Work Text:
1.
It is difficult to sit behind him.
The classroom is small, an old amphitheater with tables placed randomly on the risers extending from the lectern at the center. The carpet is a little brighter where the tracks from the folding seats used to be before they were torn out and moved to the newer music wing.
The professor clicks through slides of texts documenting the Ancient Greek Phalanx, the rectangular formation of heavy infantry. Latin for finger, for any linguists in the room.
His broad shoulders are still and pulled inward. So much so the fabric of his grey t-shirt creases in three places coming to a point between the flat plates of his shoulder blades.
Bella takes notes on top of the long, uncalculated loops on the top page of her yellow legal pad. She'd drawn them absently in the few minutes before class. Before he had walked in from the rain and took a seat, dark splotches at his shoulders, water droplets beading from the tips of his curly blond hair. Before he stepped in, she'd been silly. A first-year grad student doodling before a boring class, chin resting against the heel of her left hand, head full of tangled song lyrics from the ride to campus with Jess.
And then he walked in.
She could see the evidence plain as day in the last movement of her pen in her doodle. The long graceful oval halting and stuttering to a jagged stop as if her hand had seized. The way the black line had dug in two sheets below. Like she'd been electrocuted.
She'd shaken out her hand, perplexed. Then, of course, she saw him and it all made sense. Coming toward her up the trampled risers, scarred and imposing, was yet another vampire.
.
In high school, Edward Cullen had loved her enough to share his family's secret, but not enough to take her with them when they fled town after a few rumors started swirling about his father, the doctor, so young for so long. He certainly didn't love her enough to tear his teeth into her flesh and make her just like him, pale and bloodless and forever. Maybe, she thinks idly and not very often, he loved her just the right amount.
.
She wonders how and if she should tell him.
It's the first day of classes of the Winter/Spring semester. It doesn't really seem like the best idea to tap him on the shoulder when the professor calls for partner work and open with: I know what you are. Though that worked pretty well the first time. But that was high school. Back then, the margin for error was wider than whatever the regular margin is called.
So she twists her pen, drilling slowly through her pages, noting the calm of the room, its strange intrusiveness. The professor had been a read the syllabus on your own time kind of guy and started lecturing thirty seconds after the period started. Bella finds it a bit funny that all their tests will be online.
The bulky guy in front of her, the bulky dead guy twitches as she smiles to herself. She wonders if he can read minds too. Maybe he could read hers. She wills him to prove it, focusing all her mind power and feeling quite ridiculous for it. Nothing happens. Except she drops her pen and bangs her elbow on the table in some kind of jerky reflex to catch it. Pain shoots through her arm. Only then does the guy turn around, eyes curious, hinting amusement, slight J of a smile. Oh, she's so glad.
He scoots his chair back, picks her pen off the ground, and tosses it over his shoulder, followed by another half-smile, a flash of white teeth. I know what you are, she thinks so hard even a human could hear it, probably. He doesn't waver an inch, but his brows pull together like she's so puzzling, but not enough to straighten that grin.
"You're not nervous," he says suddenly. His voice is smooth and low. After spending high school in a house full of vampires, Bella had started to notice the holes in the way humans speak. The way their voices break, random words get punctured by a lack of breath, imperfect and rushed, slurred and mispronounced, cracked and porous. There's none of that here with him. If she wasn't already sure enough to text Alice after class, his voice would have done it.
She blinks, backtracking, glad she can plead humanity and imperfection for the time it takes her to respond with a very eloquent: "What?"
"You are not nervous," he repeats, slight southern tilt there. Didn't quite notice that before. His throat is webbed with silvery-white scars, long faded but brutal. Her pen slips from her hand again. Not nervous. Right.
"Why would I be nervous?"
"Dr. Vossler is dictator of the historical sciences." He nods toward the tweedy professor at the podium. "He's a hardass."
"I'm not worried, exactly," she says, lying and shuddering with it.
"You're distracted."
"You're distracting me."
He smiles and she feels that cloud of calm descend on the room once again. She twitches slightly in her chair at the synthetic, forced, generalized feel of it. Impersonal calm. That's certainly something to think about.
When he turns back to his notes, his shoulders are relaxed slightly. Maybe a little. Maybe not at all. But when he reaches over to flip the page of his textbook, Bella can see that he's smiling to himself.
…
A week into the semester, the quad is slushy and hazardous, even for normal people like Jess who sticks her arm out every ten to fifteen seconds to give Bella something to hold onto lest she faceplant into a plowed snowdrift. In the fall it's bright orange, leaves like fire against the stone benches for about a week before they turn brown and rot in sluggish piles in the gutters. Jess has a nine AM chem lab twice a week, and Bella uses the time to stop by the library and actually get through her readings.
The stacks smell like mildew and envelope glue. It's a consistent place. Bella appreciates the palpable peace mixed with the jittery way college students read with their hands wrapped around coffee cups. The slight gilt in the air indicates only one thing: Rose Hale is here. Bella sees her almost immediately. She's leaning over a ridiculous spread of books, long blond hair falling around her in that tousled, tenured academic way even though she's only a student. She's wearing glasses needlessly. Bella smiles when she pushes them delicately into place.
Without question, she's at least a hundred years dead.
Bella slips into the seat across from her, unsure what good she's supposed to be in this partner project for their museum studies class. Rose is naturally at the top of the class. She lives here in the library and has probably already finished their project as well as twelve other versions of it on other topics that interest her more than their assigned papyrus palimpsests.
"Hey, Rose," she says, fighting a smile at the precise and practiced way her partner looks up in surprise. She wonders how many years of fine-tuning her expressions in the mirror it took for her to get so convincing in her role as a human.
"Oh hello, Bella!"
"What are you up to?"
"Just a little extra reading on our project… Among other things." She takes a sip of her coffee. Bella wonders why she's torturing herself with appearances like that. She also considers asking Rose about the guy from her Colloquium in Historiography class but decides against it. Just because they're both Galatea-ing their ways around this college campus doesn't mean they know each other. Besides, it took her all last semester to get Rose to even look up from her books at all. She can't imagine losing that headway all for dream boy with the curly hair and bright smile. Besides, she's not lacking in hot blond vampires with Rose in her life. Still, she feels the square force of the urge to tip something, anything.
"I know what you are," Bella says quietly.
Rose's surprise is minimally shown on her face because the bulk of it goes into her slender fingers crushing her metal coffee cup.
The moment passes. Rose sighs in an unpracticed exasperated sort of way. She closes one of her books and slides it aside in favor of another. "I suppose you've always known, then?"
"Yes." From the moment she saw her on the second day of school, coming down the stairs, wind in her hair, gold in her eyes, one hell of a gravitational pull. Yeah, Bella could sense her through walls, with her eyes closed. So beautiful she gave Bella powers.
"And you let me go on pretending? I drank coffee for you."
Bella shrugs. "It seemed important to you. Your humanness."
"Yes," Rose says with a certain bleakness, "it was."
…
.
2.
It is difficult to sit behind him. Seats aren't assigned, but it's a full class and everyone has picked where they're comfortable.
The tension in his shoulders mirrors its way into her own. She can't keep her mind on the lecture, the harsh voice of the professor. His hair is wet from the rain, as usual, darkened at the ends, messy but not neglected. She wants to reach out and put her hands on his shoulders and ease them down just to save her grade in this class. She tries to relax her own muscles but they tighten back up the moment her mind drifts.
Of all people, she thinks of Emmett Cullen. How he'd lift her in the air at every hello and smile with squinted eyes at goodbye. Emmett and the ropes of scars across his torso from the bear attack that would have killed him if not for Carlisle. If Esme hadn't found him. He was her best friend. And Alice. Edward. They were like family. How quickly they disappeared from her life. How completely they hollowed her. College was supposed to be a new start.
At the end of the lecture, the professor passes out lists of the recommended readings for next week. Bella slides her shoddy notes into her book bag and reaches for her textbook, startled to see him turned around in his chair, scrutinizing her.
"Are you okay?" he asks.
"Uh, yeah. Why?"
He stands and collects his books in the crook of his arm, pausing to hand her a reading list as the professor comes by. He smiles at her then shakes his head a little as if forgetting himself. His eyes are dark today, getting close to that worrisome edge she'd seen in Edward's a handful of times.
"Nothing," he says, eyes flicking away for just a moment before lighting up, amused. "It's just difficult sitting in front of you."
"Is it?" she says. She could laugh. She could slap him across the face, break all her fingers against his marble cheek because he thinks she's the problem.
"Yes," he says and she feels it again, the ease around her, so straightforward and literal like the dictionary definition of the word. She feels her own shoulders relax, and they stay that way even though he's starting to walk away.
I know what you are, she thinks but there's not much feeling behind it. This time he does stop and Bella feels herself reddening. She didn't expect it to actually work.
"Sorry," he says. "That was kind of a rude thing to say when I don't even know your name."
"Kind of rude in general, don't you think?" She shoulders her book bag and checks her watch. She has about a half-hour to kill before Jessica gets out of her quantitative analysis class. Jess and her secret smarts.
"Yeah, you're right. Sorry, I'm just… in my head. I'm Jasper."
"I know the feeling." She heads for the door, proud of the way she makes it all the way down the risers without twisting her ankle. "I'm Bella, by the way," she says, stopping briefly in the doorway. Just long enough to see the turn of his cheek, and then she is gone.
…
Rose teaches a children's pottery class at the community center on Wednesday afternoons. She enjoys the unself-conscious way children dive into art, and how everything they make is more than good enough. Even if they seem to love the mess more than the craft itself.
Ever since the Spring semester started, she's spotted Bella in the back most weeks, drinking iced coffee despite the cold outside and the poorly heated classroom. Today marks the third time. At this point, Rose supposes she's come to count on it. These study sessions afterward among the lumpy, drying creations of her students.
Bella shakes the ice around in her drink and pokes at a drooping vase with the eraser of her pencil. "I think Piper's getting better."
"Yes, I think so too," Rose says, smiling fondly. The girl had started the class intent on squashing everything and laughing at the wreckage. It only took some slight direction and Skittles bribery to get her to put in some real effort.
Bella shifts in her chair and looks around the room. She takes in a breath and holds it so long Rose can hear her heartbeat quicken. Vampirically ungifted as she is, she can always tell when a human wants to say something but is too stubborn to just come out with it. Is it pride that stops them? What do they have worth being prideful over? Rose rolls her eyes, mostly at herself and closes her textbook, resting her hands on the sturdy cover.
"Well?"
"What?"
"Out with it!" Rose leans forward, sick to death of this dance of bravery and cowardice she's been watching across her friend's face for the past month. "What is so important?"
"Okay, okay," Bella says, setting her drink down. "I just… I never should have told you I know. Or…at least not like that."
Rose leans back, thrown slightly. Of course, it was shocking that day in the library to have her only human friend confess she's always known her secret, but that day was as good a time as any in Rose's eyes. Any big gesture or meaningful moment on Bella's part would have felt conjured, some strange inflation of their friendship that wouldn't have been natural. It seemed perfectly right that Bella would tell her in the library on a quiet morning at the beginning of their project together. But more than any of that, Rose had assumed they've moved on from all this. They haven't spoken about it, sure, but it made sense to Rose that for Bella to have identified her as a vampire, she must have already had some meaningful experience with other vampires. What was there left to talk about?
"It's fine, Bella. Really."
Bella shakes her head and looks down at the clay streaked surface of the table. "No, it's not. I wasn't thinking of you… I was thinking about this guy in one of my classes and how I wanted to tell him I knew, and next thing, I blurted it at you. I regret it. I'm sorry. I didn't even…out you personally."
Rose smiles slightly at her choice of words and her clear overthinking of things. "You certainly didn't out me, Bella. Maybe you made me feel a bit silly for keeping up my ridiculous charade for so long, but it's not like you told anyone, right?"
"No, of course not."
"Then it's all behind us." She starts to open her book then pauses, smiling yet again but for markedly different reasons. It seems her friend has stumbled across her idiot companion. "This guy in your class…he's like me?"
"Yeah." Bella opens her notebook and writes the title of chapter thirteen across the top. She smiles, sharp and mischievous. "He's not as hot though."
"No," Rose says, "of course not."
…
There's an empty table in Dr. Vossler's ten AM Colloquium in Historiography class.
Bella asks Jasper if it's any easier sitting beside her.
He says no.
She smiles and feels just the same.
…
.
3.
Pathokinesis.
Bella figures it out as they're walking across the quad to Jess' car. Jasper has his hood halfway on, barely caring about the rain that's already beaten its way through Bella's heavy jacket. She feels her irritation spike as she trips over a crack in the sidewalk. He catches her arm easily, but not before steps into an ankle-deep puddle off the edge of the sidewalk.
"Great," she mutters. She groans and lifts her leg from the puddle, watching a steady stream of dirty stormwater leak from the soaked sole. She feels the slight touch of his hands at her shoulders as he drapes his windbreaker over her and with it, a lightness settles in her chest. Yeah, her shoes are ruined and the wind is loud and threatening to collapse hundred-year-old trees, but the water-logged grass is a deep shade of green and Jasper's green and purple windbreaker is the ugliest piece of clothing she's ever seen, but it's beautiful and it smells like cinnamon and the ink from those cheap Bic pens she used to snap in high school. And water is good for the land and for the animals and Jess is so lucky her parents bought her a brand new car for college and-
Bella stops abruptly on the sidewalk and shakes herself. Ahead of her, Jasper sticks his hands in his pockets. The lightness flutters in her chest again and has she really never noticed the mountains and their majesty before?
"What the fuck?" Bella says aloud. She physically shakes her head, feeling like she just got out of the pool or something.
The feeling cloys her, too nice and so far from any feelings she'd ever end up with on her own, left to her own brain chemistry. Not that she's negative all the time, but when has she ever cared about the warm and inviting tones of the college's flag? The answer is never.
She's felt it before, in their shared class. That first day. You're not nervous. The cloudlike feeling of calm settling down on the room, the strangeness of it. The bland blanket statement of serenity from out of nowhere. Or even the burst of intense focus she'd feel some days when the lecture dried out even the dampness clinging to the carpet. How the whole class went from daydreaming to enthralled by the toneless voice of one Dr. Vossler. And now this saccharine happiness and positivity out of the blue.
She narrows her eyes at the back of Jasper Whitlock's head.
It's all his fault.
.
He waits with her beneath an eave. Jess has a habit of getting caught up with her work or cute wannabe scientists. The rain thins out a little, pinging quietly off the roof in individual discernable drops.
"You don't have to stay," she says after about five minutes and regrets it. It's just a nice thing to say, but really who has ever meant a platitude?
Jasper looks out across the half-empty parking lot as if surveying. When he speaks, his voice is quiet, barely audible over the light rain. "Where I come from, we don't leave friends in the rain."
Bella turns away from him to conceal the laugh or scoff or whatever it is that's threatening to bubble up from her chest. What an odd thing to say. Though admirable in its own right. She slips her arms into the sleeves of the windbreaker. Her extended fingers barely stick out from the cuffs.
"Thanks," she mutters, though for which part she's not sure. All of it most likely.
Another ten minutes float by on the dark water racing in the gutters. Bella texts Jess to check in and gets a response immediately. Apparently, she'd got swept into coffee with her new study group and completely lost track of time, and would Bella mind waiting another twenty or so minutes, pretty please?
"Need a ride?" Jasper says before she can ask.
"Sure," she says.
.
He doesn't drive like a Cullen.
Which is to say she doesn't fear for her life as they zip through the city. Jasper drives an older car, no GPS or heated seats or anything like that. Still, it looks like it just rolled off some showroom floor, it's so shiny and pristine inside. The radio is turned way down, murmuring classic rock barely above the thrum of the engine.
If it'd been Alice, they'd be flying down alleys and sidestreets, pop music blasting, Alice barely looking at the road, closing her eyes even, singing along with the radio, Bella holding on for her life. The memories send a pang through her.
Within the confines of her shared apartment with Jess, Bella can't help but miss them in quite a desperate, human way. There was once a time when she could simply knock on the door of Carlisle's study and talk at length with him about every curiosity into their world she could come up with. He would have been fascinated by Jasper's gift, by Rose's iron control over her thirst and the seamless way she can mimic human expressions.
Loss is more than an empty feeling. It's a hole drilled into a tooth and left to dry out. A puff of air on the raw nerve. It's been years. Nearly five, and she'd acknowledge that if it didn't break her heart to do so.
"Are…you alright?" Jasper asks, honey-sweet comfort swirling around her shoulders like a warm blanket.
Bella grips the handle of her door and shudders. She glares at him. "Stop doing that."
"Be-"
"You can't force people to feel things. Especially when you don't care what you're forcing on them." It's out before she can stop herself. The car slows, and Jasper silently pulls off the road near a closed down dance studio and a used book store.
Shock is not something vampires experience often. On Rose, it looked like she'd caught a chill or short-circuited. From the set of his scarred jaw, Bella can't quite tell what she's done to him.
"I can't believe her," he says quietly, looking straight ahead. "To want a friend so badly she'd…"
"What are you talking about?"
"Rosalie," he says almost harshly. "I can't believe she told you."
Bella makes a note to commend her study partner for the extremely human attribute of playing dumb. This guy in your class…he's like me? Though she supposes it was stupid of her to believe that the two near-gods had never crossed paths let alone shared one. Maybe they have their own coven.
"What, that you control people's moods? Or that you're dead?" Bella says, trying for lightness. It's a little too much to ask, she knows. "She didn't tell me anything. Not even that she knew you. I figured it out. It wasn't hard."
"But how?" He is looking at her closely now, curious or awed. Like the kids in Rose's pottery class when she comes by to help them. His eyes are warm brown and a steep improvement from the last time she'd seen him.
"I used to know a family of vampires." Bella turns her eyes away and squeezes her arms into her sides. It's stopped raining, but the air is still misty and grey.
"What happened to them? Are they close by?"
"No," she says. "They're gone."
He hesitates for a moment before putting his hand on her shoulder, offering a small smile, not even attempting to lift her mood. She appreciates that more than she can say.
…
.
4.
"He saved my life in a way," Rose says, poking her head out from underneath the hood of Jasper's car. Her long blond hair is tied back and her hands are smudged with grease to the wrists.
Bella swings her legs, her heels bump into the cabinets of the workbench she's sitting on, much to Rose's dismay at the displacement of her tools.
It's mid-March. Grey and imposing and long past wearing out its welcome. Rose and Jasper's place is out past the city limits, much like Cullens' had been outside Forks, but it's far less open and lavish. It's clear Esme didn't design it with her careful eye, but it's nice. Nicer than anything two grad students should be able to afford together. She has been over a handful of times since the car ride with Jasper, but it's mostly been to see Rose. Jasper always makes sure to greet her and walk her to her truck as she's leaving, but in the meantime, he disappears upstairs into his study.
"You don't have to tell me," Bella assures her. "If it's painful. I won't make you."
Rose rolls her eyes. "Like you could make me do anything."
"I'm trying to be sensitive."
"You're the one with the heartbeat. Not me." She ducks back beneath the hood for a few minutes before lowering it softly and wiping her hands on a rag. When her eyes finally meet Bella's, they are unsure and wavering.
"It's really okay, Rose."
"It was so long ago," she says quietly. "More than a lifetime and yet…it's so clear in my mind." Rose pushes her tools further out of place as she sits beside Bella on the workbench. "You're my friend, but I don't want it to be in your mind, ever."
Bella puts her hand over Rose's, the ice of her skin so distantly familiar, like a dream. "That's alright," she whispers.
"You should know, I wouldn't have chosen this life for myself. But to have died alone that night…murdered in the freezing rain… That would have been worse. I'm sure of it." Rose takes Bella's hand and squeezes it gently in both her own. "Jasper…he blames himself for not getting there earlier, not taking me to a hospital. He's always struggled with his thirst, even now, but somehow he found it in himself to save me."
She releases Bella's hand and the corner of her mouth turns upward, golden eyes narrowing with the memory. "He even offered to help me avenge myself if that's what I wanted. Of course, it's what I wanted. Though I didn't need any help on that front." She shakes her head at the memory, smiling slightly like it is something she holds onto. The frown that follows is nothing short of grounding. "It was a long time ago," she says, seemingly only to herself.
"I'm glad you're here," Bella says. It's almost startling how much she means it. Rose who outshines the sun. She wonders idly just what she would look like in a sunbeam. Jasper beside her, crystalline and refracted. Alight.
.
It's late and she has an early class tomorrow, but standing outside of Jasper's study and listening to him turn the pages of some old book is probably the same thing as stepping back in time. Especially when he looks the way he does in the lowlight, motionless and carved from stone, achingly beautiful.
When he notices her or pretends to just notice her, he smiles. Not the half one she gets in class every other day or the formal one she gets when he tells her goodnight and closes her truck door for her, but the one that reaches his eyes and brightens his whole face. Something incandescent starts to happen inside her chest. Absently, she presses a hand over her heart. He must be able to sense it because he closes his book, a thick, leather-bound edition that must predate the ground beneath their feet.
"Bella," he says, her name a greeting.
Truthfully, she doesn't know what exactly brought her up here. Maybe the desire to see the place he hides. More likely to see him for more than the five minutes it takes her to drag out her goodbye. It used to be difficult to sit near him, but now, if she's honest, it hurts to be near him. The turn of her heart when their eyes meet as she walks into their one class together, the earnest way he tries to use his gift to equalize the people around him. How he's taken to checking with her before he uses it around her- not even on her. The other day he asked her permission to calm Jess down a few notches after the hottest boy in her study group left her on read all weekend. How he waits with her in the rain even on the days where her mood feels so toxic it could taint the water supply and kill people.
"How long do you stay in one place?" she asks, blurts really.
Jasper rises to his feet and tucks the volume back onto a shelf well above her reach. The walls are lined with sturdy bookshelves crammed top to bottom with books that are probably irreplaceable. Paired with the museum-like pieces in glass cases, she can't imagine much of any of this could be salvaged if they had to flee in the way the Cullens did.
"Depends on the place, really," he says. "We've been here for about three years now. Rose wants to get her Master's before we move on. But sometimes we've stayed as long as ten years in one place."
"Have you ever had to run?"
He nods soberly. "When it was just me, I thought I'd never stop running. It took me decades to begin to get a handle on my thirst. And then Rose…" He trails off fondly and sticks his hands in his pockets. Bella follows him as he moves along the shelves. "With Rose, we were running every few months for a long time. She showed incredible restraint with humans- she helped me greatly, more than I've ever helped her with anything."
"But?"
He smiles. "But…she was so angry for so long. If a man so much as raised his voice at a woman and Rose happened to hear it… Well, you understand why we would have to keep moving."
"She said you saved her."
Jasper's face hardens slightly, but he nods. It's very easy to see how much he cares for Rosalie. She sees it in Rose too, the admiration and regard she holds him in. They don't appear close by any means, but they seem to be all each other has had for a long time.
"I was too late to save her, Bella."
"Still, she's around because of you. She can drink lemonade and act like it's sour and get her Master's and teach kids how to make mugs all because of you."
"I couldn't have asked for a more brilliant mind to share eternity with," he says, an easiness in his tone that agrees with him.
"Sounds like you really care about her," Bella says, touching the worn spine of a well-loved book.
"She's the closest thing I've had to family in a very long time."
"So you've never-" Bella cuts herself off, because really, where the fuck was she going with that?
He laughs. A hand drifts across his stomach in a human gesture of his own. "No, no," he says, genuine amusement across his perfect face. "Rose is a great friend and…the only one of her kind, for sure, but her heart has belonged to a nomad for decades."
"Really?"
"Oh, you should see her when Victoria passes through. She's something else." He shakes his head, chuckling a bit to himself like he needed a good laugh. "We're actually due for a visit from the hurricane woman here pretty soon, so maybe you'll get to see for yourself."
He stops in front of the big picture window that points toward the valley before it shoots up into nothing but mountains for miles and miles.
"Sometimes I worry the next time she passes through, Rose will go with her," he admits, staring out the window in the murky twilight. "Not that I blame her. I can feel it every time Victoria leaves, how much Rose regrets staying behind. I had no idea missing someone could feel like…a cut that won't stop bleeding, just this dull ache that never really fades. And hope just thins the blood."
Bella turns away quickly when she feels his eyes. He's right. Losing the Cullens was like an excision. An amputation. Seeing Edward Cullen in every tall figure she passes on the street just punches another hole in her tattered heart. She wants to tell Esme about her classes and how beautiful the campus is in the late afternoon, the golden light. It's been five years. The memories she had with them are fuzzing around the edges, fraying and blurring together worse and worse the harder she tries to hold onto them. Why can't she be like anyone else and pick herself up? Why can't she go a day without hoping she'll turn a corner and find them all waiting for her, smiling with open arms and overflowing apologies for leaving her behind?
Jasper- poisoned by her grief, she's sure- puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes. "Bella, it's alright."
"No," she says, tears welling in her eyes. She wraps her hands around his arm and looks him in the eye. "Please," she says, "just do it. I can't-" I can't go on feeling like this. Take it away or numb me out but god, just don't make me happy.
He gives a short nod of understanding and all at once she feels wrapped in her scratchy purple duvet. Her fingers ache like they do after she's spent the night annotating. Her chest is warm from tea she hasn't drunk. All things that make her feel balanced and in control. All things he has picked up from listening to her. No sterile beach scene or sudden disquieting jolt of unnatural calm.
Bella looks up at him in wonder. She didn't know he was paying that close attention.
"It's alright," he says again as she lets go of his arm. He takes her hand as they turn back to the window and the darkening sky. "You feel very deeply," he says. "More than most humans."
She nods even though no one's ever said anything like that to her before. What is she supposed to do with that?
"I'm sorry," he says, and she believes it.
…
.
5.
Rose comes home from her pottery class streaked in acrylic paint and not all that surprised to see Bella's red truck already parked in the driveway. Inside, she drops her keys into the ceramic bowl by the door and hangs up her coat. The two of them are sitting cross-legged on the floor of the living room, side-by-side with their eyes closed as if meditating.
Though Rose has been silent, Bella turns her head in her direction. She smiles, eyes still closed. "Hey, Rose."
"How do you do that?" she asks when the human finally opens her eyes. She has a glow about her that Rose recognizes quite well. Like a flash of red in the forest, a vampire so fast Rose has spent the past fifty years just trying to catch her when she orbits.
Bella puts a hand on Jasper's shoulder, pulling him from his head. The deep concentration melts off his face. "We're just-"
"I don't want to know," Rose says, already halfway to the staircase.
.
After Rose disappears upstairs, Bella closes her eyes once more and takes a deep breath. Ever since that night in his study, she hasn't been able to shake the perfect way he'd created neutrality out of nothing. He'd evened her out when she felt like she'd break open.
Now, for fun- for science- he's trying out anger on her, and so far it's been laughable. He's tried hellfire, centuries of bloodlust, and traffic jam road rage and all it does is make Bella roll her eyes and lean back against the couch cushions.
"It's harder when you're expecting it," he says, smiling still even though this is probably the twentieth time he's tried it. "You know it's coming so you resist it."
Bella pushes her hair out of her face and laughs. "No. You're just thinking too big."
"I think war makes people angry."
"Of course, it does. But I've never been in a war. I get mad over the atrocities I read about sometimes, but there's always this disconnect. I'm from a time where I have the choice to look away, and I probably shouldn't, but I do."
"Okay," he says slowly, considering that.
"When you use your gift, you tend to big picture it. I think. You use the same thing on everyone, and it works, but it's also disorienting. Like…" she looks around for inspiration but comes up empty. "Like…for happiness, it's the sun on your face and your feet in the sand as the waves roll around your ankles."
He nods. "But?"
"Some people are terrified of the ocean."
"I'll try one more time," he says. He closes his eyes and Bella feels a flare of adoration in her chest at just how serious he's taking all of this. In truth, he could keep using his gift the same way he has for the past hundred years and still get the same results. Riots calmed in seconds, bored students suddenly attentive, a crying girl in the hallway finding a bright side.
She closes her own eyes and immediately feels a stab of irritation. Like tripping off the sidewalk and splashing in a puddle, like soggy assignments, the spring coiled shoulders of the vampire that used to sit in front of her. Slipping on ice, a little war because he just can't help himself, the truck's engine sputtering the day after Rosalie tunes it for her- this one has Rose shouting from her bedroom upstairs for them to knock it off.
"God," she says. She opens her eyes and gives his shoulder a shove. He doesn't even pretend to budge. She takes a deep breath and tries to shake the feeling out of her body. "You can stop now. Please."
"So, it worked?"
"Yeah," she says, leaning into his side. He puts his arm around her, easy as anything. She doesn't have to look up to see his smug smile. "Shut up."
.
After about an hour of going over their reading while intermittently assuring Rose she's the best mechanic on the west coast, it was just for science and you look really hot by the way, Bella pats her on the head and says goodnight.
"Hey." Rose tosses a crumpled paper wad at her. In the muted light from her lamp, she could be a modernist writer, posing for the back cover of her inaccessible stream of consciousness. "You've been through a lot, I know," she says, "so has he."
For Rose Hale, it's a pretty tame warning.
.
Alice had a vision five years ago of Bella, golden-eyed and marbled, glittering in a pale halo of light. They're beautiful, Alice had said then, so beautiful, and they love you so much. At the time, nobody really knew what she was talking about. Nobody ever knew what she was talking about with the rare exception of Edward.
Hope thins the blood, but Bella knows she's supposed to be here, walking to her truck in the colorless moonlight, Jasper beside her. His hand is light on the small of her back as she opens her door.
The Cullens were never supposed to be her forever. She loved them as fiercely as they loved her in turn, but they're gone now. And they're not coming back. In her mind, she pictures them up north, doing well. There's something so sad about Alaska.
"Drive safe," Jasper says. If she didn't know any better, Bella would think he's lingering. "I'll see you tomorrow."
She thinks of the beginning of their class together and how badly she wanted to put her hands on his shoulders and push down. Tonight, she settles for a hand on his neck, the ripple of scars cold beneath her palm. She kisses his cheek. "Goodnight, Jas," she whispers, pulling away just a bit. If she holds still, maybe she can keep this moment forever.
For a second, she thinks he is going to nod and walk away, gentlemanly to the end, to a fault, even. But suddenly, she's flooded with light, a frantic mix of sunlight and high marks and seafoam, and his arm is tight around her waist, steady and fast. His lips meet hers in the pale moonlight, deep enough to make her dizzy.
…
There's a different kind of tension filling the amphitheater of Dr. Vossler's ten AM CH class these days.
…
.
6.
In April, Victoria blows into town, a cyclone of a woman. Bright red hair, curly and tangled with sticks and pine needles, clothes mismatched and outdated, red-eyed and gorgeous in an I might rip your throat out later, don't test me kind of way. Right away, Bella understands at least some of what Rose sees in her.
.
Moments before she arrives, they are in Jasper's study. Bella has one of his old field journals open in her lap, admiring the longhand and careful drawings in the corners. He's been telling her little by little about his home. A town he knew so well growing up; the general store, the sheriff station, the one-room schoolhouse, just like a story. A town that doesn't exist anymore.
In 1863, an army of newborn vampires leveled the place. In a matter of hours, everything was destroyed and everybody he'd ever met and loved was dead. Or worse. They hunted him for decades, but once Rose came into the picture, he realized he had someone to lose all over again. This time, he wouldn't take the chance. Instead of running away, he ran straight at them.
Bella runs her fingers through his golden hair and traces the scars along his jaw and down his neck with her eyes. They're all over his arms too if she looks closely. From the way both he and Rose handle bringing up the past, it's clear they don't even talk about it with each other.
"I'm glad you're telling me," she says, and then across the hall, Rosalie rips her door off the hinges.
.
Victoria kills people.
That's the first thing Bella notices about her. The eyes. A dead giveaway. She knows about nomads. How they don't fear the Volturi the same way established covens do. Because of this, they spend their lives roaming. Not very many vampires, transient or not, feed on animals like the Cullens or Jasper and Rose, but it's still shocking to Bella, the red of her eyes, and how quickly they snap to her when she enters the room.
In a blur of red, Victoria is right up next to her, lifting her hair off her shoulder and…sniffing her like an animal.
Jasper actually growls, which Bella would definitely laugh at if Victoria wasn't looking at her neck so closely.
"Vic," Rose says warily. "She's my friend. Bella."
"Uh, hi," Bella says. She waves lamely even though the nomad is less than a foot away from her.
Victoria raises an eyebrow like she doesn't approve of becoming friends with your food. She gives Bella one last look before blurring back over to Rose, jumping back into the embrace that had been destroying all the furniture in the time it took for Bella to get downstairs.
Bella glances at Jasper. He looks at the smashed coffee table with the resignation of a man who has lived through this moment a great number of times but otherwise happy for Rose. She and Victoria spin around the room, caught in each other's orbit, coming together with the force of tectonic plates.
"This will go on," Jasper mutters, "for a very long time."
…
Two weeks later, Bella hears the window slide open as she's finishing up the online assessment for her required marketing class.
"I have neighbors, you know," she says without looking up. Jasper settles behind her, arms around her middle. She feels his cold lips press the space where her shoulder meets her neck. She shivers. "Jess is right outside."
"She's color-coding her lab book," he says. "The happiest I've seen her."
Sounds like Jess. That and building sugar-powered rockets with the kids who speak in formulas. "How are they?" she asks, meaning Rose and Victoria.
"They have spent the last eleven hours slow dancing around the living room in ballgowns and show no signs of stopping," he says. "I think I've reached my limit."
"I think it's nice," Bella says, closing her laptop and shoving it away. Jasper's arms are cool around her. She rests her head against the front of his shoulder and thinks about the other night when she'd looked out the window of Rose's bedroom and saw them up in a tree together. "Crazy, but nice."
"It's funny. Rose tries so hard to act human, but the minute Victoria comes around, humanity be damned."
"And that's what love is," Bella says with a laugh. "I don't know. She's happy, Jas. Let her be."
"That reminds me." He shifts to pull something out of his pocket and presses it into her palm. Bella opens her hand to a very familiar necklace. The too-long chain and simple oval pendant. A clumsy gift from Charlie. Her going-away present.
She touches her neck where it should be, where it was the last time she checked. "Where did you find it?"
"Victoria sends her apologies. A habit carried over from her human life apparently. Rose had a fit over it, and now they're dancing."
"They're a little…"
"Tumultuous?" he offers. "Yeah, but better your jewelry than your life. Rose would never forgive her if she hurt you."
"I don't think she would," Bella says quietly. "The way she looks at Rose…like she'd cross an ocean for her. It's intense."
Jasper chuckles, a low sound she can feel in his chest. "When they met, I thought they'd crack the earth in half. Believe it or not, this is their tame."
Bella turns to face him. Even in the pink and blue light from the neon sign across the street he could pass as an angel. She rises to her knees and rests her hands on his shoulders. "Some people love louder than others is all."
"And you?"
She tilts her head and looks up to the ceiling, pretending to think it over. "Quietly. Very, very quietly."
"Quietly?" His eyes are dark, he needs to hunt soon, but his hands on her waist shake the thought from her head. "All the time?"
She pushes him gently against the headboard. "Not quite."
…
When Bella gets out of class Friday afternoon, it's not Rose in the lot waiting for her but Victoria. For the first time, she has her hair twisted up and pinned at the back of her head, and she's wearing clothes that go together and belong in this century. She could be a student here if not for her blood-red irises. Fear begins to curl around her spine. Bella looks around the lot, but it's empty. Jasper doesn't have class on Fridays.
"Relax," Victoria says, rolling her eyes. "I'm not going to hurt you. Besides, Jasper is not the blond vampire I want chasing me to the ends of the earth."
"Sorry," Bella says. She can't help it. Everything about her sets off warning bells and jumpstarts her nerves.
Victoria frowns and looks in the direction of the forest. "I'm…leaving soon."
"Where will you go?"
She shrugs and leans against Bella's truck. "It doesn't matter."
"What about Rose?"
"I guess you don't know. This is just what we do."
"Why?" Bella blurts, and with the sharp look in the nomad's eyes, she can see her soul leaving her body. "I mean, you're so happy together. Why do you leave?"
"Rose has her own life. Things she wants that I can't be a part of."
"I don't really understand."
"I don't expect you to. I've been around for nearly five hundred years. Did she tell you that? I've lived more lives than you could ever imagine. But all I really know is that no matter how much it hurts to leave her," Victoria says, smiling distantly, "it doesn't compare to when I find her again."
…
.
7.
"You're leaving," Rose says quietly as Bella and Victoria come up the steps together. She can't quite say it's out of nowhere, but it feels too soon. Bella squeezes Rose's arm in support or perhaps sympathy before disappearing upstairs. She trips somewhere in the middle.
When it's just them, Victoria lingers near the door. It's too cloudy for a decent sunset, but she has never needed light to appear aflame. Rose sighs. How can she get anything out of her when her very gift is avoidance?
"I'm coming with you," Rose says resolutely.
"No, you're not."
"You always do this. You leave me just when I can count on you."
"I know." Victoria crosses the room in her long, graceful stride. "You know me, always quick to run. Never a home in life."
If she were merely running, Rose wouldn't welcome her back with open arms as she always does. The reality is, Victoria has led dozens of lives. There are people she cares about the world over. Humans and vampires alike, though it'd be surprising if she actually admitted it.
Rose relents like she was always going to. Like she always does. She takes Victoria's hand and lowers her lips to her thin wrist. "I will miss you."
"Terribly, I'm sure." Victoria throws her arms around her, a hug so strong the drywall crumbles with the collision. "I love you, my Rose."
It's times like these where Rosalie is glad she is not human. Her fragile mortal heart couldn't take the sincerity, the depth in her scarlet eyes. Never a home in life, never.
"You won't even notice I'm gone. I'll be back so soon, you'll get sick of me, I promise. And besides, you'll have your hands full soon enough with that one." Victoria lifts her head and nods toward Jasper's study. "Though something tells me she'll be a dreadfully boring newborn."
…
Victoria leaves early the next morning, not long after sunrise. Bella is still in her pajamas when Rose drags her downstairs under the excuse of saying goodbye. Bella knows she really just wants someone to hold her hand while her heart takes off for the Canadian border.
Before she disappeared, Victoria had grabbed Jasper's arm so tightly, his marble skin cracked in webs around her hand. Take care of her, she'd said firmly, harshly, and then she fixed her gaze on Bella as if to say you too.
Now, it's just the three of them standing in the driveway, staring down the gap in the trees she'd vanished through, goodbye hanging in the air like nitrogen. It's misty out. Bella sheds a few tears for Rose who cannot. Jasper puts his arms around both of them, pushing contentment which to him, is a bright morning and a stack of books.
The three of them are similar that way.