Title: How To Break A Habit
Author: Aaydona
Rating: PG
Pairing: Alice/Jasper
Notes: Three instances in which sacrifices are made. (The title was inspired by the Linkin Park song "Breaking the Habit".)
Summary: It's as if something is shifting inside her, and she doesn't want to watch Jasper suffer so. She does not know why exactly. She thinks that she just likes the look in his eyes when they are not hard and cold like glass, mesmerized by the contrast of light and dark there. Pre-Twilight.
1. The night has risen and the air is full of sharp urgency that is cool against his marble skin. He is graceful still in the dark, even when no one is watching his inhumanity, lanky limbs slicing silently through the air. The corners of his lips lift in a smile as the sound of nervous footsteps clears in his ears. He smells the blood through the wilderness and it appeals to him like a stroke of color on a blank canvas.
He lifts off in his mind. He begins to run but his feet are soundless. He does not feel a burn in his lungs—time and distance releases their hold on him. There are only the shifts of his mood, only amusement. Soon he reaches the panting human man. He is a park ranger, wanting to know who the hell he is and what he's doing in the park at this hour, accusing the other with his eyes.
"My name is Jasper," answers he, smoothly. He sees that the man wears a soiled old uniform, wrinkled as the skin on an ancient face.
"The park's closed," the man grows back, authoritative. Quickly, Jasper sees to it that this man whose uniform is made duller by night calms, softens, relaxes. "What is this—feeling? It's hazy…"
Then the hunter takes hold and pins the ranger to the ground. "A feeling… I suppose you may call it that," he says, half-snarling.
"What… are you?"
Jasper answers no more and the horrified man doesn't speak. The man doesn't feel a thing.
Need is what drove him to the hunt but the blood tastes like some unearthly nectar when it touches his lips, the words of a familiar song ebbing through his cold veins. It is a shot of pleasure, sweet desire, aching all at once. He thinks that the red is quite beautiful, really, maybe even spectacular aside from the human body falling limp beneath him like a withered flower. "Thank you," he says with gratitude to the body, and starts to walk away.
A new voice arrives. "So I guess this is what you do?"
"All there is to it," Jasper replies to her, shrugging as he licks his lips. "What do you want, Alice? Still unwilling to feed upon humans?" She looks small in a white dress before a backdrop of gnarled branches reaching out like outstretched arms, though actually as unbreakable as he.
She replies cheerfully, "I haven't got a clue. I'm mostly an amateur supernatural being of the night."
"Aren't you quite the wit," he growls, a faint scowl touching his lips slightly. The low rumble that is his voice is only a fraction of the predator he is.
"Why thank you," Alice says cheekily in return. The swish, swish of the fabric of her dress is soft to his ears as she curtsies mockingly.
"As much as I enjoy our stimulating little chats, pardon me, because I must be rid of this." Jasper shrugs at the corpse, drained of all life and blood, nonchalantly. There is a tension of on Alice's mouth when her vibrant gaze reaches the hazy black eyes of the dead man, a tension which Jasper thinks can be licked off her lips, like chocolate—or blood, if one bothers. But it is just a random thought to him, nothing more. "Don't look so stricken," he tells her. "Death is everywhere." The body is lifted up in his arms and he carries it off into deeper forest as if handling a sheet of satin.
"I can't be like this. I'll see the blood in their veins and taste it and I'll remember the terror in their voices. I'd be exchanging their lives for my own, and it's nothing exciting or seductive. I can't be like you."
He raises an eyebrow and smiles with a secret of his own. "Whoever said you had to be like me?"
"I don't understand you."
There is a sneer in his voice when he tells her, "Yes, well I'm full of mysteries and hidden depths. When do you plan to leave, or are you still desperately attached to these woods, the asylum? The last shreds of a detestable thing called humanity left in you?"
"One vampire's trash is another's treasure.' She flashes him a too-easy grin. "And when are you leaving, O Great Inhumane One?"
"Tomorrow, actually," he answers, smoothing his crisp shirt in brisk movements. There is a strange disappointment in him, because he is leaving and she cannot stand to move away from these grounds.
There is a light in her eyes, strange in contrast to the blackness of their surroundings, capturing his attention irrevocably. He shields himself from the light, for he feels his flaws and hatred being revealed to her like the answer to a riddle as the illuminating light catches him from within.
"Well then, I'm coming with you."
"Why?"
"You want me to." The answer isn't perfect and there's no poetry in its promptness but it is enough for Jasper.
2. They are aboard a train for a fifth day, to where Alice doesn't really know. Jasper is pacing anxiously, beautiful and godlike in the light seeping in through the windows. She can tell Jasper is restless, from the bouts of energy shooting through his limbs, hidden beneath his skin. He is practically dying for blood. "How do you feel?" she asks her friend. Her best, only friend, who creates friction with the world around him, and makes her love the things he does.
"I suppose this is the part where common courtesy requires me to say 'by golly, I feel brilliant, my friend'?"
"You have common courtesy?" she says mischievously. "Why I never!"
"I am a very considerate person, don't you know?" He grins at her, on his lips a curve crooked like a moon dangling crescent. He is joking and acting as though everything is good and fine. That's Jasper's way, she knows, of weaving an illusion around himself with quiet smiles and banter until his fears are buried.
"You want blood," Alice states matter-of-factly, legs swinging from her bunk.
He does not deny it. "Aren't you full of tact. Yes, of course I want blood. But that'd be too risky and suspicious, wouldn't it?"
He is so sour, she thinks to herself. Full of grace and anger and hunger. For a moment neither of them speaks and she can hear the steady hum of the train and the conversations between wheel and track. "You are angry," she says to him lightly. "Why? You don't have to be."
Without any effort at all he climbs onto her bunk, the starched white sheets of the bed shifting beneath his form. Alice finds her hand suddenly in his, something she does not quite understand. "You're so full of light. You don't feel any hatred or guilt," he murmurs softly, words meant only for her ears.
"I guess it's because I'm more selfish than you. I like being happy too much to let things bother me," she lies.
"I don't mind." She can hardly hear him anymore. She isn't really sure what his words are, but she can see them written on his fleeting expressions.
Then she exclaims abruptly, "You're going to kiss me now!" And looking shocked out of his skin, Jasper obliges. His breath is unexpectedly warm on her lips as he leans closer. Alice is melting into the kiss, feeling lofty and insubstantial as air until her hand brushes the nape of his neck. She mumbles, as their bodies part, "Let's get you some blood."
"Are you mad, as in 'insane', not 'angry'?" he demands. "You can't stand watching me kill humans."
"But you want it, and you'll botch it if you don't have someone to help you," she says. She doesn't quite believe what she is about to help him do. It's as if something is shifting inside her, and she doesn't want to watch Jasper suffer so. She does not know why exactly. She thinks that she just likes the look in his eyes when they are not hard and cold like glass, mesmerized by the contrast of light and dark there.
A pause.
"I don't mind. I can stand it!"
3. "Are you sure you would like to watch?"
"I'll have to get used to it, wouldn't I?"
The man they chose smells of greed and dirt. He is unconscious, slumped against the wall of the unsanitary train bathroom. He remembers how they had snatched him out of the air. The man—presumably a businessman of sorts, judging form the suitcase in his large hands—had cursed at first and fought against Alice's restraining arms before he gave in to slumber.
There is a faint tremble in Alice's hands, mirroring that of her weak smile, which Jasper pretends not to notice as he kneels next to the man.
"It won't be… pleasant," he warns, pausing to meet her gaze, even though the hunger was gnawing at him.
"I know, Jas." She nods sagely. "I know."
"Well this is awkward," he comments as his attention shifts back and forth from the man to Alice.
"Two vampires and an unconscious human walk into a bar—" She makes horrible, cheerful, and embarrassing jokes whenever she's unsettled, he realizes, at last acknowledging to himself that Alice can most definitely not stand watching him steal the blood of this living man, and most definitely never will be.
"Dear God, please make this stop." He exhales in a dramatic and mournful sigh and places his lips over Alice's with a certain quickness. Surprisingly, she obliges. Somewhere inside him there is a hunger lingering still, a hunger that he finds is slowly thawing away into nothing when he sees that tiny whisper of a smile in her eyes.
Perhaps that means more to him than a simple human life that will allow him to live.