Chapter 6: Breaking the Silence

"Alice, I don't know if I can get through it," he warned softly. "I don't want to lose it on you again…"

She pressed herself in closer, kissing the edges of his lips. "I'm right here. I won't let you get lost," she whispered in promise.

Still, he hesitated – wondering where to begin, where to end, what to say. She had suspected for a long time, he knew, that there was something in his past he'd never shared. Even Maria – he nearly started growling again at the name – even Maria hadn't known about Celia.

She sighed, laying kisses around his face at random. "Does this have to do with that package that you think I don't know about?" she murmured. "The doll's cape? I see you, you know, sometimes, when I'm not there, taking out of the chest. I can see you running your fingers through it, and I can see that it hurts you."

How had he ever thought he could hide something like this from her?

"Who was it for?" she asked softly, tracing her fingers through his hair.

Sighing, Jasper decided to just do it. "My sister. It was a present for her fourth birthday. I'd left home by then, I'd already joined the army. The laundress for the cavalry had stitched it for me, with material I'd found at a destroyed home. It was velvet, emerald-green velvet and I knew Celia would love it. She'd been asking for a cape for her doll before I'd gone."

"What happened?" Alice asked carefully.

"I went back home for her birthday," he replied, voice shaking. "My mother… my mother was always a little self-involved, I knew she wouldn't remember Celia's birthday – and our father had left before Celia had even been born. But when I got there… the entire property was burnt to the ground. I think a group of Union soldiers must've done it – I'd seen it before, in other towns. It looked like it had been a while since it had happened –"

He stopped as the pain started coming back, closing eyes and moaning slightly. Immediately, Alice flew into action, her gentle kisses pressing against his eyelids and his lips. "Stay with me, Jasper," she whispered.

"In a lot of ways, Celia was more like my child than just my sister," he said hoarsely. "So it was like… it was like losing my daughter and losing my sister. And they'd killed her in such a horrible way… and I hadn't been there to protect her… and I broke my promise…" He cringed at the morbidly-delighted snarls of pain inside, pushing its way out of its confinement and beginning to run its course once more.

"Shhh, Jazz, stay with me," Alice soothed, rubbing his shoulders. Her lithe hands made gentle, firm circles across his tense muscles. "You had no way of knowing…"

"You know how everything I feel seems so much more powerful than it does to somebody else… especially the negative emotions," he continued softly, closing his lips around hers, pulling her firm body against his in a desperate attempt to calm himself. "The pain and the grief and the anger… it wouldn't have been easy for any normal person, but me… it was like I was drowning in it. It was all I could feel… I was going to jump off a cliff into the river, just to have it all stop."

"Why didn't you?" Alice asked carefully, nuzzling her nose against his cheekbones.

"My unit leader talked me down. Promised me revenge…"

Alice's eyes went sad with understanding, never stopping her relentless kisses.

"I went a little crazy," he whispered in shame. "When I moved higher up in rank, my new superiors thought it was just devotion to the cause. The others, who'd been with me then, they knew better. They knew it was vengeful obsession. I wanted every Union soldier I ran across dead. I had no clue who was truly responsible, so they all were."

"Shh…" she whispered again.

"I could never bring myself to get rid of her present," he admitted. "There was one man in a Louisiana infantry unit we were traveling with – he had a daughter not much older than Celia. He offered to buy it off me, let his little girl make use of it. I nearly killed him. I feel bad about it now, Lieutenant Compton was a good guy – too nice for army life, really. I've always hoped he made it through the war…"

Alice settled herself down comfortably against him, fingers still lightly combing through his hair. As she fell into a vision, she was acutely aware of him kissing her with the sort of aching desire she rarely felt from him outside of their reunions after an extended separation. Now, she thought, she might have the slightest bit of understanding about why he hated to leave her.

The vision confused her, and she wondered whether it was truly a vision or just something her mind was making up.

In it, she was sitting on a damp red rock in what looked like somewhere in the South. The sun was shining brightly outside the cavern she sat in, and she was watching her beloved a little distance away in the dark, as he crouched down to look at the indistinct little porcelain doll in front of him. The girl – she couldn't be any more than four years old – seemed especially miniscule in contrast to Jasper's muscular, leonine frame.

"What about your parents?" she asked quietly. "What happened to them?"

Jasper sighed, and was silent for a moment. Then he spoke again. "Their marriage wasn't a particularly happy one. My grandfather Sumner – my mother's father – had literally held my father at gunpoint during the wedding to ensure he went through with it. My mother was already pregnant with me when they married, and there was quite a considerable age gap between my father and my mother, so of course people made assumptions. It was the scandal of the century, apparently – my father was going on 41, I believe, when I was born; my mother was only about 14 and a half."

Alice absorbed those numbers with a certain degree of shock. It was no wonder that there could've been such a large age difference between him and his sister.

"My father never appreciated being forced into that marriage," Jasper continued distantly. "Most of his anger got directed at my mother, but sometimes I would get caught in the crossfire… He had a horrible temper – something I inherited, unfortunately, as I've realized over the years."

"You do not have a horrible temper," Alice corrected sternly. "You have no more a temper than anybody else. It just seems worse to you because of your gift. And you have never lashed out at any of us."

"At Edward, when he saved Bella from the accident…"

"That doesn't count. You were perfectly in control of yourself."

Jasper just sighed and gave up the argument. "He left one day when I was 13," he said, returning to the original topic. "Just packed his bags and left. I don't know where he went, I'm not even sure why he left. But he did, and that left me to take care of everything. We had no family on my father's side, and my mother's family was a state away…"

"What about your mother?" Alice asked softly. "Why wouldn't she have…"

Now Jasper seemed pensive. "My mother… I don't think that it was necessarily that she was a bad mother. I think, maybe, she was just much too young. She never really had a chance to mature, to realize that she was supposed to be the adult and that there were more important things to worry about than her appearance and her social status – the things she'd been concerned with when she'd first gotten pregnant. If she'd been about ten years older, maybe she would've turned out differently. I'm not sure." He paused, his eyes seeming to watch the memories flying through his mind. "When my father was there, I'm sure that she seemed more like a second child to him than a wife. He kept her reasonably spoiled, though. She didn't have any real responsibilities – in theory, I'm sure she was supposed to be looking after me, but one of the household hands ended up taking over the important parts of that job. My mother just… wasn't very good at it. She was better at dressing me up, taking me with her to social events to show off, like a particularly adorable accessory. And once my father had left, she just… lost interest in everything, I suppose. Her public appearance had gone belly-up when my father left. People were spreading all sorts of nasty rumours – and her apathy towards Celia and I didn't help her any. The midwife who delivered Celia, she was the mother of one of the biggest gossips in Houston, and by the end of the week, the entire circle of VIPs in the city knew that Margaret Whitlock hadn't even looked at her daughter, let alone held her."

Now Alice knew she was just imagining things – she could see Jasper, dressed in the simple trousers and shirt common in the 1800s, though his face was human in its classic beauty and he appeared younger. His blonde curls were a little more unruly, his face a little rounder, his eyes still the same startlingly perfect shade of caramel – maybe just because she could never imagine him with any other sort of eyes. He was cradling a tiny bundle of white blankets in his arms, uncertainty in his eyes as he walked back and forth in a parlor of some kind, his gaze focused on the little baby he held.

"I remember thinking how small she was, and how… fragile," he murmured. "Maybe just because I was so much bigger than she was. She always seemed so breakable to me."

"What did she look like?" Alice asked softly, stroking his cheek.

Jasper sighed. "The women in the area used to call her the prettiest child in the city. She looked a lot like me, I suppose – we both took after Mother. Except for the eyes. The eyes were our father's."

The vision of the cavern returned, clearer now. The little girl Jasper watched with such gentle adoration was small, delicate. She had long blonde hair, tangled and coated in dust, and the eyes that sparkled back at him were bright caramel. She had a dazzling smile that put angels to shame, and her little hands were holding onto the sleeves of Jasper's shirt as she turned her attention to Alice.

It was surprising how, even in a vision – even in a vision that wasn't even real – Alice wanted so much to wrap that little girl up in her arms and take her home. Take her home, clean her up, give her something new to wear besides that dirty, dusty, ragged dress (which had to date back centuries), and protect her from every small evil.

Jasper's faint voice was still talking when she came back to Earth. "… and – what is it, Alice?" he asked worriedly. "What are you seeing?"

"Nothing," she sighed, slight disappointment in her voice as she settled in against his chest. "Just errant flashes."

How could losing somebody she didn't even know – somebody who'd died long before even her parents were born – hurt so badly?

*~*~*

Alice had fallen back into her sleep-like trance hours earlier, her head nestled tightly between his neck and the pillow as her breath tickled gently against his skin.

Jasper sighed as he brushed his fingers lightly across her cheek, relishing every second he got to have her snuggled in with him. Could he ever have imagined being this happy again in the entirety of his miserable existence? Could his mind ever have fathomed the depths of this love? Could his heart have ever survived not knowing her?

Alice moaned softly, and he felt the frown form on her face. "What is it, Alice?" he asked.

"Nothing," she repeated, eyes opening as she slid out of his embrace. "Chelsea and Afton are coming." Sitting up, she looked over at him. "Thank you."

"For what?" he asked.

Sighing, she crossed the room and took hold of his hands. "For telling me. For not throwing yourself off that cliff in 1861. For finding me. For staying with me. Shall I go on?"

"I should be the one thanking you," he replied with a brief smile. "You were the one who did all the finding and the staying. I just walked into a diner to get out of the rain." Ducking down, he closed his lips onto hers. "You are by far the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me, and nothing is going to change how unworthy I am of your love."

"Don't be silly," she murmured. "I can't think of any better recipient of my love and absolute devotion."