Notes (2012): Own nothing but my OC, this story takes places somewhere after Breaking Dawn, eeeeenjoy~!
*re-edited 2017
(Never trust a stranger, friend; no one knows how it will end.)
Harmony Patterson is wrong.
There is nothing really that tells it, yet Jasper knows as surely as the venom in his body, that the young girl is all wrong.
She is human. So perfectly so - he can hear the rush of her blood, and the steady beating of her heart. He can hear the expanse of her lungs as they breathed air into her very being - and yet Jasper knows she is wrong, though there is nothing to truly prove that.
It is not her smile that makes him believe this. Nor is it her words or even her eyes.
They are warm and wide, as bright as the sun he remembers beating on human skin, burning and bright.
Everything about her is innocent - from the tips of her absurdly curly hair to the greens of her eyes and the pinks of her cheeks and the little feet that pattered - or at the very least, the surface of her seems to be, innocent that is. Yet there is something so obviously wrong about her and it is setting off all the warning bells in his mind.
It is screaming at him that there is danger, that there is death looming in the shadows, that he must run or eliminate before everything comes to an end -
Yet he is the one alone to see it. Or at least feel it.
He knows Harmony Patterson is wrong, all wrong, and it is driving him mad that no one sees what is so obvious to him. Yet, is it really? No one else feels the danger that he does, sending his senses in a flurry that he is barely able to control. (It has nothing to do with the blood lust. It has nothing to do with her scent. It is everything else and it almost seems ridiculous how much he is falling apart because of one slip of a human girl.)
He knows though, he knows, and he can't stop himself from knowing, even when he begins to think he has gone mad (the whispers at the back of his head biting and demanding and fluttering in a chaotic beat. The automatic tension in his body that is one seconds breathe away from either jumping or running, and each day he doesn't know what it will be). He wonders if perhaps it would be better to be mad. At least then he can justify all this nonsense.
At least then his family would not look at each other as if knowing he is wrong.
(Even when he knows he is right.)
Innocent she might look, but Jasper sees. He sees what everyone else will not. He sees truth, no matter how horrible it is, and how cruel it seems, and how it screams. He sees, because he is unable to not see. He sees simply because feeling cannot lie where expression and words will. He sees even when he doesn't want to, because it burns. It burns to see and Jasper truly believes that this is what it must feel like to burn completely.
(Yet where he will turn to ash at the raging flames of crackling wood and burning orange, he can only endure here.)
Oh does she burn.
(Like black fire.)
It is all wrong. So very wrong, the way she burns.
It screams at him. It screams the way something dying would scream, clinging to the earth even as the demons drag, and claw, and cling, and rip into the flesh of the soul -
It's all wrong. He feels it. He hears it. All of her calling out in a way that overpowers everything else.
He doesn't understand how no one else sees. He's even a little surprised that Edward hasn't heard. Maybe that is her own sort of power. The power to make others so ignorant to the wrongness inside bleeding out like poison.
(The world is ignorant where he alone is not.)
This is her power and Jasper wonders if there is a single way to overpower it. (Each day seems that little bit more impossible.) He wants them to see, yet all the same he does not. What would occur should they see? Something screams it wouldn't really be pretty.
It sounds ridiculous. She's human. Nothing but human.
(Yet, so much more than that.)
She bleeds.
She feels pain.
She is not indestructible.
She is, at the very end of the day, so very human.
(Something screams still, it is still screaming, even as she looks up at him. A pretty smile and warm green eyes crinkling with joy. There is something screaming she is wro -)
Harmony Patterson though, is all wrong in the same ways one would say it was wrong to steal, or wrong to hurt, or wrong to take life. The most basic sorts of knowing, yet so hard for others to see and understand. He wonders if there is more to her power than simple ignorance. There must be more than just suggesting to ignore what is really there. The way others react towards her - he isn't certain how he hadn't thought of it before.
Emotional suggestion - manipulating the way others perceived her in the same way she pushed for overlooking the obvious.
So strong is the power to ensnare and twist apart that it has forced the hands of 'imprinting'.
Jasper knows that the wolf is not at all like her. His temper is a short thread so easily snapped. His feelings and thoughts so far away from her own, that Jasper can see what is so obvious. They are not meant for each other.
(He wonders if they ever were.)
The worst thing of it all is that she is nothing more than an ordinary human being.
(Isn't that so horrible?)
So ordinarily human, but with all the wrong things scrambling upwards in a turbulent storm with no restrictions.
Jasper hated it, because he was certain, despite this all, that she was no charismatic villain. She was not the kind of cold-minded killer who ended human life without doubt, nor did she wield extraordinary violence to evil ends. She was like any other human who possessed greed and desire, the most basic feelings of all human beings, (and yet with enough personal conviction to violate all taboos if they stood in her way) so ordinarily human.
(So why does it scream?)
Sometimes Jasper could sense something warm and different to what is bleeding out and around her. It is as if something had broken and ripped itself apart. It's strange to him, almost inconceivable the way it blends and doesn't.
He remembers the first time he noticed it. He remembers it had been during the after party of Edward and Bella's wedding. He remembers her in her pretty dress, long skirt fluttering and a tiny pouch in hand. He remembers how exhausted he had been, how he had asked her something. He remembers her suddenly frozen expression, with those wide unblinking eyes and the little loose tension around her jaw. He remembers it had hurt, and he couldn't quite think through the sudden onslaught of feeling that had been, just moments before, so frighteningly still.
Jasper remembers. Though he doesn't remember very well what had occurred in those split seconds of silence and the white noise loudly spluttering in his head.
It hadn't ended well though, he remembers that.
No one had quite been able to look at him the same way again. They seemed to see something else than what Jasper saw, what he remembers. They saw a victim while Jasper saw... he wasn't certain what he saw. It was odd, like a line in the sand and one was more washed out, dirty than the other. Ironically it was the warmth that was more dirty, broken even. It was greatly overpowered by the rest of her, the part of her that made Jasper antsy and filled with tension.
He couldn't do anything though, to check why this was so, his curiosity high enough to do it all again. Alice hadn't been happy at what he did, and even less when she had stilled on a vision of him honestly choosing to do so, to reach forwards towards the dirty, torn pieces of Harmony and pull. He was most shocked though when Bella had reared a never before seen nasty anger in defense of the other girl. It had burned in a way he had never felt from the almost calm presence Bella exuded constantly.
It rubbed Jasper in all the wrong ways to realize he was being pushed out simply because of what he could feel, the truth he could see, even at it's most unsettling. They all refused the truth, in this they weren't much different from humans. If they could not touch it, could not see it, then it was not real. He hated it in all honesty, the way they proved they would choose ignorance to truth.
It had happened though, and with it Jasper had realized she had won something. She had won their loyalty and Jasper had nothing but the powerful memory of something strange about her, of something he could not seek to understand least the family react with prejudice.
(Humans, even when turned, are the most profoundly, mysterious creatures in the world.)
They saw what they wanted to believe in.
"Jasper,"
She looked at him even now, knowing this, her eyes glimmering.
(The best lies about me are the ones I told.)