the beast devour'd.
-irishais-
The moonlight hovers behind Alice's head, a spectre running thin fingers through her dark hair. She shifts, the motion taking a fraction of a fraction of a second, as she dips her head to graze her lips along his collarbone. He inhales, tasting the air, feeling the oxygen filter through his body, a whisper as loud as a shout in a chest that has no heartbeat.
Her body is featherlight, he believes, sliding his hands down her smooth back, her flesh soft, yielding, pearlescent under the ghost moon.
(He wonders what Edward sees in that fragile human girl. She will shatter under his touch.)
She nips at his flesh; he presses his face in her hair and relishes in the softness against his cheeks. Alice breathes his name-- Jasper, the word hovering in the air, waiting to be plucked, waiting to be devoured.
He yields, he yields, falling back against the bedding, a man drowning in touch, taste, scent, words and gasps and nails digging into flesh.
Afterward, time drifts, and Alice counts his scars, one, two, three, her fingers dancing over his flesh to the beat of a waltz. He grasps her hand and brings it to his lips, a kiss for each finger, a smile for each kiss.
"Do you think," she asks, "that the Volturi will really come?"
The question is unexpected, and she takes his pause to pull her hand from his grasp.
She's Alice, she is the keeper of the future and the past, of everything in between. The question is the knife-edge, teetering in the silence it leaves in its wake. Alice watches him, absorbing every miniscule movement in his face.
"They are the Volturi," he says after a second. This should explain everything, shouldn't it? They will come for Edward's mind-reading, for Alice's visions. For everything that Bella will bring, if she survives the transformation, and Aro believes that she will, for Alice claims to have seen it, and ergo it must be true. The Volturi don't know that Alice is playing with a full deck, that Aro has drawn but one of fifty-two cards.
Alice glides her fingers along his arm, tracing the faint raised ridges of scar tissue. "They are, that."
Somewhere beneath them, a lullaby begins to play.