Previously:

My head snapped up in realization.

He hadn't even tried to hide it.

I was missing pages.

Jasper

I threw the duffel bag at her feet and promptly started to walk away. Perhaps my ignorance wasn't the behavior she expected after my absence, because she didn't seem to like it.

She picked up the bag and advanced close behind me. I turned around to face her, making sure she was perfectly aware that we were in the middle of camp.

"I need to practice," she gritted out.

It was past her usual time for dinner. Hadn't Peter taken her out?

"Tomorrow."

She stood her ground. "I need to practice."

"Tomorrow."

But her weapon was deadly. Her shield came tumbling down, and her feelings crashed into me. The hostility was unprecedented, and it took me by surprise. I would have expected her to calm down after a few days and develop light hints of anxiety due to the bond. But there was none of that.

Minimal anxiety.

Absence of calm.

Betrayal.

Rage.

I motioned for her to take the lead. She, apparently, didn't play games.

We were a few miles from the city when she turned around and continued her battle.

"Do you expect me to trust you?"

I had missed her voice, no matter how venomous. My fingers found her chin. "Hello to you too, sweetheart."

She turned her head sharply to avoid my touch. "Answer my question."

"I have never expected that of you. Actually, I've advised highly against it."

She stared at me with judgement and disbelief. If she hadn't pulled her shield up, I'd probably be on my knees with the amount of distaste thrown at me. "I'm missing pages."

The journal. It all came together, and her reaction made sense. I put a smile on my face. "So, you've gone through all of it. What did you think?"

"All of it? Where are the missing pages?"

"They contain information that you aren't ready for."

She crossed her arms. "You don't get to decide that."

"I guess I do," I grabbed a section of her hair and twirled it around my fingers. "I'm the one that took your memory away."

"You think you have the right to withhold information from me?"

"Just the last few pages."

She grasped my fingers to stop me. "That would be… right before you killed me. What happened?"

I wasn't ready for this. But when would I ever be? I veered the conversation to a more important topic. "Did you look into your bag? It may be important."

She dropped the duffel bag in front of us and eyed me warily before zipping it open.

"There were no bodies in the house," I said, addressing her request for the search of her parents. "But the place was torn apart."

Elise wasn't human anymore, but I saw her throat swallow in anticipation… fear? It was odd to see such humanizing behavior. The mention of her parents took her back to a different time. She repeated what she heard, almost to herself. "No bodies."

"Take that how you will."

Her hands reached in to pull out items. A jewelry box. Pens. Albums. A stuffed animal.

She was on her knees, crouched over various trinkets. "These are mine."

"Yes."

She looked up at me. "You did go."

"I knew you wouldn't trust my word. Here is evidence."

Her brows furrowed at my words, and her expression went between confusion and gratitude. "You know I don't trust you, but you still manage to take steps back. Why?"

She stood from her prized possessions, and she expected an answer.

"I tore out those pages long ago."

"Why?"

I ran a hand through my hair. "Because I thought you weren't ready."

"For what? What more could there possibly be?"
She must have sensed my indecision. Her anger rarely worked, so she tried another angle. She same closer until her scent was all that I breathed. "It won't kill you to tell me the truth. Just once."

My silence invited her in. Her hands ran down my arms, then came up to rest on my chest. Indecisively, she crawled them up to my neck, then back down.

I stood, unsure. "What are you doing?"

"I don't know. It's always weird when I touch you. I thought maybe it would be better than lowering my shield."

I grabbed her waist and held her in place. "Better for what?"

"To get you to speak. The shield thing—" She averted my eyes. "That only made you leave."

It was my turn to stare at the trees. "I'm used to you being a blank wall. What you did caught me off guard." I pushed a lock of her hair back behind her ear. "And it pissed me off a little that you would even practice leaving yourself defenseless."

"I don't think I was the defenseless one."

I stared into her eyes, searching for something I didn't want. "It's hard to take that much hate from you."

I didn't deserve the way her eyes softened. "It's hard when you leave."

Her tone and her words stung, but not in a bad way. It was electrifying to hear the need she probably didn't want to express.

"Tell me the truth," she whispered after a while. "Please."

"I can give you some truth. Remember when you were running West from New York? And you ran into me?"

She frowned slightly. "Sure, remind me of more dishonesty."

"I didn't want to bring you to Texas. Peter taunted me endlessly about coming to get you."

"I remember," she said. "He threatened to take me to… Virginia?"

"Peter wouldn't put you into danger. I came to see you. That's all I wanted."

She looked up at me. "Then why did you do this?"

"You alluded that Damon wanted to bring you to the Volturi. I couldn't have you running around aimlessly knowing that the kings were hunting you down. You're safer here."

She hesitated when she pulled away, an unconvinced look in her eye.

"You need to trust me when I say that this is the only way I can keep you safe."

"What am I missing in those pages?"

"A conversation for another day."

"Jasper," she insisted.

"Ask me anything but this. Not now," I breathed. "Please."

She searched my eyes carefully. "I don't understand."

"You don't have to."

She thought for a while. "Maybe there's something you could do, then. I want to join Kate's group."

Absolutely not. "You're not ready."

Her smile was challenging. "I can show you how ready I am. You ready to lose another arm?"

My smile was non-existent. "You want to be ripped apart alongside Kate's recruits?"

"I want to train for the worst-case. Sparring is ridiculous. We're going into war."

She was completely right, but I couldn't have her torn apart. "No."

"Missing pages, or transfer me to Kate. Come on, Whitlock. I don't have all night."

She constantly backed me into corners. Her strength was undeniable, and I wanted to bend to her will. So, I questioned her instead. "What did you think of what you've read?"

She frowned, but remained personable. "It was like reading a book. I understood the character, and I could reason through her feelings. But she wasn't me."

No, she wasn't. "I cared for human you."

"And you don't care for vampire me."

I chuckled, admiring her face and our proximity. "Obviously."

Her smile made the dark night just a little brighter. "We were on a journey. Romantically. It ended pretty abruptly for you."

"Well. Decisions led to actions, which led to consequences. Nothing is ever unpunished." I examined her eyes carefully, then determined my next action. "I'll talk to Kate."

Her eyes brightened, then focused in on the duffel bag. She knelt down beside it. Her hands ran over her items from a previous life, and the more she lingered, the more distant her expression became. "Did I talk a lot about my family? I didn't write a lot about them."

"We didn't talk much about them," I told her. "I was unresponsive when you brought them up. You didn't like that."

She thought for a moment. "You don't like to waste time talking about closed books."

"Not at all. You told me they were dead; I didn't see why we needed to dwell any further."

Her hands played with the zipper. "They're probably dead."

"Probably. Or Damon took them and kept them alive, which would be unfortunate."

She sighed, brimming with solemnity. "My dad had a heart condition."

I sat next to her. "And your mom?"

"Just arthritis. Not the worst."

Her brain was probably firing thoughts at a mile a minute. "What are you thinking?"

She only had to say one word. "Damon."

Given the details, her father would have needed continuous medication for his heart. Damon, a man of presumed medical intelligence, could have anticipated that. But in either case, given just the medical history of Elise's parents, her mother would have the most chance of surviving.

"Tell me more about them," I offered.

"They seem like a distant memory," she shook her head. "But I wrote about them… little details that really shouldn't matter—but I wrote about them."

She had, and I had told her to.

"I remember my dad having this very specific meal plan for the days of the week. We had to have baked potatoes on Fridays, no matter the main meal. Tuesdays were soup days. We never had breakfast on Sundays—only brunch and brunch foods. Mom had done her best to cater to these requests. It was actually pretty enjoyable."

I gave her my patience as she continued. "They weren't always nice to each other. My dad wasn't an easy person. He was obsessively meticulous with everything. Time, money, garage organization. It drove me insane. But they were kind to the world. They had perspectives that made sense to me as a teenager, and we had a solid, yet distant relationship."

"Solid, yet distant?"

"I think people expect an only child to be closer to their parents because they're really all they have when they grow up. But eventually, it becomes suffocating. And we do a lot to get away from them, which creates a wedge between us. It never meant that I didn't love them—it was just strictly parent-child. I wasn't best friends with my parents."

I nodded when she looked at me.

"I don't know," she rambled. "You'd probably think they were a little dull."

"Not for the reasons you might think. I find humans in general to be… bland. You should've seen Edward's human"

"The one you killed."

I nudged her knee with mine. "I was just helping him move on to bigger and better things."

"You were human once. That doesn't bring any sympathy or understanding? I'm sure you were very uninteresting as a human."

"Probably," I agreed. "It's circumstantial. If you're poor, and you win the lottery—you end up moving into a new stage of your life. Your interests and activities change. Perhaps the people you associate with are different. You look back at your previous life and see it as a distant haze. You start disassociating from that person you were. You might even mentally depersonalize the poor and reject you were ever that person."

"So, you reject that you were once human?"

"I don't openly reject it, obviously. It's amazing how the brain processes change. It can ignore the details that matter, and even replace them with false memories that'll simply make your brain happier. In your case, you've lost a lot of those details."

The air around us shifted with the wind. And so did the mood.

"Trauma is a form of change," she said. "I just wish I forgot about Damon, as well. Why did I only lose you?"

It was a great question. "I talked to Carlisle a lot about this. You had compared me to Damon, but I'd like to think our relationship was different. You cared about me, and given everything I put you through, I don't think you ever expected that I would actually kill you. You had a sense of immunity because of your gift. And you were right—it would have been a waste to kill you off completely."

Her voice was distant. "You still see me as a weapon."

"A weapon is an object that loses monetary and functional value over time with physical depletion and technological advances. None of that applies to you."

"Tell me you didn't change me just to use me."

I drew closer to her because her anger was beginning to bubble, and I didn't need to feel her to see it. "This might be hard to understand, but I killed you to protect you. You would not survive my world as a human."

"I want to know why you want to protect me."

She was searching for malicious answers where there were none. She wanted me to say that I wanted her in one piece so I could throw her into the battlefield. But I wanted the exact opposite.

I slowly grabbed her hand, fully aware of her statement denying any unapproved touch. The fact that she welcomed it made this easier. I pressed my lips to her knuckles. "Let me track Damon for your parents. I'll talk to Kate for your new arrangements."

I read the conflict in her eyes. "It's bad, isn't? Whatever you're hiding from me."

"No, Elise. It's just bad for me. Give me some more time."

A/N: I like this. A gentler conversation. We see Jasper trying, even a little. He clearly doesn't want to talk about the pages. Is he being sincere by helping her open up, or is he simply just trying to avoid the main topic at hand?