Disclaimer: Not mine, not profiting, etc.

From the Wreckage 2/3

Edward sat stiffly at his least favorite coffee shop on campus, shuffling absentmindedly through graded exams with his eyebrows pinched together. He had learned on his second day as an Assistant Professor that he and his stomach barely tolerated the coffee at Espresso Royale; it was watery and bland, and came nowhere close to the socially accepted concept of coffee. Yet, for the past three days, something had led him to this less than mediocre café where he grudgingly drank its less than mediocre coffee. The company of a complete stranger, which had injected a welcome sense of novelty into his carefully calibrated routine.

He had yet to figure out what part of Jasper Hale he found so fascinating. Edward was noticeably more organized than the average teaching professional, as he consistently stored appointments in a Rolodex and kept his desk uncluttered. He also rarely lost track of his priorities. But for three consecutive days, he had let Jasper Hale interrupt his mornings, pull him away from what was necessary to what was indulgent. He had sat with his papers crinkling in the wind and completely ignored, making small talk. No. Whatever words passed between them were much too honest to be so carelessly labeled. On the first day, he'd gotten the sense that whoever Jasper Hale was, he was not a man who wasted his time talking about the weather or coffee. At least, not anymore.

"Hi." Edward started a little and looked up to find Jasper standing next to the open chair with his usual smile and tilt of his head, and Edward imagined that it was easy for most people to see Jasper and mistake wary for shy.

"Hello, sit, please." He motioned with his left hand before he bunched his papers messily and pushed them to the corner. He wondered when and if they would ever get past that formality.

"Any of your students failing?" Jasper nodded towards the stack, somehow seeming more relaxed now that he was sitting down and level with Edward.

"Thankfully, no." Edward smiled at the question. "Are you questioning my abilities as a teacher?"

"Not at all." The reply, so quick and confident, made Edward wonder how Jasper already had faith in him. "I talked to –"

"Honey! Hi, I'm so glad I found you." Edward heard his wife before he saw her emerge from the throng of heavily caffeinated students. "Don't you always say you hate this place?" She bent down to place a light kiss on his lips, her perfume filling the space around him and smelling more strongly than usual.

"I'm meeting with a student." The lie formed around his tongue and left his mouth as easily as the truth, but the strangeness of it made him realize that it was the first time he'd lied to his wife. "Bella, this is Jasper. Jasper, my wife Bella."

As they shook hands he didn't know what made him feel worse, Bella's bright smile or Jasper's willingness to comply.

"I just wanted to remind you that my dad is coming tonight. Don't forget to buy the beer that he likes and please don't be late." She rubbed her hands nervously against her thighs until he grabbed them and promised he wouldn't do either.

"Thank you." She leaned in for one last, lingering kiss that made him feel inexplicably self-conscious and impatient.

"Wife, huh?" Jasper turned his head to watch her walk away, face remaining as stoic as his question.

"Yes?" Edward stuttered, momentarily confused by Jasper's casual dismissal of his lie. "I mean, yes. Yeah." He cleared his throat around his obvious embarrassment and thought he saw a smirk flicker over Jasper's lips.

"How long?"

"Only six months. But it's been great. She's great." Edward groaned inwardly, wondering if his answer sounded as idiotic to Jasper as it did to him. "Are you… married?" His eyes unconsciously flitted to Jasper's left hand.

"I was." His teeth closed abruptly over the end of the second word, jaw clenching and throat moving against some aftertaste that gave the impression of acridity above anything else. It looked as if that topic of conversation was closed until Jasper began speaking again, quietly but forcefully, as if he had to physically push his words out one by one. "She was… everything. I knew it the moment we met, at a rundown bar in the outskirts of town. I couldn't believe my luck. I was twenty and she was nineteen. Her name was Alice. Both of us stood a little apart from everyone else our age. I guess we were just waiting for each other. We got married in six months. We wanted so much to start a family, but we were still in school so we figured a couple more years wouldn't make a difference. Then, you know, I enlisted and went off to Afghanistan. To fight the good fight." His laugh then was filled with things Edward didn't and imagined he wouldn't ever understand. "It was hard, but we got through it. I got through it, but I came back different. I still loved her, God, I did, but everything was different. I felt like I didn't know anything about my life before the war anymore, like I had been walking through water and suddenly I was thrown out and the world was colder and faster, and that was how it really was."

Jasper paused and Edward realized his hand was clenched around his mug, as if he was trying to get satisfaction from breaking something, anything. He had spoken to veterans before, gotten multiple secondhand experiences of how war changed people, and hurt for them as only an outsider could. But he'd never spoken to someone in his generation, never hurt for a near stranger so thoroughly that the ache radiated into his bones and through his gut.

"So for… a while, I just wasn't ready to be a father. I thought, how I was supposed to teach my son or daughter what to believe in if I didn't even know what I believed in? But Alice, she was my hope, my lighthouse when all I could see and breathe was stormy weather. I knew it was hard for her, but she hid heartache so well. She was so small and she looked so delicate, but the truth is, every inch of her was strength. She had enough fight in her for the both of us." His eyes were unfocused and Edward knew that Jasper Hale wasn't in front of him anymore; he was travelling through another time that had perhaps been difficult, but also better because Alice had been there. "Eventually, I wasn't scared and confused anymore, just guilty and ashamed. Every time she saw someone else's family, she would look at me, half resentful and half regretful. So, I tried harder. I wasn't about to lose her because I had lost just about everything else. When she finally got pregnant and I saw how much more beautiful it made her, imagined how beautiful our baby would be, I couldn't believe that that was what I had been running from. And for six months, we were waking up to a life we had only dreamed of having."

Jasper's voice shook on those final few words and then disappeared entirely, letting the cacophony of faceless voices filter back into the spaces around them. Edward saw a mangled play of emotions through Jasper's eyes that had him breathing tightly between dread and anticipation. Whether it was to comfort Jasper or himself, his right hand rose to brush against the back of Jasper's left, briefly touching the cold precious metal on his ring finger. And somehow it felt strange, but also right.

"After six months of believing I would be happy again, that I could make Alice happy again, I got recalled to duty. I had two weeks to find a way to say goodbye to my wife and unborn child and make them believe I would come back alive. Alice, she begged–" His voice faltered and he closed his eyes for a moment, trying to either remember that time more clearly or forget it more thoroughly; Edward imagined that it was both. "She couldn't shake the feeling that something horrible would happen, no matter how often I promised her that I would be all right. She didn't believe we would get through it a second time. Then in the last few days, she just stopped talking about it. The war, her fear, the nightmares I knew she still had because I could always feel her tighten in my arms. She made herself look happy and I remember thinking that I didn't want her to be brave or self-sacrificing, just honest. And more than anything, I wanted her to have a little faith, because that's one thing, maybe the only thing, that gets you through a war."

Edward took one look into Jasper's eyes and knew that Jasper no longer preached or believed in what he was talking about. Knew without hearing it that, somewhere along the way, Jasper had left his faith strewn behind him on the road like useless belongings from another life too wonderful and short to keep remembering. Edward had once come close to that terrifying place and nothing relieved him more than the thought that it was far away from him now. He still had faith but Jasper had nothing. The only person he needed to be there would never be. And the life he had a part in creating had gone before the world could even touch it, before he could feel its fingers curl around his. Edward felt that, more strongly than he could have ever imagined, and he sat unmoving and bound by ropes of thick emotion. He breathed heavily under the weight of empathy and heartache, and against the slightest prick of fear. At the same time, he searched foolishly for a reason why he felt so much for a man he knew so little about.

Without warning, Jasper stood up forcefully, his chair wobbling precariously on its back legs. "I should go. I need to- I have to go."

"Jasper, I–" Edward stopped pitifully short of an excuse to make him stay and watched as Jasper elbowed his way through the crowd with blind determination until he was out of sight.

"I'm sorry."

With the noise in the café his voice didn't carry farther than his clenched hands on the tabletop, and he wasn't sure if he had meant to be apologetic or sympathetic. All he knew was that he needed to find Jasper, to say something better than sorry, something that would make him feel even half as vulnerable as Jasper must have felt during their conversation. Only then would his words be just good enough.

---

He narrowed his eyes slightly when he stepped into the lobby, trying to picture Jasper walking past the sagging couch with its dusty green floral print or sitting on its edge and reading the Wall Street Journal with his elbows on his knees. With the exception of a small, round clock and an amateur still-life of chrysanthemums, the walls were bare and painted, Edward guessed some time ago, in an overly ripe shade of peach. The hotel had neither warmth nor character and he wondered if that was what Jasper had wanted or what he hated- what drove him to seek out a place filled with strangers he could meet and then forget just as easily.

He stepped up to the front desk where a woman, perhaps in her 40s, stood with a smile that was either genuine or perfected. He thought maybe a bit of both, as he traced it to the corners of her eyes.

"Good morning, Noreen. I was wondering if there's a guest here by the name of Jasper Hale. Could you be so kind as to check for me?" He had learned when he was five years old that he could get favors just by crooking his smile and sweetening his words. He was loath to use it on unsuspecting strangers, but what compelled him in that moment was the fresh memory of Jasper's lips quietly giving away the secrets that his eyes could only hide from a safe distance. Secrets, Edward imagined, that had once made Jasper grip something solid and cry without tears or control, through dry, heaving breaths that left him dizzy from too much oxygen. Edward imagined it because he could remember doing exactly that.

"Yes, there's a Jasper Hale staying here."

Her immediate reply caught Edward off-guard, as did the way her eyes lingered suspiciously on his face and the way her smile slipped just a quarter of an inch. He entertained the silly thought that she was acting like a protective mother.

"Could you tell me what room he's occupying, please? He accidentally left something with me." For the second time that day, he lied when he could've just as easily told the truth. He shifted anxiously from one foot to the other even as he remembered to keep his smile relaxed.

"Let me check." Again her gaze swept over him and Edward detected a baffling combination of wariness and curiosity. "Room 215, up those stairs and turn left."

"Thank you."

Only one thought remained as he went, two steps at a time, to a room he probably had no right to visit: he had no idea what to say when he got there.