A/N: If you have me on alert, you probably have already read this fic. I had to delete it due to ... we'll call it "technical problems".
This is the companion fic to "My Pereche". It's not absolutely necessary to have read that, but it helps.
Warning that things are pretty dark. If you're sensitive to abuse, you probably don't want to read. And if you're underage, you shouldn't be reading, either.
Thanks to my beta, thir13enth, and pre-reader "The Child of Time".
Freedom. That's what it had felt like when Bella's transformation had released me from the heart-breaking attachment to Jasper—freedom.
I loved Jasper, I really did. But to no longer be in love with him was such relief. Especially after the long goodbye I'd had to undergo over the two years before he finally bit her.
I'd been a worthy person – at least I thought I had. Hadn't it been selfless of me to help Jasper with Bella? I could have prevented them ever meeting if I wanted and I didn't. I loved him enough to let him go. So surely I deserved a happy ending of my own. Surely I deserved new own new beginning.
As I sat overlooking the Grand Parade next to my new-found mate, the grey clouds above us threatening more snow, I felt a new emotion – hope. Hope for the future. Hope for what I foresaw in our future. Hope that I could be happy and love once more.
"Are we…" Daniel cut himself off halfway through his question. "Are you…" His voice was like music. Like a cello playing legato. Rich, full and smooth.
"Yes," I whispered, knowing of course what he wanted to ask.
He stared out at the humans going about their days, taking shortcuts across the wide paths, the odd one darting up the stairs into the City Hall itself.
"How do you know?" He moved his hand slightly so it was more firmly covering my own.
"It's my gift. I see the future."
"And that's me?"
I looked over at his pale silhouette, his chiseled jaw and gently sloping nose. "That's you."
He exhaled deeply, with just the faintest sigh peppering his breath. "I don't know what to say."
"That's okay," I told him with a smile. "Are you alone here? Do you have family? I mean, a coven?"
He tensed slightly. "I've been alone for… what year is it now?"
"2017."
"Huh. Nine years."
"I'm not expected back with my family for a couple of days, so we have time."
He swung around to look at me abruptly. "Time to what?"
I shrugged and hid my face somewhat behind the collar of my coat. "Get to know each other?"
He nodded sharply.
I stood and offered my hand to him. "Come with me."
He tensed for an instant. "Why?"
"Because Canadians might be a hardy lot, but you may have noticed that it's too cold for even them to be sitting outside for prolonged periods of time. Being out here is conspicuous."
"Conspicuous," he muttered to himself, as if trying to blend in was a foreign concept to him.
He took the proffered hand, causing my body to warm all the way through. It was as if I was human again, standing in the early morning sun. As he stood up he took the time to really look at me properly for the first time. His gaze stopped when he got to my face. "What's wrong with your eyes?"
My fingers naturally fluttered up to touch the skin around the offending features. "I drink from animals, not humans."
He crinkled his nose. "That, uh, doesn't sound very appetizing."
I knew the look on my face was one of yearning as I gazed up at him, but I couldn't seem to stop it. "You get used to it. Come on." I tugged on his hand and led him down the street.
"Where are we going?"
"We're just walking. Who knows where we'll end up."
"You, apparently."
I sighed. "I'm trying not to look at any of the future regarding you. It's difficult, but I'd like for at least something to be a surprise."
He wasn't exactly chatty. I had to ask about a million questions to get anything out of him, and he seemed reluctant to open up to me. I couldn't be sure what to make of it. I wanted my new mate to know everything about me, yet he didn't want to volunteer any information. And when I asked him about his former coven, he froze up completely. Something was amiss, but I wasn't exactly sure what.
I held in the sigh trying to escape as I looked out over the river. Life with Daniel wouldn't be all romance and flowers. I'd had an inkling about that in a few of the visions I'd had, but a girl can always hope.
I didn't want to compare him to Jasper, but it was hard to resist. He wasn't the southern gentleman Jasper was. He had been 21 back in 1989 when he'd been changed, but the year and his age was all I was able to pry out of him about the day. Not because—like me—he couldn't remember. The look that crossed his face told me that he remembered exactly what happened. I could only guess that something traumatic had happened.
He wasn't as tall as Jasper – less than a foot taller than me. With a great set of heels, we would have that perfect height difference which makes couples look amazing standing together. I hadn't tried it at this point, but I could imagine that it would feel nice to lean my head on his shoulder as we stood side by side.
His short hair was a warm brown color with the perfect highlights vampires possessed. It drew in the eye, but all I could focus on was how badly it had been cut. He admitted that it had been a mullet cut when he was human but had been cut shorter after his change. I knew how difficult that process was – it required each individual strand to be cut using vampire teeth, so basically someone needed to sit there for a very long time and bite off his hair. Whoever had done so obviously didn't care much for precision.
Daniel was gruff at times, and he wasn't afraid to show when he was unhappy. Humans often frustrated him, and he struggled to keep up with technology, so he didn't really understand them anymore. He remembered being human but seemed disconnected from the memories, as if they had happened to someone else.
After walking for over two hours, the sky was darkening, a pink hue painting the horizon. We found ourselves at the high iron gates of the public gardens. As we entered, I purposefully grabbed his hand, threading my fingers through his. He froze for a second, looking down at our joined hands.
"Alice." He let out a gust of breath. "I don't know what I'm doing here."
"It's okay. You don't have to."
Daniel growled in frustration. "See, I don't even know what that is supposed to mean! I don't know what to do with a mate. I don't know how I'm supposed to act. I don't know what I'm supposed to say."
"You're not supposed to do anything, Dan. Just do and say what is in your heart."
"My heart? I don't have a heart! You don't have a heart. Our hearts died long ago. How am I supposed to feel love—or whatever it is you're expecting of me—when my heart hasn't functioned for almost three decades? How do I know that it's even possible?" He ended his speech with a light scoff.
I stopped in my tracks and looked up into his eyes. "Everything is possible," I told him softly. "I know that we can love, that we can feel things. I know this because I've felt it almost every day since I was changed. I feel it from my family. And I felt it from my ex-husband. He's an empath, so if anyone knows about love, it is him. And not for one day that we were together did he question the existence of love or vampires' ability to feel it. He knew, and I know."
Daniel began walking again, shrugging his hand out of my grasp. I quickly trotted after him, cursing my choice of footwear as I crunched along the gravel path.
"I know you've been hurt," I called after him. "I don't know how, and I desperately want you to confide in me, but all I know for sure is that something has happened to make you question love. You don't need to question it, Daniel. It's right here. Just let yourself feel it."
He stopped and whipped around to face me, the stones crunching beneath his boots. "You don't know what I'm feeling, Alice. You don't know me. You might think you do and that this cosmic connection gives you some sort of claim that you can know my thoughts, but you don't."
"No," I whispered. "I don't know what your thoughts are. I don't know how you feel. But I know what you could feel if you just allow yourself to. It can be wonderful, but you have to allow it."
"I don't know what it is I'm feeling. I know that I feel something, but how am I supposed to know that is the bond of a mate? How should I know when I've never felt anything like it before? I've felt lust, but that's not what this is. I can't even explain it."
Hesitantly, I raised my hand up to touch his cheek. His flinch was almost imperceptible, but it was there. I turned away, cringing to myself, and leaned against the white stone post that was one corner of a beautiful, ornate bridge spanning the stream. The stone felt comforting, reminiscent of our own skin as it was.
"I know what the feeling is. I've felt it before," I said softly, my words drifting out over the slow-moving stream. The edges were iced over, only the middle part of the water running freely. How aptly it mirrored Daniel and me – one part of us willing to flow with what was happening to us and another part frigid and unwilling to allow the spring thaw to separate them from the unmoving bank.
I slowly turned around, leaning against the pillar. "You just have to let go. Allow yourself to be taken along for the ride. It's easy."
"It's not easy," he protested, his hands grasping his hair in frustration. "You come along and expect me to just be your mate all of a sudden? Do you know this is the longest conversation I've had in years? I'm no good around other people. I'm no good for you."
"Shouldn't I get to decide what's good for me?"
"I don't know what I'm doing here, Alice!"
"You don't have to know anything. Just do what feels right."
"I can't!"
I could feel venom prickling in my long-ago dried up tear ducts. It caused pain to stab through me knowing I had no outlet for the pain. My mate didn't want to be mated. He wanted to stay the way he was before, a loner and a nomad, not relying on anyone else.
"It's not supposed to be like this," I whispered, and I was sure the anguish was written all over my face.
I turned and stumbled up the bridge, making it to the apex before I was grabbed by the arm and roughly turned around.
"Don't be like that," he demanded. "Don't get all pissy and make me out to be the bad guy here. I haven't had the time you have to get my head around what's going on. You had a head start with this vision of yours. I don't know what to do. I'm scared, okay?"
"There's no need to be scared. Vampires like you and me find their mates every day. It's a good thing, but for some reason you're acting as though it's the end of life as you know it."
"It is this end of life as I know it! Everything is going to change. I know how this is going to work – I've seen other mated pairs. I can't now just go off on my own again. It'll hurt too much."
"Hurt? So you do know that you can feel things?" I didn't know why I was trying to make things worse. I just couldn't help but feel defensive. I'd been so sure that this day would be one of the most wonderful days of my existence, and here it wasn't like anything I could have foreseen. I now understood why I'd never seen any details of this meeting – maybe my brain was trying to protect me from the harsh truth that there was nothing romantic about my first meeting with my mate.
"Well, I sure know that I can feel pain. How do I know that you're going to bring me anything other than agony?"
"You just have to trust me."
"I can't trust anyone."
It was like a stab to the chest.
"You can trust me," I said softly, looking at the brickwork beneath my feet. The paving was smooth and still perfectly white even after all the foot traffic. "If there's one person in the world you can trust, it's me. I'm not going to go out and hurt you."
I felt the first flakes of snow of the day landing on the back of my bowed head and saw even more landing near my feet. I could feel Daniel hovering just in front of me, undecided how to proceed. I desperately wanted to use my gift, but it felt like it would be a betrayal. Just seconds earlier he'd complained that I knew what was happening before he did, and I didn't want to make that a habit. I had learned the hardest way possible just how much pain my gift could cause in the last decade or so.
"Do what feels right," he whispered to himself, and I suddenly felt his two large hands grasping either side of my face, forcing me to look up and him. We paused, looking at each other for just a second, just long enough for another snowflake to land on my nose. Then he pulled me up, forcing me onto my tip-toes, and his mouth descended onto mine.
It was rough and forceful, angry and needy. He didn't try to ease us into anything; his tongue was instantly invading my mouth. And as much as I felt like I should protest his force, I found that I couldn't. I wanted this just as badly as he seemed to. I wrapped my hands around the back of his head, keeping him against me, and attempted to give him back as much as he was giving me.
Anyone else might have felt assaulted, but this was my mate. This was what was right for him; right for us. He wasn't soft and romantic, but he was claiming what was his, whether he mentally believed himself to be ready for a relationship of not. I was his. And though his brain hadn't quite caught up, his body sure knew it.
Just as suddenly as it began, it was over, and I was stumbling back in my shock until my back hit the side of the bridge. If I were human, I would have been panting like a dog.
"You deserve better than me," he said, not looking directly at me.
"No. I deserve you. Because it may not seem like it at the moment, but the fates don't just throw two random people together and decide they're mates. Maybe we're both what the other needs."
"I don't need anyone," he growled.
"Maybe not." Inside though, I knew he desperately needed someone. And apparently that someone was me. "But it's okay to want someone even if you don't need anyone. It doesn't make you weak."
"I'm not going to be some knight in shining armor, if that's what you're expecting."
"I don't need rescuing. I just need you."
The snow fell around us, and like magnets, we both took two more steps toward each other, drawn back together against our will.
"Please don't hurt me," I murmured as we moved closer together.
"No promises," he replied the second before moving in to kiss me again.