery snowflakes coming down. He wouldn’t be able to see them if not for his vampire-vision. There was to be a full moon tonight, but it wouldn’t be up for several hours, and then only for a short time. Right now, the sky was dark as the devil’s pocket. Eventually, he turned a handy laptop toward him and clicked onto the net.
He started by checking the news in Washington: particularly, anything to do with Bella’s disappearance which was now being connected with the “large animal attacks” of earlier in the year. He perched his chin on his hand and read the speculation on why Bella had gotten out of her truck (which the authorities had found abandoned between the Cullen home and Forks). Some folks believed she had seen one of the mystery beasts and got out to take a picture with her new digital camera (the camera was never found). A quote from Charlie read, “Bella was cautious. Not outdoorsy at all. She would never have done anything so slap-foolish.”
Perhaps she wasn’t foolish enough to get out of her vehicle to photograph an enormous carnivore, thought Jasper, but she had been foolish enough to fall in love with a vampire. That error in judgment had lead to her death just as surely.
He clicked the news browser closed so sharply he thought he might have damaged the mouse button. He told himself that it wouldn’t do any good to brood, especially since Edward was probably brooding enough for the both of them. Jasper surfed around a bit more, looking into online degree programs for Bella, but his mind was restless and he couldn’t focus. Eventually, he decided to turn to writing, but for him that meant pen and paper, not keyboard and monitor.
He went downstairs and settled in with a fountain pen and a hardbound journal. It was a habit he had picked up from Carlisle, though Carlisle kept his private journal with a quill. A quirk he referred to as his “pet eccentricity.”
Jasper wrote two entries, one with a salutation to Alice, and another without. While each contained basically the same information, he had learned years ago that he wrote differently for them. He held back some things in the “Dearest Alice,” entry, but wrote with more emotion, letting himself really feel, when he wrote “to” his mate.
He sighed, thinking about Alice. It had been nearly three weeks since Jasper had last heard her voice, the longest he had ever been without her. He missed the touch of her hand, and the taste of her mouth, and the gimlet look in her eye when he tried to sidestep her foresight. Much of her scent had faded from the garments she had socked away for him (the devil-cat had hidden a pair of her panties and bra in the bottom of his bag). Mostly, he missed the deep, familiar hum of her emotions. He couldn’t sense her in any way, and it wasn’t like missing an appendage, whatever the poets would have you believe; it was like missing a vital organ.
He hated being left so in the dark, not knowing how or what she was doing, and so he determined to call her. Friday. He would definitely call her on Friday, four days from now. Alice would see his decision, and she was clever enough to warn him off, if necessary. He looked down to see a dime-sized ink blotch spreading on the page, and quickly lifted the nib.
It wasn’t like him to be so careless.
3:29
He checked it again ten minutes later, and again five minutes after that.
It was almost funny, Jasper thought. He was acting a father waiting for daughter who was late returning from her very first date. He caught himself short with that; Jasper had taken Bella’s father and mother away from her, as surely as he had taken her life. To insinuate himself into a parental position would be despicable beyond measure.
Suddenly, a wild anxiety ripped through him, practically knocking him from the chair. In a split-second, Jasper had the front door open.
“What happened?” Jasper demanded, but he already knew. “Where is Bella?”
Tanya’s eyes were crimped with distress as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other on the threshold. “She’s out. She’s back there.”
It took Jasper a mere instant to understand what had happened. A little guilt on Tanya’s part was reasonable, no matter how little fault she might bear. But this was more than average guilt.
“You let her do it?” he hissed.
“I didn’t let her. I--I just thought about it, but I couldn’t. I wanted to stop her, but by then it was too late!” Her voice cracked with emotion.
“Why did you think about it, Tanya?”
Tanya shook her head, mute, and snow flew from her hair.
“Why!”
“Maybe, she should know. . . I though Bella should be able to make a choice. She’s not obliged to our lifestyle, right?”
“You did it because of Edward,” he snarled. “You’re hoping she won’t stick to this life and that Edward won’t want her anymore.
Tanya couldn’t deny her motives and dropped her head.
Jasper rarely allowed himself strong negative emotion; it was too heavy, too much to manage when he had to deal with everyone else’s feelings from day to day. However, he let the anger fill him now, and he twisted it sharply before thrusting it back upon Tanya--as crippling fear.
She shriveled and dropped to her knees with a gasp.
“Where is she?” he demanded.
“She wouldn’t come back.” Tanya’s voice trembled violently, but it wasn’t enough for Jasper. He could just imagine Bella in the comedown from her blood lust, the dead body before her. Those empty unseeing eyes in the face of the first life she had taken. Overcome by a sudden vengefulness Jasper cranked the emotional dial till Tanya was absolutely frantic. “I didn’t want to leave her!” she cried. “I came back here to get help. For her!”
Tanya was the ground, shuddering on her hands and knees. Cowering. Jasper hadn’t seen a vampire so terrified since his days killing newborns in Te--.
The memory brought him to his senses with a blow, and he tore off down the trail Tanya had created, leaving her behind him, gasping and sobbing. Jasper sailed over the new skiff of snow, the crisp cold of the air and Tanya’s rich herbal scent filling his nostrils. He sprinted through meadows of browning autumnal grasses and the dusting of snow, finally coming to the intersection of Tanya’s and Bella’s scents, and the pungent, luscious tang of human blood.
He swallowed hard and took the fork right, following Bella’s scent and the lingering perfume of blood, hoping he’d be able to hold it together. A half mile later and he found Bella’s blood-stained coat abandoned on the trail. Two hundred yards beyond that he found her shirt. Then the boots and pants. She must have shucked everything as she ran.
Jasper came upon a lake at the base of the foothills, and there he saw her, on a short outcropping of rock. Bella was naked, and her skin was the same silky color as the moonlight, from her forehead down her thighs and to her bare feet. Her knees were bent to her chest, fingers linked around her shins. She stared out at the glassy expanse of water, silent and still as the rock on which she sat.
He approached slowly, though loudly enough so that she would know he was coming.
Bella didn’t move; didn’t cover up. He paused several yards behind her, but she stared straight ahead when she finally spoke.
“What do you suppose the temperature is out here?” she asked quietly.
“Ten. Twenty degrees maybe,” he said, surprised at the question.
“Below freezing,” Bella said with a dulled sort of wonder. “I never even saw thirty-two degrees in Phoenix.” There was a short pause. “How cold will it have to get before I really feel it?”
“You don’t feel it now?” he asked.
“A little. Maybe.”
“It will take time to re-sensitize yourself,” he said.
“Is it cold to you?” Bella asked, finally turning. Her face was a careful mask, covering the turmoil beneath the surface.
Jasper took a moment then. There was a sense of the cold, surely, but he didn’t feel it in the way she meant. It was an uncomfortable dryness in his sinuses, the almost imperceptible shrill of things freezing.
“I’m aware of the cold,” he said.
Bella bowed her head, pregnant with defeat. “I’d like to feel it. Cold. Hot. Anything. Sorry,” she said, with a quick glance at him. “I don’t mean to make you feel. . . .bad.”
Guilty. That was what she meant to say, of course. Jasper’s hunch was confirmed with her next remark.
“They were sleeping. In a tent.” Bella gave a small turn of her hand indicating a place beside her. Not so close as they could touch, but close enough to actually be in conversation.
“What did you do with them after?” he asked gently, slipping up beside her. He half-considered offering her his shirt, as a gentlemanly gesture, but she wasn’t embarrassed, and neither was he. He knew that the offer would only have made her so.
“Tanya--” there was bitterness in the name. “She helped me. We pulled up a couple of trees and put the. . . bodies underneath. Sort of replanted the trees on top.” She spoke in short utterances, almost panting. Jasper felt her anguish, and wanted to help her, take it away. Instead he helped her by letting her feel it, unadulterated.
“And it maybe was stupid. But I said. . .a prayer too. I don’t know that I even believe in God, so I prayed to them, the people I. . . killed.” She brought her hand down with a smack against the rock, and a crack jittered between them. “Once, Jacob--Jacob Black, a friend of mine, he’s Quileute,” she explained to him, unnecessarily. “He told me that their fishermen used to say a prayer when they pulled in a large take. Sort of a prayer to the earth for the food, and to the fish, to acknowledge the necessity of their death. . . . But I didn’t have to kill those people!” She shook her head furiously at herself. “And I don’t know if they can forgive me. Or if everything is just over for them forever. It was one thing I could do. But maybe in the end the prayer was just for me.” Her voice dropped, almost out of the range of his hearing. “Do you think it’s wrong?”
“It’s not about what I think,” he said.
“I need your help!” Bella cried. “Killing them was wrong! I know that. Is every thing I do in response to that murder somehow wrong too? I need. . . help.” The words choked off, and Jasper realized it wasn’t just pain, or hurt--Bella was angry as well. How long had she been hiding that? He sat there, stunned by his own emotional tone-deafness, and Bella groaned and turned away, dropping her head to her knees.
“I don’t think it was wrong,” he said softly. Still Jasper still didn’t take her pain, but he didn’t fight it either; he let it spill onto him, and a deeper compassion stirred in him in response. He eased closer and placed a hand upon hers where it lay on the rock. Bella flipped her palm up and seized his hand greedily. With a sad shock Jasper realized it was probably the first time anyone had touched her in a non-restraining manner since her change.
It was a long time before she replied.
“They won’t have a gravestone, or anything. Their families won’t even know what happened to them.” Her words were muffled in the cavern between her legs and body.
Jasper merely nodded though Bella wouldn’t see it. Her family would never know what became of her either.
“What did you do when-have you ever killed anyone?” she amended. Jasper was stunned, but oddly grateful at how little Edward had told her about his past.
“Many, many people, Bella. I had a different experience than the Cullens.” He gave her hand a brief squeeze. “I know better now, and sometimes I manage to do better. As for the people I’ve killed, I track down their names however I can, old records, microfiche. I learn who they were and make it a point to remember.”
Bella raised her head, just enough to gaze down at their joined hands.
“Almost every person who walks this planet will be lost to time,” he said. “Memories fade and disappear after a generation or two. Or three. Some people believe that a person can live on in memories, that first-hand memories of the deceased keep that person alive, and that the dead aren’t wholly gone until all who knew them are dead as well.” He let his gaze wander to the reflection of the full moon where it shone like a silver dollar on the water. “As long as I live, as long as I remember these people, and what I did to them and to their families, maybe they go on living a little. It doesn’t make what I did any less wrong, but it’s how I live with it. Is that rationalization, do you think? Am I just trying to ease my conscience?”
He waited, and eventually Bella realized he wasn’t just asking rhetorical questions.
She shook her head, struggling to meet his eyes.
“I don’t think so.”
Jasper’s mouth tightened into a weak smile, and he ignored the fact that her answer might have been self serving; he appreciated her strength, and weakness. Like a man easing a heavy load from his body, he let down his defenses. Jasper let all of her pain and loneliness sink into him, and allowed his own emotions to settle into all of the empty, hollow places revealed over the past weeks.
He had been toying with the notion of care-taking, of a parental sort of responsibility, but hadn’t taken it seriously. Jasper knew it wasn’t enough that the Denali family had been keeping busy, it wasn’t the same as her keeping company. Keeping tabs on her behavior wasn’t the same as giving thought to her heart. He scooted up beside Bella and dropped an arm around her shoulder. She leaned hard against him and convulsed with tears she couldn’t make and a sob she wouldn’t release.
They stayed that way for a long while, long enough for the moon to dip closer to the horizon and the falling snow to dust their bodies. He felt her slow intake of breath before she finally spoke again.
“Do you think we have souls?”
Jasper wondered if Edward had had this conversation with Bella, or if this were just another one that he had avoided. “Humans or vampires?” he asked.
“Any of us.” She gave him a surprised look, as if the distinction had never crossed her mind. Jasper was glad of it.
“Yes. . .” Bella must have heard the hesitation in his voice and she looked up from his shoulder waiting for the other shoe to drop. So he dropped it.
“And no. I don’t know that we have souls so much as we create them. Humans and vampires both. We are beings, we have “being”. It’s what we do with our being, what we experience, the people we love, that’s how we create our souls.”
Bella’s expression flickered and Jasper felt the hopefulness behind it, along with a spoonful of admiration.
Jasper almost smiled. “I didn’t come up with it, Bella, but it’s the closest I’ve found to what I do believe.”
“I like that,” she said. “I want to try to create a good soul too.”
Jasper noticed the way she said, “too,” and Bella turned her head back against his shoulder and sighed. Her hair brushed softly against his stony jaw, as he settled his head against hers. Above, the Aurora stretched and blossomed in ghostly greens and pinks across the vast night sky.