Cracked! Chapter 17: Thoughts They Cannot Defend
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And now, without further ado, I give you chapter 17...
You may notice a difference in continuity after the La Push visit. Meyer had Bella go all day Monday and most of Tuesday without seeing Edward. Probably because she wanted that stupid “Bella falls asleep reading Jane Austen in her backyard so that Edward can spy on her from the trees” scene. You know, the part of the book where Bella spends all day Monday hoping Edward will show up at school, and he never does, so she basically does nothing except go outside in 50 degree weather, plop her blanket down on the wet ground, and pretend that she’s getting a tan while she moons over a boy? And Edward sneaks up on her in broad daylight, because that’s supposed to be romantic or some shit? That whole section is a waste of time. Monday is the last sunny day in my version.
From “Twilight Chapter 7: Nightmare” and “Midnight Sun Chapter 8: Ghost”
Thoughts They Cannot Defend
“Earth to Bella. You there?”
Bella blinked and returned her eyes to her own lunch table, rather than the empty one across the cafeteria. “I’m sorry, I was distracted. You were saying?”
Jessica suppressed her urge to smirk knowingly. She could afford to be gracious, though, because Bella’s advice about re-inviting Mike to the dance paid off-they’d gone out to dinner and a free outdoor concert over the weekend and had a pretty good time. “I was asking if you wanted to go dress shopping with us this afternoon.”
“Oh.” Bella looked down at the other end of their table where Lauren sat talking animatedly without ever once stopping to listen to anyone around her. “Who’s going?”
“Just Angela and me,” Jessica assured her.
Angela, who followed Bella’s gaze, whispered to her. “I asked Jess not to invite Lauren. She’s been extra bitchy lately, and I just don’t want to deal with it.”
Bella’s eyes popped, and she looked at her friend. “Did you just curse?”
Angela shrugged. Lauren may or may not have called Angela a ‘bland little church mouse’ during first period, apparently oblivious to the fact that the church mouse in question sat two seats behind her and was not hard of hearing in the least. Everyone around Angela seemed to think a preacher’s daughter only fit into one of two categories: nice good girl or rebellious hellcat. Her mother once told her, when it was just the two of them, that she was free to figure out who she was on her own, independent of her father’s expectations or beliefs. Which is fine to say, but a lifetime in the same town meant everyone she’d ever met had expectations of her, not just Daddy. Seeing the Cullens keep to themselves without succumbing to peer pressure for two years, and then meeting Bella, who clearly didn’t have a problem with expressing herself, was just the inspiration Angela needed to shake herself up a little. Because while Angela wasn’t by any means a trouble maker, and in fact she loved her family very much, that didn’t mean she wanted anyone to put her in a box. Especially not Lauren.
“Hell yeah,” Angela added, liking the way the phrase rolled off the tongue.
“Sweet,” Bella smiled. After all the stress of the previous week, a sunny afternoon spent doing something normal sounded like a relaxing way to finish off her day. Looking back at Jessica, she said, “My pick-up truck won’t really hold three people and keep the shopping bags dry. But I can pitch in for gas if we take your car.”
Meanwhile, in a thicket not far away…
“What are you doing?”
“Good afternoon to you, too. What does it look like I’m doing?”
“It looks like you’re standing under a tree, staring at the back side of the school.”
“Then that’s what I’m doing.”
“You do realize that if anyone here knew your actual age, you’d be arrested for child endangerment or the like.”
“Not that anyone can see me, but it also looks like I’m seventeen years old, same age as nearly a third of the student population.”
“Great. Instead of being a creepy old man, you’re just a young, truant stalker. That’s much better.”
“You’ve made your point, Jasper,” Edward sighed. “Many times over, I might add. I already told you I won’t be entering her room at night anymore.”
“I’m sure you told yourself you wouldn’t climb into her room in the first place, right before you did it anyway.”
Edward, who had done exactly that, said, “That was a completely different situation.”
“Sure it was. Now you understand why hanging around in her room is wrong, but you’re okay with watching her at school.”
“Can’t you just let me have this?”
“It’s not for me to ‘let’ you have anything.”
“Since when did you acquire a set of human morals? You don’t think of humans as people, but now you’re sitting in judgment over the way I treat one of them? Suddenly they have value to you? You don’t even like Bella.”
Jasper frowned, looking at the school-he hated to be near so much tension every bit as much as Edward hated proximity to so many thoughts, but unlike Edward, the fresh air, distance, and closed doors helped Jasper immensely. “I neither like nor dislike her. That’s not what this is about.”
“You’re right, it’s not,” Edward agreed, his voice tightly controlled. “This is none of your business. It’s no one else’s, either, and you can tell the women I said so when you report back to them.”
“Unfortunately I need to make it my business,” Jasper answered evenly. Edward could sense his brother’s attempt to be reasonable rather than emotional. “You’re in love, and you don’t know how it’s done.”
Edward paused thoughtfully before he spoke. “I didn’t realize there was a right or wrong way to ‘do’ love.”
“How many murderers did you kill who started out exactly like this?”
Sighing, Edward replied, “Not that you don’t have a point, but that’s not what I’m here for.”
“Tell me why you’re here, then.” At Edward’s skeptical eyebrow, Jasper added, “Honestly, I want to know.”
After another moment, Edward asked, “What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without seeing Alice?”
Jasper’s eyes and thoughts immediately moved in the direction of their house, where Alice was entertaining Peter and Charlotte while he slipped away to talk some sense into his brother. “Four days.” Very long days.
“While you were separated,” Edward probed, “did you think for even one minute that she’d come to harm, and that you wouldn’t be there to protect her?”
“I suppose,” Jasper reflected. “But Alice is strong, fast, and just as deadly as I am.”
“Bella isn’t.” Edward’s eyes swept the grounds and street for the thirteenth time, looking for anything that could even remotely be construed as a threat: rabid squirrel, concealed gopher hole on the P.E. field, rat climbing into the Big Red Truck to chew on the battery cables, drunken truck driver headed straight for the science building. Not that he could do anything about any of these hazards, what with the bright afternoon sun imprisoning him in the shade. “Six million ways for a human to die, and over the weekend I realized I could only rule out about forty percent of them.”
Jasper, who had only ever considered the dangers of vampire proximity, said nothing.
“You go away for a long weekend,” Edward continued, “and you’re anxious to get back to Alice, but you’re okay. You know she’s all right. You know she loves you, and that she’ll be waiting for you to come home. I don’t have any of that, not even some assurance of her feelings. So yes,” he turned to look at his brother, “it is different. Bella could die while I’m away, from something as simple as another car accident or a tree falling on her house or a tiny little germ. She could meet someone else, someone who could give her all the things in life I can’t. She could get fed up and go back home to the desert-all of her clothes were missing from her closet this morning, and I still don’t know for certain what it means. Any of those things could happen before I’ve even had so much as a chance to tell her how I feel or see her again, hear her voice with my own ears. You’ve never had such worries with Alice, whereas I’m going to have them for the rest of Bella’s natural life. Pardon me if the best way I have to alleviate the stress is to sit here, at a respectful distance, and watch her go about her day.”
Mollified, Jasper considered all this carefully. “I suppose I understand, but…”
“But what?”
“This isn’t the best way to alleviate your stress.”
“Hunting doesn’t help with anything but thirst…oh. You don’t mean hunting.”
“It’s a simple solution.”
“I can’t do it, Jasper.”
“You’ll never be happy if you don’t.”
“I’ve never expected to feel happy.”
“You prefer to feel miserable, then?”
“No, just…content.”
“This is no way to live your life.”
“You say that from the secure position of having a mate. Trust me: this is an improvement over the last century or so.”
“Alice believes the girl is your mate. Or will be.”
“Alice would believe in Santa Claus if she had a vision of a fat lumberjack in red pajamas stuck in a chimney.” It was a deflection, and not a particularly effective one, either-Edward’s heart soared at the thought of being mated to Bella. He couldn’t conceal that from his brother.
“So…this,” Jasper said, ignoring the crack about Alice instead of letting it divert his attention. “Watching from the sidelines. Is it supposed to be enough?”
“It isn’t supposed to be anything. It simply is.”
“That’s hardly fair.”
“Nothing’s ever been fair since the day my mother died.”
“I don’t mean to you, Edward.”
“To the girl? Coming from the Cullen with the highest body count under his belt, that’s almost funny.” Neither vampire smiled.
“And yet it’s true.”
“You think I haven’t considered that aspect?”
“Have you?” Jasper asked.
“I’ve given it a lot more thought than you have.”
“Are you ever going to do anything besides think about it?”
“You’re a man of action. I can appreciate that. But you aren’t just talking about easing the burden our physical differences create. I can’t take so much away from her.”
“You already are taking something from her, just in a different way.”
“Perhaps,” Edward conceded. “But at least my way, she can walk away from this unscathed. What you and Alice are proposing…no. I can’t alter her life so permanently. I won’t.”
“As you’ve already pointed out,” Jasper observed, “there are six million ways she can die. Six million and one, actually, if you include yourself. ‘Unscathed’ isn’t a realistic expectation.”
Edward finally turned and looked at his brother. “You want to kill her, you want her alive. You want me to leave her alone, you want me to turn her. What side are you on?”
Jasper made a frustrated sound. “Whichever side keeps the rest of us safe, just so long as you pick one. Did you think I was here to be supportive of your fence-straddling bullshit?”
Edward heard himself growling, “You’re an absolute bastard.”
“You’re the one who took ‘ignoring her’ off the table, not me. Someone has to make the hard choices in this family.”
“If you so much as touch her-”
“Your threats are tiresome and unnecessary,” Jasper interrupted. “I couldn’t change her myself if I tried.”
“Then what is your purpose here? To annoy me into turning her?”
“Actually, I wanted to tell you something.”
Edward waited.
“Idiot man-child
Confuses a house of cards
For a foundation.”
Edward snorted. “Did you just haiku at me?”
“Stop pretending to miss the point, you foolish boy,” Jasper snapped. “She’s human. You’re not. Your relationship with her is barely beginning, and it’s already built on a lie. Every time you open your mouth, you say something weird that only makes her more curious. Do you think she’s stupid?”
“Hardly. It’s obvious that she’s suspicious. I told her I’m different. But that’s as far as it went.”
“Then what makes you think she’s never going to notice that you aren’t aging?”
“I thought you understood,” Edward sighed. “She won’t have time to notice.”
Jasper stared at him, confused. “What the devil are you talking about?” Whatever it was, Alice hadn’t foreseen it.
“You don’t know her,” Edward said simply. “This girl…she can do anything. She’s brilliant, savvy, driven-she’s got so much more ahead of her than this.”
“She’s stubborn, too smart for her own good, and unable to leave well enough alone,” Jasper retorted. Rather like you, actually. “She’s infatuated with you and she already knows too much. You really think she’ll ever stop digging? Christ, have you even been listening to her?”
I know you think I’ll freak out, Edward remembered her saying, but I won’t.
“Once she leaves Forks, she’ll leave all this behind,” Edward said smoothly. “She can have an education, a career, a family…a brilliant future.”
“But then you…” Jasper started. “You don’t intend to be part of it.”
“A year and a half,” Edward murmured. “I get eighteen months, and then she’s off to college. It’s a natural point of separation for someone her age.” Staring at the biology classroom again, he said, “I can fake something resembling humanity for eighteen months.”
“Alice won’t like this,” Jasper grumbled quietly.
“Alice would do well to spend less time planning my romance,” Edward muttered poisonously, “and more time thinking about how to conduct her own.” Anyone could see that Jasper was growing tired of his wife putting herself in the middle of Edward’s love life-in point of fact, he’d been tired of it fifteen years ago, when she tried to ‘guide’ Edward in the path of an unoccupied female vampire on a trip to Spain and somehow inadvertently caused the entire family to have to flee from their beautiful Andalusian hotel via sewer. Edward knew that part of the reason Jasper was getting directly involved this time was because, in the back of his mind, he longed for the old days when Alice’s primary concern was her own husband, not finding a wife for her brother.
“Don’t make this about me,” Jasper hissed. “We’re talking about you and Bella Swan. After everything you said about loving her and worrying over her for the rest of her natural life, you would bond with her and let her go. Your own mate. As easy as that.” Jasper looked away in disgust. No matter how irritated Jasper ever got, he never once seriously considered leaving Alice.
“I never said it would be easy,” Edward replied, his tumult of emotions belying his calm delivery. “It’s the right thing to do.” Or at least as close to it as I can get without walking away right now.
“Falling in love with her and then breaking her damn heart is the right thing to do?” Jasper hoped appealing to Edward’s concern for the girl’s emotional well-being would snap him out of this idiocy.
“Humans don’t feel heartbreak like ours,” Edward said dismissively.
Jasper had an urge to correct this assumption-he knew perfectly well how intense a teen’s feelings were compared to a thirty-something whose hormones had leveled out. But on this point, he knew it was senseless to argue; Edward had never been able to understand the difference between a thought and a feeling, or how you could use one to conceal the other, or how even one moment of turmoil could alter the entire flow of someone’s life, even a human’s. Especially a human’s. “They do feel heartbreak, I guarantee that much,” he tried anyway. “It’s like a poison in their blood. Why else do you think I hate being around them?”
“She doesn’t love me the way I love her,” Edward continued stubbornly.
Jasper lifted an eyebrow. “Fifteen minutes ago you were whining that you didn’t know how she felt. You’re leaving something out, aren’t you?” Jasper asked.
Edward thought, Pez dispenser.
He also thought, She said whenever I’m ready, she’ll be right there. I know that’s not love, but no one has ever said that to me before and meant it.
“I’m telling you, she couldn’t possibly love me after so short a time,” he said instead, not a little longingly, and somehow feeling guilty at the same time. He knew Jasper could pick it all up, but he hoped it was too confusing for his brother to decipher. (It wasn’t.) “We’ll have our time together, we’ll part ways, she’ll be sad for a little while, and then she’ll get over it and move on. She’s strong enough for that.”
“What if she is that strong? What are you going to do after that?” Jasper demanded. “Spend the rest of her life watching her from the trees while she falls in love with someone else?”
“I’ll worry about that when the time comes.”
“You should worry about it now, Edward-any vampire who finds their mate coupling with another generally loses their shit. You’ll kill someone, probably right in front of her. And then you’ll catch her scent in the heat of the moment and kill her.”
“I’ll never allow myself to lose control,” Edward swore. But it was like swearing he would never lose control of a NASA space shuttle when his flight experience was limited to flying small aircraft: he had no way to be sure he could keep such a promise, and there was a high probability of failure.
Naturally, Jasper rolled his eyes at Edward’s impassioned declaration. “I’ve always had a certain amount of respect for Carlisle because he pioneered a new way to survive while suppressing his instincts. But you’ve confused self-imposed repression with an idea that you don’t have most of your instincts anymore. There’s more to our kind than mere thirst and predation-you’re old enough to know that by now.”
Edward remained unmoved, even though he knew Jasper was older and spoke from experience. Intellectually he knew all of this was dangerous to Bella. But like many teenagers, Edward was certain that he was capable of being the exception to the rule. Instead he said, “I could probably take that seriously if it weren’t coming from you.”
Frustrated both with Edward’s repeated attempts to bait him and with his firm, tenacious grip on what amounted to sheer nonsense, Jasper groaned. “Say you’re strong-willed enough to carry out this ridiculous plan. You manage to sustain your relationship, not feed on her yourself, and then let her go when her time in Forks is done. She’s just supposed to forget everything that happened here? Forget that you’re not human?”
Edward tapped the side of his own forehead. “Believe me, you’d be surprised what people can make themselves forget.”
“It’s official.” Jasper shook his head. “You’re completely delusional.”
“And you’re cruel,” Edward replied, not looking away from the only window pane without a glare; he could almost make out Bella’s hair in the biology classroom. She was sitting in his seat, and it pleased him. “You tell yourself you’re on a diet because you can’t stand the victim’s terror, but you kill people and devastate their families when you’re too thirsty to wait for the next hunting trip. You lecture me about respecting Bella’s space and dignity, but you’d have me extinguish her whole life for selfish purposes, all so your life goes back to the way it was. Kill her or turn her, regardless of what’s good for her or the impact it would have on her parents, just so long as you won’t have to look over your shoulder. It’s all the same to you. You’re worse than Rosalie.”
“We’re already looking over our shoulders,” Jasper whispered. “That’s the price your family pays for the path you’ve chosen. When this all collapses around you, the girl will pay for it, too.”
Edward would have argued, but Jasper was gone. He went back to listening to human thoughts, adjusting his plans, deciding what to do about Bella’s afternoon shopping trip in Port Angeles.
I can do it, he told himself. Eighteen months of discomfort is an easy trade for eighteen months of happiness. Or something close to it. When she’s gone, at least I’ll still have my memories.
In her classroom, Bella hummed to herself and stared straight ahead, resisting the urge to turn around and look out the window behind her. And smile. And shoot the finger.
-------------------------------------------
A/N: Song title comes from the lyrics to “Nights in White Satin” by The Moody Blues.
And now, without further ado, I give you chapter 17...
You may notice a difference in continuity after the La Push visit. Meyer had Bella go all day Monday and most of Tuesday without seeing Edward. Probably because she wanted that stupid “Bella falls asleep reading Jane Austen in her backyard so that Edward can spy on her from the trees” scene. You know, the part of the book where Bella spends all day Monday hoping Edward will show up at school, and he never does, so she basically does nothing except go outside in 50 degree weather, plop her blanket down on the wet ground, and pretend that she’s getting a tan while she moons over a boy? And Edward sneaks up on her in broad daylight, because that’s supposed to be romantic or some shit? That whole section is a waste of time. Monday is the last sunny day in my version.
From “Twilight Chapter 7: Nightmare” and “Midnight Sun Chapter 8: Ghost”
Thoughts They Cannot Defend
“Earth to Bella. You there?”
Bella blinked and returned her eyes to her own lunch table, rather than the empty one across the cafeteria. “I’m sorry, I was distracted. You were saying?”
Jessica suppressed her urge to smirk knowingly. She could afford to be gracious, though, because Bella’s advice about re-inviting Mike to the dance paid off-they’d gone out to dinner and a free outdoor concert over the weekend and had a pretty good time. “I was asking if you wanted to go dress shopping with us this afternoon.”
“Oh.” Bella looked down at the other end of their table where Lauren sat talking animatedly without ever once stopping to listen to anyone around her. “Who’s going?”
“Just Angela and me,” Jessica assured her.
Angela, who followed Bella’s gaze, whispered to her. “I asked Jess not to invite Lauren. She’s been extra bitchy lately, and I just don’t want to deal with it.”
Bella’s eyes popped, and she looked at her friend. “Did you just curse?”
Angela shrugged. Lauren may or may not have called Angela a ‘bland little church mouse’ during first period, apparently oblivious to the fact that the church mouse in question sat two seats behind her and was not hard of hearing in the least. Everyone around Angela seemed to think a preacher’s daughter only fit into one of two categories: nice good girl or rebellious hellcat. Her mother once told her, when it was just the two of them, that she was free to figure out who she was on her own, independent of her father’s expectations or beliefs. Which is fine to say, but a lifetime in the same town meant everyone she’d ever met had expectations of her, not just Daddy. Seeing the Cullens keep to themselves without succumbing to peer pressure for two years, and then meeting Bella, who clearly didn’t have a problem with expressing herself, was just the inspiration Angela needed to shake herself up a little. Because while Angela wasn’t by any means a trouble maker, and in fact she loved her family very much, that didn’t mean she wanted anyone to put her in a box. Especially not Lauren.
“Hell yeah,” Angela added, liking the way the phrase rolled off the tongue.
“Sweet,” Bella smiled. After all the stress of the previous week, a sunny afternoon spent doing something normal sounded like a relaxing way to finish off her day. Looking back at Jessica, she said, “My pick-up truck won’t really hold three people and keep the shopping bags dry. But I can pitch in for gas if we take your car.”
Meanwhile, in a thicket not far away…
“What are you doing?”
“Good afternoon to you, too. What does it look like I’m doing?”
“It looks like you’re standing under a tree, staring at the back side of the school.”
“Then that’s what I’m doing.”
“You do realize that if anyone here knew your actual age, you’d be arrested for child endangerment or the like.”
“Not that anyone can see me, but it also looks like I’m seventeen years old, same age as nearly a third of the student population.”
“Great. Instead of being a creepy old man, you’re just a young, truant stalker. That’s much better.”
“You’ve made your point, Jasper,” Edward sighed. “Many times over, I might add. I already told you I won’t be entering her room at night anymore.”
“I’m sure you told yourself you wouldn’t climb into her room in the first place, right before you did it anyway.”
Edward, who had done exactly that, said, “That was a completely different situation.”
“Sure it was. Now you understand why hanging around in her room is wrong, but you’re okay with watching her at school.”
“Can’t you just let me have this?”
“It’s not for me to ‘let’ you have anything.”
“Since when did you acquire a set of human morals? You don’t think of humans as people, but now you’re sitting in judgment over the way I treat one of them? Suddenly they have value to you? You don’t even like Bella.”
Jasper frowned, looking at the school-he hated to be near so much tension every bit as much as Edward hated proximity to so many thoughts, but unlike Edward, the fresh air, distance, and closed doors helped Jasper immensely. “I neither like nor dislike her. That’s not what this is about.”
“You’re right, it’s not,” Edward agreed, his voice tightly controlled. “This is none of your business. It’s no one else’s, either, and you can tell the women I said so when you report back to them.”
“Unfortunately I need to make it my business,” Jasper answered evenly. Edward could sense his brother’s attempt to be reasonable rather than emotional. “You’re in love, and you don’t know how it’s done.”
Edward paused thoughtfully before he spoke. “I didn’t realize there was a right or wrong way to ‘do’ love.”
“How many murderers did you kill who started out exactly like this?”
Sighing, Edward replied, “Not that you don’t have a point, but that’s not what I’m here for.”
“Tell me why you’re here, then.” At Edward’s skeptical eyebrow, Jasper added, “Honestly, I want to know.”
After another moment, Edward asked, “What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without seeing Alice?”
Jasper’s eyes and thoughts immediately moved in the direction of their house, where Alice was entertaining Peter and Charlotte while he slipped away to talk some sense into his brother. “Four days.” Very long days.
“While you were separated,” Edward probed, “did you think for even one minute that she’d come to harm, and that you wouldn’t be there to protect her?”
“I suppose,” Jasper reflected. “But Alice is strong, fast, and just as deadly as I am.”
“Bella isn’t.” Edward’s eyes swept the grounds and street for the thirteenth time, looking for anything that could even remotely be construed as a threat: rabid squirrel, concealed gopher hole on the P.E. field, rat climbing into the Big Red Truck to chew on the battery cables, drunken truck driver headed straight for the science building. Not that he could do anything about any of these hazards, what with the bright afternoon sun imprisoning him in the shade. “Six million ways for a human to die, and over the weekend I realized I could only rule out about forty percent of them.”
Jasper, who had only ever considered the dangers of vampire proximity, said nothing.
“You go away for a long weekend,” Edward continued, “and you’re anxious to get back to Alice, but you’re okay. You know she’s all right. You know she loves you, and that she’ll be waiting for you to come home. I don’t have any of that, not even some assurance of her feelings. So yes,” he turned to look at his brother, “it is different. Bella could die while I’m away, from something as simple as another car accident or a tree falling on her house or a tiny little germ. She could meet someone else, someone who could give her all the things in life I can’t. She could get fed up and go back home to the desert-all of her clothes were missing from her closet this morning, and I still don’t know for certain what it means. Any of those things could happen before I’ve even had so much as a chance to tell her how I feel or see her again, hear her voice with my own ears. You’ve never had such worries with Alice, whereas I’m going to have them for the rest of Bella’s natural life. Pardon me if the best way I have to alleviate the stress is to sit here, at a respectful distance, and watch her go about her day.”
Mollified, Jasper considered all this carefully. “I suppose I understand, but…”
“But what?”
“This isn’t the best way to alleviate your stress.”
“Hunting doesn’t help with anything but thirst…oh. You don’t mean hunting.”
“It’s a simple solution.”
“I can’t do it, Jasper.”
“You’ll never be happy if you don’t.”
“I’ve never expected to feel happy.”
“You prefer to feel miserable, then?”
“No, just…content.”
“This is no way to live your life.”
“You say that from the secure position of having a mate. Trust me: this is an improvement over the last century or so.”
“Alice believes the girl is your mate. Or will be.”
“Alice would believe in Santa Claus if she had a vision of a fat lumberjack in red pajamas stuck in a chimney.” It was a deflection, and not a particularly effective one, either-Edward’s heart soared at the thought of being mated to Bella. He couldn’t conceal that from his brother.
“So…this,” Jasper said, ignoring the crack about Alice instead of letting it divert his attention. “Watching from the sidelines. Is it supposed to be enough?”
“It isn’t supposed to be anything. It simply is.”
“That’s hardly fair.”
“Nothing’s ever been fair since the day my mother died.”
“I don’t mean to you, Edward.”
“To the girl? Coming from the Cullen with the highest body count under his belt, that’s almost funny.” Neither vampire smiled.
“And yet it’s true.”
“You think I haven’t considered that aspect?”
“Have you?” Jasper asked.
“I’ve given it a lot more thought than you have.”
“Are you ever going to do anything besides think about it?”
“You’re a man of action. I can appreciate that. But you aren’t just talking about easing the burden our physical differences create. I can’t take so much away from her.”
“You already are taking something from her, just in a different way.”
“Perhaps,” Edward conceded. “But at least my way, she can walk away from this unscathed. What you and Alice are proposing…no. I can’t alter her life so permanently. I won’t.”
“As you’ve already pointed out,” Jasper observed, “there are six million ways she can die. Six million and one, actually, if you include yourself. ‘Unscathed’ isn’t a realistic expectation.”
Edward finally turned and looked at his brother. “You want to kill her, you want her alive. You want me to leave her alone, you want me to turn her. What side are you on?”
Jasper made a frustrated sound. “Whichever side keeps the rest of us safe, just so long as you pick one. Did you think I was here to be supportive of your fence-straddling bullshit?”
Edward heard himself growling, “You’re an absolute bastard.”
“You’re the one who took ‘ignoring her’ off the table, not me. Someone has to make the hard choices in this family.”
“If you so much as touch her-”
“Your threats are tiresome and unnecessary,” Jasper interrupted. “I couldn’t change her myself if I tried.”
“Then what is your purpose here? To annoy me into turning her?”
“Actually, I wanted to tell you something.”
Edward waited.
“Idiot man-child
Confuses a house of cards
For a foundation.”
Edward snorted. “Did you just haiku at me?”
“Stop pretending to miss the point, you foolish boy,” Jasper snapped. “She’s human. You’re not. Your relationship with her is barely beginning, and it’s already built on a lie. Every time you open your mouth, you say something weird that only makes her more curious. Do you think she’s stupid?”
“Hardly. It’s obvious that she’s suspicious. I told her I’m different. But that’s as far as it went.”
“Then what makes you think she’s never going to notice that you aren’t aging?”
“I thought you understood,” Edward sighed. “She won’t have time to notice.”
Jasper stared at him, confused. “What the devil are you talking about?” Whatever it was, Alice hadn’t foreseen it.
“You don’t know her,” Edward said simply. “This girl…she can do anything. She’s brilliant, savvy, driven-she’s got so much more ahead of her than this.”
“She’s stubborn, too smart for her own good, and unable to leave well enough alone,” Jasper retorted. Rather like you, actually. “She’s infatuated with you and she already knows too much. You really think she’ll ever stop digging? Christ, have you even been listening to her?”
I know you think I’ll freak out, Edward remembered her saying, but I won’t.
“Once she leaves Forks, she’ll leave all this behind,” Edward said smoothly. “She can have an education, a career, a family…a brilliant future.”
“But then you…” Jasper started. “You don’t intend to be part of it.”
“A year and a half,” Edward murmured. “I get eighteen months, and then she’s off to college. It’s a natural point of separation for someone her age.” Staring at the biology classroom again, he said, “I can fake something resembling humanity for eighteen months.”
“Alice won’t like this,” Jasper grumbled quietly.
“Alice would do well to spend less time planning my romance,” Edward muttered poisonously, “and more time thinking about how to conduct her own.” Anyone could see that Jasper was growing tired of his wife putting herself in the middle of Edward’s love life-in point of fact, he’d been tired of it fifteen years ago, when she tried to ‘guide’ Edward in the path of an unoccupied female vampire on a trip to Spain and somehow inadvertently caused the entire family to have to flee from their beautiful Andalusian hotel via sewer. Edward knew that part of the reason Jasper was getting directly involved this time was because, in the back of his mind, he longed for the old days when Alice’s primary concern was her own husband, not finding a wife for her brother.
“Don’t make this about me,” Jasper hissed. “We’re talking about you and Bella Swan. After everything you said about loving her and worrying over her for the rest of her natural life, you would bond with her and let her go. Your own mate. As easy as that.” Jasper looked away in disgust. No matter how irritated Jasper ever got, he never once seriously considered leaving Alice.
“I never said it would be easy,” Edward replied, his tumult of emotions belying his calm delivery. “It’s the right thing to do.” Or at least as close to it as I can get without walking away right now.
“Falling in love with her and then breaking her damn heart is the right thing to do?” Jasper hoped appealing to Edward’s concern for the girl’s emotional well-being would snap him out of this idiocy.
“Humans don’t feel heartbreak like ours,” Edward said dismissively.
Jasper had an urge to correct this assumption-he knew perfectly well how intense a teen’s feelings were compared to a thirty-something whose hormones had leveled out. But on this point, he knew it was senseless to argue; Edward had never been able to understand the difference between a thought and a feeling, or how you could use one to conceal the other, or how even one moment of turmoil could alter the entire flow of someone’s life, even a human’s. Especially a human’s. “They do feel heartbreak, I guarantee that much,” he tried anyway. “It’s like a poison in their blood. Why else do you think I hate being around them?”
“She doesn’t love me the way I love her,” Edward continued stubbornly.
Jasper lifted an eyebrow. “Fifteen minutes ago you were whining that you didn’t know how she felt. You’re leaving something out, aren’t you?” Jasper asked.
Edward thought, Pez dispenser.
He also thought, She said whenever I’m ready, she’ll be right there. I know that’s not love, but no one has ever said that to me before and meant it.
“I’m telling you, she couldn’t possibly love me after so short a time,” he said instead, not a little longingly, and somehow feeling guilty at the same time. He knew Jasper could pick it all up, but he hoped it was too confusing for his brother to decipher. (It wasn’t.) “We’ll have our time together, we’ll part ways, she’ll be sad for a little while, and then she’ll get over it and move on. She’s strong enough for that.”
“What if she is that strong? What are you going to do after that?” Jasper demanded. “Spend the rest of her life watching her from the trees while she falls in love with someone else?”
“I’ll worry about that when the time comes.”
“You should worry about it now, Edward-any vampire who finds their mate coupling with another generally loses their shit. You’ll kill someone, probably right in front of her. And then you’ll catch her scent in the heat of the moment and kill her.”
“I’ll never allow myself to lose control,” Edward swore. But it was like swearing he would never lose control of a NASA space shuttle when his flight experience was limited to flying small aircraft: he had no way to be sure he could keep such a promise, and there was a high probability of failure.
Naturally, Jasper rolled his eyes at Edward’s impassioned declaration. “I’ve always had a certain amount of respect for Carlisle because he pioneered a new way to survive while suppressing his instincts. But you’ve confused self-imposed repression with an idea that you don’t have most of your instincts anymore. There’s more to our kind than mere thirst and predation-you’re old enough to know that by now.”
Edward remained unmoved, even though he knew Jasper was older and spoke from experience. Intellectually he knew all of this was dangerous to Bella. But like many teenagers, Edward was certain that he was capable of being the exception to the rule. Instead he said, “I could probably take that seriously if it weren’t coming from you.”
Frustrated both with Edward’s repeated attempts to bait him and with his firm, tenacious grip on what amounted to sheer nonsense, Jasper groaned. “Say you’re strong-willed enough to carry out this ridiculous plan. You manage to sustain your relationship, not feed on her yourself, and then let her go when her time in Forks is done. She’s just supposed to forget everything that happened here? Forget that you’re not human?”
Edward tapped the side of his own forehead. “Believe me, you’d be surprised what people can make themselves forget.”
“It’s official.” Jasper shook his head. “You’re completely delusional.”
“And you’re cruel,” Edward replied, not looking away from the only window pane without a glare; he could almost make out Bella’s hair in the biology classroom. She was sitting in his seat, and it pleased him. “You tell yourself you’re on a diet because you can’t stand the victim’s terror, but you kill people and devastate their families when you’re too thirsty to wait for the next hunting trip. You lecture me about respecting Bella’s space and dignity, but you’d have me extinguish her whole life for selfish purposes, all so your life goes back to the way it was. Kill her or turn her, regardless of what’s good for her or the impact it would have on her parents, just so long as you won’t have to look over your shoulder. It’s all the same to you. You’re worse than Rosalie.”
“We’re already looking over our shoulders,” Jasper whispered. “That’s the price your family pays for the path you’ve chosen. When this all collapses around you, the girl will pay for it, too.”
Edward would have argued, but Jasper was gone. He went back to listening to human thoughts, adjusting his plans, deciding what to do about Bella’s afternoon shopping trip in Port Angeles.
I can do it, he told himself. Eighteen months of discomfort is an easy trade for eighteen months of happiness. Or something close to it. When she’s gone, at least I’ll still have my memories.
In her classroom, Bella hummed to herself and stared straight ahead, resisting the urge to turn around and look out the window behind her. And smile. And shoot the finger.
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A/N: Song title comes from the lyrics to “Nights in White Satin” by The Moody Blues.