Mail was slow and sporadic during the war. When Jasper did receive it, there was often a stack of letters from his mother and his sister waiting. His mother hadn't gone very far in school but she was a better correspondent than he would have guessed. She sent him all the news from home in her labored block lettering and, at the end of every letter, she reassured him again that he would come back to her safe once the fighting days were done.
But that particular day, he only received one thin envelope. The handwriting on it was his father's slanting cursive and he immediately felt his stomach sink. He waited until he was alone to open it, finding a quiet shady spot under a tree.
The envelope held a single sheet of paper covered front and back with cramped writing - the man was so cheap he hated wasting paper - and he knew immediately that even if he did return home safe, his mother wouldn't be there to greet him.
Jas -
It is my sad duty to inform you that your mother went to her reward early this morning. She had taken ill with a lingering fever in March, as did many in these parts. It settled in her heart and afflicted her with breathlessness and palsy. We held out hope and prayed on her recovery, but the sickness lingered in her. After a fortnight, she was confined to her bed, from which she did not rise again. The doctor saw her twice, providing powders and tinctures to strengthen her, but the third time he came, he said there was naught to be done and went away. The fever has taken many in town of late and his capacity is stretched taut in caring for all of them.
Sure she has gone to a better rest than she would ever know in this world but her glory is a cold comfort to us. In the weakened state of her final days, your mother was plagued by strange lucid fever dreams. It was a terrible sight, her eyes bright and wild with this madness, and your sister was so disturbed by your mother's moods I feared for her health as well.
They both became insistent that I transcribe your mother's rantings in her precise words and send them to you and Sam. Your mother was not one for fancies such as these and I confess I do not hold they have any meaning. Yet as it was her dying wish, I have set them down here. Her words for you were:
"Tell Jasper it will be the smallest one, the one with night hair and sky eyes. She sees everything coming from a long way off. The little sky eyed girl so far away but not that far from here. Nothing's so far for him. He'll know her when he sees her. She lights him up. The little night girl."
I pray our Savior is with you in your time of need, and gives you peace. Clara and I think of you and Sam often. We hope to see you when these days are gone and peace rests on the earth once more. Until then, I remain, Your Devoted Father.
Jasper was holding the letter far from himself in shaking hands, as though he could distance himself from the news it contained. He folded it up and stuffed it in his jacket. He sat under the tree for a long time in stillness, remembering all the mornings he had woken up to the sound of her voice saying his name. Her arms around him the day he left home, how he had stood on the lowest step of their porch and hugged her so she would be taller than him again.
He touched his face and found it wet with tears. When he was called away to his duties, he stood and removed the letter from his pocket, letting a strong breeze carry it aloft and whisk it away.
There - gone like his only mother and no matter how he searched, he would never find it.
Seventeen days later, he met Maria and Nettie and Lucy.
No homecoming, no family, no end to the days of war. Nothing his mother hoped for him would come to pass, except perhaps what she had seen before her soul guttered out like a candle.
For when his burning ended and Maria came to him with her promises and her praise for his talents, he remembered his mother's words. Maria was small and dark, as his mother had said, and she was a natural-born general. They planned together, the lands they would reclaim, the covens they could destroy. His mother had said she would be a little night girl, and surely they were few darker than Maria in looks and deeds, and he had rarely seen one smaller. So he went to bed with Maria, not only for that reason, but with that action, it seemed to confirm that she was the one his mother had told him was coming. His mother had said he would know her when he saw her, and he had.
Hadn't he?
In the years to come, Jasper began to wonder. He remembered Josiane's words, long ago when he was very small. Remembering his human life got easier as the years went on, like remembering an old fable he had heard countless times around the fire. It felt sometimes like it hadn't quite happened to him but he knew it like the back of his hand. He recalled Josiane had said, "You won't know her 'til she finds you." And something about love, that love was real, that it was important.
He had never loved Maria, not for a second. He had liked her once, but when the novelty of her drive and her rewards (that endless delicious flow of blood, always keeping him oversated so he would never stop fighting) wore off, he tired of her. And he knew better than anyone how weary she was of him, the dull and useless sadness that sanded down his vehemence a little more with every kill.
Sometimes, especially in those darker moods after a battle, he wondered if he had missed the night girl somehow. If she was not Maria, if she had come to find him, he would more than likely have killed her. It seemed like he killed everyone he met, and plenty of them had been small and dark.
Wouldn't that be my luck? he thought after a battle where he killed another dozen, one of them a woman with long flowing jet-black curls. I meet the woman I could love and I tear her apart. He stood under a tree, watching a field of Texas wildflowers blowing in the breeze, and reattached his arm to his shoulder with venom. The curly-haired woman had been brutal, even standing a head smaller than him. He felt a sharp pang recalling the instant of disbelief she had felt when he had shredded her spine and crushed her skull, and handed her over to the flames. He had no choice if he meant to survive, he reminded himself again, but sometimes it was only his fear of what waited for him after this life that made him land the killing blows.
He had seen love among his army enough to believe that it was real. It never amounted to much - his newborn pairs never lasted more than a year. Even if one was useful enough to warrant keeping, once their mate was dead, the other simply gave up and bared their throat to their enemies.
More and more, Jasper had begun it was error in the way he was made, that he simply wasn't capable of feeling love. Perhaps he was too scarred, too gifted. Or he was so old he had gone off, his heart (or whatever it was that governed love) rotted through like human remains in the Texas heat.
And then, after so long a wait, he walked into a diner in Philadelphia, and a very small, black-haired girl with funny eyes came forward to meet him. She had seen him coming after all.
Years later, Jasper waited for Alice next to an old abandoned house. Wisteria vines had claimed the walls for their own years ago, and Alice had scaled them for clippings to bring home for Esme and Carlisle's anniversary. She had thrown down enough heavy purple blossoms to overflow his arms, and he still watched her with indulgent eyes.
When she finally scampered down, her feet barely making contact with the bricks as she ran down to the ground, she barrelled toward him. He dodged her twice, not dropping a single petal, and then she wrapped herself around him, burying her face in his back. It was a playful fight, the kind he had almost forgotten existed until he found Alice and the Cullens. He had never imagined he would feel this kind of peace again.
"What a beautiful bull you make," came her muffled voice, lips against his skin. "Your neck is lit up brighter than the sun, Jasper."
The thick scars on his neck did not reflect sunlight so prismatically as the rest of him - it was more of an intensely glowing circle. Alice teased sometimes that his halo had slipped too far down, but then she always had the strange idea he was some kind of angel.
"You would be quite a matador, in your traje de luces."
"Those costumes are so divinely dramatic," Alice sighed. "The poor bulls of course, but remember the one we saw when we were in Spain?" They began the hike home, Alice running off occasionally if she saw another beautiful blossom to bring home or smelled an interesting scent. Every time she returned, she darted close and kissed him and he grinned.
They were more circumspect around strangers since strangers were, by and large, humans. They restrained themselves to small fleeting things - his hand on her back, her gaze grasping him close from across the room. Alone, they scaled each other like Alice had that wall, wrestled and teased and sprawled. Laughed- she could make him laugh until he was breathless and gasping.
They were laughing at each other when Jasper looked down at her, her dark eyes reflecting the sky perfectly, blue on black. Sky eyes. "She was right about you," he said without thinking.
"Rosalie? I could absolutely make matador outfits a trend, I don't care what she says."
"No, my mother. You're my night girl. She predicted you would find me, you know."
She stopped and looked up at him. "She did? How? Tell me!"
"Have I never told you before?" he smiled, continuing on, his arms full of her flowers, and then she knocked him down and they rolled until they were covered in petals. He found himself on top of her, but her arms tight around him, both of them smelling quite strongly of wisteria.
"Your mother was like me?" Her face was gleeful. "You never told me that!"
"No one's like you, darlin'. No, hers was a fever dream, shortly before she died. My father wrote it to me in a letter." He recounted it for her, the strange words imprinted in his mind perfectly, as though he had stood under that tree in Texas yesterday, rather than over a century ago.
"That's beautiful, Jasper," Alice whispered when he finished and he tucked another bit of purple flowers behind her ear.
"I thought it was Maria at first," he admitted and Alice grimaced, "and then I thought perhaps I had missed her somewhere along the way and then I thought maybe I couldn't love at all. But it was you all along, my little night girl with sky eyes." He lifted his hand to brush it over her hair - even in these sunny woods, her tufts of hair were black as a moonless sky.
She smiled her assent and kissed him. She held up her tiny arm in turn and they fit their hands together, small pixie fingers slotting between his long, scarred ones, each one having been ripped off and patched with venom countless times.
"You should never ever doubt love," Alice admonished him with a tug of his hand, not willing to let that tidbit pass her by. "Truly, Jasper, you can love harder and stronger than anyone I've found!"
"Well, for one who lived the way I did, love was rather incidental, Alice. I never thought I could be as good at it as I was at soldiering."
"Nonsense," she huffed, pushing him over to his back and beginning to pile the unbroken blossoms into his arms again. "Love would only have made you a better warrior. It's a cliche but it's true - love is the only true thing worth fighting for. At the end, it's all that matters."
.
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Author's Note: Alice's powers are why his mother referred to her as having sky eyes - she can see that are going to happen, similar to someone looking down from a great distance and watching things unfold. "Nothing's so far for him." - Really, the amount of time it took for them to find each other is pretty insignificant to a vampire. Jasper took the message more literally and expected to find her right off. Maria was small (though not as small as Alice) and dark-haired and I liked the idea of Jasper mistaking her for the one he was waiting for. Alice doesn't care for that notion a bit, as you'd expect. Jasper's mom didn't have COVID but I figured I would use that as inspiration, just a reminder than there have always been (and will always be) epidemics and the world will somehow continue on.