Chapter 2
Disclaimer: I am pleased to say that I did not write Twilight.
A/N: It's a long time since I posted any of this, and I don't think it has much of a following, so it's not very high on my priorities, but if anyone really wants to see more chapters, just let me know and I'll try to get something together. And obviously I would really, really like reviews. If I know that people like it, I'll be more likely to update. Anyhow, I had this chapter down on paper so I thought I'd type it up and post it. I made the vampires' powers slightly less in the last scene, just to give Carlisle something to lecture Jasper on. Because, quite frankly, with the level of speed they have in cannon it's just boring.
As Jasper ran, he tried to put Carlisle Cullen out of his mind. He needed to hunt, and that was hard enough these days without any extra confusion preying on his mind. He skidded to a halt in a dingy alleyway and crouched in a doorway to await the coming of darkness.
He sat there, motionless, his head on his knees. He could not sleep, but no mind can bear to remain unceasingly conscious, and by and by he slipped into a kind of trance, the instinctual part of his mind keeping track of his surroundings while his thoughts drifted. The sun came out and swung through a long arc in the sky until its rays were falling within a few feet of his hiding-place. The light was red now, bloody. He roused himself and stretched out a hand into it, so that ruby glints shattered off his skin. He stared at his glittering arm, at what it meant about its nature, letting the monster seep through him and take hold. It was easier to hunt this way.
His sharp ears caught footsteps, and the laughter of two girls. Dinner. He closed his eyes and followed their progress. He heard one of the girls split of and head south, away from him, but the other was still approaching. He let his head tilt back against the wall, nostrils flaring to catch her scent in the air.
The girl entered his alley. He could ere the echo of her footsteps bouncing from wall to wall. He kept his eyes closed, but he knew she had seen him when he felt a wave of astonishment roll off her. It was quickly followed by admiration. Shyness. Anxiety about being alone with a grown man, and a little concern for him, sitting pale and tired against the wall.
He opened his eyes and turned to look at her. She was a young woman, about eighteen, with long dark hair rolled and braided and a basket on her arm. He caught the first flickers of trepidation off her as some buried instinct warned her of danger. Smiling slightly, he stood with one fluid push of his legs. He needed no sixth sense to hear her gasp in wonder at his beauty.
'Good evening, sir,' she said as he stepped slowly into her path. Jasper did not reply.
'Can I help you, sir? I – OH!'
He had caught her by the arm and spun her into the doorway where he had been hiding.
'Tough me again and I'll scr-' she began, but then the fading sunlight fell on him and the words died on her lips. She simply gazed in awe. Jasper felt a mix of horror and derision; could she still find him beautiful, after this? I am not beautiful, he thought. I am a monster.
Slowly he crouched, fingertips splayed on the ground for balance, his smile widening into a feral snarl. A growl slid between his teeth. And then the girl really did scream, not a scream for help but a primordial shriek of pure terror. She launched herself past him and sprinted down the street. Jasper spun round and leapt into the air, landing in her path and pivoting to face her, and for a moment her bolting instinct hit him so strongly that it nearly made him turn and run. Then he had her by the throat and was flinging her into the wall. Her head flew backwards and struck it with a sharp crack.
'No!' she was sobbing as he closed in on her. 'Please! Ma, I've got to get home to Ma! Help, help, please...'
He felt her fear, a wild, blind panic. Confusion – he was an angel, he wasn't supposed to murder and kill – and then something that twisted his stomach and nearly knocked him to his knees. Disgust. To her he was a demon, a creature of the devil. Revulsion swept through him/ He couldn't feed, he couldn't bear it, but the biting instinct was too strong. It felt like he would tear in half. He lunged for his victim's throat, thrusting his forearm into the way just in time. His teeth scythed into his own stony flesh, and the girl cried out in horror. Jasper let out a roar of pain as his venom stung at him. Another punch of emotion from the girl, another stab of pain, and suddenly they were both screaming. In a second his nails were going to break her skin, and then there would be no escaping the blood-lust of the depression that would follow.
And then a cold, hard hand came down on his shoulder, and a voice said:
'Jasper.'
He caught the faintest whiff of leather and pears again, cutting through the reek of blood and sweat and fear, almost like the varnish carpenters used in their workshops.
'Carlisle,' he rasped.
'Come, Jasper. Come with me. Leave her.' Carlisle's voice was calm and measured as he turned to the girl, who was staring at him wide-eyed, her breath coming in wrenching sobs.
'It's alright,' he told her gently. 'Go home to your Ma.' He reached out a hand towards her, but she flinched away. Carlisle lowed his hand, his eyes cast down, and began to steer Jasper away. As soon as they were out of sight Jasper began to run.
He wasn't trying to escape Carlisle, and didn't particularly object when he fell into pace beside him, though he did wonder why the blond vampire didn't just leave. He was trying to get away from the place where the hideous scene had occurred. Nothing seemed to matter but putting as much space as possible between himself and that alley.
He sprinted as hard as he could, trying to work up a bit of burn in his legs, to take his mind off things. But his perfect muscles never protested. His bitten arm stung, but in the wrong way. They left the last of the houses behind, pounding uphill towards a patch of woodland. Finally he stopped in a clearing. Twilight gathered beneath the trees, but it did nothing to dull his sight.
He dropped onto a fallen log, cradling his arm. Carlisle sat down beside him, reached for his wrist and said:
'Let me see.'
Jasper ignored him, but Carlisle tugged more insistently, and eventually Jasper let him draw out his arm and examine it.
'It's not too bad,' he pronounced eventually. 'Ragged, but it will heal.'
Jasper didn't bother to point out the obviousness of this statement.
'I'm sorry.' Carlisle smiled apologetically, as though he had guessed Jasper's thoughts. 'It's habit, you know.'
That remark was cryptic – it might even have been intended to provoke questions – but Jasper ignored it. He brought his arm up to his mouth and sucked, drawing out some of the venom.
'What happened?' Carlisle asked. 'When I met you, I presumed you were like all the rest of our kind, but with...that girl...'
He was hesitant, worried about offending Jasper, but there was something else there too. Was it...hope?'
It was only curiosity about this hope that prevented Jasper from tearing Carlisle apart for witnessing his weakness. Instead he began to speak.
'Perhaps in your time you have encountered a vampire who has skills above and beyond the ordinary?' he started. 'Someone who is, as the Volturi put it, gifted?'
'Yes...' Carlisle said evenly.
'I...' Jasper got up and paced slowly across the clearing, swallowing surruptitiously. '...I am gifted. I can sense people's emotions, and manipulate them as I choose. Excite a lethargic crowd, clam an adversary...'
'So?' Carlisle prompted. 'You are gifted, and...?'
Another spike of that hope. Jasper had thought himself to be in control, but now he rounded on Carlisle, snarling.
'I sense every emotion!' he bellowed. Comprehension dawned on Carlisle's face. 'Every emotion! And they call it a gift!' He lashed out with a fist, punching into a tree, knocking a chunk out of its trunk. 'A gift? It's a curse! I feel their awe.' His voice was rough with unsheddable tears. 'When they see my beauty. 'They're ready to worship me.' The wild rage rose in him again and he lunged forwards, punching and kicking at the tree, trying to find something that did not yield like matchwood beneath his stony fists. 'And then fear, horror, pain, DISGUST!' His words were lost in a senseless roar as he slammed his forehead and open palms into a granite outcropping. That was better. It only suffered a little at the impact, and left rough white lines on his skin, the way his nails had done when he was human.
'I feel every second along with my prey,' he choked. There was a grinding ad squeaking as his nails gouged into the rock. 'It's weakness. If I can't feed, I might as well curl up and die. But I can't even do that.'
For a long time there was silence in the clearing. Jasper stood, his arm against the boulder and his head in his hand. Carlisle had not moved from his spot on the log since Jasper's tirade began.
'It might be weakness, it might not,' he said at last. 'I have no gift, and I have never tasted human blood.'
Jasper whipped round faster than the eye could follow.
'You have never tasted human blood?' he echoed incredulously. 'You mean...you don't hunt?' His eyes raked Carlisle up and down. The other vampire was not wasted or weak, he looked to be in the positive bloom of health. But how could that be?
'Oh, I hunt alright.' Carlisle grinned briefly. 'But not human beings. Animals,' he added, seeing Jasper's mystified look. 'I have seen you wondering about my eyes. They are a result of my unorthodox diet.'
'Tell me about it,' Jasper ordered, moving imperceptibly closer.
'There's little more to tell, really,' Carlisle shrugged, almost as though her were embarrassed. 'Those are the technicalities.'
'But why?' In all his time as a vampire, he'd never thought he'd come across something that his brain couldn't compute. But he couldn't seem to get his head around this one. 'It can't be easy.'
'And it wasn't,' Carlisle agreed. ;But for me, killing humans was never an option. When I changed, I was horrified by what I have become. I tried everything I could think of to put an end to myself, but as you know that's not easily done.'
Jasper ran a finger over the feathery tracery of battle scars on his forearm, now overlaid with his own toothmarks, which were already beginning to seal.
'I hid myself, far away from human habitation,' Carlisle was saying. 'My resistance was weakening, I was afraid of what I might do it a human crossed my path.
'I was weak by now, though still too strong, and wild with thirst. When a herd of deer passed my hiding-place, I attacked instinctively. I cannot describe the relief...' He closed his eyes and swallowed. 'The relief of quenching my thirst, and the relief of realising that I didn't have to be a monster. And so my new philosophy was born. Had I not eaten venison in my former life, after all?'
'Had you not indeed,' Jasper agreed with an almost hysterical laugh. He was still grappling with this new concept. His first instinct was to dismiss the other vampire as mad. No gift to get in the way, and he still wouldn't hunt? Where was the sense in that? But another part of him, the part that suffered most whenever he hunted, was feeling hope...
'I swam to France after that,' Carlisle was saying meditatively. 'I hunted during the day and attended university by night, studying – don't laugh – medicine.'
'You trained as a doctor?' Jasper spluttered.
'Yes, yes.' Carlisle was chuckling himself now. After a moment his face slowly became serious again. 'I find a great deal of comfort in saving human lives, you see,' he admitted. 'I like to think that, occasionally, people may be better off because of what I am.'
;So why did you come to the new world?' Jasper was trying to keep the conversation rolling, so that he could carry on digesting this new concept.
'I was looking for companionship. In Italy I met immortals much more civilised than those who had changed me – the Volturi – but they did not understand why I chose this way of life, nor did they know of any others who shared it. They persisted in trying to cure my aversion to my 'natural food source' as they put it. So U came to America. I had acquaintances, vampires I knew well, and whose company I enjoyed, but always out feeding habits stood as a stigma between us. I thought them cruel, they thought me insane. I was very lonely.'
'And couldn't you have created a companion?'
'I have considered it, many times, but it felt wrong to force this life upon another when I regret my own transformation so much. I remember when I was working in Chicago during the influenza epidemic of 1918, nursing a family: a husband and wife, and one son. The mother demanded that I save her child, almost as though she knew what I was, but I was undecided and he slipped away while I debated. There was a young woman in a town where I worked, named Rosalie Hale. She was...a great beauty. Raped and murdered by her fiancé and his gang. I worked over her for hours when I found her dying in the street. It seemed like too much waste to just let her die. But what did I have to offer her? I would have loved her like a daughter, but she already had a father. She died. It was a bitter loss for all who knew her.
'And then there was a woman who had fallen from a cliff. Of all those I had considered changing, I was most sorely tempted by her. But it looked like suicide to me. She had lost a baby in the same hospital they brought her to after she jumped. I could not condemn her to an eternity of that pain. So I let her go.' Carlisle's voice dropped to a whisper. Jasper regarded him in silence. He understood the sadness now, and the hope.
'You think I'm mad, don't you?' Carlisle asked matter-of-factly.
'Yes. I almost despise you, but it's hypocritical of me. Incapable as I am of hunting.'
'Yes.' Carlisle's face was deliberately impassive, but Jasper could feel his hurt and disappointment. Then he said abruptly:
'Do you remember what they always used to teach us when we were human?'
'They taught us a lot of things. The memories are vague –'
'Do no murder. Love thy neighbour as thyself. In some shape or form, those teachings were always there.'
'As soon as I came of age...' Jasper sat down next to Carlisle and rested his elbows on his knees, clasping his hands... 'I joined the army. I suppose I never valued human life much...the woman who changed me put me in charge of her army of newborns, and then I had to kill those, change them and kill them...nothing but blood and death.'
'Blood and death,' Carlisle agreed.
'My coven was broken.' Jasper could feel something swelling inside him, clawing to get out. 'I split from my – my mate after we lost our territory in Monterrey, and travelled with acquaintances for a while, but I drew apart from them as well, estranged by my depression. All my immortal life I've lived...in a climate of hate...I've felt suffocated...oh God, I've been so lonely...'
'I too,' Carlisle murmured, and finally Jasper broke down and wept. Carlisle wrapped an arm tentatively around his shoulder, and he was suddenly overwhelmed by a desperate need to be comforted. He turned his face into Carlisle's chest while tearless sobs wracked him, breathing in the steadying scent. It was nowhere near as satisfying as human crying, but it was a relief nonetheless. A part of him wondered if he was actually suicidal, putting himself at the mercy of a complete stranger, but no sooner had the thought occurred to him than he was disgusted with himself. He didn't understand how or why, but Carlisle was not like that.
After a couple of minutes he pulled himself together and drew away. It was silent in the glade, except for his raged breathing, but suddenly Carlisle turned his head. Jasper heard it too: sounds of passage through the brush.
'I was going hunting when I found you,' Carlisle said. 'If you would like to accompany me, I'll show you how it's done.'
'I am thirsty,' Jasper said, by way of assent. 'What do we hunt?'
'I prefer the blood of carnivores when I can get it, but I think we'll have to make do with deer tonight.'
'Deer?' Jasper wrinkled his nose in distaste.
'It isn't the most appetising drink in the world, but it's wet and haemoglobin-filled, so why complain?'
'What's haemoglobin?' Jasper asked, following Carlisle as he jumped up and began to stride off into the trees.
'An iron compound which helps blood cells to bond strongly with oxygen.'
'Oh.'
'Keep downwind,' Carlisle said more quietly, waving a hand to steer him to the side. 'They smell better than humans and we don't want to scatter them.'
'Sorry,' Jasper said again, feeling suddenly clumsy, foolish and consequently irritated. 'But can't we catch up to one?'
'They're faster than humans too, and our instincts aren't tuned to hunt them. The way a herd scatters and bolts can be confusing, so it's best to jump them as smoothly as possible...'
His voice fell away and he slid into a fighting crouch. Jasper followed suit, staying a length behind as they crept through the undergrowth towards a thick growth of bushes, beyond which he could clearly smell and hear the deer. Carlisle paused for the length of a heartbeat, gauging angles, then sprang.
Since the start, Carlisle had unsettled Jasper. His urbane manner, his civility, odd habits such as tipping the waiter, had all struck him as verging on unnatural. Add that to all his talk of compassion and kindness, of complete abstinence from human blood, and he seemed quite mad, hardly a proper vampire at all. But watching him leap on the deer, Jasper could see that whatever strange ideas he might have, Carlisle was one of his own kind. Difficult to relate to, but not impossible. He struck the deer full-on, all the perfection of vampire reflexes on display, his eyes full of proper bloodlust as he sank his fangs into his victim's throat.
Jasper shifted his attention from watching, remembering that he had to make a kill himself. A deer was bolting right at him, and he crouched to intercept it. The animal struck him head-on, tumbling them both head-over-heels. It hurt not at all, but the speed and power of it took him by surprise. The kicking legs were so much stronger than a human's, without even trying, and it struggled without human inhibitions. This was a wild creature, not softened by a lifetime of relative safety, and it cared not at all that he bore the appearance of a human. It continued to struggle wildly until he snapped its neck and bent forward to feed.
The blood was weak-flavoured, unappetising stuff; it compared to human blood the way fine beef consommé might to an infusion of grass and leaves that a child might boil on the stove. But Jasper hardly minded that. He was too busy not minding the emotions of his prey.
He had felt a little vague fear off the bolting herd, but it was nothing compared to the acute, aware emotions of humans he had hunted. To be able to feed, to taste blood without the constant barrage of hate and horror! He drained his kill dry – there was more blood in it than in a human – and then pushed it away and sat back on his heels. He drew a hand across his mouth and breathed in deeply, eyes half-closed.
Carlisle was done. He turned to look at Jasper, his eyes, flooded with blood, glowing a buttery gold in the half-light of the forest. Jasper flinched a little away from the bright, pale stare, and clambered to his feet.
'So how do you like red deer, then?' Carlisle said at last, trying to sound jovial and coming across awkward.
Jasper swallowed again and grimaced. 'Not up to much, is it? Ugh.
'I'll tell you this, though, it was more fun than hunting a human. I had to work a little bit. And the...the other thing...wasn't nearly so bad.' He stood there for a moment or two, rubbing a hand up and down the back of his head, considering. 'I'll tell you this, though, I couldn't keep it up on my own.'
'Well.' Carlisle said. '...I'd be happy to hold you to it.'
Jasper supposed that they had been working up to that. He considered heading back to the outskirts of town where he hid, hunting humans, enduring the emotion for the fleeting, greedy pleasure of feeding. He imagined stalking these woods on his own, trying to hold himself to the diet of dear – like beating his head against a brick wall, back when that would still have hurt. Neither of those options was very attractive.
He eyed Carlisle. The other vampire was an odd customer, no denying it, but he didn't seem dangerous – travelling with him would probably be as safe, if not safer, than staying alone. He didn't seem a bad sort. He might even turn out to be quite agreeable. And, Jasper was beginning to decide, he was sick of being on his own. It was time for another stint of companionship, and travelling with Carlisle, living mainly on animals, with maybe a human here and there, sounded as good a course of action as any. Looking at the open, intelligent face, he thought they might well have something to talk about.
'Carlisle Cullen,' he said, 'if it's all the same to you, I think we'll stay together for the time being. You can help get me started on this...what d'you call the habit?'
Carlisle gave the shadow of a grin.
'Vegetarianism.'
A/N: I'm not entirely sure what happened to my dialogue at the end there. Possibly I've been reading too much Watership Down. Seriously, guys, every time I pick up that book I feel misery at the thought of all the people in the world who aren't experiencing it. Go. Read. That. Book. It's by Richard Addams, I think. Strong candidate for the best novel ever written.
True
PS. I'm trying to remember who suggested this title. Thanks, whoever you were!
Forksintheroad: Of course you may! Oops, I forgot there was a chorus...*looks sheepish*
Anonymous: Thanks a lot.
YourDarkMistress...: Well, now you know...up to a point. Haha, I'm so evil.
