This is for a good friend and great writer. Bex, I know how much you enjoy BellaJasper, and as they are my Twilight OTP, I could do nothing more than this and I hope you like it because I loved writing it.
This should have been up in February 2017, for the GGE exchange :)
This is who I am;
escapist, paradise seeker.
Farewell, now time to fly
out of sight, out of time, away from all lies
—
December in Forks had a strange beauty Bella never enjoyed until she turned forty-four years old. Physically, she was still eighteen and she'd never be more than that, but her mind had matured and now there were new things in old places. She never got to see those places. She never got to experience new things.
Most of her time was spent indoors, staring out in silence. The trees around the house made for a diverse scenery depending on rain, wind and snow. The birds, the squirrels and the smallest creatures kept away of the big prey she was, but once or twice she had heard the song of a nightingale and she closed her eyes, imagining herself in the bird's place, flying around the forest in search of new branches to sit on while she sang.
Here, there was no song unless Alice and Jasper sang for them, and that only happened when Alice had drunk too much O-. Otherwise, the noise of the Cullen house would be sharp even when everyone kept quiet thanks to her vampire hearing. Sometimes the noise reminded her to step away from the windows and go down with the others to enjoy family time.
She had rarely done that in the last few years after Renesmee left saying living with teenagers that would never change, would never age, was not what she wanted. Bella understood even as Edward stood heartbroken on the threshold, hoping that their daughter would reconsider and come back but not once telling her she was loved there. It wouldn't have served, Bella thought, because Renesmee knew she was loved and she loved them all in return. Her farewell said so. She still wanted to go.
If someone was even more heartbroken than Edward that was Jacob. He had been Renesmee's companion for twenty years and to the Quileute's surprise, she didn't find that attractive or romantic. She said there was more to the world that vampires and werewolves and their needs. Bella saw herself in her daughter then and recognised Renesmee's need to be free.
Now, five years later and as she silently went down the stairs into the light of the living room, she felt as trapped as she once felt in her frail, imperfect human body.
Alice met her first. Her endless chatter had always annoyed Bella to an extent but as a human she said nothing; she had wanted to belong and Alice was welcoming. Bella let herself, in the past and right now, be guided by Alice to her designated seat and heard of how I knew you would come down soon.
Edward tore himself from the window where he served as a reminder of how similar they could be at times. His smiles never reached his eyes. She gave him a small grin, one that she hoped he would interpret as her permission to sit by her. It amazed her how, after all this time, he still tried to keep his distance from her at times while at others he would be overwhelming with his constant presence. He hadn't changed in twenty-five years.
"It's going to rain soon," Emmett told her. She hadn't missed their conversation but was glad they actively included her in something instead of expecting her to know her piece and play her part blindly. She was no mind-reader or precognitive woman. "I want you on my team."
"If I get to be the pitcher," she grinned. Playing baseball and hunting were the only two legitimate reasons to go outside. As a human, she hadn't minded being inside for long periods of time. As a vampire and immortal, she relished the breeze and the wind, the snow and the rain, the thunder was music and the rivers sang to her.
Rosalie, who still hadn't forgiven Bella for both becoming immortal and letting Bella's own daughter go out to the world, complained pettily of how her throws weren't fast enough. Edward tried to stop Rosalie with stares and whispers of her name. Emmett laughed. Jasper tried to ease their emotions. Alice spoke of how they would have a lovely game. Carlisle and Esme smiled at their pretend family.
Bella's bitterness grew again in spite of herself.
This was her family now. This was the place where she belonged and the life she had chosen. The petty squabbles, the egocentric stares, the loud silences and the blurred out world outside were her choices. And for that she was glad; she never felt at ease with herself when she was a human. But being happy with herself didn't mean she was happy with them. That broke her heart because she was afraid of breaking theirs.
Only Bella and Carlisle kept up with the world. He still ventured out to work and help the frail humans who needed sharpened senses to find illness and sickness. She still lurked online to find rare gems of literature that transported her to other, more lively places.
She had read many contemporary books and slowly those replaced the classics in her list of favourites. It was hard to relate to the contemporary novels and memoirs and instead, she easily believed the heroines of Austen novels to be herself, trapped in a place that tried to drown her with contentedness and conformity while she tried to reach for more. Only Bella never reached for more. She kept to her books and her music and stared out of the window. She was useless.
The others never gave any hint of wanting to go out. The only one who did was Emmett, who felt happy simply running around through the forests and up and down the mountains. His happiness came easily and he tried to give it to all of them. Only Rosalie and Bella herself ever wanted part of it, but he promptly got bored of sharing and his ego won once more. He mocked Edward and tried to anger Jasper.
Jasper simply smiled in silence with dull eyes that never shone. He spoke sometimes to quiet them down and to make useful suggestions the others dismissed.
Why would we need to move someplace else?
Why would we need to hunt in different areas?
Why would we want to spend our endless time doing something when we could spend eternity speaking of the same topics and doing the same routine we have had for decades?
And he would silence himself again. Bella hadn't noticed how his eyes always sought hers. She hadn't felt his emotions flare up because she always thought those were her own. The boredom, the need to be something more than she already was, the desire of living and experimenting... Everything was him and everything she had already felt on her own.
She couldn't know that those emotions had belonged first to her and then to him. She couldn't know that she broke the grey image with a multitude of colours, each corresponding to the echo of an emotion she couldn't quite reach.
Alice had insisted they throw a party for Bella's birthday. As always, it was a grand party in which they spent more money than most people would see in their lives. They had no food, they had no drink other than animal blood, but the decorations hanging from the ceiling were real diamonds and the mirrors on the walls were backed with silver. The clothes Alice prepared for them, as if they were dolls with which she could play, were worth more than Charlie's house. And so they spent money no one had earned.
Sometimes Bella would remember her dad and she would want to weep and go back to him. The man, happily married to Sue after all these years, knew her true nature and loved her still, but she could smell the fear and the anger in him whenever she visited. After Renesmee ran away, she never visited again.
Her father would have been ashamed of this decadent parties. He would have told her how much better it could be to simply laugh with your friends as you ate or drank, but Bella couldn't do that anymore. Not in the same way Charlie could.
The party was the same as any other afternoon only they drank blood until Bella's senses felt magnified and the smallest speck of dust in the room seemed to glow with life akin to a small planet. Tonight, Bella felt sick of everything and went up before the others.
Edward, once again in his sulking moods, let her go without asking why she was uncomfortable. He smiled at her miserably, with eyes half closed and looking at her feet and not her eyes. His hand tried to reach her but he let it fall before it could touch her and Bella pursed her lips.
She didn't storm out of the room. She walked with a fake smile on her lips and told Alice she needed a few minutes of silence. Knowing her (and Edward's) penchant for quiet and solitude, Alice nodded and hugged her, returning cheerfully to the thin glass of O- she was drinking.
Once upstairs, she closed the door behind her and stopped herself from going to the window to stare out. She was not a princess trapped in a tower and she could go out anytime she wanted, she simply didn't want to do it. Bella walked to the bed instead and sat on the comfortable mattress that was never used for sleeping and barely used for sex anymore.
That had been a great disappointment she wasn't ready to talk about with Edward. Her husband was a year younger than her in body, and a century older in mind, yet she often thought that the one who matured through the years was her. He still acted childish and moody, much like a teenager trying to act grown up. It didn't work for her as it had on her human, younger self. Edward's mystery was now mundane and his attitude was now unattractive.
But Bella didn't dare to go away and leave this place of commodity and comfort. This was the only place in which she could truly belong short of going to Volterra and asking the three royal vampires to change her cage for a gilded one. It was not what she wanted.
She stood from the bed, tired with herself and her own lack of determination. What was that about her human life always made her cringe with shame? Her inaction. Her indecision. Her lack of plans for her life beyond reaching the silence of her bedroom so she could read about ladies falling in love against their common sense. Was that what happened to her? She wanted to deny the accusation but her brain came up blank.
Bella walked to the centre of the room and put her hands on her waist. She looked around trying to find something that made her happy, anything that could make her feel more than just restlessness. There were a few books that she wouldn't have found without Carlisle's contacts, and a pair of shoes that reminded her of Renee so she kept (even if they were from two decades ago). She smiled at those.
When she turned to the other side of the room, where Edward and hers music collection was, she froze.
Jasper was at the door leaning casually against the threshold.
"You are happy," he said. Bella tilted her head to a side, thinking of that. It had never occurred to her that different people saw her differently. She knew Edward thought she was happy with their life, yet Jasper sounded surprised at the fact he stated.
"Aren't we all?" she said, crossing her arms in front of her and looking down. She didn't want him to dig deeper into it and see how hollow she felt most of the time. Then she looked up, wondering if he already knew. His eyes were shining with confirmation.
"Edward is miserable downstairs," Jasper told her. He looked indifferent, as he always did, except for his golden eyes. She had never paid any attention to them; usually, she and Jasper never had motives to be alone together and Bella had never wondered why. "Is something going on?"
Bella couldn't know if the anger was her own or if Jasper was luring her out, but as soon as he asked that she remembered the problem.
"Nothing is even happening," she shared in a harsh whisper, surprising herself at how easy it was to voice her feelings. Empowered by the weight lifting from her shoulders, Bella pointlessly exhaled. "Nothing ever happens here. We hunt and we come back to look at each other without saying anything meaningful. How can we even exist like this?"
Her question made him smile and she felt surprised again. Jasper's posture changed completely as if a switch had been activated. He stepped into the room and Bella had a sudden sensation of what her human memories remembered as panic.
"And how does that make you feel, Bella?"
"Trapped," she spat without thinking. Her arms were stiff and if she were human she would be trembling with anger. "Smothered."
"It feels like you're drowning, doesn't it?" he told her, stepping forwards again. They were three metres from each other and in a bubble that kept them apart from the rest of the world. Oddly, it felt like a taste of freedom.
"Yes," she agreed, taking a step in his direction. He met her halfway and Bella realised they had never been this close before. They had never been alone like this before.
"You felt so hopeful before being turned," he told her with the smoothest voice. "Then you were afraid and angry and hopeful again. After a few years, you were empty like the rest."
"How can we let ourselves be like this, Jasper?" Bella asked and this time she wanted him to lie to her.
"We're dead." He didn't lie. "And some forget how to live but you're young and your memories are still there. Do you remember Carlisle saying you were meant to be a vampire?" She nodded; the patriarch's words were a source of pride for her at the time, when she wanted approval more than anything else. "He was right, Bella. You are the only vampire I know who kept her human emotions."
Bella rolled her eyes. "I was uncaring, Jasper," she confided almost shyly. In retrospective, she lamented not being more open with her feelings to her parents. The guilt of being immortal out of selfishness didn't torment her anymore, but it didn't mean she forgot her failures of a past life. I was indifferent. I barely had emotions."
He chuckled. "I remember," he said. "I thought you were made for each other. You and Edward would be quiet for all eternity." Bella grimaced. It wasn't something to be proud of. "But you changed, Bella. And here you are, having an existential crisis because you long for a life."
That she did. She almost giggled at the irony. "Isn't it sad that we have no brain chemicals to help with that?"
She closed her eyes and looked down. Sometimes she wished she could sleep but no matter for how long she closed her eyes, rest never came. Then Jasper put his hand on her chin and she felt calm. It was different from sleeping but it quieted her mind gently, like how it felt to be half-awake after a night of sleep. When she was human, she took all that for granted.
The calm was gone in an instant and she looked up, baring her teeth at him. He was smiling maliciously, the hand on her chin went down to forcefully hold her elbow to stop her from attacking out of instinct.
A second later she blinked and pushed him away. "Why would you do that?"
"To make you angry. To make you feel something that isn't the same misery that I've had to feel from them for a century. Why would you wish for chemicals when you can have something more if so you wish?"
She didn't know how to react. Jasper was, above all, a manipulator. He had never hidden that and only chosen not to use his pathokinesis on any of them unless needed. Until tonight. And, if Bella was completely honest with herself, she had liked it.
Once more, he stepped closer to her. This time, Bella didn't know what to expect. A familiar sensation extended through her limbs but she didn't know if it was her instinct or his doing; the sensation took form and nested in her chest now, pulsating like a heart would have done.
She looked up at him. He was shorter than Edward and she could reach his eyes with her own easily without having to crane her neck to see him. His lips —lips that she hadn't craved, hadn't even seen before tonight— formed a wicked smile. Bella licked her lips. She could feel her pupils dilating, letting light enter her eyes so she could find her pray. Bella knew she was the prey here.
"How did it make you feel, Bella?"
His voice hypnotized her and she forgot the world. She forgot the party. She forgot their family. She forgot the mockery of a husband she had.
"Like I'm alive," she whispered to him.
"I could do it again," he whispered. His hands found hers and they entwined easily. The scars in them were bumpy and rough, darkening his pale skin with proof of his might. "An out-of-schedule hunt while the others are sated. A night in when they're hunting. I could make you feel."
Bella felt herself lean into his touch. She hadn't felt like this in a long, long time and she hadn't realised how much she missed it. Jasper kept his wicked smirk as he brushed his lips against her. It wasn't tender. It was a taste of what she could have if she were his. She could feel his smirk and wanted to reach for it and keep it for herself. She wanted to bite him and let him bite her. She wanted a thrill. She wanted to feel and who better to make her feel than a man who worked emotions?
"Choose," he prompted her again. His hands went to her waist and he let her feel what their life could be. "You know how I will make you feel? I'll melt you without even having to touch you. Tell me this isn't the life you crave and I will stop. I can stop, Bella. Do you want that?"
All the while he did nothing more than look into her eyes and convey her everything he wanted. She felt controlled. She felt used. This was instinct. And she could have it. Bella made a choice.
In the same moment, many things happened. If her heart could still beat, it would be racing. She looked into his eyes and they knew what it meant. A glass was crushed downstairs. The tacky music kept going. Edward ran away and Bella felt her choices validated by his cowardice. Alice stood by the door, looking hurt. In her hand shone blood and glass dust.
Jasper's hands still held her waist and she felt how good they fit together. It was a pleasure she had forgotten long ago. Now, as the better half of a vampire coven stared at her as if she were guilty of the lowest crime, Bella felt satisfied.
She didn't tell them she was sorry. She said she'd be leaving in the morning. Jasper said he was going with her.
Bella, as a human or as a vampire, had never been so alive.