Pen name: NChris
Rating: T/PG-13 (no overt lemons)
Pairing: Jasper/Alice
Title: We are learning to make fire.
Fandom: Twilight
A/N: Thank you for the opportunity to participate in the Fics for Nashville charity. All characters from the Twilight Universe belong to Stephenie Meyer. No copyright infringement is intended. I hope you enjoy this little exercise in character development.
We are learning to make fire.
-from Habitation by Margaret Atwood
Fire. It's something we, as vampires, are intimately familiar with. We start our life bathed in it and, if our life ends, fire is what consumes us again.
Close to a century of my existence was spent stoking fires, both real and metaphorical. I'd seen fire create and seen it destroy, often in the same breath. I'd wielded fire's power. I'd struck a match and watched it burn, flicked a lighter and gazed into its flame.
But, I'd not felt warmth. For almost a century, I'd roamed this earth without a moment of true peace or warmth. No matter how many fires I lit, how many lighters I ignited, I'd never felt the heat.
My heart remained a chunk of granite inside my chest, cold and still. How I wished to find the right fire to warm that part of myself. So, I wandered, searching for the thing or person who could spark some level of heat within me.
It's funny how I searched for something for so long, yet I was shocked when it finally found me.
A dingy greasy diner in a dingy sooty city held the key to my searching. For the first time I felt it the tiniest flash of a spark. I wandered inside, weary and travel-worn. She danced over to me and gently admonished me for keeping her waiting. The spark trembled between us.
She was an enigma, reminding me of the faeries from long ago childhood tales. Compassion flowed from her to me, at once soothing and igniting the spark inside.
She reached out to me and I ducked my head, stuttering out an apology for making her wait. She laughed and danced a few steps closer. The spark flared brighter.
We. For the first time I was part of a 'we', stepped out into the pouring rain and even the downpour couldn't extinguish the tentative heat. Her emotions flowed across, over, through, my soul. As if I had one, as if I wasn't a broken shell of a man.
I made a decision in that moment and she smiled. She whispered my name, startling me and stoking the shuddering heat, forcing it higher. God, I'd give anything to stay with her, fight for her, live for her...die for her.
I followed her, blindly at first, though confused and uncertain. I was ashamed of tainting this pure woman with my evil, my hardness. Her hands soothed me as I poured out my story, shaking and desperately cold in her arms.
I learned who she was, how she had looked for me for a decade before finally finding me. We embraced and the spark shuddered into a tentative flame.
Day, weeks, months passed and the flame grew. It was a quiet fire, a simple but all consuming burn inside us. She was young for our kind, but wise beyond her short years. I was ancient, battle-scarred and weary. Together we learned to kindle our flame, to protect and guide it.
My hands roamed her petite frame, learning each curve and texture, memorizing each sigh and shudder of pleasure. Her lips burned a path across my ravaged and imperfect body and I was ashamed. I wasn t good enough to be touched by her, but I would do everything in my power to care for her. She whispered my name, trembling as I learned how to please her. The flame quickened.
When she broke apart in my arms, the heat of her pleasure threatened to consume me. My mouth swallowed her cries, my arms held her together as she spasmed and rocked against me, and the fire surrounded me as she took me inside herself. The fire consumed me, both inside and out, as I buried myself deep inside her heat, moaning her name; a prayer long desired but never uttered fell from my lips until I was so utterly inflamed that I could do nothing but clutch her sweet form to me, pouring myself into her, absorbing more of her until all the cold empty darkness dissolved in a blinding flash of heat and love.
We clung together afterward, trembling and weak, murmuring soft words of forever; words of consumption by flame.
She murmured softly into the stone flesh of my chest, her fingertips stroking and healing my pain and despair.
where painfully and with wonder at having survived even this far
we are learning to make fire.
-Habitation, Margaret Atwood